Doom Report (Week 10: Searching for Answers)

If I had a lot of money—say, as much as Elon Musk—I don’t think I would spend it on buying state supreme court elections in Wisconsin.  Admittedly, the thought of using their own tactics against them is tempting, but even so I think I’d leave that to other fantasy billionaires.  No, I think what I would do is start a television show (or it could be streaming, for you younger people out there, but I’m old and I still think of it all as television no matter where I’m watching it).  And the name of this television show would be Answer the Fucking Question.  And its gimmick would be simple: we’d have on politicians, and we’d ask them questions.  And when they go off on these idiotic 5 minute tangents that don’t even come close to answering the question, we’d look at them and say, “that’s nice ... now answer the fucking question.”  And then what we’d air is the question, and then the answer, and none of the bullshit in between.  I suspect that a lot of politician interviews would edit down to just the questions and some blank stares from the politicians.  There are a lot of problems with this idea, of course, not the least of which is that a lot of politicians would just refuse to come on the show at all—hey, man, you expect me to actually answer questions? no thanks! I’ve got better things to do with my time (they’d say).  I think that you could fix that by just inviting their competitors onto the show and letting them have more airtime through the dirty trick of ... well, answering the fucking questions.  If I could use my fantasy billions to make the show popular enough, failure to answer questions—whether by refusing to do the show or by doing it and refusing to answer the fucking questions—might actually become disqualifying again.

But this is a fantasy, of course.  For an example of why that is, watch Stephen Colbert’s interview with Chuck Schumer.  Stephen asks “Why can’t they just do this again in September when the next CR has to be passed?” (where “this” was referring to the bulldozing of Schumer’s professed “resistance” to the agenda of President Musk and Trumpy).  Schumer wanders around aimlessly for 30 seconds, getting nowhere, and then Colbert, uncharacteristically, interrupts him: “How do you stop that?” he asks, more pointedly.  This time Schumer talks for more than two minutes, with no answer in sight.  Watch the clip.  You tell me what the answer to Colbert’s question is.  And, if you happen to be Chuck Schumer, Answer the Fucking Question.

Of course, the major news this week was about “Signalgate,” which is where the complete boneheads that are attempting (and mostly failing) to run our government conducted a classified discussion on bombing another country via Signal, a commercial app.  A lot has been made of the fact that Signal is not fit for dissemination of classified information (particularly in light of the fact that nearly every participant in the chat has spent hours of their lives ranting about Hilary Clinton’s private servers which might have had some classified information on them, even though, in the end, they didn’t), and much has been made of the fact that they set the messages to autodelete (despite that fact that that’s a violation of the Presidential Records Act), and much has been made of the fact that they accidentally included a journalist on the chat, and much has been made of their emojis, and their lying about it afterwards, and their mismatched excuses that don’t line up because they can’t get their stories straight.  But not much has been made of the fact that, at the end of all that bungling of classified information, we bombed an entire building to get one guy, and, of course, we ended up killing over 50 innocent people, including children.  Still too incompetent to manage the government, still plenty competent to kill innocent people.  (For a really good summary of Signalgate, Devin from Legal Eagle has you covered.)

Of course, it’s not only people in the Middle East that Trump’s regime hates: it’s also people from the Middle East.  In addition to Palestinian Mahmoud Khalil, still imprisoned without charge in Louisiana (nearly 1,500 miles from where he was arrested), they have now disappeared a second student protester, Turkish student Rumeysa Ozturk.  You may recall that people objected to Rubio claiming that he revoked Khalil’s student visa, on the grounds that Khalil didn’t have a student visa to revoke, so apparently their solution to that was to find someone who did have a student visa and revoke that.  Ozturk’s offense? she wrote an op-ed in her university’s student newspaper.  The video is somehow even more chilling than that of Khalil’s arrest; as one eyewitness put it, “It looked like a kidnapping.  ...  They’re covering their faces. They’re in unmarked vehicles.”  America Unhinged has a pretty good summary of the case, along with guest Stephen Rhode, who has rewritten Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” poem as “First They Came for Mahmoud Khalil.” (Note that Ozturk is being held in a completely different detention center in Louisiana which is over 1500 miles from where she was arrested, despite the DoJ being ordered by a judge not to remove her from the state of Massachusetts.)

Aside from the typical parade of horribles, I did think there were some interesting points being made this week.  Not necessarily optimistic—I don’t want to get your hopes up—but perspectives that really made me think about things differently.  The first was Jon Stewart’s interview with Ezra Klein on The Weekly Show.  Klein has cowritten a new book called Abundance about how China built 23,000 miles of high-speed rail in the same time California failed to build 500, and how only 3 of the 56 eligible jurisdictions have survived the 4-year, 14-step process to be able to start receiving the money for rural broadband from Biden’s Build Back Better legislation.  Absolutely not hopeful, but it really underscores that the Republicans are not the only problem here, and I think it points us to why the Democrats are losing working class people: they keep promising this utopia of social justice and change, but in the end they can’t deliver.

One last small thing: on Pod Save the UK this week, Nish Kumar said something that I had honestly never considered before.  Remember that Nish is a native-born Brit whose parents are from India; in this clip, he’s talking about Andrew Tate, a piece of human excrement who I’ve been meaning to bring up for a while now, but the flood of news has just drowned it out.  Tate is an influencer in the so-called “manosphere” ... but also a self-proclaimed misogynist who has been indicted in two countries for rape and human trafficking.  But his status as a right-winger and Trump fan was sufficient to get the regime to put pressure on the Romanian government—who of course were not allowing him to leave the country while under investigation—and last month he fled Romania and landed in (where else?) Florida.  Within a month, he added a third country to his sexual assault world tour.  If you need more info on how much of a scumbag Tate is, I would refer you to America Unhinged’s Feb 27th episode, or to the Strict Scrutiny episode from the following Monday.  But this is probably sufficient context to understand Nish’s comments below.

Since I was a young man, I’ve heard this idea that young men can be very easily radicalized, and we need to be very careful about young men being radicalized.  But the young men that that radicalization is being aimed at are young men that look like me, and exclusively young men that look like me.  My whole entire life, since I was a young man, I’m—and now even as I reflect on that time as a very, very old man—there has been a long, protracted conversation about the radicalization of black and brown men: that’s the conversation that we have.  We have no scope in our hearts to have a conversation that white men could also be radicalized.

So, as we look back on Trump’s success with young men during the last election, perhaps we need to think in terms of radicalization.  Just as Muslim extremists have for decades convinced disaffected male youths that suicide by bomb is the answer, so now filth like Andrew Tate and other “manosphere” influencers are radicalizing today’s young men with misogyny, self-aggrandizement, and the death of empathy.  Treat women like property, spit on foreigners, everything you don’t have was taken from you: take it back.  Again, this realization is not a hopeful thought, but I think it’s an important perspective to understand what’s happening, and one I had never even considered before.  This is how diversity saves us: a brown man from Britain can teach me something I was never going to figure out on my own.  This is also why the MAGA regime hates it so much: diversity brings enlightenment, and they really don’t want their base getting any smarter.

Doom Report (Week 9: The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil)

If one wanted a reasonably compact roundup of the week’s news, it’s tough to beat this week’s Armageddon Update.  It’s, as Christopher Titus puts it, “a partial list of idiocy, hatred, and darkness that President Felon Rapist crapped out his stupidhole,” and it’s a tight 5 minutes.  He concludes that “the billionaires have decided that people with nothing have too much,” and that’s pretty incisive commentary from a guy who never went to college, a guy who once described himself as “just a very thin layer of charming with some funny sprinkles wrapped around a huge creamy center of raging arrogant A-hole.”

