Doom Report (Week 43: Atlas Shrugged ... Then He Went Ahead and Paid His Damn Taxes)

If there was ever any question that the Democratic Party could take any amount of headway, no matter how huge, and still manage to shoot themselves in the dick, the Democrats in the Senate answered it definitively this week.  Eight Democratic senators (well, 7 plus Independent Angus King) voted to roll over and show their bellies to the Trump regime, which promptly kicked them in the guts.  They gave the Repubs everything they wanted and got nothing in return.  Now, by amazing coincidence, every single one of these 8 senators are either not up for re-election next year or are flat-out retiring.  Totally weird how it just happened to turn out that way.  Meanwhile, supposed minority “leader” Chuck Shumer got to claim that he was totally opposed to the whole thing; he’s also not up for re-election next year, but he likely needs the cover to hold on to his leadership position.  I’m not sure that’s gonna work, but I’ve moved well beyond expecting anything but failure from the majority of the current Dems.

Probably the best evaulation of this debacle was from Even More News’s Tuesday episode, including the assesment that Shumer is either in on it (and therefore lying) or too incompetent to do his job: either way, he needs to get gone.  For a shorter take, Adam Kinzinger opines on whether or not the Democrats caved (spoiler alert: yes.  yes, they did).  If you want to know how I feel about it, as a progressive who is definitely not a Democrat, I think this week’s Armageddon Update sums it up better than I ever could.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Another pretty good week in review from Adam Kinzinger.

• Strict Scrutiny tells us why it won’t mean much if the Supreme Court finally says “no” to Trump on tariffs.

• Some More News examines Trump’s weird meme war, as well as exposing the whole “antifa” ridiculousness.

• On the Daily Show, Josh Johnson examines the depths of Trump’s current fumblings, from 50-year mortgages to $2,000 tariff rebates to attempts to end the affordability crisis by putting his fingers in his ears and yelling “LA LA LA!” at the top of his lungs.

• In another brilliant “In My Opinion” appearnace on The Daily Show, Nick Offerman explains how Trump hates farmers.  Offerman is quickly emerging as the greatest “In My Opinion” contributor outside Charlamagne tha God (and may even be giving him a run for his money).

• I didn’t much mention the whole Epstein files thing, because I refuse to believe anything will stick to ol’ Teflon Don, but, if you need a decent breakdown, Devon over at Legal Eagle has got you covered.

This week’s bright spot, in my opinion, was Jon Stewart interviewing Lina Khan on The Weekly Show.  Khan, who is one of the smartest people in the progressive movement today, gained fame as Biden’s head of the FTC, and is now going to be part of Mamdani’s transition team.  Always a great interview, she and Jon play off each other well and have some great moments.  The only place I disagreed with Jon was when he was asking about how real the threat that all the billionaires would move out of New York was, and he said this:

... because we all know capital can travel; labor can’t.  It’s one of the advantages capital has, and we saw that with globalization.

Now, this is a super common argument: if you tax rich people, they’ll just leave—it’s the entire plot of Atlas Shrugged.  Of course, the majority of these arguments are coming from the rich people themselves, which makes them a bit suspect.  Gary Stevenson has debunked this fallacy several times; here’s a particularly articulate example:

And this is relevant to the idea of “if you tax them they’ll leave,” because, if you try and tax a working person, like a doctor or a lawyer or a Youtuber, then that person can very often move to Dubai or move to Singapore, and they can do their job in the other country; they can pay tax in the other country, which might be at a lower rate: they can avoid the tax.  If we’re talking about taxing billionaires, billionaires, they don’t make their money from their work: they get their money from owning assets.  And assets means property, assets means land, assets means natural resources, assets means government debt, it means your mortgage, it means businesses that sell to the West.  These guys they own largely property and debt—I think one way to think about it is, if I have an asset, I get a passive income: where does that income come from?  So, if I own British businesses, it comes from British consumers.  If I own British debt, it comes from British mortgagees, people have mortgages.  If I own British government debt, it comes from the British taxpayer.  If I own British property, it comes from British renters—you know, and the same is true all over the West.  So if I own a ton of British assets, and I tried to move to Dubai, I’m still taking an enormous amount of cash flow from British people when they pay that passive income.  So wealth holders can be taxed even if they leave.

To make it more concrete, if you’ve got ten billion dollars, and one billion of that is just in a bank account somewhere, then, sure: you can just leave.  Move from New York to Floria, move to Canada, move to the Caiman Islands, move to Dubai (as Gary suggests).  But, if your one billion dollars is in waterfront property, you can’t really take that with you, now can you?  What if your billion dollars is in the form of the local sports stadium?  What’re you gonna do: pick it up with a crane and put it on a truck and ship it to Florida?  Now, if your billion dollars is in the form of the local sports team, then you could theoretically move the team (to Florida, at least; probably not to Dubai).  But how much is that going to cost you?  As Mamdani famously said about one of the billionaires funding the opposition to his candidacy: “he spent more on trying to keep me from getting elected than I was planning to tax him.”  And you’ll see people do that sometimes.  But, for the most part, if it costs $20 million to stay (the vast majority of proposed wealth taxes are 2%; 2% of one billion is twenty million) and $200 million to move the team (likely a conservative estimate), the billionaire may threaten to move, but they’re not going to do it.  Rich people who routinely spend 10x what they need to just to make a point don’t typically stay rich for long.

But, that nitpick aside, I thought Lina made some excellent points in the interview, and it’s people like her that give me hope that we might be smart enough to come out of this cesspool in the long run.  And, as far as the billionaires all leaving, Jon’s producer Gillian Spear put it this way:

I don’t see it happening.  Like, New York City isn’t cool because you’re here; you’re here because it’s cool.  So I’d like to see you try and leave.

Mic.  Dropped.

Doom Report (Week 42: Politics Is Something We Do)

This week, the MAGA crowd all seemed utterly shocked that people were upset with them.  I mean, all they did was take away food from hungry children—globally, let’s not forget—steal money for research into children’s cancer, cause millions of Americans’ health insurance premiums to more than double, make everyone’s grocery bills higher, and used that money to create a combined $60 billion tax break for the top 0.1%.  Why would people be pissed off at them?  They seem to have forgotten the attitude of “we don’t care whether we’re popular or not” and now are scrambling to justify, ignore, or doomcry (depending on the individual) the fact that Democrats beat the pants off them in this week’s elections.  I mean, they whupped their hides real good, to quote John Cleese in A Fish Called Wanda: the NYC mayoral and VA and NJ gubernatorial elections have gotten all the press, but there were gains all over the country.  In Georgia, Dems broke up the Republican monopoly of the Public Service Commission (if you need more info on why that’s important, Hank Green did a great video on it before the election), which is the first time Dems have won a state government seat in nearly a decade; Colorado voted to fund free meals in public schools; Maine voted down proposed voter suppression measures; and, in the New York county that’s home to Syracuse, a 12-5 Repub legislature just became a 10-7 Dem one (including one winner from the Working Families Party), an event which a headline on syracuse.com described thusly: “Onondaga County GOP seeks answers after stunning losses. The consensus: Trump is a problem”.  Hell, the Dems even won in Mississippi, where they broke a 13-year Republican supermajority in the state Senate (hey: progress, not perfection).  Even more telling, the margins by which some of these candidates won is pretty amazing: 13 points for Spanberger in VA, nearly 14 points for Sherrill in NJ, and, despite what some Cuomo supporters seem to think, Mamdani beat Cuomo so badly that even getting all of Sliwa’s votes wouldn’t have made any difference.  Now, for sure, I’m worried that Dems only came out ahead because the MAGA crowd didn’t think they needed to bother cheating, and I absolutely don’t think next year’s elections will go that smoothly, but I’m willing to just stop a bit and bask in the MAGA tears for a bit.

