Loose* [0 - 9]

Friday, August 1, 2025

Loose Tabs

I've spent roughly a week pulling this together. It's nowhere near as comprehensive as it should be, but part of that is that I'm rowing against a flood of mostly disturbing news. My idea is that I'll go ahead and post this on August 1, then write some kind of Executive Summary for a Notes on Everyday Life post in the coming week. While I'm pulling that together, I'll add a few links here, plus some more subject head writing. I'll also do the Table of Contents then. Big thing is to move on, which means putting this up sooner rather than later. I'll add change bars to mark whatever I add.

As it turns out, I'm not going to have a lot of time next week anyway. We'll have visitors, and that will take a fair amount of time and attention. It will probably result in the shortest Music Week in quite some time. Also next week is the primary election in Kansas. The big issue to be decided here is an Amendment on how State Supreme Court Justices are selected in Kansas. Republicans are upset because the State Supreme Court has ruled that abortion rights are protected by the Kansas State Constitution, so cannot be simply outlawed by the state's very gerrymandered veto-proof legislative majority. A couple years ago, they tried to pass another amendment to outlaw abortion. That measures was voted down 58.8% to 41.2%. Now they're trying this back door route. We'll also have open Democratic primaries for Governor, Senator, and the House, each with multiple capable candidates. They've been hard to come by in past years, so there is some small reason to hope for this fall.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically (12 times from April-December 2025, not much more often in 2026). My previous one appeared 48 days ago, on June 14. The exceptional delay this time has much to do with my work on the Mid-Year 2026 Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll.

By the way, I've been trying to write some more in-depth pieces on major issues (and/or personal peccadillos), using Substack as an email agent. I call this series Notes on Everyday Life. Here's a list of recent ones, plus a couple of oldies I've pinned because they still seem relevant here, in LIFO order:

  • [07-29]: Famous Death Dwarves: Lindsey Graham is finally laid to rest. This was based on the section below.

  • [06-26]: Arafat and Abbas on Violence: Reflections from Tomorrow Is Yesterday.

  • [06-22]: After Iran: A funny thing happened on the way to the apocalypse.

  • [05-29]: But Reality Is Unscripted: Disturbing thoughts on Trump.

  • [05-05]: The Real Road to Serfdom: Tim Wu explains how monopoly power leads to fascism.

  • [05-02]: Lookback: Iraq 2003: Why does the Iran war story sound familiar? (with allowances for tragedy repeating as farce)?

  • [04-27]: Explaining Inflation: AI treats us like 5-year-olds. They leave out a few things.

  • [04-05]: Iran War: The Big Question: How does it end? Or does it end at all?

  • [04-03]: Iran War: The Three Questions: Why is this happening?

  • [03-13]: Days of Infamy: "Franklin Roosevelt knew how to sell a war." Donald Trump doesn't. He only knows how to start one.

  • [2025-10-21]: Making Peace in Gaza and Beyond: "Looking beyond the Trump points toward a peace we can all live with."

  • [2025-10-17]: Gaza War Peace Plan: "Twenty Trump points, for better or worse."

  • [2025-08-10]: Four Stories: My first post, which sets out the basic ideas behind my effort, and takes its title from a very wrong-headed Vox piece that offered some teachable moments. One sample quote I buried in parentheses:

    There is no problem that Trump is the solution to. But his slogan, "Trump will fix it," suggests that some people thought we had problems he could fix. I think Trump's slogan was very effective, especially as Harris made little or no effort to show how very ridiculous the boast was.

I also have a Notes feed there. While I've done very little with it so far, it occurs to me that I might be able to use it to publish Loose Tabs items and Music Week reviews as I write them, instead of having to wait for a long compilation post.

Table of Contents:

New Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent themes of the following sections, or vanish altogether.

The World Cup:

  • Graham Peebles [07-09]: Poisoning the World Cup: The American Way: "The football has been brilliant, because football is brilliant. But the 2026 World Cup — hosted across the US, Canada, and Mexico — mainly in America — is the most corrupt, polluted tournament in the tournament's 96-year history."

  • Bess Levin [07-29]: Everyone hates FIFA's plan to let Jared Kushner's brother run the World Cup: "How did interested parties react to the plan? In a word, badly. In three words, quite fucking badly, unless threatening to boycott the World Cup was intended to signal support for the idea."

Lindsey Graham: [Note: I published an extract of this on [07-29] as: Famous Death Dwarves.] The Senator (R-SC) died on July 11, age 71. While I have many unpleasant memories of the man who probably ranks as the most persistent war hawk in my lifetime (a span that includes Arthur Vandenberg, John Stennis, Henry Jackson, and Graham's amigos John McCain and Joe Lieberman), one that sticks in my mind occurred back when he was an obscure junior member of the House (1995-2003). I pretty clearly remember him talking about the need for Republicans to lock up the judiciary and other centers of power whenever they have the chance, to stay in power even when elections turn against them. (Admittedly, it isn't easy to fact check this rare instance of blurting out the usually unspoken part about subverting democracy.) While his passion for provoking armed conflict was his defining trait, he was an inveterate schemer, a political animal with no respect whatsoever for democracy, or for the people it's meant to serve.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos [07-12]: Lindsey Graham, last great Cold War warrior, dead at 71: "The senator was an inspiration to those who believed military power was essential to making the world 'right.' Others thought he lost his 'America First' perspective in Ukraine and Israel." I think the "Cold War warrior" concept misses the point. While he was old enough to have formed his hawkish beliefs before the Soviet Union dissolved, the Cold War was always constrained by a sense of limits. Graham, on the other hand, fully embraced the post-Cold War euphoria, relishing America's singular superpower (aka hyperpower) moment, believing that the mere threat of "shock and awe" would cower enemies into surrender and submission. That doctrine almost immediately failed in Somalia (where it is still failing 35 years later). It failed in Afghanistan. It failed in Iraq. No nation embraced it more fully than Israel, and they've been locked in a hopeless forever war against everyone (even their own people) ever since. Most people know by now that Graham never met a war he didn't want to escalate. What's less commented on, perhaps because it's even more ridiculous, is his inability to ever see a downside in the wars he promoted. They've failed time and time again, not only to achieve their stated goals but by causing enormous collateral damage that has only generated more chaos and resistance. But his only answer to such failure was to double down on violence. He not only worshipped power. He was locked inside its web, unable to see or imagine anything else. But perhaps worst of all was how glib and giddy his delusions made him. I don't know why Al Smith was called "the happy warrior," but he couldn't have been a tenth as deserving of that title as Graham.

  • Benjy Sarlin [7-12]: Lindsey Graham sacrificed his reputation to Donald Trump. He got plenty in return. "His career explains why so many Republicans made peace with Trump — and what he gave up to do it." The assumption, which isn't unreasonable, is that Trump will be soon regarded as a disgrace, even to Republicans. But one could also ask the question, what did Trump sacrifice to gain the toadying allegiance of Republicans like Graham? (And Rubio, Cruz, Vance, dozens more, among them the most reactionary reprobates in American politics.) In 2016, Trump had the smarts to run against Republican orthodoxy on war, trade, corruption ("the swamp"), and social security. But after he got elected, he turned everything over to regular right-wing Republicans, reducing himself to nothing more than an inept front man.

  • The New Voice of Ukraine:

    • [07-13]: Inside Lindsey Graham's relentless last days spent fighting for Ukraine and sanctions: On July 9, Graham traveled to Ukraine (flew out of Turkiye, took a train from Poland, "a journey that lasted 10 hours"). He met with Zelensky.

      That same day, the senator and his colleagues announced they reached an agreement with the Trump administration to advance the revised version of the Russia sanctions bill.

      In Kyiv, Graham told reporters that the deal had been struck just 30 minutes earlier.

      According to Representative Michael McCaul, keeping Trump engaged in supporting Ukraine was largely Graham's doing.

      Graham returned to the US, where he died on July 11.

    • [07-28]: Witkoff, Kushner could visit Kyiv within weeks.

    • [07-28]: Iran, Ukraine ease tensions over Caspian sea attack: "Ukrainian and Iranian foreign ministers, Andrii Sybiha and Abbas Araghchi, spoke on July 28 to calm things down after Ukraine attacked an Iranian cargo vessel in the Caspian Sea on July 26."

  • Jeet Heer [07-13]: Lindsey Graham chose evil: "Conspiracy theorists liked to say that Graham's Trump sycophancy was a result of blackmail. But the truth is worse: He stuck with Trump to keep the US war machine going."

  • Michael Tomasky [07-13]: Lindsey Graham's legacy? It's about one thing, and it isn't good: "He alone had the moral authority within the Republican Party to try to stop Donald Trump, especially after January 6. He chose not to. That's what we must remember today." It's mind-boggling to think that Graham had any morality, much less moral authority. (I don't have any more respect for McCain, but at least he had an act he appeared to believe in.) And for the record, the one Republican who could have stopped Trump after Jan. 6 was McConnell, who could have gotten Trump banned from running again by declaring him invalid under the 14th Amendment (with or without convicting him on impeachment charges). But by then hyperpartisanship had so rotted his brain he couldn't conceive of crossing Trump.

  • Chas Danner [07-13]: Was Lindsey Graham an opportunist, operator, failure, or disgrace? Probably all of the above. None of those are words a normal person would welcome in a eulogy, although Graham himself might have opted for the first two.

  • Jeffrey St Clair [07-13]: Graham Crackers: The words of a professional warmonger. Lots of Graham quotes here, not a lot of context. He contradicts himself so often some quotes may appear reasonable, but rest assured that in its proper context everything he said was meant to be evil. Like this one, which can hardly be interpreted any other way: "When this [Iran] regime goes down, we are going to have a new Middle East, and we are going to make a ton of money." I doubt that Graham was ever in the war business that much for the money, so most likely this quote was intended for an audience of the one who was [Trump]. But it sums up nicely what Graham saw as his Faustian bargain: he gets his war in exchange for his soul, which was never worth much in the first place. Still, odds are that in the end Trump will just pocket the money, leaving the old Middle East much as it was, but poorer.

  • Nathan J Robinson [07-13]: Why mourn Lindsey Graham and not his victims? "The late Republican senator was constantly lobbying for the killing of others. Why should anyone weep for a man who didn't care about inflicting death around the world?"

  • Elie Mystal [07-14]: Lindsey Graham's defense of Brett Kavanaugh told us everything: "The senator's infamous cry of rage spoke not only to his cruelty but also to his larger role in changing the court." Well, not everything, but enough.

  • Jamelle Bouie [07-15]: Lindsey Graham knew better. Better than what? Trump? Maybe, but other explanations are at least as plausible. Graham, like most politicians, had an intuitive sense of what one could and could not say and do. He also has a fevered desire to get out front whenever he could. Consequently, when Trump said or did things that plainly violated Graham's expected code, he was quick to criticize, only to find himself flat-footed, as Trump got away with things Graham thought impossible. That Graham moved so readily into the camp of Trump sycophants should be taken not as hypocrisy but as evidence that his earlier critiques of Trump were merely tactical, soon recognized as mistakes and corrected. Same for JD Vance.

  • Peter Baker [07-28]: At Graham's funeral, a glimpse into power in Trump's Washington: "The political evolution of Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, both captivated and confused many of his old friends but reflected the changing order in the nation's capital."A report from the funeral, which doesn't come close to capturing how very surreal it must have been. Imagine if all the old Nazis could have shown up for Eichmann's funeral.

  • Brett Wilkins [07-28]: 'Lindsey liked war': Trump laughs off Graham's giddiness over Iran onslaught: "He's never seen a war that he didn't like." And Trump finds that charming?

  • Al Jazeera [07-28]: Lindsey Graham 'almost cried' tears of joy over war on Iran, footage shows: "Excerpts from a planned documentary show the hawkish senator claiming credit for persuading Donald Trump to attack Iran."

  • Noah Robertson [07-29]: Inside the deal to clinch Lindsey Graham's 'sanctions bill from hell': "The late senator pushed for a bipartisan financial bill that could curb Russia's main source of income."

Trump's Nuclear Proliferation Deal With Saudi Arabia: Trump announced signing this agreement on July 22. It immediately met flack from multiple quarters, including from Israel, which led to Trump insisting that Saudi Arabia sign an Abraham Accords deal. I have half a dozen categories below I could have slipped this into, but it straddles several, and is worth considering on its own. My own theory is that, having relaunched his bombing of Iran, Trump was desperate to keep Saudi Arabia support — a big deal, given that it and the other Persian Gulf states are by far the most vulnerable to Iranian counterattack. On the other hand, if the purpose of the Iran war was to stop nuclear proliferation in the region, providing Saudi Arabia with the same technology isn't a good look.

  • Trita Parsi [07-22]: The US-Saudi nuclear deal makes no sense: "How will Washington get Tehran to accept intrusive inspections beyond the JCPOA when Saudi is offered enrichment with no IAEA inspections?" The sense I can make of it is that Trump was desperate to keep Saudi Arabia aligned against Iran, but asked what it would take to keep the Saudis in line? Nuclear power has long been a Saudi goal, and long frustrated by Israel, so the agreement is above all a test of Trump's independence from Israel. That it involved granting to Saudi Arabia terms that Trump went to war to deny to Iran is the sort of irony Washington is no longer capable of understanding.

  • Kenneth Roth [07-23]: Why would Trump agree to the Saudi nuclear deal?: "The agreement offers the Saudis the same options Trump has sworn Iran will never have."

    Why would Trump agree to such a deal? Money seems to have played a big part. The deal could provide tens of billions of dollars to the US nuclear industry if it were to sell reactors to the Saudis. Suddenly the principle that Trump said was worth fighting for can be jettisoned for the right price.

  • Zack Beauchamp [07-23]: Did Trump just kill his own nuclear deal? "The US inked a deal with the Saudis. A day later, Trump walked it back."

  • Mitchell Plitnick [07-25]: The farce of Trump's nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia: "The White House announced an agreement to supply nuclear material to Saudi Arabia, and then killed its own deal by linking it to normalization with Israel under Israeli pressure. But even if the deal fails, it will significantly impact Gulf politics."

Major Threads

War on Iran: Trump's war was suspended on June 17, when he signed a Memorandum of Understanding, which among other things promised to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, while further negotiations took place for a formal peace agreement. A disagreement over protocol for shipping emerged in early July, where the US attempted to guide ships through the Strait without notifying Iran. Iran objected, and on July 6-7, opened fire on transgressing ships. On July 7-8, Trump declared the truce over, and resumed bombing of Iran, reigniting the war. Iran responded by closing the Strait, and by retaliating against US bases in the region.

  • Stephen Semler [06-22]: Iran War: Most unpopular US war in history. This was even before Trump restarted the war.

  • Andrew Cockburn [06-23]: No more Mr. Nice Iranian Guy — we killed him: "Why he never closed the Straits." "Ever since I got my hands on a secret study conducted by an Operational Intelligence Cell attached to U.S. Army headquarters in Baghdad in 2007, I've been reporting that assassinating enemy leadership figures is an entirely counterproductive exercise."

  • Robert Malley/Stephen Wertheim [06-23]: Trump's Iran debacle could be a gift for America: Since Trump resumed the war, the optimism herein has turned to dust.

  • Trita Parsi:

    • [07-01]: Why Iran believes Israel will attack again before October: "The recent Israeli-Lebanese agreement and Hezbollah's unreported role in the previous war is leading Tehran to this conclusion."

    • [07-06]: Israel belongs in the new Saudi-Iranian order: "An anti-Abraham Accords is taking shape. That would be a big mistake." This refers to something called the Better Order Project, which is basically a "two-state solution" reboot. As such, it is a non-starter for any plausible Israeli governing coalition, even with the enticement of participating in an economic zone with Saudi Arabia and Iran.

    • [07-08]: How the US-Iran fight in the Strait of Hormuz can be resolved before it blows up the MOU.

    • [07-13]: A new US-Iran war would end where the last one did: "The fundamentals won't change: Iran can threaten Hormuz, the United States can punish Iran, and neither can secure its objectives through force."

    • [07-16]: "Israel's impunity has ensured that peace is no longer part of Israel's survival strategy." "Western-provided impunity has made the Israelis believe that they can live securely without suing for peace and without ending the illegal occupation of Palestine."

    • [07-18]: Yesterday's US-Iran escalation is a mere prelude to what is likely to come

    • [07-28]: Is Zelensky trying to merge the Iran and Ukraine wars? ". . . and why Israel would benefit from intertwining these two wars." He explains the Israel angle thusly:

      This dynamic would also appeal to Israel. First, it would give the Iran war another lease on life. Second, it would internationalize the conflict further by drawing European governments into the Iran theater through their deep commitments to Ukraine. And third, perhaps most significantly, it would transform the political narrative. Defeating Iran would no longer be presented as a necessity to defend Israel, but rather, to defend Ukraine.

      Given the levels of elite and public support Ukraine enjoys — after all, it was the victim of an illegal invasion — such a framing is far more politically digestible than centering the war on Israel, given Israel's plummeting standing in the West due to its genocide in Gaza and critical role in starting the illegal war with Iran.

      Parsi turned this blog post into an article:

    • [07-28]: Zelensky's dangerous gambit to merge the Iran and Ukraine Wars: "Of course this would also appeal to Israel, prolonging the Middle East war and potentially drawing European governments into the theater, too." I've heard mixed reports about Trump's support for Zelensky: his arms pipeline has more/less shifted to Europe, which isn't capable of the same largesse as Biden provided, but also is less likely to saddle him with crappy weapons like the Abrams tanks. Zelensky's resolve to fight on has been bucked up by European support, while Putin's resolve builds on Trump's indifference to the war. So one can see how Zelensky's move tries to break this stalemate, but the key to getting Trump support isn't alignment with Israel: it's pushing Putin to align with Iran. At present, Iran is hard pressed to manufacture all their own missiles and drones. But Russia may have surplus manufacturing, and could provide Iran with weapons systems (like anti-aircraft, longer-range missiles, aircraft even) that could make a difference. Also, while Zelensky may fancy that the way to Trump's heart is through Israel, he's ignoring a lot of moral baggage that come with aligning with Israel. He's already been reckless in provoking Russia, repeatedly crossing so-called "red lines," which Putin has been reluctant to do anything about. But at some point, some Europeans are going to doubt the wisdom of following him into what might quickly become a World War. Especially if it involves supporting Israeli genocide.

    • [07-29]: Why did Iran launch a surprise attack on US bases in Jordan? "Tehran is using a risky strategy that's based on the idea that deterrence now requires demonstrating a willilngness to accept the risks of total war."

  • Mitchell Plitnick [07-11]: The US war of choice against Iran has now become the War of Hormuz: "American goals in the war on Iran were unclear from the start, driven by Donald Trump's personal ambitions and the fantasies of pro-Israel neoconservatives. Now, however, there is a clear agenda: to prevent Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz."

  • Rosemary Kelanic [07-21]: The Houthi blockade puts Trump in a serious bind: "The Iran-aligned group wants to halt shipping to and from Saudi Arabia, undermining a Strait of Hormuz alternative."

  • Chas Danner:

  • Elfadil Ibrahim

  • Qamar Cheema/Mir Ahmad Muritza [07-24]: Aiming at the Gulf, Iran shoots itself in the foot: "Tehran's attacks on its Arab neighbors have increased their reliance on the US rather than reducing it." I've long thought that Iran's best chance to force Trump to negotiate is to put pressure on the Gulf States (including Saudi Arabia), who really have the most to lose in an all-out war. Unlike Israel, they are within easy range of Iranian missiles and drones. Unlike the US bases, they are poorly defended and vulnerable to attack. Plus they have lots of money, which plays into Trump's motivations. But it's tricky to figure out the optimal amount of pressure. I think it's certainly the case that Iran has attacked much less than they could have. Some moderation makes sense: after the war, they will be neighbors, with mutual interests and concerns. But the harder Trump attacks, the more tempting it will be to strike back where US allies are most vulnerable.

  • Benjamin Hart [07-28]: Trump has only humiliating options left in Iran: Interview with Danny Citrinowicz, a 25-year veteran of Israel's intelligence groups, now a "senior researcher in the Iran and Shi'ite Axis Program at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies."

  • Spencer Ackerman [07-29]: A regional war, with options to expand: "And without any reason for Iran to trust in negotiations, this is a one-way elevator until US capitulation."

Israel:

  • Ramzy Baroud [06-22]: When the Iran War is over: The West Bank may be Netanyahu's next front: It already is, and has long been, but he'll have even more pent-up ire to vent somewhere.

  • Jason Ditz [06-22]: Israeli troops raid southwest Syria villages, interrogate shepherds, detain farm worker: Well, if they can't have their war in Iran and Lebanon, they'll just move on to Syria. For Israel, there will always be another war to fight, enemy to vanquish, and maybe even land to occupy.

  • Qassam Muaddi:

  • Paul R Pillar [07-21]: With Trump distracted by Iran, Netanyahu is squeezing Gaza: "The US administration needs to use its leverage to get Israel to follow through on the ceasefire agreement." I've long thought that Netanyahu's efforts to sick Trump on Iran were meant more to distract him from following up on the Gaza Peace Plan than to address any real or imagined Iranian threat, but I don't know that he really needed the distraction. After the hostages were exchanged, I seriously doubt that Trump cares what Israel does to Gaza and the West Bank, or even to Lebanon — maybe at the end of the rainbow he'd like to get another golf resort, but he has much shorter-term grifts to play. Trump's definition of "peace" is he doesn't have to field questions about war. Thanks to a very complacent media, that's not likely to happen (unlike with the hostage story).

  • Razi Nabulse [07-24]: How Israel's crackdown on Palestinian citizens of Israel created the crime epidemic now ravaging their communities: "Nearly every day, a Palestinian citizen of Israel is killed by gang violence within Israel. The crisis has been years in the making, but its roots trace back to Israel's war on Palestinian political activity."

  • Yakov M Rubin [07-24]: Israel in Crisis: A treat from within: Writes about the Haredim, a large group of "ultra-orthodox" Jews in Israel who are mostly anti-Zionist, noted especially for their refusal to serve in the IDF, which is to say as part of Israel's permanent war machine. Rabkin's book, What Is Modern Israel?, looks interesting (possibly dated, having come out in 2016).

  • Aurélie Daher [07-30]: Trump's Lebanon fantasy is running smack into reality: "Officials in Beirut know that any agreement with Israel would be dead on arrival at home." On June 26, official delegations from Israel and Lebanon "signed a framework agreement with great fanfare in Washington." The problem is that Hezbollah wasn't a party to the agreement, and no one else has the power to disarm them. Or for that matter, to stop Israel from continuing to devastate and occupy Lebanon.

    The systematic, large-scale destruction of the country's south and the massive killings of civilians did not produce Israel's desired results. Tel Aviv had ideally hoped for a polarization of Lebanese society that would lead to a civil war, in which Shiites would come under fire from their compatriots — or, at the very least, for a majority of Lebanese to condemn and permanently exclude Hezbollah from governance.

    The Israeli army's brutal campaign had the opposite effect, adding fuel to Hezbollah's fire rather than extinguishing it. In practice, the Israeli army has re-legitimized the Lebanese organization's narrative that it has a special (if self-assigned) mission to defend the territory against the enemy to the south.

    This represents an extraordinary failure for the pro-Israel position on the issue.

Israel-American-World Relations: I used to try to separate out Israel-related pieces into several bins. The Iran war has its own news section. The Israel section above pertains to security operations in Gaza, Israel/Palestine, and Lebanon, as well as internal Israeli political affairs. This one deals with America's relationship to Israel, and possibly with the world's.

  • Shaul Magid [06-14]: "Reactionary renewal": "Judaism," the "Jews," and a note on peoplehood: "Is Jewish renewal abandoning the left, and if so, why?" An interesting piece, not of much political import but it does bring to light a strain of thought within Judaism (Renewal, which I'm aware of only because my father-in-law was a student of Mordecai Kaplan) against the backdrop of Israel's incessant demands for fidelity.

  • James North:

  • Philip Weiss:

    • [06-21]: My generation still can't discuss Palestine, but thankfully we no longer control the debate: "My generation of Jews entered Harvard in the 1970s as outsiders and left as the establishment that built support for Israel. Today, attitudes have shifted completely, yet my group still can't discuss Palestine. Fortunately, no one is waiting for us."

    • [07-12]: Palestine and the role of the activist intellectual: Interview with Bruce Robbins, author of Who's Allowed to Protest, on "the new McCarthyism on campus targeting those who support justice for Palestine."

    • [07-23]: Nicholas Lemann's aggrieved article on Jews and progressives reveals a blindness to the evil of Zionism: "In a widely read New York Times article, Nicholas Lemann claims anti-Zionism in the progressive world marginalizes Jews. Yet his failure to even mention Palestinians reveals his ignorance of Zionism's role in driving the crisis he seeks to confront." Lemann's article is: [07-06] A profound question haunting Jews today. He does admit "the return to power of Benjamin Netanyahu, at the head of a far-right coalition, in 2022 was a devastating blow, compounded by his government's failure to prevent the Oct. 7 attack and its conduct of the wars that followed." But that's about it. I sympathize with the emotional attachment that many American Jews feel toward Israel. What I don't get is the blindness that ignores how self-centered, power-mad, and supremacist Israel has become, and how far that ethic has strayed from the one that has allowed Jews in America to largely free themselves from centuries of Euro-American prejudice. By the way, Lemann's article led me to:

      • Ari D Berman [07-01]: What Zionism has always meant: Or what actually-existing Zionism has almost never meant. The Ahad Ha'am quote is misleading — he was a critic of the idea of a Jewish state, not an idealizer — while the "similar" quote from Ben-Gurion is just misdirection: "saying that Israel's ultimate successes would be determined 'not by its riches or military power nor by its technical skills but by its moral worth and human values.'" Israel's leaders have amassed so much power that it's incredible they should persist in blaming their own moral failures on enemies they have allowed no other option to. Berman's conclusion:

        [Zionism] was a means of allowing Jews to live to their greatest potential, unfettered by the restrictive, often brutal, experiences of living in foreign lands. Zionism is thus an answer to a 3,800-year-old yearning, not only a response to a modern crisis.

        Seen through the lens of its history and ultimate purpose, Zionism becomes a framework for constructive dialogue and renewed inspiration. From its biblical beginnings until today, Zionism has carried one of humanity's most enduring ideas: that a people, rooted in its values and returned to its homeland, can build a society that honors faith, dignity, responsibility and hope.

        This reminds me of Gandhi when asked, "what do you think of western civilization?": "I think it would be a good idea." I don't mind much if today's Israelis look back to their Zionist (and/or Biblical, but don't confuse them) history to find support for better values — as Americans, we have a lot of practice at elevating higher principles from the deeply flawed individuals who founded the nation — but such efforts need to be accompanied by practice. Nations can change. There are Israelis who want this change, but they have thus far had little political impact. And that's at least partly because apologists like Berman try so hard to pretend that Israel isn't the repressive, racist powerhouse it has so plainly become.

  • Yonatan Touval [06-24]: US support is Israel's true weakness. In 1979, Jimmy Carter solved Israel's real security problem by brokering a peace deal with Egypt. This included a commitment of substantial aid to both Israel and Egypt. In Israel's case, this aid has been used to finance a long series of wars that did little if anything to enhance security, and much to convince the world that Israel is a rogue nation with no interest in peace and even less in justice. For a while, the US acted as a brake on Israeli excesses, but after Clinton's Camp David fiasco and Bush coming to power, Israel increasingly took advantage of the American blank check, and American presidents, especially Trump and Biden and Trump again, turned into mere supplicants. The result is that Israel has become abhorrent to the sensibilities not just around the world but even in the US, where there is a growing movement to finally cut the subsidies and complicity. It's unclear when this will actually happen — the Trump administration is not exactly known for its sensitivity to polling shifts, but the direction seems clear.

    • The end of Israel's American dependency will be painful. Dependencies tend to end that way. But the tragedy would not lie in the loss of indulgence. It would lie in losing it and learning nothing from the loss. If America is now withdrawing the certainty of unconditional rescue, that may be the last gift it can give. What follows will test not Israel's might, which is not in doubt, but whether it can learn the discipline that sovereignty demands.

  • Mitchell Plitnick

  • Connor Echols [07-08]: Inside the growing religious revolt against Christian Zionism: "Faith groups battled over Israel Tuesday during a marathon day of lobbying on Capitol Hill."

  • Elliott Colla [07-11]: The New York Times enabled the Gaza genocide and lost its legitimacy in the process: "Professor Elliott Colla was a lifelong New York Times reader but can no longer trust the paper due to its coverage of Gaza. In fact, he's found that there is a strong case for prosecuting many at the paper for their role in the genocide."

  • Andrew Prokop [07-16]: When Israel lost Democratic voters, in 3 charts.

  • Omer Bartov [07-21]: I'm a scholar of genocide. We're entering a terrifying new era.

  • Michael Arria:

  • Hillel Schenker [07-28]: Signs of cautious hope on the Israeli left: "One interesting development on the left is the new joint Jewish-Arab 'Place for All of Us' party, founded by leaders of Standing Together."

  • Hanno Hauenstein [07-30]: Free speech crackdown: Germany deports Bob Vylan frontman for anti-Israel chants.

Ukraine, Other Hot Spots, and World Politics:

  • Jennifer Kavanagh [06-16]: Trump is blowing his chance to make peace in Ukraine: "A serious attempt to end the war means shifting focus from territory, making realistic promises, and bringing all parties to the table."

  • Alina Khamatdinova/Matthew Blackburn [07-23]: The West's plan to pressure Putin has a glaring flaw: "Hopes that a Ukrainian deep strike campaign will force a ceasefire are based on a misunderstanding of Russian politics."

  • Stavroula Pabst:

    • [07-27]: As war drags on, Ukraine's population is collapsing: "As the war in Ukraine trudges through its fifth year, deaths there now outnumber births at a nearly four-to-one ratio."

      The new population figures come as fewer Ukrainians are demonstrating a desire to fight. Earlier this month, anti-conscription protests rocked the western city of Lviv. Ukraine also has about two million draft-dodgers and about 200,000 military deserters, according to the country's former defense minister.

      In line with polling it conducted last year, Gallup found last month that Ukrainians' support for continued fighting remains low. Only 24% of respondents told Gallup that Ukraine should keep fighting until it wins the war. In contrast, 66% wanted a negotiated solution to end it as soon as possible.

      About 52 million people lived in Ukraine in 1991. Back in May, Denys Uliutin, Ukraine's Minister of Social Policy, said the country now only has about 22 to 25 million residents.

    • [07-29]: Ukraine's 'turned tide' doesn't comport 'with basic military reality': "Cajoled by Zelensky, Western media is dangerously upselling — again — Kyiv's ability to win."

  • Caitlin Dewey [07-28]: Why Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average: "The wildfires sweeping France and Spain this week are the largest blazes either country has faced in modern history."

  • Connor Echols [07-28]: Zelensky's big idea for Trump: Ukraine is the Israel of Europe: "The Ukrainian president is emphasizing the close ties between Iran and Russia as he seeks greater US support."

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky landed in Washington with a bang Tuesday, just days after Ukraine carried out a missile strike against an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea.

    The attack appears to be part of Zelensky's effort to win over President Donald Trump, who has long had a tense relationship with the Ukrainian leader. The pitch is simple: Ukraine is the kind of partner who will take action when others won't.

    As George Beebe of the Quincy Institute put it, Zelensky's goal is to "convince President Trump that Ukraine will be an Israel-type partner for the United States in Eastern Europe, where it can serve to counter Russian aggression, contain Russian expansionism, and protect Europe and NATO." Beyond that, Kyiv is hoping to show Trump that it is "even more valuable than America's NATO allies," which the president has repeatedly criticized for being insufficiently supportive of his war with Iran.

Trump's War Department: I set this section up to deal with Trump's threats of war. We're obviously beyond that now, so see the section on Iran for more on that.

  • Ben Freeman [05-29]: Congress quietly moves to integrate US and Israeli militaries: "In the first step towards shifting aid further into the shadows, the House's 2027 NDAA would all but fuse the two countries' armed forces together."

  • Stabroula Pabst [06-25]: Trump's $88 billion Iran war request is stuffed with pork: "The proposal includes hundreds of millions for elevator and memorial repairs — and lawmakers aren't buying it."

  • Charles A Kupchan [07-02]: America does not know its own mind: "Internationalist are once more doing battle with America Firsters, cleaving the body politic between two incompatible approaches to global affairs." The previous time was the 1930s, when "America First" was a slogan of anti-interventionists (including fascist sympathizers), who were ridiculed as "isolationists" by advocates of extending America's increasingly global economic power into world politics. Of course, it was (and is) more complicated than that, and then and now much effort has been made to confuse the issues. I'm not finding much clarity in this thumbnail sketch of US history. Part of Responsible Statecraft's America 250 deep dive into American history, arguing about the past to score points about the present.

  • Medea Benjamin [07-10]: Eight contradictions behind NATO's Summit of "Love": Member nations have long had different views on NATO, as have people within those nations, and the result is not just confusion but an ingrained habit of stasis. For most of its history, the US was happy with that. Russia wasn't really a threat beyond its Warsaw Pact satellites, the US wasn't terribly demanding, NATO's existence allowed Europe to pretend at keeping a military while keeping it impotent (France and UK were partially exempt as long as they had colonies to suppress). This only got messy when the US went on the warpath, starting with Iraq/Kuwait in 1990, and accelerated with the War on Terror, where Washington expected them to fall in line. NATO increasingly became a US-dominated arms cartel aligned with Israel's militarism, US foreign policy was redirected to promoting arms sales, which meant provoking potential threats in Russia and China (where the Cold War playbook still resonated). What Europe (and Canada) got from this new regime was hard to quantify, but it's mostly been negative. Any reasonable analysis would move them to negotiate deals with Russia, China, Iran, etc., and cut the Americans loose. But their longstanding habit of humoring the Americans has held steady — so far, at least.

  • Joseph Solis-Mullen [07-23]: How Washington's interventions fuel Somalia's cycle of chaos.

  • Blaise Malley [07-24]: What a US war with Cuba would really look like: "Experts say every military option carries its own strategic, political, and humanitarian risks."

  • Dana Frank [07-29]: Trump's favorite drug trafficker returns triumphantly to Honduras: "Juan Orlando Hernandez came home with a skip in his step after receiving a pardon despite moving 400 tons of cocaine."

  • Jeet Heer [07-31]: Trump's Caribbean killing spree is a feckless, criminal failure: "Blowing up innocent fishermen hasn't curbed the drug trade."

Trump vs. Law: Early on the emphasis here was on ICE, which appeared as Trump's rough draft for a national SS. I've mostly deferred to Jefrey St Clair for those stories, but they are still killing people. I then moved on to focus more on Supreme Court cases (which Ian Millhiser covers especially well), and related cases. But lately Trump's crime spree — weaponization of the Justice Department, cover for corruption, and other abuse of powers — have spread far and wide.

Trump's Administration: Trump can't remake America in his own image (i.e., destroy the country, culture, and civilization) just by himself. He needs help, and having largely purged the government of civil servants and replaced them with his own minions, this is what they are doing (whether he's paying attention or not):

  • Aparna Soni [07-19]: 2.6 million lost health insurance after ACA subsidies expired. That has real consequences. "Many people switched to cheaper, higher-deductible plans, but average premium payments still rose 58% and deductibles climbed 37%, or more than US$1,000 per person. By February 2026, only 83% of people who selected a marketplace plan had paid their premiums and kept their coverage, down from 91% the previous year."

  • Dylan Scott [07-23]: So is the lettuce bad or not? "Can we trust anything the Trump administration says on cyclospora?" Nope.

  • Tony Romm/Brad Plumer [07-24]: Trump administration admits canceling grants to states that did not vote for him: "Federal officials said in court documents that they halted billions of dollars in funding for energy projects to states 'based solely' on whether they backed Trump in the 2024 election."

  • Caitlin Dewey [07-27]: The worst year for measles in a generation: "Measures is back in part because we stopped fearing it." Also . . . Trump.

  • Emily Badger/Alicia Parlapiano [07-27]: Congress budgeted billions for big transit projects. Trump isn't spending it.

  • Brad Plumer [07-29]: Trump administration is repurposing federal land for AI data centers: "In the latest example, the Energy Department will convert a shuttered Cold War-era uranium enrichment facility into a data center campus and gas plants."

  • Thom Walsh [07-29]: The Big Beautiful Bill's market-based health care delusion: "The Rural Health Transformation program asks states to build market-style reforms in places where health care markets often do not exist." It is fair to say that the program is not only designed to fail, it is designed to fail irreplaceably:

    But the program is not simply a grant program. It is leverage. States are being asked to manage the consequences of reduced federal health care financing through plans that must satisfy federal expectations. If a state does not use the funds in accordance with its approved application, the federal government can withhold, reduce, or recover funds. The statute also bars administrative or judicial review of those decisions.

    That matters because the program is built partly around the familiar vocabulary of health care reform: choice, competition, technology, transparency, partnerships, right-sizing, and value-based care. Those ideas are not inherently wrong. The problem is that access-sustaining money is being used to push market-style policy in places where the market case for that policy is often weakest.

Donald Trump:

Politics: Pieces on US elections (recent and future) and, more generally, intra-party politicking. Party-specific pieces in following sections.

  • Ed Kilgore: Lots of pieces that could be sorted under other categories, but many become obsoleted almost as fast as they land.

    • [06-20]: Trump's new GOP midterm strategy is pure chaos: "He thinks Republicans should stop fixating on voters' concerns about prices and focus on his phony voter-fraud panic."

    • [06-23]: Tucker Carlson and MTG choose irrelevance over GOP: "These high-profile apostates may claim they represent many unhappy MAGA folk. But the fact is they're leading no one and going nowhere fast." For now, sure, but could there be a longer-term positioning angle?

    • [06-26]: JD Vance identifies with Nixon, which says a lot: "The veep compared himself to the former president, painting him as another bad boy who overcame his snooty detractors and achieved supreme power."

    • [07-07]: Why 'Medicare for All' is back on the Democrats' agenda: "Exploding health-care costs and a New Wave of progressive-candidates are reviving calls for single-payer health." It will be on the agenda until it is implemented, because anything less is bound to fail. The best one could hope for ACA was to delay the inevitable: it solved a few problems, and ameliorated some more, but at a high cost, as it also attempted to keep all industry business interests fat and happy. But rather than welcome what was actually a big victory for business, Republicans did everything they could to sabotage the law, which only accelerated its failure.

    • [07-10]: How Trump's polling lies fuel his election denial: "Trump conditions his supporters to believe his election fables by regularly making delusional claims about his popularity." And vice versa.

    • [07-15]: MAGA won't stand for limits on ICE brutality: "Efforts to rein in ICE tactics and poorly targeted mass deportations have been met with a backlash from Trump's base." As Adam Serwer put it, The Cruelty Is the Point.

    • [07-16]: Trump drags America deep down the rabbit hole: "In a White House address Trump spouted wild election conspiracy theories. Damage to the midterms could be profound."

    • [07-20]: GOP's midterm message: Democrats stink more than we do! "With Trump unwilling to defend his own record, Republicans must struggle to make the election comparative and smear the opposition as extremist." The thing is, this tactic has been backfiring. Indeed, it arguably backfired for the Democrats in recent elections, even though there is a good case that the Republicans are far more extremist than any Democrats. When Republicans attack Democrats as "socialist" or worse, the reaction is increasingly divided between "huh?" and "cool!" The charge only resonates for people who already hated Democrats.

    • [07-22]: Polls show even MAGA has soured on Trump's Iran War: "The Iran war has always been unpopular, and as the conflict drags on, public opinion is looking more and more dismal for the president."

    • [07-22]: John Fetterman's party-switch calculus: "The erratic Pennsylvania Democrat is flirting with a party flip. If the midterms produce a narrow Senate majority, he could have massive leverage."

    • [07-26]: Democrats need to postpone their civil war.

    • [07-27]: Will Trump make January 3 another January 6? "Reversing a 2026 midterms defeat wouldn't be easy, but the president is laying the groundwork."

    • [07-28]: Democrats poised to overreact to Michigan and Wisconsin primaries: Both races seem to be cases where the Democratic money people are in panic because their preferred candidates simply don't have the appeal of their challengers. The problem is that they're not coming up with good candidates to campaign for their do-nothing agenda.

    • [07-30]: Democrats need a better answer on voter ID. Here's one.

    • [07-30]: Trump is absolutely flailing in high-quality polls: Approval rates: CNN 34%, AP-NORC 33%, Quinnipiac 32%. At Silver Bulletin, Trump is −13% on immigration, &minus-22.4% on trade, $minus;-27.7% on the economy, −43.3% on inflation, and &minus-39.9% on his Iran war.

    • [08-02]: The GOP's big red scare is really stupid: "No, Democrats aren't communist, and the relatively small progressive surge in primaries isn't a Bolshevik revolution." I'd add that the success of the red scares (both after 1918 and 1945) was largely based on the charge that communists were effectively foreign agents, and their failure happened after McCarthy and the Birchers expanded their targets to include the Army, Eisenhower, and Earl Warren.

  • Robert Kuttner [07-28]: Yes, Trump will attempt a coup: "If we are vigilant, he won't pull it off."

Other Republicans:

  • Rick Perlstein [06-28]: Ronald Reagan to JD Vance: minimizing Watergate is a Republican tradition: "On the American right, there is an unbroken lineage of Watergate propaganda going back to the 70s from today." There was a brief period starting in the 1990s — I date from Clinton's shameful eulogy of Nixon — when liberals loved the irony of touting Nixon as a liberal icon. That went hand-in-hand with the tendency to view the Republican turn to the right as starting with Reagan in 1980. That turn was deeply embedded in the Nixon years, even if he let some laws pass that later conservatives decried (like Clean Air, and OSHA), and put Harry Blackmun on the Supreme Court. But Nixon also installed Rehnquist, which started the erosion of civil rights. (Also note that he turned the Office of Economic Equality over to Donald Rumsfeld's deliberate incompetence, so that the Great Society programs would end in failure.) Nixon also largely invented the "culture war" manipulations Reagan and others would later advance. But only with the advent of Trump has it become clear that Nixon's main contribution to the Republican right has been to justify presidential criminality, both against domestic and foreign "enemies." Unfortunately, the backlash against Watergate was limited to domestic affairs; his more serious foreign policy crimes, like the murder of Allende, were never addressed, partly because they weren't new with Nixon.

    • Lauren Gambino [06-25]: JD Vance says Nixon's Watergate scandal would be '12-hour news story' today. This says more about Vance, who was 12 year short of being born when Watergate broke, than anything else. He doesn't know the story (especially about how the cover-up overshadowed the crime, but also the whole panoply of "dirty tricks" Nixon was also hoping to cover up), and he has even less understanding of how people, including the media, viewed political crime back then. What's less clear is how much media have changed: certainly Republican-aligned media have cozied up to Trump's crazed criminality, so they can be counted on to deny and dismiss any charges. But it's not like Nixon didn't have allies hoping to bury Watergate. It couldn't be buried due to the way that it slowly leaked out, as every attempt at cover up backfired.

    • David A Graham [07-21]: JD Vance isn't a fool. Why does he act like one? "Every politician does some pandering, but few do it as clumsily, or with such evident disdain for their own supporters, as the vice president."

    • Thomas B Edsall [07-28]: Who does JD Vance think he is?

  • Bess Levin [07-15]: Ken Griffin, GOP megadonor and Rubio fan, goes all in on midterms: "The billionaire Citadel founder is said to be focusing on Senate races in hopes of shaping the party beyond Trump." He was the 5th biggest political donor in 2024, and "has contributed some $40 million to midterm races," which "could easily double by November." Susan Collins (R-ME), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), and the Republican nominated to succeed Joni Ernst (R-IA) are major beneficiaries.

  • Ariana Aspuru/Sean Rameswaram [06-29]: How the rich got stingy: "The ultra-wealthy used to build libraries and public parks. Those days are over." Interview with Bella DeVaan, director of the Charity Reform Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies.

  • Elisabeth Zerofsky [07-28]: What the crackup of the Heritage Foundation says about the post-Trump right: "The bastion of American conservatism best known for Project 2025 has been consumed by an ideological — and generational — civil war."

  • Virginia Heffernan [07-31]: Don't be fooled: America hates these toxic right-wing gasbags: "Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and Erika Kirk get lots of attention. But America hates them. And increasingly, they hate each other." Hate, after all, is their stock-in-trade.

  • Annie Karni [08-02]: Ohio Senator calls former son-in-law accused of abuse unfit for office: "Senator Bernie Moreno, Republican of Ohio, broke his silence about allegations of domestic abuse his daughter had made against Representative Max Miller."

Democrats: Had I written this in real time, I probably would have expressed my dismay and revulsion over how prominent Democrats as well as the usual media vultures piled on to wreck the Graham Platner campaign in Maine, and especially over those ostensible Democrats who had promised to vote for Collins. I was never much of a Platner fan, nor am I overly enamored of his "working class charisma," and I know nothing (and care little) about the disputed facts. It's quite possible that my own kneejerk reaction isn't all that different from the way Trump fans responded to libelous charges against their hero. But we don't need to go into that any further. Platner has withdrawn. Maine Democrats have a new candidate. No need to rehash this again.

  • Kate Yoder [06-16]: The climate myth Democrats can't quit: Climate change seems to have slipped to the bottom (24 out of 25) of issues that voters identify as "very important to their vote," which is being taken as an indication that it's not worth talking about.

    The idea that talking about climate change is a liability for Democrats has become conventional wisdom. Last year, the Democrat-aligned think tank Searchlight Institute issued the advice "Don't say climate change." A recent op-ed in The New York Times concluded, "When it comes to climate change, for now, it might be better to say nothing at all." An early draft of the Democratic National Committee's autopsy report of the 2024 election, released under pressure in May, posited that messages about climate change and shifting to green energy "created anxiety among workers in traditional industries worried about job losses."

    This question deserves a much deeper answer, but all I can offer here is a paragraph. First, we have to get realistic: about the real dimensions of the threat; about how difficult it is to prevent the conditions from getting worse; and about what government needs to do to for disaster recovery. From this you can make at least two clear points: one is that Republicans are bad at disaster recovery, for lots of reasons (denial of causes, unwillingness to help anyone who isn't one of their chosen people, corruption in what they do spend); another is that climate disasters are driving up insurance rates, eventually to levels no one can afford (government needs to be able to provide insurance, starting with people who can't afford it, but also to make people who used to be able to afford it more comfortable). Neither of these things attacks people for driving SUVs or eating meat, nor do they try to shame people for setting thermostats wrong. But sure, once you start to rebuild trust, you can suggest sensible changes to reduce carbon footprint, etc. And you can justify investing money in changes that will eventually pay for itself in managing insurance costs. I suspect that the problem isn't denialism, although Republicans have campaigned on that. Most people believe the science. But they don't want to take personal responsibility for it, nor should they given the role that companies and government (like the military) play in making it worse. And they're not impressed by the solutions Democrats have been pushing so far, which are mostly just subsidies to alt energy companies and tax breaks for buying electric cars. That's a deep problem with the political system, which only supports proposals that make interest groups money.

  • Bhaskar Sunkara [07-02]: Jonathan Chait doesn't understand the socialists he's attacking: This seems to be the new definition of an academic squabble: not only is Chait's Atlantic essay behind a paywall, so is Sunkara's Jacobin rebuke. All we get is this: "Jonathan Chait thinks the Democratic Socialists of America has become the thing founders like Michael Harrington built it to oppose. He has the history totally wrong. The thread from Harrington's DSA to this one isn't hard to find."

  • Kevin Kruse [07-08]: Punching Left: Ed Kilgore refers to this as the "Democrats' civil war." Basically, there is one faction which has controlled the upper ranks of the Democratic Party since the Reagan-Bush era, largely by tapping into big business money (mostly in tech and finance). They saw this shift as both necessary, given the decline of unions as a force for political mobilization, and as an opportunity, given the Republicans' embrace of reactionary "culture war" issues. Indeed, by the time you get to Trump, their main pitch is that they're the only safeguard against fascism. But they found that they couldn't get the rich to support them unless they attacked anyone who challenged the rich and powerful, which is to say the left. This wasn't new. This happened way back with Truman and his "loyalty oaths." It happened when LBJ wrecked his Great Society to fight a pointless, hopeless war in Vietnam. And it's still a reflex for the Democrats who still raise money and direct campaigns, even though their candidates have lost much of their credibility. The problem is that their campaign pitches don't win, not least because their solutions don't work. And also because they keep embracing wars that make a mockery of their supposed commitment to peace and justice. It's no surprise that the people cited below who want to purge the Democratic Party of its left see support for Israel as their litmus test issue. (The link is to Shapiro, but Fetterman has been even more adamant.)

    Over the last month, there's been a flurry of panic from self-styled moderates and centrists in the Democratic Party about the success of a few socialist candidates in party primaries.

    Some of this grumbling has simply been the self-interested reaction of inert incumbents who are (rightly) worried that these political upstarts might be coming for their own jobs in Congress. But other prominent figures in the party have also gone out of their way to trash these leftists and assert that they have no place in the party's coalition. Rather than working alongside the left, these misguided moderates seem to believe the Democratic Party needs to distance themselves from them and denounce them.

    Today, professional concern troll David Brooks confirmed that this is a horrible idea by embracing it in a piece for The Atlantic titled Democrats Became Great By Fighting the Left.

    • As Kruse points out, at least from the New Deal forward, the left has been the leading force behind Democratic rises. I'd go further and make three more bold claims: the left has better solutions for most of the problems that trouble us today; that left arguments are potentially more effective than pitches for "moderation"; and that left overshoot is almost structurally impossible, so there is no reason to panic about power shifting left. We're a long, long ways from stopping the rich from getting richer, and even farther from making the rich poor. Few on the left even want that: we'd rather have poor people more secure, while reducing the power differences; some degree of inequality may be inevitable, but at some point the value of further leveling up may cease to matter.

    Also, I must say, if Brooks thought the Democrats were great in the 1940s by fighting the left, why did it take him until Trump came around to leave the Republicans?

  • Howard Dean [07-16]: Democrats' key to winning the midterms: "The party's healthcare affordability agenda could lower prices and put the Senate in play." One thing I've never forgiven Obama for was getting rid of Dean as DNC chairman, after Dean had engineered the Democrats' majority in Congress in 2006, and Obama's own election in 2008. Obama's pick may have helped him get reëlected in 2012, but by then Congress was lost, and stayed that way.

  • David Freedlander [07-20]: Like it or not, Kamala Harris is the front-runner: That means quite simply there is no front-runner. It's silly to even talk about the prospect. She lost to Trump. There is no excuse for that. And while she "comes in with 99 percent name ID," much of that ID isn't favorable, and virtually none of it was built by campaigning against any other Democrat.

  • Steven Greenhouse [07-22]: Democrats need to hammer Trump on his unprecedented corruption: "To win in this year's midterm elections, the party must highlight that Trump has made huge financial gains while millions struggle to make ends meet." While Trump embodies many character faults in the American people, this level of corruption should still be a major turn off. He cites Hungary as a similar example:

    Democrats should repeatedly hammer Trump for his greed, corruption and conflicts of interest the same way that Hungary's opposition repeatedly attacked Viktor Orbán for his immense corruption — a strategy that caused Orbán's popularity to plummet and caused Hungarian voters to oust their country's authoritarian leader last April. Peter Magyar, Orbán's challenger, defeated Orban by focusing on three issues the Democrats would be smart to focus on: the cost of living, the lack of economic opportunities, and the fact that their country's leader and his family grew ever richer even as many people grew poorer.

  • Andrew Prokop:

    • [06-24]: Why urban Democrats love socialists now: "Democratic socialists are winning in New York — and in other cities." I suggest everyone go back and read Thomas Geoghegan's primer on European (especially German) models for social democracy, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life. For sure, socialism is better for the poor than no socialism, but where the value of robust rights and generous public services really pays off is with the middle class. Socialism makes it possible for people with middle incomes to get a good education, to get health care when they need it, to bounce back from loss of a job, to give their children opportunities, to plan for retirement, and to avoid the pitfalls of sudden bankruptcy that haunt many Americans today. Highly educated, somewhat better than median income people, especially in large and expensive cities, may benefit even more. Moreover, they're likely to have traveled and seen that it's possible to have functioning government that treats people fairly and generously.

    • [07-30]: How "abundance" lost the Democratic war of ideas: "Moderates hoped 'Abundance' could be the party's new vision. It hasn't worked out." First I've heard of that, but centrists probably spoiled the concept by adopting it too fervently. I still haven't looked at the Klein & Thompson book, but probably will at some point. Klein makes some bad calls, but he's a pretty smart guy, and I'd expect him to have some good ideas. (Thompson I'm not so sure about, so let's forget him for the rest of this comment.) Also, I think Klein's intent was to convince the left to add yimbyism to their repertoire, and not as a substitute for everything else — which was the tack took by the centrists, who were looking to rekindle their love affair with the rich by adopting some kind of supply-side, trickle down economic agenda. And beyond that, they saw it as another cudgel for punching down the left. Of course, some on the left took their bait, and took it out on Klein. Mamdani, on the other hand, took what he liked, and ignored the rest — which seems like the right way to handle things. After all, the left does want things like more affordable housing, and has no affinity for zoning rules and anti-development hassle that derails development that would be worthwhile.

  • Bill Scher:

    • [07-28]: The DSA platform would destroy American democracy: "The socialist group's vision of a federal government without three equal branches providing checks and balances would facilitate the whims of a would-be authoritarian. Sound familiar?" Not really. The "checks and balances" system has been more effective at preventing popular reforms than it has been at preventing authoritarianism. The Republican-packed Supreme Court has pretty consistently backed Trump's authoritarian power grabs. Maybe not as consistently as Trump wanted, but the right has won some pretty serious arbitrary victories there, like ending abortion rights, allowing unlimited campaign spending corruption, and much more. What protects democracy is the right to vote, which is also under attack from Trump. It's certainly not the electoral college, the manifestly unrepresentative Senate, the gerrymandered House, the unelected war machine, or the highly politicized federal courts system.

      That much said, I'm in no position to defend DSA. I'm not a member. I'm not involved with them in any way. I've never read their platform, nor do I want to. My views are generically leftist (I believe that equality is the foundation of justice), democratic (I believe that government should serve all people, so should be responsive to all of their needs), and liberal (I believe that individuals should be as free as possible within the constraints of mutual respect and cooperation). The "socialism" label carries some historical baggage that I fear is unhelpful (as does "communism" and "anarchism"), but I recognize people who adopt such labels as fundamental allies, even if we may quarrel over details (as I also do with other leftists, democrats and/or liberals).

      Still, if the best charge Scher can make against DSA is that they want to write a new constitution which would abolish the Senate, that's a pretty weak complaint. The Founders certainly didn't regard their Constitution as permanent or sanctified. They allowed for amendments, and indeed for a new constitutional convention. The latter hasn't happened, because we've always found it easier to work with the old document than to open up a blank piece of paper. In recent years, the people pushing for a constitutional convention have been on the right, not on the left. Give this political threat, I've basically taken a defensive posture, and given no consideration to proposals to restructure government. On the other hand, if DSA wants to dream, I can only say, "good for them." Back when I was in my teens, before I settled on any real position in politics, I was fascinated by the various utopian thinkers, so it's fair to say I've always loved a good thought-experiment.

      Scher has long been the most dutiful of centrist DNC pundits, so it's pretty clear who he's carrying water for. His argument is pure distraction: DSA has many more immediate goals and plans before they get around to abolishing the Senate (which, however good in theory, can only happen after they win the Senate, by which point it will no longer be an obstacle). However, his argument takes a weird turn when he looks for a case where a "democratic socialist" case advocating "unrestrained majority rule" without constitutional checks and balances, and comes up with David Ben-Gurion. He was a nationalist first and foremost: his commitment to "socialism" was limited to "Hebrew Labor," a repudiation of the fundamental leftist notion that all are equal; and his view of "democracy" was as a bag of favors he could use to shore up his power bases and general legitimacy. There is much more that can be said about Israel's example, but one thing odd here is that one of the main complaints centrist pundits have about DSA is their opposition to Israel's wars on equality, human rights, and democracy.

    • [07-31]: How left will Democrats go in 2028? That depends on 2026: "Democratic voters, long partial to candidates who show a capacity for bipartisan compromise over ideological purity, may be changing." That statement is probably wrong on every point, except perhaps "may be changing." Democratic voters supported Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden against Bernie Sanders not because they wanted compromises with Republicans but because they feared unbridled Republican control, and thought that the better-financed "moderates" would be better positioned to protect them. They failed, in part because all this talk about seeking bipartisan compromises made Democrats look weak and wobbly, while raising the expectations that Republicans could be moderate. Also, there's no evidence that anyone on the left wing of the Democratic Party is hung up on ideological purity. As for "changing," Scher runs through a lot of polling data, of which the most surprising is:

      According to annual Gallup polling sampled from 1994 to 2025, the share of Democrats who identify as "liberal" — as opposed to "moderate" or "conservative" — sits at a record high of 59 percent, up from 25 percent during Bill Clinton's first term.

      The label poison seems to be wearing off, as it is also for "socialist" and all the other red-baiting epithets. Scher makes more hay with polling on how many Democrats are willing to compromise, but much of that can be explained by poll construction. Let me put it this way: if I was president, and had a Democratic majority in Congress, I would still profess my willingness to cooperate with Republicans on bipartisan solutions to any problem they were willing to engage with seriously. Any time you can reach a consensus, that's better than eeking out a narrow partisan win. But how often are Republicans willing to help solve a problem? Damn near never. Clinton once described his welfare reform bill as a fundamentally good bill "wrapped up in a sack of shit." At least since Clinton became president, the only times Republicans have been willing to work out compromise deals is if they wound up making Democrats look bad, mostly by alienating their base. (NAFTA was the first big example of this. ACA was an example of months of bipartisan negotiation compromising a bill that should have passed with 80% margins, only to be 100% of Republicans oppose it, they turn it into a political cudgel.) One shouldn't be surprised that Democrats are getting sick and tired of their politicians selling them short in a pretense of bipartisanship that only seems to ratchet right. It doesn't take ideological rigor to see that candidates with left principles are more likely to see through these centrist ruses and hold out for principled solutions.

  • David Atkins [07-31]: The case for the DNC's Ken Martin. Really: I don't have any insight or opinion here. As far as I've been able to tell, the only DNC chair who did any good was Howard Dean, and Obama put an end to that. Since then, it's been a tool of the money-grubbing "centrists," and as such dead weight on efforts to elect Democrats across all 50 states. I don't know whether Martin is a change or more of the same. I will say that having to assume $20 million of Kamala Harris campaign debt isn't a good look.

The Economy (and Economists):

  • Ha-Joon Chang [06-12]: The end of the old economic order is an opening for the left: Interview. Another subscriber's only thing. (My wife subscribes, but no, I don't have the password.)

  • John Herrman [06-29]: AI inflation is screwing with the rest of the economy: "Rising prices for computers, phones, game consoles, appliances, and cars are just the beginning."

  • Brad DeLong:

    • [06-30]: Is Kevin Warsh as bad a central banker as he seems? Perhaps . . . : "Standing on one's Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is no way to create a stable standard of value."

