Peace, someday

Peace will come someday, but not from cutting support for Ukraine. The war will end when Putin gives up his dream of absorbing Ukraine into Russia, when he understands that he cannot win.

– Anne Applebaum

This week’s featured post is “Your 2026 election-watching guide“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Trump has tried to interfere in the midterms in a variety of ways, most of which the courts have beaten back. His outrageous lawsuit to prevent Alaska from certifying its Senate race if Trump’s candidate loses got thrown out, though it may reappear after the election. The attempt to get states to put aside ballots from people Trump claims (on flimsy grounds) are not citizens has also not succeeded. Expect shenanigans to continue, and hope the courts are up to the challenge.
  • Climate change. Natural gas is often touted as being better for the environment than other fossil fuels like coal. But that’s only if methane doesn’t leak during the drilling and transportation process. The Biden administration increased controls on methane, but Trump is rolling those rules back.
  • Gaza. The Gaza genocide seems not to have had much traction as an issue in Israel’s recent election.
  • Ukraine. Over the last few weeks, Trump has largely dropped the pretense that his administration is either an ally of Ukraine or a neutral arbiter seeking peace. The “deal” he keeps pushing Ukraine to accept is to surrender territory to its invader. More below.

This week’s developments

This week’s biggest story is tomorrow’s election

The featured post is a watch guide if you plan to spend Tuesday night in front of a television, as I do. Apparently most of my friends consider this a form of torture, so my envisioned watch party isn’t happening. Maybe you’ll have more luck.

Trump has been holding rallies in all the red states that threaten to defect from his coalition, and he is getting increasingly unhinged. The American public is like the frog that doesn’t realize it’s slowly being boiled: We’ve watched Trump’s mental deterioration happen gradually, so it doesn’t shock us the way it should. He tells the story of a simple dementia test where he repeated back five words they gave him, and claims doctors were wowed that he could do it. “Almost no one can do it. But I can because I’m a freaking genius.”

But if you watch any significant chunk of his speeches, read the increasingly bizarre rants he posts on Truth Social, or listen to his ridiculous self-aggrandizing fantasies (“I would have won the Vietnam War in a week.” He would have won the Afghan War in three weeks — ignoring the fact that he had troops in Afghanistan for his entire first term and didn’t win.), it’s obvious that this man is insane. J. D. Vance should be asked every day why he doesn’t invoke the 25th Amendment.

In his blog The Farce, Jason Sattler offers a message for any of his fellow Jews who happen to live in Michigan: Religious bigotry, even if it takes the form of Islamophobia, will eventually hurt Jews. He asks them to reject Mike Rogers’ campaign of hate and vote for Abdul El-Sayed.

We know that Islamophobia feeds the same beast as Jew hatred for the same cruel, senseless aims. We know this even as our community struggles to come to terms with even how to discuss the horrors of October 7 and the war crimes that followed. And we know this tidal wave of hate is only coming because Mike Rogers can’t run on anything else.

Corruption is a big issue in this campaign, but it should be bigger. Trump’s net worth has more than doubled since he started his second term, and that doesn’t count how much his sons and son-in-law have made.

Elon Musk has spent over $440 million this year trying to buy a Republican Congress, nearly $35 million on Ken Paxton alone. He is clearly afraid of being subpoenaed by Democrat-led congressional committees to explain things like temporarily cutting off Ukraine’s access to Starlink for its high-speed drones, or being called to account for the deaths his destruction of USAID is causing, or whatever happened to all the sensitive government data DOGE sucked up.

Musk responded to these possibilities with threats:

Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets.

One look at that tweet tells me everything I need to know: Musk has too much power. Concentrating that much power in one unelected individual is a threat to the Republic.

and Ukraine/Russia

You can’t say you weren’t warned. Back in the 2016 presidential debates, Hillary Clinton predicted that Trump would be “Putin’s puppet” and spelled out what that meant.

It’s pretty clear you won’t admit that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him, because he has a very clear favorite in this race.

In his first administration, Trump tried repeatedly to undo the sanctions that the Obama administration had placed against Russia after its annexation of Crimea. But his administration and the Republican caucuses in Congress were full of people who respected the Russia threat and stood in his way. He also sided with Putin’s claims against the conclusions of the US intelligence agencies.

