The Weekly Sift

We’ve seen newspapers go into a death-spiral before. But who thought it could happen to The Washington Post?

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Maybe you’ve seen this pattern with your own local newspaper: It has financial problems, so it lays off staff. Then the paper shrinks and has less to offer, so its readership declines, creating new financial problems. So the cycle repeats: more layoffs, less coverage, fewer readers, less revenue.

When that happens to a small-town paper (as it has, many, many times in the last 20 years or so), it’s tragic for the community the paper serves, but the rest of us barely notice. Now, however, it’s happening to one of the most storied, most influential newspapers in the United States: The Washington Post.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When the Graham family sold The Post, it looked for someone who had both the will and the resources to do right by one of the crown jewels of American journalism. And at the time, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos looked like the right choice. In The New Yorker, Post veteran Ruth Marcus described the moment like this:

On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”

For a while, Bezos and The Post had favorable winds. The controversies of the first Trump administration drove the public’s interest in political coverage, and The Post rode that wave to build its online readership. Then the Biden administration set out to be boring (as good government often is) and largely succeeded. The Post began losing money, and even Trump’s return hasn’t turned that around.

Then Bezos stepped away from his white knight role and began interfering in the newsroom. He cancelled the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris at the last minute, shifted The Post’s stable of columnists sharply to the Right, and began currying favor with Donald Trump, who has the power to give or take billions from Amazon’s bottom line. Bezos’ most blatant and most corrupt move is playing out right now: He gave First Lady Melania Trump $40 million for the rights to make the Melania propaganda vehicle, and spent another $35 million promoting it. Yahoo reports that the film’s $7 million opening weekend was larger than expected [1] and high for a documentary, but

It’s hard to imagine a scenario where the film ends up making the $75 million back.

From the beginning, it was obvious that giving Melania $40 million could not be justified economically. It was a bribe.

Bezos appeared to miss one of the key factors about The Post’s potential audience: It appeals to people who want sound, fact-based coverage. But in the Trump era, those people are mostly liberals. Like Elon Musk before him, by bowing to Trump he was alienating most of his market base.

On the flip side, The Post hasn’t been able to bow sufficiently low to attract many MAGA readers.

So Wednesday, Bezos ordered a massive layoff, about 1/3 of The Post’s workforce. The sports department is gone, and the Books section, along with big chunks of its international coverage. (For example, the Ukraine bureau and the Middle East bureau.) The Metro section shrinks from around 40 staff members (already well below its peak) to maybe 12.

NPR analyzes:

Now the Post appears poised to appeal primarily to readers interested in issues about the U.S. government, with an emphasis on national security and American politics. … Several former editors said it appeared the paper was seeking to compete more with such specialized publications as Politico and Punchbowl rather than The New York Times.

Here’s how I think about it: Historically, the Post has been the local newspaper of a company town: the town is D. C. and the company is the US government. That made the Post interesting to a national audience, in addition to the people who wanted to keep up with the Redskins or know what was happening on the National Mall. The recent layoffs look like a decision to stop being a local newspaper in any but the most superficial sense. But simultaneously, Bezos’ decision to position the Post as a MAGA-friendly billionaire-favoring news outlet is alienating its mostly non-MAGA national base. Besides, Fox News and The Wall Street Journal already own that market.

The rest of the mainstream press has been mourning for what the Washington Post used to be, and blaming Bezos for failing to come up with a solution other than entering the doom-loop of diminishing quality and diminishing returns. Many have referenced the scene in Citizen Kane where Kane says he doesn’t care how much money his newspaper loses, because he can go on losing at this rate for sixty years.

Bezos is far richer than Kane (or William Randolph Hearst, the model for Kane). The Post’s losses are just a rounding error on Bezos’ net worth. He could go on losing at this rate forever.

However, it’s a bit unfair to blame him for refusing the Charles Foster Kane role. We, the news-consuming public, have no real claim on the Bezos fortune. [2]

For that reason, one of the most interesting takes on the Post’s situation is from Josh Marshall, who has shepherded Talking Points Memo from a one-man blog to a profitable news site. The necessities of business leave him little room for being sentimental about journalism. “Making payroll,” he says, “is a brutal taskmaster.”

He sees the Bezos/Post saga as one more example of the “billionaire white knight press baron doom cycle” (previously observed when Chris Hughes bought The New Republic in 2012). The billionaire comes in as a hero, ready to spend what it takes to turn around the flagging fortunes of some iconic news source. Why doesn’t that work? In a prophetic post last July, Marshall observed:

The super rich don’t like losing money, even if it’s at scales that are essentially meaningless to them. … Why did things go wrong when Bezos got involved and started making big changes [at the Post]? A big part of the answer is the consultants, the particular ones a guy like Bezos would gravitate toward. In short, he gravitated toward the ones who speak billionaire. Which is to say, the language of leverage, commercial paper, efficiencies, disruption, innovation, the big idea, etc. Why would he go to those people? Because that’s his social world. To the extent Bezos has peers they live in that world, work with those consultants, think in that way. … They have these ideas because, like Bezos, they are heavily plugged into the tech business, its assumptions, its business models. Critically, they are hyper-focused on scale and efficiencies — two things which can be positives but are mostly neither here nor there in terms of the challenges facing most news publications.

Marshall takes a both-sides-are-wrong attitude towards the Post. The business model of the 20th-century metro newspaper is dead, but Bezos is

defaulting to what was probably the biggest error of the first two decades of the 21st century on the business side of the journalism business: the idea that the dynamics, business concepts and mores of the tech world were applicable to the news business. They’re mostly not.

Bezos will probably bring in a new batch of non-journalist consultants when The Post’s decline continues, and so the doom loop will continue, until Bezos either closes the doors or sells to someone who understands what The Post can be in the current era.

