< World Premiere > MATTHEW MARTIN : The Lamentations of Jeremiah (for unaccompanied SSATTB choir) Wednesday 20 April, 2016 The Tallis Scholars, cond. Peter Phillips Faber Music, Ltd., 2017

Alban Berg's 'Violin Concerto' — Michael Steinberg Albano Maria Johannes Berg was born on Monday 9 February, 1885, in Vienna and died there on Tuesday 24 December, 1935. He wrote the 'Violin Concerto', his last complete work, in the spring and summer of 1935, finishing the composition on Monday 15 July and completing the orchestration on Monday 12 August. Louis Krasner, who had commissioned the concerto from Berg, gave the first performance on Sunday 19 April, 1936, in Barcelona, at a festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music; Hermann Scherchen conducted the Orquestra Pau Casals. Krasner, who made the work known all over Europe and America, also introduced it in the United States, at concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Friday 5 & Saturday 6 March, 1937, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting. In addition to the solo violin, the score calls for two flutes (both doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (3rd doubling alto saxophone) and bass clarinet, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 1 tenor and 1 bass trombone, bass tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, snare drum, tam-tam (low), gong (high), triangle, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). The concerto is about 26 minutes long. ~ On Thursday 12 August, 1909, Alban Berg wrote to Helene Nahowski, whom he would marry two years later, that “this morning a wasp stung me in my right hand, middle finger. It began to swell and has now become so thick I can hardly move the fingers; quite painful. Well that’s life in the country.” In the next day’s letter he writes, evidently from experience, “My hand is not better yet, I ought really to keep it very quiet so that the inflammation won’t spread to the arm.” Twenty-six years later to the day, Berg drew the double bar on the last page of his 'Violin Concerto'. Soon after, the wasps got to him again, and this time Berg, all his life a bundle of ailments, allergies, and hypochondriac fantasies, did not recover. Carbuncles developed, then boils, then an abscess on his back, and then blood poisoning. He received a transfusion—the donor was a Viennese laborer, and Berg expressed the hope that it would not turn him into an operetta composer—but, with sulfa drugs not yet available, nothing helped. On 23 December he said, “Today is the 23rd. It will be a decisive day.” Ever since his first attack of bronchial asthma on Thursday 23 July, 1908—at age 23—he had been superstitious about the number 23. Helene Berg sought to help her husband by moving the clocks ahead so as to convince him that the critical day was past. In vain: Berg survived the critical 23rd, but only by an hour and a quarter. He was two days older than his adored Gustav Mahler had been at the time of his death. The score of his opera 'Lulu', a project he had harbored for thirty years, was nearly finished. The last completed work was the 'Violin Concerto' for whose sake, and rather to his own surprise, he had interrupted work on 'Lulu'. Two summonses had called the concerto into being. First, the Russian-born American violinist Louis Krasner (1903-1995) commissioned such a work from Berg. Krasner knew and liked the lyrical quality of Berg’s early 'Piano Sonata', and had been overwhelmed by his opera 'Wozzeck' when he heard Stokowski conduct it in New York in 1931. Then, in Vienna early in 1935, he heard the Galimir Quartet play something more recent and representative, the 'Lyric Suite' of 1925-26. Not only was Krasner impressed by the 'Lyric Suite', he also fell in love with, proposed to, and married Adrienne Galimir, the second violinist in the quartet, which then consisted of a brother and three sisters. Berg was reluctant to commit himself to the idea of a concerto, saying that the world of Wieniawski and Vieuxtemps was not his world, to which Krasner sensibly replied that after all Beethoven and Brahms had written violin concertos, too. Still more telling was Krasner’s suggestion that Berg was the man to demonstrate the lyric and expressive potential of twelve-tone music, and to release it from the stigma of “all brain, no heart.” For a while, Berg stuck to his rather guarded position, but he formally accepted the commission, and friends observed that he lately acquired the new and strange habit of attending violin recitals. The second summons was a tragic one—the death on Monday April 22, 1935, of Manon Gropius, the 18-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler-Werfel by her second husband, the architect Walter Gropius.