Category Archives: Articles

Can Democrats compete for Christianity?

March 9, 2026 – 11:01 am

Republicans have left an opening. Can Democrats like James Talerico take advantage?

Ever since Jerry Falwell launched the Moral Majority and got credit for electing Ronald Reagan in 1980, conservative Republicans have seemed to own Christianity.

Not really, of course. There was always a Christian Left, going back to Dorothy Day in the 1930s, and even further back to St. Francis or even that ultimate bleeding heart, Jesus. Both the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement had strong liberal religious components.

But from the 1980s on, in the media and the public mind, Christianity in politics somehow came to mean conservative politics. “Moral” issues were defined as the issues religious conservatives cared about: abortion, gay rights, and so on. When Supreme Court decisions purport to defend “conscience”, or people’s right to act on their “sincerely held religious beliefs”, you can bet that those beliefs are conservative. Only rarely have treating women like people, fighting oligarchy, refusing to racially discriminate, opposing cruelty towards immigrants, preserving the environment, or allowing LGBTQ people to lead full lives been framed as “moral” issues.

So when OB-GYNs sued to claim a right of conscience to treat pregnant women in violation of South Carolina’s fetal heartbeat bill, it was largely covered as a man-bites-dog story: “Look! People who believe a woman’s life should take precedence over her fetus claim to have consciences too!” Anti-abortion laws at the state level have led to unnecessary deaths of women with complicated pregnancies, but that is rarely presented as a moral issue, much less a Christian one. Bible-belt states not only accept such deaths, they don’t even want to know about them.

Texas has gone as far as to legally prohibit its [mortality review] committee from reviewing deaths that are considered abortion-related. This could include some miscarriage care, health officials told ProPublica.

So it’s not hard to find writers claiming that Christians can no longer vote for Democrats at all.

In times past, the choice between Democrat and Republican wasn’t always so clear, and Christians tended to split down the middle. A shared worldview across the aisle led to more options in the voting booth. As things stand now, no such options remain. The Democratic Party has so situated itself against the God of heaven and against His Word that no Christian can justly, nor obediently cast a vote for anyone who claims the Democratic platform. … For these reasons, Christians cannot vote for any member of the Democratic party while also saying “I believe and follow the teachings of King Jesus.” From Vice President Harris all the way down to local City Councils and school boards. 

The “reasons” given are abortion [1], LGBTQI+ rights, and DEI (which doesn’t even rate an explanation). 

Democrats, for the most part, have dodged this challenge. Conservative Catholics like J. D. Vance can claim to know better than the Pope, but liberal Catholics like Joe Biden or John Kerry have had to strike nuanced positions (like disapproving personally of abortion while defending a public right to choose it) while trying to change the subject. Barack Obama’s liberal Christian religion was seen as a political problem, not a strength.

Enter Trump. During the Trump era, Republicans have leaned even more heavily on the conservative Christian vote while putting their Christian supporters in an ever-more-difficult position. Trump, after all, represents the virtual antithesis of Christianity.

When you get down to cases, it’s actually harder to see how a Christian can support Trump rather than a typical Democrat.

Pastors who are committed to Trump politically have twisted themselves into all kinds of contorted positions. Bible verses get re-interpreted to circumvent what they obviously say. The importance of morality and character in public leaders (something we heard a lot about when Bill Clinton was president) is discounted, because “God uses flawed people“. When Republicans have scandals, we hear about God’s mercy and forgiveness — even if the offender denies the sin and refuses to make things right with the victim. But Democratic sin is unforgivable.

This can’t go on forever. At some point, the gulf between Trump and Christ grows so large as to be unbridgeable. And that raises the question: Can Democrats make an explicitly Christian play for the Christian vote?

Talerico. That’s going to be tested in Texas, where Presbyterian seminarian James Talerico won the Democratic senate primary Tuesday. Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons comments:

Talarico’s message is not about moderating progressive commitments to win over religious conservatives. It is about courage. It is about saying plainly that support for LGBTQ+ equality, reproductive freedom, public education and church-state separation can flow directly from Christian faith. He’s openly Christian and firmly pluralistic. 

That does more than close a messaging gap: Talarico and those like him can change the terrain. When leaders speak about faith with confidence instead of defensiveness, they show that democracy and devotion are not in conflict. 

His Republican opponent — whether it will be the incumbent John Cornyn or challenger Ken Paxton (who presents about as many moral issues as Donald Trump) — is bound to double down on the Christians-can’t-vote-for-Democrats message. Texans can expect to hear a lot about Talerico’s support for reproductive freedom and trans rights. We’ll see whether such attack ads can drown out the voice of an authentic liberal Christian whose worldview is rooted in what Jesus actually said rather than the conservative positions that have attached to him like barnacles.

But what about church-and-state? A second question Talerico raises is whether Democrats should compete explicitly for the Christian vote. One popular liberal viewpoint is an interpretation of church-and-state separation that extends to political argument rather than just government: Our government needs to remain secular and not favor any particular religion, so our candidates should campaign in a purely secular way.

I think this view misses an important point: People come to their political positions through their values, and many people’s values are grounded in their religion. If you can’t use religious language, you end up arguing against opinions already set; you can’t get into the mill where those opinions were forged and might be re-forged.

And finally, purely secular politics runs into a widespread American belief: that religious convictions are more serious and solid than secular ones. One reason Democrats are always under more pressure to compromise than Republicans is that the public sees conservative positions as religion-based and therefore immovable. Democratic positions seem more political than principled, because we so rarely seem to “speak from the heart”.

Many, many liberal positions rise out of deeply held moral values that are as serious as any religion, and many of those values are in fact religious. In the privacy of their own minds, many Democrats think in religious terms. If those terms have to be edited out before we speak in public, we will sound inauthentic.

[1] I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating that the anti-abortion position is entirely un-Biblical. Nothing in the Bible indicates that fetuses have souls, and Genesis 2:7 shows the soul entering the body not at conception, but with the first breath (which is a common Jewish belief).

Occasionally someone argues that Jesus or the prophets would have denounced abortion had they known about it, but this is nonsense. Surgical abortion may be a recent development, but from the beginning of time women who didn’t want to be pregnant have tried to induce miscarriages. If you see some spiritual difference between mifepristone and pennyroyal, you are more perceptive than I am.

Jesus and the prophets had to know about this practice, but for some reason they didn’t find it worth commenting on.

This lack of Biblical support is not so important for Catholics who oppose abortion, because the institution of the Catholic Church reserves the right to create new doctrine. But Protestant denominations — especially conservative ones — explicitly reject this view: Churches are not supposed to add or subtract from the message of the Bible.

Anti-abortion has been grafted onto the Bible. It wasn’t there originally.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (6)

Why this? Why now?

March 2, 2026 – 9:46 am

Two decades ago, George W. Bush and his cabinet spent months raising support for an invasion of Iraq. Two days ago, the Trump regime attacked Iran without giving us any coherent explanation.

Saturday, the US and Israel began an air war against Iran. The widespread attacks had a variety of goals, but decapitating the government was clearly one of them: One early death was that of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, an ayatollah who has been in power since the death of the founder of the current theocracy, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989.

The first American deaths were reported yesterday: three service members who had not yet been named. Five more have been seriously wounded.

We have no idea how many Iranian civilians have been killed, but at least 175 of them appear to be schoolgirls.

It’s hard to know what to write about this, because we have been told so little. Comparisons to George W. Bush’s Iraq fiasco are everywhere, but this attack differs in one important respect: Bush spent months trying to raise public and congressional support for his invasion. Trump, on the other hand, has given no credible explanation. In retrospect, many Americans resented Bush’s deceptive propaganda, but at least he acted like our opinions mattered. Trump seems not to need either our approval or that of Congress. (The Constitution and the War Powers Act say he does need Congress’ approval, if things like that still matter.)

I remember where I was when Bush came on every TV network to announce we were going to war. Trump hasn’t bothered. He posted to social media an 8-minute video full of rhetoric and falsehoods, and never answered the questions “Why this? Why now?” Stylistically, he talked at us rather than to us — standing behind an official podium and hiding his eyes in the shadow of the visor of a USA cap.

Yesterday, he didn’t even send his people out to answer questions.

No senior Trump administration officials or cabinet members appeared on the Sunday show television circuit a day after the US and Israel began a major military operation in Iran, killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. … The White House’s communications operation indicated that it would let allies on Capitol Hill do the talking, three people familiar with the discussions said.

Why would Trump want Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton to make the case rather than Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth or J. D. Vance? To me, the answer seems obvious: Republican senators aren’t official representatives of the Trump regime, so anything they say is deniable.

