Doom Report (Week 21: Third-World Lawlessness)

So our wannabe dictator has decided that you should not look over there, where Elon Musk is calling him a pedophile, but rather over here, where people are protesting the insanity of ICE rounding up, not criminals, but day laborers, farm workers, people showing up for court dates, and even elementary school children.  How dare people assemble peacefully to object to the government trying to arrest children! 

Now, since “here” in this case is the actual city where I actually live, I’ve chosen to take this personally.  Oh, not because of the ICE raids: it’s hard to feel singled out on that count when they’re shutting down meat packing plants in Nebraska and roofing companies in Florida.  And not because of the military either: while LA may be the first, it certainly won’t be the last, and anyway they’re ripping up the roads in DC even as I’m typing this.  Is it because they threatened to arrest my governor, or because they manhandled and handcuffed my senator, throwing him to the floor because he tried to ask a question at a press conference where noted dog-murderer Kristi Noem had just said that homeland security had come to “liberate this city from the socialist and burdensome leadership” of its mayor?  Nope—although those things are very bad.  No, I take it personally because they are creating the crisis they are supposedly responding to.

I hear people like Robert Reich and Jimmy Kimmel say “there is no crisis here.”  But that’s not true.  There’s a crisis now, because Trump and his cronies—in particular Stephen Miller—made damned sure there was one.  They sent in the National Guard without the permission of—over the express objections of, even—the governor, for which they were already on shaky legal ground, and then threw in some Marines just for fun.  The majority of them have nothing to do, and even nowhere to sleep.  Now reporters are getting shot with rubber bullets (and be sure to watch the left side of the screen to see the cop deliberately turn to shoot her), and government SUVs are threatening to run people over to elicit reactions of “violence” from the surrounding crowd.  The President of the country is publishing screeds about arresting everyone wearing a mask while the majority of mask-wearers are the ICE agents people were protesting in the first place.  And, as Jimmy Kimmel said: “Putting out a fire you purposefully start doesn’t make you a firefighter: it makes you an arsonist with a hose.”  Even Hank Green—typically known for videos about science, not politics—had this insight:

This is a situation that inevitably will create conflict.  And in my opinion this is a situation that is intended to create conflict.

(You should probably watch the whole video.  It gives a really incisive overview of the strategic aims of Trump & Vance.)

Trump said at Fort Bragg that what’s happening in California is “invasion and Third-World lawlessness”—well, it sure is, because he’s invaded us, just like a Third-World tinpot dictator.  And, even after all that, the real situation is still not as bad as he’d like us to believe.  One of my personaal heroes, Lou Wilson, is also Kimmel’s announcer, and he, as Jimmy put it, “went downtown today [June 12th] where all hell isn’t breaking loose” and showcased the contrast between the peaceful protesters and the military presence.  As Lou put it when talking about the Marines, “the general vibe I get from them is boredom and a sense of ‘what are we doing here’.”  The crowd Lou showed was pretty tame, since it was a lull in the protests; if you’d like to see a bit more active scene, Brian Tyler Cohen (who, like Kimmel, Lou Wilson, and most of the Some More News crew actually lives here) went down yesterday for the merger of the ongoing local protests with the nationwide “No Kings Day” protests where he spoke quite eloquently, as well as showing the (entirely peaceful) crowds being fired up to show their support for, you know, not being invaded by a guy with (as BTC put it) “small dictator energy” who seems to think Third-World lawlessness is what America’s been missing for the past 250 years.

But, hey: don’t believe what you can clearly see with your own eyes.  Just believe what they tell you.  Watch the video where the FBI grabs Senator Padilla and drags him out of the room; note that the first words out of Padilla’s mouth are “I’m Senator Alex Padilla.”  Yet Noem’s department later tweeted that Padilla “interrupted a live press conference without identifying himself.”  As Devon notes in his excellent breakdown of the whole incident, this makes perfect sense:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command ...
— George Orwell, 1984

But I’m not “the party.”  I’ll tell you to make your own decisions.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Zeteo had a great interview with civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis about “copaganda,” by which he means that the harms the media tends to focus on pale in comparison to the ones they never mention.  A simple example he gives: “There was one viral video of a shoplifting from a Walgreens in San Francisco of a guy on a bicycle that spawned 309 news stories around the country.  During that same period, there was not a single national news story about the far larger wage theft cases against Walgreens from stealing from its own employees.”