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[1] Possibly because military commanders pressured their subordinates to see the movie. Viewership dropped considerably in its second week.

[2] I will leave aside whether multi-billionaires like Bezos should face higher taxes, or whether the antitrust laws should apply to online monopolies like Amazon. I strongly support both propositions, but that’s a different conversation.

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.

– Rep. Jim Himes, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee

This week’s featured post is “The Venezuela attack is a constitutional crisis for the United States“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. All year, Trump has been pushing Congress aside in all sorts of ways. This week, he completely obliterated Congress’ role in decisions about war and peace.
• Climate change. A few years ago, climate change was mostly a theory about possible future disasters. But lately it’s been showing up in the lives of ordinary people. Meanwhile The Guardian picks four of Trump’s most outrageous lies about the climate.
• War. This week the ongoing war in Ukraine and the not-quite-peace in Gaza took a back seat to Trump’s illegal attack on Venezuela. But Israel is once again harassing groups that try to bring aid into Gaza.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the attack on Venezuela

The featured post makes the case that the way the Trump administration ignored and even lied to Congress about its Venezuela policy constitutes a constitutional crisis, which a self-respecting Congress would answer with impeachment. (Not that I expect that to happen.) There’s still a lot we don’t know about what the administration intends going forward (or if they even have a clear intention). But a few things are immediately clear

• The mission was a tactical success. Plucking a foreign leader out of his seat of power without killing him is never easy. The people who planned and executed this mission must be very good at their jobs.
• Maduro was a bad guy. Critics of the attack shouldn’t fall into the trap of lionizing Maduro or making him a victim. He stayed in power by stealing the 2024 election (and probably the 2018 election as well), and has ruled as a dictator. Venezuelans running from oppression have created a refugee problem for several countries.
• None of the administration’s justifications for the attack add up. Maduro was an illegitimate leader, but so are the leaders of many countries. He may have been involved in the drug trade, but Trump just pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández for convictions on very similar charges. Just about everything Trump has ever said about Venezuelan refugees or Venezuelan gangs operating in the US has been a pure flight of imagination.
• The attack was illegal under international law. The UN charter recognizes two justifications for going to war: self-defense, and when the war has been authorized by the UN Security Council. As Oona Hathaway of Yale Law School and the American Society of International Law put it: “The dangerous thing here is the idea that a President can just decide that a leader is not legitimate and then invade the country and presumably put someone in power who is favored by the Administration. If that were the case, that’s the end of international law, that’s the end of the U.N. charter, that’s the end of any kind of legal limits on the use of force. And if the President can do that, what’s to stop a Russian leader from doing it, or a Chinese leader from doing it, or anyone with the power to do so?”
• There is no plan for what happens next. During a press conference Saturday morning, Trump said: “So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. … [F]or us to just leave, who’s gonna take over? I mean, there is nobody to take over.” But Max Boot was unconvinced: “What is he talking about? There are no indications that U.S. troops are preparing to occupy Venezuela. … Maduro was not a one-man band. He presided over a large apparatus of oppression that includes the army, the national guard, the national police, the intelligence service and the Colombian guerrilla group ELN. All of those forces remain intact after the U.S. raid.”

If we learned anything from the expensive fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq, it should have been that you don’t take down a country’s government without having a plan for what comes next.

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I wonder what’s going on in the minds of Trump voters who thought “America First” meant that we were done with pointless foreign wars.

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Josh Marshall speculates on what’s going on at the White House:

I don’t think there’s any actual reason we’re invading Venezuela or trying to decapitate its government or whatever we’re doing. I think there are two or three different factions in the government each pushing a very hostile policy toward Venezuela for differing reasons. Meanwhile, Trump thinks it’s cool and has a personal beef with Maduro. That combination of factors created a lot of forward momentum within the U.S. government with nothing pushing back in the opposite direction. That gets you to today. My point is that it’s a mistake to think there’s a “real” reason mixed in with other subterfuges and rationales, or that it’s important to find out which one the “real” reason is. It’s not that linear or logical.

and the old/new year

Andy Borowitz and Anne Telnaes pick out the best editorial cartoons of the year.

TPM did its annual celebration of the year in corruption, the Golden Dukes. Best General-Interest Scandal: Trump’s $300 million ballroom. Biggest Journalism Fail: the NYT’s anti-Mamdani campaign.

Meanwhile, the NYT reviewed a year of Trump’s attempts to “crush dissent”.

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In case you’re wondering how the other half thinks, conservative WaPo pundit Marc Thiessen lists the 10 worst and 20 best things Trump did in 2025. Second-worst thing: He didn’t give the Pentagon enough money. Sixteenth best thing: “He brought many of the nation’s elite universities to heel.” #4 is his mostly mythical “peacemaking” record, while #6 is his attack on Venezuela.

and the Supreme Court

A week ago yesterday, Face the Nation had an extended panel discussion about the year behind and the year ahead. In their final go-round (at about the 22:40 mark) about over- or under-reported stories, legal analyst Jan Crawford picked out the corruption of the Supreme Court — that it is “in the tank for Trump” — as an over-reported story.

Not only is that narrative over-reported, it is patently false, and it is dangerous for the institution and the public’s faith and confidence in the rule of law.

The people making the in-the-tank charge did not take that criticism lying down. On his Law Dork blog, Chris Geidner described Crawford’s statement as “shockingly devoid of substance”. She gave no examples and did not point to any specific case where someone has criticized the Court unfairly.

In particular, she did not account for the obvious corruption of Clarence Thomas, who has taken literally millions of dollars worth of favors from people (like Harlan Crowe) who want to influence the Court. (Thomas has tried to hide behind a “hospitality from friends” loophole in rules about reporting gifts. But Crowe’s “friendship” only manifested after Thomas ascended to the Court.)