    • [06-27]: The centuries of Eric Hobsbawm, and:

    • [07-02]: The centuries of Eric Hobsbawm II: "Hobsbawm's Long Nineteenth Century — in which his unshakeable bedrock foundational commitment to Marxist teleology is both his superpower & his Akhilleus's heel." First piece is based on an Enzo Traverso review of a book by Emile Chabal. Untangling this gets messy, not least because DeLong wants to draw a line between Hobsbawm's 1789-1875 books and his later 1875-1991 volumes, praising the former, and condemning the latter, mostly for unfashionable politics, which are blamed for excessive gloom. DeLong sees his own book as the antidote, a choice that doesn't seem like much of an improvement: by limiting himself to "actually existing socialism" DeLong loses the critiques offered by all the other possible socialisms, which only serves to lock in actually existing capitalism. Still, I like this bit by DeLong:

      In Hobsbawms telling, 1848 fails as a social revolution. However, it succeeds in killing the old order: thereafter, rulers know that they must reckon with capitalism, mass politics, and national movements, and that if anything is going to stay the same, everything must change.

      I thought Hobsbawm was far too sketchy and far too glib about 1848, especially given that between the two books, I read Christopher Clark's 896-page Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World: 1848-1849. While the loss of detail may matter little, DeLong's two sentences are closer to the point than Hobsbawm's "nothing changed." What changed was the side the bourgeoisie aligned with. While they could proclaim equal creation and universal rights back in 1776 and 1789 without considering the possibility that their slaves and workers (and wives and children) might consider claim to such rights, by 1848, their world had changed, even if they weren't totally aware of it. They restarted their revolt against aristocracy, but quickly found they had more in common with the aristocracy than with the masses (something Marx anticipated in The Communist Manifesto, which is directed not against the aristocracy but instead against the bourgeoisie — this may be why Hobsbawm showed so little respect for the 1848 revolutionaries).

  • Paul Krugman:

    • [07-14]: Suddenly, Hormuz is less crucial than it was: "Why? Because the real energy crunch is coming from the Russia/Ukraine war." He points out, and has the charts, that pump prices have risen far above crude barrel prices, and that they came down less during the brief opening of the Strait. How much of that has to do with Russia isn't clear, but when Ukraine attacks Russia's "energy infrastructure," they're aiming at refineries, not production wells. While closing the Strait was certain to raise oil and gas prices, I've always been skeptical that the increased costs would spell economic disaster for the rest of the world. While demand for many individuals is sticky — it isn't easy to switch to more fuel-efficient transportation, or to cut your commute — there is some slack in the system to absorb shocks. (Krugman gives several examples.)

    • [07-24]: Quagmire of the vanities: "Why the world economy is still at risk from the Iran debacle." Following up on the previous post, he points out that the "crack spread" (the difference between the price of crude oil and the price of refined products like gasoline and diesel) "has exploded, from around $25 a barrel before the war to more than $65 now."

      Trump's gratuitous war on Iran has turned into a remarkable quagmire — remarkable because the only thing keeping the war going is Trump's vanity. He effectively lost the war in the first few days, when it became apparent that Iran's hardline regime had survived the initial decapitation strike and that the U.S. military couldn't keep the Strait of Hormuz open. But Trump is psychologically incapable of admitting failure. So the war goes on, weakening America by the day, as he searches for some way to spin his abject defeat as a victory.

Technology (Including AI):

  • Caitlin Dewey [07-22]: The AI that went rogue: "The models broke out of a controlled digital environment in an "unprecedented" show of AI risk."

  • Eric Levitz [07-30]: AI could end up too cheap to control: "Think anarchy, not oligarchy." He's talking about Chinese AI models, which are nearly as powerful and currently much cheaper than American models. Competition should drive software prices down to near-zero. AI I'm not so sure about, but I do believe that American AI companies will never make profits that justify their current valuation.

  • Kate Clark/Sam Schechner [08-01]: The race to build an American alternative to cheap AI from China: "Silicon Valley startups are setting up open models, with some operating on shoestring budgets because of limited interest from VCs."

The Environment:

Media:

  • Scott Carney [07-29]: The real reason that Substack is collapsing: "The subscription model has maxed out." Quotes Taylor Lorenz as saying, "I wish I could turn off the ability of anyone to 'follow' me. Because what good are followers when follower growth seems correlated with losing paid subs??" The author shows a graph of his total subscribers growing (+1.8%) while paid subscribers are dropping (−11.6%). He also notes that "on a good day my brain can only keep up with about 5 newsletters. Meanwhile my wallet is skeptical of the value of even paying for that number." I probably subscribe to a dozen (my two paid subscriptions were comped; I don't pay for anything else, but my wife pays for but I can't access; I very rarely pay for anything, but sometimes I can pick up on her subscriptions).

  • Margaret Sullivan [07-30]: No TV experience? At CBS News, that's no problem: "The conservative columnist Ross Douthat is the network's latest perplexing hire — but the move is in line with the new leadership."

Regular Columnists

Sometimes an interesting columnist writes often enough that it makes sense to collect their work in one place, rather than scatter it about.

Dean Baker: Look for links here. They are all worth reading.

  • [07-08]: The Sanders-Trump plan for an AI sovereign wealth fund: Don't buy it: "An AI sovereign wealth fund would concentrate political power, reinforce the AI bubble, and divert attention from more effective industrial and corporate tax policies." I'm not sure what Sanders' position on this is, but I doubt it's the same as Trump's. I can imagine developing a sovreign wealth fund system that could be beneficial, but the main point wouldn't be to piggyback on bubble riding (which is what investment in AI would be at this point) but to direct investment to businesses that need more support, including for countervailing power reasons like stimulating more competitiveness. Baker makes another pitch for his "serious corporate income tax: non-voting shares in lieu of taxes." Two questions here: I don't see how the government gets its in-lieu-of-taxes from stock buybacks; and while I can see the logic of the government not voting in corporate management, I'd like to see more employee ownership, with customers also having a voting stake, so why not give the voting shares to them?

  • [07-14]: Social Security is a problem of income distribution, not demographics: "Social Security's long-term financing shortfall is driven primarily by decades of rising income inequality and slower wage growth, not an aging population or overly generous benefits."

  • [07-15]: Blocking the Paramount-Warner merger: Keeping the Trumpers from owning everything: "The Paramount-Warner merger threatens media competition, increases political control over major news outlets, and underscores the need for alternative public funding of journalism."

  • [07-16]: The NY Times reports on China: A teachable moment: "The New York Times exaggerates the weakness of China's economy by misrepresenting GDP growth, misunderstanding deflation, and overlooking the country's longer-term economic transition."

  • [07-18]: Exporters are still not eating the Trump tariffs: They are taxes on us: "New import price data reinforce that Trump's tariffs function as taxes paid by American importers and consumers, not by foreign countries." This is mostly a point on Trump's misunderstanding, which is fair enough. Still, the point of tariffs is to disadvantage foreign products, which happens regardless of who pays the tax. What's less clear is who benefits? In theory, when foreign products become more expensive, domestic equivalents become more competitive, but nothing stops them from simply becoming more expensive, raising profits. The classic theory is that tariffs help protect developing industries, which as they grow may become competitive enough to no longer need tariff protection. This doesn't seem to enter into Trump's calculations at all.

  • [07-22]: Government-granted monopolies in health care create need for prices controls: "High health care costs are largely driven by government-granted patent monopolies on drugs and medical devices, making price controls a response to existing market intervention rather than a source of it." I'd rather get rid of patents altogether, but this is one of the least things one can do to make a difference in limiting the abuse.

  • [07-23]: Trump and Hegseth are demanding big bucks for their wars: "Trump's proposed military budget would increase defense spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, far exceeding the cost of many domestic programs that have faced intense political opposition."

  • [07-29]: Trump wildfires: The arsonist complains about the smoke: "Trump's threat to tariff Canada over wildfire smoke ignores his own role in promoting fossil fuels, worsening climate change, and raising costs for US consumers."

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [06-26]: Roaming Charges: Call the shrink. Per Woodward and Bernstein, Nixon's last days in the White House were spent "having drunken conversations with the portraits of FDR, Jefferson and Lincoln." Unlike Nixon, "Donald Trump posts his insane rants online for all to see, nearly every night, and without the aid of alcohol to set him off, just his own disintegrating mind and no one bats an eye anymore. Last week, he compared himself to Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Alexander the Great, claiming he was more powerful than all of them, and was 'by far the most powerful person that has ever walked the planet,' because of his 'global reach.'"

    + AI-linked securities now account for a record 45% of the S&P 500, according to Yahoo Finance.

    + Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, dead at 100, may have inflicted more human misery than any other American in the post-World War II era . . .

    + Speaking of housing costs, there are 25 million American adults living with their parents, a new record.

    + $2.5 billion: the total amount of taxpayer money the Trump administration has paid out (so far) to cancel offshore wind projects.

    + Sen. Roger Marshall: "53 Republican senators, you're gonna find 53 opinions. We're very strong-willed, typically top of our class type of folks. So we've got opinions. And the hope is, the debate within us, we take 2+2 and turn it into 8." Turning 2+2 into 8 is how the Pentagon ended up with a $1.2 trillion-dollar budget and still couldn't defeat Iran (total defense budget $20 billion) . . .

  • [07-03]: Priapic ambitions: Notes on George Washington.

  • [07-10]: Roaming Charges: The American mirror: Opens with another ICE story, this about them killing Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. Farther down, he has a chart on "wealth per adult in USD": the US is number 2 in average wealth, but didn't make the top 20 in median wealth. (Switzerland dropped from 1 to 8; Luxembourg rose from 3 to 1; Belgium rose from 11 to 2; Singapore fell off the chart from 6; Denmark rose from 7 to 5.) More bullet points:

    + The Telegraph on the AI bubble: "The overvaluation of US stocks has now surpassed the level that brought the stock market crashing down in 1929. At a rating more than double that of their British and European counterparts, and the highest since the peak of the dotcom bubble, US equities are in for a hairy decade."

    + Trump made $2 billion on his crypto swindle and more than a million of his investors lost $3.8 billion . . .

    + Measles had largely been eliminated from the US. Trump and RFK, Jr. have brought the disease back, with a vengeance, as cases reach a near record high . . .

    + NYTimes Pitchbot: "Graham Platner's history of sexual assault proves he does not belong in the US Senate. He belongs on the Supreme Court." by Susan Collins.

  • [07-17]: Roaming Charges: When farce repeats itself: Starts with a Jean Beaudrillard quote, one-upping Marx. Then details another ICE killing, this one in Maine, Joan Guerrero, who was "shot and killed by ICE officer David Brouillette, a recent recruit with a history of domestic violence who was, in the words of one relative, 'extremely mentally ill.'" Also: "ICE has shot at least 17 people while they were inside their vehicles."

  • [07-22]: Transmitting the news from Neptune: Carl Estabrook's embrace of the life force.

  • [07-24]: Sound Grammar: When Hendrix hit home.

  • [07-29]: Sound Grammar: The best jazz records of 2026, so far: Among other things, describes my site as "essential reading for music fans."

    Music therefore can reach us without conditions, without expectations or contrived limits. It seeps through the boundaries of accepted discourse and hits us in the gut and the head and heart at the same time. And can only dispute the message if you play the sax, which has rarely, if ever, been an instrument of fascism. Jazz has other advantages in times of autocracy. It can express radical, even revolutionary, ideas and sentiments without falling under the censor's lash. Bill Orcutt's Music in Continuous Time may well be a call for sedition against the regime, but good luck to Todd Blanche proving it or even understanding it.

TomDispatch: Editor Tom Engelhardt has retired, which ironically gives him more time for writing, although his stock-in-trade remains rants about Trump which all lead back to global warming. Meanwhile, former intern Nick Turse has taken over, while remaining The Intercept's primary critic of American militarism.

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

Sara Herschander [07-09]: What that wobbling New York office tower reveals about America's housing crisis: The US is finally turning empty offices into homes. But it isn't always easy.

Paul Starr [07-22]: Proportional representation gets a new look: "Supreme Court decisions and unrestrained partisan gerrymandering are focusing attention on a fundamental election reform. But one version is more feasible than the others." This "fringe" idea is common around the world. It encourages the development of multiple political parties, which compete for leverage, then try to form coalitions once the votes are counted. It's a pretty good idea, but I've proposed a version that is, I think, better: I call this representative democracy. The idea here is that everybody (or almost everybody) gets their own representative. The country can still be divided up into districts, although they don't have to be equal sized. Each district would elect at least two representatives, and each of them would proxy for how many votes they received. Thus, for instance, in my district in and around Wichita, Ron Estes would be entitled to cast 198,465 votes (or 0.65 vote), but Esau Freeman would also get a ticket to Washington, where he could cast 106,632 votes (or 0.35 vote). Thus the 35% of the electorate who aren't in the least represented by Estes would still have representation. Elections would move from winner-take-all to minor adjustments. Gerrymandering would be pointless. The advantages of raising huge amounts of money would diminish, and with it all of the attendant corruption. Of course, this could be more complicated with third parties, independents, write-ins. I could see making allowances for people who didn't vote to sign up for a representative after the election, or for people who did vote to transfer their proxy. Of course, there is no chance of anything like this being implemented as long as the Republicans think they benefit from the current undemocratic system of corruption. But were that system to turn against them, representative democracy could be a lifeline, to at least stay in the game.

Emily Topping [07-22]: You should get to own your media, not rent it forever: "From Playstation games to ebooks and family photos, corporations are replacing ownership with temporary access. But we don't have to accept that." File this under "Enshittification." Leasing games go back a long ways, and come back whenver some company sees an angle to maximize profits that way. (Renting vs. owning houses is another example.) But the thing about media that's different is that the marginal costs of additional copies are so near to zero that everyone could have a permanent right to access. And, as someone who's spent most of his disposable income on print and music and has, thereby, ammassed a ridiculous amount of clutter, that sound much better to me (and, no doubt, even better for you). Of course, short of my imagined world, there are lots of reforms that can be implemented. A good first start would be to get rid of patents. Ensure a right to repair. Demand that products that are no longer maintained become part of the public domain, so that others can maintain them. Expand rights to share and copy. One more I'd like to throw out there: no clickthrough license can be enforced unless the provider can prove that the customer had adequate legal representation before clicking.

Books:

  • Zack Beauchamp [07-04]: The late historian who rekindled my hope for America's future: "Gordon Wood's argument for the 'radicalism' of the Revolution reveals something profound — and hopeful — about America." Wood has long been my "go to" historian for the period from 1875-1925, as he always seemed to have a view that was both generous and precise of very different people in a very different time. In short, he made sense to me, but I also appreciated that his view of the radicalism of the American Revolution fit in nicely with my view of its essential virtues.

  • Daniel Felsenthal [07-31]: The Jewish radicals who wanted equality for all: "In her history of the Jewish Labor Bund, Molly Crabapple tells the story of workers who opposed prejudice, tyranny, and nationalism." Which, among other things, means Zionism. The name of the book is Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund.

  • Joseph Heath [06-12]: Harari vs. Henrich: "What science actually says about human evolution." Contrasts two books on human evolutionary theory: Yuval Noah Harari: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and Joseph Henrich: The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. The two books differ in how they order evolution. For Harari, it goes: 1. intelligence, 2. language, 3. cooperation, 4. culture. For Henrich, the opposite: culture, cooperation, language, intelligence. This may be explained by an ambiguity in the word "culture." While we commonly think of it as the constellation of arts produced by intelligence/etc., another meaning is the nutrient soup in the petri dish in which bacteria grow. That is at least logically previous to whatever else can develop. On the other hand, how can you tell you have intelligence unless you can manifest it somehow (like in language, or art)? Putting language before cooperation also seems backward, as the utility of language depends on interaction with others.

  • Katherine Kelaidis [07-06]: How historians took over liberal punditry: "The hottest resistance talking heads during the Trump 2.0 are academics. What happened?": The author names: Jill Lepore, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Joanne B Freeman, Kevin M Kruse, Heather Cox Richardson, and Timothy Snyder. Author focuses, rather critically, on the latter two — not my favorite examples, although I don't read any of them regularly (or Ben-Ghiat and Freeman at all). That overlooks numerous other academics, most prominently economists like Paul Krugman and Adam Tooze (who could just as well be considered a historian).

    • Charlotte E Rosen [2025-01-20]: The end of resistance history: Cited above, deals with many of the same people, more critically on Richardson, reminding me how she became a prominent fan of Biden's foreign policy, even when it ran off the rails with Ukraine and Israel. (Snyder is another one, a Russophobe and Ukraine hawk. His area is the "bloodlands" between Germany and Russia.)

    • Osita Nwanevu [07-03]: Who owns the Declaration of Independence? "The founding document has been fought over since it was written. Today, we can let Trump claim it, or we can take up its battle cry to 'alter or to abolish' what's destroying our country." A prime example of arguing over history to make current political points. I've long been sympathetic to the view that it is a radical document based on high ideals that still have some way to go to be implemented for all. For a detailed reading, see Danielle Allen: Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality.

  • Allen Lowe [05-17]: Melvin Gibbs' How Black Music Took Over the World: Book review. Noted because Lowe complained about the reactions he provoked, and I figured I should check it out. But I still haven't.

  • Michael Shorris [07-21]: What's so scary about the Frankfurt School? "In The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy, AJA Woods looks at how the Frankfurt scholars became the latest bogeymen for the contemporary right." I had never heard of Lyn Marcus, but Lyndon LaRouche, sure, what a nitwit! And then you get to William S Lind, and eventually Ted Cruz and Andrew Breitbart. Critical theory is difficult enough without having to extricate it from people who understand nothing and intend to keep it that way.

  • JD Vance: Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith:

Music: I should probably make this a regular section.

Obituaries: I had been using the New York Times, but they're giving me aggravation these days, so I'll switch over to Wikipedia (July, also June), which is probably better anyway. Roughly speaking, since my last report on May 12:

  • [05-20]: Cleve Moler, 86, American mathematician and computer programmer, developed the LINPACK and EISPACK math libraries, and MATLAB, a software package that helped non-programmers solve complex math problems.

  • [06-05]: James Bradley, 72, American historian. I read two of his books: The Imperial Cruise: The Secret History of Empire and War (2009); The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia (2015). His earlier Flags of Our Fathers (2000) was the basis for Clint Eastwood's movie about the legacy that followed the taking of Iwo Jima in WWII. [NYT]

  • [06-12]: David Hockney, 88, English painter. [NYT]

  • [06-15]: Abdullah Ibrahim, 91, South African pianist. [NYT]

  • [06-22]: Clive Davis, 94, record producer and executive. [NYT]

  • [06-22]: Alan Greenspan, 100, long-time Fed Chair. [NYT]

  • [07-05]: Mike Wallace, 83, historian, best known for his three-volume history of New York City, starting with Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (co-authored with Edwin G Burrows; he was the sole author on the other two volumes). In the 1970s, he was involved in the Radical History Forum, and Radical History Review. I have a memory of him writing about Mexico. I'm not finding much to substantiate that, but he was married to Mexican author Carmen Boullosa, and they co-wrote A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the "Mexican Drug War" (2016). [NYT]

  • [07-11]: Lindsey Graham, 71, American politician and war criminal. See his section above.

  • [07-13]: Pat Oliphant, 90, Australian-born American political cartoonist.

  • [07-15]: Plas Johnson, 94, American saxophonist. [NYT]

  • [07-19]: Richard Heinberg, 75, journalist and ecologist, wrote extensively on fossil fuels (especially oil depletion) and climate change. I've read a bunch of his books, including The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2003); Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (2007); and Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last Energy Crisis (2009) — seems like there must be more, but the only one I readily found on my shelves is The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century's Sustainability Crises (2010). The idea of "peak oil" attracted a lot of interest c. 2000, but faded later in the decade as secondary production (aka "fracking") took off, especially in the US. With that, US production finally increased beyond the 1969 peak, which lulled people back into a sense of complacency — although by then, the worry was less about running out than about turning all we had into greenhouse gases. Actually, the advent of widespread fracking proved that the era of really cheap fossil fuels was over, and that oil and gas would only become more expensive to produce.

  • [07-20]: John C Dvorak, 80, tech writer. I read him regularly, especially in the 1980s personal computer magazines.

  • [07-20]: James Woolsey, 84, Clinton's first CIA Director, possibly his worst appointment ever (no mean feat). Especially prominent in his suport for Bush's invasion of Iraq. I recall a description of how Clinton appointed him: he was just a name the staff proposed; Clinton met with him once, 15 minutes top, and was satisfied. It was not a job he cared about, let alone realized would undermine his presidency. Now we should understand that his biggest mistake was his failure to radically curtail the military and CIA/NSA/etc., which metastasized under his benign neglect. That started with Colin Powell backing him down into "don't ask; don't tell," which turned a reasonable proposal into license for unprecedented enforcement. He should have fired Powell, like Truman did MacArthur. Instead, he kept promoting machine cogs like Woolsey (and his oily replacement, George Tenet), until the "vulcans" were calling the shots, and he was just rubber-stamping them — especially when he saw that bombing Iraq was a good political diversion from impeachment. [NYT]

  • [07-28]: Raoul Vaneigem, 92, Belgian author of The Revolution of Everyday Life, a major tract associated with the Situationist International (best known for Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle).

Some other names I recognize:

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas.

  • Kurt Andersen [08-01]: Picture is a Trump-posted meme which poses two pictures of Trump, one from his military academy days, and one current with an admiring glance of his youth, and the caption: "Same Guy. Even more energy now!"

    The ultimate malignant narcissist posting a perfectly unwitting self-parody of his malignant narcissism.

  • Kevin M Kruse [08-03]:

    I'm just going to keep screaming this until I'm hoarse, but until Trump the norm -- for 50 years -- was that sitting presidents had their taxes audited by the IRS and released to the public to show they were clean.

    But Trump refused repeatedly, and sued when his return was leaked, and now . . . this

    FLAG: Trump gets to keep tax immunity for himself, his sons, and the Trump Organization under the new 'deal' struck by Todd Blanche.

    The new order also reaffirms that Trump won't have to pay any taxes he might have owed the IRS.

    Kruse has another tweet about the Seattle Mariners bullpen deciding they believe that "Babe Ruth didn't exist."

    People in this country used to be afraid of announcing to the world that they were stone-cold idiots who shouldn't be allowed behind the wheel of a car. Now they're out there bragging about how dumb they are.

Original count: 299 links, 18965 words.

Current count: 344 links, 19921 words (25204 total)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Saturday, June 14, 2025

Loose Tabs

Unfortunately, I've dawdled much too long on this post, which puts me into a position where for better or worse I simply have to dump it out now. Sorry for the hit-and-miss nature of what follows. I've been preoccupied with music matters, including the Mid-Year 2026 Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll, which is almost certain to swallow up all of my remaining time and energy through roughly July 15. (Voting deadline is July 5. Then I have to write some sort of essay on the state of the art.)

It is possible that I will add bits and pieces to this after initial posting. Otherwise, I'll store away items for next time, whenever that may be. I'd like to carve out more short pieces to go into Notes on Everyday Life. Below you'll find an index of some political pieces I've written there. The three Iran War pieces and the two on Israel/Gaza are still relevant to understanding the chaos that has so cluttered up the news there. I projected a fourth Iran War piece, but we're presently stalemated in a war that is basically between Trump's id and ego, things that Iran seems powerless to affect. (Israel is another story.) A rational analyst would point out that Iran should be willing to forego its "nuclear program" (or "ambitions" or whatever you're calling it) in exchange for real, credible security, and complete freedom from sanctions. Also that they should be willing to end military aid to Hezbollah and other "proxies" in exchange for real, credible security for them. Also that they should be entitled to considerable reconstruction aid, which could be provided by accepting fairly modest tolls through the Strait of Hormuz. Also that the US and Iran should normalize relations, allow trade, investment, etc. And that Iran should be willing to normalize relations when Israel when/if Israel reaches a peaceful settlement of Palestinian grievances. Is that too much to ask? All I'm asking for is normalcy, which has been broken partly by Iran's anti-Americanism from 1979 (which, frankly, was hard earned), but mostly by America's post-1979 grudge, stoked by Israel's cynical opportunism.

I could blow that last paragraph up into an essay, but that's the gist of it, and pretty much everything else is ephemeral. Sure, Americans will complain about Iran's missiles and drones, but they're only a threat if underlying relations remain hostile. That's actually true of the nuclear program as well, but Israel and America are so used to using nuclear weapons for extortion they can easily forget that most people just see them as some kind of deterrent: one that works by recognition, not by use. Meanwhile, their undoubted ability to close the Strait of Hormuz is a pretty effective deterrent on its own, making the potential of nuclear weapons issue moot. Meanwhile, the US and Israel have effective nuclear deterrents of their own, so why should they worry?

The problem, as I've tried to explain before, is that Netanyahu regards peace as a political disaster — he's maintained his longest term ever by repeatedly escalating, a promise that is bound to collapse when Israelis see how little his wars have gained them — and perhaps worse, given that he's still dodging criminal charges. Trump faces similar perils in ending the war with only the flimsiest claims to victory, but his war is already so unpopular that he may be doomed anyway. On the other hand, his fixed term has 32 more months to run, so he may indeed simply not care.

There are, of course, many more stories below, plus much I simply haven't gotten to. Political primary season is heating up. Trump has been pretty successful so far in disciplining his own party, as well as in motivating support for Democrats. The net effect will be hard to ascertain until we start seeing them compete against each other.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically (12 times from April-December 2025). My previous one appeared 33 days ago, on May 12. This one was initially posted on June 14. Any subsequent adds will be marked with change bars.

By the way, I've been trying to write some more in-depth pieces on major issues (and/or personal peccadillos), using Substack as an email agent. I call this series Notes on Everyday Life. Here's a list of recent ones, plus a couple of oldies I've pinned because they still seem relevant here, in LIFO order:

  • [05-29]: But Reality Is Unscripted: Disturbing thoughts on Trump.

  • [05-05]: The Real Road to Serfdom: Tim Wu explains how monopoly power leads to fascism.

  • [05-02]: Lookback: Iraq 2003: Why does the Iran war story sound familiar? (with allowances for tragedy repeating as farce)?

  • [04-27]: Explaining Inflation: AI treats us like 5-year-olds. They leave out a few things.

  • [04-05]: Iran War: The Big Question: How does it end? Or does it end at all?

  • [04-03]: Iran War: The Three Questions: Why is this happening?

  • [03-13]: Days of Infamy: "Franklin Roosevelt knew how to sell a war." Donald Trump doesn't. He only knows how to start one.

  • [2025-10-21]: Making Peace in Gaza and Beyond: "Looking beyond the Trump points toward a peace we can all live with."

  • [2025-10-17]: Gaza War Peace Plan: "Twenty Trump points, for better or worse."

  • [2025-08-10]: Four Stories: My first post, which sets out the basic ideas behind my effort, and takes its title from a very wrong-headed Vox piece that offered some teachable moments. One sample quote I buried in parentheses:

    There is no problem that Trump is the solution to. But his slogan, "Trump will fix it," suggests that some people thought we had problems he could fix. I think Trump's slogan was very effective, especially as Harris made little or no effort to show how very ridiculous the boast was.

I also have a Notes feed there. While I've done very little with it so far, it occurs to me that I might be able to use it to publish Loose Tabs items and Music Week reviews as I write them, instead of having to wait for a long compilation post.

Table of Contents:

Special bonus: Lyrics for Carsie Blanton's Everything Is Great!:

Everything is great
Everything is fine
Everything is getting better all of the time
Everybody knows that president's insane
Nobody wants to talk about what people do if their president's insane

It's the hottest summer in the history of man
For some reason yesterday we bombed Iran
Everybody knows we're starting world war three
But nobody wants to talk about what you should do if your government is starting WWIII

Everything is great
Everything is fine
Everything is getting better all of the time
Everybody knows that Luigi was right
But nobody wants to talk about what you should do when everybody knows that Luigi was right

They're shooting people lining up for bags of flour
You don't need the permission if you've got the power
Everybody knows that we're living in a death cult
Nobody wants to talk about what you should do if you're living in a death cult

That would be great
That would be fine
Light a little fire and drink a bottle of wine
Everybody needs a friend sometimes
We can sit around and talk about what we should do if the presidents insane and starting WWIII and we're living in a death cult and everybody knows that Luigi was right

And we can talk all night

New Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent themes of the following sections, or vanish altogether.

Last time: Cuba; Jerome Powell, David Warsh and the Fed; White House Correspondents' Dinner; Gerrymandering around voting rights; Spirit Airlines bites the dust.

David Warsh and the Fed: Trump's appointment to replace Jerome Powell has been confirmed, so he's now in charge. Powell remains on the board for now. Trump had tried to have Powell prosecuted to move him out before his term ended, and Powell's decision to hang on may relate to that. Otherwise, this basically confirms the pattern, where Republican presidents nominate new chairmen who are more reliable political food soldiers, while Democrats renominate Republicans to keep from spooking the financial markets, and those Republicans proceed to hold the economy hostage, so the Democrats wind up looking bad. Granted, some left-leaning economists wound up saying good things about renominating Powell and Bernanke, and also granted that some of the front-running Democrats (like Summers or Volcker) could have been worse.

  • Bess Levin [05-14]: Kevin Warsh now gets to prove he isn't Donald Trump's 'sock puppet': "How does the incoming Fed chair's background signal his approach to inflation, interest rates, and dealing with you know who?" As for who is Warsh?

    The incoming Fed chief is a former investment banker who served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from January 2006 to March 2011, when he resigned in protest over the decision to buy $600 billion in Treasury securities as part of a goal of lowering long-term interest rates (more on that later!). Known during his time in Washington as the "Federal Reserve's chief liaison to Wall Street," Warsh later became a partner at billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller's family office and was named a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Speaking of billionaires: Warsh is the son-in-law of billionaire Trump donor and Estée Lauder Companies, Inc., heir Ronald Lauder, through his marriage to Jane Lauder. The soon-to-be Fed chair himself is worth over $100 million, making him the richest Fed chief in the history of the central bank. (In comparison, Powell is worth a paltry $19.5 million.)

  • Mike Konczal [05-15]: The weirdness of Jay Powell's legacy: "I think [Jay Powell] did a good job. I think he'll be remembered well" but "his legacy will be a bit weird in the short term."

  • Matt Peterson [06-02]: Fed Chair Warsh makes first hires at central bank, including 'Project 2025' author: Paul Winfree, whose "contribution to the 'Project 2025' policy book set out potential reforms that go beyond Warsh's calls for 'regime change' at the Fed."

AI Goes to trial: Elon Musk (xAI) is suing Sam Altman (OpenAI) over who can be trusted with running the world through AI.

Trump and Putin Go to China: On May 13-15, Trump flew to Beijing for a state visit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The visit had been planned for April, but was postponed due to the Iran War.

  • Lyle J Goldstein [04-22]: War has significiantly altered major Trump meeting with Xi: "Rather than a clash, these titans are likely tempered by the Middle East war. The question, who now has the better advantage?"

  • Anatol Lieven [05-13]: Picking up on the vibes in Beijing before major Trump-Xi visit: "Insights from my trip two weeks ago: Beijing doesn't want to indulge Trump's actions in Iran, nor lead international condemnation or an 'Axis of Upheaval.'"

  • Joshua Keating [05-13]: Trump's China policy is nearly the exact opposite of what everyone expected: "As Trump heads to China, attention and resources are being shifted from Asia to yet another war in the Middle East." I think "from unconventional hawk to unexpected dove" is wrong on both counts. "Hawk" and "dove" are tactical ploys for him, not ideologies. I think you should look at Trump on two levels, and understand that he's not coherent enough to consistently link them. One is rhetoric: what he says is mostly independent of what he does, but it is highly variable according to who he's talking to. In America, for domestic political consumption, he's very hawkish about China, but when he's face to face with Xi, he's very dovish, deferential even. But action is something different. Trump, like any bully, understands that actions are situational as well: there are some people you can beat up, and some you can't. Often, he overestimates his power, and errs on the side of aggression, as he has done with Iran. But what can he actually do to China? He knows that simply talking a tough game will not work. He doesn't have the firepower to cower China, and he doesn't have the logistics to take the fight to them. He doesn't even have any good opportunities for skirmishes. If he tried to send the Navy into the South China Sea to secure some artificial islands, he's probably get routed. If he could provoke China into attacking Taiwan, he might be able to defend it, but nobody wants to test that. And if he tried to turn China into an active enemy, there's a lot more they could do to him than he could do to them. If China really hated us, they could arm Iran, like the US did Afghanistan and Ukraine. China could extend Iran a "nuclear umbrella," like the US offers to South Korea and Japan (and maybe Taiwan?). Trump thought he could act unilaterally on tariffs, but even there he's mostly had to back down. You could say he doesn't have the guts, but really he just doesn't have the cards.

  • Kate Lamb [05-14]: What is the Thucydides Trap and why did Xi Jinping mention it in his meeting with Donald Trump: I've heard the term, but couldn't give you a definition off the top of my head, partly because I've had very little interest in Greek and Roman precedents (I've been known to quip that every bad idea in western thought can be traced back to some fool Greek), partly because the "experts" who dwell on such things tend to be assholes (e.g., Victor Davis Hanson, Robert D Kaplan; by the way, there's a 2017 book by Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?, so it's easy to see how Xi might think that Americans recognize the term). Here's a definition: "A staple of foreign policy commentary, including by Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon, the Thucydides Trap refers to the idea that when a rising power threatens to displace an established one, the result is often war."

  • David Smith [05-14]: Trump delights in his deference to Xi, his strongman fantasy made flesh: There are those who might regard Trump's showering of Xi and China with flattery as demeaning for the frequently dubbed "most powerful person on earth" — or would, if a Democrat came even remotely close to such a display — but Trump seems to get a bye, perhaps in deference to his reputed mastery of multi-dimensional chess, or maybe just because we know him to be an inveterate liar? But I figure it's just a quirk: as someone who expects and thrives on flattery, Trump may figure it works on others, and it costs him little. It also conveys the feeling that nothing serious is at stake, and it's all meant to be quickly forgotten. Xi certainly understood that part, loading the brief two-day schedule — they must have spent as much time in the air as on the ground — with nothing more than pomp and circumstance. My only takeaway is the menu:

    The dinner was also notable for a menu that felt like fusion cuisine to appease Trump's unadventurous palate: lobster in tomato soup, crispy beef ribs, Beijing roast duck, stewed seasonal vegetables, slow-cooked salmon in mustard sauce, pan-fried pork bun and trumpet shell-shaped pastry, tiramisu and fruits and ice-cream.

  • Chas Danner [05-15]: Did Trump's China trip accomplish anything at all? "Here's what did and didn't happen, as far as anyone can tell." Not much, least of all for public consumption.

  • Amy Hawkins [05-15]: What was actually achieved at Trump and Xi's 'stalemate summit' in Beijing?

  • Michael D Swaine:

  • Robert Wright [05-15]: Trump's accidental triumph in Beijing. After taking some shots at "dean of Blob scribes" David Sanger, Wright takes Trump's modest posture in Beijing as good news (admitting, "I've always been a sucker for peaceful coexistence"):

    Imagine, for example, that the Iran War had gone according to plan: Trump oversees a Venezuela-esque display of military mastery, installs a puppet regime, starts exercising remote control over Iran's oil spigot, and waltzes into Beijing as king of the world. In that scenario, this summit might have had a different tenor, with Trump demanding more and demanding it loudly, creating the kind of friction he's so good at creating. And it's especially easy to imagine that kind of summit if — to add a second power-of-contingency thought experiment — some adviser had last year persuaded him to go easy on the tariffs and other forms of economic warfare, in which case Beijing wouldn't have been pushed to the point of chastening Trump by playing its rare-earth minerals card.

    But those are just thought experiments. In the real world, Trump came to Beijing a humbled man (OK, OK, a closer-to-humbled-than-usual man). What's more — and what makes me so emphasize the magnitude of this moment — the things that humbled him have implications that go well beyond US-China relations. True, his Middle Eastern demonstration of the limits of American military power has, on the one hand, implications for Taiwan (a fact that has no doubt crossed Xi's mind). But it also has implications — tectonic implications — for the Middle East itself. As the Beijing summit started, there were reports that Saudi Arabia has proposed a non-aggression pact between Iran and its Arab neighbors. That's the kind of thing you propose when you realize that your guardian superpower can't keep you safe — and it could turn out to be the kind of thing that foreshadows the eventual withdrawal of that superpower from the region.

  • The White House [05-17]: Fact Sheet: President Donald J Trump Secures Historic Deals with China, Delivering for American Workers, Farmers, and Industry: Not a place I've ever done looking for information, as this is just the official Trump administration spin. (So I was taken aback when I saw the pop-up asking or email addresses under the head "Welcome to the Golden Age!" So that's what this is?)

  • Pjotr Sauer/Amy Hawkins [05-20]: Same but different: how Xi and China welcomed Trump and Putin. "The choreography of the two welcomes appeared deliberately mirrored, designed to showcase Beijing's ability to host leaders from Washington and Moscow with equal grandeur."

  • Jake Werner [05-26]: An alternative view of what's next after the Trump-Xi summit: "Hawkish rhetoric from the national security establishment isn't grappling with the complex challenges posed by China's rise."

The Hantavirus Outbreak: For background, see MV Hondius hantavirus outbreak. The outbreak was confirmed on a Dutch cruise ship, which departed from southern Argentina on April 1 to visit Antarctica and several islands in the South Atlantic. The first passenger began showing symptoms on April 6, and died on April 11.

SpaceX IPO: The IPO happened on June 11, when SpaceX offered some stock (555.6 million shares), which it sold, raising $75 billion. As that implies the rest of the stock is worth as much per share, this gives the company a valuation of $1.77 trillion. As Elon Musk owns most of the reserved stock, that makes him, in theory at least, the world's first trillionaire.

  • Bess Levin [05-21]: SpaceX warns humans may suffer 'same fate as dinosaurs' in eye-popping IPO pitch: Elon Musk's space company filed to go public, which means they have to explain some things, like why "according to the filing, the company thinks it could pull in $28.5 trillion — yes, you read that right — in the future." Most of that ($26.5 trillion) is supposed to come from AI. (The "real GDP" of the US economy is currently $24.2 trillion.)

  • John Herrman [05-23]: The SpaceX IPO reveals what really happened to Twitter.

    As visible as X is in the outside world, though, and as integral as it is to Musk's public image, in SpaceX's 150-plus pages of corporate prospectus, it hardly shows up. And when it does, things don't look great.

    The numbers that are shared tell a story of decline, losses, and liability. Advertising revenue fell by nearly $600 million in 2023, bounced back a bit in 2024, and kept slipping again in 2025. As for the subscription business, the company has reached "approximately 6.3 million active paid subscribers" to X and around 1.9 million to versions of Grok (some X subscriptions come with expanded access to Grok). The company recorded a onetime, $3.75 billion impairment "primarily related . . . to the Twitter brand following its rebranding to X." The prospectus describes hundreds of millions of dollars of settlements stemming from Musk's massive, early, and chaotic cuts at the firm after he took over; looking forward, it suggests Musk's other businesses, including the profitable Starlink, face political risks from their connection with X, citing the company's 2024 free-speech battle with the Brazilian government.

    Then there are the numbers we don't get, ones a company might be inclined to share if they told a particularly good story.

  • Eleanor Davis-Diver [06-10]: Elon Musk is about to make saving for retirement even harder: "The upcoming SpaceX IPO will make investing in index funds for retirement worse, while Musk and friends rake in millions."

  • Freddy Brewster [06-12]: The SEC is radically loosening trading rules for SpaceX: "For the occasion, the SEC exempted Wall Street brokers from consumer protection rules — potentially jeopardizing the assets of investors, including 401(k)s and pensions, if markets are volatile."

  • Bess Levin:

  • Elizabeth Spiers [06-12]: What Elon Musk's trillion-dollar payday is costing the rest of us: "The tech mogul will leverage the initial public offering of SpaceX into more sociopathic wealth-hoarding."

  • Paul Krugman [06-12]: Elon Musk, human Ponzi scheme: "With Wall Street's help, you're about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX."

  • Brad Badertscher [06-13]: SpaceX IPO: Why insiders like Elon Musk are much likelier to cash in big than public buyers. Updated article, originally published on April 2.

  • Dean Baker [06-15]: The AI bubble monitor: Few things seem more intuitively obvious than that the SpaceX IPO is a massive fraud based on an incredible economic delusion, but just in case, Baker works through the numbers for you. One surprise for me is how consistently Tesla stock has been overvalued. Another question I have, is: if Musk expects the federal government to go bankrupt, who does he expect to buy SpaceX's inflated products?

The Trump Slush Fund: Trump's Department of [In]Justice, headed by his former personal attorney, signed off on a "settlement" to his $10 billion lawsuit over an independent contractor leaking Trump's tax returns while Trump was still president, agreeing to set up a $1.77 billion slush fund that Trump could use to "compensate victims of Biden's weaponized prosecutions" (e.g., of January 6 rioters), which also includes a promise to never again audit Trump, his family, or any of his businesses. This jumps to the head of a very long list of the most corrupt things anyone in the US government has ever done (mostly over other Trump examples). There's a fairly long quote under the Honig article below, detailing what Trump tried to do, in no uncertain terms.

  • Nia Prater:

    • [05-22]: Trump's weaponization slush fund is 'completely insane': Interview with former New Jersey attorney general Matt Platkin on "the legality of the controversial fund created by President Trump's IRS settlement." Platkin is representing 93 members of Congress in challenging this. At least one more lawsuit has been filed to block the "settlement." The legal grounds for doing this ("blatant self-dealing makes this matter a collusive suit") appear to be very shaky, which makes me doubt that they'll get away with it, but strange things are happening every day. One note here is that they "settled" just days before having to file briefs before a court that could very well have thrown the entire suit out. So there is an element of panic in how quickly this happened. But that it happened at all shows that Todd Blanche was mostly concerned with appeasing Trump, and that Trump was careless as to the optics of such blatant corruption.

    • [05-22]: Everyone trying to cash in on Trump's slush fund: Some names: Michael Cohen, George Santos, Mark and Patricia McCloskey ("the gun toters"), Enrique Tarrio ("seditionist Proud Boy"), Mike Lindell, Michael Caputo; and more generally, "members of the January 6 mob."

  • Kyle Cheney/Hassan Ali Kanu/Josh Gerstein [05-29]: Judge pauses Trump administration's 'anti-weaponization' fund: "The temporary order halts any payments from the controversial fund."

  • Elle Honig [06-01]: How a federal judge is blowing up Trump's slush fund: District Court Judge Kathleen Williams "is clearly furious — at getting played by the two Trump parties and at the slush fund itself." This is worth quoting at some length:

    The judge noted that the lawsuit involved the same party (Trump) on both sides and raised concerns about whether the case might be "collusive." Gee, Your Honor, you think? What tipped you off — Trump's public declaration upon filing the complaint, "I'm supposed to work out a settlement with myself"? . . .

    That dismissal cleared the way for the settlement, and mayhem ensued. Days later, the public learned that the bizarre deal included creation of a $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" slush fund to be administered by five cronies chosen by Trump's sycophantic acting attorney general, Todd Blanche (plus a bonus free pass for Trump, his family, and his companies on any tax shenanigans they'd committed up to 2026). The designated taxpayer money would pay off violent January 6 rioters and pretty much anyone else deemed by Trump's DoJ to be a victim of an unfair political prosecution. The fund would remain operative, conveniently enough, until December 15, 2028, just as the Trump administration will be packing its bags. (Quick math: If we assume roughly 2,000 claimants — 1,600 January 6 defendants plus other assorted miscreants seeking to feed at the trough — the average payout from the fund would amount to . . . $888,000.)

    Pretty much everyone promptly and appropriately lost their minds at the sheer grift of it all. Even Senate Republicans turned on the boss and Blanche. For reference, this is largely the same group of politicians who voted not to convict Trump after January 6. They can conjure some way to justify almost anything — but not this. . . .

    But then, a breakthrough: A group of 35 former federal judges came up with an end run. The ex-jurists filed an amicus (friend of the court) motion gently informing Judge Williams that she might have screwed up by agreeing to dismiss the case to facilitate the settlement and laying out a legal roadmap to double back and reopen it. The judges weren't seeking to file or join a case as parties, so standing was no impediment; they merely offered friendly professional advice to a former colleague. The ex-judges explained to Judge Williams that, under somewhat obscure rules of law and procedure, if she finds she has been deceived by the parties and that the settlement was actually a "product of collusion," she can reopen the case and shut down the whole slush-fund mess borne of the settlement.

  • Ed Kilgore [06-01]: Trump abandons toxic 'anti-weaponization' slush fund.

  • Chas Danner [06-04]: Trump's anti-weaponization slush fund may yet live.

  • Nia Prater [06-12]: Trump will have to defy court order to pay January 6 rioters: Evidently, even after back-pedaling, he still thinks he can get away with it.

The World Cup:

  • Alex Shepherd

  • Mark Hertsgaard [06-11]: The hottest World Cup in history has arrived: "Science blames the scorching hot temperatures on global warming, but will sports reporters make the climate connection?"

  • Flynn Coleman [06-11]: The autocrat's game: "For nearly as long as the World Cup has existed, autocrats have tried to exploit it. Trump is no exception." Benito Mussolini got there first.

  • Frances Nguyen [06-11]: The world descends on an inhospitable World Cup: "As players and fans arrive in an unfriendly United States for the quadrennial soccer spectacle, civil society organizations are mounting an effort to keep visitors safe."

  • Adam Elder [06-14]: The hater's guide to the 2026 World Cup: "Price gouging, sweltering heat, and a healthy dose of Trump. What's not to love?" This is a pretty long, really overwhelming list, from "The whole war thing" and "(Un)welcome to America" all the way down to "The grift never ends," with occasional sniping at the soundtrack.

Major Threads

War on Iran: Just as I'm scrambling to try to post this compilation of over a month's news, I'm seeing headlines on the New York Times [06-14]:

Now, back to our previous notes:

  • Sudarasan Raghavan [05-12]: The art of the ceasefire: "How President Trump's approach to the war in Iran is turning endless conflict, interrupted by fleeting pauses, into the status quo." The title was foreordained, but also ridiculous, as with Trump there is no art, just poorly considered impulses.

    Historically, negotiating a ceasefire to end an international conflict of this magnitude would have involved months, even years, of talks led by skilled negotiators with large teams of experts, the help of credible mediators such as the United Nations, and armies of diplomats shuttling between the different sides to build trust. Peace proposals are usually negotiated behind closed doors; threats are seldom made publicly. With the Trump Administration, none of this appears to be happening. Ceasefires are not treated as avenues to solve political contradictions and pave the way to a lasting settlement, Bhamidipati said. Instead, they have been reduced to tools of conflict meant to speedily manage escalation, contain risk, limit spillover, and restore short-term stability — a version of kicking the can down the road. Ceasefires don't end wars; they only interrupt them. And, the longer they continue without a real political resolution, the higher the risks of even greater violence in the future.

    Historically, this almost never happens. Ceasefires have two uses: one is to limit the damage while a resolution is negotiated, which can happen if both parties seek peace, or are willing to settle for the status quo (as happened in Korea); the other is as a tactical pause in aggression (Israel agreed to two ceasefires during 1948-50, time when they used to rearm so they could launch new offensives). Trump has found himself in the position where he can't politically afford to make peace, but also can't afford to keep bombing at the levels so far, so a ceasefire is useful for him. It's also agreeable to Iran, which never wanted this war in the first place. Perhaps there is some art to Israel's bad faith ceasefires — there have been hundreds since 1950, nearly all violated by Israel on the slightest pretext (or none at all).

  • Muhammad Saad [05-13]: Why Gulf data centers became deliberate targets in Iran War: "Not only did the US make the placement and investment in these tech warehouses a 'loyalty test,' they then made the dual use for Washington's military."

  • Trita Parsi:

    • [05-16]: China's position on the Hormuz Strait: What 'open' really means: "Beijing is not going to put itself in a position where it loses access to Iranian oil, nor will it support a UN call for force."

    • [05-18]: Trump appears poised to restart the Iran war: "Tehran believes fresh attacks will come over the next two days. Feeling emboldened, leaders there are ready with new targets for retaliation." This is quickly becoming old news, as Trump has already canceled a wave of attacks planned for Tuesday, May 19, citing concerns of the Gulf States, and "improved negotiations."

    • [05-22]: Are we on the verge of a US-Iran deal? A blip of optimism, as China and regional nations have been active in mediating, and some Chinese ships have been passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

    • [05-23]: Warmongers in meltdown as Trump heralds Iran deal: [Same title also appeared on blog here.]

    • [05-26]: Iran to Israel: You hit Lebanon, and we'll hit the UAE. Trump's schizophrenia is making it very difficult for Iran to gauge when (if ever) he's being serious, but the real test is whether he can commit for (and discipline) Israel.

      For Tehran, tying Israel to the ceasefire is ultimately a test of America's willingness — and ability — to restrain its closest regional ally. If President Donald Trump either cannot or will not do so, then the value of any agreement with Washington comes sharply into question. A ceasefire that leaves Israel free to reignite hostilities at will — while the United States remains unable to prevent itself from being dragged back into conflict — offers little assurance of stability. Under such circumstances, the utility of a deal with Washington diminishes dramatically.

    • [06-01]: Why Trump may actually have told Netanyahu "everybody hates you!"

    • [06-03]: Iran moved to change the US-Iran equation yesterday: The US "disabled" a Botswana-flagged tanker. Rather than respond minimally, Iran countered with attacks against US targets in Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Iraq, Qatar, and UAE.

    • [06-13]: So they tried to deport me . . . "The Free Press reported that the State Department was preparing to deport me. But it appears the hit piece was designed to trigger a deportation." Of course, the people who planted this story are out to get Parsi not just because he opposes Trump and Netanyahu's war, but because he's one of the most knowledgeable people in America talking about the war.

    • [06-14]: With one strike, Netanyahu tries to kill two peace deals: "Netanyahu knew exactly what he was doing when he defied Trump's red line and struck Beirut this morning."

  • Mark Mazzetti/Julian E Barnes/Farnaz Fassihi/Ronen Bergman [05-19]: Early War Goal Was to Install Hard-Line Former President as Iran's Leader: "An Israeli strike designed to free Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from house arrest in Tehran, US officials said, was part of an effort to bring about regime change and put him in power." After spending the entirety of his term propagandizing that he was the incarnation of anti-US and anti-Israel evil.

  • Isaac Chotiner [05-25]: Why any plausible Iran deal is a humiliation for Trump: "Even as the US claims to be nearing an agreement to end the conflict, Tehran's ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and hold the global economy hostage has reinforced the power of regime hard-liners." Interview with Danny Citrinowicz, who is very explicit about the political peril Trump and Netanyahu have brought upon themselves, with their inability to budge Iran.

  • Miranda Jeyaretnam [05-26]: : Trump threatens to 'blow up' Oman over Strait of Hormuz. Oman has been "a strategic partner of the US for more than 50 years," but has tried to mediate the conflict with Iran, and has been offered a stake in Iranian tolls through the Strait of Hormuz (which at its narrowest is wholly within territorial waters of Iran and Oman, allowing some legal basis for a toll regime).

  • Luc Cohen [06-01]: 'We are in a war,' alleged Iran-backed militant exclaims in US court: Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, an Iraqi who was captured and extradited from Turkey, charged with supporting Kata'ib Hezbollah, which the US has defined as a terrorist group.

    U.S. prosecutors say Kata'ib Hezbollah is directed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

    They said Al-Saadi helped plan approximately 18 attacks in Europe in recent months, not all of which occurred, and in March and April plotted attacks in the United States, including against a New York synagogue.

    While Al-Saadi's individual role in all this isn't at all clear, pretty much everyone expected that when Trump & Netanyahu started their war with Iran, that individuals and groups sympathetic with Iran would strike back asymmetrically, with acts of terror, mostly against vulnerable symbolic targets. Such people are routinely reported in our press as directed by Iran, which serves two purposes: to deflect blame from those responsible for starting the war, and to reinforce our understanding of Iran as intractable enemies, willing to strike out at us in the most unprincipled of ways. Israel has long made a point of blaming Iran for all manner of resistance, as if Israel's own acts didn't generate resistance on their own. Since the war started (or should I say escalated?) reports of terrorist incidents have picked up, but Al-Saadi's is the first face to be associated with such resistance. I first heard about this on Fox News, where they were making a big deal about his arraignment. But it's less of a victory than evidence that the costs of war are mounting.

  • Blaise Malley [06-03]: Finally: House votes to end Trump's war with Iran: "Four Republicans join all Democrats to pass War Power Act resolution aimed at pulling US military from hostilities."

  • Tanya Goudsouzian/Ibrahim Al-Marashi [06-04]: Trump's art of the deal meets Iran's long memory of foreign exploitation: "Washington may view these talks as a standard business transaction, but history has taught Tehran that a compromise with the West is a trap."

  • Juan Cole [06-11]: If Trump deliberately hit reservoir in Iran, it was a war crime & endangers the whole Gulf.

Israel: Israel's Knesset voted to dissolve early, setting up new elections for October 27, 2026. After the instability of four elections between 2018-22, the current government was sworn in on December 29, 2022. The maximum time for a government after election is four years, so elections were previously scheduled to happen in November. By dissolving, Netanyahu has managed to move the election up before the US "midterm" elections in November. If Democrats win Congress in November, that might weaken the spell Netanyahu seems to have over Trump, and as such to encourage Israelis to elect a more flexible government leader. On the other hand, Netanyahu has managed to cling to power a long time after he started the mass destruction of Gaza, the increased plundering of the West Bank, and peripheral wars, especially in Lebanon and against Iran, with what is clearly the most extreme racist and chauvinist right-wing government in Israel's long history of such.

  • Jonathan Ofir:

  • Tareq S Hajjaj:

  • Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man [05-18]: The dangerous allure of a post-Netanyahu Israel: "Naftali Bennett and his emergent opposition in the upcoming election are just as hardline on security but they want you to think otherwise." A subhed here explains that "Netanyahu is not the problem," but Netanyahu is very much one problem, and that may be the only one Israelis can attempt to solve in the next election. I agree that the driving forces behind genocide in Gaza and pogroms in the West Bank have been Ben Gvir and Smotrich, who have become Netanyahu's essential coalition partners, and who have encouraged him to embrace a extreme religious (not just Kookist but Kahanist) vision of Israel's destiny. As I've said before, Netanyahu's one consistent political instinct is to never allow anyone to pass him on the right. Sure, that may be impossible viz. Ben Gvir, but Netanyahu's wars against Iran and Lebanon are very much matters of his own choosing, supported by his right-wing allies mostly because they provide cover for further "ethnic cleansing" in the West Bank. So while Bennett is unlikely to break with Israel's blob (the professional security state, which Moshe Dayan built in 1967 and every Israeli politician since has had no option but to serve), a break with the holy rollers is more feasible. While it won't solve the fundamental inequity of Israel's ethnocracy, it could take a bit of its sanctimonious arrogance off.

  • Shatha Hammad [05-21]: Israel has a master plan to relocate thousands of Palestinian Bedouins to a giant ghetto: "The 'Shami neighborhood project' will ethnically cleanse the Bedouin population of Jerusalem's eastern wilderness as part of Israel's plan to take total control over the strategic 'Greater Jerusalem' corridor, which would split the West Bank in two."

  • Qassam Muaddi:

  • Sari Bashi [05-21]: Israel's death penalty drive enters next stage with Oct. 7 military tribunal: "Lawmakers voted 93-0 to create a special court to try accused Palestinian perpetrators, designed to subvert due process and lead to mass executions." Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians, some deliberately, many more as collateral damage, and lately more or less indiscriminately, but since 1948 they have only executed one prisoner, Adolf Eichmann in 1962 (although others have died in custody). That is about to change with a new law and a special court ("designed to subordinate due process to speed and punishment") for Palestinians only.

    Judges will have broad discretion to alter standard procedural and evidentiary rules that normally apply in Israeli courts, including those allowing defendants to access and challenge investigative materials. Most hearings are to be conducted by video conference, without defendants physically present, and some may occur without even bothering to connect defendants remotely. The law also appears to permit collective or mass trials, where judges have discretion to hold proceedings behind closed doors or broadcast them on a dedicated website.

  • William I Robinson/M Gürsan Şenalp [05-24]: Pax Silica, the Gaza genocide, and the crisis of global capitalism: "Gaza was the first AI war of the 21st century, and if Global Trumpism succeeds, it will become a testing ground for its vision to dominate the future: Pax Silica, or the merger of the high-tech military-surveillance complex and transnational finance." I have to admit that I thought Pax Silica was a joke, until I saw the picture with the banner and flags. However, "Board of Genocide" is not an official title. That's Trump's more Orwellian "Board of Peace." But both seem to be part of a broader scheme which forces countries that want to do business with the US to also cozy up to Israel.

  • Shatha Yaish [05-27]: In first since Oslo, Israel seizing land for army base inside West Bank City: "The seizure order, near Jenin refugee camp, is the latest move aimed at expanding military and settler presence in the north of the occupied territories."

  • Juan Cole [05-29]: Netanyahu seeks 70% of Gaza in Israel's own Generalplan Ost.

  • Jared Hillel [06-02]: Why the plan to disarm Hamas is destined to fail: "The US and the Board of Peace are ignoring the lessons of past, successful peace settlement efforts." This compares Trump's Board of Peace with other settlements where third-party arbiters at least tried to be neutral:

    In Gaza, obliging both parties to uphold the ceasefire is where the Board of Peace has shown itself to be most biased.

    According to the Gaza Health Ministry, over 900 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the ceasefire began. Humanitarian groups say the delivery of aid, which is entirely controlled by Israel, has also been insufficient, leaving the population malnourished and exposed to a growing rodent infestation. Hamas has also been accused of ceasefire violations, having killed four Israeli soldiers.

    The Board of Peace has not treated these violations equally.

    I still maintain that Hamas could have been disbanded and effectively disarmed a month or two after Oct. 7, 2023, if only Israel had turned Gaza over to a UN-directed administration to implement independent self-rule in the territory. I wrote most extensively about this in my pieces about the Trump "Peace Plan" here and here, but the same ideas were expressed in my late 2023 blog posts, and the essential element of Israel quitting Gaza has been a persistent theme for many years. Israel has never wanted to run Gaza, and has repeatedly proven itself incapable of doing so peacefully. It hasn't done so for several reasons, some of which can be attributed to Palestinian leaders who have insisted that all Palestinians should wait for a common "national" solution. (Israelis care a great deal more about the West Bank, and are adamant about refusing return of the refugees from 1947-49. There should be room for negotiation there.[1])

  • Saliha Bayrak [06-05]: Israel tortured these activists. Now they're speaking out. "Multiple Gaza flotilla activists describe severe violence and psychological torment while in Israeli detention."

  • Hudda Mattar [06-10]: Israel is abducting ordinary Syrians and seizing their land in Quneitra: "In the Syrian governorate of Quneitra, Israel is seizing land, attacking and abducting residents, mauling them with army dogs, and spraying chemical agents over farmland. The Syrian government remains silent."

  • Alaa Serhal [06-14]: Civil records for hundreds of thousands of Lebanese could be wiped out by Israel's total war: "With whole towns leveled by Israel, a quarter million Lebanese people may have lost the proof of who they are and what they own."

[1] I've sketched out ways to do this before, and could well again, but in my experience, anything less than a full right of return gets rejected by "pro-Palestinians" (who can point to international law for support, as well as more general principles), while Israelis are not just as adamant but also have the power to enforce their views. I don't disagree with the pro-Palestinian view here, but I am much more bothered by the persistence of Israel as a racist and militarist state, constantly at war with its neighbors and its own people (and not just Palestinians, who they don't consider people at all; and I might also note, increasingly at war with diaspora Jews, who they may claim to represent but are increasingly an embarrassment, and perhaps even a liability, to).