By the time Trump took office for the second time, in January 2025, Putin’s invasion of the rest of Ukraine was nearly three years old. During the 2024 campaign, Trump often said he could end the war in 24 hours; once in power, it was clear how he thought the war should end: Ukraine should surrender and give Putin all the territory he had demanded. (“Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk will be recognized as de facto Russian”.) That is still his position.

The Biden administration had provided something like $200 billion in military aid to Ukraine — one of its few actions that had bipartisan support in Congress. Trump began scaling that back soon after he took office, and by August of 2025 had cut US support to zero, though the US would continue to sell weapons to its NATO allies, which they would pass on to Kiev. Republicans in Congress, like the late Senator Lindsey Graham, continued to understand that Putin was the bad guy in this situation, so in August they passed the Graham Act giving Trump the power to sanction countries that buy Russia oil.

Trump signed that act, and then — surprise! — made a deal for the US to buy Russian diesel itself. Just before the Graham Act was scheduled to take effect, Trump waived all its anti-Russia sanctions.

Although the deal is unlikely to lower diesel prices, it will benefit Putin and Russia. Diesel sales will generate revenue that could be used to prolong the war in Ukraine. Since announcing the deal, Trump has also told Ukraine to stop attacking Russian refineries.

And Trump became more explicit about blaming Ukraine for its failure to surrender to Russia.

I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because [Zelensky] could have made many deals and for some reason he never does.

At around this same time, Ukraine’s high-speed drones lost access to Elon Musk’s Starlink/Starshield system, crippling its battlefield operations. Though access was eventually restored, this may have been a shot-across-the-bow warning Ukraine that it had better surrender to Russia.

Support for Ukraine continues to be popular in both parties. But after the midterms are over, Trump may decide he no longer cares what voters think. The master will pull his strings, and even a new Democratic Congress may not be able to interfere.

Phillips O’Brien notes:

This Summer and Fall have seen a noticeable and continuing increase in the number of Ukrainian civilians being deliberately targeted and killed by Russian bombing. It is becoming more and more common to have mass casualty events on a weekly basis, and Russian ranged systems are being used to hunt out trains, buses, apartment buildings, etc. … While we await the grim figure for Ukrainian civilian casualties for October 2026 as a whole, it is clear that 2026 is shaping up to be the worst year for Ukrainian civilian deaths caused by the Russian military since 2022, the year of Russian full-scale invasion. … This slaughter is a result of Russia’s strategic decision. It is an attempt to break Ukrainian will by killing non-combatants. It is also a primal scream of rage at the Ukrainian people for not bowing down in front of the Russian military and Vladimir Putin.

He further points out how Trump continues to placate the pro-Ukraine Congress and American people by making phony announcements of support. On October 30, for the benefit of the midterm electorate, the State Department announced that 500 of the most advanced Patriot missiles would be sold (not given) to Ukraine — for delivery in 2030 at the earliest.

and demonstrations in Europe

I was in Paris on my honeymoon when the demonstrations started there. I got emails from home asking if we were OK.

If you’ve ever been in a city where “riots” are going on, you probably understand how localized such disturbances can be. In the vast majority of the city life goes on normally. That certainly was our experience of Paris, though I gather that things got worse after we left. (Fortunately, we were able to visit the Louvre twice before it temporarily shut down.)

On the way back to our hotel one evening, we happened on a demonstration outside some public building. Neither of us speaks or reads French in any but the most rudimentary way, so the slogans being chanted were hard to make out. The signs seemed to be about children and perhaps homelessness. Later we read that there had been demonstrations against sexual abuse in the schools, so maybe that was one of them. There was no violence and we walked through the center of the demonstration with no sense of danger. The demonstrators we saw were trying to communicate with the larger public, not terrorize it. Later we figured out that on a previous day in a different neighborhood we had walked past one of the shops that burned

Trump and various online provocateurs tried to convince their American audience that this had something to do with immigration.

“The migrants have taken over France,” the president posted on Truth Social. “They must CLOSE THE BORDERS, FAST!”

This appears to be pure opportunism on Trump’s part. French President Macron denounced “stupid” comments by foreign leaders, presumably meaning Trump and Israel’s Netanyahu.

By most accounts, the demonstrations began with a student movement protesting against poor funding for schools, especially high schools. They then spread to a general sense of pessimism about young people’s prospects in France, and then to a larger movement of citizens concerned about the high cost of living, largely spurred by the increased fuel prices caused by Trump’s war.

None of these concerns should seem foreign to Americans. We just don’t have the same mass protest traditions the French do.

