Doom Report (Week 52: Don't Look Back in Anger (as much as possible))

Just after the last presidential election, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who caused me quite a bit of surprise (and not a small amount of despair) because it indicated to me that he had voted for Trump.  And this, I felt, was disastrous.  So disastrous that it engendered first a single blog post, then an entire series, and now there’s a Substack, and that’s what you’re reading right now.

And now—or at least in a day or two—we will have had the current regime in power for a year, and so it seems like an appropriate time to look back on my original conversation, and its attendant blog post, and revisit the dismissals my friend made, and the predictions that I made, and see which ones were right.  (I’d also like to note that all the Doom Reports now exist on Substack, despite many of them predating the creation of that account, so you can read them all there if you’re so inclined.)

Now, the one thing that I didn’t mention about my friend, perhaps because I was scared of “outing” him to anyone who happens to know me personally, was that he himself actually works for the government.  (I suppose I’m no longer concerned about the outing: I don’t have too many friends who work for the government, so if you know me decently well you almost certainly now know who I’m talking about.  But it’s probably fine.)  And I could also mention that our birthdays are about 4 days apart, right around election day (in 2024, election day was actually on my birthday).  So it’s traditional for us to call each other right around that time, which is how the whole conversation about Trump happened in the first place.  This past November, however, we did not call each other.  I hope that doesn’t mean our friendship is fractured, but I will happily admit to being an utter coward when it comes to finding out.  I certainly don’t have any desire to call him up and say “I told you so”—I’ve never found that particularly satisfying anyway, and it certainly wouldn’t be constructive in this particular situation—but I also know that that if I called him and he didn’t seem to think his assessment was wrong, I would be devastated.  I’m not sure our friendship (which has thus far lasted over 40 years) could recover from that.  I think he probably does realize I was more right than he (although certainly not right in all respects), but I’m just too chickenshit to test the theory.  And why didn’t he call me?  I can’t say.  I don’t even have a wild guess.

The only contact I’ve had with him was in July, when things were sufficiently bad that I felt I needed to reach out and ask if he was personally impacted.  So I sent a text saying “Have you survived being DOGEd?”  He allowed that he had, though he now had to come into the office every day.  And, since “the office” in this case was about 4 hours away from his house, I suspect this was not a pleasant change.  Still, he made out much better than many other government workers.  But I didn’t say that.  I texted back that I was sorry to hear it, and that it sucked, and I sent some frowny-face emoticons.  I commiserated.  Because, at the end of the day, he’s still my friend, and while he may have been wrong about ... well, just about everything in that original conversation ... he still didn’t deserve getting jerked around in his employment situation.  So when I go through all the things that he said, and that I said, and talk about which of them were good predictions and which were shit, I hope that you don’t think that I’m trying to make my friend look a fool, or that I’m in any way happy about being (mostly) right.  No, this is just a reflection on the things we said, and an exploration on which were prescient, and which were hyperbolic.

Things My Friend Said:

• Calling Trump “fascist” was over-the-top rhetoric.  Do I to have offer any proof that this myth is busted?  Fine: here’s a recent New York Times article that breaks it down pretty well.  Here’s a former Yale professor who wrote two books on fascism explaining why he lives in Canada now.  Or here’s an Australian perspective from a University of Sydney professor with a lot of thoughtful research and a balanced viewpoint.  Or maybe it’s sufficient to point out that there is a Wikipedia article called “Donald Trump and fascism” and, while the article itself doesn’t definitively take a position one way or the other (“teach the controversy,” as the conservatives are fond of saying), the mere fact that it exists at all is sort of telling.  There is no “Bill Clinton and fascism” article, nor a “Joe Biden and fascism” article, nor a “Barack Obama and fascism” article.  Heck, there aren’t even any “George Bush and fascism” or “Ronald Reagan and fascism” articles.  Just Trump.

• Trump didn’t do any of this crazy stuff in his first term, and he doesn’t really mean all the crazy shit he says.  Well, he certainly seems to mean it now, and he’s certainly getting a bunch of it accomplished.  Everyone said he was just “trolling” when he talked about taking over Greenland.  Now NATO is sending troops there because, as the Danish prime minister put it, “there is a fundamental disagreement because the American ambition to take over Greenland is intact.”  (In regard to Trump not being able to reach this level of insanity on the first go-round, I offered this quote: “If the arsonist can’t burn your house down because he can’t figure out to work the flamethrower, that’s good, but you still don’t let him keep the thing, right?”  I know it’s bad form to quote yourself, but I’m still pretty proud of that one.)

• He’s not actually running on Project 2025.  Well, whether we still want to believe the bullshit he spewed about not knowing anything about it or not, it doesn’t much matter: as a recent Some More News breakdown makes clear, Project 2025 is getting done, and quite effectively at that.  As the Project 2025 Tracker (referenced in the SMN piece) notes, out of 320 total objectives, 129 are already achieved, with another 68 in progress.  Which it rates as 51% complete in just the first year.  As of time of writing: if you’re too slow clicking that link, it may well be more by the time you look.

• There are checks and balances.  Sigh.  This was really the most disappointing argument, in my book.  I’m not entirely sure who my friend imagined would be providing those checks and balances, but I’ve seen barely any.  The Republicans in Congress have provided essentially zero, and even the Democrats have caved more often than stood up.  The lower courts keep handing him losses, sure, but that doesn’t matter because the Supreme Court hands him win after win.  And the cabinet?  It’s full of two types: sycophants like Bondi, Hegseth, and Duffy who are so busy sucking up that they just don’t have time to do any checking or balancing, and puppetmasters like Bannon, Miller, and Vought who are there to steer Trump around the checks and balances.  And maybe a few people like Vance and Rubio who still haven’t decided which camp they belong to.  It’s telling when the best note of hope that people like Robert Reich can come up with is that Trump is demonstrating to us how all the checks and balances are broken.

