Doom Report (Week 14: Snippets the Third)

The best video this week, once again, comes from The Weekly Show, where Jon Stewart is this time interviewing Brit Rory Stewart.  Rory is a former member of the Conservative Party, which he left in 2019—apparently Brexit and Boris Johnson were a bridge too far for him.  He has an American wife and has taught at both Harvard and Yale, so he’s not unfamiliar with American politics; in response to the same comment from J.D. Vance that drew an incisive reply from the Pope before his untimely death, Rory called it a “bizarre take” on the Bible, to which Vance tweeted back that “Rory Stewart thinks he has an IQ of 130 when it’s really 110.”  Damning with faint praise indeed.

Anyway, Rory said 3 things during the interview which I found trenchant.  The first was about the perceptions of our economy:

... I think one of the things that’s difficult to understand in the US debate is, you are all thinking, well, the reason ... Trump came to power is that the American economy is relatively weak ...  Of course, the rest of us have spent the last five years looking at you, thinking you’re an economic miracle, right?  I mean, Europe’s economy was the same size as the American economy 10 years ago.  You’re now 50% bigger than us, right?  So we look at you and we’re like, wow.  ...  Then the question is, how do you reconcile that with how somebody feels in Dayton, Ohio who’s voting for Trump?  How does this make sense?  On the one hand, the American economy is going gangbusters.  You’ve got the seven largest companies in the world.  You’ve got 70% of all global equities are in the United States, et cetera.  And yet, a lot of people feel their lives are very underwhelming, very disappointing.  They’re struggling with cost of living.

Once again, as I mentioned two weeks ago, the thing that both I and Some More News independently concluded is here reinforced by a Brit: the typical economic indicators are failing us because they’re only indicating how rich all the rich people are while the rest of us are getting screwed.

Rory’s second quote is regarding the tariff debacle, and it’s an exchange between the two Stewarts:

Rory: I mean, your listeners will understand that Trump is saying four completely contradictory things, right?  He’s saying these tariffs are going to generate a huge amount of money for the US government, right?
Jon: No more taxes.  All the money from tariffs.
Rory: Exactly.  We’re going to import all this stuff from China.
Jon: The most beautiful word in the English language.
Rory: Right.  Second thing is, it’s going to create lots of jobs, right?  That’s the opposite.  That’s, we’re not importing things from China.  We’re going to make them here.  In which case you don’t get the tax revenue.
Jon: Right.
Rory: Third thing he’s saying is, no, no, no, these are temporary things which are being used to achieve something else.  They’re being used to get a concession on fentanyl from Canada or Mexico.
Jon: Sure.  Canada’s been flooding us with over $40 worth of fentanyl over the last year.
Rory: So that’s a completely different theory.  That’s like, I’m not actually going to keep tariffs.  I’m not going to get the revenue from it.  I’m not to get the jobs from it.  I’m just using it to stop the fentanyl coming in.  And then the fourth theory, which seems to be going with China, is I’m using it to damage somebody else’s economy.  It’s like sanctions: I’m just punching them.  And I’m going to take some damage in my own economy, but they’re going to feel it more.  You know, Walmart will feel the pressure, but China macroeconomics will feel it more.

I appreciate his ability to lay it out succinctly like that, because it makes it really obvious how utterly batshit crazy it all is.

Finally, he noted this:

Rory: These are people who think, like many people did in the 1920s and ‘30s, that liberal democracy was kind of weak and indecisive and incompetent, and it failed people.
Jon: I think Musk said that empathy is the world’s biggest problem.
Rory: Yeah.  ... like you, I was talking to Ezra Klein recently, and ... one of his points is he thinks that Musk was motivated by the fact that he felt that his employees were rude to him, and that they kept asking for empathy, and that a lot of this rage with DEI and wokeism is just Musk and other tech bros, feeling that the people who work for their companies were not obedient enough to the great leader.

Compare this with my discussion of “swim teams” and what my CEO said.  Spot on, I say.

Please also note that Rory Stewart is the former president of GiveDirectly, which is an amazing charity that you should go give some money to right now.  Especially if you’re worried that the disappearance of things like USAID is causing real harm to people in other countries—which it is—this is a good way to help combat that.

If you need a shorter video to watch, let me recommend Hank Green’s video this week on the closing of the Loan Programs Office.  While Hank is primarily known as a science communicator, sometimes science and politics intersect—particularly when there’s an anti-science regime in control of the government.  Well, anyway, the LPO is the government program that gave Tesla the loan to build its first electric car factory, and DOGE just shut it down.  I would once again point out that the far right has lost its sense of irony, but I think Hank is probabaly more correct when he says “it’s textbook ‘I got in and I’m going to close the door behind me’.”