• If you’d like to know about the Trumped up charges (quite literally, in this case) against illegally deported, newly returned Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, both Devon from Legal Eagle and Brian Tyler Cohen did excellent videos this week.  My favorite was when the reporter interviewed by BTC (who was in the courtroom when the government presented its “case”) noted that they asked the judge to deny bail because Abrego-Garcia was a flight risk.  And the reason they gave for him being a flight risk?  Well, if the judge lets him out on bail, ICE would just pick him up and deport him!  Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up (because people would call you an idiot for saying such moronic things).

It’s a difficult week to find much hope to leave you with, but I’ll defer to the exemplar for why not all old white guys are bad: Bernie Sanders.  He put out a short video this week which he ended with these words:

If there was ever a time in American history when we need to come together, now is that time.  If we continue to fight for the basic principles of economic, social, racial, and environmental justice, I am confident that we will not only get through this unprecedented crisis in modern history, but that we will lay the foundation for a better and more just America in the future.

I can’t say I share his confidence, but, then again, if people had taken him seriously for the past 40 years, we wouldn’t be in this mess.  So I guess we have to take him seriously now.

Doom Report (Week 20: Why, Yes: More Snippets)

Well, the news has all been about President Musk stepping down.  He “left” the government, accepting a golden key (which his sidekick Trumpy, hilariously, made sure to point out has been given out to a lot of people), and headed back to spend more time tanking his stock prices.  And, even up through the middle of the week, I didn’t buy it for a second.  I was completely in accord with Jon Stewart, who said on the Weekly Show this week:

I think everybody thinks it’s—I think people are talking about it like, it’s over.  It’s not over.  That was the first—that was an official, explicit confluence of the richest man in the world and the most powerful man in the world, sitting next to each other, seeing how they’re going to divvy up the spoils and how it’s going to go down.  But it is still unofficially, implicitly—they are still together, collaborating on despoiling whatever it is, and he will still use his media might and influence to shape things, and Trump will still shower him with the spoils that go to those that are in favor of the king ...

But then shit started to get ... messy.  And I was suddenly reminded of something I said way back in Week -4:

I mean, they are two malignant narcissists: they were never going to be able to work together for long.

Remember right at the end of last year? when Musk was having twitterbattles with Bannon and Loomer over immigration?  I was surprised that the Trump-Musk alliance was breaking down so quickly.  But then it all blew over, and I was surprised that the alliance seemed to be holding.  Quite frankly, this has taken way longer than I at first anticipated, and I think I almost forgot that I was expecting it—maybe even forgot to expect it at all.  But, also I don’t want you think I’m breaking my arm patting myself on the back; after all, as Brian Tyler Cohen said this week:

... but sometimes it’s just entertaining to watch the most predictable outcome on Earth take place between the most thin skinned narcissists ever born.  No one didn’t see this coming.

So, the thing that everyone with half a brain said was going to happen happened ... not like I needed to be an oracle to make that prediction.  Seth Meyers had a pretty good Closer Look summarizing the feud (although it missed some of the juicier bits that came later), and The Daily Show also did a good summary, including the delusional belief coming from Newsmax that Trump and Musk staged all this in what they call a “4D chess move.”  This is exactly as hilarious as it sounds, not only because Trump is so dumb he can’t even read his daily intelligence briefings, but also because, despite the legions of fanboys who assume that mega-rich must equal mega-smart, Musk is also a dumbass, as Adam Conover pointed out over 2 years ago.  (Fun fact: while I’ve never met Musk personally, I actually work closely with someone who has met him, and, based on the stories of that meeting, Conover ain’t wrong.)  Basically, these idiots probably couldn’t finish a game of 2D chess, much less “4D chess,” which isn’t even a thing.

Good things to watch this week:

• In this week’s Strict Scrutiny, one of Leah’s favorite things is a New York Times article about how many children President Musk has murdered.  Now, the “favorite things” section is supposed to be where the ladies of Strict Scrutiny end the show on a more upbeat note: here are some things we enjoyed this week.  It might be a new novel they read, a new song—usually by either Beyoncé or Taylor Swift—that they like, etc.  I’m not sure this article, which references mathematician and professor of infectious diseases Brooke Nichols’ model showing that DOGE cuts are responsible for the deaths of over 300,000 people, over two-thirds of them children, counts as “positive.”  But it certainly is interesting.  (Note that Christopher Titus picked up on this story as well: his latest Armageddon Update provides an articulate take on it.)