And the thing he opens his list with is the renditioning of over 200 supposed “Venezuelan gang members.” And, to think: I spent all that time last week talking about one guy that our government has disappeared—if only I’d been patient enough to wait a few days, I could have covered so many more.  (That one person is Mahmoud Khalil, by the way, and he is still being detained, without charge.  Strict Scrutiny thoughtfully released a clip from their full show to catch you up on all the details.)  And, lest you think I’m exaggerating about how bad this is—despite getting surprisingly little coverage from the usual sources; only America Unhinged gave it the full analysis it deserved—let’s just be clear: once again, there were no actual charges; people were just being rounded up based on tattoos, and the Trump regime apparently can’t tell a Venezuelan gang tat from a Spanish soccer team one; and the fact that innocent people were included in the group is no longer in doubt.  If it’s not so bad, then why did the Trump regime go to such extraordinary lengths to defy a court order telling them to stop the illegal deportations?  First they said that the judge’s oral order didn’t count because it wasn’t written, then they said the written order didn’t count because the planes had already left American airspace, then they said that the judge had no authority to enjoin them from using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—again, the same act used to justify locking up Sulu and Mr. Miyagi for the crime of having their parents be born in Japan—to disappear people.  If it’s not so bad, why is Legal Eagle reporting that the regime claimed the lack of evidence against them “proved” how bad they were?  If you still have any shred of possible belief that just maybe this was all justified and all on the up and up, then I want you to do something for me.  I want you to look at this picture and tell me one thing:

Why can we see the faces of all the prisoners—the people who have never been convicted of anything, because they’ve never been charged with anything, because they’ve never even been accused of anything other than having tattoos—but the guards are all wearing masks?  If you saw this picture without any context whatsoever, what country would you suppose those black-masked guards work for?  Now think back to the video of Khalil’s wife asking for the name of the officer arresting her husband and the man saying “we don’t give our names.”  No names, no faces: these supposed Americans sure don’t seem too proud of their work.

More Perfect Union this week talked to a fired CFPB lawyer who was investigating companies turning off people’s cars while they were driving.  They also talked to one of the fired FTC lawyers (and the Coffee Klatch interviewed the other one) who were engaged in cases against companies owned by Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg.  Both organizations are effectively gutted now, meaning that the billionaires are finally free to continue ripping us off without pesky government interference.  Not to mention the attempt to shut down the Department of Education, the resumption of the mass killings of Palestinians despite the “ceasefire”, and the attacks on Social Security: first they gutted the phone service, claiming people could still get service in person (which conveniently ignores the fact that many people on Social Security find it difficult to travel for medical reasons), then they started massive force reductions, meaning that there won’t be nearly enough people to handle those in-person visits.  Then perennial idiot Howard Lutnick (who Ian Michael Black refers to on Have I Got News For You as “this fucking guy”) had the balls to say this:

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—she just wouldn’t.  She would think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month.  A fraudster always makes the loudest noise: screaming, yelling, and complaining.

To which the only reasonable response is YOU’RE A FUCKING BILLIONAIRE.  Of course she won’t complain if she misses a check: she’ll just call her moron of a son-in-law and get a few thousand in pocket change to tide her over. I swear the cluelessness of these people makes me not only question how they got so rich, but also how they managed to just survive this long.  This fucking guy in particular seems like he should have wandered out into traffic to play by now.  Darwin ain’t always right, you know.

But, look: I keep saying I’ll try to end these things on a positive note.  This time I wanted to share with you my collection of quotes from people that still have the balls to stand up to President Musk and his pal Trumpy.  A lot of people have not been doing that, including most of the Democrats.  But some have.  Here are a few:

the single most un-american and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an american president
— Jamelle Bouie, New York Times columnist, in response to Trump’s quoting of Napolean

The Government again evaded its obligations.  This is woefully insufficient.
— James Boasberg, U.S. District Judge, in his response to ICE’s defiance of his temporary restraining order

That should not have been done in our country.  It was a sham in order to avoid statutory requirements.
— William Alsup, U.S. District Judge, in response to mass firings by Elon Musk’s faux department

It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment.
— Danielle Sassoon, former U.S. Attorney, resignation letter

I’ve been on the bench for over four decades.  I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one.  This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.
— John Coughenour, U.S. District Judge, when striking down Trump’s executive order outlawing birthright citizenship

I am not going to abide by government officials saying one thing to the public—what they really mean to the public—and coming in here to the court and telling me something different, like I’m an idiot.
— Ana Reyes, U.S. District Judge, in her order blocking the Department of Defense banning trans troops

May you renew daily your dedication to justice, and always seek to end each day secure in the knowledge that you showed up and sought justice for your one and only client, the people of the United States of America.  You serve no man.
— Sean Murphy, former Assistant U.S. Attorney, resignation letter

I understand that Donald Trump wants to ruin me and he has a lot of tools to be able to ruin me.  But the question is: am I going to look myself in the mirror and say “Okay, therefore, compromise everything I believe in, compromise everything I’ve fought my career for, and just hide or cower or—even worse—make a deal with him?”  Or am I at least going to look in the mirror every day and stand tall and say “You know what, I have my integrity; I have my self-respect.”  And if Donald Trump’s able to destroy me, then he destroys me.  But at least he will he will have taken out someone who, to the bitter end, was doing the best he could to fight for democracy in this country.
— Marc Elias, after being targeted in a memo to the Department of Justice

But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.  If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion.  But it was never going to be me.
— Hagan Scotten, former Assistant U.S. Attorney, resignation letter

Some of those voices are even conservatives.  Danielle Sassoon is a member of the Federalist Society and clerked for Scalia.  James Boasberg was appointed to the bench by George W. Bush and appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by Chief Justice Roberts.  John Coughenour was appointed by Ronald Reagan as I was starting 11th grade, 2 years before the first episode of Stranger Things ... not before it aired, before it takes place.  These are not squishy liberals.  Or to put it like Christopher Titus does in the first video I linked above:

None of these things are Democrat or Republican things; none of it.  It’s good and evil.  I have family who are Republican—guess what: they aren’t evil.  But this fat felon fuckup douchebag, and South African dork Lord Vader, are.  Pure evil.

Amen brother.

Doom Report (Week 8: Didn't Know that "Disappeared" Was a Transitive Verb)

I learned what “Los Desaparecidos” means by watching a movie, sometime around the turn of the century.  I can no longer remember exactly which one, but, looking back with the faulty memory of a quarter-century passed, I suspect it was probably Of Love and Shadows, which is not (as that faulty memory assured me) about Argentinian dictator Jorge Videla, but rather about Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.  But perhaps I can be forgiven for mixing them up: they were dictators during roughly the same time period, in neighboring countries, and were both a large part of Operation Condor, which is a particularly chilling thing to read about, because the US was actively supporting these brutal dictators, on the grounds that they were arresting Communists, and of course we hate Communists.  And this is not one of those “oh, people say that the CIA was involved, but we really don’t know for sure”: no, we know, because in 1999 Clinton declassified all the communiques between these regimes and our government, mostly in the form of Henry Kissinger, who might be responsible for more deaths than anyone else in history.

But, anyway, I’m pretty sure the word “desaparacidos” wasn’t used directly in this movie I was watching, but it did mention “the Disappeared,” which was a grammatical construction that struck my ears as odd at the time.  Which is what led me to the Wikipedia articles which used the term, which itself is just the Spanish word for “disappeared” turned into a noun.  Because, you see, these dictators weren’t just arresting the Communists (and anyone else they thought disagreed with them): they were whisking them away to secret facilities, torturing them, and, more often than not, murdering them.  This process came to be know as “to disappear” someone.  As Videla once said:

They are just that ... desaparecidos.  They are not alive, neither are they dead.  They are just missing.

You see? no body, no crime.  As long as you don’t know where your father, or brother, or husband is, you can’t accuse me of killing him.  I may have lost him—so many prisoners, so much paperwork, so much bureaucracy, it is so hard to keep track—but I’m sure he’ll turn up.  And this is how “disappear” transformed into a transitive verb.  Which leads us to the words Heather Lofthouse spoke on this week’s Coffe Klatch:

They disappeared him.  I mean, I didn’t even know that that was a transitive verb.  They have ... you disappear people.  I mean, that, to me, is not what happens in America.

