The Weekly Sift

All we have are whistles. They have guns.

– Francisco Segovia, executive director COPAL

This week’s featured post is “Greenland: It’s getting serious“. There is also an Expand Your Vocabulary post explaining “the Dual State”.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. Typically, I use “assault” metaphorically. But in Minneapolis the assault has become literal.
• Climate change. The EPA will report only on the cost to industry of implementing new standards, not on the money or lives saved.
• War. Venezuela already seems like ancient history. Now Trump is starting a trade war with Europe in order to claim Greenland.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about Minneapolis

In a sane world, the administration would look at videos of the Renee Good shooting — which clearly show Jonathan Ross killing her for no good reason — and say, “We’ve got to tone this down.” But of course, we haven’t been living in a sane world for nearly a year now. So ICE surged additional troops into Minneapolis in an attempt to bring the city to heel. There are now something like 3000 federal agents in Minneapolis, which Mayor Frey says is about five times the size of the municipal police force. More and more, the stories that come out of the city sound like reports of a military occupation rather than law enforcement.

NPR has witnessed multiple instances where people with legal status or U.S. citizenship have been questioned about their immigration status. Everyone NPR witnessed in the last week were people of color. We have also witnessed people being picked up by immigration agents off the streets.In one neighborhood, immigration officers crashed into a car of a U.S. citizen who refused to pull over. ICE officers ultimately let him go after running his license plate. In the same area, immigration agents dragged a woman out of her car. She said she was on her way to the doctor when she encountered the agents. The agents says she did not follow the commands to move. We witnessed how demonstrators blocked the federal agents from leaving the area and banged on their vehicles. In return, officers sprayed the large group with pepper spray and tear gas and left after throwing flash-bangs.

Meanwhile, DOJ reports that it is not investigating Ross, but is investigating the governor of Minnesota and the Mayor of Minneapolis for “actively encouraging” protesters “to go out on the street and impede ICE.” Previously, we learned that DOJ is investigating Good’s widow, prompting six career prosecutors to resign. Governor Walz summed up:

The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.

CNN collects nearly three minutes of videos of ICE abusing protesters. Also: racially profiling a US citizen, grabbing a woman’s phone for no reason, yanking a disabled woman out of her car as she was on her way to a doctor’s appointment, and using flashbangs and tear gas against protesters.

Mainstream media is not paying nearly enough attention to the role gender plays in these confrontations. ICE agents, with their masks and body armor and extreme weapons, are cosplaying hypermasculinity. They are trying to dominate and intimidate, and they get angry when people (especially women) fail to be impressed. Andi Zeisler writes in Salon:

It’s fair to assume, for instance, that Ross was looking to intimidate both Renee Good and her wife (who was outside the car, directing Renee in making a three-point turn). Neither woman gives him that satisfaction: Renee speaks to him calmly and clearly; she’s not gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles but has one hand on it. Rebecca more closely matches Ross’ energy. He has a phone in his hand; she has one in hers. She’s not scared of Ross either, instead poking fun at his obvious desire to intimidate.

Hence Ross walks in front of Good’s SUV and reaches for his gun long before she starts to roll forward. I think he was planning to point the gun in Good’s face and see if that finally scared her into submission. Her driving away was thwarting that plan. He felt a flash of rage and his gun was already drawn, so he shot.

As the various justifications for Ross’ actions dissolve under scrutiny, ICE supporters are falling back on blaming the victim for antagonizing Ross. Fox News columnist David Marcus made Good the exemplar of a class of uppity women:

According to a recent poll, only 24% of Americans believe that it is acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement. But among White women 18-44, that number leaps to an astounding 61%. … The video of Good and her partner heckling and, let’s be honest, goading ICE officers with an obnoxious smugness that makes most people’s skin crawl, is just one of many. 

We see these self-important White women doing it in video after video after video, taunting cops, insulting journalists or even bystanders, often with a weird and disturbing glee. Let’s be clear, this is happening because we let it happen.

We? Are American men failing to keep their women sufficiently intimidated? It’s true, I guess. In 40 years of marriage, I don’t think I ever saw my wife cringe in fear of me.

And here is my warning: If we do not enforce the law, if we simply allow these cosplaying would-be revolutionaries to do whatever they want, including hitting cops with cars, Renee Good will not be the last to needlessly die. This madness needs to end, and it needs to end right now.

Let’s be clear: The “madness” Marcus refers to isn’t ICE agents killing people for no reason beyond offended pride. No, he insists that will continue until women learn their lesson. This agent agrees, asking a woman who is legally following his vehicle: “Have you not learned from the last couple of days?”

Border Czar Tom Homan repeated the threat on Meet the Press:

I’ve said, from March, if the hateful rhetoric doesn’t decline, there’s going to be bloodshed. I’ve seen this movie before. And unfortunately, I was right. And there’s been a lot of bloodshed. … We need to let [the investigation] play out. But while we’re doing that, we’ve got to stop the hateful rhetoric. Saying this officer is a murderer is dangerous. It’s just ridiculous. And it’s just going to infuriate people more, which means there’s going to be more incidents like this because the hateful rhetoric is not only continuing, now has tripled down and doubled down.

So I get that it upsets Homan to hear his people called murderers. But I have a suggestion for that: Get them to stop murdering people.

I know that’s radical, but think about it: What if Jonathan Ross had never drawn his gun? What bad thing was he preventing by doing that? What if he hadn’t stood in front of her vehicle to begin with?

and Greenland

That’s the subject of the featured post.

but take a minute to learn a new idea: the Dual State

That’s the subject of this week’s Expand Your Vocabulary post.

and you also might be interested in …

The Justice Department has stopped releasing Epstein files. The last new documents came out on December 23.

The “Great HealthCare Plan” Trump has been promising for a decade came out. It’s a title page and one page of explanation. Nothing in it is going to make a significant different in your life.

This week’s measles outbreak is in South Carolina.