* [Alma Mahler was by then married to the novelist Franz Werfel. In the mid-1970s, research by George Perle and Douglass Green uncovered a long and passionate love affair between Berg and Werfel’s sister, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. Berg’s 'Lyric Suite', it turns out, was secretly dedicated to Hanna and is full of references and messages to her that are encoded in various musical and structural features of the work.] Manon, singularly gifted, gentle, vivacious, and beautiful, seems to have been loved by everyone who came in contact with her. She was studying to be an actress when struck down by poliomyelitis, which led to spinal paralysis and so to her death. Berg, shaken through and through, suddenly saw how the concerto might be a Requiem for the beloved Manon. The title page says at the top “Für Louis Krasner” and at the bottom, “Dem Andenken eines Engels” (“to the memory of an angel”). “Angel” carries a specific reference in that Max Reinhardt had planned to have Manon make her debut as an angel in his Salzburg production of 'Everyman'. In June, Krasner was able to spend some time with Berg at the composer’s country house on the Wörthersee—just opposite Pörtschach, where Brahms had written his 'Violin Concerto', as he was fond of pointing out—and he spent hours improvising for him so that Berg might get to know the strengths and characteristics of his technique and style. Until then, Berg had been the slowest of the great composers, and his catalog is very small. But the 'Violin Concerto' poured out of him with a speed and urgency and ease he had never before experienced. On Tuesday 16 July he was able to write to Krasner that he had finished the composition of “our” concerto the day before. “I am perhaps even more astonished than you,” he added. “I was, to be sure, industrious as never before in my life and must add that the work gave me more and more joy. I hope—no, I believe confidently—that I have succeeded.” In 1935, Berg was just past the height of his fame and public success. He would have been at the zenith if the establishment in 1933 of Hitler’s regime had not suddenly choked off the performances in all the German theaters of his opera 'Wozzeck'. Losing what had become a substantial source of royalties caused Berg serious financial hardship, and throughout 1934 and 1935 he was obliged seriously to consider selling his country house and the little Ford convertible he had proudly bought with 'Wozzeck' earnings in the fall of 1930. His father, whom he resembled to an uncanny degree, was a bookdealer who had come to Vienna from Nuremberg in 1867, and the whole family crackled with literary, theatrical, musical, and artistic talent. Berg’s sister, Smaragda, was the only other member of the family to pursue a professional career in music: she became a superb, much sought-after vocal coach, among whose pupils was Frida Leider, the great Isolde and Brünnhilde of the pre-Flagstad era. Alban’s and Smaragda’s older brother, Hermann, who emigrated to the United States, where he joined the New York firm of importers, Geo. Borgfeldt & Co. Inc., was responsible for a creation perhaps even more significant than 'Wozzeck', 'Lulu', the 'Lyric Suite', and the 'Violin Concerto', and certainly one of wider circulation, for it was he who gave the world the teddy bear. It was Smaragda who spotted a newspaper advertisement on Monday 8 October, 1904, announcing that Arnold Schönberg would be teaching some night classes in harmony and counterpoint, and another brother, Karl, known as Charly, who secretly took some of Alban’s songs to the already celebrated, indeed notorious Schönberg for evaluation. Schönberg accepted Berg as a pupil, and Berg studied with him in a nourishing, trying, often exceedingly dependent relationship until 1910. Those aspects of their friendship hardly changed over the years. For a time after his father’s early death in 1900, Berg had had to support himself by means of a job in civil service, but an inheritance from an aunt made him modestly independent in 1906. In 1908 he completed his 'Piano Sonata', the first work to which he assigned an opus number and which he counted as the real beginning of his career as a composer. There followed a string quartet in 1910, 'Five Songs' with orchestra on texts by Peter Altenberg in 1912, 'Three Pieces for Orchestra' in 1913, and the completion in 1922 of 'Wozzeck', on which he had begun work in 1914. In 1911 Berg had married Helene Nahowski and moved into the apartment he was to occupy for the rest of his life, and which was still Helene Berg’s home when she died in 1976. Berg served briefly in the army, wrote some criticism and analysis, and after the war assisted Schönberg in setting up the Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna. 