Trump has sent them out to lie to us, and doesn’t want to be answerable when those lies collapse.

Every hint of an explanation that we’ve been given so far is full of holes. We were told in June that the bombing raids then had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability. But only months later we have to attack again because Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon.”

As they made their public case this week for another American military campaign against Iran, President Trump and his aides asserted that Iran has restarted its nuclear program, has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days, and is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States. All three of these claims are either false or unproven.

Of course, President Obama had already negotiated a plan to keep Iran from getting nukes, but Trump tore it up, promising a “better deal”. This war, apparently, is that better deal.

He told Iran’s military and police forces:

Lay down your arms. You will be treated fairly with total immunity. Or you will face certain death.

But there’s no way an air campaign can back that up. The Iranian forces would have to surrender to somebody on the ground, somebody with the institutional power to hold tribunals for some people but not others. Who is that?

Trump also claimed to be doing this for the Iranian people:

When we are done, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations. … America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.

But yesterday he told the NYT

What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.

In Venezuela after Maduro was captured, his vice president took power and the entire regime remained intact. All they did was let Trump control their oil.

So much for the Iranian people.

In the absence of any plausible explanation from Trump, we’re left to imagine some other motive. Here’s the opinion of Phillips P. OBrien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland:

Boil it all down and what do we have? We have a military operation with no clear ends at all. Stop asking what the US government’s intentions are, they do not exist outside of the personal interests of Donald Trump. They can and will therefore change in a heartbeat as he searches desperately for whatever end gives him the best chance to declare victory. He has made the national interest entirely personal.

The pundits who look for personal motives have identified two:

  • Trump attacked Iran to change the media narrative in the US. The testimony of the Clintons to the House Oversight Committee has raised the question of why Trump doesn’t testify. And polls show Trump’s party headed for a historic defeat in November, losing the House and possibly even the Senate.
  • This bombing campaign is what Iran’s regional rivals get in exchange for a series of bribes to Trump and his family: the UAE’s half-billion-dollar investment in Trump’s crypto company; a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar; Jared Kushner’s firm getting $2 billion in Saudi money to invest despite their high management fees and lack of experience; an Abu Dhabi firm using $2 billion in Trump meme coins to complete a business transaction; and perhaps countless others that are still hidden behind the veil of Trump’s real estate and crypto-currency operations. Rachel Maddow says: “And now for that low, low price, they appear to have rented the services of the United States military to start a war that they want, but that the American people do not, and that our American government hasn’t bothered to explain in terms that are even internally consistent, let alone rational and sound.”

A big, expensive distraction? A quid for the sheikhs’ quo? Trump may not like those theories. But if he doesn’t want them settling into the public mind, he needs to give us something better.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (15)

Non-Cooperation

February 9, 2026 – 11:02 am

When does cooperation become complicity? And what other choice is there?

This morning I want to introduce you to a blogger a bit more radical than I am: A. R. Moxon, who writes a payment-optional Substack blog called The Reframe. I often have reservations about what he’s saying, but I find myself consistently challenged (in a good way). Maybe you will too.

Right now there’s a debate going on in Congress about funding DHS, and before that about funding a fairly large swath of the government. Democrats have tried to hone the issue down as small as possible, and to make only the most obvious common-sense demands in exchange for their support: ICE agents don’t wear masks, have to get judicial warrants, can be held accountable when they use excessive force, and so on. Even this is too much for Republicans, apparently. So Democrats will probably eventually water their position down even further to reach some kind of agreement.

This is usually explained as follows: Democrats want to appeal to a reasonable middle of the country, so that they can build a majority and regain power. Making more extreme demands might alienate the center and leave Republicans in power. That makes sense in its way, but more radical voices reject abandoning principle. When ICE may be building massive concentration camps, compromise makes no sense: Would you feel victorious if you got them to agree to fewer or smaller concentration camps? (“I’ll support Dachau if you agree not to build Auschwitz.”)

That’s the view that animates this week’s Reframe post “Hating the Game“. He starts small, with the MAGA meltdown over Bad Bunny headlining the Super Bowl halftime show. Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican, which makes him a native-born American citizen — unlike previous Super Bowl headliners like Paul McCartney, Sting, Phil Collins, and other English-speaking White males whose selection raised no controversy at all.

But Bad Bunny is brown-skinned and sings in Spanish, making him too “foreign” for MAGA’s nativist base. He is so unacceptable that Turning Point USA (founded by self-proclaimed non-racist Charlie Kirk) sponsored an “All American Halftime Show” featuring the washed-up-and-never-that-good Kid Rock, whose songs have never been described as family-friendly.

So OK, making fun of that is shooting fish in a barrel. (The Onion: “Conservatives Boycott All Forms Of Entertainment“.) But Moxon goes somewhere with it. He starts with this quote from The Washington Post:

Even if Bad Bunny doesn’t use the stage to explicitly condemn Trump’s deportation campaign, the dueling shows will highlight the nation’s deep divide over immigration, and his performance is likely to be viewed through that lens.

This kind of even-handed framing is so common that it may not even raise your hackles. But it raises Moxon’s:

The Post’s framing only makes sense if, as is often the case, the demand of white bigotry is being accommodated. You can be one of the most popular figures on the cultural landscape and it won’t matter; if white racists don’t like you, you’re controversial and polarizing. White racists, meanwhile, are never framed as divisive or polarizing, no, they’re always “concerned” or “anxious,” and the problem to be solved is never their racism, but always how best to assuage it.

From there, he describes three models of political engagement, which he calls the cooperation game, the murder game, and the non-cooperation game. MAGA, he says, is playing the murder game: They are using the machinery of government to dominate opponents and seize loot for themselves. Democrats are trying to play the cooperation game, where you are seeking common ground on which you can assemble a democratically governing majority. Moxon’s observation is that this doesn’t work.

It’s not just a bad idea to play the cooperation game with people playing the murder game—it’s an impossibility. When you act in good faith with those who have proved themselves capable of limitless bad faith, then you are no longer playing the cooperation game: you are merely cooperating with the murder game, and are, therefore, a participant not in the cooperation game, but the murder game.

He suggests playing the non-cooperation game: Stop giving the benefits of cooperation to those who have dedicated themselves to murder.

For the Super Bowl halftime show, non-cooperation looks like this:

Our response should not be “This response to Bad Bunny’s inclusion shows how divided we are, how can we stop this polarization?” Our response should be uncooperative: “The response to Bad Bunny’s inclusion shows just how racist our society is. Racists are angry about the halftime show? Good! Everything about our society should make racists feel alienated. How do we make racists feel even more alienated from even more of society??

More generally:

[Non-cooperation] can be strategic; refusing to grant even one vote toward the funding of a murderous government, until the death squads have been utterly abolished, and the vile white supremacist serial child rapist of a president who controls them has resigned, along with all of his cabinet, and submitted to prosecution. It can be legislative; refusing to allow voice votes, in order to grind down the apparatus of government. It can be social; refusing to fraternize with Republican colleagues, or refusing to serve members of Republican governments or their death squad in restaurants and businesses. It can be tactical: following the death squads and impeding their work; playing loud music to keep them awake; making them and their abuses known and shaming and shunning and excluding them for daring to murder their neighbors. It can be losing paperwork. It can be deliberately misunderstanding instructions. It can be purposefully dawdling. It can be tripping somebody up, getting them lost and turned around, obstructing the gears of brutality, sabotaging the engines of murder.

It’s not murder, and it’s not retributive; it’s removing all the benefits of human cooperation from all humans who play the murder game—not because we hate the humans (though it’s difficult not to hate people who would murder their neighbors, and I don’t shame those who can’t manage it), but because we hate their vile murderous game.

If you’re like me, you read The Reframe and think: “I don’t know if I’m ready for that.” (Example: Do we have to call it “the murder game”? Isn’t that needlessly off-putting?) But why not, exactly?

I’m calling attention to non-cooperation this week for a very specific reason: If the guardrails completely fail and Trump manages to cancel, steal, or ignore the midterm elections, then the only response short of violent revolution is the ultimate form of non-cooperation: the general strike. We need to start talking about it as a real possibility right now. We need to get the general public thinking about it and deciding how they will respond to it. Otherwise, if and when the need arises, most people will brush it off as impossible. But it’s not impossible. It’s an effective tactic whose roots go back to ancient Rome.

There are many possible layers of resistance to a fascist takeover. Currently, I’m counting on the courts and the elections. But if those fail, we’ll need to fall back to more radical tactics. The people who are too radical for us now may someday be our best friends.

