The Power of “Again”

Honest journalists can debunk false news stories.
But the responses those false stories raise linger as if they were true.

Something I’ve been struggling with since the election is: Why didn’t Kamala Harris’ message get through?

The majority of Harris-campaign criticism I’ve read is of the form “She should have talked about X instead of Y.” Kitchen-table issues instead of trans rights, centrist issues instead of far-left issues, and so forth. And typically, if you look at the actual content of her speeches and ads, the answer is: “She did, but nobody paid attention.”

Which raises the question: Why not?

One answer (which commenters have repeatedly criticized me for not highlighting) is that she’s a Black woman, so it’s easy for our sexist and racist culture to discount whatever she says. And that’s true up to a point, but I doubt it hits the heart of the matter, because I was already noticing the same problem with the Biden campaign: He never got credit for the jobs created by his infrastructure bill, for example, or for lowering the cost of prescription drugs. You can say, “He should have talked about that.” But when he did, no one listened.

I also think the racism/sexism interpretation suggests a too-easy solution: We can just nominate a White guy like Gavin Newsom next time, and we’ll be fine. But I doubt that’s true.

A related problem is why Trump could tell obvious lies, get debunked, and keep telling those lies with positive effects. Even people who knew the truth continued believe the point the lie was making. I think we need to understand how that works.

The critical relative. I want to propose a theory based on scaling up something you may have observed in your personal life.

Imagine you have a relative who for many years has criticized you in some unfair way: You’re stupid, you’re ugly, you’re selfish, or something like that. Picture a parent, a sibling, or an annoying older cousin who’s been putting you down since you were both kids.

So you go to a family gathering, and as you walk in you hear that relative saying things that sound just like the unfair criticism. Somebody is being stupid, ugly, selfish — and you’re sure it’s you.

But as you walk up ready to give that relative a piece of your mind, something in the conversation makes you realize they’re not talking about you at all. So if you enter the conversation and cut loose, you’ll just make a fool of yourself.

Now think about how you feel: You have no cause for offense. Nobody has insulted you. But do your emotions stand down?

Probably not. Even though the goad that raised those emotions was a complete misperception, nonetheless they have been raised. Most likely, you’ll be spoiling for a fight the rest of the day.

I think that’s what happened in the campaign.

Preexisting narratives. The most powerful propaganda message is “This thing you already know about is happening again.”

What’s insidious about this message is that it’s almost impossible to debunk. Ostensibly it’s a news story: Something supposedly has just happened. So an objective news source might try to debunk it by demonstrating that the “something” in question didn’t happen.

But that doesn’t work because it doesn’t address what’s really being communicated. The “things you already know about” that the news story brought to mind are not explicitly in the story, so they’re not touched by the debunking.

I think this requires an example: the Haitian immigrants who were supposedly “eating the dogs … eating the cats” in Springfield, Ohio. It just flat out wasn’t true, and every piece of “evidence” supporting the story was either made up or repurposed from some other event. (The photo that supposedly showed a Haitian carrying off a dead goose wasn’t of a Haitian, it wasn’t from Springfield, and the guy was clearing roadkill, not returning from a successful goose-hunt.)

So as a news story, eating-dogs-and-cats was completely debunkable. But the debunking didn’t stick: Trump and Vance continued to refer to it long after it had been proven false.

But why didn’t the debunking stick? In this case, the “thing you already know” — at least in TrumpWorld — is that illegal immigrants are threatening your way of life. Haitians eating people’s pets isn’t the beginning of this issue, it’s just more of it. If you’ve been paying attention to Fox News or Truth Social or right-wing podcasts, you’ve heard hundreds of examples of how illegal immigrants are threatening your way of life. This one isn’t strictly true? So what?

To truly debunk the story in the minds of its target audience, you would have to identify what they think they already know and the incidents they think establish their knowledge — and debunk all of them. Obviously, that can’t be done, both because the assignment itself is impossible, and because even if you succeeded, nobody would have the attention span to process everything you’d need to tell them.

Second example: The “trans” Olympic boxer who was beating up women in the Olympics. Again, completely false. The boxer was from Algeria, a Muslim-majority country where trans isn’t recognized as a thing. Imane Khelif’s birth certificate identifies her as a woman, and she’s never been anything else. An Algerian with a male birth certificate who was claiming to be female would most likely be in prison, not on the Olympic team.

All those facts were easily available to anybody who wanted to check.

But so what? You are already supposed to know that men claim to be women so they can cheat in sporting events, and men posing as women put real women in physical danger. Again, the people who believe these things also believe that they’ve seen dozens and dozens of examples — the great majority of which are probably also either objectively false or wildly exaggerated. But what can you, the objective mainstream journalist, do about that? You weren’t there when this base of misleading examples was laid down, and you’re not going to reverse it with one news story.

So even after the claim was known to be false, Trump went on making it, presumably because he believed it was working for him.

The impact of “it’s happening again” is to bring back to mind people’s general impression that this kind of thing happens all the time. And that impression continues to feel fresh even after the particular story turns out to be false.

Or remember when President Biden said Trump voters are “garbage”? He was clearly trying to say that the Trump campaign’s racist rhetoric was garbage, but — surprise! — things Biden tries to say often come out wrong. But never mind that — instantly this became a scandal for Harris, who hadn’t said anything remotely similar.

Think about why: Trump voters already think they know that elite Democrats look down on them. And here it was, happening again. It brought back Hillary’s deplorables remark (which also wasn’t as bad as you probably remember) and countless other moments when Fox News has told them that Democrats were insulting them.

Ambient informaton. The it’s-happening-again phenomenon is related to the problem of ambient information that I talked about three weeks ago.

The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has noted that people increasingly take in news by incidental encounter—they are “rubbed by the news”—rather than by seeking it out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against, and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent piece.

The upshot is that when many people hear some meme like “eating the dogs”, they don’t make a serious attempt to figure out whether or not it refers to something that actually happened. Instead, they’re thinking about whether it “sounds right”. How well does it fit into a pattern with all the other news they’ve rubbed up against?

You can say that people just shouldn’t think this way, but in the meantime we have to deal with a world where many do.

And that seems to require a completely different form of campaigning and a different form of journalism.

In traditional political and journalistic thinking, ethical campaigning and objective journalism go hand-in-hand: Your candidate is right on the issues, you collect the facts and examples that show your candidate is right, the media gives that information preference over conflicting information based on lies, and the public eventually gets the message.

But if things ever really worked that way, they don’t any more, at least not for a number of voters large enough to decide close elections.

And if Democrats can’t figure out how to address this problem, I don’t think nominating a White man or targeting Latinos with more effective ads is going to do the trick.

December 9, 2024 – 10:25 am Categories: Articles | Comments (17)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The worst news this week is personal: My wife Deb died unexpectedly during the night between Thursday and Friday. She had survived three different cancers over the past 28 years, but they were all undetectable at this point, and her death seems to have had little to do with any of them. For a few days she had complained of intestinal discomfort, but none of her symptoms seemed out of the ordinary or hinted at being life-threatening, so she was taking a wait-and-see approach before involving her doctor. Friday morning I decided to let her sleep in, and when I finally went to wake her, I couldn’t.

I can anticipate the thought in most of your minds: “Why are you putting out a Sift this week at all?” It’s a really good question. My only answer is that it feels right; sometimes keeping going is easier than stopping. I want to assure you that I am paying attention to my emotions, and that a group of loyal friends are watching me like hawks. I am being well taken care of, and if I need a break in the future, I’ll take one.

If you have a personal connection to me or Deb and are reading the news here for the first time, I apologize for not reaching out to you in some less public way. There’s nothing that you need to be attending this week. I expect to hold an event to celebrate her life sometime after the holidays.

