The Weekly Sift

Machiavellian Assessments

No Sift for the next five weeks. The next new articles will appear on November 2.

Globally, then, Trump is in exactly the opposite position of where Machiavelli said a prince should be: hated but not feared.

– Paul Krugman, “Fear Strikes Out“

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

– Rudyard Kipling, Recessional (1897)

This week’s featured posts are “At the end of an age” and “The Nerd Reich“.

Mostly, I try to keep my personal life out of this blog, but occasionally it sneaks in (usually in the Monday Morning Teasers). Today I can’t avoid it, because I’m about to take a break longer than any I have taken since I started this blog in 2008. (Interestingly, that first post had the same title Paul Krugman used this week for the post where I found the quote above: “Fear Strikes Out”. It’s a reference only a handful of people will get, to a book and a movie almost 70 years old. RIP, Jimmy Pearsall.)

As many of you know, or may have gleaned from subtle references, I was married for 40 years to a woman who (after surviving several serious health crises) died unexpectedly almost two years ago. Saturday, I’m getting married again. In October, my bride and I are going to travel around Europe, where I plan to spend as little time as possible thinking about American politics.

I realize I am deserting my post at a key moment. This fall’s campaign is a pivotal point in American history. The electorate will either ratify or reject Trump’s attempt to put aside the Constitution and establish autocracy. Billionaires are putting up hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure we ratify the current regime and its rampant corruption. I hope they will be disappointed.

I’ll be back in time to write an election-eve Sift on November 2.

Ongoing stories

Trump’s assault on American democracy. This week’s assault was against the press, as Trump banned CNN, MS Now, and Politico reporters from the White House, and threatened to add the New York Times and Washington Post to that list. “Something is wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” he said, attacking the whole notion of a free press. The ban is being challenged in court. Other reporters should boycott the White House in solidarity. I didn’t think they would, but maybe so.
Climate change. Climate change has a number of effects you wouldn’t necessarily have predicted. One is that waterways are becoming less navigable. Diminished local rainfall is limiting shipping on the Rhine, the Mississippi, and the Panama Canal.
Ukraine. The air war has hit a point where offense has a huge advantage over defense. So a lot of damage is going to be done on both sides.
Middle East. The US appears to be staying out of the Saudi/Houthi battle. We’ll see what effect this has on world oil supplies.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about interest rates

Wednesday, the Fed raised interest rates for the first time in over three years. The increase was .25%, to a range from 3.75%-4%. Trump appointed Fed Chair Kevin Warsh precisely because he wanted interest rates to go down, not up. So he must be very disappointed.

A quick explanation is appropriate here, since most of the interest rates the average person deals with — mortgage rates, credit card rates, whatever your bank might pay on your checking account — are nowhere in that 3.75%-4% range. So what exactly did the Fed raise?

Wikipedia explains:

Financial institutions are obligated by law to hold liquid assets that can be used to cover sustained net cash outflows. Among these assets are the deposits that the institutions maintain, directly or indirectly, with a Federal Reserve Bank. An institution that is below its desired level of liquidity can address this temporarily by borrowing from institutions that have Federal Reserve deposits in excess of their requirement. The interest rate that a borrowing bank pays to a lending bank to borrow the funds is negotiated between the two banks, and the weighted average of this rate across all such transactions is the effective federal funds rate.

What the Fed now wants to keep in the 3.75%-4% range is that effective federal funds rate. It has two tools for controlling those rates: First, the interest rate the Fed pays banks on those institutional deposits, called the IORB (interest on reserve balances). Second, the rate the Fed charges banks for loans at its discount window. (Basically, the Fed will loan banks money based on their capital assets. This prevents runs on the bank, where a bank has assets, but can’t quickly generate the cash that depositors suddenly want back.)

Those two rates essentially bracket the interest rates the banks charge each other for the overnight loans: The only reason to loan another bank your reserves is if it will pay a rate higher than what the Fed is already paying. But there’s also no reason to pay a rate higher than what the Fed would charge you.

Changes in the Fed funds rate tend to ripple through the economy, to all the other rates people pay. That’s what we mean when we say the Fed “sets interest rates”. It only does that indirectly.

Next we get to why. By law, the Fed has two competing missions: to simultaneously keep the inflation and unemployment rates low.

Basically, high interest rates encourage people to save, while low interest rates encourage people to borrow and spend. More spending means more demand for goods and services, which tends to encourage businesses to hire. But it also makes prices rise, as more dollars chase the same quantity of goods.

High interest rates also fight inflation in another way: The ability to earn high interest encourages foreign investors to keep their money in dollars. That increases global demand for dollars and so makes the dollar more valuable relative to other currencies. That means that the price of imported goods goes down.

Recently, the unemployment rate has held fairly steady at a rate just over 4%, which in general is pretty good. But inflation is also running close to 4%, which the Fed considers too high. Hence the decision to raise rates.

After the Fed raised rates, Trump demonstrated how little he understands about economics by tweeting this on Truth Social:

Interest Rates in the United States should be 1%, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the World — BY FAR. Our Country is BOOMING with new Investment! If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year. The word “Deficit” is nothing more than a fancy word for LOSS. We are “carrying” almost every country in the World, and that cannot go on any longer. LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST! President DONALD J. TRUMP

That’s about as much economic stupidity as I’ve ever seen compressed into one paragraph. It combines two different elementary misunderstandings: one about interest rates and the other about trade.

First, interest rates have to cover three different things simultaneously

credit risk. That’s the lender’s insurance that the borrower won’t pay the loan back. So if a bank lends to 100 people and one defaults, the interest payments from the other 99 need to cover that loss. This is the only component of interest that Trump recognizes. The US government has been a great credit risk for a long, long time, because it essentially has the power to create the dollars it owes. So yes, if credit risk were the only component of interest, rates could be very low.
inflation. Inflation is currently running at just under 4% (which is almost exactly the Fed’s new short-term interest rate). If I loan somebody money for less than the inflation rate, I’m losing money, because the dollars I get repaid are worth less than the dollars I loaned.
compensation for deferred consumption. Suppose we’re two kids in our school lunchroom, and I want your candy bar. I could offer to give you back a candy bar tomorrow. But the ability to eat the bar now is worth something. If you could eat a bigger candy bar tomorrow, the deal might seem worthwhile, but otherwise not.

So no, a 1% interest rate would make no sense at all. First principles would lead you to a higher rate than the one the Fed has chosen, not a lower rate.

Then there are the macro-economic consequences. If interest rates were 1%, holding cash would be a losing proposition, so everybody would spend and borrow rather than save. That would increase the number of buyers for everything, which would drive prices up further. Inflation would skyrocket.

Now we come to Trump’s trade stupidity: He thinks that we are “losing” whenever we have a trade deficit with some country, and that we’d gain that money back if we just stopped trading with them.

This is something everybody should easily understand from their own experience: I have a trade deficit with my local supermarket, because I buy things from them while they never buy anything from me. I also have a trade deficit with my dentist, with the local coffee shop, and a lot of other businesses. Under Trump’s logic, I should just stop trading with them.

Think about that tweet together with this tweet from last Monday about AI regulation.

The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!

It’s hard to judge IQ from a distance, but I can say with confidence that Trump does not know or understand much. That’s what happens when you aren’t curious and surround yourself with people who only tell you what you want to hear. It doesn’t matter how good your brain is if it never engages with the world.

I am reminded of something one of my junior-high teachers said: “Some people are so stupid, they think they’re intelligent.”

and the end of the American age

This is the subject of an Atlantic article by Phillips O’Brien, which I comment on in one of the featured posts.

One of the themes is those articles is countries like Canada deciding to go their own way rather than remain in the American orbit. Here’s an example: You know those foreign knowledge workers that Trump slapped a $100K tax on? He’s saying America doesn’t want them. But Canada does.

Meanwhile, the EU invited Canada to become an associate member.

and you also might be interested in …

Remember back in those innocent days of the Biden administration, when it was a major scandal that the president’s son might have gotten a job he didn’t deserve? Last Monday, ProPublica revealed that a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin spent hundreds of thousands of dollars celebrating Don Jr.’s wedding — including renting a private island and putting on a fireworks display.

A wedding with a guest list only 50 people long — not even Don Sr. came — had room for Umar Kremlev, whom Don Jr. described as a “close friend”.

The Christian Democrats of German Chancellor Frederick Mertz continue to do badly in regional elections, with voters moving both to the right and the left.

