Drawing by Patrick Chappatte/Globecartoon.com,
Switzerland/CagleCartoons.com 2018, via
Washington Post.
David Rothkopf may be
the most respectable person coming out to say this, and he says it well:
as much as we may condemn the actions of the regime in the Islamic Republic
and feel its government is a threat to the stability of the region, Israel
started this war. Furthermore, Israel started it not for the reason it
gave—the imminent threat posed by the Iranian nuclear program. That threat
has existed for many years and U.S. intelligence did not feel Iran had made
any notable new strides recently. Rather, Netanyahu decided to strike for
three reasons. 1.) He remains in political jeopardy and war has proven an
effective means of helping him to stay in power. 2.) Rather than fearing an
Iranian breakthrough on nukes, he feared one on a potential nuclear deal. He
opposed the one negotiated under Obama. He goaded Trump into abandoning it.
And he was deeply troubled that Trump was now advocating re-entering just
such an agreement. 3.) He has made the conflict between Israel and Iran a
centerpiece of his politics throughout his career. He is Ahab. It is his
Great White Whale.
Of which point (1) is the most obvious to me, as you might expect, and the
most offensive to the respectable, because of the moral implications that that
is the kind of person the Israeli prime minister is, OK with killing a
substantial number of human beings (something like 600 in Iran as of
yesterday, including at least
239 civilians, and 24 in Israel, under Iran's retaliatory strikes, which seem to have been
more effective than usual), as the price of office, and escaping prison in his
corruption cases. That's exactly how I've seen him, though, for the last 18
months of slaughtering Gazan civilians (something like 50,000 at this point)
and abandoning the kidnap victims from Israel still held in Gaza, so I'm not
especially shocked.
Point (2), on the possibility of a US deal reviving the 2015 JCPOA or
something like it, in which Iran would stop enriching uranium in return for
some sanctions relief, hasn't been taken very seriously by the punditry at
large, though newspapers loyally reported the five rounds of talks between the
two countries in April and May, of which the last, held
May 23
in Rome, was described by the Americans as "constructive—we made further
progress" and by the Iranians as "one of the most professional rounds of
negotiation," though they held out little hope of an agreement any time
soon.
Los neoyorquinos latinos son el corazón de esta ciudad y merecen un alcalde que les hable directamente. Este vídeo es un esfuerzo a presentar nuestra visión a la comunidad latina, para que podamos trabajar juntos para construir la ciudad que todos merecemos. Latino New Yorkers are the heart of this city — and they deserve a mayor who will speak to them directly. This video is an effort to introduce our vision to the Latino community, so we can work together to build the city we all deserve.
This
is pretty irritating, from the New York Times Editorial Board keeping its
promise not to endorse any candidates in local elections any more:
Given those polls [showing Cuomo and Mamdani dominating over the other nine
candidates] the crucial choice may end up being where, if at all, voters
decide to rank Mr. Cuomo or Mr. Mamdani. We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani
deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots. His experience is too thin, and his
agenda reads like a turbocharged version of Mr. de Blasio’s dismaying
mayoralty. As for Mr. Cuomo, we have serious objections to his ethics and
conduct, even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.
For any voters tempted to leave both off their ballots, it is important to
understand that this decision would be tantamount to expressing no
preference between the two. It is similar to voting for neither major-party
candidate in a traditional election.
"We refuse to choose, because it's beneath our awesome dignity, but if you
follow our example you're a moral coward. Also, you should choose the
ethically challenged Cuomo." As they make clear by devoting three paragraphs
to Zohran Mamdani's shortcomings, condemning his ideology, policy ideas, and
inexperience, and the way he reminds them of de Blasio, and just one to Andrew
Cuomo's—the issue of his weird though probably not criminal mistreatment of
women, over which he resigned from the state governorship four years ago, on
the advice of this same editorial board, which now seems to think that was
less serious a fault than advocating a minimum wage hike or free buses, as
Mamdani does.
