"Quiet, quiet, piggy!"

 

So Trump responded to Bloomberg's Catherine Lucey aboard Air Force I last week after she asked him why, if there is nothing that incriminates him in the Epstein files, he is acting as if there was.

There was a good deal of talk about how disrespectful and misogynous he was then, and later during his Oval Office photo session for the state visit of the Saudi prime minister and crown prince (who should not be referred to, for the last time, as "bin Salman", that's a patronymic, not a surname, like calling Putin "Mr. Vladimirovich"—if your house style demands that he be given a family name, he has one of those too, "Āl Saud", House of Saud, the lineage founded by his ancestor the Emir of Diriyah, with the assistance of a clerical ally, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam and his son's father-in-law, in the 1740s), when ABC News's Mary Bruce asked the prince a question about his role in the murder of Washington Post's Jamal Kashoggi:

"You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial," Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question."

Which raises a series of uncomfortable questions in its own right, when you think about it, like what is the purpose of asking such a question anyway. It's not as if the prince is going to give you a scoop by answering honestly—in this case he used it skillfully to look sad and respectful about the murder without acknowledging any involvement, in general to give a much more favorable personal impression (at least to people who haven't heard much of anything about the Kashoggi case) than Trump himself—but what, other than embarrassing him, could the question have accomplished for the reporter? If they wanted to make a journalistic point, surely it would have been better to boycott the whole event,  as something that wouldn't be producing any real news in the surface the press would be permitted to see. They should have stayed home. But that'll be the day.

January 6 Was Not a Dream

 

Peter Thiel Dreams of Empire, Hanna Barakat + AIxDESIGN & Archival Images of AI / via Dave Karpf, Tech Policy Press, January 2025.

I guess everybody's heard about the weird little present eight Republican senator—Tommy Tuberville (Alabama), Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee), Josh Hawley (Missouri) and Dan Sullivan (Alaska)—gave or attempted to give themselves in the continuing resolution that ended the government shutdown last week, inviting them to sue the government for half a million dollars apiece for, I guess, insulting them by suggesting their behavior was suspicious, when the FBI seized their phone records for January 4 to 7 2021, in what was briefly known as the Arctic Frost investigation in 2023.

Or as Josh Hawley said, “Yesterday we learned that the FBI tapped my phone … tapped Lindsey Graham’s phone, tapped Marsha Blackburn’s phone, tapped five other phones of United States senators,” except of course that wasn't true in any way—it was just the metadata for the four days, no wiretaps. And

Biden’s Stasi who claimed to be saving ‘our sacred democracy’ in fact worked overtime to destroy it — all for power. They spied on Catholic churches, prosecuted pro-lifers, deployed the FBI against parents at school board meetings — and tried to tap the phones of their political enemies. Including mine," Hawley wrote on X.

"This is an abuse of power beyond Watergate, beyond J. Edgar Hoover, one that directly strikes at the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the First Amendment."

Obviously none of that was true either. "Biden's Stasi" is the agency that named special prosecutors to investigate Hunter Biden's business dealings and the classified documents retained in Biden's home from his time as vice president, as also Mike Pence's, though it also did issue a memo, rescinded shortly afterwards, expressing concern about hypertraditionalist Latin Mass enthusiasts, after investigating a

suspect [who] expressed neo-Nazi rhetoric and described himself as a "Catholic clerical fascist." The FBI said he wrote in a letter to a family member that he needed to "build guns, explosives, and other forms of weaponry" in order to "make total war against the Satanic occultist government and the Zionist devil worshiping bankers who control it."

Call me paranoid, but I'm with the FBI on that; I don't get a good feeling off people who call themselves "Catholic clerical fascists" either.

We're All Democratic Socialists Now

 

"Socialism in Milwaukee": Drawing from The Milwaukee Independent, probably ca. 1910-12, when the city had its first Socialist mayor, Emil Zeidel.

I began coming to this idea on election night itself, and the morning after, contemplating the most cautious candidacy, that of Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey—cautious for understandable reasons, I might add, with the most plausible Republican opponent, who'd come scary close to beating Governor Phil Murphy four years earlier, in a state that elects an awful lot of Republican governors for one of its general blueness, but I'd been worrying it had made her so cautious it wasn't good for her, making her really tense and uneasy. The victory speech showed her much better, much less buttoned-up and tight-lipped; energetic and relaxed at the same time. It struck me that it was the first time I'd seen her having a good time during the campaign, and I was honestly happy for her.

But something surprising escaped my notice until the morning airing of radio excerpts, from her acknowledgments of all the volunteers and all she had learned from them:

I was moved during my block walk in Trenton with Shanique because she spoke so passionately about the promise of her city and her neighbors despite the challenges. I love the group of young men from Monroe who have been hard at work on this campaign. They want a seat at the table and they're ready to fight for their future. The little girls who come up to me to say that they're going to be a governor or they're going to be a president. It reminds me of my own belief that anything was possible. Akeem's team, who worked their butts off, knocked over 60,000 doors. Akeem told me these are not the kids who will succeed in Trump's vision of this country. But they will in mine. Union jobs at a time when our economy is set up to make it harder and harder for working people. You know what? They don't just fight for their brothers and sisters in labor. They fight for all of us.

Sherrill, under the guidance of working people she's come to know, has come to a particular kind of view on how things are working: that the industrial economy is "set up" to deprive working people of a fair share of the profits, and that the organized labor movement is an essential part of righting the situation, and that the object is a social movement from which the whole society can benefit, "for all of us."

