The Return of the Great American Stomachache Deborah Bloom The NY Times Wednesday 9 April, 2025 In the late 19th century, the government chemist Harvey Washington Wiley proved several shocking suspicions about the American food supply as correct: Milk was routinely thinned with dirty water, coffee contained bone, ground pepper was full of dirt, cocoa was packed with sand, and cayenne was loaded with brick dust. The findings turned Wiley into a crusader for food safety, and by 1906 Congress finally agreed that regulations were needed. With the passage of the Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act, the United States created the framework for a federal system to test ingredients, inspect food factories and recall unsafe products. This system has been criticized as seriously underfunded and often overcautious. But it has prevented a return to the fraudulent and poisonous food supply of the 19th century, which one historian called the “century of the great American stomachache.” That is, until recently, when the Trump administration began to unravel that safety net. Since President Trump’s inauguration, his administration has been chipping away — sometimes quietly, sometimes with great fanfare — at food safety programs. In March, two Department of Agriculture advisory committees that had provided guidance on fighting microbial contamination of food as well as meat inspection protocols were shut down. The agency also expanded the ability of some meat processors to speed up production lines, making it more difficult to carry out careful inspections. The administration also delayed a rule that would have required both manufacturers and grocery companies to quickly investigate food contamination and pull risky products from sale. At the start of April, thousands of federal health workers were fired on the orders of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; a plan called for terminating 3,500 employees at the Food and Drug Administration — a move that he welcomed as a “revolution.” Consumer watchdogs and others described it as a safety blood bath. It’s probably too early to be quite that hyperbolic. The food safety officials and consumer advocacy experts I’ve talked to are still trying to assess the full extent of the damage. But they see warning lights starting to blink. The F.D.A. has already indicated that it will conduct fewer food and drug safety investigations because of its greatly reduced staff. Spending limits imposed on government agencies are also so tight that it’s unclear if the remaining researchers will be able to purchase food to be tested. While Mr. Kennedy has loudly promised a better regulation of food additives, he’s quietly undermining the ability to do that work. As an example, the latest round of cuts decimated the staff of a laboratory dedicated to testing for bacteria and toxic substances in food, such as heavy metal contamination. Many experts now believe food poisoning outbreaks will spread farther and last longer. If too many precautions are removed, then there’s a real chance that we’ll rediscover how dangerous a less regulated food system can be. It takes only a brief look back at the 19th century to realize what that means. Not only did Wiley and his chemists find widespread fraud in the food supply, their work also helped reveal a routine use of poisons. Red lead was used to make Cheddar cheese more orange; arsenic was used to color candy and cake decorations green; the toxic embalming agent formaldehyde was used to preserve milk. So many children were sickened or killed by formaldehyde that by the 1890s, newspapers regularly reported on “embalmed milk scandals.” All of this food adulteration was legal, of course. Frustrated by the resistance of both industry and industry-funded congressional leaders, in 1902, Wiley began a study, nicknamed “The Poison Squad” by the press, in which young U.S.D.A. workers were knowingly fed a diet that included doses of potentially dangerous additives. Their resulting illnesses received widespread national coverage, heavy with references to poison in the daily diet. Public outrage was rising when the writer Upton Sinclair, in 1906, published a notably gruesome novel, “The Jungle,” that focused on the unregulated and filthy practices of the meat industry. It was a proverbial last straw, the book leading to passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Food and Drugs Act that same year. Since then, America has strengthened those early and basic protections, gradually modernizing the F.D.A. with passage of the 1938 Federal Food, Drugs and Cosmetic Act and other updates, including most recently, the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act, which focused on preventive measures, such as testing irrigation water on farms. We’ve also been repeatedly reminded why we need those protections: Accidental contamination and malfeasance in food processing are still relatively common. One of the cases that prompted the 2011 law, for instance, involved the Peanut Corporation of America, which kept its peanut butter profitable by skimping on cleaning costs and failing to report its bacteria-infested operations to F.D.A. inspectors after testing showed the presence of salmonella. The resulting 2008-2009 salmonella outbreak killed nine people and sickened hundreds in almost every