A Speckle of Pepper in A Sea of Salt Danielle Moodie The DAM Digest Thursday 3 April, 2025 Since Donald Trump took office for the second time, aside from the consistency of chaos, another theme is readily present—the desire to re-whiten America. Since the beginning of the 21st Century, the Census Bureau and others has indicated that America’s demographics were shifting; and that by the year 2045 the non-Hispanic white population of America would become the minority. While some hailed these predictions as good news the opposition got to work constructing their plan—Project 2025; which would not only upend racial progress in America; but criminalize various ethnicities and races to the point that the rise of the Hispanic population would cease under draconian deportation policies. While the Trump regime has been busy dismantling every bit of the 20th century from health advancements to environmental protections to bodily autonomy, the latest move to dismember the Department of Education strikes at the heart of what many believed to be the biggest advancement for Civil Rights— integrated public education. The 'Brown vs. Board of Education' decision of 1954 set in motion a form of racial equity in this country. Thurgood Marshall successfully argued that the “separate but equal” doctrine established through 'Plessy v. Ferguson' was not present in public education, where Black children were resigned to under funded schools in dilapidated structures. Over the last 70 years however arguments have arose questioning whether Brown was the best decision. You see, rather than strengthen Black schools; which in many ways were the center of the Black community, the 'Brown' decision, some argue centered whiteness as the ultimate goal—sprinkling specks of pepper into a sea of salt and calling it integration. As a former educator and education lobbyist I’ve been wondering for quite sometime whether integration in the haphazard way it has been applied was the right way to create a robust education system, and with it a robust multiracial democracy. The reality is as Noliwe Rooks, Africana Studies professor at Brown University argues in her new book, 'Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children', that there is a “murdering of the soul” which takes place inside of white institutions. She argues that in these white environments, where just a few Black students are accepted, can in fact have devastating results. In her book and an article at 'The Atlantic' she discusses her own father’s experience with integration: “Milton’s experience reflected the trauma Black students suffered as they desegregated public schools in states above the Mason-Dixon Line, where displays of racism were often mocking, disdainful, pitying, and sword sharp in their ability to cut the unsuspecting into tiny bits. It destroyed confidence, shook will, sowed doubt, murdered souls—quietly, sure, but still as completely as could a mob of white racists setting their cowardice, rage, and anger loose upon the defenseless.” This quote hung like smoke in the air for me. It made me realize that my own educational experience was indeed the product of lopsided integration. I attended a 96% white school district for my K-12 education. When I asked my mother why she chose to move so far out on Long Island, NY she replied, “ I chose the best school district I could afford to live in.” This meant that while I received a great education, I could legit count the Black kids in my school—the largest in New York at the time—on two hands. While the education was indeed good—the micro-aggressions I’d experience throughout my schooling would abound. I’d work overtime throughout my life to “teach” myself about Black America and Civil Rights as my family were immigrants and the information on this subject in my school district was wholly lacking. My entire schooling experience can be summed up as me being “a speckle of pepper in a sea of salt”. I’d unpack my feelings around this through my graduate school program that was focused on creating a “unified transformative early education model”—UTEEM, which focused on centering racially diverse children and their needs at the heart of learning as well as their families rather than just plopping them into white institutions and hoping they didn’t drown. The reality is that we have never truly addressed the very obvious disparities that persist in our public education system. Consequently, over the last several decades we have just nibbled around the edges of progress telling ourselves that the sloth-like progress that has been made was enough. While I absolutely disagree with what Donald Trump is doing to our education system and the country at that—we’re here now, and maybe with the destruction there is an opportunity to design something better. As many Black intellectuals and education experts say post Brown, the decision did a great deal to advance racial equity throughout society; but did so by making whiteness the stick from which we measure success. The goal should have never been to expose Black children to whiteness as a point or goal of success but rather to strengthen and fortify the Black community.

Absolutely Tarrific : When Your Leaders are Frozen in Time Greg Fish World of Wierd Things Sunday 6 April, 2025 We live in a 21st century world ran by leaders who were born in the 20th century and use 19th century ideas with an 18th century legal framework, clinging to 17th century traditions to solve 22nd century problems and wondering why it’s not working and we are all now on the struggle bus careening down a hill as the wheels are coming off. Take the new sky high tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on every country from which we buy more things than they buy from us. Last time that was tried, it was an economic disaster now known as the Great Depression and ended in a world war, a war in which fascist and Nazi movements decided that they were superior humans so they needed to conquer and ethnically cleanse other nations for the glory of… hold on just a minute, why does all of that sound so familiar? Superpowers former and current are eyeing conquests right out of the 1800s. Russia is trying once again to conquer Ukraine, China is making all the moves to at least give invading Taiwan a shot in the next year or two, and the United States’ new regime has suddenly developed an insatiable urge to acquire Canada, Greenland, and for starters, at least parts of Panama, straight out of a techno-feudalist proposal from — oh, would you look at that, the throes of the Great Depression. Yes folks, everything old is new again and it seems like those in power learned exactly zero lessons not just from their history classes, but any class whatsoever. As existing systems are faltering under the strain of rapidly advancing technology, modern ideas, and byproducts of past mistakes, their reaction is to retreat into that simple past they remember as children and drag us back with them by force. Now, true, they’re also being advised by charlatans trying to create a world-spanning cyberpunk dystopia loosely based on the aforementioned techno-feudalist proposal, but neither these advisers nor the politicians with whom they’re working actually have an understanding of what they’re doing, and none of their ideas are original. They’re a rehash of the greatest hits of a sci-fi genre from 1968 to 1992 dumped into a blender, with a dash of sci-fi cultism around the future of AI. In the meantime, the retrograde reprobates are trying to dismantle our civilization with disaster economics through a global trade war, regressing medicine and public health by almost two centuries, reinstating blacklists for wrongthink popular in the middle of the last century, and behaving as if infinite consumerism and industrialization aren’t a path to something new, or tools to create things we need and don’t have, but a goal in and of itself despite countless voices shouting from the rooftops that after a certain point, industrial production will have to slow and transition to something else. The opposition to all this? It’s also busy trying to replay as many of the greatest hits of the New Deal as possible, back-benching and sidelining its rising stars as leadership roles are reserved for septuagenarians with cancer and octogenarians for whom a trip and fall in the kitchen could be their last. Because you see, they paid their dues and it was their turn, so no matter how quickly the new generations are gaining momentum towards political escape velocity into leading new movements, they’ll just have to wait until the old guard expires in office, still gripping their desks as rigor mortis sets in. Make no bones about it, we’re being very much dragged backwards even in areas like building walkable cities. Just not wanting to drive your car as much today is now seen as “terminally, civilization-ending levels of wokeness” and any city trying to build bike lanes and walking paths is being targeted for funding cuts. Surely, you see, walkable neighborhoods are just the first step towards open air prisons ran by the Marxist New World Chinese Reptoid Jewish Illuminati cabal. Here’s my nuclear powered hot take. A country can go into decline by choice when it decides to obsess about its idealized past instead of working on its future. It doesn’t innovate, adapt, and evolve. It simply sulks and rots in the hole it digs for itself while throwing temper tantrums. And with its sneering pundits shouting down new ideas as utopian fever dreams, spineless politicians who refuse to lead, and feckless, flippant, selfish voters resigned to corruption and mediocrity, America has chosen decline for the past nine years. Those celebrating the idea of reversing globalization in reverse and returning to small and isolated worlds of each nation state behaving like its own planet, making all of its own goods and those simpler times when factories could employ entire small towns, a high school diploma could buy a house and raise a family on one income, are 40 or 50 years too late to that party. None of the necessary geopolitical conditions, economic regulations, or market incentives are there to make it happen again. It’s the equivalent of wanting to re-establish a quiet fishing village in the woods after building a massive cannery and two generations of commercial trawlers prowling the waters with nets that extend all the way to the sea floor. All the trees have long been chopped down, the quaint dockside homes are now Airbnbs and private villas, it will take at least a decade for the fish populations to even remotely recover, and most of the youth left for places with actual job prospects. The best case, and I mean the absolute, by far best case scenario for the New Great ‘Murican Re-Industrialization are factories leaking and belching pollution into the air, water, and soil, staffed by a few thousand people, and filled with robots — which are the main reason why nine in ten manufacturing jobs went away — producing cheap crap no one really needs to fill homes people can’t afford, and if the amount of crap doesn’t grow every quarter, the factory gets shut down anyway. So, not only are we not getting the glory days of one income households and easy, convenient lives back, that wasn’t even the reality for many. As many as a third of all women were working, the average home was less than half the size it is today, and legalized discrimination based on skin color and gender would concentrate most of those economic gains to white or white-passing men. Who are now being replaced with robots, AI, and offshore centers. And that’s not going to be reversed because all legal and economic guardrails meant to prevent a return of the corrupt oligarchy of the Gilded Age, which was followed by tariffs, the Great Depression, and a world war — oh hey, here’s that history repeating itself thing again — have been ripped out. Investors and tycoons are used to steady double digit returns every quarter no matter how many mass layoffs and white collar crimes it takes, blinded by greed that is now a full blown pathology. In fact, the oligarchy in waiting is now busy biting its elbows and howling as they see the stock market doing its best impression of a skydiver in response to weaponized mass nostalgia being unleashed on a global order based on trillions of dollars, euros, and so on constantly moving across the world daily, and complex, multinational trade agreements. Sure, they’ll get their tax cuts and even further deregulation, as well as lower interest rates again, but who will want to make deals with them now? But all that said, the current economic, social, and political model is not working for just about anyone. Unless you have a net worth in the tens of millions or higher, and making seven figures anually, odds are that you’re falling further and further behind every year and you honestly don’t know when, or if, you’re ever going to be able to stop “hustling” while having orders barked at you by wealthy failsons trying to build trendy startups as a hobby and laying off employees left and right at the first sign of trouble. No wonder so many want not just a change but a radical one. All right, so if we can’t go back and the current way forward is about as pleasant as a naked swim through a cactus patch for anyone who has generational trauma instead of generational wealth, what do we do? Obviously there’s no way out but through, but to where exactly? Earth has finite resources, a finite population with a finite number of hours in the day, and occupies finite spaces. To assume infinite growth through the mechanism of either consumerism or parasitic rent-seeking of middlemen backed by oodles of money from investors desperate for wildly unrealistic returns is every bit as asinine as pretending we’re back in 1980 and acting accordingly for all the reasons that we already covered in great detail. But we did have alternative solutions going as far back as the early 1900s from people who saw industrialization as a means to an end, not the end in and of itself as the powers that be today seem to believe it is. Both the already twice mentioned proposal for a united North American technocracy and pre-USSR Cosmism planned for the future of global industrialization to be much like we see agriculture today. Until the 1970s, the majority of humanity’s primary jobs were farming in some capacity. Today, it’s about a quarter and falling worldwide, with the majority in low to middle income nations. In the U.S., it’s just 1.2% of all jobs. With a tradition of family farms in Europe, the number is closer to 4.2% there. Between industry consolidation and mechanization, we need fewer people than ever to produce more than enough food for the entire planet. It was considered a massive disaster during the dawn of industrialization that people were leaving the farms and agricultural employment began to plummet as people moved into cities to work in the dense forest of new factories. And the same transformation is now happening with manufacturing. We needed to be able to make stuff quickly, efficiently, and at scale. Freed from having to make sure there was enough to eat from day to day, or having to manually hand-build every tool, decoration, or piece of furniture that we need or want, we were supposed to transcend modern jobs that the vast majority of the world feels have become little more than busywork and people storage, workhouses on a global scale because the powers that be believe that we have to prove our right to exist with shift-based labor. It doesn’t matter if it’s really needed in the grand scheme of things, or if this is a good use of a human’s time. Adventure? Exploration? Seeing the world? Having dreams? Autonomy? That’s for the rich and their children. You? You get to explore the wonderful world of spreadsheets, paperwork, and software which does little more than CRUD and relaying messages to process said spreadsheets and paperwork. People are bored out of their minds. They have to make their own adventures with conspiracy theories, social media drama, and political cultism. In response to their anger and boredom they are simply offered more of the same and either a pat on the head or a condescending lecture. People want a future in which they don’t feel like passive observers of their own lives, a future where they don’t feel they need to spend the majority of their days worrying about meeting their basic needs while a dozen bored people who could buy an entire country imagine conquering space. Obviously, this future will take very different forms for different people and there will always be conflict and disagreement. But they don’t want more of the same spiraling mess we have now, and the core reason that we just can’t seem to get back to those boring, precedented times is because we’re trapped in having the exact wrong people to deliver something new and transformative in charge of politics, discourse, and the economy. And until we get them out, we’ll stay in this angry downward spiral.