No, it’s not, because it’s what happens in South America, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia ... although it must be noted that among all the countries from those regions, the United States (along with Northern Ireland) does sort of stand out in the “Examples” section of Wikipedia’s “enforced disappearance” article.

And, yet, the big story this week was that of Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent (Green Card) resident of the US, married to a US citizen who is 8 months pregnant.  And, on March 8th, our government disappeared him.  Arrested in New York, it took his wife and lawyer several days to figure out that he had been incarcerated in Louisiana, for some inexplicable reason.  To my knowledge, neither his family nor his legal representation have actually seen or spoken to him in the intervening week.  He has been charged with no crime.  He and his wife were told that his student visa was being revoked, but he doesn’t have a student visa: he’s a permanent resident.  ICE and the State Department then claimed that his Green Card was being revoked, but they have no legal authority to do that.  He’s been accused of anti-Semitism, but there’s no evidence that he’s said anything other than that bombing Palestinian children is wrong—although that seems to be close enough to anti-Semitism for many, including (as the Even More News crew pointed out this week) Chuck Schumer, whose statement “supporting” Khalil starts with the words “I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports, and have made my criticism of the antisemitic actions at Columbia loudly known.”  Well, good to know Schumer abhors the idea of not bombing children.  But, more importantly, even if Khalil were anti-Semitic—and I again stress that no one has offered any evidence that suggests that he is—but even if he were, that is not a crime.  If it was, there’d be far fewer Klan members and Proud Boys running around fucking up the country.  Hell, someone might have even locked up Elon Musk’s Nazi-saluting ass by now.

If you want to see what it looks like when ICE disappears someone in front of their pregnant wife, there’s a video.  But it’s pretty depressing.  I would hope you’d think that even if you “abhor” his pro-baby anti-murder stance like Chuck Schumer does, but I suspect I may be misguided on that score.

Khalil has been the top story for a good reason, not only highlighted on the Coffee Klatch and Even More News, but also touched on by a Seth Meyers’ A Closer Look segment (Seth highlights the possible good news that a judge has blocked his deportation, but no one wants to opine on whether that will actually stop the Trump regime from doing so), Christopher Titus’ podcast (Titus’ take: “when you just start grabbing people without the rule of law and and holding them without charging them ... that’s Gestapo shit”), and, reliably, America Unhinged, who pointed out that Trump and Rubio are here using the same logic that was used to justify the “internment camps” where we locked up American citizens (including George Takei from Star Trek and Pat Morita from The Karate Kid) because their ancestors just happened to come here from a country we were currently at war with.  Trump said during the campaign that he planned to revive the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, and here we are.

In truth, the fact that people continue to believe that Trump won’t do exactly what he very explicitly says he will do continues to astound me.  Here’s another exchange from the Coffee Klatch:

Lofthouse: How about Wall Street, you know was reeling and shocked and upset; what did they think was going to happen when they supported him?
Reich: Well, very good question.  I think that most people I have talked with on Wall Street assumed that Trump would back off with the tariffs; they assumed that as, if there was any indication that the stock market was reacting negatively to tariff talk, that Trump would say no, no that’s—I won’t do it ...

I have to admit, I literally laughed out loud when Robert Reich was talking about Wall Street people “assuming” that Trump didn’t really mean it when he threatened to put tariffs on everyone, everywhere.  It’s easy to fall into the trap of being dismissive of average voters who supported Trump, but trust me: it’s way more fulfilling to see Wall Street bigwigs fall for that same used-car-salesman scam.

And, if you think I’m exaggerating about Trump being a used car salesman, you definitely haven’t paying attention to the news this week, because he literally did a Tesla commercial on the White House lawn (a thing which in itself would have been scandalous in less “interesting” times).  He did this because Tesla stock has crashed lately, by an amount which, as Sky News put it, “to put it in context, ... is roughly equivalent to Poland’s annual economic output.”  And, if your company is tanking to the tune of a mid-size European Union country, why not get the US president to do some marketing for you?  I mean, we’ve already established that the office is for sale, so may as well take advantage of that.  If you’d like to watch President Musk and his slimy orange salespumpkin shilling on government property, I recommend watching the Christopher Titus version.  At least there’s some amusing patter to go along with the cringe.

But, in general, I’m thinking back to week -4, when I pointed out that the schadenfreude of watching people almost instantly regretting their choices (I specifically called out the old Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party meme) won’t be worth the actual suffering that real people will have to live through.  I’m sure Mahmoud Khalil’s wife takes no comfort at how many billions Musk lost in the stock market.  Or, for an even more sobering example (if you can imagine that), the Even More News crew (and no one else that I’m aware of) talked this week about the Trump regime transferring trans women into men’s prisons.  You’ll have to watch Jonathan and Katy and Cody talk about it; I’m too traumatized by the mere thought of it to recount it here.

But overall this week feels less like the blasting firehose of previous weeks and more like “merely” whitewater rafting amidst sharp rocks.  I’m not sure if that’s because our capacity for horror has been overloaded at this point and we’ve just gone into shock, or because the regime is going more underground and doing their terrible things without making quite so many waves, but what I don’t think it is is any lessening of the evil.  But point being that there aren’t too many other things to note this week.

The fine folks over at Election Profit Makers this week caught a news item that had fallen through the cracks of the other folks I follow: 538.com was shut down, immediately after Trump’s approval rating went negative for the first time since the election.  Disney says this was just part of a larger restructuring—nothing to do with approval ratings!—but then again Disney also paid Trump $15 million to settle a case he absolutely would have lost, so I’m not sure they can be considered trustworthy here.

And, finally, Strict Scrutiny continues to keep us up-to-date on the goings-on at the Supreme Court.  This week they reported on Trump’s loss on the attempted USAID fund freeze, including Alito’s screed of a dissent (Kate Shaw’s assessment: “such a drama queen, my God”), which includes the line “nothing in our precedents even remotely supports this grossly inflated conception of executive power which seriously infringes the legislative powers that the Constitution grants to Congress” ... no, wait, that’s what he wrote in a case where Biden wanted to do something he didn’t like.  Here, he wrote “I am stunned” that the majority of his colleagues agreed that the government should have to pay its bills.  Kate and Melissa also reported on the Court’s ruling that the EPA’s was misinterpreting the Clean Water Act by attempting to regulate clean water in San Francisco.  The interesting part here, for me, was that this was the second case this episode where Amy Coney Barrett sided with the 3 liberal justices: in the USAID case, they were the majority (along with Chief Justice Roberts); here in the EPA case, they were the minority (as Melissa Murray put it, “it’s a 5 to four opinion, with Justice Alito and the other sewage swilling mens in the majority, and all of the women justices, who apparently would prefer their water without a side of raw sewage, siding with the EPA and Mother Earth in dissent”).  This harkens back to an earlier observation of mine (also in week -4, as it happens) where I wondered if Barrett might end up becoming a moderate, perhaps like Justice Kennedy.  Still too early to tell for sure, of course, but here at least are two more data points.

I do hope that this trend towards fewer obvious insanities per week means that I can take a break from writing the Doom Report as often as it’s turned out to be necessary.  You think I enjoy collecting all this dreck and dung and regurgitating it all in these columns?  I assure you I do not.  As far as I’m concerned, one Doom Report a month would be plenty—or even one too many, some might say.  But I think that as long as President Musk and his oily orange salesflunky are continuing to attempt to destroy our democracy, I’ll probably continue writing.  It feels like the least I can do.