Another factor that Americans should be able to identify with: There’s no money to satisfy the demonstrators’ demands. France is running persistently high budget deficits, and the country faces increased needs in many areas. For example, the sudden unreliability of America’s commitment to NATO puts pressure on all European countries to increase their defense spending. And the nation’s difficult fiscal situation pushes investors to seek higher interest rates, making the fiscal situation even worse.

The main difference here is that the US runs its deficit in dollars, which its Federal Reserve can create at will. France owes euros, which are controlled by the European Central Bank. That gives the US more short-term flexibility, but it’s not clear that our long term situation is any better. For example, in the recently concluded FY 2026, we ran a $2 trillion deficit. We got essentially nothing for that money: We didn’t make some major national investment, spend our way out of recession, fight a major war, or deal with some external challenge like the Covid pandemic. Subtract the estimated $47 billion spent on attacking Iran, and it’s still a huge deficit. And that’s just business as usual.

and elections in Brazil, Israel, and Serbia

Brazil’s election was a very pleasant surprise. Jair Bolsonaro was Brazil’s Trump. When he lost his reelection bid in 2022, he reacted as Trump had in 2021:

On 8 January 2023, his supporters attacked the buildings of the Supreme Court of Brazil, the National Congress, and the Planalto Presidential Palace to instigate a military coup d’état and reinstate Bolsonaro as president.

Because the Brazilian justice system is less corrupt than ours, Bolsonaro was tried and convicted. He is currently in prison. His sone Flavio ran for president in Brazil’s recent election and led after the first round, in which neither he nor incumbent president Lula got a majority. It was widely expected Bolsonaro would win, and would pardon his father just as Trump pardoned all the January 6 criminals in the US.

But instead, Lula won the runoff in a surprise victory. Flavio was ordered to surrender his passport, pending an investigation into a money-laundering scheme. The Trump administration then conspired to spirit him to Florida, where he is expected to set up a government-in-exile.

Remember how upset Trump usually gets about South American countries sending their criminals here?

Serbia’s strong-man Aleksandar Vučić also fell after 12 years in power. He appears to be accepting his defeat. His enablers are backing down.

Serbia’s public broadcaster RTV Vojvodina has publicly apologized to viewers for years of one-sided coverage. The statement came after Aleksandar Vucic, who ran for prime minister, lost Sunday’s election in Serbia to the student movement. “Public broadcasting has failed to do its job for many years. A lot was left unsaid, a lot was overlooked, information was presented one-sidedly, reporting was uncritical, and the right questions were not asked, or no questions at all. And for that we must apologize to our viewers,” said Eror, as quoted by the TV channel N1.

It’s hard to know what to make of Israel’s elections held last Tuesday. These were the first elections held since the October 7, 2023. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party lost seats in the Knesset, but remains the largest party. AP reports:

Netanyahu’s coalition, made up of ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties, supported strengthening Israel’s Jewish character. It pushed for more settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and allowed for military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jews. It also attempted to push through an overhaul of the country’s judiciary in 2023 that drew mass protests.

Eisenkot’s camp promoted a vision where Israel’s Jewish character lives in harmony with its liberal democratic ideals. It promised honest leadership and accountability for Israel’s Oct. 7 failures, vowed to bolster the judiciary and end the military draft exemptions. They also promised to fix Israel’s international standing, which has deteriorated because of the Gaza war and settler violence in the West Bank.

Neither party seems likely to put together a 61-seat Knesset majority without making deal with the Arab parties, which hold 19 seats. The Arabs would never partner with Netanyahu, but Eisenkot has also pledged not to deal with them.

If no one can form a majority, they’ll have to hold the elections again.

and you also might be interested in …

Chances are, you’ve eaten more than your usual quota of chocolate this last week. And maybe you got nostalgic about how good chocolate used to taste back when you were the trick-or-treater collecting candy rather than the homebody handing it out.

Well, apparently it’s not just your imagination. New York magazine writer Rachel Handler did a deep dive into how chocolate is made, who makes it, and why it (like just about everything else at this stage of capitalism) is getting enshittified.

It was a sad week for Star Trek fans. Walter Koenig, who played Chekov in the original series, died at the age of 90. And then Wednesday, Patrick Stewart died.

Stewart’s Captain Picard wasn’t just a beloved character, he represented a new direction, emphasizing exploration and negotiation rather than the more warlike virtues of Captain Kirk. It took a great actor to pull that off, and Stewart was one.