No vaccine is 100% effective, but the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine comes close. Two doses, usually given around age 1 and then again around age 4, are 97% effective at preventing measles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to NBC News data, the K-12 vaccination rate for MMR in Spartanburg County was 90% for the 2024-25 school year, below the 95% level doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak. In neighboring Greenville County, the MMR vaccination rate was 90.5%.

Another story that is all but getting lost in the avalanche of news: Venezuelan oil has started coming under US control. We sold the first batch for $500 million, and put a bunch of the money in a Qatari bank. You might think Congress would need to be involved in deals this large, what with the constitutional power-of-the-purse and all. But no, of course not.

I worry that Democrats are repeating a mistake. Lately I’ve once again been seeing the slogan “Abolish ICE”, which reminds me a lot of “Defund the Police”.

I supported the strategy behind “Defund the Police” — namely, to empower more appropriate agencies with more appropriate specialists to respond to 911 calls that don’t involve violence. Instead of men and women with guns, we might send social workers, mental health workers, and so on, as the situation warranted. This would have the effect of lowering funding for the armed police.

It was a good idea and still is. But politically, the slogan was a disaster, because it allowed Republicans to smear Democrats as wanting to let criminals run wild, which was never the idea.

Same thing here. If we start demanding that Democratic candidates pledge to abolish ICE, that will come back to haunt us in general elections. Republicans will say that Democrats want to open our borders and let people in without any vetting or process. (They already say that.)

Under Trump, ICE has become a monster that needs to be slain. The outrageous budget it got in the Big Beautiful Bill needs to be scaled back. The thuggish agents it has recruited need to be let go. Possibly it should be cut up into smaller agencies with more targeted tasks. But border protection is a legitimate mission that some agency needs to take on.

I’m not sure how to put that into a slogan. But “Abolish ICE” isn’t it. When your opponents decide to lie about you, they shouldn’t be able to point to your own slogan for support.

The week’s most pathetic story was Donald Trump accepting María Corina Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize medal.

Trump has long campaigned to get a Nobel Peace Prize, which President Obama won in 2009. He said many times this year that he deserved the medal for (in his fantasy world) ending eight wars.

Trump holds leverage over Machado. Her opposition party won the 2024 election in Venezuela, but Nicolás Maduro remained in office anyway until US troops kidnapped Maduro three weeks ago. Rather than try to install Machado or her party’s winning candidate Edmundo González in the presidency, or even push for swift elections that her party might win again, Trump has backed Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez. He said of Machado:

I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect.

Others have speculated that Trump was still miffed at Machado for winning the Peace Prize he had convinced himself he deserved. So Thursday, Machado attempted to appease Trump’s jealousy by presenting him with her Nobel medal. It probably won’t work, but it was worth a try.

The sad thing here is that Trump accepted the gift. This fits the portrait I painted last month in “Three Days in the Life of a Pathetic Man“. This is a man who frames fake Time covers and still won’t admit that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Trump is president and a billionaire and the godlike idol of millions of MAGA sheep, replacing Jesus in the hearts of many who call themselves “Christians”. For almost anyone else, that would be enough. And yet his own heart is such a yawning abyss that he must have Machado’s Nobel medal so that he can pretend he deserves it.

As I said in the December article: Trump used to make me mad, but he doesn’t any more. He just seems pathetic.

The Internet has been ruthless, spreading manufactured images of Trump accepting other awards he never earned, like the TriWizard Cup.

Josh Marshall explains the wider effects of firing the government’s inspectors general and corrupting the Justice Department: It isn’t just that corrupt government actors don’t get prosecuted, but that they can escape public notice entirely.

There’s a natural trajectory: reporting builds a record, and then the record is the basis of an investigation. Then the progress of the investigation becomes the focus of more reporting and public disclosure. If you can decapitate the investigatory agencies, the whole ecosystem of investigation and accountability becomes like a car that can’t ever get out of second gear. You assume that axing the investigators just means no one will be criminally accountable. Actually it means much more than that: the whole system of public accountability and disclosure breaks down.

Also Josh Marshall: The corruption of the Supreme Court makes it much harder for a Democratic Project 2029 to outline the reforms necessary to safeguard democracy against the next would-be autocrat, because there’s no predicting what new pseudo-constitutional doctrines the Court will invent to strike reforms down. That’s why reforming the Court needs to be front-and-center in any set of reforms. Democratic planners have been slow to realize this, and it’s throwing a monkey-wrench into any kind of planning process.

The point is that the corruption of the Supreme Court is actually beginning to slow, disincentivize, detour policy work. It could not be more critical that people across the Democratic world — policy, law, electoral politics — have this realization. There’s no reason to accept a situation in which democratic self-government is only allowed now for Republicans.

and let’s close with something spooky

We all realize that we share certain features with other members of our families, but not to this extent. Canadian artist Ulric Collette has a project called “Genetic Portraits“, where he presents two relatives as left/right halves of a single face. Mother/son, sister/brother, and so on. The results are striking testimony to the heritability of facial features. This one is a grandmother/granddaughter pair.

These documents are more blacked out than Pete Hegseth on New Years Eve.

– feral streep, on the redactions in the newly released Epstein material

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on January 5.

This week’s featured post is “Three days in the life of a pathetic man“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. He’s trying to move CNN into the hands of an oligarch ally, and is maneuvering us towards war with Venezuela without consulting Congress.
• Climate change. Based on the theory that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, the administration is planning to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, due to its “climate alarmism”.
• Gaza and Ukraine. I didn’t run across anything new this week. Probably I was too busy with Christmas stuff.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was still talking about the Epstein files

Friday was the deadline that the Epstein Files Transparency Act had set for the Justice Department to release all of its files about Jeffrey Epstein, with a few minor exceptions, mostly related to protecting the identities of the young women who were Epstein’s victims.

But the EFTA is just a law, one passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed by President Trump himself. Why should the Justice Department consider itself bound to obey? So of course, DoJ waited until the final day to release anything at all. When it did, the release was not complete, and appeared to be much more heavily redacted than mere victim-protection could account for. (One 119-page document is entirely redacted. One commenter characterized the release as a whole as “more blacked out than Pete Hegseth on New Years Eve”.)

on Friday morning, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, went on Fox News to say that the department wouldn’t actually be releasing all of the files on Friday as required by the law. “I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks, so today, several hundred thousand, and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” Blanche said on Fox News. “There’s a lot of eyes looking at these and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing, that we are protecting every single victim.”