'Wozzeck' was the turning point. The performance under Hermann Scherchen in Frankfurt of concert excerpts in July 1924 made his name widely known. The first complete production followed in Berlin under Erich Kleiber’s direction in December 1925. Still more significant was the production in March 1929 in Oldenberg, then a city of some 400,000. It made the point that 'Wozzeck' was not just something for the big houses, and within a few years, Berg’s opera was in the repertory of some thirty European theaters. In March 1931, Leopold Stokowski introduced 'Wozzeck' in Philadelphia and New York. Meanwhile, Berg led his life, traveled to hear performances of his music, carried on a copious correspondence, read voraciously (Balzac, Strindberg, Ibsen, Kafka, Karl Kraus, Shakespeare, Goethe, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil were special favorites, but there was also room for Jack London and the Styrian poet, Peter Rosegger), played with his albino dachshunds, laughed at the movies of Buster Keaton and of Laurel and Hardy, cheered himself hoarse at soccer games, was delighted to receive a visit from George Gershwin, and wished in vain that the Austrian government’s tobacco monopoly, which had called its more luxurious grade of cigarette “Heliane” after an opera by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, would name its cheapest working-class brand “Wozzeck”. Honors began to come his way, but when the City of Vienna offered him the honorary title of Professor (and that is a big deal in Austria and Germany to this day), he turned it down: “Too late,” he said, “Alban Berg is quite enough.” He himself became a teacher. His most famous pupil was that formidable polymath, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, who eventually wrote a brilliant and characteristically idiosyncratic study of his master. On the other hand, the parents of an extraordinarily gifted English boy refused, on the advice of his teacher, to allow him to go to Berg, for it was feared he would be a bad influence: Benjamin Britten never got over his chagrin. Of course the most important thing was Berg’s music. He added to his catalogue the 'Chamber Concerto' for violin, piano, and thirteen wind instruments, the 'Lyric Suite' for string quartet, the concert aria 'Der Wein' on a poem by Baudelaire, most of Lulu, and the 'Violin Concerto'. Twelve days before his death, wracked by fever, he was able for the first time to attend one of the many performances of the five-movement Symphony he had drawn from Lulu: it was the last music he heard. The 'Violin Concerto' he never heard at all. After Berg’s death, the program committee of the International Society of Contemporary Music, an organization on whose juries Berg had repeatedly served, asked Krasner to play the concerto at the festival scheduled for Barcelona in April 1936. Schoenberg’s most famous pupil, Anton Webern, was to conduct, but, emotionally upset, unable to get along linguistically or in any other way with the Catalan orchestra, allowing himself to become hopelessly bogged down in detail, he withdrew at the last moment, and Hermann Scherchen, with minimal chance to study the score and of course with next to no rehearsal time available, came to the last-minute and heroic rescue. ~ Berg casts his concerto in two movements, each divided into two parts. The music starts in utmost quiet as harp and clarinets with solo violin begin some exploratory preluding, gently drifting at first—the violin’s entrance is just a touching of the four open strings from G up to E and down again—but gradually taking on a firmer sense of direction. A clear cadence is reached and, with a simple accompanying figure to set the pace, the first movement proper begins. When the violin next enters, it again begins on the open G string, but moves up this time into a higher register. The pitches are these—G B♭ D F♯ A C E G♯ B C♯ E♭ F—and virtually every choice of pitch that Berg makes in the concerto is related to that particular ordering of the twelve notes of our chromatic scale. The bold notes are the ones to which