Meanwhile, the world has kept on turning. The weekly summary will discuss the fall of the Assad regime, the murder of a health-insurance CEO, martial law in South Korea, reactions to the Hunter Biden pardon, Pete Hegseth’s promise that he will stop drinking if we give him one of the world’s highest-stress jobs, and a few other things. As usual, I’m going to try to get that out around noon EST.

The featured post is another in my series of meditations on what went wrong in the 2024 election. This time I’m looking at pre-existing narratives in the public mind, and how they can protect misinformation against debunking. After reading even the most thorough debunking, too many voters are left with the impression that while this particular event may not have happened, this kind of thing happens all the time (even if it doesn’t). It’s hard to guess when I’ll get that posted, but probably not before 10.

December 9, 2024 – 8:30 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (132)

Weak Points

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

– George Orwell, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” (1946)

I have admired the quote above for years, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I looked up the larger context. Often, well-loved quotes are taken out of context, and were never really intended to say what we hear in them today, so reading the whole paragraph or page or chapter can ruin the effect. But the context of this quote makes it even more relevant to the present moment:

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.

This week’s featured post is “Resisting, eventually“. It describes my election hangover, and a corresponding unwillingness to commit to a resistance strategy, or even research one adequately.

This week everybody was still talking about Trump’s nominations

Now that Matt Gaetz is gone, the next nominee likely to fall is Pete Hegseth, chosen by Trump to run the Pentagon. We’ve known for two weeks that he paid a woman to drop her accusation of sexual assault in 2017, but a single episode of sexual assault is almost a badge of honor in TrumpWorld, so his nomination was still viable.

But then Friday, the NYT published an email Hegseth received from his mother in 2018:

You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth. … … On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself

Sunday, The New Yorker detailed a history of Hegseth’s alcohol abuse and financial impropriety in addition to a pattern of sexual harassment. He headed two veteran-focused political groups, and each time was dismissed after overspending the organization’s funds for drunken staff parties. Hegseth’s drunken exploits include trying to get up on stage with the dancers at a strip club, and on several occasions being carried up to his room by co-workers.

The Republican senators whose votes Hegseth needs are probably impervious to sexual-assault claims, since they’ve already had to make so many excuses for Donald Trump’s behavior. “Don’t believe women” could be the party motto at this point. But a Defense Secretary who is often drunk and out-of-control is a different problem. From the New Yorker article:

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut and the senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, described the report of Hegseth’s drinking as alarming and disqualifying. In a phone interview, Blumenthal, who currently leads the Senate committee that will review Hegseth’s nomination, told me, “Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure.” Blumenthal went on, “It’s dangerous. The Secretary of Defense is involved in every issue of national security. He’s involved in the use of nuclear weapons. He’s the one who approves sending troops into combat. He approves drone strikes that may involve civilian casualties. Literally life-and-death issues are in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, and entrusting these kinds of issues to someone who might be incapacitated for any reason is a risk we cannot take.”

It would be bad enough if Hegseth were the kind of drunk who just quietly falls asleep. But the stories about him point to a drunk who loses inhibitions and does stupid things.

The hits keep coming. Trump’s nominee for FBI director is Kash Patel, whose main qualification is a slavish devotion to Trump.

The pattern here is something we often see from the Right: Democrats are falsely accused of something so that Republicans can “respond” by actually doing that very thing. In this case, the “something” is weaponizing the Justice Department. (The archetypal example is Fox News, whose right-wing bias parallels a grossly exaggerated notion of left-wing media bias. A completely different example is the Florida education system, which Governor DeSantis is turning into the indoctrination program he falsely claimed it already was. “DeSantis’s anti-education crusade is doubly authoritarian – most obviously in its use of state power to suppress ideas and information, but also in its more subtle assumption that teaching is ultimately about imposing doctrines of one sort or another.”)

The Biden Justice Department was not weaponized. Every Trump investigation began with probable cause for suspecting an actual crime, and every indictment was backed by evidence that probably would have led to convictions if Trump-favoring judges had allowed the cases to go to trial. That’s law enforcement, not weaponization.

But a Patel-led FBI and a Bondi-led Justice Department won’t bother with niceties like probable cause and proof beyond reasonable doubt. Look for people to be investigated because they are Trump critics, and for rumors of wide-ranging conspiracies to regularly leak to Fox News. Most of these investigations won’t lead to indictments, or even identification of the specific laws supposedly violated. Those that do will produce show trials that juries quickly dismiss with not-guilty verdicts.

The Durham investigation from Trump’s first term is the model here. Trump claimed it would uncover “the crime of the century“, and right-wing media regularly gave credence to Durham-inspired conspiracy theories that led to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But only minor figures went to trial, and they were charged with minor offenses falling far short of the vast conspiracies Durham was supposed to reveal. Only two went to trial, and they were quickly acquitted.

Such prosecutions have three goals: generating a series of enraging headlines inside the right-wing echo chamber, making targets spend vast sums of money on lawyers, and intimidating people who fear falling out of Trump’s favor.

It’s hard to sort out the pluses and minuses of Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter. Undoubtedly, we will hear about this every time Trump makes a self-interested pardon, which he will do often, beginning with the January 6 rioters and seditionists.

But it’s also clear that a Bondi/Patel Justice Department would never leave Hunter alone. His father let the Trump-appointed prosecutor do whatever he wanted, with the result that Hunter was prosecuted far more intensely than an ordinary person who committed the same offenses would have been.

Biden is anticipating injustice from the Trump administration and acting to avert it. It would be better to wait for the injustice to begin, so that it’s obvious to everyone, but by then his power to mitigate it would have evaporated. He had to act now or not at all.

The larger cause of democracy probably would have been better served if Biden had been willing to sacrifice his son to it. (I’ll let you decide whether there’s a Christian metaphor worth inserting here.) But I don’t blame him for not letting that happen.

This account of budget-director-nominee and Project 2025 author Russell Vought is genuinely scary. Basically, he believes we’re in a “post-constitutional” situation. Our government has drifted so far from what he thinks the Constitution calls for that extra-constitutional presidential authority is needed to pull us back.

and Russia and its ally Syria

The Biden administration imposed a truly biting sanction on Russian banks two weeks ago, leading to this:

Against a backdrop of high inflation and fears over the value of the currency, Russia’s central bank has already lifted interest rates to 21% this year.

We’ll learn a lot about the state of the world in January, when we see whether Trump starts relaxing Russian sanctions. If he does, and he doesn’t get some major concession in return, we can be pretty sure that the rumors of kompromat are true.

It also looks like a bad time to be a Russian ally. Rebels in Syria have taken Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city, with surprising ease. The Assad regime, which was propped up by Russian intervention when it seemed to be falling over a dozen years ago, now has few allies it can count on: Russia pulled its troops out to fight in Ukraine, while Iran and its various proxy groups have their hands full dealing with Israel.

Meanwhile, the former Soviet nation of Georgia has seen days of massive demonstrations against the ruling party, which has been leaning towards Russia and away from joining the EU.

and tariff skirmishes

This week included a major reminder of what a Trump administration is like. Trump will troll us by threatening to do something, get some kind of response from the targets of his threats, falsely claim that the response is a concession, and do a victory lap for “winning” the exchange. Nothing has actually happened, but he has exhausted his opponents and given his followers a fake “victory” to crow about.

Trump loves tariffs, because this is the area where presidential power is its most authoritarian. Congress has largely delegated this part of its taxing power to the President — something the Supreme Court should (but won’t) look at in view of its emerging non-delegation doctrine — so he really can just decree something and see it happen.

Past presidents have used the tariff power for economic purposes: If we don’t like how a country treats our exports, we’ll put a tariff on their exports to us. Most of the time this has been a warning shot to induce another country to negotiate. But Trump views tariffs in a far more expansive way: If we don’t like anything another country does, we can punish them by taxing their goods. (Of course, the tax will be paid by the American consumer, but it should hurt the targeted country’s sales.)