By the time the department eventually did release thousands of pages of materials on Friday evening – not the hundreds of thousands Blanche promised – many of the documents had been heavily or completely redacted. Other than a few pictures, the materials made no mention of Trump, even though attorney general Pam Bondi reportedly told Trump earlier this year his name was in the files.

Some of the pictures released did include former President Bill Clinton, an apparent effort to support Trump’s gaslighting that the Epstein affair was a Democratic scandal, not a Trump scandal. Trump doesn’t seem to grasp that whattaboutism won’t get him out of this jam. “Democrats did it too” or even “Democrats did worse” isn’t a valid excuse. If Democrats are also guilty, expose them too.

The two sponsors of the EFTA, Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, both denounced the partial release, which fails to identify anyone who victimized the girls other than Epstein, who is dead, and Ghislaine Maxwell, who is already in prison for sex trafficking (after apparently trafficking the girls to no one, if what has been released is the whole story).

What can Congress do to force DoJ to obey the law? Not much, apparently. It could find Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress, but her own department would then be responsible for prosecuting her, which it would not do. Congress could impeach her, if it had the will to do so (which is doubtful). But Bondi could make the impeachment moot by resigning. Again, whatever Trump is hiding would stay hidden.

The only penalty Trump can be forced to pay is political, which they apparently believe they can mitigate by continuing to dribble out files little by little.

and war with Venezuela

Step-by-step, we are marching into a war with Venezuela. First we blew up their fishing boats, which may or may not have been smuggling cocaine and may or may not have been headed towards the US.

On December 10, the US seized a Venezuelan oil tanker. And then Tuesday, Trump announced an oil blockade of Venezuela. He did it in a Truth Social post that was barely coherent, making references to “the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us”.

It’s tempting to sanewash this by looking for some plausible reference — maybe the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. But nations all over the world (Saudi Arabia, for example) have nationalized their oil industries without getting attacked. And why oil previously claimed by an oil company should be “ours” is a bit of a stretch.

But while I think justifications like that should be put to administration spokespeople, I’m not going to assume Trump’s post makes sense at all until some official source explains it.

Here’s something more people should be saying: The recent moves make it clear that the attacks on boats were never about drugs, they were about regime change. And changing the Maduro regime is about getting control of Venezuela’s oil. Without the oil, Maduro could be five times as tyrannical and nobody in the Trump administration would care.

and the Bondi Beach shooting

On December 14, a father and son opened fire on a crowd gathered for a Hannukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia. 15 people were killed and 40 injured. The father was killed by police and the son badly wounded. No official statement of motive has surfaced, but antisemitism seems like an obvious guess.

I find two things noteworthy here: First, antisemitism really is rising around the world. I know some people falsely claim that any criticism of the current Israeli government is antisemitism, but you can brush off that canard and still recognize that antisemitism is real.

I’ll repeat what I’ve often said before: You can think whatever you want about Netanyahu or Hamas, but that’s no excuse to bring the war here. American Jews and American Muslims or Arabs are not the problem, and violence against them will not solve anything or prove anything. Ditto for Australians.

Second: Pro-gun people have been crowing about how Australia’s more rigorous gun restrictions didn’t stop this mass shooting. But they’re not thinking this through. The shooters used a bolt-action rifle and a shotgun, rather than semi-automatic weapons, because that’s what they could get their hands on in Australia. Because of that restriction, they only got off 83 shots in something like ten minutes. With American AR-15s, they could have unleashed hundreds of rounds and killed many more people. The 2017 Las Vegas shooter, by himself, fired over a thousand rounds and killed 60.

These kinds of restrictions make a difference, as do limits on the sizes of gun magazines. Shooters are most often stopped when they have to reload. The more bullets they have available without reloading, the longer it will take to stop them.

and Trump’s sad sick week

The Rob Reiner post, the strange plaques Trumpifying past presidents, the self-serving national address, and then the Trump-Kennedy Center. All in three days. The featured post covers these incidents, emphasizing how Trump’s attempts to aggrandize himself just make him smaller.

and Susan Wiles

For some reason nobody has been able to specify, White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles gave a series of interviews to a Vanity Fair reporter, and high-ranking members of the administration posed for a Vanity Fair photographer.

We learned that Wiles thinks:

• Trump has an alcoholic’s personality.
• Vance’s conversion to Trumpism has been “sort of political”
• OMB head Russell Vought is “a right-wing absolute zealot”.
• The destruction of the White House’s East Wing is just the beginning. “I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning.”
• There is no evidence to support Trump’s claims about Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein.
• The component parts of the Big Beautiful Bill are popular. “That will be a very big deal in the midterms.”
• Blowing up boats in the Caribbean isn’t about drugs, it’s about pressuring the Maduro government in Venezuela.
• Trump’s attacks on the high seas don’t needs congressional approval, but an attack on the Venezuelan mainland would.
• Trump believes Putin wants all of Ukraine, not just the provinces he has claimed so far.
• If Vance runs in 2028, he’ll be the Republican nominee.
• Trump hasn’t been asleep in cabinet meetings. He’s just resting his eyes.
• He insults female reporters because “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.”
• Trump won’t run for a third term.
• Trump doesn’t wake up thinking about revenge against enemies like James Comey, “But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

Amazingly, Trump has not denounced her.

and pro-Trump media consolidation

Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary is often cited as a model for Trump’s authoritarian takeover. A key piece of Orbán’s strategy was to make sure the major media outlets wound up in friendly hands, creating a state media unofficially.