the four strings of a violin are tuned and, with each bearing either a minor or a major chord, they are the scaffolding of Berg’s chosen series. The last four notes take on special meaning later. It is clear from the outset that both a place for traditional tonal harmonies and a specifically violinistic element are built right into the material. The two movements of the concerto can be said to represent respectively a portrait of Manon Gropius and a drama of “death and transfiguration.” The Andante, which Berg thought of as a Praeludium, soon leads to a wistful Allegretto. This is music full of pictorial reference: the sweet thirds in the violin are to be played “wienerisch” (“Viennese”), a more bumpkin-like passage is to be “rustico,” and the hiccup of the yodel is heard. There is even room for quotation when, after a couple of contrasting episodes (Trios to this scherzo, really), a Carinthian folk song is tenderly passed among the horn, the solo violin, and two trumpets. [Carinthia is a province in the southwest of Austria. It was there that Berg composed the concerto. Its German name is Kärnten, and the Kärntnerthor Theater in Vienna that one encounters so often in writings about Mozart and Beethoven was by the city gate where one took the road for Carinthia.] The second movement enters violently and with an intensity of dissonance Berg has so far avoided. Berg sets up a powerful contrast between the cadenza-like freedom with which he wishes the opening projected and the strictly rhythmic style that takes over later on. A dotted rhythm ominously commands this scene. A demanding cadenza halts the forward thrust for a moment, but when the orchestra re-enters in full force, it pushes the music toward an immense climax. The storm subsides, and the violin is heard quietly but decisively playing a Bach chorale, accompanied only by the bassoon and a few of the orchestral strings. At a point when the first movement was far advanced and the basic compositional material of the concerto was long since determined, Berg was still looking for a suitable Bach chorale that he might somehow introduce. When he found one, it was so right he could hardly believe it: not only was the text perfect, but its first four notes were the last four of his own ordering of the twelve notes. It is, moreover, Bach’s most adventurous, chromatic, tension-laden chorale harmonization, so that it fits uncannily with Berg’s own harmonic style. It comes from the Cantata No. 60, 'O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort' (“O Eternity, Thou Word of Thunder”), and the melody itself is by the 17th-century Mühlhausen church musician, Johann Rudolf Ahle. The words, by Franz Joachim Burmeister (1633-72), are as follows (the German text as given here follows the version printed in the Universal Edition of Berg’s score) : Es ist genug! / It is enough! Herr, wenn es dir gefällt, / Lord, if it please you, So spanne mich doch aus! / Unyoke me now at last! Mein Jesus kommt: / My Jesus comes: Nun gute Nacht, o Welt! / Now good night, o world! Ich fahr’ ins Himmelhaus, / I travel to my heavenly home, Ich fahre sicher hin mit Frieden, / I travel surely and in peace, Mein grosser Jammer bleibt darnieden. / My great distress remains below. Es ist genug! Es ist genug! / It is enough! It is enough! Berg’s and Bach’s harmonizations alternate and subtly intersect. Variations follow the playing through of the hymn, beginning with the melody in muted cellos and harp. The solo violin, also muted, joins in and is in turn joined by a single violin from the orchestra, then another, and more and more. Berg even asks that at this point the violinist “audibly and visibly” assume leadership of the strings. Louis Krasner stated that to Berg, this was “the real cadenza” of the concerto, and that he thought of the passage as one in which one seemed to perceive the solo through an ever-stronger magnifying glass until one violin, grown to overwhelming dimensions, entirely fills the room. The other strings drop away as gradually as they had entered until only the soloist is left. The Carinthian song is heard as if from a great distance, but it is the chorale, garlanded about with a filigree of solo strings, that leads the work to its serene close: “My great distress remains below.” The last music we hear is a scarcely audible recollection of the preluding on open strings where it all began. — Michael Steinberg was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1979, and after that, of the San Francisco Symphony & New York Philharmonic.