Doom Report (Week 7: Human Progress: Neither Automatic nor Inevitable)

Many moons ago, I worked for ThinkGeek.  And, as I touched on briefly a few years back, I left because the downward spiral seemed inevitable.  I distinctly remember sitting down with Willie, the company’s co-founder and chief visionary ... but not its CEO.  CEOs were supplied by the corporate overlords, which was the source of the downward spiral, in my opinion.  Willie disagreed, of course: his unfailing optimism was what I admired most about him as well as his most infuriating trait.  From his perspective, there were plenty more years for ThinkGeek to continue being awesome.  I clarified: I too thought that ThinkGeek would continue being awesome for years to come.  I just felt that, when we were old and looking back on it, we would point to this time and say “that’s where it all started to go wrong.”

This week, Jon Stewart interviewed Maria Ressa on the Weekly Show.  If you don’t know Ressa, she’s a Filipino-American journalist who reported extensively on the autocratic takeover of the Philippines by Duterte.  She was arrested, detained briefly, and charged with enough crimes to put her in prison for a century, some of which are still pending despite the fact that Duterte lost power in 2022.  In addition to her real-life experience, Ressa has taught politics at the college level and has written 3 books on the topic, including How to Stand Up To a Dictator.  She’s been interviewed by Stewart several times and is an amazing resource on recognizing patterns in aspiring autocrats.

I encourage you to watch the whole interview, but the part that most caught my ear was this snippet from Jon:

Right now, it’s it’s getting a little dark, but we’ll talk about some of the institutional, structural, geographical things that are positive and optimistic for the United States moving forward—and there are some.  You know, I don’t want to make it seem as though this is inexorable and we’re just sliding towards that ...

And I couldn’t help but think, is it inexorable?  Maybe Jon is being like my friend Willie; 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.  For that matter, I bet Willie would still disagree with me on the whole ThinkGeek thing ... but also it is a fact that all the founders were pushed out and the company was eventually sold again and now it no longer exists.  So I would say that any argument along the lines of “well, sure: it eventually happened, but it wasn’t inevitable” is applying a layer of rose-colored glass to the facts.

Ressa has plenty of chilling comparisons between our current situation and that of the Philippines during Duterte’s rise to power in the mid-2010s: the use of social media to spread misinformation, the recruiting of Internet trolls to do some of the dirty work, calling Ressa’s news organization “fake news” when she wrote about his crimes and dictator-curious policies.  At one point she puts it this way:

So the question here is: the longer these institutions do not act, and you have a compliant head that is selected based on loyalty—and I’ll talk about the Philippines so I don’t get myself in trouble in the United States—you know, ignorance and arrogance plus loyalty: this is how it collapses.

“Ignorance and arrogance plus loyalty” is also a good description of Trump’s “state of the union” speech this week.  I don’t want to rehash the hot takes you’ve probably already heard, but I’ll draw your attention to a few of the less repeated ones.  Colbert highlighted the irony of Trump claiming he had ended government censorship and “brought back” free speech shortly after ejecting Texas rep Al Green for ... well, speaking.  (And don’t even get me started on the 10 moronic Democrats who voted with the Republicans on the resulting censure vote.)  On The Daily Show, Michael Kosta specifically showed the moment where a random Democrat silently holds a sign behind Trump’s back saying “This is NOT Normal” only to have it snatched out of her hand and tossed away by a random Republican.  Kosta posits that this is emblematic of the Democrats’ ineffectualness and the Republicans’ glee in bullying them.  I’m not sure I agree ... but then I’m not sure I can really disagree either.

Over on LegalEagle, Devin has two really good videos this week.  The first is on the court battles over Trump trying to fire civil service workers, which he is (ostensibly) losing, because that’s illegal.  (As is rapidly becoming the LegalEagle mantra: let’s hope he follows the court order.)  Devin covers the basic history of those Civil Service protections, but I’ll add even more context:  After the Civil War, there were two factions in the new(ish) Republican Party, typically referred to as “Stalwarts” and “Half-Breeds” (each vaguely insulting epithet being coined by the other side).  Stalwarts believed that government employees should be chosen the way they’d always been: the President just picks all the cronies and bootlickers they can find, and that’s who runs the government.  Meanwhile, the Half-Breeds were on about some dumb “merit-based” system.  And then President Garfield—a Half-Breed—comes along, and Charles Guiteau, one of the people who advocates for him during his campaign—a Stalwart—demands to be made consul of France.  (The fact that this man spoke no French seemed to be not an obstacle to him.  Is any of this sounding familiar at all?)  But Garfield refused.  So Guiteau shot him.  And then, after that, we decided to make the majority of civil service employees not be appointed by the whims of the President and their advisors, but rather by passing a test.  Which we did, nearly a hundred and fifty years ago.  It’s truly stunning to me how often we have to learn the same lessons over and over.

The more chilling aspect of this video is when Devin points out that a lot of the stuff Trump did illegally, he could have done legally if he’d just been a bit more patient.  After all, he completely controls Congress: if he had just waited the requisite amount of time and demanded his toadies do as he asked, he could have fired thousands of federal employees without raising any legal issues whatsoever.  Which leads me to wonder: if President Musk and the Project 2025 crowd just been more patient, would we even have noticed?

Speaking of President Musk, Devin’s other great video was on the crazy DOGE emails that keep flying around to government employees.  Again, watch the whole thing, but my favorite bit was almost a throwaway line toward the beginning:

When musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, he sent a similar email to Twitter employees demanding that they send him screenshots of their most salient lines of code.  Musk then fired thousands of them, leading to dozens of lawsuits, all of which he’s lost so far, and a diminished user experience in Twitter, to put it lightly.  And now that Elon Musk has purchased the US government for a much lower price, he got to work making America more miserable for everyone, but especially government employees.

Note Devin’s bon mot about how it cost Musk significantly less to buy our government than he paid for Twitter.  Get it?  It’s funny because it’s true.  And also horrifying.

Still, our primary hope continues to lie in their incompetence.  This week’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me contains another throwaway line about a CIA black site being outed when DOGE put the building up for sale.  Of course, the part that Colbert found the most amusing was that the agency responsible for selling the buildings, the GSA, managed to put their own building on the list of ones to sell.  Maybe that one will get sold before the others have a chance to.  We can only hope.

One final nugget of maybe-hope: BTC has a great video on the resurgence of that greatest of soap operas: the Real Housewives of MAGA.  Bannon going after Musk, Musk and Rubio at each other’s throats ... great popcorn viewing.  You may recall from our last installment that I predicted that this falling out was inevitable, and it’s actually taken a bit longer than I expected for the cracks to start showing.  Well, they started showing before Trump even took office—my link there is to Week -4, after all—but it kind of seemed like Susie Wiles had it locked down for a bit.  But now the cracks are widening, and we haven’t heard anything from Susie for a while ... I wonder if she’s given up, or just been sucked into the undertow.  But it continues to be amusing to watch them at each other’s throats.  If you want a less serious take on the whole thing, SNL’s cold open this week was, once again, pretty funny.

Doom Report (Week 6: Gilded Oldies)

[The Doom Report now has its own home on Substack.  If you prefer, you can read this post over there instead.]

Last week, I titled my post “The Fourth Realm?”, which was a (perhaps too) subtle nod to the current Musk/Trump regime being a successor to the Third Realm—or, to use the German term, “Reich.”  So, have the white supremacists running our government backed off their Nazi leanings in the week since I last mused on this topic?  Well, they’ve taken over the White House press pool, which allows him to claim that he answers more questions from reporters than any other President.  Of course, when you get to pick the people asking the questions, it’s a bit more like he “answers” more questions from “reporters” (and perhaps I should add: than any other “president”).  They’ve also fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—who, being a black man, was obviously a DEI hire—and plan to replace him with a white man whose primary qualification is that he once told Trump, “I’ll kill for you, sir.” So, they’re controlling the media narrative and purging the government of undesireables: nope, no Nazi stuff here.

And I’m happy to see other people making these points as well.  I don’t normally recommend people watch Christopher Titus’ Armageddon Update, because Titus is notoriously fond of offending everyone.  (And he also has some bad takes, at least in my opinion, such as believing that we should have stuck with Biden as the candidate last year.)  But his call to action this week was pretty inspiring:

Do not think this is over in four years, people, and do not wait until it gets deadly to react.  It took Hitler roughly seven weeks to end a free Germany.  People thought it would just go away—it didn’t.  A World War ensued and millions died.  So may I say: wake the fuck up.