Under Trump, the US is getting a reputation as a country hostile to foreigners, and it’s killing our tourism industry.

The Justice Department’s latest attempt to keep the Hunter Biden case going just failed: The case against two FBI agents that DoJ said lied to Congress about Hunter’s laptop was dismissed.

A federal judge on Monday dismissed a criminal complaint against two former FBI officials accused of making false statements to Congress about Hunter Biden, saying the investigation that produced the charges was rushed, overtly political and dogged by “critical mistakes.”

“What has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said in a scathing ruling from the bench that dismissed the case against former officials Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides.

and let’s close with something scary

The Onion has become one of the most accurate sources of journalism in the country: “ICE Agent, 7-Year-Old Both Wearing Same ‘Military Commando’ Halloween Costume“.

November 2, 2026 – 12:33 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Your 2026 election-watching guide

What polls and experts expect to happen. Real Clear Politics’ generic congressional ballot polling average has Democrats up 8.9% (52.0%-43.1%), and that margin has been in the 8-9% range for about a month. Such a lead is consistent with a wave election big enough that gerrymandering the districts shouldn’t matter. So just about everybody expects Democrats to win the House.

Things get interesting in the Senate, where 34 Democrats and 31 Republicans are not up for election this year. Cooks Political Report lists 9 Democrats and 11 Republicans as solid favorites, bringing the totals to 43 Democrats and 42 Republicans. Each party has two seats listed as “likely” and two more as “leaning” in their favor. So if you add those in, it’s 47-46 for the Democrats. That leaves 7 toss-up races, which is an unusually large number. So any outcome between a 54-46 Democratic majority and a 53-47 Republican majority (the same distribution we have now) is plausible. (Democrats have had fantasies about flipping seats in Mississippi and Florida, but that seems like a bridge too far.)

How that happened is fascinating. For months, Cooks has been shifting races towards the Democrats, but not across the board: Races might go from “likely Republican” and “leaning Republican” to “toss-up”, but the toss-up races would not shift to “likely” or “leaning” Democratic. (The NYT/Siena poll does seem to show Dems pulling away, but it could be an outlier.)

That appears to have happened for a few reasons: The worst impacts of Trump’s policies — high diesel prices, closing hospitals, data-center construction — have tended to fall in rural states that usually vote Republican: Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, South Carolina, Alaska. Because these states weren’t supposed to be competitive, the GOP is stuck with some poorly chosen candidates. I mean, Roger Marshall is a sucky senator, but it’s Kansas, so who cares? Darlene Graham isn’t her late brother Lindsey, but it’s South Carolina, so anybody with an R next to her name was supposed to be safe.

Meanwhile in blue states like Michigan and Maine, Democrats have maintained small but fairly stable leads in the polls. In a shifting national environment, you’d expect them to start pulling away, but they haven’t. So the RCP average has Troy Jackson up 3.3% on Susan Collins in Maine, and Abdul El-Sayed up 5.3% in Michigan. Both margins were considerably smaller before averaging in yesterday’s NYT/Siena poll.

You especially can’t count on small margins in a mid-term election, because mid-terms are all about turnout. The difference between Obama’s landslide in 2008 and the Democrats’ “shellacking” in 2010 wasn’t so much that people changed their minds. It was that the 2008 Obama coalition of young voters and minorities didn’t come out to vote in 2010. 2010 was an older, whiter electorate, and it elected a way more conservative Congress.

So a big piece of the Blue Wave theory is that Democrats are more motivated this year than Republicans. Trump voters who believed he would lower prices, end foreign wars, and generally look out for the little guy (at least the White male little guys) are disillusioned and unmotivated. But Democrats who have watched Trump circumvent laws, enrich himself, and send his ICE thugs out to murder American citizens with no consequences — they’re motivated.

And that explains the Republicans’ closing arguments that center on fear and bigotry: Democrats will turn America Communist, let brown people run the country, change your child’s gender, take away your guns, and persecute Christians. El-Sayed is a jihadist, James Talerico and Adam Hamilton are fake Christians, and so on. Those arguments won’t convince anybody who cares about the price of gas or health care, but they’re not supposed to. They’re supposed to fire up the MAGA cultists to go out and vote.

The upshot of all this, in my opinion, is that the toss-up races will almost all go the same way. One party or the other will sweep at least six of the seven. The people who make up their minds at the last minute, the people who may or may not vote — they’re all going to do the same thing. I just can’t tell you what it is.