Israel-American-World Relations: I used to try to separate out Israel-related pieces into several bins. The Iran war has its own news section. The Israel section above pertains to security operations in Gaza, Israel/Palestine, and Lebanon, as well as internal Israeli political affairs. This one deals with America's relationship to Israel, and possibly with the world's.

  • Rawan Abhari [04-04]: Stop asking if Israel has a right to exist: It's rhetorical trap, asking you to grant an innocuous premise, which is then taken to justify murder and mayhem by a state that only represents one "chosen" group of people. I would say that no state has a right to exist, but we should accept all states that are constituted by the consent of the governed. I'd also stipulate that all people have a right to equal citizenship in the state that governs them. Israel might arguably have met the first criteria from 1951, when those Palestinians who were not driven into exile were granted nominal political rights, to 1967, when Israel extended its land but denied political rights to the people of the newly occupied territories. After that, Israel ceased to be a legitimate state. Even in the 1951-67 period, the case is shaky.

  • Michael Arria: Also see his piece on the Democratic Party autopsy.

  • Nicholas Kristof [05-11]: The silence that meets the rape of Palestinians: This is a pretty major report, although it is far from the first allegation of sexual abuse in Israel's prisons. I'm also bothered by the repeated references to "the horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7," as if both-sidesing this mitigates it somehow. (Not an excuse, but Oct. 7 was one day of anarchy, whereas Israel's prisons are long-term arenas of control and power.)

  • Mitchell Plitnick:

    • [05-17]: As support for Israel declines in the US, the 'Special Relationship 2.0' is starting to take shape: "Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies in Congress have begun calling for an end to U.S. aid to Israel, but this won't end the 'special relationship' between the two countries. In fact, recent signs suggest it may only deepen US military ties to Israel." I think they're just spitballing here, trying to figure out ways to interlock the militaries of the US and Israel in ways that look like we're giving Israel less, but which allow Israel to take even greater funds, and to exercise even greater levels of control and coordination with the US.

    • [05-23]: With signs of a possible Iran deal within reach, pressure is mounting on Trump to return to war: "Political and economic realities are pushing Donald Trump to pursue a deal with Iran, but he will need to resist mounting pressure, including from Israel, to return to all-out war."

    • [05-31]: Will Trump sideline Israel in order to make a deal with Iran? "Donald Trump reportedly has a deal on the table to suspend fighting and begin negotiations to end the Iran war and the resulting global economic crisis. But Israel and Iran hawks see it as a disaster and are working to undermine it. Who will win out?" Given that Netanyahu will sabotage any deal Trump might make, the only way Trump will ever get any sort of face-saving deal is by throttling Israel. That he needs a deal to save what little's left of his political carcass should be obvious even to him by now. But he's so vain and stupid he keeps falling for the temptation to hit them one more time, as if that will soften up Iran, and not simply look like a weak-minded, untrustworthy foe. Netanyahu's political life quite literally depends on keeping the war going. But who in Trump's circle sees this and has any idea how to handle it?

    • [06-12]: The time has come for Trump to choose between US and Israeli interests in the Iran war: "The US can end the Iran war, but only if it restrains Israel. Will Donald Trump muster the political will to end this disastrous war of choice?" For me the notion that the interests of the people of the US and Israel are even under consideration is ridiculous. What passes for interests here are the vanities and foibles of two politicians who have gone way out on a limb to start this war, with no chance to back down gracefully. Netanyahu has no interest in a solution, so he's always going to be an obstacle. That means that if/when Trump wants a deal, he's going to have to force it onto Netanyahu. That he has the power to do so seems likely. That he has the will and/or the skill seems pretty unlikely. But if the key for Iran is credible security, the only way Trump makes a deal is if he faces down and boxes up Netanyahu. So Plitnick is right, but there is little reason to be hopeful.

  • Yakov Hirsch [05-21]: How Jeffrey Goldberg weaponized Jewish trauma to pave the way for war with Iran: "Over the past two decades, no one has done more to shape US discourse on Israel than Jeffrey Goldberg. By relying on tropes of eternal Jewish victimhood, Goldberg declared Iran an existential threat to Jews and helped pave the way for war." There's a lot of detail here. Whether Goldberg is really exceptional in his service for Israel's propaganda line, or just so well positioned in American journalism he makes an obvious target (Thomas Friedman is another, and I'd hate to have to study enough to rate them, but Bret Stephens is probably more dogmatically vicious than either) is hard to say. I do find interesting that there is a whole section here on "Goldberg's campaign against Ha'aretz." Ha'aretz is one of the few papers in Israel that is willing to critically examine Israel's right-wing politics and psychology, and this can lead to doubts about the eternal rectitude of Israel's leadership — doubts which in any other country we would celebrate as proof of the viability of its democracy. Most liberals in America would point to Ha'aretz as an example of Israel's virtues. Only someone who's a slave to the official line would fret so.

    Hirsch cites a couple of his own articles:

  • Alex Schultz [05-21]: The man who explains Israel to John Fetterman: "How a little-known writer became one of the senator's closest friends." David Safier.

  • Moti Rieber [05-22]: And now for your fleeting moment of outrage: "For a few days, let's pretend that what Ben-Gvir did was somehow unique." Nope. "In fact, Ben-Gvir is the unrestrained id of Israeli — the walking talking personification [of] what the country has become."

  • Alice Speri [05-26]: Storied New York food co-op votes to boycott Israeli products after contentious campaign: The Park Slope Food Coop.

  • Ahmed Alqarout [05-28]: Trump wants the Palestinians to pay for the US occupation of Gaza: "Trump's Board of Peace is in financial crisis and wants to use funds taken from the Palestinian Authority to pay for Gaza's reconstruction. Palestinians would pay twice over: money stolen from the West Bank would be used to cement Gaza's occupation." In February, with announced $17B in pledges. So far only $1B has been delivered to the fund (no info on what they've actually spent rebuilding Gaza, but it's certainly less than Israel has bombed since then). But the shakedown continues. This never was anything but a criminal enterprise.

  • Josh Ruebner [05-29]: The time for a US arms embargo on Israel is now: "The US is starting talks on a new military aid deal for Israel as support for the country hits an all-time low. Israel's supporters are feeling the pressure and pushing for cosmetic changes, but don't fall for it. We need a full arms embargo now."

  • Michael Leonardi [05-29]: From Jabotinsky's Iron Wall to Gaza's graves: Zionism's Fascist alliances then and now.

  • David Masciotra [05-31]: Antisemitism — left, right, and growing: He concedes that "criticism of Israel and its conduct is fair game," while insisting that "conspiratorial delusions about Zionism are not." Yet somehow he manages to condemn everyone doing the former for the latter transgression. He especially takes offense at Hasan Piker (a name I've run across before, but who means nothing to me), and pulls quotes out of context from various Democratic politicians (like Ro Khanna, Brandon Johnson, and Graham Platner), trying to twist them into ominous spectres. As for the right, few specifics, just the occasional name drop (Hitler, of course, and Tucker Carlson — nine out of ten anti-semites love Israel, but one bad apple and you never hear the end of it). But the right doesn't worry him, despite the commanding power of Trump and Netanyahu, who are doing a bang-up job of making sure that millions of people who had no previous thoughts on the matter see Israelis and Americans as monsters.

    What does worry him is that "over 70 percent of Democrats believe the 'genocide' myth." It's a myth because Israel hasn't killed everyone yet (far from it, "if Israel imposed genocidal policies on Gaza even before the war, as many anti-Israel critics claim, the population of the Gaza Strip would not have grown 450 percent since 1967"). (Nice sleight of "many" there. I can't think of anyone who made such an argument before it became obvious in 2023, although there has long been much to criticize about Israel's treatment of Gaza, especially since 2006, when Israel removed its settlements, making it easier to inflict collective punishments like sonic booms — a practice they gave up on because, unlike shellings and "diets" it couldn't be contained within the prison walls they erected.)

    I grew up with no sense whatsoever of Jews until I started reading about the Holocaust and The Murderers Among Us in the 1960s. I later became aware that many people I admired on the left were Jewish. As an American, I regarded anti-semitism as an example of racism, a belief structure I rejected as soon as I became aware of it. The right readily embraced anti-semitism, racism, sexism, other forms of bigotry, because they started from a belief that some people are better than others, and that formed a natural hierarchy of society. The left, on the other hand, rejected hierarchy and inequality, so we naturally opposed the whole panoply of prejudices. While some individuals who moved to the left may have picked up some bad habits, the idea that those habits could come from the left struck me as nonsense. Still does.

    Aside from the sophistry and deliberate confusion, there are several things that really bother me about this and similar pieces: the assumption that anti-semitism is somehow different from, and more important than, any other form of discrimination; the notion that any trope associated with anti-semitism proves the whole case; the idea that bad thoughts by powerless people are equivalent to bad acts by people with the power; the belief that victimhood gives one (but not just anyone) license to victimize others. Those points are so obviously false I don't see any need to refute them. I'm just gobsmacked that anyone should have so little self-consciousness, or so much arrogance, to propagate them. Worse still, I don't see why they would.

    For instance, let's say I set forth the argument that in the aftermath of the Hamas revolt of Oct. 7, 2023, Israel embarked on a program that was tantamount to genocide. I lay out my evidence, as I've done elsewhere. So what do you, as a lover of Israel, do? You can try to gaslight me: make me doubt the evidence and/or the logic that moves from evidence to analysis, or you could concede facts and try to convince me that what I took to be genocide is actually justified. The latter strategy runs the risk that I may conclude that it's just you who justifies genocide, which makes you (in my mind, at least) complicit. If I had the power to do anything about it, I might even wish to use that power to stop you. More likely I would just argue back, but I don't have the power to fire people, or to expel students, as has happened on numerous occasions to people protesting Israeli genocide. If as an Israel lover, you had that power, you might well jump straight to that stage, skipping the denials, the faulty logic, and/or the gaslighting. Of course, there is a further risk to using that power, which is that it makes you look you're part of a conspiracy out to harm us. While I trust my fellow leftists to sort fact from fiction here, I wouldn't be surprised to find other people return your hate and contempt in kind. That's just what people on the right like to call "human nature."

    Or you might consider the alternative, which is to use whatever influence your love of Israel has gained you to get Israel to change its policies and stop killing people, stop taking captives, stop torturing them, stop denying them food and the necessities of life, stop discriminating against them, and start treating others with the respect and dignity you yourselves desire. If you succeed, you might wind up with an Israel that actually deserves your love, and one that the rest of us might learn to respect. If not, you have a decision to make, which is whether you're willing to identify with murderers, or break with Israel. It's really way too late to simply pretend that none of this is happening.

    The last question raised by the title is whether anti-semitism is "growing"? If you buy the argument that opposition to anything Israel does (like genocide) is anti-semitism, then sure, growing. But that's simply because most decent people have always opposed the atrocities and terrors that Israelis are committing: the growth is in the number of people becoming aware of what's happpening, and who is responsible for it. And when those people are told that opposition to Israel is anti-semitism, some will laugh, many will just focus on the real culprits, but some folks will buy the pitch, and say "why not?" This is something to deplore, but the solution is not to censor the news and stifle dissent. The solution is two-fold: stop the slaughter and wreckage, which the political powers in Israel and the US are responsible for, and are quite competent to do if they decide they should; and move politically to the left, where all people meant to be equal, and free to live their lives in peace and security.

    Since Piker came up:

    • Team Zeteo/Simone Zimmerman [06-11]: Hasan Piker refuses to soften the truth: 'I don't care about Zionists' feelings': "the much-discussed, much-maligned Twitch streamer responds to accusations of antisemitism and argues that the Democratic Party fears its own base." One of many interviews Zimmerman has hosted recently with critics of Israel, including Hannah Einbinder, Molly Crabapple, Tareq Baconi, and Yuli Novak (Executive Director of B'Tselem, who says "Israeli society has become completely genocidal"). Zimmerman was a founder of IfNotNow, a director of B'Tselem USA, and was featured in the documentary Israelism. Unfortunately, the episodes are paywalled (although I was able to watch the one with Piker).

  • Illy Pe'ery [06-04]: Israel's curriculum for 'influencing public consciousness': "A leaked Defense Ministry tender lays out the army's training program for manipulating public opinion in Israel and abroad."

  • Craig Mokhiber [06-11]: The US and Israeli campaign to liquidate the ICC is working. Countries of conscience must intervene. "The recent suspension of ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan over allegations of sexual misconduct, despite a lack of evidence, shows the US, Israel, and their Western allies will stop at nothing to torpedo any effort to hold Israel accountable for genocide."

  • Current Affairs [06-11]: "I won't be inclusive of child killers": Norman Finkelstein on Israel's "genocidal society": Interview with the long-time Israel critic. I've read several of his books, including two specifically on Gaza, and found him to be a rigorous historian, as well as a sharp political critic. One book from 2005 (updated 2008) that seems especially prescient today is Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. Even while meticulously documenting Israel's many assaults on Gaza, I doubt he had ever raised the "genocide" word before 2023. But then something snapped. Israelis used to talk about "crying and shooting," as if they had no choice, but now:

    You know what's new about the new Israel? They don't cry anymore. No, it's an interesting phenomenon. They've dropped the crying routine. Now they do it with relish, and they do it with glee, and they post it on social media. That's something new. I don't want to say — it's hard. Look, you're a bright young man. It's hard to say morally which is worse. Or to just do it gleefully and happily. But as a factual matter, it's something new. The Nazis didn't carry on like that. They did not. "We're supposed to see to this terrible burden that was imposed on us by history." The Israelis are in a class all their own. It has to be stressed.

    The problem is not a genocidal regime; that's not correct. The problem is not a genocidal state; that's not correct. The problem is a genocidal society. And that's a real problem.

    This makes me wonder to what extent the genocide was driven by and/or was throttled by Israel's elites — not so much the politicians like Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir, whose success depends on their ability to gauge the pulse of the public, as the careerists in the IDF, Shin Bet, etc., who actually implement, and have some leeway to direct, whatever the political strategy is. At this point we know quite a bit about the internal dynamics of the Nazi genocide, which were much more complex than the simplistic views that either Hitler alone or the entire German population were responsible (the latter claim comes from Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust). But we know very little about such dynamics in Israel. What we do have is lots of inflammatory statements from Israeli politicians and citizens expressing a desire for genocide, and clear evidence that the bombing and razing of Gaza has been extensive and systematic, although one might quibble that the focus has been less on the sheer numbers of killed (which was more clearly the Nazi metric, although even they made allowances for extracting slave labor) than on the general immiseration of the people, including much psychological trauma. From a legal standpoint, I have no doubt that adds up to genocide. But there is more going on here that we don't fully understand. Still, the uncertainty is far less than might give us doubts about the culpability of Israel's leaders, and the general popular consent of the majority of Israel's citizens.

Ukraine, Other Hot Spots, and World Politics:

  • Anatol Lieven

  • Gillen Tener Martin [05-26]: The French rejection: "Why Emmanuel Macron can't convince his voters to rearm." Granted, Trump cannot be trusted to protect Europe from its "enemies" — while Putin has been groomed to play the role, more voters seem worried about the refugees being churned up by the wars in the Middle East and the climate-fueled eco-disasters coming from points south and/or east, a threat that NATO has done more to promote than to stop. Key paragraph here:

    European nations' best hope for security without the United States is to bolster their militaries individually and forge a credible deterrent bloc collectively. To make that happen, leaders must build national consensus on defense spending; and despite his innumerable speeches on the subject, Macron has failed to convince his own voters. Among the most prominent of the 30 potential candidates clamoring to succeed him, some are skeptical not only of remilitarization but also of the EU and NATO.

    We should realize by now that deterrence only works against states that have no desire to attack in the first place, and that to the extent that it has any effect at all, it is to provoke attacks that are supposedly "defensive." US wars against Iraq and Iran were framed as necessary to stop those countries from developing nuclear weapons, even though the US already had a very credible deterrence against any aggressive use of those weapons. (For that matter, so did Israel, which may have initially developed nuclear weapons for deterrence, but now uses them for intimidation and "nuclear blackmail." Iran's "threat" wasn't that they would attack, but that by developing their own deterrence, Israel would be inhibited from attacking them.)

    I don't wish to excuse Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but that war should be seen as a local border issue to Russia, not as a plot to threaten let alone to conquer Europe. It is a war that can and should be resolved diplomatically, and that solution should be a first step toward a much broader disarmament in Europe. Russians should understand that the arms race of the 1950s was ultimately what bankrupted the Soviet system, and also that it was started deliberately by the US because Americans knew their economy could sustain such expenses much longer than the Soviets could. (Early on, rearmament also stimulated the American economy, and it helped produce some advances in science and technology. Europe would get some similar benefits if it were to increase defense spending from 2.0% to 3.5% of GDP, as this article recommends. But they, like America, would find most of the money to have been wasted, at a time when there are much better things they could invest in.)

  • Connor Echols [06-02]: Touting battlefield successes, Ukraine leans into peace talks: "President Zelensky and his entourage now say securing a deal within six months is 'realistic.'"

  • Andrés Arauz [06-12]: Bolivia's streets have erupted. Here's why. "Ordinary people are rising up against neoliberal orthodoxy." Wasn't Bolivia part of Latin America's big shift to the right over the last couple years? Looks like it's paying the price.

Trump's War Machine: I set this section up to deal with Trump's threats of war. We're obviously beyond that now, so see the section on Iran for more on that.

Trump Fights the Law:

Trump's Administration: Trump can't remake America in his own image (i.e., destroy the country, culture, and civilization) just by himself. He needs help, and having largely purged the government of civil servants and replaced them with his own minions, this is what they are doing (whether he's paying attention or not):

Donald Trump's Tremendous Content:

  • Margaret Hartmann:

  • Christian Paz [05-14]: A year of Trump is backfiring on the religious right: "Americans don't really want 'Christian nationalism.'" Many poll charts here, but I don't find them very enlightening. Most people have vague and contradictory ideas about the role of Christianity in public life. It makes a difference between asking whether politicians should look to Christian values for their personal behavior and whether politicians should use the state to force other people to follow their religious beliefs.

  • Chris Lehman [05-15]: The hypocrisy of Trump's 9-hour prayer festival: "The claim that the founders meant America to be a Christian nation isn't just bad history — it's a declaration of war by the religious right."

  • Sasha Abramsky [05-15]: Trump is rooting around in the public trough: "Trump's second term is unabashedly a project of self-enrichment and oligarchic rule."

  • Molly Jong-Fast/Michael Tomasky [05-21]: Donald Trump is finally cracking up for real: "His recent tirades confirmed what more than half of America now believes: The president is mentally unfit. How will we survive two and a half more years of this? And what's he got in store for us?" This reminds me that David Ogilvy used to say, "Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga." Or at least they won't be sure. It's really hard to tell with Trump, because different people have very different expectations about him, and apply very different criteria to what they see and hear. The four sections here:

    1. Age ("We Barely Talk About It")
    2. Dementia (Disinhibition and Digression)
    3. Arrogance (Too Much and Never Enough)
    4. Stupidity (Every Accusation Is a Confession)

    I don't have time to unpack this, but I'd say the arrogance is congenital, and the stupidity is a side-effect of never having to learn anything. That he thinks he's smart is farcical. But then he's usually been able to make farcical work for him. Most people try to debate like boxers, guarding your vulnerabilities, looking for the knock out punch. Trump debates like a wrestler. He's all over you, relentless, constantly breaking rules, until he wears you down. That's a different skill, one that people with any sort of intellectual discipline find maddening. Does that make him mad? I'd say so, but that's probably because I don't see any way that a person could function as president without analytical skills. He has a knack for giving you instinctive political takes, but he isn't capable of analyzing and solving problems. He's pure reaction. Add age to this, and certain things happen, pretty much to everyone. You slow down. You drop a word here and there. You doze off. How long you can function depends on what you're doing. Athletes lose their edge by age 40. Most people slow down in their 50s, and start forgetting things in their 60s. Even if you still seem competent at 80, it's a grind. But neither Biden nor Trump were ever very sharp, but they had different weaknesses, which were more glaring in Biden, because they were more normal in politicians, and because we were less inclined to excuse them as eccentricities. Trump's decline may seem less obvious, but he never was even remotely competent to be president. If you were aware of that, everything he says and does seems damning. If not, well, I don't know what to say.

  • Jonah Raskin [05-28]: Ivy Meeropol's cinematic celebration of E Jean Carroll. Meeropol has a previous documentary on former Trump mentor Roy Cohn, titled Bully, Coward, Victim. Carroll sued Trump for rape, and won $83.3 million in damages. He's having his [In]Justice Department investigate her now.

  • Chas Danner [05-29]: Trump's Great American State Fair is running out of acts: "When a colleague first shared the announced headliners for this summer's Great American State Fair concert series on the National Mall, my first thought was, Is that a joke? It wasn't, but now it sort of is."

  • Ryan Cooper [06-09]: Two simple steps toward de-MAGAfication: "A big reason why Trump II is so much worse than the first time is that the world's richest man bought Twitter and turned it into a fascist cesspit." I don't mean to dispute the "fascist cesspit" description, although my own limited but continuing use of X isn't that bad (for one thing, I use the "following" thread, and an ad blocker). Nor do I doubt that Musk has reaped a big windfall from his 2024 gamble on Trump. But the real difference between Trump I and II is that first time he was a fluke outsider saddled with a Republican establishment that didn't know what to do with him, not least because they found him unreliable, erratic, and embarrassing (although they still managed to get their tax breaks, deregulation, and military build up, so they weren't unhappy). Second time, they had a chance to plot, to come up with a plan ("Project 2025" was the best known, but just one of many schemes) on how to use him and the whole power of the presidency, a more politicized administration, and a largely rigged court system. Trump is still the weak link in this regime, unreliable, incoherent, sometimes just weird, and his personal projects are ridiculous diversions, but he mostly does what he's told, and even though he's sunk deep in the polls, he's probably doing better than any other front man could. (Obviously, the art of the shill has declined from Reagan through the Bushes, but Trump still makes the coarseness of the UFC end of the pop culture work for him. Fascists have to find their base wherever they can.

  • Kelli Wessinger/Noel King [06-10]: Will Trump ruin America's birthday? "Inside Trump's big plans to celebrate himself — and maybe America, too." Spoiler alert: he already has. Interview with Ben Smith.

  • Michael Calderone [06-10]: Pressuring The Wall Street Journal and other ways Team Trump went into Epstein damage control: This is mostly derived from a new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, specifically this excerpt:

  • Michael Tomasky [06-12]: The not-so-secret impulse behind Trump's vulgar, garish birthday party: "In the real world, a weak and insecure Donald Trump is being humiliated by Iran. Ah, but Sunday night, he'll be a manly man among manly men."

    It's sickening. Oh — and it's also, as we've come to expect with Trump, deeply corrupt. First of all, the cost of constructing the arena is around $60 million. Supposedly UFC is picking up that check, but with Trump, who really knows? We taxpayers will undoubtedly be on the hook for something. Meanwhile, the chief sponsor — surprise, surprise! — is Crypto.com. There are in addition figurines of some of the featured fighters. There's apparel — garish T-shirts running $40. Over at TrumpStore.com, somewhat to my surprise, I didn't see any merch specifically tied to the event, but you have to believe that Trump's short-fingered hand is dipping into some till or another here. A lawsuit filed by the group the Public Integrity Project to block the event from taking place (it's pending as I write) states that UFC set up a for-profit entity to manage this event, which is selling seating packages that cost up to $1.5 million — and that Trump previously bought $50,000 worth of stock in TKO, UFC's owner.

  • Donna Ferguson/Adam Gabbatt [06-13]: Workers remove Trump's name from Kennedy Center after court rulings: "In the dead of night, behind a screen, the president's name was purged from the facade of the Washington building."

    Cooper's program of "De-MAGAfication" still needs some work. Even if X is as bad as he says, I don't buy this: "I conclude that for the next president, the first, most straightforward, and arguably most important task is to destroy X." I'm slightly more sympathetic to "the next president could also target Musk himself." As Eddie Murphy's character in Trading Places put it, "it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people." One can have some fun with that, without (as Cooper does) comparing Musk to Pol Pot. Musk's wealth is exceptional, but as with all billionaires it's based on some poor political decisions and attitudes given power in the 1980s. It's going to take more than a wealth tax to reverse that, but lots of approaches are possible. What one needs first is the political support to change things.

    Cooper's second step is to add more seat to the Supreme Court. No doubt the Court, as presently constituted, is a problem, and that would be one way to work around it. But again the first step is to build up the sort of majority support that even this Court will have to listen to. FDR's "court-packing" scheme failed not because he couldn't raise political support for New Deal policies, but because after its initial tantrums the Court recognized that it shouldn't stay in the way of blocking democracy. (As some wag put it, this was "the switch in time that saved nine.") Perhaps this bunch of Federalist Society grooms will stand their ground, in which case expansion becomes an option of last resort. Or maybe a couple of them recognize when they're beat, while new justices arrive and shift the balance. Still, we need to focus on more than just a couple malefactors, like Musk and Roberts. I am increasingly of the view that the way to do this is not so much "De-MAGAfication" as in trying to capture the MAGA base, not by pandering to their prejudices, but by showing them who their real enemies are. The MAGA crowd has one thing going for them that conventional pro-business Democrats have struggled with: they really hate those globalist elites. (Minor point, but I'd change the "G" to Good, as Bill Moyers tried to talk LBJ into calling his programs The Good Society.

Politicking: New section, covering elections, gerrymandering, and other bipartisan mischief, with party-specific pieces to follow.

  • Ed Kilgore: Also see his piece on the Democratic Party autopsy.

    • [05-12]: The Supreme Court chose to upend the midterms: "The Callais decision should have been timed to be implemented next year. Apparently, the Court couldn't wait to blow up the Voting Rights Act."

    • [05-13]: What Republicans got out of their gerrymandering blitz. Louisiana and Alabama have eliminated one black-majority House district each, with Tennessee soon to follow. Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia may hold off until 2028. "Including the recent Florida GOP gerrymander and the Virginia Supreme Court decision overturning a voter-approved Democratic gerrymander, that means Republicans will roll into the midterms with 12 US House seats in their sights, all of which Democrats thought they would control as recently as two weeks ago."

    • [05-15]: When extreme polarization outlasts Trump, we know who to blame: "Samuel Alito's poisonous Callais opinion is moving the center stage in both parties' future plans."

    • [05-15]: Why the midterms battleground keeps shrinking: "The 2026 races will effectively end with the primaries in much of the country." That's because most districts are designed not to be competitive.

    • [05-20]: Trump gets revenge on Massie, but primary may haunt GOP: "The president took down several Republican foes in last night's primaries. But there was also good news for Democrats in November."

    • [05-20]: Trump's self-absorption spells midterms disaster for the GOP: "Forget policy goals or even boosting his party. The president wants his ballroom, his vengeance slush fund, and lots of payback."

    • [05-21]: Senate GOP turns on Trump, freezes ICE bill. Trump was hoping to push the bill through by June 1. Senate Majority Leader John Thune pulled the plug on that happening.

    • [05-23]: Trump is becoming the un-populist: "From the ballroom to Iran to blatant self-dealing, he's ignoring the will of the people — to his party's peril." Or to his party's delight, if you ask them. If the ultimate goal of Republicans is "own the libs," just look at all the ways he's winding them up. On the other hand, the most compact charge one can make against a complete scumbag (or any political foe) is that he lies, cheats, and steals. That he's a habitual liar has long been obvious, but the cheating (like his attempts to rig congressional seats and interfere with voting) and the stealing (like his $1.77 billion self-dealt slush fund) have grown too blatant to ignore.

    • [05-30]: Democrats suddenly have a real shot at flipping the Senate: "When the midterms cycle started, the Senate looked secure for the GOP. But after many lucky breaks for Democrats, it's now a toss-up."

    • [05-31]: Why Democrats shouldn't write off the South: "Post-Callais, Republicans are racing to lock in their power over the region. Democrats have a moral and political obligation to fight back."

    • [06-10]: Hegseth's faith purge creates a holy mess: "The Defense secretary drastically culled the Pentagon's list of recognized religions, triggering a backlash from Mormons and other faith groups." I don't care enough to go through the lists, but will note three venerable protestant churches that appear to have been dropped: Disciples of Christ (which most of my family attended), United Church of Christ (I have a very good friend who is a retired minister), and Unitarian Universalist (which my late sister belonged to). All three are major exceptions to the generalization that Hegseth seems to subscribe to: that to be a real Christian, you must also be a fascist.

  • David Dayen [06-11]: The threat of big insurance: "The industry is hugely lucreative, with endless sums of cash to influence lawmakers. A new report tracks 25 years of health insurance industry donations."

Other Republicans:

  • Christian Paz [05-11]: Marco Rubio is dreaming of a kinder, gentler MAGA: "Trump is floating Rubio as a potential successor. His vision sounds very different than JD Vance."

  • Ross Barkan [05-14]: Why Ben Shapiro's media empire is collapsing: "Not long ago, he was the king of conservative media. A lot has changed in 2026."

  • David Smith [05-16]: Can a Republican defy Donald Trump and survive? Kentucky voters will decide: "Congressman Thomas Massie, chastized by the US president as a 'lowlife', will soon face the ballot box — setting up a crucial test of Trump's political strength."

  • John Herrman [05-26]: Republicans are lost in the AI wilderness: "The Trump administration went all in on AI. Then the public started hating it." The Republicans' default stance seems to be that any angle to get rich is fine with them, even if it's fraudulent and/or predatory. On the other hand, aren't they as conservatives supposed to want to slow change down? Or at least to dispell some of the uncertainty about what AI will do, who it will do it to, and how it will make a very small number of people absurdly rich? Democrats aren't very sure what to do either. Especially the ones who feel like they should care about how AI impacts ordinary people.

Democrats:

  • On That 2024 Autopsy Report:

    • Ed Kilgore [05-21]: Autopsy report shows Democrats really are in disarray: So, "DNC chairman Ken Martin has released an extremely unfinished draft of the 'autopsy' report, and those who wanted this to happen are going to be very disappointed — or perhaps even horrified."

    • Noah Hurowitz [05-21]: DNC autopsy of 2024 loss doesn't mention Gaza or Israel at all: "As the DNC blamed the author for the report's shortcomings, a source who participated in the research said the author seemed to grasp that Gaza 'clearly' hurt Harris." One thing I want to stress here is that people don't have to understand the war, or feel like they "have a dog in the fight," or even care, to blame Biden and Harris for letting it go on so long.

    • Michael Arria [05-22]: It's the genocide, stupid: "The DNC finally released its long-awaited autopsy of Kamala Harris's failed presidential campaign, and it doesn't mention Gaza. The Democratic leadership's refusal to acknowledge the party's shift on Israel could spell another defeat in 2028." While I believe that most Americans do not support Israel's genocide in Gaza[*], and further believe that most of the Americans who continue to defend Israel is its wars since 2023 would change their mind if they had a better grasp of the facts, I've long believed that what cost Harris the election was not that crimes and great harm were inflicted on Palestinians, but that Biden and Harris had failed to end the two major wars, in Ukraine and in Gaza and around Israel, and worse still that they failed to show any concern that those wars should be ended. Sure, one may assert that Biden did not start those wars[**], and that he had kept American troops out of the wars, so that the human costs of those wars didn't fall on American citizens, but his massive supply of armaments for those wars kept the wars going, and made tidy profits for the US arms industries.

      The reasons why Americans hated these wars wasn't sympathy for the victims. Or that they had any scruples about contributing to the massacre of foreigners, especially those they had been assured were bad hombres who hated America. No, the reason was that the wars were messy and stupid, inconvenient and expensive, and that exposed the politicians responsible as reckless and incompetent. Biden certainly looked the part, and the more Harris said nothing meaningful the more she did too.[***] (While Trump, in 2024, reaped the benefits with his anti-war posse of RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, he's likely to find the shoe on the other foot this year.)

      [*] Whether it's still fair to call it that during the current quasi-ceasefire could be debated, but in intent and in effect from October 2023 until that time it was as clear cut a case of genocide as any since WWII. It is still a war crime of stupendous proportions, with myriad offenses against fundamental human rights. The main reason for referring to Israel's operations in Gaza as genocide is that there is a clear definition of genocide in international law, and that law specifies remedies to bring the perpetrators to justice. To some extent, this has been recognized by international courts, and indictments have been issued, but that has still not stopped the offenders in Israel. As the law notes, the speed or completeness of the genocide does not affect the finding, which is first based on intent (clearly stated by Netanyahu and members of his government, especially Smotrich and Ben-Gvir) and tangible acts to implement that intent (which the IDF has done on a massive scale). On the other hand, I want to stress that there are many ways states and their armed forces (and for that matter, especially in the West Bank, their civilian populations) can violate human rights, and these are no less objectionable if they don't quite add up to the legal definition of genocide.

      [**] I could also argue that both wars were the result of gross negligence on the part of Biden, although I would also insist that Biden's mistakes were built on top of comparable mistakes by his predecessors, going back as far as Clinton's bungling of the Oslo Accords and his expansion of NATO to threaten Russia, but Trump's failures to mediate a solution to Ukraine (which blew up in 2014, under Obama's watch) and to do anything to settle the Palestinians (it was his "Abraham Accords" that conceded to Israel the right to do whatever they wanted in Gaza and the West Bank) led directly to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the desperate Hamas revolt in Gaza.

      [***] As I recall, every time Harris was asked about Gaza, the first thing out of her mouth was that "Israel has the right to defend itself." What Israel called "defense" was indiscriminate slaughter combined with the systematic destruction of all of the infrastructure in Gaza necessary to sustain human life. "Self-defense" was Israel's license to kill, and everyone understood that. So no matter how much she lamented the death and destruction after her initial concession, and promised to work "night and day" for a cease-fire, we (and Israel's supporters, including Netanyahu) knew she would do nothing meaningful about it. At the time, I suggested that all she had to do was to move the self-defense sentence to the end, after she had expressed a bit of humanity and/or reason, and she would have come off sounding much better, even if the bottom line was the same. But she didn't dare do even that much, which left her supporters high and dry, and most others either irate or confused. Then, of course, she sent her most Zionist spokespeople to Michigan, to further piss off the decisive Arab vote. I wonder if that's in the autopsy? (Arria remembers: Liz Cheney and Rep. Ritchie Torres.)

  • Zack Beauchamp [05-13]: Are far-right politics just the new normal? "Liberals are preparing for a longer war with right-wing populists than they once expected." Reporting from something touted as "a recent conference for the international left, featuring people like former President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney," where speakers are still lamenting that the wonders of the Biden economy weren't appreciated by the unkempt masses. How can anyone still confuse these "liberal elites" with "the left"? Rather than just accepting the "populist right" as a permanent fixture, shouldn't we try to figure out how to redirect their anger against more appropriate targets (like the superrich)? While they have many ill-considered views, their basic sense that something is profoundly wrong, and someone in power must be held responsible for it, is something one can work with and build on. Makes a lot more sense than trying to tell people that their problems are just in their heads.

  • Errol Louis [05-13]: AOC's plan to win the midterms: "To prevail in November, House Democrats need to do more than oppose Trump." Focus on substantive issues, and don't let the media get you sidetracked with speculation about personal ambitions.

  • Bill Scher:

    • [05-22]: The Democratic Party is divided (but not how you think): "New polling shows not so much ideological division among Democrats but a lack of consensus about where the party should go." I think he means about who can be trusted to lead the party. He opens with photos of Rahm Emmanuel and Graham Platner. While Scher, perhaps the ultimate DNC Centrist pundit, loathes Platner, his case for Emmanuel stresses how "populist" Clinton's former chief wonk is trying to appear. While I have my own reservations about Platner (his case for ending the federal gasoline tax is plain wrong), unlike Emmanuel, he doesn't reek of board room/country club effeteness and corruption.

    • [05-27]: Janet Mills should unsuspend her US Senate campaign: The former Maine governor gave up after falling hopelessly behind in the polls, but as Scher points out, she's still on the ballot, so the small number of diehard Graham Platner haters (like Scher) still have all the options they need. And the points they want Mills to score against Platner will continue to be made by Republicans. Most of the time Scher is arguing for pragmatic choices, so why not here? Why waste her time and money trying to help Collins to another term?

      PS: Much more about Platner, both before and after the primary, where Platner won the Democratic nomination with 72% of the vote. I don't have time to organize a whole section, but here are a few links:

      • Perry Bacon [06-10]: Graham Platner is testing a new strategy to defeat Susan Collins: Interview with Billy Kobin (no transcript).

      • Dustin Guastella [06-13]: The attacks on Graham Platner didn't just fail — they may have backfired: "Graham Platner's primary victory in Maine says more about the unpopularity of the Democratic party elite than any race to date." I had similar thoughts before the election, when I commented on Tom Carson's admission that he would "vote for Collins in a heartbeat" against Platner:

        Maybe this is my redneck coming out, but the more slime I see from well-meaning liberals against Platner, the less I believe, and the less I care. Granted, that's a common reaction from Trump voters, but their problem was less their knee-jerk reaction against Harris-Biden-Clinton-Obama than their ridiculous blind spot around Trump. Democrats need candidates who can puncture that blind spot much more than they need goodies who suck up to the rich thinking they can turn their money into votes.

    • [05-29]: If you called for Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales to be expelled, then you should impeach Donald Trump: First, I never called for their expulsion, nor would I have. I'm still upset about the House's "exclusion" of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. as the elected representative of Harlem in New York City in 1969 (which, by the way, was later ruled unconstitutional). Maybe there should be a recall process, as some states enacted during the Progressive Era, which would give voters a chance to second-guess their choices, but the House itself should have no such powers. As for comparing the misdeeds of Trump vs. those of Swalwell and/or Gonzales, they precisely match, although Trump's exceeds the others by even more than their net worths. The problem with impeachment isn't the crimes, but the jurors. The only way Trump can be removed from office is if his own Party decides to cut his losses and do the thing (either impeachment or through the 25th amendment, which would have to be initiated by Trump's toady cabinet, and then ratified by Congress with the same 2/3 supermajority needed for Senate conviction, which makes it virtually impossible without Trump's consent). This isn't a very good system, but it is our system, and changing it would be even more difficult than using it. Republican Party unity is such that there is zero chance of impeaching Trump now, so it's a moot issue. If Democrats win the House in November, they could "impeach" Trump by minority vote, but they would have to win over at least one-third of the Senate Republicans to convict. It certainly isn't clear whether the two times Trump was "impeached" during/after his first term in any way hurt him in the 2020 or 2024 elections. While he is very unpopular now, Republicans still balked at convicting him after he instigated the January 6, 2021 siege of Congress. Democrats have no reason to think they can construct a case to convince them. Indeed, it seems like a waste of time to bother with a remedy that is certain to fail. So let's just stipulate that impeachment (or a cabinet-forced resignation) is an option for Republicans. When sufficient numbers of them decide to make it happen, they can expect Democrats to help them rid themselves of this pestilence, but until they do, the only thing Democrats can do is to make sure that people realize that it is Republicans who are keeping Trump's reign of (t)error operating. They should all pay the price next time the people get a chance to vote.

  • Harold Meyerson [06-08]: Encircling the royalists: "Democrats finally show up to the class war."

  • Greg Sargent [06-11]: Why is Trump tanking in MAGA country? These Dems found a good answer. "Some new research on working-class voters make it clear. They're furious at Trump — and they want a message from Democrats that pledges specific action." It's about time for Democrats to try to win over districts where plenty of people are upset at how things are being run. Cites this piece:

The Economy (and Economists):

  • Emmanuel Saez/Gabriel Zucman [05-26]: The case for California's billionaire wealth tax. The opening chart, of "the surging fortunes of California's ultrarich," which in constant dollars for the top 0.0002% of Californians, has risen from $22 billion in 1982 to $1.6 trillion in May 2026.

Technology (Including AI):

  • Eric Levitz

    • [05-21]: The hidden way dictatorships are shaping what AI tells you: "Authoritarian states may have accidentally brainwashed ChatGPT." And casually calling China and Russia "authoritarian" while exempting the US and Israel is what? AI only knows what it's been trained to know, and it only "thinks" in ways that are consistent with fidelity to its training materials. That could make it useful for propagating an establishment worldview, as much in the US as in China, as the rulers of each have no doubt already recognized. The difference may be the degree of control they exercise: in the US, that's usually been weak but certainly not neutral (e.g., consider how willingly major media went along with the Cold War and the War on Terror, where very distorted views of the world became ubiquitous and for the most part unquestioned).

    • [06-12]: Trump's strange flirtation with AI socialism, explained: "Uncle Sam and OpenAI may go in business together." Uh, whatever this is, it isn't socialism.

  • Ryan Cooper [06-10]: Tracking the flood of AI political spending: Not unlike the $245M the crypto industry spent in 2024, with Trump getting in on both ends, profiting mightily from his own crypto scams.

  • Jelinda Montes [06-12]: AI data centers are taking over. These Americans are fighting back: "Energy and water intensive AI projects are draining communities. The revolt is just getting started." I must admit a considerable degree of ignorance and/or skepticism about opposing AI data centers as a political agenda item. (I recently heard Astra Taylor on this, and know that Bernie Sanders is concerned. I'll add some more links below, but I really haven't thought this through.) I've long found it interesting why so many people intuitively fear some things and not others. Or perhaps, for complex issues like climate change and AI, they latch onto some aspects but not others. I don't quite get what they fear about AI, but what I fear is capitalism: specifically, that AI might make it so efficient its essential rotten core will become manifest, unfettered by practicality and ethics.

  • Kate Aronoff [06-12]: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wants us to think he's building a god: "He acts like he has special knowledge about how best to regulate his company. But he's a CEO like any CEO, and he wants what all CEOs want: to write his own rules."

Regular Columnists

Sometimes an interesting columnist writes often enough that it makes sense to collect their work in one place, rather than scatter it about.

Dean Baker: All his pieces are worth reading. But I didn't collect them regularly, as I have in the past, so I thought of skipping this section. But a couple stood out:

  • [05-20]: Reforming bankruptcy laws: Getting tough on private equity deadbeats: How private equity firms work should be well known by now. Josh Kosman laid out the basics in his 2010 book The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy, just before Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign gave us a case in point. Bankruptcy laws are important here, as that's where most of the companies bought by PE firms end up. Baker has some good ideas here, but I have one I like better: I feel that bankruptcy law should attempt to preserve businesses and jobs by giving them a fresh start, free of the encumbrances PE firms saddle them with. I would turn those companies over to their employees, and inject enough financing to get them up and running again. And sure, this means screwing the creditors. And if that makes banks less likely to finance perilous PE deals, so much the better.

  • [06-05]: Friday morning book review: Cancelling Billionaires: The Urgent Case for a Wealth Tax: The book, by two Canadians, is Linda McQuaig/Neil Brooks: Cancelling Billionaires Before They Cancel Us. (McQuaig, by the way, also has a 2019 book called The Sport & Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich Are Stealing Canada's Public Wealth.) I have mixed feelings about wealth taxes. For one thing, assessments are hard to pin down (e.g., the city thinks my house is worth 2.5 times what I paid for it; when we sold my late father-in-law's house, it went for less than a third of its assessment; if Elon Musk had to sell all of his stock, it would certainly go for much less than its current valuation). Worst case, you have to liquidate your property just to pay taxes on it. Much better to tax transactions, where the money is there. On the other hand, there are cases where wealth taxes do make sense, especially for estates (where the marginal rates can be quite high, because not dying isn't an option; you can, as we do, exempt a sizable chunk before taxes, and liquidate the rest, so you get an honest assessment of its value). I also think that foundations should be forced to liquidate some share of their equity each year, so they don't just become permanent tax shelters. But at present, in the US at least, I wouldn't mind a wealth tax on the super-rich. It's just that, like Baker, I'm more bothered by how they managed to get so rich in the first place:

    I prefer nailing the rich before they get their money, both because it is much more efficient than trying to pry it back after the fact, but also because it takes away the rich's shield, where they try to hide behind the free market. A government that funds research upfront and puts it all in the public domain is no less free market than a government that grants patent and copyright monopolies. Similarly, a government that taxes financial transactions, like every other item, is no less free market than one that makes a special exemption for the financial industry. And the market doesn't tell us how to structure bankruptcy laws.

  • [06-08]: Trump mistake #27,462: Chasing away immigrants doesn't help native born workers: I doubt he's actually counting, but as a guestimate this isn't obviously high or low. But the number is a distraction. I don't really buy the old saw that "few people born in this country want to work on farms picking lettuce or tomatoes or in meat-processing plants." Sure, they don't want to work lousy jobs for poor wages, but I doubt that immigrants want that either. They may be more willing to settle because they have few better options. What American workers need is more rights and leverage. Reducing competition from immigrants might give them a bit more leverage, but that doesn't translate quickly to rights. On the other hand, giving both native and immigrant workers more rights does. Maybe this results in some jobs becoming unaffordable, but if they really mattered, someone would find a way to make them attractive enough for workers.

  • [06-09]: Just say no to Bernie Sanders' AI sovereign wealth fund. I'm not sure whether Baker is being critical of sovereign wealth funds in general — they mostly exist in countries that have nationalized mineral wealth (mostly oil), allowing them to direct those revenues to other business ventures — but one focused on the AI bubble is certainly a bad idea. And not just because like all bubbles, this one will break. And not just because such a fund not only lose a lot of money, but will inevitably waste even more trying to save itself. But also because we're confusing the AI business with AI technology. Business develops technology not because it's good for people but to make money off of them. This predatory relationship may be tolerable if limited, but nothing about this generation of AI moguls suggests that they're into it for short of unlimited power and wealth.

  • [06-12]: The real abundance agenda: weakening patent and copyright monopolies: Sure, he's written this piece many times before, and will do so many times again. It's such an obvious and essential point that it's hard to understand why more people aren't doing the same. I keep meaning to write it up myself. I'd go so far as to say that there is no justification whatsoever for granting patents. Moreover, you could eliminate the entire system today, and innovation, development, and industry would carry on without a hitch. (Sure, it would be bad for patent lawyers, and possibly speculators, but we'd save so much money elsewhere we could easily retrain them to do useful work, or just pay them a generous amount not to bother us further.) The situation with copyrights is a bit messier, because we don't have a good alternative scheme to fund writers and other artists, but the present copyright system doesn't work very well either (yet lots of people still create things, for little reward). These systems are really just another form of tax farming. That's a horrible system, as all historical instances show. Baker is responding to this piece:

    • Dylan Gyauch-Lewis [06-12]: New documents detail nine-figure, Silicon Valley-funded abundance movement: I should probably dig my way more carefully through this, but the gist is fairly obvious: that the Klein-Thompson focus on Abundance works for rich Democratic donors much like the supply-side economics jargon did for Reagan Republicans: it offers a way for government to make rich people even richer, while claiming they're doing something for all of us. But this has been standard policy for Democrats at least back to Clinton: pursue reforms, but only ones that have substantial donor/business buy in. As such, they never tackle things like patent rents that make health care unaffordable. They're happy to invest money in "green energy" businesses, but not conservation.

Tom Carson:

  • [05-12]: Triomphe the insult comic's Arc de Trumpe. After being assured by "sandbox-loving Trumpies, that we're the lucky owners of the most powerful, most lethal, most all-around bitchenest military on the planet and/or in world history," he points out that "this coming August will mark the 81st anniversary of the last time we won a war." (Then misses the opportunity to quibble over whatever the hell we actually "won" in that war.)

    Maybe I'm a born Eeyore, but the Trump administration's Epsteiniran gamahuche strikes me as a poor candidate to liven up America's moldy victory laps with a new lap dance. And that, my friends, is why we need a Trumpian Arch of Triumph in Arlington, Va., to grandly fuck up the view from the Lincoln Memorial to the Lee-Custis mansion on the other bank of the Potomac. . . .

    One unpleasant truth that can't be avoided is that his plans for a gloriously Trumpified nation's capital resemble Albert Speer's designs at Hitler's behest for a gigantic, pastless new postwar Berlin to be known as Germania. Another, more reassuring truth is that Germania never got past the stage of being a big 3-D scale model that the addled Fuhrer spent increasing hours canoodling with as the war went phhht. . . .

    Yet in both cases, what porn connoisseurs call the money shot — destruction on a vast scale — will already have been accomplished. Berlin's hash got settled by American and British bombers and Red Army artillery and tanks in 1945; whatever happens next, the White House's East Wing is rubble for good. Don't bet against the same being true soon of the Kennedy Center, a building, concept, and Camelot talisman Trump hates so much that sticking his name on it provided only inadequate and temporary respite. You know, like a dog pissing on sumac to mark its own territory.

  • [05-18]: Trump and what army? "As Memorial Day looms, let's take stock of how POTUS values America's military." Having "grown up partly around military people in Berlin during the Cold War," etc., he has a soft spot for the military I've never shared, but I can count dozens of relatives and a few friends who have done their bit, some at great personal sacrifice, some merely gloating over the personal perks of the closest thing America has to socialism, I can suspend my own disdain for the military to allow those so inclined to show them some respect. Especially when that respect runs counter to Trump:

    Two particular features of Trump's reign that fascinate me. One is his hostility to American history. Guy's really got a grudge against it, wonder why. The other is his administration's truly extraordinary disdain for the United States military. You can't say it exceeds any prior administration's disdain only because no prior administration has gone anywhere near the lunacy of expressing disdain at all. . . .

    Trump's loathing of being seen with maimed combat veterans — they didn't make him look good, he complained, underlining who the only important guy in the visual was — makes George W. Bush like he missed his calling as a battlefield surgeon. His craving for a tank-crunchy military parade in D.C. disregarded how many — sadly, not all — of the U.S.A.'s wars have been fought against everything such images represent. His hatred of Black and female generals and trans enlisted troops spits in the face of the one government entity that, for all its sins, has been in the forefront of literally embodying social equality.

    There isn't space enough here to list all of Trump's military-bashing insults and smears, and keep in mind I'm writing this online. So let POTUS's ability to discern a competent and laudable Defense Secretary in Pete Hegseth, who believes war is a continuation of date rape by other means — a line I've used before, but screw it, it's an evergreen — stand for the rest.

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [05-15]: Roaming Charges: Go down, Moses.

    + $109 billion: the amount Americans spent on lottery tickets in 2025, more than they shelled out on movies, concerts, books, and sporting events combined. It's the Crap Shoot Stage of Capitalism.[1]

    [1] I knew a guy whose email signature was something like: "Lottery, n. a tax on stupidity." I thought it was more like a tax on futile hope. They see it as the only chance they might get to make enough money to make a difference, and all it costs is something they'd probably lose anyway. Sure, the odds are awful. But so is the rest of their lot in life.

  • [05-22]: Roaming Charges: Peanuts from heaven.

  • [05-28]: A short history of the Iran War, so far. This is how it started:

    Trump began his war on Iran during talks to prevent it. He said it gave him the element of surprise. His missile strikes killed much of the Iranian leadership, including some of the Iranians his team thought might govern the country after the bombing ended. One of his missiles hit a girls' school, another hit the compound of Mahmood Ahmadinejad, one of the candidates Trump's people had in mind to run Iran after they killed Ayatollah Ali Khameni, the Iranian religious leader who, austere as he was, preferred negotiation over confrontation.

    Trump brushed off talk from some of his advisers that Iran would likely respond by shutting the Strait of Hormuz and attacking other Gulf States that had aided the US, either explicitly or covertly. His aides were right. He and Hegseth were wrong. Then Israel killed Iran's top negotiators. Suddenly, there was no one left to talk to. Trump claimed that the Iranian military was completely destroyed. Iran responded by downing US fighter jets, drones and surveillance planes. It struck US military bases, ships and a CIA station house.

    Trump claimed Iran had no leaders and its government was in a state of collapse. But the new regime quickly coalesced around Khamenei's son, Mojtaba, and took a more radical, uncompromising stance. Trump said the Kurds would invade Iran and arm Iranian dissidents. But the Kurds, burned one too many times by the US, declined. And after US and Israeli missiles hit neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, power plants and oil refineries, the Iranian resistance turned against the US.

    The Strait of Hormuz was shut down. The price of oil shot up and Trump's poll numbers sank. The global economy was sent into crisis. Trump asked the European nations he had refused to warn about his plans to go to war against Iran for help. They refused. Spain, Italy, France, Austria, and Switzerland went further. They either blocked or restricted the use of their airspace, landing rights or shared military bases for airstrikes on Iran.

    It gets worse from there, including:

    Unable to extort former US allies to bail him out or bomb the Iranians into submission, Trump began to manipulate the market, announcing fake cease-fire deals one week, threatening to make Iran glow the next. The market spasmed up and down and people with inside knowledge, including Trump, who made over 3000 trades, cashed in.

    Trump may not understand the first thing about war, but he knows how to run a graft. I'm not convinced that "Iran is now in a position to dictate the terms of any deal," but they're certainly in a position to reject any deal they find disagreeable, which means that Trump has to do something he's incapable of, negotiating.

  • [05-29]: Roaming Charges: Hail the unconquering hero! Title a twist on the Preston Sturges film. Starts with a reprise of his "Brief History," then moves on, finding Cory Booker even more hawkish than Trump.

    + Sam Altman: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." This is why they don't care if (and in fact don't want) your kids to learn to read or write. They want to sell basic intelligence and the less you know, the more they can charge you for telling you something you should have learned in middle school.

    + Artificial intelligence is causing a net U.S. loss of 16,000 jobs per month, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs.

    + The Trump administration is now targeting people who oppose AI and massive water hogging and power-hungry data centers under a new threat category dubbed "anti-tech violent extremism," many of whom, by all indications, are MAGA — along with the Pope, of course.

    + White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka says that the Trump administration is going to label American Leftists "terrorists" right alongside drug cartels. Will there be drone strikes? "We're gonna label terrorists as terrorists, whether it's cartels, whether it's jihadis, or whether it's sadly the le — the Americans who are left wing, who are radical, and because they subscribe to some anarchic, anti-fascist, or radically pro-transgender ideology."

    + Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, dropping an inconvenient truth about the social and economic consequences of AI: "The signature of AI is that it's going to take us to a world where we have very high GDP growth, and potentially also very high unemployment and inequality."

  • [06-12]: Roaming Charges: Data my eyes:

    + Dante himself couldn't have found a better spot in Hell to deposit James Dolan, maybe the worst owner in all of professional sports (and that's really saying something), than to lock him in a box next to a farting, snoring, grunting Donald Trump as 24,000 Knicks fans jeer and boo them both, while watching his team lose to the young San Antonio Spurs, over and over again, night after night for all eternity . . .

    Trump: "Look at the basketball ratings. They're down to very, very low numbers. People are angry about it. They don't realize. They have enough politics with guys like me. They don't need more as they're driving down, going up for the shot. They don't need it. There was a nastiness about the NBA the way it was done, too, so I think the NBA's in trouble. I think it's in big trouble, bigger trouble than they understand, and frankly, ice hockey, which is doing very well, they didn't do that. They respected the mores. They respected what they're supposed to be doing."

    + As for who is really watching what . . .
    Stanley Cup NHL Finals (2026) viewership: 5.05 million (Game 3)
    NBA Finals (2026) viewership: 28.7 million (Game 4)

    + 39: the number of times Trump has said a deal is imminent to end the Iran war. Does President False Alarm continue to move the market?

    + This week, Israeli troops conducting raids in Hebron shot a seven-month-old, Sam Fahd Abu Haikal, in the head while he was held in his mother's arms. . . . Israel has killed more Palestinian children in the last 3 years than Palestinians have killed Israelis of any kind over the last 80 years.

    + 97: Number of J6 rioters pardoned by Trump who have committed new crimes since J6. Recidivism is the hallmark of a true Trumper.

    + Trump on Graham Platner (or is he engaging in a rare episode of self-reflection?): "This guy's got a rap sheet, I've never seen anything like it. He's a low-level thug, and he's running to be senator . . . He's worse than any human being that's ever run for office, probably." [Worse than Trump? Worse than Aaron Burr? There must be some others on that level that are slipping my mind.]

    His "Booked Up" includes a link to Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late.

TomDispatch: Tom Engelhardt's newsletter has come to an end, with the world still badly in need of it. Reports are that Nick Turse, a former intern as memory serves, and recently The Intercept's top war reporter, will take over. No evidence of that yet.

  • William D Hartung [05-28]: Donald (disaster) Trump: "And the fight for a humane future."

  • Rebecca Gordon [05-31]: Endings and beginnings: "About that arc of the moral universe, sometimes it's more like a meandering sine wave."

  • Tom Engelhardt

    • [06-04]: A personal TomDispatch farewell (of sorts): The site's editor, after 24 years, is retiring. I've followed the site regularly almost since its inception. (As best I recall, my tip was just one step removed from Jonathan Schell, an early writer there.) I tried to get him interested in my writing a couple times, to no avail. The dissolution of the American empire has been both his and my great theme of the last 25 years, so I both appreciate all he has done, and think I could add a little bit more. One thing I probably would not do is always cycle back around to climate change. I don't doubt that it's happening, or that its effect will be huge, but I'd rather focus on other things, while treating it more as something that can be adapted to, although the opportunity costs of not working on it are huge.

    • [06-08]: War, what's it good for? "Absolutely nothing." He's moved on to a Substack.

    • [06-11]: Reading the Times: "(And not just the paper)."

    • [06-12]: 2025 wildfires were the costliest ever: why isn't that news?. Seems to be an alternate title to "Reading the Times."

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

[Washington University] Rebecca Dudley/Gloria Fall [05-06]: WashU's financial mismanagement is jeopardizing our education: Authors are PhD students at my almost alma mater. (I had a couple summer school courses that would have met my BA hours total, but some strange things happened, and I got shot down by an incomplete on a course that I wasn't allowed to finish. It's a weird story I should write up some time, including why I didn't much care about the degree I missed out on. But that was 1973. The bit I find most shocking here is the current $71,310 tuition. As I recall, it was about $6000 then, which I could only handle with scholarship and loans, which even then meant that most of my classmates were rich kids.) Another item here is their use of some software called Workday, which WashU "has spent over $265 million on." That in turn has led to "massive layoffs." Also re Washington University:

  • John K Wilson [06-09]: Academic authoritarianisn in a new attack on humanities scholars: "There is virtually no evidence offered in the report for its sweeping conclusions about the entirety of the humanities." I'll just add that the destruction at Washington University started back in the 1970s when I was a student there, and the administration decided to gut and dismantle what had been one of the nation's most eminent sociology departments.

[Vox] Sara Fischer [05-20]: Vox Media sells podcast biz, some publishing brands to James Murdoch's Lupa Systems: This includes the Vox and New York Magazine websites, which I often cite. Some other brands will remain independent, but none I recognize (maybe The Verge). Vox Media co-founder/CEO Jim Bankoff will join Lupa. James is one of Rupert Murdoch's sons, which raises some sort of alarm.

[Biden] Ben Terris [06-13]: Building back the Bidens: "The urgent, embarrassing, and occasionally convincing campaign to salvage their legacy." Sure, I could have filed this under "Democrats," but they've moved on, and so should we. Two things permanently destroyed his presidency. One was his indifference to ending the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Sure, that may largely be blamed on Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, who most likely will never work in Washington again, but he was president, he could have done something, and he only made bad situations worse. The other, perhaps even more unforgivable, was losing to Trump, even disguised as Kamala Harris. There's a story here about Biden trying to scrape up change to build his presidential library in Wilmington, and how poorly he's doing compared to Obama's foundation, with its "behemoth center in Chicago, known as 'the Obamalisk.'" I seriously doubt that the legacies of Obama and Clinton are going to wind up looking much better than Biden's term, but at least they went out as "winners" (unfairly, I'd say, given that both lost their Congressional majorities after two years, and never recovered, leaving them six years to legislate nothing of note for their constituents, while helping their donors get rich, a favor amply returned through their foundations).

