Friends,

Famed “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley was fired tonight. “We have parted ways with Scott Pelley,” Nick Bilton, the tech journalist who CBS News’s editor-in-chief Bari Weiss hired last week as the show’s new executive producer, wrote in a memo to the staff this evening.

What had Pelley done to get the axe? At a staff meeting yesterday, he accused Weiss of “murdering” “60 Minutes,” according to an audio recording and a source who was in the room. Others at the meeting applauded him. (Earlier today I gave Pelley this week’s Joseph N. Welch Award for truth-telling in the face of tyranny.)

It was all part of Weiss’s shakeup of the revered broadcast.

Why, you may wonder, is Weiss so eager to shake up “60 Minutes”?

I mean, it’s the most successful television news broadcast in U.S. history. It has remained the #1 news program for 50 straight years and consistently ranks among the top 10 of all Nielsen-rated television programs.

And it pulls in a fortune for CBS. “60 Minutes” is one of the most profitable programs in all of television, generating tens of millions in annual profit for CBS. In one recent year, its advertising revenues were $67.5 million. The network wholly owns the franchise, which makes it a gold mine. It’s the most lucrative and prestigious journalism operation on the network.

I could understand Weiss wanting to shake up, say, CBS’s Sunday morning news program. But why in hell would Weiss want to shake up CBS’s golden goose?

One hint: Besides firing Pelley for insubordination and chucking the show’s former executive producer, Weiss has also cut ties with “60 Minutes” producers Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega.

In December, Alfonsi challenged Weiss’s decision to hold a “60 Minutes” segment on an El Salvador maximum-security prison where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants, including alleged gang members. Weiss had raised concerns about the comment-seeking process and determined that it needed additional reporting. Alfonsi termed the decision a political move. (The segment, called “Inside CECOT,” eventually ran in January, with some additional material bookending the piece.)

Alfonsi calls the network’s decision now to allow her contract to expire “a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting” that “sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom.”

Vega is no less blunt. “In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,” she said in a statement. “Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions…. Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven.”

Of course it’s censorship, because CBS is now owned and controlled by Trump pals Larry and David Ellison, who kissed Trump’s assets to get Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr to approve their acquisition of CBS from Paramount.

Trump’s “fingerprints and DNA are all over this,” veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Croft says. “He’s been making threats against ‘60 Minutes’ and how he wanted it gone. And he finally got his wish.”

Trump has fixated on “60 Minutes,” calling the show “a dishonest Political Operative disguised as News.”

Trump sued CBS News over an interview of then presidential candidate Kamala Harris that Trump claimed had been edited in such a way as to hurt his presidential campaign. After “60 Minutes” aired a story about Ukraine and another about Greenland, Trump said CBS “should lose their license.”

This much is clear. CBS is being “murdered,” as Pelley calls what’s happening, not because of economics but because of politics. Economically, “60 Minutes” is a gold mine. Politically, Trump thinks it’s dangerous as hell because it tells the truth about him and his regime, and wants it killed.

Bari Weiss knows this. Larry and David Ellison know it. Nick Bilton knows it. Everyone who’s been fired from “60 Minutes” knows this. Trump’s lapdog at the FCC, Brendan Carr, knows this.

You need to know this.

“60 Minutes” — the most successful television news broadcast in U.S. history — is being dismantled because Trump doesn’t want America to know the truth.

It’s the same reason CBS canned Stephen Colbert — because Trump hated Colbert’s truth-telling jokes about him.

It’s important to see all this as a systematic effort by Trump to silence the truth about what he’s doing to America.

Trump’s increasingly corruption — rife with crony capitalism, corporate welfare, and payoffs to the powerful — is producing an increasingly corrupt economy in which everything depends on bribes and personal deals made by the biggest Republican loyalists and grifters, oligarchs and plutocrats, billionaires and multibillionaires, and monopolists.

When political and economic deal-making become personal transactions — when greed and payoffs replace trust — what happens? Authoritarianism replaces democracy. And an economy collapses, as it did at the end of America’s first Gilded Age, in the Great Crash of 1929, leading to the Great Depression.