In the first place, the argument is bullshit. It's a rank-choice vote among
11 candidates, and it is not similar to voting for neither major-party
candidate in a traditional election. With the much smaller (and better
informed) turnout you expect in a primary, and only Democrats voting in New
York's closed-primary system, it's easy to imagine one or two of the other
candidates emerging if enough people decided not to rank the two frontrunners,
and if the frontrunners are as bad as the board seems to think they are,
that's what the board ought to call for, instead of using this backhanded
technique of pushing us in one direction.
Then, Cuomo's ethical failings
aren't limited
to the #MeToo moments that helped to drive him out of office. In the middle of
his first term as governor, in 2013, he named what's called a "Moreland
Commission" in New York to fight corruption in state government, then abruptly
shut it down halfway through its 18-month appointed lifetime. It later became
apparent that Cuomo and his aides had never really allowed it to function, as
The Times
reported:
I'd been wondering if Hegseth was freelancing, volunteering out of the blue
when he said on Saturday he was ready to deploy Marines to Los Angeles, the
project sounding so off the wall, even more illegal than the National Guard
proposal, and I had trouble imagining they'd allow Trump to call him up and
ask for them. "Hey Pete! They're burning down Los Angeles! Send the Marines!"
And indeed, on the Sunday, Trump didn't seem to have heard of it, suggesting,
as he often does when asked about some abuse that he hasn't thought about,
that he hadn't made any decisions but definitely could
if he felt like it:
When asked what the threshold is for sending in the Marines, Mr. Trump said
Sunday: "The bar is what I think it is."
If I'm reading that right, he was saying the only consideration would be the presidential will. When he found out how he felt, what he wanted to happen, that would be the thing that would happen.
Wall Street Journal (gift link) confirms what you probably have been suspecting, that the ICE push over last week in Southern California, where they raided garment factories and warehouses, car washes (nabbing customers as well as workers) and at least one day care center (where they grabbed a mom dropping off her four-year-old), climaxing with Friday's and Saturday's assaults on Home Depot parking lots in Westlake and Paramount, was engineered by Reichskommissar Stephen Miller as part of a general strategic shift away from trying to deport gang members and criminals to deporting any unauthorized immigrants at all.
The somewhat amusing part is that it was motivated by jealousy, of Joe Biden:
Philipse Manor War Memorial, Yonkers, New York, via.
David Brooks writes about the thing that made him angriest last week,
something he says William F. Buckley, Jr. advised him to do when he first
entered into punditry, but doesn't often get the chance, because it's so rare
that anything makes him angry at all, but apparently he did this time ("The Trump World Idea That's Pushed Me Over the Edge"):
Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a
Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen
wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t
motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die
not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of
life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to
brave all for the men and women of their unit.”
This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting
for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of
postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump
administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the
national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut
their teeth.
I think we can assume "communing with my phone" means "googling desperately,
having forgotten for the past three days that Memorial Day existed, for
something I could hang a belated Memorial Day column on". I'm not sure what
"the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism" is (postliberalism with accordions and a
bubble machine metonymically representing Champagne?), but "postliberalism" is
Brooks's current term for the bothsides thing that gets him sort of quietly
irritated just now, not angry of course, the thing that
JD Vance and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
do where they object to "neoliberalism", which seems in his view to be when
they are pushing "populism", which seems to me (a non-bothsiderist) to refer
to two quite different responses to income and wealth inequality, depending on
whether you have ideas for doing something about that (as Ocasio-Cortez does)
or not (like Vance) and thus different sides, but maybe that's just me.
Wong Kim Ark, from a 1904 US immigration document, via Wikimedia Commons.
Revised and expanded from the post of January 26, with what I think is a somewhat new argument up in front, inspired immediately by an irritating Bluesky post.