< World Premiere > ALBAN BERG : Violinkonzert ('To the memory of an angel') Sunday 19 April, 1936 – Palau de la Música Catalana, Barcelona (XIV Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music) Pau Casals Orchestra, cond. Hermann Scherchen Louis Krasner, Violin solo Universal Edition, 1996 (UE 34119) “Berg’s 'Violin Concerto' stands as a pinnacle of 20th-century violin literature, showcasing his ability to balance avant-garde techniques with a deeply expressive and personal narrative. The concerto’s synthesis of form and emotion, combined with its intricate harmonic language, solidifies Berg’s place as a key figure in the evolution of modern classical music.”

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In April 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations. While incarcerated, Dr. King responded: Letter from Birmingham Jail Tuesday 16 April, 1963

Letter from Birmingham Jail, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

< World Premiere > PRIAULX RANIER : Requiem (for unaccompanied SATB div. choir & Tenor solo) Sunday 15 April, 1956 – Victoria & Albert Museum, London The Purcell Singers, cond. Imogen Holst Peter Pears, Tenor Text: David Gascoyne Schott Music Ltd., 2003 (Ed. 13335)

< World Premiere > WOLFGANG RIHM : Sieben Passions-Texte (for unaccompanied SATTBB soli) Friday 13 April, 2001 Basilica dei SS. XII Apostoli, Rome, Italy Singer Pur

< World Premiere > GEORGE PERLE : Adagio for Orchestra Tuesday 13 April, 1993 – Carnegie Hall, New York Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, cond. David Zinman In 1937, Perle made his first connection with the revolutionary innovations of Schönberg and his school when he came upon a copy of Berg's 'Lyric Suite'. “It wasn't until I came upon the 'Lyric Suite' that I realized that there was something going on in contemporary music that implied really significant new ways of thinking about harmony...”

Book Exerpt : Why Do We Give White Guys a License to Kill Black People? Elie Mystal (from 'Bad Law : Ten Popular Laws Killing America', © 2025) Did you know that Geraldo Rivera has a brother, named Craig Rivera, who is also a broadcaster? I know this because back in the day, very early in my journalism career, I got a call from Geraldo’s producers asking me to do a television segment with Craig. It wasn’t a normal “talking heads in boxes” TV appearance. Craig had a running segment on Geraldo’s Fox News show, Geraldo Rivera Reports, called “Craig Investigates,” where Craig would go out into the country, among “regular Americans,” and ask them questions about whatever hyped-up culture war issue Fox was pimping that week. My call came in the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s murder of Trayvon Martin. I had been writing a lot about lax gun laws and racism and how the two intersect and inevitably lead to the deaths of innocent young Black people. Craig wanted to challenge my takes by sending me to a gun store in New Jersey. That could seem like a non sequitur, unless you understand the ammosexual brain. You see, their standard view is that liberals are both afraid of guns (because we don’t know how to be “real men” who handle their problems with violence) and ignorant of how guns work and of guns’ allegedly life-saving properties. Taking a bog-standard liberal like me to a gun store works as a response to the slaying of Martin because once there, I’d surely expose myself as a wuss who simply doesn’t understand how to defend himself. It was a dumb idea for a segment, but I was down to clown. I was young, eager to do more television, and totally comfortable being uncomfortable around guns. I am, in fact, squeamish about pumping hot lead into another human being until they suffer enough internal trauma that they no longer live. I imagine I could do it in a kill-or-be-killed type of situation, but I don’t live in a goddamn thunderdome and thus have never had to put that theory to the test. If Katniss Everdeen found a way to win the Hunger Games without straight murdering every single person she encountered, I’d like to think there’s a good chance I can get through my entire life without committing a homicide. I was totally willing to forcefully defend my effete, northeastern, liberal stance to Fox viewers who are used to liberals who try, unsuccessfully, to hide their effete, northeastern, liberal sensibilities. I wasn’t going to pretend to know more about guns than I do or to be more comfortable with killing than I am. I was going to affably explain that the gun store owner, Craig, and everybody in the store were fucking lunatics whose pathetic need to feel strong with a gun made them the actual wussies. I may be afraid of guns, but these assholes are the ones who still need a night-light. My principal objection to the segment was that they