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.