Elon Musk is revving up bigotry against trans people in an attempt to turn the tide in key Senate races.

America PAC, Elon Musk’s super PAC supporting conservative candidates and causes, is churning out dozens of digital ads vilifying transgender people and criticizing Democratic candidates over their past support for trans rights in the hopes of driving Republicans out to the polls in November. In less than a week, the group, initially created to support President Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign, has released at least 38 social media ads claiming Democrats in competitive midterm Senate races would “put our daughters in danger” and prioritize a “radical trans agenda” if elected. Most of the group’s ads focus exclusively on trans people, according to a review of America PAC’s ads in the Meta and Google libraries.

Two of the ads feature people who are implied to be trans women; it is unclear if they are real actors or AI-generated amalgamations. … The ads, which portray trans women as drag queens rather than as they are in day-to-day life, follow a recent pattern of AI-generated attack ads targeting Democratic candidates over their support for trans rights. It’s unclear whether these specific ads are AI-generated, but they fall in the uncanny valley of authenticity. At minimum, they present harmful stereotypes of trans women — that they are physically imposing and always wear overdone makeup — to an audience who may not have ever met a trans person.

Appealing to negative stereotypes is key to maintaining bigotry, whether it is Jewish caricatures with big noses or Black characters speaking in jive or plantation-era pidgin English.

Scapegoating is one of fascism’s central strategies: Raise people’s anger at trans folk or immigrants, and maybe they’ll forget about gas prices, how expensive their healthcare is, and that our nation is fighting another pointless war.

Anti-trans, of course, is one of Musk’s many bigotries, including racism and sexism. He has never accepted his trans daughter. If you want to see a real trans woman, she looks like this.

Musk is just the biggest example of a larger phenomenon: As other parts of Trump’s coalition lose faith in him, billionaires are standing firm.

According to a recent analysis from the Financial Times, “More than a third of the $2.8 [billion] raised for the current 2025-26 election cycle comes from the 20 biggest mega-donors,” 16 of which have “plowed money” into the Republican midterm campaigns, a marked shift from prior cycles. … A closer look at the donors themselves tells much of the story. The shift is driven primarily by Silicon Valley boodle—particularly money tied to concerns about the regulation of artificial intelligence—as well as special interests like crypto and gambling.

If you’re not rich, and the richest people in the country are all putting their weight on one side of the scale, that’s a good reason to put your weight on the other side.

If the Kennedy Center story weren’t happening in full public view, it would be hard to believe. First, Trump took over the board of the Center, which apparently is something all previous presidents could have done, but chose not to. He politicized the Center, alienating both the artist community that performs there and the Washington-area audience that attends. His hand-picked board added his name to the Center, in violation of the legislation that established it. When a court said no to this, his board tried various other schemes to attach Trump’s name to the Center, which the court has also said no to. Then he started talking about tearing it down. He’s been quite explicit about it: Put his name on the building or it won’t survive.

If we’re going to save the Kennedy Center, I think the Trump administration should be given recognition for doing so.

I can’t think of any comparable case for any previous president: Name this thing after me, or I’ll tear it down.

Pundits are explaining this as childishness or petulance or some such. To me, it looks like mental illness.

Meredith Blake at The Contrarian has a good summary of the Ed Sheeran controversy. Sheeran himself is about as uncontroversial as a musician gets. But the opening act on his tour was the rapper Macklemore, who made pro-Palestinian statements during a recent concert. This brought down the wrath of the pro-Netanyahu Robert Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, one of the Sheeran tour venues. He organized resistance to Macklemore, who was then removed from Sheeran’s tour by the promoter.

Sheeran has claimed that wasn’t his decision, and that he doesn’t make political statements. Then the other musicians opening for him then pulled out.

The debacle has thrown Sheeran’s tour into chaos and resulted in a rare PR crisis for a musician who is usually about as incendiary as a bowl of oatmeal. But it has demonstrated one thing: despite what Sheeran would like to believe, being apolitical is not really an option for an artist with a global platform in 2026. That’s because many of the artists who do opt to speak out in this climate, particularly on Gaza, face severe consequences, disproportionate backlash, and bad-faith allegations of antisemitism.

and let’s close with something generic

Writing new English subtitles to Hitler’s breakdown rant in “Downfall” is practically its own genre of political satire. Here’s the latest Iran-war version.

September 21, 2026 – 12:17 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

The Nerd Reich

For weeks I’ve been promising a review of The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán. Now that it comes time to deliver, I find I have more of a commentary than a full review. You can find wide-ranging interviews with Durán here and here.

The central character the book follows is Peter Thiel, a billionaire who is notable for several reasons:

He co-founded not just PayPal but also Palantir, which has enormous government contracts involving surveillance.
Thiel is not just powerful himself, he is also influential: Durán attributes to Bloomberg the observation that “sixteen men connected to Thiel and his companies now hold positions of power in the Trump administration”.
Most importantly, J. D. Vance is essentially a Thiel creation. Thiel found him as a student, shepherded his career in venture capital, and then funded his race for the Senate. [1]

The important thing to know about Thiel’s vision is that he seems not to appreciate that the world of 1990s cyberpunk novels is a dystopia. In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, just to give one example, government exists but has largely become obsolete, with its services mostly privatized by franchised corporations. Local jails have turned into franchises of a corporation called “The Klink”. Another franchise operation, Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, is made up of gated communities in which you can buy citizenship.

Apparently, Snow Crash and various other cyberpunk classics are not dystopias to Thiel. Making government obsolete and expanding corporate power to usurp government has been his vision since he first read the 1999 nonfiction book The Sovereign Individual. [2]

He was also influenced by Balaji Srinivasan’s notion of a “network state”, which Srinivasan’s book defines as

a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.

Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, in other words. Thiel is part of a broader community of tech visionaries and entrepreneurs like Elon Musk. Plans for a new frontier, new city, new country, or new colony run throughout their thinking, pulling together examples that otherwise seem to have nothing to do with each other, like Musk’s Mars colony, the California Forever planned city, Jared Kushner’s “New Gaza”, plans to develop Greenland after the US takes it over, seasteading operations, and many others. The point is to find a place that is either empty or populated (like Gaza) with people whose rights can be neglected, and then to build whatever a tech lord dreams, controlling it much like a company town from America’s Gilded Age. As diverse as they seem, they are all “network states”.

Crypto-currency, of course, is a key part of this vision, because it privatizes the management of money.

Taking powers away from government can sound good in an anarchistic sort of way. But the powers typically don’t go away, they just get lodged in some organization where the average citizen has no voice or influence. That’s a good thing to Thiel, who has opined “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” An article in SFL Media that claims this quote is “misunderstood” provides a more nuanced explanation:

True breakthroughs, from PayPal to SpaceX to Palantir, require continuity beyond election cycles. Thiel has seen firsthand how visionary projects can take decades to mature. Political instability and constant electoral turnover, he argues, kill innovation before it can bear fruit. For this reason, he insists that innovators and technocrats need protection from the volatility of democracy, creating islands of stability where the future can be built without interference.

The author apparently thinks this is less scary.

It’s worth considering Thiel’s point of view in the context of the current debate over artificial intelligence. I understand the fear that the electorate cannot be trusted to make wise choices among potential futures. But who should be trusted instead? Thiel? Musk? Sam Altman? Anybody rich enough to buy their own island, like Jeffrey Epstein? Will the future they build serve everyone’s interests, or just their own?

To the tech elite, the answer to those questions is obvious: They truly are an elite, and deserve consideration that no one else gets. This is why so many of the tech lords flirt with eugenics: Musk so far has had 14 kids with four women — trying, he says, to “set a good example”.

if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad.

He worries about population decline, even as world population is still growing.

Musk, however, acts as though we’re already in a state of decline, which suggests he’s more concerned with the growth rate of particular segments of the population than the population as a whole — as his concern about the procreation of “smart” people suggests.

This is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the massive wealth a few individuals have acquired through technology: It’s not just that they have disproportionate wealth and power, but that their ascension has convinced them that they are superior beings. They saw opportunities that no one else did, and had the nerve to let their bets ride when anyone else would have cashed out. So of course their current vision of the future is correct. The rest of us should just get out of their way. They are the players in this game, we are just NPCs (non-player characters, i.e., the characters in a computer game who are created and managed by the algorithm, and are not actually real.)

More than anything, this is why they have no sense of noblesse oblige. They do not consider themselves lucky, or as people who happened to be in the right place at the right time. They do not look at the poor and think “There but for the grace of God …”. They are superior, and the world is better off with them running it.