Josh Marshall fleshes out that response to Crawford, observing that defenders of the Court like to use a very narrow definition of corruption that focuses on bribery in exchange for specific favors.

The secondary and older definition is the act of taking something in its healthy form, in its prescribed and proper form, and pervert it into something different. The corruption of the Court is bound up with both those definitions. What the current Supreme Court has done is take the proper and constitutional role of the Court and wrench it into something very different. That very different thing is corrupt, unconstitutional and undermines democratic self-government itself. It has moved from a final Court of appeal, which reviews cases and renders decisions by a range of possible jurisprudential philosophies — more conservative or liberal, progressive or libertarian — and changed it into a body which follows no consistent or coherent mode of interpretation or even the most basic procedures and processes for how cases are supposed to make their way from trial courts and finders of fact up through the appellate process. It is a “choose your own adventure” jurisprudence, mixing and matching doctrines based on desired outcomes, frequently manufacturing entirely new ones based on ignoring the explicit language of the constitution itself. And all for the consistent purpose of advancing the partisan and/or ideological interests of the Republican Party.

What both writers find most dangerous about Crawford’s statement is the implication that the Court’s corruption itself does not threaten democracy, but pointing out the Court’s corruption does. Yes, the rule of law is less secure when the public doubts the honesty of the courts. But the solution to that problem is to call the Court back to honesty, rather than cover up its dishonesty.

and Jack Smith

You can tell that former Special Prosecutor Jack Smith performed well during his closed-door testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, because the committee’s Republican chair released the transcript on New Years Eve, hoping no one would notice.

In his more-than-eight-hour of testimony, Smith insisted he had no political motivations in indicting Trump, and said he believed “we had proof beyond a reasonable doubt in both cases” that he brought.

“If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat,” he said in his opening statement. Smith later told an unnamed committee staffer he would have indicted Biden or Barack Obama over similar evidence.

Trump wants to keep harassing the people who investigated him, but all he’s doing is keeping the story alive. And that’s bad for him because all the investigations were justified and he was guilty.

and fault lines in the MAGA movement

MAGA is struggling with the question of Nazis and antisemitism inside itself. It first arose in late October after Tucker Carlson interviewed avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes on his show, prompting considerable disagreement about whether Fuentes should continue to be held outside the pale.

Now, just weeks later, after the Carlson/Heritage fiasco appeared to have blown over, it bubbled back up in spectacular fashion at the main stage at Turning Point USA’s mega conference, dubbed “AmericaFest.” Podcaster Ben Shapiro used his speech to attack his fellow conservative influencers, from Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens to Megyn Kelly and Nick Fuentes himself. That led others to clap back at Shapiro, turning “AmFest” into a circular firing squad of grievance among the right’s top influencers.

Owens responded on her podcast by proving Shapiro’s point, referring to dangerous Talmudic conspiracies.

The Heritage Foundation’s president defended Carlson’s Fuentes interview, causing more than a dozen staffers to defect to Mike Pence’s rival think tank.

Vox finds a proximate cause in Elon’s changes to X/Twitter. Musk took down the guardrails at Twitter, encouraging the growth of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and personal attacks. Once, these changes helped right-wing posters “own the libs”. But liberals have largely left X for BlueSky and other greener pastures. Now, the best way to raise traffic (and get payments from Elon) might be to goad rival right-wingers.

It’s hard not to laugh at someone like Christopher Rufo being hoisted by his own petard.

“On the right, the public mind is now shaped by the X algorithm,” right-wing activist and X power-user Christopher Rufo recently wrote, arguing that X has usurped the role formerly held by Fox News. But, he went on, “the platform’s algorithm seems increasingly hijacked by bad actors who peddle baseless conspiracies” for “clicks, dollars, and shares.”

but I want to talk about the future of small towns

In mid-December, I made a trip back to my hometown (Quincy, Illinois), a small city of about 40,000 people that is the regional center of a rural area stretching about 50 miles in any direction. That radius takes in smaller cities like Hannibal, Missouri and Keokuk, Iowa, but if you need any citylike service — from a hospital to a good Indian restaurant to a big box store — probably you go to Quincy.

My community within Quincy is comprised almost entirely of people from the local Unitarian church. I didn’t grow up in that church, but it includes nearly everybody I go back to visit (now that my parents are gone). The church is a left-leaning citadel inside a county that voted 70% for Trump every time he ran. People attend largely because they need a place where liberals can feel safe saying what they think.

So I can’t claim that I have spent much time talking to Quincy’s MAGA majority. But simply being there gives me occasional bursts of insight into their worldview. This time something crystalized for me that I probably should have seen a long time ago: The Democratic Party has no message for towns like this.

Think about it. If I support MAGA, I can tell a story about how my vote is going to help this community thrive: Immigrant workers are going to leave the country, and tariffs will keep out foreign products. So we’ll return to a time (like the 1950s) when Americans made products for other Americans. Factories will boom again, and jobs will be plentiful.

Now, so much is wrong with that vision that there’s virtually no chance of things working out that way. The ultimate effect of Trump’s policies won’t be to shift money from immigrant workers to native-born workers. Instead, money will flow from ordinary people to the oligarchs who own the machines and algorithms. I don’t believe many of those oligarchs call Quincy their home. Meanwhile, the people who do live in Quincy will have to make do with holes in their safety net, without well-funded schools, and without decent health insurance.

But as vaporous as the MAGA fantasy is, it’s still a narrative that you can believe in if you need to believe in something. If somebody asks how your policies are going to help Quincy thrive, MAGA at least has a story to tell.