Or, if you’re looking for a perspective that’s slightly more scholarly (but no less entertaining), Elie Mystal was on America Unhinged this week. I’ve been impressed with Mystal ever since I first came across him while researching my post on third parties, and then even more so when he sat in for Leah Litman on an episode of Strict Scrutiny.  Here’s how he put it:

People, I feel, are waiting for, like, the day that they wake up and they read the Jeff Bezos Post and it says “America: Under New Dictatorship Today” ...  As if it’s going to be, like, a line of demarcation, you know: Sunday we had a democracy, but Monday we’re living under a dictatorship, right?  That’s not how it works.  That’s not how it’s ever worked: any country that has lost its Republic, that has lost its Democratic institutions and ended up in a totalitarian or authoritarian regime, that happened exactly as it’s happened here: not one day, not one decision, but a number of small decisions every day and ... a lack of consequences for those illegal decisions that led these countries and led these prior regimes into dictatorship.

It’s a slow slide into autocracy.  If you act like a dictator, and nobody stops you, then you’re a dictator.

Of course, what Mystal was there to discuss was Chief Justice John Roberts overturning a lower court’s deadline for President Musk to restore foreign aid payments—not for future foreign aid, mind you: just to pay for what was already delivered.  A court told the executive branch that they had to pay their bills, and the executive branch said “Nunh uh!” and yet somehow the media is still asking the “question” of whether or not we’re embroiled in a constitutional crisis.  But apparently John Roberts said it was okay to ignore the courts, so ... there you go, I suppose.  And many are positing that that’s exactly why Roberts did it: to provide cover for what Trump was going to do anyway.  Because, if Roberts didn’t do that, and President Musk didn’t comply (which, honestly, he very well might not even be able to do, since bigballs and his pals have broken things so badly that it seems unlikely that they can be fixed at this point), then the thumbing of their noses at the judicial branch would be impossible to ignore.  I’m reminded of the days when Glen Kirschner used to show up on Brian Tyler Cohen’s channel and talk about what Roberts wouldn’t do for Trump because the one thing dictators have no use for is a Supreme Court.  Kirschner, of course, says no such thing now, and I wonder if Roberts is sweating bullets that he may have painted himself into the corner of obsolescence.

Of course, Kirschner isn’t the only person having to eat crow these days: remember back in week 1 when I was naïve enough to think that companies wouldn’t cave into Trump’s attempt to shove anit-DEI stuff down their throats, because study after study shows that diversity increases profitability?  Yeah, that didn’t age well in the intervening centuries, did it?  While many companies have continued to stand firm, including Costco, Apple, Delta, and even Microsoft (I’m old enough and tech-savvy enough to experience profound cognitive dissonance at the thought that Microsoft might be on the right side of history, even in a small way), more corporations than I expected have decided that their bottom lines are best served by getting right with the folks in charge.  DEI may increase your profits, but apparently alignment with autocracy increases them more.  Or so some think.

In an attempt to help combat that sort of thinking, which may or may not be successful, a group called The People’s Union organized an economic blackout day of this past Friday.  More are planned.  Now, my cynical side says these megacorporations won’t even notice, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad idea.  Our family participated in the first blackout, and we’ll likely participate in the future ones as well.  Might not help, but it sure can’t hurt.

In a similar vein, Jon Oliver on Last Week Tonight gave some great tips on how to keep Facebook from earning revenue off your account, which he details on his reused web site (long-time LWT fans will remember the “rat erotica” days).  I’ve done this, and I encourage all of you to do the same.  Mark Zuckerberg, he of “it’s okay to call women ‘property’ on Facebook now” fame, does not deserve to make money off you, or me, or anyone else.  Fuck that guy.

Because it’s all about the money.  You may remember two weeks ago when I pointed out that every agency—every single agency!—targeted by President Musk was investigating him, even the ones that you thought didn’t do that that sort of thing.  (Also, I missed one: USDA.)  But the conflicts of interest are getting even more blatant, as President Musk cancels a Verizon contract so that SpaceX can swoop in and grab that $2.4 billion.  Pretty sweet deal for whoever owns SpaceX.  Good thing that Trump has promised that Musk won’t be allowed to touch things which might involve a conflict of interest.

Trump, of course, seems to be truly obsessed with recreating the Gilded Age.  Here’s Brian Tyler Cohen calling out Trump saying this yet again:

You know, we were richest, the richest relatively, from, think of this, from 1870 to 1913, that was our richest ...

The Gilded Age (which Trump usually refers to as “the Golden Age,” I think because that way it will match his golden toilet) was, as Wikipedia will tell you, “a time of materialistic excesses marked by widespread political corruption,” so it’s easy to see why Trump finds it so appealing.  It was also a period of vast wealth inequality, widespread poverty (including two depressions), and the rise of Jim Crow laws which advantaged white people.  Sure, lots to pine for there.  Of course, the Gilded Age leads inevitably to the Great Depression a few decades later, but I don’t think Trump particularly cares about that: he’ll no doubt be comfortably dead by the time we reach that point in the cycle.  The robber barons of the Gilded Age died fat and happy and, presumably, unrepentant.  (Fun fact: while Trump’s favorite word—“tariffs”—were probably not the cause of the Great Depression, there can be little doubt that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 was the major reason that the economy could not recover as quickly as expected from the stock market crash.  It’s also worth noting that BTC posits that our era of greatest prosperity was not in fact the Gilded Age, but rather the 50s and 60s; I haven’t fact-checked him, but I suspect he and Trump are just using different definitions of “rich.”)

Of course, in between the Gilded Age and the Great Depression was a World War, but Trump seems all set to recreate that bit as well.  Both the Coffee Klatch and BTC showed clips of Trump and Vance shouting down Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a manner that can only be described as cringe-inducing.  To describe it as a performance is underselling it: Stephen King called it throwing red meat to the base, and noted “Old pro wrestling trick. Fire up the crowd.”  But don’t take anyone’s word for it: in the Reich clips, we can actually see Trump trying to work out a good sound bite in real time:

That was with Obama who gave you sheets, and I gave gave you javelins.  I gave you the javelins to take out
all those tanks, Obama gave you sheets, in fact, the statement is: Obama gave sheets and Trump gave javelins.

(Unclear if our Commander-in-Senility is referring to the first invasion of Ukraine, of if he’s just mixing up Obama with Biden again.)  It’s even more blatant in the BTC clip: “This is going to be great television, I will say that.”  To top it off, in BTC’s clip you can hear Brian Glenn (Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend and, of course, host of a right-wing podcast) asking Zelenskyy why he isn’t wearing a suit.  Um, maybe because he’s running around from bomb shelter to bomb shelter and doesn’t really have time to visit the tailor?  Maybe because he wouldn’t want to look too sartorial while his people are fighting for their lives?  Or maybe just because he had no idea that the press pool had been taken over by douchebags.

And, if there’s any doubt that the rest of the world is as embarrassed about this as I hope you are, BTC has you covered there as well with a litany of reactions from world leaders.  The knowledge that Trump has the balls to accuse Zelenskyy of risking World War III boggles the mind, especially when you consider that recent UN vote where the US voted against Ukraine alongside such bastions of democracy and free speech as Russia, North Korea, Hungary, and Belarus.  (Also in that group? Israel.  Just something to consider.)  But, sure, it’s going to be Zelenskyy’s fault.  Yeah, that tracks.