[1] If you wonder “Why J. D. Vance?”, you’re not grasping a major piece of Thiel’s worldview. He is fundamentally a venture capitalist. As such, he invests in lots and lots of wild schemes, understanding that most of them will go bust. The point, though, is to find the one that becomes the next big thing. A VC may lose hundreds of small bets. But if one turns out to be the next Apple or Amazon, he’s a big winner.

Same thing with people. We don’t know how many young men (and maybe a few women) Thiel invested in. Dozens or even hundreds of them might amount to nothing. But if Vance becomes president and is still under Thiel’s thumb, it’s all been worthwhile.

[2] A few recent events become clearer when viewed through Durán’s lens.

DOGE, for example, appears to me (and most people now, I think) as a massive blunder. Musk’s acolytes fired a lot of people and broke a lot of government systems, in the end probably increasing the very government waste they were supposed to eliminate. But that’s only if you take Musk’s stated intentions at face value. What if, instead, you view breaking government systems — not saving money — as the goal? Then DOGE was a great success. Breaking government, however you do it, moves the world closer to the cyberpunk dystopia the tech lords want.

September 21, 2026 – 11:08 am Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (4)

Tagged democracy, economics, elon-musk |

At the End of an Age

Why this lost war is different from the others.

In the current Atlantic, Phillips O’Brien announces the end of the “American age”. (The link is a gift from O’Brien and should work even if you don’t subscribe to Atlantic.) By the American age, I think he means an era when the financial and technological dominance of the United States has allowed it to project power all over the world, and has allowed allies as far afield as Saudi Arabia and South Korea to rely on that power.

Our failure in the Iran War heralds the end of that age, not just because we are losing to a regional power, but because we are losing in a way that undermines our whole theory of power projection. We are losing because we cannot defend our own bases in the region from Iran’s missile attacks, and cannot defend our regional allies.

That makes this defeat different from, say, our loss in Vietnam. There, we were unable to achieve a result we wanted at a cost the American public was willing to pay. But North Vietnam wasn’t able to strike at our bases in Thailand, the Philippines, and Guam. The Japanese and Australians did not have to worry about our ability to protect them. Walking away from Vietnam wounded our pride, but left the rest of our world power structure largely unaffected.

Not so this time. The much-publicized travails of the USS Abraham Lincoln, for example, arose because the Iranians destroyed our logistics base in Bahrain, and so the Lincoln had to be supplied from Diego Garcia thousands of miles away. And the Bahrain base is not just temporarily out of commission. O’Brien notes:

At a recent town-hall meeting, Navy Times has reported, a service member asked Admiral Daryl Caudle about retrieving personal items from the Bahrain base. “We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” Caudle responded. “I just want to be completely honest with that.”

Our era of dominance was bound to end eventually, O’Brien says, but Trump has made it come about sooner by starting a foolish shooting war against Iran and foolish trade wars with our former allies. Around the world, countries are concluding that neither our power nor our word can be trusted, and are beginning to make post-American arrangements.

Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—all long-term U.S. partners—recently signed their own defense pact. Now that Iran is exercising control over the Strait of Hormuz, Oman, on the waterway’s opposite shore, is inching toward closer cooperation with Tehran. Other Gulf States are reaching out to Iran as well. Even Saudi Arabia, which for decades based its security on massive purchases of U.S. weapons and the hosting of U.S. forces, must reassess its choices after Trump told its de facto ruler that the U.S. will not assist the country in its war with the Houthis. Meanwhile, South Korea is improving relations with China, and European states are thinking more and more of a European-wide defense association.

It is quite ironic that this end of American greatness happens under a regime that promised to “Make America Great Again”. What makes O’Brien’s article important — I suspect it will be referenced decades from now, the way George Kennan’s anonymous 1947 “X article“, the one that promoted a policy of “containment” against the Soviet Union, has been — is that the American public has not gotten this message yet. The Trump regime still trumpets its “victory” in Iran, and hubristically compares an ally like Canada to “a little yippy dog“.

The bulk of Trump voters, the ones who live in the MAGA echo chamber, are beginning to become uneasy about the war dragging on, and are tired of paying higher war-induced gas and diesel prices. But they do not yet understand that we have lost, much less what we have lost.

The rest of the public is not far ahead of the MAGA base. Most Americans are coming to understand that Trump has no plans that will lead to victory, so we will at some point have to simply drop the war — probably ending up in a situation far worse than Obama achieved by negotiating with Iran. But even they are imagining a loss like Vietnam or Afghanistan, where we feel embarrassed, but turn the page and go on as before.

What the end of the Pax Americana will mean is still a mystery, even to foreign-policy experts. The last time a world power passed from the scene was over a hundred years ago, with the decline of the British Empire. As Kipling wrote in 1897:

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

But even then, Britain could pass the torch to a like-minded ally in the United States. In some sense, what is ending now is an Anglo-American period of dominance that goes back at least to the Napoleonic wars. Today, China is the only power comparable to the United States, and it is neither like-minded nor ready to define a world order.

We are likely to be entering a period of instability around the world. Probably the worst thing we can do is to refuse to recognize it, and to escape into nostalgia for our past greatness. We could go ever-deeper into debt by increasing our military budget, maybe rebuilding bases we still cannot defend, and buying nostalgia-inducing weapons like the Trump-class battleships.

Or we could rethink America’s role in the world. We are a strong nation with outstanding technology and world leadership in many areas. Much can be still be done with that, if we come to a new understanding of both our strengths and our limitations.

September 21, 2026 – 9:25 am Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

Tagged iran, war |

The Monday Morning Teaser

I’m about to take the longest vacation from the Sift since I started it in 2008: five weeks. I don’t plan to post again until election eve. I guess we’ll find out whether blogging is a choice or a compulsion.

I realize this is bad timing on my part, but there are special circumstances: I’m getting married again Saturday, and I’ll be on a long honeymoon in France and Spain. Those of you who have followed this blog for a while may remember that I was married for 40 years before my first wife died in 2024. I did some fairly public mourning before making the decision to get on with my life rather than wallow in grief and nostalgia. I’ve been extremely lucky in how well that getting-on-with-life has been going. The way I describe this to myself is that I’m writing new chapters in my story rather than living out an extended epilogue to a story that has already concluded.

While I’m gone, I’m counting on the rest of you to step up and make history. Let’s hope that the election I come back to is a pivotal rejection of the MAGA autocracy.

In an attempt to clear the decks, I’ll be posting two featured articles today. One is a response to a recent article I think is very important: Phillips O’Brien’s “The American Age is Over” in the current Atlantic. The Iran War isn’t just a defeat like Vietnam or Afghanistan, it points out a fundamental flaw in the way America projects power. Going forward, the world is going to be different in ways that are hard to predict. That post is nearly done, and should be out shortly.

The other is my commentary on The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán. I’ll try to get that out before 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will discuss the Fed’s interest rate hike, and get a bit nerdy about how that actually works. Then there’s the latest example of blatant corruption: a close Putin associate putting up hundreds of thousands of dollars to celebrate Don Jr.’s wedding. (So far, no one has offered to rent me a private island for my afterparty.) Also: billionaires trying to come to the GOP’s rescue with a massive burst of anti-trans propaganda, Trump’s bizarre and destructive obsession with the Kennedy Center, Ed Sheeran’s failed attempt to stay apolitical, and maybe a few other things. The goal is to post that at noon, so I can get back to wedding-prep stuff.

September 21, 2026 – 8:53 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (14)

Just Desserts

They said, “I don’t get what I deserve.” And the deserving—who’s deserving? That is the question.

– Thomas Zimmer,
“How to Stop Trumpism from Rising in Germany and Europe“

This week’s featured post is “What Germany teaches us about ourselves“.