Maybe the birthright citizenship order will ultimately be held unconstitutional, but I find it highly embarrassing for a judge to say something so unequivocally at a preliminary stage without the slightest acknowledgement that there is an entire literature that disagrees. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/2R4OE9lT8a
The "entire literature" (which seems to consist of a single book by Peter Shuck and Rogers Smith, Citizenship without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity, Yale University Press, 1985, and its brief recap in the American Enterprise Institute's magazine National Affairs, summer 2018, presumably published in the hope of attracting attention from President Trump and his factotum Stephen Miller), is fatally flawed by its failure to recognize the significance of an obvious fact: there were no "illegal aliens" in the United States at the time the 14th Amendment passed Congress in 1866 and was ratified two years later, only millions of immigrants who might or might not choose to be naturalized (white immigrants, that is, under the terms of the Naturalization Acts of 1798 and 1802).
And when those immigrants had children, as they often did, no reason to question their citizenship or "naturalize" them; as affirmed in an 1844 New York state case, Lynch v. Clarke, in which a state judge held that a woman born in New York City, of alien parents temporarily sojourning there, was a U.S. citizen. They were "natural" already; for the children of immigrants, birthright citizenship was the universal norm (local governments could order the deportation of obnoxious individual immigrants, but there wasn't a national policy). Miller's scenario is completely irrelevant to the realities of the time when the 14th Amendment was written.
The hard cases before 1866-68 were not immigrants, but people whose parents were born within the borders of the US: citizens of the Indigenous nations, and the freed descendants of enslaved Africans.
At Top Cottage, Hyde Park in 1941, with Fala and Ruthie Bie, granddaughter of one of the gardeners. Via.
In March 1944, not long after his 62nd birthday, President Franklin Roosevelt,
who was taking too long to recover from a bout of flu the previous December,
went to Bethesda Hospital for a battery of tests meant to find out why, and
diagnosed with a pile of serious heart problems: hypertension,
atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease, and congestive heart failure. The
doctors' recommendations focused on rest—no business guests at lunch, and two
hours' rest after lunch—not easy, as he was pretty busy prosecuting World War
II and running for his fourth presidential term. They also prescribed some
drugs, and thought he should cut down smoking, and try to lose some weight,
which last turned out awkward: Roosevelt was anxious to hide his health
problems from the public, as he always had been, going back to the paralysis
he'd been concealing since contracting polio at Campobello in 1921, and the
successful dieting ironically left him looking sick to the public, not his
robust, jaunty, grinning self but gaunt and haggard, sparking exactly the
rumors he was most anxious to avoid.
That was a kind of bad thing, as everybody understands nowadays, in the wake
of Eisenhower's heart attacks, Kennedy's Addison's disease, Nixon's
stress-related alcoholism, Reagan's incipient Alzheimer's, Trump's obesity, severe personality disorder, and
possible psychoactive drug use (sniff, sniff!), and whatever was going on with
President Joe Biden during the presidential campaign last year on June 27,
during the presidential debate with Trump, when he spoke in an almost
inaudibly hoarse whisper, and altogether lost the thread of what he was saying
at at least one point early in the show. Just an hour or two later he seemed
fine, as loud and as on message as ever, but the damage (thanks in part to a
long campaign on the part of The New York Times and other organs, not to claim that Biden was suffering age-related infirmities but that the
public thought he might be, based not on observation of the
president but on a bunch of rather pushy Times-Siena public opinion polls) was done.
Over at Techdirt, the genial
Mike Masnick
has come up with a brilliant explanation of what is happening when Trump does
an interview like the one with
Time
a couple of weeks ago; it's something remarkably similar to the way a chatbot,
especially the less successful-looking early models like ChatGPT itself,
handles a conversational series of prompts, with its "response generator":
A journalist asks a specific question about policy or events
Trump, clearly unfamiliar with the actual details, activates his response
generator
Out comes a stream of confident-sounding words that maintain just enough
semantic connection to the question to seem like an answer
The response optimizes for what Trump thinks his audience wants to hear,
rather than for accuracy or truth....
Brilliant, if maybe not exactly right. Consider Masnick's first example:
You were harshly critical of what you called the weaponization of the
Justice System under Biden. You recently signed memos—
Well, sure, but you wouldn’t be—if this were Biden, well, first of all,
he wouldn’t do an interview because he was grossly incompetent.
We spoke to him last year, Mr. President.
Huh?
