The Weekly Sift

The transition to pathocracy begins when a disordered individual emerges as a leader figure. While some members of the ruling class are appalled by the brutality and irresponsibility of the leader and his acolytes, his disordered personality appeals to some psychologically normal individuals. They find him charismatic. His impulsiveness is mistaken for decisiveness; his narcissism for confidence; his recklessness for fearlessness.

– Steve Taylor, “The Problem of Pathocracy“

This week’s featured post is “The Longer View“, where three articles try to answer the question “What’s wrong with those people in the Trump administration?”

Ongoing stories

This week I didn’t have the time and energy to look at the ongoing stories I usually keep track of. I’ll try to do better next week.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was still talking about Iran

I don’t think I need to say a lot about the progress of the war: The US and Israel continue to blow things up in Iran and in Lebanon, and while Iranian casualties are far larger than ours, we’re still getting our own people killed. And they’re dying for some goal that seems to exist only in Trump’s inarticulate mind. He certainly hasn’t figured out a way to explain it to the rest of us.

As the cartoon indicates, even though everyday Americans are largely insulted from the killing (at least until the next big terrorist attack), the war has significant effects everyone can see: immediately, higher gas prices, and down the road, higher prices overall.

Trump appears to have thought through none of this. Articles about how the go-to-war decision got made are largely based on anonymous sources, so they’re not as reliable as I’d like. But they do all paint a similar picture: Trump imagined his Iran attack going like Venezuela: He’d take out the country’s leadership, and the next leaders would be so intimidated they’d cooperate with whatever plan he came up with. It would all be over in a few days.

No one else thought it would go that way, including a lot of folks inside the administration. What has happened since was easily predictable: Iran’s theocratic leadership would take a next-man-up approach. The next leader would face the prospect of martyrdom with the same dispassion the last leader did and would refuse to surrender. Iran would attack US allies in the region with missiles and drones, and they would shut the Strait of Hormuz, jacking up world oil prices.

But in his second administration, Trump has surrounded himself with opportunists, weaklings, and cowards. No one is willing to lose his job to save the country from some wrong-headed notion that gets into the Great Leader’s head. So: We’re at war, gas prices are high and rising, overall inflation will start rising soon, victory remains undefined, and the Iranian regime is as entrenched as ever. We face the prospect of either stopping our attack without any lasting accomplishment, or significantly escalating the war with either ground troops or nuclear weapons.

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So far, I haven’t heard anyone in the administration talk specifically about nuclear weapons, so my mention of them in the previous paragraph may seem unwarranted.

But I worry about them anyway. As I’ve said before, Trump has only two ways of dealing with opposition: buy them off or intimidate them. If opponents refuse to be intimidated, he makes a series of ever more extreme threats — which he is then on the spot to carry out.

We’re already running low on conventional munitions, so Trump’s threats to hit Iran “20 times harder” if they don’t surrender are mostly empty — unless he goes to nukes. I have trouble picturing him backing down on his threats, given what he’s said in the past, and I also don’t trust the people around him to tell him no.

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Wednesday, Iran flexed its cyber-terrorism muscle. The Iranian hacker group Handala somehow got high-level privileges on the network of medical device maker Stryker. At the very least, the attack will delay delivery of devices. But it raises the possibility of homocidal mischief in the future.

Chillingly, Stryker’s chief of IT emphasizes that nothing went wrong on the technical side:

I build the robots that perform your surgery. The defibrillators that restart your heart. The systems that let your nurse find your doctor at three in the morning when something goes wrong. Twenty-five billion dollars a year. Fifty-six thousand employees. Sixty-one countries. Every device in every country, managed from one console.

On March 11th, someone who was not me sat down at that console and erased everything. I should be precise. They did not hack us. They logged in. … My security tool did not fail. It performed exactly as designed. It wiped every device it was told to wipe, without error, on schedule. The architect of my destruction was my own IT budget line item. The command went out. The devices obeyed.

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The man who rammed his vehicle into a synagogue in Michigan quite likely was motivated by learning that four of his family members had been killed in Lebanon by an Israel bombing raid. He was wrong to do what he did, and it is fortunate no one died but the perpetrator. But it’s not hard for me to imagine being in that situation and feeling like the only conceivable response is to kill someone.