  • Nia Prater [05-28]: 5 revelations from Jill Biden's upcoming memoir: Four have to do with cognitive decline and the debate, so you can guess them. The fifth is "she says she left notes warning Biden about dealing with Netanyahu":

    According to the outlet, she left a note reading, "Net has to stop," referring to the world leader after an Israeli air strike killed seven aid workers. On other occasions, she left a message ahead of a planned conversation the president had with Netanyahu, telling her husband, "Be strong. Don't let BN use your goodness."

Books:

  • The Guardian [05-12]: The 100 greatest novels of all time: Click bait, which often for music and sometimes for movies I used as checklists, but I read so little fiction this will likely prove useless. Fwiw, I've read one (The Master and Margarita), started several others, have heard of (can tell you the authors of) most of them, and have seen a couple dozen in the form of movies or television series. One thing I have in common with my wife is that we both started then abandoned Anna Karenina, back in our teens, after a couple hundred pages. She's gone on to read the majority of the list. One novel I did read and liked so much I'm pretty sure it would hold up in this company is Thomas Pynchon's V. But I gave up on Gravity's Rainbow after 350 pages, and haven't attempted any of his later books.

  • Michael Eby [05-14]: Is antitrust enough?: "Tim Wu's Age of Extraction lays out an antitrust strategy for fighting platform capitalism. But does the challenge posed by Big Tech require a new playbook?" I've read Wu's book, and there is much more to his solution than just antitrust. Still, some business models are problems in themselves, a problem that making them more competitive and less extortionate doesn't help much.

Obituaries: I had been using the New York Times, but they're giving me aggravation these days, so I'll switch over to Wikipedia (May, also June), which is probably better anyway. Roughly speaking, since my last report on May 12:

  • [05-13]: Clarence Carter (90): American singer-songwriter ("Slip Away," "Patches," "Strokin'")

  • [05-18]: Sally Head (79): British trelevision producer (Cracker, Prime Suspect, Jeeves and Wooster).

  • [05-19]: Barney Frank (86): Member of Congress (D-MA, 1981-2013).

  • [05-20]: Ron Escheté (77): American jazz guitarist.

  • [05-21]: Kyle Busch (41): NASCAR driver.

  • [05-25]: Sonny Rollins (95): Saxophone colossus.

  • [06-03]: James Blood Ulmer (86): American jazz guitarist and singer.

  • [06-04]: Robert Coles (97): American child psychiatrist and author of many books, most famously his Children of Crisis series.

  • [06-04]: Marjane Satrapi (56): Iranian-French graphic novelist.

    • Phillip Maciak [06-08]: The singular power of Persepolis: "Marjane Satrapi's inimitable art encompassed revolution and war, education and ideology, repression and rebellion."

  • [06-06]: Bob Packwood (93): US Senator (R-OR), 1969-95. New York Times obituary is subtitled Senator forced to quit in sex scandal. I remember him more for taking an antiwar stand on Vietnam.

  • [06-06]: Lee Raymond (87), American oil executive, the guy who put Exxon and Mobil back together again. He's the main character in Steve Coll's Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (2012).

  • [06-07]: Gordon S. Wood (92): American historian, author of: The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (1969); The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992); Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic 1789-1815 (2010); and other important books.

    • David Waldstreicher [06-11]: How Gordon S. Wood shaped the idea of America: "The acclaimed historian, who died at the age of 92 this week, spent decades at the center of a debate about the founding of the United States." I've read quite a bit by Wood. I thought his first book was the definitive history of the writing of the constitution, while his later books were my principal sources for the founding generation and, with Empire of Liberty, the early years of the republic.

  • [06-11]: David Hockney (88): English painter.

  • [06-12]: Gene Shalit (100): American journalist, media critic and television personality.

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas.

  • David Everall [04-30]: Forwarded a post from Chalkie Davies, noting that "Lester Bangs died on this day 44 years ago," and including an obituary written by Robert Christgau (also available here).

  • Steven Hendricks [04-27]:

    Communication Con Job

    As a former corporate communications and government affairs executive, I've been watching Donald Trump answer questions with the media for more than 10 years now. The confidence, the certainty, and the way he controls media interviews. It's no wonder some people "think" that he's a skillful communicator.

    Every single time that Donald Trump is asked a question — any question — he runs the same exact seven 'deceitful' steps — the same exact order—without exception.

    This is not one's personality, not confidence nor is it charisma either. This is a deliberate repeatable "control the lie" formula — and here is the formula.

    1. KILL THE QUESTION (First thing every time — make the question itself the problem.) —"That's a stupid question." / "Fake news."
    2. KILL WHO ASKED IT (Destroy the source so the question has nowhere to stand.) —"Your ratings are terrible. Nobody watches your network."
    3. INSERT HIMSELF (Every topic. Every time. Without fail. It always lands here.) —"Nobody has ever done what I've done."
    4. SCALE IT TO THE BIGGEST CLAIM POSSIBLE (Not good. Not great. The greatest—ever— In history. Every single time.) — "More than any administration — by far." / "Nobody has ever had crowds like I've had in history, for any country."
    5. UNNAMED PEOPLE AGREE (Faceless. Countless. Unverifiable. Always there.) — "Smart people are saying it. Great people. A lot of people."
    6. VAGUE THREAT (Something bad will happen. Never specified. Always implied.) — "All hell will break out." / "They know it. Believe me."
    7. LOOP BACK TO HIMSELF (Different words. Same destination. Formula complete.) — "It's been an amazing period of time. Page after page of accomplishments."

    The question was never answered — the formula was just executed. Go back and watch any news clip, any interview, any topic, any reporter. Count the steps — they're all there.

    And this is the part that nobody wants to believe . . . A "control the lie" formula runs the same seven steps whether the topic is war, Epstein Files, or egg prices. Which means the response was never built for the question; it was built for you—the listener; to feel certain; to stop you from noticing that nothing was actually answered.

    And it worked — for years it has worked. It's why he lies with such confidence, with such arrogance, with such certainty — he's controlling the moment — and he's doing it without people noticing.

    Pull any news clip video, any interview transcript, any public statement and count the steps yourself. This isn't about politics. This is about controlling what you were never supposed to notice — and Donald Trump is a master it!

    MAGA Trumpublicans eat it up and they fall for Trump's "communication con job" — every single time! Unfortunately, so does a lot of other people!

  • Tom Carson: Picture of a guy who looks like Lindsey Graham in a "69 47" T-shirt."

  • Astra Taylor: She seems to have a new book coming out, combining forces with Naomi Klein, called "End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World." Book is scheduled for September release. Quote from Naomi Klein:

    Trapped in Bad Fiction

    Must the future be this corny? Are we really doomed to live inside the half-remembered childhood fantasies of overgrown teenage boys? To be cast as bit characters in a misunderstood book that Elon Musk or Peter Thiel may or may not have finished reading? Is it even possible to write about those hackneyed futures without becoming a cliché yourself?

    Over the past year, as Astra Taylor and I have immersed ourselves in what we call End Times Fascism, I have returned to these questions often. Whether it's Musk's dreams of space colonization, Sam Altman's prediction of an imminent machine-human merger, or Pete Hegseth's Armageddon complex, it often feels as if we are trapped inside very bad science fiction.

    Our book comes out in September and now that we are through the copyedit (and the fact check, and the legal review . . . ) I finally have a little space to engage in real time conversations about how apocalyptic stories about the end times are shaping the news cycle, from everyone accusing everyone else of being the Antichrist, to Donald Trump's obsessive drive to build a gilded ballroom over a fortressed bunker (which I think of as a sort of drydock Titanic).

    I love this new direction because it speaks directly to that uncanny feeling, shared by so many of us, of being caught in somebody else's kitschy version of the future — one we have all been warned against countless times. The cold blues recall several classic Isaac Asimov jackets, and the retro rocket ship brings the same scifi era to mind.

    Jim Stoddart, who designed the cover for Allen Lane, explains that the rocket's exodus "illustrates the most extreme metaphor of the super-rich believing they can escape the rest of humanity — whether fleeing to islands on the other side of the globe or rocketing off to Mars — while exacerbating devastation behind them." And, of course, the Earth on the cover is imperiled, "being metaphorically shrouded with poison intentions by the privileged few." But Stoddart points out, all is not lost: "the planet has not yet been entirely overwhelmed — and there lies the hope for the future."

    Astra and I firmly believe that to be the case, which is why we wrote the book and immersed ourselves in that poison since Trump re-entered the White House. A huge part of the reason why a dystopic future can feel inevitable is precisely because versions of that violent story have been told and retold so many times, riffing off the same template that appears in the Book of Revelation, which casts armageddon as a necessary stage on the way to a frictionless, lifeless heavenly utopia. Unfortunately, we have far less practice imagining versions of the future in which we come together to fight for all that is irreplaceable in the blessedly imperfect, friction-filled living world.

    And yet we are surrounded by examples of people doing just that, from parched communities coming together to resist AI data centres to the historic summit happening right now in Santa Marta, Colombia, where 60 governments have convened to chart a path away from fossil fuels, refusing to let the breakdown of climate negotiations at the United Nations be the last word in the fight against climate breakdown. With the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran showing us all — yet again! — the enormous perils of fossil fuel dependence, the summit comes at a critical moment.

Current count: 371 links, 26617 words (32677 total)

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Tuesday, May 12, 2026

Loose Tabs

I'm posting this on May 12, after initially hoping for May 10. The delay will push Music Week out a couple days. Elapsed time since my previous one is 28 days, so I'm still close to monthly, but not on any formal schedule. Still, these are falling into a monthly pattern, even when (as this time) I think I should be kicking something out after 2-3 months. Slowing down in old age is my initial excuse, but one could also say being overwhelmed by events. And even with massive paywalling, I'm still finding many more reports and opinion pieces than I can handle. I'm less and less worried about the world going to hell due to ignorance. But more due to stupidity, for lack of a better word to describe the tendency to view issues and problems through one's own narrowly biased focus, with an inability to even imagine looking at them from some other perspective.

Needless to say, this state of the world has found its ideal in Donald Trump, who is not only a victim of this stupidity, but also a tireless spreader. One can only hope that, as disasters mount, this triggers some massive reflex reaction to undo everything he has done. Still, I worry that some aspiring Democrat is going to look at the polling, and decide that the sure path to power is to campaign on lower gasoline prices.[1] Because the problem here is not just the platform plank, but the whole thinking around it.

One could easily solve the supply problem by ending Trump-Biden wars, unblocking the Persian Gulf, and putting Russian and Venezuelan oil back on the market. But what about also working on the demand side? For instance: by pitching more solar and wind as ways to free up cheaper gasoline. Same for electric cars. Mass transit would also help out, as it allows people to move around efficiently without the congestion and pollution of cars. Do all that and gas will get so cheap you should start increasing taxes to discourage people from wasting it. I'd argue that taxes should gradually increase over time, as setting the expectation of future expenses will help move people away from fossil fuels, without clobbering them right now. A car is typically a 5-15 year investment. You don't want to obsolete current cars immediately.

But most importantly, explain to people that Trump is not only costing them at the pump, his whole worldview is making their lives more precarious, and more miserable.

[1] Looks like this Democrat is Graham Platner, the Maine Senatorial candidate much celebrated recently by left-leaning Democrats for driving centrist Janet Mills. Platner wants to end the federal excise taxes on gasoline and diesel (18.4 and 24.4 cents per gallon, respectively, earmarked for funding roads and bridges; there are also state taxes, which in many cases are higher than the federal tax). This tax hasn't been raised since 1993. It is much less than it should be, for lots of good reasons (and not just inflation).

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically (12 times from April-December 2025). My previous one appeared 28 days ago, on April 15.

By the way, I've been trying to write some more in-depth pieces on major issues (and/or personal peccadillos), using Substack as an email agent. I call this series Notes on Everyday Life. Here's a list of recent ones, plus a couple of older ones I've pinned because they still seem relevant here, in LIFO order:

  • [05-05]: The Real Road to Serfdom: Tim Wu explains how monopoly power leads to fascism.

  • [05-02]: Lookback: Iraq 2003: Why does the Iran war story sound familiar? (with allowances for tragedy repeating as farce)?

  • [04-27]: Explaining Inflation: AI treats us like 5-year-olds. They leave out a few things.

  • [04-05]: Iran War: The Big Question: How does it end? Or does it end at all?

  • [04-03]: Iran War: The Three Questions: Why is this happening?

  • [03-13]: Days of Infamy: "Franklin Roosevelt knew how to sell a war." Donald Trump doesn't. He only knows how to start one.

  • [2025-10-21]: Making Peace in Gaza and Beyond: "Looking beyond the Trump points toward a peace we can all live with."

  • [2025-10-17]: Gaza War Peace Plan: "Twenty Trump points, for better or worse."

  • [2025-08-10]: Four Stories: My first post, which sets out the basic ideas behind my effort, and takes its title from a very wrong-headed Vox piece that offered some teachable moments. One sample quote I buried in parentheses:

    There is no problem that Trump is the solution to. But his slogan, "Trump will fix it," suggests that some people thought we had problems he could fix. I think Trump's slogan was very effective, especially as Harris made little or no effort to show how very ridiculous the boast was.

I also have a Notes feed there. While I've done very little with it so far, it occurs to me that I might be able to use it to publish Loose Tabs items and Music Week reviews as I write them, instead of having to wait for a long compilation post.

Table of Contents:

New Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent themes of the following section.

Last time: Cuba, No Kings, Viktor Orbán, Fascism.

Cuba: While I don't doubt that Trump would like to "do Cuba next," aside from reinforcing the world's view of America as a cruel and petty bully, I doubt the military has (or can come up with) a viable attack plan. So his threats mostly are diversions, meant to distract from the war in Iran, while reinforcing Trump's madman cred (which, and this reveals something, he values as part of his "art of the deal."

  • Peter Kornbluh [04-20]: 65 yrs after the first one, Trump's 'Bay of Pigs' may take many forms: "'There were sobering lessons,' JFK said after the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961. There is still time for the current president to learn them." Kennedy does seem to have learned some lessons from the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but not the important one of resigning to live with an independent Cuba. Whether Trump is capable of learning any lessons at all, ever, is doubtful. I will say that I'm skeptical that the specific litany of mistakes made in 1961 are likely to be repeated now (both Cuba and the US are very different now). On the other hand, the idea of invading another country just because you think you are entitled to run it (for whatever reason) is as bad as ever. Nor is there any reason to think that, given the chance, the US would allow Cuba to choose their own democracy. The election processes the US set up in Afghanistan and Iraq were shams, and the one in America isn't much better.

  • Lee Schlenker [04-23]: Despite Trump's threats, a US-Cuba deal is taking shape: "Talks in Havana are starting to deliver results even as Washington prepares for the possibility of war."

  • William Leogrande [04-26]: In Cuba a deadlock is more likely than a deal: "Trump wants something that the government in Havana is just not willing to give."

  • Blaise Malley [04-28]: Senate kills effort to stop Trump war against Cuba: "By 51-47 vote, Senate blocks debate due to 'US troops not being engaged in hostilities,' despite ongoing blockade."

  • Joshua Keating [05-01]: Trump says Cuba is "next." What does that mean? "But it's not clear what the plan is." Or what the goal is, other than another feather for Trump's cap. Regime change in Venezuela "worked" because the next up was willing to play along. It didn't work in Iran when the next-in-line leaders refused to play along. In neither case did the long-suffering people revolt, but Trump isn't exactly a grass roots democracy kind of guy, so that's not something he really cares about. Cuba is more like Iran than Venezuela. There is reason to believe that lots of Venezuelans really were unhappy with the Maduro government, even if they were unable to do anything about it. That simplified what was basically a cosmetic change. How unpopular the Cuban government is may be hard to gauge. The reporting here is very myopic, with one quotable Cuban dissenter packed in with an armada of the usual anti-Cuban propaganda (there's a whole section called "In Marco we trust?").

Jerome Powell, David Warsh, and the Fed: Trump originally nominated Powell for Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2017 (term starting in 2018), figuring he would be more reluctant to raise interest rates than the other candidates he was offered (John Taylor and Kevin Warsh). Biden, following the precedent of Clinton and Obama, gave the Republican-appointed Fed Chair a second term — a big political mistake, considering how much power the Fed Chair has over the economy that Democratic presidents will be blamed for. Powell ultimately disappointed Trump, so much so that Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate Powell in an attempt to turn him out of office early. That effort has failed so far, but Powell's term ends on May 15, and he's appointed Warsh to replace Powell. The Senate has yet to confirm Warsh, who for now has to walk a fine line between professing loyalty to Trump and vowing to maintain the independence of the Fed.

  • Claudia Sahm [04-20]: Fed Chair Apprentice: Written in advance of Warsh's Senate confirmation hearing, with sections on Fed independence, Warsh's understanding of inflation, and financial market deregulation (which Warsh favors).

    Warsh accuses the Fed of being stuck in the past: "the tyranny of the status quo." But he is the one resurrecting Milton Friedman's monetarism of the 1970s and Alan Greenspan's productivity studies of the 1990s. Neither fits the current moment well, and they don't even fit together.

  • Mike Konczal [04-27]: Cherry-picking the wrong inflation measures with Kevin Warsh: "Kevin Warsh's favorite inflation metrics ar exactly the ones that failed us during the inflation wave."

  • Dean Baker [04-28]: Jerome Powell ends his career as Fed Chair: Baker offers a generally favorable review of Powell's two terms as Fed Chair, including why Baker favored giving him that second term. I felt then, and now, that Biden had missed an opportunity to appoint someone better, as had Obama and Clinton before him.

White House Correspondents' Dinner: Where a supposedly fun evening was interrupted by a gunman, who was apprehended. Everyone else went home early.

  • Margaret Sullivan [04-23]: Why are White House journalists partying with Trump? "The White House correspondents' dinner has always been a questionable affair. It's even more worrying under an anti-press administration." That's a good question, one I've had since I've heard there even was a White House Correspondents Association, let alone their gala dinner. I've always assumed that the default stance for journalists viz. their subjects is critical and, when necessary, adversarial. I don't doubt that schmoozing with your subjects can yield insights and lead to stories that one otherwise might have missed, but I also have doubts that journalists who get too close to their subjects can still do their jobs. My own experience is mostly in the low-stakes field of music journalism, where I have always thought of myself as a critic, and almost always avoided personal contact (or limited it to publicists, who work for their clients, but have usually shown me courteous respect; after all, not every bridge is worth burning). I recall Bill James writing a piece on the advantages of his outsider status, as opposed to nearly all sportswriters. But covering politics is relatively high-stakes, and we depend on journalists to get the real stories, and not just to parrot what the PR flacks want them to say. The WHCD has always struck me as not just corrupt, but proud of it. I'd go so far as saying that I take offense to the very idea of there even being a White House Correspondents Association. Isn't there a need for all political journalists to be able to trace their stories all the way to the White House? Why should there be a club of insiders controlling access? Except, of course, that their dependence on access makes them so much easier to control.

    Of course, Sullivan also goes into some specific concerns about this particular president.

  • Benjy Sarlin [04-26]: What we know about the shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The suspect arrested was Cole Thomas Allen, who released "a manifesto" before the attack, condemning Trump's wars and policies. Trump and his minions are apoplectic that anyone would contemplate doing unto them what they've so carelessly enjoyed doing to others.

  • Francine Prose [04-28]: Shrugging at calamity: America is reacting in strange ways to our chaotic times: "The reaction to the Washington DC shooting shows that Americans are swinging between outrage, exhaustion and numbness."

  • Elena Moore [05-11]: New poll finds a majority of Americans unsure if attempts on Trump's life were real. "One in four respondents believed the attempted attack . . . was staged. The same was true for Butler. [24%] I don't have an opinion on the WHCD event, but the Butler event during the 2024 campaign reminds me strongly of an Agatha Christie story where the killer cuts her ear to make it look like she was the intended victim (the ear bleeds dramatically, without actually posing much risk; the story appears to be A Murder Is Announced). My main reason for not believing that's the event was staged is that it seems like it would be very difficult to keep the plot under wraps, but it likely had significant impact on the election — it certainly help Trump sell a ton of merch.

Gerrymandering Around Voting Rights: I originally filed this along with the other Supreme Court cases, but the case itself was caused by an attempt in Louisiana to sink a Democratic House district, and the same idea has been floated elsewhere, and as Republican prospects grow worse, their desperation has only increased.

A Cure for Gerrymandering: Representative Democracy: By the way, I have figured out a pretty good solution to gerrymandering, which I call Representative Democracy. With this, every candidate running for Congress that receives more than a low threshold (for sake of argument, let's say 10%) is elected to Congress, able to cast the same number of votes the candidate received. You can still have primaries for candidates who belong to political parties. Jungle primaries and ranked-choice voting could help to fairly narrow down the number of candidates. But the key things are that: winner-take-all districts are gone (nearly all districts will have multiple representatives, which means that nearly everyone in each district will have elected a representative to Congress); precise apportioning of districts is not necessary (but there can be guidelines). This means that every state, including every major city, will have at least one representative in each party. Also, by getting rid of winner-take-all, the value of winning a close race will go way down, which should also drain a lot of money from campaigns — which, of course, could be made cheaper still by limiting fundraising and expenses, and providing basic funding for all candidates, which would in turn make elections much less corrupt than they are now (and would allow people to run who have no chance under the current system). This could be a boon for third parties and/or independent candidates, or not, depending on how you deal with primaries, funding, and voters who don't vote for any elected candidates. (I have some ideas there. For instance, unaligned voters could assign their votes to at-large candidates through petitions, or in the most extreme case could represent themselves.)

I've written this idea up roughly a half-dozen or more times. I should give it a proper essay, but it seems bigger than any outlet I can offer. I have dozens of ideas like this: worth presenting, but someone else needs to pick them up and run with them. I've often thought about compiling them into a book borrowing Paul Goodman's title: Utopian Essays & Practical Proposals. (The utopian end would include ideas for escaping from capitalism. Representative democracy is more on the practical end, although as far as I am aware it's never been discussed. The technology to add up the votes is pretty trivial these days. By the way, there's no need for all voters to show up in person to vote, or for the hall to seat all of them.)

To kick things off, I've thought about a Wikiplans website, which I could seed with my rough sketches, and hope others would flesh them out. I need to figure out how to set up Mediawiki anyway.

Spirit Airlines Bites the Dust: And the industry contracts, competition is reduced, and prices will rise.

  • CK Smith [05-02]: Spirit Airlines collapses after bailout efforts fail.

  • Caitlin Dewey [05-05]: Every airline is Spirit Airlines now.

    And if there's anything positive to be said about Spirit, it's that the company's bottom-barrel fares have forced other airlines to lower their prices. One 2017 study found that fares were roughly a fifth cheaper in markets where Spirit or another low-cost airline had a presence. The airline industry even has a name for this: "the Spirit effect." . . .

    With Spirit out of the game, which airline will inherit the ignominious title of most-hated airline in America? Among large carriers, the title passes to American Eagle, a network of regional flights operated by American Airlines, according to YouGov. If you're looking at all US airlines, then Allegiant — a low-cost carrier that mostly services vacation destinations — was already less popular than Spirit was.

    Don't underestimate the airline industry's ability to give you new reasons to hate it, though. Some analysts predict that Spirit's closure will push other airlines' fares up: CBS found average fares rose roughly $60, or 23 percent, when Spirit exited a route.

  • Dan Primack [05-04]: Spirit Airlines blame game is going strong. One argument is that Biden should be blamed for blocking a merger between JetBlue and Spirit. "It is impossible to know if a JetBlue-Spirit merger would have saved Spirit in the long term, or saddled the combined carrier with so much debt that it too would be liquidating as jet fuel prices climb."

  • Alex Kirshner [05-05]: Who killed Spirit Airlines? "The abrupt collapse of the ultra-low-cost carrier ignited a big, misleading blame game in Washington." Interview with Jan Brueckner.

  • Dave Schilling [05-09]: Air travel was already miserable. Now we get to pay more for it!: "Spirit Airlines helped turn flying into a fee-based nightmare. Now it's gone, and fuel prices are soaring."

  • John Cassidy [05-11]: Why Spirit Airlines failed while European budget carriers thrive: "Loved for its cheap seats and derided for its extremely low-frills flights, the American company was arguably a victim of its own success."

How to Save Bankrupt Companies: By the way, another idea I have is to revamp the bankruptcy laws, to reduce the power of creditors, and allow companies to survive and reorganize under employee ownership. At present, the previous owners' equity is generally wiped out, but creditors can force liquidation to recover what they are owed. Each reorganization would have to be negotiated separately, but I expect that most debt will be written down, the employee shares will be held within the company with an initial $0 value, and any capital needed will be provided as long-term, low-interest loans secured with equity.

By the way, another way to promote employee ownership would be to allow stock distribution to employees to bypass estate taxes (which should be raised high enough to make that seem like a good deal). In general, I believe that most companies should be employee-owned, as this facilitates labor and management working in harmony, and tends to keep companies more responsible to their communities and nation. I'd also add a couple public interest board seats, devoted to customers, clients, and/or the community. This could also be applied to non-profits. (Much more could be said about them.)

Major Threads

War on Iran: Trump's war is in a muddled state, as he flip-flops between apocalyptic rhetoric and caution, while allowing no concession that might actually lead to a negotiated solution. Meanwhile, Iran's leaders — who despite all aspersions of religious fanaticism appear to be the relatively sane ones in this conflict — seem confident that time is on their side. The quality of reporting makes it impossible to know.

  • Michael Arria [04-14]: Understanding the Iran war in the context of US imperialism: Interview with Afshin Matin-Asgari, author of Axis of Empire: A History of Iran-US Relations, which came out in January 2026. His analysis of the war is pretty much same as mine, but he provides some info on early US-Iranian encounters I wasn't familiar with: 19th century Presbyterian missionaries had a similar role there as they did in Lebanon and Egypt; the US was shut out of the oil industry by the UK, but wound up stationing 30,000 troops in Iran during WWII to facilitate supply of the USSR. Then there was the 1953 coup and the 1979 revolution(s): he sees a second one which kicked off with the US embassy occupation, which Khomeini exploited to concentrate clerical power over the many other anti-Shah factions. I've been making a similar point, as my reading of events is that the anti-Americanism of 1979 was instrumental for Khomenei, and could easily have been shelved as early as 1981 (when the hostages were released to a new American president, Reagan), but have since festered due to America's propensity to hold grudges.

  • Jared Sacks [04-15]: How Zionism's anti-Jewish logic led Israel to bomb an Iranian synagogue: "Israel bombed Tehran's Rafi-Nia synagogue in the middle of the Jewish holiday of Passover. The attack revealed, to a shocking degree, Zionism's willingness to treat Jewish life as disposable in the service of its ideological project."

  • Mitchell Plitnick:

  • Maryam Jamshidi [04-17]: Only one side has clearly broken the law in the Strait of Hormuz: "And it isn't Iran." On closer examination, it turns out that Iran actually has an international law legal case for regulating commerce through their own territorial waters (as does Oman).

  • Lauren Aratani [04-18]: Traders placed over $1bn in perfectly timed bets on the Iran war. What is going on? Pretty obviously, someone is making money on inside information. Quite a lot of money. Whether Trump is personally getting his vig isn't clear, but that's something reasonable people will investigate sooner or later.

  • Ian Proud [04-28]: Iran and Russia are gaming the United States, and winning: "Is Trump running out of time to end the war before the American economy catches up?"

  • Kate Aronoff [05-01]: Trump's Iran war is smashing his fossil fuel dreams: "The president wanted to ensure American hegemony and global energy dominance. Instead, he might be torpedoing both." This may be the "silver lining" in the war. Of course, there were better ways to move away from fossil fuels, but when you elect the wrong people, inadvertent disasters may be the best you can hope for. I'm tempted to write a piece on the ten worst things Trump has done, plus five more bad things he's done that may eventually turn out for the better. Of course, there are hundreds of options to choose from, and rebounding is a tricky concept.

  • Trita Parsi: Author of three important books on Iran, Israel, and the United States (e.g., Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, from 2007). He's been all over media of late, and his early warnings of how Iran would respond to the attack have been spot on.

    • [05-02]: Trump's Iran blockade snatches defeat from the jaws of victory: "Washington's search for a 'silver bullet' to defeat Tehran has made it all but impossible to secure a deal."

    • [05-02]: Trump's war has destroyed the illusion of US military supremacy.

    • [05-03]: A few observations on Iran's latest proposal to Trump.

    • w/Brandon Carr [05-06]: 'Christmas bombings' worked in Vietnam but won't drag Iran to the table: "The military and diplomatic situation in the Persian Gulf bears virtually no similarity to that in 1972." "Worked" is a funny word to use in this context.

    • [05-08]: Iran war marks the end of American primacy as we know it: "For states that had opted to depend on US protection, this should be a wake-up call." While obviously true, this piece is sorely lacking in specifics, possibly because primacy was never anywhere near what it was cracked up to be. It always depended on consent of the weaker powers, perhaps because they didn't feel like testing their weakness, while it was easy and not too expensive to humor the American egos. I suppose you could say that the US moved to protect Berlin in 1948 and South Korea in 1950, but since then the US has achieved little, mostly beating up on small and poor countries, and having little to show for their efforts. But while the US is increasingly frustrated by minor gestures (like disallowing use of bases and air space for launching wars), that consent has yet to crack let alone break in a big way. While the US military gets little respect, the American market (and US support for global capital) is still a big enough deal to tread carefully. The Persian Gulf states could shut the Iran war down almost instantly, but they need the West (and especially the US) to launder their oil profits. A break by Europe could be an even bigger deal. Ironically, while Trump's madman act is breaking up the old world order, it makes other nations reluctant to be explicit.

  • NBC News [05-06]: Trump's abrupt U-turn on a plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz came after backlash from allies: "Saudi Arabia, a key Gulf ally, suspended the US military's ability to use its bases and airspace to carry out the operation, sources say."

  • Stavroula Pabst [05-06]: Five shameless moments of Iran war opportunism & grifting: "War brings out the best — and worst — in Americans, especially in industril Capitol Hill and Wall Street."

    1. Lockheed Martin CEO: wartime Trump Pentagon a "golden opportunity"
    2. Trump sons roll in the drone industry dough
    3. Defense-contractor funded think tanker: Iran war is a bargain!
    4. Literally gambling on war
    5. Political influence blitz

  • Ishaan Tharoor [05-06]: How the Iran war is shifting power toward China: "As the US's credibility and military capacity are tested abroad, China has gained leverage by staying out of the fight and learning from it."

  • Chas Danner [05-06]: Trump still thinks his confusion can crush Iran.

    It has been more than nine weeks since President Trump started his war with Iran, and somehow he's still keeping everyone guessing — about whether he has any idea what he's doing. Less than two days after launching his latest strategy for the very unpopular war, "Project Freedom," he's already pausing the operation.

  • Juan Cole:

    • [05-09]: How the Iran war is changing the Middle East: Interview with Tafheem Kiani. Most interesting thing here is the dynamic between Muhammad bin Zayed (head of Abu Dhabi and president of UAE) and the much better known Muhammad bin Salman (Saudi crown prince). I think the war will ultimately turn on those two countries, and possibly on the fates of those two monarchs. Both are in way over their heads, with an enemy in Iran that could do they a great deal of damage, and allies in Trump and Netanyahu who could hardly care less about them, but ultimately depend on them to sustain their war. Of course, what makes prediction impossible is that both (or really, all four) are wack jobs — we're used to Iran's leaders being depicted as fanatics, but compared to their adversaries, they are paragons of reason and sanity.

    • [05-10]: Iran threatens to kidnap data cables as well as oil; Trump warns of nukes: His nukes, not theirs.

    • [05-08]: China grows 5% — but fears a Trump-caused Hormuz shock.

      Still, China has some cushions with regard to petroleum. It produces about a quarter of the oil it uses. It can increase imports from Russia. It has six months of oil reserves, and anyway 53% of new car purchases are electric, a percentage that is likely to rise substantially this year.

  • Dave DeCamp [05-11]: UAE has secretly launched attacks against Iran: "The attacks included the bombing of Iran's Lavan Island after the ceasefire was announced."

  • Peiman Salehi [06-08]: Former IRGC commander: Lebanon is Iran's 'non-negotiable red line' in any deal with the US: "Mohsen Rezaei, a senior adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader and former IRGC Commander, says Tehran will not separate Lebanon from any deal with Washington, including a nuclear deal, as Iran seeks to redefine the terms of negotiations with the US." And Lebanon will not be solved without Israel withdrawing and agreeing to no further attacks.

Israel: After Israel reluctantly agreed to Trump's ceasefire plan in Gaza, Netanyahu escalated his search for other targets, not just because his perpetual war machine always needs live bait, but by ensnaring Trump into his Iran adventure, and opening the Lebanon front much like 1982, he's avoiding scrutiny in Gaza and the West Bank, where something akin to genocide proceeds apace (given the goal of eliminating or substantially marginalizing the political and/or economic viability of a group of people, does it matter how fast you actually kill people?). This section deals with military and political matters within Israel. A second section follows, dealing with the propaganda front.

Israel-America-World Relations: I used to try to separate out Israel-related pieces into several bins. The Iran war has its own news section. The Israel section above pertains to security operations in Gaza, Israel/Palestine, and Lebanon, as well as internal Israeli political affairs. This one deals with America's relationship to Israel, and possibly with the world's.

  • Philip Weiss:

    • [04-15]: The Israel lobby is fracturing as young Jews abandon Zionism: "A revolution is underway within the Jewish community as youth abandon Zionism following the Gaza genocide. While the community scrambles to respond, the Israel lobby is being fractured in the process."

    • [04-29]: The mainstream media is finally beginning to echo Americans' outrage at Israeli slaughter: "Over the past two years, Israel has lost the support of the American public and is now losing one of its last bulwarks in the political arena — prominent voices in the mainstream media."

    • [01-15]: J Street is the new AIPAC in the Democratic Party: "AIPAC is suddenly unwelcome among Democrats, but there's a new sheriff in town to enforce the pro-Israel orthodoxy. J Street aims to make liberals 'love Israel again,' but most Democrats are looking to distance themselves due to the Gaza genocide." Older piece I think I missed. I haven't followed Jeremy Ben-Ami or his organization, but they used to be a more decent (but still passionately Zionist) alternative to party-line advocates like AIPAC, so I think it's less likely that they've become "the right-wing Jewish establishment here" than that some of said establishment have moved in search of a less toxic organizational identity. This refers to a piece by Ben-Ami [2025-12-07]: How can I get my kids to love Israel? He's asking the wrong question. It should be: how can we get Israel to be worthy of our kids' love? (I would have preferred "respect" here.) Otherwise, you're just attacking your own kids, while ignoring the problem. Not that I'm sure anyone can (or should) try to change some other country. But the only hope I still have for Israelis to change is by realizing that their blind support in America is lost. Maybe that will trigger some self-examination. (After Shamir's obstinate refusal to even talk about peace alienated the first Bush admin, Israel's voters replaced him with the more flexible and diplomatic Rabin. I suspect that much of Netanyahu's appeal in Israel is due to his reputation as a Trump/Biden whisperer.) Related here:

  • Michael Arria:

    • [04-16]: In historic Senate vote, over 75% of Democrats vote to block arms sales to Israel: "In a historic vote, 75% of Senate Democrats backed an effort to block weapons to Israel. The resolutions failed, but the vote was the latest sign of Democrats' growing consensus against aid to Israel, as support for the country hits an all-time low." I suspect that most of them still want to help Israel, but have come to the conclusion that sending Israel more arms right now is just pouring gasoline on a fire, which is bound in the end to hurt Israel as much as anyone else.

    • [04-16]: Senate Democrats' vote to reject weapons for Israel reveals an out-of-touch party leadership: "Senate Democrats supported two measures to block weapons shipments to Israel in record fashion, but they were not joined by party leadership, who suddenly appear very out of touch with the party's base."

    • [04-23]: Unpacking the liberal Zionist sleight of hand on military aid to Israel: "While it may appear that pro-Israel politicians and organizations are finally embracing calls to end military aid to Israel, a closer look reveals they are simply trying to maintain the status quo."

    • [04-24]: How the corporate media helped fuel Israel's genocide in Gaza: "Mondoweiss speaks with media critic Adam Johnson about his new book detailing how cable shows, newspapers, and online news sites helped build support for the mass killing of Palestinians." Johnson's book is How to Sell a Genocide: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. Johnson is also interviewed here:

      • Current Affairs [04-24]: How the media sold a genocide. Long interview with Adam Johnson, with a lot of detail. Here's Johnson on The Atlantic:

        Well, they really are one of the most high-leverage, along with The New York Times, of what I call soft genocide denial for the tote bag set. Their interventions were consistent. They were genocidal. They were racist. They promoted the beheaded babies trope and never retracted it. They published Eliot Cohen's "these people are barbaric" kind of outright racist screeds. They published Hillary Clinton with her "Hamas must go" headline. They didn't have any pro-ceasefire arguments at all. They constantly scolded and demagogued against a ceasefire. They did genocide denial with respect to body counts. Graeme Wood's interventions were really disgusting — his infamous "it's permissible to kill children legally" line. Pretty much every intervention they had was genocidal, and to the extent to which they allowed some hand-wringing, there was no real call to action. No mention of child deaths in any meaningful, rigorous way. No mention of the dozens of journalists who were killed by Israel. No mention of Hind Rajab. Just an obsession with fake college antisemitism. Dozens of articles about Claudine Gay alone, again, without mentioning any other major moral crisis in the context of Gaza.

        Just bottom-rung Zionist propaganda by a former IDF prison guard. But it's all done in this kind of highbrow trappings. It has the aesthetic of serious reportage and the aesthetic of intellectual and academic seriousness. But again, if you read a lot of what I call the "move along, nothing to see here" genre, they would have these multiple rebuttals to claims about genocidal statements by Israelis. They're very unrigorous. I'm sure you've come across this because you're obviously very rigorous when you do this. But they'll sort of say, "Israel didn't mean to be genocidal when they said that." And you're like, "Well, why?" And they don't even say; they just kind of move on. Because it has the trappings and the aesthetics of rigor and think tanks and academic kind of credibility, but it's really just third-rate, sloppy, racist, dehumanizing arguments meant for upwardly mobile liberals who could have maybe been swayed towards the anti-genocide camp.

    • [04-30]: Biden official says Israel committed genocide in Gaza, but the US must keep supporting it: Wendy Sherman, former US Deputy Secretary of State.

  • Aaron Gell [04-21]: What went wrong in Israel? A genocide scholar examines 'what Zionism became': Omer Bartov, who has a new book on this, Israel: What Went Wrong?.

  • Alison Glick [04-26]: Latest polling paints dire picture for Israel in US politics: "Israel's plummeting popularity has been driven by the Gaza genocide and Iran war, but it has been building for decades. We are now finally seeing the political results." Picture shows a Pew poll of Democrats, showing that net favorability of Israel has dropped from -26 to -74 among liberals, +3 to -55 among "not liberal" Democrats (self-described moderates as well as conservatives).

  • Eric Cheyfitz:

    • [05-02]: Understanding the shared ideology behind settler colonialism in Native America and Palestine: "Both the United States and Israel were founded and exist on land taken during ongoing genocides. Settler colonialism drives these genocides, and both nations share an ideology that justifies the theft and rationalizes the killing." The question of whether (or how) the repopulating of America from 1500-1900 fits into the legal concept of genocide is rather academic, not that you can't find interesting insights from the exercise. My own interest in viewing Israel through the prism of settler colonialism has focused on the demographic tipping point: colonialism has only been successful if the immigrants outnumber the natives, usually by a large margin (US, Australia, Argentina); otherwise they have failed (South Africa, Vietnam, Algeria, Malaysia). There is a secondary factor having to do with the degree of segregation, which was extreme for English colonies, much more muddled for Spanish. Israel has always been marginal (the 1950-67 period, where Jewish Israelis held a 70% majority, had started to stabilize, but the conquests of the 1967 war brought a return of British-style colonial rule). Ethically, of course, settler colonialism has been a disaster, as with every attempt of one group to overpower another. Nor is the disaster limited to the victims, as such power eventually corrodes the humanity of the oppressors as well.

    • [03-31]: Zionism and the Iran War.

  • Amra Lee [05-09]: Israel's atrocities in Lebanon are normalizing war crimes. UN Humanitarian Chief Tom Fletcher says: "1,000 dead humanitarians in three years — when did that become normal?"

The Crutch of Anti-Semitism: By the way, I originally wrote this up to follow the author's article on Roger Marshall (R-KS), below, but it fits better here, along with a couple counterpoint articles that I had been sitting on. But I didn't feel like slotting it chronologically above, either.

  • Gary Blumenthal [04-27]: When did anti-semitism become acceptable again? "Will there ever be peace, mutual respect and an end to reciprocal hate?" Blumenthal calls his newsletter Heartland Cynic, but he can't see past one of the hoariest myths of our age: that any criticism of Israel is an attack on all Jews, a revival of two millenia of anti-semitism. Sure, he might take exception to my summary, as he is critical of "the Trump-Netanyahu war of choice," and he opens with photos of both Israeli Jews and Palestinians in mourning. But he insists that "more than half of American Jews say they've experienced anti-Semitism in just the past year" (something I've neither seen nor heard any evidence of, but most of the Jews I know are critical of Israel). He goes on to claim, "People of my faith have heard this crap, throughout recorded history, that Israelis and Jews are aggressors, oppressors, and outsiders." Just because some statements are crap doesn't mean they all are. Let's skip over all of recorded history, and just focus on the last 50-100 years.

    Before 1947, there were Jews, self-consciously divided between the Yishuv and the Diaspora. Before 1880, there were Jews in Palestine, but no Zionists. Diaspora Jews may have been outsiders, but there is no record of them as aggressors or oppressors. But Israelis are a different story. Every war from 1946 on was aggression by Israelis, and every time they gained power over Palestinians, they oppressed them. Some of the early wars (1947 and 1973 are the best cases) could be characterized as defensive, but in 1947 they seized territory beyond what the UN partition plan had offered them, and they drove some 700,000 Palestinians into permanent exile, while subjecting all of the remaining Palestinians to military rule and second-class status. Israel has continued such discrimination and oppression to the present, and since 2023 have flaunted their power more harshly than ever.

    I have considerable sympathy for people (many Jews, but also others) who originally developed such an emotional attachment for Israel back in the days when the holocaust revelations were fresh and the anti-colonial movement threatened (as happened in Algeria in 1962). But the world changed since then: anti-semitism faded in the west, in favor of tolerance, diversity, and human rights. White Afrikaners in South Africa gave up apartheid power, without being displaced. Since the 1990s, most Palestinian leaders based their aspirations on universal rights. But Israel has failed to meet them. Instead, Israel has doubled down on colonial control, drawing from British law and violence, while adding their own innovations.

    But few Americans seem to fully appreciate how extreme Israel had become, even well before November 2023. Since then, you really have to bury your head in the sand not to notice the depths of Israeli malevolence. You also have to completely ignore that Palestinians have long offered peace deals for coexistence, and that Israel could have peace on very favorable terms, but has chosen war and oppression instead. I shouldn't have to explain Jews in America and Europe shouldn't be blamed for what Israel does. But by not holding Israelis responsible for their crimes against humanity (most simply refused to acknowledge them), and not trying to use whatever influence they have to get Israel to change, their neglect can be seen as support, opening themselves up to blame — especially as Israel's supporters, more than anyone else, are the ones insisting that criticism of Israel is plain old antisemitism. It's almost like they want for Jews in the diaspora to pay for failing to heed the call to immigrate to Israel.

  • Moti Rieber [04-08]: Israel breaks people's brains: Post by a Kansas rabbi who when I first encounted him was as gung-ho on Israel as Blumenthal has ever been. I'm not sure where Blumenthal lives, but that he is commenting on Kansas politics suggests he may be a neighbor.

  • MJ Rosenberg [03-03]: Jewish organizations are setting Jews up for antisemitic attacks: "With the help of Brett Stephens, Bari Weiss, and other Dershowitz successors." Let me quote some of this:

    Because once you sell the country on the idea that Jews and Israel are interchangeable, once you insist "we are one" — you don't just stain every Jew with Israel's crimes. You also paint a target on our backs. And then, when the backlash grows, these same organizations act shocked, pass the hat, and use the fear to recruit and fundraise. Oh how they fundraise!

    I think they like seeing antisemitism spike — not because they want Jews harmed, but because panic is their business model. Fear is their fuel. And the grotesque irony is that they help manufacture the very conditions they later monetize. . . .

    So let me be clear, keep us out of it. We are not "one" with you. We are not "one" with Israel. You don't get to launder state violence through my identity, and you don't get to draft my family into your propaganda let alone turn American Jews into human shields for Israel's war crimes.

    You are not the solution to antisemitism. You are the problem.

Ukraine, Other Hot Spots, and World Politics:

  • Wenjing Wang [03-26]: On energy, China can sit this crisis out. "'Green energy' here isn't a slogan or abstract aspiration. It's economical and geopolitical survival."

  • Harrison Stetler [04-20]: The honeymoon is over between Trump and Europe's Far Right: "Viewing an alliance with Trumpist America as a liability." JD Vance stumping for Orbán didn't save him. Elsewhere, reports are skeptical. But it's never made much sense to me that rabid nationalists should band together, because their nations are by definition not just separate but in conflict with each other. I suppose that could change if they wanted to get serious about their flagship issue: blocking immigration. The only real way reduce migration is to join with other countries to counter the driving forces: war, economic dislocation, and climate change. But the idea of international (or any other kind of) cooperation is inimical to the right, while their instincts of chauvinism and repression are fundamental.

  • Elfadil Ibrahim [04-25]: UAE's dollar swap threats show how brittle these US alliances can be: "The Emirates don't need the money but they are laying down a market: if we take fire because of Washington, we want something in return."

  • Karthik Sankaran [04-28]: UAE leaves OPEC: what it means for the US, oil markets & Saudi: "The Iran war is certainly exposing a lot of long festering wounds, with this rupture certainly stunning Wall Street today." Chart here suggests that UAE can afford to sell oil much cheaper than Saudi Arabia can (breakeven at $49/barrel vs. $90; that has less to do with production costs, which do vary between oil producers, than with other government expenses funded by oil).

    [PS: Yanis Varoufakis commented: "So what that the UAE is leaving when it cannot send a single barrel of oil through the Hormuz Strait!"

  • Pavel Devyatkin [04-10]: Japan's new long-range missiles put US-China on collision course: "Ahead of the Trump-Xi summit, Tokyo is making moves that could stoke tensions between the two powers." Japan's constitutional embrace of pacifism should have been a model for the world, but the US started pushing for Japan to rearm in the 1950s, and now the war lobbyists seem to have a breakthrough. There's even a note her that Japan's Prime Minister "Takaichi also signaled a willingness to abandon Japan's 1967 pledge not to produce, possess or host nuclear weapons." Takaichi also "said that a Chinese blockade of Taiwan could lead to a Japanese military intervention."

  • Umud Shokri [05-09]: Can China use its huge economy to break US sanctions? In 2021, China issued something called "Rules on Counteracting Unjustified Extraterritorial Application of Foreign Legislation and Other Measures" ("China's Blocking Rules"):

    The order bars the recognition, enforcement, or compliance inside China with U.S. sanctions imposed on five Chinese refineries accused of buying Iranian crude: Hengli Petrochemical (Dalian) Refinery, Shandong Jincheng Petrochemical Group, Hebei Xinhai Chemical Group, Shouguang Luqing Petrochemical, and Shandong Shengxing Chemical.

    This was not just another diplomatic complaint from Beijing about U.S. "long-arm jurisdiction." It was the first formal use of China's Blocking Rules and marked a sharper legal response to Washington's secondary sanctions. By invoking the measure, Beijing signaled that it is prepared to defend its energy trade with Iran not only through rhetoric, but through domestic law, court remedies, and regulatory pressure. . . .

    In the long run, China's legal shield against U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil may be remembered less as a single dispute over five refineries and more as an early sign of a multipolar sanctions order, one in which economic coercion is increasingly met by legal counter-coercion. The age of sanctions was already messy. Now it is becoming institutionalized on both sides, because apparently global governance needed more paperwork and fewer exits.

    While South Africa showed that widespread adoption of sanctions can sometimes persuade a government to change course and redress internal injustices, the US sanctions regime has more often been used simply for power projection, and often just for spite (which has usually been the case viz. Iran). Two things Americans don't seem to understand here are: sanctions can only have widespread support to advance political goals rooted in common morality — such as opposition to South African apartheid, or to Russia's war against Ukraine; and that sanctions need to be reversible once the underlying problem is resolved. The attraction of sanctions is that they're one way to express one's feeling and to do something potentially effective without resorting to armed violence — which attacks sovereignty, hardens resolve to resist, can escalate, and produces collateral damage, effectively abandoning one's claim to moral high ground. Of course, the targets of sanctions may regard them as "acts of war," but their credibility is something for others to judge. Also, one should be sensitive to the likelihood that the burden of sanctions will largely fall on people not responsible for the offense. There are ways around this, like allowing "humanitarian" relief supplies to get through, but they are rarely good ones.

    I should note here that the one case where sanctions were most clearly justified has been Israel. Indeed, had the BDS movement been more successful, it's likely that the 2023 Gaza revolt and Israel's genocidal response, including spreading war to Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran, could have been avoided. But the world's sanctioner-in-chief, the US, actively sided with Israel in resisting BDS, and as such bears substantial responsibility for Israel's atrocities. I'll also note that sanctions against Russia preceded the Ukraine invasion, with two major effects: they led Putin to view the US as an aggressive foe, and they pushed Russia to figure out ways to work around them, making them less effective. Promiscuous use of sanctions can cause more problems than they solve. By the way, one of those problems is that ineffective sanctions, especially combined with diplomatic sloth, ultimately weaken America's standing in the world. (Cuba and North Korea have resisted US sanctions for 65-75 years, making the US look cruel, vindictive, and ineffective.)

    China is the one country that seems to be able to face down American sanctions directly. Tariffs are a prime example: Trump has tried to use them to express American power and to punish other nations he dislikes, and with China he has mostly had to back down — not least because China is proving they too can play this sanctions game. But while other countries, even Russia and Iran, may chafe when faced with American bullying, China has the wherewithal to create a viable alternative to America's global power. China has opened doors with trade, and with relatively generous direct foreign investment. They are willing to work with everyone, and show no interest in the internal politics of other countries (except perhaps Taiwan, which for them remains a sore point). And they're using the UN, while building alternative organizations to America's increasingly politicized ones. As a strategy, it reminds me of what the US did viz. European imperialism: the Open Door strategy meant to undermine colonial exploitation, the Good Neighbor Policy. The US generated enormous good will around the world up to 1945, after which they squandered it on rabid anti-communism, but even as they sought global hegemony, they at least allowed more autonomy than the UK and their ilk did. As Trump drives the US into his peculiar combo of autarky and global terror, China will increasingly be seen as a way out. Of course, that will depend on them not being as stupid as the American order (not just Trump but Biden and Obama and Bush and Clinton) has been.

    • Robert Wright [05-08]: China bites back: Some more details here, including a story about a China-subsidized Singapore-based AI company, Manus, that Meta tried to buy, but China vetoed.

  • Ziyad Motala [05-09]: Fatal friendships: Gulf monarchies and the price of American patronage: "For decades, Gulf rulers mistook access to America for influence, but now, with the Iran war, they finally see they are viewed as disposable on the front lines of the US empire."

  • Evan Robins [05-11]: The UK's far right is on the march — thanks to Keir Starmer: "How the Labour Party's catastrophic prime minister paved the way for fascists to dominate British politics."

  • Dan Sabbagh [05-11]: Why is Putin now talking about the war in Ukraine 'coming to an end'? "Drone strikes, mounting casualties and a distracted US president means a slow-motion victory is in doubt." It sounds like the stalemate has only gotten staler.

Trump's Wars: And the Department Thereof, and its associated graft and malice. I set this section up to deal with Trump's threats, but we're obviously beyond that now, so see the sections on Iran and Cuba for more on on those specific fronts.

Trump vs. Law: The latest from the Courts, and sundry other matters involving the so-called Department of Justice, although the Supreme Court decision on gerrymandering has been moved elsewhere, along with its political fallout.

  • Ian Millhiser:

  • Nia Prater [04-23]: ICE will reportedly curb some of its most aggressive tactics.

  • Elie Honig:

    • [04-24]: Trump seems to be planning ahead for losing the Senate.

    • [05-08]: Why the Jim Comey prosecution is about to fall apart (again): While the charges are ridiculous, and should be laughed out of court the moment they appear, I do appreciate this paragraph:

      Let's stipulate up front: Comey is a legendary blowhard, an inveterate fibber, and a pretentious prig whose guiding principle is that he alone has access to some mystical code of morality that conveniently justifies his outrageous conduct over the past decade. The former FBI director's arrogant defiance of core DOJ policy likely swung the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump and earned excoriation from the DOJ's nonpartisan inspector general and a bipartisan procession of former AGs. Comey then launched a sneak attack on the incoming Trump administration and later chortled publicly about how he broke ordinary FBI protocol in the process. Comey leaked to paint himself as a hero to undermine Clinton (in 2016) and to undermine Trump (in 2017). Afterward he claimed that even though he arranged for sensitive FBI information to be released through a personal friend to the media, it somehow wasn't a leak. Nobody likes the guy, and everyone has got their reasons.

  • Cameron Peters [04-28]: James Comey gets indicted (again): "Trump's revenge ploys are getting kookier." How kooky? "prosecutors allege that a 2025 social media post Comey made, showing seashells arranged to read '86 47,' was a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, Donald Trump."

  • Kelli Wessinger/Noel King [04-29]: This is what it takes to become Trump's attorney general: "Who is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Donald Trump's personal lawyer?"

  • Rachel Rebouché [05-02]: The Fifth Circuit seeks to unilaterally reimpose an outdated abortion pill protocol: "What comes next is shifting terrain. The drug manufacturer has asked the Supreme Court to intervene, but the Food and Drug Administration could also step in."

  • Andrew Duehren/Alan Feuer [05-12]: Justice Dept. officials consider settling Trump suit against IRS: "One of the settlement terms under review is for the IRS to drop any audits of the president, his family members and businesses." The ostensible reason for the suit is that someone at IRS leaked some of Trump's tax returns (which, once upon a time, he had promised to release himself, as has been customary for all other presidential candidates, at least in recent years). As a tweet linking to this put it: "This would constitute one of the most brazen, most appalling acts of corruption in US history." For more on this:

Trump's Administration: Trump can't remake America in his own image (i.e., destroy the country, its culture and civilization) just by himself. He needs help, and having largely purged the government of civil servants and replaced them with his own minions, this is what they are doing (whether he's paying attention or not):

  • Center for American Progress [2025-10-23]: The Trump Administration is erasing American history told by public lands and waters: "Through a series of executive orders targeting place names, signage on, and access to public lands and waters, the Trump administration is erasing important chapters of American history." I should follow this website more closely. For instance:

  • Whitney Curry Wimbish [04-16]: GOP food stamp work requirements hit just as jobs dry up: "Millions of people will lose food stamps, according to early estimates."

  • Caitlin Dewey [04-22]: Another Trump official exits in scandal: "Lori Chavez-DeRemer's resignation underscores a familiar pattern in the Trump administration." She was Secretary of Labor.

  • Merrill Goozner [04-22]: RFK Jr. and the perils of peptides: "The Health and Human Services Secretary's push to deregulate unapproved peptides will inevitably lead to worse health outcomes.

  • Pratik Pawar [04-29]: What really happened after Trump slashed HIV funding: "The official numbers are finally here." Well, we're not all dead yet, but they're working on it.

  • Adam Federman [04-30]: Trump bulldozed a 1,000-year-old archaeological site to make room for a second border wall.

  • Gregg Gonsalves [05-01]: The rise of the Vichy scientists: "Too many scientists are willing to collaborate with Trumpism in the mistaken assumption that obedience will save their own necks." Again with the Nazi analogies, because once again they seem to be the only historical precedents that come close to the gravity of the current situation. Focuses on anti-vaxxers currently in vogue at NHS. Refers to a piece on similar opportunism in the law schools:

    • Steve Vladeck [01-29]: Legal scholarship and the dual state: "A few thoughts on the responsibilities of legal academics in a time of increasing governmental lawlessness." While I've mostly been following Ian Millhiser at Vox, Vladeck also has a newsletter, One First, "aiming to make the Supreme Court's rulings, procedures, and history more accessible to all." It looks to be worth following.

  • Jack Healy [05-04]: Home on the range no more: Trump wants bison gone: "The Trump administration is evicting bison herds from federal grasslands, in Montana, siding with ranchers and Republican leaders over environmentalists and tribal leaders."

  • ProPublica [05-04]: 8 things you should know about Trump's effort to "take over" the midterm elections: "Trump is gutting federal agencies and installing allies who supported his claim that the 2020 vote was stolen."

  • Nia Prater [05-08]: ABC takes the fight to Trump administration over FCC's View probe.

  • Timothy Noah [05-08]: It's no longer safe for civil servants to be good at their job: "If you're an effective federal worker, don't let Trump find out — you might not be one for much longer." This remind me that I had never heard the word kakistocracy before Trump (definition: "government by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people"), although it evidently was used as far back as 1644 (in reference to Roman Emperor Nero, who famously "fiddled while Rome burned"). Most of the examples given strike me as misapplied, suggesting it's already turned into a generic but meaningless slur, but the Trump administration is chock full of such people, not just incompetent themselves but intent on exporting their incompetence to everyone around.

  • John Feffer [05-08]: Trump's ostrich policy on climate change: "The president has downgraded the threat of climate change to the point of non-existence. Like Stalin, Trump now stands alone."

    The administration's campaign started with the scrubbing of all references to climate change from federal websites. It has encouraged more widespread self-censorship: anyone who wants to keep their federal job or apply for a federal grant has tactically removed anything Green-related from their descriptions and applications. This animus toward anything climate-related has also shaped many of the administration's latest budget cuts: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) budget halved, $1.6 billion cut from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the $4 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program eliminated, $449 million in renewable energy funding slashed. . . .

    The administration's approach can also be seen in the carrot side of the equation. It has approved pipelines like the recent Bridger Pipeline Extension, green-lighted deep-water oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil companies, and tried to prop up the dying coal industry. The administration has paid out $2 billion to companies to cancel their wind power projects and invest instead in fossil fuels. Deregulation and lack of enforcement — of pollution standards, of safety and health requirements, of environmental permitting — have been huge gifts to companies spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

  • Mark Olalde [05-10]: Trump exempted some of the biggest polluters from air quality rules. All it took was an email: "Admin set up an EPA address where companies could get compliance pause simply by sending an email."

Donald Trump and His Cult: While his administration implements malign policies crafted by lobbyists and right-wing think tanks, the news is so dominated by his cult of personality that it seems like a full-time job just to resist the rising tide of vanity and stupidity.

  • Margaret Hartmann: She also handles the British royal family beat, which I have even less interest in than I do Melania (or her idiot husband).

    • [04-22]: Trump hiding ballroom donors for secret, non-corrupt reasons: Or so they say. While the donations look like bribes in the short term, further out they're just likely to be embarrassing.