• Speaking of Leah Litman from Strict Scrutiny, the fact that she’s got a new book out means she’s showing up everywhere these days.  Last week, I mentioned seeing her on Even More News; this week, she was interviewed by Michael Kosta on The Daily Show, and by Mehdi Hasan on Zeteo.  Both are great.

• In case current events aren’t depressing enough for you, you may want to check out More Perfect Union’s video on PFAS (a.k.a. forever chemicals).  As dispiriting as it is to know that our bodies are full of chemicals that never break down and that chemical companies have known about this for decades and done nothing, I actually find it heartening that MPU isn’t letting the avalance of current events stop them from bringing long-term things like this to our attention.

• More Perfect Union also gives us an excellent study of why young men are turning to the Right (or maybe just away from the Left?).  Basically, every news story you’ve heard about this since the election is reductive and silly; not exactly wrong, but the truth is way more nuanced, and this video does an amazing job of clarifying the situation.

Finally, our hopeful news for the week is that Kilmar Abrego-Garcia has finally been returned to the U.S., although we must temper that with the knowledge that the Trump regime immediately arrested him on ridiculous charges.  Still, if he manages to get the due process he was denied for all this time, he’ll likely end up going free at the end of the day ... and then maybe ICE will deport him somewhere else, but at least he won’t be locked up in a megaprison that many have called a concentration camp.  We have to be very liberal in what we describe as “hopeful” in these times.

Robert Reich closed this week’s Coffee Klatch with these words, and I think they’re worth closing my post with as well.

People come up to me in the street and say “How are you?”  And my first impulse is to say, “Okay.”  And then my second impulse is to tell the truth, and to say “I’m not okay.  You know, I feel like shit.”  And a lot of you feel that way too.  But know that you’re not alone.  Know that we will get through this, and know that we all, together, in solidarity, have a much greater chance of getting through this if we’re together.

Stick together, people.

Doom Report (Week 19: Congress Is Too Old for This Shit)

This week the Republicans passed Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which they actually named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.  And if you need more proof than that they’re all morons, I don’t know that I can help you.  If you want to see my personal reaction to learning this fact, you can just watch Cody over at Even More News: trust me, his reaction perfectly mirrored my own.

But, if you stick around until Cody puts his brain back together, you can hear producer Jonathan Harris say this:

So the thing passed; it passed 215 to 214, two Republicans voting no, and three Democrats voting not being alive any more on planet Earth.

Now, we often talk about how it’s a problem that all our Congresspeople are too damn old, because they’re out of touch, because they don’t understand what it’s like for the younger generations, because they don’t understand technology, etc etc.  But I think too often we forget that there’s another really good reason it’s not a great idea to have nearly half of your entire Congress being Baby Boomers (or older!): they have a tendency to die.  The 3 Democrats who have passed away since Trump’s inauguration were 72, 75, and 77, with a wide array of health problems, and the fact that all Representatives are up for re-election every two years means that they all ran for office in that state, knowingly.  And they all died of old age.  If even 1 of those 3 seats had been won by a younger candidate, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” would not have passed.  And I haven’t heard a single show talk about this other than the good folks over at Some More News.

About the only other thing of interest this week was a reporter telling Trump that Wall Street has coined the acronym “TACO”—which stands for “Trump always chickens out”—as the new, best way to make money.  You just wait for Trump to raise a tariff (or fifty), the stock market crashes, you buy heavily, then all you have to do is wait for Trump to reverse himself, sell everything, and boom! you just made a killing.  Probably the best take on this story was Brian Tyler Cohen’s coverage of the press conference.  And, this is hardly the most important part of the story, but notice how Trump gets pissed at the reporter for asking “such a nasty question.”  Dude: all the reporter did was let you know what people were saying about you.  Talk about shooting the messenger.

Top shows to watch this wee:

• Adam Conover talks about the Right Wing Nutjobs’ plan to convince more white women to have babies.  I was pleased to note that the ultimate conclusion was the same I came to back in Week 16: stop trying to keep the immigrants out.