While we’re talking about Bad Bunny, Trump hated his show: “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” Because, you know, Spanish. Nobody speaks it.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (15)

Greenland: It’s getting serious

January 19, 2026 – 10:39 am

What started as a punch line is turning into a trade war with our allies.

When President Trump began fantasizing about annexing Greenland back in 2019, the suggestion was hard to take seriously. Maybe he’d been playing Risk, where Greenland-to-Iceland is the sole invasion path between North America and Europe. Or he’d been fooled by the Mercator projection map of the world, which exaggerates land masses near the poles and makes Greenland appear to be about the size of South America.

However he got to this strange idea, it had to be a joke. Governments buying and selling inhabited lands was commonplace in the age of monarchies. But slavery ended, and the idea of selling people wholesale vanished soon after.

Unsurprisingly, Denmark refused to consider the offer.

Danish PM Mette Frederiksen described the suggestion as “absurd” and said she hoped Mr Trump was not being serious.

He was serious enough to cancel a planned trip to Denmark in response. But nothing happened right away, and the next year Trump lost the 2020 election and had to leave office.

Most of us forgot, so when he began talking about Greenland again last year, it seemed to come out of nowhere. But he hadn’t even taken office yet when Don Jr. went to Greenland to drum up support. One Danish broadcaster claimed Trump bribed poor people to express their desire to join America.

Several sources said a portion of the people who appeared in a video by Trump’s campaign team that was recorded at a restaurant in the capital city of Nuuk, and pictures on social media, are homeless and socially disadvantaged, according to DR.

By March, J.D. Vance and his wife were scoping out Greenlanders’ support for becoming part of the US. Greenland’s prime minister described the trip as “aggressive“.

Last week, Stephen Miller brushed off a question about whether the US might take Greenland by force, saying “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” But if Trump thought he could bluff his way into Greenland, European powers have called that bluff.

The White House has been describing talks between the US, Greenland, and Denmark as “technical talks on the acquisition of Greenland” — as if the sale were a done deal, pending a little haggling about price. But Denmark and Greenland think they have agreed to no such thing.

Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, said the agreement at Wednesday’s meeting had in fact been “to launch a high-level working group to explore if a common way forward can be found to address the American security concerns in relation to Greenland.”

This week, countries began moving troops around.

Before the talks began Wednesday, Denmark announced it would increase its military presence in Greenland. Several European partners — including France, Germany, the U.K., Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands — started sending symbolic numbers of troops or promised to do so in the following days.

Ostensibly, the European troops are there to address Trump’s stated concern about defending Greenland against Russia and China. But they also make another point: Maybe somebody will fight the US over the future of Greenland.

The idea isn’t that a dozen or two French or German soldiers can fend off a concerted US attack. But they draw a line in the snow: Trump isn’t going to take Greenland without killing some of America’s most loyal allies.

The US did something similar during the Cold War, when it stationed troops in West Berlin. Berlin was entirely surrounded by Soviet-occupied East Germany, so it could not be defended by the troops we had stationed there. But their presence meant that the Soviet Union could not take Berlin without starting a war with the United States.

Having been denied his fantasy of a bloodless Anschluss, Trump upped the ante, saying on Truth Social that the European countries “are playing this very dangerous game”, and “have put a level of risk in play that is not tenable or sustainable”.

So he announced 10% tariffs on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Finland, rising to 25% on June 1, and “payable until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland”.

Presumably that’s an additional tariff, because Americans already pay 15% tariffs on goods from the EU.

The tariff move seems to have goaded European leaders into action. For some while, they have been trying to humor Trump, flattering him rather than criticizing him, and making relatively small concessions in hopes that some other shiny object would draw his attention. The EU signed a trade deal with the US in August that allowed the US to impose 15% tariffs on most European imports while having no tariffs in the other direction. But having seen how long that arrangement has lasted, they are discussing retaliation rather than further appeasement.

It’s hard to see how they could do anything else. Trump’s trade demands last summer were about money, but this crosses over into principle.

A second EU diplomat said the situation was seen as very serious: “There was a clear and broad understanding that Europe and the EU cannot start reneging on key principles in the international order, such as territorial integrity.”

Making the conflict even more mysterious is that Trump’s stated rationales for wanting Greenland don’t add up. He claims that Russia and/or China want Greenland, and that only the US (not Denmark) is able to defend the island.

But of course, the US is already obligated to defend Greenland through the NATO treaty. We already have bases in Greenland. Greenland and Denmark have expressed willingness to allow a greater US military presence, as well as openness to deals for exploiting Greenland’s mineral resources. So what do we gain by making Greenland a US territory?

I hope the Supreme Court is watching. If anyone needs more evidence that Trump’s use of tariffs has nothing to do with the intention behind the law he is using — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — this is it. Paul Krugman writes:

A tariff to promote territorial expansion is clearly illegal, under any sane interpretation of U.S. trade law. This is on the Supreme Court, which is obviously dithering while the world burns

Remember the dancing frogs of Portland? Well, Greenland defenders have their own absurdists. Numerous music videos depict an inter-species Greenland defense force. Also check out this one and this one.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , , | Comments (6)

Renee Good and Our Epistemological Crisis

January 12, 2026 – 9:21 am

Is there any hope of finding a common reality?

Wednesday in Minneapolis, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot American mother Renee Good three times, killing her. There is so much to be upset about here, it’s hard to pick a focus. So I’ll start by listing a few and justify them later.

Those things are all true and objectionable, but most of them are being well discussed elsewhere. This morning, I want to take a step back and look at something else: the ability of right-wing media to keep telling a story conflicting with widely available evidence, and the apparent belief inside the MAGA news bubble that objective reality does not exist; what you think happened is simply a matter of who you choose to believe and what evidence you choose to examine.

To me, analyzing the videos of this shooting should resemble what happens in instant-replay review during a sporting event. A questionable play has happened, and then the refs examine the available video. Typically, one or two camera angles aren’t definitive: Looking at them, you can still imagine outcomes favorable to either team. But then you get the angle that makes everything clear. (Here’s the ball, here’s the goal line. It either did or didn’t cross. Or: Here’s the shooter when the clock hits zero. The ball either is or isn’t out of his hand.) Once you’ve seen the definitive angle, the other angles don’t matter any more. You don’t go back to a previous shot and say, “Sure, but in this one the other conclusion still seems possible.”

In this case, there are several decisive moments and angles, all consistent with each other. Like this one, which is a still from a bystander video analyzed in detail by the New York Times:

Ross is the agent behind the agent by Good’s door. His feet are clearly visible to the left of the vehicle, while the front wheels are steering right. (The orientation of the wheels is hard to see in this shot, but clearer when you see the continuous video.) So two conclusions are obvious: (1) Good was not trying to run Ross over, as Noem claimed. Her wheels were pointed away from him. (2) Ross was not in any danger of being run over.

Trump posted a different video along with his claim that “Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.” It is a distant video that lets you imagine that anything could have happened — exactly the kind that the football refs would ignore. And in fact, Ross was not harmed, something that is obvious from video of him walking up and down the street seconds later. (It’s possible he was brushed as the car went by, but nothing more.)

Still, you might imagine that Ross believed he was in danger, even though he wasn’t. That conceivably might justify a self-defense claim for his first shot. (The bullet hole is on the left side of the windshield, consistent with him standing close to the left front wheel, and not directly in front.)

But there are two problems with that justification: First, he’s in front of the car because he moved there. Moving into danger so that you can use that danger as an excuse to kill someone does not usually fly in court.

But even more damning: He shoots twice more. His second shot is through the open window in the driver’s door, and his third comes from behind as Good is trying to drive away. In other words: the SUV has already missed him. Shooting as your alleged assailant runs away is not self defense.

You could also imagine that Ross got scared, panicked, and fired three times before he realized he was safe. Even if true, that’s not much of an excuse. At the very least, a guy with responses this bad should never again have a job where he carries a gun. And if I were a prosecutor, I would see what degree of murder I could make stick.

So far I’ve just been drawing clear conclusions from objective evidence. But now I’ll say what I believe in my heart really happened: ICE’s stated mission is to round up deportable immigrants, but that’s not the whole story. Another part of its mission is to intimidate American citizens, particularly citizens in majority-Democratic cities who might be inclined to protest against Trump’s policies. Intimidation is why they wear masks. (They claim it’s to avoid reprisals, but that excuse doesn’t hold water. Local police and FBI agents also investigate dangerous gangs, but they don’t wear masks. Why are ICE agents more cowardly?) And if you watch ICE behavior, it’s clear what rules of engagement the agents been given: If somebody isn’t sufficiently intimidated, escalate the confrontation until they are.