Ongoing stories

Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Missouri gerrymandering case (discussed below) shows just how far MAGA is willing to go to seize an unfair advantage. The Luttig article (also discussed below) raises an even darker possibility.
Climate change. NOAA says 2026 had the hottest summer in US history. Meanwhile, the EPA is about to scrap limits on the amount of CO2 coal and gas power plants can emit.
The Iran War. The Houthis seizing control of the south end of the Red Sea is a major development, which I talk about below.
Ukraine. Jared Kushner frames Ukraine as the obstacle to peace, because it refuses to surrender territory to its invader: “President Putin laid out his line of what he wants to achieve. If Ukraine wanted to withdraw to that line, then obviously, you know, we have the rest of the deal set up and put together. Ukraine right now does not want to do that.” Kushner views Ukraine’s stubbornness as temporary: “right now”. Of course, Putin could end the war at any moment by bringing his troops home to Russia, but that goes unmentioned. The Trump regime is on Putin’s side and always has been.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about distractions like the Trumpapalooza

where nothing important happened. Trump’s dubious offer to give $5K to each adult American if Republicans retain majorities in both houses got a lot of attention, but no one believes it. The only remotely newsworthy thing about the GOP Midterm Convention is that so few people showed up or watched it on TV.

and how AI is going to kill us all

Anthropic is the company that makes the chatbot Claude, while OpenAI makes its rival ChatGPT. Tuesday, Jacob Coxon posted to X:

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. … The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.

Evan Hubinger, a safety researcher at Anthropic, replied:

Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.

It’s hard to know what to make of stuff like this. Tech researchers are always claiming amazing positive things are about to happen soon — Elon Musk has been promising self-driving Teslas since 2013, and they’re still only kinda-sorta here. So I can easily imagine their negative predictions are just as off base. (“Did we promise to end the world this year? Sorry. Things came up. Next year for sure.”) Something about the industry makes everyone think in grandiose terms. An out-of-control AI can’t just kill a few people. It has to be everybody.

The essential problem, as best I understand it, is that AIs don’t carry around the breadth of context that humans do. So if you’re thinking about some problem at work and the thought “I could just kill everybody” pops into your head as a solution, you naturally take a step back, say “That’s crazy”, and start over. Because you know that a world where people solve their problems with mass murder is not someplace you want to live.

An AI doesn’t know that unless someone has thought to explicitly code that knowledge into it. An AI has a problem to solve, and it does all its thinking inside the box where the problem lives. There is no bigger context in which a solution is judged. So unless someone has thought to constrain possible solutions to avoid mass murder, that might be what the AI comes up with.

This happens in fiction all the time. In the X-Men universe, the Sentinels are robots tasked with wiping out mutants (like the X-Men). But eventually they realize that mutants come from humans, and that some small percentage of human babies will necessarily be mutants. So the only really complete solution to their problem is to wipe out humans.

Anyway, pondering grand dystopian possibilities is probably not the best use of what time you have to think about AI. And these scary headlines distract us from a much more mundane problem: If AI does revolutionize how our society works and how we produce goods and services, who is going to benefit?

Right now, we’re on track for a handful of Tech Lords to design the future. If they do, they will almost certainly design it for their benefit, not ours. We can already see this tendency in the existing internet systems. (Read Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification, which I reviewed in July. Or read The Nerd Reich, which I have now finished and plan to review soon.)

If you can’t help thinking about this stuff, though, and if you’re a TPM subscriber, check out what Josh Marshall has been assembling in his Editor’s blog. Also, most of these kill-everybody articles are way too vague about how exactly we all end up dead. Noah Smith has got that covered. (Basically, some disgruntled human will want to kill us all, and a superintelligent AI will help him figure out how.)

but we should have been talking about the Houthi advance

Iran’s allies, the Houthi faction in the Yemeni civil war, have captured strategically important territory.

On Thursday and Friday, a rapid Houthi advance southwards along Yemen’s western coast resulted in the capture of the port city of Mocha and then the strategic island of Perim in the the Bab al-Mandab strait. Pending a counter-offensive from government forces, the group is now in a position to control shipping through the strait.

Here’s why that’s important: The north end of the Red Sea is the Suez Canal. The south end is the Bab al-Mandab strait. If Iran shuts the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off shipping through the Persian Gulf, and the Houthis shut Bab al-Mandab, then Saudi Arabia has only one outlet for its oil: the Suez Canal, which makes for a very long trip to markets in East Asia.

And that’s only if the Saudis can get their oil to the Red Sea. The oil fields are close to the Persian Gulf, but a pipeline can carry oil across the country to the Red Sea port of Yanuba. That pipeline is currently shut down after an attack from drones apparently launched from Iraq.

The Yemeni government that the US recognizes looked to Saudi Arabia for help, and they looked to the US, who said no. Phillips O’Brien notes that US arms sales to the Saudis are 4% of all state-to-state arms sales in the world. Why wouldn’t we step in to help our client state? He speculates:

The reasons for the US unwillingness to step in to help the Saudi government at this moment, when everything in US strategic history would have indicated that the US should, are probably down to American military degradation. The US can barely fight the Iranian regime and protect US bases and forces against Iranian attacks. As such, opening up a new front in the war might be beyond US capabilities. It is not like there is some free US aircraft carrier strike force that can be easily deployed away from Iran to fight the Houthis. The US has already stripped the western Pacific—the cupboard is bare. … So what we are seeing is a weakening US, having to abandon its key strategic and economic allies, as its flounders around running out of munitions and losing advanced equipment fighting Iran. …

The Saudis purchased such masses of weapons from the USA not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they believed that this meant that if they were faced with real peril (like they are now) that the US would come to their aid. Now, the USA is too weak to do so. What the Saudis are experiencing will also accelerate a move away from military dependence on America from other states in the Gulf.

The price of oil is rising this morning, and is back over $100 per barrel. This is yet another Iranian move that the Trump regime failed to anticipate.

and what just happened in Missouri

So we all remember last summer, when Trump was pushing all the red states to redraw their congressional maps to make them even more gerrymandered. Missouri stepped up with H.B.1, a bill designed to eliminate a Democratic seat (currently held by a Black man, Emanuel Cleaver) in Kansas City. So the 6-2 Republican advantage in the state’s delegation should grow to 7-1.

Let’s let David French pick up the story:

The Missouri Constitution, however, contains a provision that says that the people of the state “reserve power to approve or reject by referendum any act of the general assembly, except as hereinafter provided.”On Dec. 9, 2025, a coalition of Missourians who sought to overturn H.B. 1 submitted a referendum petition that contained more than 300,000 signatures — more than enough to put it on the November ballot.

So in a law-abiding world, H.B. 1 becomes a ballot proposition rather than a law, and the fall elections are held using the 6-2 maps. Prior to the MAGA fascist era, that’s what would have happened under a secretary of state from either party. But Missouri’s SoS Denny Hoskins is MAGA, so he did a very Trumpy thing: He came up with a bogus re-interpretation of the law that made an exception for what he wanted to do. So: the ballot proposition is invalid and H.B. 1 is a law that applies this fall.

But even then, there’s a clear responsible path Hoskins could have followed: announce his decision in plenty of time to let the courts rule on it before the primaries on August 4. Instead, though, Hoskins announces on August 4 itself and holds primaries using the 7-1 maps.

On Sept. 3, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a unanimous opinion holding that voters do have the right to overturn redistricting legislation by referendum, that the petition was sufficient to put the referendum on the November ballot, and — as a result — “H.B. 1 is not the law and has never been the law.”

So Missouri appeals to the U. S. Supreme Court, but that noted liberal justice Brett Kavanaugh refuses to issue a stay on the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling. Again, in a law-abiding world that’s the end of the story. But not here.

On September 8, a Trump-appointed federal judge finds federal grounds to throw out the 6-2 maps, and orders Missouri to proceed with the 7-1 maps. Hoskins sends an email to local election officials instructing them to do that. The Trump-judge’s order winds up back at the Supreme Court, which stays that ruling, restoring the 6-2 maps. Hoskins’ argument in that case is that restoring the 6-2 maps would create chaos, given that (due to his own bad-faith actions) the 7-1 primaries have already been held.

The Missouri Supreme Court has a hearing on whether Hoskins is in contempt, and even there, Hoskins’ attorney won’t commit to following the court’s order. Finally, after being found in contempt, Hoskins agrees to obey the law. The 6-2 maps, somehow, will be used in November.

That’s a sort-of-happy ending, but French draws a broader conclusion: Going forward (like in the mail-in ballot dispute, for example) we shouldn’t get too comfortable just because the laws are on our side and the courts are mostly enforcing them. We can expect MAGA to play chicken with the courts, creating chaotic situations and then insisting on outside-the-law outcomes to deal with the emergency they themselves caused.

and Judge Luttig’s warning

Michael Luttig is a Reagan-era Republican who was appointed an appellate judge by George H. W. Bush. He held that post until he retired in 2006. He is a widely respected conservative legal thinker who has sometimes been compared to Anton Scalia, for whom he once clerked. In short: not a left-winger.