state. The cover-up led to the company’s president and two others being sent to prison. More recently, the U.S.D.A. investigated a listeria outbreak that killed 10 people and spread to 19 states, and traced it to a Boar’s Head deli meat plant in Jarratt, Va. Inspectors had found filthy conditions, including mold and dead insects; the company shut down the plant in September. And this year? The U.S.D.A. has issued a recall for more than 200,000 pounds of liquid egg products that appear to be contaminated with a cleaning solution. The F.D.A. has flagged stones in candy, a potential botulism-causing toxin in juice, and undeclared allergens, such as nuts, in salad dressing. The United States clearly still needs the safety systems that were so painstakingly built over the last 120 years, and to make them better and stronger. The labs and scientists and inspection teams that have been recently lost should not only be restored but expanded. And the mistakes of the 19th century should stay firmly in the history books. ~ https://tinyurl.com/28a8trhs

G.O.A.T. Tournament Final Four : Who Would You Rather ... The quest to find the "Greatest Oppressor of All Time" has reached the Final Four. Who will take home the gold medal for white supremacy? Michael Harriot Contraband Camp Thursday 9 April, 2025 Welcome to the penultimate round of the racism championship of the world! We are ready to put our divisional champions against each other to see who will win the title of the "Greatest Oppressor of All Time". According to our scientifically sound results, Donald Trump is now officially the most racist person in the history of politics and government. When it comes to companies and organizations, the police reached the division finals in a landslide. Meanwhile, longshot Peter Thiel fought his way through the influencer division while Christian Nationalists scored a surprising victory over white women. While it’s easy to judge a person by their actions or a group by its negative impact, you are now tasked with deciding which kind of white supremacy is worse. Is hate worse than institutional inequality? Is an inept doofus filled with hate more dangerous than a competent racial bigot? Does a movement do more damage than an individual? It’s time to choose : — Donald Trump vs. The Police Would you rather live in a country run by a corrupt, privileged, barely educated half-wit who is never held accountable for his actions … Or Donald Trump? Would you rather the most powerful man in the world put a target on your child’s back, our would you rather him be stopped by the police on a dark road? If you heard a Black man was accused of a crime, and there were two competing allegations — one by a cop and one by Donald Trump — which one would you believe? Better yet, would you rather live in a country where 800,000 Donald Trumps were walking around with guns and badges or a country where one random police officer served as president every day? OK, here’s the last choice. Which would you rather have: Every single police officer from now until the end of time will be qualified, incorruptible and free or prejudice, BUT Donald Trump has to be president for life, or: Donald Trump is ousted from office tomorrow, but every single police officer will be replaced by someone as racist as Donald Trump? — Peter Thiel vs. Christian Nationalists Here’s a more difficult choice: In exchange for Peter Thiel being made the CEO of America, including every corporation and all three branches of government, but no one will ever misuse religion again? OR: EVERYONE in America becomes a Bible-thumping, Christian zealot who believes in the worst interpretation of Christianity but Peter Thiel miraculously becomes a decent human being and dedicates his money, power, technology and influence to helping every single person he can. Would you rather have one extremely powerful, privileged, wealthy white man with almost unlimited resources fighting a white multitude who believes in a twisted, racist 2,000-year-old ideology that has caused wars, lynchings, discrimination and hate because no amount of logic or truth can dissuade them, or: One evil racist with unlimited resources battling an entire cult of good, decent, non-racist human beings? ~

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Trump's Psychological Vulnerability and the Destruction of the American Economy Dr. Timothy Snyder Thinking About Thursday 10 April, 2025 Trump has an obvious weakness that makes America weak. He places the American economy at risk for the sake of a personal foible, a visible vulnerability. All his adult life, Trump has been ripping people off. That is his modus operandi. Rather than a conscience, he has the habit of displacement. It is not that he is ripping people off. Everyone else is ripping him off. As he has aged this has grown into a vulnerability. He actually seems to believe that everyone is ripping him off. He makes no distinction between himself and the government. And he has no grasp of how any significant policy actually works. This means that anyone who has access to him and understands his vulnerability can generate a self-destructive American policy. An easy example of this, before the tariffs, was Ukraine. Somewhere Trump got the idea that Ukraine was ripping off the United States. And once the idea was in his head, he was its slave. He