    • [04-25]: Is Melania Trump a US citizen? Her immigration story, explained.

    • [04-30]: Amazon mulls Apprentice reboot absolutely no one needs: "Trump is making money from reruns, Don Jr. doesn't need a hosting gig, and Amazon has already done plenty of groveling. So who is this for?"

    • [05-01]: Don Jr. has incredible excuse for putting wedding on hold: "While Bettina Anderson just had her bridal shower, the latest rumor is that the couple won't wed until the Iran war is over."

    • [05-05]: Surprise! You're paying $1 billion for Trump's ballroom: "The White House insisted the project wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime. A new GOP bill includes $1 billion in public funding for ballroom 'upgrades.'"

    • [05-07]: Gold 22-foot Trump statue definitely isn't a false idol. Thus spake Pastor Mark Burns, before anyone even asked.

      It says a lot about our current president that in response to the news that a giant gold statue of Donald Trump was dedicated this week, you have to ask, "Which one?" . . .

      Today, we're focusing on a statue dubbed Don Colossus, which now sits outside the Trump National Doral Miami golf course. The statue, which depicts Trump with his fist raised, was commissioned by the $PATRIOT cryptocurrency group shortly after the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt. Artist Alan Cottrill finished it before Trump's second inauguration, as the New York Times reported earlier this year. But then Don Colossus was held hostage in a payment dispute between Cottrill and the crypto bros. The disagreement was resolved this spring when an anonymous donor stepped in and paid the artist the remainder of what he said he was owed.

      So in late April, the 15-foot statue was placed atop a seven-foot pedestal on the grounds of Trump's Miami golf course. And on Wednesday, the statue was formally unveiled at a dedication ceremony presided over by Pastor Mark Burns, a friend of the president who helped organize the project.

      The "not a gold calf" line came from Burns, lest someone mistake "gathering to praise a giant golden status [as] textbook idolatry."

  • Stephen F Eisenman [04-24]: How Fascism works now: A note about Trump as the Healing Christ: "By attending to obvious outrages — the supposed blasphemy of an image of Trump as Healing Christ — the public is more likely to overlook bigger, but less promoted ones, like weakened pollution standards, cuts to disease research, and of course, war. But there's another, equally important communication strategy at work, and it's hiding in plain sight: insipidness or kitsch. That's the language of fascism now."

  • Andrew O'Hehir [05-03]: An arch bigger than the Arc de Triomphe? Hitler wanted that too: "Tyrants and dictators often dream of building gigantic monuments to themselves."

  • Hafiz Rashid [05-11]: Trump turns White House UFC cage match into massive cash grab: Of course. You hear about TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), but there's also a TBS (Trump Bewilderment Syndrome): the inability lots of us have to see any attraction whatsoever in most of the things Trump claims to value. I've never once, even out of morbid curiosity, been tempted to watch The Apprentice. Similarly, UFC is something I lack even the slightest interest in ever attending or viewing. Very little that he does or says has any interest whatsoever — aside from the many cases that are purely repulsive, but they only matter because for some reason he is president. TDS is often cited by his supporters as way to ignore the possibility that anyone might have cause for taking exception to him. TBS is less useful to them, because it is clearly subjective.

Other Republicans:

  • Gary Blumenthal [03-02]: Is Roger Marshall the worst US Senator in Kansas history? If you want an argument, I'd note that Sam Brownback didn't even get a mention here. I'll also note that I never forgave Bob Dole for his dirty campaigns against Bill Roy, who came within a hair of becoming the best US Senator in Kansas history. But Marshall is pretty bad, and not just for his extraordinary suck up to Donald Trump. Blumental misses the most glaring example: during Covid, while he was still a US Rep running in the Senate primary, as a MD he prescribed Ivermectin for his whole family. Certainly proved he's not the sort to let science or professionalism get in the way of political expediency. By the way, I looked some more at Blumenthal's blog, and responded at some length here to a piece he wrote on Israel.

  • Naomi Bethune [04-02]: The far-right cash machine: "There's money in bigotry, and specialized crowdfunding platforms are where to get it."

  • Ed Kilgore:

    • [04-23]: Trump's average job approval hits new second-term low: As far as the mid-terms are concerned, the interesting numbers are the "strongly disapprove" (47.5%) and "strongly approve" (22.8%), as mid-term voter turnout always slumps, which makes strongly-held opinions loom even larger.

    • [04-23]: Why the GOP's new midterms strategy won't work: The "new" strategy is actually just the old one: to bash the Democrats, blaming them for everything that's gone wrong under Trump. This is largely because they've convinced themselves that most Americans hate Democrats as much as they do, and for the same reasons (you know, that they are radical communists who will take your guns away, promote abortion and atheism, and convince your children that they'd be happier as another sex). That's never been remotely true, but somehow Democrats manage to look guilty by denying such nonsense. This reminds me of the advice given to lawyers when they neither have facts nor law on their side: pound the table. Given how thin Trump's margins have been, and how disillusioned many people have become since "Trump Will Fix It!" proved a hollow promise, it shouldn't be hard for Democrats to tip the balance. Still, until Democrats show some actual skill at campaigning, we should all be nervous.

    • [04-30]: DHS shutdown finally ends with an exhausted whimper: After 75 days, Republicans decided to get what they wanted through some kind of future "budget reconciliation" which they could pass on a straight party line vote.

    • [05-05]: Republicans' second 'Big Bill' isn't beautiful at all.

    • [05-06]: Trump's polling is getting into George W Bush territory: "Disapproval of his performance as president is now pervasive across nearly every issue, and he's particularly unpopular with independents."

    • [05-08]: Trump's Big Ballroom could tank GOP's 'skinny' ICE bill: "After the WHCD shooting, it seemed like a good idea to market Trump's ballroom as a security imperative. Now it's a politically dangerous boondoggle."

    • [05-08]: Trump's affordability agenda barely exists anymore. Did he ever have one?

  • Sarah Jones [05-07]: JD Vance and the rise of the Catholic right: I have zero interest in reading Vance's Communion, but my hunch is that his conversion was a calculation based on the newfound prominence of Catholics on the right (including a majority of the Supreme Court). Sam Brownback is an earlier example. I wondered about his lord and master Peter Thiel, and was informed that he was raised evangelical Christian, with "somewhat heterodox" views, but also "he is known for his deep interest in Catholic theology and in 2026 was hosting lectures on the Antichrist near the Vatican."

Democrats:

  • Ross Barkan [04-23]: Chuck Schumer used to be popular. Now he's stuck. Quotes the D-NY Senator as saying (at an AIPAC conference): "We say it's our land — the Torah says it, but they [Palestinians] don't believe in the Torah. That's the reason there is not peace. They invent other reasons, but they do not believe in a Jewish state, and that is why we in America must stand strong with Israel through thick and thin." Because we Americans, with our separation of church and state, and constitutional guarantees of equal treatment under the law for all, belived that a foreign country that mocks our values should be able to quote a line from the Torah and use it to justify killing, torturing, and otherwise discriminating against and harming a large segment of the people who live there?

  • Eric Levitz [04-27]: Democrats' latest critique of Walmart is wrong — and dangerous: "No, Medicaid is not 'corporate welfare.'" Filed here because the author is calling out Democrats explicitly, although the general complaint is applicable to Republicans as well, who differ mostly in omitting the word "corporate" before attacking "welfare."

  • Zack Beauchamp [04-29]: This billionaire could be California's next governor — and he wants to arrest Stephen Miller: "Tom Steyer talks to Vox about using state power to fight the Trump administration." It takes a lot of ego to run for president, and that's something billionaires have in spades. When Steyer ran for president in 2016, he had the ego (and the money), but he didn't have a campaign that actually appealed to anyone. He seems to have found one now, on the left, which as I've long said is where the answers come from. He's picked up an endorsement from the Bernie Sanders-founded group Our Revolution. Reminds me that Ralph Nader wrote a novel back in 2009 called "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!". JB Pritzker, in Illinois, is another example. (Mike Bloomberg is not.) Sometimes you have to take what you can get. Or as Steyer puts it several times here, that's the world we live in.

  • Eoin Higgins [05-01]: Graham Platner handed centrist Dems a bruising defeat in Maine: "After throwing their support behind Gov. Janet Mills, party leaders are left doing an about-face on the insurgent candidate."

  • MJ Rosenberg [05-01]: Death to end stage capitalism: Time for Dems to be the Social Democratic Party: 20 points about capitalism. I could use this as scaffolding for commentary, grouping some things, discarding (or revamping) others. I still see a place for capitalism going forward. It's just not the only place, and it's one that becomes progressively unimportant as we get on to better things.

The Economy (and Economists): Also see Dean Baker.

Technology (Including AI):

  • Susannah Glickman/Amba Kak/Sarah Myers West [04-08]: The great AI grift: "Tech leaders want you to believe that AI is the key to a new golden age. The reality looks more like a bold, government-backed heist."

  • Ryan Cooper [04-23]: Meta is a monopoly even if TikTok can compete: "It is foolish to suggest that competition anywhere proves that a company isn't a monopoly." Still, he doesn't make the case as clearly as it should be. Any company that owns a patent (or other exclusive intellectual property) has a monopoly right, at least to the extent that it is able to collect rents beyond what competition allows. Pharmaceutical companies don't compete with each other so much as they exercise and exploit monopolies over individual drugs. HP has a monopoly selling ink for the printers it manufactured. Perhaps at some point words like "monopoly" and "antitrust" should be recognized as antiquated, in that they are really just extreme forms of much broader (and in some cases subtler) behavior. Unfortunately, our "antitrust" laws limiting anti-competitive behavior were mostly passed in the 1880s, leaving us playing catch up with 140 years of rent-seeking innovation (not that the most common and effective means, bribing politicians and officials, is a new development). One monopolistic innovation that has become increasingly prevalent is network effects, which even more than IP is the source of Meta's monopolistic power.

  • Timothy Noah [04-23]: How the tech world turned evil: "Once upon a time, they were counterculture idealists bringing power to the people. Today they're greedy monopolists who'd sooner destroy our democracy than be reined in by government in any way — and they have to be stopped." This is stuff I've been reading a lot of recently, including notes from recent books by Corey Doctorow and Tim Wu. For what it's worth, I think the shift toward evil has more to do with money than tech. And the shift to Trump is due to their shared perception that nothing else matters.

  • John Herrman [04-25]: The downgrading of the American tech worker: "Meta is laying off more stuff — and monitoring the rest to train AI."

  • Jasmine Sun [04-30]: Silicon Valley is bracing for a permanent underclass: Seems like an important article (I haven't delved very deeply into it yet), but one thought I have is that industry estimates of the economic effect of AI are likely to be very tailored not to what the tech can or cannot do, or what the public does or does not want, but to the opportunities to jack up their stock prices, which right now is the main thing AI has going for itself. Since most of the target customers are looking to save money on labor, that's a major angle. What happens to people out of jobs isn't going to impact their bottom line, at least directly, so can be ignored. That they might all wind up in a permanent underclass is, well, at first approximation also not their problem. Granted, those people may eventually be driven to revolt, but the leading wave of AI tools are being designed to surveil and control dissidents, and to lock them out of political channels and otherwise shut them up. As for the problem of who do you steal from when all the wealth is held by the super-rich, AI should help there, too, creating a cycle of cannibalism as sport.

  • Astra Taylor/Saul Levin [05-08]: The fight against AI datacenters isn't just about tech — it's about democracy: "Claims of nimbyism are a misunderstanding: the movement is about whether regular people have a say in fundamental decisions." I don't really get the whole data center issue, but I do understand that new tech can be good and/or bad, and leaving it to the big companies drives it toward bad, so slowing them down makes sense. But the answer probably has more to do with the companies than with their tools.

  • David Futrelle [05-11]: How prediction markets are taking control of everything: "We have seen the future, and it is Polymarket and Kalshi processing insider bets on mayhem, chaos — and celebrity-wedding guest lists." I grew up with an intense hatred of gambling. (I got it from my mother, but it's probably the only one of her prejudices I kept.) I don't want to criminalize it, because I don't like banning things just because they're bad for you. But I also don't think we should go around advertising and promoting it, because it's not only bad for individuals, it warps society, especially our apprecation of the value of work. While Republicans have pretty much kept with their old prohibitionist impulses, the one exception is gambling, which they have embraced with gusto. They seem to get off on folks playing with their money, and not just because that makes it easy to separate it from them. But also because they promote an ethic of pure gain for no work, a dream which beats even fraud. Stripped of all the other bullshit (and there's a fair amount of that here), prediction markets are just gambling, but elevated to a massive scale, tied to real world events that insiders can manipulate at will.

  • Sam McAfee: I was forwarded a PDF by mutual friends, and started to quote it before I tracked it down.

    • [03-23]: The reality behind the singularity: I'm not especially up on this discussion, but found this interesting. He attributes the "singularity" concept to Ray Kurzweil (The Singlarity Is Near, 2005), then notes:

      What this framework inherits, without much examination, is a fundamentally Cartesian view of mind. Cognition, in this model, is computation. The brain is hardware. Intelligence is a function that runs on it, and can in principle run just as well, or better, on different hardware entirely. The substrate, in other words, does not matter.

      This is a position that several decades of neuroscience research have given us good reasons to question.

      Antonio Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis, developed across a series of influential works including Descartes' Error (1994), demonstrated through careful clinical study that emotional processing is not incidental to rational decision-making but constitutive of it. Patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the region most associated with emotional integration, did not become more rational in the absence of emotional interference. They became incapable of making decisions at all. The implication is significant: what we commonly describe as reason is not separable from the affective systems that the singularity framework is inclined to treat as noise.

      Lisa Feldman Barrett's more recent work in How Emotions Are Made (2017) extends this argument further, presenting evidence that emotion and cognition are not merely intertwined but that the distinction itself may be a useful fiction. The brain, in Barrett's account, is a predictive organ constantly modeling the body's internal state and its relationship to the external environment. Feeling and thinking are different descriptions of the same underlying process.

      The implications for the singularity argument are not trivial. If intelligence in any robust sense requires embodiment, a body whose states are continuously integrated into cognition, then the prospect of disembodied computational intelligence reaching or exceeding human cognitive capacity is not simply technically difficult. It may be the wrong description of what intelligence is.

      The broader framework known as 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) further develops this position across a range of disciplines, arguing that cognition emerges from the dynamic interaction between organism, body, and environment rather than from computation occurring within a bounded system. On this account, the question of whether a machine could be more intelligent than a human is a bit like asking whether a map could be a better traveler than a person. The category does not transfer cleanly.

      And then there is the social dimension, which the singularity framework tends to underweight to a degree that borders on negligence. Human cognitive capacity is not simply individual. It is distributed across relationships, institutions, cultural practices, and accumulated knowledge that has been refined across tens of thousands of years of collective life. The organizational intelligence that allows human societies to coordinate at scale, to build and maintain institutions, to sustain trust across generations. This is not separable from the embodied, emotionally regulated, socially embedded creatures who produce it.

      The latter point risks some fuzziness, and I suspect will prove hard to pin down. It's much easier to train AI to quantitatively approximate intelligence than qualitatively, not just because we have a pretty good idea of the former but not the latter, but also because quantities are by definition measurable, whereas qualities are not.

    • [2025-12-27]: The risk of AI writing is leadership without judgment: This earlier piece, which appeared as the title in the PDF I was sent, is styled as management advice. Indeed, the most prominent word is "leadership," which means that the sales pitch starts with a bit of flattery. McAfee turns out to be a "technology and product leader, author and coach" for a management consulting company called Humanize (or maybe that's their product and/or service? he is one of 14 members of their "personal board of advisors," where "coach," "strategist," "expert," "facilitator," and "storyteller" are the most common occupations). Some interesting things here, but I'm often unsure whether meant to solve problems or just inadvertently expose them. For example:

      Generative AI doesn't just help the CEO write faster. It changes when the CEO stops thinking. It offers coherence early, before ambiguity has done its work. It makes conclusions feel available before judgment has fully formed. When a medium removes friction from thinking, leaders don't just move faster — they skip the moments where responsibility normally takes shape.

      Tools don't merely speed work up. They define what counts as work in the first place.

      Human writing started to sound like this long ago — safe, optimized, detached from real stakes.

      AI doesn't create this problem. It removes the last excuses for ignoring it.

      This led into a section called "We Were Already Drowning in Bad Writing."

Regular Columnists

Sometimes an interesting columnist writes often enough that it makes sense to collect their work in one place, rather than scatter it about.

Dean Baker:

  • [03-22]: $200 billion for Trump's Iran "Excursion" is real money: First thing I did when I saw this was flash on Everett Dirksen's quip — back from the 1960's, and nowhere in evidence here, so all I'm doing is showing my age — that "a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Baker offers other examples of much smaller things one could spend money on, but aside from "Minnesota fraud" the more significant difference is that they're things that generate positive value. Most of them will even result in long-term positive paybacks (although child care and health care may seem nebulous to accountants). The Iran War will only result in negative paybacks, which is to say the massive expenditure now is only a down payment on future inevitable and irrecoverable costs. Even when people talk about burning or blowing up cash, they're showing the limits of their imagination. Reality is far worse.

  • [04-14]: Inflation is a process: Notes the return of "anti-inflation hawks" arguing for "a structural break" causing persistent post-pandemic inflation. Baker argue for an alternative "bad breaks" theory, where the baddest of breaks was Trump becoming president, feeding price rises with tariffs and war (and I would add lax constraints against anti-competitive behavior, including price gouging). By "process" he means that inflation is something that takes time to develop, as higher prices raise costs which get fed back into even higher prices (he cites the "wage-price spiral" of the 1970s). He doesn't go much into what the current process is (after all, he's arguing against any such thing), but what I think is that the supply disruptions by and after the pandemic kicked off a general psychology where businesses discovered they could get away with price gouging (in common discourse described as "inflation") and took advantage of decades of anti-competitive consolidation. The wars and tariff shenanigans just added to the pile of excuses, but another big motivation (for business) was that under Biden workers got a bit of real income gains, and businesses were desperate to claw that back.

  • [04-15]: Are the Republican killing you? "Americans in Republican-led states live significantly shorter lives than those in Democratic states, highlighting major health disparities." The difference in life expectancy is 8 years longer in Hawaii than in West Virginia. "Even moving away a few notches from the extremes, a person living in California can expect to live 5.5 years longer than a person living in Tennessee." Only one of the top ten states is nominally Republican (Utah), while only one of the bottom ten leans Democratic (New Mexico). Baker has fun with his cart by adding some foreign countries, showing not only that Japan and South Korea are way ahead of Hawaii (the top US state), but so are Albania and Costa Rica. Cuba scores higher than Idaho (12 in US), Iran (pre-war) better than Florida (19), Mexico better than Indiana (40), and even Russia beats out Kentucky (49, ahead of India, which also beats Mississippi and West Virginia).

  • [04-17]: The stock market is not your friend: "Stock market gains driven by higher profit shares benefit a minority of investors, while most workers would be better off with higher wages instead." Sadly, many people regard the stock market as measuring the health of the economy, whereas a big part of what it really measures is how much business owners are at screwing everyone else over. (It also factors in real growth, so it's not simply wrong. And it also, more sensitively, not just measures but exaggerates investor panic, which has made it an easy mark for Trump's war machinations.) I suspect much of its allure is that it is reported daily, whereas most other economic measures come out monthly, quarterly, or annually. But that it mostly serves to inflate the importance of the investing class is also part of why corporate media pushes it so hard. (And why it matters to Trump.)

    In principle, the stock market reflects expectations of future after-tax corporate profits. Expected profits can rise because the economy is expected to grow more rapidly, and corporations will get their share as profits rise along with the economy. But that has not been the case over the last quarter-century.

    The after-tax profit share of national income has nearly doubled, going from an average of 6.6 percent in the 1990s to 12.5 percent in the last quarter of 2025. This explains most of the soaring stock market over this period, although the ratio of stock prices to corporate earnings is also near a record high, leading many of us to argue that we have a stock bubble.

    It is hard to see why the bulk of the population, who own little or no stock, should be celebrating the redistribution from wages to profits that provides most of the basis for the run-up in stock prices in the last quarter-century.

    Two further notes:

    There is one other point worth noting in this respect. As I said, the price-to-earnings ratios in the stock market are near record highs. That is also not something most of us have cause to celebrate.

    The run-up in house prices has far exceeded the run-up in rents over the last decade. This is likely at least in part attributable to people with big gains in the stock market bidding up house prices. Many of the big winners in the market have two or three homes.

    The common denominator here is that because rich people have more money than they can productively invest (let alone spend), they're driving up asset prices, possibly to bubble levels. In the case of house prices, this can have a major impact on affordability.

  • [04-18]: A $600 billion increase for the military is a ton of money: "Trump's massive military budget proposal highlights how enormous spending increases often go underexamined without meaningful context." Again, he's comparing this waste to other more sensible possible expenditures. Even I find the figure so mind-boggling I'm not sure where to start. The $900 billion the old Department of Defense spent each year was almost totally wasted. Sure, it produced a jobs program for contractors and indolent youth, and provided some degree of a socialist safety net for the soldiers (and veterans, who had their own budget, as did the nukes and the supplementals for unplanned wars). But it subtracted from the productive economy, and shipped a lot of that money abroad, so jobs and education for Americans could have been handled much more efficiently. Still, when you take an enterprise which is already pretty close to worthless, and throw 60% more money at it, what happens? You're going to hire more soldiers, but you're going to get somewhat less than 60% more: not that many people want to waste their lives "in service," so maybe you bump up the pay and perks and get 20-30% more people (probably less qualified and trained; the recent expansion of ICE hiring is worth studying). And you can buy more stuff, but again you have too much money chasing too little value, so you'll wind up paying more to get anything of value, and since value is so hard to evaluate in war, you'll probably wind up with a lot of no value at all. Some of the latter will be pure fraud. Much of it will be software, especially AI, where the gap between sales pitch and reality may turn out to be infinite. Of course, you could just buy a lot of bombs and bullets, but that's just going to build up pressure to use them. Given that management has already renamed Defense to the Department of War, the worst possible outcome seems destined.

  • [04-20]: We don't need billionaires, and we can structure the market so we don't have them: "A critique of claims that billionaires are essential to innovation, arguing that policy choices, not individuals, create extreme wealth." As Baker points out, there is no reason to think that "the innovations [billionaires] are associated with would not have taken place otherwise." (I'd add that many billionaires, including Trump, are responsible for no worthwhile innovations whatsoever.) But the bulk of the piece argues that "capitalism can be structured differently, with sections on:

    • Government-granted patent and copyright monopolies
    • Let the financial industry enjoy the free market: as opposed to repeatedly bailing them out
    • Whack private equity: The structure of bankruptcy laws is not intrinsic to capitalism
    • Make non-compete agreements unenforceable
    • Capitalism needs to be restructured to produce less inequality

    These are old themes for Baker (see his book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer), and much more can be written both about the problems and the solutions. I'd like to see bankruptcy laws changed so that companies can be restructured under employee ownership, which would preserve competition and jobs.

  • [04-21]: Trump hits a home run for the green transition: "Trump's war-driven energy shock may unintentionally hasten the global shift to clean energy while weakening US dominance." This is more like a Wrong Way Corrigan touchdown than a home run for anyone, but it does underscore how right Chinese leaders were when they shifted focus from coal in the 1980s-90s to wind and solar, and moved their fledgling automotive sector from gas to electric. Roughly up to 2000, the Chinese saw emulating the west as the definitive development strategy, but since then they've dared to find their own way, starting with avoiding the warmongering the US succumbed to after 2001.

  • [04-24]: Bad vibes and the Trump betrayal: "Consumer pessimism may stem less from economic fundamentals than from polarization and Trump supporters feeling betrayed by unmet promises." The partisan shift is certainly good for a few points swing, especially in the absence of sensible information. Trump's reliance on magical thinking may also have set unreasonable expectations, at least for the hordes of voters inclined to believe him. But isn't it also possible that the fundamentals measurements that Baker follows and touts don't seem to have a lot of relevance to most people's lives. The unemployment rate hits very hard on its edge, but until you get fired, it doesn't have a lot of impact. The felt impact of wage changes depends on how close it impacts you, at which point it seems to be more personal than macroeconomic. Rising prices have a broader and more immediate impact, so one might feel them without appreciating as much that your own wages have outpaced them. Then there are vibes that are measured very imperfectly, like precarity and enshittification.

  • [04-25]: Trump's ignorance could kill millions: "Trump's apparent disregard for the predictable consequences of striking Iran could drive energy shocks, food crises, and widespread suffering that put millions at risk worldwide."

  • [05-01]: Five bit takeaways from the first quartet GDP report: "The Q1 GDP report shows modest growth masking deeper weaknesses, including fragile demand, rising inflation, declining manufacturing investment, and no sign of an AI-driven productivity boom."

  • [05-08]: The Trump corruption tax on the oil industry: "Perceived insider trading tied to Trump's oil-related announcements could distort futures markets and increase costs across the oil industry." Baker tends to use the word "tax" broadly, to refer to any extraneous cost imposed by an external source, usually but not necessarily a government. Insider trading is an example, as it extracts money from a series of stock trades, leaving everyone else (on average) poorer. Over time, it also undermines trust in the markets, as participating in them opens you up to depredation from people who know things you cannot know. This rot eventually carries over into futures markets. Those where originally set up as a means of risk management. That way you could secure future costs, instead of just waiting to see what happens. That usually cost you a small premium, but reduced the risk that you might get screwed. The problem is, once the market has been tainted by manipulations, no one knows how to set that premium, so the futures market also rots, and risk multiplies.

  • [05-09]: Trump Accounts are a sick joke, not a threat to Social Security: "Trump accounts are unlikely to replace Social Security, offering limited benefits while Republicans simultaneously cut programs many families rely on."

  • [05-11]: Citizens United, Buckley v. Valejo, and media ownership: Turning money into power: "Billionaires maintain political power not just through campaign spending, but through growing control of media and social media platforms." I suppose if you're familiar with William Randolph Hearst, you can't use the word "unprecedented" to describe the way media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are imposing their politics on the media they own, but in my lifetime at least it's never felt like this much of an imposition. Baker advocates for using defamation suits against right-wing liars. I've gotten to where I hate defamation suits, but he may have a point:

    The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News was an enormous public service. In addition to many damning e-mail exchanges that were revealed in discovery, the $787 million settlement was effectively an admission by Fox that it spread lies about the 2020 election being stolen from Trump.

    One thing I've learned from reading Thomas Geoghegan is that the sue a company is a big equalizer, as you can obtain relevant documents in discovery, and compel them to answer depositions under oath. They still have huge structural advantages in our lopsided "justice" system, but it does even the playing field a bit, making it harder to hide from the truth.

Current Affairs/Nathan J Robinson:

  • Ben Burgis/Matt McManus [04-15]: Steve Pinker doesn't know anything about Marxism: "Bill Gates' favorite writer keeps spewing out lazy clichés about Marxism being a 'disaster' whenever it's 'implemented.' But he's way off-base, and Marx deserves better critics." I think it's a little late in the day to care much whether people give Marxism proper respect, although I will point out that people who do will learn a lot of things that might otherwise escape them. Some time ago, I bought a copy of Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, because I'm sympathetic with its thesis, and I think that our sympathy with and desire for violence has in fact declined over recent centuries. But I never got around to reading the book, or anything else by him. But even if his thesis is valid over the long term, it's hard to deny that there is still a lot of violence in the world, and that there are periods (including the "30 years war of the 20th century" that so disturbed Adorno, and the current period where Netanyahu, Trump, and Putin are on the warpath seems to qualify) where violence has at least temporarily intensified.

  • Nathan J Robinson [04-21]: The Bezos Post editorial page has become a mouthpiece for pro-billionaire propaganda: "Jeff Bezos said The Washington Post would no longer publish opinion pieces critical of free markets. Recent editorials show just how seriously the paper has taken this mandate."

  • Nathan J Robinson [04-23]: In praise of "virtue signaling": "Signaling our convictions to one another is an important part of the push for moral progress." Ok, but not a point I really feel like making. He wants to map "virtue" onto "morality" and "signal" onto "expression," so what he's really defending is expressing your views of morality. The reason they call it "virtue signaling" is that they don't want to talk about morality; they want to talk about the superior airs you seem to be taking on when you assert that your moral views are better than theirs. That's almost always a caricature of what's actually going on, but does it really help your case to fight them on their terms?

  • Adam McKay [04-27]: Staring at the pointing hand: "How do we actually get people to pay attention to the crises unfolding around us? As corporate media fails, we need to build a mainstream consensus against fascism and climate collapse."

  • Nathan J Robinson [05-06]: The Democratic establishment can be defeated: "It's not 2016 anymore. We can throw out the party's sclerotic leadership."

  • [05-08]: Why "progress" is a dangerous idea: "In his new book, Samuel Miller McDonald argues that progress is one of humanity's deadliest illusions." Interview with the author of Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It. I don't particularly get the arguments here, although, sure, focusing on progress skips over a lot of history/pre-history that is interesting and possibly useful, and it's a mistake either to assume that anything new will be better, or that nothing new will ever be lost. I have a narrower political quarrel with people who call themselves "progressives": they are suggesting that change is inevitable, and we need to just go with it. The former may be true, but the latter needs to be mediated by political judgment. And for now, change is happening so fast and thoughtlessly that I wouldn't mind slowing down a bit, and thinking more. I don't know that McDonald and/or Robinson would disagree, but they don't exactly say so.

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [04-24]: "A picayune detail": Nazi science heads west. An updated chapter from the book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press.

  • [05-01]: Roaming Charges: Bad citizens: Starts with a section on WHCD "shooter" Cole Allen, suggesting that he didn't shoot, but was shot at (five times) by the Secret Service (who may have hit one of their own).

    + One of the inevitable problems with leading a conspiratorial movement, as Trump has done, is that your paranoid, conspiracy-minded followers will ultimately come to turn those conspiracies against you, as has happened in the Butler, PA shooting and already just a few hours after the shooting (if there was a shooting) in the hallway of the Washington Hilton . . .

    + Pete Hegseth: "The one institution that should win the Nobel Peace Prize every single year is the United States military."

    + Financial Times: "The number of white-collar prosecutions in the US has fallen to its lowest level in at least 40 years, leaving many white-collar criminal defence lawyers facing a major problem: they have nothing to do." Grift, graft and greed are good again!

  • [05-08]: Roaming Charges: Pity, the poor billionaire: Ted Turner, Steve Roth a piece by Kyle Smith called "Billionaires Rock" ("We ought o build statues of them, not chase them from state to state").

    + According to the National Association of Realtors, the average age of a first-time home buyer in the US has climbed to a record high of 40. Meanwhile, the average age of a repeat buyer has reached a record high of 62.

    WSJ: More and more people are selling their cars, even though they still owe more money than the car is worth.

    + We keep being told that the US doesn't need foreign oil, yet as this chart from analysts at JPMorgan shows, the spiking gas prices in the USA in response to Trump's Iran war are higher than any region in the world, except Southeast Asia, which is the most dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf States.

    + Trump's top economic advisor Kevin Hassett finding (inventing) the good news about soaring gas prices: "Credit card spending is through the roof. They're spending more on gasoline, but they're spending more on everything else too."

    + Trump: "4 or 5 snipers way up high on buildings killed 42,000 Iranian protesters." (He went on to describe in graphic detail how the snipers, who allegedly killed 10,000 protesters apiece, aimed at people's heads, which then exploded, making these gruesome remarks in front of pre-teen children.)

    + In April, the level of atmospheric hit a new record high, averaging carbon dioxide detected in the atmosphere, averaging about 431 parts per million (ppm).

    + Dr. Tyler Evans on the hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius:

    There is a pattern that has repeated across every major outbreak I have worked on, from HIV in sub-Saharan Africa to COVID-19 in New York City. The acute event commands attention. The structural lesson does not. Cruise ships, whether they carry six thousand passengers or one hundred fifty, are mobile communities that move pathogens across borders faster than any public health system can track them.

    + I don't know what kind of people enjoy going on these floating Petri dishes after outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease, Norovirus, Covid and now Hantavirus . . . but they should all be nominated as a class for the Darwin Awards.

    + Of course, the Trump/RFK, Jr. CDC wasn't just MIA, it was gone, baby, gone, as in eliminated.

    Jonathan Reiner: Last year half of CDC's Vessel Sanitation Program staff were fired. This is the group responsible for investigating cruise ship outbreaks. The cuts were made despite the fact that US taxpayers don't pay for this team. The cruise ship industry does.

    Under his "Booked Up" section, I was pleased to see John Berger: The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays. Originally published in 1969, it is one of the most brilliant books I've ever read. I could also say that about his 1972 Ways of Seeing, which I think is different from the also newly reprinted 1960 book, Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing. I also recall reading The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965) and Art and Revolution: Ernst Niezvestny and the Role of the Artist in the USSR (1969).

  • [05-12]: A force for a livable planet: Mitchel Cohen's unwavering sense of direction.

TomDispatch:

  • Tom Engelhardt [04-21]: "You dirty ORANGE maniac! You blew it all up! Damn you to hell!": The editor appears to be blowing a gasket, but actually just scraped this title off a No King's Day protest sign. This makes me wonder what a truly unhinged screed against Trump might look like. I'm reluctant to guess, but it shouldn't stop mid-way to lament, "And the worst thing is that I feel I've written all of this before." Indeed, he has, especially the seemingly inevitable recycle of "he's also launched another brutally losing war against Planet Earth." Whenever I read something like that, I can only sigh, "Planet Earth is going to cope with whatever we throw at it (or dump onto it). It's what we're doing to ourselves that we should be worried about.

  • Alfred McCoy [4-23]: Military disasters and the end of empire: Writes about "what modern historians now call 'micro-militarism,'" which Google AI defines as "the tendency of declining imperial powers to launch small-scale, often ill-fated military interventions to project strength and regain fading glory, which often accelerates their decline." And citing TomDispatch, is "often driven by emotional, irrational responses from leaders, not strategic necessity." I wasn't familiar with the term, so had to look it up. I don't much care for the term, nor for any explanation of modern events that harkens back to ancient Greece for examples. Current cases remind me of Trilling's decay of conservative thought into mere "irritable mental gestures." It matters little whether they lead to loss of power or merely reflect the fear that power has already been lost.

    • Michael Schwalbe [2012-11-26]: Micro Militarism: Examples here include "patriotic displays at sporting events, such as flyovers and national anthem singing, as a form of cultural militarism that discourages debate on war policy," and "celebrating military personnel in media, normalizing war-making as an integral part of national identity."

  • William D Hartung [04-26]: Shutting down the war machine: Co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home, which Trump and Hegseth now want to give an extra $500 million to (beyond the $200 million "supplemental" they want for Iran?). It's tempting to fixate on the insane waste in this spending, but worse still is the off chance that someone in charge might be stupid enough to think they can actually use this military (especially now that someone has, so we're no longer talking hypotheticals).

  • Andrea Mazzarino [04-28]: The trauma and the terror among us, or "The global war on terror's journey home: the collective trauma of America's twenty-first century wars."

  • William deBuys [04-30]: The border wall thrives, the borderlands don't.

  • Tom Engelhardt [05-03]: A world in Trumple deep "(And we are all his apprentices now)": Another tirade, self-conscious enough to forgo "section titles for a simple reason. It's all about Donald J. Trump and when it comes to him, in this strange world of ours, no one ever really gets a break." As usual, this winds up with Trump making "climate-change denial seem like a far too mild term."

  • Karen Greenberg [05-10]: Trumpland is a man's world.

  • Juan Cole [05-12]: The Strait of Hormuz oil crisis of 2026 is the biggest ever.

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles, on subjects that don't really fit anywhere above, are more/less in order published.

Jelani Cobb [05-04]: Two hundred and fifty years of complicated commemorations: "Donald Trump's aversion to admitting fault suggests that we will not likely see events that grapple with the nuanced nature of the nation's history this July 4th." Or any time. I am in no way looking forward to any 250th anniversary celebrations. I expect that each of them, with or without Trump, will only heighten my disgust with what this nation has become.

Kenny Torrella [05-06]: The backlash to Billie Eilish's vegan comments explains a lot about the American left (and everyone else): I hated this title even before I had any idea what Eilish's comments were. Why should anyone on the left care what Eilish or anyone else eats? Being left has nothing to do with what one eats, or what anyone else eats. The only real question is whether to treat all people the equally. If you think so, you're on the left. Conversely, you're on the right if you think there should be some kind of hierarchy, where some people receive preferable treatment over others. Whether you eat is affected by the left-right balance, but what you eat is up to you. Most people like to eat some meat (at least when given the option), but some don't, and some of those claim their rejection of meat and animal products is some kind of virtue. I disagree, but when those same people are antiwar, egalitarian and/or altruistic, I'm happy for them, and don't mind their idiosyncrasy, as long as they don't become too imperious about it. As a leftist, I feel it is important to respect other people's preferences. Attacking people who eat meat is bad politics, and bad manners. Putting the welfare of animals over people is another non-starter, especially given how far we still are from ending the mistreatment of people.

I'm even more bothered by the subhed: "Why are American leftists so reluctant to confront the meat industry?" Why is the author so eager to attack the left? And drive a wedge between them and the meat-eating majority? Actually, Vox has gone out of their way to focus on trashing the meat industry (Torrella's byline notes his "focus on animal welfare and the future of meat"; by the way, Current Affairs is also obsessed with meat, which I think undermines the rest of their agenda). I'm not saying the meat industry should be beyond reproach: it's big, competitive, runs on thin margins, and like all businesses is tempted to cut corners. But it also manages to keep extraordinary numbers of people living "high on the hog" (or whatever your preferred cut is). I understand most of the anti-meat arguments, but the only solutions are higher prices and scarcity, and whoever imposes that isn't going to be very popular.

As for Eilish, my main complaint is I don't understand what "loving all animals" means. It's more complicated than that.

Mike Masnick [05-06]: Matt Taibbi loses his vexatious SLAPP suit as judge explains what a 'metaphor' means. Taibbi had sued Eoin Higgins, author of Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left for "defamation" (aka, reporting).

Books: Reviews, although there are more books scattered above.

  • Kohei Saito [02-11]: The enclosure of all: "How capitalism transformed the natural world." Review of Alyssa Battistoni: Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature.

    This past fall, the Liberal Democratic Party's Sanae Takaichi, who had long been regarded as an outlier on the party's right flank, became the country's first female prime minister. . . .

    Part of Takaichi's rise was fueled by heat. After the rainy season ended unusually early in much of Japan, the country saw a third straight year of record-breaking temperatures as the global average increase approaches the 1.5°C target set by the Paris Agreement. Rice yields plummeted, and the resulting "rice shock" deepened public anxiety in an already inflationary economy and forced the government to release its emergency grain reserves for the first time.

    Out of this economic and ecological turmoil came a right-wing-populist turn. Enraged at the Ishiba administration's tepid response, many voters turned to Sanseito (the "Do-It-Yourself Party"), whose platform combined promises of food self-sufficiency and support for organic farming with a rhetoric of "Japanese First." Over time, its mix of nationalism, conspiracy politics, and environmental populism curdled further into xenophobia and opposition to climate action, taking the form of attacks on immigrants, renewable energy, and vaccines. To win back the many defectors to Sanseito, the Liberal Democratic Party swerved ever more to the right and elevated Takaichi to power.

    Sound familiar? From Donald Trump in the United States and Javier Milei in Argentina to the far-right resurgence in many parts of Europe, the pattern is unmistakable: The convergence of ecological disaster, resource scarcity, a flagging and disoriented liberalism, and climate-driven displacement leads to an authoritarian turn.

  • Nancy Folbre [04-17]: What, exactly, is a fair wage?: "Arindrajit Dube brilliantly dissects how wages really are set — but overlooks the particular hurdles that care workers face." Review of the book, The Wage Standard: What's Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It.

  • Corey Robin [05-11]: The long revolution: "Will capitalism last forever?" Review of Sven Beckert: Capitalism: A Global History, a book which goes way back (1150) and ranges wide (starts with the merchants of Aden). While the historical sprawl is probably the most interesting aspect of the book — having recently read Hobsbawm's quartet, Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Credits, and into Acemoglu & Johnson's Power and Progress, I'm pretty familiar with the usual turf — but the tendency to be all-inclusive risks blurring what is most peculiar about capitalism: the unique power accorded to owners. If all factories (or for that matter all trade) are capitalism, is any future alternative possible? [PS: Elsewhere Robin describes the book as "poorly conceived and terribly written." He's less clear on that here, or maybe just more diplomatic, or just chooses to focus on the facts at issue?]

Obituaries: I had been using the New York Times, but they're giving me aggravation these days, so I'll switch over to Wikipedia (May, also April), which is probably better anyway. Roughly speaking, since my last report on April 15:

  • [04-15]: Barbara Carr (85): Soul/blues singer. Name sounds familiar, but nothing in my database. [PS: Added The Best of Barbara Carr, which covers 1997-2001, B+(***).]

  • [04-15]: Robert Skidelsky (86): British historian/economist, wrote a major biography of Keynes. I read his 2009 Keynes: The Return of the Master, which convinced me of his continuing relevance and value. I also read his later How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life, which is a question few economists ask.

  • [04-19]: Desmond Morris (98): English zoologist, The Naked Ape was a big bestseller in 1967. My impression is that the book hasn't aged well.

  • [04-19]: Dave Mason (79): English singer-songwriter, started in Traffic, had a solo career of some note in the 1970s.

  • [04-22]: Michael Tilson Thomas (81): Classical music conductor, composer.

  • [04-23]: Nicole Hollander (86): Cartoonist (Sylvia).

  • [04-24]: Donald Riegle (88): Michigan politician, elected 1966 to House as a Republican, opposed Vietnam War, switched parties in 1973 and served in Senate 1976-1995.

  • [04-24]: Tony Wilson (89): Trinidadian musician, member of Hot Chocolate (first two albums), I liked his 1976 solo album I Like Your Style.

  • [04-29]: David Allan Coe (86): American country singer ("Take This Job and Shove It").

  • [05-02]: Bob Skinner (94): baseball player (1954-66), two all-star games, manager.

  • [05-06]: Ted Turner (87): Rich guy, inherited a billboard business, bought a TV station in Atlanta (WTBS), expanded it into Turner Broadcasting System, founder of CNN (and other cable networks), sold out to Time Warner (which he became largest shareholder in; he supported their AOL merger, regretted it later, losing a lot of money), owner of Atlanta Braves, married Jane Fonda (1991-2001), raced yachts, owns multiple ranches (about 2 million acres), signed a pledge to give away most of his money on death.

  • [05-09]: Bobby Cox (84): Baseball, short career as a third baseman (1968-69), long career as a manager with Atlanta, Toronto, and Atlanta again (1978-85, 1990-2010).

  • [05-09]: Craig Morton (83): Football, quarterback for Dallas and Denver.

  • [05-10]: Abraham Foxman (86): head of Anti-Defamation League (1987-2015), an organization set up to patrol against anti-semitism, but which has reduced its scope to attacking any criticism of Israel as anti-semitism.

  • [05-12]: Rex Reed (87): Film critic.

Current count: 332 links, 23475 words (28534 total)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Wednesday, April 15, 2026

Loose Tabs

I'm posting this on April 15, after initially hoping for April 10. The delay has in turn pushed Music Week out, not that I have much to report there anyway. It's been a difficult week or two, but aren't they all these days? I'll probably add more when I do publish Music Week, in a day or two. Hoping to get to some long-procrastinated house work this weekend, with decent weather forecast. Then, I hardly know what. Maybe I'll write about cooking or housework, or the book on manufacturing I've been reading, or the other books I got out from the library on tech business, or maybe another book on the advent of the Third Reich — not that the good deal I already know about that subject has adequately prepared me for the rise of Trump.

I should also point out that I've written several standalone pieces on the Iran war:

The last of these was written after Trump's April Fools' Day speech, but before his ultimatum threatening the "end of civilization" if Iran didn't surrender, or the "ceasefire" that allowed him to back down a bit (temporarily). My next piece will probably be on what I think a good peace agreement might look like, given a serious effort to find a solution based on "doing the right thing," and not just on which side is the more powerful and/or the most insane.

More on this below, in the still unfolding Iran War section.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically (12 times from April-December 2025). My previous one appeared 24 days ago, on March 22.

I have a little-used option of selecting bits of text highlighted with a background color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to use it sparingly.

Table of Contents:

New Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent themes of the following section.

Cuba: As I was filing my previous Loose Tabs on March 22, my feed was lighting up with tweets on Cuba, where Trump was tightening the blockade, and people of good will were raising the alarm about its probable human toll. Much like the heady early days of Bush's Iraq War, when you heard quips about how "real men go to Tehran," Trump was already talking up "Cuba next."

"No Kings": Another round of "No Kings" protests against Trump were scheduled for March 28, expected to draw biggest — and most diverse — anti-Trump crowds ever.

  • Michael Arria [03-26]: 'No Kings' protest refusal to address the war on Iran reflects the failure of the US antiwar movement: "The upcoming No Kings protest could be the biggest anti-Trump event ever, but opposing the war on Iran doesn't seem to be on the agenda." Sheesh! The organizers don't have to bullet point it (they may momentarily have balked, worrying about splitting their coalition, or maybe some kind of "rally around the flag" effect, but that didn't happen: people who were already anti-Trump saw through this war instantly, and others are discovering the war as a moment when he showed his true colors). Trump put the war on the agenda. The antiwar signs will come out. The war is already more unpopular than Vietnam was well into Nixon's "silent majority." As for the "antiwar movement," the job is going to be to get the Democratic politicians up to following their constituents and opposing the war in practice.

  • Bette Lee [04-03]: 30,000 "pissed off" Americans: A photo essay of the No Kings Protests in Portland.

Viktor Orbán: He founded the right-wing Fidesz party in Hungary, entered Parliament in 1994, and became prime minister from 1998-2002, and again in 2010, this time with enough of a majority he was able to change the constitution to lock in Fidesz power, and he has remained in power until losing this week's election. During his long reign in power, Orbán has become a hero for much of the American right (Tucker Carlson has broadcast from Hungary; Orbán has been opening speaker at CPAC; Steve Bannon referred to him as "Trump before Trump"; Trump and he have endorsed each other multiple times; JD Vance went to Hungary to campaign for Orbán [reminding us that Vance visited Pope Francis just before he died].) Although Orbán lost in a landslide this year, it remains to be seen whether the new government will be able to change the constitution to free the government from Fidesz control. [Later reports show winner Peter Magyar's Tisza party winning 137 of 199 seats in parliament, which would give them the two-thirds majority needed to change the constitution.]

  • Zack Beauchamp [04-13]: How MAGA's favorite strongman finally lost: "Hungarians ousted Viktor Orbán in an election rigged to favor him. It wasn't easy."

  • Molly O'Neal [04-13]: What Viktor Orban's crushing defeat in Hungary really means: "Ascendent leader Peter Magyar is no liberal, and is certainly not pro-Ukraine but tapped into bread and butter issues pressing on the people."

  • Harold Meyerson [04-14]: A really bad week for the global right: "And what is it about Christian nationalism that looks to produce kleptocratic regimes?"

  • Scott Lemieux [04-15]: But it's *competitive* authoritarianism! Notes that one measure of how Orbán rigged Hungary's election process is that opposition leader Peter Magyar hadn't been able to appear on state media for 18 months until he won. Does anyone think that Trump, had he been banned from news media for 18 months before the 2024 election, would still have won? But now right-wingers, who have shown nothing but contempt for democracy, want to spin this loss as a vindication of their faith in the voters.

    This kind of apologism, though, does provide a useful illustration of how Republican elites — including less Trump-aligned ones — have become comfortable with their own anti-democratic measures. Democrats could have broken the Wisconsin 2010 gerrymander by getting 70% of the statewide vote, so what's the big deal? Vote suppression measures don't make it impossible for Democrats to win, so why should we be worried about the Supreme Court effectively repealing the Voting Rights Act with a series of decisions that barely even pretend to have a legal basis? This is what John Roberts has believed since he was a DOJ functionary under Reagan, and it's a way in which Trump is more symptom than cause.

  • Tibor Dessewffy [04-15]: How was Orbán defeated? With energetic campaigning and cunning exploitation of his weaknesses.

  • Sarah Jones [04-16]: Why Orbán's loss was so devastating to the new right. This notes the cross-breeding between America's "new right" think tanks and Orbán's similar Hungarian/European organizations (which have recruited Americans like "crunchy con" Rod Dreher).

Fascism: This could be a regular feature section, but for everyday purposes we already have sections on Trump and Republicans (and Israel) that catch most of the news. Before the 2024 election, there was considerable debate over whether Trump is really a fascist (or is just play-acting). He settled that question very quickly upon taking office. Before the election, I felt that the similarities were pretty obvious, but that the political charge was largely pointless: those who understood the history of fascism were already opposed to Trump (aside from a tiny faction of proud fascists), while the word was nothing more than a vague expletive for almost everyone else (as was obvious from their efforts to call leftists "fascist"). But now that Trump is on the warpath, both domestically and abroad, there are few (if any) historical analogies other than fascism that come close to helping us understand what he is doing. I have no idea how many articles I will find explaining this, but let's start with a quote from Robert Paxton, author of Anatomy of Fascism, with this definition (from 2004):

Fascism may be defind as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, of victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

I read Paxton's book long ago, and have long felt that his definition was excessively tailored to separate Hitler and Mussolini from virtually every right-wing killer (e.g., Franco). I tend to agree with the 1930s "premature anti-fascists" who intuitively understood that the fascists are the people who wanted to kill us, regardless of how they rationalized their murderous intentions. But with his Iran War, Trump has managed to tick off literally every box on Paxton's inventory.

Eric Swalwell: Democratic congressman from California, ran for president in 2020, not coming remotely close but at least got a bit of name recognition, which this year he's tried to build on by running for governor. He was leading in the polls, but now has suspended his candidacy, and facing an expulsion vote in the House has announced his plans to resign. The charges have to do with sexual misconduct.

  • Benjy Sarlin [04-13]: Eric Swalwell's downfall, explained: "The accusations that forced out the frontrunner in California's governor race — and could push him from Congress next."

Major Threads

War on Iran: While the US has arguably waged war against Iran's Islamic Republic starting with the "Carter Doctrine" in 1979, and Israel has spurred America on at least since the 1990s, the belligerence accelerated after Trump became president in 2017 and terminated the Obama-negotiated JCPOA agreement, daring Iran to build a nuclear deterrent against US and Israeli attacks. This came to a head with the socalled Twelve-Day War of June 13-24, 2025, when Israel and the US bombed sites in Iran believed to be involved in developing materials that could be used to build nuclear warheads. Iran responded by launching missiles at Israel and US bases, hoping to establish a deterrence against further attacks, but measuring their response (as they had done following previous "targeted assassinations" to avoid provoking a broader war). Trump, at Netanyahu's urging, took this response as a sign of weakness, and started plotting another round of attacks, aimed at Iran's missiles, navy, air force, and political leadership. Trump used the period to build up offensive forces in the Persian Gulf, and on Feb. 28 unleashed a massive wave of airstrikes against Iran, starting with the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and much of the upper echelon of Iran's security state. Within a day, Trump declared himself the winner, and promised to wrap it up in a couple days or weeks. Iran, once again, responded by firing missiles and drones against Israel and US bases, but also by blocking passage through the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off major exports of oil, gas, and petrochemicals (most critically fertilizer) from the region. While Iranian arms development has never deterred Israel and America — it has actually played large in the reasons given for US & Israeli aggression — control over the Strait has finally proven to be real leverage. Of course, sensible leaders would have understood that before testing the hypothesis, and decent leader wouldn't have thought of this war in the first place. Trump is neither. Netanyahu may be more complicated, but that hardly matters.

The following pieces are roughly chronological by date, but events have moved quickly. In particular, there is one section on Trump's April 1 "speech to the nation," where he suggested a willingness to not contest control over the Strait of Hormuz. Then on April 5 (Easter Sunday), Trump issued an ultimatum to open the Strait, otherwise he would order the destruction of Iran's civilian infrastructure:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be livingin Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

On April 7, Trump reiterated his ultimatum, in even more apocalyptic terms:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran.

Then, just before his April 7 deadline, Trump called the attack off and accepted a ceasefire based on Iran's 10-point proposal. I've seen conflicting information about what's in that plan (including some points I can't imagine Iran prevailing on, and others that will be extremely difficult for Trump to swallow — Netanyahu is a different case, because his interests are even more personal-political than Trump's, and even more divorced from Israel's actual needs — but the suggestion that the ceasefire should include Lebanon is clearly not being heeded by Israel. These points, and much more, are reiterated in the stories below.

  • Mitchell Plitnick:

    • [03-20]: Anger in the GCC spreads as Iran retaliates over US-Israeli strikes: "These are signs of the growing impatience of Iran's Arab neighbors with Iran's tactic of striking at them in response to Israeli or American attacks. But the anger of the Gulf states isn't only reserved for Iran." I expect this will become an increasingly large and decisive part of the story. Iran wants the US to leave the region, but can't insist on that as long as the GCC states look to Washington for defense. On the other hand, the US isn't a very reliable defense for them, and given Israel quite possibly puts them at greater risk than having no US bases and negotiating separate peace deals with Iran. If/when the GCC states split with Washington, the bases will have to go, and Iran will feel much more secure.

    • [03-26]: The US and Israel's diverging interests will prolong the war, but Iran will determine its outcome: "A month into the Iran war, it is clear that Israel aims to disrupt any possible off-ramp the Trump administration and Iran may be looking for to end the fighting, and that Iran, not the US, is the key actor that will determine how the war ends."

      • Julian E Barnes/Tyler Pager/Eric Schmitt [03-24]: Saudi leader is said to push Trump to continue Iran war in recent calls: "Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sees a 'historic opportunity' to remake the region, according to people briefed by US officials on the conversations." This doesn't seem to be very reliably sourced, so one suspects that it is meant to plant the idea that it isn't just Israel that is pushing the US to war. (This sort of thing has been a regular occurrence, as we've been regularly assured that the Saudis and other Persian Gulf states are every bit as alarmed by Iran as Israel is. That in turn has been the rationale for US arms sales to the region, which Israel would veto if they didn't buy the argument about Iran.) On the other hand, this makes MBS look like a blathering idiot. I've long felt that he is a deranged megalomaniac, but nowhere near this stupid. The most likely outcomes of the war are a failed state that sows chaos in the region and a retrenched, hardened central regime which will continue to threaten its neighbors (as it, not without reason, feels threatened by them). Given this scenario, what the Saudis and the Gulf states should be doing is attempting to mediate, not to escalate the conflict. If they don't find a peaceful way out, and are viewed as mere tools of Israel and America, they risk not just Iran taking pot shots at their infrastructure but revolt from within their own ranks.

      • Matzav [03-16]: Saudi Arabia denies report claiming Crown Prince urged US to continue war with Iran.

    • [04-03]: Trump has no good options to resolve the disaster he created in Iran: "Trump faces a disaster of his own making in Iran. He had no plan to address Iran's predictable retaliation, including closing the Strait of Hormuz, but even if he did, he faces another problem: Israel, his disastrous choice for a partner in crime."

    • [04-09]: The Iran war will end only when the US finally decides to rein in Israel: "As the shaky ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran holds, only Israel has an incentive to continue fighting, as Netanyahu is widely seen as having lost the war. If there is to be a durable end to this war, the U.S. will be forced to rein in Israel." I think he's right, but that this will be very difficult for Trump, who can't stand the idea that he has to back down on anything, especially with Netanyahu doing everything he can to keep the war going. The only real hope is that someone will get in Trump's ear and convince him that Netanyahu has steered him wrong. If he chooses to use it, I believe that he does have the power to rein in Netanyahu, or simply knock the legs out from under him. (Other Israeli politicians are already lining up to follow Trump into a peace agreement, but that's going to take a signal from Trump.)

  • Ali Abunimah [03-21]: The war on Iran is making it stronger. I'm skeptical, not just because I don't know how you measure such things, or whether "stronger" is even a good thing, but the war has allowed Iran to flex muscles that had long been kept dormant, and that's caught some people by surprise who expected them to cower under America's "shock and awe" attack and fold like a house of cards.

  • Harrison Mann [03-25]: 3 things Trump needs to do to end the Iran war: While admitting that "Trump couldn't end his war tomorrow, even if he wanted to," Mann's suggests are pretty basic:

    1. Unilateral de-escalation: "stop openly trying to destroy and take over Iran."
    2. Acknowledge Iran's demands: Put them on the agenda, and negotiate over them seriously.
    3. Rein in Netanyahu: If the US cannot control Israel, the US cannot be trusted to negotiate an end to the war (as Israel can, and probably will, open it up again).

    The problem is, it's going to be very hard for Trump to back out of this war without admitting that it was a mistake, especially if he can't blame the mistake on Netanyahu. Similarly, it's going to be hard for Netanyahu to back down without admitting his own colossal error. Moreover, even if he did so, he'd still have to deal with a Palestinian problem he's only made worse, and he doesn't have the political capital within Israel to get beyond that. Mann also wrote:

    • [03-10]: I was a US intelligence analyst. Here's what a ground invasion of Iran could look like: Actually, he only considers three scenarios, none of which have any chance of forcing an Iranian surrender, or even of triggering a regime change:

      1. Commando raid on nuclear sites to secure Iran's uranium: That may seem like a doable limited objective, but the sites are deep within Iran and are likely to be well defended, some known sites are deeply buried which will slow down the operation, and some materials have probably been moved to unknown sites.
      2. Seize Kharg Island to hold Iran's oil exports hostage: This isn't worth much unless you can ship the captured oil out of the Gulf, which right now you can't. You could blow it up to keep Iranian oil off the market longer, but so much of Trump's political flak concerns oil prices that he's letting Iran sell its oil at a premium now, rather than further reducing supply.
      3. Occupy Iran's coast to reopen oil shipping lanes: For this to work, you'd have to occupy all of a very rugged coastline, which Iranian troops can access by land. Moreover, Iran doesn't have to be on the coast to launch missiles and drones into the Strait, or to mine it.

      This doesn't discuss scenarios like Iraq and Afghanistan, where the US had proxy armies they could easily supply, and neighboring countries they could mount a land invasion from. No nation adjacent to Iran would allow the US to stage an invasion force. In any case, Iran is 3-4 times larger than Iraq or Afghanistan, making it much more formidable.

  • Joshua Keating

    • [03-26]: Trump says the Iran war is over. So why won't he end it? "It may not be possible to TACO out of this one."

    • [04-01]: Is this the beginning of the end of the war in Iran? "Trump signaled that he's ready to wrap up the conflict, but that may not be up to him." Well, it could be up to him, if he were willing to accept the consequences of his mistakes: he needs to cut Iran a deal which assures them that this war will never break out again; and he needs to restrain Israel. If he doesn't do the latter, he can't make a deal, because Israel can break anything he comes up with. And since he launched the attacks, the price of assurance has only gone up, to a level of concession he's bound to find uncomfortable (perhaps even humiliating).

    • [04-07]: "A whole civilization will die tonight": How Trump is threatening war crimes: "Bombing all of Iran's bridges and power plants would be illegal." Oh, by the way, bombing anything else is also illegal, and immoral, and even if you don't care about those things, just plain stupid politics.