So last Monday Trump tweeted that he would impose 25% across-the-board tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada unless they solve our immigration and drug problems.

This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!

He then had a conversation with the Mexican president, who told him that Mexico is already doing what he asked for (as part of an agreement negotiated by Biden). Trump then claimed victory. Does that mean the tariffs won’t happen? Who can say?

Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau also talked with Trump, but the outcome was less clear.

David Atkins summarized what I’ve been thinking:

The next four years are in large part going to be Trump taking credit for what Biden and Harris already did.

Inflation is headed down, fentanyl deaths are down, border apprehensions are down — in a few months we’re going to hear Trump claim all these accomplishments as his own.

and you also might be interested in …

ProPublica has been reporting on women with problem pregnancies who have died because state abortion bans delayed their emergency treatment. (In general, life-of-the-mother exceptions are too narrow. Problems that don’t seem immediately life-threatening can go south faster than doctors can react.) You might think that the states would respond by issuing new treatment guidelines to keep similar deaths from happening in the future, but their response is going in a different direction entirely: They’re making it harder for the public to learn about such cases.

In other words, dead women is bad optics, not bad policy.

Paul Waldman points out something that’s been bugging me too: Critiques of Kamala Harris’ campaign or the Democratic message in general don’t have much to do with the actual campaign or message. He’s not arguing that everything was great and no changes are needed,

But if you want to alter your strategy in effective ways, you have to begin with a clear understanding of reality. Which is why it’s important to puncture some of the myths that keep getting repeated.

Short version: The election was very close, and not a groundswell repudiation of everything the Democrats stand for. Harris ran a centrist campaign rather than an identity-politics campaign. She focused her message on kitchen-table issues rather than culture-war issues. People can legitimately argue about why her message didn’t get through to enough voters, but they shouldn’t distort what her message actually was.

I continue to be skeptical of carbon-capture as a solution to climate change, but this piece of research does look promising.

They’re sad and depressing, but you should check out the comments on this Jess Piper post to BlueSky:

What does a defunded school look like?

A constant turnover of new teachers because of the pay rate. No science lab. No band. No track. No real cafeteria, just a warming center for pre-packaged foods. No school nurse. A lack of bus drivers and AP/dual credit classes.

Ask me how I know…

Oklahoma and Texas can mandate that schools teach the Bible, but to get the results Christian nationalists are aiming for, eventually they’re going to have to specify who teaches the Bible and how.

and let’s close with something colorful

In my father-in-law’s final days, my wife was managing his affairs, so his mail came to us. He died years ago and we’ve moved twice since, but somehow we still get fund-raising letters from a few of the bizarre-to-us Catholic organizations he supported. The mailings, when we don’t just toss them unopened, can offer a glimpse into a different world.

At the most basic level, fund-raising letters are all the same no matter who they come from. Whether the bogeyman is Trump, the Deep State, or the Elders of Zion, somebody is doing something terrifying that there is still time to head off if you send money.

Recently a mailing from America Needs Fatima in Hanover, PA warned us about “the growth of Satanism and its expanding legion of followers” — who never contact me despite all the weird web sites I wander through while I’m doing research for this blog. My wife collects Tarot decks, which seems like it should have put the Mark of the Beast on our mailbox a long time ago. But nothing.

Anyway, the growth of Satanism in general is too vague a development for a truly scary mailing, so ANF found something more specific: WalMart is helping the Satanists target America’s children.

“How?” you might ask. Well, the WalMart web site (not the stores, apparently) offers a “Satanist” coloring book: Let’s Summon Demons: A Creepy Coloring & Activity Book.

My first thought was that ANF was making this up, but journalism requires fact-checking, so I went to the WalMart web site and found it: available for $12.04.

HOME ALONE? PART OF AN OTHERWORLDLY CULT? Whether coloring alone or having fun together with others equally versed in the occult, paranormal, and witchcraft, this is the PERFECT coloring and activity book to pass the time until the great [your chaotic primordial god here] descends.

Sounds pretty serious, don’t you think? It’s also at Amazon, for the same $12.04, whose numerological significance escapes me. (BTW: I question the author’s magical technique: The boy in the cover drawing is breaking the summoning circle.)

Might your unsuspecting-but-curious child happen across this by accident while browsing for other kinds of indoctrination? Not likely. I scrolled through many screens worth of WalMart-offered coloring books and didn’t find it. Technically WalMart classifies it under “Other”. Amazon says it’s “Novelty”.

However, if your child is already versed in summoning the occult via Google (as I just did), anything can happen.

And once they find it, they will know the name Steven Rhodes, through which they can conjure the Threadless marketing site, full of t-shirts, posters, and other products spawned by the same dark-and-twisted sense of humor. This would be a totally inappropriate place to look for Christmas gifts for your friends, so I recommend you stay away from it.

Don’t thank me for that warning. Thank America Needs Fatima.

December 2, 2024 – 12:02 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (8)

Resisting, eventually

Recovering from the disillusionment of the election is taking longer than I expected.

Many articles are being written about how best to resist the incoming Trump administration and its expected assault on democracy and human rights. I had planned to write a post curating those articles for you, picking out the best ones and summarizing their advice. Unfortunately, I’ve bookmarked more of them than I’ve read, and I haven’t given the ones I’ve read enough serious thought.

That lack of motivation has forced me to admit something about myself: I’m not ready to resist yet. I hope I will be soon.

Everybody’s absorbing the reality of the election at their own pace and in their own way, I suppose. Prior to the election, I advised my readers over and over again not to speculate about what would happen. Like many advice-givers, I almost listened to myself. I refused to anticipate and dwell on either the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. (I’m dating myself: When I was growing up, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” was the well-known catch-phrase of ABC’s Wide World of Sports.) And yet, deep down, I stubbornly refused to believe the American people would do this. Even at the lowest points, like after Biden’s disastrous debate, I would think about a second Trump administration and think, “No. That can’t happen.”

In retrospect, my faith in the good judgment of the American electorate looks like the faith of a wife who is certain that her husband won’t ever cheat on her, or a child who is sure Dad will never go back to drinking, because it led to so much pain the first time.

But here we are.

I had imagined I was living in an early British detective novel, where Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple would eventually figure everything out and justice would triumph. Instead, I woke up in an American detective novel by Dashiell Hammit or Raymond Chandler, where the Powers That Be have known all along who the murderer is, but see no reason to do anything about it.

Here we are.

Many of my friends have reported periods of anger, which I haven’t experienced yet. Maybe that’s still coming or maybe I’m just not built that way. Instead, I’ve been living with a deep sense of disappointment. I don’t anticipate any satisfaction coming when Trump voters lose their health insurance or see his tariffs reignite inflation in their grocery stores. When Trump-supporting Hispanics have their naturalization revoked or see their birthright citizenship denied, I don’t expect “I told you so” to taste delicious in my mouth. It will be a sad day, even if they did it to themselves. They are my countrymen, even if my country tells me otherwise.

But I’m still not ready to construct my resistance strategy. I hope I will be soon. Andrea Pitzer is right about this much: Most countries that experienced a fascist takeover didn’t enjoy the luxury of three months to plan. But one of those months is gone already. The clock is ticking.

I can tell I’ll eventually come around. One weird aspect of my psychology is that I’m aware of a subconscious personality who communicates with me — and occasionally critiques my behavior — through my brain’s musical soundtrack. (I noticed it my senior year in college, when I was trying to keep a relationship from getting too serious because I anticipated it ending with graduation. All spring I unaccountably found myself humming “Frosty the Snowman”.)

Lately it’s been playing a song I haven’t heard in years, maybe decades: Graham Nash’s “Chicago“, which he wrote in response to the Chicago 7 trial. It’s aimed at someone Nash wants to “come to Chicago” to protest, and hopes that the listener isn’t like Jack, who won’t help “cause he’ll turn the other ear”. And he envisions this:

We can change the world.
Rearrange the world.
It’s dying to get better.

