Category Archives: Uncategorized

Stop Asking

March 2, 2026 – 12:22 pm

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.

– Phillips P. OBrien

This week’s featured post is “Why this? Why now?“

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Iran attack further undermines the role of Congress in our democracy. But congressional Republicans seem content to watch their institution fade into irrelevance.
  • Epstein. From the beginning, I’ve been in denial about the depth and persistence of this scandal. It’s not going away. So I’m moving it onto the Ongoing list.
  • Climate change. My limited attention didn’t spot anything this week.
  • Gaza. The US has opened two consular offices in West Bank settlements that past administrations of both parties have deemed illegal.
  • Ukraine. Ukraine seems to have survived the “battle of winter”, gaining more territory than it lost during February.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the attack on Iran

In the featured post I focus on how little Trump seems to care about either Congress’ approval or the public’s.

and the State of the Union

In past years I’ve often devoted a featured post to analyzing the State of the Union, but this one doesn’t deserve that kind of attention. Ordinarily, a president whose party controlled Congress would list things he wants Congress to do in the coming year, and use his public platform to build popular support behind those proposals. But Trump views himself as a dictator, so he didn’t bother to ask Congress for much of anything — not even for approval of the Iran attack that was undoubtedly already in the works.

The one noteworthy thing is a speculative theme I’ve seen in several places, notably from David Frum in The Atlantic: Trump has now broken the State of the Union tradition so badly that Democrats should put an end to it if they hold the House majority next year.

Lots of people think the State of the Union address is mandated by the Constitution, but in fact it isn’t. Here’s the relevant text:

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient

Notice: no set schedule and no requirement for an in-person speech. Washington and Adams did speak to Congress on a more-or-less annual basis, usually sometime in early December. Jefferson began sending written messages instead, a practice that continued until Woodrow Wilson revived the in-person speech in 1913.

If you look at old state-of-the-union messages, they are not political speeches. What they resemble instead are the reports corporate presidents send to their boards of directors: This is what your government has been doing this last year and what we plan to do in the coming year. They aren’t full of well-crafted phrases and soaring rhetoric. But they did have policy announcements: James Monroe announced the Monroe Doctrine in the 1823 SOTU.

The first SOTU broadcast over radio was Calvin Coolidge’s in 1923. The first televised SOTU was by Harry Truman in 1947. Broadcasting changed the nature of the speech, turning it into an address to the nation rather than a message to Congress. Now it’s an annual pageant for the president to try to whip up support.

This year’s address was shameful, as so many of Trump’s speeches are. It was full of lies, way too long, and insulting to the Democrats in Congress. It contained no proposals of substance. It’s sole point was that Americans should love Trump and hate his enemies.

Before the speech, Democrats debated among themselves about whether to attend or boycott. Why subject yourself to two hours of lies and insults? I “boycotted” in the sense that I had better things to do with two hours of my life. (I scanned the transcript.)

Here’s the piece of the SOTU ritual that Trump has forgotten and needs to be reminded of: He is not the master of this event; he is a guest of the Speaker of the House. He comes in response to an invitation. Guests should act with a certain decorum. In particular, they should not gratuitously insult their hosts.

The Democrats are widely expected to regain the House majority in the fall. So when it’s time for the 2027 SOTU, the Speaker may be a Democrat like Hakeem Jeffries. He should not invite Trump to come speak in person. Trump should not be invited back at all until he pledges to behave as a guest should.

and ICE

Every week, more horror stories.

Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a refugee from Burma who was nearly blind, died after Border Patrol agents took him into custody, determined that they couldn’t hold him, and then abandoned him outside a closed Tim Horton’s franchise on a freezing-cold night in Buffalo. His family (who put up fliers asking if anyone had seen him) wasn’t told about his release or where to find him. His body was found five days later.

A Nashville man who was in this country legally and had a work permit was stopped, had his windows broken, and was taken away. His wife says he showed the agents his papers but they didn’t care.

The Portland Press Herald has found 35 Maine residents (out of the 206 swept up by ICE in the recent Operation Catch of the Day) who have been arrested and detained, but were then released by immigration judges who found that the government had no reason to hold them. Many of them have done nothing wrong.

[South Portland resident Evaristo] Kalonji’s name was on ICE’s target list even though the agency knew he had no criminal record, according to notes the government submitted in court that were viewed by the Press Herald. He said he had left his native Angola, completed an ardous journey up through the Americas and arrived in California a few years ago. He presented himself at the border, he said, then applied for asylum, so the Department of Homeland Security knew he was here.

He spent weeks in custody, paid a $3000 bond, and was released back into the same situation he was abducted from: He’s living with his family and working while he waits for his next asylum hearing.

“People were held in detention facilities for weeks for an immigration judge to essentially find that they were not a danger or a flight risk and should be released,” said Jenny Beverly, an immigration attorney in Portland and a former immigration judge. “That tells me that the arrests were needless to begin with.”

Being in detention meant Kalonji and others missed paychecks. Some lost their jobs. Their families and friends scrambled to raise money to continue to pay their bills, to pay bond, while waiting anxiously for news.

Here’s what grinds on me: The Maine detainees were brought to a detention facility in Burlington, Massachusetts — the next town over from where I live. The site was built to be a temporary processing center, but has turned into an overcrowded jail where people spend weeks or months under “inhumane” conditions. I’ve protested outside this facility, which is a quick walk from the popular Burlington Mall, with its Nordstrom’s and Victoria’s Secret. (Mall police chase away protesters who try to use the mall’s parking.) But those of us who live nearby have no way of knowing what goes on inside.

You may feel like all this Gestapo activity is far away from you. But it probably isn’t.

Politico tells the inside story of Minnesota officials dealing with Trump’s crackdown, and what lessons they have for other cities.

and Epstein

So now Bill and Hillary Clinton have both testified before the House Oversight Committee that is investigating the Epstein files. Reportedly, they answered every question. Both denied wrongdoing, and Hillary said she had never met Jeffrey Epstein, although she did know Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.

There is way more evidence linking Trump to Epstein than either of the Clintons. So why isn’t he testifying?

and deadly AIs

The Pentagon was negotiating a contract to use Anthropic’s AI app Claude, a competitor of ChatGPT. They hit a snag when Anthropic wanted the contract to ban Claude “being used for the mass surveillance of Americans or deployed in autonomous weapons with no humans involved”.

That demand didn’t just result in Anthropic losing the contract, but being declared a “supply chain risk“, which would blacklist the company from just about any government work. Axios says this designation is “usually reserved for companies from adversarial countries, such as Chinese tech giant Huawei”.

The future is not working out the way Isaac Asimov pictured. Sticking to his three laws of robotics will get you punished.

and you also might be interested in …

Florida is making it virtually impossible to teach introductory sociology at their state universities.

In 2023 the Florida Legislature passed a bill that bans curriculum at state-funded schools that supposedly teaches identity politics or diversity, equity and inclusion, or that suggests racism, sexism and other forms of oppression are embedded in American institutions.

You might wonder what kind of sociology textbook Florida professors could find that stays clear of all that. Well, Florida has made its own.

Florida’s new 267-page sociology textbook is an abbreviated version of the 669-page free and open-source “Introduction to Sociology 3e” and excludes chapters not just on race and ethnicity and gender and sexuality — the usual targets — but also on media and technology, global inequality and social stratification.

The word “racism” appeared 115 times in the original textbook, but just six times in the censored version. Sociology Professor Robyn Autry comments:

Because sociology aims to better understand “today’s most divisive issues,” it’s hard to imagine how any sociology course, especially an introductory one, can be taught without delving into topics that have been censored. And that appears to be the point for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies on the board of governors. It’s rational to conclude that they don’t want sociology taught at all, and that it’s not just particular topics but the discipline as a whole that bothers them.

Robert Cassanello, president of the United Faculty of Florida, warns:

I have it on good authority that next year they’re going to look at the psychology and American history textbooks. It’s an assault on critical thinking.

Hegseth won’t allow officers to take courses at Ivy League universities. Anything that interferes with the indoctrination he wants the military to have is off the table.

India has shifted towards Israel because they are both ethno-nationalist states now.

How does MAGA want to make ObamaCare plans cheaper? By raising the annual deductible to $31,000.