What’s the Democrats’ story? As best I can suss it out, we offer to help Quincy’s young people pay for college, so they can get qualified for decent-paying jobs somewhere like Boston (where I wound up). In other words: We’ll help your kids escape from the hellhole you call home. If you’re lucky, they’ll make enough money that they can come visit you at Christmas.

That’s not going to win many votes. We need a story of how people from small towns can succeed and prosper in those towns.

I have a few ideas about that, but nothing like a complete program. For now, I’d just like to get more people sitting with the question.

and you also might be interested in …

Maybe you remember that viral video where an ICE agent manhandled a woman in the hallway of a New York City immigration court. The agent was briefly taken off duty, but he was back the next week. Now DHS Office of Inspector General has decided no criminal probe is necessary.

ICE does not punish this kind of violence. It condones it.

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Anti-government demonstrations are going on in Iran, sparked largely by economic issues.

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Trump’s super PAC raised over $100 million in the second half of 2025, mostly in big contributions from people who expect favorable treatment from his administration. Together with his wife, the founder of Open AI gave $25 million. Crypto.com tossed $20 million Trump’s way.

Other donors included a nursing home entrepreneur seeking an ambassadorship, a vape-maker, a pro-cannabis group and a woman whose father was seeking a deal from prosecutors to settle charges that in 2020 he bribed Puerto Rico’s governor at the time.

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Anti-abortion politicians always deny that they want to go after women, but then there’s this:

A Kentucky woman has been charged with fetal homicide after police say she admitted to terminating her pregnancy at home. Kentucky State Police arrested 35-year-old Melinda Spencer on charges of fetal homicide in the first degree, abuse of a corpse and tampering with physical evidence.

Apparently, Spencer confessed to clinic workers, who ratted her out to the police. Her “crime” was to obtain abortion drugs through the mail, induce her own miscarriage, and then bury the fetus in her back yard.

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The trans University of Oklahoma instructor who was put on leave for giving zero to a Christian student essay has now been officially removed from all instructional duties.

This story has been in the news for about a month, but I hadn’t paid any attention until recently. So I read the assignment, an abstract of the article the essay was supposed to comment on, and the essay itself.

My conclusion: A failing grade was justified, but a zero was probably harsh. Out of the 25 points available, I’d have graded it somewhere in the single digits. I mean, she did turn in an essay, the essay was made up of coherent English sentences, and an opinion was expressed, if not justified. Maybe five points.

The central problem is that the essay doesn’t really address the assignment. The social-science article the essay is supposed to be commenting on was a study of the relationship between “gender typicality” and popularity in high school, and exploring the extent to which the poor mental health associated with gender atypicality is inherently part of gender atypicality, versus how much is due to teasing, bullying, and other social responses.

The student essay is almost entirely a personal emotional response to gender atypicality itself, and repeatedly makes the religious point that gender roles were established by the Creator. Teasing to enforce these gender roles is “not necessarily … a problem”. Did the student read any more of the article than the abstract I read? Not clear.

Personally, I’m reminded of a failing grade a friend of mine got on an essay for a college course on Indian philosophy. His essay responded to the questions in the assignment, but only from the point of view of Western thinkers. Similarly, he wrote coherent English sentences that had something to do with the general topic, but didn’t demonstrate any course-related knowledge.

My conclusion: Removing the instructor is much worse overkill than zeroing the essay. Have somebody else regrade the essay and give the instructor a lecture about sensitivity to the prevailing winds of Christian domination. Right-wing Christians are encouraging their students to walk around with chips on their shoulders, looking for a fight. It’s unwise to give them such a clear target.

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Trans News Network interviews former NYT editor Billie Jean Sweeney, who describes how the NYT’s hostile attitude towards trans coverage was pushed down from above.

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Guess what? Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post disapproves of taxing billionaires. California is considering a ballot initiative for a wealth tax, and some billionaires are already relocating to dodge it. “California will miss billionaires when they’re gone”, the WaPo editorial board writes, pointing out that it’s better for a state to collect low taxes from billionaires rather than none after they leave.

And that’s true as far as it goes, but it misses the more important point: We need national taxes on billionaires precisely so that they can’t play one state off against another.

Similarly, the nations of the world need to come together on a global corporate tax scheme, so that corporations can’t play one country off against another. Here’s how it could work: If you want to be a corporate tax haven like the Cayman Islands, fine. But you don’t get to use the international banking system or trade with the countries who participate in the global tax regime.

You see this kind of argument all the time: Nobody should challenge the rich and powerful because they’ll use their wealth and power to make your effort counter-productive. That argument is always presented in a matter-of-fact of-course-the-world-works-this-way manner, and the possibility that the world can and should work differently is never discussed.

and let’s close with something positive

In a year with a lot of bad news, the WaPo picked out its five best good-news stories of the year.

No Sift for the next two weeks. New articles will appear September 29.

Judges in the trenches need, and deserve, well-reasoned, bright-line guidance. Too often today, sweeping [Supreme Court] rulings arrive with breathtaking speed but minimal explanation, stripped of the rigor that full briefing and argument provide.

– anonymous lower-court judge

This week’s featured posts are “Will the courts hold the line?” and “The Democrats’ Shutdown Strategy“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. Fresh off a rebuke from a California judge about the meaning of the Posse Comitatus Act, Trump seems ready to send troops to Chicago.
• Climate change. Windmills have not had this persistent an enemy since Don Quixote.
• Gaza. Israel’s defense minister issued a “final warning” to Hamas: release the remaining hostages and lay down your weapons “or Gaza will be destroyed, and you will be annihilated.”
• Ukraine. We’ve been hearing all summer that Putin was winning the war and Ukraine’s military was on the brink of collapse. But the summer offensive is all but over, and Russia has gained very little ground.

This week’s developments

Trump’s legal defeats

These are covered in one of the featured posts.

