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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doom Report (Week 6: Gilded Oldies)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doom Report (Week 5: The Fourth Realm?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What can Congress do about all this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doom Report (Week 3: Being Lied to Unbelievably)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doom Report (Week 2: Hurtling towards Rock Bottom)

We seem to be in the business of continually reaching new lows these days.  The most amusing was Trump’s claim that he had “turned on the water” in California.  He’s apparently moved beyond taking credit for things that he didn’t do and moved on to taking credit for things that never even happened.  As Leah Litman put it in this week’s episode of Strict Scrutiny, “America is officially in its finding out era.”

Strict Scrutiny is another great show that I recommend people listen to; while I’ve never been a huge fan of the flagship Crooked Media show (Pod Save America), some of their other shows (such as Scrutiny and Pod Save the UK) are pretty good.  Also in this week’s show, Melissa Murray proposed that, under Trump, “DEI” was being redefined as “dicks, ex-husbands, and incels,” which I thought was a pretty trenchant observation.

I didn’t even get a chance to talk last week about their previous episode, where they covered the Supreme Court’s response to oral arguments in the Texas pornography case.  The concensus of the conservative judges—who seem to be the only ones who matter any more—was that technology is advancing too fast, so I guess I that means we don’t need to follow the Constitution any more.  You know, historically, I’ve been very opposed to slippery slope arguments, because they are often used by the Right to justify opposition to popular positions with completely ridiculous, made up consequences (remember how gay marriage was going to lead to people marrying turtles?).  But the Right has actually made me rethink this position.  If Trump 1.0 was the first step on a slippery slope, we seem destined, inevitably, to break our necks at the bottom of the incline.

Also from this week’s Strict Scrutiny episode: buried in the spectacle of pardoning 1600 insurrectionists, Trump also pardoned the first police officer in DC convicted of murder while on the job, as well as his pal who helped him cover it up.  Why?  Because they were white cops convicted of killing an unarmed black man, of course.  Just in case you were still, somehow, doubting that Trump is all in on the white supremacy.

On the Weekly Show this week, Jon Stewart interviews Chris Christie.  As an anti-Trump Republican, Christie is worth listening to: much of what he says you want to cheer, because he hates Trump, and much of what he says has you yelling at the screen, because he is after all still a Republican.  On the topic of why Trump won (or, rather, why Kamala lost), he dovetails nicely with what I’ve also been saying:

And I think strategically, for her, the big mistake was, she didn’t distance herself from Biden.  And when 72% of the country (as the last poll the last weekend) said the country is on the wrong track, not separating yourself from the person who was president when it went to 72% wrong track, is a politically fatal mistake.

Fair enough.  Brian Tyler Cohen has said (and many seem to agree) say that the Democrats were “punished for high prices.” Bullshit: they were punished for trying to gaslight the American people.

But Christie then goes on to talk about how Americans feel like their government is failing them, and he cites the LA wildfires and the air traffic controllers.  Now, it’s not clear if this interview took place after the horrific plane crash on Wednesday, or if Christie was just being eerily prophetic here, but what struck me at the time was how both of his examples about how the government is failing could be construed to be the fault of the Republicans.  Of course, this never occurred to him (because apparently we live in a post-irony society).  On the topic of the wildfires, I completely agree that some of the funding decisions made by LA Mayor Karen Bass had some impact on the fires, but it’s hard to argue that the 100MPH winds weren’t the major factor.  And why do we have such insane winds? could it be because the Republicans have been waging a deliberate, decades-long campaign to convince us that climate change was a hoax when we all know—can see with our eyes, for fuck’s sake—that it’s very real, and endangering property and lives?  As for the air traffic controllers, I’m trying not to leap to judgement on the recent crash, even though it’s very tempting to do so when Trump forced out the head of the FAA (because President Musk didn’t like him), fired the entire aviation security advisory committee (which had been around since the 1989 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie), and then tried to convince us that DEI initiatives instigated under Obama were responsible, even though they somehow were fine for 15 years until Trump managed to get into office again.  But we don’t even have to blame Trump here: Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers back in 1981—wiping out over 11 thousand jobs in one fell swoop—and the industry never recovered.  More Perfect Union all but predicted an incident like this in a video they did on the topic almost a year ago.

