Far Out

There’s a maddening tendency among elected officials and the political press to equate “far left” and “far right” candidates as occupying equally extreme, dangerous ends of the political spectrum, though those in the former camp mostly want universal healthcare and affordable housing while the latter is more likely to endorse the forced deportation of non-white people from the United States.

– Allegra Kirkland
“Whose Narrative Is It Anyway?“

This week’s featured post is “Some revolutions are too big to see.“

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. DHS’s response to ICE’s murders of Alex Preti and Renee Good was to launch investigations into local Minneapolis groups that organized protests. The murderers are still at large.
  • Climate change. The predictions of a record-setting El Nino seem to be coming true.
  • Iran. As it becomes harder to deny that his war is lost, Trump’s rhetoric has become increasingly fantastic. The two-month window for a larger deal set by June’s memorandum of understanding has now run out, but Trump says he is “in no hurry” to end the war. But if Oman gets in the way of a settlement with Iran, “we’ll bomb the shit out of them”. He has also threatened to declare the Strait of Hormuz, which remains closed, “a territory of the United States”.
  • Ukraine. Phillips O’Brien: “Russia’s allies show they are more intent on helping Russia win than Ukraine’s are in helping Ukraine win. The difference is stark.” He counts Trump as an ally of Russia.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about primary elections

For the second week in a row, a progressive Democrat’s big lead in the polls evaporated on election day. Last week, Abdul El-Sayed was supposed to have a double-digit victory in the Michigan Senate race, but instead he barely squeaked out a win. This week, progressive Francesca Hong actually lost by half a percent to David Crowley (who was supported by the current governor) in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin’s governor.

The NYT’s analysis points to three factors:

  • Undecideds went overwhelmingly for Crowley, as media focused on Hong’s more out-of-the-mainstream past statements.
  • Young voters (who overwhelmingly supported Hong) didn’t vote in the same numbers as older voters.
  • Hong’s more enthusiastic supporters were more likely to respond when pollsters called.

Pundits love to play the expectations game, and announce some “collapse” or “surge” as results come in differently from the most recent polls. But in truth there are just votes. You get more of them than the other candidates, or you don’t.

My state, Massachusetts, has its primary September 1, and the marquee race is for the Democratic Senate nomination. My congressman, Seth Moulton, is running against incumbent Senator Ed Markey, primarily on the age issue: Moulton is 47 and Markey is 79. Unlike most generational primary struggles, though, Markey is the more progressive candidate.

So far, I am unmoved by Moulton’s case. To me, the age issue has to be backed up by something more substantive: examples where the older candidate is out of touch with today’s world. Absent an argument like that, I don’t see the point.

and the Abraham Lincoln

When we go to war without adequate planning, eventually the men and women of our armed forces suffer the consequences.

You’ve probably already heard the gist of this story: Due to the Iran War, the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln has been at sea for a long time without shore leave for the crew or the kind of maintenance that can only be done in a port. The situation has been complicated by damage Iranian missiles did to a naval base in Bahrain, which would ordinarily be the logistics hub supplying the Lincoln while it was deployed in the Middle East. So it’s being supplied through Diego Garcia, a British island in the Indian Ocean over 2000 miles away. The strain of constant deployment with limited supplies is taking its toll.

MSNOW talked to families of the Lincoln crew:

The families say that their loved ones have described food shortages and standing in line for the ship’s store for an hour or more, and that the store often lacks basic supplies like toothpaste, soap and deodorant. Families said there have been times during the deployment when the Lincoln was rationing portions. Nicole Conrad’s son is serving on the Lincoln, and she hasn’t been able to see his face in seven months. Exchanging messages from the ship, he has told her about days when the showers were locked and laundry was closed, and about food shortages on board that meant his meal was half a cup of rice and two tortillas.

USA Today has published photos of meals served aboard the Lincoln and also the USS Tripoli, which is also deployed to the Middle East. The trays pictured are from the Tripoli.

When Dan F.’s daughter said hygiene products were running low on the [Tripoli], the family sent a care package with shampoo and conditioner, deodorant, toothpaste and tampons, filling every open space with candy and snacks. They filled the second box with Emergen-C vitamin C packets – Dan’s daughter said she was feeling a sore throat coming on – and clean socks. The boxes were sent nearly a month ago, yet neither has reached its destination.

It’s easy to imagine being homesick and going stir crazy after more than 260 days at sea. What civilians have a harder time appreciating is the stress level on an aircraft carrier.

The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is already one of the most dangerous places in the military. High-speed aircraft with powerful engines can burn sailors and blow them overboard. Spinning propellers can cause accidents. And the constant loading and unloading of bombs, missiles and rockets pose the risk of explosions and fires.

Trump, Hegseth, and the Navy deny everything. US Central Command posted:

The Sailors and Marines of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group remain resilient and resolved after more than 260 days at sea, 10,000 aircraft flights, and 1.5 million pounds of ordnance expended. No service members aboard the aircraft carrier have died, and the one Sailor who fell overboard Aug. 3 was quickly and safely recovered. The rampant misreporting on Abraham Lincoln’s historic deployment is a disservice to our men and women in uniform and their loved ones.

The Guardian quotes one relative’s response:

The sister of a Lincoln crew member in his late 30s said that the remarks made her want to grab Trump and Hegseth and shake them. “I grew up in a United States where you have to be very respectful of the military, as they’re making the ultimate sacrifice and protecting their country, and now you have the commander-in-chief and defense secretary dismissing their experiences and calling them liars. I’m really angry,” she said. “It’s a feeling of betrayal. These are frustrating, false and careless comments, and they are going to have a lot of consequences for my brother.”

The USS George Washington reportedly is moving from the western Pacific to replace the Lincoln. This leaves the Pacific temporarily with no carriers.

No one expects China to invade Taiwan because an American aircraft carrier has left the region. But the carrier’s absence gives the Chinese another opportunity to show its strength, said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner who is a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute.

“They’re using this as part of the narrative to demonstrate to the Philippines, to Japan, to Indonesia and others that the US is not the big dog in the western Pacific anymore,” Clark said. “They would just prefer that countries in the region decide that China is the bigger power and the US is not able to guarantee their security anymore.”

While continuing to deny that the US supply of high-tech missiles is being depleted, Trump is blaming the problem (which he insists doesn’t exist) on President Biden, who gave Patriots and other weapons to Ukraine.

I am reminded of what Donald Rumsfeld said when he was Secretary of Defense during the Iraq War:

You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Whatever you think about how Biden handled our armed forces, Trump arrived in office commanding a particular stockpile of weapons. It was up to him to use them wisely. But Trump has never in his life taken responsibility for any of his numerous mistakes.

and ignorance-based executive orders

If there was a theme of the week, it was Trump giving orders based on his disastrous combination of ignorance and confidence. Two were related to his ignorance of naval technology and ship design, and another had to do with public health.

Trump has frequently cited his admiration of steam-powered catapults for launching planes off aircraft carriers, rather than the newer electromagnetic tech. Thursday, he signed a memo instructing the War Defense Department to replace the newer systems with the older tech.

The new mandate would likely cost billions of dollars and revert the Navy’s most advanced ships to a system that takes more sailors to operate and is more difficult to maintain.

Reportedly, Trump also has the Navy looking at redesigning the Ford-class carriers still under construction to move the tower to the center of the ship, similar to the look of World War II era carriers.

The changes – including moving the multistory aircraft carrier’s command center tower to the ship’s middle – would cost billions and worsen chronic delays, sources said. Officials also told The Post that changing the command center to the middle would remove 3 key benefits: additional parking spaces, reduced launch time and lowered chances of turbulence during landing.

Neither of these examples is Trump taking a side in a previously existing dispute among experts. It’s just Trump deciding that expertise doesn’t matter.

Last Monday

US President Donald Trump has signed an order that … recommends splitting the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) shots. … The order also recommends that the number of childhood vaccines drop to 11 from the existing 18 recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

During a the signing announcement, Trump spread anti-vax nonsense, claiming at one point that

I’ve seen proof of it. Where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body.

He also implied, without saying outright, that vaccines are related to autism, a well-studied and often refuted piece of anti-vax propaganda.

Trump has no real authority here, since vaccine requirements are set by the states. Mainly, this order will make parents more doubtful of vaccines and less likely to get their children vaccinated. Separating the shots would require more office visits and more expense, further motivating parents to skip some.

Meanwhile, the regime is bungling the cyclospora outbreak. The cyclospora parasite is suspected of causing over 24K illnesses so far this year, resulting in an enormous increase in the usage of the phrase “explosive diarrhea”. The center of the outbreak is in Michigan, and many cases have been traced through Taco Bell to lettuce from a plant in Mexico run by Taylor Farms.

The NYT explores how efforts to shrink the US government and loosen its regulations have made it harder to prevent outbreaks like this, and harder to track them after they arise. The Guardian points out that Congress mandated a better system for tracing outbreaks 15 years ago, but it has been repeatedly delayed and now is set for 2028.

It turns out that “big government” isn’t always a bad thing. In many ways, those much-derided “bureaucrats” are like offensive linemen in football: When they’re doing their jobs well, nobody notices them. It’s only when the quarterback gets sacked that you see a replay of the guy who was supposed to stop that from happening.

and Trump in the catering truck

I’m always torn about covering stories in which Trump does something outrageous, but it doesn’t affect most people’s lives. (That’s why I’m ignoring the fun people had making fun of Trump’s new hairpiece.) They leave me asking “Can you believe a guy like this is our president?”. But in some larger sense they’re inconsequential.

The Air Force One story that broke this week is a great example: Trump flew to the NATO summit in Turkey in the luxury jet he got as bribe from Qatar. While he was there, US intelligence heard rumors about a plot to shoot down his return flight on July 8, a plan made simpler by the fact that the Qatari jet still hasn’t gotten all of its security upgrades. Without referencing the threat, Trump moved back to the older Air Force One plane, which also carried the White House press corps and several high officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as top aides Stephen Miller and Steven Cheung.

But it turns out that flight was only a decoy. After boarding the plane, Trump was whisked away in a catering truck and taken to another plane, which went to the UK where he met up with AF-1 again as if he had never left it.

There are two possibilities here: Either the threat was not serious, in which case Trump was just being a scared little rabbit. Or it was serious, and to save himself he was content to sacrifice not just journalists, but some of his own cabinet and staff as well.

History will little note nor long remember this incident, but it says a lot about our president’s character.

and you might also be interested in …

I copied the graph above from Noah Smith’s Noahpinion blog. The original is on the Our World in Data site. I find it very striking. 36 years ago, extreme poverty was a worldwide phenomenon, mostly distributed across East Asia, South Asia, and Africa. Today it is largely a sub-Saharan Africa problem, with some contribution from the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

I don’t have any grand conclusion to draw from this graph, other than that big changes in poverty are possible. And it’s surprising that a change of this magnitude would draw so little attention.

According to TPM,

The Trump administration is planning to dramatically reshape the data the Census Bureau collects, setting the stage for an audacious effort to curtail crucial information used in voting rights complaints and revive a right-wing effort, pursued in Trump’s first term, to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count used to determine how many members of Congress represent each state in Congress.

The point would be to count fewer non-citizens in 2030 and thus lower the number of congressional seats that go to states with a lot of non-citizens, like New York and California.

The 14th Amendment is actually pretty clear about this:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.

That clause superseded the famous 3/5 clause in the original Constitution that distinguished free people from slaves. The word “citizen” appears five times in the Amendment, so the authors knew how to use it. The fact that they stipulated “persons” should be taken literally.

It’s possible the Supreme Court plans to continue its piece-by-piece repeal of the 14th Amendment. Section 3 (which bans from office anyone who has taken part in an insurrection) was made meaningless in 2024. This June, four justices wanted to ignore the birthright citizenship clause. (They’ll get another shot at it this year.) But if not, the regime’s new census rules should go down quickly.