Although possibly the most interesting interview this week had nothing to do with the elections: Jordan Klepper interviewed Scott Galloway on The Daily Show on Wednesday.  Galloway is an author, professor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, but, most importantly for his new book Notes on Being a Man, a father to two boys.  With how much ink has been spilled—and YouTube commentary has been spewed—on how young men voted, and how they’re being radicalized by assholes like Andrew Tate, and how they’re avoiding intimacy and living with their parents and etc ad nauseum, I think Galloway’s book could not come at a better time.  It’s been challenging for us to admit that young men—they of the class who have traditionally had all the adantages in our society—are today struggling.  Some seem to think we’re negating or disavowing discrimination against women by admitting that young men have problems.  But, as Scott puts it:

We can absolutely acknowledge the huge challenges that women still face while acknowledging that. if you go into a morgue right now and there’s five people who’ve died by suicide, four are men.  And I would offer up, Jordan, that if any group was killing themselves at four times the rate of the control group, we would move in with programs.  But because my generation registered so much unfair prosperity, we are holding young men accountable.  And it’s resulting in a country that’s not going to continue to flourish.

You really should listen to the whole thing.  But, if you only listen to one part, make it this one:

People under the age of 40 are 24% less wealthy.  People my age are 72% wealthier.  Because we figured out—old people have figured out a way to vote themselves more money.  And when Congress is a cross between the Land of the Dead and the Golden Girls, you have a $40-billion child tax credit gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill, but the $120-billion cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security flies right through.  We need a more progressive tax structure.  You know what would be the biggest help to men, to young men—would be universal child care.  Because when men are most vulnerable, in terms of self-harm, is the year after they get divorced.  And why do young people get divorced?  It’s not a lack of shared values.  It’s not infidelity.  The most common reason for divorce is economic strain.  And we keep transferring money from young people to old people.

But really do watch the whole thing.  Galloway is spitting fire in this one.

This weirdly ties into another interview, if a much longer one: British YouTuber Jimmy the Giant interviews Gary Stevenson, who I’ve mentioned a few times.  Jimmy I’ve never mentioned before; I’ve only ever even seen him on YouTube once before, and that was back in January on Pod Save the UK, when he told the story of how he got sucked into the alt-right scene, and then, as Nish Kumar put it, “de-radicalized” himself.  While I was mainly watching for Gary, whose opinions I always find informative, Jimmy dropped this bomb:

Sometimes people will look at these lot, like the far right lot, and they won’t give them the same grace that they might give, say, gang members.  And I do sometimes notice that on the left, where I would say it’s quite easy for, I don’t know, a lot of us to look at someone who is in a gang or something and be like, the reason they’re in a gang is because of various scenarios, they’re not evil in their heart, they’re just a person that has fallen into this kind of lifestyle, blah blah blah.  But then you’ll look at, maybe the far-right rally, and there will be comments like “these are disgusting gammons, these are like gross blah blah blah.”  And I’m like sort of thinking, you know, we understand the reasons why people do bad.  The same for like al-Qaeda.  Like, I can understand how that movement formed.  I can say it’s evil, awful, but I can understand how it formed, how it took power, and how it controls people’s lives and forces people to do awful stuff.  But some people don’t extend—I don’t know if this is widely held, but I do notice it sometimes—they don’t extend that same generosity and compassion to the far right.  Because, again: it’s always the same thing.  These people have fallen into these movements because of a lack of something in their life, usually material, or their culture feels like it’s been eroded because, I don’t know, their fucking high street has two shops left and they’re a vape shop and a betting shop.  And, it’s like, you understand, you gotta remember, these are people that are not perhaps deeply into politics, or deeply well-read, or deeply understand these movements, they just feel fucked, they feel like their life sucks, and some guy’s coming along giving them some smooth talk.  And you don’t, I guess, judge the person who gets swindled for a car for a smooth talking salesman.  You don’t judge them.  You’re like “the salesman was a dickhead.”

And I will admit that I’m sometimes guilty of this myself, despite the fact that I used this exact analogy in my pre-election post about what Kamala should have said in her Bret Baier interview.  But, upon reflection, I think Jimmy is really onto something here.  When these young men get red-pilled, we probably shouldn’t be blaming them or assuming they’re just racist and/or misogynist shitheads.  As Nish once said on a different Pod Save the UK episode (and I quoted back in week 10), “We have no scope in our hearts to have a conversation that white men could also be radicalized.”  Yep, I think he might be onto something.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Another pretty good week in review from Adam Kinzinger.  I disagree with his take on the air traffic controllers, but I’m not going out of my way to defend Sean Duffy, so I’ll let it slide.

• Hank Green talks about the government shutdown and people losing SNAP benefits.

• SNL’s take on the press conference where a man fainted was, typically, amusing.

• Cristian Farias is back on Legal Eagle, this time covering the contrast between circuit court judges and the Supreme Court.  There’s some inspiring stories in there.

• The Weekly Show explores how the Dems will fuck up their gains, with Chris Hayes and David Plouffe.

If you need even more hope than I’ve already given you, just go listen to Mamdani’s victory speech.  I honestly don’t know if he’s going to be able to do all this shit he’s claiming to be able to do, but, damn: it sure sounds good. 

I’ll give you some highlights, but you really should listen to him say it.  He’s a brilliant speaker.

Years from now, may our only regret be that this day took so long to come.

And yet, if tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back.  We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we have paid a mighty price.  Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party.  And too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they’ve been left behind.

As has so often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour.  They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long broken system.  We refuse to let them dictate the rules of the game any more.  They can play by the same rules as the rest of us.

In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another.  In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light.  Here, we believe in standing up for those we love.  Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall.  Your struggle is ours, too.  And we will build a city hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of anti-semitism where the more than 1 million Muslims know that they belong.  Not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.  No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.

And we won because we insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us.  Now it is something that
we do.

Hell.  Yes.

Doom Report (Week 41: Further Reflections on Kamala)

This week on The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Kamala Harris.  She’s been making the rounds, pimping her new book 107 Days, which seems to be framed as an excuse.  Although, as I’ve noted before, it’s more than twice as long as Kier Starmer had over in the UK, and he won handily.  But whatever.  In this interview, she says a lot of things I liked ... and quite a few that made me scream at my monitor.  Worst among them was when Jon asked her if her affection for Biden had prevented her from making her case as to what she wanted to accomplish, separate from Biden, for fear of offending him.  To which she responded:

I felt that the distinction between he and I was pretty clear.

The epithet that came out of my mouth when I heard her say this was very unflattering, and I won’t repeat it here, but I couldn’t help but remember what she said on The View a little under a month before the election:

Sunny Hostin: Well, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?
Kamala: There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact ...

So the distinction was “pretty clear” and yet you couldn’t come up with a single fucking thing when asked about it point blank?  (To be fair to Kamala, she probably gave a better answer in her recent reappearance on The View.  It’s basically the same answer, but at least it’s more complete.  But she also fails to identify that moment as the turning point for her campaign, which I feel is foolish on her part.)