Black Americans Are Not Suprised Dr. Christina Greer The NY Times Monday 7 April, 2025 I think of my late grandmother Lillian McCray quite often these days. She might have completed only a portion of ninth grade, but living in the segregated South gave her and other Black people of her generation — she was born in 1921 — an education in what Americans are capable of. She saw a lot, maybe too much. In one of our many long talks on her Yulee, Fla., porch she said of this country, “The only time you should be surprised is when you’re surprised.” There’s something about this moment that is shocking to many in my orbit. Watching a security camera video of a graduate student — from Tufts, my alma mater — who is legally in the country being picked up in broad daylight by masked government agents and hustled into an unmarked car. Witnessing people lose their jobs with no warning or justification. The presumption underlying these attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs that somehow only white men are qualified to do many jobs. Denying lawyers access to federal buildings so they can’t represent their clients properly. Seeing communities from Cincinnati to El Paso live in a state of fear from the police and bands of vigilantes. “How can this be happening in America?” these people ask. “This is not the country I know, the country of rights and laws and due process.” Needless to say, these people are almost all white and liberal and are not used to feeling this fear of arbitrary, brutal state authority. But this moment, the one that was explicitly promised by Project 2025 and Donald Trump when he was a candidate, looks a lot like what my grandmother experienced every day for much of her life. It is frightening and disappointing but not surprising if one knows anything about the Black experience in America. And not the sanitized just-so version of the Black experience in which America skips from slavery, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to civil rights, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and somehow ends with a postracial America and Barack Obama. Black people have seen this America before. We have endured throughout history’s progress and regress, watching the arc of justice bend with the changing winds. Until we reckon with our fellow citizens’ capacity — even hunger — for injustice, we will fail to meet, understand and survive this political moment. What I mean by that is the ability of some Americans (historically, almost all of them white, though increasingly there are multiethnic fellow travelers in MAGA these days) to burn this country to the ground before they share it with those deemed other and unworthy. I also mean how long it takes for almost everyone else to wake up to the danger these people pose not only to Black people but, yes, to everyone else, too. Again, Black people are not surprised. Far too many well-meaning white Americans have been what I like to call ally ostriches, believing in progress while burying their heads in the sand when discussions around the past become uncomfortable. Or newer Americans, perhaps the children of immigrants of recent decades, who don’t see what business it is of theirs what violence slave owners or Jim Crow enforcers visited on their fellow citizens or the legacy of it. And now some of them are seeing people who look like them summarily deported. How did this happen? Every day I hear, spoken by these ostriches but also, increasingly, by those who blithely voted for Mr. Trump, thinking he didn’t intend to actually do those things he said he would do, or who just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Black woman or who feel some version of disbelief. As if the America of chattel slavery, of Native American expulsion and attempted extermination, of reckless imperial expansion, of Jim Crow, of internment camps was echoed by authoritarian regimes across the globe in the past. I find myself reminding those who are surprised by this moment that my still very spry mother attended legally mandated segregated schools her entire life. The past has somehow turned into prologue, and the head-scratching of many tells me there is a fundamental lack of understanding of this country and what Americans are capable of. No, dear ostriches, not all Americans. But enough and often enough. And in the midst of this fear and real threats to democracy, most Black people are not only not surprised but also tired out by explaining why all of this is not surprising. (And yes, I am aware there are a few Black ostriches, too.) That is why many of the 92 percent of Black women who have been the keepers of the Democratic Party and democracy writ large have been resoundingly silent. Why did no one listen to us? People like Stacey Abrams, Vice President Kamala Harris and Representative Maxine Waters walked all of us through the political, social and economic ramifications of a second Trump term. Higher Heights for America mobilized for candidates across the country to help energize and educate the electorate. We talked about how what happens to the least of us could most definitely happen to the rest of us. The stories of the past horrors have been passed down. We know what has happened, and we see what is happening around us. However, at the moment, many Black women I know are taking a moment for ourselves. And so we’ve been learning line dances and gleefully watching Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, transfer snacks from a big bag to a small bag. It is not as if Black women have forgotten the principles of linked fate, what the political scientist Michael Dawson described as African Americans’ tendency to keep in mind larger group consciousness and group interests. (We’re all in this together.) It’s that Black women have been the cleanup women, literally and figuratively, for this country for generations. We’ve been warning of the dangers to our democracy and have been overlooked, our contributions downplayed. As the “I didn’t think he would do this” chorus continues to grow, I can’t help but think what many really mean is, “I didn’t think he would do this to people like me.” Unlike in the past, though, it is clear that it will not be just immigrants and Black people experiencing the boot of oppression. If much of white America did not know the full story of how fragile this democracy and its rule-of-law norms are, they are going to experience what their fellow Americans are capable of. There is a reason Trump is so determined to root out any honest telling, whether in school curriculums or the Smithsonian Institution, of this country’s historical faults. This nation went backward before. Reconstruction lasted 12 years, then its advances were not only abandoned but also mostly undone. We must be honest about that. We have gotten back on the right path only after an arduous struggle. If you’re wondering where Senator Cory Booker’s endurance came from, he was drawing on that memory of struggle. (The act of outlasting the segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond’s 1957 marathon oration was crucial if you want to understand what he was doing, of course.) And maybe people are waking up. In Wisconsin, voters rejected Elon Musk’s meddling. On April 5, there were “Hands Off!” protests across the country. American democracy must be tended to with eyes open to the future and lessons learned from the past. My grandmother knew that. But she never had the luxury of having her head in the sand. ~

Opinion | Black Americans Are Not Surprised

Many Black Americans are not surprised by the way Trump is running roughshod over the rule of law, because they have seen it happen throughout Amer...

Twenty Lessons on Tyranny Dr. Timothy Snyder 1. Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. 2. Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about -- a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union -- and take its side. 3. Beware the one-party state. The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multiple-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office. 4. Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so. 5. Remember professional ethics. When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor. 6. Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come. 7. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no. 8. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow. 9. Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books. 10. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. 11. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate with others. 12. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society. It is also a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down social barriers, and understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life. 13. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them. 14. Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis. Remember that email is skywriting. Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks. 15. Contribute to good causes. Be active in organizations, political or not, that express your own view of life. Pick a charity or two and set up autopay. Then you will have made a free choice that supports civil society and helps others to do good. 16. Learn from peers in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends in other countries. The present difficulties in the United States are an element of a larger trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports. 17. Listen for dangerous words. Be alert to use of the words "extremism" and "terrorism." Be alive to the fatal notions of "emergency" and "exception." Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary. 18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it. 19. Be a patriot. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it. 20. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

Porno for Pyros Paul Campos Lawyers, Guns, and Money Blog Monday 7 April, 2025 As we watch the international financial markets burn down today, a few observations: (1) Trump is extremely stupid, extremely evil, and extremely mentally ill. I’ve noticed that very many people have an overwhelming desire to deny one or more of these things. The most common defense mechanism is to deny the stupid and mentally ill parts, and just treat him as some sort of criminal mastermind. For example, there’s a bunch of stuff out there now about how the chaotic tariff regime is “really” just an extortion scheme, by which Trump can force businesses and countries to beg him for exemptions. I mean it is that in part, but Trump has been babbling about the magical power of tariffs for decades, long before he had any prospect of being in a position to use them as part of his venal rackets. In other words, yes he really is that stupid: he thinks a trade deficit means that the country running the surplus is ripping off the country with the deficit. Like all extremely stupid people, he thinks that a complex issue has a simple answer, and he can’t be talked out of that view because he’s extremely stupid. This doesn’t mean he isn’t also extremely crooked, and will therefore use his extremely stupid beliefs about tariffs to try to extort people: he is, and he will. (2) The mental illness part of this whole mess is another one of those complicated things that don’t have a simple answer, but a psychologist I’ve known for nearly 30 years who diagnoses a lot of criminal psychopaths has this to say: * When referring to a real-deal psychopath “Never, ever, say ‘Oh, he wouldn’t go THAT far.'” And the corollary: “There is no bottom.” What the “malignant narcissist” descriptor misses about Trump: as a really, really, psychopathic person (far more so than all but a few of the psychopathic criminals I see in risk assessments professionally), Trump is highly callous and enjoys creating chaos for its stimulation value. He isn’t doing this just to make others grovel before him while “holding all the cards” in a shakedown. That too, of course, but he also simply enjoys destruction, no less than a child knocking over a Lego tower. * Trump is getting off on the chaos he’s causing right now, because he’s a sick twisted individual. If you want to predict the USA’s tariff policy over the next few months you’re better off having a degree in abnormal psychology than any kind of background in finance or economics. Again, that doesn’t mean he isn’t also extremely stupid and extremely evil: the presence of A doesn’t exclude the simultaneous presence of B and C. Indeed, the stupidity and evil and abnormal psychology all feed off of and reinforce each other. (3) There’s no formal legal solution in our system to any of this, other than waiting for the next round of national elections. Some people are talking about the 25th amendment (again), but that is a much more cumbersome process than impeachment and conviction, and the latter can’t be used because the Republican party is a cult, and part of the cult’s identity is that Donald Trump is a god-like savior figure, not the perpetrator of high crimes and misdemeanors. Trump’s stupidity and evil and madness are going to continue largely unimpeded until at least November of next year, absent solutions that are extremely prejudicial to formal legal processes. *

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The 'Threat to Democracy' Is Over It's time to admit that the fascism we feared is already here. Michael Harriot Contraband Camp Wednesday 12 March, 2025 What is the opposite of America? Is autocracy an apt antonym for democracy, or will we eventually become a dictatorship? Totalitarianism or oligarchy? These are just a few of the quasi-synonymous terms that scholars, journalists and politicians have used to describe the void at the bottom of the slippery slope of a collapsed constitutional republic America is careening toward. Even if one doesn’t subscribe to the narrative that Donald Trump is dismantling this 248-year-old experiment in self-governance, the question should not be dismissed. It’s possible that the current political climate is just a phase the country is going through. Still, it should have a name. What do we call it? The answer is “fascism.” Although the word is frequently employed by melodramatic pundits and sober-minded critics, fascism is loosely described as “a political movement that embraces far-right nationalism and the forceful suppression of any opposition, all overseen by an authoritarian government.” Merriam-Webster offers a more precise definition: “Fascism: a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.” Perhaps the best definition comes from 92-year-old Robert O. Paxton — perhaps the world’s greatest fascism expert. Twenty years ago, the Columbia University social sciences professor penned 'The Anatomy of Fascism'. In the book — which the New York Times called “so fair, so thorough and, in the end, so convincing that it may well become the most authoritative” book on the subject — Paxton avoided the urge to reduce a complex political ideology to a pocket-sized definition fit for glossaries and articles like this. But in the last chapter of the book, he capitulated to the intellectual necessity. One million years from now, if an intellectually curious 16th-grader at the Musk-Bezos Institute of Caucasian Science asked its artificially intelligent, virtual reality, CRT-free social studies instructor to describe the American government from Jan. 20, 2025 until the moment I typed these words, it will cite page 217 of Robert Paxton’s 'Anatomy of Fascism': "The moment has come to give fascism a usable short handle, even though we know that it encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person. Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." America fits the description. This is not what America is becoming, nor is it one of many possible outcomes that lies in this nation’s uncertain future. Whether your understanding of fascism comes from partisan hyperbole, “America’s most trusted authority on the English language” or the “foremost expert on fascism” who wrote the definitive book during a life that spans two fascist regimes, it is impossible to deny that the definitions provided by linguists, scholars and laymen are describing the current political climate. The fascism we feared is here. We are beset on all sides by a populist political movement that is “preoccupied with community decline, humiliation and victimhood.” The erosion of “Western values” is the foundation on which the entire “Make America Great Again” movement rests. It’s why New York Times chief white grievance correspondent Ross Douthat laments the loss of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. It’s why Trump leverages humiliation as a political weapon — whether it’s referring to a sitting U.S. senator as “Pocahontas” during an official address or publicly chastizing a fellow president for not showing enough gratitude. The Rumpelstiltskin of fascism spins white victimhood into political gold by using DEI, immigration or even counting votes as a straw man. The current administration seized power because of a “mass-based party of committed nationalist militants” (Proud Boys, insurrectionists, Christian nationalists) “working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites.” (What’s more elite than a “grand old party,” the three richest men on Earth and 57% of white America?) There is no question that this government has “abandon[ed] democratic liberties and pursu[ed] with redemptive violence” by threatening to shoot, deport, arrest and label protesters as “domestic terrorists.” Trump’s handpicked Supreme Court justices relieved him of any ethical and legal restraints. Mass deportations and ending birthright citizenship are perfect examples of “internal cleansing.” The attempts to colonize Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal reflect his “goals…for external expansion.” One doesn’t need a dictionary to know that Trump “exalts race above nation.” Under the guise of an executive order against DEI, he attacked civil rights. While he hasn’t issued a single presidential decree to address well-documented racial disparities, he’s fulfilling his promise to address the “anti-white feeling in his country.” Instead of using a democratically elected legislature controlled by his party, he is allowing an unelected billionaire to deploy a legion of stormtroopers. Elon Musk doesn’t have an official government title and DOGE is not an official federal agency; they are just “associated with a centralized autocratic government.” The administration has weaponized tariffs, renamed geographical landmarks, punished journalists and stripped away government funding from states that resist his anti-trans agenda — all to ensure “severe economic and social regimentation…by forcible suppression of opposition.” Based on every single metric, we are already in the throes of fascism. During most discussions of fascism, I usually note that there is little need to look outside the borders of this country to theorize how America would decline into fascism. After all, I am among the first generation of Black Americans who did not live under fascist rule. Plessy v. Ferguson — the Supreme Court case that codified a “system with some combination of fascist values and governing structures” — came four decades after America officially decided that Black people were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” However, if one needs a more Caucasian example, we need only remember that Hitler and Mussolini both used racism, propaganda and nationalism to manipulate their countries’ democratic process. Mussolini was prime minister of Italy for more than two years before he declared himself Il Duce (“the leader” or dictator). Hitler waited a year before he gave himself the title of Fuhrer. Do we have to wait for Trump to follow in the footsteps of his fascist OGs before acknowledging the truth that is staring us in the face? In fact, it might be more challenging to prove that America is not in the throes of fascism. Is there a definition or description that exists that objectively exonerates the current administration from allegations of fascism? Can you name a single one of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights that this two-month-old administration has not violated? Can you conjure a counterargument to the professional fascism labeler’s opinion that labeling Trump as a fascist “now seems not just acceptable but necessary?” Paxton said that four years ago. I’m not even sure what more it would take to convince people of these facts. Would Trump have to repeatedly cast himself as a monarch, a dictator and a strongman? Would he have to say, “I alone can fix it”? What if he kept bringing up a third term? Who would you rather believe — facts or your lying president? Just before he defines the term, Paxton devotes an entire chapter of his book to answering the question: Is fascism still possible? His answer was not just concise, it was chilling in its accuracy. “An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well.” If there is a better, more definitive encapsulation of the second Trump Reich administration, I’d like to hear it. To be clear, I am not suggesting that everyone should just give up and let Trump have his way. However, the first step to winning any fight is acknowledging one’s opponent and what it will take to defeat them. And when it comes to this administration, it’s too late to prevent them from turning the government into a piggybank for his MAGA monarchy. Defeating him means defeating someone with unchecked authority who has every lever of the most violently powerful empire in the history of the world at his disposal. But, whatever America was, it does not exist anymore. He has absolute control of a less perfect Union that cannot be saved. It can only be restored. As fragile and flawed as it was, I’d much rather live in a factory-refurbished democracy than a fascist ethno-theocracy. If you don’t believe me, ask my grandmama. Still, the question remains: What is the opposite of America? “This.” ~

