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.

Doom Report (Week 9: The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil)

If one wanted a reasonably compact roundup of the week’s news, it’s tough to beat this week’s Armageddon Update.  It’s, as Christopher Titus puts it, “a partial list of idiocy, hatred, and darkness that President Felon Rapist crapped out his stupidhole,” and it’s a tight 5 minutes.  He concludes that “the billionaires have decided that people with nothing have too much,” and that’s pretty incisive commentary from a guy who never went to college, a guy who once described himself as “just a very thin layer of charming with some funny sprinkles wrapped around a huge creamy center of raging arrogant A-hole.”

And the thing he opens his list with is the renditioning of over 200 supposed “Venezuelan gang members.” And, to think: I spent all that time last week talking about one guy that our government has disappeared—if only I’d been patient enough to wait a few days, I could have covered so many more.  (That one person is Mahmoud Khalil, by the way, and he is still being detained, without charge.  Strict Scrutiny thoughtfully released a clip from their full show to catch you up on all the details.)  And, lest you think I’m exaggerating about how bad this is—despite getting surprisingly little coverage from the usual sources; only America Unhinged gave it the full analysis it deserved—let’s just be clear: once again, there were no actual charges; people were just being rounded up based on tattoos, and the Trump regime apparently can’t tell a Venezuelan gang tat from a Spanish soccer team one; and the fact that innocent people were included in the group is no longer in doubt.  If it’s not so bad, then why did the Trump regime go to such extraordinary lengths to defy a court order telling them to stop the illegal deportations?  First they said that the judge’s oral order didn’t count because it wasn’t written, then they said the written order didn’t count because the planes had already left American airspace, then they said that the judge had no authority to enjoin them from using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—again, the same act used to justify locking up Sulu and Mr. Miyagi for the crime of having their parents be born in Japan—to disappear people.  If it’s not so bad, why is Legal Eagle reporting that the regime claimed the lack of evidence against them “proved” how bad they were?  If you still have any shred of possible belief that just maybe this was all justified and all on the up and up, then I want you to do something for me.  I want you to look at this picture and tell me one thing:

Why can we see the faces of all the prisoners—the people who have never been convicted of anything, because they’ve never been charged with anything, because they’ve never even been accused of anything other than having tattoos—but the guards are all wearing masks?  If you saw this picture without any context whatsoever, what country would you suppose those black-masked guards work for?  Now think back to the video of Khalil’s wife asking for the name of the officer arresting her husband and the man saying “we don’t give our names.”  No names, no faces: these supposed Americans sure don’t seem too proud of their work.

More Perfect Union this week talked to a fired CFPB lawyer who was investigating companies turning off people’s cars while they were driving.  They also talked to one of the fired FTC lawyers (and the Coffee Klatch interviewed the other one) who were engaged in cases against companies owned by Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg.  Both organizations are effectively gutted now, meaning that the billionaires are finally free to continue ripping us off without pesky government interference.  Not to mention the attempt to shut down the Department of Education, the resumption of the mass killings of Palestinians despite the “ceasefire”, and the attacks on Social Security: first they gutted the phone service, claiming people could still get service in person (which conveniently ignores the fact that many people on Social Security find it difficult to travel for medical reasons), then they started massive force reductions, meaning that there won’t be nearly enough people to handle those in-person visits.  Then perennial idiot Howard Lutnick (who Ian Michael Black refers to on Have I Got News For You as “this fucking guy”) had the balls to say this:

Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month.  My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain—she just wouldn’t.  She would think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month.  A fraudster always makes the loudest noise: screaming, yelling, and complaining.

To which the only reasonable response is YOU’RE A FUCKING BILLIONAIRE.  Of course she won’t complain if she misses a check: she’ll just call her moron of a son-in-law and get a few thousand in pocket change to tide her over. I swear the cluelessness of these people makes me not only question how they got so rich, but also how they managed to just survive this long.  This fucking guy in particular seems like he should have wandered out into traffic to play by now.  Darwin ain’t always right, you know.