Last-minute events. The Michigan Senate race got roiled Sunday when Rep. Haley Stevens (who lost to Abdul El-Sayed in the primary) withdrew her endorsement of El-Sayed and made an appearance with Republican nominee Mike Rogers, whom she had previously described as “a rubber stamp for Donald Trump“. In a subsequent interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, she dodged and flailed when asked what changed her mind. Even as her social media message absurdly accused El-Sayed of campaigning on “hate”, she appealed to Islamophobia by referring to him only as “Abdul”.

Michigan observers question how much difference this will make. It has been a much bigger story in the national media than locally, and has focused attention more on Stevens herself than on any problem with El-Sayed’s candidacy. Her career as a Democrat is over now, and it’s hard to imagine her as a Republican given her record in Congress. Possibly she’s hoping for a job as a lobbyist with AIPAC, who channeled $30 million into her primary campaign and has also spent millions to support Rogers.

Similarly, the would-be scandal of Democrats recruiting a second Dan Sullivan to run for the Senate in Alaska seems to be more of a national-media story than an issue on the ground in Alaska. The media-criticism blog Finding Gravity comments:

[T]he national news media is doing everything they can to make the central story of the last days of this election season an alleged political maneuver by Alaska Democrats that was, by all accounts, legal, consistent with past behavior by both major political parties, and unlikely to have any real effect on the outcome of the Alaska Senate race. America’s dominant news companies, led by the New York Times, have literally ignored the new rape allegation against the president of the United States while breathlessly hyping the Alaska maneuver, giving Donald Trump the distraction he desperately seeks and a phony premise for his anti-democratic efforts to effectively cancel a Senate election that could determine control of the entire U.S. Senate.

… At this writing, the New York Times has now run more than a dozen reports on this matter in just three days. The Times is in the kind of full-court press mode it saves for things like Joe Biden stumbling over his words. By my tally, the alleged Peltola maneuver has been a primary subject of six New York Times articles, four New York Times newsletters, a New York Times podcast, a New York Times video, and two letters to the editor the New York Times chose to run. At least nine New York Times journalists have bylines on these pieces. I can only imagine what the Sunday crossword puzzle has in store for us.

I have two observations:

  • If Republicans had done something like this, it would be covered as an infuriating-but-clever move to own the libs.
  • It’s a non-story, because Alaska has instant run-off voting. Even if you get confused about which Dan Sullivan is the Republican incumbent, despite the words “Republican” and “incumbent” appearing next to one Dan Sullivan’s name, you just rank the two next to each other. When the “fake” Dan Sullivan is eliminated, your vote will flow to the “real” one. So there is absolutely no chance this maneuver will affect the outcome of the election.

How the night unfolds. There’s a certain amount of tea-leaf reading you can do before any polls close. Exit polling goes on all day. The major media networks are committed not to release any of that information while the polls are open, but their talking heads have probably seen it. They’re generally pretty careful not to reveal anything directly, but I believe they shade their predictions so that they don’t look stupid later. So if MS-NOW folks are still talking about the Blue Wave at 5 p.m., it’s probably still plausible. Likewise, if Fox News pundits are making not-so-fast noises, that could be what the exit polls are showing.

The returns start coming in at 7 p.m. EST, when the polls close in Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Virginia, Vermont. (All poll closing times and a summary of the interesting races are in this NPR article. Some eastern time zone districts in Kentucky and Indiana will report at 6.) None of the toss-up Senate races are here, but you can get some insight into how the night will go by looking at margins. The South Carolina Senate race is supposed to go to Republican Darlene Graham by a small margin. How small? If this race stays too close to call for a long time, it’s a good night for the Democrats. If Graham wins with surprising ease, that’s good for Republicans. The WaPo’s Henry Olsen targets five points as the line to watch.

The Georgia governor’s race is also expected to be close.

Florida’s eastern time zone polls close. A number of House races are close, including some recently gerrymandered districts.

At 7:30: North Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia. The big race here is the Ohio Senate race, where Democrat Sherrod Brown has a small lead in the polls, but the race is considered a toss-up. Don’t expect that to get called early either way. The thing I’ll be watching for early is Black turnout in Cleveland and other big cities. The first bad sign for Hillary Clinton in 2016 was low Black turnout in Cleveland. Probably the Democratic early vote comes in first, so Brown should have a big early lead that shrinks as the night goes on.