Finally, let us all heed the wise words of Kat Abughazaleh in her video this week about the regime’s disturbing tendency to disappear people (including small children).  Kat is a researcher on the far right, a contributer to Zeteo, and, more recently, a candidate for Congress in Illinois.  In this great breakdown of the dangers posed by ICE, she notes:

This is scary, it is not normal, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.  The road to atrocities is paved by people telling you you are overreacting.

You’re not overreacting.  People told us we were, before the election.  Now, I hope—I pray—they’re seeing that we weren’t, in real time.

Doom Report (Week 13: Snippets the Second)

This week, the major story (at least in my view) has been that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump regime disappeared to El Salvador in direct defiance of a court order.  The court order, by the way, only prevented him from being deported to El Salvador: if the regime weren’t utterly incompetent, and they really wanted to deport him, they could have deported him to literally any other country in the world.  But they are utterly incompetent, and they actually didn’t mean to deport him: they picked him up completely by accident, thinking he was Venezuelan.  And of course if they had just deported the 200 Venezuelans to Venezuela, poor Abrego Garcia would be stuck in a country where he had never been and had no knowledge of, but the regime wouldn’t have run afoul of the law.  But the regime, in its brilliance, decided to send the Venezuelans to El Salvador, where our taxes are paying the “world’s coolest dictator” to put them all in prison, despite none of them being convicted of a crime ... or even spending a day in court.  Thus, Abrego Garcia ended up in the one country in the world where he wasn’t allowed to be deported.

So the issue went to court, where the regime admitted that Abrego Garcia was deported by mistake.  And then it went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled 9-0 (an amazing thing in and of itself) that the regime had to bring him back—or, as Trump put it, “it’s interesting because we won that decision nine to nothing in the Supreme Court, and, uh, if you listen to the news, you wouldn’t know that.”  Nope, you sure wouldn’t know that thing you just said that totally isn’t true.  So then the regime immediately changed their story and started claiming that they had done it on purpose because he was a dangerous gang memeber.  Don’t miss Stephen Miller’s self-righteous, condescending press conference: when he asks “what do you think would happen to him if he came back to this country?” and a reporter responds “he could be with his family.”  Rolling Stone also has a great article covering all the regime’s lies.  Meanwhile, the courts are now contemplating holding the government in criminal contempt, and a court of appeals has denied the Trump regime’s request to allow them to interpret the word “facilitate” to mean “sit around and do nothing despite the court order.”

Again: we are paying the dictator of El Salvador to keep all these possibly innocent people incarcerated.  Which is a sweet scam for him, because, as Mother Jones reported, Bukele actually cut a deal with MS-13 to stem the flood of violence and let him credit for it, which is how he was able to come to power.  Then he in turn gives incarcerated MS-13 members special privileges, including just letting a bunch of them go.  Some of them end up in Mexico, where they get picked up and deported to the US for outstanding crimes here, and could possibly end up in court testifying to the whole devious scheme.  Trump is doing a Bukele a favor (though) by sending those guys back to El Salvador so that Bukele can let them go again and start the whole cycle over.  And then Bukele makes us, the American taxpayers, pay for the whole scam to boot.  Slick motherfucker.

Good videos this week:

• Legal Eagle has the absolute best summary of the Abrego Garcia case, including a later update.

• On this week’s Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Heather McGhee.  She tells some fascinating stories of institutionalized racism, including a few I didn’t know about.  Do you know what two major groups of workers were initially excluded from receiving Social Security?  It was agricultural workers and domestic labor.  Probably just coincidence that those were the two sectors with the highest percentage of black workers.

• If you’re still buying the bullshit that Trump is “just joking” when he talks about running for a third term, you should watch BTC’s analysis of Steve Bannon’s comments on Politically Incorrect. (To his credit, Bill Maher calls him out on this stance pretty hard.  While Maher is, in general, a terrible human being with terrible views, he’s still on the right side of history every now and again.)

• America Unhinged had a pretty good show this week, where they cover RFK Jr saying just the most disgusting (and abjectly false) things about people with autism—which my autistic child watched and just laughed at the ignorance of—and also Republican Lisa Murkowski admitting that she’s afraid of speaking out against the current regime.

On this week’s Pod Save the UK, Nish Kumar once again put something into perspective for me.  He pointed out that he had learned in school that the Great Depression led inevitably to the rise of the Nazi party.