I wonder.

In my uninspired wanderings through resistance articles, I have noticed a few things, which I’ll pass on in lieu of a better post in some future week.

The simplest advice has been repeated by many people, so you’ve probably heard it already: Timothy Snyder says “Don’t obey in advance.” In their formation phase, authoritarian regimes wonder what they can get away with. When people anticipate the regime’s demands and comply before they’re asked, they teach the government what it can do. We’ve seen simple examples already: When the Washington Post and LA Times owners torpedoed their editorial departments’ Harris endorsements, they signaled to Trump that he can control the press through the government’s influence on the owners’ other businesses. Seth Moulton — my congressman, sadly — has already offered that many Democrats are willing to surrender trans rights without a fight.

Other examples are more local, like libraries that remove LGBTQ memoirs or non-White fiction before anyone demands it, or sociology departments that voluntarily pare back their programs to avoid discussing White supremacy.

The other thing I’ve been struck by is the importance of perception. The power of an authoritarian regime rests more on belief than on institutional power or even guns. No one resists because everyone believes that (in the words of Star Trek’s Borg Collective) “resistance is futile”. But if enough people believe resistance isn’t futile, then it’s not.

That’s why Trump and his people are working so hard to assert that his sub-50% showing in the election is a “mandate” or even a “landslide“. But if you voted for someone other than Trump, you belong to the majority. And there’s certainly no mandate for implementing Project 2025 policies, which he explicitly denied during the campaign.

Similarly, we can expect a Day One shock-and-awe campaign, where it will seem as everything is happening at once: mass deportation, attacks on abortion rights and trans rights, tariffs, oil drilling on public lands, rolling back environmental regulations, firing civil-service workers, and so on. Trump and his people will make it sound as if these are all done deals — it’s happened already, get over it.

But in fact it won’t have happened. Most of his Day One moves will be challenged in court or require agreement from Congress, either of which will (at a minimum) take time, and may result in significant revisions or even reversal. Every delay means that less gets done, and the secret to saving American democracy is making sure that Trump doesn’t finish it off before the next elections.

So one of the worst things we can do is be defeatist, and claim that democracy is already lost. That does Trump’s work for him.

A George Orwell quote from 1946 is relevant here:

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.

Trump’s overthrow of democracy has barely started. We can’t let him pretend that it has already succeeded.

Perry Bacon‘s list of things to do or avoid doing is well chosen. The gist: Get involved in something beyond electoral politics, like union, a local issue-oriented group, or a politically committed liberal church. (After initial skepticism, Perry is a UU now. Welcome!) Don’t obsess over political news or Democratic strategy.

December 2, 2024 – 9:14 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

I started the week with the intention of reading and summarizing some of the many articles that have been appearing about how to resist the incoming Trump administration and its expected attacks on democracy. But in the last few days I’ve discovered something about myself: I still haven’t fully recovered from the profound disillusionment of the election. I still can’t find in myself the hard base of determination that a principled resistance requires, or even the fire of anger. I’m still processing my feelings of disappointment in my countrymen and sorrow for what my country will soon face. I hope to get past this phase soon, and do pass on a few resistance tips I’ve gleaned from the limited research I’ve done.

So I decided to write about that instead. The featured post “Resisting, eventually” should be out before 10 EST.

The weekly summary will cover the new Trump appointees, plus what we’re learning about one of the previous ones: Pete Hegseth, whose own mother has called him “an abuser of women”. Then there’s the collapse of the ruble, and what Russia’s problems might mean for their allies, particularly the Assad regime in Syria and the ruling party in the nation of Georgia. Then there are Trump’s tariff threats against Mexico, Canada, the BRIC countries, and practically everyone else. A few other things are buried in my bookmarks somewhere, and then I’ll tell you about the “Satanist coloring book” a Catholic organization warned me about in a fund-raising letter, and how it led me to a dark-humor marketing site you definitely should NOT use to get amusing Christmas gifts for your friends. (I refuse to be responsible for any demons your friends’ kids might accidentally set loose.)

I’ll try to get the summary out by noon.

December 2, 2024 – 8:39 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Early Signs

Can you read this graffiti?
Can you decode this information?
Can you work out what they’re saying to you?
Can you read the signs yet?

Can you feel the real intention?
Can you discern the subtle meaning?
Can you see all the implications?
Can you read the signs yet?

– Shriekback, “Signs” (1992)

This week’s featured post is “Should Democrats Abandon the Trans Community?“.

This week everybody was talking about Matt Gaetz

Thursday, Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration as attorney general. This is worth celebrating in its own right, but also for a larger reason: It shows that Trump isn’t a dictator yet. Or, as Amanda Marcotte puts it: Resistance is not futile.

The nomination battles are all part of a larger question: Now that the Republicans have a Senate majority — 53-47 after Bob Casey’s concession in Pennsylvania — will the Senate continue to be an independent branch of government? During the Biden administration (or any previous American administration of either party) the answer was obviously Yes. How many times, for example, did Biden have to negotiate with Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema to get some part of his program passed? He couldn’t simply demand that they get into line.

But MAGA is an authoritarian movement with no principles beyond whatever its Leader wants. It dominates the Republican Party, so it’s an open question whether the GOP has also become an authoritarian movement. Many claim that it has, and that if you were elected as a Republican, you were elected to obey Trump. Last week, Texas Congressman Troy Nehls said as much:

If Donald Trump says “jump 3 feet high and scratch your head.” We all jump 3 feet high and scratch our heads.

I can’t picture Joe Manchin doing that for Biden.

Come January, Republicans will control the Senate, so has the Senate also been assimilated into Trump’s authoritarian machine? Trump’s cabinet nominations, the worst of which I discussed last week, have raised that question: If the Leader can make you agree that Matt Gaetz should be the top American law enforcement officer, or approve RFK Jr. as the primary shaper of federal health policy, what can’t he make you do?

For the moment, at least, the answer seems to be that the Senate will retain some limited amount of independence. We got a hint of that on November 13, when the Republican Senate caucus elected John Thune as majority leader, rather than Trump’s choice Rick Scott. The Gaetz withdrawal (in the face of repeated leaks about orgies where underage girls were paid to participate) is a second sign. Trump was apparently unable to make senators repeat Gaetz’s denials and continue supporting him.

Admittedly, that’s a low bar. But it establishes that there IS a limit — something we didn’t know a week ago. What happens to the rest of Trump’s nominees will give us a better idea where that limit is.

The NYT’s Michelle Cottle warns that this is just the beginning:

[Trump’s] M.O. is to relentlessly pressure-test people and institutions. Those who don’t crumble at first are hit again. And again. The goal is to shatter the resisters’ spines, one vertebra at a time if necessary, so that they don’t just bow before him but rather collapse in a gelatinous blob. Like, say, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

A related point that I hope Republican senators bear in mind: You can never prove your loyalty once and for all. Whatever you offer, he will keep asking for more. If you have any line you won’t cross, he will eventually try to push you past it — and reject you if you hold, as he did with Mike Pence. No VP was ever more loyal than Pence, but it wasn’t enough. There is no “enough”.

Former GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley has no current position and no direct power, but I think it’s meaningful that she criticized both DNI nominee Tulsi Gabbard and HHS nominee RFK Jr. on her radio show. Ultimately, I doubt her resistance will amount to much, but she is demonstrating that Republicans do not automatically have to bend the knee to whatever Trump does.

Trump wasted no time naming a new AG nominee: Pam Bondi. There is things not to like about her as well, but at least she has some qualifications: 20 years as a prosecutor and 8 years as Florida’s attorney general. We can hope she doesn’t have Gaetz-level baggage.

