Into the Woods: The Last of Platner

Maine woods, photo by George Wuerthner for The Rewilding Institute.

I've been sitting on the first paragraphs here for quite a while, not knowing what, if anything, I wanted to do with them, and then came Ezra Klein's interview with Morris Katz, one of the consultants responsible for the ill-fated Senate candidacy of Graham Platner in Maine, offering his own somewhat self-serving view of what went wrong, and just today Platner's replacement by an excellent candidate, former logger, labor organizer, and state senate president Troy Jackson.

I just wanted in the first place to say I was against Graham Platner before I was for him, and for some though clearly not all of the right reasons, which I think I can articulate better now than I could earlier: most particularly the way his attractively progressive policy message was getting confounded with a reactionary message that came with his packaging, as the embodiment of a theory of US politics in its current state that is both bad sociology and also lousy politics, as expressed in one way by Moira Donegan at The Guardian early in the campaign, last October:

The notion that the Democratic party is losing because it is too feminized – too dominated by women among its voters, leaders and candidates, or not sufficiently comfortable with the style of masculinity represented by Platner – has been bubbling up among left and liberal commentators with increasing insistence over the past decade. The idea is that in catering too much to women, and in being insufficiently deferential to domineering, gruff, physically imposing and implicitly white, rural men, the party has come to seem hectoring, inauthentic and whiny, and lost the voters they need to most recruit: that is, the working class, imagined here, as they so frequently are, as brusque, bigoted, ignorant, vulgar and male.

Partly because I don't think a progressive movement should be thinking of the working class with that kind of contempt, to be honest, but also because that's not what it is, at all. It's a false picture that skips over the important issues, and it's also mistaken about where the votes are (which nowadays includes lots of relatively well educated white guys stranded in the gig economy and layoff victims of the AI chaos—they're proletarians now too). The people struggling with low wages and workplace disrespect, the working class in any decent sociological analysis, are more female, and more nonwhite; the truly brusque, bigoted, and ignorant white males are more typically well-off members of the petite bourgeoisie and resentful about tax expenditures they believe are thrown away on the undeserving poor, and unlikely to abandon the Republican party that has worked so assiduously to get the bigots on board. And I have my own ideas about the kind of masculinity we could be aiming at.

AI Experiment

Karoline Leavitt's response to the reporter's question as to how the White House decided Jared Kushner's involvement in all the Middle East negotiations was appropriate kind of triggered me:

It may be frankly, but it's not despicable. It's what we call *normal*. The reporter isn't suggesting it's inappropriate, he's presupposing that any normal person would regard it as inappropriate prima facie.

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) July 22, 2026 at 8:40 PM

But am I right on that? Is it really prima facie inappropriate? It seems obvious to me and my Bluesky pals, but then of course I and they don't like Trump or Kushner. We think they're horrible and criminal malefactors. So we could be biased.

So I thought I could put it to an LLM test: If I put it to Google's Gemini as a pure hypothetical case, the way they do in in law school, at least in the movies I've seen, without any names, what would it say?

suppose the president of a country invites his son-in-law to join a diplomatic negotiating team dealing with parties some of whom have given the son-in-law's investment firm billions of dollars, while the other parties haven't given him anything. Is that appropriate?

The LLM responded, and I'll give you the whole thing, in the purest LLM style (note the em-dashed parenthetical and the bullet list):

Assessments

Wuhan wet market (not, I think, the one where the coronavirus emerged). Photo by Arend Kuester via UCLA Newsroom.

I was interested in finding something precise about the "new evidence" the Trumpers claimed to have discovered implicating the Chinese government in interfering with the 2020 US national elections and trying to evaluate it myself, really just for something I could get an analytic handle on, but considerably more interested when I learned from a Reuters report that the Trumpers' point man on the project was our old pal John Solomon, the "investigative" journalist who had been fired by the conservative The Hill over his coverage of the Uranium One controversy of 2017, where he was a key figure in the rightwing effort to implicate Hillary Clinton in a fictitious bribery scandal; Rudolph Giuliani's collaborator in the effort to create a Ukrainian bribery scandal implicating Hunter Biden and possibly President Joe Biden, over which Trump was impeached in 2019; and Kash Patel's partner in the management of the stolen government documents at Mar-a-Lago for which Trump was indicted in federal court in 2023. So I naturally smelled some dirt. 