Now, look: I haven’t been shy about saying that I mostly like Kamala.  The first time I spoke about her was on my original blog, way back in August of 2020, shortly after she and Biden won the Democratic nomination.  I noted that I was “a bit more” heartened over the choice of her than Joe—which is a bit of damning with faint praise, I’ll admit, but still.  In November of 2020, I mentioned her again, in the context that Biden retiring at some point (how foolish I was to imagine such a thing back then) might actually work out pretty well for us, as she seemed better poised to accomplish big things than he.  But note that I also wrote that:

The Democrats are exactly half of what’s wrong with the American political system, and I have very little faith in their desire to effect real change, much less their ability to do so.

Which is almost prophetic enough to make up for that whole “imagine Biden stepping down” delusion.  I also noted, before the election, that I was not only going to vote for her for President, but that I had voted for her for Senator, and before that for Attorney General.  I am not anti-Kamala by any stretch.  But, in the first time I brought up the topic of Kamala in these Doom Reports, I pointed out that this moment on The View is not only the point where I think Kamala lost the election, but it’s also the moment that James Carville called out, Chris Christie also mentioned it in week 2, and, indeed, it was one of the main points raised by my Trump-voting friend (who, you may recall, was the impetus for this whole series).  (To be fair, it’s really one of two points where I think Kamala lost: the other being listening to her brother-in-law when he advised her to stop going after corporate price gouging.)  So the fact that Kamala apparently still can’t accept the full weight of that faux pas—other than some weasel words about how she “didn’t understand” how important it was to “other people”—it makes me crazy.

But also let’s not downplay that other reason, which in the preceding paragraph I relegated to a parenthetical.  It didn’t seem to come up much in the conversation with Jon Stewart, so I’m unclear if Kamala recognizes what a misstep it was to back off going after the big corporations.  I understand wanting to listen to a trusted family member (Tony West is married to Kamala’s sister), and I understand wanting to get the perspective of a proper businessperson when you have no business experience yourself (Kamala is a lifelong prosecutor and politician; West is the chief legal officer of Über).  But there is a point where the buck stops with you.  She claims she could understand that people were hurting, she claims she had plans to address corporate price gouging and other malevolent business practices, but yet she made the choice to downplay that stance.

And, not that it has anything to do with the Kamala interview—or then again maybe it does—but Charlamagne tha God appears to agree with me; he appeared this week on The Daily Show’s “In My Opinion” segment, slamming corporate Democrats.  He trenchantly zeroes in on the heart of the problem when he says:

And that—that brings me to the real problem.  Democratic leaders never support candidates who might disrupt the capitalist system.  But guess what? the current system isn’t working.  Americans want it remodeled the way Trump is “remodeling” the East Wing, all right?  Dems act like they’ll get a cookie for being the most rational people in the room.  No one cares.  You’re trying to win voters, not get a signed headshot from Ezra Klein.

The shot at Ezra Klein aside (I still think Klein and the hard progressives are saying more things in common than either side realizes), Charlamagne is dead right.  When Bernie ran in 2016, the Democratic leaders disavowed him—and it cost them the election.  When Mamdani blew Cuomo out of the water in the primary for NYC mayor, leaders either ignored him or outright attacked him ... though it seems like, if polls are to be believed, they’ll end up on the wrong side of history.  Again and again, they ignore what the people want in favor of what their rich donors tell them to do. 

As I say, this exact issue didn’t really come up in the Weekly Show interview, but here’s another thing Kamala said there that irked me:

But, also, we’ve gotta understand that we cannot just be focused on Donald Trump.  We need to not only be against something, but also, we need to be understanding of how we got here, and that it’s a bigger apparatus, and not just the one guy.  But the second point that is equally important, which we’re not emphasizing, is what we stand for.

How in the hell does a politician—and, let’s not mince words: she is a politician: has been for 15 years, and normally is a pretty good one—so how does a politician say “we need to not only be against something” and not immediately follow that with “we need to be for something”?  Not to finally wend her way to that point some 40 words later ... no shit you’re not emphasizing it!  When exactly did you plan to start?

I’m picking on her a bit here; the interview overall is pretty good, and you should watch the whole thing.  But also watch the after-show conversation, where Jon’s producers (all women, as it happens) express their own reservations.

Other things you need to know this week:

• On this week’s Strict Scrutiny, we get an excellent run-down of the ongoing trials, and an exquisite summary of the insane Lindsey Halligan text chain.

• And, speaking of the Lindsey Halligan text chain (did I mention it was insane?), the person on the other side of that chain, Anna Bower, happens to work for Legal Eagle, which means that we got a video of Anna herself telling the whole story.  To say that the incompetence is legendary would be underselling it; this one is a must-watch.

• And, speaking of Legal Eagle, Liz Dye has an excellent breakdown of the naked illegality of the DOJ payout that Trump seems poised to receive (if he hasn’t already gotten it).

• Legal Eagle was really killing it this week: on yet another video, guest legal journalist Cristian Farias explains how ICE got to be above the law.

• During one of this week’s episodes, the Even More News crew talks about the Trump regime’s plans to send “election monitors” to California.  (Although, for the most part, joke’s on him: everyone here in Cali gets mail-in ballots, so likely their efforts to intimidate people into not voting will be entirely moot, as Prop 50 will probably have already passed before they even get here.)  While talking about how Trump has constantly complained about people rigging the elections, Cody notes that “And they’ve done it for a long time.  It’s what he did from the start, of saying like, well, they’re going to they’re going to steal this and steal this.  And then when we say it—because he’s doing it—then we sound like we’re being alarmist or hypocritical ...”  This is exactly how I feel about just about everything Trump complains about.  Whenever Trump accuses someone of doing a thing, you can lay money on the fact that that’s exactly what Trump himself is doing.

• And, on yet another episode of Even More News, the crew talk about Kat Abugazaleh being indicted by the Trump regime, and also expose the lie of the “ceasefire” in Gaza.

• This week’s Coffee Klatch features special guest W. Kamau Bell, who’s always a delight to hear from.

• And, as usual, Adam Kinzinger gives another great (and short) week in review.

If there’s any message of hope this week, it’s that Democrats who buck the corporate donor system are starting to break through.  And there’s no greater symbol of that than Zohran Mamdani.  Robert Reich produced another great Substack article this week focussed on Mamdani taking on corporate Democrats, and, as I mentioned above, the polls are looking pretty good for him.  Perhaps my favorite Mamdani moment of the week was his Daily Show interview with Jon Stewart.  Here are some of my favorite quotes.

In response to Jon pointing out that, if he can’t deliver, the New Yorkers who love him now will be his most vocal critics:

You know, it’s often framed as a burden or as an obligation.  But frankly, I think it’s an opportunity.  It’s an opportunity to actually show that this whole campaign where we’ve talked about freezing the rent, making buses faster, free delivering universal childcare—these are not just slogans.  These are commitments.  And when we deliver them here in New York City, it will be also the delivery of a politics that can actually aspire for more than what you’re living through.  And for so many people across the city, politics has just become synonymous with an argument of celebrate the little you have or lose that.  And it can’t be that.

In response to Jon saying that public disorder could be a challenge for him:

I mean, look, public safety is the prerequisite for an affordability agenda.  Right?  People have to be safe.  And we also know that safety is something that you not only deliver with the NYPD; it’s also something that you deliver by ensuring that there are actually jobs that can pay people enough to stay in this city.  All of these things are integrated.

On Hakim Jeffries’ half-hearted (and very late) endorsement of him:

And I think what we showed in many ways was that the days of endorsements deciding elections, those days have come to an end.  It’s the people that build up a campaign.