TPM’s Layla Jones examines the century-long history of right-wing attempts to gain an advantage by monkeying with the census.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is leaving her job because “I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary”. The Contrarian is not inclined to be generous:

Karoline Leavitt’s farewell post contained no mention of a single administration accomplishment she’s proud of — just how extreme the left has become. Fitting, considering her tenure.

To be fair, she did mention “the many historic accomplishments of this Administration” without getting specific about any. The Guardian notes that her tenure started with an outrageous lie — “she claimed that the Biden administration had planned to use $50m in taxpayer dollars to send condoms to Gaza”, and did not improve from there.

A snide comment I’ve seen frequently on social media is that Leavitt is quitting in order to spend more time lying to her family.

Last Monday, ICE agents cut off the car of US citizen Caroline Molina. They then jumped out of their van, and one of the agents pointed his weapon through her driver-side window, in the manner of the agent who murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis. He was yelling at her, claiming that she tried to run them over — which was a complete lie.

Molina yelled back at them that she had a dashcam video recorder, so she could prove they were “full of shit”. They eventually left. Both the dashcam video and the video she shot out her window are here.

Unraveled has identified the agents.

Unraveled has verified the agents in Molina’s videos were far from their usual base of operations. The team has been recorded inflicting violence on immigrants, protesters, and observers in the Chicago area since last summer, including outside the region’s ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois that became the epicenter of anti-deportation protests during Operation Midway Blitz last autumn. Members of the same team were also recorded intimidating and threatening drivers in the Twin Cities in mid-January—in the brief period after federal agents killed Renée Good, and before U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents killed 37-year old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti.

Will the agents be disciplined? Of course not.

ICE has been dragging its feet about its agents wearing body cameras that might capture their illegal actions. But they’re about to roll out electric-shock gloves. No doubt they’ll use them wisely.

and let’s close with something celestial

Spain got to see a full solar eclipse on Wednesday. In case you missed it, here’s a feline recreation.

August 17, 2026 – 11:54 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

Some revolutions are too big to see

If you want to understand the 21st century, take a wide-angle view of the 20th.

During the 1800s, the technological underpinnings of the 20th century economy gradually arose and got implemented on a large scale. The steamboat and then the railroad revolutionized transportation. The telegraph, telephone, and mass-market newspapers revolutionized communication, creating new possibilities for democracy, but also for advertising and propaganda. Eli Whitney’s interchangeable parts allowed low-skill factory workers to mass produce goods that formerly required highly skilled craftspeople. The limited liability corporation and developments in banking and security trading enabled a unified management to wield quantities of capital far beyond what any individual entrepreneur could raise.

Each of those developments was of historical significance on its own, and many people recognized that they were living in an age of wonders. The introduction to Lilaquat Ahamed’s recent book 1873 calls attention to three enormous infrastructure projects that all were completed in 1869-70: the American transcontinental railroad, the Suez Canal, and the rail link from Bombay to Calcutta.

One French paper even hazarded a guess that these three critical links in the global transportation chain would now enable a traveler to go around the world in fewer than eighty days.

What was harder to see than the individual wonders, though, was what they added up to: Large chunks of humanity, tens of millions of people, were becoming economically, socially, and culturally integrated in a way the world had not previously seen.

The first large-scale demonstration of the new possibilities came during the American Civil War, when the North mobilized the Union states into a vast war-production machine, fielding a well-equipped army far larger than Napoleon had used to invade Russia just half a century before. (Unlike Napoleon, the Union managed to keep its army supplied.) That integrated productive machine was largely allowed to dissolve once the war was won, but its example raised a question that first got a full expression in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian time-travel novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887: What if a similar nationwide integration could be directed towards peaceful goals? Could a war-style mobilization provide everyone with enough to eat and clothes to wear and decent housing to live in?

While Bellamy’s vision and others like it may have been politically inspiring, no mobilize-for-peace movement gained power in the United States. But private-sector visionaries like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were grasping the business possibilities of large-scale integration. All (or nearly all) of the oil wells in the country could become Standard Oil. All the steel mills could become U. S. Steel. With Morgan’s capital and guiding hand, industry after industry united into trusts that could monopolize their particular markets. Rather than a dozen or more competing entities risking the over-production that regularly crashed prices in a boom-and-bust fashion, a nation-spanning monopoly corporation could manage production and keep prices consistently high. Simultaneously, the lack of competition for labor could keep wages low. Concentrated wealth enabled political manipulation that kept the laws friendly and insured streams of government contracts for railroads and other infrastructure projects.

The result was the Gilded Age. Rockefeller became the world’s first billionaire, but he was just the apex of a wealthy class that became a kind of shadow government. The epitome of the new organization was the company town: a small city dominated by a single mine or factory, whose owner also owned the houses workers lived in and the stores where they had to shop. The town might even have its own money: Workers could be paid in company scrip that could only be redeemed in company shops. The spirit of the times is captured retrospectively in the 20th-century song 16 Tons about a worker in a coal-mining town:

St. Peter don’t you call me, cause I can’t go. I owe my soul to the company store.

Eventually, the progressive political movement pushed back against the excesses of the Gilded Age oligarchs: Antitrust laws were passed, unions eventually were protected rather than broken by police, and government regulation limited corporate power. The process took decades, but Standard Oil was broken up into smaller companies that became known as the Seven Sisters. Morgan’s dominance of banking was replaced by the Federal Reserve, which at least nominally had a responsibility to the public.

Over the same time period, Europe was developing similar technological infrastructure, and in World War I the major European powers shared the American experience of full-scale mobilization: An entire nation could become one big engine powered by a single purpose. By the end of the war, people all over Europe were (in a variety of partial or limited ways) asking Bellamy’s question: Large-scale economic integration made a new level of production possible. What could or should be done with it?

That question raised additional questions: Who would manage this engine? And manage it for whose benefit? One way to read the turmoil of the 20th century (from the end of World War I through the Cold War) is as a battle between different answers to those questions.

  • Fascism took society’s power structure as it found it and integrated the pieces into a corporate state with a single leader. Industries would still be dominated by huge corporations like Krupp in steel or I. G. Farben in chemicals. But the ruling political party would take over the media and the educational system so that it could mold public opinion to its liking. The Leader would have a cult of personality, and the frustrations of the working classes would be channeled to target scapegoats like Jews or foreigners. Gleichschaltung, an engineering term related to synchronization, was a system of political, economic, and social pressure — ultimately backed by the police and the concentration camps — to bring individual opinions (or at least public expressions of individual opinions) into line with the state’s official ideology.
  • Communism upended the existing power structure and replaced it with institutions created by the state. Like fascism, it controlled media, education, and the police. But it demolished private-sector institutions entirely: Individual farms were gathered into collective farms. Leaders of the various industries were government officials without even nominal independence. Centralized authority attempted to script economic development in five-year plans.
  • Liberal democracy roughly followed the model of the Progressive Era United States: Private-sector corporations continued to exist and were allowed to manage themselves within bounds established by an elected government. Wealthy individuals and corporations would, of course, try to influence the electorate or corrupt the government, and would sometimes succeed. But when public misery reached extreme levels — as it did during the Great Depression — a political revolution like the New Deal became possible.

Each of these systems had its moments of success. Fascism took Germany from desperation to a continent-bestriding empire in eight short years, creating the autobahn and other large-scale infrastructure projects. Soviet Russia became one of the world’s two superpowers, with nuclear weapons and the first artificial satellite. Though the quantity and quality of Soviet goods never caught up with the West, Russian consumers who remembered the deprivations of the 1930s felt very fortunate indeed by the 1960s.

But the winner of the 20th-century competition was liberal democracy, with a victory so clear that in 1992 Francis Fukuyama heralded “the end of history“. To be fair, Fukuyama did not mean to say that history was over, but that — on this question at least — it had reached an answer.

the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

You might expect a trend created by technology to be disrupted by subsequent technologies. But the pull of integration was only reinforced by the major developments of the 20th century: radio, television, the electrical grid, automobiles, highways, chain stores, and eventually computers and the internet.

The propaganda industry of World War I inspired a post-war advertising revolution that did not simply announce products but shaped public opinion, creating markets rather than simply responding to them. (See Walter Lippman’s 1922 classic Public Opinion and Edward Bernays’ 1928 Propaganda. By 1967 John Kenneth Galbraith had put it all together in The New Industrial State. Focusing on the Ford Motor Corporation, Galbraith concluded that the market-defining power it shared with GM and Chrysler made it an altogether new kind of entity that Adam Smith would not recognize as a firm.)

It’s important to realize that no major nation refused to integrate. The possibilities of increased production and wealth were just too tempting, both to leaders and to the general public. Much was lost in the transition to the new integrated society: The pressure to conform restricted individuality. Physical and social mobility disrupted families and communities. Materialism challenged religion. By the mid-20th century, we had a new word, totalitarianism, to express the new level of intrusion and oppression that an integrated society made possible. But eventually, ordinary people (most clearly in liberal democracies, but also in fascist and communist countries) came to experience a level of luxury their ancestors could not have imagined. Refusing, or going back, was never really an option.

What the 20th century example means to us. So now let’s talk about the 21st century. It has become a commonplace observation that cheap personal computers and the internet are revolutionary in the way that the printing press was in the 15th century. But the early manifestations of that revolution were fairly trivial: You could order and start reading an e-book without leaving your bedroom, or download a real-time satellite image of the current weather system, or carry your entire music collection on a device in your pocket. Those who didn’t live through this period may have a hard time imagining how marvelous it all seemed. It was indeed an age of wonders. And yet, society was still society. If you wanted to go on living your life as if nothing were changing, you could.

But consider what has happened since, not as a series of individual developments, but as a whole:

  • Surveillance capitalism. The services and devices we all use give each of us an enormous data trail. Your phone knows where you’ve carried it. Your car knows where you’ve driven. Your TV knows what you’ve watched. Your voice-activated Siri or Alexa can listen to your conversations. Your supermarket tracks your purchases. Your smart house knows what hours you keep and what rooms you like to use. Your internet browser knows what you’ve shown an interest in. All those entities are owned by companies that can and do sell the information they collect.
  • Social media algorithms. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube don’t just show you what you look for, they also make models of your interests and suggest what you might look at next. The algorithms that do this are not designed for your benefit. Instead, they exploit addictive patterns in the human mind, hooking you with anger or fear, and then drawing you ever further down various rabbit holes. Their goal is to hold your attention longer so that they can sell the advertising they can show you. In addition, Elon Musk’s X has a clear propagandistic purpose. It privileges Musk’s own neo-Nazi posts, and possibly similar voices. In short, the algorithms don’t just reflect your interests, they can and do change your interests, and perhaps your personality as well.
  • Artificial intelligence. The tech giants are building out a massive computing infrastructure that can process data on scales never before imagined.

The weakness of 20th-century totalitarian surveillance was simple: Who was going to listen to all those recordings or watch all those camera feeds? Who was going to assemble the clues you inadvertently left to figure out what you intended to do? Maybe if you were a world leader or a suspect in some important investigation, the KGB or FBI or some similar organization might assign you enough watchers and analysts to make sense of it all. But the vast majority of us just aren’t worth that kind of attention.

We aren’t worth that kind of human attention. But maybe going forward we will be worth that kind of AI attention.

Similarly, 20th-century marketing and propaganda was based on statistical models. What were most people thinking? How would an average person respond to this message or that one? But 21st-century attempts to influence consumers and voters are increasingly personalized: What message would motivate you to do what the messenger wants?

20th-century corporations used mass-market advertising to create and alter large-scale trends. (How could Proctor and Gamble turn bad breath or body odor into embarrassing social problems that required its mouthwash or deodorant?) But a 21st-century marketer has the time and energy to analyze you as an individual. (Are you ready to buy a new car? What would cause you to choose this one rather than that one?) 21st-century politicians can target a message at you individually, whether the purpose is to change your vote, or just to make you give up on the possibility of figuring out what is true or what you should do about it.

Put it together: Just by living your life, you create an enormous data stream. The capability to analyze that data stream either exists or soon will exist. That analysis might produce a pretty good picture of what you know, what you believe, and how you think. Knowing that, the algorithms that decide what information comes to your attention might know just what to show you to make you do what their clients want you to do — buy a product, vote for a candidate, join a movement, or whatever.