Trump wants his AG is to make the Department of Justice into the partisan weapon he has falsely claimed it was under Biden. (Every DoJ investigation of Trump began with probable cause, and the indictments against him were well supported with evidence. I will have no problems with Bondi investigating or indicting Trump’s rivals or critics if she upholds those standards.) The question to raise with Bondi is how she will respond when her President tweets that so-and-so should be in jail, as he often does.

The signs on this issue are not good. In 2023, Bondi said on Fox News:

At DoJ, the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones. The investigators will be investigated.

Joyce Vance suggests another question: Did Trump lose the 2020 election?

Unless her answer is yes, the Senate must reject her nomination. You can’t be an election denier & the attorney general.

Trump’s “landslide” win continues to shrink. He got less than half the popular vote.

Trump still hasn’t signed the documents that officially begin the transition process. That would unlock federal funding, allow Biden officials to share sensitive information with their prospective replacements, and let the FBI begin background investigations of Trump’s appointees.

What’s the holdup? Transparency. Trump would have to reveal who’s been funding his transition efforts to date, and would open his incoming administration to conflict-of-interest considerations.

The night before Gaetz withdrew, a panel on MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour” discussed the most recent sexual revelations and how Gaetz’s nomination probably wasn’t tenable any more. One panelist said, “I do agree. He will probably have to pull out. Excuse me, that’s a bad choice of words.”

The panel erupted into laughter and host Stephanie Ruhle quickly went to commercial.

and whether Democrats should abandon the trans community

That’s covered in the featured post. Spoiler: I think not.

and Netanyahu’s indictment

From Vox:

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has formally issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif for war crimes and crimes against humanity. … The warrants accuse Gallant and Netanyahu of violating the laws of international armed conflict by intentionally depriving civilians in Gaza of “food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity” by consistently blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza. They also accuse both men of intentionally directing attacks against civilians in Gaza in at least two instances. Deif is also accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, torture, and sexual violence.

Naturally, Israel is not going to turn its own government officials over to the ICC for trial, and Deif may not even be alive. So the immediate effect is more of a nuisance than a threat: Any time he wants to travel outside Israel, Netanyahu will have to make sure that the countries he passes through aren’t planning to arrest him. 124 countries are treaty-bound to arrest him, though some have announced they won’t. The US has never officially recognized the ICC, and President Biden has called the indictment “outrageous”, so Netanyahu should be safe to come here. (If his plane has to make an emergency landing in the EU or Canada, though, there could be a problem.)

The warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant could also complicate weapons transfers from European states and nations with laws limiting transfers in situations in which there’s credible reason to believe a country will use them to commit atrocities.

“We’ve already seen a Dutch court saying that the Netherlands cannot send fighter jet [parts], for example, to Israel. We’ve seen the termination or expiration of various arms contracts that the UK had,” said Kelebogile Zvobgo, professor of government at the College of William & Mary.

and the federal budget

Elon Musk’s DOGE is about to barrage us with disinformation about federal spending. Paul Krugman pre-bunks a bunch of it with the following graph, showing that federal employment has not significantly increased since the 1950s. (Those little blips at 10-year-intervals must be census employees.)

Don Moynihan covers some of the same information, and notes that the entire federal civilian payroll is about $271 billion per year. So firing all of them would be just a drop in the bucket on the way to the $2 trillion annual savings Musk is promising. Moynihan then explains what the government does spend money on.

Where do you think Musk can find his $2 trillion, if not in Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest we owe on existing debt?

Elon has started identifying individual government workers for harassment.

We’re also going to be hearing a lot of nonsense about taxes in the coming months, as Congress deals with the expiration of the tax cuts from Trump’s first term. Here’s some nonsense Don Jr. retweeted:

Replace the US tax code’s 7000 pages and millions of word with a simple flat tax. It could fit into a few pages of simple English, making paying taxes simple and enforcement even simpler.

I’m guessing that neither Don Jr. nor the guy who originally posted this have ever done their own taxes. If they had, they would know that progressive tax rates add almost no complexity to the process, so making everybody pay the same rate would not simplify anything. What’s complicated is defining income. Once you’ve determined your taxable income, you just look up your tax on a table.

What makes defining income so tricky? Rich people like the Trumps who hire smart accountants to seek out every possible trick for hiding income. If everybody could be trusted to report their income fairly and accurately, the tax code could indeed be much shorter and simpler.

Bottom line: Flat taxes are not simpler. Period. All they do is shift the tax burden from the rich to everybody else.

If anybody honestly wants to make taxes simpler, I have a suggestion: treat dividends and capital gains the same as wages. If all forms of income were equal, I wouldn’t have to fill out the Dividend and Capital Gain worksheet, which is one of the most annoying parts of filing my taxes, and where I’m most likely to make mistakes. But of course, that change would hurt the rich rather than help them, so it will never go anywhere.

and long-term Democratic strategy

If you’ve gotten tired of hearing about how you need to work harder to understand and empathize with Trump voters, I have a conversation for you: David Roberts interviewing Dan Savage on his Volts blog.

At first glance, they seem like an unlikely pair to discuss long-term Democratic strategy: Volts mostly focuses on sustainable power and electrification, and if you have heard of Savage, you probably probably associate him with LGBTQ issues. But Roberts has Savage on to discuss “The Urban Archipelago“, an article Savage was responsible for when he was an editor at Seattle’s weekly alternative newspaper The Stranger two decades ago. (The current Democratic mood is remarkably similar to the post-2004 election mood, a comparison that also comes up in the featured post.)

It’s time to state something that we’ve felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America.

Republicans have long celebrated their identification with rural and small-town America (which Sarah Palin dubbed “real America“), and they openly run against America’s cities — not just Washington DC, but against all the cities. Democrats, by contrast, have never embraced their urban identity, or made the case that “San Francisco values” are admirable values. “The Urban Archipelago” claimed that they should.

[T]he challenge for the Democrats is not just to organize in the blue areas but to grow them. And to do that, Democrats need to pursue policies that encourage urban growth (mass transit, affordable housing, city services), and Democrats need to openly and aggressively champion urban values. By focusing on the cities the Dems can create a tribal identity to combat the white, Christian, rural, and suburban identity that the Republicans have cornered.

The Stranger apparently was (and maybe still is) one of those in-your-face alternative papers, so the article contains a lot of statements like:

To red-state voters, to the rural voters, residents of small, dying towns, and soulless sprawling exburbs, we say this: Fuck off. Your issues are no longer our issues. We’re going to battle our bleeding-heart instincts and ignore pangs of misplaced empathy.

It’s a little bit different from all those we-must-try-harder-to-understand-Trump-voters articles. This is much more like: If the morons in West Virginia want to let mining companies turn their state into a polluted wasteland, let them. If they want to rebel against vax mandates by letting their kids get polio, let them. It’s not our problem.

So Roberts and Savage look at the last 20 years and lament the missed opportunities. In particular, they lament the unwillingness of Democratic governments at the state and local level to build dense housing or expand mass transit into the suburbs and exurbs, with the result that city living has become prohibitively expensive, especially for the working class. NIMBYism among single-family homeowners combined with anti-gentrification and anti-growth sentiment among urban progressives has prevented the creation of the dense, liveable neighborhoods you can find in European cities like Hamburg or Berlin.

(Roberts and Savage make a simple observation: If rich people want to move into Seattle or Nashville, they will. And if new housing isn’t being built, they’ll outbid the lower classes for the housing available.)

By limiting the opportunity to live in cities, Democrats have failed to promote the lessons that come from urban life: that it’s not enough to be a rugged individual, that you have to tolerate and work together with people different from you, and that immigrants and Muslims and transfolk aren’t demons, they’re people you see every day on the subway.

One line to remember from this conversation: For Democrats, city building is party building.

and you also might be interested in …

“I want to be in the moment, just not this moment.”

DoJ has proposed its remedies in response to a court decision last August that Google had an illegal monopoly on internet search.