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Saturday, Trump asked other countries to help clean up his mess.

In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump called on the UK, China, France, Japan, South Korea and other countries to send ships to the waterway, the world’s busiest shipping route, which is being violently blockaded by Iran. In his post, Trump alleged that “many countries, especially those who are affected by Iran’s attempted closure of the Hormuz strait, will be sending war ships, in conjunction with the United States of America, to keep the strait open and safe”.

In a later post, Trump extended his call to all “the countries of the world that receive oil through the Hormuz strait” to send naval support.

But countries are not exactly jumping up to volunteer.

German chancellor Friedrich Merz’s spokesperson, Stefan Kornelius, underlined that “it is not Nato’s war. Nato is an alliance to defend the alliance area.”

The time to look for allies is before you start a war, not after. Trump is like the guy who starts a bar fight nobody else wanted without giving his buddies any warning, but then expects them to come fight on his side.

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Josh Marshall asked the same question I’ve been wondering about: Why do oil markets respond to what Trump says, when so much of what he says is nonsense?

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Most of us are losers in this war, but there are a few winners: Putin and the major oil companies. But some people and countries are less vulnerable to oil prices, because they invested in renewable energy and electric vehicles, both of which Trump has discouraged in the US.

and the law

Courts have been proving troublesome to the Trump administration.

Friday, a judge unsealed an opinion quashing subpoenas in the investigation of Fed chair Jerome Powell. The investigation appears to be nothing more than an effort to harass Powell into doing what Trump wants: lowering interest rates. The US attorney’s brief in support of the subpoenas vaguely asserts that cost overruns in renovations at the Fed might be due to fraud, and that testimony Powell gave to Congress might be false. No further specifics are given.

After the opinion was released, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro went on a rant about “activist judges”. But

The striking thing about the brief, and about Pirro’s press conference, in fact, is that neither seems remotely concerned with establishing that there is a predicate for a criminal investigation at all. … [N]either shows any awareness that investigative agencies aren’t supposed to initiate criminal investigations at all without an appropriate evidentiary predicate.

In her rant, Pirro “said she was willing to see acquittals and willing to see grand juries reject her proposed indictments”. Grand juries used to almost never reject the government’s attempts to indict someone. But now they regularly do, because the government pursues so many indictments purely to harass Trump’s enemies.

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Lawfare examines proposals circulating in administration circles for Trump to declare a national emergency to take control of the fall elections. Unsurprisingly, such an order would likely be illegal.

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While the SAVE Act appears blocked in the Senate, Florida has passed its own version, which Gov. DeSantis is expected to sign:

Under the new law, a voter registration applicant’s citizenship status must be verified by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Until that happens, an applicant will be registered as an unverified voter and must vote with a provisional ballot that will not be counted if his or her legal status as a citizen cannot be verified through the department’s records.

The law doesn’t just impact new registrations. It also requires the Florida Department of State to verify the citizenship status of all registered voters who have not already been verified as U.S. citizens. If the citizenship status of a registered voter cannot be established or the voter record does not indicate that the registered voter’s citizenship is verified, the department must notify local election officials, who then notify the registered voter.

Unless courts intervene, we can expect chaos in Florida in November.

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Remember all those people claiming that ICE agents were randomly rounding up brown people because they had arrest quotas to meet? A wild, crazy accusation, right?

Well, now some ICE agents have been interviewed under oath, and it turns out they were supposed to make eight arrests a day. They found people to arrest using a custom AI-app that made a lot of mistakes. And this part is beyond parody:

JB said the team decided to follow the van once it departed, even though officers didn’t confirm whether the driver of the van was, in fact, the registered owner of the vehicle. JB found it suspicious that the driver was making multiple stops for passengers, saying: “You don’t know if it’s human trafficking or smuggling.” The fact that the occupants were “only speaking Spanish” during the stop seemed to “confirm” there was smuggling or “harboring people that are not supposed to be here in the United States”, JB said.

It was a car pool, taking farm workers to their worksite. But

JB’s team pulled over a van of farm workers heading to their job early in the morning, smashed the car windows and detained all seven occupants.

One of them, a plaintiff in the suit that resulted in this deposition, had entered the US legally. But she

was taken to a detention center in Washington state before ICE released her “without explanation and left her to find her own way back home to Oregon”.