• We have too many government agencies anyway, so losing some is fine.  What’s “funny” about this one is how naïve I was.  I was worried about Trump causing deaths by allowing more pollution and stopping action on climate change.  (And let’s be clear: he did do those things as well.)  But that sort of slow, methodical approach to mass murder was way too inefficient for our current regime.  No, the coup de grâce was actually letting Elon murder USAID, which probably killed about a million and a half people while simultaneously stealing over $2 billion from the pockets of American farmers.  Look, no one’s saying that there’s not too much bureaucracy in the government.  But the reason that “move fast and break things” works for Silicon Valley is that the broken things are just corporate profits.  In D.C., the “things” that they’re currently breaking are often people’s lives.

• If the worst comes to pass, we’ll just vote him out in 4 years.  Well, maybe ... or maybe “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”  And, even assuming we still do, between the gerrymandering attempts and the threats to invoke the Insurrection Act, those elections might well be less than pristine.  Overall, this is a pretty fucking scary time to be counting on voting people out of office, and that’s not even considering how much damage could be done before we ever get a chance at an election.

So, overall, I’m going to declare that 0 for 6 for my friend’s predictions.

Things I Said:

To be fair, I wasn’t batting 1,000 on my prognoses either.

• Among the people that were definitely not going to stop him, I listed the following: Elon Musk, RFK Jr, Herschel Walker, Steve Bannon, and Laura Loomer.  Now, Bannon and RFK have certainly fallen into the categories of puppetmaster and sycophant, as I described above, and Musk has definitely done his share of damage, though he did have at least one minor fit of rebellion.  Meanwhile, Loomer hasn’t been nearly the influence that I thought she’d be (although some disagree with that assessment), and Walker got shipped off to the Bahamas.  I’ll call this one 50-50.

• Among the agencies I listed as potential targets of the administration were the EPA, the Department of Education, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, and the Strategic Climate Fund.  Well, the EPA hasn’t been dismantled, but many of its regulations have been rolled back.  The Department of Education certainly has been gutted, aided by another of those Supreme Court wins.  The LIHEAP didn’t survive the One Big Beastly Buttfuckery, and while I can’t find any info on the Strategic Climate Fund specifically, Trump has taken the US out of 66 international climate change agreements, so I don’t hold out much hope for any particular fund.  I think I get to count this one as confirmed.

• I said we’d get (at least) 2 years of people dumping pollution everywhere, 2 years of cruelly rounding up immigrants, 2 years of women suffering from abortion rights rollbacks, 2 years of state-sanctioned hate crimes against trans people, and 2 years of horrible prices caused by disastrous economic policies.  Well, after 20 years of decreases, our fossil fuel pollution rose 2.4% in 2025.  We’ve not only spent the year rounding up immigrants, we’ve deported them to torture prisons, detained US citizens, and outright killed 36 people: 32 who died in custody, and another 4 just plain gunned down.  At least 12 women have died due to abortion bans, and we’ve seen trans people feel less safe and less financially secure, trans women sent to men’s prisons where they are inevitably abused (despite courts saying this was illegal), trans people banned from the military, and a war started on gender-affirming care.  And the economics?  The tariffs cost over $1,000 per family last year, the national debt added $1 trillion in under two months, prices are higher just about everywhere, and there are a host of other economic problems.  Honestly, I radically underestimated the problems: I never considered invasion of Venezuela, extradition of green card holders, obsession with getting a Nobel prize, or an inverted food pyramid that tells us to eat more saturated fat.  I think I get to count this one too.

• I predicted that my grocery bill would go up in 2025, and that I’d end up with nearly every local grocery store owned by the same megacorp.  Well, according to my spreadsheet, I spent $800 less on groceries in 2025 vs 2024 (maybe due to having to get smarter about what we spent on, though that won’t make me any less wrong), and the Albertons/Kroger merger didn’t find new life under Trump, so the majority of my local stores are (still) owned by two megacorps.  But either way I’ve got take the L on this one.

So, maybe 2½ out of 4?  Could have been worse.

Putting It All Together.

I noted that I’ve never found “I told you so” particularly satisfying.  My father does.  He lives for it.  From what I could gather from his work stories, being able to tell his bosses that he had told them so was the greatest joy he ever got as an employee.  Me, not so much.  What I wrote at the end of this post that I’m reflecting on today was:

And, look: I hope I’m wrong about that. I would be very pleased for you to be able to tell me “I told you so.”

And I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you that I really would be much happier today if this post were all about how wrong I was and how paranoid I was being and how Trump wasn’t nearly as bad as all the “deranged liberal loonies” said he would be.  I’m not sure I can imagine a time in my life when I would be happier to have been wrong.  But, sadly, the only way us liberal loonies were wrong was that we didn’t imagine it would be worse.  We didn’t think it could get this cruel.  This callous.  We thought the courts would provide a meaningful check.  We thought that at least some of the Republicans in Congress wouldn’t willingly surrender their power.  We thought public outcry would be greater.  We thought it would be bad, and we’d all regret it, and then we’d be able to recover.  Now ... I’m not sure that I believe we will recover.  Last week, I mentioned Kim Lane Scheppele’s guest spot on Strict Scrutiny.  Scheppele is an expert on autocracies, and the coiner of the term “Frankenstate” (meaning a government which appears democratic on the surface, but is functionally an autocracy).  Here’s a quote from her segment last week:

One thing that we know about countries that have had these episodes of autocracy is that it’s extremely hard to come back, because the supporters of these autocrats are still around.  They burrow in.  They occupy choke points.  They can still win elections.

Now, ostensibly she was talking about Brazil, whose own Trump-like figure, Jair Bolsonaro, is now in jail (you may recall that Trump threw a bit of a tariff hissy-fit over that fact).  But it’s impossible not to feel like she could be describing our own future.  Note the sober look on Melissa Murray’s face after Scheppele finishes speaking; we know what she’s thinking well before she uses the phrase “cautionary tale.”

