Friday, March 14, 2025

Free Mahmoud

 

"It's part of a wider strategy to obfuscate MAGA antisemitism and an increasingly fascist regime Gift link to the piece.

Somebody I respect, I don't actually remember who, was warning us against trying to show that Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian with a graduate degree from Columbia University who was kidnapped from New York over the weekend by ICE, and spirited away to Louisiana for deportation proceedings, was innocent of whatever wrongthink he's suspected of, on the grounds that it doesn't matter. He's clearly not charged with any crime, which would be a problem, but he has a right in the United States of America to hold any thoughts whatever, and associate with whomever he wishes to associate with, whether they're good people or bad, if only because that's what the First Amendment says, and if I were to use Mahmoud Khalil's personal behavior as evidence that he doesn't "deserve" to be deported I'd be suggesting that other people in a similar position might indeed "deserve" it, but the First Amendment isn't about what you deserve. It's about what you are owed, your unalienable rights, even if you are a bad person or have bad friends. It's "the thought we hate", as Justice Holmes said, that needs the most protection of all, because that's where it's easiest to not care about people's rights and let the cops do whatever they want with them.

On the other hand, it isn't just about him.  It's about what ICE and the Trump regime have in mind, what they are trying to accomplish, which isn't really about the thought they hate. That's just an excuse. If you look more closely at the case of Mahmoud Khalil, if you try to figure out what he's accused of and whether or not he might have done something that merits deportation, you get a clearer picture of what they're really up to, and how it threatens all of us.

That there was something very funky about the case was evident right from the beginning:

Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia until this past December, was inside his university-owned apartment Saturday night [March 8] when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.

Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer. (AP)

How did the ICE agents not know whether the man they were picking up had a student visa or not? (He had finished his masters' degree—in public administration, at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, and of course gotten married, which favored his getting the green card.) Or, given the swiftness with which they changed their story, were they making stuff up?

Tuesday, March 11, 2025

Showtime

 

This may be more obvious than I think, but this week's votes on a continuing resolution to keep the government going past Friday's debt ceiling deadline until September are a kind of confession of failure on the part of House Republicans, and Speaker Mike Johnson in particular, retreating from the effort to use reconciliation rules to put through the huge package of tax cuts and spending cuts they passed on February 25 for fiscal year 2025. Never mind, said Johnson: Elon and Donald can do it, or something like it.

But Johnson said those cuts would be reserved for legislation to fund the government in fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1.

"We will actually be able to change the way this is done and incorporate all the extraordinary savings that DOGE is uncovering through fraud, waste and abuse, the other revenues that President Trump is bringing about because of his policies," Johnson told the Fox News program "Sunday Morning Futures."

Although as you know DOGE hasn't uncovered any fraud, waste, or abuse at all that they're able to publicly identify, and their own estimate of how much money they've managed to save so far—$105 billion—would be pretty pathetic as an attack on a $2 trillion deficit, if it were accurate, which it clearly isn't anywhere near. While the revenue that President Trump is "bringing about because of his policies" means tariffs, and it's pretty hard to estimate, what with Trump changing his mind up to three or four times in a given day (just announced he's doubling the tariffs on steel and aluminum he's landing on Canada on Wednesday, from 25% to 50%), but the best guesses seem to make it around $120 billion a year, which also isn't much, though the rise in consumer prices it will bring on, focused on the areas of electronics and clothing, motor vehicles and food, will cost us around $1600-$2000 a year per household. Not only a tax on Americans, whatever Trump may imagine, but a very regressive tax, mostly felt by those with lower incomes (the lower your income, the higher the proportion of it that you end up spending on stuff like food and clothing, or really anything).

Saturday, March 8, 2025

For the record: The Secret History of Diversity in US Higher Education

 

He doesn't look like an African explorer called Dr. Spaulding. He looks like a Commie from the Lower East Side. Duck Soup, 1933.


There's a story about the evolution of US higher education that involves "meritocracy" at a time the word would never have been used other than in its original satirical sense: The development of rigorous competitive academic standards for admission after World War II was part of an effort...

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 8:56 AM

specifically to overcome anti-Jewish quotas at elite schools that excluded the "wrong kind" of Jews, from immigrant families and public high schools and not wealthy or athletic--and the point was *in favor* of diversifying the comfortable mediocrity of the WASP ruling class...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:01 AM

in the atmosphere of competition among schools to become "centers of excellence" in the era between the Manhattan Project and the Sputnik. But other kinds of excellence than very high SAT scores and other kinds of diversity didn't get the same kind of attention (sports helped overcome...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:09 AM

resistance against recruiting Black students but not in such big numbers--you don't need as many football and basketball and track stars as you do science students). But the effort to increase diversity was always understood as an effort to increase excellence of schools as a whole...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:13 AM

until the rightwing revolt we know from cases like Bakke turned the idea upside down with ideas of "reverse discrimination", meant to restore the mediocre WASP ascendancy. You can read some of this between the lines here www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09...

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:16 AM

And of course the push to recruit Jewish science students and Black athletes also recruited a lot of Jewish and Black humanities and social science students and radical activists, and the ruling class didn't like that one little bit.