Trump’s Trumpiest judge isn’t satisfied with just blocking his prosecution for his document-stealing crimes. She has also banned Jack Smith from releasing volume 2 of his report.

and let’s close with something slick

What do Canadian dads get up to when their wives aren’t looking? Curling with the baby in a car seat.

Until I went looking for that video, I never realized that “Dads unsupervised” is a popular YouTube search term. Here’s something else it will get you.

By weeklysift | Comments (5)

The Tariff Decision

February 23, 2026 – 11:04 am

At least for now, the power to tax still belongs to Congress.

I had been starting to wonder if we still had a Supreme Court.

Again and again, starting with two cases before the election (the ballot-access case in March, 2024, where the Court more-or-less took Section 3 of the 14th Amendment out of the Constitution; and the immunity case, where they placed Trump above the law) and proceeding through a series of shadow-docket cases in 2025, the high court has seemed to be just another agency in the Trump regime, and not at all an independent branch of government. After spending four years trying to limit executive power when it was wielded by Joe Biden, the Court has been expanding the reach of the Trump presidency well past legal limits that seemed clear to judges in lower courts.

But the Court’s creeping abandonment of the rule of law at least paused on Friday, when it ruled that the emergency law Trump had been using to justify his tariffs, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), doesn’t actually give him that power. So the approximately $130 billion of IEEPA tariffs to date have been collected illegally.

I thought the law in this case was clear, so I can’t say that I was surprised by the outcome. But I was (at the very least) grateful that the six conservative justices didn’t make up some completely new legal principle to let Trump continue to do whatever he wants. (Only three of them did — not enough to form a majority.)

Several pundits are trying to read some great meaning into this decision, like that the Court is drawing a line on Trump’s power grabs. In other words, John Roberts has finally seen where all this is going and decided to take a stand. But I don’t think so. In order to understand what happened, you need to break the nine Supreme Court justices into three camps:

  • The partisan hacks: Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh. Whatever Republican presidents do is fine. Whatever Democratic presidents do is unconstitutional.
  • The liberals: Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson. They look at the statute Trump says authorizes his tariffs and can’t find an authorization there. They don’t think any novel constitutional doctrine is needed to see this.
  • The long-gamers. Roberts, Gorsuch, and Barrett. They’ve worked to establish new constitutional doctrines (Major Questions, Non-delegation) that limit regulation and unleash corporations to do whatever they want. Denying that those doctrines apply here would undermine their long-term program to hogtie the administrative state.

The votes of the hacks and the liberals were both predictable before any arguments were presented. The question was what the long-gamers would do: They are also partisan Republicans, as the immunity decision showed. (Barrett less so than Roberts and Gorsuch.) So they must have wanted to let the tariffs stand. But Trump’s justification for his tariffs flies in the face of Major Questions decisions the Court made during the Biden administration. Finding for Trump here would give the game away: Major Questions is just a rhetorical trick for constraining Democratic presidents; it doesn’t apply to Republican presidents.

Delegated powers. OK, let’s explain what these doctrines are. When Congress passes a law, sometimes small turns of phrase turn out to have big consequences. (I’ll give you a simple example from the Constitution: When the Founders gave the federal government the power to regulate interstate commerce, they never imagined that eventually nearly all commerce would have some interstate component. What they imagined to be a specialized power has turned into a sweeping power.) Both Major Questions and Non-delegation are supposed to limit this possibility.

  • Major Questions says that an executive action with huge consequences can’t be based on a subtle reading of an apparently minor phrase. So Biden couldn’t cancel all student debt, even though a law allowed him to change the terms of any particular student loan. Congress couldn’t have imagined that this simple provision could be the basis for a trillion-dollar action.
  • Non-delegation says that there are powers Congress can’t delegate, even if it wants to. It couldn’t, for example, delegate the power of the purse, essentially telling the president: “Tax and spend however you want.” Even if a law said that, the courts should disallow it.

Both of these ideas make sense in extreme cases, if the courts apply them fairly. But they both allow the Supreme Court to grab power away from the executive branch, and they’re both open to ideological bias. There’s no clear definition of the powers that can’t be delegated, or exactly when an executive action becomes “major”. So the Court has essentially given itself as much veto power as it chooses to claim.

Up until now, the Court’s conservative majority has been using that power in a partisan way, but they usually don’t even need to: Both provisions inherently favor de-regulation, because corporations tend to move much faster than Congress. For example, corporations can create new compounds faster than Congress can pass laws to regulate them. So the Clean Air Act specifically empowers the EPA to identify new pollutants and make rules about them. (The Obama administration used that power to find that climate change makes CO2 is a pollutant, allowing the EPA to regulate things like coal-burning power plants. The Trump regime has recently unmade that scientific finding, which the Court was probably going to undo anyway.) Disallowing delegations like that favors corporate malefactors over government regulators.

On the surface, both doctrines seem to be pro-democracy: If the government is going to do something significant, Congress should debate it and vote. That sounds lovely in the abstract, but it ignores the dysfunctionality of our Congress. Senate filibuster rules require a supermajority to pass new laws, and a presidential veto requires an even bigger supermajority to overcome. In practice, this means that very few new laws will get passed. So either major problems will go unaddressed, or other branches of government will have to use the powers Congress has abdicated.

This case. (The text of all the justices’ opinions is here.) The problem for the long-game faction is that the Trump tariffs are clearly a bigger intervention in the economy than Biden’s student-loan cancellation was. Biden wanted to take a one-time charge against the national balance sheet. But Trump wants to take hundreds of billions out of the private sector every year, and do it in a way that re-arranges the global trading system. So if student loan cancellation is a major question, massive tariffs must be too.

In 2021, Barrett famously declared that the Court “is not a bunch of partisan hacks”. Taking Trump’s side in this case would have exposed that as a lie.

So, here’s the issue this case presents: The Constitution gives Congress (and not the president) the power to tax. Tariffs are taxes. So a president can only impose a tariff if Congress has somehow delegated that particular taxing power to him or her. In his majority opinion, Roberts writes:

the President must “point to clear congressional authorization” to justify his extraordinary assertion of the power to impose tariffs. He cannot.

Trump takes the IEEPA as the congressional delegation he needs. But IEEPA doesn’t specifically mention tariffs, or any equivalent term. Kagan’s concurring opinion summarizes:

That text authorizes the President, upon finding a foreign threat and declaring an emergency, to “regulate” the “importation” of foreign goods.

Trump’s lawyers interpret “regulating” imported goods as including the power to tax them. But it can’t point to any other law where “regulate” carries that meaning. Roberts writes:

The Government concedes, for example, that the Securities and Exchange Commission cannot tax the trading of securities, even though it is expressly authorized to “regulate the trading of . . . securities.”

(Wouldn’t that be a bombshell, if the next Democratic president could impose a sales tax on NYSE transactions, and change the tax rate according to whatever whim possessed him that day?)

To the liberals, that’s the end of the story; it doesn’t matter whether the tariffs are major or minor, they’re just unauthorized by Congress. (To the charge of hypocrisy, in supporting Biden’s loan cancellation while opposing Trump’s tariffs, the liberals might point to this: Biden stretched a provision that is really in the law. But Trump is making up an authorization that doesn’t exist at all.)

But the long-gamers feel obligated to have an argument about why and how this falls under the Major Questions doctrine, which the liberals don’t recognize at all, and Barrett appears to regard as minor. That argument takes up about half of the 170 pages of opinions, and is well worth skipping.

The consequences. So according to the BBC, the regime has so far collected about $130 billion in illegal tariffs. Legally, that money ought to be returned. It’s a mess, made worse by the length of time the Court took to decide the case.

But who should it get returned to, and how? Directly, tariffs are paid by importers, so they presumably can sue to get their money back. (Or there’s an administrative procedure to claim tariff refunds, a process that undoubtedly will get swamped soon.) Importers like, say, WalMart or General Motors have plenty of lawyers, so they’ll eventually get their money back.

Indirectly, the tariffs have been paid by ordinary American consumers. A recent report from the New York branch of the Federal Reserve estimates that about 90% of the tariff costs were passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. But absent some unlikely legislation to pay us back out of the Treasury, we’re just out of luck. You didn’t directly write a check to the government, so you can’t get a refund.