    • [04-07]: From threatening a civilization to ceasefire: What we learned from a wild day in the Iran war: "Trump just pulled a Russian-style policy move — and it's not clear it will deliver what he promised." Russian-style? Keating thinks he's referring to the "escalate to de-escalate" tactic, which Russia has never actually used, and denies even considering. (Unlike, say, Nixon scrambling SAC bombers in a mock attack on the Soviet Union. Nixon called his tactic the Madman Theory. Trump's threat fits that model, even if he didn't plan on "ending civilization" with nukes (a detail he remained ambiguous on, but given the size of Iran and the limits of America's conventional weapons, the only credible threat would have been to use nukes).

    • [04-09]: We have no idea if Iran can still build a bomb: "The central goal of the war is nowhere near a resolution." Interview with Jeffrey Lewis ("a professor at the Middlebury Institute's James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies"). This doesn't go into a lot of detail, probably because, as the title says, no one knows. The questions of "why would they build a bomb?" and "why should we care?" aren't raised at all. They should be, because nuclear bombs are useless except as deterrence against attack. Given how stupid the US-Israeli attack has proven to be, we would have been better off if Iran had bombs (assuming that would have deterred us; it turns out that their command of the Strait of Hormuz should have been deterrence enough, although even that shouldn't have been necessary).

  • Tom Carson [03-26]: Strange Khargo: Donald Trump's Toy Story War: "This is obviously a cool way to behave that only Presidents get to cosplay in what John Le Carre called the theater of the real." And:

    It's said that feeling nostalgia for Trump's first term is a mug's game, and maybe so. But he did show a marked aversion to getting us entangled in mindless foreign wars. For all its sins, the MAGA base shares this antipathy, and that's why they're so puzzled — if not worse — about what's become of their Donald. But maybe he's just never found a war stupid enough to entrance him until now.

  • Jack Hunter

    • [03-27]: Putting boots on the ground could kill Trump's presidency: "Every single poll of Americans, including Republicans, shows a hard line against a land war involving US troops in Iran." Polling is fickle, and it's not unusual for support for a war to increase due to a "rally around the flag" effect as the question is transformed to "do you support our troops?" On the other hand, sustaining that level of support is difficult when you're losing and don't have anything to show for it. And Trump is uniquely polarizing, so much so that many Democrats who might have rallied behind Israel didn't give Trump a moment's credibility.

      1. Iran is too big, and too distant, and too estranged, for the US to mount a successful ground invasion, at least one aimed at occupying the whole country and installing a puppet regime.
      2. Trump will make no effort at nation buiding, so the purpose of a ground invasion will be simply to obliterate and kill more precisely than is possible from the air (cf. Israel in Gaza).
      3. The political (and for that matter economic) costs of a prolonged ground war will be unbearable for Trump personally and for America as a whole.

      Ergo, it's not going to happen. Still doesn't hurt to explain what a bad idea it is, especially given that the dead ender war mongers are sure to bring it up (if only to blame peaceniks for their own failures). I might also add that if Trump's presidency is already doomed, he's unstable enough that he might take that as reason for desperate measures.

    • [04-11]: Mark Levin seems upset we haven't nuked Iran: "The neoconservative talk host tried to normalize the use of nuclear weapons and now appears irate that the president hasn't taken his advice." The right-wing idiot chorus dropping hints for Trump.

  • Oliver Holmes, et al. [03-31]: 'Get your own oil': Trump launches tirade against Europe for not joining Iran war.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos [04-01]: Trump's April Fools' address to the nation: "Expectations reached a fever pitch Wednesday, but he neither called for an end of the war nor announced a ground invasion. Bottom line: We're not finished." In anticipation of the speech, oil prices dropped and the stock market rose. The speech itself was so full of nothing that financial manipulation may have been its sole purpose. In 19 minutes, Trump laid out the case for going to war, or not going to war; declared victory, while vowing to fight on; gave up on opening the Strait of Hormuz, or expected it to happen magically. For more on the speech:

    Also by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos:

  • Timothy Snyder

    • [04-01]: Wars fought for fun cannot be won: "The attack on Iran is wrong in countless ways: morally, legally, politically. But set all of that aside momentarily and stay within the logic of war planning. The war cannot be won because it was the result of a whim, not a plan." Leaving aside whether any war can be won, and his six-point rationalization of the process (do "national interests" even exist, or are they just class interests?), the point about "whim" is well taken, as is his assertion that Trump just enjoys blowing things up (the "two-minute sizzle reels" he is shown daily proves that point). But the "capabilities" goes a bit deeper: the US is doing what it is capable of doing — mostly blowing things up, but also kidnapping Maduro, bribing allies, threatening everyone else, spreading lies — but is anyone asking whether what they can do actually helps to achieve any sensible goals? Not Trump, nor his cronies, nor the rational but narrow-minded specialists tasked with devising weapons and tactics for using them, nor the Clausewitz fanboys who decided that if politics was just war by other means, we could dispose of diplomacy and put all our eggs in the military's basket. But turning this into "fun" takes something else: a lack of concern for other people, and a shallowness of character that amounts to sociopathy.

      This is the pleasure principle. If war feels good, do it. Trump and Hegseth take satisfaction in killing or dominating other people.

      That, however, has nothing to do with a national interest.

      There is no evidence of anything beyond the pleasure principle. With good intentions and bad, commentators seek to force some policy around the whimsy. But it is whimsy all the way down. And a war for fun cannot be won.

      And now that we have started with the pleasure principle, Trump is trapped, at least for a while, like an amateur gambler, in the behaviorist logic of intermittent pleasure and pain. It felt good at first. But then it didn't feel good when Iran didn't surrender, when Iran destroyed US systems, when Iran blocked the Straits of Hormuz. So now we must "double down" (consider how often that gambling jargon appears!) so that Trump can get another hit of pleasure. Each one will be more elusive than the last.

      And he who follows the pleasure principle into war cannot understand the other side. He cannot understand any action that is based upon other grounds than his own. If the other side is not having "fun" (again, Trump's own term) it should surrender. If it does not, this is, according to Trump, "unfair."

    • [04-07]: The president speaks genocide. Deciphering Trump's "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again," while maligning various known "bad guys" who never themselves issued such sweeping and nihilistic threats, and not just because unlike Trump they never had to power to make such threats credible.

  • Zak Cheney-Rice [04-02]: How to ignore a war: "Trump is hoping confusing timelines and mixed messages of victory will make the conflict fade away."

  • David Dayen [04-02]: The opening of Trump's box: "Iran has put a tollgate across the Strait of Hormuz. This fundamentally changes the global economy."

  • Stephen Semler [04-02]: The war on Iran is more expensive than you think: "In the first two weeks of its war on Iran, the US spent an estimated $2.1 billion a day. It's no wonder Donald Trump is saying that the cost of war means the federal government can't afford to spend money to help Americans meet their basic needs." It's more expensive than Semler thinks, too.

  • Brahma Chellaney [04-03]: Why Iran is beating America: "The 'asymmetric cost' model — a war the US starts will ultimately cost the other side far more — has proven vital to sustain the illusion of American invincibility and to limit domestic political resistance to US military adventurism. Now, Iran has broken it." Explanation follows the paywall. I got a summary from google, and found the full article here, as How Iran is able to beat the US in its war. "Beat" has two meanings: to win, or just to hurt. The former is nonsensical in this context, as (despite common beliefs) both sides stand to lose much and/or gain little. The latter cuts both ways, but the question there isn't which side gets beat the worse, but how much each side can afford to be beaten. There is little doubt that the US can hurt Iran much worse than Iran can hurt the US, but can the US (and its "allies") take it? That may turn out to be the greater asymmetry.

  • Jonathan Swan/Maggie Haberman [04-07]: How Trump took the US to war with Iran: "In a series of Situation Room meetings, President Trump weighed his instincts against the deep concerns of his vice president and a pessimistic intelligence assessment. Here's the insure story of how he made the fateful decision." Pretty much as I expected, although the reporters' inside sources are already making sure to register their reservations, which Trump didn't hear or didn't give any credence to (e.g., on Hormuz, uprisings in Iran).

  • Andrew Prokop [04-08]: Does Trump really always chicken out? "Iran offers a fresh window into when Trump chickens out — and why his threats matter anyway." The problem with "chicken" is that it's a schoolyard taunt, meant to shame someone who backs away from a fight, or better still to provoke them into fighting. For a guy who fancies himself as tough, and who as president has almost arbitrary access to weapons of mass destruction, that's a dangerous accusation. The phrase caught on when Trump backed away from extreme tariff threats, which will foolish fell well short of acts of war. Iran, however, is an act of war, and there are many reasons to back away from that other than being chicken. The thing to understand is that Trump's wildest threats are nothing short of insane. When he realizes this, in some rare (for him) moment of sanity, we should welcome his backing off, and not taunt him for not doing something awful. Still, that's hard to do, largely because he so relishes making the insane threats in the first place, especially as doing so offers maximum publicity. But it also exposes him as thoughtless and dangerous, and utterly untrustworthy. It's rarely clear whether he does it just for effect, planning on "chickening out," or he just flies off the handle, and someone saner has to chill him down. Either way, it's not only not effective, like the "boy who cried wolf" it's likely to produce diminishing returns, and possibly end by doing him in. With Iran, I'm not sure that hasn't already happened.

  • James K Galbraith [04-08]: The ceasefire just showed the world that US military power is obsolete: "With the illusion shattered, now is the chance for the US to liberate itself from a broken imperial model." I see this more as a tactical retreat, perhaps based on the military finally acknowledging that they don't have the firepower to deliver on Trump's apocalyptic promises, nor do they have the defensive armor to protect against the inevitable reprisals. You could characterize that as weakness, or as pointlessness. But the ceasefire didn't shatter any illusions. It protected them from further distress. Still, why not hope for more?

    In my dreams, this defeat could liberate the US from a broken imperial model. The US could demilitarize, mothball its nuclear weapons, decommission its aircraft carriers, and close bases, even beyond those now abandoned in the Middle East. It could shrink its financial sector and devote its real resources to domestic physical, social and industrial renewal. It could revive, retrain and reenergize its worn-down population, with useful jobs doing worthwhile tasks. It could join the concert of great powers on equal terms, accepting the fact that none of the other powers — not China, not Russia, and not Iran — has any interest in taking over the world. And that therefore,for effective management of the world commonwealth, cooperative solutions must be found.

    Won't happen, but it is true that most Americans would be happier if we didn't have to carry the dead weight of empire. And that's really all it is.

  • Ishaan Tharoor [04-08]: A US-Iran ceasefire is here, but Trump's stone age mentality endures: "A temporary truce can't erase the chaos of a war that the White House started and never fully understood."

  • L Ali Khan [04-08]: The fragility of Gulf States: Some useful information here on the significance of migrant workers and foreign capital in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the UAE. The population of migrant workers in Qatar and the UAE is around 88%; 67-70% in Kuwait; 52% in Bahrain. While migrant workers are kept powerless, those are huge numbers. While the economies are based on oil and gas, they've accumulated a lot of foreign investment, and run huge sovereign wealth funds. In Abu Dhabi, foreigners own 78% of total property value. This is all based on the appearance of stability, but could easily prove fragile.

  • Robert Pape [04-09]: "The war is turning Iran into a major world power": Interview with Pape, who's long been a skeptic of the use of air power only in war. He has a Substack called Escalation Trap, but mostly just briefing points there. As I understand "escalation trap," it's that when you commit escalation, you make it harder to try any other approach. Trump, for instance, had a range of negotiation options back in February, but in choosing to escalate by killing Khamenei, he discarded many of his options, committing to a path that pointed only toward more escalation. Pape explains it this way: "The Escalation Trap equips you with the frameworks to recognize when conflicts are shifting phases, anticipate the pressures driving escalation, and make clearer decisions before volatility hardens into irreversible commitments."

    Pape also wrote a NYT op-ed on this theme:

    • [04-06]: The war is turning Iran into a major world power. I don't much like this formulation, possibly because it seems like an unnecessary escalation: Iran clearly has some ability to frustrate and limit the US, but I'd beware of making a false equivalence. The ability to break something does not make one a craftsman, although it may negate the value of anyone else being a craftsman.

  • Ariana Aspuru/Sean Rameswaram [04-09]: Pete Hegseth preaches "maximum lethality." What has that meant in Iran? Interview with Benjamin Wallace-Wells. I'll note that all this talk about "warrior ethos" goes back to Robert D Kaplan, who in the 2000s wrote a couple books using that terminology. Actually, he concept goes back even further, as researchers discovered that draftees rarely fired their guns at enemy soldiers. A major push in the Vietnam War was to increase their firing efficiency, which was partly accomplished by dehumanizing their opponents. The next advance was getting rid of draftees, allowing better selection of "warriors," although the effect there was blunted by officers becoming less wasteful of their soldiers' lives. Still, it's hard to say that US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan weren't lethal enough. McChrystall's counterinsurgency program failed in Afghanistan because US soldiers were unwilling to build better relationships with Afghans if that meant restraint (and more risk). What's new with Trump and Hegseth is that you're never going to hear the phrase "hearts and minds" again. Given how hypocritical that's always been (at least since Vietnam), that may be for the better, but is a "pure warrior" military something that we want? Or can even use? Granted, sociopathic sadists like Hegseth and Trump get off on the idea, but are we going to look back on Trump's use of the military and find anything worth carrying forward? I doubt it.

  • James R Webb [04-09]: For peace with Iran to work a reckoning with Israel is in order: "Trump must get back to basics, and his promises to the American people. In order to do that he must put this relationship in its proper place." This is true, and more people should say so, but it is also a big ask for Trump, as his alignment with Israel is based not just on mutual donors and graft but on a deeply held faith in power and violence. Webb notes that "killing leadership makes it more difficult to negotiate." But Trump and Netanyahu have convinced themselves that negotiating is for losers, and in the process consider the elimination of potential negotiators as good policy. Good luck convincing them otherwise.

  • Matthew Cunningham-Cook [04-10]: Marcus Foundation bankrolls pro-Iran War group: "A foundation associated with Home Depot has been the biggest funder of one of the loudest voices for war against Iran." The group is Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), which Bernie Marcus has donated $19 million to.

  • Cameron Peters [04-13]: The new Hormuz blockade, briefly explained: Not really. I wonder where this subhed came from: "Trump tries Iran's playbook." It's not really the same tactic at all, although as a short-term negotiation ploy it may make some sense.

  • TRTWorld [04-13]: Iran offers 5 years enrichment freeze as US pushes for 20 in Islamabad talks: I find these time frameworks very revealing. Twenty years is long enough that current leaders can conveniently forget about the problem, continuing to treat Iran with callous contempt, figuring that the consequences will be someone else's problem. Five years is soon enough one should start planning straight away. Enrichment itself is only a hypothetical problem. While the US and Israel prefers prohibiting any HEU, the other way of neutralizing the "threat" is to normalize relations and forge bonds of trade and aid that would lead Iranians to viewing the US and Israel not as foes but as friends. Five years should be enough time to make substantial progress, if that's something the US is willing to consider. (And we're mostly talking the US here, which harbors the sharpest grudges from 1979. Israel and Saudi Arabia have found that an easy way to cozy up to the US, and to neutralize their own antagonism, is to posit Iran as a joint enemy threat. That no longer works if the US makes peace with Iran.) Another report:

  • Rajan Menon [04-16]: Behind the bluster, Donald Trump desperately needs a peace deal with Iran. Here's a solution. I'm not especially impressed with these proposals, but anything mutually agreeable would have my blessing. The key to a solution is not just that both sides must compromise, but that both sides need to recognize the other's legitimate fears, and seek to alleviate them in ways that are minimally disruptive and demeaning. This would, of course, be much easier if Israel would negotiate a modus vivendi with the Palestinians, but they are miles away from even considering such a thing.

Israel: Shortly after Israel and the US killed the Ayatollah, kicking off major war with Iran, Hezbollah lobbed a few rockets at northern Israel from Lebanon, so Israel responded as they always do, by escalating. Then when Trump canceled the apocalypse and agreed to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, most people expected Lebanon to chill out, but Israel escalated once again, suggesting they were even madder about the ceasefire than about Hezbollah's initial attacks (or "self-defense" or whatever). Evidently, while Israel can drag Trump into their wars, Trump can't (or won't) attempt to control Israel, so whatever ceasefire promises he makes have no credibility.

  • Dave Reed

  • Jonathan Ofir [03-22]: 'Forever live by the sword': Understanding Israelis' massive support for Iran war: "A recent poll registered Israeli support for the war on Iran at a whopping 93%. Between the genocide, the ethnic cleansing, and the annexations, Israelis think this is how it's meant to be. Constant war to sustain our constant expansion." The prevalence of right-wingers in Israel seems to be the result of so many years of psychodrama — the existential fear that has been drummed into every Israeli, combined with the seeming reprieve of incredible military victories — although this is aided by the insulation of having nearly all of the violence take place outside their own communities. (For similar reasons, Americans fell in love with WWII, and generally tolerated later wars until their utter pointlessness became too obvious to ignore.) What troubles me more is how the nominal left has fallen for the same mythology. Here's an earlier piece that makes the same point:

    • Orly Noy [03-01]: We are at war, therefore we are: "Months after proclaiming a 'historic victory,' Israel embarks on another offensive against Iran — and the ritual erasure of political dissent begins anew."

      For these three men — Lapid, Golan, and Bennett — no task is supposedly more urgent than replacing Netanyahu's blood-soaked, Kahanist government, which has led the country to unprecedented depths. They understand how dangerous he is. They know the devastation another term would bring.

      Yet the moment the smell of war fills the air, all these insights evaporate, replaced by automatic reverence to the Israeli war machine. It is as if the very idea that a war can be opposed simply does not exist within their cognitive framework.

      No one understands this mechanism better than Netanyahu. However precarious his political position may be, he knows that uniting even his fiercest rivals across the Zionist spectrum is only a click away. If "in wartime there is no coalition or opposition," then perpetual war becomes his most reliable political strategy — and he has learned to deploy it with increasing frequency.

      Netanyahu is a cynical and dangerous war criminal. But one thing cannot be denied: No Israeli leader has so deeply understood the collective psyche of Jewish Israeli society. A society that seems capable of feeling its own pulse only in war and destruction; that, if it is not attacking, destroying, and killing, is not entirely certain that it exists. In that sense, Netanyahu fits it like a glove.

  • Esther Sperber [03-26]: Settler violence is the symptom, not the disease: "As rabbis and generals rush to denounce West Bank attacks, we must ask: what kind of political system makes such brutality not just possible, but predictable?"

  • Qassam Muaddi:

    • [03-25]: What it's like to be a family caught in the crosshairs of Israel's 'de-Palestinization' of Jerusalem: "The Hamdia family spent all of their life savings on building a home, but Israeli bulldozers destroyed it in a single day. They are one example of Israel's surging policy of home demolitions in the West Bank."

    • [03-31]: Israeli policies pose an existential threat to Palestinians in the West Bank. Why isn't there more resistance? "Israeli settler pogroms, annexation, and economic strangulation are eroding Palestinian life in the West Bank." The answer seems so obvious that it's almost irresponsible to even raise the question: resistance, either through legal channels or as a violent uprising, is hopeless, with the latter exactly what the Israelis are hoping for, an excuse to do to what's left of the Palestinian West Bank what they've done to Gaza. All that really leaves is making some kind of moral appeal to the world to chastise Israel, and good luck with that. For an example:

      • Salman Abu Sitta [04-01]: Israel may dominate through violence, but Palestinians hold a force more powerful: "Israel has overwhelming military power, but moral power rooted in peace and justice is completely absent from Zionism. This is the power that has inspired millions to shout 'Free Palestine' in cities around the world like never before." Easy to say for some kind of organizer based in London. I'm choking on "powerful" in the title. That's really not the right word — "compelling," maybe? or "inspiring"? — and what about "shouting"? Isn't that what you do when no one is listening?

      Still, I wouldn't discount resistance just because it isn't working to the satisfaction of activists (especially outsiders). People resist in their own ways, given their own situations, and the limits of hope and action. Slavery existed in America from 1619 to 1865, punctuated by a few inconsequential revolts, but I wouldn't say there were long periods of no resistance.

    • [03-31]: Global condemnation as Israeli ministers celebrate death penalty law targeting Palestinian prisoners: "Human rights groups condemned a new Israeli law targeting Palestinian prisoners with the death penalty as a possible war crime and 'deeply discriminatory.' Meanwhile, Israeli ministers celebrated the law's passage with champagne on the Knesset floor."

    • [04-04]: Israel is implementing its Gaza strategy in Lebanon: turning 'buffer zones' into permanent borders: "Israel has stated it does not plan to leave Lebanon even if the current 'war' ends. If the Gaza model is any guide, Israel appears to be moving toward expanding its border into Lebanon." Israel has long (as far back as Ben-Gurion) wanted to annex southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. The problem, as in Palestine, has always been disposing of the people who live there. But while there is renewed talk of annexation, their immediate plans are only slightly less ambitious:

      Now, as Israel escalates its war on Lebanon, Israel's Defense Minister Israel Katz has made Israel's plans clear: implement the Gaza model of total destruction and ethnic cleansing. He said on Tuesday that "the model of Rafah and Beit Hanoun" will be implemented in Lebanon.

      This means that Netanyahu's orders to the Israeli army to create a buffer zone 10 kilometers deep into Lebanon is more than a military strategy. It is a statement of reshaping an area of approximately 10,000 square kilometers, making it uninhabitable for its Lebanese residents, and putting it under Israeli military control. In Syria, Israel hasn't conducted the same kind of destruction, but it has announced that it will remain in the new territories it occupied after the fall of the al-Assad regime in December 2024. Together, in Lebanon and Syria, Israel seeks to maintain permanent control of some 14,000 square kilometers, all to create a so-called "buffer zone."

    • [04-08]: As US and Iran agree to a temporary ceasefire, Israel launches 'massacre' in Lebanon, threatening entire deal: "Hours after Iran and the US reached a two-week ceasefire agreement, Israel launched a massive bombing campaign across Lebanon, killing hundreds of people and threatening to derail the US-Iranian ceasefire before it even begins."

  • Jamal Abdi [04-09]: The forever spoiler: Netanyahu has been blowing up diplomacy with Iran for decades.

  • Jonathan Ofir [04-10]: Israelis are finally revolting against Netanyahu — for agreeing to the US ceasefire with Iran: "The entire Israeli political spectrum is united in blasting Netanyahu for not continuing to attack Iran, and Israeli society agrees. The reason, to put it simply, is that Israelis are war junkies." That's easy to say, not just because "Israelis are war junkies," but because the war rhetoric is so seductive to people who are sheltered from the costs and risks.

Israel-American-World Relations: I used to try to separate out Israel-related pieces into several bins. The Iran war has its own section, with most of the Lebanon front included under Israel above, as well as operations in the West Bank and Gaza, and internal Israeli politics. But here we will break out stories relating to Israeli propaganda, and the growing opposition to Israeli apartheid, war, and genocide in America and around the world.

  • Peter Beinart

    • [02-16]: The closing of the establishment Jewish mind: "What a letter claiming that accusations of genocide against Israel constitute a 'blood libel' says about pro-Israel discourse." I don't recall whether I cited this before, but the tab was still open. You can skip over the housekeeping up top and go straight to the "video transcript, where he makes his point. I'll add that "blood libel" seems to have become some kind of shorthand for any baseless accusation against Jews. Even in that very generic interpretation, it's impossible to argue that the charge of genocide is baseless. There is considerable evidence on both critical fronts: intent, and effect. You may try to argue that either or both don't quite reach the level of the legal term, but you can't pretend there's no evidence to be weighed.

  • Theia Chatelle [03-10]: With world's eyes on Iran, Israel locks down the West Bank: "The Israeli military has closed checkpoints around the West Bank, restricting Palestinians' movement as settler violence ramps up."

  • Michael Arria

    • [03-12]: Lindsey Graham helped push Trump to war: "As the war on Iran unfolds, it's clear that most Americans, including many on the right, don't support it. Nevertheless, warmonger Republican Senator Lindsey Graham continues to boast about his role in helping Israel push the US into war." There's also a section here on "Samantha Power and genocide," which includes a transcript of her response to a question of why she didn't quit her USAID post so she could speak out about the genocide unfolding in Gaza. Her rationalization isn't very compelling, making me wonder if the real problem wasn't just that she didn't take the problem seriously enough, probably because the political currents within the Biden administration were hostile to any such circumspection.

    • [03-26]: Newsom flip-flops on Israeli apartheid comments: The lobby strikes back, and by backing down, Newsom further discredits himself. One might quibble about the term "apartheid," but that's mostly because Israel's system of discrimination and separation is more extreme than South Africa's. Democrats need to find a way to talk about Israel without falling into hasbara clichés which ultimately justify war and other abuses of human rights. You don't have to say "apartheid" or "genocide" (although anyone who does is well justified). You could just say that you believe that everyone should have full and equal civil and political rights wherever they live, under whatever government is operating there. Then, when asked to clarify whether that includes Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, all you have to say is "yes." When asked about "Israel's right to self-defense," you can say, "sure, but not at the expense of anyone's rights to equal civil and political rights." Back during the 2024 campaign, Kamala Harris answered every question by first asserting Israel's "right to self-defense," after which nobody listened to anything else she had to say. Any time you write Israel a blank check like that, expect to be morally bankrupted.

    • [04-09]: Military aid to Israel emerges as the latest political litmus test for Democrats: "Last week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she would vote against any military aid to Israel, even weapons deemed 'defensive.' As support for Israel craters across the US, the issue of military aid has become the latest litmus test for Democrats." This is still a long ways from becoming a majority view, let alone a litmus test. The more realistic test is whether to oppose Trump's war against Iran, and blame Netanyahu for putting the idea into his tiny brain, and then using the leverage of the purse to rein both of them in and negotiate some kind of peace. Still, that's going to be hard for Democrats to do, especially the pro-Israel ones who would rather attack Trump for failing to win an unimaginable victory than to admit that their loyalty to Israel was (and always has been) misguided. Mainstream Democrats must finally realize that the only way they can function — the only way they can build any degree of voter trust — in the modern world is to become the party of peace. Failing that, they have no alternative when Trump flies off the handle and plunges America into a hopeless war.

  • James North [03-26]: The US media is ignoring Israel's efforts to torpedo Trump's talks with Iran: "Why won't the mainstream US media report on Israel's efforts to sabotage Trump's efforts to end the war with Iran?"

  • Yonathan Touval [03-29]: Is it 1914 in America? Filed here because the author is an Israeli "foreign-policy analyst," complains about leaders who "remain strikingly obtuse about human beings — their pride, shame, convictions and historical memory"; about his dangerous it is to place war "in the hands of people untrained in irony, contingency and the darker constants of human nature." Corey Robin complained about this piece, and he's probably right, but it seems to me pretty orthogonal to whatever it is that drives the core question, which is whether to go to war or not. A simpler first approximation is "not."

  • Nathan Thompson [04-03]: Democratic leader shift away from Israel: "Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's announcement that she will not vote for any Israeli military aid is part of an emerging trend." I'd be more impressed if Hakeem Jeffries said that.

  • Rawan Abhari [04-04]: Stop asking if Israel has a right to exist: "The question . . . isn't a real inquiry about the rights of nations. It's a manipulation of discourse, a litmus test that forces Palestinians to offer theoretical assurances before their real political grievances can even be heard."

  • James Zogby [04-14]: A major taboo was broken at the DNC last weekend: "An AIPAC-specific resolution didn't make it through the party's meeting. But I've never seen such an open debate about the role of pro-Israel money before."

  • Bernie Sanders [04-15]: No more US military aid to Israel: "The time is long overdue for members of Congress to listen to the American people and end US military aid to the extremist Netanyahu government."

Around the World: The Ukraine War is still with us, and beyond that states around the world try to navigate around the neuroses and pathologies of Trump and Netanyahu. It is worth noting that people who are routinely slandered as mad tyrants in America often appear as much saner than those two.

  • Anatol Lieven [03-31]: Is the Iran War breaking NATO forever? "Trump is lashing out at allies as European partners increasingly turn away from his war — all signs that this is more than just a situational divide."

  • Karthik Sankaran/Sarang Shidore [03-24]: Iran war could cripple the 'Yuxi Circle' or 55% of world population: "This includes the Indian subcontinent, China, Japan, the Koreas, and all the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN."

  • Wenjing Wang [03-26]: On energy, China can sit this crisis out. Here's why. "'Green energy' here isn't a slogan or abstract aspiration. It's economic and geopolitical survival."

  • James Park [04-10]: Kim Jong Un waiting for Trump, but there's a path right in front of him: Relations between North and South Korea have thawed a bit since Lee Jae-myung followed Yoon Suk-yeol's "imprudent hawkishness," although Kim remains more focused on the US, even as Trump continues playing hard-to-get:

    From Pyongyang's perspective, engagement with Seoul has little strategic value. One takeaway Kim may have drawn from his failed 2018-19 negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump — mediated by South Korea — is that Seoul lacks either the diplomatic leverage to move U.S. policy or the agency to advance inter-Korean relations without U.S. consent. In practice, Washington exerts decisive influence over key issues of concern to Pyongyang, including potential nuclear talks, U.S.-South Korea joint military drills, sanctions, and a permanent end to the Korean War.

    Another lesson, this from the Iran War but already learned from Libya, is that giving up nuclear weapons would be stupid and perhaps suicidal. It occurs to me that Trump could make partial amends for his blunder in Iran by negotiating a normalization deal with North Korea. I doubt he has the skills or imagination to do so, and I doubt North Korea will give him the win on nuclear disarmament he mostly wants (not least to pair it with whatever he gets out of Iran; neither will be complete, but perhaps within spin distance). But it's doable if he can overcome the internal resistance that has kept the US at odds with North Korea since 1953.

Trump's World War III: I initially set this section up to deal with Trump's threats of war. We're obviously beyond that now, as Iran has its own section now. I've also opened a temporary news slot for Cuba. That leaves other fronts here, as well as broader issues of American militarism, including the logic that has led to the Iran War.

  • Leah Schroeder [02-04]: Hegseth to take control of Stars & Stripes for 'warfighter' makeover: "Critics, including veterans and First Amendment advocates, say the proposed overhaul would usurp the storied military newspaper's independence."

  • Joseph Bouchard [03-03]: How Maduro overthrow was key node in US-Israeli war on Iran: "It is important not to see them as separate operations: Venezuela was very much a precursor to regime change in Tehran." Several quotes here as how "the Israeli government has long viewed Venezuela as a strategic satellite of the Islamic Republic of Iran" make you wonder whether Israel had lobbied for the Venezuela coup. What is certain is that it served as a confidence-builder for Trump to go up against Iran — a point that Netanyahu and other skillfully exploited.

  • Daniel Immerwahr [03-16]: What' behind Trump's new world disorder? "A foreign policy freed of liberal pretenses and imperial ambitions could lead to restraint — or, as the Iran attack shows, simply license hit-and-run belligerence."

  • Alex Thurston [03-23]: Trump's Sahel reset banks on 'sovereignty,' guns + minerals deals. The art of dealing with Trump is the kickback.

  • Nick Turse: Selected articles (more here).

  • Robert Kagan [03-30]: America is now a rogue superpower: "Washington's conduct in the Iran war is accelerating global chaos and deepening America's dangerous isolation." Sounds like the author's dream come true. So why isn't he happy now?

  • Garrett Graff:

    • [04-02]: The mythology of Pete Hegseth: "The Iran War cheerleader-in-chief embraces a dangerous alternate history of the 21st century."

    • [04-06]: Is Trump about to nuke Iran? "The fact we can't say 'no' for sure should terrify us."

    • [2025-08-25]: America tips into fascism: "Today is different than before." Old, but still on the top of the author's "featured posts." Still, it wasn't immediately clear what had happened on that August 25, 2025, so I asked Google to look it up, and got this: "deadly Israeli airstrikes on Nasser Hospital in Gaza killing five journalists, the approach of powerful Typhoon Kajiki in Vietnam triggering evacuations, and US political developments involving National Guard deployments and administration cabinet changes." The latter was what the reference was to, but his subject was the whole anomalous drive of the then-eight-month-old Trump administration.

  • Francesca Fiorentini [04-03]: Finally, an anti-woke war: "America refuses a prolonged DEI quagmire." This is a bit too tongue-in-cheek, taking Hegseth at his word that the Bush wars failed because the military was too woke, but as he's fixing that, Trump should have any problems.

  • Simon Tisdall [04-04]: As Team Trump wage unceasing war on Iran, evangelical nationalists are destroying any moral world order we once had. Illustrated with pictures of Hegseth's Crusader tattoos, as if the text itself wasn't disturbing enough:

    Exploitation of Christian belief for political and military ends is a long-established, shabby US practice. . . . For most practising Christians, the misappropriation, distortion and weaponisation of faith to justify death and destruction, sow divisions, excuse war crimes and bomb Iran "back to the stone ages" is deeply saddening. Christians — who celebrate Easter on Sunday — believe Jesus was crucified for the sake of all mankind, for the forgiveness of sins, not for vindictive vengeance, pride and domination.

  • Charles Homans [04-04]: America is used to hiding its wars. Trump is doing the opposite. This seems to be largely based on the assumption that Americans have no risk in war any more: they can blow things up, kill people, make life difficult or impossible, and nothing can touch them, least of all conscience. Trump was quick to grasp this, perhaps because he has no conscience.

  • Abdaljawad Omar [04-06]: How the neoconservative influence over US war-making paved the way for Trump's war crimes in Iran: "Donald Trump's naked threats to target Iran's civilian infrastructure are the culmination of a strand of neoconservative thought that has defined U.S. war-making over three decades, from the Iraq war to Obama's drone campaigns to the Gaza genocide."

  • Bill Scher [04-08]: Trump believes in "madman theory." But he's actually a madman: "After six weeks of insane behavior, the ceasefire should not lead us to believe Trump has regained his facilities." The Madman Theory was one of Nixon's dumber ideas: in order to work, you not only have to convince the other side you're insane, but you are depending on their sanity to save you from yourself. But if the other side is sane, why don't you just try to reason with them. Sure, you have different interests, and you may have to compromise to get the best possible mix of gains and losses, but isn't that what sane people do? And I suspect that it's usually possible to reason your way to some kind of net positive — especially compared to the massive net-negative of war. The only reason for engaging in this sort of game is because you have goals that cannot be supported by reason, where one's only hope is to impose by power (e.g., Nixon on Vietnam).

    I don't know whether Trump is insane, or just plays at insanity on TV, but he's pretty convincing at it, at least in terms of his narcissism and sociopathy. What I do know is that he is reckless and insincere: he compulsively says crazy things he may or may not mean, but you can never trust to know the difference (he probably doesn't himself). I also believe that he only cares about himself, and can only engage the world in terms of what's in it for him. Thus people who want something from him have to go the circuitous route of flattery and apparent obeissance, which is to say they have to humiliate themselves to gain favors from someone they neither respect nor can trust. That's more opportunity than problem for weasels like Netanyahu and Lindsey Graham, but is a huge challenge for anyone who wants to reason toward sensible goals. When confronted with someone who is probably insane, the normal reaction is to look away and disengage. Unfortunately, if that person is also president, that's hard to do, and fraught with its own risks. (That's probably why the media work so hard to respect and rationalize Trump, because they don't feel like they can afford disengaging from the subject they're supposed to cover. Of course, the humiliation builds up, and sometimes even they snap.)

    It's also worth noting that the Madman Theory has never worked, even with leaders who are genuinely mad. At some point, pretty much everyone decides they've had enough, and have to fight back, even if the odds aren't good. Otherwise, you're just acquiescing to arrogance. By the way, Trump himself has embraced the Madman Theory:

  • Christian Paz:

    • [04-10]: Did the Trump administration threaten the pope? "Avignon-gate, the scandal blowing up MAGA-Catholic relations, explained." I'm tempted to quote James Baker about "not having a dog in that fight," but the piece is rather fascinating even if you understand that it's just about other people. I've found it interesting when right-winger protestants convert to Catholicism, presumably because they want a more ornate, more hierarchical religion (I've also heard of Catholics concerting to Eastern Orthodoxy for the same reason), only to find a mix of things they like (anti-abortion) and dislike (opposition to real killing, like capital punishment, and especially war).

    • [02-10]: Is MAGA pushing the Catholic Church to the left? "Progressive Catholics are ready to fight back." Interview with Christopher Hale, who publishes a newsletter called Letters from Leon, where he asserts that "the pontiff's effort to moderate the church and act as a bulwark against creeping authoritarianism in the Trump 2.0 era."

    • [04-13]: Donald Trump's pivot to blasphemy: "Attacking the pope and posing as Jesus — even religious conservatives are mad this time." I got over Christianity by the time I turned 20, but in my teens I was pretty well schooled in the intricacies of Christian sectarianism, at a time when the distinctions between the dozens of Protestant sects still meant something. In those days, a fraudulent poseur like Trump would have been called out from all quarters. These days, I'm not sure that most nominal Christians believe anything drawn from religious traditions. Rather, they believe in secular philosophies (liberalism, conservatism, fascism, some even socialism) and use selective readings of scripture and other authorities to buttress those beliefs. If I still cared, I would find this aspect of Trump very upsetting. Now, I'll just note that I doubt the sincerity of any professed Christian who isn't upset and disgusted by Trump's religious posturing.

  • Harold Meyerson [04-13]: Re-enacting the Crusades: "Pete Hegseth's Christianity — tribal, with plenty of enemies who deserve the sword — is central to the MAGA worldview."

  • Martin Di Caro [04-14]: Lacing up LBJ's shoes, Trump is walking willingly into a trap: "Choosing War author Fredrik Logevall on how the Democratic president went from bombing in 1964 to sending 500,000 ground troops into Vietnam in 1967." Interview. One thing I'm struck by here was the 1965 prediction by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that to win would take 500,000 troops and give years. That prediction was tested, and proved overly optimistic. Also by the Humphrey prediction that such a war would destroy the political unity Johnson built up in his 1964 landslide election.

  • Blaise Malley [04-14]: US strikes on alleged drug boats have killed more than 160 people: "With eyes on Middle East, military continues campaigns of deadly strikes at sea."

  • Jim Lobe [04-14]: Think the Iran war is a disaster? Blame these DC thin tanks first. "We asked AI to find the conflict's biggest boosters in Washington. Surprise: many are connected to Israel and pushed for the invasion of Iraq too." Don't let "AI" distract you here. Any systematic survey would have identified these same "usual suspects."

Trump vs. Law: This section has moved beyond the stormtroopers of ICE, and might as well include the whole US Courts system, as well as the increasingly oxymoronic Department of Justice. The firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi is one story here, but doesn't merit its own section.

Trump's Administration: Trump can't remake America in his own image (i.e., destroy the country, culture, and civilization) just by himself. He needs help, and having largely purged the government of civil servants and replaced them with his own minions, this is what they are doing (whether he's paying attention or not):

Trump Himself:

  • Margaret Hartmann:

  • Liz Crampton [03-28]: 'He's lied about everything': Iran war puts Trump on shaky ground with young MAGA men: "Their frustrations and anger with the conflict were on full display at CPAC this week."

  • CK Smith [04-05]: Paula White likens Trump's troubles to Jesus Christ at Easter lunch: White is "Trump's chief spiritual adviser," which evidently means that it's her job to assure Trump that whatever he does is God's will. I'm not sure whether any previous president ever employed such an adviser, but Trump is exceptionally needy of reassurance, and given his baser instincts, such reassurance is especially treacherous.

  • Tom Carson:

    • [04-07]: Terminatic: After running on about Adlai Stevenson as only a novelist would, then offering a back-handed compliment to JFK:

      Sixty-plus years later, is the performance of Mar-A-Khargo's throne-sitter in chief in the same league? In every way but one, no way. It must gall Trump to his bone spurs that the Kennedys outdo him even as narcissists, and he can't stand Serious Pretending anyhow. Besides being profoundly unserious, he's actually lousy at pretending: just watch him whenever he's got to act solemnly concerned about anyone's welfare but his own, something Kennedy could pull off even right after someone shot him in the head. As anyone who's ever been in a bar fight can tell you, what Trump's good at isn't pretending but bullshitting, not the same thing at all. Too bad a ton of bullshit can kill people every bit as dead as a bazooka.

    • [04-14]: No King of Kings: "Trump does Jesus the way Debbie did Dallas."

      Trump still has no idea why his Ramadan message didn't go over well in the ungrateful Muslim world. He thought "God bless Allah" had a benign, even generous ring to it. Only the fake news persists in the slander that he doesn't have a gooey side he can trot out like bubble gum scraped off his heel.

      I mean, Jesus, am I wrong? It's not as if he represented himself as Allah, something he's been told is a sacrilege in their religion. He thinks that's a stupid rule, but guesses it takes all kinds to make a world. Not counting everyone he wants to obliterate, but that goes without saying. Or would if he ever stopped saying it.

      One difficulty of writing about Trump 2.0 is you can never be sure whether you're making crazy shit up or just guessing right a few hours ahead of the news cycle. Unless the real clickbait here is the scoop that everybody's just fucking fed up with him, I wouldn't have bet on the President of All the Peepholes sharing an utterly endearing AI image of himself dressed up an ever-succoring Messiah to raise this hue and cry. In happier days when the redcap horde was feeling more MAGAminous, it wouldn't have.

  • Zack Beauchamp [04-13]: New data suggests Trump's assault on democracy may be stalling out: "Three new reports give some surprising reasons for optimism."

Republicans:

  • Shawn McCreesh [03-31]: In South Dakota, neighbors feel sorry for Kristi Noem's husband.

  • Zack Beauchamp [04-13]: JD Vance had a vision for the world. Trump is wrecking it. "The vice president's disastrous week reveals that he's in a trap of his own making." First he went to Hungary to campaign for Orbán. (As I've been asking everyone this week: how is that supposed to work for anyone?) Then he went to Pakistan to head the negotiations with Iran, and walked out with nothing after 21 hours. "In effect, the most promising avatar of postliberal politics in America has been saddled with a record that betrays some of his movement's core principles. And it's not clear how he'll ever escape the baggage." Actually, it looks like it's very hard for a sitting vice president to get elected: aside from Adams and Jefferson, which was under a very different system (the VP was the runner-up, not just a ticket mate), the only ones I can think of was GHW Bush, following Reagan, who had won his second term in a landslide, and Martin Van Buren, after Jackson (again, very popular, and like Bush a loser running for a second term). On the other hand, Harris, Gore, Humphrey, and Nixon all lost (Nixon and Biden did win after an interval). Harris and Humphrey were really hurt by their inability to break with the wars of unpopular presidents. Of course, Vance's prospects would look up if Trump dies (resigns, is impeached, etc.). After a shaky start (John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur) promoted VPs have won their own terms (Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson).

  • Raquel Coronell Uribe [04-14]: Vance warns the pope should 'be careful' when talking about theology: "Vance, who [says he] is Catholic, said the pope was wrong in saying Jesus wasn't on the side of those who wield the sword, pointing to the US helping defeat the Nazis in World War II."

Democrats:

  • David W Chen [03-31]: A Democratic electrician nabs a state senate seat in Republican Florida: "With Brian Nathan's victory certified, Democrats won two of three state legislative races in this month's special elections, all in Republican-leaning districts." Democrats have flipped 30 seats since the 2024 election.

  • Astead Herndon [04-04]: How one Democratic senator is tackling Trump's corruption: "Sen. Chris Murphy explains how blatant corruption is undermining faith in democracy."

  • Ed Kilgore [04-15]: Finally, Democrats are a unitd antiwar party: "Conflicts with Vietnam and Iraq deeply divided the party. But now nearly all Democrats oppose Trump's dangerous and unjust Iran war." Aside from Fetterman, who voted against limiting Trump's assumed warmaking powers, I still think many others in the Democratic caucus come up short of being antiwar. If they were, they would vote against funding for Israel, which is the driving force (and supposed beneficiary, but that may just be Netanyahu) behind Trump's war. Still, it's a movement that has to happen if Democrats are ever able to regain and maintain a hold on the presidency.

The Economy (and Economists):

  • John Cassidy:

  • Jonquilyn Hill [04-05]: The high price of everything, explained: "What the cost of gas, coffee, and milk tells us about why everything feels more expensive right now." Actually, the author just explains three cases, with three different explanations: gas prices are directly attributable to Trump's war on Iran, which has disrupted supplies; coffee production has also been disrupted, but by climate change; milk is less obvious, but a combined effect of rising costs elsewhere (including oil, which affects all of agriculture). But the author doesn't get to "everything," or even try. That's partly because the answers aren't simple — other than inflating the money supply, which may have seeded the wave of price rises that started around 2021 but doesn't explain much of what's happening recently. My own theory is that most of the initial price rises were caused by supply disruptions, then escalated by companies that found they had enough market power to raise prices, after which "inflation" snowballed into a psychology, where most businesses wanted to get in on the action, or at least not be left out. Trump is making this worse with his wars and tariffs (a consumption tax disguised as ordinary price gouging), and possibly by his deficit spending (limited as the tax cuts mostly went to the rich). On the other hand, he's dragging the economy down, not unlike the Volcker recession that broke the inflationary mindset of the 1970s.

  • Ryan Cooper [04-07]: A retrospective on Bidenomics: "Joe Biden listened to the left on full employment. But the lasting effects were wanting, and the politics were brutal." I don't have time to unpack this pretty good summary of how Biden's policies affected the economy, mostly for the better, not that he got much credit for that, not just from his enemies but from his own incoherence. I should also stress once again that what killed Harris wasn't the economy but the wars. (True that Harris wasn't much more articulate about the economy than Biden was, and especially that she failed to identify the villains — largely because she spent more time sucking up to donors than campaigning for votes.)

  • Eric Levitz

  • Robert Kuttner [04-14]: The faltering war economy: "Trump's war craters the economy in multiple ways, even if it somehow ends soon."

Technology (Including AI):

  • Eric Levitz [03-26]: 4 reasons why AI (probably) won't take your job: "What the AI jobs panic is missing."

  • Ergosphere [03-30]: The machines are fine. I'm worried about us. An astrophysics story, or parable perhaps.

  • Janet Abou-Elias/William D Hartung [04-07]: The Pentagon is going "AI first": "The US military is placing the technology at the center of its mission,and the human costs promise to be staggering." "Human costs" are nothing new at the Pentagon, where the best remedy would be slowing down and down-sizing, both of which could support much-needed overview. AI's promise of a faster, sloppier control system does just the opposite. But we should also be concerned about the literal costs. One deal cited here is a 10-year, $5.6 billion contract to the start up Salesforce. Only the Pentagon could blow that kind of money on a nebulous fantasy sketch.

  • David Futrelle [04-13]: How a New York Times puff piece missed the toxic creed of the tech oligarchy: "A profile of an AI healthcare start-up overlooked the creaky business model behind it, as well as the tech sector's worship of 'high agency.'" About Michael Gallagher, of Medvi.

    According to Gallagher, the company is on track to do $1.8 billion in sales this year, with a staff of only two (Gallagher and his younger brother).

    Too good to be true? Well, yes. Almost immediately, critics online filled in what the Times had left out: a warning letter the FDA sent to Medvi over alleged deceptive marketing practices; a RICO lawsuit against Medvi's fulfillment partner over a weight-loss compound that hasn't been proven to work; a slew of AI-generated fake doctors shilling for Medvi in thousands of spammy ads.

    After the online outcry over the article, the Times added a few paragraphs describing some of the ways that "Medvi's aggressive advertising has led to legal and regulatory issues" — which is putting it a little gingerly. But the story remains largely unchanged on the Times website. I say let it stand. Because every age gets the heroes it deserves, and Gallagher is in many ways a perfect representative of our current Gilded Age 2.0.

  • Dani Rodrik [04-13]: To work for us, AI must not think for us. Alternate (slightly better) title, at Mint: "Artificial intelligence was meant to assist human work, not replace our thinking."

Regular Columnists

Sometimes an interesting columnist writes often enough that it makes sense to collect their work in one place, rather than scatter it about.

Paul Krugman:

  • [04-07]: MAGA is winning its war against US science: "When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength."

  • [04-13]: The Axis of Autocracy loses a wheel: "Hungarians stand up for democracy."

  • [04-14]: Chinese electrotech is the big winner in the Iran War: "An energy-hungry world is being pushed away by America and into China's arms."

  • [04-15]: Autocracy = corruption: "What the US resistance can learn from Hungary." It's worth recalling here that Trump's presidential wins came when he was (improbably but relentlessly) able to paint his opponent as the corrupt one. He never acknowledged, much less normalize, his own corruption.

    The good news from Hungary is that blatant corruption doesn't have to be normalized. In fact, public perceptions of runaway corruption can become a weapon in defense of democracy. The public understands corruption, hates it, and can be mobilized to vote en masse against it.

Nathan J Robinson and Current Affairs:

Jeffrey St Clair:

Robert Wright:

  • [04-11]: The future arrived this week. "And boy are we not ready for it!" Author has a new book coming out in June, with the very unfortunate title of The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning. I recently read his 1999 book Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which was pretty good but would have been better had he excised all his references to "God" and "destiny." I suspect the new book will also have much real value, but once again way too much about "God" and "Cosmic Reckoning." He does write here:

    One of the book's central points is that if we're going to successfully navigate the AI revolution — avoid traumas and catastrophes that range from social chaos to planet-wide authoritarian rule to nuclear war to complete annihilation — we'll have to cross the threshold to true global community. The world's nations have to confront this challenge collectively — build new international rules and norms — or else watch in dismay and intermittent terror as a technology that accelerates without constraint or guidance strips us of agency.

    Given that "true global community" is a pretty extreme pipe dream, I wonder if something more practicable might work. To some extent, this depends on what the real threat of AI is, and how it interacts with other problems (or perhaps I should say comorbidities?). If you want to take nuclear war off the table, maybe the best way to tackle that problem isn't through AI but through nuclear weapons. I'm all for some "new international rules and norms," but caution that they have to be mutually agreed upon, without the coercion of power. It isn't beyond imagination that the ten or so states that possess nuclear weapons could agree to safeguards that would effectively end their threat, and that every other nation could agree, as nearly all have already done in signing the NPT, not to build their own. With no nuclear weapons, there can be no nuclear war, regardless of how funky AI gets.

    "Social chaos" and "authoritarian rule," tough less clearly defined, can also be dealt with without reference to AI. As for AI itself, I think most people understand that it promises some benefits but also poses some challenges, possibly including a few that may prove insurmountable. If we take nation-states as atoms, each free and autonomous — i.e., living in anarchy, with no overarching "world order," just a set of "international rules and norms" that are freely agreed upon, I doubt that any will want to not enjoy the benefits of AI, although they may have legitimate concerns about how others might abuse it, so they may seek to formulate some rules and norms to regulate its use, maybe even its development. Wright isn't arguing against me here, but he's imagining some kind of enforcement mechanism that I reject at an invitation to abuse. All I want to do here is question why we need to go to such (unworkable) extremes?

    Which gets us back to "what God has to do with it"? On the one hand, I find the concept bewildering (what could it possibly mean?), and on the other I find it ominous (who wants to be God? and why?). I don't know much about AI, but I suspect that the notion that whoever controls AI is going to be able to run the world is just megalomaniacal nonsense. Admittedly, if you look at the capitalization of AI companies, it's profitable nonsense, as it seems to be the basis of such ridiculous valuations. But aside from trying to set up a system of tribute-rents, which is ultimately equivalent to a tax on breathing (or life), where is the natural profit? Conversely, take away the patents and rents, and where is the problem?

    The piece goes on to offer valuable insights about Trump and Iran, before cycling back to his book, wherein he writes:

    These kinds of dangers — AI-abetted biological virus, AI-abetted computer virus, AI-infused cyberweapon, rampantly destructive AI agent — and various others make it harder for any nation to feel safe unless it has some confidence that things are under control in other nations. And it's hard to get that kind of confidence without international agreements that qualify, in at least some sense, for the term "international governance."

    To which he quotes Tom Friedman, saying virtually the same thing, but couched in more conventional realpolitik:

    The solution — this may shock people — must begin with the two AI superpowers, the US and China. It is now urgent that they learn to collaborate to prevent bad actors from gaining access to this next level of cyber capability. Such a powerful tool would threaten them both, leaving them exposed to criminal actors inside their countries and terrorist groups and other adversaries outside. It could easily become a greater threat to each country than the two countries are to each other.

    I suppose I find it hopeful that such great powers might fear the future more than each other and/or their own people, but I'm sure a sampling of AI executives would love nothing more than to see an arms race develop to control AI, as that would make themselves the most important (and potentially most powerful) people in the world. As it is, they're playing up the potential use of AI in weapons systems, because they know that's where the sweet spot between fear and money is. Take that money away, and the mighty motivation of greed will melt away. That won't cause AI not to be developed, but will slow it down, and straighten it out, with the much better motivation of altruism.

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

Gabrielle Gurley [03-30]: Ending sports owner blackmail: "A new bill would prohibit the money grabs that billionaire team owners unleash to pit states and cities against each other in bidding wars over potential moves." The bill is the Home Team Act, sponsored by Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). They cite the Green Bay Packers as an exception to the billionaire-owner rule, as the team is owned by fans, none of whom can exceed a 4% ownership share.

Caitlin Dewey [04-01]: America is going back to the moon: "Artemis II and the new space race, explained."

John Semley [04-14]: The fanfare around the band Geese actually was a psyop: "The Brooklyn band Geese was labeled an 'industry plant' by those who questioned its sudden ubiquity. Maybe it was." Paywalled ("You've read your last free article"; when did I ever read my first?), so I'm short on details, but as a non-fan this caught my eye. Zachary Carter tweeted: "Give me a break. They had a digital marketing team for their fourth record, and it worked. Music has always been promoted via inorganic methods." The Geese album, Getting Killed, wound up in first place in my 2025 EOY Aggregate, by a slim margin over Rosalía's Lux (247-230; AOTY put Lux ahead, 413-404, an order I might have wound up with had I surveyed my usual large number of lists, but I fell far short). I'm not a fan of either album, but had five A- albums in AOTY's top ten: Wednesday, CMAT, Lily Allen, Clipse, and Billy Woods. That's if anything above average for me, so I'm used to albums I don't much care for ranking well. Publicity has something to do with this, but more to do with ranked vs. unranked. Records that are noticed by enough people to get reviewed usually scatter not by degrees of PR but by more basic taste considerations. That said, I have even less idea why other people like Geese than I do with other ranked albums I don't care for (FKA Twigs and Turnstile from both our lists; I had Bad Bunny at ***, which qualifies as an album I like; Oklou and Hayley Williams, both ** for me, made the AOTY list, displacing Allen and Woods — sure, my list is skewed slightly in my direction).

Astrid Barltrop [04-16]: How will attitudes change if students like me aren't taught the truth about British colonial history? Misunderstandings about colonial history is not just a British problem. Most former empires, including Russia and the US (and even long-gone ones like Iran and Turkey), have exaggerated senses of their own self-importance, with little recognition of the harm they caused to others, let alone the self-harm of trying to dominate other peoples.

Books:

  • Tom Carson [03-28]: Charlie is my darling: "The Little Drummer Girl, 43 years later."

  • Robert Kuttner [04-03]: Capital ideas: "Two books on the history of capitalism provide lessons for how to tame it." Reviews of Sven Beckert: Capitalism: A Global History, and John Cassidy: Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI.

  • Ishan Desai-Geller [04-10]: The enduring lessons of the Jewish bund: "A conversation with Molly Crabapple about Here Where We Live Is Our Country, her capacious history of Bundism and what we can learn from their socialist and anti-Zionist example."

Some Notable Deaths: I've been using the New York Times, but it's giving me aggravation these days, so I'll switch over to Wikipedia (April, also March), which is probably better anyway. Roughly speaking, since my last report on March 22:

  • Dan Wall, 72 [04-14]: jazz organ player, notably worked with John Abercrombie and Jerry Bergonzi.

  • Asha Bhosle, 92 [04-12]: Indian singer.

  • Phil Garner, 76 [04-11], baseball player and manager.

  • Mike Westbrook, 90 [04-11]: English pianist, composer, band leader; a Penguin Guide favorite.

  • Afrika Bambaataa, 68 [04-09]: DJ and rapper, "Looking for the Perfect Beat" was one of the founding classics of hip-hop.

  • Davey Lopes, 80 [04-08], baseball player and manager.

  • Tracy Kidder, 80 [03-24], journalist. I read his books: The Soul of a New Machine (1982, which won a Pulitzer), and House (1985).

  • Chip Taylor, 86 [03-23], singer-songwriter ("Wild Thing").

  • Keith Ingham, 88 [03-12], English pianist.

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas.

  • Kevin M Kruse [04-02]:

    I think the reason AI propagandists are so flustered by the fact that no real writer wants to use their idiotic tools is that they themselves don't enjoy writing. They see it as a boring arduous chore to be avoided, while real writers actually enjoy writing and actually care about the quality of it.

    It's like approaching a chef who really loves making new dishes, watching other people enjoy them, enjoying the taste himself and saying, look, this cooking thing takes a lot of time and energy, wouldn't you rather just get your nutritional needs from this brand new Gruel Bar we're selling?

  • Tom Carson [04-02]:

    It fascinates me how totally indequate the NYT is -- its methods, its strictures, its preconceptions, its reason for being -- the dealing with Trump's insanity. This brand of delirium is outside their wheelhouse and that's why they're pretending it doesn't exist. I say this with some sympathy, like your grandma losing the ability to proper her wheelchair in any direction at all.

    A comment: "Compared to all the other national and international reporting outfits that are doing such a bang-up job?" Carson responded citing "the mystique of invaluability and authoritativeness the NYT has projected all my life." At least he admits that the reputation may not be deserved.

  • Jon Lovett [04-03]: "In a surprise twist, the Epstein files released the attorney general."

  • Emily DiVito [04-15]:

    Annual Tax Day reminder that Trump killed Direct File and now taxpayers have no choice but to shell out millions a year to TurboTax.

  • Dean Baker [04-15]: "Trump means that when Netanyahu gave him the orders, he was prepared to ignore the consequences." After quoting Aaron Rupar:

    Trump on high oil prices: "They're not up -- I thought, I mean, honestly -- I thought they're be much -- and I was willing to do that, to stop a nuclear weapon to be used against this country or the Middle East, to stop that it was certainly worthwhile being much higher than it is.

    Uh, but there was no nuclear weapon, nor even a program to develop a nuclear weapon, a lie Netanyahu has been pushing since the 1990s, when his estimates of achievement had already been discredited. Even if Iran had nuclear weapons, there is no reason to think that Iran would use it against Israel, much less against the US. Since the end of WWII, no nation with nuclear weapons has used them against another nation. Nor have any used them for "nuclear blackmail" (unless you read Trump's ultimatum to Iran that way). They've all posed them as deterrence against foreign attack, only to be used in response to such an attack. So why should Trump, or Netanyahu, worry about Iran developing nukes, other than that they hoped to attack Iran before it had any sort of nuclear deterrent? For what it's worth, I don't think that Netanyahu is in a position to give Trump orders. But he's a conniving sort, and persuaded Trump to launch the war by exploiting Trump's ignorance and playing on his vanity. How long Trump will allow himself to be so manipulated is an open question, as is what he will do about it. While I don't see Trump as someone easily ordered about, he is one of those rich guys who depends on other people to do anything, and he's surrounded himself with a mix of sycophantic morons and Israel agents that won't give him many options.