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Boogeyman & Trojan Horses Jay Kuo Tuesday 18 March, 2025 It’s tempting to avoid the news these days. The headlines read as a parade of horribles: Trump invokes the Alien Enemies Act! Medicaid funding to be slashed! Green card holders deported! Migrants disappeared to El Salvador! DOGE is inside our federal systems! Social Security in peril! Mass federal layoffs announced! It’s overwhelming. And it’s doubly frustrating that many Democratic leaders, along with nearly all major media, have capitulated without any fight, leaving us with little faith that they are able or willing to counter any of this. Only the courts, and the people themselves, stand in the breach. When we’re hit with a barrage of attacks, seemingly from all sides, it’s often very helpful to climb up a level and assess the situation from a higher vantage point. From there, we can see some commonalities in the other side’s strategy and develop our own to counter them. It takes a bit of discipline, but if we stop thrashing around in panic and rise above the smoke and din, the picture becomes clear. It turns out that neither Donald Trump nor Elon Musk is very original in how he operates. Their M.O.s largely come down to two classic and well-understood ploys: bogeymen and Trojan horses. — Ask “why” when they raise up bogeymen When Trump first came down his golden escalator in June of 2015 and announced his candidacy, he went off about how Mexicans coming over the border were rapists, murderers, and drug dealers. Beyond the initial shock from his speech, there were two common reactions. The first was to denounce him as a racist, and the second was to defend the Mexican community from these attacks. While these responses were understandable and important, it was rare at the time to see anyone asking “why.” Why was Trump demonizing Mexicans? Why was he inviting condemnation and committing what felt at the time like political suicide? The answer, as experts in fascism would later come to point out more forcefully, is simple: Demagogues need bogeymen and scapegoats to stir up fear and loathing among their followers. These are powerful “gut” emotions that override higher thinking and allow for easy bucketing of people into good and bad sides. Had we asked the “why” more wisely at the time, we would have identified Trump much sooner, not as some political clown with no hope of being elected, but rather as a dangerous would-be fascist. Here was a man seeking to tap into strong, negative emotions and willing to dehumanize an entire country’s inhabitants so long as it served his purposes. — We’re still falling into the bogeyman trap Now here’s the depressing part: We haven’t learned our lesson. Trump keeps putting up bogeymen, but we keep responding not with an emphatic why, but rather disputing his wild claims or even arguing that we are tougher on the bogeymen. Trump’s newest targets are trans people, and in particular transgender athletes in female sports. As the election grew near, he spent a lot of political capital stoking fears and getting voters to despise this very small subsection of an already small minority within an already marginalized community. But instead of our first question being “Why is Trump coming after trans people?” we found ourselves debating whether Trump was right or wrong about it. And we’re still in that sandtrap of his making. The problem, of course, is that once you do this, you’ve already lost. You are now on Trump’s turf, spending time arguing the merits of his claims, which only serves to elevate the “problem” in the public eye. Suddenly it feels like trans people are in every locker room and trans women in every public bathroom. Trump doesn’t really think trans people are a problem, or even that transgender athletes in female sports is a problem. He admitted as much only recently, saying that he only brings the issue up around election time: [They’re] fighting like crazy about ‘men’ being able to play in women’s sports…. I think it’s a 95 percent issue. But in a way, I wanted to keep doing it because I don’t think they can win a race. I tell the Republicans, I said, “Don’t bring that subject up because there is no election right now. But about a week before the election, bring it up, because you can’t lose.” Bonus for Trump: He can now look like a strong leader who has taken care of this “problem” which of course was never a real issue to begin with. People are often surprised to learn, for example, that according to the testimony of its president, the number of transgender athletes in the NCAA is ten. That’s right, ten. And yet the transgender athletes in sports “debate” catches Democrats flat-footed because the public has already been worked into a slathering hunger over a complete nothing burger, in large part because Democrats keep giving the issue oxygen. For example, Democratic Texas Senate candidate Colin Allred was so concerned about Ted Cruz’s television ad attacks on this subject that he put out an ad himself insisting he doesn’t support “boys in girls’ sports.” This was bad politics because not only had Allred betrayed his own principles and his friends in the LGBTQ+ community, but he had taken the trans bait, which as a rule you should never, ever take. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who bafflingly launched a podcast where the first two guests he platformed were Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, doesn’t understand this basic rule either. He recently told Kirk that, with respect to transgender athletes on female sports teams, “I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness — it’s deeply unfair.” He added, “I am not wrestling with the fairness issue. I totally agree with you.” Congratulations, Gov. Newsom. You are now part of the problem and the weak Democratic response to fascism. The right way to answer unfair attacks, and the obvious use of edge cases like trans athletes to distort the picture, is not to agree with the attackers. When demagogues put up bogeymen (e.g., trans people, migrants, Muslims) to frighten and divide people, the first thing out of any leader’s mouth should be to call them out. The response goes something like this: “You know, I see right through you, and so do the American people. You’re targeting a group of people who are already bullied and misunderstood. You want to scare everyone into overreacting, to tap into that fear and fuel your own political ambitions. It’s cynical, it’s bullying, and it’s frankly disgusting. And when you’re done attacking one group, you’ll move on to the next, because that’s how fearmongers like you operate. But I won’t be a part of that, just so you can make new headlines and edit clips for political ads. You want to demonize others instead of talking about things that actually matter and affect the lives of voters and their families. You do this because you don’t actually have any answers, just more division and fear.” To the extent we do talk about whatever “problem” they want to hype, it’s vital to focus on how it is in fact a non-issue, a bogeyman of their creation. We need to remind people, for example, that red states are scrambling to pass anti-trans laws that cover only a handful of students. The reason they are doing that is to target and marginalize the trans community, and not out of any genuine concern for families or students. This won’t be easy. The right will respond with images and videos of masculine-presenting trans women who look physically imposing, goading us into accepting their framing of the debate. But we need to be disciplined. Of course, it’s easy to rile people up over edge cases, just as it is easy to get many voters to believe all Muslims are terrorists or all Venezuelan migrants are murderers and that Haitians are eating pets in Springfield. No matter what we say, that is the nonsense they will come back with. And sadly, we will not win if we engage with them on their terms. There will always be bogeymen for them to point to, so our first response must be to expose that tactic for what it is. In the 1950s during the McCarthy era, the bogeymen were communists and homosexuals. The media got coopted into the red and the pink scares, blaring headlines that made it seem like there was a huge problem with both. Anyone who tried to prove they weren’t a member of either group was already doomed. Had the media and politicians first demanded an answer to the all-important question of why, the country would have more quickly understood that the red scare was not about rooting out actual communists, but simply a way for McCarthy and his thugs like Roy Cohn (who by no coincidence was a mentor to Donald Trump) to terrorize and silence their enemies. Trump is a student of this time-worn tactic. He immediately understood, for example, that he could leverage the murder of Laken Riley by a Venezuelan migrant into a terror campaign against all Venezuelan migrants, which then could extend to all migrants, and then to all immigrant communities. Democratic leaders didn’t have the political courage to push back and call out Trump for using Riley’s murderer as a bogeyman to paint all migrants as murderers. That was because they believed doing so would make them look soft on migration and soft on crime. What they really were was soft on fascism. Indeed, many of them even voted for the Laken Riley Act because they didn’t have the tools of effective counter-messaging or even know how to begin to respond to Trump’s demagoguery. We must always begin by identifying why Trump is drawing so much attention, say, to one murder. Our leaders must courageously warn Americans what can happen, and what indeed has happened, whenever he stirs up these kinds of fears. We can now draw a clear line from fear and anger over Laken Riley’s murder to the summary deportation of anyone, without so much as a hearing, who is even suspected of being a Venezuelan gang member. There should be no excuses for weak responses now. When Trump and the GOP fearmonger or scapegoat anyone or any community, no matter who they are, no matter how horribly they paint them, we need to immediately recognize it and call them out: This is exactly what fascists do to gain power. — Ask “why” when they roll up a Trojan horse If the people of Troy had known beforehand of the cautionary story of a hollowed-out horse hiding soldiers within it, they would have been quite wary when a big, beautiful horse rolled up to the gates as a “gift” to the city. Here in the U.S., we have the advantage of this parable and presumably know to be wary of Trojan horses. So then why are we so willing to accept the absurd notion that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, wants to give our nation a big free gift? Hearing Trump, the GOP, and Musk tell it, he simply wants to make our government more efficient out of the goodness of his heart. Specifically, Musk has promised to root out “fraud, waste, and abuse” within our government. And who could possibly be against that, right? Yet under the guise of this great gift from a benevolent billionaire, who claims to be actively rooting out unwanted things from our bloated bureaucracy, we have let in a viper. Musk is now positioned to gain unparalleled access to private financial data, to destroy the many parts of the government that were responsible for regulating his many businesses, and even to redirect government contracts, such as the FAA’s $2.4 billion communications deal with Verizon, to his own company, Starlink. Had the media and Congress been asking the why more emphatically when Trump first put Musk in charge of government efficiency, we would have been far more on guard about his true intentions, which have never been altruistic. Musk didn’t become the world’s richest man by giving away his time and money, after all. We would have understood that few big gifts are ever truly free, and indeed some hide very dangerous and self-serving motives. — We’re still falling for the Trojan horse trap Musk, along with the White House as guided by Project 2025, is slashing and burning his way through the federal government on a self-described mission to improve efficiency by eliminating “fraud, waste and abuse.” We already know that this is just a smokescreen for some far bigger plan. Strong evidence for this was on full display when Musk began to make completely unfounded claims that his DOGE team had discovered millions of dead people who were still receiving Social Security benefits. Computer experts debunked these claims as nonsense, but not before they became a rallying cry for the right. Social Security is corrupt and broken, they claimed, and needs to be fixed. But let’s be clear: Social Security is weakened today because Musk has been able to attack it from within while using the Trojan horse of eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse. His goal is to convince tens of millions of Americans, who have paid into the system and are entitled to its benefits, that it is broken, wasteful, and corrupt, all so that private companies can gain access to its trillions. As Judd Legum of 'Popular Info' recently reported, an internal SSA memo reveals that the administration is preparing to gut its workforce and close many of its regional offices, on top of eliminating customer service by phone and disallowing walk-in appointments. Far from making things more efficient, this combination will make it much harder for older, less technology-savvy recipients to access services, meaning many will lose out. In the memo, acting SAA deputy commissioner Doris Díaz predicted “service disruption,” “operational strain” and “budget shortfalls” that would create increased “challenges for vulnerable populations.” Musk uses other Trojan horse strategies, including making his private satellite internet service, Starlink, available for countries all over the world. Again, his goal is not altruistic but to eventually make more profit for himself. It also gives Musk an incredibly powerful weapon to deploy against governments who fall into his disfavor. Musk has threatened Ukraine, for example, with the loss of Starlink for use in repelling invading Russian forces. The U.S. is vulnerable to this extortion as well. Musk is now eyeing $42.5 billion in rural internet broadband appropriations under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program. As Gizmodo reported, Musk now wants to swap in Starlink for the planned fiber optic cables that are about to begin being laid from that Biden-era program. He’s promising quicker deployment for rural communities, but there’s a catch: As Evan Feinman, who directed the program for the last three years, wrote in a departing email to staff, Starlink’s satellite internet is “inferior” to alternatives, “delivering slower speeds at higher costs to the household paying the bill.” And if Musk can control the internet service of most of rural America, that would leave him with incredible control, data and leverage over much of the country, on top of raking in hundreds of billions in profit from yet another project redirected to him by the government which he now controls so much of. The Trojan Horse story reminds us that it doesn’t matter how good the gift looks or what lofty words of greeting and friendship come with it. We shouldn’t trust it; our first move should be to reject it outright; and by the way, why would we ever freely give any one person, let alone a power-hungry oligarch like Musk, that much power? — Lessons applied elsewhere Once we understand that most everything coming from Trump, Musk and the administration is either a bogeyman scare or a Trojan horse deception, we know how to identify threats and tactics far more readily. Here are some quick examples: Tren de Aragua and migrant criminals : Bogeymen to give Trump unlimited powers to deport anyone No tax on social security or tips : Trojan horse to open the doors for a big tax break for the wealthy Fentanyl traffickers and migrant invasions : Bogeymen to justify high tariffs on our neighbors Make America Healthy Again : Trojan horse to eliminate vaccines and mRNA-funded research DEI / woke mind virus : Bogeyman to justify firing competent women and minorities and to attack higher education Offer to distribute DOGE “savings” to taxpayers : Trojan horse to justify continued slashing of the government Attacks on Zelenskyy as real obstacle to peace : Bogeyman to justify realignment to Russia As you can see, it’s actually not that complicated. It’s important to become disciplined in identifying and calling out these ploys now, because in the not very distant future the stakes will grow even higher. The ultimate form of a bogeyman, for example, is a major false flag operation, where the government invents a crisis and then blames it on another party in order to justify the seizing of dictatorial powers. That’s also known as a "Reichstag moment", named after the arsonist burning of the German parliament just weeks after Hitler took power in 1933, which he then attributed falsely to the communists and used it as a pretext to suspend civil liberties in Germany. Be prepared for Trump’s own Reichstag fire, particularly if the economy continues to sour and he needs to create an emergency in order to justify an iron rule. He’s already invoked a “national emergency” over the border to justify tariffs and the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify summary deportations. Next up is a swing at the Insurrection Act to put military forces to use against his domestic enemies, and for that, he will need a very big justification indeed. If he doesn’t get one from the protests against his presidency, he very well may invent one. And from there, his “Trojan horse” gift of using U.S. troops to, say, put down the “riots” could become his permanent way of ruling through military force instead of by the consent of the governed. This next part is important: These are all avoidable outcomes. But to help ensure they do not come to pass, we and our leaders, both civic and cultural, need to collectively become much better, faster, and more responsive to the ruses of the regime. That way, when the big false flags and gifts of “law and order” do arrive, we are trained and prepared to reject them.