This week The Weekly Show is back, and Jon Stewart is interviewing Fareed Zakaria.  At one point Fareed says:

And that’s the tragedy.  We had been so reliable that the world never thought—that our allies never thought—they needed an insurance policy, they needed to hedge against, you know, against our becoming crazy rogue imperialists.  And now they do.

You may remember way back in week 14 when Jon interviewed former UK cabinet minister Rory Stewart.  One quote of his that I didn’t use in that Doom Report was this one, where he discusses running through economic and military scenarios:

But nobody then, nobody 10 years ago ever said, well, wait a second: are you not taking a big risk here?  Because what happens if the US was no longer a reliable ally?  It was inconceivable.  I mean, literally nobody in that room said, well, hold a second.  You’re going to put yourself completely dependent on buying US defense equipment.  What happens if a president comes in who says he’s going to switch off the software on the F-35s?  ...  I mean, it’s maybe a silly point and obvious to listeners, but we had no doctrine.  When we went to military training or we looked at strategy, we had no doctrine for what to do if the US became an adversary.  We literally don’t have any plans for defending Greenland because it was inconceivable.

Well, I bet the UK government has scenarios for that now.  I bet every country in Europe—not to mention Canada, Mexico, Australia, and so many others—is figuring out what to do if the US ceases to be the good guys.  Because they can’t trust us to do that any more.  And trust, once lost, is hard to regain.

All of which is to say that maybe the Republicans will lose the midterms, despite everything Trump can do to stop that.  And, if we get that far, they’ll likely lose the presidency in 2028.  But that doesn’t mean that everything goes back to the way it was.  Not by a long shot.  And, hey: not everything should go back to the way it was, because the way it was was really good for billionaires and pretty shit for everyone else.  But I’m still kinda hoping—fingers crossed and everything—that we will go back to the rule of law, and the checks and balances, and a government whose job it is to help people rather than screw them over.  Or murder them in the streets.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• Jon Stewart’s episode of The Daily Show this week gives us a very moving assessment of our current situation.

• On this week’s first episode of Even More News, border czar Tom Homan says “We’ll stop shooting people in the face when people stop complaining about getting shot in the face”, Trump says to Iran “Stop killing innocent protesters! that’s my thing!”, and head of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell says “I’m being investigated for cost overruns on a new building; now what’s the price on that $200 million ballroom these days? $400 million? cool ...”  And the second episode this week was pretty damn good too.

• Another good week in review from Adam Kinzinger.

• Another interesting thing from The Weekly Show: at one point, Jon says: ”... it’s worse than oh he’s blowing past—it’s why I wasn’t so bothered by, oh he fired some inspector generals.  When he blew past norms, I kind of soft-pedalled it.  This is a different thing that is now being accomplished.  This isn’t about norms.  It’s exposing the weakness of the enforcement mechanisms of the laws that a powerful executive just decides to ignore.”  You may recall my disagreement with Stewart on this point way back in week 2 (because that’s how long ago Trump did that), and I continue to think he’s missing the point.  Technically he could have ousted the IGs the “right” way; it just would have taken longer.  But the reason he did it practically immediately (week two, for fuck’s sake) was that he needed the freedom to fuck everything up without anyone whinging about it.  So the “blowing past the norms” was a clear warning sign, and probably one that we should have taken more seriously.

• Another amazing “In My Opinion” segment from Charlamagne tha God this week.  His thoughts are primarily on MLK Day, but, as always, they’re far-ranging and trenchant.

• SNL is back!  This week’s cold open has pretty solid impressions of Rubio, Vance, Noem, Hegseth, and of course James Austin Johnson’s ever-excellent Trump.  The Weekend Update was also pretty funny.

• Josh Johnson has this amazing facility to make you laugh and cry, sometimes even at the same time.  His video this week discussing the shooting of Renee Good was a particular gem.

• On this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich ends with one of my favorite MLK quotes, which is extremely apropos today: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  Worth remembering.

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I don’t often mention Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me in these reports, mainly because the facts you learn from them are always quick snippets.  Useful, especially if Peter Sagal and his panelists can find some humor in them, but usually I focus on things with more context.  On this week’s episode, however, one of the facts I learned was so stunning that I had to chase it down and find my own damn context: Bari Weiss, given control of CBS News along with instructions from whichever Ellison owns it now to “Fox-’News’-ify this bitch up!”, has managed to lose a million viewers in the 3 months she’s been in charge.  Now, I know I just gave a whole long speech about how, even if we do feel like the country’s finally waking up to the dangers, it’s still going to be a really horrible next few years—or decades—but I have to say I found some comfort in this story.  The reason that the news sucks so badly these days is because it’s all about advertising.  That’s the reason the news makes you feel sad and scared and angry: because the people that run the news figured out that negative emotions drive engagement long before “the algorithm” came along.  And it’s now (finally) the reason that all the good journalists are abandoning the “legacy media” for YouTube and podcasts: Mehdi Hasan and Alex Wagner and Katie Phang and Joy Reid and Don Lemon and Jim Acosta and so many more.  But you know the one good thing about it?  These “news” shows can’t survive if they lose the public’s trust and attention.  So maybe other companies will take the hint that trying to convert the “normal” news into the right-wing nutjob news isn’t profitable.  Because, if there’s one thing that right-wing nutjob billionaires care about more than their right-wing nutjob philosophies, it’s their bottom lines.

Except Elon Musk.  That motherfucker is just nuts.

Doom Report (Week 51: What Dies There)

Born in 1988, Renee Ganger was, according to her family, “extremely compassionate,” as well as “loving, forgiving and affectionate.”  She went on youth missions to Northern Ireland, and then proceeded to attend one of the 3 colleges that I myself attended.  By all accounts she made a much larger impression than I did in my single year of attendance; in contrast, Renee won a prize from the Academy of American Poets for one of her poems.  She married a man and had two children; after they divorced, she married another man, Tim Macklin, with whom she started a podcast, and also had another child.  Macklin died in 2023; Renee’s father said of her “she had a good life, but a hard life.”