But Christie goes beyond not seeing the irony in pointing out a bunch of deficits in the government that his own party is almsot certainly responsible for (or at least responsible for making worse).  He and Stewart get into a pretty spirited debate over DEI.  Christie is, predictably, against it.  He says that the American people feel like DEI forces companies to choose unqualified candidates just because they’re women or minorities—note that he won’t quite so far as to claim DEI actually does this, merely that people have this perception.  But Stewart points out that all DEI does is throw open the pools of candidates to people who traditionally would have never been considered.  Christie somehow manages to disagree with this perspective and then tells a long story about how he, when he was a US attorney in New Jersey, specifically sought out candidates of color because he recognized his office was “the whitest, male-est office I had ever been in, in my life.” And yet somehow, when he says it, that’s not DEI ... man, I hate to tell you, Chris, but if you were doing that today instead of 20 years ago, someone would have reported you to the DEI snitch line by now.  (As a side note, it never ceases to amuse me that the Trump regime’s poster child for the “meritocracy” that’s going to replace all the evil DEI initiatives is Pete Hegseth, a straight white man utterly devoid of merit.)

And the takeover of the government continues.  The OPM is sending out memos written by Project 2025 authors, President Musk is getting in on the act by recycling his buyout offer to Twitter employees, now directed at government employees, and federal workers are suffering an existential crisis.  Still, that’s nothing compared to Mike Pompeo and John Bolton (and others) having their security detail eliminated when there are still credible threats on their lives, just because they spoke out against Trump.  On this week’s Coffe Klatch, Reich had another take on this:

I think the Press gets this wrong, Heather: even the mainstream press are are describing this as retribution for people like Fauci or Bolton who have crossed Trump in the past, but, if you understand this in the terms that I’ve been giving you—and that is the consolidation of power—what Trump is really doing with all of these punishments is warning people who are currently in the government, currently officials, anybody who is potentially standing up to him, he’s saying to them “Don’t try to cross me, because if you do I’m going to make your life miserable in the future.  If for example you do something that causes you to receive death threats, ... I’m going to take away your security detail, or I’m not going to give you a security detail ...” In other words, this is this is all about consolidating power.

But, honestly, I think that might be a distinction without a difference.

Trump also fired a bunch of Inspectors General, without providing the requried 30 days’ notice to Congress.  Lindsey Graham was on CNN saying, sure, it was “technically” illegal, but Trump has the authority, so he wasn’t worried about it.  Weirdly, John Stewart, on Monday’s Daily Show, ended up agreeing with Graham.  Stewart’s point was that we shouldn’t be freaking out over everything Trump does; we need to save our outrage for the really bad stuff.  And this was a thing he did because we elected him, not because he’s a fascist.  But I think Stewart (uncharacteristically) misses the mark here.  IGs were invented to provide independent government oversight in the wake of Watergate.  As one acerbic Internet observer wrote, “Welp, if you’re the manager of a bank and you plan to rob the bank, firing the security guards is step one!” So I respect the point Stewart was trying make, but I think it’s a bit bigger deal than he intimated.  Also, being in agreement with Lindsey Graham pretty much always means you’ve gone wrong somewhere.

I think Stephen Colbert summed it up best this week with the story of his first car:

First car I ever owned was a 1978 powder blue Pinto.  I bought it from my brother Billy for a dollar, and I got ripped off.  But what she lacked in acceleration she made up for in rattle.  It clearly had some problems, but I didn’t have any money to fix it, and I didn’t know anything about cars.  So what I would do is, I would drive it over a shallow drainage ditch across the street from me, and I would keep it running, and I’d pull the handbrake really hard, and I’d shimmy underneath it with a hammer, a pair of pliers, and a screwdriver.  And then I would touch the hammer to various things under the car and, if by touching them, the rattling stopped, I would use the other tools to remove that thing from the car.  And after a while I had a beautiful collection of rusty hunks of metal on the wall of my garage.  I had no idea what they did, but the car was still running.  Until one day I removed one too many mystery parts and then it died.  So I left it on the street where it was eventually towed away to an area of Chicago you don’t want to know about called Lower Whacker Drive.  Now, I’m not saying the American government doesn’t have problems—it clearly does—what I’m saying is, if we just let Trump start firing people and cutting programs without knowing who any of them are or what any of them do, sooner or later America’s going to get Lower Whackered.

