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.