wanted me to go to Jersey, but once Fox said they’d provide a car, I was in. A few days later, I stuffed my fat, bespectacled ass into a suit (looking every bit like the bookish, soft liberal I was to play) and was driven to some faraway place across the Hudson River. I do not recall the name of the gun store, or the names of men I spoke to, or the make and model of the guns they brandished. I spent most of my time questioning why anybody would need any of these weapons. I do know that I pissed off the gun store owner, because he was showing me some kind of handgun, and I said something to the effect of, “You’re saying this is what you use if you are clumsy and lack the skill or hand-eye coordination to operate a bow and arrow?” The store owner, agitated and still holding the weapon, asked me, “What would you do if somebody broke into your house and threatened you and your family with one of these?” This, of course, is the baseline fear that I believe prompts most ammosexuals to purchase a compensation device: the fear of home invasion. It’s so pervasive among that set that every gun reform advocate has been asked that question hundreds of times. We all have our standard answers to the question. I gave the owner mine. “If possible, I’d run,” I said. “WHAT?!” responded the store owner. “If an armed man broke into my house, I’d run away at the first opportunity,” I repeated. “You’d run away from your own house,” a suddenly interested Craig Rivera chimed in. “Yes,” I repeated for the second time. “What about your wife?” asked Craig. “She’s faster than me,” I accurately told him. I don’t know if the segment ever aired. I didn’t watch Geraldo, obviously, and certainly wasn’t going to start just because I may have been on. I do know I was never invited back on the show . . . even though I gave them exactly what they thought they wanted. My response, while shocking to gun-addicted segments of our country, was a fairly standard application of the legal doctrine known as the “duty to retreat.” The duty comes to us from English common law, which consists of the precedents and rulings made by judges in England sometime after William, Duke of Normandy, whupped the entire island until he got to Scotland. The doctrine stands for the simple and exceedingly reasonable premise that deadly force may be used only when all other reasonable options have been exhausted. I know that in our toxic masculinity–bred culture “retreat” is a dirty, nearly unforgivable word. It’s worse than “surrender,” because at least surrendering implies a battle was waged and lost. Retreat implies backing down without a fight. It implies cowardice. American presidents do not like to say the word “retreat,” even when they order a goddamn retreat. Richard Nixon said we were getting “peace with honor” when we ran away from Vietnam. Joe Biden said we were “ending,” or concluding, operations in Afghanistan when we retreated from America’s longest war. George Washington was a crap battlefield general but a master of the organized retreat. He won the Revolutionary War by running away when all seemed lost and keeping his army together to lose another day. I could make an argument that this entire country would be different and better if we remembered Washington as the Great Retreater. I wish I could relabel the duty to retreat as something else—perhaps the “duty to explore all options” or the “duty to live and let live”—something that wouldn’t make American men’s penises feel sad when it’s invoked. Nonetheless, despite its bad marketing, the duty to retreat is a foundational principle for living in a civilized society. You shouldn’t kill somebody unless you have to. Sure, there will be edge cases where reasonable people disagree on whether they simply had to take another life. But all that the duty to retreat requires is that nonhomicidal options are taken . . . if it is safe to do so. If some maniac is threatening to kill you, and you can safely walk away, you should just walk away. If somebody breaks into your school and starts shooting people and you can safely flee, you should flee. If you can’t retreat safely, then you should, of course, defend yourself by any means necessary. But if you can retreat safely, you should. The duty to retreat wants you to deal with violent individuals the way we’ve all been taught to deal with fire: run away from the danger and wait for the professionals to handle it. Nobody tells you to stay inside a burning building with a bucket of water to show the fire who’s boss. They tell you to get on the ground, retreat from the flames, and get outside. In this way, the duty to retreat is not only the appropriate moral stance it’s also the most pragmatic way to stay alive. You are much more likely to survive an encounter with an armed individual if you don’t start shooting