Thursday, Luttig published an article in a liberal magazine, The New Republic: “The Final Battle for America’s Democracy“. In it, he outlined where he thinks the Trump regime has been headed ever since his failed coup on January 6, 2021: to reach an end state where democracy no longer matters, and the American people have lost their ability to check his power.

He assumes that the current polls hold, and that — in spite of gerrymandering, in spite of voter suppression, in spite of whatever tricks Trump pulls with mail-in ballots — Democrats win the November elections, at least far enough to take control of the House of Representatives.

But then we get to January 3, when the Congress comes back into session. Luttig pictures Speaker Mike Johnson doing something similar to what Trump tried in 2021: Using all Trump’s rhetorical nonsense about Democratic cheating, illegal aliens voting, and so forth, Johnson will claim that some large number of the new Democratic representatives were elected improperly, and will refuse to seat them in the new Congress. In this way, Johnson avoids losing his power as Speaker and the GOP avoids losing control of the House.

Since the current Republican majority is so small, a mere handful of Republican congressmen could save democracy by (together with Democrats) refusing to go along with this. But will they?

If there are any such Republicans in the Congress today, they should announce well before November 3 that they will not be party to Trump’s and Johnson’s attempt to steal the midterm elections from the American people.

Luttig has confidence in the current clerk of the House, but Johnson could replace him. Then “the loyal temporary clerk refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress.”

The omitted Democrats can then go to federal court for a court order. But what if the clerk simply refuses to obey the court order? (See the Missouri situation above.)

Judicial review of the House’s decision not to seat Democratic representatives-elect in the 120th Congress would take weeks, if not months, during which time the United States would be in the throes of a paralyzing constitutional crisis, helplessly vulnerable to all the world’s evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Then we run into the Missouri situation again: Trump and Johnson can argue that the ensuing chaos (which they intentionally provoked) creates an emergency situation, allowing Trump to claim extra-legal emergency powers. Will the Supreme Court, this Supreme Court, stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law?

I don’t intend to be overly sanguine about this Supreme Court. This is the court that shattered the one constitutional truth in the U.S. since 1789 that “no man is above the law” and placed Donald Trump of all presidents above the law in Trump v. United States. This is the court that betrayed the Constitution by refusing even to decide whether Trump was disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his insurrection against the Constitution, which he clearly was. This is also the court that has cynically authorized Trump’s lawlessness for the past two years through its aptly named “shadow docket,” without so much as briefing, argument, or written opinion.

But surely by now this court must understand what it has wrought for the U.S. and the Constitution, and is aghast as we all are, even if it is not penitent. Surely, surely, it will understand the signal moment in American constitutional history that would be presented, and this time understand its supreme obligation to the nation.

And even if it does, what if Trump refuses to listen to them?

and thinking deeper about right-wing appeal in Germany and the US

That’s the subject of the featured post, leaning heavily on an interview with history Thomas Zimmer and a column by Paul Krugman.

and you also might be interested in …

A Russian oligarch put hundreds of thousands into paying for Trump Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas. If Don were a Biden he’d be in real trouble.

In Ireland on Sunday, during a taxpayer-funded trip to visit his own golf course, President Trump urged Ukraine to stop its most effective attacks:

Mr. Zelenskyy has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets but not diesel fuel because he’s causing a shortage of diesel. This isn’t done by the Middle East; this is done by what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine.

Diesel in the US went over $6 a gallon Friday, a record high. This is bound to affect the price of anything shipped by truck, making life harder for Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Of course that’s Trump’s fault for starting his stupid war with Iran. But nothing is ever Trump’s (or Putin’s) fault, so he has to blame Ukraine.

Trump’s FCC again censored Jimmy Kimmel, threatening ABC stations with losing their licenses if they aired Kimmel’s interview with Texas senate candidate James Talerico.

So Kimmel posted the interview on his YouTube channel, where it got way more views than it would have gotten on the air. (9.2 million last time I checked.)

The interview reinforces something I’ve felt about Talerico from the beginning: Republicans don’t know what to do with a real Christian. They have so co-opted and distorted evangelical Christianity that they no longer recognize the actual teachings of Jesus.

So all they can do with Talerico is try to keep him off the air. This time, they succeeded in a way, but failed in the larger view.

and let’s close with something restful

OK, it’s been a tough week and I’ve made you look at a lot of disturbing things. You deserve a cute little lamb that never decides it’s had enough petting.

September 14, 2026 – 12:37 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (14)

What Germany teaches us about ourselves

What if both kinds of Democrats are taking the wrong approach to resisting fascism?

The victory of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt region eight days ago led to some interesting thinking this week. AfD in Germany is sort of like MAGA in America, but sort of not. Comparing the two creates opportunities to tease apart the various strands of each.

At the New Republic, Perry Bacon interviewed historian Thomas Zimmer, who introduced the topic like this:

[I]f you approach [AfD] as the German equivalent to MAGA, that gets you actually pretty close. It gets you very much in the correct direction. It’s make Germany great again. They definitely share the same enemies. They’re similarly fueled by this sort of sense of radicalizing grievance, right? It’s defined by this sort of resentment towards a society that has been moving away from them, right?

In a sense that this is of this desire to restore dominance over those who they deem lesser somehow. And who they deem lesser—that’s very much … racialized and gendered. It’s the grievance of predominantly white male people who are consumed by this feeling of having been deprived of their rightful place at the top.

So it’s very anti-egalitarian more than anything, anti-pluralistic. And I think it’s also, just like the MAGA movement, not at all conservative, right? In no reasonable sense of the word, in conserving, preserving, is this a conservative movement. They’re all in on radical measures. They talk about revolutionary change. They’re extremists.

In short, both MAGA and AfD fit the definition of fascism I gave back in 2015 when I started using that term to describe Trump and his movement.

Fascism is primarily a phenomenon of social psychology. I would summarize it as a dysfunctional attempt of people who feel humiliated and powerless to restore their pride by:

styling themselves as the only true and faithful heirs of their nation’s glorious (and possibly mythical) past,

identifying with a charismatic leader whose success will become their success,

helping that leader achieve power by whatever means necessary, including violence,

under his leadership, purifying the nation by restoring its traditional and characteristic virtues (again, through violence if necessary),

reawakening and reclaiming the nation’s past glory (by war, if necessary),

all of which leads to the main point: humiliating the internal and external enemies they blame for their own humiliation.

The thing that makes fascism hard to talk about coherently is that it’s not really a political or economic philosophy at all. There aren’t defining principles like democracy’s human rights and the sovereignty of the People, or communism’s public ownership of the means of production. It’s purely an Us-against-Them movement. Any action at all — like adding a gilded ballroom to the White House — can be fascist or not, depending on who wants to do it and who benefits.

While the similarities may be instructive, so are the differences. Paul Krugman looked at the economics of Germany and Saxony-Anhalt, and concluded that many of the economic explanations of MAGA’s popularity may not hold water.

[R]elative to the size of its economy, Germany runs trade surpluses and retains large-scale manufacturing employment to an extent that lies far beyond the wildest dreams of Trumponomics. And none of this appears to make a bit of difference to the resentment that underlies right-wing extremism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Saxony-Anhalt sits within the boundaries of the former East Germany, and after reunification it went through a period of having much higher unemployment and much lower per capital income than the rest of Germany. So it qualified as a “left-behind region” in the same way rest-belt Ohio or coal-country Kentucky does. But both factors have virtually vanished over the last 20 years, and Saxony-Anhalt is much closer to the German average in both areas than it has been since reunification. So AfD is not a reaction to economic despair.

What, then, is the moral of this analysis? Mostly it’s negative: Crude economic factors don’t explain the fascist shift in Germany. And Trumponomics, even if it worked (which it doesn’t) wouldn’t end the resentment feeding our own authoritarian movement.

Zimmer hits a similar point from the other direction: If economic issues aren’t what picks out Saxony-Anhalt as an AfD stronghold, what does that say about the progressive Democrats’ strategy for resisting MAGA?

Every single one of these Western European countries, aside from the UK, has a significantly stronger social welfare net than the United States. It doesn’t matter. There’s no correlation whatsoever across Northern and Western Europe between the strength of the social welfare net and the strength of the right-wing parties. There’s no correlation whatsoever. You have countries with super strong social welfare systems, like the Scandinavian countries, and yet the far right over there is also basically as strong as anywhere. Like, polling at 25 to 30 percent, whatever, right? And sometimes they get more and sometimes they get less, but roughly speaking, they have gotten stronger and stronger.