Renee Good’s primary offense was not being intimidated. When agents gave her conflicting orders, she didn’t freeze, she started to drive away. This made Ross angry, and so he killed her, with “fucking bitch” as her epitaph.

Other ICE agents know this. That’s why they are using Good’s death to further intimidate potential protesters. Here, an agent warns a woman sitting in her car not to “make a bad decision and ruin your life”. Nice life you’ve got there; be a shame if anything happened to it.

What has truly amazed me, though, is not that liars will lie. I never trusted Noem or Vance or Trump or ICE, so seeing them gaslight the country is not the least bit shocking. (A columnist for National Catholic Reporter had a different reaction to Vance: “The vice president’s comments justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith.”)

What amazes me is the number of people who simply repeat what the regime tells them, either not looking at the evidence or (even worse) looking at it and seeing what they have been told to see.

Friday evening, my church organized a vigil for Good. We stood on our town common and quietly held candles with a few signs. According to a reporter for the local online news, 77 people (some church members and some not) attended, which is not bad for a hastily organized event in a small town.

When I came home from the vigil, I saw the Facebook comments on an article that announced it. (122 at last count.) Many of the commenters repeated the regime gaslighting: Why were we holding a vigil for a woman who tried to kill a federal officer? When others disputed this characterization and pointed to the videos proving otherwise, they were answered by vague references to other videos that supposedly support the regime gaslighting. (Like this one: It does not support the regime, but apparently they looked at it and thought it did.)

I wonder what DHS expects its sheep to see in a video it posted yesterday. It shows the street the shooting happened on, during the three minutes before the shooting. There’s a snowy middle-class residential neighborhood, a lot of honking cars moving slowly, pretty much what you’d expect from the videos already out. Absolutely none of the “violent rioters” a DHS official had mentioned.

Maybe the point of such a video is just that it exists. I could point to a brick and claim that it proves I’m right about something. And if you’re sufficiently sheeplike, you might say, “It must be true. He showed me proof.”

I find all this disturbing on a deep level. Apparently, many of our fellow citizens are living in a world where there is no objective reality. There is just disagreement, and some people are powerful enough to make their version of events stick.

A second disturbing feature in the comments I saw was the claim that Good was responsible for her own death, because she didn’t obey ICE agents’ commands. First off, I’m not sure what authority ICE agents have to give commands to US citizens. But suppose they can. The penalty for civil disobedience is not summary execution. Apparently, a number of Americans think it should be.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (14)

The Venezuela attack is a constitutional crisis for the United States

January 5, 2026 – 10:07 am

Is Congress still a branch of government?

As I often point out: A one-person weekly blog is a bad place to cover breaking news. This morning, the attack on Venezuela is in that nebulous zone between breaking news and an ongoing story: US forces attacked Caracas early Saturday morning, seized President Nicolás Maduro, and apparently left. We can see the general outline of what happened, but what it all means and where it’s all going is still very cloudy.

At the same time, we can’t just wait for the dust to settle, because this is an emergency moment not just for Venezuela, but for America.

For almost a year now, Trump has been pushing Congress into irrelevancy, and the Republican majorities in both houses and in the Supreme Court have been letting him do it: Congress no longer controls government spending. Agencies set up by Congress to be independent of the President have been taken over. The deadlines laid out in the Epstein Files Transparency Act have been ignored. The Education Department established by Congress has been all but eliminated.

And now, Congress has been shoved out of any role in making decisions of war and peace.

Apologists for the administration will tell you that this is nothing new. Ever since World War II (the last war officially declared by Congress), Congress’ constitutional power to declare war has been in tension with the President’s constitutional power as commander in chief. [1] Exactly where the boundary lies — what the President can do on his own and what requires congressional authorization — has been a topic of legitimate debate. A rule of thumb has been that decisions that need to be made quickly belong to the President, while longer commitments require Congress.

Congress asserted its power in the War Powers Act of 1973, which set clear limits on presidential discretion. Subsequent presidents have refused to recognize the constitutionality of the WPA, but have generally respected its boundaries as a matter of good form and sound politics. [2] So, for example, President Bush II sought congressional approval before invading both Iraq and Afghanistan. Lesser military actions have sometimes been initiated without Congress.

But the Venezuela attack is completely outside the bounds of previous constitutional debates. Not only did Trump not seek authorization from Congress, but the congressional “Gang of 8” — leaders of both parties in both houses, who by law are required to be kept informed — did not know about the attack until it was underway. Worse, briefings by Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth actively misinformed congresspeople about the administration’s intentions. [3] In short, Trump has given Congress no role whatsoever in this decision to go to war.

If Congress were taking seriously its constitutional obligation to preserve our system of checks and balances, it would immediately launch an impeachment. But unfortunately, Republicans in Congress are mostly taking an all’s-well-that-ends-well view: Maduro was bad and he is out now. The mission itself was a stunning display of tactical brilliance. So we should all just be happy with our military success.

The problem with that view is that nothing has ended yet. Immediately, power has not passed to the opposition leaders whose election victory Maduro stole. Instead, Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez has taken charge of a governing structure that is very much intact. So far, she has sent signals in both directions, denouncing the US attack as “an atrocity that violates international law”, but also saying she want the US government to “collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation”.

Trump, meanwhile, has said several times that the US is going to “run” Venezuela now and “fix” it. No one in the administration seems to know exactly what that means, or whether American troops will have to occupy the country and take casualties. He seems to imagine that he can manage Rodriguez with threats. But even if he can, will Rodriguez’ people let her stay in power as an American puppet?

Rep. Jim Hines, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee (which makes him one of the uninformed Gang of 8) summed up pretty well:

We’re in the euphoria period of acknowledging across the board that Maduro was a bad guy and that our military is absolutely incredible. This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan, in 2003 when our military took out Saddam Hussein, and in 2011 when we helped remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. … Let’s let my Republican colleagues enjoy their day of euphoria, but they’re going to wake up tomorrow morning, knowing, oh my God, there is no plan here any more than there was in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in Libya.

[1] This is one of many situations where the Founders lived in a different world than we do now. The early United States had only a minuscule standing army. So any president who wanted to go to war first had to convince Congress to raise and supply a larger force. But World War II made the US a global superpower, so recent presidents have always had large military forces to command.

[2] One of the lessons of Vietnam was that it’s hard to sustain a war without popular support. Getting Congress to buy in is usually part of a larger effort to sell a war to the general public.

[3] Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told CNN’s “State of the Union” yesterday:

I can certainly tell you that the message that [Rubio and Hegseth] sent was that this wasn’t about regime change. When they came to Congress — and they literally lied to our face — they said, “This is just a counternarcotics operation. This is about trying to interrupt the drug flow to the United States.” Right around that same time, the White House Chief of Staff [Susie Wiles] said publicly if we ever had boots on the ground in Venezuela, of course, we would have to come to Congress.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (10)

Three days in the life of a pathetic man

December 22, 2025 – 9:55 am

Everything Trump does to aggrandize himself just makes him smaller.

From the time he came down the escalator in 2015, Donald Trump has gloried in his ability to get a rise out of people like me. All our howls of outrage, all the shocked shouts of “He can’t say that!”, have been music to his ears. But lately he’s been losing his touch. Donald J. Trump, once the greatest troll of the social-media era, has jumped the shark. The realization that he is past his sell-by date seems to be driving him ever further off the deep end.

I catch on slowly, so I didn’t notice until his Rob Reiner tweet.

I don’t know if Gen Z even knows who Reiner was, but several of his movies — The Princess Bride comes to mind — became cultural touchstones for my generation. They didn’t often make the critics’ lists of all-time greats, but you could quote them decades later and people would know what you meant.

So Monday, Reiner and his wife were found dead in their home, apparently murdered by their troubled son in the kind of tragedy that touches every parent somewhere deep: What if my kid had inner demons that all my attention, all my love, all the resources I could bring to bear, were helpless to exorcise?

And Trump’s response Tuesday morning was to make this tragic murder all about himself: Reiner died because his Trump Derangement Syndrome made the people around him crazy. The President of the United States went on at some length in that vein.

When I read that post, I was surprised to realize that it didn’t make me angry. No “How can he say that?”. No desire to strike back with some cutting insult.

His tweet wasn’t outrageous. It was pathetic. What a sick, sad little man.