Trump has been doing the same thing, partly by acquisition, partly by coopting the oligarchs who already own media properties. And so:

• The richest man in the world (Elon Musk) is a Trump ally who owns X/Twitter.
• The US’s second-richest man (Jeff Bezos) owns The Washington Post, and blocked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024.
• The US’s third-richest man (Mark Zuckerberg) owns Meta, which controls Facebook.
• The fourth-richest (Larry Ellison) controls Skydance, which owns Paramount, which owns CBS. His hand-picked news baron is Bari Weiss. She just spiked a 60 Minutes episode exposing the Trump gulag in El Salvador. Ellison also has wound up controlling the US version of TikTok.

Now Ellison’s empire is bidding against Netflix for Warner/Discovery, which controls CNN, among other notable media properties. Trump is in a position to influence how this goes: He could hint that DoJ would sue to stop a Netflix acquisition as a violation of antitrust laws, but let the Paramount bid go through.

and you also might be interested in …

To no one’s surprise, Republicans in Congress still have no solution to the ObamaCare insurance premiums that are set to skyrocket. The House did pass a bill roughly along the lines I told you about in November: You can lower your premiums by buying the kind of junk insurance that the Affordable Care Act made illegal. You won’t be insured if anything really bad happens to you or your family, but you can tell yourself you have insurance. And even that won’t get through the Senate.

North Carolina’s legislature is one of the most gerrymandered in the country. That’s how a state that has had Democratic governors since 2017 and that Trump carried by a mere 3% in 2024 has substantial and rock-solid Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature: 30-20 in the Senate and 71-49 in the House.

It’s a great frustration to NC Republicans that you can’t gerrymander a statewide office like the governorship. So they’ve done the next best thing: Taken away nearly all the power of the governor and moved it to the legislature.

In essence, they have disempowered their own voters: The voters can control which party gets the governorship, but control of the legislature is baked into the maps.

The Democratic Party is about to go through its usual pattern in the Texas Senate race:

• A firebrand progressive (Jasmine Crockett, who I love to watch on TV news shows) will excite the base and win the primary.
• The national party will decide she can’t win and will refuse to put any resources into the race.
• She’ll lose.
• The finger-pointing will start: Was the problem that she’s too liberal or that the national party sabotaged her?

I’m not taking a side here, I’m just pointing to the pattern. Until the Party goes all-in on one of these races, we won’t know whose intuition is right.

In his testimony to Congress, FCC Chair Brendan Carr (last seen demanding that ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel) denied that the FCC is an independent agency. Instead, he sees the FCC as an instrument of Trump’s political agenda.

Data from Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Press Freedom Tracker shows that every single investigation or social media tirade Carr has launched against licensees’ speech – be it 60 Minutes’ editing of its Kamala Harris interview, Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks about Charlie Kirk’s death, or Comcast’s accurate reporting that contradicted Trump’s lies about the Kilmar Abrego García’s immigration case – has involved content that upset Trump.

and let’s close with something seasonal

Randy Rainbow’s new parody: It’s beginning to look a lot like f**k this.

I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.

– President Donald Trump
Oct 23 (at 58:50 in the video)

This week’s featured post is “Crime in the Cabinet“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. Courts continue to push back against Trump. Trump’s spiteful indictments of James Comey and Letitia James got thrown out.
• Climate change. COP30 was dispiriting. The fossil fuel industry seems to be winning the information war.
• Gaza. In spite of the “ceasefire”, the death toll keeps rising. It’s now over 70,000.
• Ukraine. It looks like Marco Rubio has managed to stop the attempt to force Ukraine to surrender to Putin’s demands.

This week’s developments

This week the Ukraine peace negotiations got more confusing

Initially, we heard that the Trump administration had negotiated a 28-point plan to end the Ukraine/Russia War. Trump’s amateur diplomat Steve Witkoff (a real estate mogul) supposedly had worked it out with Putin’s representative Kirill Dmitriev (who is the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund).

Ostensibly, this was “the Trump plan”. But the deal looked suspiciously one-sided, and was essentially a reiteration of Putin’s demands: Ukraine would yield all the territory that Russia claims (including territory it has been unable to conquer), Ukraine would limit the size of its army, NATO would agree not to station peacekeeping troops in Ukraine or let Ukraine join the alliance, and a few more points. Russia would yield essentially nothing, beyond making commitments similar to ones it had already broken by invading Crimea in 2014 and attacking the rest of Ukraine in 2022. Western sanctions against Russia would be dropped, opening up lots of business opportunities for men like Witkoff and Trump, if Putin felt inclined to look on them favorably.

Worse, some odd phrasing in the proposal suggested it had been translated from Russian. In other words, Witkoff had received a Russian plan and passed it off as “the Trump plan”, which Trump seemed content to go along with. Trump gave Ukraine until Thanksgiving to respond to the plan, warning that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy “is going to have to approve it” or face an even worse future for his country.

Two major things have happened since. First, Marco Rubio managed to insinuate himself into the process, pull Ukraine and our NATO allies back in with him, and rewrite the plan in a more balanced way that Putin is likely to reject. In other words, Trump’s Secretary of State for now has managed to scuttle “the Trump plan” to force Ukraine’s surrender.

Second, Bloomberg (behind a paywall) released transcripts of phone calls Witkoff had with Dmitriev and Putin’s top foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov. The calls raise serious doubts about Witkoff’s true loyalties. (The Foreign Office blogger Michael Weiss refers to Witkoff as “Dim Philby”, a play on the name of the famous Cold War British traitor Kim Philby. The nickname seems to be catching on.) In the transcripts, Witkoff coaches the Russians in how to pitch their proposal to Trump, as if Witkoff’s job were to manipulate Trump for the Russians, rather than the Russians for Trump.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan summarizes:

Trump is left with two choices: to either fire Witkoff, who is not a formally appointed official anyway, or essentially confirm that he is acting as a Russian tool as well. The fact that Trump has decided to send Witkoff to Moscow for further talks in the coming days suggests the latter.

Three sources tell the story in more detail: Marcy Wheeler, Fred Kaplan, and Michael Weiss.