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:23 AM

They combated it with a strategy of divide and conquer, welcoming (or feigning to welcome) Jewish students, as they now welcome Asian Americans, as "meritorious" allies.

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:28 AM

And that's where we are.

Monday, March 3, 2025

White House Kayfabe

 

Prime Minister Winston Churchill in "siren suit" visiting the White House in January 1942; photo by the Royal Navy's official photographer, Lt. C.J. Ware, via Wikipedia.

Trump may have been genuinely upset by President Zelenskyy's showing up at the White House in fatigues and sweat shirt instead of a suit and tie (he once slapped his eldest boy to the floor in front of everybody in the dorm for thinking it would be OK to wear jeans on a father-and-son outing—to see a baseball game, no less), but he can't have been surprised, since it's known that that's what Zelenskyy does, and intends to do until the war is over, by way of showing solidarity with his country's troops, as Winston Churchill liked to do in one of his special rompers outfits during World War II. 

So it's pretty clear that the incident on Friday was wholly staged kayfabe, from Trump's greeting as the Ukrainian president stepped out of the car ("You're dressed up today") onwards. 

The reporter who fired the first shot at Zelenskyy's clothing choices, Brian Glenn, was obviously planted for the purpose—he's from one of the new media joints the White House has chosen to replace the venerable AP in small-size press availabilities, the cable channel Real America's Voice, previously best known as a venue for Stephen Bannon's show after Bannon was thrown off of YouTube and Spotify, and had been selected to lead the press pool alongside CNN for the occasion (on Thursday it was Newsmax). Glenn is also said to be "dating" Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), which sounds to me like an assertion that the two of them have regularly scheduled sexual relations, but you really don't want to get into that. (That's what she said, heh-heh.)

Saturday, February 22, 2025

Git Along, Little Doges


Wish there'd been more Rubio (or just more cowbell) in the video of that meeting a week ago, which Trump decided contrary to custom not  to hold in private before the photo op and public statements but did all three at once, presumably to prevent King Abdullah from screaming at him; but Rubio's face in this photo reminds me of that lady in the Hermès scarfs who used to watch Trump explaining virology to the nation from the standpoint of his transcendent ignorance—deeply panicked but trying not to show it. I didn't realize until that moment that Trump actually has no idea what the Gaza ceasefire deal (which he has endorsed) entails: the sequence of phase 1, releasing some hostages and prisoners to set the stage for phase 2, negotiating a final disposition of the territory and releasing all the remaining hostages, followed by phase 3, implementing the deal and permanent ceasefire (the Biden deal I've been telling you about for a year), as revealed by Trump's comment,

“As far as I’m concerned, if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock, I think it’s an appropriate time. I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out. I’d say they ought to be returned by 12 o’clock on Saturday,” Trump said.

No, it's not an appropriate time. Phase 2 hasn't even started yet. It would be nice for the hostages and their families, who I support, and no doubt also nice for Netanyahu, who I don't support, but it has no relation to the agreement painfully worked out over the past year. It's demanding that all the parties trash that agreement and start all over again, which clearly meant it couldn't be wrapped up on Saturday. It's just a completely new idea nobody else has ever heard of, because Trump just made it up on the spot and doesn't know enough about the situation to realize that it can't possibly happen, and there's a reason it can't possibly happen.

It's nothing but a big smelly turd deposited in the Oval Office that is of no relevance to anything, except to Trump's equally irrelevant fantasy of taking control of the Gaza Strip as his own, or Jared Kushner's, development project, with all the irritating Gazans cleared out of the way in Egypt or Jordan (I don't know who he thinks are going to be the housekeepers and waitstaff and caddies, perhaps they'll be imported from the Philippines), in spite of endless attempts by Jordanians and Egyptians and Saudis to explain to His Imperial Stupidity that it can't be done. A turd the existence of which nobody present dares to acknowledge, because Big Donald might get upset (Abdullah did have something to say about it once he got out of there, though he did lower himself to suggesting that the meeting might be described as "constructive"—he's far from the worst king in his neighborhood, not that I support kings, but diplomacy requires some dishonesty).

Things may have marched in a different direction since I started drafting these remarks with the development of a Trump policy on Ukraine, but I think Trump's stupidity remains the main factor. I'm sure I'll get back to that later.

Sunday, February 16, 2025

Bonapartheid

 

From Michael Meschke's production of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, Stockholm 1964.


I guess that should be counted as a kind of confession, with a plea for jury nullification: yes, when you come down to it, he kind of has tried to overthrow the US government, a couple or three times, and that's probably illegal in the normal way of things, but then the price of eggs is really high, so what choice did he have? You can't make a revolution omelette without breaking some constitutional eggshells, even if that's going to push the egg price even higher.

That is, Trump is really and truly making the claim that he has led a revolution against unbearable oppression, and at a time like this, the ordinary laws that we've been living with don't apply any more. Laws specifying procedures you have to follow if you want to fire a few hundred civil servants, or saying you have to spend the money Congress has allocated for a certain purpose on that purpose, or demanding that you treat immigrants as if they were human beings. You're busy saving your capital-C Country, for Christ's sake! Like the Founders, who were breaking the law too! 