The next two days backed up that assessment. Wednesday we found out about the presidential plaques now lining the colonnade connecting the White House residence to the Oval Office. It’s a newly installed “walk of fame” with plaques for Trump (twice, since he’s both the 45th and 47th president) and his predecessors.

But of course, the plaques for past presidents are not really about them, they’re about him. Andrew Jackson, for example, was “unjustifiably treated unfairly by the Press, but not as viciously and unfairly as President Abraham Lincoln and President Donald J. Trump would, in the future, be.” Ronald Reagan “was a fan of President Donald J. Trump long before President Trump’s Historic run for the White House.”

Joe Biden — who committed the unpardonable sin of kicking Trump’s ass by seven million votes in 2020 — got the nastiest treatment, with the plaque proclaiming him “by far, the worst president in American history”, and representing him not with a portrait, but with a picture of an autopen. The plaque declares that Biden became president “as a result of the most corrupt election ever” and “brought our nation to the brink of destruction”. Barack Obama is characterized as “one of the most divisive political figures in American history” who presided over “a stagnant economy” until his handpicked successor was defeated by Trump. Bill Clinton’s plaque also ends with the defeat of his wife by Trump.

Am I angered? No, I’m embarrassed for my country. Trump probably pictures himself impressing foreign dignitaries by leading them along this walk. In fact, they also will be embarrassed, like your friends are when your senile grandpa starts bragging about things they all know he never did. By casting his plaques in brass, Trump probably imagines them being read decades or even centuries from now. But of course they will vanish the instant he is gone, because they are sad and pathetic. They reflect badly on the White House and whomever its future occupants might be.

Wednesday night, Trump gave a nationally televised address. Typically, presidents demand time from the major networks either when there is something of substance to announce (like a the raid that killed Bin Laden) or some tragedy that calls for a presidential response (like like the Challenger disaster). Prior to Trump, addresses like this were non-partisan: The President was acting as president, speaking to or for all of us, and not as a politician revving up his base.

But that kind of compartmentalization is foreign to Trump’s nature. He demanded national attention Wednesday not because Americans needed to know something, but because his ego was hurting: The economy is doing badly and the American people are increasingly blaming him for it.

His 18-minute address (about the same length as JFK’s Cuban missile crisis speech) contained no news worth mentioning — no major developments, no policy initiatives. (The one apparent announcement turned out to be flim-flam: His $1776 “warrior dividend” to members of our military isn’t new money; it comes out of funds already appropriated for housing allowances.) The self-justification started in his first line: “Good evening America. 11 months ago I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it.” From there he launched into the kind of self-contradictory excuses you might hear from an 8-year-old: I wasn’t fighting, and besides, he started it.

Everything is wonderful, and the fact that it’s not wonderful is Joe Biden’s fault.

Most presidential addresses call for a fact-check, but that would not do this speech justice. A reverse fact-check would be more appropriate: Try to pick out some statements that are true. It’s a challenge. Sentence after sentence, clause after clause, is a travelogue from a fantasy world where Trump is a world-defining super-president.

What a sick, sad little man.

Thursday, his handpicked board at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts attached his name to this once-iconic institution. It’s now supposed to be known as the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But like the Department of Defense, the Kennedy Center was named in the statute that Congress passed to establish it, so Trump and his board of puppets have no power to rename it. The Washingtonian reports:

While the board’s “change” is basically just another flashy marquee that Trump has hung up in service of his inner real-estate developer, it’s likely to accelerate the tangible decline of the Kennedy Center’s reputation. Ticket sales have nosedived since the president took over in February, which has taken a palpable toll on the performers who work there—including the National Symphony Orchestra’s principal violist, who recently spoke to Washingtonian about his experience serenading half-empty audiences.

Maddening? No, pitiable.

One frequent discussion topic among my friends is how long it will take to undo the damage Trump has done to this country. Some of it, of course, can never be undone. The children who died of hunger or disease after he gutted USAID are beyond the help of future administrations. And we’ll never get back the four wasted years in the battle against climate change (plus a little from his undoing the small progress Biden had made).

I can’t guess how many responsible presidents will have to come and go before our allies trust us again. Or how long the CDC or the Kennedy Center will need to rebuild their reputations. How long before the Presidential Medal of Freedom becomes an honor again? Or until all the demons of bigotry he unleashed can be put back in their bottles? And what about our national sense of decency? Our respect for one another? To rebuild them will require decades of nurturing.

But Trump has never really cared about that kind of thing. He cares about promoting his name and about dictating the names others use. He cares about buildings and decor and gaudy gilding.

And I think he’s starting to realize that all those things will begin vanishing the instant he loses power. No one will ever again talk about the Gulf of America, or the Department of War, or the Trump-Kennedy Center. (JFK’s niece wants to wield a pickaxe to remove Trump’s name herself.) If he leaves before his term is up — this is precisely the situation Section 4 of the 25th Amendment was written for — not even Vance will want anyone to see those ridiculous plaques. The tasteless gilding of the White House will go away, and even his over-priced ballroom will be used for some other purpose and carry some other name.

As soon as he’s gone, the whole country (even most of the people who voted for him) will start pretending he was never there.

I think he’s starting to realize that, and so he’s been turning his Trumpiness up to 11. Every effort to aggrandize himself just makes him shrink faster, but he can’t help himself. It’s like he’s constantly screaming: “You can’t forget me!”

But we will, Donald. We will.

Maybe a small reminder will survive here or there. Perhaps, as in Shelley’s Ozymandias, somewhere the ruins of a statue will survey the wasteland of his legacy.

Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (15)

A MAGA National Security Strategy

December 8, 2025 – 10:26 am

America used to frame its self-image around freedom and democracy. Now it’s about making money and preserving whiteness.

Back in July, J. D. Vance tried his hand at answering the question “What is an American?” But first he had to say what an American wasn’t, namely, someone who agrees with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time.

I don’t think many people would argue with the over-inclusive part. As Vance observed, there are probably billions of people who agree with the founding principles of the United States. They may even identify with America the way JFK was identifying with Germany when he said “Ich bin ein Berliner.” But that doesn’t make them Americans in any real sense. Now, if they come here, work, pay taxes, and pledge their allegiance to the government defined in the Constitution, we can start to have a discussion. But until then, hardly anyone would claim they’re Americans.

Where Vance caused controversy, though, was with “underinclusive”. If your ancestors fought in the Civil War, then you “have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say [you] don’t belong”, even if you don’t believe in the founding principles. Vance seemed to be saying that you could be, say, a Nazi. But if your ancestors fought for the fascist empire of its day, the Confederacy, maybe because they wanted to defend and preserve slavery, then you’re one of us.

In short, Vance’s America isn’t fundamentally about freedom or democracy or any other grand principle.

America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.

This is sometimes described as the “blood and soil” vision of a nation, and it quickly lends itself to what the far right calls “heritage Americans”, who are English-speaking and Christian and (predominantly) White and have a “way of life” that puts men (and not women) at the top of the pyramid. As one author explains:

Non-Christians can be tolerated, as long as they acquiesce to living in an unashamedly Christian America (i.e., submitting to Christian civil law, government support for Christianity, Christian moral, civil, and religious norms and customs, etc.). At the same time, both public and private citizens should be concerned to help the Christian Church flourish in our nation, since a collapse of Christian conversions, church plants, and influence will mark the end of America.

Like so much of Trumpism, this is deniable if you find it embarrassing (as I hope many Trumpists do). Vance didn’t actually spell all that out, and besides, it’s Vance, not Trump. Who takes what J. D. Vance says all that seriously anyway? And since Trump isn’t coherent enough to enunciate such a grand vision, MAGAts don’t have to own up to the full implications of redefining America in blood-and-soil terms.

NSS-USA. Last month, though, the regime put out a document that is harder to deny: National Security Strategy for the United States of America. The text part of it is only 29 pages, but I can’t recommend you read the whole thing, because (like nearly all regime publications) it’s full of praise for how Donald J. Trump rescued America from the pit of despair Joe Biden had left it in. Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of New York, and yadda, yadda, yadda.

But beyond the huckstering, the NSS-USA does have some real content. In particular, it declares an end to the era in which the US tried to be the linchpin of a rules-based global order, and tried (at least some of the time) to promote freedom and democracy. The NSS-USA characterizes this past policy both as “permanent American domination of the entire world” and as “lash[ing] American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty”.