Epstein is back in the headlines

The whole point of starting Congress’ August recess sooner was to avoid voting on legislation to release the Epstein files. By September, Speaker Johnson figured, the whole thing would have died down.

Well, apparently not. Congress is back in session and the Epstein files are still a thing.

Early on, I wrote off the Epstein controversy as a Q-anon-related conspiracy theory (which it contributed to), so I didn’t pay attention to it. As a result, I completely misrepresented it when I first mentioned it here. (Commenters called me out for that, and they were right.)

For my sins, I watched the complete two-hour rally and press conference that Epstein survivors held Wednesday. I recommend it. It’s not an easy story to hear, and the victims’ stories get a little repetitive, but that’s sort of the point: This happened over and over again; it was reported to authorities over and over again; and nothing was done.

What happened over and over was that some attractive and impressionable 14-year-old was invited to come to Epstein’s mansion either with the offer of easy money ($200 to give some old guy a massage), help launching a modelling career, or immigration to the United States. That intro turned into sexual exploitation that was difficult to escape, sometimes for years.

The purpose of the rally was to try to get two more Republicans to sign Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)’s discharge petition that will force a vote on legislation demanding release of all federal files on Epstein. (Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert are the other Republicans on board. If you’re uncomfortable being on the same side they are, join the club.) That effort seems to be failing, but the petition might succeed anyway after a few more Democrats fill vacancies by winning special elections later this year.

Opposing this bill looks terrible for congressional Republicans: They’re siding with sexual predators against their victims. You know that most of them must want to vote for it, at the very least just to avoid criticism. The only reason they don’t is pressure from Trump. Which leads to an obvious question: What in those files is so bad for Trump that he would torpedo his own party like this?

Declaring War on Chicago

That looks like a fake post some satirist made up, but it’s real. Our president put it out on social media on Saturday.

The previous Tuesday, Illinois Governor Pritzker had given a second speech [transcript, video] challenging the basis for Trump’s planned invasion: It’s not about crime and it’s not about immigration. There are proven violence-reduction programs that Trump cut, and even with majorities in Congress he has offered no plan to fix the immigration system.

Chicago has a

comprehensive evidence-based approach to crime: hiring more police officers and giving them more funding, gun and drug and gang interdiction, investing in community violence intervention, mental health supports, more substance use treatment. Those programs have shown real progress.

Then you know what happened? Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress cut those programs because they are unserious people who seem to know nothing about fighting crime.

Pritzker has pledged to go to court immediately if troops show up in Chicago. From previous court rulings, I think I know how that case will go. Requests for injunctions to stop Trump from sending in the National Guard have failed, because Congress really did delegate that power by law. But the next question is what those troops can do once they get somewhere: They can’t do law enforcement, because that violates the Posse Comitatus Act. Here’s the conclusion Judge Charles Breyer came to in the California lawsuit:

For the foregoing reasons, the Court ORDERS that Defendants are enjoined from deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops heretofore deployed in California, to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants, unless and until Defendants satisfy the requirements of a valid constitutional or statutory exception, as defined herein, to the Posse Comitatus Act.

The California injunction is stayed pending appeal, and doesn’t apply to Chicago or DC anyway. But the same principles hold once they are put before a judge: Nobody can stop Trump from sending troops to Chicago or anywhere else. But legally, they can’t do much once they get there.

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Washington DC has also filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s occupation of the city. They will win.

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Something I don’t hear discussed often enough: Why would anybody expect a temporary military presence to resolve the crime problem in a major city?

Sure: muggers, carjackers, and the like might lie low while troops are patrolling the streets. But what long-term problem is getting solved? Or are the troops themselves the long-term solution, because they stay forever?

The only way any of this makes sense is if you believe the Trump myth that big-city crime is due to undocumented immigrants. In that fantasy world, ICE could deport the whole criminal class during the occupation, leaving a crime-free city at the end.

But if crime is the result of poverty, hopelessness, poor education, drug addiction, mental illness, and the lack of legal opportunities, then it will spring back up as soon as the troops leave.

the Navy attack on a drug-smuggling boat

Tuesday, a US Navy aircraft destroyed a boat that the Trump administration claims was smuggling drugs into the US and was operated by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Eleven people, alleged gang members, were killed.

I was skeptical of these kinds of attacks when Obama did them, so you can predict my position on this. But even more interesting is the view of Benjamin Wittes, founder of the Lawfare blog, who has long been a defender of “targeted strikes against enemy individuals or small groups”. This strike, though, is “not what I signed up for”.

Wittes makes three distinctions between this strike, and, say, the Obama drone attack that killed Anwar Al-Aulaqi (the very one I was complaining about in the link above). First is legality:

The first and most important difference is that those past strikes targeted people genuinely believed to be operational figures in terrorist groups who were at least plausibly covered by a congressional authorization to use military force, which was worded broadly to cover a broad range of worldwide operations.

Second, there were alternatives to deadly force:

When you’re dealing with one small boat heading to one’s own territory in international waters and the United States Coast Guard is available, there are plenty of options short of blowing up that boat. … [T]he United States targeted with lethal force people it believed to be civilian drug traffickers and acknowledged that it could have stopped them. This would be illegal for cops. And it should be unthinkable for the military too.

And finally, this just isn’t a military problem.

Cartel and gang members are not combatants in an armed conflict against the United States. And unless they are engaged in an ongoing or imminent military attack against the United States, it simply isn’t self-defense to attack them with lethal force either.

The question I always come back to is: What stops the President from calling in an airstrike on me? It seems like the restrictions on presidential killings are getting thinner and thinner. Ron Filipkowski expresses a similar view:

So if you are out on a boat Trump can just blow you up and kill you and everyone on board by saying you had drugs without presenting any proof? That’s how this works now?