Then Renee married Rebecca Good, finally becoming Renee Nicole Macklin Good, which was her full name on the day when, after dropping her now six-year-old son off at school, she and her wife encountered a group of ICE agents in her new home city of Minneapolis.  A bit of yelling ensued; the agents were yelling at the couple, and Rebecca was yelling right back.  At least one agent yelled at them to get out of the car; at least one other agent yelled at them to just drive away.  Renee, however, did not yell: she responded to the aggressive officer outside her window, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”  In response, the agent shot her 3 times in the face, both through the windshield and through her open driver side window as her body went slack, her spasming foot hit the accelerator, and her SUV went past the agent, who had ample time to pronounce “fucking bitch” and walk sedately down the road.  A nearby doctor tried to give Renee medical aid, but was prevented from doing so by the ICE agents.  The murderer stuck around for a while, then was hustled off; later, masked federal agents cleared out his house.  He’s now apparently in hiding, along with his wife.  She, by the way is a Filipino immigrant.  Our vice-president, JD Vance—whose wife is the daughter of immigrants—exhorted people to thank this man for murdering an unarmed mother of three.

This woman was not a brown woman: she was a white, Christian, suburban mom.  This puts the poor, beleaguered MAGA crowd in a tough spot: how to paint her as a villain?  They tried calling her a domestic terrorist, but that didn’t seem to stick.  Jesse Watters, ever the brave one, hit upon pointing out that she was a lesbian, and had “pronouns in her bio!”  I’m actually a little surprised that there hasn’t been more coverage of Good’s LGBTQ identity.  I mean, I understand why people aren’t talking about it: because it shouldn’t matter.  It shouldn’t.  But I have to wonder if it does.  The murderer’s father described him as a “conservative Christian”; was he aware that the two women he was harassing were married?  And did that influence his decision on whether or not to shoot?  Surely it’s hard to believe that it didn’t color his “fucking bitch” pronouncement.

But what’s really weird to me is that all the coverage—right and left—seems to have devolved into whether Renee was trying to run the man over, and whether he might have been suffering from PTSD because he had been dragged by a vehicle in another, earlier violent ICE incident (the regime’s use of that excuse is how the murderer was identified, by the way: it amuses me how they’re constantly blathering on about how the masks are crucial to protect their agents’ identities, but then they just go and doxx this guy themselves).  But does any of that matter?  She was an unarmed civilian trying to leave the scene.  Even if she had been a professional agitator (she was not), or a domestic terrorist (she was not), or even if she was being aggressive and yelling at the agents (she wasn’t) ... does any of that justify murdering her?  Hell, even if it were true that she was intentionally trying to run him over (she absolutely wasn’t), then you might see how the first shot, through the windshield, could be explained, but those other two shots? through the side window as she drove past?  How could that possibly be an okay thing for a law enforcement officer to do?  To shoot into a moving vehicle containing a second person and a dog and a dashboard full of stuffed animals?  I’m not sure what they could say that would make me think this is okay, to make me believe it was justified.  I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything at all.

Good coverage of the murder from just about all quarters this week: Ronny Chieng on The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert’s monologue, Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue, Seth Meyers in “A Closer Look”, Christopher Titus’ Armageddon Update, the Even More News crew and guest, Robert Reich and W. Kamau Bell on the Coffee Klatch, Adam Kinzinger’s reaction, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey interviewed by BTC, Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan interviewed on Under the Desk News, Alex Wagner on What a Day, Colbert’s Late Show interview with Chris Hayes, V’s Under the Desk interview with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg reacting on BTC, Jamelle Bouie’s call to abolish ICE, Owen Jones providing the UK perspective.  I recommend them all, but I know it’s a lot to watch.  The best short summary is probably the Kimmel; if you need something angrier, try Titus; for the best in-depth coverage, I would take Even More News.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• Another good week in review from Adam Kinzinger.

• Over on Legal Eagle, Spencer the Scowl Owl covers all the ways that our invasion of Venezuela was illegal.

• This week’s Strict Scrutiny covers the Venezuela thing as well, but I thought the more chilling segment was their interview with Kim Lane Scheppele, who you may recall as being the author of the fish soup metaphor that I quoted Kate Shaw’s quoting of back in week 27.  Here she’s comparing our Supreme Court to the “captured courts” of autocratic regimes around the world.  She says: ”... when people think it’s a captured court, they think that it will stop looking like a court or acting like a court ...  But the thing about captured courts is that they don’t rule in every single case for the government they’re trying to defend, because they want to preserve their appearance of independence.  They want to preserve the fiction that they’re still actually operating in law rather than politics.”  I found the whole “appearance of independence” thing a bit chilling, and it’s something to remember as the Supreme Court is set to rule “against” Trump on birthright citizenship and maybe even tariffs.

• Mehdi Hasan also breaks down the invasion of Venezuela.  He points out that, while it seems like everything has worked out great at the moment—Maduro captured, no American lives lost, we appear to be in charge of their oil—these things don’t last.  “I remember watching—I was in a BBC newsroom in 2003 when the Saddam statue fell, and a colleague turned to me and said, ‘Haha, you were wrong about Iraq: look, it’s all great.’  How did that work out?  You know, give it time.”

• On Runaway Country, Alex Wagner talks to Jon Favreau and Ben Rhodes (of Pod Save the World) about Venezuela.  At one point they play a clip of Marco Rubio saying, in regard to the money we take from the sale of Venezuelan oil, “we will control how it is disbursed, in a way that benefits the Venezuelan people, not corruption, not the regime.”  What balls!  Apparently we will save the Venezuelans from the Venezuelan corruption, but I wonder who will protect them from the American corruption?

• Adam Kinzinger has some stirring words on the anniversary of January 6th.