It’s easy to make a dystopia out of this, but hold off on that thought for a second. What this all points to is that a deeper level of social/economic/cultural integration is now possible. That power could be used for good or ill, just as the power created by the previous integration was.

In a dystopia, AI might analyze your data trail, figure out exactly what conspiracy theory might hook you, and at a key moment send you just the right upsetting pseudo-fact that pushes you towards mass-murder or suicide bombing.

In a utopia, the algorithms might cheer you up when you’re depressed, nudge you to make that career change you’ve been thinking about, or even search out (or create) a place in the economy for someone with your exact combination of talents and disabilities.

The near-universal psychological trauma of 20th-century was the thought that the system is indifferent to us, that we don’t fit and there is no place for us. In order to survive, we need to hide our inner selves and become organization men or men in grey flannel suits who are made of ticky-tacky and all look just the same.

In a utopia, the system would not be indifferent. It would try to meet us halfway and find roles we could fill with our authentic selves.

And maybe along the way, we could have another productivity bump, similar to the last one. Maybe in a few decades that increased integration will have ordinary people living in what would seem like unimaginable luxury now, albeit with the loss of some cultural values that seem important today.

Which way things will go depends on the same questions as last time: Who is going to manage this integrated society, and for whose benefit?

Right now, we’re on the Gilded Age track. Musk, Bezos, et al. are managing the transition for their own benefit, just like Rockefeller and Morgan did. They’re collaborating with a corrupt government and using their increased power to squeeze the rest of us ever tighter. We may end up in the online equivalent of the company town, owing our souls to the owners.

But look for each of the three 20th-century competitors to make their cases again. The fascism of the Trump regime is not particularly well-founded in the new possibilities, and is being derailed by Trump’s own greed and ignorance. But the last two years do point out how eagerly Gilded Age oligarchs will line up behind a fascist leader.

Communism may also get a second chance. One reason Soviet Communism failed was the sheer impracticality of central planning in a large modern economy. A market in essence is a distributed-processing system for managing production and consumption. The market-oriented liberal democracies simply had more processing power and greater flexibility and creativity than any Soviet central planner could apply to the job. But a 21st-century central planner’s capabilities may may be better suited.

If we are lucky, liberal democracy will also get a second chance. But for that to happen, some significant number of people need to grasp what’s happening and apply our creativity to doing something about it. Certainly we’ll have to revive the 20th-century progressive tools of antitrust and unions. But we also have to hope that the new possibilities include new tools for fighting back against oligarchy and escaping the company town.

It may seem impossible, but the first Gilded Age seemed unassailable too. As George Orwell put it, “Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”

August 17, 2026 – 9:29 am Categories: Articles | Comments (6)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Usually I take the news one week at a time, but today’s featured post takes a step back to examine a much wider time span: I’m looking at the technological developments that led to the first Gilded Age in the late 19th century, and trying to draw a parallel to the current internet/social-media/AI technologies that have landed us in a new Gilded Age. We may be in for a reprise of the fascism/communism/democracy struggle that dominated the 20th century. Lately it’s been easy to focus on the dystopian possibilities of the tech revolution, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the utopian possibilities as well.

As in the 20th century, it’s all going to hang on who manages the new society, and for who’s benefit. Right now this Second Gilded Age is being managed by tech oligarchs for their own benefit, just as the First Gilded Age was managed for the benefit of the Rockefellers and Morgans. But that changed, and our own situation could change as well.

That post is tentatively titled “Revolutions too big to see”, though I still hope to come up with something better. It should be out before 10 EDT. If you like it, I hope you’ll promote it to other people who might like it. I feel like this is more important than my usual blog posts, and I hope it can get a wider readership.

The week didn’t have a truly dominant news story, in my opinion. The weekly summary will divide its attention among primary elections, the USS Abraham Lincoln fiasco, Trump in the catering truck, and a variety of ignorance-based executive orders like the new recommendations for vaccines. Expect to see that around noon.

August 17, 2026 – 8:46 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Interested Parties

Tyranny is the handmaiden of the moneyed interests.

– Robert Reich
“The real meaning of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan“

This week’s featured post is “Why the freak-out over El-Sayed?“

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Blanche is fully installed as AG. Money for the rest of this calendar year has been voted. So there’s nothing restraining Trump from doing his worst between now and the fall elections.
  • Climate change. Lots of climate stories this week. Wildfires are still raging. Lake Mead is at a historic low point. The Trump regime continues to spend taxpayer money to pull the plug on renewable energy projects. A judge is stopping the Pentagon from blocking all new onshore wind projects. Ford is planning a cheap EV pick-up truck for next year.
  • Iran. Phillips O’Brien: “A quick lesson on winning and losing a war. If you start a war of choice, blow through masses of your weapons stocks so that you cannot escalate effectively, and find the country you attacked dictating negotiating terms while in a stronger strategic position … You lost.”
  • Ukraine. Trump has seemed to waver between favoring Russia and favoring Ukraine. But in fact it’s always been Russia.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the economy

Wednesday, Donald Trump told a crowd in Las Vegas that this is “the greatest economy we’ve ever had by far“. Friday, the Labor Department released its July jobs report: The US lost 23,000 jobs in July, and the more robust hiring reported in May was revised downward by 66,000 jobs. The unemployment rate ticked downward to 4.1%, but for the wrong reason: The people who stopped looking for work outnumbered the people who lost jobs. More technically, the labor participation rate declined to 61.4% of the working-age population. Other than the Covid era, that’s the lowest rate in 50 years. Wage growth was at an annual rate of 3.2%, which doesn’t quite keep pace with inflation.

That doesn’t sound like such a great economy.

And here’s something that nobody talks about any more: Remember, back when Joe Biden was president, how the growing national debt was an existential threat to the United States? In March 2025, when the second Trump administration was young and all problems could still be blamed on Biden, the Republican-led House Budget Committee reported:

If Congress does not act swiftly to confront the structural disconnect between reckless federal spending and incoming revenues, our nation will experience either slow and painful economic demise through sustained stagnation or a swift and catastrophic sovereign debt crisis whereby our creditors lose confidence in our ability to service and repay our debt. This distrust will jeopardize the dollar’s dominance as the world’s reserve currency and result in massive tax hikes and austere spending cuts. Both scenarios would imperil our Republic and our nation’s future.

Well, since then Trump and congressional Republicans have cut taxes for the rich again, started an unnecessary war, and massively boosted military spending. They tried to cover that with cuts to food programs and health care, but the numbers didn’t balance. So the federal deficit for the first nine months of FY2026 has been $1.4 trillion. It’s still an open question whether the year’s final total will top $2 trillion or not. The deficit has broken $2 trillion only once before: in FY2021, a combined Trump/Biden year (running from October 2020 to September 2021), when the government was trying to keep the economy functioning during the Covid shutdown.

The striking thing about the current deficit is that no external emergency requires it. The economy does not need stimulus to get out of a massive recession. No one has attacked us. No plague, famine, or natural disaster demands government intervention. No, Trump is running this deficit by choice. He has chosen to fight an unnecessary war and to cut rich people’s taxes. And the House Budget Committee doesn’t seem terribly alarmed about it.

Here’s what worries me: We’re running this massive deficit while the big tech companies are borrowing unprecedented amounts of money to spend on their AI infrastructure. Yet somehow, this combination of public and private spending isn’t causing a boom. GDP growth is limping along somewhere in the 2-3% range that it’s been in since around 2011 (except for the Covid collapse and recovery, which were lower and higher).

I’m no economist, but it looks to me like we’re masking a major recession with borrowed money.

Interesting gender disparity in the jobs numbers:

Overall, the economy lost 23,000 jobs in July: Women lost 32,000 jobs, while men gained 9,000. Many of the jobs lost were in local government and leisure and hospitality—real jobs that real women, who are already dealing with slowed wages and rising inflation, work. Meanwhile, a whopping 165,000 women exited the work force last month, meaning they were neither working nor looking for a new job. The number of men in the labor force remained steady. … In fact, more than double the number of women have left the labor force than men since the start of the year. A total of 845,000 women have left the workforce since January, while 406,000 men have left.

The theory that fewer immigrants means more jobs for native-born Americans … it’s just not panning out.

and Todd Blanche

Well, a few Republican senators managed to get media attention with their public hand-wringing, but in the end all but Collins and Murkowski knuckled under, so Blanche was confirmed as attorney general 50-49. Fifty Republican senators have now signaled their approval of vindictive prosecutions, winking at obvious corruption, and continuing the Epstein cover-up.

I don’t know how fair this point is, but I have seen it fairly often: As soon as Susan Collins came out against Blanche, we knew Trump had the votes to confirm him. She only strays off the MAGA reservation when they don’t need her vote.

and Dr. Fauci

Imagine you’re a Republican in Congress looking for some TV time, but wanting to stay in Trump’s good graces. What are you going to talk about? Not the war, which has turned out to be a big mistake. Not the economy, which is limping towards stagflation. Not the wildfires spreading all across the northern hemisphere, because that leads into climate change, which Trump insists is a “con job”, a “scam”, and a “hoax”. Not the budget deficit, which is approaching $2 trillion for the year, because who’s fault is that exactly? Not the great job ICE is doing as it terrorizes cities across the country and murders American citizens on the streets. Not corruption, obviously, and not your vote to approve Todd Blanche, because he winks at Trump’s corruption. The Epstein victims? No way.

I know: You can talk about an 85-year-old who holds no government office and is making no decisions that affect Americans’ lives. So Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky published Anthony Fauci’s diary, and then pulled Fauci in for questioning before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Consider the context of this appearance: Before he left office, President Biden gave Fauci a sweeping pardon so that the incoming administration wouldn’t be able to harass him with vindictive prosecutions. We’ve just seen James Comey vindictively prosecuted for lying to Congress, when he actually did no such thing. Career prosecutors recommended against pressing charges, but the prosecutor Trump illegally appointed went ahead with them. The illegal appointment caused the charges to be thrown out by the judge.

So Fauci’s pardon covers everything he did while he was actually in government, but testifying before Congress put him in danger of being prosecuted for lying to Congress, whether he told the truth or not. So Fauci took the Fifth Amendment 111 times.

You might think that would insulate him from prosecution, but guess again. Paul introduced a motion to find him in contempt of Congress. The committee approved that motion. Ordinarily it would go to the floor of the Senate, where it probably would not pass. So Paul wants DoJ to act on the referral of his committee, without the full Senate.

With all this smoke, you might be wondering if there’s a fire somewhere. I don’t think there is. There is legitimate scientific debate about whether Covid-19 leapt from animals to humans spontaneously in China or whether the virus leaked from a Chinese lab. But that debate has gotten swallowed up by a conspiracy theory that the virus was created in that lab, perhaps intentionally, perhaps with NIH funding that Fauci had some oversight over. There seems to be nothing to that theory.

Looking back, it’s hard to remember just how scary Covid was and how little anybody understood about it. Over a million Americans died of the virus, and perhaps millions more would have died without the vaccines. We all did things (I recall my household wiping down our groceries) that look silly in hindsight.

During this time, Fauci gave the best advice he could, which was always based on incomplete information. On the whole, though, his advice wasn’t that bad. And besides, he never had the power to impose his views. That had to be done by governors, school boards, and other elected officials at various levels.

Thankfully, I have never had to make decisions based on incomplete information while people were dying around me.

an El-Sayed’s win in Michigan

This is the subject of the featured post. But I have a few things to say that weren’t in that article.

Robert Reich had this comment on the idea that the Democratic Party is the subject of a hostile takeover:

The Democratic party isn’t being taken over by “the left” or by democratic socialists. There’s no civil war between progressives and moderates. We aren’t witnessing an ideological battle between the “left” and the “center”.

We’re seeing the US wake up to the tyranny that’s engulfed us, and to a crisis of affordability that’s causing most Americans to struggle financially while fueling the biggest stock market rally in history.