But we’re done with all that now. Instead, we’re going to control immigration, make money, and launch a “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health”. And we’re not going to try to export American values like human rights that disrespect “other countries’ differing religions, cultures, and governing systems.” (So if MBS wants to lure an Washington Post journalist into a foreign embassy, kill him, and saw his body into little pieces, that’s just how they do things in Saudi Arabia, and we want to do profitable business with them. As the Emperor Vespasian supposedly said about raising funds by taxing public toilets, “Pecunia non olet“, meaning “Money doesn’t stink”, no matter where it comes from.)

Here’s what that “reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health” means:

We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age. We want a people who are proud, happy, and optimistic that they will leave their country to the next generation better than they found it. We want a gainfully employed citizenry—with no one sitting on the sidelines—who take satisfaction from knowing that their work is essential to the prosperity of our nation and to the well-being of individuals and families. This cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.

That’s why we have to turn our schools into propaganda mills that expunge any real discussion of slavery, genocide against the Native Americans, or the ongoing effects of racism and sexism. The American past must have nothing but “glories”, and we must ignore discouraging trends like climate change, the increasing concentration of wealth, or anything else that might cause our people to expect something other than the Golden Age of Trump. The NSS-USA doesn’t define “strong traditional families” or “healthy children”, but I hear a lot of ominous subtext there.

The document then goes region by region. Some of its goals are the same as previous administrations. We don’t want a hostile power to control the oil of the Middle East, and we want to maintain our access to other critical resources. We want to avoid seeing some rival power dominate the world.

But then it starts to diverge. It defines what is basically an American sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere. We want countries that are “reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States”. Beyond that, we don’t care what they do to their people.

The one place where we do want to interfere in other countries’ business is with our allies.

We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.

However, it looks like the regime sees those “elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions” mainly in our allies’ attempts to suppress right-wing radicalism. It promotes a view of Europe’s future that sounds a lot like proto-fascist parties such as Germany’s AfD (which Vance endorses). Due to immigration and falling native birth rates, Europe faces “civilizational erasure”. But the US wants Europe to “remain European” and to “regain its civilizational self-confidence”.

Europe’s support for Ukraine against Russia (i.e., its “unrealistic expectations for the war”) is due to its “anti-democratic” aspects.

A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes. This is strategically important to the United States precisely because European states cannot reform themselves if they are trapped in political crisis.

Again, what this “reform” consists of is not spelled out, but I suspect the model is fascist Hungary.

American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism. … We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.

But that’s not where NSS-USA sees Europe heading, so it wants to “cultivat[e] resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”, I suppose this means supporting blood-and-soil European parties like France’s National Rally.

If Europe refuses to defend its white cultural heritage, though, it sounds like the Trump regime wants to cut them loose.

Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter

I mean, we signed a treaty with white countries. We can’t be expected to honor it if Whites become a minority.

Other than Europe, where we want political change to preserve a native-European racial mix, we care about other countries only as potential business partners. Nothing in the document suggests that Russia is an enemy, a rival, or a threat to anyone in particular. China is a frenemy, a rival we can do business with. I would really worry if I were Taiwan, because this is how NSS-USA views it:

There is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters

Taiwan is a fellow democracy and a long-standing ally, but who cares? It produces semiconductors and has a strategic location. China would have to cough up some serious bucks to induce us to turn our backs on that.

The Kagan interview. Robert Kagan is a historian of US foreign policy with whom I have often disagreed. Recently he was interviewed by Bill Kristol, who I also differ with on many things. But despite past differences, I’m fascinated by this interview [video, transcript], which takes a view-from-orbit perspective on American foreign policy. It happened before the NSS-USA came out, but anticipates much of it.

Kagan’s view, basically, is that the American-dominated post-World-War-II world order is a pleasant aberration in history, because for 3/4 of a century other potential great powers like Britain, France, Germany, and Japan have been content to live inside the American orbit. The unspoken contract was that America would take the lead in international affairs, the dollar would be the world’s reserve currency, and so on; and in return, the US would guarantee its allies’ security and wouldn’t use its preeminent position to take advantage of them.

Ordinarily, sovereign nations wouldn’t trust each other to keep a deal like that. (One cautionary historical example is the Delian League, an anti-Persia alliance that got coopted into an Athenian Empire.) But this one has held largely because of the faith all the nations had in shared liberal values like democracy and human rights.

Kagan sees that deal unraveling, largely because Trump doesn’t share liberal values and wants to take advantage.

[T]hat bargain has been exploded. And that’s why we are entering a new era, because if these countries, as is now the case, cannot rely on the American security guarantee, and I think the Trump administration has made it very clear that they can’t, that it’s sort of the intention of the Trump administration to make it clear that they can’t really rely on the United States, on the one hand.

While on the other hand, the United States now is using its superior power to demand, what is in effect, tribute from its allies in the form of these high tariffs. And so the United States is taking advantage of its overwhelming power and abusing it with its own allies. I don’t see how the alliance structure can continue under those circumstances. And now all these countries that have relied on the United States for their security are now going to have to go back to the world that existed before this unusual era in which they can only rely on themselves for security. And that has vast implications for regional geopolitics and global geopolitics that I think, again, Americans have not really begun to contemplate.

(Kagan doesn’t mention this, but from my point of view the contract has been slowly eroding for several years, as the US has used the dollar’s central role to finance enormous budget and trade deficits. In essence, the world sends us goods and we send them dollar-denominated bonds that we could devalue at any time. The Fed could, for example, create enough dollars out of nothing to redeem all the bonds.)

Needing to be able to go it alone, without the US, will probably change the nature of those countries and their governments. Kagan gives the example of Japan, which he says came out of World War I with a largely democratic pro-American government. But in the 1920s, America instituted high tariffs and strong barriers to immigration.

[P]olitics in Japan completely shifts, and then you get the Japan that invades Manchuria in 1931.

For now, our NATO allies may cut deals with Trump and pay his tariffs, while grasping that he no longer guarantees their security against, say, Russia. Short-term, they have little choice. But that’s not a stable situation.

Germany having to re-arm to the point where it can actually meet Soviet power means a completely new Germany again. Now, maybe a heavily armed Germany will still be a liberal Germany, that’s possible. But it’s clear that Germany’s neighbors are going to have the same reaction to that level of German power that they’ve always had in the past. If Japan can’t rely on the United States, it’s going to go become a nuclear weapon state. It’s going to build up its capabilities, and tensions between Japan and China are going to increase exponentially. And if there’s one thing Americans have learned over the past century is that when other great powers get into wars, the United States is immediately implicated in that. That’s the great lesson of World War II. And that’s why we created this liberal world order in the first place.

And again, that’s another thing that I think Americans just are not conscious of. A lot of Americans think we created this liberal order to fight the Soviet Union, which was not true. It was created without regard, even without anticipation that the Soviets were going to be the big problem. It was to prevent a return to effectively a multipolar world.

Trump may think the US can just collect its tribute and live happily ever after. But history has never worked that way before. Picture, for example, a re-militarized Germany led by a xenophobic far-right party like the AfD. What could possibly go wrong?

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (4)

Crime in the Cabinet

December 1, 2025 – 10:04 am

Most administrations come and go
without credible evidence of a crime by a cabinet official.
There were two this week alone.

In January of 2017, as Barack Obama was getting ready to hand the presidency over to Donald Trump after eight years in office, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky pushed back on the “myth” that Obama had presided over a “scandal-free administration”. Von Spakovsky listed six of what he described as “some of the worst scandals of any president in recent decades”.

One — using the IRS to “target political opponents” — was nothing more than a canard that circulated inside the conservative information bubble. (The IRS was skeptical of the tax-exempt status of new political organizations founded to take advantage of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Most of the investigated organizations were conservative, but that was due to the flow of money rather than specific targeting of conservative organizations. In the end, nearly all of them were recognized as tax-exempt. More importantly: No link back to the White House was ever established.)

Others — Benghazi, government personnel records getting hacked, losing track of guns allowed into Mexico as part of a smuggling investigation, veterans dying while waiting for appointments at the VA — were screw-ups not rooted in any nefarious intentions.

Only one — the Hillary Clinton email controversy — involved any credible accusation of a crime. That was investigated by the State Department during the first Trump administration, and the report found “no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.” No one was ever charged with a crime, much less convicted.

That’s not unusual. Crime in the cabinet is exceedingly rare. In the history of the United States, no cabinet official was convicted of a crime until 1929, when former Interior Secretary Albert Fall was found guilty of taking bribes in the Teapot Dome scandal. Three Nixon cabinet members and his vice president were convicted of crimes, which is one reason why the Nixon administration is remembered for its corruption.