But the moderate/centrist Democratic approach fares no better. What is sometimes called “popularism”, adopting right-wing positions that poll well, doesn’t work either.

Again, we have a mountain of evidence that adopting these far-right positions on immigration and on any other sort of, quote-unquote, “culture war issue,” and adopting their framing—the effect of that is, you’re not gaining back voters from them. Because A, voters will generally see this as merely a tactical adjustment. They will not believe you, right? B, you are constantly legitimizing and normalizing this sort of framing of the problem. If the Labour Party in Britain constantly tells the people, Oh yeah, no, the far right is correct. Immigration is this great threat. It is the biggest problem that we’re facing, then people do not vote for the Labour Party. They vote for that party that says, We are the answer to this, the far right, these sort of ethnonationalists. And so the only thing you’re doing is you’re shifting the entire discourse to the right by adopting their frameworks and their answers to the problem, and you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

The current UK government is a good example. In the last two years, things have gotten significantly worse for trans folk and immigrants in the UK, just as the right-wing parties demanded. So you’d expect voters to say, “OK then, we don’t need a far-right party to represent our interests.” And yet, polls indicate that the right-wing Reform UK party has nearly doubled its support since 2024.

So if the key motivator for right-wing politics isn’t economic despair and can’t be mollified by serving up scapegoat groups like trans folk or immigrants, what should we do?

Zimmer points to an interesting clue:

There was a very, I think, revealing question in these exit polls on Sunday in this Saxony-Anhalt election, where people were asked, do you feel like you’re getting what you deserve in Germany, or less than you deserve, or more than you deserve? And the voters who said, “I’m getting less than I deserve,” the AfD got most of those people, right? And so, to look at this and say, Oh, they probably mean wages or social security, or they don’t know how to pay the rent—no. They didn’t say that, because they were also asked those questions, but that’s not what they said. They said, “I don’t get what I deserve.” And the deserving—who’s deserving? That is the question. And this who is deserving is so clearly defined in racial, and gendered, and sort of ethnic terms, right?

In other words, some percentage of the population is nostalgic for a more hierarchical society, where men are above women, Whites are above Blacks, straights above gays, and so on.

It would be nice if that weren’t the issue, because then we could offer a win-win solution: We’re all good people. If we all get opportunity, we all get a safety net, and so on, then we’ll all be happy.

I think there’s just this sort of enormous incentive to sanitize the discourse, and sanitize these sort of political choices of people who are coded as, quote-unquote, “regular folks.” And that’s sort of white people, right? That’s white conservative people. We are constantly asked to come up with explanations of what they’re doing politically that sort of preserve their innocence, right? There’s this sort of idea of white innocence, right? And, by the way, this is not a new thing. When David Duke in the early ‘90s was close to winning a governorship in Louisiana, the next day what you read in the Los Angeles Times was, Oh, goodness me, economic anxiety must really be quite pressing in Louis— That sort of thing, right? It’s always been like that, right? Sort of this sanitizing thing.

Instead, progressives need to

accept that, unfortunately, a significant portion of the people around us are simply not on board with this idea of an egalitarian pluralistic democracy, and that is a fight that you cannot hug away. You cannot find the right tone, and then they will be all, OK, we get it now. You can’t just—I don’t know. Again, you can’t just solve it with just economic policy. But then what do you do? And at that point, I have to admit, me personally, I have to admit, I don’t know. Other than, you have to fight the fight, right? You have to accept you are in this fight, and you have to fight it and win it.

In other words, we need to make the idealistic case for egalitarian society — because that’s just what’s right. And that means defending everybody, even the unpopular folks that the Right is framing as scapegoats.

In other words, Abdul el Sayed has it right:

We are being told that if we do not line up against other people’s rights, then ours will be taken away. But it is when we line up against other people’s rights that we are assenting to ours being taken away. And I think we need to understand that rights are rights are rights are rights. And that there is a responsibility — right? when you break a finger in sports, they tie it to the other finger. And I think we have to think that way. Which is to say: You may never understand how somebody uses their rights. But you damn well better show up for their rights if you would like people to show up for yours. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, if your coalition is not uncomfortable, it’s not big enough. And so we’ve got to ask people [when] rights are on the chopping block, [people] who might never understand how somebody else might use their rights, to show up for one of those rights.

September 14, 2026 – 10:33 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

Tagged culture wars, democracy, fascism |

The Monday Morning Teaser

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a week where so many bright, shiny objects obscured the really important things that were happening.

We had the GOP’s Trumpapalooza midterm convention on Wednesday and Thursday, which was as near a non-event as it could possibly have been. Few people attended, few people watched, and the big headline afterward — $5000 for everybody if Republicans keep both houses of Congress! — is obviously never going to happen, as even the most ardent Trump cultist probably knows.

Then a couple AI researchers went public with their worry that AI might kill us all. There are real issues with AI, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a government where people understood that? There could be an international conference that included China and the EU. Some kind of standards could be written, and we could avoid needing the Butlerian Jihad they had in the Dune universe. But how likely is that with the know-nothing expertise-despising regime we live under now?

I don’t know how to start the kind of thoughtful, nuanced public discussion we need. But going around panicked about AI killing us all is probably not the right approach.

So what should you have been paying attention to this week? Well, for one thing, Iran’s Houthi allies took control of the strait at the south end of the Red Sea, potentially cutting off the Saudis’ main way of avoiding Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz. I’m not sure what happens next, but it sure looks like Iran has outflanked us in the current war.

And then two things should have drawn your attention to the threat of Trump stealing the midterms. First, the dispute over Missouri’s congressional maps demonstrated MAGA’s dangerous willingness to play chicken with the courts. The courts won this time. But it’s easy to imagine the line not holding next time. And then conservative Judge Michael Luttig, appointed by Bush the First to an appellate judgeship that he retired from in 2006, described how a constitutional crisis might unfold in January, if the current House leadership simply refused to seat the newly-elected Democrats.

And finally, there’s what we can learn from last week’s biggest news: the victory of the neo-Nazi AfD party in the Saxony-Anhalt region of Germany. Germany is both similar to and different from the US, making it an interesting case study in how not to control the extreme Right. Worryingly, what we can learn from the Germans undermines both the progressive and centrist Democrats’ strategies.

The featured post will be about what we can learn from the Germans. It should appear around 10 EDT. The weekly summary will handle the rest, and I hope to get it out by noon.

September 14, 2026 – 8:56 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Freakish Events

My worry is that this gets filed away as a freak event, when the same small river flooded 14 months earlier and nobody moved a gauge onto it. “Freak” is the word that we use for things we decided not to measure.

– Gwen, Critical Latitude
“Everything we know about Nepal’s flood“

This week’s featured post is “Hegseth vs. the Deep Pentagon“.

Ongoing stories

Trump’s assault on American democracy. Trump’s attempt to control mail-in voting is obviously beyond his legal powers. But he has appealed to the Supreme Court, where laws have no meaning.
Climate change. The Nepal flood is another of those extreme events that scientists can’t 100% nail down as a consequence of climate change. But climate change makes events like this much more likely.
Ukraine. We’ve been around this track many times before: Trump sends his people (Kushner and Wittkoff this time) to Moscow. They have “substantive” or “productive” talks with Putin. They go to Kyiv to present Putin’s demands to Zelenskyy, who says no. “The war will continue.“

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the postal service

Under normal circumstances, the US Postal Service is not national news. It delivers mail, does it wonderfully in some ways and disappointingly in others. But during an ordinary presidency the most newsworthy thing it does is add a few cents to the basic letter rate or close a post office somewhere.

USPS used to be an independent agency. But that was in the days before the Supreme Court signed on to the unitary ~~tyrant~~ executive theory, which basically wipes out all independent agencies, placing them under the control of the President (at least until a Democratic president gets elected; whether s/he will have the same powers the Court has given Trump is anybody’s guess).

So Trump is trying to use his authority over the Post Office to cheat in the fall elections. Democracy Docket summarizes:

Under the new USPS rule, written to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting, states’ mail ballot envelopes must include certain design changes, such as new logos and barcodes. The rule also requires states to submit personal information on voters who’ve requested mail ballots to a federal online portal. States that fail at either requirement would not receive mail ballots from USPS.

The cheating part is the submission to the federal portal, which would check those states’ lists against a list complied by DHS of US citizens, and not deliver ballots to people it deemed ineligible. The alleged intent is to keep non-citizens from voting — which is a laudable goal, but is nearly achieved already: No study has shown any significant number of non-citizens voting in any state. But the actual intent is more sinister: to make the Trump regime the arbiter of who can legitimately vote.