Trump’s tyranny and America’s affordability crisis are related. … When corporate America and Wall Street are unleashed – when the president of the United States has made an implicit deal with the moneyed interests to back him and his authoritarian regime in exchange for tax cuts, deregulation, monopolization and pay-to-play corruption – of course prices soar and wages stagnate.

One thing I don’t like about special-interest ads is that the interests usually don’t own their message. I wouldn’t care how much Elon Musk had spent in Wisconsin if he had appeared in ads himself and said, “I’m Elon Musk, and I want you to elect Brad Schimel to your state supreme court.” Ditto if AIPAC ads had said, “We’re AIPAC, and we want you to vote for Haley Stevens because she supports continuing US military aid to Israel, while her opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, does not.”

If all political ads were that straight-shooting, the Supreme Court’s otherwise bizarre notion that money is speech would almost make sense. But AIPAC-supported ads about El-Sayed being “disrespectful to women” aren’t just deceptive about El-Sayed, they mask why AIPAC doesn’t like him.

To be fair, a renewable energy PAC did the same thing to Andy Ogles in Tennessee.

According to Politico a big reason Rep Andy Ogles, one of the slimiest and terrible members of the GOP House caucus, went down to defeat is that he was targeted with $2 million by a SuperPAC funded by solar industry execs. They didn’t hit him on renewables or environment policy. They used garden variety attacks about Ogles’ missed votes while playing up the conservative credentials of his primary challenger.

PACs do that because the honest message — “We’re solar executives and Andy Ogles has been working against our industry.” — wouldn’t persuade enough voters.

A hilarious attack ad against El-Sayed’s opponent Mike Rogers is framed like a drug ad. The drug is called “Endless War”, and Rogers is pitching for it.

Trump seems to think this meme works in his favor. (Note the misplaced apostrophe.)

El-Sayed accepted the challenge in an interview with Jake Tapper:

Yeah, he’s right. One [America] in which your overlords are two people who don’t like each other but join in the interest of making billions of dollars off of you, or two people who genuinely love each other, enjoyed some pancakes together, want to come together to build the kind of America where they can raise a family, and know that that family is going to have the good things.”

So yes, you’ve got two different visions of America. Donald Trump’s vision is the one you’re living in right now. Can you afford your gas? Can you afford your groceries? Do you believe, when you look your kids in the eye, that they’re going to have a better future than you did?

and you also might be interested in …

They two parties really do have different standards. Unlike Democrat Graham Platner, Republican Rep. Max Miller has not withdrawn from his race and will be on the November ballot.

The WaPo claims Trump is upset with War Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for hiding the munitions shortage from him, and that Hegseth in turn blamed his Deputy Secretary Stephen Feinberg. (The White House claims the whole story is “fake news”. The Pentagon says: “Secretary Hegseth did not mislead anyone about our munitions posture, and he did not blame Deputy Secretary Feinberg. These claims about depleted stockpiles, internal disagreements, the Secretary’s position on Iran … are equally fictional.” Those quotes are also in the WaPo, because that’s what journalists do.)

A couple of observations here:

  • Any idiot knows that you don’t just go down to Home Depot and get yourself more Patriots and THAADs and Tomahawks. The Pentagon stockpile is the only one, and these missiles take years to manufacture in any quantity. So the whole idea that Trump would buy Hegseth’s claim that the munitions problem had been “fixed” points to Corporal Bonespurs’ ignorance about war.
  • The old adage that “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics” needs third classification for Hegseth: Complete doofuses talk testosterone and worry about the race and gender of their officers.

Paul Krugman used the previous story as one of many examples of administration officials lying to each other, which is one reason why they are governing so badly across the board.

The fact is that it isn’t possible for an administration to be completely dishonest with the courts and the general public while being honest with itself. Do you believe that when Trump boasts about $18 trillion in foreign investment, Kevin Hassett, the administration’s top economist, quietly tells him, “Just between you and me, Mr. President, that number comes out of nowhere, and even the investment promises we have received are vaporware”? Of course not. … So the Iran War is just the most visible of many ongoing, self-inflicted disasters perpetrated by this administration.

A few weeks ago I reviewed Cory Doctorow’s book Enshittification, which focuses on the software platforms that are increasingly making life miserable. But the trend is larger than that. There’s a broad trend for big conglomerates to buy famous brands and then cut quality. There are big short-term profits to be made before the brand’s reputation is used up. One article focused on how this trend has affected cookware.

Yesterday, Phillips O’Brien’s weekend update on the Ukraine war veered into media criticism. He needed to explain why the latest Trump regime nonsense about “helping” Ukraine — Trump is and always has been on Putin’s side in this war — had gotten so much serious coverage. O’Brien originally thought he was writing a niche blog for military strategists, but suddenly has seen his substack vault into popularity (with people like me).

[W]hat I have discovered, which is not enlightening, is that the actual reporting of war and politics these days in most media outlets can be incredibly weak. The system often seems broken—reporting White House inspired narratives that have no basis in fact as actual events, and replacing rigor with herd behavior.

He started trying to figure out why that was.

Doing what I have done over the last few years has been learning experience (and not it a good way) about how much of the media (and much of the think-tank community) works. The key thing in both worlds is not being accurate or truthful as much as it is gaining access to power and being seen to be smart. Access and perceived intelligence—usually drastically greater than real intelligence—is the currency of these worlds.

Thus to maintain access, some reporters and commentators will say exactly what the White House wants, time and again, even after the White House narrative has been shown to be nonsense (many times). When it comes to think tanks, many are not interested in attempting even-handed or rigorous research; instead, they want to impress funders and also maintain access, and thus they publish crap to appeal to power and maintain their perceived viability (in most cases they have none). This means that much of what is produced in think-tanks is of laughable quality, meant to signal access and support, not to actually analyze a problem or policy.

When I started this blog, nearly all of my sources were mainstream media: CNN, NYT, WaPo, with occasional deeper articles from The Atlantic and a few similar outlets. And I still quote those sources selectively: When they publish a checkable fact, the fact usually checks out.

Increasingly, though, I am relying on blogs written by people like O’Brien, Paul Krugman, Josh Marshall, Jess Piper, Jay Kuo, Marc Elias, and so on. Why? Because they aren’t chasing access to sources in the Trump regime, so they can maintain higher standards.

So it’s none of my business, or yours, whether or not Ariana Grande has an eating disorder. The public response to recent photos is probably counter-productive. But if it leads to an intelligent discussion of celebrity culture and eating disorders in general, some good may come of it.

[Grande’s] body has also become a proxy on to which wider cultural anxieties are projected. In a moment of GLP-1 drugs reinstating the aspiration of thinness, body positivity in retreat, bonesmashing still on the up, and Maga tradwives once again moralizing fatness, fears about the return of aughts-era anorexia have settled on to Grande herself. Whether or not those fears belong to her alone is almost beside the point. Her body has become the site through which the culture argues with itself.

That can’t be a comfortable position to be in, no matter what her actual health situation is. Send a few good vibes her way, however that works in your religious tradition.

Trump is already preparing his response for when Republicans lose big in the fall: Voters are “not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.” Nothing in the history of the world has ever been his fault.

Ross Douthat’s final NYT column (before he moves on to be a white conservative DEI hire at 60 Minutes) expresses the it’s-not-so-bad view of the Trump administration that I think we need to push back hard on.

But as Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents. At the moment, Trump 2.0 has no great popularity, no legislative capacity, no policy legacy that a Democratic successor can’t easily roll back. The president himself might still be a dangerous figure, there might be darker forces waiting in the wings — but I don’t think that justifies making anti-populism the measure of all things.

But look at what he has implicitly admitted there: If Trump doesn’t have a Democratic successor willing and able to roll this back, American democracy is in real trouble.

We have masked federal police who obey Trump rather than the law, and who get away with murdering people in the streets if they protest against Trump’s policies. We have a massive concentration camp system under construction and partially operational. We have a “unitary executive” who has obliterated all the boundaries that used to wall off certain key areas of government power from the whims of the president. That executive is immune from prosecution after he leaves office for all “official acts”, which might include having political rivals jailed.

The whole point of Trump’s effort to control elections is that he doesn’t have to be popular. The point of encroaching on the power of Congress is that he doesn’t need legislative capacity. Give him two more years of a supine Congress and it might be too late.

Expect to hear a lot of it’s-not-so-bad between now and the midterm elections. Everyone who isn’t dyed-in-the-wool MAGA needs to respond to the fall elections like a four-alarm fire. But what if your candidate lost in the Democratic primaries? What if the Democratic nominee makes you feel uneasy for reasons that may or may not have something to do with your subliminal biases against color or religion or gender? What if you have a lot to do and getting out to vote feels like a hassle?

But if it’s not really so bad, then you can stay home or vote for the White guy or teach the politicians a lesson by voting for a third party. I mean, what’s the harm?

and let’s close with something mythic

It’s hard to tell if it’s too soon to joke about Mitch McConnell’s situation, since we don’t really know what that situation is. But The Wizard of Was is pretty darn funny.

August 10, 2026 – 12:49 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Why the freak-out over El-Sayed?

Don’t react to labels, paraphrases, or guilt by association. Listen to what he says.

It wasn’t the blow-out the polls had predicted, but progressive candidate Abdul El-Sayed defeated the Democratic establishment’s candidate Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary. El-Sayed will face Republican Congressman Mike Rogers in the fall election.

Not being a Michigan voter, I didn’t give this race a lot of attention until last week, when the primary was almost upon us. I knew that El-Sayed was the progressive candidate (backed by Bernie Sanders and AOC) and that Stevens was the establishment candidate (backed by Chuck Schumer, Gretchen Whitmer, and $32 million from the pro-Netanyahu group AIPAC). I watched a couple of videos and came to the conclusion that El-Sayed was the more talented retail politician. He’s clearly smart (a doctor and a Rhodes scholar), but he is also uncommonly good at boiling things down in a way that any voter can understand. He focused his campaign on three points:

  • Money out of politics.
  • More money in your pocket.
  • Medicare for All.

So while I haven’t consistently lined up on either the progressive or the establishment side in the Democrats intra-party debate, I was rooting for him. And though he got outspent something like 9-to-1 by Stevens, he won.

Since then, I’ve paid a lot more attention to him and I’ve become a fan.

I’ve seen Republicans launch a McCarthy-style red scare against him. El-Sayed is a “Communist“, Trump says, speaking from his complete ignorance of what Communism is or has ever been. Senator Tommy Tuberville (whose name always comes up when people are challenged to name the dumbest person in the Senate) charged that Sayed is a “terrorist“.

Michigan Democrats just voted to send a TERRORIST to the Senate. Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is a RADICAL ISLAMIST who will do everything he can to destroy America.

I mean, with a name like “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed” (or “Barack Hussein Obama” for that matter), how can he be anything but an America-hating terrorist?

Meanwhile, a few Democrats freaked out about “electability”. This is always a bad topic to keep discussing after the primary is over, because it gives cover to Republicans who lie about the “unelectable” candidate. El-Sayed is unelectable if people start to believe that he’s a communist or a terrorist, and by worrying about his “electability” you’re implying that maybe he is.

So here’s the main point I want to make about El-Sayed: Listen to him. Don’t judge him on his Egyptian name, or his Muslim faith, or the color of his skin, or some objectionable thing one of his supporters said. Don’t judge him by a label somebody else attaches to him, like “socialist” or “antisemite”. Look for evidence. What has he actually said or done that justifies that label? And finally, take a moment to appreciate that we have a charming, personable, articulate candidate. I just love this campaign ad his grandparents made.

I also love the subtle generational message here: He’s young enough to still have living grandparents.

A good place to hear what he has to say is this interview with Katy Tur. The heart of his message sounds a lot like Obama’s 2008 “hope and change”, with a touch of Sanders’ working-class edge.

I’m asking people: “What is it that you want from your government?” Maybe if we broke the chokehold that corporations had on our government for so long, maybe if we actually used this to put money back into our pockets rather than into our politics, and we guaranteed everybody healthcare, maybe life could be a little bit easier. … We need a movement at the federal level that says actually [Medicare for All] is about what we can do when we’re not sending our money to drop bombs on other people and their kids, if we’re using that here at home.