... I spent so much time at school, studying the Wall Street crash and the depression in the 1930s, and how that had huge implications and led directly to the rise of the Nazi party.  It was such an important event for me, like the ways that that happened, and the lack of regulation around financial markets.  Then, in 2008, to see that happen again, and to see, over the next sort of 15 years, that not lead to the kind of sweeping changes that brought in the postwar consensus and led to the establishment of the NHS and the welfare state in the United Kingdom; to sort of instead see that all we’ve seemed to have learned from that is, that inevitably leads to a rise in far right politics, is really a great source of despair for me.

Again, the British perspective (and their no doubt superior educational system) helps a lot.  As a stupid American, I had never actually thought of the Great Depression as a worldwide event before, but now that I have, it all makes perfect sense: a severe economic downturn makes people desperate, and distrustful of their leaders, and ready to listen to anyone who tells them that the immigrants and the brown people and the Jews (or the Muslims) are the problem, and promises them a better life if they’ll just hand over all the political power.  And they do.  And apparently the only difference between 1929 and 2008 is that, in the latter case, it took twice as long before the people elected a right wing lunatic.  And also that Hitler seems to have been a lot smarter than Trump.  But it’s the fact that we as a people seemed to have learned nothing in the intervening 80 years that really depresses me.

In the end, I’m trying to take comfort in the wise words of Heather McGhee this week, who reminds us to stay ready so we don’t have to get ready, and always know what time it is.

Doom Report (Week 12: Snippets the First)

I’m starting the process of moving the Doom Report to a less weekly format.  So this week I’ll give you a few nuggets, but save the rest up until there’s sufficient momentum for a more nuanced report.

This week, the great sage Benny Johnson gave us these indelible words of wisdom: “Losing money costs you nothing.”  I mean ... except for all that money you lost.

Hunh.

Maybe Benny’s not so bright after all.  Happily, there’s a solve for your financial woes: just follow Trump’s social media and he’ll tell you when to buy and sell.

Good videos this week:

• Legal Eagle has an in-depth look at the tariffs, from how stupid they are, to where the numbers come from, to why they’re most likely illegal.  Probably the best video of the week.

• Some More News has a great explainer on the economy.  Great mostly because they echo what I said over a year ago: the numbers the Democrats are using to demonstrate how “good” the economy is are not working any more.  Refreshing to know there’s a school of thought where people actually understand that.  But the video is also good because they quote Robert Reich—I love it when my sources of information overlap.

• Speaking of Reich, he had a good (and very quick) video on how President Musk is reducing his tax burden.  Not yours, of course: just his.

• More Perfect Union had a great video on the Bernie/AOC rallies.  Also featuring John Russell, who is my favorite MPU contributor.

• Another MPU video, only slightly less entertaining, but probably more informative: why we have a major shortage of fire trucks.  An excellent couterexample next time someone is trying to convince you of the benefits of privatization.

We’ll talk more next week, I’m sure.

Doom Report (Week 11: Point and Counterpoint)

Look, I know I’m not the first person to notice this, but I think that the primary reason these people are so terrible is just plain lack of self-esteem.  Much has been made of how cold and indifferent the fathers of Trump and Musk were, and there’s something to that.  But you gotta expect terrible behavior from the old white men.  It’s when you see it in gay men, or Latines, or black men (Byron Donalds had a moment this week), that you have to wonder, what went wrong in these folks’ lives?  The women are often the most baffling to me: Trump hates women, other than the exact moment he’s sleeping with them (and, honestly, I’m not all that certain even then).  He certainly has no respect for them, and is happiest when surrounded by men who feel the same.  For instance, this week’s profile on Brian Glen by The Daily Show includes a clip of Glen denigrating liberal women for not wearing make-up or shaving their legs: “That is not embracing what it means to be a woman” (he actually utters these words, out loud, into a camera).  So I often have to scratch my head at the folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene (Glen’s girlfriend, as it happens) who fawn over Trump and his ilk.  But the good folks over at Have I Got News For You (US version) have cleared it all up for me.  I’ve watched their exposé on “Mar-a-Lago face” 3 or 4 times now, and every time I’m stunned all over again.  There are 3 “before and after” photos of prominent Republican women, and the contrast is ... well, I think “shocking” undersells it, but it’s the best word I can come up with.  Look at that third example (I won’t spoil it for you as to who it is) and tell me how much that woman had to hate herself to do what she did to her face.  Amber Ruffin’s reactions are also priceless, but just sit with it for a bit.  These people are all compensating for something, and in the meantime we’re all going to suffer for it.  Horribly.