RFK Jr. and the larger attack on science

The HHS Secretary testified for three hours before the Senate Finance Committee Thursday. The hearings came just a week after Kennedy was responsible for decapitating the CDC: The Trump-appointed head was fired and three other high-ranking officials resigned, largely due to Kennedy’s moves to restrict access to vaccines, relying on cranks and conspiracy theorists rather than the scientists of the CDC.

Kennedy faced tough questioning not just from the Democratic minority on the committee, but also from Republicans Thom Tillis, John Barrasso, and especially Bill Cassidy, who had been the deciding vote on the committee that voted to approve Kennedy’s nomination in February.

Cassidy, a doctor, is like so many Republicans in Congress: He surely knew better in February, but for whatever reason decided to go along the Trump administration. In February he told the Senate about assurances he had gotten from Kennedy:

These commitments, and my expectation that we can have a great relationship to make America healthy again, is the basis of my support. He will be Secretary, but I believe he will also be a partner in working for this end. 

If Mr. Kennedy is confirmed, I will use my authority as Chairman of the Senate Committee with oversight of HHS to rebuff any attempts to remove the public’s access to life-saving vaccines without ironclad, causational scientific evidence that can be defended before the mainstream scientific community and before Congress. I will carefully watch for any effort to wrongfully sow public fear about vaccines between confusing references of coincidence and anecdote. 

But my support is built on assurances that this will not have to be a concern and that he and I can work together to build an agenda to make America healthy again.

Now, predictably, RFK Jr. has violated those commitments, including one to “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes” (in fact he fired the whole committee and replaced them with cranks). Cassidy is left with no recourse beyond asking tough questions. He gave up real power when he had it, and now it is gone.

I watched the first hour of the three-hour hearing. Kennedy staunchly defended an alternate reality in which all evidence of vaccine effectiveness is propaganda from Big Pharma, which controls all medical journals, just about all scientists, and any member of the committee who leaned on him too hard. He did not explain where better information would come from.

I imagine that any MAHA true believers watching the hearing felt vindicated. In a world where there are no reference points and no sources of reliable information, why not believe whoever you want to believe?

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Something similar is happening with climate change. The Trump administration put out a report written by five climate-change skeptics hand-picked by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, the former CEO of a fracking company, who said before his appointment: “There is no climate crisis and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either.”

The report was criticized by 85 climate scientists, who judged it “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking”, mainly because it cherry-picked data to reach a pre-determined conclusion, and cited papers as proving things that those papers’ authors disagree with. Andrew Dessler, one of the 85, wrote:

I did not go into science to make money, nor did I go in to push a “liberal agenda”. I went into science because I love science. I love the rigor, I love the discipline, I love looking at data and seeing how the world operates. Most importantly, I respect science. When I read the DOE report, I saw a document that does not respect science. In fact, I saw a document that makes a mockery of science.

He compares the DoE report to “research” put out in decades past by the Tobacco Institute, denying tobacco’s connection to cancer.

Their goal was not to win the debate that cigarettes were safe — they clearly understood they could not — but to muddy the waters enough to head off regulations on their business. Thus, the DOE report is designed to do exactly the same thing: muddy the waters enough that the government can claim there’s too much uncertainty to regulate carbon dioxide.

This is the method of the current authoritarianism: There is no capital-T Truth, just your experts arguing with my experts. So we should just all do what we want and whatever we have the power to do.

and FY 2026

Money to operate the government runs out when the fiscal year ends on October 1. One of the featured posts discusses the leverage this might give Democrats and what they should do with it.

and you also might be interested in …

Apparently, firing the head of BLS didn’t fix the jobs reporting process the way Trump wanted. The August report came out Friday, and was once again disappointing, or perhaps even alarming. The economy added only 22K new jobs in August, well below the 80K economists expected, not to mention the 168K per month rate of 2024.

As usual, past months’ estimates were revised as more complete data came in. July numbers were revised upward, but June downward, for a total loss of 21K jobs. The unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, its highest level since October, 2021, during the pandemic. 4.3% is not alarming in itself, but the trend is up.

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The Texas legislature has passed, and Governor Abbott is expected to sign, a new law against abortion pills, modeled on its 2023 bounty-hunter law that allowed civil cases against anyone who helped a woman get an out-of-state abortion.

The background is that out-of-state doctors prescribe to Texas women abortion pills that are illegal in Texas. Such pills are easily mailed or carried across the border. Texas is searching for ways to penalize those doctors, but it keeps running into blue-state shield laws.

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White supremacist and Christian nationalist rhetoric is moving into the mainstream.

Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) addressed the question “What is an American?” at the National Conservatism Conference in D.C. on Tuesday. He called into question the whole idea of immigration and naturalization, and argued against the notion that anyone who believes in our system of government can become an American. [I linked to the full text because you should be able to check that I’m summarizing him fairly.]

He seemed to carefully avoid any specifically racist or fascist quote that could be pulled out for criticism, but the basic ideas were there: American was built by a particular group of people for their descendants. He doesn’t say “White people” exactly, but

We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.

He mentions the George Floyd “riots” as if they are code for something bad that he doesn’t want to spell out. He proudly points to his own German ancestors (arriving, like mine, in the 1840s), and the Scots-Irish who settled Missouri, who were “ideally suited to life on the edge of civilization”. He doesn’t come right out with proclaiming America a White homeland. But he closes with this:

This fight is about whether our children will still have a country to call their own. It’s about whether America will remain what she was meant to be: The apex and the vanguard of Western civilization. A strong, sovereign nation—not just an idea, but a home, belonging to a people, bound together by a common past and a shared destiny.