One day we will look back on the murder of “60 Minutes” as one of the travesties of Trump’s despicable reign.

In the meantime, thank you Scott Pelley for telling the truth. Thank you, former “60 Minutes” producers, correspondents, and staff, for telling the truth.

And now, what do we do in the interest of the truth? We boycott CBS.

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Friends,

Anthropic — the artificial intelligence company behind the chatbot Claude —confidentially filed yesterday for an Initial Public Offering of its shares of stock. Soon, SpaceX and OpenAI will be doing the same. These three I.P.O.s could mark a once-in-a-generation creation of giant AI firms — valued at more than a trillion dollars each— and huge money for a relative handful of people (including the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk).

But this giant AI wave is also likely to spell the end of a large number of jobs. True, AI will also create some new jobs. But the AI tsunami is coming so quickly that, unlike in previous technological waves, most workers won’t have much chance to adapt.

Not only will AI destroy jobs, but it will further reduce the bargaining leverage workers now have — which means that to stay employed (or land a job) they’ll have to settle for lower wages.

Put this together with (as I pointed out Sunday) languishing returns to labor and soaring returns to capital even before the AI tsunami hits, and AI is sure to shift the balance of economic power further from labor to capital — making wages an even less reliable mechanism for distributing prosperity. We’re heading for a major shakeup of our entire political economic system — and it’s coming soon.

So what should be done?

Herewith, four ideas that are being actively discussed — in schools of public policy, in legislative cloakrooms, and among the billionaire class. I’m going to set each of them out as clearly as I can, along with their downsides, and ask you to weigh in.

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Friends,

What does Trump do when facing a humiliating defeat? He closes everything down. If that doesn’t work, he dumps it entirely and criticizes the hell out of whoever’s then in charge. Call it the Trump dump.

He did this in the 2020 election — refusing to accept defeat and then trying to close it all down by instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol. When that didn’t work, he spent the next four years blaming Biden for everything.

When performers scheduled to appear at the Kennedy Center canceled in protest of Trump’s taking over the center and putting his name on it, Trump closed the center, with the lame excuse that he was “renovating” it.

Then, Friday, after a federal court ordered him to reopen the center and remove his name, he announced, “I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into ‘NEVER NEVER LAND,” followed by: “The Kennedy Center will soon be closed, probably never to open again” and “the Kennedy Center will collapse, both structurally and financially.”

A similar Trump dump occurred over the weekend after artists pulled out of his 250th anniversary concert series on the mall when they discovered that the series was a promotional vehicle for Trump. In response, he said he was canceling the series and replacing it with a Trump rally.

Trump is pulling a nearly identical — and far more serious — Tump dump in Iran. In mid-April, rather than accept Iran’s humiliating blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, he pretended he was in charge and that he’d close the strait. So he ordered a naval blockade, which did nothing but maintain the status quo.

Last Friday, when Iran signaled it might be willing to reopen the strait on its own terms (by charging tolls), Trump once again acted as if he were in charge, announcing that he’d be making a “final determination” on a potential deal that “must see the strait reopened, and then Iran must work with the U.S. to have its highly enriched uranium DESTROYED.”

Now that Iran is reportedly breaking off talks with the Trump administration and seeking “complete closure” of the Strait of Hormuz because of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, we can expect an even larger Trump dump.

What might this one look like? One likelihood: Trump takes credit for brokering a shaky peace deal between Iran and Israel over Lebanon’s Hezbollah, while blaming critics inside the U.S. for imperiling his peace talks with Iran. He announces he’s ending the ceasefire — which ended over the weekend anyway, with the U.S. military striking Iranian radar and drone sites near the Strait of Hormuz — and that “he’s finished with negotiations!” He then claims he’s done. He’s destroyed Iran’s military and killed off its old regime and warns that if Iran doesn’t open the strait and give up its nuclear program, he’ll resume bombing. It’s up to them.

In effect, he leaves the problem of reopening the strait to other countries more dependent on oil shipped through it, such as China, and the problem of taming Iran’s nuclear ambitions to Israel. It’s the final Trump dump.

We’ll see.

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