There Is Only One Way to Make Sense of the Tariffs Derek Thompson The Atlantic Thursday 3 April, 2025 Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump celebrated America’s so-called Liberation Day by announcing a slew of tariffs on dozens of countries. His plan, if fully implemented, will return the United States to the highest tariff duty as a share of the economy since the late 1800s, before the invention of the automobile, aspirin, and the incandescent light bulb. Michael Cembalest, the widely read analyst at JP Morgan Wealth Management, wrote that the White House announcement “borders on twilight zone territory.” The most fitting analysis for this moment, however, does not come from an economist or a financial researcher. It comes from the screenwriter William Goldman, who pithily captured his industry’s lack of foresight with one of the most famous aphorisms in Hollywood history: “Nobody knows anything.” You’re not going to find a better three-word summary of the Trump tariffs than that. If there’s anything worse than an economic plan that attempts to revive the 19th-century protectionist U.S. economy, it’s the fact that the people responsible for explaining and implementing it don’t seem to have any idea what they’re doing, or why. On one side, you have the longtime Trump aide Peter Navarro, who has said that Trump’s tariffs will raise $6 trillion over the next decade, making it the largest tax increase in American history. On another, you have pro-Trump tech folks, such as Palmer Luckey, who have instead claimed that the goal is the opposite: a world of fully free trade, as countries remove their existing trade barriers in the face of the new penalties. On yet another track, there is Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, who has suggested that the tariff salvo is part of a master plan to rebalance America’s relationship with the global economy by reducing the value of the dollar and reviving manufacturing employment in the United States. These three alleged goals—raising revenue, restoring free trade, and rejiggering the global economy—are incompatible with one another. The first and second explanations are mutually exclusive: The state can’t raise tax revenue in the long run with a levy that is designed to disappear. The second and third explanations are mutually exclusive too: You can’t reindustrialize by doubling down on the global-trade free-for-all that supposedly immiserated the Rust Belt in the first place. Either global free trade is an economic Valhalla worth fighting for, or it’s the cursed political order that we’re trying desperately to destroy. As for Trump’s alleged devotion to bringing back manufacturing jobs, the administration has attacked the implementation of the CHIPS bill, which invested in the very same high-tech semiconductors that a strategic reindustrialization effort would seek to prioritize. There is no single coherent explanation for the tariffs, only competing hypotheses that violate one another’s internal logic because, when it comes to explaining this economic policy, nobody knows anything. One might expect clarity from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But even he doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on. The “tariff gun will always be loaded and on the table, but rarely discharged,” he said last year. So much for that. Yesterday, a Bloomberg reporter asked Bessent if the Trump administration has plans to negotiate with America’s trading partners. “We’re just going to have to wait and see,” he said. Was the administration ready to negotiate with the European Union, China, or India? “We’ll see.” Asked why Canada and Mexico were missing from the president’s list of tariffs, he switched it up: “I’m not sure.” Nobody knows anything. By the numbers, the tariffs are less an expression of economic theory and more a Dadaist art piece about the meaninglessness of expertise. The Trump administration slapped 10 percent tariffs on Heard Island and McDonalds Islands, which are uninhabited, and on the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose residents are mostly American and British military service members. One of the highest tariff rates, 50 percent, was imposed on the African nation of Lesotho, whose average citizen earns less than $5 a day. Why? Because the administration’s formula for supposedly “reciprocal” tariff rates apparently has nothing to do with tariffs. The Trump team seems to have calculated each penalty by dividing the U.S. trade deficit with a given country by how much the U.S. imports from it and then doing a rough adjustment. Because Lesotho’s citizens are too poor to afford most U.S. exports, while the U.S. imports $237 million in diamonds and other goods from the small landlocked nation, we have reserved close to our highest-possible tariff rate for one of the world’s poorest countries. The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence. If the tariffs violate their own internal logic and basic common sense, what are they? Most likely, they represent little more than the all-of-government metastasis of Trump’s personality, which sees grandiosity as a strategy to pull counterparties to the negotiating table and strike deals that benefit Trump’s ego or wallet. This personality style is clear, and it has been clearly stated, even if its application to geopolitics is confounding to observe. “My style of deal-making is pretty simple and straightforward,” Trump writes in The Art of the Deal. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought but in most cases I still end up with what I want.” One can see this playbook—threat, leverage, concession, repeat—playing out across all of society. It’s happening in trade. It’s happening in law. It’s happening in academia. In the first two months of his second term, Trump has already squeezed enormous concessions out of white-shoe law firms and major universities. Trump appears to care more about the process of gaining leverage over others—including other countries—than he does about any particular effective tariff rate. The endgame here is that there is no endgame, only the infinite game of power and leverage. Trump’s defenders praise the president for using chaos to shake up broken systems. But they fail to see the downside of uncertainty. Is a textile company really supposed to open a U.S. factory when our trade policy seems likely to change every month as Trump personally negotiates with the entire planet? Are manufacturing firms really supposed to invest in expensive factory expansions when the Liberation Day tariffs caused a global sell-off that signals an international downturn? Trump’s personality is, and has always been, zero-sum and urgent, craving chaos, but economic growth is positive-sum and long-term-oriented, craving certainty for its largest investments. The scariest thing about the Trump tariffs isn’t the numbers, but the underlying message. We’re all living inside the president’s head, and nobody knows anything. ~

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< World Premiere > JAMES MacMILLAN : Tenebrae Responsories (for unaccompanied SSAATTBB choir) Wednesday 4 April, 2007 St. Andrew's in the Square, Glasgow, Scotland Cappella Nova, cond. Alan Tavener Boosey & Hawkes, Ltd., 2008 (BH11954)

Trump Just Bet the Farm Thomas Friedman The NY Times Thursday 3 April, 2025 Donald Trump is not known for doing his homework — he’s more of a go-with-my-gut kind of guy. What I find most terrifying about what Trump is doing today is that he seems to be largely relying on his gut to bet that he can radically overturn how America’s institutions have operated and the way the nation relates to both its allies and enemies — and get it all right. As in, America will become stronger and more prosperous, while the rest of the world will just adjust. Next question. Well, what are the odds that Trump can get all of these complex issues right — based on trusting his gut — when on the same day that he was announcing his huge tariff increases on imports from the world over, he invited into the Oval Office Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist who believes that Sept. 11 was an “inside” job. She was there, my Times colleagues reported, to lecture Trump about how disloyal key members of the National Security Council staff were. Trump subsequently fired at least six of them. (No wonder so many Chinese asked me in Beijing last week if we were having a Mao-like “cultural revolution.” More on that later.) Yes, what are the odds that such a president, seemingly ready to act on foreign policy on the advice of a conspiracy theorist, got all this trade theory right? I’d say they’re long. What is it that Trump, with his grievance-filled gut, doesn’t understand? The time we live in today, though far from perfect or equal, is nevertheless widely viewed by historians as one of the most relatively peaceful and prosperous in history. We are benefiting from this pacific era in large part because of a tightening web of globalization and trade, and also because of the world’s domination by a uniquely benign and generous hegemon called the United States of America that is at peace and economically interwoven with its biggest rival, China. In other words, the world has been the way the world has been these past 80 years because America was the way America was: a superpower ready to let other countries take some advantage of it in trade, because previous presidents understood that if the world grew steadily richer and more peaceful, and if the United States just continued to get the same slice of global G.D.P. — about 25 percent — it would still prosper handsomely because the total pie would grow steadily larger. Which is exactly what happened. The world has been the way the world has been because China brought more people out of poverty faster than any other country in history, largely on the back of a giant, relentless export engine that took advantage of the U.S.-engineered global free trade system. The world has been the way the world has been because the United States had the good fortune to be bordered by two friendly democracies, Canada and Mexico. Together the three nations wove a network of supply chains that made them all richer, no matter that many goods manufactured in North America could have a label saying, “Made by America, Mexico and Canada together.” The world has been the way the world has been thanks to the alliance between the United States and both the other members of NATO and the European Union, which, with U.S. help, have kept the peace in Europe from the end of World War II right up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This vast, prosperous trans-Atlantic partnership has been a pillar of global growth and security. The world has been the way the world has been because America had the government work force it had, with its expertise, incorruptibility and funding of scientific research that was the envy of the world. Trump is now betting that the world will stay the way the world was — growing more prosperous and peaceful — even if he converts the United States into a predatory power ready to seize territory, like Greenland, and even if he sends the message to aspiring talented legal immigrants, “If you do come here, be very, very careful what you say.” If Trump turns out to be right — that we’ll still enjoy the economic benefits and stability we’ve had for nearly a century even if America suddenly shifts from a benign hegemon to a predator, from the world’s most important proponent of free trade to a global tariffing giant, from the protector of the European Union to telling Europe it’s on its own and from a defender of science to a country that forces out a top vaccine specialist like Dr. Peter Marks for refusing to go along with quack medicine — I will stand corrected. But if Trump turns out to be wrong, he will have sown the wind, and we as a nation will reap the whirlwind. But so, too, will the rest of the world. And I can tell you, the world is worried. When I was in China last week, more than a few people asked me if Trump was launching a “cultural revolution” the way that Mao did. Mao’s lasted 10 years — from 1966 to 1976 — and it wrecked the whole economy after he instructed his party’s youth to destroy the bureaucrats that he thought were opposing him. This question was so much on the mind of one retired senior Chinese official that he emailed me last week, with a warning: Mao sent his young party cadres to attack “anyone who could think — ruling elites such as Deng Xiaoping, college professors, engineers, writers and journalists, doctors, etc. He wanted to dumb down the entire population so that he could rule easily and forever,” the former official wrote. “Sounds a bit similar with what is going on in the U.S.? I hope not.” I hope not, too — especially for a reason raised by Stephen Roach, a Yale economist with long experience in China. When Mao’s Cultural Revolution happened, Roach noted, China was largely isolated and the effects were mostly felt within its borders. A similar cultural revolution in the United States today, Roach noted, could have a “profound impact” on the entire world. ~

Opinion | Trump Just Bet the Farm

Donald Trump is upending a world that has brought peace and stability for 80 years. What is it he doesn’t understand?

Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived. Masha Gessen The NY Times Wednesday 2 April, 2025 “It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband. “We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security. Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.” It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car. It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment. It’s the growing irrelevance of the law and the helplessness of judges and lawyers. A federal judge ordered flights carrying the Venezuelan men to be turned around and demanded information about the abductees. Another federal judge forbade the government to deport, without notice, Rasha Alawieh, the Brown University medical school professor who was detained on return from a trip to Lebanon. Another judge prohibited moving Rumeysa Ozturk from Massachusetts without notice. The executive branch apparently ignored these rulings. It’s the chilling stories that come by word of mouth. ICE is checking documents on the subway. ICE is outside New York public libraries that hold English-as-a-second-language classes. ICE agents handcuffed a U.S. citizen who tried to intervene in a detention in Harlem. ICE vehicles are parked outside Columbia. ICE is coming to your workplace, your street, your building. ICE agents are wearing brown uniforms that resemble those of UPS — don’t open the door for deliveries. Don’t leave the house. The streets in the New York neighborhoods with the highest immigrant populations have emptied out. It’s the invisible hand of the authorities. The media outlet Zeteo reports that Homeland Security employees are revoking foreign students’ status in the database that’s usually maintained by universities. (Normally, once a person has entered the country on a valid academic visa, they have the right to stay as long as they remain in the program for which the visa was granted — this is what university administrators track.) These changes have reportedly been made with no notification and in the absence of any transparent process. Of course, the Department of Homeland Security, when it was created in the wake of 9/11, was meant to function in opaque ways and with broad authority; it was designed to be a secret-police force. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has bragged to reporters about revoking the legal status of upward of 300 people and promised there would be more: “We’re looking every day for these lunatics.” It’s the shifting goal posts. They are taking not only people who are in the United States without legal status but also those who are here on a visitor’s visa and then also legal permanent residents. They are targeting not only people who have criminal convictions but also those whom they say they suspect of belonging to a gang and also those who participated in or supported campus protests and then also someone, like Ozturk, who merely wrote, with three other people, an opinion essay in a student newspaper. And then there was a German green card holder at Boston’s Logan Airport who was allegedly stripped and deprived of sleep and his medications by Customs and Border Protection — actions that could fit the legal definition of torture. (The agency has denied the allegations.) And a Canadian with a job offer who was detained at the southern border and held for 12 days. And another German, a tourist, who was detained at the southern border and held for more than six weeks. And a Russian biomedical researcher at Harvard who was detained coming back from France and has been in the infamous detention facility in Louisiana for over a month. It’s the way we dig down for the details of these stories to reassure ourselves that this won’t happen to us, or that there is some logic to these arrests. The German man had a misdemeanor charge a decade ago. The Canadian was possibly using a crossing not meant for people submitting work visa applications. The other German, a tattoo artist, was carrying her equipment and customs agents might have suspected that she was planning to work illegally. The Russian scientist was bringing in frog embryos that the Department of Homeland Security says she did not declare properly. When the range of factors that can get a person arrested stretches from political speech to a paperwork error, we are in territory described by the Russian saying, “Give us a person and we’ll find the infraction.” And, as the historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, if due process is routinely denied to noncitizens, it will be denied to citizens too, simply because it is often impossible for people to prove that they are citizens. This has happened before, when an unknown number of U.S. citizens were caught up in the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans in the late 1920s and 1930s. It’s the lists. More than anything else, in fact, it’s the lists. A private company has launched an app called ICERAID, billed as a “protocol that delegates intelligence-gathering tasks to citizens that would otherwise be undertaken by law enforcement agencies.” The app promises rewards for “capturing and uploading images of criminal illegal alien activity” and possibly even bigger rewards for self-reporting — for adding oneself to the ICERAID registry if one is “an honest, hard-working undocumented immigrant with no criminal history.” The app, in other words, combines two time-tested secret-police techniques: incentivizing some people to denounce their neighbors and inducing others to add themselves to registries. It’s the denunciations by concerned citizens. Before there was ICERAID, there were several groups compiling lists of people they consider antisemitic, especially university students and faculty. These organizations include Mothers Against College Antisemitism, a Facebook group with more than 60,000 members; Betar U.S., a Zionist organization so extreme-right that the Anti-Defamation League has denounced it; and several other groups that, since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, have been reporting people to government authorities and cheering when they are detained, deported or fired. When Rubio was asked if the State Department is using lists fed to it by these private groups, he said, “We’re not going to talk about the process by which we’re identifying it because obviously we’re looking for more people.” The state appears to have outsourced surveillance. A Columbia professor shared an Instagram story by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei that showed Elon Musk’s “X” symbol rotating and morphing into a swastika. The professor did it on personal time, from a personal residence, to a personal account. An Instagram story lives only for 24 hours; someone was watching. It was reported to the university; three months passed before the professor was cleared. Then the professor’s name and picture, along with a new inventory of ostensible offenses, popped up on one of those lists of supposedly antisemitic faculty members. There was, of course, nothing antisemitic about the Instagram story or the rest of it. The professor, like so many of the people on these lists, is Jewish. Last Friday, mere minutes after Columbia announced the name of its new interim president, Claire Shipman, an entity that calls itself Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus addressed Shipman on X: “We have identified faculty members” who, the group believes, should be purged. The self-appointed enforcers are vigilant. This, too, is a hallmark of a secret-police state. The citizens of such a state live with a feeling of being constantly watched. They live with a sense of random danger. Anyone — a passer-by, the man behind you in line at the deli, the woman who lives down the hall, your building’s super, your own student, your child’s teacher — can be a plainclothes agent or a self-appointed enforcer. People live in growing isolation and with the feeling of low-level dread, and these are the defining conditions of living in a secret-police state. People lose the ability to plan for the future, because they feel that they have no control over their lives, and they try to make themselves invisible. They move through the world without looking, for fear of seeing too much. But while we are still capable of looking, we have to say what we see: The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve seen it before. ~

Opinion | Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.

Those of us who’ve seen secret police in action can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity.

The Real Reason Trump is Destroying the Economy Zack Beauchamp VOX Thursday 3 April, 2025 The Trump administration’s tariffs are, by every reasonable account, an economic catastrophe in the making. So why are they happening? One explanation is that this is simply democracy at work. President Donald Trump campaigned on doing more or less exactly what he’s just done, and the voting public elected him. So here we are. That’s at best a partial story. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to see Trump’s tariffs as a symptom of democratic decay — of America transitioning into a kind of strange hybrid system that combines both authoritarian and democratic features. Were America’s democracy functioning properly, Trump wouldn’t have the power to impose such broad tariffs unilaterally. Congress, not the presidency, has the constitutional authority to raise taxes — and tariffs are, of course, a tax on imports. Yet the basic design of the American system has broken down, allowing the president to usurp far more authority than is healthy. In many policy areas, the presidency functions less like a democratic chief executive who operates under constraint and more like an elected dictatorship. And historically, dictatorships — elected or otherwise — suffer from a fatal flaw: they have no ability to stop the people at the top from acting on their policy whims and, in the process, producing national disasters. This tendency is why democracy tends to produce superior policy outcomes over the long run; why America, and not Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, won the 20th century. The tariffs, in short, show the true stakes of democratic decline. It’s not just a matter of abstract principle, but the difference between stability and disaster. America’s democratic decline caused the tariffs When Donald Trump and Elon Musk began laying waste to the federal government in February, the political scientist Adam Przeworski declared himself “at a loss.” Though Przeworski is one of the world’s most eminent scholars of comparative democracy, author of many defining pieces in the field, he could not find the right vocabulary to describe what was happening in the United States. Though “Trump was elected in fair elections,” his subsequent policy agenda amounted to “revolutionary change of the relation between the state and society” — one that attempts to replace the rules and norms that define democratic politics with something very different. Understanding America in this more textured sense, as a country under a new and confusing regime that is both democratic and not, helps us make better sense out of the Trump tariff debacle. On the one hand, an electorate that picked Trump is getting one of Trump’s signature policies. Sometimes, in democracies, demagogues win elections — a problem so old that you can find a discussion of it in Plato’s Republic. On the other hand, democracies rely on legal rules constraining the executive to prevent any such demagogue from becoming a dictator. In the American system, that means a complex system of constitutional checks and balances — one of which is the Constitution granting taxation powers to Congress and Congress alone. Yet instead of asking for statutory authorization to raise tariffs, Trump is exploiting broadly worded emergency legislation to do an end-run around the legislative branch. This is what a hybrid political system looks like in practice. The United States still has free and fair elections at all levels of government, and is in that sense democratic. But elections don’t matter in the way that they’re supposed to, because the people’s representatives in Congress are not playing their constitutionally assigned policymaking role. This is the autocratic component of the current American system, one that enables the president to sabotage the global economy if he so wishes. The transformation of America, from democracy to Frankensteinian amalgam, has been in the works for decades. The primary culprit is Congress, which has — due to a combination of partisanship and political cowardice — become both unable and unwilling to act as the supreme lawmaking body. Instead, it began delegating significant amounts of its own authority to the executive. Sometimes, this was intentional — authorizing the president to make policy through executive agencies, creating the “administrative state” conservatives decry. Sometimes, it was unintentional: Congress giving the president vague emergency powers that were supposed to function in narrow circumstances, but in practice allowed the president to act unilaterally in all sorts of “normal” policy debates. And sometimes, Congress simply did nothing on crucial policy issues — forcing the president to try to address them with dubiously broad interpretations of their own powers. The judicial branch deserves some blame too. While the Supreme Court has occasionally stepped in to address presidential overreach, it has done so in a haphazard and partisan way. Moreover, it has long deferred to the president on key issues like immigration, trade, and war. Observers on both the liberal left and the libertarian right warned for decades that growing executive power posed a problem for democracy and good policymaking. Obviously, they were right to do so in hindsight. Yet part of the reason that they were ignored is that there were other checks on the president that seemed to keep the executive in line. Some of these were internal executive branch checks. The White House relied on the Office of Legal Counsel — a group of senior executive branch attorneys — to provide independent opinions on the legality of various policy options. Internal policy shops like the Council of Economic Advisers provided informed expert opinions that would steer presidents toward more evidence-based policymaking. In dire cases, the Justice Department would probe potentially criminal activity by executive branch staff. Other checks were more informal. Fear of losing the war for public opinion might prevent a president from taking a particularly radical stance. The president’s own moral code, a sense that there are just certain things one shouldn’t do even if you can, also provided a kind of soft check on the abuse of power. But what’s clear now is that all of these internal mechanisms were voluntary. Trump has neutered executive branch checks on his authority and (clearly!) does not possess the judgment we expect from people in the highest office. It turns out that the rest of the political system — and especially Congress — had created the conditions for our descent into a hybrid political system. The only barriers remaining were norms about how the executive branch should work, ones that a determined president like Trump could smash through with ease. The tariffs show why our hybrid system is so dangerous Sometimes, the stakes in this kind of conversation can feel a little fuzzy. Why does it matter if we are living in a hybrid system rather than a full democracy? Sure, the president may be powerful, but if we’ve still got elections, then isn’t everything going to be fine in the end? The tariffs provide one of the clearest examples of why this matters for everyone: without democracy, the quality of our policymaking gets dangerously worse. Political scientists have long found that, on average, democracies produce better outcomes for citizens than authoritarian states. They produce higher rates of economic growth, superior technological innovation, better public health services, and are even more likely to win wars. One of the key reasons for democracy’s success has been its formalized policymaking process. Because laws are changed through legal and transparent processes, ones subject to public debate and legal oversight, they are more likely to both be well-informed by the best available evidence and corrected if something goes badly. Authoritarian and hybrid regimes ditch these constraints, which allows them to make policy changes a lot faster. But it also enables one person, or a small group of people, to make radical decisions on a whim with disastrous consequences. Think about Mao’s Great Leap Forward in China, a direct product of the leader’s adherence to a Communist ideology that was out of touch with reality. While Trump’s tariffs are nowhere near as evil — the Great Leap Forward killed somewhere between 18 and 32 million people — the same formal problem contributed to both mistakes. For a more recent example, look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The disaster began with Putin’s personal obsession with the idea that Ukrainian nationhood was fake and that the territory was rightfully Russian. This notion went from Putin’s personal obsession to actual war because no one could stop him. Trump’s tariffs will, if fully implemented, be remembered as their own cautionary tale. While he campaigned on them, he wouldn’t have been able to implement the entire tariff package had he gone through the normal constitutionally prescribed procedure for raising taxes. The fact that America isn’t functioning like a normal democracy, with public deliberation and multiple checks on executive authority, is what allowed Trump to act on his idiosyncratic ideas in the manner of a Mao or Putin. Now, it’s still possible that Trump steps back from the brink. But even if he does, and the worst outcome is avoided, the lesson should be clear: the long decay of America’s democratic system means that we are all living under an axe. And if this isn’t the moment it falls, there will surely be another. ~

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Cory Booker Condemns Trump’s Policies in Longest Senate Speech on Record Tim Ball, Mike Ives, Matthew Mpoke Bigg NY Times Monday 1 April, 2025 Senator Cory Booker, his voice still booming after more than a day spent on the Senate floor railing against the Trump administration, on Tuesday night surpassed Strom Thurmond for the longest Senate speech on record, in an act of astonishing stamina that he framed as a call to action. Mr. Booker, a New Jersey Democrat and one-time presidential candidate, began his speech at 7 p.m. on Monday, vowing to speak as long as he was “physically able.” In a show of physical and oratorical endurance, he lasted past sunset on Tuesday, assailing President Trump’s cuts to government agencies and crackdown on immigration. He ended his speech at 8:05 p.m., 46 minutes after eclipsing Mr. Thurmond’s 24-hour 18-minute filibuster of a civil rights bill in 1957. He finished by quoting John Lewis, the civil rights hero and congressman. Mr. Booker said of Lewis: “He said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble, to redeem the soul of our nation. I want you to redeem the dream. Let’s be bold in America.” Earlier, cheers broke out in the chamber when Mr. Booker passed Mr. Thurmond. For a moment, Mr. Booker addressed the man he had eclipsed. “To hate him is wrong, and maybe my ego got too caught up that if I stood here, maybe, maybe, just maybe, I could break this record of the man who tried to stop the rights upon which I stand,” Mr. Booker said. “I’m not here though because of his speech. I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.” Earlier, at 4:20 p.m., Mr. Booker passed Senator Ted Cruz’s memorable 21-hour-and-19-minute harangue of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2013. As the hours dragged on Tuesday and Mr. Booker kept speaking, tens of thousands followed along on livestreams, curious to see how long he might go. Without bathroom breaks but with occasional pauses for encouraging questions from his fellow Democrats, Mr. Booker read from a binder of notes and waved a small copy of the U.S. Constitution. He gesticulated and roared. At times, he draped himself over his lectern. His voice grew hoarse. But it remained strong. He said the United States had reached a “moral moment” that required a stand against the Trump administration, which he said had brought the United States to a moment of “crisis” barely two months after the president returned to office. “My voice is inadequate,” Mr. Booker said more than 19 hours into the speech. “My efforts today are inadequate to stop what they’re trying to do. But we the people are powerful.” More than 67 years earlier, Mr. Thurmond set a record with a 24-hour-and-18-minute effort to block the passage of a civil rights bill. The Senate’s log of longest speeches does not reach back to the founding of the nation, but Mr. Thurmond’s is the longest recorded. Mr. Booker, who for weeks had contemplated delivering a marathon floor speech, had long been bothered that Mr. Thurmond, a segregationist from South Carolina, held the record, according to Mr. Booker’s office. Mr. Thurmond had sustained himself by sipping orange juice and munching on bits of beef and pumpernickel; it was not clear if Mr. Booker had eaten anything on Tuesday, but two glasses of water rested on a desk in front of his lectern. He had prepared for the speech by fasting for days, he told reporters on Tuesday night after his speech. Before he began on Monday, he had not had food since Friday or water since Sunday night. The approach took its toll, said Mr. Booker, a vegan and former Stanford football player who has chronicled his efforts to stay fit and eat healthy. “Instead of figuring out how to go to the bathroom,” he said, “I ended up, I think, really unfortunately dehydrating myself.” During the speech, he recalled, he started to “really cramp up.” Unlike Mr. Thurmond’s speech, Mr. Booker’s was not a filibuster — a procedural tactic that has been used to block legislation on many issues — because it did not come during a debate over a specific bill or nominee. But it did delay a planned vote on a Democratic-led bill to undo Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Mr. Booker paused from time to time to take encouraging questions from Democratic colleagues and for a midday prayer by the Senate chaplain. He divided his remarks into sections focused on aspects of the administration’s agenda, focusing on health care, education, immigration and national security. He assailed what he said were Mr. Trump’s plans to cut funding for Medicaid and other programs. The White House has denied that it plans to cut Medicaid benefits, but the president and his allies have attacked Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security over what they claim is waste, fraud and abuse. Mr. Booker repeatedly drew on American history, comparing the moment facing the United States under Mr. Trump to the civil rights movement and the fight for women’s suffrage. He quoted repeatedly from speeches by Lewis, the civil rights hero, and John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona who broke with his party to defend Obamacare in 2017. At one point, Mr. Booker spent some 30 minutes reading an account by a Canadian citizen, Jasmine Mooney, detailing her detention in the United States by immigration enforcement officers. “We’re senators with all of this power, but in this democracy, the power of people is greater than the people in power,” Mr. Booker said, adding, “The civil rights movement wasn’t just won because of just a few Black folks that stood up.” He called on a broad coalition of Americans to stand up to the Trump administration. The White House dismissed Mr. Booker’s speech. A spokesman for the president, Harrison Fields, said Mr. Booker was seeking an “I am Spartacus” moment, referring to a comment by the senator during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh that was mocked at the time as a bid to capture a viral moment. “When will he realize he’s not Spartacus — he’s a spoof?” Mr. Fields said in a statement. But in the U.S. Capitol, Mr. Booker was cheered on by his colleagues and staff. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, told Mr. Booker that he was delivering a “tour de force.” “It’s not only the amount of time that you have spent on the floor, what strength,” Mr. Schumer said, “but the brilliance of your indictment of this awful administration that is so destroying our democracy, that is taking so much away from working people.” When fellow Democrats asked their questions — offering interludes more than inquiries — Mr. Booker’s staff members jumped into action. Kleenex, for dabbing sweat from his brow, was replenished. A fresh binder, thick with printed material, was placed on the podium. Representatives who had crossed the capitol from the House filtered in, drawn by the spectacle. They arrived, lingered, departed. Each bearing witness to the endurance test unfolding. Throughout his speech, Mr. Booker attempted to frame his case as existing outside of run-of-the-mill Washington debates — as a call to action at a pivotal juncture. “This is not right or left, it is right or wrong,” Mr. Booker said on Tuesday afternoon. “This is not a partisan moment. It is a moral moment. Where do you stand?” ~