The proposals filed to a Washington federal court include the forced sale of the Chrome browser and a five-year ban from entering the browser market; a block on paying third parties such as Apple to make Google the default search engine on their products; and divestment of the Android mobile operating system if the initial proposals do not work.

I believe this case was undertaken in good faith, but you don’t have to be Nostradamus to see where things go from here: Google will adjust its algorithms to favor Trump, and the case will be dropped.

Remember during the campaign when Trump denied that he had anything to do with Project 2025? He just nominated the head of Project 2025 to be his budget director.

Republicans are already feeling better about the state of the economy. By Inauguration Day, they’ll be back to saying it’s “the best economy ever”, even if nothing actually changes.

Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro has been indicted for plotting a coup after he lost the 2022 election. Now we’ll get to see how another democracy handles this problem.

Louisiana Republicans have just shifted their tax burden downward: They cut personal and corporate income taxes, and “balanced” it with an increase in the state sales tax, which even the poorest people end up paying.

The BlueSky migration continues. Here’s an article by somebody who understands the details better than I do.

The season of humility begins: The Washington Post has published its list of 50 notable fiction and nonfiction books of 2024. Illiterate schlub that I am, I have read none of them.

How bad has the UK been governed since 2008? This bad.

61 years ago yesterday, it was Sunday afternoon and I was 7 years old. My grandfather had recently died, so the grownups were in my grandmother’s kitchen, probably trying to work out what she should do next. I was considered too young to be in that conversation, so they parked me in her living room in front of the TV.

That’s how I watched Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald — live, as it was happening. I ran out into the kitchen telling people that somebody had just shot Oswald. The grownups patiently explained to me that nobody had shot Oswald, Oswald had shot Kennedy. Then they sent me back out to the living room to face reality by myself.

This was one of my formative experiences as a journalist.

and let’s close with something a little too accurate

From The New Yorker:

“The pit of despair. That’s new, isn’t it?”
November 25, 2024 – 11:40 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (9)

Should Democrats Abandon the Trans Community?

If we run away, how far will we have to go?

During the stretch run of the presidential campaign, $37 million worth of Trump ads connected Kamala Harris to trans people, especially transwomen and transwoman athletes. It’s hard to know whether those ads decided the election, but it’s not crazy to imagine that they did. This has started a debate among Democrats about how to handle trans-rights issues going forward.

Republicans sense an advantage, so they will make sure those issues don’t go away any time soon. Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R-SC) responded to Delaware electing transwoman Sarah McBride to Congress by proposing a bill to keep her out of women’s bathrooms and locker rooms in the Capitol. [1] WaPo’s Matt Bai laid out how this political trick works:

First, you single out someone transgender for unprompted cruelty. … Then you sit back and wait for Democrats to do the decent thing, which is to stand up for the right of any American to be left alone. At which point, Republican leaders step in to say, as House Speaker Mike Johnson did, that they’re “not going to engage in silly debates about this,” as if it were Democrats and not Republicans who are so obsessed with trans rights that they can’t stop thinking about who’s in the next stall.

Talk about obsessed: Of the current posts on Mace’s X-timeline, 76 of the first 79 are about her bathroom bill. All since November 20.

Bai’s model certainly captures how the issue played out in the recent campaign, as M. Gessen (who identifies as trans) observed:

In the wake of an election in which Donald Trump stoked fear about trans people — as in the much-discussed ad that warned “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” — Democrats are now debating how much the issue of trans rights hurt them and how fast they should retreat from it. Which is remarkable, because throughout her brief campaign, Kamala Harris was all but silent on the subject. It’s not clear how much further Democrats could actually retreat.

Unfortunately, the answer to that question is obvious: Democrats could get on board the anti-trans train and start their own fear-mongering about trans people. My Congressman, Seth Moulton [2], is showing the way:

I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.

This is a tactic I remember well from junior high: If kids are picking on you for looking gay, find some kid who looks gayer and beat him up. Don’t stand up to cruelty, just make sure you’re on the inflicting side rather than the suffering side.

But while you’re doing that, make sure you don’t look cruel. So Moulton, who (like me) enjoys almost every kind of privilege American culture offers, is the victim here: People like him are “afraid” of the Big Bad Trans Community. But Seth himself is one of the few Democrats courageous enough to join in the smear against transathletes. He knows that the number of transathletes in women’s sports is vanishingly small [3], that identified-male-at-birth kids who have taken puberty blockers don’t have significant physical advantages over identified-female-at-birth kids, and that the only way Trump managed to find an example in the news that he could use to smear transathletes was to lie about a female Algerian boxer in the Olympics. But never mind that. His little girls are in danger and require his protection.

That’s how the game is played: Don’t attack. Just invent a “threat”, pin it on the target group, and then “defend” against that threat. You know: “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.“

So let’s not kid ourselves about what the choice is. Democrats can’t just “stop spending so much time talking about trans issues”, because we never did that. Whatever we say or do, Republicans are going to try to connect us to the trans community. The only way out of that box is to actively join the lynch mob.

Is that really what you want to do?

Josh Marshall offers a historical parallel: the 2004 election, when George W. Bush won reelection over John Kerry. Like 2024, 2004 was a very discouraging election for liberals. Bush had won in 2000 despite losing the popular vote, so it was easy to look on his administration — torture, war based on lies, etc. — as an aberration. America wasn’t really like that. But then he got over 50% of the vote in 2004 (the only Republican to do so in the 21st century), so Democrats had a lot of soul-searching to do.

There’s at least a decent argument that Democrats lost the 2004 election over gay marriage. It certainly wasn’t the biggest issue. But Republicans, cynically and shrewdly, got state ballot initiatives banning gay marriage on the ballot in a number of key states. Ohio seemed like the keyest. … Who knows whether it actually turned the election. But it’s not a far-fetched argument given how close the result was. There’s no question that substantial majorities of voters opposed same-sex marriage rights at the time, though of course support varied from more liberal to more conservative states. …

I don’t think you get to the Obergefell decision in 2015 without 2004 or the whole range of marriage equality activism in the first years of this century. In fact, I’m also certain you don’t. And I guarantee it was an albatross and super annoying to tons of Democratic elected officials. It’s possible it cost Democrats the 2004 election. It generated all sorts of agita and in many cases anger that LGBT activists were pushing the envelope so hard.

Marshall allows that the parallel isn’t perfect, but it’s also not totally off-base. Neither is the comparison to civil rights in the 1960s — Marshall didn’t go there — when there were literal race riots in cities all over the country. Nixon won in 1968 largely because he could pose as the law-and-order candidate who would stand up to Black activism.

Once in a while, there’s going to be a political price to pay for refusing to beat down on whatever group is unpopular at the moment. We can’t ignore that price, but going the other way has a price as well.

One thing the gay-marriage comparison suggests is that we have no idea how trans issues will play in 2028 and beyond. Most voters in 2004 based their same-sex marriage opinion on ignorance: They did not know any gay couples with a public long-term commitment, so they had no basis on which to judge claims that same-sex marriage would lead to “the fall of Western Civilization itself“. Same thing now: Most Americans don’t know any openly trans people, so they’re easy to demonize.

A few years down the road, most Americans probably will know at least one or two such people, plus a handful of trans celebrities. [4] The conversation may be very different by then.

[1] In the WaPo, Style (not Politics) columnist Monica Hesse wonders if Mace knows how women’s bathrooms work.

Just so we’re all on the same page, here’s how public bathrooms work for women: Each restroom is cordoned off into multiple private stalls. Each stall has its own door, which fully shuts and locks. Each door either goes all the way to the ground or — more commonly — stops approximately 12 inches from the floor. This is not an open-plan urinal situation, is what I’m saying. This is a situation in which the most flesh anyone typically sees is a scandalous, tawdry swath of … ankle.