• If you’re into conspiracy theories, Christopher Titus has been going on for a while now about how Trump’s victory last year was pretty suspicious.  This week he got an expert (a statistician from the Election Truth Alliance) and released several videos diving deep into this theory.  (If you just want to try one to see if it’s for you, I’d probably start with part 3, strangely enough.)  What I will tell you about this particular conspiracy theory:
• Don’t believe in conspiracy theories.  People believing stupid shit is how we got into this mess in the first place.
• That having been said, while all conspiracy theories are stupid, they are (sadly) not all wrong.  As I wrote once in an off-topic work discussion about them:  I always used to think that the conspiracy theory that the U.S. totally invented an excuse to get into the Vietnam War was kookoo for Cocoa Puffs.  Turns out ... not so much.  Or, if I had told you ten years ago—hell, even five—that some shadowy group called “the Federalist Society” was engaged in a 50-year plan to change the meaning of the Second Amendment and reverse Roe v Wade, I’m sure I would have sounded like a total nutjob.  Today, it’s a documentary on Showtime.
• I actually used to work on electronic voting systems.  While I can make you feel a little better and tell you that some of the stuff they discuss in this video doesn’t track for me, I’m also going to make you feel a little bit worse by telling you that a lot of it is totally plausible.
• Every time Trump and the MAGA crowd accuse someone of doing something, it’s always what they’re doing themselves.  Every time.  It’s like the dumbest version of “nuh-uh, you are!”  And they sure do accuse the other side of rigging elections a whole bunch ...
• Definitely don’t believe in stupid shit.  Also, sometimes listen to the stupid shit and work out for yourself just how stupid it is.  Or isn’t.

• I love it when BTC interviews James Talarico, the fundamentalist Christian Democrat on the Texas state legislature.  In their discussion this week about Texas mandating the 10 Commandments in classrooms, Talarico drops this truth bomb: “The Christians in Congress should be feeding the hungry, but they’re cutting food stamps; they should be healing the sick, but they are cutting Medicaid.”  You know, my friend (who you may recall as being the impetus for this whole series) is also a devoted Christian.^*  I sort of wish he were reading along here, because I’d love to hear his response to Talarico’s poignant words, but I suspect he’s not bothering.

• The Some More News crew did an excellent report on the influencer culture on the right, which included this remarkably depressing graph from Media Matters.  Those red bubbles are the Right Wing Nutjobs, and the blue ones—the ones that are few, far between, and generally much smaller—are the progressive shows.  I love that Trevor Noah and Charlamagne tha God are two of the three biggest, and it’s nice to see BTC (in a fairly small bubble in the upper left), but, as Cody notes, Some More News itself doesn’t even show up at all.  (The reason being that the minimum is 1 million subscribers, and SMN has just over 900K.  If you haven’t subscribed yet, take this opportunity to help push them over the edge.)  But the video covers the problems with the Nutjobs’ dominance in this space and why you should be worried about it.

• And, for even more reason to subscribe to SMN, this week’s second installment of Even More News features a crossover with another of my favorite political shows, Strict Scrutiny.  Their guest is Leah Litman, who’s got a new book to promote.  This is a really great confluence of judicial insight and absurdity acknowledgement; don’t sleep on this one.

Is there any reason for hope this week?  Well, Leah tells Katy, Cody, and Jonathan that she doesn’t believe the Supreme Court will support Trump’s batshit crazy legal theory on birthright citizenship, but she packs it with enough caveats that I’m not sure we can count that as good news.  Everyone is continuing to report that President Musk is stepping down, which is certainly good news if true (personally, I’ll believe it when I see it).  And there’s some reason to believe that the One Big Beautiful Bill won’t make it past the Senate, and, even it does, it almost certainly won’t make it through in its current form, which means it’s back to the House where it passed by a single vote last time.  And maybe that will take long enough that some special elections can be held to fill the seats of the Democrats we lost to the Grim Reaper this year.  Honestly, that might be the best we can hope for.

__________

* Full disclosure: I myself am not.  I was raised an indifferent Methodist, and would now best describe myself as pan-theistic agnostic.  When I don’t outright claim to be a Baladocian.

Doom Report (Week 18: What? More Snippets???)