My two conclusions:

• The 28-point “Trump plan” is dead, at least for now. Ukraine will not be pressured to surrender for at least another week.
• We’re going to see more of this kind of behind-the-throne maneuvering, as Trump’s cognitive abilities continue to fade. Strong-willed lieutenants like Witkoff, Rubio, J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller et al will keep trying to manipulate Trump’s increasingly simple thought processes to get their own pet projects through, or just do things and hope the details never rise to the level of Trump’s attention.

and someone killed one of the National Guard troops Trump posted to DC

Two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot near the White House Wednesday. One, Sarah Beckstrom, has died. The other, Andrew Wolfe, is in critical condition. The two were victims of what appears to have been a planned attack. No motive has been identified.

The alleged gunman, identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, came to the US in September 2021 under an Operation Allies Welcome program that gave some Afghans who had worked for the US government entry visas to the US. He was granted asylum in April this year, under the Trump administration, Reuters reported. Lakanwal’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, which worked alongside US special forces in Afghanistan, were confirmed by the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, to media outlets. The New York Times reported that the shooting suspect had worked for several US government agencies in Afghanistan, including CIA-backed units in the southern province of Kandahar, a stronghold of the Taliban.

Trump, of course, did what he always does: blamed the Biden administration, took no responsibility for his own administration’s role, and cast collective blame on all asylum seekers.

The Trump administration has halted all asylum decisions following the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington DC, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director has said. Joseph Edlow said the pause would be in place “until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible”.

That article is an example of “sanewashing”. It makes Trump’s actions sound like a reasonable, if maybe misguided, response. But you get a different impression if you read what Trump actually posted:

Even as we have progressed technologically, Immigration Policy has eroded those gains and living conditions for many. I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization. These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process. Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for — You won’t be here for long!

So:

• Trump wants us to believe that immigrants (and not billionaires or Trump’s tariffs) are responsible for the dismal current economy and the long-term hollowing out of America’s middle class.
• In general, even illegal immigrants are not a “disruptive population”. The vast majority keep their heads down, try not to draw attention to themselves, and work hard for very little money.
• Trump is promoting the Biden-autopen conspiracy theory, which has no evidence to back it up.
• Terminating Biden’s “illegal admissions” means getting rid of 1.3 million people who came here entirely legally, through programs like temporary protected status for victims of natural disasters.
• “Denaturalization” is not a thing, unless your path to citizenship was based on fraud, as Melania’s probably was. Naturalized citizens are like native born citizens; you can’t get rid of them by labeling them “non-compatible with Western Civilization” or making vague claims about “undermining domestic tranquility”.

This is all White supremacist rhetoric otherwise unhinged from reality.

Some background: The US fought a war in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, until President Biden finally faced the reality that we were accomplishing nothing and pulled out in 2021. The pullout was chaotic, which only emphasized the need to get out: Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump had been telling us for 20 years that we were building a viable government with a viable military, but in fact everything collapsed before we could even get our people out of the country.

In the chaos, everyone who had helped the US military or the CIA was in danger. Operation Allies Welcome was designed to get them out of the country before the Taliban could find and kill them. It was followed by Operation Enduring Welcome. About 200,000 Afghans got at least temporary legal status in the US.

Now one of those 200,000 has done something terrible. So of course we should have left them all to the mercy of the Taliban. And refugees from every other country are also suspect — except Whites escaping South Africa.

and Trump continues to lose in court

Not long after last week’s Sift posted, a federal judge threw out the James Comey and Letitia James indictments because Lindsey Halligan had not been lawfully appointed as US attorney for eastern Virginia. Halligan is a former personal attorney of Trump’s and has no previous experience as a prosecutor. She was appointed after the previous US attorney refused to prosecute the Comey case.

The regime may find another way to prosecute James, but the statute of limitations has run out on what Comey is accused of.

Another court just took out a different Trump prosecutor: An appellate court panel upheld a lower court ruling that Alina Habba was not legally appointed as acting US attorney for New Jersey. Every case she has prosecuted since July 1 is now subject to challenge. The issues here are slightly different than in the Halligan situation, but similarly concerns a scheme to keep a Trump-friendly and unqualified US attorney in office without Senate confirmation, beyond the 120-day period allowed for acting appointments.

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The Epstein files issue hasn’t gone away. The Epstein Transparency Act gives the regime until December 19 to release the files. The clock is ticking.

During the shutdown, Democrats were holding out to get ObamaCare subsidies extended, in an effort to avoid premiums skyrocketing on January 1. Republicans said no, but that they’d deal with the problem after the Democrats caved on the shutdown.

Well, Democrats eventually caved, and guess what? Republicans can’t get a proposal together. Trump briefly seemed to be pushing for a plan to extend the subsidies for two years. But that ran into opposition in the House and vanished.

The basic problem is that a sizeable number of Republicans favor a plan they can’t defend in public: Let poor people die.

Kristi Noem’s contempt of court got covered in the featured post. But that wasn’t even the only Noem scandal this week: $220 million of DHS money has gone to an ad firm with close ties to Noem. The money is for image-building ads starring Noem herself.

Under Noem, DHS bypassed the normal competitive bidding process when awarding the contracts — allocating the majority of the money to a mysterious Delaware LLC that was created days before the deal was finalized. The Strategy Group does not appear on public documents about the deal.

My annual dose of humility: The NYT’s 100 Notable Books list for 2025. This year I’ve read three: 1929, Katabasis, and Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.

In stark contrast to Trump’s apparent concern with drug smuggling, which has caused him to have the US Navy murder 80 or so Venezuelan fishermen — see the featured post — he said this week that he intends to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who is serving a 45-year sentence in US prison for drug trafficking and related offenses.

Who knows what this is about? Maybe Hernandez paid somebody off. Or maybe Trump is just showing loyalty to a fellow criminal president, or his characteristic sympathy for people at the top of a pyramid, no matter how corrupt the pyramid is.

Similarly mystifying: Trump commuted the sentence of convicted fraudster David Gentile from seven years to 12 days. Gentile ran a Ponzi scheme that defrauded more than 10,000 investors. Does Trump just identify with fraudsters? Or is there something more sinister happening?