Finally, on how the current Democratic Party thinks about young voters:

After the presidential election, there were all of these obituaries written about the Democratic Party’s ability to motivate young voters.  And there’s just this condescension in the language that we use about young people.  And I can just tell you that what we found in this campaign is that young people have been at the heart of believing that something could be more than this.  And I would say throughout the primary, this quote from Ed Koch: “if you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me; 12 out of 12, see a psychiatrist.”  And I’m in Washington Square Park.  I’m filming a video with David Hogg.  And this young guy comes up to me and goes, “12 out of 12, baby: send me away!”

And, look: I know he told that story mainly because it’s an amusing anecdote, and he’s very good at that, and he was speaking while on Comedy Central.  And, don’t get me wrong: it is funny.  But it’s also, maybe just a little bit, inspiring.  Is Hakim Jeffries getting that kind of response from young voters?  Is Chuck Schumer?  Somehow I think not.  But the mere fact that someone is ... that gives me a bit more hope than I had last week.

Doom Report (Week 40: A Nazi Streak, from Time to Time)

On this week’s Coffee Klatch, Heather Lofthouse and Rober Reich talk about the guy with a “Nazi streak” who, surprisingly, had to withdraw from consideration from the second job that Trump wanted to give him (I believe he’s still retaining his first job).  Stephen Colbert compared this to a casserole with a streak of poop.  Seth Meyers compared it to a waiter telling you about tonight’s special, which comes with a streak of poison.  But Reich, with his typical optimism, focussed on the Senate Republicans finally taking a stand.  He and Heather had this exchange:

Robert: Even Senate Republicans ... said this is too much.
Heather: Even though he’s a Trump loyalist. So that gave me a little bit of—
Robert: Yes, there’s a bottom.
Heather: Oh ... yeah.
Robert: There is a bottom, at least for the Senate Republicans.
Heather: Right.  Um—
Robert: No, that’s that’s good news, and we should celebrate the good news.

I’m not sure I’m taking away as much hope as Reich seems to have, but I respect the perspective.

Other things you need to know this week:

• As usual, Adam Kinzinger’s week in review is invaluable for understanding the latest debacles.

• Seth Meyers has takes A Closer Look at Trump’s new construction project.  Where’s the money coming from?  Maybe from the $230 million he plans to pay himself.

• The Even More News crew has some views on the Graham Platner controversy, although they don’t come to any actual decisions; their take on the Argentina bailout is more on point.

This week Alex Wagner’s new show Runaway Country debuted ... as a YouTube “podcast” in the Crooked Media network (which also encompasses Strict Scrutiny and Pod Save the UK, two shows I regularly recommend here).  The first episode (titled “How Trump Broke America’s Justice System”) is out, and it’s pretty good, if you can spare just over an hour (closer to 45min, if you crank it up to 1.25x and skip the ads).  I like Alex, though I’ve never watched a single one of her network shows, because I don’t watch network news.  But she shows up on Colbert or Meyers every now and again, and I always enjoy her political takes, so I gave the new show a shot.  Don’t know if I’ll become a regular viewer, but I certainly don’t feel I wasted my time watching it or anything.

But I mainly mention it because Alex is the latest in a long line—which includes Trevor Noah, Mehdi Hasan, Francesca Fiorentini, Don Lemon, and even Tucker Carlson—to abandon network news shows and transition to online media.  For years, the YouTube and Twitch and TikTok crowd have been telling us that broadcast and cable is dead, but it seemed like it would be a long, lingering death where the patient continues to do quite well, thank you.  Lately, though, corporate America has been hastening the demise by pushing out anyone who is even remotely controversial—and, since the vast majority of corporate America is right-wing, anyone who is even remotely progressive—which only makes their shows boring and even more unwatchable than they were before.  Now, as I say, I was never a fan of network news anyway, but I continued to watch The Daily Show and Colbert (they’re literally the only reasons I keep paying for Paramount+) and Last Week Tonight; Meyers and Kimmel I’ve already transitioned to just watching YouTube clips.  But now Colbert is cancelled and will be gone in May, and I don’t see John Oliver being long for this world either, now that HBO Max is on the chopping block.  I mean, I ditched my cable a long time ago, so I suppose it’s only a matter of time until I bid farewell to Paramount+ and just start watching The Daily Show on YouTube as well.

Of course, the online streaming industry has a lot of issues too, and there’s too many of them, and most of them are too expensive, but YouTube is still free at least (you can certainly pay for YouTube Premium, but it’s far too much money to avoid the ads that any decent ad blocker will take care of for you for free), and, if that’s where all the content is going anyway ...

It’s an interesting time, certainly.  I don’t know what will eventually happen, but I’m interested to see how it all shakes out.

Doom Report (Week 39: No Thrones, No Crowns, No Kings)

This week, there was yet another No Kings rally.  The Trump regime—supported by his sycophantic pet Congresspeople—desperately tried to characterize it as a “Hate America” rally, or some violent protest organized by “Antifa,” an organization which can’t atually organize anything, since it doesn’t actually exist.  This doesn’t seem to have worked (partially because of pushback from many folks online; try Christopher Titus for an example, if you don’t mind the profanity), and early reports suggest that this may be the biggest protest in American history.  There were some impressive speeches given: Brian Tyler Cohen’s was good; Bill Nye the Science Guy’s was better; and Mehdi Hasan’s was thunderously excellent.  Hopefully this is a good sign that the tide is turning.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger gives us another great week in review.

• The Supreme Court is back in session, and Strict Scrutiny will tell you all about how tragic that is.

• On his Substack, Robert Reich gives an excellent, if chilling, summary of where we are today.

• For a really good summary on Marjorie Taylor Greene, news orgs (including Fox “News”!) finally putting their foot down, and just how racist (and how old) the “Young” Republicans are, the Even More News crew has you covered.

I’m a little late reporting on this one, but Zack Polanski (leader of the UK Greens) interviewed Gary Stevenson (from Garys Economics) on his podcast Bold Politics.  Politics in the UK is very interesting, in my opinion, and it also has a lot of things to teach us here in the US about our own politics.  The Reform Party (that’s sort of the UK version of MAGA) is set to swallow the Conservatives (their version of the Republicans), and Labour (their version of the Democrats) is struggling to remain popular and relevant, but losing because they refuse to jettison their reliance on billionaire donors.  Sound familiar?  The difference, of course, is that, in the US, we’re stuck with two parties, so the MAGA movement had to literally eat the Repubs from the inside out, and the Dems are not much threatened by the diaspora of progressive enclaves that have nowhere else to go.  Whereas, in the UK, Reform is an entirely new party, and the Conservatives aren’t really going anywhere; they’re just being gradually made irrelevant.  And, likewise, there are more left-leaning parties in the UK that can threaten the long-established domincance of Labour.  There are the Liberal Democrats—called the Lib Dems, for short—and there are the Greens.  Both these parties have gained in popularity and power lately, similar to Reform, but the Greens are the clear winners between the two.  (There’s also a neotonous new party that’s trying to birth itself, but it’s yet unclear if that will actually pan out.)  With the new attention came a new election for head of the Greens, and Zack Polanski was the winner.  He’s charismatic and agressively pro-worker; we think of the Greens as being focussed on the environment, and the UK Greens certainly are that, but not to the exclusion of all else.  So Polanski is an interesting figure.

Stevenson is as well.  You may recall I pointed you at a video of his last week; he’s a working class guy who grew up poor, got a Bachelor’s at the London School of Economics, became a millionaire being a trader for Citibank, got a Master’s at Oxford, and now just spends his time hammering home a single message: tax wealth, not work.  He says he’s run the numbers, and there is just no way to keep the economy afloat without taxing the rich.