Cory Booker Condemns Trump’s Policies in Longest Senate Speech on Record

The New Jersey senator spent much of his speech, which ended after more than 25 hours, assailing the Trump administration. He eclipsed Strom Thurmo...

The Biggest Scandal of the Second Trump Term Isn’t “Signalgate” Alex Shephard The New Republic Friday 28 March, 2025 On March 26, 2024, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University, co-authored an op-ed criticizing the university’s response to student demands for divestment from Israel, which was published in its student newspaper. “Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide,” the authors wrote, referring to Israel’s disproportionate response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks. Aside from its focus on Tufts, a small private college outside Boston, it was hardly different from a lot of writing published in student newspapers across the country over the past two years—for that matter, it was little different from a lot of writing published in mainstream publications, including The New Republic. On Tuesday, as captured on video, a half-dozen masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security ambushed Ozturk as she left her Somerville apartment to meet friends. She was surrounded, cuffed, led into an unmarked car, and driven away, apparently for the crime of having co-authored that op-ed. Despite a court order blocking authorities from removing her from Massachusetts without advance notice, she was flown to Louisiana—where many other visa holders like herself who have been critical of Israel are being held, such as Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil. Masked agents snatching legal residents off the streets and disappearing them—not so long ago, this would be unthinkable in the United States. Now it is not only a regular occurrence but something that the Trump administration boasts about. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson claimed that Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” adding, “Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated.” But DHS has provided no evidence that Ozturk supported Hamas—indeed, the group is not mentioned in the offending op-ed. When asked Thursday about the student’s detention, Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed the uproar. “We revoked her visa … once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States,” he said. “If you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country.” That was arguably not even the most chilling part of Rubio’s press conference. Rubio confirmed recent reporting that the U.S. State Department had revoked 300 student visas—most or all for criticizing Israel or protesting the war in Gaza—but then went further. “At some point, I hope we run out because we’ve gotten rid of all of them, but we’re looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up.” So you can expect this dragnet to get even worse. Ozturk’s abduction by agents of the state occurred during what has thus far been the biggest scandal of Trump’s second term. The Beltway media calls it “Signalgate.” As you surely know by know—since the story has dominated the news for three days—the Trump national security team accidentally included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a Signal group chat discussing precise plans to bomb Houthi rebels in Yemen. It’s an embarrassing scandal that captures the idiocy and incompetence of the Trump administration, which has foolishly given the story extra legs with a raft of silly deflections and obvious lies. But the detention and attempted deportation of student activists on spurious grounds—and the use of armed, typically masked agents of the state to do so—perfectly captures the real, menacing story of the second Trump administration. There’s the tortured, spurious defenses of extralegal action; the foaming of the mouth over nonwhite immigrants and “woke” students at elite universities; the criminalization of free speech that runs contrary to that espoused by the MAGA right; and the blatant violation of people’s legal rights. By removing the authors of innocuous op-eds, Rubio seems to believe that he can surgically smother the opinions they were expressing. At the same time, this purge allows the administration to systematically attack higher education. Already, the administration has used student protests to attack a number of colleges and universities and to withhold hundreds of millions in federal funding from several. Allegations of antisemitism—and a list of demands that are more or less impossible to fully meet—are being used as a Trojan horse to withhold funding and to attack other sources of revenue. Many schools rely heavily on foreign students, who often pay full tuition. The Trump administration’s crackdown, even if it were to somehow stop today, has already seriously jeopardized that. Who would send their child to study in America in such a climate? Especially knowing their child could be swept off the street and flown to a detention facility? None of the students who have had their visas revoked have had anything resembling due process. None of them have been accused of crimes. Instead, they are being punished for speech that’s rightly outraged over Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Yes, Ozturk’s case and others like it will eventually all play out in the courts. But people are being swept off the streets right now, every day, and being detained without legitimate cause. The administration is fast-forwarding to its desired conclusion and daring the courts to stop it, while also choosing which court orders to obey and which to defy. Even if the judiciary were somehow able to stop all of this, the chilling effect remains—which, after all, is the point. When Rubio was nominated for his current role, there was a mild sense of surprise. The senator was seen as a moderating force, an establishment Republican expected to be more committed to foreign policy norms—and, for that matter, the rule of law—than the president’s other nominees. And this belief (or hope) was projected on him in the early days of the administration. As Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office last month, Rubio seemed to shrink into the furniture. Body language doctors on social media and cable news overlaid the image with the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme. Here, at least, was someone who saw what was happening around him for what it really was. The situation looks rather different now. As my colleague Greg Sargent wrote recently, Rubio is perhaps Trump’s biggest enabler. And his feverish pursuit of legal immigrants and students, over speech he and his boss object to, is the administration’s most appalling act thus far. I shudder to imagine how much worse it will get. ~

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Vance’s posturing in Greenland was not just morally wrong. It was strategically disastrous Dr. Timothy Snyder The Guardian Monday 31 March, 2025 Elon Musk and Donald Trump inherited a state with unprecedented power and functionality, and are taking it apart. They also inherited a set of alliances and relationships that underpinned the largest economy in world history. This too they are breaking. The American vice-president, JD Vance, visited a US base in Greenland for three hours on Friday, along with his wife. National security adviser Mike Waltz and his wife also went along. Fresh from using an unsafe social media platform to carry out an entirely unnecessary group chat in which they leaked sensitive data about an ongoing military attack to a reporter, and thereby allegedly breaking the law, Waltz and Vance perhaps hoped to change the subject by tagging along on a trip that was initially billed as Vance’s wife watching a dogsled race. The overall context was Trump’s persistent claim that America must take Greenland, which is an autonomous region of Denmark. The original plan had been that Usha Vance would visit Greenlanders, apparently on the logic that the second lady would be an effective animatrice of colonial subjection; but none of them wanted to see her, and Greenland’s businesses refused to serve as a backdrop to photo ops or even to serve the uninvited Americans. So, instead, the US couples made a very quick visit to Pituffik space base. (Pete Hegseth, another group chatter, stayed home; but his wife was in the news as well, as an unorthodox participant in sensitive military discussions.) At the base, in the far north of the island, the US visitors had pictures taken of themselves and ate lunch with servicemen and women. They treated the base as the backdrop to a press conference where they could say things they already thought; nothing was experienced, nothing was learned, nothing sensible was said. Vance, who never left the base, and has never before visited Greenland, was quite sure how Greenlanders should live. He made a political appeal to Greenlanders, none of whom was present, or anywhere near him. He claimed that Denmark was not protecting the security of Greenlanders in the Arctic, and that the US would. Greenland should therefore join the US. It takes some patience to unwind all of the nonsense here. The base at Pituffik (formerly Thule) only exists because Denmark permitted the US to build it at a sensitive time. It has served for decades as a central part of the US’s nuclear armoury and then as an early-warning system against Soviet and then Russian nuclear attack. When Vance says that Denmark is not protecting Greenland and the base, he is wishing away generations of cooperation, as well as the Nato alliance itself. Denmark was a founding member of Nato, and it is already the US’s job to defend Denmark and Greenland, just as it is Denmark’s job (as with other members) to defend them in return. Americans might chuckle at that idea, but such arrogance is unwarranted. We are the only ones ever to have invoked article 5, the mutual defence obligation of the Nato treaty, after 9/11; and our European allies did respond. Per capita, almost as many Danish soldiers were killed in the Afghan war as were American soldiers. Do we remember them? Thank them? The threat in the Arctic invoked by Vance is Russia; and of course defending against a Russian attack is the Nato mission. But right now the US is supporting Russia in its war against Ukraine. No one is doing more to contain the Russian threat than Ukraine. Indeed, Ukraine is in effect fulfilling the entire Nato mission, right now, by absorbing a huge Russian attack. But Vance opposes helping Ukraine, spreads Russian propaganda about Ukraine, and is best known for yelling at Ukraine’s president in the Oval Office. On the base, Vance blamed the killing in Ukraine on Joe Biden rather than on Vladimir Putin, which is grotesque. Vance claimed that there is now an energy ceasefire in place between Russia and Ukraine; in fact, Russia violated it immediately. Russia is now preparing a massive spring offensive against Ukraine; the response of Musk-Trump has been to ignore this larger reality completely while allowing Biden-era aid to Ukraine to come to an end. Denmark, meanwhile, has given four times as much aid to Ukraine, per capita, as the US. Greenland, Denmark and the US have been enmeshed in complex and effective security arrangements, touching on the gravest scenarios, for the better part of a century. Arctic security, an issue discovered by Trump and Vance very recently, was a preoccuption for decades during and after the cold war. There are fewer than 200 Americans at Pituffik now, where once there were 10,000; there is only that one US base on the island where once there were a dozen; but that is American policy, not Denmark’s fault. We really do have a problem taking responsibility. The US has fallen well behind its allies and its rivals in the Arctic, in part because members of Vance’s political party denied for decades the reality of global warming, which has made it hard for the US navy to persuade Congress of the need to commission icebreaker ships. The US only has two functional Arctic icebreakers; the Biden administration was intending to cooperate with Canada, which has some, and with Finland, which builds lots, in order to compete with Russia, which has the most. That common plan would have allowed the US to surpass Russia in icebreaking capacity. This is one of countless examples of how cooperation with Nato allies benefits the US. It is not clear what will happen with that arrangement now that Trump and Vance define Canada, like Denmark, as a rival or even as an enemy. Presumably it will break down, leaving Russia dominant. As with everything Musk-Trump does, however, the cui bono question about imperialism in Greenland is easy to answer: Russia benefits. Putin cannot contain his delight with US imperialism over Greenland. In generating artificial crises in relations with both Denmark and Canada, America’s two closest allies these last 80 years, the Trump people cut America loose from security gains and create a chaos in which Russia benefits. The American imperialism directed towards Denmark and Canada is not just morally wrong. It is strategically disastrous. The US has nothing to gain from it, and much to lose. There is nothing that Americans cannot get from Denmark or Canada through alliance. The very existence of the base at Pituffik shows that. Within the atmosphere of friendship that has prevailed the last 80 years, all of the mineral resources of Canada and Greenland can be traded for on good terms, or for that matter explored by American companies. The only way to put all of this easy access in doubt was to follow the course that Musk-Trump have chosen: trade wars with Canada and Europe, and the threat of actual wars and annexations. Musk and Trump are creating the bloodily moronic situation in which the US will have to fight wars to get the things that, just a few weeks ago, were there for the asking. And, of course, wars rarely turn out the way one expects. Much effort is spent trying to extract a doctrine from all this. But there is none. It is just senselessness that benefits America’s enemies. Hans Christian Andersen told the unforgettable tale of the naked emperor. In Greenland, what we saw was American imperialism with no clothes. Naked and vain. As a parting shot, Vance told Greenlanders that life with the US would be better than with Denmark. Danish officials have been too diplomatic to answer directly the insults directed at them from their own territory during an uninvited visit by imperialist hotheads. Let me though just note a few possible replies, off the top of my head. The comparison between life in the US and life in Denmark is not just polemical. Musk-Trump treat Europe as though it were some decadent abyss, and propose that alliances with dictatorships would somehow be better. But Europe is not only home to our traditional allies; it is an enviable zone of democracy, wealth and prosperity with which it benefits us to have good relations, and from which we can sometimes learn. So consider. The US is 24th in the world in the happiness rankings. Not bad. But Denmark is No 2 (after Finland). On a scale of 1 to 100, Freedom House ranks Denmark 97 and the US 84 on freedom – and the US will drop a great deal this year. An American is about 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than a Dane. Danes have access to universal and essentially free healthcare; Americans spend a huge amount of money to be sick more often and to be treated worse when they are. Danes on average live four years longer than Americans. In Denmark, university education is free; the average balance owed by the tens of millions of Americans who hold student debt in the US is about $40,000. Danish parents share a year of paid parental leave. In the US, one parent might get 12 weeks of unpaid leave. Denmark has children’s story writer Hans Christian Andersen. The US has children’s story writer JD Vance. American children are about twice as likely as Danish children to die before the age of five. ~

the Guardian

Vance’s posturing in Greenland was not just morally wrong. It was strategically disastrous | Timothy Snyder

Thanks to Trump’s administration, the US could soon have to fight wars to get things that, just a few weeks ago, were there for the asking, says ...