kept repeating that the Ukraine owed the United States $350 billion. This made no sense. The assistance in question was aid, not a loan. The value of the aid was about a third of what Trump claimed. Most of the military aid came in the form of spending inside the United States. And of course the Ukrainians have paid. They have fulfilled the entire NATO mission by themselves in holding off a Russian attack. They have suffered enormous losses of all kinds. And they have shared intelligence and innovations with the United States. But none of that matters to Trump. Once he is told that he is being ripped off, he is helpless, and others must suffer. We don't know now, though it is not hard to guess, who told Trump that Ukraine was ripping him off. The Russians have a keen sense of psychological vulnerabilities, and they have been paying close attention to Trump for a long time. Trump also cites the made-up number of $350 billion to justify tariffs. He claims that Europeans, curiously, somehow "owe" the United States that exact same amount. Trump believes that if Americans buy more from another country than residents of that country buy from us, that is a loss, that he personally is somehow being ripped off. And so when the United States formulated tariffs on the whole world last week, the operating principle was that all trade deficits -- cases where we buy more than we sell -- should be eliminated. This is nonsensical. There is no state of nature where countries buy and sell the exact same amount from one another. Imagine a party where people are freely talking to each other. Then someone jumps up on a table and insists that in every conversation each speaker should use the exact same number of words as the person with whom he or she is in dialogue. What would happen then? Every conversation would grind to a halt, because an artificial planned equality of words is not how conversations work. An artificial planned equality of the value of imports and exports is, by the same token, not how trade works. There is a much injustice in international trade. And there is much to be said for a thoughtful trade policy that protects or encourages certain industries. Manufacturing is of inherent value. But none of this will arise from the hurt feelings of an oligarchical president. Because Trump's policy is based on personal vulnerability, it is erratic. If someone makes him feel more vulnerable than he was already, he will stop. He will not, for example, impose tariffs on Russia, because he is afraid of Russia. On the other hand, if someone convinces him that he has won, then he will also reduce the tariffs, as has just happened. If he no longer feels that he is being ripped off, then he yields. Until the moment when his feelings change. To a person which such a obvious vulnerability, everything seems out of control. And so control is the only answer. Everyone is acting to rip me off. And so I must establish control by calling them all out, and making them deal with me from a position of weakness and ridicule. And so now the United States -- so goes the theory - will now negotiate individually with every single country of the world. We have broken agreements with many of them, and now we will sign new agreements, which will probably be worse: we lack time now, and patience, and focus. And we can never get back the trust of our closest trade partners. The same is true in domestic policy. By establishing the tariffs, Trump thinks that he is creating leverage for himself against American companies. They will all have to come to him personally to seek the "carve-out," the exception, that will allow them to continue to trade in world markets and function as they had before. And so Trump can enjoy feeling less vulnerable as he tries to bully companies. But this amounts to central planning, and of a particularly irrational sort: one that depends upon one man's feelings. Investing inside the United States no longer means what it once did. And this will not quickly change. We all have our foibles, our whims, our vulnerabilities. But when one person has unchecked power, irrationality becomes unchecked. Donald Trump thinks that everyone is always ripping him off. If he were the president in a normal situation, this would be a minor problem. But in a situation in which he has gotten away with an attempted coup, in which the Supreme Court has told him he is immune from prosecution, in which members of his own party rarely challenge him, in which Congress no longer sees the need to pass laws, and so on, in which too much of the media normalizes him, Trump's vulnerability can bring about the destruction of the country. We have thousands of years of political theory and indeed great literature to instruct us on this point: too much power brings out the worst in people -- especially among the worst of people. As the founders understood, the purpose of the rule of law, of checks and balances, of regular elections, is to prevent precisely such a situation. Allowing our republic to be compromised has many costs, for example to our rights, and to our dignity. But it also has costs in a very basic economic sense. When you elevate the mad king, you elevate the madness.

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. ~ https://tinyurl.com/2895uqhw

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)