Next steps. Trump responded to his legal defeat in two ways: First, he lashed out at individual members of the Court, accusing them of being “swayed by foreign interests” and “fools and lapdogs for the Rhinos and the radical left Democrats”. His own appointees — Gorsuch and Barrett — weren’t exempted. He called their opinions “an embarrassment to their families, to one another”.

Second, he announced new illegal tariffs: First 10% across the board, which he then raised to 15%. (Since the IEEPA lawsuit was first decided in a lower court last June, and was filed months before that, you’d think Trump would have had a clear plan of what to do if he lost. Apparently he didn’t, and just started making stuff up on the fly.)

The new tariffs are based on a different law, Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act. That law allows tariffs up to 15% that last for 150 days. However, there are conditions, which Trump has ignored:

the actual language of the Trade Act lists requirements that don’t exist today, including a “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficit. While the U.S. has run a trade deficit for decades, it’s been offset by capital inflows as foreign investors pour billions into financial markets, resulting in a net balance of zero.

Bryan Riley, director of the National Taxpayers Union’s Free Trade Initiative, wrote in a blog post last month that Section 122 only makes sense under a fixed exchange rate, which hasn’t existed in the U.S. in more than 50 years.

Expect lawsuits to be filed as soon as the new tariffs take effect. Trump will lose that case too.

However, winning may not actually be the point. The Supreme Court decision made Trump look weak, and responding with a new power grab makes him look strong again, at least for now. To the MAGA faithful, he remains a valiant warrior against the Deep State, which now includes two people he appointed to the Supreme Court himself.

One last point. Maybe at this point you are asking an obvious question: The Court didn’t say that tariffs are illegal, just tariffs unauthorized by Congress. Republicans control Congress, so why doesn’t Trump ask for authorization?

Two reasons: First, Trump’s authoritarian takeover relies on establishing that he doesn’t need Congress. A tariff he imposes on his own authority is better, in that view, from a tariff Congress gives him permission to impose. And second, Congress wouldn’t do it. The tariffs are unpopular, economists of all stripes say they’re a bad idea, and the Republican majorities in each house are small. Asking for permission and not getting it would make Trump look weak (because he is weak). From an authoritarian-takeover point of view, it’s the worst possible outcome.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (4)

Uncooperative Responses

February 9, 2026 – 12:31 pm

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on February 23.

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?

– A. R. Moxon, The Reframe

This week’s featured posts are “Non-Cooperation” and “Dying in Broad Daylight: The Washington Post“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. This week he threatened to “nationalize” vote-counting in 15 states, and continued the violent occupation of Minneapolis.
  • Climate change. Trump’s war against renewable energy is having results: Last year, for every new dollar committed to renewable energy projects, three dollars were rolled back.
  • Gaza. The ceasefire is holding more or less, but it can’t hold forever if Gazans’ lives don’t start improving.
  • Ukraine. The question is less who is winning than who will crack first. Russia’s economy is in serious trouble, and Ukraine is running out of soldiers.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about election interference

In the wake of the regime’s seizure of Georgia’s 2020 ballots and election records, and Trump threatening to “nationalize” the midterm elections rather than let states run them (as the Constitution mandates), it’s hard to decide how alarmed to be. Trump may daydream about counting the ballots himself and proclaiming his lackeys the winners, but what can he actually get away with?

Hakeem Jeffries sounds very confident: “What Donald Trump wants to do is try and nationalize the election – translation: steal it. And we’re not going to let it happen. This is going to be a free and fair election. [It] is going to be conducted like every other election where states and localities have the ability to administer the laws.”

Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias gets down into the weeds a little and has a more nuanced take on the situation. He starts with the strange fact that the warrant for the Georgia seizure came from a Missouri prosecutor, Thomas Albus, rather than from any Georgia prosecutor. It turns out that Albus has been named a “special assistant” to the attorney general. That gives him national scope, and might allow him to seize ballots anywhere in the country.

But Elias thinks seizing ballots in an ongoing election might be more difficult.

It is one thing to seize old ballots; it is quite another to imagine federal agents seizing ballots from county offices on election night or the day after. And that’s only the beginning of the chaos he could unleash. States and counties have limited supplies of voting machines and tabulators, and Trump has already threatened to unilaterally decertify certain machines. A federal prosecutor willing to abuse his power would be a potent tool in achieving Trump’s stated goals. The same is true of mail-in ballots and other forms of voting that Trump seeks to outlaw or disrupt.

But Albus would need cooperation from other prosecutors, FBI agents, and local judges. While Albus might be willing to corruptly serve his boss, others might not be.

Vox interviewed the Brennan Center’s Wendy Weiser, who has a similar opinion.

There is a very high risk that the administration will use every tool at its disposal to get voting machines or ballots in the course of an upcoming election. But I don’t think there is a high risk that they will succeed. I think every magistrate judge in the country would understand the difference between a search warrant to seize materials for an election that happened five years ago and a search warrant to seize election materials from an election in progress. I understand why people are worried. But it’s not remotely the same.

The Vox article also addresses the worry that ICE will create chaos in Democratic cities in swing states — maybe Atlanta or Philadelphia or Milwaukee. The point would be to lower voter turnout and shift the state Republican. However, it’s just as likely that a heavy ICE presence would energize Democratic voters rather than deter them. Weiser concludes:

There is clearly an effort afoot to interfere in our elections and that is something that people should be alarmed about. But this can be thwarted. And it must be.

and Minneapolis (still)

If you think the regime has changed its tactics in Minneapolis, think again. Watch this video, for example. A woman is following an unmarked ICE vehicle when agents jump out with guns drawn on her. The quickness with which agents draw their guns tells you everything you need to know. Has there been a single incident in Minneapolis in which an agent drawing a gun was an appropriate response? I think not.

More senseless gun-drawing and tear-gassing is recorded here. And then there’s this incident:

Four days after ICE arrested a Rochester man who is the recipient of a kidney transplant, federal authorities still have not given him the life-saving medications he needs to prevent his body from rejecting the donated kidney, according to the man’s wife.

There hasn’t been a headline-grabbing ICE murder in the last couple of weeks. But that doesn’t mean anything has fundamentally changed.

Speaking of murder, Trump explains to NBC’s Tony Llamas how unfair it is to judge his immigration crackdown by the completely unjustified killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti: “two people out of tens of thousands, and you get bad publicity”.

Has anybody in history ever been treated more unfairly than Donald Trump? I mean, I get that two people are dead and their families will never see them again, but Trump has had to suffer through bad publicity. How can you not sympathize with him?

Yesterday I spoke to my minister, who was part of the clergy demonstrations in Minneapolis two weeks ago. He described a church in Minneapolis that invited families who are afraid to leave their homes to sign up online to have groceries delivered to them. They expected to get maybe a dozen responses, but instead they got hundreds. And they mobilized volunteers to deliver the food.

Fox News loves to describe the resistance in Minnesota as “a national network of socialist, communist and Marxist-Leninist cells in the United States” who are funded by “foreign adversaries“. But it’s neighbors helping neighbors, using free online tools (like Sign-Up Genius) to organize themselves.

Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis” was the most-downloaded song in the country last week.

Law Dork discusses a remarkable court transcript in Minnesota. You may have heard one quote from it, where the administration’s lawyer fantasizes about being held in contempt so that she can get some sleep.

The larger story is that lawyers and prosecutors have been resigning from the Minnesota office because the administration’s policies challenge them ethically. Simultaneously, ICE is arresting so many people for no reason that it’s hard to process all the court orders releasing them. So they remain in custody for no reason.

The judge, understandably, disapproves. “What you cannot do is detain first and sort out lawful authority later.”

and Trump’s racism

As anyone with a shred of objectivity knows, Donald Trump has been racist his whole life. NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie sums up:

For years, a cottage industry of political observers has contorted itself to obscure and occlude the obvious. That regardless of what others see in him, Trump’s entire political career — from his embrace of birtherism to his hatred of birthright citizenship — cannot be understood outside the context of his bitter, deep-seated racism.

Thursday night, he ended all legitimate doubt by posting a one-minute video that included an image of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, a common racist trope. After expressions of outrage even from friendly Republicans like South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the post was removed. But Trump insisted that he would not apologize because “I didn’t make a mistake.” He claimed he hadn’t watched the video all the way through, and so had missed the Obamas-as-apes part. Of course, reposting to millions of people videos you haven’t watched all the way to the end is not a “mistake”, and the people who do watch it to the end don’t deserve an apology.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounced the “fake outrage” the video provoked. Obviously, no one could be genuinely offended by the President of the United States promoting a centuries-old slander that casts your people as subhuman.