We spoke to him a year ago.
How did he do?
You can read the interview yourself.
Not too good. I did read the interview. He didn’t do well. He didn’t do
well at all. He didn’t do well at anything. And he cut that interview off
to being a matter of minutes, and you weren’t asking him questions like
you’re asking me.
(In case you’re wondering, you can see the Biden interview here and he did not cut if off after a matter of minutes).
Because he's not doing what the automaton does, saying "what he thinks his audience wants to hear" (or, more accurately, trying to assemble the string that represents the most probable response to the prompt). Unlike the automaton, he is thinking, but in this passage from late in the interview what he's thinking about is how not to respond to the prompt, an uncomfortable series of questions on the abuse of foreign students' free speech rights over the Gaza issue, which he's not enjoying and doesn't know anything about (other than the less than accurate report that there was "tremendous antisemitism at every one of those rallies"), and he leaps at the mention of Biden's name as an opportunity to change the subject to something more comfortable, the subject of how superior he is to Biden, who would never have had the courage to submit to an interview with Time, except of course it immediately turns out he did.
So he instantly switches to pretending not only that he already knew that, though he obviously didn't, but even more ridiculously that he'd actually read the transcript, bringing in the words from the prompt.
That's the part that really looks like AI, where he lies, or hallucinates, "I did read the interview", though he's just told us he's hearing about the interview for the first time. AI is unable to maintain discourse coherence over a certain distance, as in this beautiful example I saw yesterday:
I asked Google how much $1M in gold would weigh. Simple math problem. It gave the wrong answer, then the correct answer, then wrong answer again.
Somehow they have broken the math ability of a mathematical machine.
It’s impressive, actually.
Gemini's conversational rules for answering a prompt like that are evidently to state the conclusion, then show its work, then repeat the conclusion: but it doesn't "know" the conclusion before it's done the rather complicated work required for this question, and "hallucinates" an answer instead. Then, after doing the work, it doesn't "know" that it has contradicted the prefabricated conclusion.
In a similar way, Trump has a set of prefabricated conclusions about Biden that he has been deploying for well over a year, that he's afraid of interviews and that everything he does is a failure, and when the prompts force him to switch them up, he simply does so, without showing any awareness that he's contradicting himself, and adding a kind of "hallucination" for verisimilitude, in the bit about the interview having been cut short (possibly inspired by an incident of September 2023, when a very jet-lagged Biden was giving a speech in Hanoi and his staff pulled him offstage before he was finished).
That's exactly how he maintains that tariffs will both protect the return of manufacturing industries to the US (because people will buy American dolls and pencils rather than pay the tax) and simultaneously raise hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue (because people will gladly pay the tax). The two concepts aren't connected for him, so they never collide, unless some mean interviewer forces the issue, like Time here telling him that the magazine did interview Biden, or Terry Moran on Kilmar Ábrego García:
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Don't do that -- M-S-1-3 -- It says M-S-one-three.
TERRY MORAN: I -- that was Photoshop. So let me just--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: That was Photoshop? Terry, you can't do that -- he had --
-- he-- hey, they're givin' you the big break of a lifetime. You know, you're doin' the interview. I picked you because -- frankly I never heard of you, but that's okay --
TERRY MORAN: This -- I knew this would come --
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But I picked you -- Terry -- but you're not being very nice. He had MS-13 tattooed --
TERRY MORAN: Alright. Alright. We'll agree to disagree. I want to move on --
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Terry.
Where Trump responds to being contradicted like a Mafia don.
And you don't necessarily need the AI concept to understand it. There's a lovely formulation by David Roth at Defector:
It is one of the defining Trump things that any belief that makes it into his mind will bump around in there forever; his understanding of the world is the sum of those things, thousands of permanent and perpetual irritants cut free from any context or facticity, smashing into each other and echoing forever inside of his luxuriously appointed skull. They drop bowling balls on the cars; there is no such thing as gold paint; they looked at his hand and the proof was right there. None of this, of course, is new. None of the beliefs are new, really, and nothing that Trump will do between this moment and his last one on earth will be new, or surprising in the least. It's just a matter of which echoes are ringing most loudly at that moment.