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Princeton law Professor Deborah Pearlstein explains how the Trump administration is trying to make it OK for its lawyers to lie in court.

Under the proposed rule, the attorney general could ask any independent disciplinary authority to suspend ethics proceedings against a Justice Department lawyer (on threat of unspecified enforcement action) and send the matter to the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. But a review by that office is not a serious substitute for a state bar investigation. Even before Mr. Trump, the office, which answers to a political appointee, had a reputation for operating like a black hole, with the details of investigative findings almost never made public.

and trans people

The effort to demonize and dehumanize the trans community continues.

So, most but not all states allow you to change or choose the gender marker on your driver’s license. Blocking that is one level of discrimination, but the state of Kansas has taken it a step further: They retroactively cancelled any license where the gender had been changed while it was legal to do so: 1700 of them in all.

Hundreds of trans drivers already received letters from the state informing them their documents were “invalid immediately” and they “may be subject to additional penalties” if they continue to drive, unless they surrender the license to the Kansas Division of Vehicles and receive a new one with their birth sex.

Does forcing the gender on a drivers license to match the one on the corresponding birth certificate solve any problem? Let’s think about what drivers licenses are for and how they’re used. It makes perfect sense for states to want to keep track of who can drive on their roads and to impose standards to disqualify unsafe drivers. In addition, drivers licenses get used as an commonly available form of ID.

Why is gender on a license at all? Like height and eye color and the picture, it helps verify that you really are the licensed person. But if your appearance corresponds to a different gender than the one on your license, that actually makes the license less useful as ID. Worse, it sets you up for discrimination and abuse: Anyone who has a legitimate reason to ask for your license now knows that you’re trans.

Now think about situations where you might show your drivers license. Is there any reason why a policeman or a cashier or anybody else needs to know what gender is on your birth certificate? I can’t think of one. So this law solves absolutely zero problems.

All it does is harass trans people and expose them to discrimination and abuse. The only motive Kansas had to pass this law was to encourage such discrimination and abuse.

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Last week, I talked about how the Supreme Court only takes “sincerely held religious beliefs” seriously if they are conservative religious beliefs about topics like abortion or gender.

Example: On March 2, the Court set aside a California law that prevents schools from telling parents about a student’s change in gender presentation without the student’s permission. The Court said the law prevents parents from implementing their sincerely held beliefs in the religious upbringing of their children.

It remains to be seen whether teachers and school districts who keep a child’s confidences will be held liable in some way. If a child ever confided some deep issue to me and asked me not to tell their parents, I would hope that my first response would not be to go rat them out. (I haven’t had that conversation about gender transition, but I have occasionally kept confidences about drugs or sex.) That practice comes from my sincerely held moral beliefs, which I fear the current Court would not recognize.

I also wonder when a student’s behavior might trip such a requirement. If Samantha tells her teachers she wants to be called Sam, and starts wearing gender-nonspecific jeans and t-shirts, are they supposed to call the parents?

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It’s a telling point that the version of the SAVE Act (another law that solves no problems) that Trump is throwing his hissy fit about isn’t just about making it harder to vote, it’s also about attacking trans people. The version of SAVE passed by the House and held up in the Senate just focused on disenfranchising people who don’t have passports or easy access to their birth certificates or marriage licenses. But Trump wants to add:

NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS: NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION FOR CHILDREN!

Translation: Ban transwomen from women’s sports and make gender-affirming care illegal for minors. Those provisions deserve their own argument, which maybe I’ll get to later. But the simpler question is: Why should they be part of a voter-suppression law?

The answer is simple: Transfolk are to Trump what Jews were to Hitler or Blacks have been to the KKK. His base has been trained to hate them, and he can sometimes transfer the energy of that hatred to some other issue, even a completely unrelated issue like voting.

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Morgana Ignis:

Trump just declared that he’d ban trans women from the Olympics. Only one openly transgender woman has ever competed in the Olympic Games in its history. In 2020. She did not win a medal. This is fabricated controversy to fuel bigotry. Like banning trans women from owning nuclear weapons.

and you also might be interested in …

Courts near the border are clogged with misdemeanor trespass cases that serve little purpose and are usually thrown out by judges. By declaring the border area a military zone, the administration created a new crime that most people who commit it have never heard of.