The entire interview is well worth watching: the two don’t always agree, but they’re always civil, and it’s obvious they have a tremendous amount of respect for each other.  But it’s a long video, so I’ll mention a few highlights for the impatient.

On the topic of people complaining that figuring out how to tax wealth is too hard, he paints this analogy:

I am the guy who has been to the bottom floor of the Titanic, and seen the massive hole in the bottom of the ship and the water flooding in, and I am going up to the top and saying, “There’s water flooding into the bottom of the Titanic.”  And I have people saying to me, “Oh, but fixing the bottom of the Titanic is difficult.”  You know what I mean?  And there’s people saying to me, you know, maybe we should do other things, other than fix the bottom of the Titanic.  You know, and then a lot of people frustratedly say to me, why don’t you fix the bottom of the Titanic?

... because I understand, and have understood, one single thing, which is that inequality of wealth is rapidly increasing and it will accelerate because that’s what compound interest does.  And if nothing is done, in 20 years the 0.1% will own everything.  That’s not—and I’ve made millions of pounds betting on that one thing.  ...  I’m not claiming to be an expert on everything.  I’m telling you one simple thing.  If you don’t do anything about rapidly increasing inequality of wealth, then in the relatively near-term future—10, 20 years—the 1% will own absolutely everything.  And that will make everything unaffordable.  That will make living standards collapse.  It will make England look like India, look like South Africa, look like Brazil.  That’s the truth.

Now, I don’t know about you, but, when put that way, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to me.

I’ll leave with this, another long quote from Gary.  For this quote, what you need to know is that Nigel Farage is sort of the UK version of Trump, if it had taken Trump much longer to get himself elected.  For a long time, Farage drove a lot of news cycles (primarily just by having incendiary views) without ever being elected to anything.  But he finally got into Parliament last year, and many (including Gary) think he’s on track to be Prime Minister once Labour finally collapses.  Here, Gary is telling us what needs to happen for things to change:

So then what you have, then, is a vacuum, because what has been the accepted status quo, and still is the accepted status quo from these kind of elite economists and politicians, is become totally valueless.  So then suddenly there’s a vacuum for ideas and, really, then, whoever has the loudest idea in that new vacuum will win the day.  And I think it’s pretty obvious what the loudest idea is at the moment, not just in this country, but across the world, which is, you know: Farage, Reform, the Far Right, the Alt-Right, whatever you want to call them, they’re entering that vacuum.  And at the moment the centre—and to a degree the left, you know (present company excepted)—have not really been able to craft a story of “we recognize the country is broken and we are going to offer you a way out of it.”  So there there’s this absence of a story.  What you have, really, is the centre is, like, stubbornly refusing to accept this story is dead, which means the centre is dead until it accepts that.  The right has a story, and the left is—there’s a lot of they haven’t really figured themselves out yet, you know what I mean, and I think the story on which the left can win—and you know I will continue to try to convince the centre that the centre can win on this as well—is inequality.  It’s inequality.  It’s fixing a taxation system which is patently unfair, where billionaires pay lower rates than cleaners.  You know what I mean?  It’s an obviously unfair tax system.  ...  It’s a massive opportunity.  Because the truth is, you know, I think Farage looks like he’s going to win the next election, ...  There’s 66 million people in this country.  There’s, I don’t know, 45 million people who can vote, and they’ll win it on 7, 8 million votes.  And that is because there is just an absence of an alternative story.  And what an opportunity.  What an opportunity.

Will there be anyone in the UK who can capitalize on this opportunity? will there be anyone in the US who can do the same?  I honestly don’t know.  But the fact that there are still people—like Stevenson, like Robert Reich—who can still see these dark times as an opportunity for positive change, that we might emerge from this cesspool as a stronger society ... that gives me just a touch of hope.  And hopefully it does you as well.

Doom Report (Week 38: Little Doom Bits)

Things you need to know this week:

• Yet another excellent week in review from Adam Kinzinger.

• The Even More News crew welcomes Roy Wood Jr (of the US version of Have I Got News For You) to talk about Trump’s ridiculous “anti-ANTIFA” meeting.

• SNL is back, and their assessment of Pam Bondi’s performance at the Senate hearings this week are, as usual, spot-on.  “My name is Pam Bondi.  I spell it with an “I,” ’cause I ain’t gonna answer any of your questions.”

• Jon Stewart interviews the “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton.  I did a deeper dive on this interview in my other blog post.

• Although Gary Stevenson of Garys Economics is talking about the Labour Party in the UK, much of what he says is directly applicable to the Democrats here in the US as well.  Labour is about as popular as the Democrats—which is to say, not very—and this week, Gary covered how to rehabilitate the party.

This week was mildly less crazy than most we’ve had thus far this year.  Let’s hope that pace (or lack thereof) continues.  With the Texas National Guard showing up in Chicago, and perhaps soon to arrive in Portland, I have doubts.  But we can always hope.

Deeper Into the AI Wave

I watched two brilliant video podcasts this week about technology.  The first was all about LLMs (a.k.a. “AI”), and the second was about enshittification, but it did touch on AI a bit.  You should watch them both for yourself: Jon Stewart’s interview with Geoffrey Hinton, and Adam Conover’s interview with Cory Doctorow.  They’re long, but well worth your time.

Now, you might not know who Geoffrey Hinton is, so let me enlighten you: he’s a British computer scientist, now living in Canada, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on neural networks, and is commonly known as “the Godfather of AI.”  So, you know: a guy who actually knows what the fuck he’s talking about.  And, while Jon was desperately attempting to get him to talk about the dangers of AI—which he eventually does—he seems determined to make Jon understand how LLMs work.  And it’s utterly brilliant.  Because it takes forever, and you can see Jon champing at the bit to get to the more “interesting” part of the discussion, but, in his slow, deliberate, professorial way, he keeps circling back to building up Jon’s knowledge, brick by brick.  And, at the end, Jon really does understand a bunch of things about AI that he just didn’t before.  And, as a result, he has a much firmer grasp on the positives of AI and the dangers.  That, to me, is valuable.

Of course, I also will admit to being thrilled that Hinton articulates (quite brilliantly) many of the same points I’ve tried to make in my posts about AI/LLMs.  In my more recent post on AI, I pointed out that we don’t really understand what “intelligence” means; Hinton goes further and says our concept of “sentience” is like to that of somone who believes the Earth is flat.  I said that perhaps in the far future, we would discover that our brains work the same way that LLMs do; Hinton goes further and says we already know that to be true (and it’s useful to understand that he started out with a degree in experimental psychology before transitioning to artificial intelligence).  So he and I are on the same page, but of course he explains things much better than I can.  I won’t say he’s smarter than I am, but he does have nearly 20 extra years’ experience and a PhD on me.  Also, he’s probably smarter than I am.

So here’s how he explains to Jon that claiming that AI isn’t actually “intelligent” isn’t as smart an observation as you think it is:

Geoffrey: Now, you just said something that many people say: “This isn’t understanding.  This is just a statistical trick.”

Jon: Yes.

Geoffrey: That’s what Chomsky says, for example.

Jon: Yes.  Chomsky and I, we’re always stepping on each other’s sentences.

Geoffrey: Yeah.  So let me ask you the question, well, how do you decide what word to say next?

Jon: Me?

Geoffrey: You.

Jon: It’s interesting; I’m glad you brought this up.  So what I do is I look for sharp lines and then I try and predict— no, I have no idea how I do that.  Honestly, I wish I knew.  It would save me a great deal of embarrassment if I knew how to stop some of the things that I’m saying that come out next.  If I had a better predictor, boy, I could save myself quite a bit of trouble.