Just floating around his brain, from the bowling balls (probably not originating in a bizarre misinterpretation of the Nissan ad at top—the most thorough investigation I've seen is by Philip Bump, from 2018) to Kilmar Ábrego's knuckle tattoos, and all the rest.
Image by Nicholas Konrad for The New Yorker, from David Rohde's coverage of the Mar-a-Lago documents case, August 2022.
The defense secretary makes more use of that inadequately secured communications platform than he originally said, like to keep his missus and his brother apprised of his military activities, thus endangering national security even more than when he did this with members of the Principals Committee, plus the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic (who wasn't supposed to be there but seems to be the only person involved who had a clue on how to behave in a situation where sensitive information is being discussed). Hegseth seems extremely reliant on the missus and the brother, dragging the one of them to meetings for which she hasn't got an appropriate, or indeed any, security clearance, and appointing the other to a Pentagon sinecure, and I can't help thinking their job is to carry the hip flasks, but who knows.
The punditry explodes with excitement: surely the president will have to fire him now, but that's not what happens when the president is informed:
Mr. Hegseth called the president around 8 p.m., said the person, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. The president told Mr. Hegseth that disgruntled “leakers” were to blame for the report and made clear that he had Mr. Hegseth’s back. The president also said he had plenty of experience dealing with leakers.
As far as Trump is concerned, the problem isn't that Hegseth is a threat to national security, it's that disgruntled leakers let everybody know about it. That's what those leakers do, probably because of whatever it was that disgruntled them. Once disgruntled, twice shy.
Indeed it might be the still gruntled ones who are the greater problem, like the White House anonymi who persuaded NPR to report that Trump was actively seeking a new defense secretary. At least the disgruntled ones are likely to be telling us the truth—that more or less everything is out of control.
That line of Trump's, when I heard it on the radio—"Isn't it wonderful that we're keeping criminals out of our country?"—struck me as begging a couple of important and opposed questions: asking us to assume, on the one hand, that what he's been doing can be described that way, and on the other that it's an unambiguously good idea.
I've given a lot more attention to the first, especially starting in the 2024 campaign, because the shamelessness of the lying, on the part of Trump and Bannon and Stephen Miller, got me so mad, and the respectable people were hardly discussing it: that when the Trumpies screamed about the millions of criminal aliens they were planning to deport, the murderers and rapists and human traffickers and opiate dealers, the escapees from prisons and "lunatic asylums" Trump had created out of his own linguistic confusion, they weren't talking about anything real.
Octopus City, rendering of a plan by Peter Thiel's Seasteading Institute, via Wired, May 2015, when the techie billionaires were giving up on their idea. Then Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy.
Found myself unexpectedly attracted by a conspiracy theory around the tariff mishegas, from a Substacker, Daniel Pinchbeck, with an excitingly transgressive headline: Paul Krugman is wrong.
Not that I was planning to go that far myself! I think Krugman's judgment of the White House at the moment is fundamentally right:
Hey, Mom, I told you I'd finish the project in time. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, via Newsweek.
I had a pretty strong suspicion that there was some bullshit involved when I heard about the chart (at first on the radio) of Trump's proposed "reciprocal tariffs", announced on NPR as
a 10% minimum tariff to apply to goods from all countries. However, certain trading partners will face higher, "reciprocal tariffs" aimed at penalizing them for their trade barriers. Thosetaxes on imported goods are calculated on a country-by-country basis, and the levels Trump announced for some trading partners are substantial. He said he plans to impose 34% tariffs on China, 20% on the European Union and 24% on Japan, among an array of other trading partners.
and a little more suspicion when I saw the charts Trump put on display for illustration, which seem to be describing something different, or maybe two different things, with the left columns headed "tariffs charged to the U.S.A. including currency manipulation and trade barriers", and the right column headed "U.S.A. discounted reciprocal tariffs" of around half the amount given in the first column, except for a number of countries, such as UK, Brazil, Singapore, Chile, Australia, and Colombia, where the number in both columns was 10%, which looked like a reference to the 10% "minimum tariff" instead. Why were those on the same chart?