Tur raises the electability issue.

Now, I know I wasn’t supposed to run for office. I’ve got the wrong name, I’ve got the wrong skin color, I pray the wrong way, my family comes from the wrong place. But I’m also not going to use this seat to tell you what you cannot have and you should not fight for. And I know that when we’re willing to have a conversation across the divides they tell us we can’t breach, that we really can build big things. That’s the story of this country.

El-Sayed dismisses labels like left and right, blue and red, and so on. He says that a lot of people feel left out of our system, and there are people from both parties who are locking them out. He wants to stand with the people who are locked out.

Tur also raises antisemitism: Why shouldn’t Jewish voters “feel alienated by a candidate like you”?

I’ll tell you this: Nobody understands better what it’s like to be discriminated against for how you pray than someone who gets discriminated against for how we pray. And most of the time we don’t ask how we pray, most people are asking what you pray for. And I pray for peace and dignity and basic goodness for all of our kids, whether they’re Jewish kids who are a couple house down from me, or my kids who are Muslim.

And I’ll tell you that it’s really important for us to be able to differentiate between Judaism, the Jewish people, Jewish culture, Jewish contributions to this culture (which are vast) and AIPAC and Israel. Those are two different things.

I, when I’m elected, will be the chief opposition to what the Egyptian government does. My family emigrated from Egypt. That doesn’t make me anti-Egyptian. That just means that I want my tax dollars to be spent here rather than sent over there to cement the chokehold of a military dictatorship on its own people. And I apply this same exact principle to Israel. I don’t want my tax dollars being spent to backstop apartheid and genocide, when they could be used to provide things like glasses or healthcare or schools for our own kids.

And I worry that a lot of times people want to use the word antisemitism to spread, to defend a foreign government. And I just think it’s really important for us to differentiate between those two, because I don’t want to be held accountable to what another government does, simply because I share ethnicity with the people who live there. And I know the same for my Jewish sisters and brothers.

And he nails something I’ve wanted to hear for years:

We have a two-year runway to do the things that Democrats haven’t been doing for a very long time, which is about persuading people. I think Democrats, we do this thing where we have these polls, and the poll tells us what’s popular. And we just say the thing that’s popular, and we wonder why nobody wants to join us. … We have given up on the idea that you can actually persuade people. There’s a reason why I go to 101 different cities. Not because they’re all Democrats. It’s because I want to prove that if you’re willing to take your message — if it’s authentic to you, if you believe in it — and have that conversation with folks in places where they say you can’t, you actually can start to change people’s minds.

The case against him revolves around guilt by association: He campaigned with Hasan Piker, who has said things like “America deserved 9-11.” (But Piker didn’t say anything like that in front of El-Sayed, who has called that comment “dumb”. El-Sayed himself has not said anything similar.) He was supported in the primary by the Democratic Socialists of America, whose platform includes planks that some people find far-out or objectionable. But El-Sayed does not call himself a Democratic Socialist and has not endorsed that platform.

Pay attention to what he says and does.

So far, the media freakout against El-Sayed isn’t drawing any marquee figures. To her credit, Stevens endorsed El-Sayed immediately after the votes were counted. So has the rest of Michigan’s Democratic establishment. Kamala Harris has endorsed him, and President Obama is working towards party unity.

There is one overriding political threat in America today, and it is fascism, not socialism or communism. We need a Congress that stands clearly in opposition to the fascist and authoritarian vision of the Trump regime. If we have learned anything from watching the Senate lay down for Todd Blanche to be approved as attorney general, it’s that Republican senators will not defend our democracy or the rule of law.

In this situation, I’m for any Democrat. But I particularly like El-Sayed.

August 10, 2026 – 10:00 am Categories: Articles | Comments (12)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

This week I’ve gotten fascinated by the winner of Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, Abdul El-Sayed. I hadn’t paid attention to him until last week, when the Sift came out the day before the election. I heard the “he’s unelectable because of X, Y, and Z” arguments and looked around for something solid to hang them on. Finding very little, I started listening to what he had to say and became charmed. Democrats should be happy they have such a personable, intelligent, and articulate candidate.

The media loves to focus on the ideological nature of the progressive/centrist divide in the Democratic Party, but I’m not convinced the voters care that much about it. In the most striking cases of progressives winning primaries — El-Sayed vs. Stevens, Mamdani vs. Cuomo, all the way back to AOC vs. Crowley in 2018 — the progressive was just the better retail politician: more personable, more articulate, better at making voters feel heard and cared about. The Democratic establishment has gotten way too focused on name-recognition and fund-raising ability, with the result that their candidates are often getting outplayed on the campaign trail.

Anyway, I’ve been struck since Tuesday by the vehemence of the anti-El-Sayed voices in the media. Republicans have launched a full-scale red scare against the “communist” or “terrorist” threat. And a few Democrats have not been much better: By continuing to talk about “electability” after the primary ship has sailed, they’re giving cover to the Republican lies about El-Sayed. They’re communicating that if those lies make you feel uneasy about supporting him, maybe you should back away.

So the main message of this week’s featured post is: Listen to him. Judge him by what he says and does, not by what other people say about him or the labels they try to attach to him. If you listen to him and don’t like him so much that you’re willing to give Trump another senator, that’s your decision to make. But don’t be manipulated.

That post should be out around 10 EDT.

The weekly summary has the economy to cover, with a bad jobs report, continuing inflation, and a huge budget deficit that nobody seems to talk about. Todd Blanche got confirmed, after much public handwringing by Republican senators who ultimately caved in to Trump the way they always do. I’m losing track of the Iran War — are we claiming to have a deal this week or threatening to obliterate their civilization again? And have we run out of missiles yet? With all that going wrong for the Trump regime, it must be time for a major distraction in Congress: Cue the Anthony Fauci contempt vote.

I’ll try to get that out between noon and 1.

August 10, 2026 – 8:57 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Going Long

So, how did we get here? Not because one party discovered a winning campaign slogan, a charismatic leader, or because of one presidential election. We arrived here because one political movement developed a deep understanding of how power operates within the American constitutional system.

– John F. Terzano, “The Long Game“

This week’s featured post is “Power is more than just votes.“

Ongoing stories

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the Iran War

Early on, critics of the war in Iran pointed to the Trump regime’s lack of any definition of victory or plan to get there. The prevailing strategy (if you can call it that) seemed to be that if we just killed enough people and blew up enough stuff, good things would happen. Most media talking heads found this unconvincing. But even those who couldn’t see how we were going to win rarely raised the possibility that we might lose, or perhaps even were in the process of losing. Inside the MAGA echo chamber, that judgment is still viewed as heretical and perhaps even absurd. (How could we be losing? We’re still the stronger power. We can hurt them much more than they can hurt us.)

Little by little, though, the idea that the US was losing began to break through. Center-left pundits breathed a sigh of relief when the memorandum of understanding was signed: Perhaps it would provide a face-saving way for Trump to end hostilities while quietly accepting an outcome placing the US and its allies in a somewhat worse position than before the war started — which is what defeat really means.

But the vagueness in the MOU could not be resolved to both parties satisfaction, so once again missiles started flying and oil stopped flowing.

This time around, though, observers are being bolder in their assessments. Lately I’ve begun seeing not just admissions that Trump’s war is lost, but analyses of why and how it was lost. Military thinkers like Phillips O’Brien have been saying this for a while. But that boldness has now begun to filter out to closer-to-the-mainstream pundits like Paul Krugman.

Krugman starts with a simple point: The US has lost wars before: Vietnam, Afghanistan, and arguably Iraq. But this loss seems different: The main problem isn’t that the public is losing the will to keep fighting (though it is). This time there’s a real military reason to sue for peace: We’re running out of munitions — so much so that our ability to fulfill our other military commitments is in doubt.

He points to this chart from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which estimates that (even if we stop the war immediately) we won’t fully replenish our supply of Patriot missiles until 2029.

Imagine how you would look at that graph if you were Taiwan counting on the US to protect it from China, or our NATO ally Estonia evaluating a threat from Russia. Protect us with what? you might wonder.

The regime’s response to this observation is to divert attention from it.

The administration’s response to such reports, exemplified by recent remarks by Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, is that

· Munitions aren’t depleted

· Anyone leaking the fact that they are depleted should go to jail

· It’s Joe Biden’s fault

Given the nature of Trump-speak, Waltz’s statement is in effect an admission that the U.S. military is now in deep trouble.

Krugman goes on to wonder how that happened, and locates the problem in Trump’s fundamental unwillingness to face unpleasant facts, and his kill-the-messenger attitude when someone tries to make him do so: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doesn’t want to tell Trump the bad news, the survivors of Hegseth’s purge of the top generals and admirals are unwilling to tell Hegseth the bad news, and so on down the line.

In nutshell, this is the same problem that Vladimir Putin has faced in Ukraine. He keeps making mistakes because he doesn’t get accurate information. And he keeps getting inaccurate information because he punishes people who try to make him recognize his past mistakes.

And there’s another resemblance between the Trump Pentagon and Putin’s military:

Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump began with an astonishingly stupid theory of war: the belief that performative masculinity is how you win. Hegseth literally believes that the secret of military might in an age of AI-enabled drones that can travel hundreds of miles is more testosterone. … [T]he fixed belief that “lethality” is how you win surely led to basic inability to anticipate the blindingly obvious: that we have a limited supply of sophisticated weapons and that the Iranians would close the Straits of Hormuz.

and Todd Blanche

Apparently Blanche has made a deal with Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis to save his nomination.

Acting US attorney general Todd Blanche issued a formal order late on Sunday terminating Donald Trump’s $1.8bn “anti-weaponization fund” to compensate his political allies, a move that follows weeks of negotiations with two Republican senators who were blocking his nomination to become attorney general.

Blanche has been claiming under oath that the fund was dead, but had refused until now to issue a formal order terminating it. President Trump still strongly supports the idea, so no one believed the fund wouldn’t revive again as soon as Blanche was approved.

The document released by Blanche on Sunday night also limits the scope of another provision of the settlement that provided broad immunity for Trump and members of his family from tax audits. It clarifies that the tax audit immunity agreement “applies only retroactively” to claims open at the time of the settlement and does not protect the president from examination of future tax filings.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, where Cornyn and Tillis both are members, will vote on Blanche’s nomination tomorrow.

The slush fund, which would reward Trump loyalists for beating up police officers on his behalf, was wildly unpopular and hasn’t been implemented. But Trump continues to insist that the slush fund is a great idea. He describes the violent January 6 thugs as

the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration. … Perhaps there has never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history. They are suffering still, many ruined, and I felt that they should be given compensation for what has been done to them. … I will always feel that these victims of government abuse should be paid back for what they were forced to endure

So look for them to get taxpayer money somehow, and don’t be surprised when Blanche cooperates.

But I will be surprised if Blanche cooperates with anybody trying to bring Epstein conspirators to justice. New Mexico is investigating what happened at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch near Santa Fe. But DoJ has not responded to state investigators’ request for documents. Probably they’ll have to sue.

and the climate

Alexander Hurst sees the French and Spanish wildfires as the result to environmental warfare by the United States, which is doing its worst to undermine the fight against climate change. The EU, he says, should retaliate economically.

there is something additional of consequence that we can do: use the power of the single market to make the world’s worst ecological actor change course, or at least make it pay to fund the global effort to adapt to the climate crisis. … Let’s extend the EU’s emissions trading system (ETS) carbon market to all sectors, beef up the “carbon border tax” to protect against retaliation, slap tariffs on finished goods and services from the US that have easy substitutes and place export taxes on materials and intermediate components used in US-located production. All that cash could then be pooled, shared and earmarked for decarbonisation and adaptation.

and the Michigan Senate race

Abdul El-Sayed appears to have a commanding lead going into tomorrow’s primary. He’s supposed to be one of the “socialist” candidates (though he denies the label), while competitor Haley Stevens is the candidate of the Democratic establishment. So the usual “centrist” or “moderate” voices in the party are freaking out.