That's more than a little bit Marxist, whether she understands it that way or not. At a very fundamental level:

• that industrial capitalism, the fostering of industrial growth through capital investment, inherently exploits workers, robbing them of the value they produce;
• that the "point" of the analysis, as Marx says, "is to change" the situation for the better; and
• that whatever is done to change it starts with worker organization.

And not at all incompatible with the more orthodox outline of inevitable class conflict in  Zohran Mamdani's victory speech:

We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed.

Mamdani's socialism has inspired some violent reaction from some people (mostly Gen-Xers, I imagine) who directly identify, like the fictional Alex P. Keaton, with the bloodsucking bourgioisie; after Mamdani had said:

The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”

(which ought by rights to be about as controversial as Ronald Reagan announcing that it was morning in America, in fact it's practically the same thing),  I saw some unhinged corporate guy from NBC News reacting to the opening of Mamdani's speech with its stirring invocation of the spirit of Eugene V. Debs with real horror etched in his face, as if he'd seen somebody proposing to perform human sacrifices to Moloch.

But I haven't seen much awareness of Debs's role in American history as one of the most popular third-party politicians we've ever had (clearing 6% of the vote in 1912, the year Bull Moose Theodore Roosevelt got better than 27%), a proponent of expanded labor unions, public ownership of utilities, women's suffrage, and an end to child labor, among other things, characterized by Senator Bernard Sanders as "probably the most effective and popular leader that the American working class has ever had". Not the importer of some abomination from Russia or China, but as absolutely American a figure as William Jennings Bryan, or Upton Sinclair, or Henry Wallace, whose cause may well have lost out, but who ought to retain our patriotic respect.

One of the weirdest things about the campaign was the continued professed shock at Mamdani's calling himself a "democratic socialist" and acknowledging his membership in the DSA, as if Bernard Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hadn't been doing the same thing ever since we met them, along with dozens more American politicians young and old from Greg Casar and Rashida Tlaib to my own Rep. Jerry Nadler, from 35 in state and local offices in 2017 to over 250 today. Being a "democratic socialist" is not weird! 

But the word itself remains problematic, burdened perhaps by the horrible vicissitudes of its own history, like Sade's heroine Justine (whose subtitle was, remember, "The Misfortunes of Virtue"), from Utopian experimental communities, all inevitable failures, through science fiction thought experiments, through human disasters like the end of the Franco-Prussian War in Paris to the "scientific socialism" implemented in the USSR, in which it was supposed to represent an evolutionary phase on the physically ineluctable path from reality to communism, which obviously never came close to happening, to the self-parody of "socialism with Chinese characteristics". 

In 2021, I wrote a post on the need to rectify the name of socialism, in the following terms:

I know I shouldn't bother at a time like this, but no. None of these things should be called "socialism". This probably came from a kind-hearted and justice-loving person, but it uses a worthless, nonsensical rightwing pollution of the word "socialism", according to which the word means or probably means "giving cash for nothing to people who probably don't deserve it". That is not what it is supposed to mean. At its narrowest, in the definition you probably learned in middle school, socialism is the name of a concept in political economy, of a kind of developmental midpoint between ideals of "capitalism" and "communism",

• the "capitalist" imaginary being the world in which all economic activity is performed by individuals—capitalists living off the buying and selling and rent of various things they own, property, debts, corporate shares, and the like, and workers who have nothing to sell but their labor—carrying on like an enormous anthill or machine for value creation, with no outside interference from (for example) a state,
• the "socialist" imaginary being the world in which the state, taken over by members of a vanguard workers' party, has seized all the property, debts, corporate shares, and the like, from the capitalists and administers it all really well, so that all the workers, instead of being left to penury and starvation, get paid a fair wage and have lots of time off to cultivate themselves morally, spiritually, and intellectually, and
• the "communist" imaginary being the world from which ownership has simply disappeared, leaving everybody to work just for the love of working and share the fruits of their labor with their friends and neighbors, forever and ever.

Note that this idea is no less unrealistic than the ideas of Milton Friedman (in which completely ejecting the state from economic management will turn the inequities of the anthill into its own kind of utopia where justice reigns automatically, dispensed by the marketplace magic, through the blind faith of the population), and a typical economist's idea, shaving off all the messy details of actual human life in favor of the cleanliness and beauty of a model. And the reality of socialist practice within the narrow definition has often meant a system that isn't administered well at all and makes things considerably worse (though as I always say don't forget those great industry-nationalizing nations France and Singapore), as bad as the outcome of an attempt at a pure market economy (Somalia or fictional Mahagonny).

Which is why I'm calling them "imaginaries", in a critical-sociology noun that I'm just trying to learn how to use. Because they have little to do with reality, which makes their usefulness questionable.