This week marked yet another insane Oval Office meeting with a foreign head of state.  This time the strategy seemed to be to overwhelm the President of South Africa with conspiracy theories of “white genocide.”  Of course, all these theories have been thoroughly (thoroughly) debunked, but reality has never stopped President Musk’s sidekick Trumpy from telling a good story.  And no doubt President Musk himself is the driving force here.  This motherfucker: nearly 50 years of apartheid, and he’s decided white people are the ones getting oppressed.  As for Trump, I think Ronny Chieng summed it up best on The Daily Show this week: “It’s like someone told him, hey, it’s not just a genocide, it’s a white genocide.  You know: the bad kind.”  But the person who really had Trump’s number this week was Heather Lofthouse; on this week’s Coffee Klatch, she says:

I mean, watching Trump bring these foreign dignitaries in to be so horrific to them—I mean more to some than others, right?  We had Zelenskyy; we had the president of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa.  It’s not lost on me that one is Jewish and one is black.  And Donald Trump goes after them.

Let’s see ... who hates Jews and black people?  Nope; can’t think of anyone like that.

Top things to watch this week:

• On The Daily Show this week, Charlamagne tha God deconstructs the whole “Daddy’s home” bullshit that Repulicans were doing for a while there.  Charlamagne is always incisive, and this take does not disappoint.

• Brian Tyler Cohen discusses the brain drain to Europe that Trump and flunky Kristi Noem have kicked off by attacking international students.

• I’m really starting to love Ezra Klein.  Too often progressives decide he’s a “closet Republican” when he points out that we’ve overregulated ourselves.  But I’m convinced those people aren’t actually listening to what he’s saying.  This week Hasan Minhaj interviews Klein and, as usual, it’s a banger.

• Medhi Hasan interviews Molly Jong-Fast (daughter of seminal author and feminist icon Erica Jong) where they discuss just how stupid Trump is (it’s entitled “Thank God Trump is a MORON,” if that gives you a clue just how entertaining it gets).

And the continuing proof that Trump—and most of the people around him—are utterly incompetent is about all the hope I can offer this week.  Maybe it would make you feel better to know just how bad Trump’s lawyers are; my father might say they couldn’t find their asses with both hands, a map, and an ass-finding machine.  Well, Liz Dye from Legal Eagle has got you covered.  Enjoy.

Doom Report (Week 17: Even More Snippets)

Of course, the major news this week was Trump saying he would accept a $400 million plane from Qatar.  The commentary community can’t decide whether this is a dumb idea because it’s such an obvious bribe (especially given that the “palace in the sky” doesn’t remain government property after Trump leaves office), or because the plane could contain surveillance equipment to funnel national secrets directly from Air Force One to a Middle Eastern monarchy.  But I say: ¿por que no los dos?  Trump says he would be a “stupid person” to say no to a free plane, but then again he also said “I don’t know” when asked if he was responsible for upholding the Constitution.  One might note that he specifically swore to do that during his Oath of Office, but I’m sure that Trump would point out that he never actually touched the Bible during his swearing-in ceremony, which is the Presidential equivalent of crossing your fingers behind your back.  So I think we’re all good here.

There’s also been talk of President Musk stepping away from his important job of single-handedly tanking the unemployment figures by personally putting over a quarter of a million federal employees out of a job, presumably to spend more time with his plummeting stock prices.  If it’s true, then it would certainly wound my dogged meme of President Musk and his sidekick Trumpy.  But I would note two things.  First, much like the “ceasefire” in Gaza, it was announced, but it never actually happened.  And, second, even if it does happen, does it really mean anything?  Some might take it as a sign that Trump is retaking control.  But I would look at it like this: being the billionaire President because you bought the election is kinda like being a grandparent.  You get the joy of playing with the little ones, and whenever they get to be too much to handle, you just call your children and make them take the little brats back.  Doesn’t mean you’re not still sneaking them twenties whenever no one’s looking.  So I’ll take this news of Presiden Musk stepping down with several wheelbarrows of salt, thank you.

Things to check out this week:  Don’t miss Zeteo’s interview with Ras Baraka, the Newark mayor arrested by the regime this week.  Baraka is backed by the Working Families Party and other progressive orgs in a bid for governor; I wonder if Trump’s targeting of him will help him win, as it did for the Liberals in Canada and the Labor Party in Australia.  For the legal perspective on the Mayor’s arrest, Liz Dye over at Legal Eagle has got you covered.

Other good shows this week include Stephen Colbert’s examination of the Qatari plane scandal: both the initial report, where he pointed out that Trump’s claim that being up-front about taking the bribe made it okay was like saying that stabbing someone is okay as long as you do it “in broad daylight while saying the words stabbity stab stab stab,” and the follow up where he responds to Trump’s whine that all the other planes were bigger than his by noting that “Trump definitely does not have a little plane: it’s definitely at least an average American male plane.”  Also don’t miss SNL’s final Trump impression before they take off for the summer; as James Austin Johnson (speaking as Trump) says, “see you in the fall, if we still have a country.”  Fingers crossed.