Current count: 270 links, 18395 words (22665 total)

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Sunday, March 22, 2026

Loose Tabs

After I posted my initial take on Trump's Iran war in my Days of Infamy Substack piece, and followed that with a Music Week, I figured I should go ahead and publish whatever I had in Loose Tabs before the next Music Week comes around. So I set the date for Sunday, March 22, and, well, this is it: very incomplete, with several usual sections completely missing, but pretty long nonetheless. I could work the rest of the night on it, then tomorrow, then the rest of next week. I probably will make some adds when I do get around to Music Week. I'm also thinking I should do a synopsis on Substack, possibly before I do my planned follow-up piece where I try to cut through all the noise and explain the Iran war by answering four basic questions:

  1. Why did Netanyahu want to attack Iran?
  2. Why did Trump go along with the attack?
  3. Why didn't Iran surrender once it was attacked?
  4. And how and when and under what conditions is this war likely to end?

You can probably find answers to these questions in the previous piece, and scattered here and there below, but I think it will help to organize them thusly. Of course, the first three answers are pretty simple, at least if I don't go into much historical detail. I don't know the precise answer to the fourth, but the basic point is simple enough: when Trump (or one of his successors) decides he's had enough, and is willing to negotiate a deal. This will depend on variables, including how much Iran is willing to concede, how little Trump is willing to settle for, and how long Israel will be able to muck up any possible deal. Those factors will vary over time, so the best we can do is to lay out a model. That will take some thought, but the factors aren't too complicated.

Meanwhile, there is nothing below on Cuba, which is heating up, and dominating my X feed tonight. Trump has said that Cuba's next, and it's not like he has the patience to do things in considered order. Most leaders dread two-front (never mind multi-front) wars, but for Trump each one distracts from the other. The conditions in Cuba are different, as are the motives — other than the absolute supremacy of American power, which seems to have become an obsession with Trump.

PS: I added a few more links on [03-25]. I'm not really trying to keep up with the news, although some creeps in. Most are actually tabs I had open but hadn't picked up. I use Firefox as a browser, running under Xbuntu with six workspaces to split out my work, with Firefox typically running 6-8 windows with well over 100 tabs, so it's easy to overlook something I meant to circle back to.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically (12 times from April-December 2025). My previous one appeared 23 days ago, on February 27.

I have a little-used option of selecting bits of text highlighted with a background color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to use it sparingly.

Table of Contents:

Topical Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent themes of the following section.

Last time: Epsteinmania, Melania, Washington Post, Super Bowl LX, DHS shutdown, Tariffs at the Supreme Court.

Trump Bombs Iran: On Feb. 28, Trump and Netanyahu launched a massive wave of airstrikes against Iran, opening what Wikipedia is calling 2026 Iran war. The bombing appears to have been originally designed to kill Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and thus to decapitate the Islamic Republic of Iran, but it was expanded to attack the whole nation's security structure. The bombing has continued. Iran has responded with missile and drone attacks aimed at Israel, US bases in the region, and other infrastructure related to the US and its allies. Israel has ramped up its war in Lebanon, nominally targeting Hezbollah. The following are various pieces collected on the fly, including several that I added to my previous Loose Tabs, which starts on February 19 with a link to a piece by Joshua Keating: It really looks like we're about to bomb Iran again.

PS: On Monday morning (March 23), Trump announced a short pause in the war (or more specifically, a delay in bombing power plants), citing "very strong talks" with unidentified Iranian officials. Iran issued a denial of any such talks. Trump's announcement triggered a drop in oil futures prices and a rally in the stock market, although both were muted. It's worth noting that Israel has often agreed to ceasefires (including two notable times in their 1948-49 War of Independence) which turned out to be nothing more than stalls while they rebuilt their weapons stockpiles. Israel and the US have been burning through their anti-missile defense rockets at a furious pace, so that is probably a big part of the story. I'm skeptical that either side is anywhere near willing to make the necessary concessions, especially with Israel acting as a very wild card, but a Korea-style armistice, with allowance for Iran to collect tolls through the Strait of Hormuz, could hold for long enough to allow Iran to broaden its diplomacy, organize its defenses, and develop a more effective deterrent against further attacks (possibly, like North Korea, including its own nukes — again, as with North Korea, a development which can only be prevented diplomatically).

  • Iran War Cost Tracker: "Based on the Pantagon's preliminary estimate of $1 billion per day." Also note: "Independent analyses suggest the true cost may be significantly higher."

  • Al Jazeera [2025-06-18]: The history of Netanyahu's rhetoric on Iran's nuclear ambitions: He "has warned of an imminent threat from a Iranian nuclear bomb for more than 30 years."

  • Richard Silverstein

  • Andrew O'Hehir:

    • [02-28]: Trump's war on Iran: America's shame, and the world's failure: "Trump's attack on Iran is an act of vanity and desperation, fueled by America's collective moral blindness."

    • [03-08]: Behind Trump's war fever lies profound weakness: "US wages fast-escalating war, with no clear motivation and no realistic plan. It isn't fooling anyone." I'm not sure "weakness" is the right word, but it's the sort of taunt that flies in the faces of people who value power above all else. The US always seemed more powerful when it advanced policies that were best for all, and much weaker when it tried to strong arm others into doing its self-centered will. While it is likely that the US has lost power steadily since peaking at the end of WWII, no US president has tried to flex its power to anywhere near the same degree as Trump. That he comes up short seems inevitable. That he finds this mystifying is no surprise, either.

  • Craig Mokhiber [03-01]: Understanding the US and Israel's illegal war on Iran: "The illegal US-Israeli war on Iran continues a rampage that has devastated countries and international institutions to eliminate all obstacles to US hegemony. The US-Israeli Axis has not succeeded yet, and it is up to the world to stop them." The world, on the other hand, is hoping this war just collapses under the dead weight of its instigators' stupidity, as no one else is in a position to do anything significant about it.

  • Trita Parsi: Has a long track record of writing about Iran and how Israel and the US have attempted to deal with it, most notably in his books: Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2007); A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy With Iran (2012); Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy (2017). The first book I regard as essential, as it makes clear that Israel's alliance with Iran survived the fever days of the 1979 Revolution, when Khomeini solidified control of a much broader-based revolt, to no small extent by building on pent-up resentment against the United States (the hostage crisis was a reflection of this) and by challenging Saudi Arabia's leadership of the Islamic World (given control of Mecca and Medina, and the annual Hajj). The US and Saudi Arabia never got over those affronts, but Israel had no problem with Iran until the 1990s, when Iraq ceased to be a credible existential threat to Israel, and Hezbollah developed in opposition to Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon. From that point, it was fairly easy to manipulate American resentment into designating Iran as part of "the axis of evil." Parsi has a critical but nuanced view of Iran that is much more credible than most of the rote (or simply regurgitated) propaganda elsewhere. I haven't read his later books (on Obama and the JCPOA negotiations), which should help update the story. Nor have I read Vali Nasr's 2025 book, Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History, but he seems to have a similar understanding of Iran's political leadership and military strategy.

    • [03-01]: Some observations and comments on Trump and Israel's war on Iran: I scraped this off Facebook, so might best just quote it here:

      1. Tehran is not looking for a ceasefire and has rejected outreach from Trump. The reason is that they believe they committed a mistake by agreeing to the ceasefire in June - it only enabled the US and Israel to restock and remobilize to launch war again. If they agree to a ceasefire now, they will only be attacked again in a few months.

      2. For a ceasefire to be acceptable, it appears difficult for Tehran to agree to it until the cost to the US has become much higher than it currently is. Otherwise, the US will restart the war at a later point, the calculation reads.

      3. Accordingly, Iran has shifted its strategy. It is striking Israel, but very differently from the June war. There is a constant level of attack throughout the day rather than a salvo of 50 missiles at once. Damage will be less, but that isn't a problem because Tehran has concluded that Israel's pain tolerance is very high - as long as the US stays in the war. So the focus shifts to the US.

      4. From the outset, and perhaps surprisingly, Iran has been targeting US bases in the region, including against friendly states. Tehran calculates that the war can only end durably if the cost for the US rises dramatically, including American casualties. After the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran says it has no red lines left and will go all out in seeking the destruction of these bases and high American casualties.

      5. Iran understands that many in the American security establishment had been convinced that Iran's past restraint reflected weakness and an inability or unwillingness to face the US in a direct war. Tehran is now doing everything it can to demonstrate the opposite - despite the massive cost it itself will pay. Ironically, the assassination of Khamenei facilitated this shift.

      6. One aspect of this is that Iran has now also struck bases in Cyprus, which have been used for attacks against Iran. Iran is well aware that this is an attack on a EU state. But that seems to be the point. Tehran appears intent on not only expanding the war into Persian Gulf states but also into Europe. Note the attack on the French base in the UAE. For the war to be able to end, Europe too has to pay a cost, the reasoning appears to be.

      7. There appears to be only limited concern about the internal situation. The announcement of Khamenei's death opened a window for people to pour onto the streets and seek to overthrow the regime. Though expressions of joy were widespread, no real mobilization was seen. That window is now closing, as the theocratic system closes ranks and establishes new formal leadership.

    • [02-20]: No, even a 'small attack' on Iran will lead to war: "The deal Trump wants is a no-go for Tehran, which is resigned to retaliating if bombed again, limited or otherwise." This was written a week before Trump's "decapitation" strike, so nothing here should have caught Trump or his advisers by surprise. The key thing is that after last year's "12 day war" Iran's internal strategic arguments shifted from calculated appeasement to the realization that they would have to fight back to establish any kind of deterrence:

      Third, since the U.S. strategy, according to the WSJ, is to escalate until Tehran caves, and since capitulation is a non-option for Iran, the Iranians are incentivized to strike back right away at the U.S. The only exit Tehran sees is to fight back, inflict as much pain as possible on the U.S., and hope that this causes Trump to back off or accept a more equitable deal.

      In this calculation, Iran would not need to win the war (militarily, it can't); it would only have to get close to destroying Trump's presidency before it loses the war by: 1) closing the Strait of Hormuz and strike oil installations in the region in the hope of driving oil prices to record levels and by that inflation in the U.S.; and 2) strike at U.S. bases, ships, or other regional assets and make Trump choose between compromise or a forever war in the region, rather than the quick glorious victory he is looking for.

      This is an extremely risky option for Iran, but one that Tehran sees as less risky than the capitulation "deal" Trump is seeking to force on Iran.

      By not giving Iran's leaders a choice they can live with, Trump backed them into a corner, from which they had no choice but to fight back. Now the question becomes how painful that war is to Trump, and what sort of resolution can he live with? Trump may hate the idea of backing down in any respect, but Iran isn't threatening America (or even Israel) like the US is threatening Iran. The US will suffer some losses, but nothing remotely existential. Iran is not demanding that the US give up its own ability to defend itself. Iran is not even remotely a threat to the US homeland. So how much is it worth for Americans to "stay the course" just to shore up Trump's battered ego? If anyone other than Trump could make this decision, it wouldn't take a minute's thought. But this egomaniacal moron was made president, and the presidency was vested with the power to wage war without any checks and balances, so we're stuck in this situation which no one (except for Netanyahu and a few diehard hawks like Lindsey Graham) really wanted.

    • [02-28]: How does this war with Iran end? Or does it? "Trump certainly doesn't want this to turn into a civil war, though Israel has different designs." I think anything that attributes forethought and/or concern to Trump is cutting him too much slack, but Israel is another matter (and by Israel I mean Netanyahu, his coalition partners, and upper security echelons).

    • [03-09]: Trump press conference reveals a man who wants out of war: "He may be preparing the ground for a face saving declaration of victory, but I don't think Iran is going to concede that easily without something in return." A change of leader might have been enough of a cosmetic change in Venezuela to save face and avoid further polarizing warfare, the long and cruel build up to war against Iran has foreclosed those options. Trump's ambitions are higher here, Israel has veto power, and at this point the regime in Iran would be jeopardized more by surrender than by fighting back.

    • [03-13]: Trita Parsi on the hidden influences behind the pointless war in Iran: Interview by Nathan J Robinson.

    • [03-17]: Larijani's killing will destroy Iran war off-ramps for Trump: That, of course, is Israel's point: kill off anyone with the temperament and authority to make and sell a deal. Parsi offers three possible explanations, including "opportunity," which was probably decisive, but the idea of making negotiations impossible is so deeply ingrained in Israeli politico-military culture that it was always assumed. If Israel wanted to make a deal with the Palestinians that would allow for peaceful coexistence and shared prosperity, they could have done it 50-60 years ago. The only thing they really needed was credible Palestinian leadership, but they've systematically killed off everyone, all the while whining about having "no partner for peace."

    • [03-17]: Trump's window for face-saving exit may be closing now: "Escalation is only putting him in a lose-lose situation, so negotiating is the only option. However, Iran's growing leverage could prevent an easy off-ramp." Sure, the leverage is reason for searching out an off-ramp. But finding one is going to be hard for Trump to swallow. First he needs to throw Netanyahu under the bus: this was was all his idea, based on faulty intelligence and bad analysis, and to make this credible he needs to radically cut back military aid to Israel, including anything that could give Israel range to attack Iran. And he needs an intermediary to cut a deal with Iran, which the US could then agree to. I initially thought about neutrals like Turkey and India, but better still would be a separate peace with Saudi Arabia and the Perisan Gulf states which ultimately calls for demilitarization of the Persian Gulf (i.e., removal of US bases, in exchange for which Iran will limit rearmament fully normalize relations, and end all sanctions).

    • [03-19]: Facebook post: I won't quote this one in whole, but it starts:

      The developments of the past 24h may prove a turning point in this war: Israel and the US's escalation by striking the Qatari-Iranian Pars field, the strikes against Asaluyeh, Iran's massive retaliation against oil and gas installations in Saudi, Qatar and beyond, which shot up oil prices, the near downing of a F35 by Iran and Secretary Bessent's revelations that the US may unsanction Iranian oil on the waters to bring down oil prices.

      Some grasping at straws here, as it feels more to me like all sides are digging in.

  • Joshua Keating: Vox's foreign policy "expert," I've rarely been impressed by him, but I cited his pre-war piece in the introduction, and early on wrote up a comment on his [03-09] piece. I wound up deciding his whole series of articles is worth citing, partly to show evolving thinking from someone who drinks too much of the Kool-Aid but doesn't always swallow it, and because they raise interesting tangents.

    • [02-28]: Why did the US strike Iran? "And five other questions about the latest conflict in the Middle East, answered." Some useful background, but not many answers. One section starts "In fairness to Trump," then notes that he's done stupid things before and gotten away with them, so he may be feeling excessively confident, but then he both sides Iran, concluding "The confidence on both sides may end up getting a lot of people killed." What he fails to note is that over-confidence explains action, which Trump initiated, and not reaction, which is something the aggressor forces you into. Iran may have overestimated their ability to resist and strike back, but once Trump broke off negotiations and ordered the strike, what other option did they have?

    • [03-01]: How Khamenei transformed Iran: "And what could come next." Interview with Alex Vatanka ("a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and author of the book The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran, which examines how the Islamic Republic's backroom rivalries and leadership struggles have shaped its approach to the world"). MEI is mostly funded by the US and Arab governments. Vatanka offers little here, although this seems peculiar:

      I don't know what to make of Khamenei meeting senior folks in his office. That almost seems like he was asking for death. He had been talking a lot about martyrdom in recent speeches.

    • [03-02]: World leaders are almost never killed in war. Why did it happen to Iran's supreme leader? "The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could usher in a new age of assassination." He ventures that "The nearest precedent for the killing of a head of state may be the KGB assassination of Afghan Communist leader Hafizullah Amin in 1979," although that was more like the US coup that killed their Vietnamese puppet Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, shortly after the killing of Patrice Lumumba in 1961. More relevant here, Israel has a long history of assassination, going back to the killing of UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948, and extending through scores of prominent Palestinians and various others. Also Trump's killing of Qasem Soleimani, not even mentioned here. So his headline is already dated, if ever true. The bigger problem is that the only way to end wars is through negotiation, and for that to work, both sides have to have credible leaders. It would be much easier for Khamenei to sell an unpalatable deal than it will be for some unproven substitute. Even though the US had insisted on Japan's unconditional surrender, MacArthur saw the utility of leaving Hirohito in office.

    • [03-04]: Iran had a plan to fight Israel and the US. It all collapsed after October 7. "The rise and fall of the 'axis of resistance.'" One thing that's always bothered me: if "axis of resistance" really was Iran's masterplan for fighting Israel, why did they give it such a stupid (and inflammatory) name? The whole notion seems like an Israeli psych op. Perhaps Iran should have worked harder to dispel the allegations, but Israel's aggression and intimidation campaign was pushing all of them into common cause and sympathy. And given that Iran was already largely sanctioned by the West, they may have gotten an ego boost by appearing to be the ringleader. But Keating's notion that Iran's own defense was weakened by Israel's wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis is imaginary — albeit of the kind that gave Israel and Trump more confidence to attack.

    • [03-09]: The dangerous lesson countries may take from the Iran war: "Having a nuclear weapon has never looked more appealing." The main reason Iran never developed nuclear weapons, despite having all the building blocks, was the conscience and/or shrewd political judgment of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Trump may have "set back" Iran's nuclear capabilities, but he definitely removed the one real roadblock. The result is that anyone in the regime who advised to go ahead ("just in case") is looking prescient these days, which makes them more likely to accede to power and redouble their efforts. Of course, it may be hard for Iran to progress under the current barrage, but unless the US and Israel relent and can be viewed by Iranians as benign — hard to imagine right now — sooner or later Iranians will regroup and vow to never let this happen again. (Just imagine what we would do under the same circumstances.) But the same lesson, that you actually have to have nuclear weapons ready to fire in order to deter foreign attacks, will also be learned by others, with more leeway to act. (This is, of course, the lesson North Korea drew after the US convinced Iraq and Libya to give up their nuclear programs, then toppled up their regimes.) The surprise here is that the first nation to feel the need to step up its nuclear efforts is France. But others are mentioned here, including Poland, South Korea, and Taiwan. None of those nations are likely to use their weapons against the US, but having them could give them considerable more autonomy, especially the more Trump is viewed as unreliable and unstable.

    • [03-09]: Trump might want "boots on the ground" in Iran. Just not American ones. "An Iranian Kurdish leader says his people are ready to rise up, but need more US support." Easy enough to find some Kurds willing to take American money as mercenaries, but their prospects of success are very slim. Moreover, other countries with Kurdish minorities are likely to take a very dim view of this — especially Turkey, which has intervened against American-armed Kurds in Iraq and Syria. On the other hand, Iran is the one country in the region which has never had a serious Kurdish independence movement (at least as far as I know). Perhaps because Kurdish is more closely related to Persian. Or, more likely, because Iran is a holdover from the era of multi-ethnic empires, and has never had a strong nationalist movement (unlike Turkey and Iraq).

    • [03-11]: The world doesn't have enough ammo for the Iran war: "How long can Iran keep shooting missiles? How long can everyone else keep shooting them down?" That's a good question, but Iran doesn't need a lot of weapons to tie up the Strait and frustrate Trump, nor is the US and Israel likely to compel surrender (if indeed any side has any real idea what that might entail). So this could be a long and pointless war.

    • [03-17]: How Trump's war with Iran is helping Putin: "The spiraling conflict is a lifeline for Russia's leader." I don't think Putin needed a lifeline, but this war gives him a lot of options.

    • [03-20]: Here's how Iran could become a "forever war": "'Mowing the grass,' explained." That's the term Israel has used for its periodic sieges on Gaza, which brutal as they were failed to prevent the uprising of Oct. 7, 2023, but it establishes two salient points: one is that the war never ends; the other is that the approach is fundamentally dehumanizing and sadistic. One should note that this affects both sides: the victims obviously, but also the tormentors, who must continue to live in fear that their crimes will catch up with them. The power of this fear is what ultimately turned Israelis from fear to genocide. As noted here, "the limiting factor of this strategy is the White House's tolerance for war." That's been increasing ever since Bush launched his GWOT (or maybe since WWII), but still is far from Israeli levels. I'm reminded of a story of Ben Gurion talking to DeGaulle, and offering him help with Algeria. DeGaulle replied with something like, "you mean you want us to turn into you?" DeGaulle thought better, and gave up Algeria. Israelis may feel like they're on top of the world right now, but they're up there alone, not just hated by their victims, but increasingly viewed with shame by everyone else. That's not a good way to live.

    • [03-20]: Why the US wants to protect Iran's oil and gas: "The Mideast energy truce is breaking down." Trump has some very deranged ideas about energy, which includes vastly overrating the importance of oil and underrating the fragility of an economic system which he wants to make even more dependent on oil. One weird thing is that his sanction wars (with Russia, Venezuela, and Iran until he blew it up) mostly had the effect of inflating gas prices, which also benefited his Saudi and American donors, without unduly disturbing American voters, who had no idea how cheap gas would be if all the spigots were flowing. Yet having worked so hard to prop up prices, now he's panicking that they're suddenly too high. Plus, he's a greedy bastard, so his ideal solution to Venezuela and Iran is to steal all the oil he thinks is so valuable. Yet, here both his allies and his enemies are busy blowing up the resources he wants to corner — resources that his advisers, no doubt, promised he could capture when they signed him up for the war. This is the only part of the war that's actually funny, not least because it's going to drive everyone else to renewables, while the US turns into a technological backwater.

  • Al Jazeera [03-02]: Rubio suggests US strikes on Iran were influenced by Israeli plans: This makes it pretty clear that Israel is directing US foreign policy:

    US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suggested that a planned Israeli attack on Iran determined the timing of Washington's assault on the government in Tehran.

    The top diplomat told reporters on Monday that Washington was aware Israel was going to attack Iran, and that Tehran would retaliate against US interests in the region, so US forces struck pre-emptively.

    "We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action," Rubio said after a briefing with congressional leaders.

    "We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn't pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties."

  • Michael Hudson [03-02]: The US/Israeli attack was to prevent peace, not advance it.

  • Jonathan Larsen [03-02]: US troops were told Iran War is for "Armageddon," return of Jesus: "Advocacy group reports commanders giving similar messages at more than 30 installations in every branch of the military." This story is also reported by:

  • Vijay Prashad [03-03]: A war that cannot be won: Israel and the United States bomb Iran: Of course, I agree with this conclusion, but that's largely because I subscribe to the broader assertion, that no war can ever be won. The best you can do is to lose a bit less than the other guys, but that does little to redeem your losses. I think this is true even when you downgrade your ambitions: instead of regime destruction and regeneration, which happened in Germany and Japan after WWII, or the occupation and propping up of quisling governments that the US attempted in Afghanistan and Iraq, Trump seems to have adopted Israel's Gaza model which is that of periodically "mowing the grass," hitting Iran repeatedly in a forever war that ultimately points toward genocide.

  • Michael Arria:

  • Philip Weiss [03-03]: Rubio confirms the heresy: the US went to war in Iran because of Israel: "The heresy of Walt and Mearsheimer's Israel lobby theory was the claim that Israel and its supporters pushed the US into war. Marco Rubio has not confirmed this analysis when he admitted that Trump went to war with Iran because of Israel."

  • Zach Beauchamp

    • [03-03]: How does the Iran war end? "Regime change isn't likely. Here's what is." Early speculation, which inevitably leans toward optimism (hence "will end"), although the author eventually mentions "tail risk," which is a subtle way of saying "who fucking knows?"

    • [03-13]: The Iran war is not a video game: "Based memes, real blood." This starts with examples (see the article for links):

      On Wednesday, the New York Times published the preliminary findings of a US investigation into the recent airstrike on Shajarah Tayyebeh, an elementary school for girls in the Iranian city of Minab. The investigation confirmed what all public evidence had pointed to: that an American Tomahawk missile destroyed the school, killing roughly 175 people per Iranian estimates — most of whom were children. . . .

      The day after this damning news report, the White House released a video depicting the Iran war as a Nintendo game.

      The video, set to jaunty childlike music, depicts the United States as a player in various Wii Sports games — tennis, golf, bowling, etc. When the player character hits a hole in one, or bowls a strike, it cuts to real-life footage of a US bomb hitting an Iranian target. "Hole in one!" the Nintendo announcer declares, as we watch human lives being erased. . . .

      Various official X accounts have posted videos intercutting real bombings in Iran with clips from more violent video games, war films like Braveheart, sports highlights, and speeches from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth set to movie-trailer-style epic music.

      War is not hell, for this White House — it is fun.

      Beauchamp goes on to unpack this at some length, even citing Baudrillard, and concluding:

      The wartime sizzle reels are another manifestation of this ethos. Built not to persuade a neutral audience, but rather to appeal to those already-bought in, their primary service is thought-deadening: replacing any serious consideration of consequences with collective reveling in memes. "When you didn't want the US involved with Iran but the submarine kill videos are sick," one popular right-wing X account tweeted, with a GIF of an ambivalent Larry David posted below the text.

      It thus is not just collective self-deception at work for the administration and its very online supporters: It is collective exculpation. The crimes at Minab, and anywhere else, pale in comparison to sick kills.

    • [03-17]: A top Trump aide resigned over Iran. Liberals should stay away from him. "Antiwar antisemitism is still antisemitism." Well sure, don't pretend that he's a great guy — I mean, he was working for Trump, and got that job out of some kind of ideological loyalty to Trump — but why not except his gift for what it is: even Joe Kent says that Trump had no grounds for going to war, and lied when he said he did. How hard is that?

  • Mitchell Plitnick:

    • [03-04]: Debunking the lies of the Iran War. Lies include: "Iran nuclear weapons program"; "imminent threat"; "underground missiles"; Pahlavi ("a marker for the general lack of any vision of what happens as a result of this criminal attack").

    • [03-06]: The war on Iran is forcing Gulf states to reconsider regional strategy as the US and Israel lead the region into uncertainty: "Iran's retaliatory attacks on its neighbors, and the US failure to plan for them, are forcing the Gulf Cooperation Council states to reconsider their regional strategies and their relationship with Washington." The Gulf states are by far the most vulnerable targets for Iranian retaliation, which can be justified by their allowance of US bases and other military and economic ties. They have to start wondering whether their alliance is worth the costs — especially given that they have no control or influence over what the US and Israel do.

    • [03-14]: How aligned are the US and Israel's goals in Iran? That's a good question, and I suspect the answer is not very close. Israel realizes that Iran has never been a serious threat, although the token support they've provided for Hizbullah and Hamas has been good for propaganda, especially with the Americans. They'd like nothing more than for the US to fight Iran, while they focus on Lebanon and the Palestinians (especially in the West Bank). The US, on the other hand, does have interests, especially around the Persian Gulf, that are threatened, and which will make it hard to sustain a long war, or even tolerate a short one. The US also has interests in Europe and Asia, perhaps elsewhere, that will be stressed by this war. And Trump, even more than Netanyahu, is starting off with little popular support, even for war. Trump never expected a long, debilitating war. He was told this would be quick and clean, that Iran would topple, and that he'd be seen as a great liberator. He was conned by people with ulterior motives, and those aren't Trump's motives (which mostly are to make money, which means keeping his Arab allies happy, and inflating his tortured ego). It remains to be seen whether he can figure out a way to act on his doubts, but he did corner Netanyahu into a ceasefire in Gaza.

  • Robert Malley/Stephen Wertheim [03-05]: Of course Trump bombed Iran. They rightly accuse Trump, then let him off the hook:

    President Trump's attack on Iran is astonishing in its audacity, aggression and lawlessness. Mr. Trump ordered strikes in the midst of negotiations with a nation that posed no remotely imminent threat to the United States. He did nothing to prepare his country for war. Now he's offering a dizzying array of rationales and objectives, caught in a maelstrom of his own making.

    Beyond breaking with precedent, Mr. Trump also broke with himself. In three straight presidential campaigns, he criticized American military adventures in the Middle East, relying on this stance to distinguish his "America First" mantra from rival Republicans and Democrats alike. "I'm not going to start wars," he vowed on election night in 2024. "I'm going to stop wars."

    Yet for all its Trumpian characteristics, this war is the logical conclusion of how the United States has long dealt with Iran. For decades, presidents have depicted the Islamic Republic not just as a pernicious presence in the Middle East but also as an intolerable danger to the United States that no diplomatic deal could redress. When politicians inflate a threat and stigmatize peaceful means of handling it, an enterprising leader will one day reach for a radical solution.

    Trump could simply have said no, and no one would have criticized him. Attacking Iran was always bad policy, for many reasons. But while his predecessors didn't make that same mistake, they did so little to prevent it from happening that Trump figured he not only had a green light, but attacking Iran would just prove that he's the one president who has the guts to do the deed. Biden could at the very least have revived the JCPOA deal, ending Netanyahu's hysteria about Iranian nukes. Obama could have negotiated a better deal, one that Trump would have found harder to break. Bush and Clinton and/or Bush could simply have buried the hatchet — especially if they had delivered on reasonable peace proposals at the time. Carter and Reagan could have acknowledged that US support for the Shah had harmed most Iranians, and made some amends to keep the situation from deteriorating. War is always the end result of diplomatic failures, and everyone share blame for that aspect of the war on Iran. But only Trump was wacko enough to pull the trigger.

  • James North [03-05]: Lies, distortions, and propaganda: how the US mainstream media coverage on Iran hides the truth: "Even those familiar with the biased US mainstream covers of the Middle East are shocked at how bad the reporting on the US-Israel war on Iran has been."

  • Peter Beinart [03-06]: Iran is not an existential threat: "Iran poses no significant danger to Israel, let alone [to the] the US." I think that's what he meant in the subhed. The question of whether the US could undermine Israel is a different one, and even more hypothetical. One might as well ask whether Israel could destroy the US. (If so, Trump seems to be their Trojan Horse.)

  • Brian Karem:

    • [03-06]: With Iran, confusion is the point: "The Trump administration's jumbled reasoning for war with Iran is part of the strategy."

    • [03-20]: Who still stop Trump on Iran? "As the war escalates and the president digs in, the White House says 'Nobody tells him what to do.'" Much of what I think is based on models of how I have observed people functioning. One thing I've noticed with presidents is that they usually start out cautious and tentative: the job is overwhelming, there is so much they don't understand about it, and they're worried about screwing up, so they look for consensus among their aides, and avoid moves that seem risky. On the other hand, as they settle in, they figure out what they can and cannot get away with, and everyone around them is so flattering they build up ever increasing confidence. Trump fits this model, to a rather extreme degree. Consequently, he has no aides who can question let alone challenge him, and he has many who are full or shit ideas, often ones that he is partial to. So it's hard to imagine anyone in a position to stop him, or even to nudge him into any slightly less self-destructive orbit. It's even becoming hard to see how our damaged democracy stop him. On the other hand, wars tend to impact regardless of how you try to spin them.

  • Faris Giacaman [03-06]: Israel is using the 'Gaza doctrine' in Lebanon and Iran: The "old doctrine" was simply an extension of the British version of collective punishment for any transgressions against Israeli power: each and every offense would be met by an overwhelming reprisal, not necessarily directed against whoever was responsible. (During the 2nd Intifade, Israel made a habit of demolishing parts of Arafat's headquarters every time Hamas unleashed a suicide bomber. Needless to say, that wasn't much of a deterrent to Hamas.)

    October 7 changed this equation. "Mowing the lawn" was no longer enough, and neither was keeping the population blockaded in an open-air prison. The new stage of the Dahiya doctrine became the Gaza genocide. After two years of catastrophic civilian punishment, sustained by American financial and military largesse, Israel is now seeking to apply elements of its conduct in Gaza outside of Palestine's borders. We now see this new doctrine, characterized by protracted wholesale annihilation, playing out in Lebanon and Iran.

    Whether this will be recognized as genocide remains to be seen, but the intent is largely the same. While applying the same level of destruction to Iran is probably impossible (at least without resorting to nuclear weapons), Israel sees Iran as a job for the Americans, and for now is focusing on Lebanon.

  • Layla Yammine [03-06]: Millions at risk of displacement as Israel bombards Lebanon: "After 15 months of a fragile ceasefire, Lebanon woke up on March 2 to the familiar sounds of Israeli bombs. As the violence escalates and tens of thousands are displaced, Lebanon's social divisions threaten to worsen an already dire situation."

  • Umair Irfan [03-06]: The false promise of energy independence: "The Iran war shows yet again that US oil is still vulnerable to foreign shocks."

  • Daniel Bush/Olivia Ireland [03-06]: Trump demands 'unconditional surrender' from Iran: The phrase had rarely been used before FDR adopted it as a policy goal in 1943. It was at the time widely noted that conditions were almost always terms of surrender, and were frequently necessary to gain any sort of agreement. In 1945, Japan was allowed the substantial condition of sparing and keeping its emperor. So when Trump says this, he is not only mocking American history, he is exalting himself to a level of power no Iranian leader is likely to recognize:

    Writing on his Truth Social platform, Trump said: "There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!

    "After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.

    "IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!)."

    Trump is saying, "don't even think of trying to negotiate with me." The point was probably unnecessary, not just because he lacked the power to impose his will, but because he had proved that he couldn't be trusted to follow through on anything he agreed to. [PS: The article also reports on a phone call from Putin to Iran's president Pezeshkian, but not much on details.]

  • Benjamin Hart [03-06]: A political-risk guru's biggest worry about Iran: Interview with Ian Bremmer ("founder of the Eurasia Group," a consultancy group that "has been helping the corporate and financial worlds understand and integrate political risk into their decision making"). He doesn't strike me as all that bright, or clear — at least I have no idea what he thinks that "biggest risk" is. But he does offer this:

    I think the fundamental challenge here is that Trump really believed that this could be Venezuela redux, and Venezuela went exceptionally well on a bunch of vectors. First of all, they got the guy they were trying to get. They brought him to justice, and they didn't kill him. Now he's going to face a trial. There were no American servicemembers killed. There were Venezuelan civilians killed, but the numbers were comparatively pretty small, especially compared to the numbers the Venezuelans have killed themselves. And it was popular, not just in the U.S. but across the region. Trump has now gotten a whole bunch of support from the Mexicans, more support on going after their narco-terrorists. And the same thing with Ecuador, which we saw in the last 48 hours. The Americans now have a better regime to work with in Venezuela, with the potential for private-sector investment and support from the IMF, and an economy that might actually work for the Venezuelan people. Literally on every front, this went about as well as you could expect. So Trump was like, Great, let's do that again. And this is not going to work that way on any front.

    I think he's way too quick to count Trump wins here. Is it really true that any time Mexico or Ecuador make a move against a drug kingpin, they're doing it at Trump's behest? Or because they were so impressed by Trump's snatching of Maduro? And just because they captured or killed someone, that's a success that will stand the test of time? I don't doubt that Trump's arrogance was boosted by the Maduro escapade — just like I don't doubt that Hitler's resolve to invade Poland got a boost from Chamberlain's cave-in at Munich. But that doesn't mean that Trump, any more than Hitler, drew the right lesson.

  • Ted Snider [03-09]: US and Iran were close to a deal before Trump chose war: This story has been fairly widely reported, and makes some sense, but with war plans clearly in the works, one doubts that Trump would have made any concessions to allow Iran to save face, and perhaps also that Israel was so much in control that any agreement would have been rendered impossible. What is certainly true is that an agreement to end Iran's uranium enrichment, which was the essential component for a nuclear weapons, could have been achieved, had the US and Israel shown the slightest interest in a peaceful resolution. But they had other points to make, and frankly weren't worried about uranium in the first place.

  • Max Boot [03-09]: There are two winners in Iran. Neither one is America. "Oil disruption benefits Russia, as does less US aid for Ukraine. And Iran distracts from China." The point about Russia and oil prices is pretty obvious. The one about China is mostly neocon fever dream. It is unlikely that China will take advantage of American distraction in Iran to attempt to seize Taiwan, because they probably realize that the real problem there isn't US deterrence but the unreadiness of the people to rejoin the mainland. Perhaps they could force the issue, but as long as reunification remains a future possibility, they have little reason to be impatient. The only thing likely to force their hand is if the US gets overly aggressive in securing independence for Taiwan — which seems to be the goal of the anti-China hawks, spoiling for a fantastical display of American omnipotence, oblivious to the risks of actual war. But note that there is nothing here about Israel as a winner. While the war certainly adds to Netanyahu's reputation as someone who can wrap Trump around his finger, it doesn't objectively help Israel at all. It just plunges them deeper into a wider war, which beyond providing cover for further "ethnic cleansing" creates more risk than reward.

  • Douglas J Feith [03-09]: Trump is trying something new in Iran. Hold on tight. "Critics demanding a 'day after' plan are confusing this presidency with that of George W Bush." Cited here in case you want to hear the latest thoughts from the guy Iraq War Gen. Tommy Franks called the "stupidest fucking guy on the planet," and who was later lampooned by Philip Weiss in [2008-07-30]: How did Doug Feith become a ridiculous figure?. Feith actually does a fairly good job of highlighting how Trump is different from Bush, and what the design is of his lose-lose-lost logic. He fails to note what the two have in common, which is a belief that they can kill their way to peace, and that God always smiles on America, so wars just always work out for the best. And he chides Democrats:

    Ironically, critics from the Democratic Party and elsewhere who are demanding to know the "day after" plan are implying that Trump should adopt Bush's outlook.

    That remark might have been clever, but he forgets that Bush didn't have a "day after" plan either. All he had was the "stupidest fucking guy on the planet" assigned to the job.

  • Kate McMahon [03-09]: Israel's goal in Iran is not just regime change, but complete collapse: "For Israel, a failed Iranian state fractured by civil war is preferable to any other outcome." That's largely because they can't imagine any better outcome. That's because they don't want peace. They just want an enemy they can strike with impunity.

  • Ron Paul [03-10]: Will the dollar be a casualty of the Iran war? I'm always curious about unseen risks of war, and don't doubt that this one will have hitherto unimagined impacts on world finance and trade. I'd be more worried if I thought Paul had the slightest idea how these things work, but he still hasn't gotten past the idea that you need enough gold to match the value of everything else.

  • Jonathan Cook [03-10]: Israel planned war on Iran for 40 years. Everything else is a smoke screen: I don't doubt that there are documents supporting this, as well as Netanyahu's testimony of dreaming of war with Iran for over 40 years, but I've long thought that Iran was the smokescreen, and that Israel's real interests scarcely extended beyond the occupied territories, specifically their eternal quest to create "a land without [Palestinian] people" for a people who wants it all."

  • Michael T Klare [03-10]: America's Gaza: "The bombing of Tehran." The population of the Tehran metropolitan area is 16.8 million, about 18% of Iran's total population of 93 million.

  • Benjamin Hart [03-11]: Israel doesn't want to beat Iran. It wants to break it. Interview with Danny Citrinowicz ("senior researcher in the Iran and Shi'ite Axis Program at Israel's Institute for National Security Studies"), who previously summed up Israel's position as:

    If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people in the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn't care less about the future . . . [or] the stability of Iran.

    He also adds, "In Israel, there is no opposition on the Iranian issue. . . . But people think Iran is the country that wants to destroy us, and you can always justify war with Iran regardless of the price we're going to pay." And Netanyahu is loving this:

    He's considering pushing the election a little bit earlier because he thinks he can build on this. You don't hear the opposition leaders talking about the war. Politically, it's a win-win situation from all sides: He's working with the U.S., so there are amazing operational opportunities. Nobody's challenging him, nobody can counter him, and he's not going to trial because there's a war. And none of this will hurt him in a very close and tight election.

    So look, as long as President Trump will continue this war, whether Trump is there a week, a month, a year — it doesn't matter. We will be there.

  • Eli Clifton/Ian S Lustick [03-12]: How the Israeli tail wags the American dog: "The US attack on Iran may be less about American security than about the priorities of Israel's government." Objectively that's certainly true. The only real security is in having others have no reason to attack you, which is the opposite of what one would expect after you attack them. Note also that we're not talking about security for Israel here, just interests. Israel's (or Netanyahu's) is to keep American military and financial aid flowing so Israel can keep operating their war machine, and using the threats they generate as cover for dispossessing Palestinians in their occupied lands.

  • Sasan Fayazmanesh [03-13]: It's Israel, stupid!:

    As I have written in my academic works, and in CounterPunch, Netanyahu, Israel's chief devil incarnate and the butcher of Gaza, did not take no for an answer and kept pushing every US administration to attack Iran. He had no success, until a deranged man, surrounded by conduits for Israel, including his son-in-law and a real estate friend, took control of the US government.

    A man who to this day, cannot even pronounce the name of the Iranian general he ordered to be assassinated in 2020, or the name of the "supreme leader" of Iran whom he helped to be murdered in 2026, finally did what Netanyahu wanted to be done: attack Iran on behalf of Israel. The first attack, as I wrote in my July 2025 essay for this journal, did not accomplish Netanyahu's goal of a "regime change" and restoration of monarchy in Iran. So, Netanyahu kept up the pressure. He visited the White House multiple times since July 2025 to plan death and destruction in Iran.

  • Mike Lofgren [03-14]: Why the Iran was was inevitable: "There were many reasons behind Trump's decision to attack — but none of them were about US national security."

  • Deepa Parent [03-14]: 'You are all worse than each other': anti-regime Iranians turn on Trump: "Mood among some in Iran shifts from hope of being rescued to dismay at destruction of infrastructure, culture and lives." I doubt if anyone in Iran ever looked to outsiders for "hope of being rescued. The best thing outsiders can do for the beleaguered people under a regime they despise is to leave them alone, or short of that limit their efforts to peripheral issues, like limiting trade and foreign investments, while reporting on human rights abuses. That is roughly what happened in the ending of the regimes in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. On the other hand, vigorous sanctions against Cuba and North Korea, and Iraq before the invasion, only strengthened harsh regimes. This piece quotes someone foolish enough to think that Trump's strikes might help topple the regime, but that person's already disillusioned. It shouldn't have taken actual strikes to realize that Trump and Israel have their own reasons for war, and the welfare of the people of Iran has nothing to do with them.

  • Alfred W McCoy [03-15]: How the past whispers to the present in Iran: Good historical review of US mishandling of Iran, comparing this new war to the 1956 Suez Crisis, what he calls an instance of "micro-militarism," which is really just a vote for violence without thinking through how much you are risking.

  • Bassam Haddad [03-15]: How might the US-Israeli war on Iran fail?: "Every week the US-Israeli war grinds on without a decisive conclusion becomes a lesson in the limits of US power. A campaign initially meant to reinforce US and Israeli supremacy may instead signal its decline." This doesn't go beyond the obvious, other than to stress that the attacks have only consolidated the regime's power in Iran.

  • Richard Florida [03-16]: Could this be the end of Dubai?

  • Lauren Aratani [03-18]: Trump waives US shipping law for oil and gas in bid to lower prices: "Trump issued a 60-day waiver of the Jones Act, a law passed in 1920 as a way to protect the US shipping industry. The law prevents foreign-flagged ships that carry commodities like oil and gas from traveling through US waterways."

  • Michelle Goldberg

    • [03-18]: Joe Kent's resignation letter is dangerous because it's half true: Kent was Trump's director of the National Counterterrorism Center. He resigned, admitting that there was no imminent threat from Iran, and blaming Israel for spreading misinformation that led to Trump's decision to attack. Kent is a former Green Beret, who moved into counterterrorism (and politics) after his wife was killed by an ISIS suicide bomber. He could be called a right-wing nut case, but he's also "half-right," which Goldberg admits while worrying that "it taps into old antisemitic tropes about occult Jewish control," and "the more [the war] drags on, the more I worry about a full-blown American 'dolchstoßlegende,' a modern version of the stab-in-the-back myth that German nationalists used to blame Jews for their humiliation in World War I." I'd note that those tropes only persist on the right, where they are outnumbered by neocons and Christian Zionists who envy and/or worship Israeli power. Still, dispelling them will be difficult given how Netanyahu brags about his manipulation of Trump, the obvious dissembling of Israel lobbyists (Jonathan Greenblatt, head of ADL, is quoted here), and their insistence that opposition to Israel's caste system and genocide equates to antisemitism (let's call this the power of suggestion to otherwise naive people). Also that no matter how bad the Iran war goes for the US, it won't result in the degree of defeat Germany suffered in 1918 (or France in 1871, where a similar myth led to the Dreyfuss Affair).

    • [03-16]: Trump is trying to bully America into supporting his war. It won't work.

  • Eldar Mamedov [03-18]: Israel's assassination game: Take all the pragmatists off the board: "The killing of Ali Larijani paves the way for more hardliners to fill the void, and conveniently for some, less chance to end the war peacefully."

  • Naman Karl-Thomas Habtom [03-18]: Iran war shows perils of America's Mideast bases: "US outposts are sitting targets for Iranian strikes." I imagine they are fairly well protected, but they open their host countries up for attacks against softer targets. Iran is going to be looking for some kind of assurance that they won't be attacked again. The most reassuring proof I can think of would be the the US to remove its bases. This would have to be initiated by the host countries, who should be having second thoughts about allowing aggressive militarists to camp on their lawns. This could be combined with normalized relations and armament limits that would build trust and benefit all. And if this happened, Trump could hardly refuse to leave.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos [03-18]: Vast number of Trump voters want him to declare victory and get out: "A new poll showing cracks in MAGA support and no interest in boots on the ground."

  • Arron Reza Merat [03-18]: Israel has nuclear weapons. It may use them. Worse, Netanyahu may trick Trump into using them. The prospect I can imagine is that Iran can resist conventional bombing indefinitely, while keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed, inflicting sporadic damage on Gulf targets, while Trump (not Israel) grows frustrated and impatient. Iran tries to hide its arms factories, moving most of them deep underground. This includes its stockpiles of uranium, any centrifuges that have survived, and parts for repairing or making more ones. The US supply of conventional "bunker buster" bombs proves inadequate, but they've developed nuclear warheads specifically as "bunker busters." They may feel that aiming them at remote targets can be justified, and go ahead. Global opinion condemns them, but doesn't stop them from launching another, and another, by which point someone proposes that they threaten a small city if Iran doesn't surrender. (My first thought was the holy city of Qom, but I was surprised to find it has amassed 1.2 million people, so they might want to pick somewhere a bit smaller for a demonstration.) Of course, if/when Iran develops their own nuke, the shoe will be on the other foot, at which point US and/or Israeli panic could very well ensue (and this is where Israeli panic could race ahead of American).

  • Robert Kuttner [03-18]: Israel's manipulation of Trump on Iran: "The worse the Iran war goes, the more blame is likely to be directed at Israel, and by association the Jews."

  • Blaise Malley [03-19]: Tulsi Gabbard distances US war goals further from Israel's: "In the congressional hot seat Thursday, the DNI and CIA director John Ratcliffe insisted Tel Aviv was focused on regime change but Washington was not."

  • Jason Wilson [03-19]: West Point analysis warns that strait of Hormuz blockade will strangle US defense industry: "Report shows how minerals critical to defense readiness have seen 'near total' disruption in seaborne trade." Take sulphur, for instance, which is used to extract copper and cobalt from low-grade ores. "The current sulfur shock is becoming a copper problem, and that copper problem risks quickly becoming a readiness and resilience problem." They call this a "prelogistical crisis," which is to say a crisis which will be ignored until it's too late.

  • Alex Shephard [03-19]: This is how forever wars begin: "First, with lies and bombs. Then, with a request for hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars. Will Congress cave to the White House yet again?"

  • Ryan Cooper [03-20]: Ol' Donny Trump has really stepped in it this time: "In Iran, he finally created a jam for himself it will not be easy to wriggle out of." There's a reference here to an interesting piece from 2024 called Revisiting the tanker war, which Cooper sums up here:

    The Pentagon has filing cabinets stuffed with war plans dealing with this possibility. The U.S. might take out most of Iran's formal military, but even back in the 1980s during the Tanker War, when Iran was much less developed than it is today, the Navy found it very difficult to stop irregular forces from laying mines at night, or planting limpet bombs, conducting missile attacks from speedboats, and so on. Operation Earnest Will, an escort mission to keep the strait open, required more than two dozen ships operating simultaneously (including support from both the British and the French), went on for more than a year, and saw significant casualties.

    Today, not only do we have drone technology making these types of attacks much more dangerous and effective, but also the U.S. Navy is much smaller than it was at the end of the Cold War. In particular, it has almost none of the frigates and minesweepers that were core to the Tanker War's escort mission.

    Cooper also gets into the "how will this end" question, suggesting that "the easiest and least painful way to end Trump's war is likely just to give up and let Iran seize the strait" — assuming they would be content to collect tolls to allow ships to pass, but he doubts that would satisfy them (and obviously it wouldn't satisfy Trump or Netanyahu).

    Making everything worse is Trump's alliance with Israel, whose government is evidently bent on turning Iran into a stygian nightmare of death and suffering. As noted above, the destruction of Ras Laffan was touched off by an Israeli strike — and it happened after Trump asked Israel not to. Iran struggles to hit back at Israel, but it can hit at the allies of Israel's most important ally, and increase the pressure on the global economy.

    What Trump usually does when one of his dotard plots backfires is to retreat — chicken out, as Wall Street has called it — and pretend it never happened. That sort of works with something like tariffs, where long-term damage takes a long time to appear. But it likely won't be possible here. . . .

    So if Trump tries to cut and run, he will face one of the few things he reacts to — a storm of criticism on television — plus fierce pushback from the D.C. blob. Even if he were to try to do it, Israel almost certainly would bait him back into the conflict by inciting more tit-for-tat bombing.

    If Trump doesn't cut and run, he faces a hole in global energy needs that grows by about 20 million barrels of oil and 20 billion cubic feet of natural gas every day, with steadily increasing damage to the delicate energy infrastructure all around the Persian Gulf that will take months or years to repair, and more and more American soldiers wounded or killed.

    It would be a thorny situation even for the wisest statesmen in world history. Alas, all we have is an elderly idiot whose primary method of diplomacy is posting barely literate screeds on his personal social media site. Folks, it isn't looking good.

  • Yumna Patel [03-20]: Anger in the GCC spreads as Iran retaliates over US-Israeli strikes: "These are signs of the growing impatience of Iran's Arab neighbors with Iran's tactic of striking at them in response to Israeli or American attacks. But the anger of the Gulf states isn't only reserved for Iran." A lot of stress here, which could crack up several ways.

  • Bryan Walsh [03-20]: The pain from the Strait of Hormuz crisis will be felt far beyond the pump: "Four billion people are fed by fossil fuels. The Iran war is showing just how fragile that is." There's a chart here that argues that about half of the world's current population (8 billion) wouldn't be able to live today without synthetic fertilizers, which are mostly made with oil, with about 30% normally shipped through the now closed Strait of Hormuz. This production and distribution has developed with little thought from political leaders, especially ones as stupid and careless as Trump and Netanyahu, who have now endangered the entire world.

  • Caitlin Dewey [03-20]: What everyday life is like for Iranians right now: "Iranians are still trying to work, study, and parent under the constant threat of both airstrikes and regime violence." This is a good question, but to answer it they're interviewing Roya Rastegar, a co-founder of Iranian Diaspora Collective, which is to say someone not in Iran, claiming only to be "in touch with a network of people on the ground in Iran," and even so "the blackout makes it almost impossible to hear about conditions on the ground in real time." So cue to say whatever you think is happening.

  • Ian Welsh [03-20]: This is the end of the American empire. Period. Opens with:

    My friends, this is it. America isn't going to win this war, unless they use nukes, but even if I'm wrong and they squeeze out their .01% chance of success, it is over. The army is exhausted and can't be re-armed in less than a decade, with Chinese help. The Middle East will be in ruins. The AI bubble will crash out without money and resources from the Gulf. Everyone's going to turn hard from hydrocarbons to renewables, especially solar, and that means China is going to make absolute bank.

    I'm a little confused when he demotes this to "the second stupidest war decision I've seen in my entire life" ("the first was Ukraine refusing a very generous peace deal," something I somehow missed, but I don't doubt that Ukraine was solvable had Obama, Trump, and Biden shown any actual concern for the country they were arming), and it's probable that his life is a good deal shorter a period of time than mine. I also doubt that "the Israelis almost certainly have video of Trump raping kids," but in the same sentence he hits on a truism: "Americans can't admit they're losing." So caveat lector here, please do your own thinking. My thinking is divided between: yes, the empire may not be finished, but it is bound to be severely diminished; and, well, it wasn't really an empire in the first place, just a network of bases and arms placed at the service of global capitalism, which probably doesn't need them anymore (not least because countries like China and Russia are already part of that global capitalism, and others like Iran and Venezuela want to be, just not on America's terms).

  • Brian McGlinchey [03-20]: Jion the US military — kill and die for Israel: This seems like a fair and useful debunking of many of the propaganda points used to indict Iran, turning them into a suitable target for US-Israeli aggression. Whether the US is doing its part for Israel or for its own reasons can be debated.

  • Robert Wright [03-21]: War isn't a zero-sum game. I happen to be reading Wright's 2000 book Nonzero, so I'm deep into this sort of logic:

    But, that inconvenience aside, the fact that war is non-zero-sum seems like potentially good news. If nations rationally pursue their self-interest, shouldn't the knowledge that war often makes both sides worse off discourage them from starting wars?

    In theory, maybe. But, back in the real world, there's a massively destructive war going on in the Middle East.

    Well, we might as well put it to good use! I think viewing the Iran War in game theoretical terms can shed light on the question of why humankind seems so bad at respecting the logic of game theory — why nations keep getting into wars that, history tells us, may inflict huge costs on all concerned.

    While I don't want to distract from the very enlightening discussion that follows, I already have two points to make. One is that the weights get distorted when you absolutely don't care for how much harm is done to the other side (or even more if you regard that harm as a positive for your side). This is unfortunately common. Even countries that see themselves as liberators struggle to act in ways that show concern. Then there are countries that are totally self-concerned, like Israel. Second, some countries give themselves a handicap, by assuming that they will be attacked, and counting the losses they could suffer in that event as gains when they attack first.

    Well, I also have a third, which is that hardly anyone thinks to anticipate the long-range costs of seeming to win. Israel's stunning "win" in 1967 led directly to the 1970-71 and 1973 wars, and indirectly to dozens more, including the current war with Iran. Japan's big wins in 1895 and 1905 led to their massive defeat in WWII. Even before such a final reckoning, the arrogance and belligerence took a psychic toll, on the warriors as well as their victims. It's been said that the worst thing that ever happened to the US was "winning" WWII. The US became a very different country after that, much to the woe of the world and to ourselves.

    And maybe there's a fourth point, which is that the people who decide to go to war simply aren't very good at figuring out why. Wright finally gets around to this:

    I listen to a lot of podcasts, and some of them are what you could call foreign policy establishment podcasts — they're produced by, say, the Council on Foreign Relations or some very buttoned up DC think tank, or they feature conversations among the kinds of people who work at such places. And, almost invariably, the people on these podcasts, in gravely assessing the motivations that start and then steer wars, stay at the level of geopolitics and national interest and assiduously avoid the level of domestic politics. To hear them talk you'd think that Trump was Metternich — or at least a dimmer version of Metternich — rather than a former Reality TV star who is just trying to keep his ratings up by staging a new spectacle that's more eye-catching than the last one.

    This kind of credulous discourse is a disservice to the nation. It sustains the myth that the people who steer American foreign policy are by and large worth taking seriously. They're not. The politicians who steer it are for the most part just trying to get re-elected — and will serve whichever cluster of special interests can further that cause. And the "experts" who help steer it, including many of the voices on these podcasts, are people who managed to get hired by think tanks that, for the most part, are funded by the same special interests that are corrupting those politicians.

  • Karim Sadjadpour [03-23]: Iran is trying to defeat America in the living room: "The regime knows that its best ally against American power is American public opinion."

    Although opinion polls, oil prices, and the number of projectiles remaining are measurable, the fate of the war will be determined in part by the resolve of both parties, something far more difficult to measure. A democratic president's will to fight is constrained by elections, polls, gas prices, and the news cycle. An authoritarian regime fighting for its survival answers to none of those pressures. Reagan had resolve until Congress didn't. Bush had resolve until six in 10 Americans called his war a mistake. This asymmetry of resolve is Iran's greatest structural advantage. Tehran wins by not losing; Trump loses by not winning.

  • Kelly Grieco [03-23]: The "Iran is losing" narrative is tracking the wrong number: "Yes, missile and drone launch rates are down 90%+. But hit rate (or confirmed impacts per projectile fired) has been climbing steadily since Day 1." The thread provides more numbers. "And on the metric that matters (cost imposed per missile fired) Iran may actually be getting more effective as the war goes on, not less."

  • Yun Li [03-23]: Volume in stock and oil futures surged minutes before Trump's market-turning post.

    • Paul Krugman [03-24]: Treason in the futures markets: Takes a closer look at this event. I hate the word "treason," and wouldn't use it here, but this sure looks suspicious, even compared to the level of graft we've come to expect. As I recall, back during the Bush admin, some genius wanted to create a futures market on terror attacks, purely as a way to harness the genius of markets as an intelligence source. The idea suffered a crib death, as the prospect of betting on terrorism was hard even for neocons to swallow. New "prediction markets" raise the same concerns about moral hazard, but they're run by the private sector, so nobody asked permission, and this administration won't lift a finger, possibly because ideologically they want rackets unregulated, or perhaps just because they want to use their insider knowledge to play?

      This "sharp and isolated jump in volume" — which you can see for the oil futures market in the chart at the top of this post — was especially bizarre because there were no major news items — no major publicly available news items — to drive sudden big market transactions. The story would be baffling, except that there's an obvious explanation: Somebody close to Trump knew what he was about to do, and exploited that inside information to make huge, instant profits.

      This wasn't the first time something like this has happened under Trump. There were large, suspicious moves in the prediction market Polymarket before previous attacks on Iran and Venezuela. But this front-running of U.S. policy was really large: the Financial Times estimates the sales of oil futures in that magic minute Monday morning at about $580 million, and that doesn't count the purchases of stock futures.

  • Katherine Doyle/Courtney Kube/Dan DeLuce [03-25]: Inside Trump's daily video montage briefing on the Iran war: "The montage, which typically runs for about two minutes, has raised concerns among some of the president's allies that he may not be receiving the complete picture of the war."

  • Dave DeCamp: He writes short news items for Antiwar.com. These are merely the most recent:

Epsteinmania: As Steven Colbert noted right after Trump started the war: "Fun fact: 'Epic Fury' [the name given to the "operation"] is an anagram for 'Forget Epstein.'" This abbreviated section suggests it's working (but I've never pushed the story hard).

  • Elie Honig [03-06]: The Clintons have testified about Epstein. Will Trump be next? No. Nor an I sure he should, but I can't blame folks for asking. The Republicans opened up this can of worms, in one of their few efforts at bipartisanship. As noted, Hilary had nothing to offer, and the only reason for subpoenaing her was to put on the record something we already knew: that Bill sometimes operated on his own. As for Bill, after admitting "some truth of Clinton's claim that he 'did nothing wrong,' Honig continues:

    But the "saw nothing" part of his testimony is open to reasonable questioning. Consider, first, that Clinton's friendship with Epstein peaked in the early 2000s — right as Epstein was running his massive international child-sex-trafficking ring, according to the Justice Department's indictment of Epstein, which charged criminal conduct up until 2005. And this wasn't some passing relationship, some casual glad-handing of a potential donor. Clinton flew on Epstein's plane at least 16 times, sent a warm note to Epstein on his 50th birthday in 2003, and gave a glowing quote to New York Magazine for a 2002 Epstein profile. He also shows up in many photographs partying and swimming and hot-tubbing and receiving massages while with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and others — including women whose identities have been redacted. (Clinton testified that he did not know and did not have sex with his hot-tub partner.) Yet, through it all, Clinton — a Yale-trained lawyer, reputed possessor of a genius-level IQ, two-term former president — had no idea at all that anything might have been awry, not even an "inkling."