A broader and more useful concept is an older one, older than capitalism really, dating at least to the late 14th century and the activities of Father John Ball, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered in the presence of King Richard II at St. Albans, Kent, in 1381, for preaching, to the combatants in Wat Tyler's rebellion, that the division of the English into classes was contrary to the will of God:

When Adam dalf, and Eve span, who was thanne a gentilman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and... servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord

Not, you see, that property should not exist, as in the communist model, but that it shouldn't be concentrated in the hands of one set of people and excluded from the other set, that it should be more equitably distributed across the society, socialized; not that everybody should be a serf but that everybody should be a lord, on a very modest scale—if not by the violent expedients Ball advocated,

"uprooting the tares that are accustomed to destroy the grain; first killing the great lords of the realm, then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out everyone whom they knew to be harmful to the community in future"

then by some more comfortable method like politics (which, contrary to Clausewitz, is war continued by other means, not the other way around). That is all you really need to understand about socialism, in my opinion, common to Owenites, Fourierians, St-Simonists, Proudhonists and Marxists, Craftsmen and Wobblies, Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats, and all the microfactions that have come up since the 14th century in their fissiparous frenzy: the world should not be divided between those who live on sweat and those who live on rent, but everybody deserves a bit of both, and redistribution through politics is how it should be done. That is all you really need to understand about socialism, in my opinion, common to Owenites, Fourierians, St-Simonists, Proudhonists and Marxists, Craftsmen and Wobblies, Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats, and all the microfactions that have come up since the 14th century in their fissiparous frenzy: the world should not be divided between those who live on sweat and those who live on rent, but everybody deserves a bit of both, and redistribution through politics is how it should be done.

And that, in my view, is the socialism that Zohran Mamdani and Mikie Sherill may be said to share with the reasonably (not extravagantly) progressive-minded members of their party, DSA and not: that the practices of  capitalism do bad things to working people, and collective action can, and should, ameliorate them to a really meaningful degree.

New York Note

 Happy Election Day! I don't feel like I need to give you a lot of advice about the candidates in New York City, but I thought it might be useful (if late, considering how many people have already voted by now) to say a couple of things about the six ballot propositions, for which the argumentation on both sides, seems to be just diabolically badly written.

Proposal #1: Amendment to Allow an Olympic Sports Complex on Forest Preserve 

This state question is really irritating, because voting for it will ratify an old crime, but voting against it will make it impossible to do anything about it. The crime was the development for the Mount Van Hoevenberg Winter Sports Complex for the Winter Olympics in 1932 and 1980 and other events, in particular the bobsled run, on land that was constitutionally required to be kept "forever wild". You can't actually "allow" it, regardless of what the language of the amendment may say; that train left the station a long time ago. 

What the amendment does, rather, is to say "It's not illegal any more!" Voters are offering them a pardon. Instead there is some restitution; a package of 2,500 acres of Adirondacks land that will remain forever wild in place of the original (which is frankly not that wild, I think—it's been settled, however sparsely, for centuries, and that's just the white people). 

But given that the land in question is already lost, it's probably the best that can be done. I'll vote yes.

Proposal #2: Fast Track Affordable Housing to Build More Across the City

Three proposed revisions to the city charter have to do with affordable housing; they were the creations of a Charter Revision Commission appointed by Mayor Eric Adams, they're ostensibly aimed at  breaking down some of the bureaucratic barriers, but some have also suspected some kind of plot on the mayor's part to grab some of the City Council's power. The pleasant thing about that is that Eric Adams is definitely not going to be the next New York mayor, so we can look at the proposals on their own merits.

Proposal #2 creates two  new processes for fast-tracking affordable housing projects; one keyed to publicly financed projects, and the other to the 12 community board districts with the lowest rates of affordable housing development over the past five years. Both remove City Council approval from the list of requirements, which may sound undemocratic, but the community board review might be thought more Democratic. After long hesitation, I'm inclining to Yes.

Proposal #3: Simplify Review of Modest Housing and Infrastructure Projects

This fast-tracks small-scale projects, also subject to community board review but not City Council. Again, Yes.

Proposal #4: Establish an Affordable Housing Appeals Board with Council, Borough and Citywide Representation

This is the most charged. Projects that are not fast-tracked will be approved, as always, by the City Council, with the member whose district is affected enjoying a kind of courtesy veto right. Whenever the City Council rejects an affordable housing project, though, the decision can be appealed to a board consisting of three people: the Council Speaker, the borough president, and the mayor. There is a question of NIMBYism operating here, and maybe a question of particular Council members. I love my own member, Gale Brewer, known as a staunch progressive and have loved her for years, for various reasons, but it's come to my attention that there has not been one single affordable unit built in my Upper West Side neighborhood, even as awful luxury condos spring up along Broadway without pause, and I don't think that's right. Voting Yes on this one too. (Non-billionaire Greenwich Village residents might like to think about this too.)

Proposal #5: Create a Digital City Map to Modernize City Operations

Are you kidding? Of course!

Proposal #6: Move Local Elections to Presidential Election Years

Why do we have to hold our mayoral election in the year before a presidential election? It's said that holding an election when nothing else is going on decreases turnout, but this is just an awfully funny year for worrying about that, because the turnout is already exceptionally high (factors are the horror at Donald Trump and his terrible presidency looming over the Republican Party and Zohran Mamdani and his extraordinarily attractive mayoral candidacy lighting up the Democrats in two different directions.

On the other hand, the small number of contests in an odd-numbered year, in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City, attracts a tremendous amount of attention from the punditry to issues, ours, that don't always get a lot of attention, and what they represent for the current state of party politics.

Also, nobody's explaining how it's done: do all the City Council members just get their terms cut short by a year in 2028? 

So I'm actually voting No on this one.