But, look: I keep saying I’ll try to end these things on a positive note.  This time I wanted to share with you my collection of quotes from people that still have the balls to stand up to President Musk and his pal Trumpy.  A lot of people have not been doing that, including most of the Democrats.  But some have.  Here are a few:

the single most un-american and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an american president
— Jamelle Bouie, New York Times columnist, in response to Trump’s quoting of Napolean

The Government again evaded its obligations.  This is woefully insufficient.
— James Boasberg, U.S. District Judge, in his response to ICE’s defiance of his temporary restraining order

That should not have been done in our country.  It was a sham in order to avoid statutory requirements.
— William Alsup, U.S. District Judge, in response to mass firings by Elon Musk’s faux department

It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment.
— Danielle Sassoon, former U.S. Attorney, resignation letter

I’ve been on the bench for over four decades.  I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one.  This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.
— John Coughenour, U.S. District Judge, when striking down Trump’s executive order outlawing birthright citizenship

I am not going to abide by government officials saying one thing to the public—what they really mean to the public—and coming in here to the court and telling me something different, like I’m an idiot.
— Ana Reyes, U.S. District Judge, in her order blocking the Department of Defense banning trans troops

May you renew daily your dedication to justice, and always seek to end each day secure in the knowledge that you showed up and sought justice for your one and only client, the people of the United States of America.  You serve no man.
— Sean Murphy, former Assistant U.S. Attorney, resignation letter

I understand that Donald Trump wants to ruin me and he has a lot of tools to be able to ruin me.  But the question is: am I going to look myself in the mirror and say “Okay, therefore, compromise everything I believe in, compromise everything I’ve fought my career for, and just hide or cower or—even worse—make a deal with him?”  Or am I at least going to look in the mirror every day and stand tall and say “You know what, I have my integrity; I have my self-respect.”  And if Donald Trump’s able to destroy me, then he destroys me.  But at least he will he will have taken out someone who, to the bitter end, was doing the best he could to fight for democracy in this country.
— Marc Elias, after being targeted in a memo to the Department of Justice

But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.  If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion.  But it was never going to be me.
— Hagan Scotten, former Assistant U.S. Attorney, resignation letter

Some of those voices are even conservatives.  Danielle Sassoon is a member of the Federalist Society and clerked for Scalia.  James Boasberg was appointed to the bench by George W. Bush and appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by Chief Justice Roberts.  John Coughenour was appointed by Ronald Reagan as I was starting 11th grade, 2 years before the first episode of Stranger Things ... not before it aired, before it takes place.  These are not squishy liberals.  Or to put it like Christopher Titus does in the first video I linked above:

None of these things are Democrat or Republican things; none of it.  It’s good and evil.  I have family who are Republican—guess what: they aren’t evil.  But this fat felon fuckup douchebag, and South African dork Lord Vader, are.  Pure evil.

Amen brother.

Doom Report (Week 8: Didn't Know that "Disappeared" Was a Transitive Verb)

I learned what “Los Desaparecidos” means by watching a movie, sometime around the turn of the century.  I can no longer remember exactly which one, but, looking back with the faulty memory of a quarter-century passed, I suspect it was probably Of Love and Shadows, which is not (as that faulty memory assured me) about Argentinian dictator Jorge Videla, but rather about Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.  But perhaps I can be forgiven for mixing them up: they were dictators during roughly the same time period, in neighboring countries, and were both a large part of Operation Condor, which is a particularly chilling thing to read about, because the US was actively supporting these brutal dictators, on the grounds that they were arresting Communists, and of course we hate Communists.  And this is not one of those “oh, people say that the CIA was involved, but we really don’t know for sure”: no, we know, because in 1999 Clinton declassified all the communiques between these regimes and our government, mostly in the form of Henry Kissinger, who might be responsible for more deaths than anyone else in history.

But, anyway, I’m pretty sure the word “desaparacidos” wasn’t used directly in this movie I was watching, but it did mention “the Disappeared,” which was a grammatical construction that struck my ears as odd at the time.  Which is what led me to the Wikipedia articles which used the term, which itself is just the Spanish word for “disappeared” turned into a noun.  Because, you see, these dictators weren’t just arresting the Communists (and anyone else they thought disagreed with them): they were whisking them away to secret facilities, torturing them, and, more often than not, murdering them.  This process came to be know as “to disappear” someone.  As Videla once said:

They are just that ... desaparecidos.  They are not alive, neither are they dead.  They are just missing.