The thing itself wasn't all that new: it was that when the National Intelligence Community issued its report on foreign interference in the 2020 election, in March 2021, one of the authors, National Intelligence Officer for Cyber Christopher Porter, was not in total agreement with its finding on China:

Key Judgment 4: We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election. We have high confidence in this judgment. China sought stability in its relationship with the United States, did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling, and assessed its traditional influence tools— primarily targeted economic measures and lobbying—would be sufficient to meet its goal of shaping US China policy regardless of the winner. The NIO for Cyber assesses, however, that China did take some steps to try to undermine former President Trump’s reelection. (My bold)

But Porter's specific reasons for objecting did not make it into the declassified version. Now his explanation (co-signed by a nameless Director for Election Threat Analysis) is available too in PDF format, if in a heavily redacted form, among the documents released in Trump's latest effort to show that there might have been a bit of foreign interference against Trump (in addition to the well-known interference in Trump's behalf on the part of the Israeli and Russian governments):

Fish or Cut Red-Bait

A peculiar bunch of statistics that has been making the rounds in the ongoing moral panic over the Democratic Socialists of America, whose successful endorsements in some recent elections and primaries have come as a shock to some writers, and led President Trump and colleagues to new flights of McCarthyism asserting that communists are "taking over" the Democratic party:

In a survey of New Jersey DSA members. “Nearly four out of 10 (39.3 percent) identified as anarchists, followed by Marxists at 35.7 percent and 10.7 percent as democratic socialists.” https://t.co/6vzmaA7qJl via @NYTOpinion

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) June 30, 2026

What Kraushaar could have found out by looking more closely at the Times link or preferably the survey itself is that he was reporting it completely wrong: :

The mistake is from typos in a report by Thomas Edsall of a 2024 survey of the organization's Central New Jersey branch, covering six counties, which has been used to spread the story that "communists" have taken over the club. The Times corrected the error soon after publication, but Kraushaar apparently never checked. Anyway, it's not 10.7% that identify as democratic socialists; that was the anarchists, as probably should have been obvious (an organization that calls itself "democratic socialists" should really have more democratic socialists in its membership, that's what made me look it up myself). The democratic socialists are the 39.3%, and added together with the social democrats' 8.9% (plus I think one cis man calling himself a "social liberal") a bare majority of definitively non-communist members. The balance of 35.7 percent belong to an ice-cream parlor menu of "Marxists", not necessarily "communists".

Demoralized

Eugène Delacroix, 1831, La Bataille de Nancy, depicting the death of Charles the Bold of Burgundy at the hands of the armies of Lorraine and the Swiss Confederacy in 1477 (I have an idea Charles has just been knocked off the white horse at right, but such was the slaughter among his troops that his body wasn't discovered until two days later), via Wikipedia.

On the disaster that befell the US Men's National Team in the soccer World Cup, starting with their fine (if not unexpected) 2-0 win against Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 1, marred late in the game when my favorite player of the year, US birthright citizen Folarin Balogun, stepped on the ankle of a Bosnian player and was shown a red card, meaning he was suspended not only for the rest of that game but also for all of the next, a much more challenging match against top-ranked Belgium, on Monday. That was disappointing, especially with the feeling that the referee's call had been questionable—you knew Balogun hadn't committed such an infraction intentionally—but that's sports, rules are sacred, and there's no appeal on this. What fans could say, at that point, was that our team had done well (especially by the generally dismal American standards, probably the best US men's team since 1930), and would do their best against Belgium, and might even win, because every tournament has its miracles, and even miracles in which virtue is rewarded.

Then, on Sunday, we heard that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (from the English "association football" in contradistinction, I believe, to "rugby football") had decided to reverse the red card decision, and Balogun would be permitted to play on Monday after all; and soon afterwards it began to emerge that the decision had essentially been made by the two people in the world who should have stayed farthest away from it, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, and the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, the sycophant who won Trump's heart by awarding him an imaginary "FIFA Peace Prize" on the basis of nobody knows what process.