A federal judge blocked Kristi Noem’s attempt to end temporary protected status for over 350K Haitians living in the US. The judge points out that Noem has attempted to block all 12 of the TPS designations that have come up for renewal during her tenure. The law establishing TPS had very specific condition for ending TPS status, and Noem has completely ignored them.

Notice, this has nothing to do with “illegal” immigration. TPS recipients come here legally, work, and play significant roles in some communities. These are the same people that J. D. Vance slandered as eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats.

and the Washington Post

That’s covered in one of the featured posts.

but I want to introduce you to somebody

The other featured post links to The Reframe, a Substack written by A. R. Moxon.

and the Kennedy Center

Putting Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center resulted in audiences staying away and artists canceling their performances. So Trump decided to take his ball and go home: The Trump-Kennedy Center will close for two years for renovations, starting on July 4.

The “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” is supposed to cost $200 million, which will either come from private donations or from money for “capital improvements” in the Big Beautiful Bill. NPR doesn’t see how this is possible, given that renovations on the David Geffen Hall in Lincoln Center in New York cost $550 million for a less complicated space.

The Center has contracts that go beyond July 4: scheduled performances, employees contracted to work there, and so on. It’s not clear what will happen to them, or if anybody has even thought about them. Five unions issued a joint statement:

At this time, no formal notice or briefing has been provided to the unions of arts workers whose labor sustains the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. We only know of public statements issued by President Trump and an internal message to some Kennedy Center employees that reiterated the President’s social media remarks. A pause in Kennedy Center operations without due regard for those who work there would be harmful for the arts and creative workers in America. Should we receive formal notice of a temporary suspension of Kennedy Center operations that displaces our members, we will enforce our contracts and exercise all our rights under the law. We expect continued fair pay, enforceable worker protections, and accountability for our members in the event they cannot work due to an operational pause. Our members remain steadfast in bringing to life theatrical, music, opera, dance, and other live artistic performances in the nation’s capital that speak to and resonate with all Americans.

During his second term, Trump has put a lot of effort into making a mark on DC and the country that will live on after him. This project, I think, is doomed to fail. As soon as he is gone, the country will undo virtually everything he has done. From the Kennedy Center to the Gulf of Mexico, everything will get its pre-Trump name back. His battleship class will never sail. His ballroom will become something else entirely. His triumphal arch, if it gets built at all, will be torn down. The Trump Era is going to be remembered as a time of American shame. By the time he’s gone, not even his current supporters will want to commemorate it.

and you also might be interested in …

Economist Oren Cass wrote an important piece in the NYT: “The Finance Industry is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating it That Way“. Once, the banking industry was how people’s spare cash turned into houses, railroads, and factories. But the vast majority of what the finance industry does today is disconnected from the productive economy, and its profits are largely parasitic.

The Epstein survivors have released a new ad calling on Pam Bondi: “It’s time for the truth”.

When the Trump administration gets beat, it turns vindictive. We’ve seen that spiteful side in their unending persecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who they were forced to return to his family after illegally sending him to a concentration camp in El Salvador. Now we’re seeing the same hate unleashed against the family of Liam Ramos, the five-year-old whose detention became national news. A week ago Saturday, a federal judge ordered Liam and his father released from the concentration camp in Texas where they had been held since January 20. His ruling was scalding.

But of course, the regime can’t let that stand. So Wednesday they petitioned to expedite deportation hearings on Liam’s father, who came to the border legally, requested asylum from persecution in his home country of Ecuador, and is cooperating with the legal asylum process. Friday, a federal judge granted a continuance, slowing the process down. The reports I’ve seen so far don’t say for how long.

J. D. Vance got booed during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan. But if you were watching live in the US, you didn’t hear it; the rest of the world did. Best response is from Keith Oregel: “Imagine getting booed for being a fascist in Italy.”

By weeklysift | Comments (4)

Dying in Broad Daylight: The Washington Post

February 9, 2026 – 9:34 am

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

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.

[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.

By weeklysift | Comments (16)

Through the Looking Glass

February 2, 2026 – 12:46 pm

To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave. Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame. To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children. Ask yourselves why you continue to work for an agency responsible for murders on American streets. No one is forcing you to lie to yourself, even as your bosses continue to lie to the American people.

– Keith Wilson, Mayor of Portland, Oregon

This week’s featured post is “Did We Win?” about the situation with ICE in Minneapolis.

Ongoing stories

Once again, I’m dropping the ball on climate change and various wars to focus on the battle for democracy here in the United States. I hope things seem less urgent next week.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was still talking about ICE

ICE and the resistance against it is the focus of this week’s featured post, but there’s a lot I couldn’t get to there.

The five-year-old in the bunny hat is back home. Liam Ramos and his father were both released from a Texas detention center Sunday and flown back to Minneapolis. They had been in ICE custody since January 20. The release was ordered by a federal judge on Saturday.

US district judge Fred Biery said in his ruling on Saturday that “the case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children”.

The regime claimed that when they took Liam’s father they had no choice but to take him too, because otherwise the child would have been “abandoned”. The superintendent of his school district disputes this, claiming that “another adult living in the home was outside and begged the agents to let them take care of the small child, but was refused”.

But here’s the piece often left out of the story. Not only did ICE have no reason to take Liam, they had no reason to take his father either. He had entered the country legally, by turning himself in at the border and asking for asylum, claiming that he faced persecution back in Ecuador. His lawyer says:

These are not illegal aliens. They were following all the established protocols, pursuing their claim for asylum, showing up for their court hearings, and posed no safety, no flight risk and never should have been detained.

The judge’s order says it best:

the Court finds that the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration’s detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R. The Great Writ and release from detention are GRANTED pursuant to the attached Judgment. Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.

One of the zombie lies about anti-Trump protests is that the protesters aren’t actual concerned citizens, they’re professional agitators paid by George Soros or some similar conspiracy-theory villain. (When the protesters are Black, which they mostly aren’t this time but were during the George Floyd demonstrations, the paid-by-Soros story plugs into a longstanding antisemitic/racist narrative: Jews are organizing and bankrolling Blacks to overturn White Christian society. This story has the advantage of validating stereotypes in both directions: Blacks wouldn’t be smart enough to organize on their own, without some scheming Jew behind it all.) I’m not sure exactly when this conspiracy theory got started, but it was certainly spreading at the time of the Women’s March in 2017.

If you think about this theory for more than two seconds, you’ll see how easy it would be to infiltrate and expose the whole operation, if it were actually happening: Soros is supposedly recruiting tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. Somehow he’s reaching out to them and convincing them to join. How hard would it be to cosy up to some left-wing acquaintance and get yourself recruited into Antifa, or whoever is supposed to be carrying this out? Then you could record everything, keep track of who paid you and how, and write a big expose’ for the right-wing media. You could be the Whittaker Chambers of the 21st century.

So after nine years, where is that story? Where are the names named and the receipts published? (And where’s my check, George?)

Anyway, the story never dies despite the complete lack of evidence, so I doubt that my two-seconds-of-thought is going to dissuade anybody. So the proper response is probably ridicule. With that in mind, check out this article from the humor site McSweeney’s: “I Am the Payroll Accountant for Professional Protestors in Minnesota, and I Am Swamped“. It’s a collection of memos about being sure accounting has your right name (rather than Fight D. Power), and reminding protesters to fill out their timesheets and come to the office to pick up their checks.

Fox News continues to try to make the Minnesota resistance sound sinister. Friday, they published an “analysis” by a former CIA agent identifying the “insurgency” tactics being used in Minnesota.

“All of the evidence I’ve seen indicates to me that the insurgency is funded by foreign adversaries who want to see violence and Americans fighting each other,” said de la Torre, now founder of Tower Strategies, an advisory firm based in Washington, D.C.

If you’re looking for what that evidence might be, though, the article won’t help you. The analysis is de la Torre’s personal hobby horse. If you want to believe him, you can. But if you’re skeptical, nothing here is even slightly convincing.