If you only have time to watch one video this week, I highly recommend this week’s Armageddon Update.  Unusually, this one is not done by Christopher Titus, but rather by his wife Rachel Bradley, and it is quite possibly the best one I’ve ever watched.  Rachel attacks the bizarre Evangelical belief that an adulterous misogynist (you know, the “grab ’em by the pussy” guy) was somehow “sent by God.”  I encourage you to watch the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

Please, stop calling it Christianity, because we all know this ugly festering open sore was not sent by God.  Christianity was my grandma Jean, who was still delivering Meals on Wheels to people just months before her death at 89.  Meals on Wheels: another food program cancelled by Trump.  Right after he canceled kids’ cancer research.  You know, just like Jesus.

Preach, sister.

If you have time to watch two videos this week (and can handle something more like an hour-long show), I cannot recommend enough Jon Stewart’s Weekly Show this week.  He interviews Michael Lewis, who is the author of both Moneyball and The Big Short, two books which have I not read that were made into remarkably entertaining movies, given their supposedly dry subject matter.  He’s written a new book called Who Is Government? where he (and other writers such as Sarah Vowell and W. Kamau Bell) profile various civil servants.  His conversation with Jon starts with him telling an amazing, unlikely story about a government worker that you will barely be able to believe ... and then he tells another one.  And another one.  He started on this journey when the first Trump administration fired their transition team.  President Obama had assembled a team to brief the incoming administration, and that team had spent six months preparing for the briefings, and Trump just ... never did it.  He told Chris Christie that “you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”  (Side note: this is the basis of another Lewis book, The Fifth Risk, which you can read a rather long excerpt from on The Guardian’s website.  Even for a guy like me who thought he understood just how awful Trump is, it’s pretty shocking.  At one point, Trump referred to raising money for the transition team as “You’re stealing my fucking money!”) So, now, when we look at President Musk and Trumpy running roughshod over the civil service, it makes so much more sense: they have no idea what these folks do.  Not in a figurative or hyperbolic sense—they literally have no idea, because they never bothered to learn.  They were supposed to, and there were people set aside to help them do so, but they just ... didn’t.

I also like the tie back to Stewart’s interview with Ezra Klein, which I mentioned last week.  Since then, I’ve discovered that a lot of progressives (including Francesca Fiorentini from America Unhinged, who I normally agree with) really don’t like Klein.  I suppose because he’s pointing out places where the progressive movement goes wrong, and it can sound a lot like what the crazy right-wingers say.  Personally, I don’t have any problem looking at idiocies in our bureaucracy and talking about how to improve them.  And to imagine that Klein is somehow a far right plant or a secret MAGA-head is just willful ignorance of what he’s actually saying.  But Lewis spoke of him as a counterpoint:

So I’m just guessing here, but I bet if we—you and I—wandered through the government looking for bright spots, like, things that worked— Ezra’s looking for things that don’t work.  And there are plenty of things that don’t work.  But if you are looking for things that work, you’d find that over and over, that—and it’s where there’s some distance from the political process.

Exactly.  There are plenty of things that don’t work, and we should never shy away from trying to fix those.  But there are so many things that really do work, and tearing all that down in order to fix what’s broken—assuming we even believe that lie any more—it’s just not practical.  Or sane.

If you weren’t already scared to fly because of what the regime has done to the FAA, More Perfect Union’s video on the TSA may do the trick for you.  I was especially amused by the guy who voted for Trump and is now regretting it.  Look, I know we’re supposed to be showing empathy for these folks and celebrating them for waking up and realizing their mistake.  But, honestly: you vote for a billionaire—specifically one who was actually sued for anti-union comments—and then are surprised he came after your union?  Dude, you need to wake up before you vote.

Of course, the big news was that Trump’s placed tariffs on just about every country in the world, including those those inhabited exclusively by penguins.  Well, except for Russia.  No tariffs for our old pal Putin.  In more hopeful news, President Musk lost in Wisconsin.  To be clear, he wasn’t running in Wisconsin: billionaires don’t run in elections.  They just buy them.  So perhaps more accurate to say that he failed to buy the election in Wisconsin that he really wanted.  Of course, he wanted it because he’s suing the state of Wisconsin because it won’t let him make as much money as he wants to.  But there are other reasons why it was an important victory.

Another bright spot: Cory Booker broke Strom Thurmond’s filibuster record, which seems fitting.  He spoke for 25 hours and 5 minutes, and none of it was reading the phone book, or Green Eggs and Ham, or any bullshit like that.  He talked about our nation’s problems, and his constituents, and his fears for our future.  It was a purely symbolic gesture that changes nothing ... and yet it’s the most backbone we’ve seen out of Democrats (who aren’t Bernie Sanders, or AOC, or Jasmine Crockett) in months.  So maybe it will change something after all.

We can hope.