Geoffrey: So the way you do it is pretty much the same as the way these large language models do it.  You have the words you’ve said so far.  Those words are represented by sets of active features.  So the word symbols get turned into big patterns of activation of features, neurons going ping—

Jon: Different pings, different strengths.

Geoffrey: —and these neurons interact with each other to activate some neurons that go ping, that are representing the meaning of the next word, or possible meanings of the next word.  And from those, you pick a word that fits in with those features.  That’s how the large language models generate text, and that’s how you do it too.

Which makes sense: LLMs were based on neural networks, and neural networks, as their name implies, were based on the way our brains actually work.  We designed these things to mimic our brains, but then we decided that our brains were “special,” somehow.  As they say later in the discussion:

Geoffrey: This idea there’s a line between us and machines: we have this special thing called “subjective experience” and they don’t—it’s rubbish.

Jon: So you’re s—so the misunderstanding is, when I say “sentience,” it’s as though I have this special gift, that of a soul, or of an understanding of subjective realities, that a computer could never have, or an AI could never have.  But, in your mind, what you’re saying is: oh, no, they understand very well what’s subjective.

We’ve just pre-determined that humans are different, somehow; that machines can’t possibly be as smart as we are, as creative as we are, as special as we are.  The number of times I’ve heard people use the word “obviously” when talking about how AIs will never write a song as good as a human can, or a poem as touching, or an essay as convincing ... look, I’m not saying that AIs can do those things.  I’m just saying that the word “obviously” doesn’t really apply.  Maybe one day we’ll actually figure out what it is that our brains can do that AI brains just can’t, for deep structural reasons.  But I’m pretty sure it won’t be obvious.  (Though of course this won’t stop some people from claiming they knew it all along ...)

The best part of these interviews, however, is how the people who know what they’re talking about gently correct the AI misgivings of their interviewers.  Here’s Jon and Geoffrey again.

Jon: ... my guess is, like any technology, there’s going to be some incredible positives.

Geoffrey: Yes: in health care, in education, in designing new materials, there’s going to be wonderful positives.

Jon: And then the negatives will be, because people are going to want to monopolize it because of the wealth, I assume, that it can generate, it’s going to change.  It’s going to be a disruption in the workforce.  The Industrial Revolution was a disruption in the workforce.  Globalization is a disruption in the workforce.  But those occurred over decades.  This is a disruption that will occur in a really collapsed time frame.  Is that correct?

Geoffrey: That seems very probable, yes.  ... my belief is the possibilities of good are so great that we’re not going to stop the development.  But I also believe that the development is going to be very dangerous.  And so we should put huge effort into saying, “it is going to be developed, but we should try and do it safely.”  We may not be able to, but we should try.

Jon is typically someone who thinks the benefits of AI are overstated, and it’s good to hear someone with some knowledge temper that.  This exact dynamic is mirrored in the Cory Doctorow interview; Adam is, if anything, even more of the opinion that AI is useless, while Cory, like Geoffrey, has a far more informed (and therefore more balanced) view.  Here’s a typical exchange from their conversation:

Adam: And you know what’s funny is, I’ve mentioned in in past episodes where we’re talking about AI, you know, that I find large language models pretty useless, but I’m like, “Oh, but I understand programmers find them useful.  It’s a labor-saving device for programmers.”  And I’ve had developers in my comments come in and say, “Actually, Adam, no, it’s useless to us, too.  Like, this is also a lie on the part of the companies that employ us.”

Cory: So, I got so fed up with having conversations about AI that went nowhere, that over the summer I wrote a book about AI called The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI that’s going to come out in 2026.  ... my thesis is that, so a centaur in automation theory is someone who’s assisted by a machine, okay?  And a reverse centur is someone who’s conscripted to be a peripheral for a machine.  So, you know, like I love Lucy where she’s got to get the chocolates into the chocolate box and the conveyor belts?  She’s only in the factory because the conveyor belt doesn’t have hands, right?  She is the, like, inconvenient, inadequate hands for the conveyor belt, and it works—it uses her up, right?  And I think that, you know, there’s plenty of senior devs who are like: oh, this routine task I can tell right away if the AI does it wrong.  It’s sort of time-consuming.  Like, one of the canonical examples is, I have this, like, one data file that’s in a weird format and I need to convert it to another format and I could, you know, do some regular expressions in Python and whatever and make it happen, or I could just ask—I could one-shot it with a chatbot, and then I can validate it really quickly, because I can check if the tabular data adds up or whatever.  And I hear from devs all the time who say this is great, and the thing is: they’re in charge of their work, right?  And this was like the thing the Writer’s Guild won in the AI strike, right?  We don’t have to use AI.  We don’t have to not use AI.  You can’t pay us less for not using or for using AI ... and we’re in charge.  ... but, like, if if there’s an artist out there who enjoys using AI in some part of their process, like, you do you, brother.  Like maybe it’ll be shitty art.  There’s lots of bad art out there.  It’s fine.  ... it’s the conscripting of people to assist a chatbot that I think is the thing that makes the difference.

Because here’s the thing: anyone who tells you that AI is completely useless—just a party trick to amuse stoned people by making Abraham Lincoln rap or having MLK drop the beat—is full of shit.  But anyone who tells you that AI is the future and is going to make everyone’s lives better is also full of shit (and likely trying to sell you something).  Somehow we decided that either this AI thing is all smoke and mirrors and sooner or later the bubble will collapse, or it’s inevitable and it will change the world.  ¿Por que no los dos?  Remember in the late 90s, when some people said that the Internet was inevitable, and sooner or later if you didn’t have a website your business was doomed?  And then other people said that all those Internet companies were losing money hand over fist and they were all going to go bankrupt in spectacular fashion?  Now, with the benefit of hindsight, which camp was right?  Well, turns out both sides were right.  There was a bubble, and it burst, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.  Also, the Internet is now an integral part of everyone’s lives, and those companies who were slow to adopt—like Kodak, Toys “R” Us, and Borders—ended up filing for bankruptcy and/or getting gobbled up by their competitors.  And this is the lesson we need to internalize about AI as well.

The way that AI is currently expanding is absolutely unsustainable.  People are using it like a new buzzword and just jamming it into things where it can’t possibly be useful, or putting it into things where it might be useful, but doing so with such a poor understanding of how to use it that it will fail anyway.  None of the AI companies are making any money, and most have only the vaguest idea of how they will make money.  Like tulips or Beanie Babies, eventually the whole thing will come crashing down.  It’s inevitable.

But that doesn’t mean that AI isn’t actually useful, or that it won’t become an integral part of our lives.  Yes, I happen to be a senior developer, and, while I’m encouraged to use AI, I’m not required to by any means: I’m the “centaur” Cory was talking about, not the “reverse centaur” that has AI thrust upon them whether they like it or not.  So, since I get to decide whether to use it or not—and I get paid the same either way—I’m an AI proponent (mostly).  But this idea that people such as Adam are constantly espousing—that AI is only useful for developers—is just nonsense.  AI can help you choose the best air fryer to buy.  It can help you understand difficult concepts that you’re studying.  It can help you make the seating chart for your wedding.  Is it the case that you can’t always trust it?  Obviously.  You’re not trusting every web site that comes up in a Google search either, are you?  Hopefully not.  For that matter, you probably shouldn’t trust everything coming out of the mouths of all the actual human people in your life either.  Humans in the modern age have to become very good at sifting useful knowledge from bullshit, and nothing about that part changes with AI.  The big difference is, the AI can gather the data faster, can present it more relatably, and can help you integrate it into something approaching useful, correct information.  That’s not just for developers.  That’s for everyone.