But the thing I really wanted to know about was where the numbers in the other cells of the left column came from: how had the administration calculated a single number for "tariffs charged to the U.S.A. including currency manipulation and trade barriers" for each of the 65 countries, 67% for China, 39% for the EU, 90% for poor Vietnam? Not that I would have any ability to imagine other numbers, or even to say whether such numbers exist, but could they say something about how they did it? There are no clues in today's executive order or in the presidential memorandum to which it alludes.
Anyway, I was pleased to see that Dr. Krugman, who is probably as well positioned to talk about these subjects as anybody alive (work in international trade theory is what he won his Nobel for), put up a quick note on the Substack that has replaced his New York Time column that suggests he was wondering exactly the same thing:
So where does this 39 percent number [representing the EU's "tariffs charged to the USA"] come from? I have no idea. Many people speculated that Trump would count value-added taxes as tariffs, even though they aren’t — European producers selling to the EU market pay the same VAT as US producers, so it doesn’t discriminate and therefore isn’t protectionist. But even if you get that wrong, EU VAT rates are in the vicinity of 20 percent, so you still can’t get anywhere close to 39 percent.
You have to wonder whether Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids are now producing tariff numbers.
Now it seems, as NPR reports it, that's pretty much what happened:
Trump calls the move "reciprocal tariffs," however, the White House acknowledged it would be hard to calculate the actual trade barriers from every country, NPR's Scott Horsley tells Up First. As a result, the Trump administration picked an arbitrary number they thought would be high enough to chip away at each country's trade surplus. Economists say the tariffs will likely mean higher prices and slower growth in the U.S.
Got that? It would be hard to calculate, so they decided they'd just make the numbers up. And it's not like it was totally arbitrary, they were careful to pick numbers that sounded "high enough". Close enough for country music, as we used to say. Everybody's OK with that, right?
It was government by bullshit. They just brought their big charts with the made-up numbers out to the Rose Garden like Trump's hurricane map and read Stephen Miller's statement, with news that is I mean cataclysmic for most of these countries, threatening them all with recession, and lay back in the expectation that everybody would treat it as some kind of real thing. Presumably it's another Trumpy extortion attempt. Hey Vietnam, nice little export economy you have here, shame if anything were to happen to it, why don't you make us an offer? (Except Vietnam did make them an offer, back in February, and ambassador Marc Knapper assured them that Trump's tariffs were not going to be aimed at them in any way. Maybe President Trump wasn't informed of what President Trump was doing.)
I'll have more to say about the whole event later on, but I feel like this thing on its own is so key to the understanding of what the Trumpery is about: they made the numbers up, because they felt getting real ones would be too hard, and admitted it to Scott Horsley, and they still expect to be treated as adults.
Update: The actual calculations are now available from various sources, including good old Atrios, Dean Baker, and The New York Times. And Krugman, with some hard evidence that the formula was created by an Large Language Model generative AI (though Gemini 3.5 is very insistent that it’s a stupid idea). Still insane, but helpful indicators of what kind of insanity.
In the email from rightwing poll aggregator Real Clear Politics:
Sweet Christ, Carl, you're still fretting about how four and a half years ago Twitter followed FBI advice that the New York Post's Hunter laptop story might be infected by Russian disinformation and blocked links to the Post for [checks notes] nearly three whole days, leaving users to the humiliation of having to find it on Facebook instead?
(If it had been four days, Trump totally would have won the election? Uh, maybe a comforting thought for Trump but I really don't think so.)
Meanwhile, the Republican White House is openly blackmailing the country's public school system, public and private universities, medical research institutions and hospitals, museums, national parks, armed services, federal and state judges and prosecutors, numerous prestigious law firms, and the privately owned press and public broadcast media to adopt its ideological positions on everything from history to biology and energy production, for which Twitter now, acquired by a multibillionaire who appears to have become literally the president's single-dad housemate, what a setup for Aaron Sorkin's new series "The East Wing", serves as a propagandist.