Other than that:

Manhattan District Attorney (a state office):

Alvin Bragg, the only prosecutor who has ever gotten a criminal conviction against Donald J. Trump, 34 of them in fact.  He has also implemented bail reform with extremely good results, defeating the fear that letting more defendants off cash bail would lead to rises in crime rates, which has driven the Republicans to insanity (even as the city reaches historic lows in violent crime, they can't stop lying about it). There's a slightly mysterious candidate, Diana Florence, under the label A Safer Manhattan, and she has a gigantic advertising budget—one of her things has been to take over the marquee of the Beacon Theater (the venue for many high-end comedians and beloved rock revival tours, Bob Dylan was there not long ago)—I think there's something suspicious about her, but I'm hopeful it won't matter.

Other than that, there's not a lot I need to say, but for the sake of completeness:

Manhattan Borough President:

State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal

Mayor of New York City:

Zohran Mamdani!!!

City Comptroller:

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine

Public Advocate:

incumbent Jumaane Williams

City Council Member:

incumbent Gale Brewer (running unopposed)

Doppelstaat

Memorial tablet in Berlin, at the house where Fraenkel lived before his forced emigration in 1938, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Two or three weeks ago somebody pointed me to a wonderful piece in Mother Jones by Pema Levy, on the "dual state" theory of dictatorial government, created by the German-Jewish jurist, labor advocate, and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel, based on his observations of the Nazi state in Germany from its origins until his escape from Berlin in 1938, according to which authoritarian regimes can survive and even thrive for some period of time as they consolidate their control by maintaining in effect two distinct legal systems in a single Doppelstaat, a "normative state" covering most of the population, in which civil and criminal laws function in normal and predictable fashion, and a "prerogative state" for the unlucky people scapegoated by the regime—in 1930s Germany union members, members of leftist political parties, Jews and Romani of course, homosexuals and the disabled, and so on—where the dictator's will overrides normal legal considerations and he can "do whatever I want" as Trump has put it on numerous occasions, usually applying to some claimed state of emergency. 

In this way life in the normative state does not change much, at least at first, and its inhabitants were enabled to ignore much of what was happening, if they so chose: "I was silent, for I was not a socialist," as Pastor Niemöller wrote. He himself was a national conservative and an antisemite, and when they finally "came for" him it wasn't because there was nobody left to speak for him, it was because he had bravely changed his mind, I'm pleased to say, and helped start up a Lutheran resistance and got sent to Sachsenhausen and Dachau for that, and survived to die in the German Federal Republic at the age of 92, too, may his memory be a blessing.

Fraenkel became part of the discourse on Trump 2.0 in a footnote from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent in the matter of Trump v. CASA, arising from the birthright citizenship case, where the Court decided not to ask whether or not the 14th Amendment means what it says, but did say the judges ought to stop issuing universal injunctions, like maybe birthright citizenship is real in San Francisco (one of the parties in the original suit) but not across the bridge in Oakland and it's none of a federal judge's business to assume that the Constitution is the same all over the country, which is not what they thought during the 19 or 20 universal injunctions issued by federal judges during the Obama administration, the 20 under Trump 1.0, or the 14 in Biden's single term, or at least that when the president is told there's something he's constitutionally forbidden to do in San Francisco that doesn't mean he can't do it in Oakland, as Jackson wrote:

Shitposting and Pissposting

📌 Told y'all he is trash 🤮🐥

[image or embed]

— tweety (@bluskypolitics.bsky.social) October 19, 2025 at 7:45 AM

That's at https://bsky.app/profile/bluskypolitics.bsky.social/post/3m3ka37hh7s2z if you want to look at the video

Maybe what he's doing here is asserting that he isn't king, at least not yet, in the sense that if he was king that's what he'd be doing, jetting around in his shitbombing jet with his crown on, shitbombing all his  enemies in the urban streets, or maybe we should read it as a warning of what he's going to do once he's taken the final steps, or maybe we should read it as a metaphor for what he's already doing to his enemies, in which the jet stands for his weaponized Department of Justice and the shit for the bogus lawsuits and unfounded criminal investigations he's flinging at all the people who exposed his criminality, and he's claiming to be king already.

 Then again, there's this one:

Beutlerian Jihad

T-Shirt by BumLung, $23 from Etsy.

 Happy Indigenous Peoples Day!

Brian Beutler, a veteran of Talking Points Memo and The New Republic, now mainly active as a Substacker, is one of the best at doing this one thing I can't stand, which he was up to again over the weekend: getting himself so worked up over Democratic politicians' failure to thwart the far right in its evil plans that he ends up assigning them all the blame, in a kind of vicious Murc's Law feedback loop—since only Democrats have agency, they are the effective actors when the right succeeds: they must be the ones responsible for the way our country is turning rapidly into a police state, they literally made it happen, through their fecklessness and timidity and lack of leadership. While Miller and Vought are diligently constructing fascism, Beutler is so busy complaining about Schumer and Jeffries that he hardly has time to talk about that.

Which isn't to say he doesn't have a point about Schumer and Jeffries, or whoever he's mad at at a given moment. What I want to say, rather, is that it isn't a good approach to doing something about it; it's a counsel of despair, frankly, which precludes the reader from trying.

This was especially evident in this particular post, where he's responding, precisely, to readers asking "What can we do?"

...the answer is unsatisfying, because it’s the same one you’ll get everywhere: Do what JB Pritzker says. Protest peacefully, record abuses on your phone, share the videos widely. Join organized marches—if you’re a U.S. citizen, the incremental risk of protesting is minimal. You’re likelier to be hit by a falling object or trampled to death at a concert than you are to be targeted for carrying a sign, or being an Indivisible volunteer or anything else. If you’re able, and if it comes to it, engage in genuine civil disobedience, though there’s more danger there: a greater risk of arrest, assault, political harassment.