(Infantino also became the subject of a criminal complaint, a few days before the tournament opened, from the iconic French footballer Michel Platini, who would have been president of FIFA himself if not for allegations of fraud against FIFA for which he has since been exonerated and which, he now allages,  were orchestrated in a "conspiracy of false accusations and influence peddling" by Infantino and his confederates, who in this telling literally stole the job.)

What is Roberts Up To?

 

That image you've seen that makes the Obama Presidential Center look flanked by some kind of reflecting pool, as if on purpose to madden Trump, isn't, but a much more natural-looking feature, a piece of the Jackson Park Lagoons, part of the original design of the park by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (same architects as Manhattan's Central and Riverside Parks). Image by Obama Foundation.

I briefly entertained an idea that Trump might have heard rumors of a reflecting pool on the Obama Center campus and lost his mind in the desire to have his own, and that's where his own pool project must have come from. That's plainly not true, but I think it likely is true that he's been driven wild with jealousy of Obama's monument, which he's been screaming about for more than a year:

"I mean look, President Obama — and if he wanted help, I'd give him help because I build on time and on budget — he's building his presidential library in Chicago. It's a disaster," Mr. Trump said. "And he said something to the effect, 'I only want DEI, I only want woke.' He wants woke people to build it. Well, he got woke people and they have massive cost overruns, the job is stopped. I don't know, it's a disaster.... millions of dollars, like many, many — I mean, really, millions of dollars over budget," and said the problems were because Pres. Obama "wanted to be very politically correct and he didn't use good, hard, tough, mean construction workers that I love."

There's no evidence that he builds "on time and on budget". Also, it's so cute that he loves them because he believes they're "mean", though I don't know how he could knos that. They've surely never been mean to him or more important his father; I mean they may have contemptuously ignored him on one project and another but they wouldn't have wanted him to see them doing it.

Anyway, the success of Obama's opening, with its entertainment by Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen, Bono and The Edge, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Common, Eddie Vedder joining the Chicago-based cooperative Guitars Over Guns, and The Roots, while he couldn't even get an appearance by the surviving half of lip-synch act Milli Vanilli, not to mention the audience that never showed up for his stupid-looking spectacle, may have really driven him to insanity.

***

Photo by Bob Donnan/Imagn Images via FanSided.

I'm obviously glad the Supreme Court found (in the opinion released today on Trump v. Barbara) that people born in the United States are citizens of the United States, as they basically always have been, and certainly have been since the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 (except when it seemed that might not be true for people of Chinese ethnicity, as could have eventuated in the last couple of decades of the 19th century, but didn't), but a little annoyed, along with a lot of people who are, unlike me, experts, at the stinkbomb tossed into the mix by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who found that birthright citizenship indeed exists, but not by the constitutional mandate of the 14th Amendment—rather, he says it's only a violation of the omnium-gatherum U.S.C. § 1401(a), passed in 1952, which attempts to sweeps up all the hard possible cases that the 14th Amendment doesn't clearly cover (e.g., a foundling who was under the age of 5 when discovered on US territory becomes a citizen when he turns 21 if nobody has determined in the interim that he was born in some other country), setting up the possibility that some fool Republican congressmember will try to eliminate birthright citizenship through legislation and the Court could decide to put up with it, in spite of the 5-4 majority (Roberts, who wrote the opinion, Bryant, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) that just ruled the opposite way.

It's the Ten Percent, Stupid

The "replica Trump arch" at the Great American State Fair in the National Mall celebrating the semiquincentennial (half of 500th) anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, (Latin had a word, sēstertius, for "two and a half", which would have given us the more mellifluous "sestercentennial", and I think they really should have gone with that). I wonder, can you really have a "replica" of an edifice that hasn't in fact been built and likely never will be? Or is it a replica of one of the three-dimensional mini renderings Trump has been showing visitors in the Oval Office? If so, it's missing an awful lot of architectural detail on its vinyl coating over a wood frame (which had already started to buckle by Thursday evening), and the statue on top is wildly disproportional. Photo by Evy Mages via Washingtonian.

The Wingèd Liberty (classier, by Trump standards, than the flightless French one in New York Harbor), torch aloft, prepares for takeoff while her eagle companions nervously avert their eyes. The ferris wheel might have been full of customers—it was said to have attracted the longest lines on the site—had it not broken down due to generator issues.