The War Defense Department is investigating Senator Mark Kelly for his role in an ad reminding members of the armed forces not to obey unlawful orders, which is just what the Uniform Code of Military Justice says.

President Bone Spurs and Secretary Drunkard don’t seem to understand that any story placing them next to decorated-pilot-and-astronaut Kelly works to his benefit, not theirs.

Meanwhile, South Park has its sites on Hegseth in its Thanksgiving episode. The episode ends on a song that obscenely insults Hegseth, then asks “Pete Hegseth, what you gonna do? Your kids will watch this, and their friends will see it too.”

and let’s close with something fishy

No doubt this question has been keeping you up nights: Can an octopus learn to play the piano? The answer is: kinda/sorta, if you apply huge amounts of time and ingenuity to the project.

Urbana is basically the country club and the ghetto, and neither group has any idea that the other group exists.

– Beth Macy, Paper Girl,
on returning to the Ohio town where she grew up

This week’s featured post is “Beth Macy Goes Home Again“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. Post his election disaster, the shutdown, and the growing threat of the Epstein files, Trump’s coalition is showing some cracks.
• Climate change. The COP30 international conference is happening in Brazil, without the US. Everyone is frustrated by the world’s slow progress in addressing climate change.
• Gaza. The UN is voting today on a US-sponsored resolution to establish an international Gaza stabilization force.
• Ukraine. As the weather gets colder, the drone war moves to center stage. Russia blew up an oil tanker in Odessa; Ukraine hit an oil refinery.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the shutdown aftermath

No one is happy with how the shutdown came out. It lasted a record 43 days, during which a lot of people worked without pay, saw their government services delayed, or perhaps even went hungry. But in the end it turned out to be an almost entirely symbolic fight, as Democrats got no concessions on their central issue: keeping ObamaCare premiums from skyrocketing in 2026.

The question is whether a better deal could have emerged later. Fundamentally, the Democrats’ problem is that you can’t play chicken with somebody who’s not afraid to wreck their car. As much as Americans were suffering, and as much as they were blaming that suffering on Trump, it’s not clear that Trump cared.

As Politico notes: SNAP benefits will start again soon, if they haven’t already. But meanwhile, millions of Americans will lose their benefits, due to “work requirements” that seemed designed to trap people into disqualifying themselves.

and whether Trump was involved in Epstein’s crimes

Last night, Trump flipped on releasing the Epstein files. After unsuccessfully trying to badger Republicans like Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert into removing their names from the discharge petition to bring the Epstein Transparency Act to a vote in the House, and facing an overwhelming defeat when it finally will be voted on later this week, Trump reversed course, announcing that “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files” because “we have nothing to hide”.

Probably this means that he is confident the Senate will block the bill, but we’ll see.

I have to confess that when the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking scandal got sucked into Q-Anon’s crazy theory of a world-ruling pedophile cabal, I lost what little interest I had. Surely this was just another conspiracy theory, blown way out of proportion by a cult of lunatics. (After all, if Democrats were synthesizing some eternal-youth elixir out of the blood of children, why did Joe Biden and Bill Clinton look so old? This was just one of the many bits of cognitive dissonance even a cursory glance at the theory raised.)

But lo and behold, there’s a kernel of truth at the center of all that nonsense. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell either induced or forced hundreds of under-age (or barely above the age of consent) girls into offering sexual services to their friends, who appear to have been some very powerful people. Rather than just internet rumors, there are real victims speaking out publicly, providing evidence strong enough to strip Prince Andrew of his title, send Maxwell to prison for sex trafficking, and get Epstein arrested and held in federal prison, where (the government says) he hung himself before a trial could happen.

In addition to trying to block release of what the Justice Department knows, various other facts make Trump look guilty of something:

• Epstein’s apparent suicide happened during Trump’s first presidency
• Trump appointed the US attorney who gave Epstein a sweetheart plea deal to his cabinet.
• Maxwell got a sweetheart interview with Trump’s Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, after which she was moved to a more pleasant prison and obtained additional privileges. Maxwell is said to be lobbying for a full commutation of her 20-year sentence for sex trafficking.

There’s certainly a lot of smoke there, but whether Trump himself is in the fire has not yet been proved. This week we got even more smoke, as the House Oversight Committee released 20,000 emails it obtained from the Epstein estate. Trump was mentioned thousands of times in the emails — more than anyone else — and the emails strongly imply that Trump knew what Epstein was doing but stayed quiet about it. In one, Trump is described as a “dog that hasn’t barked”.

Epstein victims made a one-minute video pushing to have all the Justice Department’s files released.

OK, just for a moment assume the worst: Trump is shown to be an Epstein client; he’s abused underage girls. Does it make a difference?

Tim Whitaker argues that for Trump’s Evangelical supporters, it won’t. His argument has two main points: First, none of Trump’s previous sexual scandals (which Whitaker lists) have dented the MAGA/Evangelical alliance.

Despite these realities White Evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for him in 2016, 2020 and 2024 choosing instead to ignore or explain away what is an obvious reality: Trump already IS a sexual abuser. He doesn’t need to be on a client list for that to be demonstrated. His words, actions and court cases prove that he is.

Second, Evangelical churches have tolerated vast amounts of sexual misconduct in their leaders. Even if a big-time preacher loses his position in scandal, before long he’s been rehabilitated and is leading somewhere else.

Megan Kelly is already lining up how she’ll defend Trump if he turns out to be a participant in Epstein’s crimes: Epstein wasn’t really that bad.

Kelly went on to allege that she knew “somebody very, very close” to the Epstein case “who is in a position to know virtually everything.” She claimed the unidentified individual “told me, from the start years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile.”

“He was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this,” she continued. “I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”

OK, let’s start here: A 15-year-old isn’t “barely legal” in most states. At best she’s barely illegal. Here in Massachusetts, the age of consent is 16 — and the only reason it’s that low is to avoid criminalizing 16-year-old boys. If somebody wanted to raise the age-of-consenting-to-men-over-25 to 18 or higher, I’d be for it.