I’m not seeing it. Like any candidate, El-Sayed’s statements can be cherry-picked for something that sounds radical, but when I listen to longer clips I don’t get that vibe from him. El-Sayed is a Muslim, a child of immigrants from Egypt, and a critic of the Israeli war crimes in Gaza, while Stevens is backed by AIPAC, so some combination of Islamophobia and antisemitism is in the air, though the candidates haven’t explicitly invoked it.

If El-Sayed does win, especially if he wins by a large margin, look for pundits to go wild about the socialist takeover of the Democratic Party. But I think Vox’ Astead Herndon has the better frame: It’s not the left rising. It’s the center falling.

If you ask people what people like Bernie Sanders stand for, they’ll tell you about Medicare for All and free college and all sorts of things. But mainstream Democrats seem (as Herndon says) “rudderless”. They’re not Trump, but what are they?

I don’t think the Democratic base agrees with every position articulated by successful left-wing candidates — like “all deportations are wrong” (as NYC’s Darializa Avila Chevalier told me) — or have suddenly become committed democratic socialists. But I do think the left is on the right side of the gateway issues the base is currently prioritizing: a working-class-led affordability agenda, a skepticism of artificial intelligence, and a moral opposition to President Donald Trump’s war against Iran and to Israel’s campaigns of violence in Lebanon and Gaza. Those issues, more than any others, have defined the Democratic Party’s internal battles since 2024. …

Stevens, [Rep. James] Clyburn, and the party’s leadership would prefer to make this a referendum on the left — on the acceptability of its candidates and its media figures. But the base is communicating something else: a lack of confidence in the center, and in a version of establishment politics that prizes seniority and loyalty over voters’ values. Establishment collapse also explains the Democratic results that don’t fit neatly on the moderate vs. progressive binary: like Attorney General Phil Weiser’s victory in Colorado or whatever is happening in the Wisconsin governor’s race.

As I explained a few weeks ago, we’re not talking about adopting a whole new economic system. We’re just arguing about where to draw the line between the public and private sectors.

Here’s the funny thing: After all the scare-talk about “Communists”, it’s the Trump administration that wants to own the means of production.

Critics of the Democratic Party keep telling us that nobody cares about democracy issues, and that instead the party’s focus needs to be on affordability and other kitchen-table issues. Here, Pete Buttigieg shows how you make the connection:

Gerrymandering lets politicians choose their voters instead of the other way around. Until we end that, it will remain difficult to achieve the things most Americans already agree on: higher wages, lower household expenses, and better services that become possible when billionaires start paying their fair share in taxes.

Back in 2000, John McCain came from nowhere (polling below the margin of error) to be George W. Bush’s main challenger in the Republican primaries. He did it by framing his central issue — campaign finance reform — exactly like that: No matter what you want out of our government, you won’t be able to get it if we lose democracy.

and you also might be interested in …

Felony charges against former Olympian David Hearn have been dropped.

Review: Trump’s made a sweetheart deal with a contractor to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The contractor screwed up, resulting in the pool lining peeling. Because Trump can’t take responsibility for even the smallest mistake, he needed to blame someone else. So he announced that the pool had been vandalized. Under intense pressure to find a vandal, US Attorney Janet Pirro indicted Hearn.

Friday, Pirro dropped the case, citing new information that she got from the Interior Department about — wait for it — “flawed installation by the contractor”. Pirro, a former Fox News host, is one of the most subservient US attorneys out there, but even she realized she could not go to court with the case she had.

Trump, of course, still is having none of it.

To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it, and other elements of the surrounding area. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!

The Guardian tells the whole sad and sordid story from the beginning.

Luis Andrade was brought to the US when he was three, and became valedictorian of his 2024 high school class before entering TCU. He has now been deported to El Salvador.

Another way that ICE detention centers resemble concentration camps: ICE doctors have force-fed at least 10 detainees on hunger strikes.

Forcing medical procedures on detained hunger strikers is seen as torture by many human rights groups and medical organizations. According to medical ethicist Dr Matthew Wynia, the director of the center for bioethics and humanities at the University of Colorado, medical staff follow a code of ethics that respects patients’ bodily autonomy. … “The idea of health professionals serving as agents of the state, rather than protectors of our patients, has a notorious history. And for the medical profession, we really don’t want to go down that path again,” Wynia added.

Back in March, ICE released a Haitian immigrant with mental-health issues. She was wearing summer clothes in Pittsburgh with temperatures in the 20s. She froze to death at a bus stop. Her family is now suing.

Not sure what to do with this factoid: Organic eggs from free-range hens have roughly twice the carbon footprint of factory-farm eggs. That sounds bad, but then you get to the reason why:

This is because organic free-range models need more chickens for the same number of eggs produced, as birds living in cages tend to be more efficient.

The frame here is that we’re looking at living beings purely as factors of production. So this living being is less efficient than that living being. That attitude seems to me to be a big part of the problem. I can imagine a similar study pointing out the virtues of using slaves for farm labor.

The article goes on to note that the organic eggs might be better for the environment in other ways, like pesticide toxicity and biodiversity. Also, the study was based on data from 2009-2010, so it would not account for more recent changes in organic chicken-raising.

Steve Benen on Maddowblog examines a White House claim that Trump “does not bluff” and finds the exact opposite to be true.

The bottom line is unsettling but simple: The incumbent president often just … says stuff. Maybe he intends to do what he says, maybe he just enjoys making declarations that sound good in his mind, or maybe he tries to follow through but can’t find lawyers willing to go along with his weird schemes.

Given this context, I’m amazed how often Trump gets quoted in the media, and even moves markets with his meaningless words. I am reminded of a Shakespearian insult I recent heard repeated:

I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick, nobody marks you.

and let’s close with something astronomical

So we’ve all seen sunrise and moonrise, and you’ve probably seen video astronauts have made of the Earth rising over the Moon. Well, this is like that, but rarer: Here’s a video of Saturn rising over the Moon, taken through a ground-based telescope.

August 3, 2026 – 12:24 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (8)

Power is more than just votes

Good short- and medium-term political news has emboldened some writers to remind us of the longer-term bad news.

The good news is that polls for the fall elections keep looking better. The unpopular and unpromising Iran War, Trump’s tariffs, the continuing inflation that the war and the tariffs make worse, ICE’s repeated acts of unjustified and illegal violence, the regime’s increasingly blatant corruption, the undying plan to reward Trump’s January 6 cop-beaters, and the Mad King’s obsession with his past defeats and continuing vanity projects (ballroom, arch, reflecting pool, coin, and putting his name on train stations, airports, bridges, investment accounts, drug plans, a peace institute, and a performance space) that do nothing to improve voters’ lives — it’s starting to add up.

Trump’s approval rating is at its lowest point ever — lower than after January 6, even. Quinnipiac has him at 32% approval versus 58% disapproval, which includes 52% strong disapproval. (Strong disapproval over 50% seems to be exceedingly rare. Nixon appears to have topped out at 48% strong disapproval, while George W. Bush hit 51%. Trump may be setting records here, with strong disapproval like nobody has ever seen before.) And that’s transferring to Republican candidates: The Democratic lead in the generic congressional poll is now at 11% in the Emerson College poll, which is a bit of an outlier. But every major recent poll has Democrats up at least 2%, with an average of 6.4%.

Polls about individual issues have Trump underwater across the board. And what seems likely to turn around between now and November? Will he win the Iran War? Wow us with some completed vanity project that makes us forget our problems? More likely, low-information voters who generally have liked Trump in the past will start to tune in before the election and say, “What? Is that still a problem? He’s in favor of what? He made how much money since getting elected again?”

Of course polling isn’t perfect and things can always change, but I’m finding this convincing: The fall elections are looking good.

So what’s looking bad? Money, to start with. Elon Musk by himself spent over $300 million to elect Republicans (mostly Trump) in 2024, and that turned out to be a profitable investment. He bought himself new government contracts, massive quantities of government data about people like you, and protection against government investigations. He’s talking about spending $100 million this fall, and that’s probably a lowball estimate.

Now, maybe he’ll waste all that money, the way he wasted $21 million on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race that his candidate lost by double digits. In that race, Musk himself campaigned, and his money became an issue that worked against his candidate.

But what if he’s smarter this time around? He says he’s funding get-out-the-vote efforts. What if those efforts include making deep-fake videos of Democratic candidates and distributing them via targeted social-media advertising? This fall, you may not even know the lies that motivate your neighbor to get out and vote Republican.

But the long-term bad news runs deeper than that, as articles by John F. Terzano and Jason Sattler point out. Basically, they are two points of view on the same unsettling story: Over decades, conservatives have built a political, legal, intellectual, and media infrastructure that is well suited to the way power actually works in the United States. That integrated power-seeking and power-wielding system can survive one or two bad elections and quickly re-assert itself. Terzano sums up what began happening after Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964:

Conservatives learned to focus on something much larger than just presidential elections: the institutions that develop and preserve ideas, cultivate future leaders, and sustain political movements across generations. That requires the long-term work of building power from the ground up. It requires discipline, persistence, and a willingness to invest in institutions whose greatest influence may not be realized for decades.

An example of how this now works is the way the Right bounced back from the disasters of the second Bush administration. By the time he left office, George W. Bush had over-50% strong disapproval, just like Trump does. The combination of unwinnable wars and the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression led his party to massive defeats in 2006 and 2008. By the time Obama took office in 2009, he had not just a landslide victory himself, but a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority in the Senate (though Republican legal shenanigans prevented the 60th senator from taking office until the next summer; Obama’s filibuster protection only lasted until Democrats lost Ted Kennedy’s seat the next January).

After that, you might have expected the GOP to spend a couple of election cycles soul-searching and remaking itself, perhaps looking for its own Obama. Instead, it rebranded almost instantly in the Tea Party. Republicans flipped 63 seats in the House in 2010, taking a majority that Obama had to deal with for the rest of his presidency. Almost instantly, the party of tax-cuts-for-the-rich (that didn’t change) had new faces, new slogans, and zero responsibility for anything W had done.

During his brief season of living beyond the reach of the filibuster, Obama did not transform the country or create a new political paradigm. By 2016, Trump represented the rebellion against Bushism (though he still wanted to cut rich people’s taxes). He likewise proved horribly unpopular and lost resoundingly in 2020, ending his term with a failed coup that should have sent him to jail.

But again, the GOP turned on a dime. Trump was back in 2024 and had a clear plan — Project 2025 — for the march towards autocracy that we are seeing now.

More than just elections, conservatives have managed to rewrite the Constitution without anyone voting for the changes. A combination of luck and political hardball has given them a radically partisan 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, despite holding the presidency for about the same amount of time as Democrats since 1992 — and only because their candidates won in 2000 and 2016 with fewer votes than their Democratic opponents.

Repealing Roe v Wade happened with much political attention. But consider these other constitutional rewrites:

  • The unitary executive theory, which was a fringe idea prior to the 1980s, is now in the Constitution. So all the independent agencies Congress created over the decades have lost their independence, and civil service protections are now suspect.
  • Presidential immunity is in the Constitution now.
  • Political contributions are now a form of speech, so virtually any limit on money in politics is now unconstitutional. And corporations have the same freedom of political speech that you do.
  • The “well regulated militia” clause of the Second Amendment is now meaningless, and the Amendment defines an individual right that did not exist prior to 2008.
  • Virtually every provision of the Voting Rights Act is now unenforceable.
  • The insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment is now meaningless.

Amending the Constitution requires a 2/3 vote in Congress and ratification from 3/4 of the states. Do you remember any of that happening with these changes?