Maybe you'd like to say that there's no constitutional prohibition against the Executive making laws abridging the freedom of the press so there's nothing we can do about it? It's not over till it's over! Don't surrender in advance!
And the FBI was right, too, BTW; the laptop (which wasn't in fact the laptop, which seems to have been squirreled away in impenetrable FBI secrecy for years, but Rudolph Giuliani's alleged copy of its hard drive), was certainly infected by Russian disinformation from the Russia agents he worked with, Pavel Fuks, Andrij Telizhenko, Andrij Derkach, and so on, though it never made it into a criminal case against Hunter Biden anyway, largely because as evidence it was total garbage with which special prosecutor Durham could never think of anything to do. And it was never a First Amendment case even under one of the weird interpretations that are going around (social media companies were always able to, and frequently did, ignore the FBI's advice).
But whoever has ever been living in terror that a bunch of college students might "cancel" them or even be publicly rude to them really needs to wake up to the evidence of what real deprivation of freedom of speech is like, where the president's impression of wrongthink is getting people fired from their jobs in really large numbers, prevented from doing peer-approved research, prevented from curating peer-approved museum exhibitions and staging peer-approved plays and dance events and the like, fired from research jobs and medical jobs and teaching jobs or if they're students thrown out of school, or if they're foreigners thrown out and transported by midnight plane without communicating with their families or lawyers to the 21st-century equivalent of Devil's Island. Something like the McCarthy era (under the guidance of Roy Cohn's old pupils Stone, Manafort, and Trump) is really back.
I mean, the Reagan administration and the Bush II administration had the cynicism and clownishness and the violent foreign policy from South and Central America to West Africa and the Middle East and the furious push to increase economic inequality through the tax system, a democratic society really shouldn't have tolerated any of it. I'n not fighting it because I'm such a good person, I'd fighting it because they're after me. I'm not even saying it's worse now, I'm saying it's personal.
If I should have fought it harder in the past, now I have no choice. They're really after me and my friends and family. If I should have felt the attack on everybody, now I feel it on us. If I've made fun of the cult of the Founders and their commitment to FREEDOM, because of the way they willingly denied freedom to enslaved people and women and workers and foreigners and "deviants" of one kind and another from the beginning, it's my freedom now: I've always been able to complain about the abuse I saw around me, and do a little something for others, giving a few dollars to ACLU and a candidate here and there, grousing about the reactionary views of some of my kids' teachers, writing a blog. I'm not sure even these little things can last. All freedom is threatened now, except for the freedom you can buy with huge amounts of money, like Justin Sun openly—openly!—escaping fraud charges with $400 million in bribes, or that other asshole with the fake e-vehicle, Trevor Milton. That kind of freedom works better than ever.
They want us in jail. They want suicides. And they give zero fucks about "free speech" because, you know why? Because they've got expensive speech, all you could ever desire, from the philosophical Charles Koch to the drugged-up Elon Musk. You know what I'm saying? Your freedom is absolutely in jeopardy.
Director of Central Intelligence lies to Senator Ossoff.
Unsurprisingly, Pete Hegseth's first instinct was to lie about the thing, brazenly, and about the messenger, Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, suggesting that he'd somehow made the story up:
“I've heard how it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans, and that's all I have to say about that,” Hegseth said shortly after landing for a layover in Hawaii on a trip to Asia.
Hegseth criticized Goldberg as “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again, to include the, I don't know, the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides, hopes, or suckers and losers.”
“This is the guy that pedals [sic] in garbage. This is what he does,” he added.