How Much Dumber Will This Get? Hillary Clinton NY Times Friday 28 March, 2025 It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb. This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security. Firing hundreds of federal workers charged with protecting our nation’s nuclear weapons is also dumb. So is shutting down efforts to fight pandemics just as a deadly Ebola outbreak is spreading in Africa. It makes no sense to purge talented generals, diplomats and spies at a time when rivals like China and Russia are trying to expand their global reach. In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower. The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless. Let’s start with the military, because that’s what he claims to care about. Don’t let the swagger fool you. Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries. Does anyone really think deleting tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen makes us more safe? The Trump Pentagon purged images of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb that ended World War II because its name is the Enola Gay. Dumb. Instead of working with Congress to modernize the military’s budget to reflect changing threats, the president is firing top generals without credible justification. Five former secretaries of defense, Republicans and Democrats, rightly warned that this would “undermine our all-volunteer force and weaken our national security.” Mass layoffs are also hitting the intelligence agencies. As one former senior spy put it, “We’re shooting ourselves in the head, not the foot.” Not smart. If they’re this reckless with America’s hard power, it’s no surprise that they’re shredding our soft power. As a former secretary of state, I am particularly alarmed by the administration’s plan to close embassies and consulates, fire diplomats and destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development. Let me explain why this matters, because it’s less widely understood than the importance of tanks and fighter jets. I visited 112 countries and traveled nearly one million miles as America’s top diplomat, and I have seen how valuable it is for our country to be represented on the ground in far-flung places. The U.S. military has long understood that our forces must be forward deployed in order to project American power and respond quickly to crises. The same is true of our diplomats. Our embassies are our eyes and ears informing policy decisions back home. They are launchpads for operations that keep us safe and prosperous, from training foreign counterterrorism forces to helping U.S. companies enter new markets. China understands the value of forward-deployed diplomacy, which is why it has opened new embassies and consulates around the world and now has more than the United States. The Trump administration’s retreat would leave the field open for Beijing to spread its influence uncontested. Diplomats win America friends so we don’t have to go it alone in a competitive world. That’s how my colleagues and I were able to rally the United Nations to impose crippling sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program and ultimately force Tehran to stop its progress toward a bomb — something Mr. Trump’s bluster has failed to do. (He actually defunded inspectors keeping an eye on Iranian research sites. Dumb.) Diplomacy is cost-effective, especially compared with military action. Preventing wars is cheaper than fighting them. Mr. Trump’s own former secretary of defense Jim Mattis, a retired Marine Corps four-star general, told Congress, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.” Our development assistance has always been a small portion of the federal budget, but it also has an outsize impact on international stability, especially paired with effective diplomacy. When American aid dollars help stop a famine or an outbreak, when we respond to a natural disaster or open schools, we win hearts and minds that might otherwise go to terrorists or rivals like China. We reduce the flow of migrants and refugees. We strengthen friendly governments that might otherwise collapse. I don’t want to pretend that any of this is easy or that American foreign policy hasn’t been plagued by mistakes. Leadership is hard. But our best chance to get it right and to keep our country safe is to strengthen our government, not weaken it. We should invest in the patriots who serve our nation, not insult them.

How John Roberts Has Enpowered a Lawless Presidency Christian Farias The New Yorker Wednesday 26 March, 2025 In the first landmark Supreme Court decision of the Trump years, back in 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts established how a President hostile toward a group of noncitizens may bar them under existing immigration laws, so long as the President’s publicly stated reasons for doing so are “facially neutral.” If that test is met, the courts must bow to the President’s action, no matter the evidence of any prior hostility toward the group in question. At the time, President Donald Trump had issued a proclamation banning nationals who were from several Muslim-majority countries—the third iteration of his so-called Muslim ban, which had been hobbled by multiple lower courts. Trump justified his actions by invoking the Immigration and Nationality Act. Roberts wrote that the relevant section of the law “exudes deference to the President in every clause.” Since the proclamation was “within the core of executive responsibility,” Roberts wrote in his opinion, the Court “must consider not only the statements of a particular President, but also the authority of the Presidency itself.” If there is one person on the Court to whom Trump owes a debt of gratitude for empowering his disruptive, smash-and-grab second term—one marked thus far by a slew of executive orders that insist, in their text, that they are authorized by “the Constitution and laws of the United States”—it is Roberts. His jurisprudence relating to the powers of the Presidency under Article II of the Constitution, which vests the executive power in a single chief executive, represents the purest distillation of the unitary executive theory. This school of constitutional thought, which holds that everyone and everything in the executive branch must yield to the President, has long fascinated conservative legal academics and Republican Presidential Administrations, beginning with Ronald Reagan, under whom Roberts served, as a White House lawyer. At the end of Trump’s address to Congress earlier this month, the President was caught on camera tapping Roberts on the shoulder, thanking him, and telling him that he “won’t forget.” Many interpreted Trump’s words as a reference to Roberts’s gift, in Trump v. United States, last summer, of granting the President broad immunity from criminal prosecution over his alleged instigation of the January 6th attack on the Capitol. (Trump later claimed that he was thanking Roberts for swearing him in on Inauguration Day.) But the gratitude should run much deeper. In his nearly twenty years as Chief Justice, Roberts has espoused a sweeping vision of Presidential authority—sometimes with language so broad as to make Congress and the courts appear small by comparison. “The President is the only person who alone composes a branch of government,” Roberts declared during Trump’s first term, when the House of Representatives was attempting to subpoena tax-related documents from an accounting firm that was doing business with Trump and his family. “The entire ‘executive Power’ belongs to the President alone,” he wrote in 2020, in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which invalidated, as a violation of the separation of powers, a statute that had protected the director of the C.F.P.B. from Presidential control. Early in Roberts’s tenure, in a case dealing with removal protections for lower-level officials, the Chief Justice all but telegraphed that a future President would be constitutionally shielded from scrutiny in ordering the mass firing of employees across the government: “The President cannot ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ if he cannot oversee the faithfulness of the officers who execute them,” Roberts wrote, during the Obama era. Trump’s embrace of this broad conception of executive power was on display last week in Washington, as his Administration defended its invocation of the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants, its firing of two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, and its hostile takeover of the little-known United States Institute of Peace—to name only three executive actions that grabbed headlines. Each of these represents a breathtaking exercise of executive authority, one that necessarily puts the President on a collision course with the courts and Congress—and one under which, if Roberts’s view is taken to its logical end, the executive branch is bound to prevail. Consider the arguments that Justice Department officials have been presenting before U.S. Chief District Judge James Boasberg, who is overseeing a legal challenge to Trump’s proclamation that members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational gang from Venezuela, are “alien enemies” subject to immediate detention and deportation without due process of law. The proclamation, which invokes a wartime provision that by its terms requires a declared war or an “invasion or predatory incursion,” was quickly challenged by immigrants’-rights groups. During an emergency hearing the day the proclamation became public, while there was still very little clarity about when it was signed or who had been targeted by it, a Justice Department lawyer suggested that attempting to block any deportations resulting from the proclamation “cuts to the core of the president’s Article II powers,” and that “interfering” with this Presidential prerogative impinges on his authority over foreign policy, war-making, and immigration. Boasberg blocked the deportations anyway, ordering any planes that may be in the air carrying the deportees to return while the litigation played out. This assertion of judicial authority set off an ongoing clash between the Administration and the judiciary—and has raised questions about compliance with court orders, contempt of court, and whether the Administration’s recalcitrance in the face of it all means a constitutional crisis is in the offing. In one filing, the government complained that the President’s “inherent Article II powers, especially when exercised outside the United States, are not subject to judicial review or intervention.” During an afternoon hearing this past Friday, Boasberg appeared adamant to learn whether the government had defied his order: “I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order, who ordered this and what the consequences will be,” he said. Earlier in the hearing, he said it was “problematic and concerning” that more than a hundred Venezuelans were deemed deportable as foreign enemies without even a chance to challenge that designation. The filings in the case, known as J.G.G. v. Donald Trump, have been fast and furious, but it’s clear that the Justice Department is making a big bet that its assertion of Trump’s Article II authority, and his authority under the Alien Enemies Act—which no President has invoked since the Second World War—supersedes that of the courts, which is governed by Article III. How dare a lowly federal judge meddle with the President’s power to conduct foreign affairs? “What began as a dispute between litigants over the President’s authority to protect the national security and manage the foreign relations of the United States pursuant to both a long-standing Congressional authorization and the President’s core constitutional authorities has devolved into a picayune dispute over the micromanagement of immaterial factfinding,” the lawyers for the government wrote in a motion filed last week. “The Court has now spent more time trying to ferret out information about the Government’s flight schedules and relations with foreign countries than it did in investigating the facts before certifying the class action in this case,” that motion concluded. On Monday, Boasberg issued a careful opinion sidestepping the “complicated legal issues” raised by the case, ruling that people subject to Trump’s proclamation can’t be summarily deported without a hearing. Later that day, the Trump Administration, in keeping with Boasberg’s final deadline to come clean about noncompliance with his earlier orders, invoked Article II and the state-secret privilege instead. That is: Boasberg wouldn’t be getting the details he’s been seeking. In a show of unity, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Attorney General Pam Bondi invoked the privilege jointly, in a trio of sworn declarations. “The Court has all of the facts it needs to address the compliance issues before it,” the Justice Department said in a court notice accompanying the declarations. “Further intrusions on the Executive Branch would present dangerous and wholly unwarranted separation-of-powers harms with respect to diplomatic and national security concerns that the Court lacks competence to address.” For support, the Administration lifted language from Roberts’s immunity decision: “President Trump’s execution of his Article II authorities—which ‘are of unrivaled gravity and breadth’ and include ‘managing matters related to terrorism . . . and immigration’—requires the ‘utmost discretion and sensitivity.’ ” Layered on top of this back-and-forth between lawyers and judges were the calls for Boasberg’s impeachment, led by the President himself and amplified by a MAGAsphere ready and willing to go along. Amid this furor, Roberts issued a rare statement that many characterized as a “rebuke” of the President. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” This statement, as studious and noncommittal regarding its intended target as others that Roberts has issued during his tenure, can be read as a mild-mannered defense of the branch he leads and which is now under attack. Other judges are certainly disturbed by the executive and media blitzkrieg against one of their own. But one thing Roberts’s statement obscures is how much his own jurisprudence has facilitated Trump’s defiance of the other branches of government. In letters informing Democratic F.T.C. members Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter that they had been removed from their posts, the President openly flouted the organic statute of the commission, which Congress determined allows him to remove commissioners only “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Instead, Trump pointed to his agenda. “Your continued service on the F.T.C. is inconsistent with my administration’s priorities,” one of the letters read, according to the New York Times. As with the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, the last time a President had attempted to fire a commissioner over mere policy differences was during the Roosevelt Administration. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote to Commissioner William Humphrey some ninety years ago, “I do not feel that your mind and my mind go along together on either the policies or the administering of the Federal Trade Commission.” Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the case that emerged from that dispute, upheld the removal protections that Congress gave to members of the F.T.C. The decision remains good law to this day and is the linchpin for the independence of the F.T.C., the National Labor Relations Board, and other multimember bodies Congress has entrusted with the laws they administer. In keeping with their distaste for regulations, Republicans and the broader conservative legal movement have long treated independent agencies as an abomination—and last month Trump sought to rein them in with an executive order that purported to bring them further under his direct control. But more telling still was a letter that the acting solicitor general, Sarah M. Harris, sent to congressional leaders a week earlier, in which she vowed that the Administration would seek to overrule Humphrey’s Executor. That decision, she wrote, “prevents the President from adequately supervising principal officers in the Executive Branch who execute the laws on the President’s behalf, and which has already been severely eroded by recent Supreme Court decisions.” Accompanying that statement was a citation of two decisions, both of them authored by Roberts, that provide the intellectual foundation for Trump’s assault on independent agencies and the broader workings of the federal government. Last week, during an appeals-court hearing dealing with the unlawful firing of Gwynne Wilcox, an N.L.R.B. member Trump targeted in February, a Justice Department lawyer was forced to confront the reality that Humphrey’s Executor remains the law of the land—the President’s wishes notwithstanding. Applying that nearly century-old precedent, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who reinstated Wilcox and declared her firing unlawful, couldn’t help but note in her ruling that the President’s actions were monarchic in nature. “A President who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator,’ perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution,” Howell wrote, in reference to a White House post on X which depicted Trump with a crown on his head alongside the words “LONG LIVE THE KING.” That’s the natural end point of Roberts’s vision of Presidential supremacy. In this vision, no one who exerts even a modicum of oversight or authority under some law is safe—not inspectors general (fired), not the head of the Office of Special Counsel (fired), not any of the members of independent agencies Trump doesn’t care for, like Wilcox, Bedoya, or Slaughter (fired, fired, and fired). The apolitical Civil Service isn’t spared, either. “Article II of the United States Constitution vests the President with the sole and exclusive authority over the executive branch, including the authority to manage the Federal workforce to ensure effective execution of Federal law,” reads an order Trump signed ahead of mass firings at agencies across the government. In urging a Maryland federal judge to limit a ruling ordering the reinstatement of thousands of wrongfully terminated probationary employees, the Justice Department echoed this theme, requesting a decision that is “narrowly tailored to preserve the Executive’s authority to exercise its Article II authority over the Executive Branch.” Speaking with Bloomberg after her dismissal, Slaughter observed that not even the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is safe under the maximalist regime Trump is advancing. “There is no legal difference between Jerome Powell and me,” she said. “If the president can legally remove me, he can legally remove Jerome Powell.” That’s not even touching what’s happening at the Department of Justice and the F.B.I., where Trump is undoubtedly seizing on Roberts’s generous language in the immunity decision to install loyalists, fire career officials and others involved in the January 6th prosecutions, and micromanage investigations. By implication, all of these actions bear the Chief Justice’s stamp of approval—and, because they’re seen as part of the President’s “core constitutional powers,” neither Congress nor the courts can do anything about it. The President enjoys “exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials,” according to Roberts’s decision in Trump v. United States. As Jack Goldsmith, a scholar of executive power, has pointed out, the real import of Roberts’s language here is not that it gave Trump a shield from prosecution (though that was the immediate result); the ruling gave Trump a “sword” to brandish across the executive branch—which is exactly why laws, institutions, and what remains of the constitutional order are being slashed to bits in Trump’s Washington now. ~

The New Yorker

How John Roberts Has Empowered a Lawless Presidency

The Chief Justice’s rebuke of Donald Trump over his calls to impeach judges obscures Roberts’s own role in fostering the destruction in Washing...

