If you were beginning to think that unaccountability and high-end thievery in the U.S. were starting to resemble Russia’s after the fall of the Soviet Union, you wouldn’t be alone. It has just seemed that miscreants of all stripes have gone unpunished. A conspiracy theorist like Alex Jones is allowed to declare bankruptcy rather than pay the court-ordered settlement to the families of the children slain at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut, whom he so willfully maligned. Nepo-baby-in-law Jared Kushner, who had been a White House adviser to Trump, and his pal, former Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, line their pockets with investments from the Saudis, whom they trolled while in office when they were supposed to be working in service to the country.
Amid this era of grift and corruption, some glimmers of hope came this month in the cases of two organizations that have histories of grubbing in the gutter for nickels—and which along the way created vast divisions in the country. Fox News was in the dock for its relentless, inaccurate attacks against Dominion voting machines following the 2020 presidential election. The courtroom reckoning promised to be a highlight of the Twitterati/media season. Instead, the Fox-Dominion case ended like a sexual liaison with Trump—with gasps, an abrupt ending, and a check being written.