I’m particularly amused by the “funded” part. The resistance uses whistles, cell phones people have already, and free internet tools like Facebook and YouTube and Signal and Google Sheets. How much “funding” does that require? (Yesterday, somebody at my church was collecting money to buy handwarmers for the people who have been standing by our local road holding protest signs during the current cold snap. I suspect the involvement of the Chinese Communist Party, or maybe just a handful of my friends.)

A week ago Thursday, a group of white-haired protesters blocked the entrance to an ICE facility in Williston Vermont. Suspecting an operation by sleeper agents from Iran, I asked a friend in Vermont if she knew any of the people involved. She did, and would have gone herself if she hadn’t been involved in a different resistance activity.

The day a drone takes out an ICE SUV, talk to me about “funding”. Nothing we’ve seen so far requires “funding”.

Paul Krugman looks at the same level of organization and sees an American “color revolution”, like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine or the Rose Revolution in Georgia.

and the Epstein files

DoJ released over three million pages of Epstein files Friday, only a month and a half after the deadline in the Epstein Files Transparency Act. That’s barely more than half the six million files prosecutors were talking about previously, but Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche insists this is the last release.

Once again, DoJ is claiming they have no evidence on which to prosecute anyone other then Epstein himself (who is dead) and his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell (who is already in prison). And that may true, as far as it goes. But if these documents aren’t enough to get convictions, it seems like there ought to be plenty to predicate investigations. Who might be called in and questioned? Are there other records that could be gotten through search warrants?

Despite the extra time taken to produce the documents, identities of the victims were not protected. Worse:

The Justice Department published dozens of unredacted nude images on its website, showing young women or possibly teenagers whose photos were contained in files related to the wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

I don’t think we’ve heard the end of this yet.

and election tampering

There are two ways to look at the FBI seizing Georgia’s 2020 election ballots and records Wednesday. Either this is

  • one more Trump attempt to prove that Joe Biden didn’t kick his butt in the 2020 election, which he lost by 7 million votes
  • the opening salvo in Trump’s attempt to rig this fall’s midterm elections

Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director of All Voting is Local, explains the first view:

I think the FBI is doing the president’s bidding and trying to create a criminal case against Georgia. And by carrying out this farce of an investigation, they’re just trying to placate his delusions. It’s all a power grab. They can’t come to grips with the fact that they lost. They really have this unending obsession with the 2020 election results in Georgia and using lies to compensate for the fact that they lost.”

and the second:

I think they’re using Georgia as a blueprint to see what they can get away with elsewhere, because if they’re allowed to seize election materials here, what would stop them from doing it in other states during the midterms?

David French imagines a variety of ways Trump could rig the election without controlling the count. For example, imagine ICE continues to racially profile non-Whites as potentially illegal immigrants, and continues to temporarily detain even legal residents and citizens in brutal conditions. Then ICE opens an operation near polling places in blue cities, so that non-Whites are afraid to show up.

Court orders might try to stop this, but the regime already ignores court orders.

and Don Lemon

Ex-CNN host Don Lemon, who was let go by CNN in 2023 and has since started his own YouTube channel (with over a million subscribers), was arrested Friday under two federal statutes, for covering a protest in St. Paul on January 18. I haven’t done extensive research, but as far as I know this is unprecedented in the United States. Journalists are sometimes charged with trespassing when they follow protesters into some place they shouldn’t be, but even those charges are usually dismissed. This looks like part of the regime’s continuing effort to intimidate, co-opt, and otherwise control the press.

Let’s start at the beginning: There’s a Southern Baptist church in St. Paul with a pastor David Easterwood, whose weekday job has him leading the St. Paul ICE field office. On January 18, 30 or 40 protesters disrupted the church’s Sunday service by chanting “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good”. None of the accounts mention violence by the protesters, but congregants reported being frightened. One woman broke her arm when she fell while rushing to get out.

By the time police arrived, the protesters had moved outside the church. I don’t know if the church went on to complete its planned service, but it could have. In the accounts, I can’t see any mention of people being arrested at the scene by St. Paul police.

Then the regime’s “Justice” Department got involved. There is a federal FACE Act (Freedom of ACcess to Entrances), which was passed in 1994 to prevent anti-abortion protesters from blocking the entrances of clinics. It also applies to churches:

Whoever … by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person lawfully exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship … shall be subject to the penalties provided [elsewhere in the statute]. … The term “intimidate” means to place a person in reasonable apprehension of bodily harm to him- or herself or to another.

Penalties for a first offense without violence are up to a $10,000 fine and six months in jail. However, the law also says

Nothing in this section shall be construed … to prohibit any expressive conduct (including peaceful picketing or other peaceful demonstration) protected from legal prohibition by the First Amendment to the Constitution

So arresting protesters or the leaders of the protesters is already a bit of a stretch, and the case against them relies on proving that the protesters intended to inspire a “reasonable apprehension of bodily harm” in the congregants. In other words, it’s not enough that a woman was frightened enough to break her arm leaving church. Her fear has to be reasonable, and the protesters had to intend to inspire that fear.

No way there will ever be a conviction here. A second charge is even more speculative: violating the Conspiracy Against Rights law, which was passed after the Civil War as an anti-Klan measure. People violate CAR

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same

That can get you up to ten years in prison.

This is an even bigger stretch, because the intention to intimidate can’t just be a vague idea: Two or more people had to agree on a plan to do it. So OK, arresting protesters on these charges is more harassment than an actual threat of conviction. But the regime took it a step further: They arrested two independent journalists — Don Lemon and Georgia Fort — for covering the protest.

Lemon was live-streaming, so whatever he did is there in the video. (Clips of it were shown during his show.) I haven’t watched it, but apparently he did not participate in the demonstration. He didn’t, for example, do any slogan-chanting. He just followed the protesters in and interviewed people.

and you also might be interested in …

Paul Krugman writes about Trump’s hostility towards Canada.

Supreme Court arguments on Trump’s challenge to birthright citizenship will begin on April Fools Day.

Another factoid that I am absolutely not making up: DHS Secretary Noem‘s full name is Kristi Lynn Arnold Noem. So if you want to refer to her by her initials, in an FDR or JFK style, it’s KLAN. We seem to be living in a bad novel.

Heather Cox Richardson called out something Stephen Miller posted on social media:

Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein. Put another way: the easier your immigration policy makes it for newcomers to vote the more discerning your immigration policy must be.

Miller, in this post, does not say explicitly that it’s a mistake to give a foreign laboring class full rights. But we know from his other statements that he’s against it. He’s against birthright citizenship and a clear path to citizenship for immigrants. Being the “first and only” civilization to do this, in his mind, is foolish. The previous day he had denounced Sherrod Brown for proposing to “Protect Ohio’s Haitian community” by preserving their TPS legal status.

Under what definition are Haitian illegal migrants flown here by the Biden Administration an “Ohio community”? Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history.

Richardson points out how “History is doing that rhyming thing again.” Miller’s hierarchical view of society, with a laboring class that can never aspire to anything higher, echoes arguments pre-Civil-War Southerners made for slavery and the subordination of women.

The hierarchical system Miller embraces echoes the system championed by those like [South Carolina Senator James Henry] Hammond, who imagined themselves the nation’s true leaders who had the right to rule. They were not bound by the law, and they rejected the idea that those unwilling to recognize their superiority should have either economic or political power.

These are not the principles America was built on.

and let’s close with something that should have happened

Sadly, the ICE-chasing-a-rolling-finger video is AI-generated. Somewhere, there is a better world where this really happened.

By weeklysift | Comments (4)

Did We Win?

February 2, 2026 – 10:29 am

Trump is back-pedaling on Minneapolis. But has anything really changed yet?

At this point, just about all observers agree that the occupation of Minneapolis has been a political and public-relations disaster for the Trump regime. The unjustifiable shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, blatantly and absurdly lying about Good and Pretti from the highest levels of government, detaining five-year-old Liam Ramos and sending him to a camp in Texas, pepper-spraying a guy whose head was already being smashed to the ground, indulging a quick trigger-finger on pepper spray, drive-by gassing a crowd of protesters with no apparent purpose beyond causing harm — it just got to be too much.

The abuses of power had gone far beyond any reasonable misunderstanding or the actions of a few bad apples. Either ICE’s Minneapolis invasion force was all bad apples, top to bottom, or (worse) they were doing precisely what Trump and Stephen Miller wanted them to do: terrorize a city that hadn’t supported Trump in any of his three races.