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Overall, I had hoped to have more time to talk about the Venezuela thing, especially the part where every single person feels a need to point out that Maduro was a bad guy, and that our military did a great job, before then moving on to talking about the illegality.  Much as with the ICE shooting, I wonder why we feel the need to focus on that part.  Even if Maduro was a horrible dictator (he was), and was guilty of many human rights abuses (he was), and even if the feat that Delta Force accomplished was an insanely intricate and flawlessly performed mission (it was), and even if we end up getting all their oil and it makes our gas prices go down (it won’t), none of that makes what we did okay.  “He was a bad guy, so it was okay that I kidnapped him and stole his country’s oil” is no more sensible a statement than “she was a lesbian, so it was okay that I shot her in the face.”

Which feels like a sour note to end on, but honestly I can’t do better right now.  As bleak as many of the previous 50 weeks have been, this one has managed to be bleaker.  The murder of an innocent woman has made us forget about the illegal invasion of a sovereign nation, which in turn made us forget that the Department of Justice still hasn’t released the Epstein files that they are legally mandated to make public.  And that’s just the top three debacles: the thing about “flooding the zone with shit” is that, eventually, everyone is drowning in shit.  Right now, I’m just trying to keep my head above water.  And/or feces.

Doom Report (Week 50: Beginning a New Era?)

So I guess we’re at war with Venezuela now?  Kat Abugazaleh gives us the full progressive take on the situation, while Adam Kinzinger gives a more conservative position, supporting the military for a job well done while wondering WTF the regime is trying to accomplish.  I tend to lean more towards Kat than Adam, personally, though I will concede that Maduro was a terrible person who certainly didn’t deserve his position.  But, as even Kinzinger wonders, will Trump install the properly elected president of Venezuela? or will he just take over the government and rape it for all the oil he can get away with before his term is up?  I suppose we’ll find out ... though I suspect we could make a pretty good guess right now.  (Also, between writing this and posting it, I think we already found out.  Sigh.)

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger has another good crop of videos this week: the one I linked above, why Russia isn’t winning the war in Ukraine (despite what Putin would have Trump believe), and, as always, the week in review.

• Christopher Titus gives us a year-end update, with his usual panache and venom.

I plan to do a proper look back on the horrors of Trump’s first year at some point, but of course the year isn’t quite over yet: that’ll come in about 2 weeks.  So perhaps I’ll have time to put something together in that time.  In the meantime, something good actually happened this week too: while most of New York was celebrating the ball drop in Times Square, Zohran Mamdani was being sworn in as the city’s first Muslim mayor, youngest in nearly a century, and possibly the most progressive since Fiorello La Guardia was elected in 1934.  If you haven’t already, listen to his inauguration speech.  His opening words: “My fellow New Yorkers, today begins a new era.”  And I think we could all use a little of that action.

Doom Report (Week 49: Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000?)

During the holiday season, many people like to watch It’s a Wonderful Life.  I don’t care for it personally—too sappy for my tastes—but I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum.  Although I’d like to note that critics at the time agreed with me—the story of how it became a beloved Christmas classic is a fascinating one.  But certainly Robert Reich really likes it, as he’s noted many times in various videos and on the Coffee Klatch.  And, this year, he’s offering us a video where he uses the Frank Capra classic to illustrate the problems with wealth inequalities.  He focuses on a scene where George (played by Jimmy Stewart) challenges the assumptions of the greedy Mr. Potter, who views the ordinary citizens of Bedford Falls as resources to be exploited.  And Reich, turned black-and-white and digitally inserted into the scene, interrupts to make comments such as this one:

George is right.  When working people get a shot at a decent life and at better jobs with higher wages, they have more money to spend.  That spending grows the economy and helps businesses thrive, creating more jobs.  It’s a virtuous cycle.

and this one:

Here’s the point that Mr. Potter never understood.  Even wealthy people like him do better with a smaller share of an economy growing rapidly because everyone is doing better, than with a bigger share of an economy growing slowly because so many are barely making it.

Geez.  No wonder that, as the story of the film I linked above notes:

... the FBI and Senator McCarthy’s paranoid House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) even investigated It’s a Wonderful Life for allegedly having communist leanings.  They viewed the film’s protagonist George Bailey’s story to be rife with subversive tendencies such as demonising capitalist bankers, and including subtle attempts to magnify the problems of the ‘common man’ in society.

I guess McCarthy would be pretty damned happy with our situation today.  (Certainly, he would have been a Trump fan, what with Trump having been mentored by McCarthy’s old buddy Roy Cohn.)  The capitalist bankers are still occasionally demonized, I suppose, but that doesn’t matter, since they can make as much money as they like, crash the economy with no consequences, break the law without facing any accountability, and receive government bailouts that they use to pay executive bonuses.  And the problems of the common man?  Why, even the Democrats seem to be stuck in a mode of trying to convince the common man that they just don’t understand how good they got it.

And, look, I’d actually love to blame this all on the greed of the billionaire class, but I don’t think it’s that simple.  I think a big part of it is something I just heard from Gary Stevenson this week, even though it’s from an interview he did earlier in the year.  The channel he did it on decided to repost it as an end-of-year treat, and I’m so glad they did: Gary’s plain-spoken way of breaking down the complexities of our economic situation never fails to enlighten.  And, in this interview, right near the beginning, he points out that a big part of the problem is that economists are all from wealthy backgrounds.

So, what kind of people go into that world?  If you actually look, economics PhD is the least social-class-representative PhD in the whole country.  And it’s obvious why, because if you’re poor and you’ve got a very good economics degree, you’d be kind of mad to do a PhD, because you can make so much more money in the city, right?  And then the end result is—it drives me mad—I did this two-year masters at Oxford; you know, it’s like a hundred posh people in a building talking about how’s the economy working while inequality is going like that, which means that their lives are becoming unbelievably richer, poor people are struggling to eat, and they’re just saying everything’s fine.