It’s BTC who’s on fire this week: I enjoyed his interview with James Talarico, a Texas state representative who happens to be a devout Christian and a Democrat, a rare combo indeed.  The perspective on how the MAGA crowd has seemingly co-opted religion, while failing to walk the walk, was pretty great:

There are so many self-proclaimed Christians serving in Congress: they’re supposed to be feeding the hungry, but they’re cutting food stamps; they’re supposed to be healing the sick, but they’re eliminating Medicaid; they’re supposed to be serving the poor, but they’re cutting taxes for billionaires.  It’s because they’re not following Jesus, they’re worshiping Donald Trump.

And, in addition to their questionable theology, the MAGA crowd’s math skills don’t seem too hot either.  They continually swear they’re not cutting Medicaid, but, as the ranking member of the House Budget Committee put it in yet another BTC interview:

The direction to the Energy and Commerce Committee is: cut spending by $880 billion.  Now, what does Energy and Commerce have control over? Medicaid.  And it has control over a few other things, but here’s the thing: if you really didn’t want to cut Medicaid and you instead wanted to cut 100% of of everything else Energy and Commerce has jurisdiction over, guess what?  That doesn’t come anywhere close to $880 billion; in fact, it only gets you about halfway there.  So even if—and they’re not going to do this—but even if they eliminated everything that Energy and Commerce has control over except for Medicaid, by definition they would have to still cut Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Or, as BTC puts it, “a mathematical impossibility.”  Or how about Trump’s brilliant plan for a $5 million “gold card” to replace green cards?  I mean, after all: he says we could sell 10 million of those and then we’d make $50 trillion.  Pretty sweet deal, eh?  Except that, as producer Jonathan Harris points out in this week’s Even More News, there aren’t 10 million people in the world with $5 million who don’t already live here.  And, as Cody followed up with, if your net worth was $5 million, you wouldn’t beggar yourself just to get into our country, so you’d need quite a bit more money than that.  And here’s my own personal thought: if you were a non-US citizen with so much money that $5 million seemed like chump change, would you really want to live here? right now?  I’m thinking you probably have better uses for that chunk of money.

So the Republicans’ math doesn’t math, and the Democrats are continuing to be useless.  Oh, sure Jasmine Crockett (whom I absolutely adore) continues to achieve viral moments by talking like a normal person, such as this week responding to a reporter’s insipid question of “what would you say to Elon Musk?” with a simple “fuck off.”  But in general I think Adam Conover hit the nail on the head with his video this week entitled “No one is coming to save us.” when he says to the Dems:

You’ve known Trump would be president for months.  He even gave you an instruction manual [Project 2025] for what he was planning to do.  You are failing a fucking open book test.

Adam thinks you should visit Action Network.  I think he’s probably right.

Finally, I’m still looking for hope to share with you, and here’s this week’s.  This is from a public newsletter from Anne Arundel County, Maryland, and I’ll quote a bit of it here for you.  This was written by a straight white man, and shared to me (and my company) by another straight white man.  Just so we remember they’re not all terrible.

So why do some politicians and their followers insist that DEI discriminates against white men?  Probably because DEI broadens the applicant pool for merit-based jobs by enforcing federal and local anti-discrimination laws.  When you end discrimination against groups that were formerly excluded from job opportunities, those who benefited from discrimination (white men) actually have to compete in a larger and more competitive applicant pool.  And therein lies their grievance.

Please don’t assume that I and my DEI-practicing friends don’t care about the plight of white men.  They also face challenges as a group, and we want them to thrive.  White men have a suicide rate that is double the rate of the total population in Anne Arundel County, and most involve a firearm.  Our Mental Health Agency and our Gun Violence Intervention Team are actively working to lower those numbers, including by distributing suicide prevention literature where firearms are purchased.
:
:
Human beings are diverse.  We live in a complicated world.  We face difficult challenges, and we all need to be at our best to overcome them.

In Anne Arundel County, we will not pretend that we are all the same. We will continue to celebrate one another, lift one another up, and defend ourselves against efforts to divide us.

I encourage you to read the whole post.  His definition of “equity” is particularly trenchant.

And, really finally, if you want a succinct and also funny summary of where we are currently, I must refer you to this week’s SNL cold open.  It’s been 50 years of hits and misses—and, if I’m honest, probably more misses than hits—but it’s good to know that, even after half a century, these guys can still occasionally cut right to the heart of the zeitgeist.

Doom Report (Week 5: The Fourth Realm?)

If you have an interest in doing a thing, but you know people will call you out on it, one tactic that you can take is to start a years-long campaign to make complaining about the thing you’re doing seem silly.  Any time someone says something about anyone doing that thing, you shake your head sadly and point out that they’re exaggerating, they have nothing better to do, and what they’re saying is ridiculous.  If you do this long enough, then you can actually do the thing right in front of people, and no one will believe you’re doing it.  Because anyone pointing out to people that you are doing exactly what you’re doing will be ridiculed as being hyperbolic and just trying to grab attention.  Meanwhile, you’re getting away scot-free.

Just to take a random example, say you wanted to dismantle a democracy the same way Hitler did in the 1930s.  You might start by adopting some of Hitler’s views, progress to actually quoting Hitler in your political speeches, and finally just straight up doing what Hitler did, once you had advanced to the point of having sufficient power to do so.  At each stage, people will inevitably try to compare you to Hitler.  So just make Hitler comparison seem like a joke.  People who can’t come up with anything better that “he’s like Hitler!” are obviously just grasping at straws.  Really: that’s the best you can come up with? that I’m like Hitler?  Oh, please.  Pretty soon you’re totally doing a Hitler and no one believes it, because comparisons to Hitler have been devalued sufficiently that no one can even bring them up any more.  This is where we high five: stick your arm straight out, palm down, at about a 45° angle down from vertical.  No need to worry about anyone thinking you’re doing a Nazi salute: just say you’re “throwing your heart out” and act like those people are dumb.

Of course, one needn’t only use Hitler as a model.  In an interview with Mehdi Hasan on Zeteo this week, British journalist Owen Jones suggested another blueprint:

Owen: Hungary is the playbook for these people.  ... you know they had a political party, Fidesz, ... Orbán ... this guy who runs it, used to call himself a liberal, he used to be Vice Chair of the Liberal International, don’t you know, and then it radicalized in power, and what it did is, ... it didn’t put ... firing squads shooting people, three people in prison, it just got rid of democracy by attrition, behind closed doors.
Mehdi: Yep, erosion.
Owen: Exactly.

Still, Owen Jones is a young punk journo (although not as young as he looks).  It’s not like he’s a historian, like, say ... oh, I don’t know, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whom Wikipedia might describe as “a scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders.” It’s not like Ruth went on America Unhinged, where she was asked by Francesca Fiorentini about aspiring autocrats dressing up their actions in the language of democracy, to which she replied:

In part, that’s ... just to kind of mislead people, ...  So one of the main things people will say to justify their coup, besides, you know, getting rid of Marxists and saving the nation, is saving the freedoms.  And even the fascists used to say that, you know, they were bringing real Freedom ...  In communist China they say that’s a democracy: it’s the People’s Republic.  And think about Viktor Orbán who is like, you know, he calls his system an “illiberal democracy”!  There is nothing Democratic about Orbán’s Hungary any more, but he still clings to that word, to confuse people.  So ... authoritarians are expert at confusing people, at using language, and then, you know, the Orwellian stuff, like ... it’s the opposite: so the the Department of Government Efficiency is the Department of Corruption and Plundering.  And that’s how authoritarians always operate: they invert, they pervert meaning, and then they want to confuse people, and it works for a lot of people.

And then Wajahat Ali responded “Steve Bannon, about a decade ago, Ruth, said that Orbán was Trump before Trump.”

Oh, wait ... I guess all that did happen.

And, while you know I mostly agree with Jon Stewart—and would totally vote for him if he were to run for pretty much anything—I did disagree with him a couple of weeks ago when he railed against not using the word “fascist” to describe everything Trump does.  This week, on an After the Cut video (as they call it when The Daily Show puts up clips of the hosts talking to the audience outside the show proper), Stewart responded to a question about that:

So I am very cautious about when to know—like, yeah, hopefully I won’t do it the night after Kristallnacht ...