Though Jefferson wrote his complex and sophisticated argument denying that they were doing that at all, putting all the blame on poor George III and claiming not that the revolutionary gang were the saviors of a Country which didn't in any case exist yet—just that they were breaking up with the abusive old country, and that they were acting in the service of self-evident truths, a higher kind of law that George was alleged to have relentlessly violated, including the unwritten British constitution, particularly in his refusal to grant them the traditional liberties of the British citizen with respect to representation in Parliament.

The quote itself is usually attributed to Napoléon Bonaparte, as a presumptive defense for his role in the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (November 9) 1799, which overthrew the government of France under the five-man revolutionary Directoire, and established him as First Consul, though it wouldn't have made much sense for Bonaparte to say it either; he undoubtedly thought of himself as the savior of the nation, but preferred to have other people say that for him (unlike the irrepressible Donald Trump), and was anxious that the thing look backed by stringent legality): "The extraordinary decree of the Council of Ancients, in conformity with articles 102 and 103 of the Constitution, has put me in charge of the city [of Paris] and the army," he told the soldiers gathered at the Tuileries, after the Council finished its vote before high-tailing it out of town to Saint-Cloud; "I have accepted, in order to support the measures it will be taking, all on behalf of the people." 

The French emperor was certainly a murderous and narcissistic psychopath, but he wasn’t an idiotic meme like our American emperor. He had some sense of dignity, and some sense of what ordinary people are like and what they need to hear.

Imagine Vought or Miller writing Trump a speech offering a legal justification from the Constitution or statutes for firing 12 or 17 inspectors general (we still don't know exactly how many) or decreeing the end of birthright citizenship, or sending the military in contravention of the Posse Comitatus Act to pacify the southern border area. Of course they wouldn’t be able to do it, any more than they are able to write up the administration’s executive orders and memoranda with the minimal professionalism required to keep judges from grinding their teeth in rage or laughing in the administration’s faces.

In fact Napoleon didn't say it, as I've been able to determine with my advanced Googling skills. The first appearance of the sentence "Celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi" is in 1838, 17 years after Napoléon's death on St. Helena, in a little collection of 525 unsourced sentences attributed to the emperor under the title Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon, signed by a hatmaker called Jean-Louis Gaudy, but actually written by no less a figure than Honoré de Balzac, it turns out, who ghostwrote it on commission from Gaudy, making the quotes up mostly up out of his head (Gaudy was apparently hoping to earn a decoration from King Louis-Philippe, the "citizen king" crowned after the 1830 revolution, who encouraged the Napoléon cult to bolster his liberal bona fides—Balzac himself was a Legitimist supporter of a Bourbon restoration but also a great admirer of Napoléon and his contrast with the destestable bourgeois dominance of the age of Louis-Philippe, which shows how confused French political thinking was in the early 19th century). Balzac could never afford to turn down some easy money. He probably tossed it off in three days with 60 cups of coffee and then hurried back to whichever installment of La Comédie Humaine he was working on.

That makes the thing a neat little epitome of what this Trump administration is about. We can argue what he means by using the sa ying, we can debate where he got it from (the prevailing opinion on X and Threads seems to be that it's Stephen Miller, who loyally retweeted its appearances three times yesterday afternoon), but what stands out in the end is that it's fundamentally bogus, like everything else they do. 

We are being ruled by memes, meme stocks, meme coins, meme policies, meme slogans, meme philosophies of government, a meme emperor who thinks he's Napoléon when he's actually more like Père Ubu, and his Batman villain billionaire sidekick. And we do have to worry about what it portends for the administration as a whole in the awful future, because it's actually going to kill people, throw families into turmoil, halt important research, destroy international relationships, spread poverty, crash markets, encourage criminal corruption, weaken the military, harm the education system, and generally humiliate our country in the eyes of the world, but we can't let them continue to make us stupider. Refusing to become stupider is our only hope.

Friday, February 7, 2025

The Emperor's New Immigration Policy

Image from The New York Times of the US Navy Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The "Migrant Tent Camp" at lower left is an area that was used to house boat people on their way to Florida, in the days when America used to welcome refugees from godless socialism, and still did during the Biden administration, from around 37 at the beginning of the term to 4 last February; it's theoretically capable of holding 13,000, but for the current exercise they've just assembled a camp of 150 tents. However, the actual 10 Venezuelan migrants sent to Guantánamo this week from America, in one of the first big moves of the Trump administration's mass deportation program, are being held seven miles to the east in the prison complex, not with but not too far from the 15 9/11 terrorism suspects still languishing there since 2002 or 2003. 

This from The Guardian is hilarious on first look:

US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations

It seems in the first week of the Trump presidency when you Googled ICE operations or raids you got the impression of a great big wave of arrests across the country of unauthorized foreigners in the form of ICE press releases, but when you looked at the stories there was something wrong:

That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008. 

They were old stories, some 13,000 of them, all timestamped "updated 1/24/2025", which shot them to the top of the Google and Bing rankings. Some Merry Pranksters (at the White House?) had spoofed us all into thinking Trump was keeping his violent Day One promises.