He cloaks this message in false class-consciousness. “They” are “the elites who rule everywhere but are not truly from anywhere.” “They” shipped your jobs overseas and brought in foreigners to compete with you. “They” are also “the Left”, which “took [America’s founding] principles and drained them of all underlying substance, turning the American tradition into a deracinated ideological creed.” [my emphasis] “They” are the ones who brought down the statues (of enslavers) and changed the names (of places honoring enslavers).

It’s perfectly rational for native-born Americans to worry about what has been happening to jobs and wages over the past 50 years. But twisting that legitimate impulse in a blood-and-soil direction is dangerous.

We’re real close to blatant ethno-nationalism here, and a vision where Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and even Jews are not really Americans — so why not send ICE after them? This kind of thinking is not hidden any more, and it’s not fringe.

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Elon Musk has a new pay package agreement from Tesla. If he hits all the goals, in ten years he will be a trillionaire.

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ProPublica looks at what happened when DOGE met Social Security. Social Security is a 90-year-old bureaucracy with ancient hardware and software, so a high-tech team empowered to promote “efficiency” should have been exactly what it needed. Instead, Musk’s minions went looking for non-existent fraud that might quickly provide fodder for good tweets.

and let’s close with something adorable

If you’ve made it through all this seriousness, you deserve seven minutes of escape. Here, National Geographic compiles video of cute baby animals in the wild. My favorites are the arctic foxes.

There’s no question, he’s the leader of our party. So now he’s got a mission statement. His mission, and his goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it, every single word. … If Donald Trump says “Jump three feet high and scratch your head”, we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That’s it.

– Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX)

This week’s featured posts are “Harris lost the war of ambient information” and “Caligula’s Horse and other controversial appointments“.

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s appointments

The worst ones are covered in one of the featured posts. In general, Americans believe that presidents should get to choose their own people, unless they go too far. Generally, the Senate revolts on one or maybe two appointees. At a minimum, though, Gaetz, Hegseth, Gabbard, and RFK Jr. deserve to be rejected. Picking them is a test of the phenomenon in the quote above: Will GOP senators really disgrace themselves because Trump asks them to?

and more election retrospectives

As the final votes get counted, it becomes clear that Trump’s victory — while still clear and undisputed — was anything but the mandate-establishing landslide he wants to claim. Currently, his percentage of the vote has fallen under 50% and is likely to continue shrinking. In both percentage and vote-margin terms, his popular vote victory is smaller than what he lost to Hillary Clinton by in 2016.

Lots of ink is being spilled to explain Harris’ defeat and what Democrats should do better next time. I’ve been unimpressed by most analyses, because often Harris did do the things her critics claim she didn’t, and didn’t do the things they claim she did.

The point my brain keeps sticking on is why so many voters believed things that just weren’t true. If you can’t explain that, I don’t think you’ve gotten to the root of the problem.

The other featured post focuses on a New Yorker article that is at least a step in the right direction.

and Palestine

I’m not sure how I didn’t notice this until now — I noticed it this week because Truthout had an article on Thursday — but in September a UN Special Committee submitted a report on the situation in not just Gaza but the West Bank as well.

The report raises serious concerns of breaches of international humanitarian and human rights laws in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including starvation as a weapon of war, the possibility of genocide in Gaza and an apartheid system in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. It documents the impact of the conflict escalation since 7 October 2023 on Palestinians’ rights to food; to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment; to physical integrity, liberty and security of persons; as well as the disproportionate effects on the rights of women, children, and future generations more broadly. The report also highlights the ongoing attacks against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and refers to developments in the occupied Syrian Golan. The report provides recommendations to the General Assembly and Member States; to the State of Israel; and to businesses operating with Israel, that in any way contribute to maintaining Israel’s unlawful presence in the occupied territories.

The report doesn’t present Israel’s actions as unprovoked, or paint Hamas in a positive light. Section IV, the first substantive section, describes the October 7 attacks and the ongoing rocket attacks on Israel.

and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

Tuesday, Trump announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will co-lead the “Department of Government Efficiency”. This could mean a lot or practically nothing. It’s hard to tell at this point.

Programs to streamline government come and go. Al Gore led one during the Clinton administration, a fact that virtually no one remembers. Musk and Ramaswamy will lead a “department” that doesn’t exist: It has no employees and no budget. (They’re both rich, maybe they’ll fund it themselves.)

It also has no authority. Congress establishes the size and funding of government agencies. Trump apparently intends to challenge a Nixon-era law that prevents the President from impounding funds that Congress has appropriated. This will lead to a court battle that only the Supreme Court can decide, and could take some while to play out. It will be a test of the Court’s partisanship, because the Court obviously would not have granted Biden such power.

But even if the Court rewrites the laws and the Constitution to give Trump impoundment power, it still belongs to him, not to Musk and Ramaswamy. Maybe Trump will rubber-stamp the DOGE’s recommendations. But they’re bound to be deeply unpopular, so maybe he won’t. We’ll see.

In general, the American people are inconsistent on the subject of government. If you ask them the broad question of whether government is too big or spends too much money, they’ll say it is and does. But if you give them a specific list of programs to cut, they’ll support those programs. Typically, voters grossly overestimate how much of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, bridges to nowhere, and obscene art projects.

Trump pledged during the campaign not to cut entitlements, and some of his proposals would make the entitlement-funding situation worse. He is likely to want to spend more on defense, and he’ll have a hard time refusing to pay the interest on the national debt. Once you set all that aside, not much is left for DOGE to slash.

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One thing is certain: We will be seeing a whole bunch of articles/tweets/posts about how stupid science is and how crazy the government is to support it. I’m already seeing tweets about studying the sex life of beetles, and I’m sure there will be many more.