But the Trump administration has a way of wearing down our standards and making us forget that lawlessness high in the executive branch used to be exceptional. For example, Trump officials violate the Hatch Act (banning government officials from using their offices for political activity) just about every day. Such violations went unpunished in the first Trump administration, so hardly anyone notices any more.

Even so, it was striking to hear two independent credible accusations of crimes by Trump cabinet officials in the same week.

  • DHS Secretary Kristi Noem all but confessed to contempt of court yesterday when she admitted she knew a federal judge had ordered a plane carrying detainees to El Salvador to turn around, but she ordered it to continue.
  • Department of War Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly gave an order to “kill everybody” in an attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean. Two survivors clinging to wreckage were then killed in a second attack. Even if the initial attack were legitimate (which it wasn’t), killing defenseless survivors is a war crime.

The second crime is more serious than the first, so let’s start there.

“Kill everybody”. Since September 2, the Trump regime has launched at least 21 attacks against boats on the high seas that it claimed were smuggling drugs, killing at least 83 people. Friday, that story got even worse, when the Washington Post published a report that Defense Secretary Hegseth had given a “kill everybody” order for the first attack. Two people survived the initial attack and were clinging to the wreckage when a second attack was ordered. It blew the survivors to bits.

If true, that incident is a clear war crime attributed to a specific person, Hegseth.

Horrifying as that is, I think it would be a mistake to lose sight of the larger picture: If we frame this wrong, it might seem as if the air campaign against the boats was fine until helpless survivors were targeted. It wasn’t. Whether Hegseth ever said “Kill everybody” or not, under his command the Department of Defense has committed 83 murders.

No operational consideration justifies the attacks. They are not like the drone attacks that have assassinated terrorist leaders, controversial and morally dubious as those might have been. In those cases, the targets might not have stayed in known locations long enough for a strike team to get there. Or the host country might not have allowed our strike team in. Often, the choice was either to send a drone or let the terrorists go on about their business.

That’s not the case here. These boats were in open seas dominated by our Navy. They could have been seized and could not have gotten away. Whatever drugs they might have been carrying would never have reached American consumers. The crews could have been captured alive, and might have given us valuable information about their suppliers or distributors.

So attacking the boats achieved nothing that couldn’t have been achieved without killing people. Instead, the Trump regime chose to kill 83 people.

Remember: Smuggling drugs is not a capital crime. Even if the alleged smugglers had been captured and given due process, they could not have legally been sentenced to death.

It’s worthwhile to put this in a more familiar context. In Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies, Harry Callahan is a cop who chafes under the legal restrictions that bind him, and that allow criminals to eventually go free. In the first movie, Harry dares a suspect to go for a gun so that he can legally kill him.

But the second movie, Magnum Force, pits Harry against a death squad of rogue cops who start a campaign of assassinations against the city’s underworld kingpins. The squad expects Harry to join them, but rogue assassinations are too much even for him. “A man’s got to know his limitations,” Harry says.

That’s what we’re seeing now: Trump and Hegseth have turned the US Navy into a rogue assassination squad. They see enough evidence to convince themselves boats are smuggling drugs, show that evidence to no one, and kill the alleged smugglers on their own authority.

Even if you’re as tough on crime as Dirty Harry, you shouldn’t approve. A government has got to know its limitations.

The Trump regime gives two justifications: First, the end justifies the means (which is precisely what Dirty Harry’s rogue cops argued). On October 23rd, Trump made the ridiculous claim that each boat blown up saves the lives of 25,000 Americans. (This is the same kind of math that caused Pam Bondi to claim that drug seizures during Trump’s first 100 days had saved 119-258 million lives.) He postulated that if he told the Congress about the operation (not to seek their authorization, which he says he doesn’t need) “I can’t imagine they’d have any problem with it. … What are they going to do, say ‘We don’t want to stop drugs pouring in’?”

Again, those boats could be stopped without blowing them up or killing anybody.

Second, the regime stretches the definition of “war” to cover this operation. The drug cartels, say Hegseth and Trump, are like ISIS or Al Qaeda. This is typical of the way the regime perverts language, so that reminding soldiers of their legal responsibility not to follow unlawful orders is “sedition”, or individuals deciding to cross our border is an “invasion”.

Smuggling has been part of the American economy since before the Revolution, from British tea to Prohibition whiskey to Colombian cocaine. It has never been considered an act of war. Those 83 people on those fishing boats were not soldiers and were not at war with the United States. They’re murder victims.

But just for a moment, grant the claim that these attacks are part of a war. That’s where the Post’s new revelations come in: Once your enemies are disarmed and helpless, it’s a war crime to kill them. If the report is true, Pete Hegseth and those down the chain who carried out his orders are guilty of war crimes.

It appears, at least for the moment, that Republicans in Congress are not going to cover this up.

Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and its top Democrat, Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, said in a joint statement late Friday that the committee “will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”

That was followed Saturday with the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, and the ranking Democratic member, Washington Rep. Adam Smith, issuing a joint statement saying the panel was committed to “providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean.”

Hegseth denies giving the order and calls the Post’s report “fake news”.

And before I leave this topic, there is one more dot worth connecting: Military judge advocate generals (JAGs) are supposed to vet these legal issues for the armed forces. But Hegseth purged the JAGs back in February, about a month into his term:

Hegseth told reporters Monday that the removals were necessary because he didn’t want [the JAGs] to pose any “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”

The plan from the beginning was to give illegal orders and remove all obstacles to carrying them out.

Kristi Noem’s contempt of court. Remember back in March, when a judge ordered DHS not to deport a bunch of Venezuelans to the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador, including turning around planes already in the air? And DHS in fact did not turn those planes around, defying the judge’s order?

The judge, James Boasberg, has kept pursuing the question of who is responsible and whether they should be charged with criminal contempt of court. Tuesday, government lawyers answered the first question: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem made the call, after consulting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General (now federal appellate judge) Emil Bove, and DHS acting general counsel Joseph Mazzara.

Dean Blundell cuts through the spin and legalese to draw this conclusion: The regime just threw Noem under the bus. Government lawyers say they’ll be happy to answer any further questions in writing, but that “No live testimony is warranted at this time.” In other words: We’ll answer the questions we want to answer with very carefully crafted spin, and we don’t want to give the court or anybody else the ability to frame their own questions or insist on clear answers.

Blundell summarizes:

  • They’re naming Noem now.
  • They’re trying to keep her off the stand.
  • And they’re trying to keep other insiders and whistleblowers from testifying live

Noem responded yesterday in an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl:

KARL: So, I have two questions on that. First of all, is that right? Does the — does the buck effectively stop with you on this? Was this your responsibility? And had you known the judge had ordered those planes to be turned around when that order was issued?

NOEM: Yes, I made that decision. And that decision was under my complete authority and following the law and the Constitution and the leadership of this president, who is dedicated to getting dangerous criminal terrorists and gangs and cartels out of our country. And I’m so grateful that we get the opportunity every day to do that and to make decisions that will keep America safe.

KARL: Did you know about — did you know about the judge’s order when you issued your order for the planes to go (ph)?

NOEM: You know, this is an activist judge. And I understand, you know, we’re still in litigation with this against this activist judge who’s continuously tried to stop us from protecting the American people.

We continue to win. His ridiculous claims are not in good standing with the law or the Constitution. We’ll win this one as well. And we comply with all federal orders that are lawful and binding and we will continue to do that.

But I’m proud of the decision that I’ve made. Proud to work for this president each and every day to keep America safe.

So there you have it: It’s up to the regime, and not the courts, to decide what is “lawful and binding”. She disagreed with the judge, so she ignored his order. If that’s not contempt of court, I don’t know what is.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (5)

The Vibecession and the AI bubble

November 24, 2025 – 9:51 am

Depressed consumers and record-setting stock markets don’t usually go together.
Why are they both happening now?

I recently came across these two facts:

Those two puzzle pieces are hard to fit together. Naively, you might think the S&P 500 and the Index of Consumer Sentiment measure the same thing: optimism about the economy. But apparently the economy looks very different depending on where you stand: Investors are optimistic, consumers pessimistic.

Statistics. Government statistics paint a mixed picture: GDP growth for the first half of 2025 was 2.1%, which is about what it’s been averaging for years now, and is neither good nor bad. At 4.4%, unemployment is higher than it’s been lately, but relatively low by historical standards. (It was more than twice that high during the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and briefly peaked at 13.2% early in the Covid lockdown.) Inflation is running at about 3% — rising somewhat recently and higher than the Fed target of 2%, but well below the 7% of 2021, not to mention the 13.3% of 1979. Interest rates are in similar territory: A 30-year mortgage is running around 6.11%, which is neither exceptionally high nor exceptionally low, compared to, say, 3.15% in 2021 and 7% in 2023, not to mention 16% in 1982.