Additionally (as I’ve observed before about Israel and genocide), when you start listing technical distinctions in the definition of a word like “pedophile”, you’ve already gone far astray.

meanwhile, Trump’s coalition begins to crack

In the most plausible American-democracy-survives-Trump scenario, a Democratic sweep of the 2025 elections is followed by elected Republicans claiming independence from their president. It’s too soon to say that’s definitely happening, but there are signs.

One of the biggest factors enabling Trump’s rising autocracy in the nation as a whole has been that he had already achieved autocracy in the Republican Party. Combined with narrow Republican control of both houses of Congress, his complete domination of elected Republicans has allowed him to usurp congressional powers and avoid investigations of the most blatant corruption.

Recently, though, cracks have been forming. Trump’s cover-up of the Epstein scandal and the Big Beautiful Bill’s deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP have allowed Marjorie Taylor Greene to get between Trump and his base. This week that dissension erupted into outright schism, as Trump withdrew his support of MTG, called her “Wacky” and “a ranting Lunatic”, and dangled an endorsement to tempt some Trump-loyal Republican to challenge her in a primary.

Tucker Carlson has also been increasingly critical of the regime lately, most recently claiming that the FBI is hiding something about Thomas Crooks, the gunman who tried to assassinate Trump during the 2024 campaign. Previously, he had denounced the post-Kirk-murder crackdown on free speech as well as the Epstein cover-up and the attack on Iran. (Isolationism is another issue where a Republican can out-MAGA Trump. Look for resistance to Trump’s escalating threats to Venezuela.)

When Trump demanded that Senate Republicans end the shutdown by scrapping the filibuster, Majority Leader John Thune calmly said no. Indiana just refused to accede to Trump’s redistricting demand. And former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels published an op-ed that appears to be even-handed, but contains some veiled criticism of Trump. He offers this hope for the future:

At some point, the public could tire of playground insults and asinine nicknames, and start asking for a little more substance from those elected to serve them. Interminable stalemate, especially when the country enters a stretch of serious economic or national security difficulty, could trigger a collective demand to “Grow up.”

It’s not a revolt yet, but Trump’s levers of power are becoming unreliable. A would-be autocrat’s most important asset is the belief that his power cannot be resisted, that everyone must either give in or be run over. That’s slipping.

Jack Hopkins is always more cynical and speculative than I am. Now he’s assessing signs that the powers behind Trump are already choosing their new champion.

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Following up on last week’s featured post: The Washington Post spells out how the Trump administration is allowing junk insurance back into the market.

CBS hasn’t been completely MAGAfied yet. Last night 60 Minutes focused on one of Trump’s corrupt pardons:

Last month, President Trump granted a pardon to a billionaire felon, after the felon’s company enriched a Trump family business. The pardon went to Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born businessman, who was accused by the Justice Department of causing, quote, “…significant harm to U.S. national security…” The president says he does not know Zhao. Our reporting shows that Zhao’s company supported a Trump family firm at critical moments leading up to the president’s pardon.

Trump’s feds seem to be pulling out of Chicago. The next American city for them to invade is Charlotte. This is the first swing state Trump has invaded, and I suspect he’ll regret it in 2026.

The reason global air temperatures don’t go up every year is that some years the oceans soak up more of the extra heat. But that energy doesn’t go away. An article in Grist explores what happens when oceans start expelling heat rather than absorbing it.

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops voted overwhelmingly for a statement critical of Trump’s immigration policies.

We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people. We pray for an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement. We pray that the Lord may guide the leaders of our nation, and we are grateful for past and present opportunities to dialogue with public and elected officials.

In some previous week, we saw that Kash Patel was using an FBI plane to go to his girl friend’s concerts. This week we find out that he has given her an FBI security detail.

Something I wonder about: With all the federal agents doing stuff like this, or trying to find dirt on Trump’s enemies, or working on deporting nannies and landscapers, is anybody actually trying to catch criminals any more?

The regime didn’t start blowing up boats it claims were smuggling drugs until September, but apparently Emil Bove, who was acting attorney general at the time and has since become a federal appellate judge, was describing the policy back in February.

So far, 20 strikes have killed about 75 people, and the regime has offered no evidence for its claims that the boats were smuggling drugs.

Ignoring the morality of killing people because you suspect them of a crime, the attacks are also bad strategy. When you capture people, you can flip them to get information. You can also capture their phones and other information devices. When you blow the boat up, you can’t do any of that.

“All this strategy is doing is killing people and the same amount of drugs is getting into the U.S.,” the former senior DOJ official said. “You didn’t save anybody or increase the number of people you’re saving in the U.S. It’s extraordinarily shortsighted and I don’t think it gets you the goal you want.”

It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.

– George Washington, The Farewell Address (1796)

This week’s featured posts are “The Shutdown Gets Serious” and “Could a Third Term Happen?“.

Ongoing stories

• Trump’s assault on American democracy. The most important article to read this week came from the NYT’s Editorial Board: “Are We Losing Our Democracy?“. It lists 12 traits of an autocratic regime, and details how Trump has achieved some and is making inroads on the others. Articles like this one make it clear that words like “autocrat”, “fascist”, etc. or not just insults or evidence of Trump derangement. They are clear assessments of where we are.
• Climate change. I’m late to notice, but the rhetoric of climate denial has changed.
• Gaza. Nominally there is still a ceasefire, but the killing continues: “On Tuesday, Israeli airstrikes killed more than 100 Palestinians, at least 66 of them women and children, in the deadliest day since Donald Trump declared the war was over. Israel said the bombings were in response to an attack in Rafah city that killed a soldier carrying out demolitions there.”
• Ukraine. Russia continues a slow and costly advance in the Donetsk region, while Ukrainian drones get increasingly effective inside Russia.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the shutdown

A lapse in SNAP benefits and higher premiums on ObamaCare policies both kicked in on Saturday. That’s the topic of one of the featured posts.