Science is always an easy target if you want to make government spending sound ridiculous. Decades ago, Senator William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave out the Golden Fleece Award to highlight expenditures he thought were obviously wasteful. Scientific research was a frequent “winner”.

I’m sure that silly research projects do occasionally get funded, but the bigger problem is that good scientific experiments often sound stupid if you don’t understand what the scientists are looking for. Ben Franklin flying kites during thunderstorms probably looked foolish to any neighbors who noticed. The significance of Galileo dropping weights off a tower was probably lost on contemporary observers. (“They fell. What did you think would happen?”)

More recently, the popular weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy came out of research on Gila monster venom, which no doubt could have been made to sound like a complete waste while it was happening. But what about the sex lives of beetles? Well, if a beetle invasion is devouring your crops, you might wonder about ways to discourage them from reproducing. Shutting down the beetle equivalent of Match or Tinder is probably worth a look.

and BlueSky

X/Twitter has been losing users ever since Elon Musk bought it and turned it into a safe space for Nazis, and eventually into a big in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign. He’s made it much harder to avoid right-wing propaganda or to shield yourself from abusive trolls. (Brian Klaus has labelled it a “Perfect Disinformation Machine“.)

The big reason to stay on X has been all the other people who are there, including a lot of the world’s top journalists. (Frequently, I back up points I’m making in the Sift by linking to X.) But as the user experience has gotten worse and worse — a prime example of what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification” — restless X-natives have talked more and more about going somewhere else.

The question was where? One candidate was Threads, a platform created by Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram. But whatever advantages Threads might offer are overwhelmed (at least in my mind) by the fact that you’re just replacing one Internet oligarch with another. Mark Zuckerberg might just be playing Saruman to Musk’s Sauron.

At the other extreme is Mastodon, which is based on open-source software and exists in a variety of “instances”, in which somebody has generously decided to host a social-networking community on their hardware.

But since the election there has been a mass exodus to another alternative, BlueSky. Lots of the people I have followed on X — Paul Krugman, Chris Hayes, Michelle Goldberg, Josh Marshall, James Fallows … — are now on BlueSky, with more joining every day. This week The Guardian closed its X accounts and moved to BlueSky en masse.

I’ve been experimenting with BlueSky (and also Mastodon) for several months. As on X, I don’t post much, and mainly use the platforms to announce Sift articles. I read a lot there, though, to find things to write about.

I’ve generally found BlueSky a more pleasant experience than X, though I can’t tell how much of that is cultural and how much is baked into the software. (I’m told that blocking trolls is much easier on BlueSky, though I haven’t had to use that feature. People seem to understand that they’ll be blocked if they become abusive, so abuse is comparatively rare.) Recently, though, it has become useful in the same way that X has been useful, so my attention has been shifting in BlueSky’s direction.

I confess I don’t really understand BlueSky as an organization. Wikipedia says:

Bluesky is a decentralized microblogging social media service primarily operated by Bluesky Social PBC, a public benefit corporation based in the United States.

I’m not sure how the “public benefit” part works, but the corporation does have investors who probably expect to make money somehow. Ultimately, that might make BlueSky subject to the same forces that enshittify everything on the internet. So it’s hard to say how long this halcyon period will last. Long term, Mastodon is probably the more durable alternative, if only everyone would move there. But for now, BlueSky seems to be the sweet spot of short-message social media: more pleasant than X, more useful than Mastodon.

and you also might be interested in …

I had to check this several times before believing that it wasn’t a joke: The new owner of Alex Jones’ fallen media empire is the satirical newsite The Onion.

Jones lost a defamation suit to the parents of the children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, which he repeatedly claimed was a hoax. He filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to avoid the $965 million judgment, and the bankruptcy process resulted in auctioning off his assets.

The Onion plans to shutter Jones’ InfoWars and rebuild the website featuring well-known internet humor writers and content creators, according to a person with knowledge of the sale.

The Onion published a very Onionish statement from the CEO of its parent company, Global Tetrahedron.

All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.

The statement does not reveal the purchase price, but says GT got a “steep bargain” of “less than one trillion dollars”.

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Nazis are apparently feeling emboldened by Trump’s victory. Saturday afternoon, a small band of them marched through downtown Columbus. The Columbus mayor and Ohio governor have condemned the march, though I expect we’ll wait a long to before Trump has anything to say about it.

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Red-state Democrat Jess Piper divides Trump-supporting women into four categories:

• Wealthy and well-connected. They’ll get tax cuts and they feel safe from Trump’s anti-woman policies.
• Indoctrinated. Mainly by religion. They’re single-issue anti-abortion voters who explain away Trump’s personal issues.
• Pick-me. Women who count on the men in their lives to protect them.
• Ignorant. “I watched an interview of one young White woman who said she voted for Trump because he ‘brought abortion back to the states.’ She thought Trump was legalizing the procedure. Roe fell during Biden’s term, and she seemed to blame Biden for the ban.”

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Rudy Giuliani’s illegal attempts to avoid paying his defamation liability have finally gotten to be too much for his lawyers.

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State laws that single out trans kids for discrimination are inevitably headed for the Supreme Court. Some have been thrown out, but Indiana just upheld one.

and let’s close with something deep

We often talk about people “going underground” to escape attention, but in ancient Cappadocia they literally did.

The ancient city of Elengubu, known today as Derinkuyu, burrows more than 85m below the Earth’s surface, encompassing 18 levels of tunnels. The largest excavated underground city in the world, it was in near-constant use for thousands of years, changing hands from the Phrygians to the Persians to the Christians of the Byzantine Era. It was finally abandoned in the 1920s by the Cappadocian Greeks when they faced defeat during the Greco-Turkish war and fled abruptly en masse to Greece.

The article estimates that 20,000 people might have lived in the underground city at its peak.