Sattler focuses on the media empire the Right has built, with its ability to create new narratives and new issues in virtually no time at all. Everyone understands the role Fox News plays, but most of us don’t appreciate the breadth of the right-wing media machine: Elon Musk’s X is now rigged to promote and distribute right-wing hate while disclaiming any responsibility for it; Meta is becoming a slightly-less-toxic version of X; CBS is remaking itself as a slightly-less-explicit version of Fox; Sinclair puts national messages into the mouths of local broadcasters, as if they thought of this themselves; AM talk radio has not changed since the Rush Limbaugh era; and social media is seeded with small-scale right-wing influencers, some of whom grow into national brands themselves. This combination of diversity and integration allows for experimentation with different messages and framing, together with quick coalescing around whichever new thing works.

The media machine explains how Ken Paxton can ride out his scandals while Graham Platner could not; how “issues” from Obama’s birth certificate to illegal-immigrants-voting can be created from nothing; why the small-scale corruption of Hunter Biden was a much bigger story than the large-scale corruption of Eric and Don Jr.; and so on.

Terzano focuses more on the institutional structure of organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society. Democrats can manage to fund candidates once they begin to catch on, the way James Talerico is raising money now or Bernie Sanders did for his presidential runs. But Republicans have the political equivalent of venture capital: Money is waiting around for start-ups it can fund, like Moms for Liberty, Turning Point USA, or the early Tea Party groups. If you are a conservative with a promising idea, you will not go begging.

The number and wealth of conservative organizations provides career paths that young liberals can only dream about. Young conservative journalists, lawyers, influencers, activists, or candidates are groomed and tracked in ways that liberals are not. (Believe me, I’ve watched young liberal political science graduates try to navigate their sparse options.)

Ideas change minds; institutions change history. This became a defining tenet of the modern conservative movement. Leadership pipelines ensure that today’s school board member becomes tomorrow’s legislator, who becomes governor or attorney general. Today’s young lawyer becomes tomorrow’s appellate judge, and someday a Supreme Court justice.

The upshot of all this is that pro-democracy forces can’t relax, even if they retake Congress this fall and the presidency in 2028. The movement that made Donald Trump and John Roberts and Paul Ryan and Charlie Kirk will not be defeated so easily. There will be new faces, new slogans, and new issues almost immediately. And the right-wing media empire will scoff at the idea that any of these new voices should have to answer for the mistakes and crimes of Donald Trump. They will suddenly discover that Trump, like W before him, was never really a conservative. The new voices will be the true conservatives, the authentic representatives of the great American people.

And they’ll still be cutting billionaires’ taxes.

August 3, 2026 – 10:36 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Polls for the fall election are looking good. Trump is unpopular and Democrats have a sizeable lead in the generic congressional ballot. At the moment, they’re even winning Senate races in states where they shouldn’t, like Texas. It’s now easy to imagine a Democratic House majority next year, and maybe even a Senate majority too. Replacing Trump with a Democrat in 2028 seems more and more likely. The bullet of authoritarianism may only graze us this time.

But this week I paid attention to articles wondering about next time. We thought we had dodged the bullet when we beat Trump in 2020, but somehow that victory didn’t stick. Will this one (if we achieve it) stick? Or will we be right back with a new fascist threat in 2032 or even sooner? Why do Republicans bounce back from defeat faster than Democrats? And why does each rebranding move further out, rather than returning to the center?

The answer is that the conservative movement has an institutional infrastructure powered by patient money. Those institutions will still be in place after Trump is gone, and the money that powers them will be even more motivated. Advocates of democracy need to understand this and prepare to deal with it. That’s the subject of the featured post “Power is more than just votes”, which I hope to get out around 10:30 EDT.

The weekly summary will talk about the war, Todd Blanche’s nomination, this summer’s climate-related wildfires, tomorrow’s Senate primary in Michigan, the demise of the reflecting-pool-vandalism case, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out between noon and 1.

August 3, 2026 – 8:46 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Left of what?

People [are] calling us the “far left” and we are literally just out here talking about funding public schools and keeping hospitals open and paving roads.

– Jess Piper

There is no featured post this week.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. This week’s primary target was the free press. Fortunately, federal judges still believe in the First Amendment.
  • Climate change. This summer continues to set heat records. Next summer should be worse.
  • Iran. Are we entering a new round of escalation or a new round of peace talks? Signals are mixed. But nothing we’re seeing indicates that the conflict will be resolved soon.
  • Ukraine. Ukraine has begun attacking Wildberries warehouses in Russia. Wildberries is said to be “Russia’s Amazon”, a big online shopping site. There may be military equipment passing through its warehouses, but mainly this looks like a way to bring the war home to Russian consumers.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the war with no end in sight

We’ve been getting signals in both directions recently. On the one hand, there are anonymous-source reports that Trump is getting increasingly frustrated with Iranian leadership and going into “revenge mode”.

he has told people that he thinks he can break the Iranians’ will through an aggressive bombing campaign, according to a person familiar with his views.

On the other hand, we’ve had a few days of both sides pausing their attacks while they see if new talks can be started.

I find Josh Marshall’s take insightful. Trump’s frustration, according to the WSJ link above, is that he “keeps making deals with them that they simply break”.

But this whole set of claims is a fantasy. Trump has never had any agreements or deals with the Iranians. What he’s had is a series of notional ceasefires in which nothing of substance or consequence is actually agreed to … But since these ceasefires are only “deals” to begin negotiations the actual war aims and demands of each side eventually seep through. Then they go back to fighting.

The underlying problem is that

Trump lost this conflict in its first days. Everything since then has been his struggle to deny that reality, either with bogus “deals,” more bombing or various threats. … Effective war diplomacy can get you the best and most creative agreement that the circumstances warrant. But that last part is key. Kickass diplomacy is never going to get the side that won the conflict to agree to a deal in which they lost.

Of course it is hard for Trump or his cult followers to fathom how anyone can say he “lost this conflict”, because the US can destroy things and kill people at much higher rates than the Iranians can. (That’s been true since the first days of the war, and it’s still true.) But the victory conditions here are asymmetric. The US wants concessions from Iran: that they stop supporting regional terrorism, developing nuclear weapons, and threatening shipping in the Persian Gulf. But all the destruction we’ve been able to rain down on them has not forced them to give in, and there is little prospect that it ever will. If the war ends without those concessions, the US has lost — even if we’ve knocked down every structure in Iran and killed 10,000 Iranians for every American death.

An analogy might help: Imagine you’re a parent who is trying to force a child to eat the vegetables you’ve put on his plate. You have it in your power to yell at him, send him to bed hungry, take away his favorite toy, or even beat him in ways that would put you in jail if anybody found out. The child can do none of this to you. But as long as he’s not eating the vegetables, you’re losing.

The worse the Iranian conflict is going, the less the Trump regime wants the American people to know. CNN lays out Pete Hegseth’s efforts to “control information, limit access and avoid difficult questions about the war”.

The Pentagon hasn’t held a press briefing in two and a half months. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hasn’t explained the military strategy behind the renewed air strikes. His department hasn’t revealed the circumstances that led to the recent deaths of US service members. … In response to CNN’s request for comment about the press briefing drought, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman Sean Parnell said the U.S. government “has consistently provided comprehensive, real-time updates” on the strikes in Iran.

But “updates” are simply releases stating what the Pentagon wants the public to know. They avoid any interaction where the official accounts might be questioned. Without any official comments on key issues, reporters have been seeking out anonymous sources, which Hegseth is also trying to shut down.

So far, though, Hegseth has not figured out a way to avoid facing questions in Congress, as he did Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee. (At least for now, Congress still controls the money he needs to fight his war. The regime is asking for $87 billion in supplemental spending over and above this year’s budget. $67 billion is related to the war.) But while he can’t avoid facing questions, he doesn’t have to answer them. In this interaction with Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, he just shouts over Ossoff and keeps repeating the same unresponsive talking points.

Somehow, the “historic military victory” Hegseth described four months ago, which will leave the Iranian military “combat-ineffective for years to come”, hasn’t stopped the Iranians from continuing to kill American soldiers, intimidate ships from using the Strait of Hormuz, and terrorize our allies in the region. Hegseth refused to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance there.

I’m not sure who said it first, but numerous people have responded to Hegseth pushing a “Spartan mindset” in the Pentagon with: Maybe that’s why we’re losing to the Persians.

When the war started, many economists predicted oil prices would soar much higher than they did. Paul Krugman explains one reason they didn’t: Ukraine’s missile campaign against Russia’s refineries has noticeably lowered the world’s oil-refining capacity. Why buy oil, Krugman asks, when you can’t refine it?

But the shortage appears on the other side of the refineries: the market for gasoline, diesel and so on. The “crack spread” is the difference between the price of a barrel of oil and the price of the various products refined from that barrel. That spread has risen from $25 to $65.

From the point of view of end users, this is the same as if crude prices had risen an extra $40 per barrel. In effect, the world is coping with the equivalent of $140 oil even though the headline price is “only” around $100.

Meanwhile, who knows what’s going on with Saudi Arabia? Wednesday, the Trump regime announced a deal that would give the Saudis the kind of pre-nuclear-weapon capabilities we’re trying to destroy in Iran. It’s the kind of historically dumb idea that only a man deeply in the pocket of the kingdom could love.

Then after the deal was signed, Trump added a condition: The Saudis have to join the Abraham Accords that normalize relationships between Israel and other Arabian countries. That’s probably a deal-breaker for the Saudis. Stay tuned.

and the environment

The science journal Nature reports:

The El Niño climate pattern that is strengthening in the Pacific Ocean is on track to be the largest one in at least 150 years, researchers said today during a press briefing. If the monster forecasts they presented pan out, the surge of heat that the El Niño will unleash from the ocean, combined with warming from human-caused climate change, will probably make next year the hottest on record — and cue up extreme weather in many parts of the world.

Another distinguished journal, Science, has stopped pulling its punches.

When I talk to people about [science funding] (and that includes some journalists as well) and say what I’m about to at the end of this paragraph I am sometimes met with disbelief. But I mean what I say and I am trying my best to say what I mean: The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.

That’s it. That’s the story. They are naturally not putting it in those words, but instead talking about “gold standard science” and the “reproducibility crisis” and funding “bold inquiry” for “transformational breakthroughs”. This is all bullshit, and it’s important to realize that. Shameless hand-waving bullshit, delivered in a how-dare-you-think-otherwise manner is the defining style of the entire Trump administration. You can see it in every appointee, in every part of the executive branch, and in the pronouncements of all of Trump’s supporters. I realize that this is a simple heuristic to apply, and a very unambiguous and unflattering one, but I find it to be all too useful and all too accurate. Give it a try.

Wildfires in France and Spain have forced 300K people to evacuate. AFP:

According to the Gironde fire service, the blaze generated a rare “pyrocumulonimbus” cloud, creating its own winds and whirlwinds and making it “erratic and unmanageable”, firefighter Captain Nicolas Braz told AFP.

Trump is back to his absurd fantasy that forests can or should be “managed” by clearing away leaves and other debris. Canada’s wildfires are in inaccessible boreal forests that cover nearly half the country’s land. They’re burning because of the global warming that Trump denies, and not because Canadians should be out there with rakes and leaf blowers.

Laws against tampering with your vehicles emission-monitoring sensors? Ignore them, the government is.

and ICE

More than 300K Haitian refugees are losing their legal status today. ICE is gearing up for major round-ups, particularly in cities like Springfield, Ohio — site of the infamous dog-and-cat-eating hoax that J. D. Vance pushed during 2024 campaign.

After an ICE agent killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine earlier this month, it came out that the agent had a history of violent behavior, including domestic violence. It turns out that’s not unusual. If you’re looking for a gun-carrying job in immigration enforcement, violent thuggery doesn’t seem to be a deal-breaker. Mother Jones reports:

On July 22, the advocacy group Ohio Immigrant Alliance released a list of 59 active and former ICE and CBP agents charged with sexual and violent crimes between 2007 and 2026.

Around the time Trump sent the National Guard to DC, he also sent it to Memphis. That hasn’t attracted as much attention because (unlike California Governor Newsom or Illinois Governor Pritzker) Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Lee welcomed the troops — despite the fact that crime in Memphis was already at 25-year low.