This week Trump floated his solution to the shutdown, which is the one I predicted two weeks ago: The Senate should do away with the filibuster so that he wouldn’t have to negotiate with Democrats. So far, Senate Republicans don’t seem interested.

and tariffs

The Senate voted three times this week to revoke the national emergencies Trump declared to raise tariffs on Canada, Brazil, and the broad range of countries in his “liberation day” tariffs. The votes will have no practical effect because the House will not concur and Trump would veto the resolution if they did, but they do mark the first stirrings of resistance in the Senate, at least among Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell.

Friday the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether the  International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 really works the way Trump says it does, and gives him the power to do whatever he wants with tariffs. Lower courts have said no, but that’s because they were doing law; the Supreme Court may be doing something else.

The Brazil and Canada tariffs should be the biggest piece of evidence against Trump having the power he claims. Both seem to have less to do with national security and more with Trump’s personal rages.

He imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil because that country prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for doing essentially the same thing Trump did on January 6. He recently raised tariffs on Canada because the province of Ontario produced an ad he didn’t like.

and tomorrow’s elections

Odd-numbered years are usually slow for elections, but there are a few: Tomorrow New York City will elect a new mayor, and Virginia and New Jersey will elect new governors.

Democrats are favored in the Virginia and New Jersey races.

In NYC, Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary, but the party establishment has not united around him. Former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo is running as an independent. Mamdani is ahead in the polls.

Mamdani is a charismatic candidate who appeals to young voters. He is also Muslim, has been critical of Israel, and is part of the Democratic Socialist wing of the party. Big money is being spent to take him down, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

and the White House

Three stories of Trump’s abuses of power got attention these last two weeks:

• tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a massive gilded ballroom
• filing claims against his own Justice Department asking for $230 million
• hinting at a run for a third term

The third term, which he later backed away from, at least for now, is covered in one of the featured posts. As for the $230 million,

The president insisted on Tuesday that the government owes him “a lot of money” for previous justice department investigations into his conduct, while at the same time asserting his personal authority over any potential payout.“

It’s interesting, ’cause I’m the one that makes the decision, right?” Trump said at the White House, responding to questions about administrative claims he filed seeking roughly $230m related to the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago and the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The New York Times had reported the claims on Tuesday.

Trump’s comment lays out a circular situation: Trump as president would in effect decide whether Trump as claimant receives taxpayer money for investigations into Trump as defendant.

The circularity is the only reason these claims might be paid. Both the Mar-a-Lago search and the Russia investigation were totally justified, and his claims otherwise would be laughed out of court. Trump says he would give the money to charity, but he’s said things like that before.

You might wonder how Trump can spend $300 million on a ballroom without consulting Congress, but he says he’s raising the money privately, from a list of individuals and corporations all of whom will likely want government favors at some point. In the long run, taxpayers would probably be better off paying for the ballroom themselves.

He also hasn’t consulted the National Capital Planning Commission. Hillary Clinton made the key point: “It’s not his house.”

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Here’s a typical story about how the Trump administration responds to corruption: Last Sunday, FBI Director Kash Patel began taking heat on social media for going to State College, PA on an FBI jet so that he could watch his girlfriend sing the national anthem at a wrestling match. The plane then went on to Nashville, where she lives.

Clearly somebody should be fired for this, and somebody was: the guy who oversees the FBI’s jet fleet. Patel appears to blame him for the story getting out, despite the fact that his flights were trackable by the general public.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) also considers disinformation to be part of its mission, which is how they got interested in climate change. They put out a report about how climate denialists have changed their tactics in 2024. (But I just noticed it this week). They distinguish “old denial” (which says climate change either isn’t happening or isn’t caused by humans burning fossil fuels) from “new denial” (which creates doubt about what can or should be done).

They had an AI algorithm produce and examine transcripts from more than 12K YouTube videos posted by climate denialists between 2018 and 2023. This graphic explains what they found.

It’s worth noting that President Trump mixes old and new denial. In September he said this to the UN General Assembly:

This “climate change,” it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.

The PBS article I quoted this from debunks many of Trump’s claims.

One big step towards the MAGA takeover of American media is faux-independent Bari Weiss becoming editor-in-chief of CBS News. How this happened is an instructive lesson in media consolidation: CBS was taken over by Viacom in 2000, spun off in 2005, then reacquired in 2019. Viacom took the name of its subsidiary Paramount, reflecting its entertainment-media focus.

Paramount then merged with Skydance. The merger was announced in 2024, but needed Justice Department approval to avoid antitrust issues. That approval came in August, after Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle a his meritless lawsuit against CBS’ 60 Minutes, and then cancelled Stephen Colbert’s show after the comedian called the settlement what it was: “a big fat bribe”.

Paramount-Skydance is now controlled by the Ellison family, who are Trump supporters. Larry Ellison, who co-founded Oracle, is #2 on Forbes list of the richest people in the US. He was briefly the richest man in the world in September with a net worth over $300 billion. His son David Ellison is the CEO of Paramount Skydance. David is the one who picked Weiss to head CBS News.

The best intro to Bari Weiss comes from John Oliver, who focused on her three weeks ago.

Now Bari Weiss is choosing the next anchor of CBS Evening News, which was the most important job in news back when Walter Cronkite had it. Most of the names being kicked around are from Fox News.

You might wonder why Texas AG Ken Paxton would do this:

Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue for deceptively marketing Tylenol to pregnant mothers despite knowing that early exposure to acetaminophen, Tylenol’s only active ingredient, leads to a significantly increased risk of autism and other disorders.

I mean, it’s not like anyone but RFK Jr. actually believes Tylenol significantly increases autism risk. So how can Paxton hope to win a suit claiming that Tylenol’s makers “knew” something none of the experts in the field know today?

Amanda Marcotte explains: Paxton has lost his lead over incumbent Senator John Cornyn for the GOP senate nomination in Texas. He desperately needs Trump’s endorsement, so he is demonstrating to the Mad King that he is willing to act on whatever nonsense the regime spits out.

and let’s close with a song parody

The Marsh Family adapts a Paul Simon tune to the RFK Jr. era: “Measles and Polio Down in the Schoolyard.”