I don’t think I can put it any better than that.

Doom Report (Week 1: Shock and Aw, Fuck)

Well, there was definitely no week 0 for this shit.  Week 1 of the Trump regime (credit to Robert Reich for proposing that alternative to “administration”) was a shit-show, with Trump demonstrating Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy, but also the military strategy of “shock and awe.” It’s important to remember, as you’re feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, that that’s all by design.  If you’re too overwhelmed to focus on any one thing, then at least some of it will slip through the cracks, and that’s all they want.  Divide our focus, blast us with a firehose, then watch as we scramble around uselessly trying to recover.

So, there have been executive orders a-flyin’, for everything from cancelling DEI programs to a literal royal decree that trans people don’t exist.  Looks like project 2025 is right on track!  On the one hand, it makes me want to call my friend and remind him of his claims that Trump wasn’t running on Project 2025—not to mention the actual scoffing I mentioned last week at the suggestion that Trump wanted to erase trans people—but I don’t think I can.  It would be too exhausting.  And, if he didn’t express remorse over his arguments, then I don’t think we could be friends any more, and I don’t want that.  Because, even though this week’s Even More News posits that people are starting to regret their choices, and even talks about how we really need to talk to them about that with empathy and not just devolve into “I told you so!“s ... I’m not sure the time is right for that.  Oh, I think they’re absolutely right about what needs to happen eventually; I just don’t believe the people who voted for Trump are getting it yet.  Sure, it’s true that he’s mainly done a bunch of culture war bullshit, like pulling us out of the Paris Climate Accords (because climate change isn’t real) and pulling us out of the World Health Organization (because ... I dunno, pandemics aren’t real either, I guess?), and in all of that was absolutely nothing that could possibly make the price of eggs go down or end the war in Ukraine, which are two major campaign promises he made, and (at least for that first one) the primary reason most people gave for voting for him, but I think people, if asked, would just say, “well, let’s give him some time.” (Of course, on the Ukraine thing he said he could end the war in 24 hours, and it’s been closer to 150, but we’re not supposed to take him seriously when he says stuff like that ... remember?)  Typically, when humans make mistakes, it usually takes a while before they’re willing to admit to them.  And of course some never will.  But I don’t think very many Trump voters are regretting their choices ... yet.

So, while a lot of the executive orders are just silly—I think trying to rename Mount Denali back to “McKinley” or imagining that he can unilaterally change “Gulf of Mexico” on all the maps is basically a white supremacist temper tantrum—and some of them (like his feeble attempt to end birthright citizenship—already struck down by one conservative judge—and the mass firing of inspectors general on Friday night) will not survive legal challenges, but buried in there are some actual harms.  Including the two Project 2025 gems I led with: the DEI rollbacks, and the attempt at trans erasure.

The MAGA crowd often claims they want to replace DEI initiatives with a focus on choosing whoever’s the “most qualified.” Sadly, “most qualified” seems to be code for “whitest.” Look at how they blame the LA wildfires on black mayor Karen Bass and lesbian fire chief Kristin Crowley: it’s because they’re “DEI hires.” It’s never stated why this means they’re unqualified, but the unspoken undertone is that there were obviously some straight white guys who could have done a better job, but were passed over.  Poor straight white guys: always getting the shaft.  Still, we can try to find some heartening news in all this.  For instance, Costco’s shareholders voted by more than 98% to resist the pressure that the government (via Right Wing thinktanks) is putting on corporations to eliminate their DEI policies.  Which makes sense: the business world figured out a long time ago that diversity increases profitability, and they’re only going to engage with your idiotic culture wars if they think it will impact their bottom line.  Obviously companies like Meta/Facebook and Amazon do think that.  They have government contracts to protect and government regulations to avoid.  But I think most companies won’t be interested in any sort of pressure: they just want that profit line to keep going up.  As for the gender thing ...