Man, Jon, I hope not too.  But I worry that that may be where we’re headed.

As the ladies of Strict Scrutiny pointed out, the Trump regime almost immediately fired the first woman leader of any branch of the Armed Services, citing DEI.  To echo Brian Tyler Cohen this week, do we just have to wait for the worst to happen?  Or, to echo someone else (possibly also BTC): what, 8 plane crashes isn’t the worst???

The former director of the CFPB (fired by Trump, naturally), pointed on this week’s Coffe Klatch:

Every single day, I think, we averaged over $4 million in refunds back to people.  Why is it efficient to cut that work?  The return on investment was huge for the taxpayer.

But of course this just goes back to Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s point that words mean nothing (unless they mean the opposite).  Besides, that money didn’t come to the government, where President Musk and his sidekick Trump could figure out a way to divert it into their pockets.  It went back to consumers.  That’s not who this current regime is set up to benefit.  It’s amazing to me that the concept of doublethink was identified (and forecast) in 1949; we’ve understood exactly how it works for over 75 years, and yet we still fall for it.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.

That’s from George Orwell’s 1984, if you didn’t recognize it, although if you thought it was a description of today’s Republican party, you could be forgiven for the easy mistake.  Ben-Ghiat pegged this doublespeak quite accurately as “Orwellian” in the quote above, so the only thing that doesn’t track perfectly is that it took us an extra 40 years to get to where Orwell predicted.  But maybe that’s just how long it took us to forget what he tried to teach us.

Also on Zeteo this week, Mehdi Hasan interviewed Ilhan Omar. It’s worth watching the whole interview; I thought her dismissal of Texas Representative Brandon Gill’s assertion that she should be deported (despite her being a US citizen for 25 years now) was actually pretty brave, considering how likely it could be under the Trump regime.  (By the way, I didn’t know who Brandon Gill even was before this interview, but now I do.  He’s the son-in-law of Dinesh D’Souza, and, if you don’t know who that is, Wikipedia describes him pretty well right in the first sentence: he’s “an American right-wing political commentator, conspiracy theorist, author, filmmaker, and convicted felon pardoned by Donald Trump.” One of his classic films is 2000 Mules, and if you don’t know what that is Wikipedia has you covered again (and again in its first sentence): it’s “a debunked 2022 American conspiracist political film which falsely claims paid ‘mules’ illegally collected and deposited ballots into drop boxes in swing states during the 2020 presidential election.” If you’ve ever wondered how so many people can hold on to the insane belief that Trump actually won the 2020 election, D’Souza is a big part of the reason.  Anyway, we needn’t judge Gill by his associations: in addition to suggesting Omar be deported, he’s also been a big fan of Daniel Penny, the white “vigilante” who killed an unarmed black man named Jordan Neely on a New York City subway.  Quoth Gill: “I think we need a lot more Daniel Penny’s in this country, because we have far too many Jordan Neely’s.” Get it?  We need more white people, because we have too many black people.  Not blatant enough for you?  How about his comment when Penny was acquitted: “It’s still not illegal to be white.” So ... yeah.  White supremacist.  Big surprise.)  I also appreciated Omar’s response to Mehdi’s question about whether she thought Harris’ stance on Gaza cost her the election:

Well, it’s not what I think: we’ve seen polls that say ... nearly 30% of the people who stayed home stayed home because of the bloodshed, the genocide that was televised on on their phones.  And the fact that, you know, the the Biden administration, which Harris was part of, was complicit in that ...

She’s likely not wrong, but I would still texture her point by noting that Harris could have worked around that problem.  She was just “part of” the Biden administration, as Omar notes; if she had only ignored her advisors and worked harder to put more distance between herself and Biden, she might have pulled it out.  Or maybe that’s only wishful thinking; I don’t know.

A passing thought, relevant to the many strong women mentioned this week: in her second episode of half podcast / half stand-up routine Thought Box, Michelle Wolf noted:

This is why we need more women in charge, because—I’m not saying that women wouldn’t be assholes too, but people would be way more critical of them.  People would, people would keep them in check.

The contrast she’s making, of course, is with the blind hero-worship that many heap onto President Musk, but the same can often be said for Trump as well.  If you don’t recognize that the embrace of the “grab ’em by the pussy” guy by Evangelicals, of all people, involves a metric shit-ton of conveniently ignoring inconvenient truths, then I might have to suspect you were engaging in similar behavior yourself.

But, for the rare spot of good news, America Unhinged (Zeteo is on fire this week) highlighted former NFL player Chris Kluwe’s speech at a Huntingon Beach city council meeting.  I cannot describe how glorious it is; you must watch it for yourself.  In today’s day and age, it’s just nice to see a straight white man who isn’t a fucking Nazi for a change.

Doom Report (Week 4: Mad as a Hatter? No, Madder ...)

When I was very young and just starting my first job, I was really confused when people would bitch about how much the government “took out” of their paychecks.  This was a common complaint, but I just didn’t get it at all.

See, I understood almost immediately that, while there may be two numbers on your paycheck—gross pay and net pay—only one of them is real.  One of them is just an imaginary number.  It’s not like you received the bigger amount and then someone took some back.  You never got that in the first place.  The smaller number is how much the company paid out, and it’s how much you received.  The other number?  Never happened.  Doesn’t exist.  Totally irrelevant.  It doesn’t matter.

And I bring this up because I wish I could sit down all the reporters and pundits in America right now and make them stop asking questions to which the answer doesn’t matter.  Here are a few examples of questions that people that I normally respect a great deal keep asking, and which make me want to punch them in the face.

“What can Congress do about all this?”

It doesn’t matter.  Congress won’t do anything, so it doesn’t matter what they can do.  What’s possible in some sort of alternate reality has no bearing on the one we’re currently living through.

“What do you think Republicans would say if George Soros did what Musk is doing / Biden had done what Trump is doing?”

It doesn’t matter.  We live in a post-irony reality.  Republicans have no problem saying something is unacceptable today and then doing it themselves tomorrow.  They assume no one will notice, and wouldn’t care if they did.  Remember when Lindsey Graham said “Use my words against me”? and then went barreling ahead with Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination anyhow?  Sure, it might be nice if Republicans had any shame left.  They don’t.  Move on.

“Can I get your reaction to this latest thing the Trump regime is doing?”

Unless you’re talking to Jasmine Crockett, whose reaction might at least be entertaining, it doesn’t matter.  Hakeem Jeffries and Jamie Raskin and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are lovely, articulate people who have intelligent platforms and, hopefully, still have a number of important contributions to make.  Their reacions, however, can’t do any more than make us feel that our outrage is righteous, and, I gotta tell ya: we’re rapidly getting to the point where even that is wearing thin.

So I’m getting tired of hearing this left-wing punditry version of mental masturbation.  Let’s talk about what we can actually do for a change.

Except for Robert Garcia.  He can react however he likes.  Also, I don’t generally agree with Brian Tyler Cohen’s rails against traditional media, but when CNN anchors are asking Garcia to defend his word choice rather than about the substance of his speech, I have to concede BTC might be onto something.

This week, President Musk assured us that, if he does anything sus, he will post about it on the social media platform that he owns.  This, apparently, makes his department (or non-department, as the case may be) the most transparent one that’s ever been.  “Maximally transparent,” assures Pres. Musk, adding “I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent.”

Good thing too, because every department President Musk wants to shut down is, coincidentally, investigating him: the FAA, the CFPB, the NLRB, the NHTSA, even USAID, which I didn’t even know could investigate people.  But thank goodness Musk will expose his conflicts of interest in his tweets.  One of those “transparent” tweets? CFPB RIP (I suppose the “Hellooo X Money!” part was implied.)  Well, I say “every department,” but in the case of the Dept of Education, it’s probably less about being investigated and more, as I mentioned last week, about creating a permanent underclass.  Still, I don’t think we need to worry too much: it’s not like he has six companies all receiving money from the federal government or anything.  Happily, any government employees cut illegally by President Musk can sue.  Well, assuming they can afford good lawyers; as Jamie Raskin told BTC, the Department of Justice certainly won’t be defending them.