Good news being few and far between these days, I’ll give you a bit that’s only slightly outdated.  Remember when I talked about Allison Riggs, way back in Week -1?  She’s the North Carolina supreme court justice who won a narrow victory over her Republican opponent and maintained the exact same narrow margin in not one but two recounts, only to have her opponent, one Jefferson Griffin, demand that the board of elections throw out 60 thousand votes—but only in Democratic-leaning counties!—due to supposed irregularities.  Well, 13 days ago a Trump-appointed federal judge threw out Griffin’s case on the grounds that he could not “change the rules of the game after it had been played” (which, duh).  Two days later, Griffin finally conceded.  As I noted, Brian Tyler Cohen was always leading the charge on this reporting, and he covered the news by interviewing both Riggs herself after the victory and legal expert Mark Elias after the cocession.  The fellows over at Election Profit Makers, being NC residents, also weighed in on the victory (jump to about 5:00 in), where they point out exactly what BTC has been warning about lo these many months: “obviously, if it worked, then we would see it all the time, everywhere.”  Mildly chilling thought, but the crisis has been averted.  After Griffin’s concession, the EPM fellows noted (following week, about 12:15 in) that Griffin’s “name is mud, and he should just be ostracized from society.”  I certainly hope that ends up being the case: it would be sad if there were no consequences for dragging out an election for six months and trying to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters, many of them serving in the military.  But for now I’ll just be happy that Riggs won, and she was finally sworn back in to her seat.

Sometimes the small victories are all the sweeter.

Doom Report (Week 16: Give Process Where Process Is Due)

Way back in Week -4, I said this in regards to the Trump regime’s plans to deport more people than there are illegal aliens in America:

Will some of those rounded up end up being Americans who actually voted for Trump, possibly screaming “wait, wait: I didn’t think you meant me!” the whole time?  Maybe.

(And then I referenced the classic “I never thought leopards would eat my face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party meme.)  Well, in this week’s Friday edition of Even More News, Katy and the gang talk about the Argentinian family who voted for Trump and now their son is detained by ICE.  If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s pretty horrific.  The son came to the country as a toddler, holds a green card, has two children who are American citizens, and also was charged with a misdemeanor in 2020, for which he served 3 years’ probation and the case was closed.  The parents discussed it like this:

The couple is now reeling from what they call a betrayal.  They say they supported Trump under the belief that his policies would target undocumented border crossers and violent criminals—not legal immigrants who made a single mistake.

“We feel tricked,” said Verdi.  “If we had known this would be the reality, we never would’ve voted for him.”

So now I get to say “I told you so.”

Except ...

Except I don’t want to.  I know a lot of people get some pleasure out of that—my father is certainly one of them—but it’s never really made me feel better.  Basically, whenever there’s the opportunity to say “I told you so,” it means that your prediction about something horrible that no one would listen to actually came to pass.  And that, in turn, means something horrible has happened.  I guess some people find that basking in having been right all along reduces how shitty you feel about the terrible thing, at least somewhat.  And, hey: if you’re one of those people, I’m not here to make you feel bad about it.  It’s a human instinct that we all have.  And I have it too, which is why I brought it up.  I’ve just found, for me personally, that my instincts in this case are faulty.  Because it doesn’t make me feel better.  Because, regardless of whether I was right all along or not, there’s still something horrible going on here.  This guy may end up having to leave his parents and his children behind, to get sent back to a country that he has no memory of.  And some people seem to be having fun telling his parents what terrible people they are and what idiots they were—many of them right there in the comments of that article I linked, in fact—but that wouldn’t make me feel better.  Yes, it’s quite frustrating to see brown people voting for a white supremacist, believing him when he says he’s going after the other brown people and certainly not you ... but, look: Trump is a scam artist.  I’ve talked before about how we shouldn’t be blaming the victims of the con man.  Let’s keep the blame squarely on the grifter.