For a few years now, economists have been scratching their heads and talking about the “vibecession“, an economy that feels worse than the data justifies. (Paul Krugman has written several paywalled articles on this, beginning here.) In 2024, the Biden administration was fighting consumers’ pessimistic vibes, and now the Trump administration is. (The public’s assessment of Trump’s handling of the economy is deeply negative: 40% approval vs. 57% disapproval, according to the RCP polling average.)

Stocks. The stock market’s euphoria is somewhat easier to square with the ho-hum economic numbers: The record gains don’t represent a broad optimism about the economy, but instead are concentrated in a handful of stocks that have something to do with artificial intelligence (AI). For example, a flagship consumer company like Proctor & Gamble that has little to do with AI has seen its stock fall this year, from 180 in January to about 150 now. Pepsi was at 165 early this year and is at 146 now. Target is down from 145 to 87.

Understand that I have cherry-picked those companies to make a point; most stock prices have increased somewhat this year. But a J. P. Morgan analyst wrote in September:

AI related stocks have accounted for 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth and 90% of capital spending growth since ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

The poster child for the AI boom is Nvidia, which you may not realize has recently become the most valuable corporation in the world, with a market capitalization (i.e., stock price per share times number of shares) that briefly topped $5 trillion at the end of October. Even more impressive: It didn’t cross the $1 trillion mark until sometime in 2023. The stock (adjusted for splits) was below $15 at the beginning of 2023 and hit $212 a few weeks ago.

Other AI heavyweights include Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Broadcom, IBM, Oracle, and a few other corporations. Not all of their stocks have soared as far and as fast as Nvidia’s, but their investors have been doing quite well.

Why don’t consumers identify with this boom? It’s simple: AI hasn’t really affected everyday life much yet, so it doesn’t feel like we’re in the middle of a generation-defining revolution. I know lots of people who have played with ChatGPT or some other AI app, and I’ve gotten used to the AI summary at the top of Google searches (though I don’t trust it yet). But I know very few people who either buy significant AI-related products or use AI tools to produce products they couldn’t produce otherwise.

At the moment, AI’s significance in the economy doesn’t justify its significance in the stock market. We’re at a point with AI similar to where we were with the internet in 2000: Most of us could check weather.com or order a cheap book from Amazon, but our lives had not yet significantly changed. Like the Internet stocks in 2000, AI stock valuations are based on visions of a future that is still to arrive.

Is AI in a bubble? That gap between investor’s visions and current reality raises a question: The Internet bubble popped, with great losses to many investors and an impact on the broader economy. Is AI also a bubble, and what will happen if it pops?

I’m currently reading 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin. I’ve also lived through the internet bubble of 2000-2001 and the subprime-mortgage real estate bubble of 2008. One common characteristic of bubbles is that accounting departments get a bit creative near the end. Everyone is convinced the market will keep going up, and a rising market can hide a lot of corner-cutting. (As legendary investor Warren Buffet once put it: “It’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s been swimming naked.”)

That kind of questionable accounting is happening inside the big AI-related companies today. This post by Shanaka Anslem Perera is a bit wonky, but puts the puzzle pieces together, focusing on Nvidia.

Wednesday evening, Nvidia reported its third-quarter earnings, which were up and looked excellent. The stock surged. And then a combination of human and (ironically) machine intelligence started digging into the footnotes of that report: Nvidia was booking sales that its customers were slow to pay for. In short, it was delivering chips, but not raking in a corresponding amount of cash. Second, its inventories were growing, which contradicts the common belief that Nvidia benefits from insatiable demand.

A third tell-tale sign is the incestuous flow of capital among the various AI corporations.

Perera writes:

The structure extends throughout the AI ecosystem. Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI committed $50 billion to Microsoft Azure cloud services over five years. Microsoft uses those committed dollars to purchase Nvidia GPUs for Azure datacenters. Nvidia books the GPU sales as revenue.

Oracle announced a $300 billion, five-year cloud infrastructure partnership with OpenAI. This partnership requires Oracle to deploy Nvidia GPUs. Oracle has pre-ordered $8 billion in Blackwell architecture chips from Nvidia. OpenAI’s ability to fulfill its $300 billion Oracle commitment depends on OpenAI generating revenue that currently runs at $3.7 billion annually—a gap of $56.3 billion per year.

The total network spans $610 billion in circular commitments, according to an analysis of SEC filings, venture capital deal databases, and disclosed partnerships. The money flows in loops: Nvidia invests in AI startups, startups commit to cloud spending, cloud providers purchase Nvidia hardware, Nvidia recognizes revenue, but the cash never completes the circuit because the underlying economic activity—AI applications generating profit—remains insufficient.

That’s a complicated diagram, and AI is an intimidating subject. But a parallel example from a more mundane industry makes the pattern easier to grasp: How Boston Chicken went broke in the 1990s.

In a nutshell, the Boston Market formula worked like this: the company raised money in the stock market and then loaned it to large, sophisticated franchisees (known as “area developers”), who used the funds to open lots of Boston Market stores in a short time.

These developers then paid the company a franchise fee for each new store, royalties on food sales and interest on the loans. So right away, the Boston Market operation looked hugely profitable. That boosted the stock, which gave the company yet more cheap capital to lend to developers, to open yet more stores.

Even if the individual Boston Market franchisees were hemorrhaging money, that would have no impact on the parent company’s bottom line. The franchisees’ costs and losses were their own problem.

As a whole, the Boston Market corporate/franchisee operation wasn’t profitable, but the corporate side of it looked profitable by pushing its losses off on the franchisees. Ultimately, the loans the corporation had made to the franchisees couldn’t be repaid, and the whole scheme unraveled.

Something similar is happening with Nvidia: It raises money on the stock market and invests it in companies like Open AI and Coreweave, who send it to Microsoft or Amazon, who in turn use it to buy Nvidia’s products. Eliminate the middlemen, and Nvidia is essentially buying its own products. You can’t make money doing that, no matter what your earning statements say. What’s missing here is the consumer: Who’s going to buy enough AI-related products to make everyone involved profitable?

Patterns like this can resolve in one of two ways: Either the industry as a whole starts making money, i.e., the AI-to-consumer link suddenly develops in ways that produce boatloads of cash to pay for Nvidia’s chips, or the whole thing collapses on itself.

For historical perspective on this kind of thing, one classic read is Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen. The book is 1931’s view of the roaring 1920s. By 1931, the Depression was deepening and all the investment booms of the 20s had gone bust. But the striking thing about them (from our point of view, which Allen could not foresee) is that the narratives behind those booms were not wrong: The story of the Florida land boom was that Northerners were going to start retiring to Florida. Suburban real estate bubbled because automobiles would make it possible to move away from the crowded cities. Even the stock market boom that ended in the crash of 1929 had good narrative sense behind it: The Nvidea of the late 1920s was RCA, because radio was going to change everything. Also: chains like Sears and Montgomery Ward were going to out-compete the Mom-and-Pop stores. The automobile market still had a lot of growth in it. Aviation was a field with a big future. And so on.

The visions that inspired the booms of the 1920s nearly all came true, but not until the 1950s, long after the original investors were bankrupt. That happened again in the internet bubble: The internet did change everything, but not as fast or as easily as the boom companies needed it to. Something similar could happen with AI. The seers of an AI-dominated future don’t have to be wrong, they could just be too optimistic about timing.

What happens then? The larger economy is always harmed when a bubble pops, because a large quantity of capital appears to suddenly vanish. Actually, it went away gradually over a period of time as people made investments that weren’t going to pay off within the time horizons they needed. But the bubble obscured that reality, so when it pops the loss seems instantaneous. Loans that seemed to have adequate collateral suddenly don’t, and companies that had seemed healthy are suddenly insolvent. Bankruptcies lead to other bankruptcies like falling dominoes — I can’t pay you back because I was counting on other people to pay me back.

Because I’m losing money in one area, I need to sell my investments in other areas to raise cash. So the losses spread. (Tech investors also tend to be cryto-currency fans, expect to see Bitcoin prices collapse first, before a widespread banking crisis. That’s already started.)

Even people and businesses that are solvent stop spending, just from the sheer uncertainty of everything. Eventually governments have to step in, both by spending to prop up demand and as a lender of last resort to keep the banking system from collapsing.

None of that is inevitable. But it looks increasingly likely.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (8)