Moving Mountains

Mountain moving, via.

I'd been struggling for a couple of days with the need to write a post commemorating the second anniversary of the Gaza war on October 7 when the news came that the negotiators in Sharm el Sheikh, including the Israeli and Palestinian delegations who had arrived on Monday, had brought the war to an end, sort of, or were about to do so, or that the beginning of its ending had been at any rate announced, on Donald Trump's social media platform under his account:

"Well, I'm blessed!" said the president. 

Not by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, though, which pointedly announced that they had already made their final decision (as it turned out this morning for the Venezuelan democracy advocate María Corina Machado) on Monday, that is days before Israel and Hamas assented to the 20-point Trump peace plan—Norwegian politicians are warning that Trump might express his rage in tariffs. The White House has issued its official complaint:

"President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives. He has the heart of a humanitarian, and there will never be anyone like him who can move mountains with the sheer force of his will," White House spokesman Steven Cheung said in a post on X. "The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace."

I have to say I very much welcome the plan as far as I understand it, in spite of its seemingly being the old mountain-mover's accomplishment. It obviously can't make up for the suffering of the last two years, of those Israelis especially living in the desert kibbutzim near the Gaza border who endured the October 7 attack and of all the Gazans who bore the constant bombing and deprivation thereafter, victims on both sides of unspeakable collective punishments—it's so much better if that stops than if it doesn't. And there seems to be a great deal of hope that it really is stopping, for some kind of long term, though the initial declaration that the war was over has been giving way to more cautious reference to a ceasefire.

The Nation's Boys' Gym Teacher

 

Somebody who goes on twitter by @TheShallowState proposed an interesting argument with which I partially disagreed, to the effect that this morning's big Hegseth event at Quantico must have been staged by Donald Trump as a TV reality show moment, but is apparently very serious about not being quoted at anybody else's website, so I have reconfigured the following in respect to their desires.

Image by Military Religious Freedom Foundation, god love them for their work.

At first glance at the idea proposed by @TheShallowState, sure, but I wasn't convinced that there wasn't something more behind it. For one thing, because the plan is just so extremely weird. It's not something that has ever happened before, as NBC News (for instance) reported; it's not so unusual to have two or three dozen senior officers gathering at the Pentagon, but more or less all the generals and admirals of the US armed forces, some 800 total, taken. away from posts where you'd think at least some of them should be ready to respond to real military. emergencies in sensitive spots around the world, together with aides, communications personnel, and their own security, which might up the total to as many as 3,000, so much too much for the  Pentagon that they're doing it at Quantico Marine Base instead, and it's bringing on serious logistical problems even though it has supposedly been under discussion for months. (Somebody was pointing out that if the government shuts down today they could all end up stranded in Virginia for the duration, which would be a pretty funny comment on our current millitary readiness.)

And how many months, actually? This is something that has really been important to somebody for a while, and I don't think it's Trump, whose decision announced on Sunday to show up for the event was by all accounts sudden, adding a whole new order of magnitude of logistical difficulties, and he himself has been anxious to play down its importance:

“It’s really just a very nice meeting talking about how well we’re doing militarily, talking about being in great shape, talking about a lot of good, positive things. It’s just a good message,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News. “We have some great people coming in and it’s just an ‘esprit de corps.’ You know the expression ‘esprit de corps’? That’s all it’s about. We’re talking about what we’re doing, what they’re doing, and how we’re doing.”

I thought it must be "Secretary of War" Hegseth, popping off in a way he's done before, in July, when he out of the blue announced a pause in weapons shipments to Ukraine without clearing it with the White House, or with special Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg or secretary of state Marco Rubio, apparently the third time he'd done it, under the prodding of undersecretary for policy Elbridge Colby,  a China hawk who thinks focus on Ukraine is stupid, but the first time it rose to public notice, forcing Trump's own people to scramble to restore the impression that Trump is in some sense in charge. Or maybe with the Pentagon's crazy new media policy, imposing total department control over what reporters can report or who they can talk to in the building itself, which Trump seemed not to have heard of at all:

Note on Libel

 

JD Vance is now using the term "blood libel" to describe criticism of ICE, saying, "The Democrats and the media — because they so hate the idea of a real border — are engaging in a kind of blood libel against ICE agents." Somewhere, our ancestors wept.

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— Joel S. (@joelhs.bsky.social) September 26, 2025 at 3:07 PM

That's not a very good choice of imagery, JD. I wouldn't expect you to know, because I wouldn't expect you to know much about these things, though you went to Princeton, but "blood libel" is a technical term in the history of Jewish people in medieval Europe, who were treated as dangerous foreigners, with their strange languages and strange religion, barred from various occupations, and confined to ghettos and shtetels where they lived segregated from the Christian population, and victimized by a particularly horrible myth; that Jews would steal Christian babies from their parents' houses and kill them, for their blood, which the Christians supposed was used for some kind of magical ritual—like the making of Passover matzoh, the weird Jewish analogue to the Christian communion wafer (historically it was the other way around: the communion wafer, the symbolic Lord's Supper, being modeled from the unleavened flatbread, matzoh, that Jesus would have eaten at his Last Supper, a Passover seder with his followers, telling them, according to the Gospel, that it was his own flesh, and the wine they were drinking was his own blood). 