It's true that Goldberg scooped a bunch of news about Trump's contempt for America's war dead ("Why should I go to that cemetery? It's filled with losers"), but it's not as if there were any doubt about the truth of that, given his publicly undisguised contempt for Vietnam POW John McCain, and World War II hero George H.W. Bush (shot down as a Navy pilot by Japanese), and the parents of Humayun Khan, killed in Iraq in 2004, etc. And if Goldberg was an early proponent, in summer 2016, of the idea that Trump might be a "de facto" Putin agent, he plainly meant not a Putin agent—
One of my nephews—a good and smart kid (actually past 30 and becoming a father
next month but they're all forever kids to me), but with some manosphere items
in his media diet—told his mom that the Trump administration is going to free
everybody who earns under $150,000 a year from paying any federal taxes, or at
least federal income tax, and she texted me to find out what I knew about
this, which at that point was pretty much nothing (my first thought was I'd
heard something that might have sounded like this but actually meant something
different). But it hasn't been reported by The New York Times or The Washington Post or NPR, perhaps because they don't want anybody to know what a generous populist our president is.
In fact there really is something, though I wasn't able to trace such a plan to Trump himself. Trump has
definitely talked about eliminating income tax for everybody, and the 16th Amendment,
altogether, and going back to the McKinley era when the federal government was
entirely financed by import tax revenues or tariffs. I believe that's a very
long-term aspiration: right now, individual income taxes raise just short of a
trillion dollars a year ($959 billion), 51% of government revenue, along with
something like another trillion in corporate taxes, while tariffs bring in $35
billion, or 1.9% of the total. If Trump went as far with the tariffs as he's
suggested he'd like to do,
Peterson Institute
calculates he could get that up to $225 billion, or a little less than a
quarter of the way to replacing personal income tax (causing a massive
recession along the way as the prices on imported consumer goods rose to make
up for it, and an international financial crisis as US consumers stopped
buying imported goods such as steel, aluminum, motor vehicles, appliances,
food, lumber, and so on, and turned to housing themselves in Hoovervilles and
eating at breadlines, so that they'd never raise that much revenue anyway;
probably bankrupting the Social Security trust fund and Medicare too, as all
the newly unemployed workers stopped paying the payroll tax!).
It turns out, however, that the more modest proposal for incomes under $150,000 comes from our clownish
billionaire secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, as he told CBS in an
interview
on Wednesday:
I know what his goal is — no tax for anybody making under $150,000 a year.
That's what I'm working for...
That's 93% of the population, though only about 25% of the individual income
tax revenue, but sounds like he's
eliminating the payroll tax
(another $1.5 trillion a year) as well. And he remains committed to renewing
the 2017 tax cuts especially benefiting the wealthiest, and a further
reduction in corporate income tax (so we can lure businesses home from
Ireland). But then maybe those DOGEboys will find a way to cut $2 trillion a
year from the budget one of these days, and then there are those $5 million
"gold cards" buying you instant permanent residence, if you could sell those
to something like 40,000 billionaires per year you'd practically be home free.
No, there aren't that many billionaires, or centimillionaires (something over
28,000
in the world, a pretty large number already Americans) either.
But then again, who needs Social Security? Not Howard Lutnick's 94-year-old mother-in-law, though she does appreciate it when the check shows up:
"Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My
mother-in-law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain," Lutnick — a
billionaire former Wall Street CEO — told the billionaire "All In" podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya. "She just wouldn't. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it
next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling
and complaining."
It's only a bunch of malcontents who think they're entitled to it (they are, that's why it's called an "entitlement"), and they're probably fraudsters (they aren't).
And the reason The Times and WaPo and NPR haven't reported the story of the near-universal income tax exemption is that it's not ever going to happen, but isn't quite funny enough (unlike the plans to conquer Greenland, or the cheerful indifference to money of Mrs. Lutnick's mom). Or even Fox News or New York Post, as far as I can tell
But it does get picked up by Newsweek and Forbes and Reuters, and the Hindustan Times and the Farm CPA Report, and taken pretty seriously by the libertarians of Reason and Mint and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and from there down to a goodly number of bottom-feeding YouTubers like Mr. Snyder up at the top of the page, and that's how it gets out to the Internet, and somebody says, “Wow, if I ever make $150K this is gonna save me $24,000!”
"It's part of a wider strategy to obfuscate MAGA antisemitism and an increasingly fascist regimeGift 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?
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).
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.)
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.
.jpeg)