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More and more, the Bezos-owned Washington Post is becoming a mouthpiece for a billionaire agenda. Here’s what I saw in their opinion section on just one day (yesterday). This piece on Pittsburgh sets up a false dichotomy between city services and progressive politics, essentially blaming progressive Democrats for the state of the city, which is painted in the same gloomy colors MAGA uses to describe all Democrat-run big cities. Pittsburgh’s new centrist Democrat mayor is a “lesson” for the national party to shift away from its progressive wing.

Zohran Mamdani wants to tax New Yorkers “to death“, but

Of course, New York doesn’t need more revenue — the city could simply cut expenditures, starting with Mamdani’s $127 billion spending plan for fiscal year 2027.

which is described in the next paragraph as “a socialist laundry list”.

Chicago also is portrayed as on the brink of insolvency. And San Francisco’s BART is “headed for a financial death spiral”. What looks on the surface like a fluffy denunciation of fancy coffee drinks is some guy from the Hoover Institute quoting Edmund Burke about how our failure to control our appetites is ruining society. A fair point, maybe, but why is the example a type of excess associated with upscale liberals, rather than say Bezos’ half-billion-dollar yacht?

And James Talerico’s candidacy isn’t inviting Christians to return to the teachings of Jesus, it’s a return to the failed views of liberal Christians in general, which the religion market rejected in the 20th century in favor of right-wing Christianity.

None of these pieces is outright pro-fascist, and any one of them might have a place on the editorial page of a newspaper trying to present a balance of views. But the WaPo bombards readers with all of them on the same day, with no voices at all from left of center.

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Today, the WaPo warns DC not to raise its minimum wage and that congestion pricing would cripple downtown DC. It also breaks with its usual opposition to taxes so that it can denounce Katie Porter’s plan to eliminate the California state income tax for families making less than $100K.

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NPR has an article about Spartanburg County, South Carolina, which is experiencing “the biggest measles outbreak in the U.S. in more than three decades, with nearly 1,000 confirmed cases”. The reason? The vaccination rate has fallen to 89%, well below the 95% necessary to achieve herd immunity.

And why are parents so reluctant to vaccinate their kids? One of the reasons is “lingering resentment over COVID mandates”.

“I think it should have been a choice. It shouldn’t have been shoved down your throat like you have to do it.”

It’s amazing to me how quickly the popular culture has minimized the COVID pandemic. (Starting with Trump, who minimized it while it was happening.) 1.2 million Americans died of COVID. When the country has to deal with a disaster that big, you’re not going to keep all your freedom. I mean, think about 9-11, and how much disruption of daily life followed from that. But in terms of deaths, COVID was hundreds of times larger than 9-11. At the pandemic’s peak, it was like a 9-11 was happening every day or two.

So yes, once a vaccine existed, the government absolutely should have “shoved it down your throat”. And they should shove a lot of other vaccines down your throat too, so that the general population doesn’t have to worry about polio or smallpox.

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A deposition under oath made it clear that a DOGE staffer tasked with flagging National Endowment for the Humanities grants to cancel due to DEI actually had no idea what DEI was and no education in the humanities. Having no knowledge himself, he used ChatGPT to

search programs and grants to cut using terms such as “Black,” “gender,” “LGBTQ+,” and “equality.” However, DOGE would not search for cuts from anything involving terms like “caucasian” and “heterosexual.”

That and similar clips went viral, but I can’t link to them because a judge has ordered them removed. Apparently, they exposed the DOGE tech bros to “widespread ridicule”.

Imagine that: Young idiots served as judge and jury over NEH grants they did not understand. And now they’re being ridiculed. How unfair!

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I am enjoying “The Ballad of Stephen Miller” from the album “MAGA Country”.

and let’s close with a political judo move

I’ve been a fan of Kat Abughazaleh since days when she used to do quick summaries each week of what Fox News was covering. Now she’s running for Congress in Illinois’ 9th district. The Democratic primary is hotly contested, and Kat (a Palestinian-American who has been outspoken about the Gaza genocide) has been targeted by AIPAC.

In her usual style, Kat offers her opponents an attack ad to use against her.