If, somehow, a sex pest were to infiltrate a women’s room and do something creepy — like attempting to spy under a stall — then the women using the restroom would and should call security to have the sex pest removed. That would be true whether the culprit was a cis woman, a trans woman, a man or six koalas in a trench coat. Creepy behavior should be policed; mere existence should not.

If Mace’s bill passes, though, it becomes someone’s job to check up on the genitalia of restroom users. The government itself becomes the “sex pest”.

[2] If you’re a Democrat who believes in human rights, including trans rights, and you’re thinking of running against Moulton in MA-6, please put me on your mailing list. I’ve been a very reluctant Moulton voter ever since he challenged Nancy Pelosi for Speaker in 2018. Politico wrote that Moulton looked like “a mansplaining young punk taking down a vastly more experienced woman”, which is generally how I see him. (I understood why Pelosi faced criticism from the left, even though I disagreed with that criticism. But that’s not where Moulton was coming from. He just wanted to be important.)

Moulton’s anti-trans turn has to be about his larger ambitions, because it isn’t forced by any local political necessity. Republicans didn’t even bother to field a candidate in MA-06 this year, so Moulton won with 97% of the vote.

[3] Apparently, one of those rare transathletes is on the women’s volleyball team at San Jose State. The WaPo outlines the current controversy there, as some schools are refusing to play against the Spartans. The article notes that the player meets the NCAA requirements for transwomen athletes (one year of testosterone suppression treatment), and quotes a rival athletic director:

I do think it is important to note, we have played against this athlete for the past two seasons and our student-athletes felt safe in the previous matches. She is not the best or most dominant hitter on the Spartans team.

[4] Slowing this process down is the core reason Republicans want to ban books like Gender Queer, a memoir that I learned a lot from. If you read such books, or attend plays like Becoming a Man, you may begin to think of people with nontraditional gender identities primarily as people. That will make it harder for Republicans to use fear to manipulate you.

November 25, 2024 – 9:23 am Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

My thinking continues to be dominated by the Trump transition and trying to learn the lessons of the election. This week’s featured post examines one of the lessons I hope Democrats don’t draw from the election: that we need to disassociate ourselves from unpopular victims of discrimination. “Should Democrats Abandon the Trans Community?” should be out before 10 EST.

In last week’s comments I took criticism for not picking out misogyny as the reason Harris lost. It’s true I’m resisting that conclusion, but not because I’m blind to misogyny. If we conclude that Harris lost because she’s a woman, then the obvious lesson to draw going forward is: Never nominate a woman again. I really don’t want to go there.

The weekly summary has three long notes that I could have hived off as separate posts:

  • conclusions to draw from the failure of the Matt Gaetz nomination,
  • a fascinating discussion David Roberts and Dan Savage had about Democrats claiming their identity as an urban party rather than running from it,
  • preparing for all the disinformation we’re about to get from Elon Musk and his minions about the federal government.

In other news, there’s the ICC’s indictment of Netanyahu, Brazil’s indictment of Bolsonaro, the UK’s economic underperformance, and a few other things. Expect the weekly summary to post around noon.

November 25, 2024 – 8:32 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (8)

New Heights

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

– Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX)

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

This week everybody was talking about Trump’s appointments

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

and more election retrospectives

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

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

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

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

and Palestine

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

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

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

and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and BlueSky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and you also might be interested in …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and let’s close with something deep

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

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

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

November 18, 2024 – 12:12 pm Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (6)

Caligula’s Horse, and other controversial appointments

Some of Trump’s cabinet picks are merely unorthodox, but others are expressions of dominance.

The Roman historian Cassius Dio told this story about the Emperor Caligula and his horse Incitatus:

[Caligula] used to invite [Incitatus] to dinner, where he would offer him golden barley and drink his health in wine from golden goblets; he swore by the animal’s life and fortune and even promised to appoint him consul, a promise that he would certainly have carried out if he had lived longer.

Modern historians generally believe that if he made this promise at all, Caligula was joking.

Caligula once said that he would appoint his horse Incitatus consul, which was probably a joke intended to belittle the Senate’s authority.

In the old Roman Republic, the consulship had been the top executive office and was anything but a joke. When Caligula’s great-grandfather Augustus established the imperial system, he preserved the forms and rituals of the Republic and ruled from behind the scenes, not as consul or dictator (as his own uncle Julius Caesar had done) but as “First Citizen”. (In Latin, princeps, the origin of the word “prince”.) Caligula, on the other hand, had no patience with such niceties and wanted to rub senators’ noses in the emptiness of their formal titles. “You want to be consul? So does my horse.”

Matt Gaetz. The Incitatus story came to mind Wednesday after President-elect Trump announced that he would nominate Rep. Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, a possibility only slightly less absurd than Incitatus’ consulship.

Gasps were heard during a meeting of Republican lawmakers when the nomination for America’s top US prosecutor was announced, Axios reported, citing sources in the room.

Republican Congressman Mike Simpson of Idaho reportedly responded with an expletive.

“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said.

Gaetz has a law degree, but no experience in law enforcement or the judiciary. He has been dogged by persistent accusations of sex trafficking and relationships with underage girls, though the Justice Department declined to file charges. [1] The House Ethics Committee had been about to publish a report of their investigation into his sexual misconduct, but Gaetz has avoided this by resigning his House seat to accept Trump’s offer. (Typically, members of Congress who take cabinet seats wait to resign until after the Senate confirms them.) Republican Senators have said they’d like to see the report, but Speaker Johnson is against releasing it to them — something he would obviously do if it cleared Gaetz.

Gaetz is also very unpopular in Congress, even among his Republican colleagues. He is generally regarded a bomb-thrower who makes problems rather than solves them. Remember those endless votes to remove Kevin McCarthy from the speakership and install somebody else? The ones that shut the House down for weeks? Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy explains why they happened:

I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker. It’s because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old.

Like Incitatus, though, Gaetz knows who his master is. He has been abjectly loyal to Donald Trump, and has said his is “proud of the work we did” on January 6. [2]

Republicans will start the next term with a 53-47 majority (assuming Dave McCormick’s victory over Bob Casey in Pennsylvania holds up). So the party has the votes to confirm anyone they want. Two things are clear:

Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama laid it out for the reluctant senators:

This is the last chance we’re gonna have of saving this country. And if you wanna get in the way, fine. But we’re gonna try to get you out of the Senate, too if you try to do that.

As for the mainstream media, sanewashing is still the order of the day. The NYT describes the Gaetz nomination as a “loyalist” and WaPo characterizes Gaetz as “outspoken“.

Confirming Gaetz will verify that two significant American institutions have lost their independence: not just the Justice Department, but the Senate also. It will be a major step in the direction of autocracy. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse refers to this as “the crawl test“, and Ezra Klein writes:

Demanding Senate Republicans back Gaetz as attorney general and Hegseth as Defense Secretary is the 2024 version of forcing Sean Spicer to say it was the largest inauguration crowd ever. These aren’t just appointments. They’re loyalty tests. The absurdity is the point.

Pete Hegseth. And that brings us to our next horse, Pete Hegseth.

Let’s start with the good: He has a strong academic record, receiving a bachelors degree in politics from Princeton (where he wrote for the conservative Princeton Tory and played on the school’s varsity basketball team), and then a masters in public policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard. [3] He was an infantry officer in the Minnesota National Guard, volunteered to be posted to Baghdad, and received a bronze star. He also served in Afghanistan and was promoted to major.

From there things go downhill. He was at first chosen to be one of the 25,000 National Guard troops protecting Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration (which needed protection given the post-January-6 threats of right-wing violence), but was removed as a possible “insider threat” in view of two tattoos: a Jerusalem cross and “Deus Vult” (“God wills it” an 11th-century Crusader battle cry). Either might be a simple expression of Christian devotion, but they are also associated with Christian nationalism and even neo-Nazism. [4]

Hegseth’s political positions have been described as Christian nationalist. In his book, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, he said he believes there are “irreconcilable differences between the Left and the Right in America leading to perpetual conflict that cannot be resolved through the political process”. He furthermore called for an “American crusade”, which he described as “a holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom”.