Roy Cooper is expected to flip the North Carolina Senate seat to the Democrats. Polls have him up double digits. If that holds, and the race gets called early, that’s a sign that the polls are accurate. NC-1 is a toss-up House seat. Gerrymandering was supposed to push Democrat Don Davis out of Congress. If it doesn’t, that’s a bad sign for Republican gerrymanders across the country.

OH-7 is another toss-up race. This time Republican Max Miller is the incumbent.

At 8: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Washington, D.C.

The Maine Senate race is one of the closest in the country. Chris Pappas is supposed to be ahead in New Hampshire; if he’s not, that’s a bad sign for Democrats. If the Mississippi Senate race is close, then the toss-up races are trending Democratic.

In Pennsylvania the focus is on House seats, where Democrats are expected to flip several. Florida is another test of Republican gerrymandering.

Josh Shapiro and Jay Pritzker will easily get reelected as governors in Pennsylvania and Illinois, but the margins matter if you think of them as a presidential contenders in 2028.

Somewhere in the 8-9 range, expect to hear projections that Democrats will take the House. The majority of races won’t be called, but enough toss-up races should come in to determine the outcome.

8:30. Arkansas. The only real news here will be if the Republicans don’t sweep.

9: Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming

Lots to chew on here. Michigan is a toss-up Senate race with last-minute events. Cook has the Iowa Senate race as a toss-up and the polls are very close, but I have a hard time believing Iowans won’t come home to the Republicans.

Texas and Kansas test the liberal Christian message. Will Christian voters stick with MAGA, or do the teachings of Jesus still mean something? Will Christian voters prioritize anti-abortion and anti-gay rights (two issues Jesus never mentioned) or helping the poor, healing the sick, and welcoming the stranger (which he talked about all the time)?

NPR says this about Texas:

Talarico could take an early lead as early voting data and mail in ballots are counted but Paxton will probably start to gain ground as counties will start reporting their totals. While the governor’s race between Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and state Rep. Gina Hinojosa is also close, Abbott is still favored.

New York has some Republican House seats that Democrats need to flip.

By now, you shouldn’t be looking for tea leaves to read any more. The night will have developed momentum one way or the other.

10: Montana, Nevada, Utah. Not a lot of excitement here. Mostly watch for close races from earlier states to begin resolving.

11: California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington. No major Senate races. California is a test of Democratic gerrymandering. But California results take a long time to come in, so we may not know much until Wednesday, if then. Ditto for California ballot questions, like the wealth tax.

12: Hawaii.

1: Alaska. If the Senate is close nationally, it could all come down to Alaska. Put some coffee on.

November 2, 2026 – 10:10 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

I’m back. The wedding itself was everything we hoped it would be (thanks for asking), and France and Spain made for a lovely honeymoon. By chance, we were always about two days ahead of the major demonstrations and unrest, and three days ahead of the train crash on the Madrid-Seville rail line. So we did a lot of looking at the news and saying: “Didn’t we walk past that shop?”

My nominee for the most beautiful cathedral in the world is La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, where the afternoon light streams in like this:

Anyway, it’s election eve. All month, polls and pundits have been trending toward the Democrats, with the result that the once impossible — Democratic control of the Senate — is now being predicted more often than not. Trump has been unable to turn the tide for a reason I predicted before I left: He has no positive message other than denial of reality — the economy is wonderful, prices are going down, and the war is all but won.

That has left Republicans with nothing to run on other than fear: Democrats are communists and jihadists who will take away your guns, sex-change your children, and outlaw eating meat, while Republicans are manly men with great butts. That message shouldn’t work with people who are worried about affording gas or health care, and (if you believe the polls) it hasn’t.

But should we believe the polls? I mean, can a Democrat really win a Senate seat in Kansas or Texas? We’ll see tomorrow night.

Today, I’m going to put out a returns-watching guide, setting the stage with pollsters predictions and then looking hour-by-hour at what returns will best tell the story. I’m hoping to get that out by 10 EST.

The summary post actually has more than a month to cover, so I’ll center on a few big things: Trump’s ever-more-open support of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the demonstrations in France, and the elections in Brazil, Serbia, and Israel. I hope to get that out by noon.

November 2, 2026 – 8:31 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (3)

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

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 (9)

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”.

Jared’s vision of New Gaza

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 (6)

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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 (11)

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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 (19)

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 (15)

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 (12)

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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)