This was a typical example of the dreadful lies that brought about the persecutions in which Christian peasants or townsmen periodically slaughtered Jews by the dozens and hundreds and thousands, and served as precursors to the 19th-century pogroms of eastern Europe and the 20th-century Shoah, the Nazis' "final solution" to the "Jewish question". 

It's like the ancestor of all antisemitism, born out of the story that the Jews, as a collectivity, murdered God's own baby, his only-begotten son, which in the terrible history of antisemitism is the fons et origo.

ICE, in contrast, is a national police force that attacks ghettosful of aliens, and the story of their violence against the presumed foreigners is no libel, but attested in cell phone videos from all over the country. We've seen them knocking women to the ground and tearing children and their parents apart. If you're looking for a blood libel, you can find something like it in the words of *checks notes* Vice President JD Vance, in the 2024 campaign, spreading the false story that Haitians fleeing from the murderous violence of Port-au-Prince and living completely legally in Ohio under Temporary Protected Status had taken to killing and eating their neighbors' pet cats and dogs. Vance basically admitted that he had no citable evidence but claimed he needed to tell the story anyway, on the weird grounds that the mere presence of the Haitians in town was causing the good (white) citizens of Springfield some kind of "suffering" that couldn't be described, only communicated, apparently, by lying about it:

During a Sunday interview on CNN, the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee said his evidence for this claim was "the first-hand accounts of my constituents [although media reporting had clearly established by then that there were no such first-hand accounts]." He then went on to defend the dissemination of this false story.

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," Sen. Vance said. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.

Totally ignored what? How the American people were "suffering" from a thing that wasn't in fact happening. "It's not real, but the media must pay attention to it!" And given the way people feel about their pets, hardly different from the way they feel about their kids, it's not just like a version of the blood libel. Telling the local citizenry that if they were unhappy it was the fault of those dark-skinned, foreign-accented people in their midst

What's wrong with these people? 

When Speech is Illegal

 

Screenshot via South China Morning Post, October 2013,

The last time I had occasion to devote real time to thinking about the late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel was almost 12 years ago,  when he was in trouble not for something he said on his show, but for his failure to respond to something a small child said, in a segment aired during the government shutdown of October 2013, which he called Kid's Table:

The offending remark came while Kimmel was talking to a group of children, ages 5 and 6, about the United States government’s debt, much of which is held by China.

“America owes China a lot of money, $1.3 trillion,” Kimmel told the children. “How should we pay them back?”

“Shoot cannons all the way over and kill everyone in China,” one boy said.

Or in this case, as he said afterwards, "Kid's Table, the Lord of the Flies edition". It was widely felt, in the Asian American community anyway, that he should at the very least have distanced himself from this bloodthirsty proposal in the followup, which was not quite what he did:

“Kill everyone in China? OK, that’s an interesting idea,” Kimmel said.

He then posed the question: “Should we allow the Chinese to live?”

While one boy said, “No,” most of the children said, “Yes.”

“If we don’t allow them to live, then they’ll try to kill us,” a girl said.

Normalizing the concept of permanent ineradicable hostility between the races. I don't know anything about the races of the kindergartners on the show, but I hope none of them were East Asian in origin—you can imagine how it would have gone if one of them was, how that child would have felt about the discussion, and then you can go on to understand that there were certainly people of East Asian origin watching the show at home.

Protests in Chinatown, protests in my own half-Chinese family, protests from the Chinese embassy, protests from my H-1B Chinese work colleague with the PhD from Urbana-Champaign, not normally in unison with the CPC, who got me to sign a petition, and ABC's swift damage control and Kimmel's apology, which was not too gracious ("I thought it was obvious that I didn't agree with that statement"), though I can see his point. A reviewer for KTAR radio in Phoenix said it was "poignant and hilarious" (just bumped into that one). Anyway that was the end to the controversy as far as I knew. Now I seem to be the only one who remembers it, though I did have to google to remember what it was about, and I may never have known that, because I find I'm seriously shocked by it now. Or could I really have thought it was OK back then? Could I have been resensitized by the explosion of anti-Chinese racism that came with the pandemic so that I now experience it in a different way? No reported pressure of any kind from the federal government, though, ABC seems to have been able to deal with it on a purely business basis.

I thought it would be helpful to have an example of a situation that Kimmel definitely handled badly before we go on to the case on which there is some disagreement.

His response to the September 10 killing of Kirk, in any case, wasn't at all "denigrating the memory of Charlie Kirk", as Stephen Bannon put it; he denounced the murder, as everyone should, and refrained from speaking ill of the victim. What aroused the criticism was what he said about Republican politicians, not involved in the murder one way or the other, but rushing to exploit the murder, starting with Donald Trump, who released a video on the night of September 10, before a suspect had even been identified, blaming it on the "radical left" and unnamed "organizations" that supposedly fund it;

Horst Wessel Moment

Summary of the list by Lawrence Britt, 2003, which I've used for Trumpery for a while now. More elaborated version here.