So I’m quite pleased to have some real experts here that I can refer to to back up my opinions.  Not that I felt like they needed backing up.  But it’s still nice to have some authoritative sources behind them.  And it’s especially nice to see Jon Stewart and Adam Conover, two people whose opinions I generally respect, learn some new perspectives in one of the few areas where they were annoyingly wrong.  Now let’s see if they can accept those perspectives and integrate them into their worldviews.

Doom Report (Week 37: No Fatties, No Beardos)

This week I think everyone wants to talk about the government shutdown, but I find that remarkably boring: the Democrats finally found some balls, which they will promptly shoot themselves in, because the point of a shutdown is to make sure everyone knows it’s the other side’s fault, and, even with the Republicans in charge of the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Oval Office, the Dems are so bad at messaging that the Republicans will inevitably convince everyone that they had nothing to do with this shutdown at all.  So I find that a foregone conclusion, and thus: boring.

No, to me the interesting thing that happened this week was Hegseth and Trump addressing all the generals.  Now, I’ve yet to figure out if this is a totally unprecedented conference, or whether it’s something that happens every year, but usually in secret, for obvious security-related reasons (I’ve seen it reported both ways), but, either way, the amount of utter batshit crazy that was spewed onto these poor military commanders is not just stunning, but also just plain bone-chilling.  The Even More News crew sums it up very well, especially highlighting the depth of shit we’re in by butting this quote from Hegseth:

We fight to win.  We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.  We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement.  We untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.  No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement: just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for war fighters.

up against this quote from Trump:

Only in recent decades did politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia while America is under invasion from within.  We’re under invasion from within.  No different than a foreign enemy, ...

Yes, our President told our generals that they were to treat his enemies as the enemies of our country directly after our Secretary of Defense (playacting as the Secretary of War) that they should hunt down those enemies with overwhelming violence and maximum lethality while ignoring the rules of engagement.  Sure, the government is shut down, but I think that the fact that His Great Orange Bloviatedness wants to send American troops into your city to murder you might be slightly more problematic.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Seth Meyers also covers the “enemy within” speech to the generals in A Closer Look this week.

• Adam Kinzinger has another good weekly news round-up.

• Some More News this week did a really great assessment of the death of Charlie Kirk and its impact on our national conversation.

• On The Weekly Show this week, Jon Stewart interviews David Faris and Tim Miller.  Normally, I put Miller into the same bucket as Kinzinger: former Republicans who left that party because of the MAGA takeover but are still sane—in other words, the few remaining voices of reason on the conservative side.  But I take exception to his characterization of the Dems as being too focussed on the “one trans girl that is in on the lacrosse team.”  The Dems didn’t focus on that at all: the Republicans did.  Now, do the Dems suck for allowing Repubs to define them in this way?  Of course.  If the Democrats were half as smart as the ladies of Strict Scrutiny, they would just point out how immeasurably creepy it is for these old white men to be so obsessed with the bodies of trans children—hell, the SS women have said “leave trans kids alone you absolute freaks” so often at this point that they’ve literally made a shirt out of it.  But, point being: this is not something you can really blame the Dems for.

• At a very dense 90 minutes, I’ll still recommend one of Jamelle Bouie’s “favorite things” from the end segment of this week’s Strict Scrutiny: How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult from the Elephant Graveyard.  It’s surreal, and occasionally sounds like a PhD thesis, but it really is quite revealing of the Joe Rogan extended universe and how it got to the weird place it is today.

Our message of hope this week comes from an opinion from First Circuit Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, as read by Robert Reich on this week’s Coffee Klatch:

First of all, the judge gets, you know, one of these crazy, all handwritten, all in caps: “Trump has pardons and tanks ... what do you have?”  So, it’s a threatening note he gets.  Well, what does the judge do?  He puts this threatening note right on the top of his opinion.  And then the judge writes,

“Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous,

Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty.

Together, we the people of the United States—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution.

Here’s how that works out in a specific case—”

Just in case we were all thinking that everyone had given up.  Apparently, a few people are still fighting.  For which I’m thankful.

Doom Report (Week 36: Back to Only as Bad as It Was 2 Weeks Ago)

Well, Jimmy Kimmel’s “cancellation” lasted barely a week, and Trump threw fits about the return and threatened to sue Disney (again).  Nearly everyone I follow weighed in on what the cancellation and return means (or doesn’t mean), including John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Josh Johnson, Adam Conover, Robert Reich, and Brian Tyler Cohen.  I think the general concensus is that the fight is far from over, but that public outcry snatched victory from the jaws of political intimidation.  Also several of them noted that the consolidation of the media landscape is really not making this easier.  Well, easier for aspiring dictators.  But not for the rest of us.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger has another good week in review.

• There was a Charlie Kirk Memorial Rally, apparently.  The Even More News crew breaks it down for you.

• In equally bizarre news, there is apparently such a thing as “Escaltategate” now.  Seriously, what a whiny bitch.  For full details, you can consult Seth Meyers or Jimmy Kimmel.

• On The Daily Show this week, Leslie Jones’ explores systemic racism and how the MAGA crowd is trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.

• Apparently, Trump is sending troops into Portland now.

• And, in other breaking news, the Supreme Court allows Trump to fire an FTC member.  Strict Scrutiny has an emergency video that explains the ramifications pretty clearly.

• I mentioned Steve Burns’ new podcast Alive last week.  The first two episodes weren’t particularly political, but, in the third, he asks Representative Ro Khanna what’s happened to the American Dream?

I suppose our hope for the week is that Kimmel is back on the air.  Now, as I said last week, I’m not the greatest fan of the man, though he has been known to make me chuckle.  But, like most everyone else, I agree that he really knocked it out of the park with his first monologue back.  As I write this, the YouTube version is closing in on 22 million views; if you aren’t yet one of them, you really should check it out.  Trying to be funny after some dark event has occurred is a tricky thing to manage, but I think Kimmel hit all the right notes: he is just as emotional when talking about Kirk’s actual death as he is biting when referring to the right-wing ghouls trying to capitalize on it.  The accolades are all well-deserved.

Doom Report (Week 35: Comedy Is Illegal Again)

Remember when we used to have the First Amendment?  Those were fun times.  Nowadays, the First is joining the Fourth, the Fifth, the Fourteenth, the Twenty-Second ... pretty soon the Second Amendment will just be called “The Amendment” and then we won’t have so much to learn in school.

Because this week, Donald Trump’s FCC forced Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of Kimmel—I’ve only quoted him twice in these Doom Reports (once in week 21 and once way back in week 1), vs the dozen or so times I’ve referenced Colbert or Seth Meyers.  But I watch him every now and again, and, to quote Hasan Piker:

What do you think of Jimmy Kimmel?  It doesn’t matter, okay?  For all intents and purposes, I am Jimmy Kimmel’s most loyal servant.  I am his fedayeen going forward.  I didn’t give a fuck about Jimmy Kimmel until this very moment.  Now he’s my GOAT.  Do you understand?  Because what is going on here is far more consequential than my own personal distaste for, like, Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes or whatever.  What’s going on here is this administration playing out its agenda of suppressing whatever they see fit.

And, I have to say, I really don’t like it when the news forces me to explain to my children what “McCarthyism” was.  Especially when I have to explain that there is no “have you no decency?” moment coming for us.  All the Republicans have their faces in the dirt because they’ve prostrated themselves to Dear Leader, and all the Democrats are writing sternly worded letters.