Not saying that excuses the behavior, of course, but at least maybe it helps explain it.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger has a whole slew of really great videos this week.  He discusses Trump’s successful takeover of 60 Minutes, he explains why the regime dropped most of the Epstein files on the day before Christmas Eve, and of course the usual excellent week in review.

• Jimmy Kimmel did a holiday message for Channel 4 in the UK.  I thought it was quite lovely.

• Josh Johnson has an extremely hilarious take on the recent Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles.

This wasn’t technically last week, but I just got around to watching the episode of Alive with Steve Burns where he interviews Daryl Davis, a black man who’s made something of a career of sitting down and talking with KKK members.  Now, Steve’s new podcast (which I’ve mentioned before, back in weeks 35 and 36) has had some great guests, and the conversation is always interesting, but this one is just incredible.  I had never heard of Davis before, but trust me when I tell you that his story is insane, fascinating, and inspirational all in one.  Apparently he’s on a mission to deconvert the entire Klan, one member at a time, and he’s making a serious dent.  Here’s how he explains how he does it:

So, you you’ve heard the saying “one’s perception is one’s reality.”  Okay, so, that’s true.  Whatever somebody perceives becomes their reality.  Even if it’s not real, it’s their reality.  Keep in mind you cannot change anyone’s reality.  All right?  What is real to them is real to them: you you cannot change it.  And if you try to change somebody’s reality, you’re going to get resistance, because they believe whatever it is they think is real and you’re going to get pushback, okay?  What you do is, you offer them a different perception, or perceptions, plural.  If they resonate with one of those perceptions, then they will change their own reality because their perception becomes their reality.

And if a black man convincing over 200 Klansmen to hang up their robes isn’t a message of hope, then I don’t know what is.  Happy holidays.

Doom Report (Week 48: An Alcoholic's Personality)

This week, Trump gave a rather unhinged “emergency” speech, wherein he lied so often that, as Seth Meyers noted, the poor CNN fact-checker was out-of-breath trying to address them all.  It spurred Christopher Titus to release an extra Armageddon Update which not only addresses that, but also contains a rather touching tribute to Rob Reiner.  Because, you know, another thing Trump did this week was to act like a stereotypical psychopath by pretending other people aren’t real, and/or like a stereotypical old man by ranting in public without really caring who he offends, by claiming that Reiner was murdered because of his “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.  Which is only not victim-blaming because of the technicality of the fact that Reiner wasn’t killed by a fan of Trump.  I mean, I don’t think Reiner’s son is a fan of Trump, although he may want to consider joining up, since he would no doubt get a pardon that way.

And don’t even get me started on the ridiculous “release” of the Epstein Files on Friday.

Other things you need to know this week:

• I’m not sure Adam Kinzinger’s week in review is quite as good as usual, but I’d still recommend you watch it.  It’s only about 10 minutes and has a pretty good summary of most of the week’s news.

• If you want good coverage of the insane Susie Wiles’ Vanity Fair interview, I recommend the Pod Save America video on the topic.  Or, for a quicker, punchier take, try Seth’s “A Closer Look” segment.

• More Perfect Union has a brilliant video on Sam Altman’s “just trust me bro” strategy towards AI (and his other ventures as well).

• If you want to see our fucked up situation through some foreign eyes, I recommend the year-end wrap up of the UK Have I Got News For You.  The best bits of British politics include several amusing digs at our bloviated commander-in-Cheetos.

• Along those lines, Pod Save the UK also has a year-end wrap-up.  This one is less of a clip show and more of a look back on the year’s events.  Less US stuff, but, if you have an interest in the parallel slide into autocracy in the UK, this is a good one to watch.

This week’s SNL cold open was pretty good: as recreations of deranged Trump speeches go, it’s tough to beat James Austin Johnson.  Few others can capture the madcap leaping from subject to subject like he can, and he gives his most unhinged performance to date, to match Trump’s most unhinged speech.  But honestly this week’s “Weekend Update” segment is probably the better one; it’s a sad state of affairs when even SNL is giving us better news that the so-called “traditional” media, but, with CBS already captured and CNN soon to follow, that’s the world we live in.

So it’s tough to feel hopeful at this point in the cycle.  Texas will move forward with its gerrymander, because that’s the Supreme Court we have.  Of course, one possible outcome there is that the Repubs overestimate their recent gains with Latine voters and end up creating a dummymander.  After all, Latines might not be as eager as last time to vote for the party that keeps rounding up all their relatives and disappearing them.  Honestly, the most hopeful development I’ve seen lately is that Miami elected a Democratic mayor for the first time in nearly 30 years, and she (also Miami’s first female mayor ever) won by nearly 20 points.  The hold the Repubs have on the system is fragile, and growing more so by the week.  I don’t expect they’ll go down without a fight, but hopefully it’s a fight we’re all willing to participate in.

Doom Report (Week 47: Democracy Is Messy)

This week, FIFA—yes, the sports organization—invented a peace prize so that they could give it to Trump.  Which they did, while Trump tried to convince everyone that he had no idea he would win it.  The prize itself

has been described as everything from zombie hands pulling the world down into hell to a tangle of fingers reaching up to tickle a hanging ball.  Not that either one is particularly appetizing.  But, as many pointed out this week, the party that has ridiculed liberals for decades for giving children participation trophies just invented a fake prize to give to their 80-year-old man-baby to keep him from whining about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize.  Maybe this will stop the whining.  But I’m not holding my breath.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger keeps his streak going with another great week in review.

• Even More News has probably the best coverage of Trump’s “participation peace prize,” although Seth Meyers did a pretty good job as well.

• Another pretty good cold open from SNL this week, featuring one of Trump’s planeside press conferences.

• Zohran Mamdani gives us a very short, but beautifully explained, breakdown of your rights when ICE comes around.

• Robert Reich asks the question that the rest of the media is studiously ignoring: is Trump okay?