Jill Filipovic at Slate, with one of the most inevitable reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk, the fear that it might serve as a kind of Reichstag moment for the authoritarians who are already in such a commanding political position—that this uncharacteristic new trend of violence-from-the-left, if that's what it is (and there's a good deal of reason to suppose it isn't—in the morning it was reported that the newly arrested suspect, Tyler Robinson, presented as antifascist, even though he's a kid from Utah, but by afternoon he was getting tagged as a groyper adherent of smiling fascist Nick Fuentes who regarded Kirk as a "fake conservative"), perhaps going back to the attempts on Trump's life during the campaign, or Luigi Mangione's killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December, will serve as the spark for legitimizing and institutionalizing the Trumpian attack on democracy, like the Enabling Act that permitted Hitler to assume dictatorial powers in 1933:

It has also enraged the MAGA right, and they are now demanding revenge—not just on Kirk’s killer, but on Democrats, liberal advocacy organizations, the news media, and progressives more broadly. We are still in the early hours after this appalling murder. But many conservatives are trying to make this into their Reichstag fire: the moment the movement has been waiting for to use as a pretext to suspend democratic rules, crush their opponents, and put themselves fully in charge.

In part because some of them have started saying so themselves, very explicitly.

Wokey-dokey

I had to be reminded or in part informed (by Heather Cox Richardson) of a number of the cultural references in this "Truth" post: Trump's costume is that of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Francis Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, played by Robert Duvall, the character who says, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," and who leads a helicopter raid over the Vietnamese countryside to the sound of the prelude to Act III of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre (representing the flight through the skies of Wotan's warrior daughters, dashing over battlefields on their airborne horses, to gather the bodies of dead heroes for the afterlife in the Hall of Battles, Wallhall), evoked in the picture by the helicopters over the Chicago skyline; while the three helicopter emojis in the message are apparently used by a certain type of rightwinger to register approval of the Chilean dictatorship  of General Augusto Pinochet and its habit of dealing with dissidents by tossing them, from flying helicopters, into the sea. I don't know why it seems to have been shot somewhere miles away on Lake Michigan, from a boat that's violently on fire, leaving Trump-Kilgore in the position of the cartoon dog saying, "This is fine" when it clearly isn't.  

Dr. Google tells me that "Chipocalypse Now" is the title of an episode from the Disney animated series "Big City Greens", named not for Chicago but for the show's villain, Chip Whistler, a wicked capitalist who hopes to demolish the protagonists' apartment building and replace it with a giant supermarket, but I believe that's just a coincidence.

I'm reasonably confident I understand Trump's motive for changing the name of the department from Defense to War, as from a trope he might have inherited from his cranky rightwing father about the general decadence of the armed forces after they "lost" China, and subsequently North Korea and South Vietnam, to the Communists. Trump referred to it pretty explicitly (if confusingly, in his slippery "weave" style) when he was signing the executive order:

Let Them Eat Sermons

Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a pond on the farm at Pindar's Corners. Still from the 2018 documentary by Joseph Dorman and Toby Perl Freilich.

Hey,  David F. Brooks ("Why I Am Not a Liberal"), what up, man? How's the wife? Read anything interesting lately?

Last May a study came out suggesting that merely giving people money doesn’t do much to lift them out of poverty. Families with at least one child received $333 a month. They had more money to spend, which is a good thing, but the children fared no better than similar children who didn’t get the cash. They were no more likely to develop language skills or demonstrate cognitive development. They were no more likely to avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays.

Notice he doesn't tell us which study he's talking about, or offer a link so we can check it out for ourselves, which is often a sign of something funky in Brooks's social science commentary, at the least that he hasn't read the paper he's talking about (which Dr. Google was able to identify pretty quickly: the. NBER report on the Baby's First Years experiment by Kimberly Noble, Katherine Magnuson, Greg Duncan et al., The effect of a monthly unconditional cash transfer on children’s development at four years of age: A randomized controlled trial in the U.S.). In typical Brooks fashion he does link his source for Baby's First Years (BFY), a piece from two weeks ago in the Substack "abundance" mag The Argument, in the next paragraph, but without acknowledging it as source, in a reference to a different study—

These results shouldn’t have been a big surprise. As Kelsey Piper noted in an essay for The Argument, a different study published last year gave families $500 a month for two years and found no big effects on the adult recipients’ psychological well-being and financial security.

—he's trying, as ever, to hide how little he's read in the preparation of the column. But if he'd read more of her essay, or the excellent coverage of the experiment by Jason DeParle at the end of July in The New York Times, he could have learned that the question is a little more complex.

Normie Distribution

 

I always used to be amused at the Twitter users paranoid about political poll results because they had themselves had never gotten the call from Emerson or Siena, and suspected that the polling outfits must be making the data up. As a New York City resident, a registered Democrat, and a certified Old Fool who kept a land line for a ridiculous amount of time and still today always picks up on a number I don't know on the possibility that the caller might be a long-lost relative or notice of a windfall from a class action I didn't know I was a party to (it's hard to scam me, I want to insist, but it's easy to get me to answer), I could assure them that it does happen, especially on questions of local politics. If the pollster never calls you, that's just a sign of how ordinary you are; there are so many millions of you that they're just never going to get around to your number. 

Sucks to be you! except when I'm trying to come up with an honest answer to whether allegation A makes me much less likely, somewhat less likely, somewhat more likely, or much more likely to vote for candidate C, or whether I don't know or don't care, in which group I increasingly fit, not because I'm any less partisan but either because I already know about the allegation and had already made my decision around it or I'm hearing it for the first time and have no idea whether it's even true or not (identifying it, in my understanding, as a "push poll", not meant to gather information but just to slime the accused candidate in some way that escapes overt publicity, and is probably false anyhow). Both of which happen all the time.