And, look: a lot of people misunderstand the First Amendment.  Remember when all the right-wing nutjobs were getting kicked off Twitter and Facebook for lying, back when those platforms actually cared about such things?  They all cried about how the companies were violating their First Amendment rights.  Except that a company can’t violate your First Amendment rights, because the First Amendment doesn’t protect you from companies: it protects you from the government.  If you want to use the service of a company, you have to follow its rules.  And, if the rule is, no blatant lying, and you go around spreading bullshit like it’s going out of style, you get the hook.

So, isn’t this the same thing?  Kimmel wasn’t cancelled—excuse me, indefinitely pre-empted—by the government, but by ABC, which is a company.  No harm, no foul ... right?  One might think so.  But then one would be ignoring the fact that FCC chairman Brendan Carr went on a right-wing podcast and said that Kimmel had to be suspended, and that ABC and its affiliates could “do this the easy way or the hard way.”  That’s not me saying that Carr was acting like a Mafia boss—those were his literal words.  So I guess I am saying that he was acting like a Mafia boss, but please don’t take my word for it.  Read about it in Variety, watch it on The Daily Show, listen to Stephen Colbert discuss it in detail.  You can hear the Even More News crew talk about the aftermath of the firing, or you can even hear them practically predict it in a video from the day before the event.

So this was government action: the head of a government agency threatened affiliates with government retribution if they didn’t comply with his wishes, and one of the biggest affiliate networks needs government approval because they want to own more than 40% of the local TV stations in the country.  So Nexstar condemned Kimmel’s comments as “offensive and insensitive,” and in turn threatened ABC, which is owned by Disney, which has already capitulated to Trump once and apparently had zero problem doing so again.

So! what exactly were these “offensive and insensitive” comments that Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk’s death?  Actually, he didn’t say anything about Charlie Kirk’s death—or indeed about Charlie Kirk at all.  You can see the clip of his show played interminably in any number of those videos I linked above, but, basically, he said that the MAGA crowd was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them” and that they were trying to score political points.  Which is, you know: true.  He also played a clip where a reporter asks Trump how he’s doing after the shooting and Trump says “I’m doing great! look at my new ballroom!” to which Kimmel responds: “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend.  This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

Literally nothing about Kirk.  Not nothing that could be considered offensive, or insensitive—literally nothing at all.  It’s possibly the only time in the history of human discourse where you can take a statement as subjective as calling someone’s comments offensive and insensitive and classify it as categorically false.  He got cancelled because he hurt their feelings, and they didn’t like it.  And, for fuck’s sake: the First Amendment means that even if he had said something offensive and/or insensitive, the government wouldn’t have the right to do anything about it anyway. People could write letters to ABC, executives could take Kimmel aside and have stern words with him, but the fucking chairman of the FCC has to stay the fuck out of it.

Except he didn’t.

So that’s why people are calling this a First Amendment crisis, and pointing out that this is how dictators start.  That’s why, when Jon Stewart interviewed Maria Ressa, she notes that she told him in March that shit was happening much faster here than it had in her native Philippines.  She (somewhat chillingly) says:

I think that was why we spoke in March.  Because I was like, this is happening.  If you do not reclaim your rights—if you don’t stand up—it’s going to be significantly harder to claw them back.

How prescient of her.

And I’m glad that all these stories are coming out and pointing out the hypocrisy.  I’m glad that Stephen Colbert plays the clip of Brendan Carr himself saying that political speech should be protected.  I’m glad that BTC is playing his clip montage of Trump, Musk, Hegseth, RFK Jr, Ramaswamy, Tucker Carlson, JD Vance, and finally Musk again, all saying things like “if we don’t have free speech, we don’t have a country any more” and “free speech only matters when it’s someone you don’t like”—he’s basically been playing it on a loop, and I guess I’m glad for that even though I’m starting to get a bit sick of it.  I’m glad that so many people keep playing that clip of Musk saying “comdey is legal again!”  I’m glad that Colbert resurrected his right-wing nutjob Colbert Report host character to do one more installment of “The Wørd”; today’s word? Shhhhhh!.  I even managed to laugh out loud when, during the report from the Daily Show correspondents, Ronny Chieng is called out because his tie is not “MAGA red” and he responds “Can you calm down?  God, is this your first dictator?”  (He goes on to point out that “They don’t care about the exact shade, OK?  It’s just about being visibly uncomfortable while you praise them like a toddler.”)  But I would be much happier if there was no need for all that commentary.

Other things you need to know this week:

• The main Some More News episode this week contains a good rundown of all the fascisms thus far.

• Legal Eagle has a great video highlighting Jeannine Pirro’s failure to indict ham sandwiches (and everyone else too).

• Another good weekly round-up from Adam Kinzinger.

• Not technically this week, but it took me a few extra days to get around to watching it: Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know interviewed Karen Hao about AI, and I think it’s one of the most balanced perspectives on AI I’ve seen in months, if not years.  She doesn’t try to convince us that AI is stupid and useless and overhyped (even though much of it is), but nor does she try to persuade us that it’s going to change our lives forever (even though there’s a bit of truth to that as well).  I especially love the part where Hasan asks her if AI will take people’s jobs and she makes a point that I also often make: AI likely can’t take your job, but that doesn’t mean it won’t take your job.  Or, as she puts it: “So the reason why AI is going to automate jobs is not always going to be because the AI tools are actually up to snuff.  It’s because people are putting the cart before the horse and just getting rid of workers, being pulled into this allure that AI is the solution.  ...  because ultimately it’s not actually AI taking your job: it’s humans.  It’s an executive deciding that your job is now redundant.”

This is quite possibly the least hopeful I’ve been since the very beginning.  Hearing Maria Ressa saying “I warned you!” (I mean, she was much more polite than that, but that’s what it sounded like in my head) ... rereading my own words from week 7:

... maybe, in retrospect, we’ll look back on this moment and say, “no, it was inexorable ... we just didn’t realize it yet.”  Man, I hope not.

and then realizing that even that feeble hope has been dashed ... it’s tough.  Perhaps the best I can do is point you at something that, if you’re a Millennial, or the parent of a Millennial, you might appreciate.  Steve Burns, late of Blues Clues, has a new video podcast called Alive, and it’s encouraging, uplifting, and soothing.  If you never watched Blue’s Clues, you might not appreciate it fully, but give it a try anyway: I think there’s something there for everyone.  Two episodes out so far.

Kimmel may sue, if only for the benefit of his staff and crew.  He may get some money out of it, and I’m sure he’ll use that to make his employees whole, but he won’t get his show back.  Colbert gets to keep going till May—hopefully!—and I suspect he won’t get his show back either.  And Trump has already said that Fallon and Seth Meyers are “next.”  That’ll be four of the Strike Force Five, and John Oliver is a recently naturalized citizen, so I suspect he may be even easier to dispose of than the rest.  So perhaps we’ll be treated to a resurrection: Strike Force Five: AntiFascism Edition.  But where will it air?  YouTube is owned by Google, and their CEO was one of the billionaires given priority seating over the Cabinet members at the inauguration.  So I’m not sure that’s the answer.  Twitch is owned by Amazon, and Bezos has already helped out the regime by hobbling the Washington Post, so there’s no hope there either.  Maybe we’ll get the modern equivalent of The Boat that Rocked, a fictional account of the real-life pirate radio stations that broadcast from ships in international waters off the coast of Britain in the 60s when BBC Radio refused to play that new, evil “rock’n'roll” garbage.  Dunno about you, but I would go to some lengths to tune into a pirate signal that featured a rotating cast of all the comedians suppressed by our current regime.  Sounds like a rockin’ show.