That was, to put it mildly, a bad look. Polls were turning against ICE, and against the regime’s handling of immigration as a whole, turning what had been Republicans’ best issue against them. Even Republicans in Congress were beginning to speak up. Democrats in the Senate were emboldened to demand curbs on ICE abuses be added to the DHS funding bill.

Something had to be done. So Trump

For his part, Homan announced three apparent changes in strategy, including giving Minnesota credit for the level of cooperation it had extended all along — possibly creating a “concession” he can point to as a reason to draw down force levels.

All of which raised a question: It sounds good, but how much has really changed? The 3000 militarized federal agents are still in Minneapolis. PBS is reporting little change on the ground.

A group of protesters blew whistles and pointed out federal officers in a vehicle on a north Minneapolis street. When the officers’ vehicle moved, a small convoy of activists followed in their cars for a few blocks until the officers stopped again. Associated Press journalists were in the neighborhood covering the enforcement actions. When the journalists got out of their car to document the encounter, officers with the federal Bureau of Prisons pushed one of them, threatened them with arrest and told them to get back in their car despite the reporters’ identifying themselves as media.

Officers from multiple federal agencies have been involved in the enforcement operations. From their car, the AP journalists saw at least one person being pepper sprayed and one detained, though it was unclear if that person was the target of the operation or a protester. Agents also broke car windows.

This weekend, anti-ICE protests were held across the country. In many cities these protests passed without incident. But some DHS troops continued to treat protesting Americans as the enemy. Saturday in Portland, Oregon DHS troops attacked protesting crowds with multiple chemical agents. Governor Tina Kotek released a statement:

Indiscriminate and unlawful uses of crowd control tools by federal agents must stop. Whether in Eugene or Portland, or in any city in Oregon, a federal presence that meets the public with unnecessary force is fundamentally unacceptable in our nation.

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson’s response was more pointed:

To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave. Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame. To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children. Ask yourselves why you continue to work for an agency responsible for murders on American streets. No one is forcing you to lie to yourself, even as your bosses continue to lie to the American people.

In this video from Portland, a phalanx of DHS troops retreats into a federal building while raining gas canisters down on protesters who seem to be doing nothing illegal, violent, or threatening.

In short, the regime’s response so far has been to try to shift the narrative without noticeably changing policies.

It remains to be seen what changes Congress will demand as it holds the DHS funding bill for two more weeks. Senate Democrats are proposing fairly modest reforms: ICE agents should lose their masks [1] and wear identification, be subject to the same use-of-force regulations as local police, and wear body cameras. They should stop entering homes on purely administrative warrants rather than warrants approved by a judge. [2]

Reforms discussed but not demanded

include an explicit ban on racial profiling during immigration stops; a prohibition on ICE raids at “sensitive locations” such as schools and churches; the elimination of arrest quotas; the withdrawal of federal agents from Minneapolis; a ban on the detainment of US citizens; and a mandatory review of all use-of-force incidents.

And one question remains unanswered: Even if Congress does pass a law reining ICE in, will it obey? A Minnesota judge has listed 96 court orders ICE has flouted. ICE routinely violates rights protected by the Constitution. Will it obey an explicit law or not?

To sum up: ICE’s abusive uses of force have turned the American public against that agency, and have stained the Trump regime in general. In retrospect, we may someday see that as a turning point in restoring American democracy. But that only happens if we don’t let up. Keep demonstrating, keep speaking out, keep holding Democrats’ feet to the fire, and do everything you can to break the Republican majorities in Congress come the fall elections.

[1] Believe it or not, unmasking is controversial. Republicans are afraid that ICE agents will be publicly identified and face harassment from the public. An official ICE FAQ says:

ICE law enforcement officers wear masks to prevent doxing, which can (and has) placed them and their families at risk.

All I can say to that is: cowards. State and local police don’t wear masks. DEA agents challenge murderous drug cartels, but they don’t wear masks. The FBI agents who searched Mar-a-Lago didn’t wear masks. Members of Congress don’t wear masks (even though Ilhan Omar got attacked this week). The prosecutors and judges in Trump’s trials didn’t wear masks. But the precious snowflakes of ICE have to wear masks.

[2] Jay Kuo explains why Democrats can’t just stop funding ICE altogether: Usually, lines in a budget bill have to be followed up by an appropriations bill. (That’s what Congress has been passing recently.) But Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (which passed through the reconciliation process without Democratic votes) didn’t just budget money for ICE, it appropriated the money. In short: ICE is already funded. As long as Republicans have congressional majorities and party discipline, they can keep doing this.

If we really want to end ICE, we need to retake the House and Senate in 2026, then hold those chambers while winning the White House in 2028. For that reason, I can understand a long-game approach on reasonable and popular reforms, one that splinters the GOP now and helps win back congressional majorities in Congress for Democrats. Nothing is more important in the end, even if we must painfully accept that we can’t get every reform we want right now.

Back in December, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern promoted the idea that the next Democratic president has to use the executive powers the Supreme Court has given Trump:

First, let’s remember that the Supreme Court has now effectively granted the president authority to impound federal funds duly appropriated by Congress and to abolish federal agencies established and funded by Congress. I think that is terrible and anti-constitutional. But thanks to the Supreme Court, that is now the law. So let’s talk about what President AOC can do with those powers in 2029. On Day 1, she needs to impound ICE’s budget. She needs to refuse to spend the billions of dollars that Congress has appropriated to the agency and fire tens of thousands of immigration agents immediately, starting with those who committed acts of violence and discrimination—which, by that point, may be almost all of them. Close as many immigrant detention facilities as possible and free the detainees.

Then turn to Customs and Border Protection. Fire CBP chief Greg Bovino. Fire every single agent who participated in the horrific operations in Chicago, D.C., and L.A. Refuse to pay out a penny in benefits to any agent who broke the law. Release all the information about ICE and CBP’s immigration sweeps, including the names of every agent who participated. Start investigations and prosecutions of any law-breaking agent whom Trump doesn’t pardon. Repurpose the billions of dollars in savings as a reparations fund for every victim. Run the reparations program through a new agency established by executive order. Pay to return noncitizens who were wrongly deported back to the country. Transform ICE and CBP’s headquarters into the nerve center of a new Truth and Reconciliation Agency, and use this extra money to pay out damages to the victims of the mass deportation campaign. This would be 100 percent legal under the precedent established by Trump and the Supreme Court.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (9)

Turning Point or Tipping Point?

January 26, 2026 – 11:37 am

If the regime can repeatedly murder people in the streets with no consequences, there’s no turning back.
Fortunately, more and more people are beginning to realize that.

When I started the Weekly Sift nearly 20 years ago, my intention was to take a step back from the news each week, so that I could try to think about it clearly and encourage others to do the same. Lately that’s been difficult, because every day or two presents some new outrage to react to. After the murder of Rene Good, the arrest and detention of 5-year-old Liam Ramos, homes routinely being invaded without judicial warrants, and countless images of peaceful protesters being pepper sprayed, tear gassed, dragged from their cars and beaten, Saturday brought the killing of Alex Pretti.

Because protesters now know that the best weapon against ICE’s violent attacks is a camera, we have video of the killing from multiple angles. None of them support the claims DHS is making to justify the Border Patrol agents’ actions.

They show a man named Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who is filming ICE activity in Minneapolis, intervening when federal agents assault a woman. In response, the agents grab Pretti, force him to the ground, beat him, and ultimately shoot the defenseless man repeatedly. Pretti was pronounced dead on the scene.

Murdered VA nurse Alex Pretti

Pretti was licensed to carry a gun, and may have been carrying one legally at the time. But he was holding a camera, not a gun, and none of the videos show him with a gun in his hand. Eye witnesses echo that account.

“I did not see him attack the agents or brandish a weapon of any kind,” the physician said, under penalty of perjury.

“The man did not approach the agents with a gun,” the woman testified. “He approached them with a camera.”

It’s hard to respond rationally to a gang of government thugs that now has murdered two people in the street about two weeks apart. Or to the government that not only allows them to commit these crimes with complete impunity, but which manufactures lies to justify them.