Now it turns out that crime was a pretext and the National Guard served as a Trojan horse. They were accompanied by an influx of agents from federal agencies, who are mainly engaging in an immigration crackdown. The immigrant community in Memphis is just as terrorized as the ones in Minneapolis or Los Angeles were, but they are getting little attention.

and tariffs

Trump loves tariffs, so he keeps imposing them. The rationale for why he has the power to do so keeps changing. As one source of authority is denied by the courts, he moves on to another.

Here’s the latest power grab:

Levied under a statute called Section 301, the administration has said these new tariffs are designed to target countries that have not effectively banned forced labor from their supply chains.

OK, what countries would that be? 80 of them, it turns out, including such famous slave nations as Canada and the UK. They all get tariffs between 10% and 12%.

It’s a sham.

And then there are special tariffs against Canada — up to 50% “covering products ranging from wine to hockey sticks to cement”. Neither liberal Paul Krugman nor conservative National Review can find a point.

For decades, people have criticized tariffs by comparing them to the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, which is widely blamed for helping turn the 1929 stock market crash into a global Great Depression. Well, the legal authorization Trump is pointing to for his authority is precisely Smoot-Hawley, which was never formally repealed.

Krugman says the new tariffs will have little immediate economic impact

But the auto industry, like business in general, has been put on notice that the huge flows of goods and services that cross those borders every day may be cut off whenever Trump has a temper tantrum. And this really is a temper tantrum, in the sense that there’s no strategy here. The new tariffs will hurt American consumers, and nobody expects them to extract any concessions from Canadians who are only getting more outraged at the United States.

National Review asks Congress to take its power back.

More broadly, this episode only reinforces our conviction that, despite the best efforts of the Supreme Court, the current state of the law still gives the president too much latitude to turn tariffs into his playthings. That has to stop. A tariff is a tax. Taxation is, under the Constitution, a matter for Congress. When it comes to tariffs, Congress must do its constitutional duty, reverse the excessive delegation of its powers to the executive, and take back control.

This is precisely what Trump loves about tariffs: He gets to impose them like a dictator, without consulting Congress. Whenever he’s feeling impotent in the world — as he must be now, given his low poll numbers and how ineffectual his bombardment of Iran has been — decreeing some new tariff makes him feel powerful again.

But there’s a bigger issue here: For more than a century, Canada has been America’s best friend in the world. Countries have got to wonder why they should want to be America’s friend these days. And why should they negotiate agreements with Trump, when he’ll break them the next time he’s jonesing for a power rush?

and Elon’s crashing companies

It’s possible that recent weeks have marked the beginning of the Musk crash I’ve been anticipating for a very long time. SpaceX stock has lost about half its value in the last few weeks, going from $225 on June 15 and $129 on Tuesday to $111 this morning. Meanwhile Tesla is down to $308 a share from a peak of nearly $500 in December and $380 on Tuesday.

But the mystery isn’t why those stocks have gone down, but why they’re still this high. Elon Musk has a history of announcing grand plans that don’t come to fruition, or at least don’t come to fruition in anything like the time scale he predicted — robotaxis by 2020, humans landing on Mars by 2024, fully autonomous Teslas by “next year” every year since 2018. And yet somehow, the stock market keeps pricing his companies as if the things he predicts might actually happen reasonably soon.

Brad DeLong looks at Tesla, which he describes as “a $50 billion company wearing a $1.2 Trillion magical rainbow unicorn costume”. He provides this chart showing Tesla’s flat revenue stream and declining earnings.

And yet Tesla’s stock is priced like like a company growing by leaps and bounds, at 280 times earnings. (Another car company, Toyota, is at 10 times earnings. A company that actually is growing rapidly, Nvidia, is at 30 times earnings.) Why? Well, the Morningstar rating service explains in a behind-a-paywall report:

  • Tesla has the potential to disrupt multiple industries with its technology for [electric vehicles], [autonomous vehicles], batteries, and humanoid robots.
  • Tesla’s full self-driving software should generate growing profits in the coming years as the technology continues to improve, leading to a robotaxi service and increased adoption by Tesla drivers.
  • Tesla’s humanoid robot will create shareholder value as its ability to perform multiple functions will transform manufacturing and be useful to consumers.

The word “potential” does a lot of work in that analysis. It embodies the assumption that all the promises Musk has made are worth hard cash.

Even more than Tesla, SpaceX is a “magical rainbow unicorn” company. Even Morningstar sounds skeptical:

Loyal holders of companies run by Elon Musk have a very long time horizon and are often willing to look past interim milestones toward the prospects of big bets on moonshot projects and the grander vision on the horizon.

But somebody has to keep putting up money to cover those “big bets”.

SpaceX faces an average annual cash burn of $84 billion through 2034, according to Morgan Stanley, which does not expect positive free cash flow until 2035.

That means SpaceX requires a constant stream of new investors (or old investors willing to double down on their bets) for nearly the next decade. If those investors fail to appear, the magical unicorn will never arrive.

Tempting as it may be in this case, I’ve never sold a stock short, and I’m not recommending you do either, because there’s no predicting how long it will take investors to wise up. As John Maynard Keynes said:

You need to keep in mind that the stock market can remain irrational a lot longer than you can remain solvent.

Bloomberg’s Bethany Benjamin observes that when you measure sales expectations against actual sales, Tesla’s Cybertruck was a bigger marketing disaster than Ford’s Edsel.

and you also might be interested in …

NPR reviews the current state of the midterm race to control the Senate.

In Maine, Troy Jackson has replaced Graham Platner as Susan Collins’ opponent. There seems to have been little rancor in the convention that chose him, which is impressive given the circumstances. After it became clear Jackson would be nominated, all his rivals stepped aside. The final vote was 566-5.

Here’s a chunk of his acceptance speech:

For nearly 30 years, Collins has told Maine that she is “concerned”. She was concerned while she rubber-stamped Trump’s Medicaid cuts and gutted our healthcare. She was concerned when she cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy, concerned when she confirmed justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. And really tragically, she was concerned when she gave ICE billions to terrorize our neighbors and murder people in the streets with no accountability.

But concern does not lower the costs of groceries or gas. Concern does not keep our maternity wards of rural hospitals like down in Lincoln County open. Concern does not restore all the rights that she’s taken away. Maine does not need another six years of concern. We need someone with courage. We need a fighter, and we need a senator who remembers exactly who sent them to Washington, which is you.

South Carolina will be the first Democratic primary in the 2028 cycle, followed by Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia

Trump’s war against the “woke” Smithsonian continues. On July 4, the White House released a report on the Smithsonian’s “ideological capture” by social-justice activists. The Organization of American Historians wasn’t impressed.

“Saving America’s Story” is part of a broad attempt to return the nation to a vision of America that never actually existed and that serves the ends of superficial patriotism. The White House seeks to impose a narrow, singular, and celebratory narrative of American greatness populated by a mythologized set of heroes. Crucially, the proposed narrative would erase the conflict, struggle, and diversity—the complexity—that have always defined the American experience. The report insists that history itself is essentially, for Americans, a special and providential story of triumph.

Friday, Trump followed up with an executive order.

The Secretary of the Interior, acting through the Director of the National Park Service (NPS) and in coordination with the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, shall install temporary signage along the NPS-maintained sidewalks and walkways used by the public to access the Museum, informing visitors of the findings of the Report and of the policy set forth in section 1 of this order. Such signage shall notify visitors that the Museum exhibits should be renovated consistent with the findings in the Report and direct visitors to locations and resources for accurate information regarding America’s history.

This is supposed to “restore trust” in the Smithsonian.

That’s typical Trumpian NewSpeak. He “restores trust” in an institution — the Smithsonian, our elections — by making up lies about how hopelessly corrupted they are. Surely no one has done more to erode trust in America than Trump himself.

I hope visitors to the National Mall find appropriate ways to deface these propaganda signs and/or ridicule them on social media.

Megan McArdle (my WaPo subscription hasn’t quite run out yet) isn’t someone I usually agree with. But in this column, she segues from the new Odyssey movie to the widespread tendency to become pointlessly enraged by cultural incidents that don’t really affect the lives of anyone you may care about. She arrives at this wise point:

However soothing it feels in the moment, all this manufactured fury is stealing our real lives, bit by bit. The high wears off, the internet mob dissipates and there we are, exactly as lonely or frustrated or sad as we were before. Meanwhile, we have not fixed any of the underlying problems, so we feel even worse.

That’s addiction in a nutshell: Something seems like it will make you feel better, but you end up feeling worse — and more in need of something to make you feel better. People who have been lost at sea talk about the temptation to drink ocean water. Their compatriots who gave in to that urge didn’t make it back, because the salt just made them thirstier and thirstier.

Another WaPo columnist, Jason Willick, reviews what happened to the Constitution’s stipulation that only Congress can declare war.

The Iran conflict makes plain that Congress has lost the war power the Founders assigned it. On matters of war and peace, the Constitution has, in effect, been amended without a vote. … America’s foreign policy is post-constitutional, with Senate-ratified treaties largely replaced by “executive agreements” and the legislature’s war power now vested primarily in the executive.

His retelling of how this happened is mostly correct, but leaves out something I think is important: The Founders (particularly the Virginians like Jefferson and Madison) didn’t picture the new Republic fielding a large standing army, which they saw as a threat to liberty. (That’s why a well-regulated militia of citizen volunteers is “necessary to the security of a free state“.) Immediate attacks would be met by state and local militias, who could be federalized under the President’s command if the conflict grew. But (as Madison found out when he tried to conquer Canada during the War of 1812) militias hate to invade foreign countries. A foreign war, or a war against a European power like Britain or Spain, would require creating a large federal army, (or, more accurately, building a large army around the skeleton of a small peacetime army) which Congress would have to fund. So of course a foreign war could only be fought with congressional support.

The modern situation, where the President always has the wherewithal to wage a major conflict for months before needing Congress, was unforeseen (and is part of the reason the Second Amendment is obsolete).

The US military has blown up 67 boats that it claims were smuggling drugs, killing 221 people — basically executing people without trials. The result? No effect on fentanyl, which the regime claimed was the target. But that was predictable, because fentanyl mostly comes into the country via land routes. But there was a temporary effect on cocaine, which is the drug the boats were actually trying to smuggle. However, the cartels adjusted, and things are back to normal now.

Preliminary findings two months after the strikes began last September showed that they had disrupted smuggling routes, the DEA analysts reported, causing increases in cocaine prices and drug-related violence. But prices have since reverted to previous levels.“Smugglers have adapted to the intensified pressure,” they wrote. “Price and availability have not been noticeably affected.” … Pentagon officials told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee last month that DEA analysis of confiscated cocaine showed high levels of purity, according to a congressional aide familiar with the briefing. High purity suggests supply remains consistent, the DEA official said; dealers do not need to dilute the drug to stretch inventory.

As in our attacks on Iran, blowing things up and killing people seems to be an end in itself. It doesn’t need to be justified by results.

and let’s close with big Finnish

I got my solar panels working this week, so renewable power is on my mind. The well-publicized problem with wind and solar power is intermittency: Sometimes the sun shines and the wind blows, and sometimes it doesn’t. The obvious answer is as old as Genesis (i.e., Joseph’s interpretation of Pharaoah’s dreams): Store the power when it’s plentiful and draw that supply back down when it’s not. But how?

Batteries tend to be techy things that use a lot of materials that may be in short supply or require some environmentally-destructive mining. But Pornainen, a town of about 5000 people in southern Finland, has a much lower-tech strategy: a sand battery, which is basically a giant thermos bottle filled with crushed soapstone. The idea is to heat up the rock at times when electricity is plentiful and cheap, and then use the hot rocks to produce steam at times when electricity is scarcer and more expensive.

I think I’m unlikely to ever put a sand battery in my back yard. But here’s a thought that I think needs wider circulation: The climate crisis isn’t going to resolve through one magic-bullet solution. It’s going to take a lot of smaller ideas that creatively adapt to the circumstances of particular places and purposes. (If you want to flesh that idea out, read the sci-fi novel The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.)

July 27, 2026 – 12:43 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (4)