at them. This is especially true in theft crimes like burglary and robbery. If a mugger asks for your wallet, give it to them. Don’t try to quick draw them like you’re Billy the freaking Kid. You’re not even Emilio Estevez. Sacrifice your wallet, withdraw, and live long enough to receive new credit cards in the mail. Most people who object to the duty to retreat gloss over the phrase “if it is safe to do so.” But that is actually critical to the entire concept. Nobody is required to put themselves at risk, just to run away. Nobody who is backed into a corner is required to cower there. Indeed, in most violent encounters, retreat is not an option. If somebody is trying to kill you on the Orient Express, you don’t have to jump off the moving train like you are James Bond. And you don’t need a license to kill in order to defend yourself. The duty to retreat applies only to situations where a person can reasonably, safely, and without much effort, get away. To put that in criminal law terms: the duty to retreat does not take away anybody’s legal right to self-defense. Self-defense is what lawyers call an “affirmative defense” to a homicide charge. You kill somebody. The cops arrest you and charge you with murder. You go to court and say, “No, no, no, I had to kill that person to defend myself.” Since you agree that you killed the person, you are not presumed innocent. Instead, the onus is on you to convince a jury that you had no option other than the use of deadly force to stay alive. If you convince the jury, you go home. Your homicide is justified. If, on the other hand, the jury feels that there were reasonable, safe, and nonhomicidal measures you could have taken to defend yourself, you go to jail. Nobody is convicted for “failure to retreat.” Instead, people are convicted for murder, manslaughter, or “imperfect self-defense” (which means you honestly thought you had to use deadly force to defend yourself but were demonstrably and unreasonably wrong and thus are still guilty of homicide, albeit with a reduction in the severity of your punishment). For every thirty or so homicides in America, one is a justifiable self-defense homicide. That figure shouldn’t surprise people. Killing is not usually a defensive action. Most people, most of the time, have some safe, reasonable option other than killing somebody. The duty to retreat simply captures the idea that deadly force is a last resort, not a preferred choice. The question about whether homicidal self-defense was reasonable or justified under the circumstances has been the critical question in probably every self-defense trial since dudes started fighting with rocks. But the invention and codification of private property inexorably led to the biggest, oldest, and most famous exception to the duty to retreat—what has become known as Castle Doctrine. Sometime in the seventeenth century, the English decided that the duty to retreat should not apply to situations where a person is violently threatened in their own home. The idea that “a man’s home is his castle,” and thus he can murder intruders in his castle as if he were an elf on the walls of Helm’s Deep, is why we call this exception Castle Doctrine. There is no duty to retreat from one’s own home. There is also no duty to retreat from one’s own business because, of course, capitalist societies treat a home and a business as essentially the same thing for the purposes of shooting people who enter illegally. I could make an argument that whatever level of defense we’re willing to contemplate for a family dwelling should not apply to the damn McDonald’s, or Target franchise you may own, but I don’t feel like pulling out my translation of Das Kapital right now. Castle Doctrine is a principle that gets rolled into an argument for self-defense. Normally, you can’t kill somebody who is threatening you unless your life is in danger. But in a Castle Doctrine case, a homeowner can kill somebody who has illegally entered (or attempted to enter) their home, even if the homeowner’s life is in no immediate danger. The homeowner is still claiming self-defense, but to make that affirmative defense, the homeowner need only show that they reasonably believed an intruder could be armed or dangerous. The implications of this doctrine are shocking, or at least they would be if we weren’t all so used to them. It completely warps the normal inquiry into self-defense, because it allows people to kill when their own lives are not in any provable danger. It’s a “shoot first, ask questions later” principle embedded into the very core of our laws. As you may have guessed, I think Castle Doctrine is a pretty dumb concept as an intellectual matter. Look, I’m a parent. A home invasion scenario, where my wife and children are present and threatened, is pretty much the scariest