Nonetheless, here we are. Responding with violence, an eye for an eye, only plays into the regime’s hands. The American people and their elected representatives need to respond with resolve and determination, but not with violence. [1]

Fortunately, many people seem to be doing just that. This week has also seen a number of hopeful signs. In saying that, I know how naive I sound. People of good will have been looking for hopeful signs for 11 years now. [2] Again and again, we have heard events described as turning points, as moments when Trump had finally gone too far and would be swept away by public revulsion. Again and again, the moment passed. Maybe it will pass again.

If there is a difference this time, it’s that the consequences of rolling over and doing nothing are more obvious than they’ve ever been. If Trump’s goon squads can murder people in the streets, tell lies obviously contradicted by the video evidence, and then paint their victims as “domestic terrorists” or “assassins” who deserve what they got — then quite likely we have passed a tipping point. There may be no going back without violent revolution and civil war.

If you’re keeping track on the timeline of Nazi Germany, I would place us roughly at the Night of the Long Knives, in July of 1934. There are obvious differences. But before that night, Nazi violence could be easily explained away as unfortunate clashes between Hitler’s storm troopers and rival Communist gangs, with occasional collateral damage. But the killings that night were obviously murders. Going forward, everyone knew Hitler could murder, and Hitler knew he could murder and get away with it.

We’re not the only ones watching to see what happens in this moment. Trump is watching too.

Here are the signs I’m paying attention to. You could respond to any single one of them by saying: “We’ve seen this before and it came to nothing.” But this time they are all happening at once. [3]

The lockstep support Trump’s worst outrages have been receiving from Republicans in Congress is starting to crack. No elected Republican I’m aware of is openly denouncing what the regime is doing in Minnesota, calling ICE’s murders by their proper name, or pointing out that the violence in Minneapolis is almost entirely instigated by ICE rather than the protesters. But a number are publicly saying that there is something to explain here. They are calling for a real investigation rather than a cover-up, and seem open to the possibility that the answers will not be pleasant.

Some are challenging the wisdom of the regime’s immigration strategy. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt observed that “Nobody likes the feds coming to their states.” Kentucky Rep. James Comer suggested that it’s unwise to launch an immigration crack-down without the state and local governments’ support. He believes that cities will be so much better after undocumented immigrants have been expelled that the voters in places like Minneapolis will be envious. (Try it and see, I say. I think it’s Comer who will be surprised.)

None of this is rebellion. But it’s also not reflexive repetition of regime propaganda. That’s a change.

The mainstream media has begun reporting the truth with much less hedging. The Washington Post editorial board begins its call for congressional action to rein Trump in with “The unjust killing of Alex Pretti …”. The injustice of the killing is treated as a fact we can all see, not a contention made by “Democrats” or “critics” or “activists”. The New York Times analyzed the regime’s response like this:

Detained 5-year-old Liam Ramos

Even as videos emerged that contradicted the government’s account, the Trump administration was in a race to control the narrative around the killing of Mr. Pretti, a registered nurse with no criminal record who was pinned down when immigration agents opened fire and killed him. The rush to blame Mr. Pretti and exonerate the immigration agents — even while officials were still gathering the facts — deviates entirely from the way law enforcement investigations are normally carried out.

Videos taken by eye-witnesses don’t “appear” to contradict the government’s account, they do contradict it. The contradiction is not something Democrats “contend” or critics “charge”. The NYT is testifying in its own voice rather than striking a listen-to-both-sides pose. This is a change. They seem to be taking seriously the point made on social media by Katie Mack:

A reminder to the news media: “conflicting accounts” is what you say BEFORE the incontrovertible video evidence appears. After that, your job is to ask why one side is lying, not to repeat the lie and pretend no one knows the truth.

On the other side, Fox News is doubling down, headlining “The far-left network that helped put Alex Pretti in harm’s way, then made him a martyr”. Fox’s crack investigative reporters have discovered that the resistance in Minneapolis is organized, uses messaging apps to communicate, and keeps a database of ICE sightings — all things that resistance organizers will proudly tell you themselves. But Fox sees something sinister in this. Meanwhile, The Atlantic covers the same set of facts with an air of admiration rather than fear. No one is trying to hide how organized the resistance is. Training for ICE observers is widely advertised.

No doubt you will hear similar rhetoric from your MAGA contacts, and maybe you will be frustrated that nothing seems to break through their silo of Trump-think. But this kind of propaganda plays differently when the mainstream media is telling a clear opposing story rather than hemming and hawing, as it so often has before.

ICE victim Rene Good. [4]

Democrats in the Senate look ready to take a stand. Counting on Chuck Schumer has been a risky strategy in the past, but he’s saying the right things now. In particular, he’s balking at passing funding for DHS without additional riders that control ICE’s abuses.

Senate Democrats will not allow the current DHS funding bill to move forward. … People should be safe from abuse by their own government. Senate Republicans must work with Democrats to advance the other five funding bills while we work to rewrite the DHS bill. This is the best course of action, and the American people are on our side.

It remains to be seen how principled and effective Senate Democrats can be, and whether the restrictions they put on ICE will be meaningful. At a minimum they can make Republicans defend ICE masking its agents, asking US citizens for their papers, breaking into homes without judicial warrants, and avoiding investigations when they kill someone. If a partial government shutdown results, I think Schumer is right that the American people will stand with Democrats as they try to bring a rogue agency under lawful control.

I think the House passing DHS funding last week was an incredibly negative moment for the Democratic Party. If all Democrats had voted with the handful of Republicans in opposition, the bill would not have passed. Results like these are demoralizing: What’s the point of voting for Democrats if they won’t take a stand when they have the chance?

Those Democrats who support DHS funding to avoid seeming like they are against “law enforcement” are boosting the regime’s propaganda. The whole point of blocking DHS funding is that ICE is not enforcing laws, it’s breaking laws.

Clergy of many faiths came to Minneapolis Friday to participate in the resistance.

The religious left has grabbed the momentum away from the religious right. I have a somewhat biased point of view here: The senior minister of my church (First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Bedford, Massachusetts) answered an interfaith call for clergy to come to Minneapolis for Friday’s protests and general strike. By Sunday, he was back to report on his experiences.

The Religion News Service reports that hundreds of ministers answered the call. Many of them participated in the organized activities that Fox News found so suspicious: ride-alongs with ICE observers, blowing whistles to tell the community about an ICE presence, packing food to deliver to non-White families that are afraid to leave their homes (independent of their legal status, since ICE doesn’t seem to care). Here’s one experience:

ICE agents surrounded one of the women from the minivan and instructed the pastors to get back. [Rev. Dan] Brockway [an American Baptist minister from upstate New York] standing behind the other faith leaders, began livestreaming the encounter to his church’s Facebook page.

Ultimately, the encounter was brief: The woman, who the pastors said appeared to be pregnant, had citizenship papers with her. She showed them to the officers — something activists have argued doesn’t always dissuade federal immigration agents, who have detained U.S. citizens on multiple occasions. But in less than two minutes, the agents left the scene.

The woman, the pastors said, was shaken. It was impossible to tell whether the presence of clergy had staved off a potential detention, but the pastors said the woman thanked them profusely before leaving.

The faith leaders — none of whom had previously encountered ICE — said they, too, were left unsettled.

“I’m becoming radicalized,” [Rev. James] Galasinski [a UU minister also from New York] said, his voice rising. “I’m seeing our nation become more and more fascist before my eyes — I saw it. I saw it. I mean, demanding papers? I never thought I would live in a country like this.”

When those ministers go home, their congregations will be radicalizing also.

The religious left is also turning up the heat in other ways, most notably by repeating the teachings of Jesus, which MAGA Christianity has completely turned its back on.

The resistance in Minneapolis is inspiring. This may in fact be the most encouraging development of all. It’s one thing to turn out large crowds of people for one-day demonstrations like No Kings. That’s happened before, all the way back to the Women’s March in 2017.

But what’s happening in Minneapolis is on another level entirely: It’s not just the mass rallies, impressive as they are. Ordinary people are getting together with their neighbors to plan activities and carry them out. They’re watching the streets for ICE raids, taking videos of arrests, watching schools so that non-White children don’t vanish without a trace, delivering food and medicine to families afraid to leave their homes, and in general looking after their at-risk neighbors.