And, it might be a bit of a tangent, but can I just ask, what the fuck is the point of all this immigration policy anyway?  Democrats keep saying they don’t want to look “weak on the border.”  Well, why the fuck not?  A couple of weeks back journalist Kara Swisher appeared on Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown.  Now, I don’t often recommend that show in this series, partially because it’s focussed on mental health more than politics, and partially because, while I agree with Mayim on many things, we diverge on the legitimacy of Israel’s actions in Palestine.^*  But politics and mental health are kind of colliding lately, and Mayim did this interview with Swisher, who I quite like, and I couldn’t help but be struck by this discussion:

I think we didn’t listen to people who live in our border states enough to—in terms of the difficulties they were facing, as much as I thought it was cruel for Southern mayors to send immigr—er, migrants up North, it does make you, like you have to, we have to figure this out as a country, to understand—I thought it was a cruel way to do it, but I understood—I have a lot of friends living in those border states—a really difficult situation.  And it’s not because immigrants are more prone to crime: they’re not; it’s not because we don’t have jobs: we do, like that need to be done; it’s that we have to, like, figure out a way to be ...

Now, most of the time when you see a quote from someone and it includes ellipses, it indicates that the quoter (that’s me in this case) cut something out of the quote.  But not this time: as you might guess from all the hemming and hawing, she just trails off and then changes the subject.  Because how else was she going to end that sentence?  Once you’ve already pointed out that the complaints of people in border states regarding crime and job loss are just straw men, you really have nothing else to talk about but racism, and I suspect Swisher just didn’t want to call out her friends.

So immigrants don’t commit more crimes than American citizens—because, you know, they don’t want to get deported—and they only “take” the jobs that citizens don’t want to do anyway.  Every time some Southern state cracks down on immigration, we see stories about construction jobs not being able to be finished and fruit rotting on the vine.  Immigrants come here, pay taxes but never get any of the services that those taxes pay for, subsidize your Social Security because they certainly can’t collect any; they don’t vote (because, again: they don’t want to get deported) so they change absolutely nothing about who gets elected, they open small businesses and contribute to the economy ...  I keep on hearing people on television say “yes, obviously immigration is a problem and we need to solve it” but I never hear them say why it’s a problem.  We’re just all supposed to know, I guess.  Well, I fucking well don’t know.  Tell me.  Seriously: if you live in a border state—or anywhere else, for that matter—and you are adamant that people coming into our country is a big problem, please try explaining why, using logic and words that you wouldn’t be ashamed to say out loud on national television.  Because, at the end of the day, much like Kara Swisher, I don’t want to believe it’s all racism ... but I’m having a hard time completing this sentence.

But, as many before me have pointed out, the cruelty is the point.  (If you’re up for a longer illumination of that point, check out the Some More News episode “The Right’s War on Empathy.”)  When you read about the Oklahoma family woken up in the middle of the night, forced to stand on the lawn in the rain in their underwear by ICE agents, with all their phones, laptop and life savings stolen from them with no clue when—or if—it will be returned, and the whole thing turned out to be a mistake because the person ICE was looking for had moved out weeks ago and had no connection to this family whatsoever ... yeah, the cruelty is the point.  (Jonathan and the Even More News crew have a great discussion on this story as well.)  When you hear Stephen Miller claim that “Due process guarantees the rights of a criminal defendant facing prosecution not an illegal alien facing deportation” and you wonder, even if that’s true—spoiler alert: it’s not—but even if it were true, how could you possibly know that the “illegal alien facing deportation” was, in fact, illegal?  The Oklahoma family were citizens.  The child with cancer who was deported a few weeks ago was a citizen.  The Argentinian son (and father) whose story started out this post was not a citizen, true ... but he was also NOT an illegal immigrant, because he had a green card.  That makes him, by definition, a legal immigrant.  Likewise, Mahmoud Khalil, who we’ve been talking about here since way back in Week 8, was also not an illegal immigrant, nor was Rumeysa Ozturk, whose story broke in Week 10.  Ozturk was finally released after six weeks; Khalil is still in jail and has missed the birth of his child.  The Argentinian family’s son is still in detention, and the Oklahoma family’s life savings still have not been returned.  But, sure, it’s probably fine to just skip the due process.

Other things that you should be aware of this week include Seth Meyers finally catching up to my last week’s view on the “30 dolls” quote on Monday’s “A Closer Look,” and More Perfect Union’s excellent explainer on how tariffs actually work (or at least should work).  The first is quite funny, and the second is quite informative.

