AMERICA(S) THE BEAUTIFUL: America Red and America Blue!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2025

As always, dueling America(s): For the second successive week, the New York Times has performed a substantial service on the front page—on page A1—of its Sunday print editions.

For the second straight Sunday, the Times is challenging those of us in Blue America to come to terms with ourselves—with our past behaviors, with our imperfect cultural instincts. In its online iteration, this week's challenge appears beneath this dual headline:

How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration
The Democratic president and his top advisers rejected recommendations that could have eased the border crisis that helped return Donald Trump to the White House.

What happened at the southern border "helped return President Trump to the White House?" That's the challenging judgment which is rendered within yesterday's (lengthy) front-page piece.

Accompanied by three photographs, the lengthy report appears above the fold, square in the center of page A1. In print editions, its display ate up roughly half the space on yesterday morning's front page.

Yesterday's report speaks to a topic we Blues ignored—a topic we may have tried to wish away—all through the presidential campaign which returned President Trump to the Oval. Last Sunday, something similar happened:

Dating to last Sunday's print editions, a front-page report is now packaged online under these challenging headline:

How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch
Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible. President Trump has drawn national attention to the scandal amid his crackdown on immigration.

The name "Tim Walz" is right in the headline! President Trump is mentioned too.

Last week, the situation described in that report triggered an ugly two-day outburst from President Trump. For those of us in Blue America, it's easy to focus on that behavior while ignoring everything else—but this is the way that lengthy report started:

(Start of the news report)
The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.

Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.

Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.

Outrage has swelled among Minnesotans, and fraud has turned into a potent political issue in a competitive campaign season...

That's the way last Sunday's front-page report got started.

For the record, the New York Times isn't the Fox News Channel. But let the word go forth to the American nation which is Blue:

The American nation which is Red is fortified by reports of this type on the Fox News Channel. 

Viewers of the Fox News Channel heard about this giant problem all through the course of last week. For those who live inside Silo Blue, where MS NOW supplies the cable news, it's very likely that viewers never heard this topic mentioned at all.

Full disclosure:

The journalism performed on the Fox News Channel is routinely a vaudeville / parody / fraudulent version of actual journalism, performed by a collection of wrestlers, cheerleaders, former VJs, hangers-on and semi-coherent clowns. But the complaints and criticisms which lie at the heart of such parody broadcasts are often perfectly valid.

People who live in Red America hear about the topics in question, if in parodic form. But for those of us in Blue America, these topics may not even be known to exist.

So it has gone in the past eight days with respect to these front-page reports by the New York Times. On the cable news channel which services Blue America, the sprawling scandal in Minnesota was barely mentioned last week, if it was mentioned all.

Similarly, will denizens of Blue America hear discussions of yesterday's front-page report—the giant report about those border issues during President Biden's term? For anyone familiar with current arrangements, the question answers itself.

Indeed, on the renamed MS NOW, this morning's Morning Joe broadcast instantly adopted an oddly remedial tone. With co-host Joe Scarborough absent for the second straight broadcast day, co-host Mika Brzezinski opened the program with a lengthy discussion—a lengthy discussion which was exactly like last week's lengthy discussions:

Starting at 6 o'clock sharp, the day's "Top Story" was identified as the way Pete Hegseth is affirming the legality of the September 2 attack on an alleged set of drug runners.  

Everything said in this morning's lengthy first segment had been said, again and again, all through the course of last week. For better or worse, the odds are very low that anyone on this cable news channel will ever conduct a retrospective discussion of the issues which were raised in yesterday's front-page report.

In Red America, the information / propaganda / messaging flow will be massively different. On the programs of the Fox News Channel, panelist groups will arrive and depart throughout the day like hockey teams changing lines on the fly. 

These panels will continue to pound away at issues involving President Biden's handling of the southern border—and they will continue to pound away at the fraud prosecutions in Minnesota, as was the case all last week.

For the record, those fraud prosecutions are an actual news event. Red America will hear the topic cited again and again. In Blue America, cable hosts will likely continue to do what Brzezinski was doing this morning—they'll try to establish the fact that a war crime has been committed by a targeted figure within the Trump administration.

One epistemic world will emerge from Silo Blue. A totally different world will be described for those inside Silo Red.

As everyone knows, we citizens live in two America(s) at the present time. A mournful observer might even ask if a very large modern nation can expect to prosper with, or even survive, an epistemic regime of this type.

We close this morning with a quick note about a journalistic oddity. That oddity concerns the way yesterday's giant report in the New York Times has managed to disappear.

In print editions, the giant report consumed roughly half of Sunday morning's front page. It's a very lengthy report about one of the ways Blue American bungling allegedly helped President Trump make his way back to the White House.

Meanwhile, how odd! If you go the New York Times' "Today's Paper" site for December 7, you won't find this giant report listed among yesterday's reports! Through a repetitive type of bungling we've mentioned several times in the past, this giant report about President Biden's border policies somehow fell through some sort of editing crack:

It isn't listed among the reports found in yesterday's paper! We've mentioned this weirdly repetitive problem—"The featured front-page news report vanishes!"—at least several times in the past.

People who perused the print edition of yesterday's New York Times immediately saw the giant layout devoted to this lengthy report. That said, many more people read the New York Times online—and if they scanned the "Today's Paper" list of reports, such people had no way of knowing that this giant report even existed.

We're the smart and moral ones, we Blues have constantly said, In Red America, our self-adoration has long been noted, and it's vastly disliked.

Where did yesterday's giant news report go? It never appeared in the listings on yesterday's "Today's Paper" site—and as of 7 o'clock yesterday morning, it was hard to find a link to that giant report at the up-to-the-minute "nytimes.com" site.

So it can go inside Silo Blue, as maintained in Blue America, where our leading purveyors of cable porridge are still trying, this very morning, to get someone locked up.

It seems to be the only thing we know how to do. Just so you can know how this works, they feed off this conduct at Fox.

Tomorrow: We've always lived in different America(s). Ken Burns takes us back.