The Atlantic reports:

But behind the violence in Minneapolis—captured in so many chilling photographs in recent weeks—is a different reality: a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest. You could see traces of it in the identical whistles the protesters used, in their chants, in their tactics, in the way they followed ICE agents but never actually blocked them from detaining people. Thousands of Minnesotans have been trained over the past year as legal observers and have taken part in lengthy role-playing exercises where they rehearse scenes exactly like the one I witnessed. They patrol neighborhoods day and night on foot and stay connected on encrypted apps such as Signal, in networks that were first formed after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.

Again and again, I heard people say they were not protesters but protectors—of their communities, of their values, of the Constitution. Vice President Vance has decried the protests as “engineered chaos” produced by far-left activists working in tandem with local authorities. But the reality on the ground is both stranger and more interesting.

Fox News reporters see a vast and threatening “Antifa” conspiracy here, while the Murdoch-owned New York Post looks for funding networks they can trace back to George Soros or some other Elder of Zion.

But the tactics and practices of ICE resistance have been developing all year, from Los Angeles to Portland to Chicago. Protesters are getting trained in the same way that Martin Luther King’s and Mahatma Gandhi’s movements trained people in non-violence. The discipline and forbearance they have shown in the face of outrageous provocation is remarkable.

What’s happening here is that ordinary American people are defending their neighborhoods and defending their neighbors. They are coming together in cells of folks who are learning to trust one another and work together.

The regime wants Americans to feel isolated and fearful, to sit in their social media silos and beg for Big Brother’s protection from Antifa or Venezuelan gangsters or whatever other bogeyman they are projecting this week. But the resistance movement is teaching people to trust one another and rely on one another. It is teaching people to love their neighbors and defend “the least of these” against bullying from those in power.

That’s been a radicalizing message for thousands of years, and it’s getting out again.

[1] Though, as A. R. Moxon points out: If non-violence repeatedly fails, eventually violence comes. The discipline the people of Minneapolis have shown during this armed occupation is awe-inspiring. But no one’s patience is infinite.

[2] In 2015, Trump dismissed John McCain’s status as a war hero. “He’s not a war hero,” said Trump. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Surely, we were told, that insult to our veterans was too much for voters to tolerate.

[3] The public response to January 6 was similar, with one difference: The focus then was whether Trump would leave office, and he did. After Biden’s inauguration, Trump seemed to be finished. Many wondered why they should beat a dead horse. Today, the horse is very much alive and threatens us all.

[4] The Renee Good shooting looks worse and worse the more we find out about it. An autopsy paid for by the family showed that Good suffered three wounds, only one of which was fatal. The fatal shot “struck her on the left side of her head near her temple then exited on the right side of her head”, suggesting that it came from the side.

Quite likely that’s Jonathan Ross’ third shot, the one through the driver’s open window. According to the NYT analysis of multiple video angles, that shot came after Good’s SUV had clearly missed Ross and was pulling away. In other words, he had absolutely no self-defense reason to take that shot. It was murder.

Now, my last two paragraphs are speculative, and responsible people should wait for a full forensic investigation before drawing that conclusion. But we seem unlikely to get that investigation anytime soon, because Trump’s corrupt FBI has concluded that there is nothing to investigate, and is blocking state and local police from examining the evidence.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (8)

The Euphoria Period

January 5, 2026 – 12:42 pm

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

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By weeklysift | Comments (9)

Companions and Instruments

October 6, 2025 – 1:13 pm

A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence [against] foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.

– James Madison, quoted by Judge Karin Immergut

This week’s featured posts are “The Silence of the Generals“ and “Trump Comes for Chicago“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Chicago and perhaps Portland are now under attack.
  • Climate change. Pope Leo spoke out reaffirming his predecessor’s opposition to climate change, saying that it should not be a divisive issue.
  • Gaza. A new peace plan is on the table. Is this any more likely to take hold than the previous ones?
  • Ukraine. I’m hearing very little news about advances on the ground in either direction. It seems for now to be mainly a drone war.

This week’s developments

The Trump/Hegseth Quantico speeches

Before the meeting of 800 admirals and generals called to Virginia, speculation was rampant about what it was for. Now that it has happened, we’re still wondering what it was for. I try to unravel it in one of the featured posts.

and the war against blue cities

This week, Blackhawk helicopters attacked an apartment building on Chicago’s south shore. The reality is just as crazy as it sounds. This is the topic of the other featured post.

I forgot to mention this in that post: The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland wrote a long on-the-scene account of the protests against ICE in Chicago, including a long interview with congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh.

and the government shut-down

It’s been a week and neither side is budging. I’m not sure what resolves this eventually, or how long it might take. Trump needs to preserve his authoritarian narrative — that you can’t resist him successfully, and if you try you’ll be punished. But it’s also hard to see how Democrats can give in without some kind of concession.

For what it’s worth, the public seems to be blaming Republicans more than Democrats: 39% blame the Republicans more, 30% Democrats more, and 31% both sides equally.

This is a situation where Trump-being-Trump works against his own interests. A number of congressional Republicans think they had a more persuasive blame-the-Democrats message: Let’s get a clean continuing resolution for a couple months while we work out the details, and not try to fight for policy changes yet.

But Trump keeps acting like a perpetrator rather than a victim. He wants to use the shutdown to fire more federal workers. He’s trolling Democratic leaders in insulting ways. He’s illegally using government websites and even out-of-office messages to make his political points.

Democrats, meanwhile, have a pretty good ask: Subsidies for ObamaCare healthcare policies are ending, and they want to get them re-funded. So they’re fighting to keep healthcare costs down for millions of Americans, including many Trump voters.

and Gaza

Trump put forward a peace proposal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which Hamas gave qualified agreement to. Trump pounced on this as a win, making it hard for Netanyahu to back out.

I’m skeptical, though The New Yorker’s Ruth Margalit is less so: She considers it possible that the first step — release of Hamas’ remaining hostages in exchange for a ceasefire and release of about 2000 of Israel’s Palestinian prisoners — may go forward.

and you also might be interested in …

I saw a weird report this morning: Google is handicapping searches asking whether Trump has symptoms of dementia. I tried it myself this morning, and sure enough: There’s no AI summary, and it’s not clear I’m getting stuff the search ought to find.

Speculation about Trump’s mental health has been ramping up lately for a number of reasons. His 70-minute ramble to the generals (see the featured post) was more muddled than usual, and he seemed tired. Governor Pritzker has raised the possibility that Trump’s bizarre posts about Portland and Chicago are demented. A judge Trump appointed himself said that his claims were “untethered to the facts“.

And why would Google need to put its thumb on the scale?

Henry Kissinger once lampooned Argentina’s strategic significance by calling it “a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica”. Argentina’s economy (the 23rd largest in the world, just behind Belgium) is also not particularly important. But the Trump administration is willing to risk $20 billion of taxpayer money to shore up Argentina just before a major election.

Why? The current president Javier Milei, is a Trump flatterer and a mini-Trump himself. And like Trump, he is very unpopular.

Milei earned many admirers on the right for undertaking a blitz of free-market reforms. Those included slashing government subsidies and regulations, in addition to thinning public sector ranks by 50,000 employees. In return, Trump has referred to Milei as his “favorite president” and offered an endorsement for his re-election.

Also, some well-connected hedge funds have interests in Argentina.

“Donald Trump gets a two-fer here,” [Senator Elizabeth] Warren said. “He gets to bail out his political ally in Argentina, who is very unpopular and in big trouble, and his treasury secretary apparently gets to help his hedge fund buddies.”

Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittifciation” to explain what has happened to all major internet platforms and services, such as Facebook and Twitter: They draw an audience by providing a convenient service, but then become profitable by abusing that audience after it gets locked in.

In this Guardian article, Doctorow explains in detail the enshittifcation of Amazon, which ensnared not just consumers, but the merchants who provide the products Amazon sells. He explains why the market itself will never fix Amazon, and how it has become impervious to individual action. Only regulation can solve the problem.

The path to a better Amazon doesn’t lie through consumer activism, or appeals to the its conscience. … Systemic problems have systemic solutions, not individual ones. You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly.

and let’s close with something festive

If you’re not finding a lot to dance about these days, maybe you should look at this collection of the 20 greatest dance routines.

By weeklysift | Comments (5)

Speed without rigor

September 8, 2025 – 12:17 pm

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

By weeklysift | Comments (5)