Baltimore Ravens (Friday 29 March, 1996) 30th Anniversary Season! 🏈

18 U.S. Code § 793 Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information (a) Whoever, for the purpose of obtaining information respecting the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation, goes upon, enters, flies over, or otherwise obtains information concerning any vessel, aircraft, work of defense, navy yard, naval station, submarine base, fueling station, fort, battery, torpedo station, dockyard, canal, railroad, arsenal, camp, factory, mine, telegraph, telephone, wireless, or signal station, building, office, research laboratory or station or other place connected with the national defense owned or constructed, or in progress of construction by the United States or under the control of the United States, or of any of its officers, departments, or agencies, or within the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States, or any place in which any vessel, aircraft, arms, munitions, or other materials or instruments for use in time of war are being made, prepared, repaired, stored, or are the subject of research or development, under any contract or agreement with the United States, or any department or agency thereof, or with any person on behalf of the United States, or otherwise on behalf of the United States, or any prohibited place so designated by the President by proclamation in time of war or in case of national emergency in which anything for the use of the Army, Navy, or Air Force is being prepared or constructed or stored, information as to which prohibited place the President has determined would be prejudicial to the national defense; or (b) Whoever, for the purpose aforesaid, and with like intent or reason to believe, copies, takes, makes, or obtains, or attempts to copy, take, make, or obtain, any sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, document, writing, or note of anything connected with the national defense; or (c) Whoever, for the purpose aforesaid, receives or obtains or agrees or attempts to receive or obtain from any person, or from any source whatever, any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note, of anything connected with the national defense, knowing or having reason to believe, at the time he receives or obtains, or agrees or attempts to receive or obtain it, that it has been or will be obtained, taken, made, or disposed of by any person contrary to the provisions of this chapter; or (d) Whoever, lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it; or (e) Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it; or (f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer— Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both. (g) If two or more persons conspire to violate any of the foregoing provisions of this section, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each of the parties to such conspiracy shall be subject to the punishment provided for the offense which is the object of such conspiracy. (h) (1) Any person convicted of a violation of this section shall forfeit to the United States, irrespective of any provision of State law, any property constituting, or derived from, any proceeds the person obtained, directly or indirectly, from any foreign government, or any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States, as the result of such violation. For the purposes of this subsection, the term “State” includes a State of the United States, the District of Columbia, and any commonwealth, territory, or possession of the United States. (2) The court, in imposing sentence on a defendant for a conviction of a violation of this section, shall order that the defendant forfeit to the United States all property described in paragraph (1) of this subsection. (3) The provisions of subsections (b), (c), and (e) through (p) of section 413 of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 (21 U.S.C. 853(B), (c), and (e)–(p)) shall apply to— (A) property subject to forfeiture under this subsection; (B) any seizure or disposition of such property; and (C) any administrative or judicial proceeding in relation to such property, if not inconsistent with this subsection. (4) Notwithstanding SECTION 524(C) OF TITLE 28, there shall be deposited in the Crime Victims Fund in the Treasury all amounts from the forfeiture of property under this subsection remaining after the payment of expenses for forfeiture and sale authorized by law. (JUNE 25, 1948, CH. 645, 62 STAT. 736; SEPT. 23, 1950, CH. 1024, title I, § 18, 64 STAT. 1003; PUB. L. 99–399, TITLE XIII, § 1306(A), Aug. 27, 1986, 100 STAT. 898; PUB. L. 103–322, TITLE XXXIII, § 330016(1)(L), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 STAT. 2147; PUB. L. 103–359, TITLE VIII, § 804(B)(1), Oct. 14, 1994, 108 STAT. 3440; CITE AS: 18 USC 793 ~

LII / Legal Information Institute

18 U.S. Code &sect; 793 - Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information

Signalgate : Violating National Security In Order to Violate Rights Dr. Timothy Snyder Thursday 27 March, 2025 A  familiar risk to a rule-based republic, such as our own, is when the government claims that it must violate our rights in the name of national security. In Signalgate, we face a novel challenge: a government that brazenly risks national security in order to preserve its ability to repress its citizens. We see that traditional problem in the deportations to the Salvadoran gulag. We are told that the government knows who is a terrorist; that we must trust their judgement; and that we must accept their actions. The reasoning, as always, is that there is some kind of exceptional situation -- an "invasion" in this case. If we accept that the government gets to decide what is exceptional, the exception then just becomes the rule. This works psychologically, because we can choose to believe (even though it is usually not true) that we the non-arrested and the non-deported are being made more safe. But in the Signalgate scandal, we encounter something more chilling: our government is openly compromising our national security, the better to violate our rights. Its position is that it is worth risking the lives of soldiers abroad in order to be able to persecute civilians at home. Let me explain. On Saturday 15 March, high officials of Musk-Trump conducted a group chat on the messenger app Signal about a bombing of Yemen, including a reporter. Jeff Goldberg, placed in one of the oddest situations in journalistic history, replied on March 24th with a restrained factual account of what happened on the chat before he removed himself. The White House and its allies confirmed that all of this happened, but denied that it was of any significance. With this new scandal, we have tipped over into something different: compromising national security in order to preserve a tool which is used chiefly to violate the rights of Americans. To see what is novel and what is threatening, let us pause for a moment on the traditional gambit of claiming that we must sacrifice one good thing (freedom) to get another good thing (safety). Musk-Trump is invoking "national security" as a reason why it need not share the facts about its deportation actions with judges, and more broadly as an argument as to why it can deport anyone at any time without due process or indeed any justification at all. The claim here is the old-fashioned one: we must trade rights for security. And the outcome is also the traditional one: if we buy this argument, we lose both. If anyone can be deported at any time for no reason, then we are obviously not only less free but also less secure, as individuals and as a nation. In a constitutional republic, such as our own, freedom and security alike are grounded in the rule of law. In a rule-of-law state, we can count on the government not apprehending us and deporting us without due process of law and without providing some justification. This practical dignity of our bodies is called habeas corpus, which means that authorities must provide a justification to a court for taking control of your physical body. Logically and historically this is at the foundation of our entire tradition of rights. The individual body comes first; the government must have a good legal reason to confine it. From this logic, as it strengthened from the Magna Carta eight hundred years ago, to the first English writs of habeas corpus four hundred years ago, to the American Constitution, emerges a usefully liberating skepticism about government purposes. Authorities will always find reasons not to take the individual seriously, and, if permitted, will conspire among themselves to confine our bodies and make us unfree. For this very reason, we have a number of laws, such as the Federal Records Act, whose purpose is to make sure that we know what our government is doing. It is not just that we want them to have a reason for seizing our bodies. It is that we want to be able to head off the kind of government that would plot to do such a thing for tyrannical reasons. This logic of freedom and tyranny is why government officials, such as those on the Signal chat, are required to record their interactions. Michael Waltz, who initiated the conversation, had the Signal messages set to self-delete. This is a violation of the Federal Records Act and other applicable laws, whose underlying purpose is to protect people from a conspiring government. And so Waltz's action is suggestion of a troubling pattern. Signalgate is shocking on its own. But it is perhaps even more troubling when we begin to understand why the people on the chat were using Signal to make and implement policy. They were risking national security by doing so. But this was worth it to them, apparently, because Signal allows them to deny the rights of Americans. Let's be clear about the national security problem. For most of us, Signal is a safe platform, and I don't mean to discourage its use by private citizens. But it is specifically forbidden for high government officials to make policy on that platform, because it is less secure that the appropriate government devices. It appears that some of the participants in this Signal chat were highly vulnerable to phishing attacks, since their numbers were publicly available. We know that Russia is trying to hack Signal – although if the Russians had that data, they would not need to do any very complicated hacking. It is possible, on Signal, to inadvertently add a participant in a group chat or a conversation without knowing who that person is. On government platforms that cannot happen. And then, on Signal, it is possible to go on and share crucial information about, for example, a planned or ongoing military operation, which is exactly did take place on March 15th. Whatever one thinks about a given military operation, it is hard to disagree that it is better, at least for the Americans involved (the surviving relatives of dead Yemeni civilians might have other views), if the plans are not broadcast around the world before they are implemented. The use of Signal suggests the use of personal phones, which some of the participants have more or less admitted (Tulsi Gabbard refused to say; Steve Witkoff, trying to head off the charge that he was using his personal phone inside the Kremlin, admitted to having joined the chat on it after leaving Russia). And the use of personal phones opens a whole new set of vulnerabilities, including the rather widespread Israeli app Pegasus. But here's the point: the authorities knew of these risks to national security, and thought that they were worth taking, and for a reason. I suggest that this reason is that Signal chats provide American authorities with cover to plan the violation of human rights. It is important to understand that the risk is systemic. We know about this one instance of the use of Signal and about the one leak. But other leaks have almost certainly happened already. We know about this particular occasion because the inadvertently-added individual happened, by a wild chance, to be a highly responsible reporter who wrote about the incident in a highly responsible way. The assumption that Jeffrey Goldberg is the only person who was inadvertently added to a national security group, just because he is the only case we know about, is unsustainable. So the people on the group chat were breaking the law, and they were breaking their own departments' rules, they were ignoring advisories from their own departments, and they were endangering national security. The information that they were sharing, had it gotten into the hands of anyone who has not a highly-responsible reporter, could have compromised not only that attack in particular, but US methods in general. It could also have served as the basis for blackmailing American officials. Indeed, for all we know, information that has been leaked on previous Signal conversations, or on other platforms on personal phones, could be the basis for blackmailing American officials right now. But the use of Signal and personal phones appears nevertheless to be the norm in Musk-Trump. Indeed, the administration has given no sign that this would change. From the content of the group chat, it is clear that Signal (and, again, likely on personal phones) is the default way that Musk-Trump high officials communicate with one another. This group chat explicitly referred to another one. There was a protocol at the beginning of this chat, which seemed familiar to everyone. It involved adding people whose Signal numbers were known, as if this were a standard procedure. No one during the chat wrote anything like: "hey, why are we using Signal?" The reason that no one did so, most likely, is that they all do this every day. Using Signal enables American authorities to violate the rights of Americans. Signal is attractive not because it is secure with respect to foreign adversaries, which it is not, but because it is secure with respect to American citizens and American judges. The autodelete function, which Mike Waltz was using, violates the law. But what is most essential is the purpose of that law: to protect the rights of Americans from their government. The timed deletion function allows American officials to be confident that their communications will never be recorded and that they can therefore conspire without any chance of their actions being known to citizens at the time or at any later point. Everyone on that group chat, including the Vice-President, the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Advisor, and the Secretary of State, knew that what they were doing was against the rules, the guidance, and the law. But they were doing what they were doing, I would suggest, for a reason: precisely because it allowed them or their colleagues to compromise the rights of Americans. In other words, it was worth risking the lives of American soldiers abroad in order to have the opportunity the violate the rights of American civilians at home. Making soldiers unsafe is apparently a price worth paying to make the rest of us also unsafe. If Signal is used for the most sensitive national security discussions, it is reasonable to ask whether it is also used in discussions about sensitive matters of domestic policy – for example in the discussions of deportations to the Salvadoran gulag or in plans for targeting other individuals. If this is correct, then consider this: when the government contemplates deporting you, it will be doing so on an app that allows those discussions to be secret, not from foreign adversaries, but from you and from judges. And that, it would appear, is why Signal is being used – and will be used. Judge James Boasberg is presiding over the El Salvador deportation case. He will now also preside over the Signalgate case, in which the chat participants are accused of violating the Federal Records Act. It is a curious juxtaposition, to say the least: in the one case, the government is unpersuasively invoking national security to keep secrets; in the other, it is openly violating national security in order to preserve the capacity to keep secrets. I think the two cases are linked, not only conceptually, but also technologically. They show both kinds of arguments for authoritarian rule, the traditional and the novel. But most likely they both involve the use of Signal. Perhaps the judge will take the opportunity to inquire. Even as the Musk-Trump people continue to say that we must sacrifice our rights for national security, they are also starting to say that they find it worthwhile to violate national security in order to have the tools that allow them to violate our rights. In Signalgate, we see the shift from the conventional excuse for authoritarian practices to an open embrace of tyranny for its own sake.