According to the Constitution, managing elections is the job of the states. Congress can pass laws regulating federal elections, but the executive branch without Congress has no authority to issue new rules.

24 states are suing to block the new rule. They initially won their suits, until the Supreme Court weighed in, saying that the suit (at that time) was premature, because the rule was only proposed and had not been finalized. Then it became final and the circus started all over again.

Friday, a district court blocked the rule. The Trump regime responded by skipping the usual appellate court and going straight to the Supreme Court, asking it to stay the lower court ruling and allow USPS’ new rule to go into effect in time for the November elections.

As so often happens these days, the law is clear. But whether the Supreme Court will follow the law or make up new laws is anyone’s guess. Maybe I’m naive, but I think the Court is going to follow the law this time.

and dissent inside the Pentagon

That’s the subject of the featured post.

and Trump’s clueless midterm strategy

You may not have heard about it yet, but there’s going to be a national political convention this week.

This week in Dallas, Texas, the party will stage a midterm convention for the first time. Donald Trump will deliver a keynote address on Wednesday and closing remarks on Thursday in Dallas, Texas. Other speakers include Vice-President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. The convention has been billed as a “primetime showcase” to boost morale, nationalise congressional elections and galvanise Republican voters.

One reason I’m optimistic about Democrats taking not just the House but the Senate: Trump doesn’t seem to understand the problem. He lives in Natalie’s fantasy world where he has done all these amazing things. The only problems he sees are that his people are demoralized and the good news of his many achievements just isn’t getting out for some reason.

Everybody was wondering what he would spend his massive PAC on. But if his first ad of the season is any indication, he’s going to spend it praising himself

He is the toughest, most resilient person that I’ve ever met, and nothing was going to stop him from fighting so hard for the country he loves. When the world needs courage, vision, and inspiration, it is still turning to America. There is no challenge Americans cannot overcome, no frontier too vast for us to conquer. We will be prosperous. We will be proud. We will be strong, and we will win like never before.

So he’s not ending the war or getting gas prices down or resolving the trade war with Canada or forgetting about his unpopular ballroom and triumphal arch until after the election. And he’s not holing up in the White House and letting Republican candidates fend for themselves. He wants to be the big issue of the midterms, and Democrats want that too.

Sadly, few people will probably watch this convention. (Being on opposite the start of the NFL season is just one of its many difficulties.) I expect the low ratings for Trump’s speech to spark an epic Truth Social tirade from the Mad King. But it probably won’t move the needle in either direction, because nobody is going to watch.

Much is being written about Trump’s desire to leave a legacy of monuments to himself. He would do well to consider this: There is no Eisenhower monument, but there is an interstate highway system. There is no Johnson monument, but there is Medicare. There is no FDR monument, just Social Security.

Trump needs his arch and ballroom and coin and airport and all the rest of it because he has accomplished nothing of note. If he doesn’t use his power to construct some physical edifice (or to carve his name on something constructed by or for some other president), no one will ever think of him again after he leaves office — at least not in a positive way.

Missouri had passed a gerrymandering map with the intent of getting rid of one of its two Democratic congressional districts. But the state supreme court blocked the move. The situation is a little confusing, because primaries were already held using the gerrymandered map.

and Germany

The far-right Alternative fur Deutschland Party (AFD) got 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, one of Germany’s 16 regions. The other major parties are firmly against a coalition with AfD, so it will be interesting to see how Saxony-Anhalt forms a government.

The AfD stands for “remigration” of immigrants back to their original countries, even if they entered Germany legally. It also wants to end Germany’s support for Ukraine and improve relations with Putin’s Russia.

Here’s how far out AfD is:

France’s National Rally under Marine Le Pen kicked the AfD out of its grouping in the European Parliament two years ago, for being too “radical”.

and you also might be interested in …

Not quite two weeks ago, Nepal suffered a catastrophic flash flood.

At least 1,342 deaths and 4,886 missing persons were confirmed in Nepal with an additional 43 dead and 519 missing in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. The flood carried the bodies of some victims 240 km (150 mi) away into neighbouring India.

One reason this event was so deadly is that in the 50 minutes between detection and the water/debris sludge sweeping a town away, nobody warned them.

Early explanations blamed the flood on an earthquake in the high Himalayas. A later explanation said it was due to a glacier breaking up. But the current explanation says that unusually warm weather melted the centuries-old ice that had been mortaring the mountain rocks together. That led to an avalanche, which fooled seismic sensors into announcing an earthquake.

Is this climate change in action? It’s very hard to look at one particular disaster and definitively attach it to climate change. But it sure looks like the kind of thing you’d expect to see more often as the Earth warms.

If you have half an hour to spend on this topic, I strongly recommend this video by the Critical Latitude podcast. It explains why the various false explanations arose, how they were debunked, why warnings didn’t make it to the people in the path of the flood, and where else in the world conditions like this might occur.

It’s been decades since I’ve been to the Burning Man festival in Nevada. I remember it as a temporary Shangri-La where you could be free from people trying to dominate you or judge you or sell you something. It’s hard to appreciate an environment like that until you experience it. You might think it’s effortless to filter out all that dominance and judgement and salesmanship, but then somebody turns it off and the quiet in your mind is amazing.

One price you pay for that freedom is that you have to follow some simple rules, like you don’t take pictures or videos of people who haven’t consented. There’s good reason for that: It would be hard to feel really free in whatever you’re doing if you had to worry about your picture showing up on social media and somehow making it back to your workplace. (My late wife once briefly wound up on Nightline, presumably because she was one of the few people who was fully clothed and willing to talk on camera.)

So anyway, according to this account by Friendly Atheist, a proselytizing Christian group showed up at Burning Man, broke a bunch of those rules, and got thrown out of the event. They then started a persecution narrative on their social media accounts, claiming they were thrown out for being Christian.

Would you look at that? Another story of Christians assuming they can break the rules and get away with it because of their faith. Another violation of consent. Another example of Christian privilege followed by false accusations of persecution. … If Burning Man is all about radical inclusion, that still very much extends to people with absurd religious beliefs. But their rules don’t have exceptions for followers of Jesus. The missionaries’ dishonest attempt to turn their eviction into a story of persecution is just another reason you should always fact-check Christians’ stories whenever they claim they’re the victims of discrimination.

I admit that I do not check out every Christian-persecution story I run across. But every one set in America that I have checked into turned out to be bogus. As best I can tell, there is no actual persecution of Christians in the United States.

and let’s close with something incongruous

When you see National Gallery of Art curator Allison Williams, her 77-year-old appearance doesn’t seem to fit with her Gen Z slang. Watch her video.

September 7, 2026 – 12:48 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Hegseth vs. the Deep Pentagon

Obeying orders doesn’t mean you can’t drag your feet.

In January 2025, a few weeks before Donald Trump would be sworn in to begin his second term, the America First Policy Institute issued a warning about career government employees who might try to sabotage what the new president wanted to do.

Many career staff diligently and impartially serve whoever holds office. However, there are those who do not. Some career employees resisted the president’s agenda during the [first] Trump Administration. Interviews with former Trump Administration appointees reveal these employees used similar strategies to stymie the president’s policies. These included:

withholding information;

refusing to implement policies;

intentionally delaying or slow-walking priorities;

deliberately underperforming;

leaking to Congress and the media; and

outright insubordination.

This opposition embedded within the government constitutes the dreaded Deep State: unelected bureaucrats who have their own ideas about what they’re supposed to be doing, ideas that sometimes contradict the orders that come down from the top.

Right-wing opinion-makers excel at demonizing a word or phrase: DEI, critical race theory, socialism, open borders, fake news, illegal immigrant, and so on. Denizens of the right-wing media echo chamber can be counted on to respond according to their Pavlovian training. So no one needs to explain what woke people do or why it’s bad. Leaders just have to attach the label to someone, and the faithful know to start growling at them. The Right has been using this technique for decades. Back in the 1980s, Reaganites demonized the death tax, and before long even minimum-wage workers were outraged that the government might try to add friction to the path of generational wealth as it oozed down plutocratic family trees.

But few phrases are as thoroughly demonized as Deep State. The Deep State is supposed to be a kind of shadow government, a hidden cabal of officials who (like the Devil) can be attached to any conspiracy theory. The villainy of the Deep State explains why conservative governments consistently fail to keep their promises, and — no matter how many job-creating tax cuts the rich get — the vise around the American working class continues to tighten.