And, finally, I continue to try to find lights in the darkness, no matter how faint.  On this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse showed a clip of a woman named Emily Feiner being forcibly removed from a town hall held by her Congressman, Mike Lawler.  Now, you might be shocked to hear that a sitting Congressperson had state troopers pick up a 64-year-old woman and bodily carry her out of a town hall meeting, but he had to: she asked him when he was going to start upholding his oath to the Constitution and refused to take changing the subject for an answer.  No choice, really: what else could he have done?  Certainly not answer the question!

But the truly uplifting part is how the rest of the crowd responds to this somewhat insane act: they start with chants of “Let her stay!” and end up just yelling “Shame!” at Lawler over and over, as if he were a Game of Thrones escapee.  If Lawler thought he was silencing opposition, it really does seem to have had the opposite effect.  And, as far as the Coffee Klatch goes, stay after the clip, because Reich and Lofthouse interview Feiner herself, and her reports of the positive support she’s received since her clip went viral reminds us all that, like her, any of us could make a difference.

And that’s something we all need to keep in mind, I think.

__________

* Nope, it’s not her stance on vaccines.  She’s actually way more reasonable on that topic than she’s generally given credit for.

Doom Report (Week 15: Snippets the Fourth)

This week marks the end of Trump’s first 100 days, which of course is a completely arbitrary landmark, but one that we’ve started making a big deal out of ever since FDR.  If you want a good summary of how Trump’s done during this period, I highly recommend Robert Reich’s video on the topic.  Reich is at his best when doing simple explainer videos such as this one.  His style is clear, his rhetoric is down-to-earth, and his facts are presented simply and without spin.  There’s bias, of course, but (in my opinion) no spin.

For a more amusing take on our current situation, I’ll refer you to Seth Meyer’s “A Closer Look” from Monday.  He’s coming off a two-week break, so he has to cover a lot of ground, and he does it with his usual panache.  When pointing out that Democrats need to do a better job of grabbing attention, he notes:

And, unlike Trump, Democrats have the benefit of not having to make shit up to get attention.  You can just shock people by reading actual headlines.  Like: “Two-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Appears to have been Deported with no Meaningful Process.”  Or: “Trump Cuts Threaten Agency Running Meals on Wheels.”  Or: “FDA Making Plans to End its Routine Food Safety Inspections.”

And that’s sort of a perfect summary within the summary.

One of the biggest new stories this week was that the US economy shrank this past quarter for the first time in 3 years.  If it does so again this current quarter, we’ll be in a recession.  And, in response to the looming consequences of his trade war with China (i.e. potentially bare shelves around Christmastime), Trump actually said “well, maybe the children will have 2 dolls instead of 30 dolls.”  And, while I watched many people this week make fun of that quote, not one of them responded as I immediately did: what about the families that can’t afford even one doll?  This was so utterly tone-deaf that it forcibly reminded me of Lucille Bluth talking about bananas.  So, if it bothers you that President Musk and his sidekick Trumpy have fired over a quarter of a million governement workers—so far—and you wish you could do something about it, there’s a charity that offers legal defense to illegally fired government workers.  Worth checking out.

Good shows this week:

• The second episode of Bowman and Bush, the showcase of Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, two former Representatives who were defeated for re-election last year by critics of their stance on the Palestinian genocide.  I’m sure it’s just coincidence that the two primaries in which they were defeated just happened to be the two most expensive primary races in US history.  They provide, as always, an excellent breakdown of what’s gone wrong with the Democratic party.

• On The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Andy Bashear, the Democratic governor of very red Kentucky.  Top quote: “Well, I think what the people of Kentucky want is what the people of America want.  They want a better life. And if you can convince them that you are working your hardest to create that better life, then they’ll give you that opportunity.”  Hopefully more Democrats learn this soon.

• Don’t miss Desi Lydic’s interview with Jon Meacham on The Daily Show.  You may recall that I talked about Jon Stewart’s interview with this historian back in Week -1, and he continues to not disappoint.  With brilliant and inspiriing quotes like “to cut mindlessly is just mindless”, it’s a great watch.  His best quote, though, was this one:

But to fight fear, you need courage.  And courage is one of the most contagious things you can imagine.

And, just in case that wasn’t quite uplifting enough—or perhaps not quite enough of the uplifting—I’ll leave you with the words of J.B. Pritzker, as highlighted on the final episode of America Unhinged, as he inspires his constituents to make their voices heard:

These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.  They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have.  We must castigate them on the soap box, and then punish them at the ballot box.

Let us hope so.

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.

Doom Report (Week 10: Searching for Answers)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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