thing I can think of. I’m not a gun owner because (say it with me now) keeping loaded firearms in a house with small children is dangerous, ineffective, and fucking stupid. But I do have weapons—blunt force or stabbing weapons, like I’m the damn Terminator 3000—stashed throughout my home. If my family’s life were in imminent danger, I’d use them. But if not (allow me to repeat for the third time), I’d gather my family and run away. I’m not trying to get into a deadly shootout to defend my pride and my PlayStation. I’m trying to keep myself and my loved ones alive. Castle Doctrine is a dumb and unnecessary principle because people already have the right to defend themselves from violent attacks in their own home without availing themselves of any special legal privileges. Castle Doctrine is an argument, made by a killer, and that argument can be rejected by juries at criminal trials. Castle Doctrine doesn’t need to be repealed; it needs to be ignored. Unfortunately, there’s a version of Castle Doctrine that cannot be ignored—a version that projects Castle Doctrine outside of one’s home, to any sidewalk, street, parking lot, or other physical place. A version pushed and promoted by the National Rifle Association that allows any yahoo with a gun to shoot first and ask questions later whenever they feel momentarily afraid of a Black person existing near them. The bad law that must be repealed is Chapter 776.012 of Florida’s state code . . . more commonly known as Florida’s stand-your-ground law. I had to go full Rachel Maddow on everybody with that long wind-up because the only way to understand the stand-your-ground law is to understand that in its simplest forms all it does is remove the duty to retreat from any situation: “Stand your ground” as a moniker makes sense only in opposition to “duty to retreat.” In this way, stand-your-ground simply extends Castle Doctrine to any place a person is legally allowed to be. Because of that, stand-your-ground adopts every stupid and violent problem associated with Castle Doctrine and extends the inane, toxic, testosterone-fueled violence to potentially everywhere. Instead of needing to show that your life is actually in danger in states with stand-your-ground, all you have to do is show that you were threatened or just felt threatened in any place you were legally allowed to be. Walking down the street and somebody threatens you and tries to snatch your purse? Pull out your Beretta and stand your ground. Get into a fender bender and the other guy tries to drive away without exchanging insurance information? Pop the trunk, grab your shotgun, and stand your ground. Somebody cuts you in line and starts shouting slurs and invectives at you? Reveal your AR-15 and stand your ground. Stand-your-ground turns being frightened in public into a justification for murder.

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This is Why Dictatorships Fail Anne Applebaum The Atlantic Thursday 10 April, 2025 He blinked. But we don’t really know why. Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again. The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning. This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia, windows closed for the sake of secrecy, they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service. From this wasteful and destructive incident, one useful lesson can be drawn. In recent years, many people who live in democracies have become frustrated by their political systems, by the endless wrangling, the difficulty of creating compromise, the slow pace of decisions. Just as in the first half of the 20th century, would-be authoritarians have begun arguing that we would all be better off without these institutions. “The truth is that men are tired of liberty,” said Mussolini. Lenin spoke with scorn about the failings of so-called bourgeois democracy. In the United States, a brand-new school of techno-authoritarian thinkers find our political system inefficient and want to replace it with a “national CEO,” a dictator by a different name. But in the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has just given us a pitch-perfect demonstration of why legislatures are necessary, why checks and balances are useful, and why most one-man dictatorships become poor and corrupt. If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price. ~

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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. ~

Opinion | The Return of the Great American Stomachache

If Trump removes too many precautions, there’s a real chance that we’ll rediscover how dangerous a less regulated food system can be.

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. ~

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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