Congratulations! we’re all women now.  Yes, in their haste to attempt to erase trans people from existence, the moron architects of Project 2025 have adopted the clumsiest language possible (I even heard one pundit claim it must be AI-generated), with the stunning end result that, according to an executive order that claims to “defend women from gender ideology extremism,” every human on earth is now, technically speaking, female.  Now, while it’s true that this embarrassing boner likely won’t mitigate the cruelty that will result from its “enforcement,” I disagree with people who have said it doesn’t matter.  Because what strikes me about this little bit of idiocracy is that, for years now, conservative pundits and influencers have opened shows featuring liberal guests with the “gotcha” question of “can you define what a woman is?” And now, when they finally have the chance to answer their own question, they’ve totally blown it.  Because defining something like that is not easy.  Here’s their attempt:

“Women” or “woman” and “girls” or “girl” shall mean adult and juvenile human females, respectively.

and then:

“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

So, first thing, notice how they’ve slyly introduced the very controversial concept of fetal personhood right into the language, no doubt in an attempt to normalize it.  But here’s where they fucked up.  First of all, at conception, zygotes can’t produce reproductive cells at all.  And, once they can, they’re all female.  For at least six weeks.  And of course the 1.7% of the population that’s intersex has just been left wondering what the fuck this all means for them.  Also worth noting: the second episode of Zeteo’s new show American Unhinghed observed that there are currently more anti-trans bills than there are professional trans athletes.  Truly this is a “solution” in search of a problem, but it’s also not much of a solution.

And now a word from our sponsors.

Want to deport your neighbor?  Not sure how to do it?  Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a law that said that any immigrant who commits a crime can be deported?  Well, there actually already are laws like that, but what if your annoying neighbor just refuses to commit any crimes?  No, problem: try the Laken Riley Act!  The Laken Riley Act gets rid of pesky details like due process, so you can just claim your neighbor committed a crime and, poof! no more neighbor.  They’ll be whisked away to private detention centers, at no cost to you (other than via your taxes, of course), where they’ll be held without charge or access to legal representation, until they can be deported to wherever we can think of!  (Terms and conditions apply.  Your neighbor might be an American citizen, in which case we cannot guarantee deportation, though we will still make the attempt.)

And we’re back.  If you want to know more about the Laken Riley Act, I would direct you to The Weekly Show, where Jon Stewart interviews AOC.  Key facts include that Riley’s parents did not want their murdered daughter’s name on this bill, but Republicans just ignored that, and that 46 Democrats in the House, and 12 in the Senate, voted for it (theoretically because they were afraid to look “weak” on border issues), thus allowing conservative media to crow that the bill was passed with “bipartisan support.” Again, it’s week 1.  I think the Democrats should probably pace themselves a bit more: they’ve still got 207 more weeks to spinelessly cave in to Trump’s fascist agenda.  Don’t blow your wad all at once, guys.

What else?  Oh, yeah, President Musk did a Heil Hitler salute.  Twice.  Weirdly, some people—including the Anti-Defamation League, which is an organization that’s supposed to be fighting against anti-Semitism—have defended this.  I’m not sure why ... it’s not particularly defensible.  He literally did it twice.  This “it was just an awkward gesture” thing is so bizarre: as the folks on Even More News pointed out, if he had actually done it by accident, he would have apologized for it.  Instead, he posted a bunch of Nazi puns, which ... I mean, why are Nazi puns even a thing?  I think maybe they aren’t a thing and Musk is just gaslighting us.  Even the ADL reversed course after that bit, alhtough I believe Netanyahu is still on board.  Which I suppose makes sense, actually: when you’re doing a genocide yourself, you probably figure the Nazi supporters are totally going to be on board.  Also, given the fact that Musk has boosted white supremacists on Twitter and even openly supported a neo-Nazi party in Germany, we may want to heed the words of Jon Stewart on The Weekly Show: “This all does fit together.  It’s not like it comes out of nowhere.” Also also, as someone this week noted (sorry, I can’t recall who it was right now), the conservative shitbags claiming we need to give Musk a break because he has Asperger’s are the same pitiful excuses for human beings that made fun of Tim Walz’s son Gus.  So, you know: fuck them.