What else?  Well, new Defense secretary Pete Hegseth had to get an emergency paint job for his house.  Still, that was only $50 thousand dollars; not nearly enough for President Musk to investigate as waste, fraud, or abuse.  And RFK Jr. was confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services, so brain worms finally have the government representation they’ve been fighting for.

Robert Garcia, at least, gives me hope that maybe the Democrats are waking up to the understanding that they can’t play nice any more.  And, maybe (and more importantly), to the idea that they need to actually listen to people’s issues rather than just talking at them about how awesome they had it under Biden.  As Ash Sarkar, a British journalist and activist, pointed out on this week’s Pod Save the UK,

... if you are in America, you have very good reasons to mistrust the FDA, to mistrust the healthcare establishment; you’ve got very good reasons to mistrust these people, and and I think that unless you understand that people are right to be angry—they are completely right to be angry, and they are right to loathe these institutions—I don’t think you can get anywhere.

Trust the Brits to understand our situation better than we do.  I think it’s because they hit it first: that people would vote for something as disastrous as Brexit seemed incomprehensible to us Americans, but I think grappling with that reality over the past several years has given the British the capacity to completely understand why Americans re-elected Trump.  They just wanted to see something—anything!—change.  Once the Democrats truly get that, they might be useful again.  Not holding my breath, of course, but one can hope.

Also note that Ash said that RFK Jr. was “obviously mad as a wasp sandwich,” which is absolutely the most brilliant assessment of our new director of HHS that I’ve ever heard.  Can’t think of a better simile for our times than that.

Doom Report (Week 3: Being Lied to Unbelievably)

This week, we find out that parts of Pete Hegseth’s defense department will stop celebrating holidays that might be interepreted as DEI, such as Black History Month, MLK Day, Juneteenth, Pride Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Days.  Apparently Hegseth said, “We’re not joking around,” and also “DEI is gone.”

Whew!  I sure am glad that our brave president has stamped out the one thing that was causing all our economic problems.  It’s amusing (a word which here means “horrifying”) to me that the wealthy in this country have been so successful in pitting working class white people against working class people who happen to be not white.  It’s easy to dismiss this as racism—I myself often have.  I grew up in the South, and nearly every working class white person I knew was racist.  So it was easy for me to extrapolate from there.  But that was long ago and far away, and I no longer believe the answer is that simple.  More Perfect Union has many great videos that challenge this preconceived notion, and most of them are by West Virginia white working class man turned activist John Russell.  Russell even appeared at the DNC this year, where he pulled no punches.  But his MPU video this week where he returned to Springfield OH to follow up on the results of the “they’re eating the dogs!” controversy really underscored this divide that shameless people like J.D. Vance have deliberately fostered.  Here’s one exchange with Russell talking to Barron Seelig (a white man) who runs a local homeless shelter, trying to dispel the persistent rumor that the Haitian immigrants have a “magic card” (yes, they literally call it that) that gives them free groceries:

Barron: He, he was getting none of that?
Russell: None of that.  But he was paying into the system.
Barron: He, my friend, is the exception to the rule.
Russell: But what if he isn’t?  What if—
Barron: What if he isn’t the exception to the rule?  Then we’re being lied to unbelievably.

I swear, my heart broke.  This is not a man who is racist.  This is a compassionate man who has devoted his life to helping people: it’s his full time job.  This is a man who has been fed the most bald-faced lies—fairy tales so ridiculous that the rich assholes who invented them couldn’t be bothered to come up with a more believable phrase than “magic card”—by people with no respect for his intelligence wanting to take advantage of his compassion.  And the fact that he didn’t try to hold on to the lie, to cling to it desperately because to let it go would crumble the foundations of his worldview, the fact that he leapt to the real truth without missing a beat ... that’s what lets me know he’s not a racist.  Real racists can’t abide having their prejudices challenged.  They can’t say, “oh, well, in that case, I’ve been lied to my whole life.” They just can’t.

We’ve also learned far more than we ever wanted to know about the DOGE Boys (on this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich proposed calling them “the Muskrats,” which I quite like), those 19 – 24 (or 25, or 26) year old mostly white (plus a few Asian-American) “men” who have been set loose by President Musk and are now “evaluating” career government workers as to whether they should keep their jobs.  Much attention has been paid to Edward Coristine, for having the ... well, big balls ... to adopt the online moniker “bigballs,” and apparently a few people find his hair cut amusing.  But I say, go back and look at that picture again: the suit jacket and shorts is really the pièce de résistance.  And also Marko Elez, who actually resigned after blatantly racist tweets were uncovered ... but also don’t forget that President Musk says he will be reinstated after J.D. Vance posted that “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people.” (And, if you want to hear someone rant about the irony of Vance standing up for a guy who wrote “normalize Indian hate” while married to an Indian-American woman and being father to Indian-American children, BTC has you covered.  It was a bit over the top for me personally, but I can’t deny he made some good points.)  I even saw a few random Internet denizens asking “how could these guys even get security clearance?” Silly rabbit: security clearances are for government employees.  The Muskrats (like the security people locking Democrats out of governemnt buildings) work for President Musk, who is acccountable to no one.  Security clearance? Schmecurity clearance!

But it makes sense that Democrats would not be allowed into our government.  On this week’s Scrict Scrutiny, Leah Littman quoted a post from President Musk:

In a tweet, he said, quote, very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud, exclamation.

I can’t decide if this means only votes for Democrats can be fraudulent, or all votes for Republican must be valid.  Probably both.

But, to quote British journalist Lewis Goodall on this week’s Pod Save the UK, this is what it is like “now that we all have to inhabit, don’t we, the burning hedge maze that is Donald Trump’s brain, and try and each day see if we can navigate our way out of it, and always fail.” To give you an idea of the cognitive dissonance under which we live, my father—someone who has been a Republican for as long he’s been alive, as far as I know, and who actually is a racist—even my father pointed out this week that opposition to tarriffs are why we broke away from the British in the first place (remember that whole kerfuffle over tea?).  Meanwhile, I have to listen to Democrats like Hakeem Jeffries on this week’s Weekly Show saying bullshit like “Perhaps we were not speaking as forcefully as necessary” directly after quoting Maya Angelou saying “People won’t remember what you say, they may not even remember what you do, but they will always remember how you make them feel.” So you’re going to fix that by telling people they’re doing fine even harder? or was it by telling them that you “understand the pain that they’ve been in economically”?  That’s just more talk, dude, and people won’t remember what you say.  (Also, I’m not sure he answered a single question Jon posed to him: there was a lot of responding to ‘what specifically will Democrats do?’ with ‘great question Jon: here’s a list of things Democrats did.’ And I was super disappointed that Jon and the producer crew didn’t make note of that in the after-show discussion.)

So the Democrats give me no hope that they are capable of keeping President Musk from running roughshod over our constituional democracy.  And what does Musk want, ultimately?  Well, according to this week’s Some More News:

The wealthiest man on the planet, getting richer every day, is really concerned about lowering birth rates, and thinks that the only indicators for high birth rates are being poor, uneducated, and religious.

And he, and people like him, will trade on those characteristics, repeatedly, to get what they want.  Which is all your money.

Speaking of religion, this week’s Election Profit Makers informs us that failed NC gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson (remember him?) is dropping his lawsuit.  He was suing, you may recall, because various news outlets outed his ... shall we say, interesting ... comments on porn sites.  Robinson said that he decided to drop the suit after consultation with “Our Savior.” To which EPM host David Rees responded:

I wish Jesus would come down and say “Keep my name out of your mouth.” Wouldn’t that be so amazing?  That would go viral on TikTok ...

And I couldn’t think of a better encapsulation of the times we live in than that.