You see? no body, no crime.  As long as you don’t know where your father, or brother, or husband is, you can’t accuse me of killing him.  I may have lost him—so many prisoners, so much paperwork, so much bureaucracy, it is so hard to keep track—but I’m sure he’ll turn up.  And this is how “disappear” transformed into a transitive verb.  Which leads us to the words Heather Lofthouse spoke on this week’s Coffe Klatch:

They disappeared him.  I mean, I didn’t even know that that was a transitive verb.  They have ... you disappear people.  I mean, that, to me, is not what happens in America.

No, it’s not, because it’s what happens in South America, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia ... although it must be noted that among all the countries from those regions, the United States (along with Northern Ireland) does sort of stand out in the “Examples” section of Wikipedia’s “enforced disappearance” article.

And, yet, the big story this week was that of Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent (Green Card) resident of the US, married to a US citizen who is 8 months pregnant.  And, on March 8th, our government disappeared him.  Arrested in New York, it took his wife and lawyer several days to figure out that he had been incarcerated in Louisiana, for some inexplicable reason.  To my knowledge, neither his family nor his legal representation have actually seen or spoken to him in the intervening week.  He has been charged with no crime.  He and his wife were told that his student visa was being revoked, but he doesn’t have a student visa: he’s a permanent resident.  ICE and the State Department then claimed that his Green Card was being revoked, but they have no legal authority to do that.  He’s been accused of anti-Semitism, but there’s no evidence that he’s said anything other than that bombing Palestinian children is wrong—although that seems to be close enough to anti-Semitism for many, including (as the Even More News crew pointed out this week) Chuck Schumer, whose statement “supporting” Khalil starts with the words “I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports, and have made my criticism of the antisemitic actions at Columbia loudly known.”  Well, good to know Schumer abhors the idea of not bombing children.  But, more importantly, even if Khalil were anti-Semitic—and I again stress that no one has offered any evidence that suggests that he is—but even if he were, that is not a crime.  If it was, there’d be far fewer Klan members and Proud Boys running around fucking up the country.  Hell, someone might have even locked up Elon Musk’s Nazi-saluting ass by now.

If you want to see what it looks like when ICE disappears someone in front of their pregnant wife, there’s a video.  But it’s pretty depressing.  I would hope you’d think that even if you “abhor” his pro-baby anti-murder stance like Chuck Schumer does, but I suspect I may be misguided on that score.

Khalil has been the top story for a good reason, not only highlighted on the Coffee Klatch and Even More News, but also touched on by a Seth Meyers’ A Closer Look segment (Seth highlights the possible good news that a judge has blocked his deportation, but no one wants to opine on whether that will actually stop the Trump regime from doing so), Christopher Titus’ podcast (Titus’ take: “when you just start grabbing people without the rule of law and and holding them without charging them ... that’s Gestapo shit”), and, reliably, America Unhinged, who pointed out that Trump and Rubio are here using the same logic that was used to justify the “internment camps” where we locked up American citizens (including George Takei from Star Trek and Pat Morita from The Karate Kid) because their ancestors just happened to come here from a country we were currently at war with.  Trump said during the campaign that he planned to revive the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, and here we are.

In truth, the fact that people continue to believe that Trump won’t do exactly what he very explicitly says he will do continues to astound me.  Here’s another exchange from the Coffee Klatch:

Lofthouse: How about Wall Street, you know was reeling and shocked and upset; what did they think was going to happen when they supported him?
Reich: Well, very good question.  I think that most people I have talked with on Wall Street assumed that Trump would back off with the tariffs; they assumed that as, if there was any indication that the stock market was reacting negatively to tariff talk, that Trump would say no, no that’s—I won’t do it ...

I have to admit, I literally laughed out loud when Robert Reich was talking about Wall Street people “assuming” that Trump didn’t really mean it when he threatened to put tariffs on everyone, everywhere.  It’s easy to fall into the trap of being dismissive of average voters who supported Trump, but trust me: it’s way more fulfilling to see Wall Street bigwigs fall for that same used-car-salesman scam.