And so many things we don’t even have time to get into.  The brave Episcopalian bishop who Trump and his allies called nasty and extreme because she had the audacity to express the radical ideas of that crazy liberal, Jesus Christ; the massive pardons for the insurrectionists, including some who violently assaulted police officers, about which Trump said, pithily, “Fuck it: release ’em all.”; the so-called QAnon Shaman adopting a bad British accent in a desperate attempt to turn the tables on a BBC interviewer when her questions got too uncomfortable; Trump literally saying that America was at its richest during the Gilded Age, so that’s what we’re shooting for again.  Or how about Carrie Underwood desperately attempting to sing “America the Beautiful” despite some amusing (though not, apparently, to her) technical difficulties?  Kimmel here makes fun of her (or at least of the situation), as many did; conservatives, on the other hand, focussed on her “the show must go on” efforts to sing a cappella when the music just refused to cooperate.  I had a different take altogether.  I think this episode was emblematic of how the Republicans assume that they just don’t need anyone, so they try to do everything themselves.  Sometimes that even works.  And, sometimes, they just embarrass themselves.  Well, they would, but I think they’ve all had their shame surgically removed, so it doesn’t seem to bother them too much.

But the Carrie Underwood appearance—as well as others such as Nelly, Snoop Dogg, and even the Village People, who not only performed but also announced they would sue anyone who referred to “YMCA” as a “gay anthem”—raises a more sinister spectre.  Remember in Trump’s first term when he had trouble finding performers for the inauguration?  And remember how many sports teams refused to accept invitations to come to his White House?  But now football players are doing the Trump jack-off dance in the end zone and Snoop Dogg is at the inauguration.  He’s been normalized now.  The times, they are a-changin’.

If you’re looking for only one political show to watch this week, I’d recommend the AOC interview over on The Weekly Show.  If you’re willing to go to two, try the first episode of America Unhinged (and, if you’ve got a third hour to invest, the second episode is pretty good too).  The only other video I’d recommend this week is perhaps Legal Eagle’s breakdown of Trump’s executive orders.  He does a pretty good job of outlining what will and likely won’t pass muster.

Finally, I’ll try to end on as hopeful a note as I can manage.  I noted that AOC, in the interview I mention above, when talking about insider trading by Congresspeople (of both parties) says that:

... it explodes the cynicism that fuels the Right.  It doesn’t benefit us.  It benefits Republicans because they make no bones about ... what class they are here to serve.

And I think she has a point.  Cynicism is almost inevitable with weeks like this one, but it’s only going to help the other side.  And let me be clear what the sides are: we’re talking about right-wing fascism vs progressive liberalism.  Screw Rebpulican vs Democrat.  Rapper Talib Kweli was on The Daily Show on Thursday, and he put it brilliantly:

I’m not a Democrat.  I’ve never been a Democrat.  I voted Democrat before; I’ve never voted Republican, but I’ve never identified as a Democrat.  This is not about Democrat vs Republican: this is about good vs bad; this is about the oligarchs vs the poor and working class people.

And AOC, I think, summed this up trenchantly when she talked about how in the world people could simultaneously vote for Trump and for her, two people who seem diametrically opposed on the political scale:

They see two people that are fundamentally anti-establishment, two people that do not respect a rule
if the rule does not lead to ... a positive outcome.

And, when I heard her say that, despite the fact that it’s a seeming compliment to Trump, I couldn’t help but remember that Monday, apart from being the spectacle of the launch of yet another disastrous Trump regime, was also Martin Luther King Day.  And I had gone back to reread some of Dr. King’s words that I quoted in a post several years ago, and one of those quotes was this one:

One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.  I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws.  One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.  Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.  I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

We already knew that Trump was willing to break the laws he doesn’t care for.  But hearing that there are people like AOC who are willing to break ... if not the laws, but at a minium the rules ... that she can’t abide—that’s what gives me hope.  Let us all hope for more progressives—for more politicians of all ideologies—to make what Civil Rights icon John Lewis often referred to as “good trouble.” And pray that Trump can’t keep up this pace.  He is, after all, very old.