In short, the Crusades — a Christian war against infidels, particularly Muslims — figure prominently in his thinking.

His business career was undistinguished, and his time managing conservative political action groups raises more red flags without any proven wrong-doing. He ran a Minnesota PAC that spent 1/3 of its funds on Christmas parties, and as director of Concerned Veterans for America he hired his brother and paid him over $100K.

Hegseth was investigated for a sexual assault in 2017, but (like Gaetz) was not charged. [5]

But the reason he’s been nominated is that Trump liked him as a weekend contributor to Fox & Friends. He joined Fox News in 2014, and is best known for advocating pardons for war criminals, including Eddie Gallagher. (Gallagher was pardoned by Trump and had his rank restored, despite testimony against him from seven of his 21 platoon members, one of whom said “The guy is freaking evil.”)

Nothing in Hegseth’s background qualifies him to run a department with nearly three million employees and an $842 billion annual budget. But he does bring to the job an anti-LGBTQ and patriarchal zeal that fits well with Trump’s criticisms of the “woke” military.

Given his past pronouncements, and those of President-elect Trump, Hegseth is expected to end any diversity programs in the U.S. military, and perhaps retire or replace senior officers he sees as “woke” or who did not get the position through what he sees as merit alone.

His view of war crimes also aligns with Trump, who said after pardoning a different war criminal that “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!”

How Trumpists see their team.

Tulsi Gabbard. This former Democratic congresswoman has been nominated to be Director of National Intelligence. The DNI is the primary liaison between the 17 US intelligence agencies and the President. The DNI’s office (ODNI) produces the Presidential Daily Brief, which integrates and distills reports from all the agencies.

Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz probably went too far by characterizing Gabbard as “likely a Russian asset“, but some hosts on Russian state TV appear to agree, referring to her as “our girlfriend Tulsi“. Gabbard has often echoed Russian propaganda about the Ukraine War. During her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, she received favorable coverage from Russian state media.

Less than one month into her presidential campaign, there were at least 20 Gabbard stories on three major Moscow-based English-language websites affiliated with or supportive of the Russian government — all of which celebrated her candidacy.

She has also been a defender of the Assad regime in Syria, a Russian ally.

Our allies are reported to be alarmed by her nomination, and there is talk that the other Five Eyes countries — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — may stop sharing information with us, for fear of where that information might go next.

Gabbard has no previous experience in intelligence. She has not worked for a US intelligence agency and was not a member of the Intelligence Committee when she was in Congress.

RFK Jr. It’s possible to describe RFK Jr. in glowing terms: He wants to Make America Healthy Again. He wants to take on the Big Pharma and Big Food oligopolies, and fight the forces that make Americans prone to chronic diseases.

But then you get down to the details. He has latched on to any number of medical and environmental conspiracy theories, and said outrageous things like “No vaccine is safe and effective.” A 2021 study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research found

Throughout the year, we observed an increasing trend in the prevalence of low-credibility news about vaccines. We also observed a considerable amount of suspicious YouTube videos shared on Twitter. Tweets by a small group of approximately 800 “superspreaders” verified by Twitter accounted for approximately 35% of all reshares of misinformation on an average day, with the top superspreader (@RobertKennedyJr) responsible for over 13% of retweets.

Then there’s the danger of fluoridated water, which is a John Birch Society conspiracy theory I remember from childhood. RFK would like to eliminate water fluoridation, due to various health problems that overexposure to fluoride can cause. But like so many of his causes, his anti-fluoride case is overstated and full of misinformation. Fluoridated water has proven cavity-prevention benefits, and local monitoring should be sufficient to prevent over-exposure.

Kennedy denies responsibility for a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people, but he did play a role.

Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit anti-vax outfit he led until becoming a presidential candidate, had helped spread misinformation that contributed to the decline in measles vaccination that preceded the lethal eruption. And during his trip to Samoa, Kennedy had publicly supported leading vaccination opponents there, lending credibility to anti-vaxxers who were succeeding in increasing vaccine hesitation among Samoans.

That, in a nutshell, is the main thing to fear about Kennedy heading HHS: He’ll encourage public doubts about vaccines that have all but eliminated various once-common diseases. If vaccination levels fall below what is necessary to maintain herd immunity, those disease can make a comeback.

The U.S. is already seeing an uptick in some vaccine-preventable childhood diseases, says Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in New York City and author of a forthcoming book about the resurgence of measles and the growing anti-vaccine movement.

Measles outbreaks and cases of chickenpox and pneumococcal disease are on the rise in the U.S., he notes.

“When we see children in the hospital with complications of these things that we can prevent or at least decrease the risk of by using vaccines, it’s very frustrating,” he says.

As vaccine hesitancy continues to spread, Alissa and other pediatricians worry that other devastating childhood diseases like polio could re-emerge.

And God help us if we have another pandemic.

As for sticking it to Big Pharma and Big Food, I have a theory about that: I deeply disbelieve in Trump’s populism, and think that fundamentally he is on the side of Big Whatever. But RFK Jr. could still be useful to him by creating a threat Trump could use to shake the big companies down.

What’s next? These particular picks were so outrageous that many other nominees are passing without comment, like Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, Steven Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, and Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security. And I’ve seen many people use the Simpsons’ worst [blank] SO FAR meme. (We’re still waiting for a Treasury secretary.)

It’s been hard to parody Trump’s team, because anything you suggest could become tomorrow’s reality. (Last week, Gaetz becoming attorney general might have gotten a good laugh.) The only real way to stay ahead of the game is to propose fictional characters:

Donald Trump picks Baltimore based developer Russell “Stringer” Bell as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

But to repeat a previous point: The question is what the Senate will do. It’s encouraging that Republican senators stuck by their own choice (John Thune) for majority leader, and didn’t give in to Trump’s choice (Rick Scott). Maybe that means the Senate will play the role the Founders intended, checking and balancing the President. At least sometimes.

[1] Not filing an indictment isn’t actually a ringing endorsement. It means only prosecutors didn’t think they could convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. But according to Gaetz’ defenders, if there’s not enough evidence to send you to jail, you might as well be attorney general.

[2] Trump’s tweet announcing Gaetz calls him “a Champion for the Constitution and the Rule of Law”, which is the kind of up-is-down statement we’re going to see a lot of.

The rest of the new DoJ management team will also be compromised: Trump has nominated his personal attorneys, Todd Blanche and John Sauer, as Deputy Attorney General and Solicitor General. At least they have some relevant experience: Blanche was once a federal prosecutor and Sauer was solicitor general for Missouri.

[3] In 2022 he announced on Fox & Friends that he was returning his diploma to Harvard.

[4] At a minimum these are anti-Islam symbols. The Jerusalem Cross goes back to the Crusades, and is also known as the Crusaders’ Cross. If I were a senator vetting Hegseth, I’d point to Deus Vult and ask him precisely what he thinks God wills in the 21st century.

[5] The Washington Post published more details about the assault Saturday, including that Hegseth paid the accuser to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

[A] detailed memo was sent to the Trump transition team this week by a woman who said she is a friend of the accuser. The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, alleged he raped the then-30-year-old conservative group staffer in his room after drinking at a hotel bar. … The accuser, whose identity has not been made public, filed a complaint with the police alleging she was sexually assaulted days after the Oct. 7, 2017, encounter in Monterey, California, but the local district attorney did not bring charges. Police confirmed that they investigated the incident. After she threatened litigation in 2020, Hegseth made the payment and she signed the nondisclosure agreement, his attorney said.

Once again, not being formally indicted for a crime seems to be the gold standard for Trump nominees.

November 18, 2024 – 9:56 am Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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