And, if you think I’m exaggerating about Trump being a used car salesman, you definitely haven’t paying attention to the news this week, because he literally did a Tesla commercial on the White House lawn (a thing which in itself would have been scandalous in less “interesting” times).  He did this because Tesla stock has crashed lately, by an amount which, as Sky News put it, “to put it in context, ... is roughly equivalent to Poland’s annual economic output.”  And, if your company is tanking to the tune of a mid-size European Union country, why not get the US president to do some marketing for you?  I mean, we’ve already established that the office is for sale, so may as well take advantage of that.  If you’d like to watch President Musk and his slimy orange salespumpkin shilling on government property, I recommend watching the Christopher Titus version.  At least there’s some amusing patter to go along with the cringe.

But, in general, I’m thinking back to week -4, when I pointed out that the schadenfreude of watching people almost instantly regretting their choices (I specifically called out the old Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party meme) won’t be worth the actual suffering that real people will have to live through.  I’m sure Mahmoud Khalil’s wife takes no comfort at how many billions Musk lost in the stock market.  Or, for an even more sobering example (if you can imagine that), the Even More News crew (and no one else that I’m aware of) talked this week about the Trump regime transferring trans women into men’s prisons.  You’ll have to watch Jonathan and Katy and Cody talk about it; I’m too traumatized by the mere thought of it to recount it here.

But overall this week feels less like the blasting firehose of previous weeks and more like “merely” whitewater rafting amidst sharp rocks.  I’m not sure if that’s because our capacity for horror has been overloaded at this point and we’ve just gone into shock, or because the regime is going more underground and doing their terrible things without making quite so many waves, but what I don’t think it is is any lessening of the evil.  But point being that there aren’t too many other things to note this week.

The fine folks over at Election Profit Makers this week caught a news item that had fallen through the cracks of the other folks I follow: 538.com was shut down, immediately after Trump’s approval rating went negative for the first time since the election.  Disney says this was just part of a larger restructuring—nothing to do with approval ratings!—but then again Disney also paid Trump $15 million to settle a case he absolutely would have lost, so I’m not sure they can be considered trustworthy here.

And, finally, Strict Scrutiny continues to keep us up-to-date on the goings-on at the Supreme Court.  This week they reported on Trump’s loss on the attempted USAID fund freeze, including Alito’s screed of a dissent (Kate Shaw’s assessment: “such a drama queen, my God”), which includes the line “nothing in our precedents even remotely supports this grossly inflated conception of executive power which seriously infringes the legislative powers that the Constitution grants to Congress” ... no, wait, that’s what he wrote in a case where Biden wanted to do something he didn’t like.  Here, he wrote “I am stunned” that the majority of his colleagues agreed that the government should have to pay its bills.  Kate and Melissa also reported on the Court’s ruling that the EPA’s was misinterpreting the Clean Water Act by attempting to regulate clean water in San Francisco.  The interesting part here, for me, was that this was the second case this episode where Amy Coney Barrett sided with the 3 liberal justices: in the USAID case, they were the majority (along with Chief Justice Roberts); here in the EPA case, they were the minority (as Melissa Murray put it, “it’s a 5 to four opinion, with Justice Alito and the other sewage swilling mens in the majority, and all of the women justices, who apparently would prefer their water without a side of raw sewage, siding with the EPA and Mother Earth in dissent”).  This harkens back to an earlier observation of mine (also in week -4, as it happens) where I wondered if Barrett might end up becoming a moderate, perhaps like Justice Kennedy.  Still too early to tell for sure, of course, but here at least are two more data points.

I do hope that this trend towards fewer obvious insanities per week means that I can take a break from writing the Doom Report as often as it’s turned out to be necessary.  You think I enjoy collecting all this dreck and dung and regurgitating it all in these columns?  I assure you I do not.  As far as I’m concerned, one Doom Report a month would be plenty—or even one too many, some might say.  But I think that as long as President Musk and his oily orange salesflunky are continuing to attempt to destroy our democracy, I’ll probably continue writing.  It feels like the least I can do.