• A surprisingly detailed breakdown of the competing takeover deals for Warner Brothers (and what it means for us) comes from an unlikely source: Jim Biederman, one of the producers of the US Have I Got News for You, explains it to fellow producer Jodi Lennon, co-host Michael Ian Black, and guest Faith Salie (perennial guest on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me) on this week’s Have I Got News for Your Ears.

• Seth Meyers comments on Trump’s giving himself an “A+++++” on the economy.

• The Weekly Show gives us a year-end wrap-up with guests Jon Favreau (from Pod Save America) and Tim Millier (from The Bulwark).  It’s entertaining and fairly well-balanced (Favreau, of course, is a former speechwriter for Obama, while Miller is the former communications director for Jeb Bush).  Well worth watching.

• The Coffee Klatch also has a year-end wrap-up.  Not quite as good as Jon Stewart’s, but Robert Reich and company do a nice job of putting as good a spin as possible on the current events.

• I love it when More Perfect Union completely ignores the hellscape created by the Trump regime and highlights instead the hellscape created by corporate greed.  Wondering why grocery prices are all over the place, and definitely not lining up with what your neighbors are paying?  This video explains it.

Speaking of More Perfect Union, there’s another brilliant video this week, again featuring John Russell.  This time he’s touring Italy, discovering how Italian co-ops work.  Unlike those in America, co-ops in Italy produce food and car parts, power infrastructure, and even run municipal sanitation services.  They step in when big corporations fail, turning struggling businesses into successful ones.  The workers become voting members who get to elect their own boss.  Russell’s point here is that this strategy could work here in America, particularly in rural communities, where corporate America is uninterested in doing anything beyond raping the land for its natural resources.  So, if you believe that our national experiment in fascism is a temporary one, and yet you despair that there’s no way to fix our systemic problems, it can be quite encouraging to know that many of our biggest issues are solved problems, if we just look to other parts of the world.  Especially when you learn that Italy’s laws which enshrine the rights of co-ops in the country’s constitution are a direct result of the defeat of fascism there, the parallels are practically inspirational.  As John says at one point:

Democracy is hard.  It’s messy.  But people choose it again and again, for a reason.

And that’s the best hope I can offer you this week.

Doom Report (Week 46: Fill the Damn Plate)

This week, Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan eulogizes his late father.  His words are touching, but they also serve to remind us of what we should be striving for every day; the quote that jumped out at me was this one:

When I remember my late father, I don’t remember a man defined by a single place or nationality or tradition.  I remember a man whose life was lived across continents, who saw himself as a bridge between worlds and made no apology for that.  He was a man who happily defied the lazy questions thrown around these days by politicians and pundits: are you British or are you Indian? are you Western or are you Eastern? are you secular or are you Muslim?  He was all of the above.  He was proof positive that our identities are not settled, not static, not singular.  You can be a European, British, Indian, Hyderabadi, Shia, Muslim Londoner, as my father was.  You don’t have to choose in a truly multicultural Britain.

This rather forcefully reminds me of a Daily Show interview that Trevor Noah did many years ago with Dominican-born American writer Junot Diaz.  Trevor notes that he came to America at 6, and became a citizen at 20.  “Like, how did you find that balance,” he asks, “between going ‘I’m from the Dominican Republic, but I’m also American’?”  To which Diaz responds:

What really helps is to think of it not as some weird, bizarre buffet where you only get one damn choice.  That’s, like, a sinister, sadistic buffet.  How ‘bout: you get to choose more than one thing? that you could literally be Dominican, and from New Jersey, and there’s no conflict.  Fill the damn plate, yo.  Fill the plate.

I think of that metaphor sometimes when I look at the people currently in charge of our country.  Trump and his MAGA crowd are like people who only put one thing on their plates, or, if they get daring and put two or three, they’re not allowed to touch.  And I remember that quote from Junot Diaz, and I think: what a sad, sinister, sadistic buffet.  They don’t even know how much they’re missing out.  They’ve always eaten the same thing, for every meal, every day, for their whole lives, and we’ll never be able to convince them that there’s other foods out there, other experiences, other simple pleasures.  And we mustn’t let them make us forget the variety and diversity that is what made them so mad in the first place.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Another excellent week in review from Adam Kinzinger.

• Legal Eagle’s military contributor, Spencer the Scowl Owl (a former Marine and JAG officer) had two important videos this week, both talking to Senator Mark Kelly: in the first, he talks about Trump’s threats against the Senator, and the second covers the illegal boat strikes.

• Adam Kinzinger also weighed in on what’s all the fuss about murdering “drug dealers”.
• Heck, even SNL got in on the action, with this week’s cold open seeing a pretty good Hegseth impression from Colin Jost, as well as some references to Trump’s increasing tendency to drift off to sleep on camera.

• Speaking of which, the Even More News crew has some even more pointed thoughts on Sleepy Don.

• In an emergency update, the ladies of Strict Scrutiny deliver a blistering rebuke of the latest Supreme Court debacle.  Personally, I was utterly unsurprised by the decision: this court has proved several times over that they can justify any travesty of justice thrown at them, as long as it serves Trump’s agenda.

This week’s Weekly Show was an interview with two historians, Joanne Freeman of Yale and Allen C. Guelzo from the University of Florida.  And it’s an excellent discussion about immigration, and who has been considered white (or not) throughout our history, and you should totally watch the whole thing.  But I think my favorite part comes (as it often does) during the producer segment at the end.  Often the zinger is delivered by producer and fact-checker Gillian Spear, but occasionally Jon himself gets in a good one.  This week, when Gillian points out that Trump keeps claiming that he doesn’t know who he’s pardoned, Jon responds:

By the way: what a six-year-old he is.  Whenever he gets confronted, his responses are either, “I don’t know,” or “you’re stupid!”  I have children.  I’m very familiar with these dodges.

So your note of hope for this week is to remember that, as scary as these people are, they’re basically just toddlers playing at fascism.  Those of us who have had toddlers know what terrifying tyrants they can be, but I think we can stand up to toddlers.  Hopefully.