What the Deep State really is. Back in the first Trump administration, I started looking at the way Deep State was being used, and I came to a conclusion that surprised me: The Deep State really exists, but it’s nothing like its conspiracy-theory description. It’s not a conspiracy at all, it’s a culture, and it changes from one part of the government to another: The Deep IRS, for example, is nothing like the Deep FDA. What the Deep State actually consists of is government employees whose first loyalty is to the mission of their organization, rather than to the chain of command.

If you imagine making a career in the federal government, this makes perfect sense. Many young people are probably just looking for a job when they join the government, but the best candidates — the ones who become leaders and create the organizational culture — have choices. They commit themselves to the part of the government they believe in most, the one whose mission best reflects their inner values. So if you believe in public health, you join HHS or the CDC. If you want to protect society from crime, the FBI appeals. If you are inspired by the visions of science fiction, an offer from NASA sparkles in a way that no other agency can match.

If you have that kind of relationship to your organization, you are nothing like the soulless drone or petty tyrant Fox News wants its audience to imagine when its hosts say bureaucrat. You go to work with a spring in your step. You are fighting the good fight and holding back the forces of darkness.

Now what happens when a new administration wants to turn your organization against its core mission? When the EPA is asked to find or create loopholes in the laws that restrain polluters? When DoJ is directed to ignore crimes by the President’s friends and invent reasons to prosecute his enemies? When DoJ’s Civil Rights Division is tasked with protecting the privileges of Whites or Christians, rather than the rights of people who actually need protection?

Maybe you quit, like countless DoJ prosecutors have done since that department was corrupted by the likes of Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche. But maybe you have a family and a mortgage, or you only need to hang on two or three more years to qualify for your pension. “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” you tell yourself. “Maybe I can avoid the morally revolting assignments and still find parts of the job to believe in.”

Or maybe you think the mission your agency was created to pursue, the one that may still be embedded in the laws that established it, is too important to leave to the ever-changing whims of an 80-year-old simpleton and his cronies. Maybe you stay because you can imagine the know-nothings and yes-men who will be appointed if you leave.

Now you start doing the things AFPI found so threatening. You don’t get a membership card or learn the secret handshake, but you have nonetheless joined the Deep State.

The Deep Pentagon. Liberals like me aren’t used to siding with the Deep Pentagon. We remember Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex. We know about the infighting between the Army and Navy, and the Pentagon’s desire to keep a weapons program funded even if the early tests aren’t going well. Too often a plane or vehicle that should be simple and nimble becomes a camel that is supposed to do everything for everybody, and gets bloated with options and gear. Generals and admirals are too easily seduced by the prospect of high-paying jobs in defense corporations after they retire.

Is there corruption in the Pentagon? Yes. Waste? Of course.

But simultaneously, there is a sense of mission: You want to protect the country. You want to preserve the geo-political prominence of the United States. When a strutting Napoleon wannabe and his unqualified Secretary of ~~War~~ Defense threaten that prominence and leave the nation open to attack, you start to rebel.

That’s what we’ve been seeing lately.

Enter Hegseth. When Pete Hegseth took control of the Pentagon, he did not have the respect of the officer corps. Yes, he had been in the military, rising to the rank of major. He deployed to combat zones and was awarded two bronze stars for “meritorious service” (which is actually quite different from getting a medal for valor). Prior to his confirmation, reports of a drinking problem and sexual improprieties came out. His ability to manage people has always been questionable; in civilian life he had managed only small organizations and not terribly well.

He was nominated as SecDef for two reasons: He was a Trump loyalist, and as a former Fox News personality he looked good on TV. Neither of those virtues ranks high in the value system of a general.

It could have worked if Hegseth had played to his strengths, if he had stayed out of major policy matters (that he knows nothing about) and been the Pentagon’s front man in the White House and Congress. But instead he has acted as if he alone understands war. He has assumed that any Black or female officer must be a “DEI hire” who lacks merit, so he has refused to promote them any higher, and has pressured some to leave. He has brought the culture wars into the military, espousing a “warrior ethos” that has little to do with modern high-tech warfare. Some of his proposals have seemed like jokes, like the one that will test the testosterone levels of all the men in the military and fund testosterone replacement therapies for those who fall short. (This is gender-affirming care for cis men.) Now he seems to be running for president, which is anathema to US military traditions.

But the real problem is the Iran War, which was launched on the assumption that it would be over quickly, and with little-to-no planning for what would happen if it wasn’t. Obvious Iranian counter-moves, like closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking the bases in allied countries that are essential logistics hubs, were not foreseen or planned around. (That flaw was made obvious by the sad conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, but is a much larger story.) Having made no attempt to raise public or congressional support prior to the attack, Hegseth has left the Pentagon out on a limb now that the war has gone badly. The supplemental appropriations the military needs to keep fighting this war are stalled, because Trump and Hegseth don’t want to answer questions in Congress, while even Republicans are reluctant to authorize more money without having a chance to ask.

The result is that the rest of our defense establishment is being raided to fund the war. If you are a commander somewhere else in the world, facing your usual responsibilities without your usual resources, you’re not happy. If, say, you’re supposed to be ready if China decides to attack Taiwan or Russia invades Estonia, you know you’re not ready. When the USS George Washington finally relieved the Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf of Oman, it left the entire western Pacific without an American aircraft carrier.

Normally, the Pentagon keeps its discontents under wraps. But then, somehow, the Washington Post got its hands on reports about the classified Secretary of Defense Orders Book.

Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland, according to people familiar with a recent assessment prepared for the Pentagon chief.

The warnings — detailed for Hegseth by the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force and the four-star commanders overseeing U.S. operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America — appear in the Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book (SDOB), these people said. They described the assessment to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because the document is classified.

The SDOB, typically produced twice monthly, outlines the worldwide availability of U.S. warships, aircraft, personnel and weapons systems. It reflects the president’s priorities for the force, which are carried out by the defense secretary, and includes insights from the military’s top generals and admirals that inform the directives the Pentagon issues.

Those “insights” can include a “non-concur”, where some regional commander can express his disagreement with orders s/he is nonetheless carrying out.

Then last Monday, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll resigned, after much feuding with Hegseth about Army leadership.

When Hegseth took office last year, the Army had 10 four-star generals on active duty. Today, it has five.

Nearly a year ago, when Hegseth abruptly called top officers from around the world to Washington to hear political speeches by himself and Trump, many tried to read the stony faces of the generals and admirals in their seats. We’re still trying to read their faces and interpret the clues they leave.

But if they are coming to the conclusion that the Trump/Hegseth regime is undermining the safety and security of the United States, don’t expect them to stay in line. I don’t expect a coup or an assassination, as might happen in some country with a lesser tradition of an apolitical military. But there are ways to act out, and I expect to see more of them.

September 7, 2026 – 11:03 am Categories: Articles | Comments (6)

Tagged military, Trump administration |

The Monday Morning Teaser

Pete Hegseth’s fight with his generals boiled over last week with the resignation of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. There have been many signs of discontent in the Pentagon over the last few weeks, as the ill-planned Trump/Hegseth Iran War drains resources from our military units elsewhere in the world. I’ll look into that in more detail (and explain my theory of the Deep State) in “Hegseth vs. the Deep Pentagon”. I’ll try to get that out between 10 and 11 EDT.

That leaves a number of stories to the weekly summary: Trump’s attempt to use the Postal Service to take over the mail-in portion of the midterm elections is going to the Supreme Court, raising once again the question of how far the Court’s partisan Republican majority is willing to go to give its party and its president unfair advantages; Trump’s desire to make the GOP midterm campaigns all about himself, which is exactly what the Democrats want; a seismic victory for the far-right in one German region; a fascinating explanation of the Nepal flood; Canada’s refusal to fold in its trade war with the US; and a few other things. Expect to see that between noon and 1.

September 7, 2026 – 8:20 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Ongoing stories

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about interest rates

and the end of the American age

and you also might be interested in …

and let’s close with something generic

Ongoing stories

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about distractions like the Trumpapalooza

and how AI is going to kill us all

but we should have been talking about the Houthi advance

and what just happened in Missouri

and Judge Luttig’s warning

and thinking deeper about right-wing appeal in Germany and the US

and you also might be interested in …

and let’s close with something restful

Ongoing stories

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the postal service

and dissent inside the Pentagon

and Trump’s clueless midterm strategy

and Germany

and you also might be interested in …

and let’s close with something incongruous

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