Toxic Work Atmosphere

You know vaguely, if you're like me, about the DOGEboys who have been uploading huge amounts of data from the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and voter data from some states, and dumping it all into a "data lake" of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Servces at the Department of Homeland Security, where they keep records of interactions between immigrants and the USCIS, information that agencies like ICE, if they wanted to commit serious violations of the governments's privacy rules, could put together and use (for one thing) to geolocate undocumented immigrants and hunt them down, and you've probably heard vaguely about this week's whistleblower complaint from Charles Borges, chief information officer of the SSA, documenting how Social Security data had been illegally uploaded to a cloud server where it could possibly be hacked by who knows what kind of reprobates, though not necessarily any more malign than the Boys who are seemingly authorized to collect it.

Borges has now resigned, and it was his letter that got my attention; it was an "involuntary resignation", he said:

After reporting internally to management and externally to regulators serious data security and integrity concerns impacting our citizens' most sensitive personal data, I have suffered exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable....

I have been made aware of several projects and incidents which may constitute violations of federal statutes or regulations, involve the potential safety and security of high value data assets in the cloud, possibly provided unauthorized or inappropriate access to agency enterprise data storage solutions, and may involve unauthorized data exchange with other agencies. As these events evolved, newly installed leadership in IT and executive offices created a culture of panic and dread, with minimal information sharing, frequent discussions on employee termination, and general organizational dysfunction. Executives and employees are afraid to share information or concerns on questionable activities for fear of retribution or termination, and repeated requests by me for visibility into these events have been rebuffed or ignored by agency leadership, with some employees directed not to reply to my queries.

We've seen bunches of resignation letters showing up on social media in recent years, in a pretty regular format ("it has been my honor..."). I've never seen anything like this before. This is the trauma Christian nationalist Russell Vought said last year he wanted to inflict on "the bureaucrats" 

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

and which he is now overseeing as head of the Office of Management and Budget and Elon Musk's replacement as unofficial leader of DOGE; he and the Boys are the newly installed leadership to which the letter refers, along with whoever he has managed to hire in the quest formerly known as Schedule F to replace qualified civil servants with certified Trump loyalists—

As Thousands Jeer

 

Via ABC News.

Via Axios:

Trump signed an executive order Monday that puts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in charge of training a specialized National Guard unit dedicated to "ensuring public safety" in D.C.

• "They say: 'We don't need him. Freedom, freedom, he's a dictator,'" Trump said at a White House event, suggesting deploying the National Guard in Chicago next.
• "A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator," Trump added. "I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person."

There's something there I don't think he's done before, and it's at least a little spooky. Nobody comes out and says, "Hi, I'm Donald and I'll be your dictator tonight." When Trump was saying during the campaign that he was going to be a dictator but only on Day 1, to "close the border and drill, baby, drill", it was reasonable to understand him as joking, or whatever that thing is he does when we're expected not to take him literally, because that's not how you apply for the job, in the first place.

You never announce your intention to be a dictator if that's your plan: you get some simulacrum of the vox populi to ask you to be the dictator and turn them down. Caesar got Antony to offer him a golden diadem three times at the Lupercalia (the Carnival-type festival held on the Ides of February) of 44 B.C.E., according to Plutarch, and he said no each time, understanding that the Senate and People of the city had absolutely rejected kingship centuries earlier, but he had already accepted an offer (from Antony's colleague Lepidus) of the official dictatorship in 49, which he held for just 11 days, long enough to stage an election making him one of that year's consuls, and was subsequently reappointed another 3 times, until his appointment early in 44 as dictator perpetuo, dictator in perpetuity, the thing that decided Brutus and Cassius and the other conspirators that they had to kill him right away, a month after the Lupercalia, on the Ides of March. Caesar's rejection of the golden diadem hadn't impressed them.

Anyway, that's what Trump is doing in the Axios story, "A lot of people are saying we like a dictator." He's saying I don't want it, but maybe you should make me an offer, because I am extremely qualified, by gender and sense both common and uncommon. That's the conventional way to put in your application.

Speaking of Farces

The secret of his success is that it's a secret.

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) August 17, 2025 at 4:23 PM

Speaking of farces, there's a story about the origins of the Trump-Putin Alaska summit that started circulating a week or so ago in the German tabloid Bild: in Steve Witkoff's August 6 meeting with Putin, he came away with the impression that Putin was proposing to have Russian troops "peacefully withdraw" from the territories they've partly occupied in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as part of a ceasefire agreement, in return for Ukraine leaving Russia in control of some territory they had held since 2014, maybe Donetsk: this would be the basis of Trump's claim on August 8 that there would "be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both."

Needless to say, this was not on offer; the best guess is that Putin said the Ukrainian troops could "withdraw peacefully" from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and the Russians wouldn't attack them as they left, and Witkoff heard it wrong. By the time Trump spoke on the 8th (one of his deadline days for dealing out the "consequences" that Putin was supposed to suffer if he failed to agree to a ceasefire), Witkoff had spoken with European officials that morning and understood that he'd been mistaken and there was no chance of a deal, but the invitations had already gone out and been announced on Russian media. 

But it's not clear that anybody told Trump about that; he went through with plans for a festive breakthrough meeting in Anchorage, with the red carpet and military flyover, the tête-à-tête meeting between the two with only interpreters present (first time since Helsinki!), the luncheon "in honor of his excellency President Putin", and a nice tchotchke for the Russian leader, the "desk statue" of a bald eagle, and schedule featuring three Trump interviews for Fox News.