Doom Report (Week 45: The End of the Boomer Dominance?)

If you need a pick-me-up—and after a week like this one, who wouldn’t?—you can see how incompetent Trump’s DoJ continues to be by watching this week’s Strict Scrutiny, or Legal Eagle’s detailed summary by Anna Bower.  Or, as Jimmy Kimmel put it this week:

Sometimes you get hung up on how evil they are; you forget they’re also dumb.

Strict Scrutiny also has an interview with Jill Hasday, who quotes an interesting Washington Post piece from 1922, when Alice Paul, one of the leading suffragettes who had helped pass the 19th Amendment two years prior, posited what gains women would achieve over the next century.  Spoiler alert: none of her predictions have come to pass.  The toughest one was that she believed that America would have had at least one woman president by that time; personally, I’ve decided that the misogyny in our culture runs so deep that we’ll only see a woman president when both parties run women candidates.  Gut-wrenching, and I want to be wrong, but it seems like that’s the way we’re headed.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger give us another great week in review, including some important perspectives from his experience as a military veteran.

• Two of my favorite journalists who have left the “traditional” news media for “new” media, Mehdi Hasan and Alex Wagner, combine forces to talk about how the information landscape has been fundamentally broken by the right-wing nutjobs.

• Hasan Minhaj interviews Ken Burns about his upcoming documentary series on the Revolutionary War.  The echoes of current day events are ... unsettling.

• Devin Stone over at Legal Eagle provides a litany of “Every Illegal Act Trump Committed in 2025 (So Far)”, which is exactly what it says on the tin.  It’s a slog to get through, but that’s sort of the point: the fact that there’s so much—and just in the first 10 months!—is worth remembering.  Don’t let the fatigue make you forget.

• But if that Legal Eagle video is too long for you, you could cut to the chase with Devin’s much shorter warning that authoritarianism is already here, which contains this heartbreaking quote: when Devin wonders if what we’ve been seeing is a constitutional crisis, he answers his own question by saying “Well, yeah, it was ... but the constitutional crisis is over.  We lost.”

I sort of led with hopeful this week, so I’ll end with informative.  This week, Hank Green explained our gerontocracy and the reasons behind it—and why it may soon be coming to an end—which was quite enlightening.  There are also echoes of the Scott Galloway interview I quoted in week 42: Galloway says people under 40 are 24% less wealthy than the population as a whole, and people his age (Galloway is, as I will be next year at this time, just over 60) are 72% wealthier, whereas Hank puts it this way:

... boomers have around $80 trillion compared with the wealth of Gen X’s 45 trillion.  That’s a big difference.

Speaking as a Gen Xer myself—an elder Gen Xer, granted, but a Gen Xer nonetheless—I feel that almost viscerally.  Because, as close as Galloway and I are in age, that borderline between Boomers and Gen X lies between us, and it feels like an interminable gulf.

Then Hank talked with pollster Joshua Doss, and they try to guess what comes next.  Here’s what they come up with:

Hank: It’s very hard for me to imagine that, like, the immediate next thing that will happen will not be a populism of the left that is quite powerful.
Josh: It’s the only clear bucket to me.  I don’t know what the next bucket that would arise would be ... I don’t know what another clear bucket would be other than that one.

So, there you go: informative and hopeful.  Just a bit.

Doom Report (Week 44: We Don't Have to Settle)

Here in Week 44, it’s not like we’re surprised any longer by how insane everything is.  And, yet, still: this week was pretty fucking crazy, even by Trump regime standards.  This week, a guy who had a journalist chopped up with a bone saw partied in the White House, several hardcore MAGA supporters called out the President for accusing someone of getting remarried too soon, Marjorie Taylor Greene called it quits, Trump called a female reporter “piggy,” the real estate lawyer masquerading as a US attorney got caught forging documents, the bill to make Trump do the thing he said he totally wants to do but won’t do without a bill making him do it which he told everyone to vote for just so he could claim that’s the only reason they voted for it passed, and Trump called for the execution of several members of Congress.  Luckily, the Even More News crew was on top of all that shit and provided not one, but two, excellent breakdowns of all the lunacy.  Is MAGA turning on Trump?  I remain skeptical.  Stil, it’s comforting to know that, after all this time: they’re still incompetent.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Another indispensible week in review from Adam Kinzinger.  The heights of insanity this week are covered in just the right amount of detail.

• Legal Eagle has an excellent explanation of how Khanna and Massie finagled the discharge petition to force the vote on releasing the Epstein files.  It was way more complicated—and clever—than I understood.

• Robert Reich has a quick video this week on the hilarity of the CEO of McDonald’s complaining that no one has enough money to buy their crappy products any more.  One of the most frustrating things about late-stage capitalism is that it’s not only terrible for working people, but, in the long term, the billionaires are screwing themselves as well.

• On this week’s Weekly Show, Jon interviews Sherrill and Spanberger, the governors elect of New Jersey and Virginia (respectively).  The two women, who, it turns out, are old friends, are surprisingly optimisitic, but also honest in their assessment of the challenges they face.

If you need some hope this week, I invite you to listen to Kat Abughazaleh, who spoke at the Lincoln Memorial this weekend.  Here’s a taste:

So, to our representatives: we don’t want any more excuses.  We don’t want to hear that impeachment is unpopular, because it’s not.  And guess what? You’re a leader.  You better lead.  We don’t want to hear that you’re worried about your reelection.  Our lives are more important than your campaign.  And you don’t deserve our votes: you earn it.

But definitely go watch the whole thing; it’s inspirational.  And, as she concludes:

Good things are possible, and, no matter what anyone on TV or on the Hill tells you, we don’t have to settle.

Preach on, sister.

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

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

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

Other things you need to know this week:

• Another pretty good week in review from Adam Kinzinger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mic.  Dropped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other things you need to know this week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hell.  Yes.