SAVE America Act: "Republicans are pushing to get historically restrictive voter ID bill to the president's desk." Evidently "SAVE" stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, a program "initially made to check if non-citizens were using government benefits." But the proposed law reportedly is much more restrictive, requiring a "birth certificate or passport," something which "half of Americans don't have." People who have changed their names, especially married women, face further obstacles. (I have an expired passport and a "REAL ID" drivers license. Unclear whether either would work, although both are based on a valid birth certificate.) The bill also adds burdens to mail in ballots. (Trump wants to completely ban them.) The bill passed the House on Feb. 11, and is being debated in the Senate.

  • Eliza Sweren-Becker/Owen Backskai [03-20]: New SAVE Act bills would still block millions of American from voting.

  • Jelinda Montes [03-18]: Trump is going all in on the SAVE America Act. It could make voting harder for millions.

  • Jamelle Bouie [03-18]: This is what the president is fixated on right now? He points out that the bill could backfire against Republicans, as it most clearly discriminates against several groups that broke for Trump last time, like women who changed their name for marriage, and uneducated people who never got a passport. I'd throw in older folk who lost track of their documentation (I may be one: I have an expired passport, which should still prove my citizenship, but does it?). Perhaps the biggest question is who has enough motivation to fight the bureaucracy just to vote? Still, Trump and his party cling to the notion that the fewer people who can vote, the better:

    The point of the SAVE Act, for them, is to use a ginned-up panic over noncitizen voting to disenfranchise the tens of millions of Americans who oppose the president and who have, as a result, been placed outside the political community. The SAVE Act embodies Trump and the Republican Party's astonishing contempt for the idea that a fair election is one in which you can vote without being hassled by the state.

The Oscars: Prodded on by my wife, I managed to watch most of the nominated pictures (without, sorry to say, enjoying them much), so I was better informed than usual. I also watched the whole show (on a delay from fixing dinner, so we could fast-forward through the commercials). In last week's Music Week, I wrote a bit about the movies in advance of the show. Maybe I'll follow up in the next Music Week?

Major Threads

Israel: Netanyahu finally got his war against Iran, which is mostly reported in the long Trump Bombs Iran section. Hezbollah offered enough of a reaction for Israel to renew its assault on Lebanon (not that, despite a "ceasefire," it had ever halted). But more importantly, the Iran war distracts the US from Israel's violations of the "Gaza Peace Plan," and provides cover for more aggression against Palestinians in the West Bank.

  • Yakov Hirsch [03-04]: The War to Erase October 7: What 'The Atlantic' leaves out about Netanyahu and the US-Israeli assault on Iran: "The Atlantic's Yair Rosenberg recasts Benjamin Netanyahu as a tragic figure forced to take radical action after October 7, ignoring his long history of fomenting war and exploiting Jewish trauma to further himself and his Zionist ideology." The section on "Weaponizing Holocaust memory" is useful for understanding the psychology that underlies Israeli politics:

    This silence is not just personal to Rosenberg. It flows from a broader Hasbara Culture that treats Netanyahu's worldview as sacred. A certain cluster of "Never Again" journalists — Jeffrey Goldberg, Rosenberg, Kirchick, and others — have spent decades telling American readers that Israel's enemies should be read through Holocaust categories. Iran is not just a hostile state; it is Amalek. Hamas is not just a brutal, rejectionist movement; they are, as Rosenberg himself argues, the new Nazis who simply want to kill Jews. Anyone who doubts that framework is portrayed as naive at best, or dangerously indulgent of genocidal antisemitism at worst. . . .

    In Hasbara Culture's world, Netanyahu is not just another politician; he is the man who sees 1938 coming again. His constant talk of "existential threats" is treated not as rhetoric but as revelation. Once you accept that frame, questioning his motives becomes almost taboo. If you say he is exaggerating or exploiting the threat, you are implicitly saying Jews should not take existential danger seriously. If you suggest he is using Holocaust memory for political gain, you risk being lumped with the people who accuse "the Jews" of "using" the Holocaust.

    That is why, when Netanyahu throws around Amalek and Holocaust analogies, these journalists nod along. It is why they treated his Gaza campaign and now his Iran war primarily as responses to October 7, rather than as the culmination of a long political and ideological project. And the long political and ideological project is the revisionist Zionist program he inherited and perfected: a maximalist claim to the land between the river and the sea; permanent rejection of Palestinian sovereignty; and an "iron wall" ethic that treats overwhelming, exemplary violence as the only reliable guarantee of Jewish safety and supremacy. Read this way, his invocations of Amalek and the Holocaust are not just panic or trauma, but the moral vocabulary of a worldview that prefers endless war-management, de facto annexation, and regional work-arounds to any settlement that would concede equal rights to Palestinians — and that is exactly how Gaza, and now Iran, end up looking like destiny rather than choice.

    Rosenberg's article is here:

  • Tareq S Hajjaj:

  • Ross Barkan [03-06]: The day Israel lost America: "The Iran war sure looks like a breaking point."

  • Qassam Muaddi:

  • Mohammed R Mhawish [03-09]: The Iran war is a disaster for Gaza: "How the crisis leaves Gaza's 2 million people more friendless, isolated, and vulnerable than ever before."

  • Ahmed Dremly/Ibtisam Mahdi [03-10]: 'The war is between Israel and Iran. Why should people in Gaza pay the price?': "After closures of Gaza's crossings drove up food casts and stalled medical evacuations, ongoing Israeli strikes raise fears of a renewed large-scale assault." One could also wonder why Iran should pay the price of Israel's war against Gaza. I fear it's reached the point where it no longer matters to Israel who they are hitting, as long as they are hitting someone else, showing the world that this is what they can and will do.

  • Michael Arria [03-10]: US support for Israel continues to plummet, despite media's best efforts. "Last month, a Gallup poll found that 41% Americans now sympathize more with Palestinians, compared to 36% who say they sympathize more with Israelis." Further down, I saw a term I hadn't heard before: "Holocaust inversion," which is a new code for people who think Israel is guilty of genocide. This tries to force an analogy with "Holocaust denial," which is not uncommon (but probably exaggerated) among old-school antisemites. But the new charge is very different: those who are so charged not only acknowledge the Holocaust, they are consistent in applying the standard definition of genocide, regardless of who's doing the killing, and who's being killed.

  • Elia Ayoub [03-11]: Israel's renewed war on Lebanon is about more than just Hezbollah: "After violating the 'ceasefire' 10,000 times, Israel is once again pounding Lebanon as its enduring thirst for war drives ever expanding ambitions."

  • Oren Ziv [03-13]: 'Our coverage is not truthful': How Israel is censoring reporting on the war: "Barred from publishing details of Iranian missile impacts or interceptions, local and international journalists are struggling to tell the full story."

  • Janet Abou-Elias [03-18]: US policy toward Lebanon is badly broken: "Washington has stoked a cycle of violence by prizing Israeli security over Lebanese stability." Sane people would realize that stability is essential for security, and focus on the basics. Israel has proven repeatedly that security must be mutual, and cannot be attained by one side repeatedly bombing the other.

  • Mayssoun Sukarieh [03-20]: The Gods must be cruel: Inside Israel's psychological warfare campaign in Lebanon: "Israel is waging a campaign of psychological warfare in Beirut by projecting godlike power from the skies, raining down bombs that mete out death and dropping leaflets vowing that Beirut and Gaza will share in the same fate."

  • Michael Sfard [03-21]: From Sde Teiman, the truth about Israel's military justice system has been set free: "By dropping all charges against the soldiers filmed abusing a Palestinian detainee, Israel has abandoned the whole masquerade of accountability."

  • Oren Ziv/Ariel Caine [03-24]: "Erasing the l ines": How settlers are seizing new regions of the West Bank: "After decades consolidating their control over Area C, Israeli settlers are expanding into Areas B and A — nominally under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction — and displacing communities."

Elsewhere Around the World: With Ukraine turning into something of a forgotten war, I thought I'd extend this section to pick up bits on how the rest of the world is reacting to Trump's adventurism. As far as I can tell, slowly and cautiously, which doesn't make for a lot of news, but I suspect there is more going on than I'm noticing.

Trump Threatens the World: I originally set this section up to deal with Trump's threats of war. We're obviously beyond that now, so see the section on Iran for more on that. Nothing much on Cuba here, but that front seems to be heating up. But there is a fair amount here on Trump's newfound militarist mentality. For a while, I thought Trump had an aversion to war — while appreciating the military's usefulness for graft — that distinguished him from classic fascists, but once again we find that fascist power fetishism inevitably ends in war.

  • Leah Schroeder [02-17]: Further US intervention in Haiti would be worst Trump move of all: "Washington sent warships this month to deploy 'gunboat diplomacy' while the island nation continues its frefall of violence and corruption." Note date, 11 days before Iran. Never say never.

  • David French [03-01]: War and peace cannot be left to one man — especially not this man. I disagree with much of this, but he tries hard to make "a case for striking Iran":

    As my colleague Bret Stephens has argued, the Iranian regime is evil, hostile to the United States and militarily aggressive. It has engaged in a decades-long conflict with the United States. Beginning with the hostage crisis in 1979 — when Iranians seized and held American diplomats and Embassy employees for 444 days — Iran has conducted countless direct and indirect attacks against the United States.

    Iranian-backed terrorists are responsible for the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983 that killed 241 Americans. Iranian-backed terrorists killed 19 Americans in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996. Iran-backed militias killed hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq.

    Since the second Iraq war, Iranian-backed militias have continued their attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. In fact, it's fair to say that Iran's efforts to attack and kill Americans have been relentless for decades.

    Beyond its attacks on Americans, Iran is one of the most aggressive and destabilizing regimes in the world. It has supported Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — three of the world's most powerful terrorist militias — it has attacked Israel with ballistic missiles, and it has supplied Russia with drones to use in its illegal invasion of Ukraine.

    Iran is deeply repressive at home. It stifles dissent, deprives women of their most basic human rights and massacres its own people by the thousands when they protest against the regime.

    If you're going to list foreign countries that should not obtain access to nuclear weapons, Iran should be at or close to the very top. Blocking Iran's ability to develop and deploy nuclear weapons is among our most vital national interests.

    This omits a lot of context, and also ignores the counterargument that if these constitute a casus belli for attacking Iran, one could construct a much longer list of similar reasons striking the US. Reasonable people should object to strikes on either, not based on the historical facts but because the attacks won't solve the problem, and will only lead to more problems. (By the way, I don't mean to justify the attitudes and behavior of Iran's rulers. I am critical of them, but one of my main complaints is the extent to which they have embraced their enemies' views on deterrence, subversion, and ultimately war. I also object to what I take to be the arrogant belief that they are a great country and deserve to have influence over lesser countries in the region.)

    French also offers a "case against an attack," which sad to say is even lamer than his case for. It starts with the worry that in attacking Iran, Trump is wasting missiles needed to deter China from attacking Taiwan. More sensible are his worries that Iran will fight back effectively, that the regime might not fall or collapse, and that its new leaders will emerge even more determined than ever to develop the nuclear weapons, especially since those Iranians who favored a path of caution have been killed off.

  • Mark Mazzetti, et al. [03-02]: How Trump decided to go to war: "President Trump's embrace of military action in Iran was spurred by an Israeli leader determined to end diplomatic negotiations. Few of the president's advisers voiced opposition." The "paper of record" explains the semi-official story, which mostly makes sense, even if the reporters have little sense of just how extraordinarily deranged Trump's decision is. The essential elements are: Netanyahu's long, determined campaign to ensnare Trump in a war with Iran; the staffing of the White House and Pentagon with action-first figures, fitting Trump's own instincts; and "a remarkable piece of intelligence," an opportunity for decapitation which spurred Trump to act immediately. The assassination strike is reported here:

  • Michelle Goldberg [03-02]: The idea that Trump was antiwar was always delusional: "Trump's foreign policy has often been less a repudiation of neoconservatism than a mutation of it." Also: "This has always been the real Trump doctrine. Not no wars, but no rules."

  • Ben Rhodes [03-02]: Trump may come to regret this: I doubt it, but that may be because whenever I see Trump's smiling mug, I immediately flash to the face of Alfred E Neumann, whose motto was "what, me worry?" I'm also reminded of the line in the Fog of War movie, where someone comments that "everyone's having Bob's ulcer but Bob." ("Bob" is Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, the guy who famously saw the "light at the end of the tunnel." What I do wonder is whether Rhodes regrets his own not inconsiderable role in the long "real men go to Tehran" march to this war? He doesn't say, nor does he mention his old boss, Barack Obama.

  • Ross Barkan [03-02]: Republican Warmongers are back in control: Especially Marco Rubio, who Trump in 2016 "mocked for being a neocon . . . a 'perfect little puppet' of hawkish megadonor Sheldon Adelson." Adelson's widow has since become Trump's top donor (or maybe 2nd to Elon Musk).

    There is a dark political logic to this administration's military adventures in Venezuela and Iran and the aborted threat to seize Greenland. As Trump's popularity plummets at home, his immigration and economic policies largely judged a failure by the American people, he has turned to sowing chaos abroad. Overseas, American presidents can act more like sultans than democratic leaders. Military operations can be launched without congressional oversight. Trump, increasingly emboldened, has indicated he might topple Cuba next. All of this is easier and more enjoyable for him than addressing the plight of the American people.

    Barkan notes that "killing a brutal dictator is easy — even Barack Obama did it in Libya"; but "power vacuums are dangerous, and old regime hands don't simply vanish into smoke." Also:

    Little of this new conflict in Iran makes sense other than as a wish-fulfillment scheme for Israel and frothing American neoconservative warriors. The U.S. already claimed to obliterate Iran's sites that were aimed at building nuclear-weapons capacity. The Iranian regime, hobbled before the air strikes, posed little threat to the U.S. Its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas have already been crushed by Israel, the latter in the de facto genocide in Gaza.

    An unsettling reality is that the current crop of neoconservatives in the Trump administration, beginning with Rubio, do not seem to believe in the need to make a popular case for what they do. When Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, he had the American people, misguided as they were, at his back. He had Republicans and Democrats. In apparently starting a war with Iran, the Trump administration has won over the minuscule slice of hawks in the electorate (and the much larger contingent in Washington), but that's about it. Younger Americans on the left and right are weary of what feels like America's constant capitulation to Israel.

  • Aaron Pellish/Eric Bazail-Eimil [03-03]: US launches military operations in Ecuador: "The joint military operation with Ecuador targeted what the US called 'designated terrorist organizations' in the country."

  • Jordan Michael Smith [03-06] Donald Trump has lit a global match: "Trump and his aides think the United States has global leverage that his predecessors refused to use. He seems to forget that other countries have leverage, too — and they're intent on using it to stop him." It's long bothered me to hear the US presidency described as "the most powerful job in the world," probably because it implied what Trump was the first to clearly hear: that the president can do anything, shake anyone else down, and they will have no choice but to submit.

  • Andrew O'Hehir [03-08]: Behind Trump's war fever lies profound weakness: "US wages fast-escalating war, with no clear motivation and no realistic plan. It isn't fooling anyone." Well, they seem to be fooling themselves. Was the problem with Obama really just "no drama"? Is it possible he just didn't know how to get credit for being rational, predictable, and boring?

  • Thomas B Edsall [03-08]: The smash-and-grab presidency reaches its apex.

    But it isn't just in foreign countries. The willingness to adopt policies that will result in increased deaths among Americans, particularly within Trump's loyal MAGA electorate, pervades administration decision making, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, as I wrote in two previous essays, "What Can't Trump Wreck?" and "The MAHA Pipe Dream Is Going to Hurt MAGA the Most."

    Even so, Trump's war against Iran stands apart from past policies adopted on impulse. In this case, preliminary developments suggest Trump will pay a political price for his lack of careful planning and impetuous behavior. In fact, he may be forced to take responsibility for lost lives, damage to U.S. facilities and allies' cities, economic setbacks and the failure to anticipate predictable adverse events.

  • Casey Ryan Kelly [03-10]: Why Pete Hegseth talks like he's in an action movie: "Many observers were taken aback by his haughty tone, hypermasculine preoccupation with domination, giddiness about violence and casual attitude toward death." This notes that speaking "in a manner that is bombastic, outrageous and perverse" isn't unusual in Trump's cabinet (cf. Kash Patel, Sean Duffy, Mehmet Oz), but Hegseth more than any other has made a role out of it. (Meanwhile, Trump himself seems to be becoming terminally blasé.)

Trump Attacks America: Law, lawlessness, and the courts.

  • Sophia Tesfaye [03-17]: Trump wants to punish media for his unpopular war: "The president and FCC Chair Brendan Carr are threatening journalists and broadcasters for their coverage of Iran." "Carr's threat is a grotesque distortion of the FCC's mandate."

  • Elie Honig [03-20]: Trump's losing war against the Federal Reserve: "The thing is, if he'd gone about it more smartly, he would have gotten his way."

  • Robert Kuttner [03-20]: How Trump lost the courts: "With every passing day, another federal judge issues a scathing order to contain Trump's autocracy and Trump keeps alienating the Supreme Court." Don't get excited too soon. But one thing you can expect judges to do is to defend their own authority, which Trump's megalomania is threatening to run roughshod over. If Republicans do manage to pass the "SAVE" act, I think it's going to have a rough time in the courts, and not just because it's blatantly unconstitutional, but because it is corrosive of the idea that the government (including the courts) reflects the will of the people.

Trump's Administration: What they're up to while you're distracted by the flood of shit emanating from the White House.

  • Joah E Bromwich/Michael S Schmidt [03-02]: Trump Administration abandons efforts to impose orders on law firms: "The move amounts to a surrender in a clash that has led many law firms to submit to the president rather than face the threat of his executive orders." For starters, this makes the firms that surrendered in cases that could easily have been defended and won look cowardly and probably complicit in Trump's outrageous shakedowns.

  • Sarah Jones [03-05]: The myth of the root cause: Meet "Dr." Casey Means, Trump's quack nominee for Surgeon General.

  • David Dayen [03-19]: The quietest government shutdown: "It's been almost imperceptible, but the Department of Homeland Security hasn't been funded since February. Avenues to resolve the standoff keep getting cut off." Last month I had this as a separate story, but it barely qualifies for a mention this time — just long lines and other concerns at airports (here's a summary of How a DHS shutdown affects different components and employees). PS: Okay, here's some news on the shutdown:

  • Maxine Joselow/Brad Plumer [03-23]: Trump admistration to pay $1 billion to energy giant to cancel wind farms: And, in case you didn't think the title was outrageous enough: "In exchange, the French company TotalEnergies would inest in oil and natural gas projects in Texas and elsewhere."

Donald Trump, Himself: Up close and personal, or blown up into some kind of cosmic enigma.

  • Margaret Hartmann:

  • Robert Reich [03-19]: Dear allies of America, please don't confuse our president with us: "We are trying our best to resist him, contain him and remove him from office as quickly as we possibly can. Thank you for your patience." This is really dumb. In the first place, our efforts aren't really working, nor are them likely to work until his term expires in 2029, if then. Sure, inside the US, there are lots of things that we are doing, or trying to do, to reduce the damage Trump is causing, but outside the US, for all intents and purposes Trump is the US, and you need to adjust your thinking to that simple fact. Just because you used to have an alliance with the US government (which was never the same as the American people), and thought that worthwhile, doesn't mean that Trump is still your ally, or won't fuck you over on some arbitrary whim. You have to do what's best for you, then reevaluate and adjust in 2029, if things change. Reich writes (my numbers, for future reference):

    In point of fact, we the people of the United States do need your help.

    1. We need your help fighting the global climate crisis.
    2. We need your help heading off pandemics.
    3. We need your help countering global criminal gangs that are trafficking people and dangerous drugs and weapons.
    4. We need your help fighting global poverty, hunger and disease.
    5. We need your help safeguarding freedom and democracy from authoritarian regimes intent on extinguishing freedom and democracy around the world.

    These are all things (and the list is far from exhaustive) that all people in all nations should want to work together on. In olden days, the US could help its "allies" on these (and vice versa), but Trump has changed that: He's said that 1 & 2 aren't problems, so you're on your own; 4 may still be a problem, but it isn't ours; 3 is something we're going to address with arbitrary violence, which you can join in on but have no authority over; and for 5, we want more authoritarian regimes, not more democracy. In short, these are areas where other nations, to the extent they realize these are real international problems, need to find their own solutions for, and that may (and probably should) involve breaking with the US. They don't have to become enemies. They can't really threaten us, and it won't do any good to interfere domestically. They may still find it possible to work with American companies (which aren't even all that American these days). But they shouldn't pretend that the US is their ally, when clearly Trump is not. Maybe when Trump is gone, the US will want to work with their organizations, and help with their solutions. But if the US is a lost cause, as currently it is, they shouldn't sacrifice their future for our ego.

    A lot of liberals, like Reich, are stuck on this idea that the US is, and should always remain, the natural leader of a network of global alliances dedicated to solving the world's problems. US foreign policy has always (but especially since WWII) been directed by financial and military interests, offering a little bit of altruism (and high-minded but often hollow rhetoric) as bait. All Trump has really changed has been to get rid of the nice-guy act. Restoring the act isn't going to wash. The world distribution of power has changed since 1945, even if the American ego has not. Moving forward needs to reflect this change, but also to recognize that power itself no longer suffices, and that cooperation has to be built on mutual respect. Trump is the antithesis of that.

  • Henry Giroux [03-20]: Trump's Crusade: Christian Nationalism and the making of a holy war: This starts with a photo of Trump at his desk, surrounded by Christian clergy, many with their hands on Trump's slumped shoulders, blessing his divinely inspired war.

    In this register, Operation Epic Fury becomes barbarism refashioned as spectacle, draped in an aesthetic of impunity and moral annihilation. War is transformed into a form of public pedagogy, a daily lesson in domination delivered through media images, political rhetoric, and state policy, teaching that cruelty signals strength and that enemies, both foreign and domestic, are rendered disposable, unworthy of recognition or justice and instead subjected to humiliation, repression, and violence. Under such conditions, violence no longer hides behind the worn language of necessity or of making the world safe for democracy. It exposes what it has long been in American foreign policy, a ruthless instrument of imperial power. . . .

    This normalization of lawless violence feeds the broader war culture shaping the political imagination of the MAGA movement. Military force is framed not as a tragic last resort but as proof of national vitality. Violence becomes a measure of masculinity and patriotism, while reflection or restraint is dismissed as cowardice. War is imagined as a cleansing force capable of restoring national greatness. . . .

    When militarism fuses with apocalyptic religion, the consequences are deeply troubling. War ceases to be a tragic failure of diplomacy and becomes a sacred drama instead. Violence is sanctified as the instrument through which divine destiny is said to unfold.

  • Chauncey DeVega [03-19]: Laugh at Trump's shoe gifts all you want — it's a loyalty test: "The Florsheim presents aren't about style — they reveal the mechanics of MAGA authoritarianism and if it can endure."

  • Matt Ford [03-19]: There will be no post-presidential peace for Donald Trump: "The president and his allies will face impeachments, lawsuits, and maybe even The Hague." Shortly after Trump took office in 2025, I gave this some thought, and concluded that whoever follows him should grant him a blanket pardon from criminal prosecution (or maybe just advance clemency against jail time should he be convicted), but should let him fend for himself against civil suits (which are as common to him as eating). For one thing, this would settle the question of whether Secret Service should protect him in jail. (In theory, jail should be the safest place in America, but it doesn't seem to be.) I didn't consider the question of international law, as there seems to be no support for that even from Democrats. As for state laws, that's outside the jurisdiction of the next president, but short of shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, that's unlikely to be a problem. Since then, I find myself caring less and less. The main reason for the clemency, aside from the Secret Service issue (and one could argue that a convicted felon safe in jail doesn't merit that service), is that it helps bury the hatchet, or at least is a gesture in that direction. On the other hand, we already have tons of things that need to be publicly examined. It might be better to do so in a commission, especially one that can subpoena and grant immunity for revealing testimony. It's more important to expose what happened than it is to lock a few people up. As for Trump, I still like my idea of exiling him to St. Helena, where he would be free to build a luxury golf resort no one in their right mind would ever visit. But short of that, Eddie Murphy's advice in Trading Places still seems right: "the best way to hurt rich people is by turning 'em into poor people."

  • Brian Karem [03-20]: Who will stop Trump on Iran? "As the war escalates and the president digs in, the White House says 'nobody tells him what to do.'"

  • Cameron Peters [03-20]: Trump's new coin, briefly explained: "How Trump is celebrating his favorite things: gold and himself."

  • Michael Tomasky [03-20]: Yes, Trump Derangement Syndrome exists; but it's among his supporters: "That Pearl Harbor comment: Aside from being a fascist, the man is a national embarrassment. The deranged Americans are those who still support this charlatan."

    Am I overstating things? Do I suffer — gasp — from Trump Derangement Syndrome? Elsewhere today on this site, Simon Lazarus issues a sharp and necessary reminder to liberals not to get overly obsessed with Trump himself — to bear in mind the movement and the intellectuals that support him.

    He's right about that. At the same time, though, I'd say that we shouldn't even accept the presumption that Trump Derangement Syndrome applies to people like us. It does not. The people who suffer from TDS in this country are the ones who support him. And it's getting worse: This week, Nate Silver found Trump's approval slipping into uncharted territory, and approval of the war generally polls in the 30s — but at the same time, an NBC News poll discovered that among self-identified MAGAs, Trump's approval stood literally at 100 percent to zero.

    They're the ones with TDS. You and I have Trump Awareness Syndrome. We see his un-thought-out war — and by the way, if it's almost over, why is he asking Congress for $200 billion? — and we hear him utter vacuous and offensive statements like the Pearl Harbor remark, and we know all too well what he's doing to this country. Awareness is a far heavier burden than derangement.

    The Lazarus piece is here:

    • Simon Lazarus [03-20]: Trump Derangement Syndrome is a self-destructive distraction: "Liberals aren't wrong to excoriate the president for his misdeeds, but they mustn't lose sight of the fact that Trumpism isn't about one man." As someone who's also recently read Laura Field's Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, I recognize the names of the so-called "MAGA intellectuals" mentioned here, but I want to point out that a lot of Trump's worst ideas derive not from them (or their gurus like Carl Schmitt and Harry Jaffa) but from more conventional Republican sources (paleocons, neocons, libertarians, Buckleyites, theocrats, and/or unprincipled weasels like Roy Cohn, and that's far from exhaustive, as the same irritable mental gestures and rabid defense of the elite go back centuries, when the same sort waxed eloquent about the virtues of slaveholding and monarchy. But Trump doesn't wax eloquent about anything. He may pick up thoughts on occasion because he swims in their same sewer, but thoughts don't stick to him, because he doesn't think them, he just spouts along with all the rest of his incoherent mish-mash. That leaves us in a quandary: he's too important, and too symbolic, to ignore, but he's too slippery to pin down, or maybe too sticky to escape ("tarbaby" comes to mind)?

      By the way, some more on Field's book:

    • Alexandre Lefebvre [2025-11-14]: A mole in MAGA's midst.

      What unites the New Right? One fear and one hope. The fear is that liberalism is everywhere, its tentacles wrapped around the public sphere and even the most intimate details of private life. Whichever MAGA faction you turn to, there is a shared conviction, as Field puts it, that "for all its pretensions to neutrality, liberal, pluralistic, modern constitutionalism has normative tendencies and implicit preferences and inevitably shapes the liberal democratic psyche in specific ways." Liberalism is right there on dating apps with every left or right swipe, in the empowerment slogans of multinationals, and in the endless Netflix scroll of choose-your-own-identity mush. And so, while MAGA strategies diverge on how to respond — from tactical retreat (the so-called "Benedict Option") to co-opting the liberal machine (Catholic integralists) to burning it all down (the chronically online Hard Right) — there is consensus on the enemy.

      That's the negative. What about the positive? Field credits Anton — author of the galvanizing 2016 essay "The Flight 93 Election" and now a senior Trump administration figure — with distilling MAGA's three-point creed: "secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy." But this, she shows, is only surface politics. The deeper point of Furious Minds is to reveal a near-consensus on a social vision and a set of moral ideals for what a postliberal United States should look like.

      Denoting these "moral ideals" as "the good, the true, and the beautiful" doesn't help explain them, because those are not concepts that liberals (or most people) lack, but ones they define differently (and less absolutely). The key thing is that the New Right wants their state (which is not your state, or any form of democratic state) to tell you what to believe, and to force you into believing it. They believe that if everyone thought the same things (the same things they think) all our problems would vanish and we'd have heaven on earth. And one of the things they think is that anyone who derides Trump is deranged?

    • Adam Gopnik [2024-03-18]: The forgotten history of Hitler's establishment enables: "The Nazi leader didn't seize power; he was given it." A review of Timothy Ryback's book, Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power. This book, like the following review, was cited in the Lazarus piece.

    • Casey Schwartz [2025-11-11]: What could have stopped Hitler — and didn't: "In Fateful Hours, the road map to authoritarian disaster is laid out in gleamingly sinister detail by the German historian Volker Ullrich."

    • John Ganz [03-20]: Grand delusion: "The Trumpist intellectuals wake up." I'm having some trouble digesting this retort to Sohrab Ahmari, but I like the comparison of Trump to Napoleon III and the Marx quote (not the farce that follows tragedy one), but this seemed like as good a place as any to file it for further reference. Intellectuals try very hard to rationalize their world view, even if it has no rational basis at all, which is doubly difficult when your world view is bound to a leader [Trump] who has no sensible grounding at all. Oh, the Marx:

      An old, crafty roué, [who] conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.

Economists and the Economy: Note that I've moved Dean Baker into his own section.

  • Richard Bookstaber [03-16]: I predicted the 2008 financial crisis. What is coming may be worse. One of the comments mentions how Trump "has bombed himself into a no-exit with the oil market," then concludes: "combine this behavior with our crumbled infrastructure, collapsing job market, rising prices, etc., and it's hard not to see a market meltdown."

Regular Columnists

Sometimes an interesting columnist writes often enough that it makes sense to collect their work in one place, rather than scatter it about.

Dean Baker: For more look here.

  • [03-20]: Are the Biden and Trump economies the same? "While short-term economic data may appear similar, key differences in inflation, labor market strength, affordability pressures, and long-term poicy choices suggest the Trump and Biden economies are meaningfully different."

    Key takeaways:

    • Presidential impact on the economy is often overstated, but policy differences still matter.
    • Claims that Democrats overstated economic success overlook efforts to address affordability concerns.
    • Inflation was trending downward before policy shifts like tariffs disrupted progress.
    • Labor market indicators, especially quit rates and wage growth, point to weakening conditions.
    • Affordability concerns may stem from rising real household costs, especially healthcare and student debt.
    • Trump-era policy changes on energy, immigration, and research could harm long-term growth.
    • Short-term differences are modest, but long-term economic outlook under Trump appears weaker.

    I think the last point should be made much stronger. We're only one year into the Trump economy, and what has happened as a policy level is only starting to impact. Moreover, while the Iran war did quickly signal higher gas prices, it's real impact is still in the future. I don't think we'll actually see the worst-case scenarios that can be projected from Trump's governing principles, because I expect businesses to be more resilient and more resistant to Trump's worst excesses, but best-case is going to be pretty bad, especially as businesses trying to save themselves aren't likely to care much about anyone else.

    I might also note here that I was surprised to see a whole section on "Harris did not cheerlead the Biden economy":

    First, I think he [Jason Furman] is very unfair in saying that former VP Kamala Harris was running around touting that the US economy was the envy of the world. This claim was in fact true, but that was hardly the main story of her campaign.

    Harris went around everywhere saying that she knew people were hurting and outlined proposals, especially on housing, on how she would make things more affordable. We can debate the merits of these proposals, but she was quite explicitly trying to address what she said were major problems in the economy.

    Baker is still far more committed than Harris was to touting the Biden economy, while Harris seemed to be more sensitive to its shortcomings — something she got no credit for during the campaign. The question is why didn't her concerns and proposals get much if any airing in the media? Possible reasons include: that she didn't convey either much outrage or empathy; that her proposals were couched in terms meant to appeal to business and donors; and that she blame the obvious culprits (Biden would have been the easiest mark, as Trump proved). But shouldn't the media have at least tried to sort this out, or are they just totally incapable of reporting on wonky policy matters? I'm reminded here of Hilary Clinton's 2016 gaffe about "baskets of deplorables," which is the only thing the media reported, ignoring the context, which included a fairly detailed and generous plan to revive the economy of areas like West Virginia which had been left behind (something her husband had more than a little to do with). What Clinton proposed would have been much better for the people than Trump's bullshit about "clean coal," but Trump saw his biggest vote gains in areas that Clinton wanted to help, and could have. But who reported that?

  • [03-18]: The "fraud" fraud: "The new anti-fraud push led by JD Vance is portrayed as politically driven, relying on exaggerated claims that don't align with the actual scale of the federal budget or national debt." Opens with:

    Fans of pet-eating migrant stories are thrilled to hear that JD Vance is heading up an anti-fraud task force operating out of the White House. As best anyone cal tell, the purpose is to drum up absurd allegations of fraud against prominent Democrats, like California Governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.

    If the reference to pet-eating migrant stories is too obscure, let me remind everyone. During the presidential campaign, Vance admitted that he invented stories about Haitian immigrants eating people's pets in Springfield, Ohio, to advance the Trump ticket's anti-immigrant political agenda. This is important background when considering the sincerity of his new anti-fraud crusade.

    The other important background item is that Trump just gave us an anti-fraud crusade last year. Doesn't anyone remember Elon Musk running around with his chainsaw and his "super-high IQ" DOGE boys? He was supposed to find trillions of dollars of fraud, and send us all $5k dividend checks.

    Baker is right that Vance's interest here is crassly political, and that the sort of blatantly illegal fraud that such a task force could conceivably find is small potatoes compared to the economy as a whole. But fraud is something people do care about, and Democrats would be smart to expose some on their own. They could, of course, start with Trump, and all the money coming in and favors handed out, which will make Reagan's "welfare queens" and whatever it was that Tim Walz got tangled up with in Minnesota look truly microscopic. Moreover, they could start looking at the broader picture of what is supposedly legal but creates a culture which allows fraud to operate and profit. For instance, every day I fend off dozens of phone calls and emails, some from legit businesses I have no desire to hear from, some surely more disreputable. How hard would it be to shut them all down? I'm sure there's a long list of things that could be done, that would in the end make business and government more respectable and trustworthy. But we live in a world where the politicians seem to accept an ethic of everyone having to struggle to screw everyone else, with our best advice being caveat emptor? We're approaching the point where vigilance against fraud is more than a full time job. It's certainly more than one can stand. And one of the worst long-term effects of Trump is that he's poisoning the entire culture by wrapping it up in his graft. Yet somehow he managed to convince lots of voters in 2016 and 2024 that he was the one who wasn't "crooked"!

  • [03-17]: The AI bubble, like the housing bubble, is a big problem and it's not complicated: "Like the housing crash, today's AI bubble driven by inflated expectations and stock valuations poses a major risk to the broader economy when it bursts." I don't doubt that there is a large AI bubble, at least as far as stock prices are concerned, and that it's based on assumptions that won't pan out, but that probably follows 2001 more closely than 2008. On the other hand, I suspect that we're also in a real estate bubble. (My evidence: my tax assessment went up by about 15% this year, and 25% over two years ago.) Both AI stocks and real estate are largely driven to speculative capital, leveraged on a house of cards. The underlying problem is increasing inequality (specifically the ability of the rich to avoid taxation by various schemes).

  • [03-16]: Trump agrees with Mark Carney: the old order is very dead: "Trump's unilateral war on Iran signals the end of the US-led world order and forces allies to reconsider security, trade, and global partnerships."

  • [03-13]: When Pete Hegseth says "lethality" he's talking about killing Iranian school girls: "Relaxed rules of engagement under Pete Hegseth are blamed for increasing civilian casualties, including a deadly strike on a Iranian girls' school."

  • [03-09]: The winning and losing countries from high oil prices: it's not just who has the oil: "Rising oil and gas prices function like a tax on consumers, and despite strong domestic production, US households still face major costs from higher energy prices."

  • [03-05]: Little boy Trump goes to war: "Those of us in the United States who lied through Donald Trump's first presidency know that he is not a person who thinks carefully about his actions and their long-term consequences." For instance, Trump's war is going to accelerate the spread of renewable energy and electric cars. It should also accelerate the realignment of much of the world away from the US: "This war without reason removes any doubt that Trump is a threat to world peace and economic stability. The world needs to move away from any dependence on the United States as quickly as possible and now they all know this."

  • [03-03]: A real abundance agenda starts by rolling back patent and copyright monopolies: "Genuine economic abundance requires weakening monopoly protections and financial rents that enrich the wealthy while driving up costs for everyone else."

  • [02-28]: Trump's stock market is headed down!

  • [02-27]: The Ellisons taking over Warner is pants on fire stuff, but team progressive just whines.

    And this is where progressives are far behind the curve. The fact that the Ellisons can put right-wing hacks like Bari Weiss in charge of the news that people see between the campaign ads is a far greater threat to democracy than the 30-second campaign ads that the rich can buy in abundance.

Jeet Heer: Other pieces cited passim, but let's add these, mostly on Trump/Iran:

  • [03-20]: Will the Iran war destroy MAGA? "Trump's coalition is splintering over nationalism and Israel." Leaving aside what is or is not MAGA, and whether its supposed constituents are anything more than a fad fan base for Trump, what's splintering them is war, specifically the kind that fights back, and seems like none of their business — the kind that Israel is perpetually fighting, and dragging us into. (They seem pretty happy with war on their domestic foes, and would welcome a lot more of that. But engaging abroad, even if just to hurt others, may strike them as unnecessary, especially when it blows back.)

  • [03-13]: The Iran war is spurring global anger at America: "Trump's reckless and unnecessary conflict is hurting allies as well as foes."

  • [03-12]: Is AIPAC doomed? "The hard-line pro-Israel lobby is facing more opposition than ever before. But fully defanging it won't be easy."

  • [03-09]: Trump's war is destroying the global economy: "Spiraling financial chaos might be the only thing that can force the president to pull back from this conflict." It's certainly not going to be analysis, or conscience.

Paul Krugman: I haven't been reading him since he retired to Substack, but his posts there are more frequent and more expansive than the New York Times allowed, and I haven't been paywalled yet. I cite one of his pieces above (under Iran), but here are a few more:

  • [02-23]: Day 1461 of Putin's Three-Day War: "Courage, betrayal — and reasons for hope." He's more hawkishly anti-Putin than I am. I doubt, for instance, that Ukraine have won the war years ago but for Biden's imposing limitations on the use of US-supplied weapons. On the other hand, I do fault Biden for not having the imagination or concern to pursue a diplomatic solution. But his charts do show that Europe has largely made up for Trump's cuts. For now, that only extends the stalemate. The question now is whether Europe can nudge Ukraine into a pragmatic compromise with Russia.

  • [02-27]: The economics of faltering fascism: "Unfortunately for Trump, and fortunately for us, he didn't inherit an economic crisis." Compares this to Hitler and Putin, who were able to consolidate power as they forcefully recovered from inherited crises. Sure, Trump campaigned on Biden being the worst president ever, but Trump's remedies have more often than not made matters worse, and his popularity has stalled and sunk. Krugman cites a couple of interesting pieces here:

    • Mike Konczal [02-09]: Why affordability and the vibecession are real economic problems: "There are many ways inflation makes people worse off even when real incomes recover, especially for essentials."

    • Timothy Snyder [02-25]: Fascist failure: "The state of Trump." This was written just after the SOTU, and just before the resumed bombing of Iran. The prescient point is in the fourth paragraph, but let's not neglect the context (my bold):

      Trump's problem is not with idea of fascism. It suits him well. Just consider the atmospherics of last night. Fascism celebrates a leader who transcends law and aims to unites the people with their destiny. It denies truth in favor of grand stories of struggle against a chosen enemy. It posits an imaginary golden age. All of that was in the speech.

      Fascism demands a chosen enemy, and victims. Trump called the Democrats in the audience "crazy" and associated them with illegal immigration and crime. The United States is engaged in an enormous cleansing project. ICE raids celebrate physical force in the cities and our concentration camp system is landscape of domination in the countryside. The murder of civilians in Minnesota was greeted by big lies about the victims.

      All of this is awful. But it is also stasis. Trump is unpopular, the economy is weak. When the government murdered Americans, this did not deter protest. To actually change the nature of politics, to move beyond the current state of affairs (competitive authoritarianism) to something else, to fascism, Trump needs another kind of conflict.

      Fascism demands a major foreign war to kill one's own people and thereby generate a reservoir of meaning that could be used to justify indefinite rule and further oppression, to make the world seem like an endless struggles and submission to hierarchy as the only kind of life. . . .

      Trump senses that he needs such a war, but, characteristically, he wants a short cut. . . . To complete the fascist transition, Trump has to give the country a war it does not want, and win it, and transform the society. . . .

      And so the state of Trump is that he is stuck. He is failing at fascism. He can break things, but he cannot make things. He can bluster, but he cannot triumph. He is tired, and every day is harder than the day before, and there are rivals in the wings, and elections coming.

      Between now and November 2026 he has two moves: win a war, which he cannot; and suppress the vote, which he has telegraphed that he will try to do.

      Snyder not only mentions Iran, he goes on at some length, to some merit but events have moved beyond speculation. But the notion that Trump would gamble on war to try to shore up his flagging polls on domestic policy was a bit too fantastic for me to figure out, even though it's long been a defining trait of all fascists. Sorry if I thought that even they weren't that stupid, but the core traits that lead folks to fascism do lead to a fetishization of power and violence, and that was already pretty clear with Trump. One more point I should make here is that Trump's problem is not that he's incompetent as a fascist. It's that fascism (even his) doesn't work to fix the problems America has.

  • [03-02]: War, oil and the world economy: "Are we less vulnerable to an oil price shock than we were in 1979?" Answers seems to be "somewhat," based mostly on that real GDP has risen substantially against oil consumption. Still, there are other factors, including "financial fragility." Conclusion — and this was just a few days into the war, before the full impact of closing the Strait of Hormuz factored in — is: "I don't want to engage in doomsaying. But I do worry that people are too complacent about the economic risks this war creates."

  • [03-04]: Reality sets in on Trump's new war: "Surprise! War in the middle of the world's most important oil fields has consequences." Starts with a hart of "traffic through the Strait of Hormuz," followed by one of Brent Crude Oil prices.

  • [03-08]: Oil crises, past and possibly future: "What the 70s can and can't teach us." [Paywall here.]

  • [03-12]: The billionaires' war: "The ultrawealthy put Trump in power but other people will pay the price."

  • [03-16]: No, America is not respected: "Thanks to Trump, we're held in contempt even by our closest allies." I don't doubt the contempt, but still wonder when it's going to be followed up by concrete action. It's still far easier for world elites to humor the US than it is to find ways to work around US obstruction and insanity. Especially as most viable ways would mean moving left.

  • [03-18]: Donald Trump, Petropresident: "Follow the Gulf oil money."

    And then there's Trump's relentless use of his office to enrich himself and his family. As the New York Times editorial board has documented, Trump has raked in at least $1.4 billion since returning to the White House. The biggest single piece of that total is Qatar's gift to him of a $400 million jet. Most of the rest has come from sales of cryptocurrency. We don't know who the buyers of Trump crypto are, but it seems likely that Gulf oil money has accounted for a large share. The Wall Street Journal reports that an Abu Dhabi royal secretly invested $500 million in World Liberty Financial, the center of the Trump crypto empire.

    Meanwhile Jared Kushner, the First Son-in-Law, has been acting as one of the U.S. government's chief negotiators on the Middle East while also raising large sums of money for his personal investment firm from investors in the region, especially the Saudi government's Public Investment Fund.

  • [03-19]: A whiff of staglation: "Inflation was rising and job growth stalled even before the Iran War."

  • [03-23]: When hyperglobalization meets chaos: "Choke points are everywhere you look. . . . While things are bad now, they may very well get a lot worse."

Heather Digby Parton:

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [03-02]: Preliminary notes on a planned decapitation. The keyword here is "whacked": for Trump, that's all it comes down to, the solution to all problems. And if it doesn't work, just whack again.

    Trump has done the world a service. He has abandoned pretense and clarified the true nature of American power. There is no longer any need to manufacture a case for war, to make an attack seem conform to international law and treaties or to demonstrate its righteousness by acting as part of an international coalition. Now America can do what it wants to whomever it wants solely because the people who run its government want to. This has, of course, almost always been the case behind the curtain of diplomatic niceties. But Trump has ripped those curtains down and now the world is seeing American power in the raw: brazen, arrogant and mindless of the consequences, which will be borne by others and if they complain, they might be whacked, too.

  • [03-06]: Roaming Charges: Calling all angels! Opens with "the shifting rationales (all fictitious) for Trump/Netanyahu's criminal attack on Iran." Let's give a prize to Mario Rubio for the most ironically unselfconscious explanation: "Iran is run by lunatics." This is followed by a video of Paula White ("the spiritual advisor to Trump and head of the White House Faith Office"). Further down, we get to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) explaining, "Iran has been an imminent threat to the United States for 47 years." Some other notes:

    • More than 70 percent of American public school teachers hold at least one side job, according to a new Gallup survey released this week.

    • On Monday, state officials in Ohio approved a $4.5 million sales tax exemption for a $136 million data center expansion in Northeast Ohio. The plant is expected to create a total of 10 new full-time jobs.

    • The number of US adults who feel optimistic about their future life has dropped to 59.2%, the lowest number ever, according to Gallup.

  • [03-13]: Kill, lie, and cover up: The shooting of Ruben Martinez. Like Renee Good, he was a US citizen killed in his car by ICE. "Over the last 14 months, ICE has shot at more than 16 people, hitting 12, including 5 US citizens."

  • [03-20]: Roaming Charges: Trump's little excursion hits the Straits:

    • Meme: "Republican support for war with Iran jumped from 23% to 85% the moment Trump started the war." Comment: "Yet more proof that the Republican Party has turned in to a Jonestown-like cult."

Nick Turse: Covering the US military for The Intercept, he's had a busy month (mostly on Iran, but not only):

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

Joel Gouveia [02-25]: The death of Spotify: Why streaming is minutes away from being obsolete: Or so says Jimmy Iovine ("arguably the most important living bridge between music and tech": co-founded Interscope, built Beats by Dre, sold it to Apple for $3 billion). Some interesting points here, but none impress me much one way or the other, at least to the point of convincing me that what came before and/or what might come after is any better or worse.

John Herrman [03-05]: Is it really illegal to bet on inside information about the Iran war? How about MrBeast?: "Kalshi and Polymarket are creating a new kind of dilemma." There are few things in this world I find more offensive than gambling, for lots of reasons, but this kind of thing goes orders of magnitude beyond the ordinary.

Chris Dalla Riva [03-06]: Long live Robert Christgau: A conversation with Matty Wishnow: Wishnow has produced a documentary film about the long-time rock critic, The Last Critic, and talks about that here. Also see:

Harold Meyerson [03-19]: Cesar falls: "With the horror of the revelations of his sexual predations, an already tarnished icon collapses." I'm surprised to see this recent spate of stories, as I thought this was already old news. Related here:

  • Timothy Noah [03-19]: The shame of Cesar Chavez: "We shouldn't forget the reasons he has come to be revered, but his legacy was tarnished long before this."

Some notable deaths: Mostly from the New York Times listings. Last time I did such a trawl was on February 27, so we'll look that far back (although some names have appeared since):

Also, not [yet] noted in New York Times:

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas.

  • Alon Mizrahi: "So basically the US is at war, its president is making one deranged statement after another, and the whole world ignores him like he is a crazy person on a bus."

  • Corey Robin [03-19]: Starts with: "If you haven't seen this yet, you have to take one and a half minutes — that's all it takes — to listen to Marc Andreessen, one of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, talk about the evils of introspection. He claims that he doesn't do introspection, and I believe him." You can follow the link to six points Robin makes, including "can you think without introspection? Silicon Valley says yes." More on this:

    • David Futrelle [03-23]: Marc Andreessen's Dangerously Unexamined Life: "The tech mogul has declared himself an enemy of introspection, and that conveniently erases considerations of conscience from his amoral investment empire." Includes a Sun Tzu quote that seems to have escaped Trump: "Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a thousand battles without disaster."

      We should note that Marc Andreessen does in fact have an inner life, because we all do. As a result, his declaration of zero introspection is either a weird and extreme failure of self-knowledge or (more likely) a performance, a brand identity so thoroughly constructed and maintained that it functions like an authentic account of the brander's experience. Either way, the practical effect is identical: a man with enormous influence over the technologies of war and surveillance, over the political direction of the country, over the infrastructure of violence that his firm has spent a decade funding, has, in effect, announced that he has no interest in examining his conscience.

      Andreessen has built the perfect ideology for Silicon Valley in the Trump age: Move fast, break people, and don't devote even a moment to self-examination.

  • Cory Robin [03-21]:

    Ten headlines from today's New York Times:

    1. You've Lost Your Health Insurance. It Shouldn't Have Been a Surprise.
    2. Trump's Reaction to Mueller's Death: 'Good, I'm Glad.'
    3. I Predicted the 2008 Financial Crisis. What Is Coming May Be Worse.
    4. The 'Hunger Games,' Hamptons-Style: Hiring a Private Chef for Summer
    5. No Pills or Needles, Just Paper: How Deadly Drugs Are Changing
    6. Student Freed From ICE Detention Worries About Those Left Behind
    7. Across the West, Record Heat Is Colliding With a Snow Drought
    8. Unclogging a Hairy Drain Is Gross. This $15 Stopper Makes It Less So.
    9. The Future of the Democratic Party Is Emerging
    10. Here's what happened in the war in the Middle East on Saturday.

Current count: 310 links, 25755 words (30834 total)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Friday, February 27, 2026

Loose Tabs
Shortly after I posted this on Friday night, Trump (and Israel) launched a wave of attacks against Iran, aimed at decapitating the Islamic regime (at least it appears successful in killing long-ruling Ayatollah Ali Khamineh). Franklin Roosevelt called Japan's surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor a "day of infamy." I used that same phrase to describe GW Bush's opening salvo of "shock and awe" on Baghdad in 2003. While I don't know the dimensions of Trump's attack — it was clearly larger than several similar attacks Trump had already made, but one could argue that the "war" actually started somewhere back — one would not be amiss to reckon this another "day of infamy." Whether this fizzles out in some sort of face-saving agreement, or escalates into WWIII, remains to be seen. That Trump and Netanyahu have blindly thrust us into a new state of the world is undeniable. The things we should be absolutely clear on are: the "crisis" that precipitated this action was totally fabricated, the result of Israel hyping Iran as some kind of supreme existential enemy, for no reason beyond their desire to provide cover for their ongoing displacement of the Palestinian people; that the US has gone along with demonizing Iran because the CIA installation of the Shah in 1953 and the subsequent support of the Shah's terror campaign against his people is something Americans have never acknowledged and made any sort of amends for; and that several generations of American politicians, including Biden and Trump, have allowed themselves to be manipulated and dictated to by Israelis, Netanyahu in particular. There was never any need to go to war with Iran, and even a week ago an agreement could have been negotiated, at least had the US shown any decent respect for the Iranian regime and people.

After rushing this out, I realized that I had left an earlier date in place, so I should at least fix that. This came out on the 27th, not the 24th. I also meant to add the Table of Contents, so that's here now. Beyond that, the only thing I've added was a note to the latest Jeffrey St Clair "Roaming Charges," which includes some useful anticipation of the attack. I haven't had time or stomach to survey the more recent news — literally, as I've come down with something that makes work impossible as well as undesirable. I also missed squeezing in a final February Music Week (although I still could post-date one), or putting up anything on my Substack in February.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically (12 times from April-December 2025). My previous one appeared 34 days ago, on January 24.

I have a little-used option of selecting bits of text highlighted with a background color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to use it sparingly.

Table of Contents:

Topical Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent themes of the following section.

Last time: Thanksgiving; Epsteinmania; Zohran Mamdani; ICE Stories; Venezuela; Iran; Jerome Powell.

We're probably not done with all of these (certainly not ICE, although I've moved them into a new regular section I'm calling Trump Goes to War (Domestic Edition)).

Epsteinmania: After numerous delays, the Department of Justice finally released a "large cache" of documents and media related to its investigation of Jeffrey Epstein: this one an overwhelming dump of 3 million pages and 180,000 images.

Melania: The movie Jeff Bezos spent $75 million on to flatter the Trumps. This is, of course, a lightning rod for critical ridicule — which, sure, is a big part of why I'm reporting on it at all. Given the subject and circumstances, I'm not surprised that at Rotten Tomatoes the average of scores given by recognized critics is 8% (50 reviews). It's likely that most film critics are anti-Trump to start with, but even if there is a bit of selection bias, that's a pretty low score, suggesting that the film isn't very good, at least by common critical standards. (The sample size is pretty decent: it may be slightly inflated by critics out to slam Trump, but not much. Moreover, one shoudn't assume that anti-Trump means anti-Melania, as a lot of people like to think that Melania is secretly anti-Trump too.) What's much more suspect is that the viewer ratings appear to be ecstatic at 99% (1000+ verified ratings), for a largest-ever discrepancy between the ratings of 91 points. I don't know how to prove this, but intuitively the self-selection bias here must be huge. Who, after all, would buy a ticket to this particular movie? No one I know, except perhaps to write a nasty review, and those people would show up in the critics column. But I find it hard to understand how anyone would pay money to see Melania. It's not unusual for right-wingers to mass-purchase books to plant them on the New York Times bestseller list. Same thing could be happening here. Indeed 1000 tickets for party operatives promising to follow up on Rotten Tomatoes would be a drop in the Bezos bucket.

The Washington Post:

Super Bowl LX: For the first time in several decades, I watched (and mostly enjoyed) the game, was perplexed by the half-time show, and suffered through enough commercials to fill a new screed like Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, but no time for that now.

  • Marissa Martinez [02-06]: Bad Bunny is taking over the US. Does he want Puerto Rico to leave it?

  • Sean Illing [02-07]: Enjoy the Super Bowl while you can. Football won't last forever: "The sport feels unstoppable — yet also doomed." Interview with Chuck Klosterman.

  • Izzie Ramirez [02-08]: Bad Bunny's knockout halftime show, explained by a Puerto Rican: "All of the cultural Easter eggs you might have missed."

  • Ophell Garcia-Lawler [02-09]: How Bad Bunny shut down his haters at Super Bowl.

  • Cruz Bonlarron Martínez [02-09]: Bad Bunny's Super Bowl show was political art at its best.

  • Alfred Soto [02-09]: The boricua quotidian: Bad Bunny.

    When MAGA has to coax a barely functional Kid Rock into alternative Superbowl programming, then you know Bunny is lucky to have such feeble adversaries. The show itself? Wobbly at first. Bunny looked like he'd realized several hundred million spectators were learning about him. Then, as he played subject and object for a staged recreation of life in a blighted U.S. territory, his confidence swelled; the recent tracks that nodded towards the boricua quotidian gained resonance. Pedro Pascal and Gaga came across as eager fellow travelers. Past and future Billboard chart toppers Ricky Martin and Cardi B served as reminders of the scope of Puerto Rican popular music. "I appreciate Bad Bunny for bringing the Telemundo Saturday afternoon variety show ethos (dancers, inapt sets, let's-try-this attitude) to global TV," I wrote on Bluesky. The dancers, for many watchers the show's kitschiest part, come straight from the twilight zone that is Spanish language television on a weekend at 4 p.m. Hell yeah. The last two minutes played as much as an elegy to an endangered hemispheric comity as an Epcot parade.

  • Josh Fiallo [02-09]: Kid Rock's lip-synced halftime show brings MAGA pundit to tears.

  • Constance Grady [02-10]: Woke isn't dead. Bad Bunny's halftime show proved it. "Maybe the right didn't capture the culture as much as they thought."

  • Addy Bink [02-08]: Trump calls out this 'sissy' NFL rule a lot. Why? I hadn't watched football for decades, but had little trouble following the game. I didn't notice anything on the initial kickoff, except that the the ball was spotted on the 35-yard-line after the end-zone touchback. I looked up this one after Trump complained about the "sissy" rule. Seems OK to me, but some assholes are primed to complain about anything. Kickoff returns always seemed like a randomizing function to me: a possible (but unlikely) lucky break as opposed to the usual methodical grind. In addition to reducing injuries, it also seems likely that the rule reduces flags away from the play, and good riddance to them.

  • Aaron Ross Coleman [02-13]: The only solution capitalism has is to sell us more useless junk: "Ad makers will never say the quiet part loud, but they increasingly know that we're unhappy and looking for solutions." I've long regarded advertising as one of the fundamental sins of modern life, and I've worked hard to arrange my life so I hardly ever have to face it. So I was far from prepared to watch the Super Bowl, in real time, with full state-of-the-art ads. I was overwhelmed, so I've been hoping to find some clear analysis. This barely glances the surface, but does suggest an explanation for the how hard I found it to figure out who's selling what: if the selling is always implicit, perhaps the best you can do is to just lodge an indelible image. Over the course of the show, I probably recognized 50+ actors in cameo bits, paid just to register their faces in some context. Beyond that, there were dozens (maybe hundreds) of pop culture references, many of which I couldn't pin down. It would take a whole new volume of Cultural Literacy to decipher all the references advertisers assume we know (or perhaps just hope we recognize).

The DHS shutdown: Funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, ended on February 14, causing a "shutdown" of the Department (which doesn't seem to include ICE). As of Feb. 24, the shutdown remain in effect. Seems like this should have been a bigger story, but I've seen very little mention of it (at least that I care to include here). It doesn't even seem to have its own Wikipedia article, although some basic info is available under 2026 United States federal government shutdowns.

The Supreme Court rules on tariffs: Or some of them, some of the time, using some definition of "ruling." The days of the Court doing us favors by clarifying the rule of law seems to be long past.

  • Cameron Peters [02-20]: Trump's tariff defeat, briefly explained.

  • Elie Honig [02-20]: Trump's tariff fantasy just exploded.

  • Ian Millhiser [02-20]: Why a Republican Supreme Court struck down Trump's tariffs: "Trump loses, and the Democratic justices didn't need to concede anything." In particular, the Democratic justices didn't endorse the "major questions" doctrine that Roberts tried invoking, pace Honig above.

  • Eric Levitz [02-20]: The Supreme Court's tariff decision could save you $1,000: "The Court just did Trump a huge favor. Will he take it?" The assumption is that everyone but Trump understands that tariffs are bad, so the Court ruling is saving Trump from self-harm. But it's possible that Trump's focus was always more about enhancing presidential power than anything economic. That's certainly why he's fighting the ruling. Moreover, the whole refund angle is a mess, not least because you can't roll back every consequence of the tariff decision.

  • Greg Sargent [02-20]: Trump's epic loss on tariffs is even worse for him than you think: "The Supreme Court's stunning invalidation of most of the president's tariffs is another sign that Trumpist populist nationalism is in crisis." That's not my take at all. It reduces a bit of the drag that tariffs are taking on the economy, while creating a messy problem of restitution that isn't likely to be handled at all well. (Personally, while I agree that Trump abused the law in implementing his tariffs, I'd write the losses off, except for purposes of blaming Trump.) But more importantly, it gives Trump an excuse for his failed policies, and turns the Supreme Court back into part of the deep state swamp conspiracy that is dead set on stopping Trump from saving the nation. That's a political argument he can, and will, run with. My main hope here is that by stressing the nefariously political nature of the Court, it bites him back.

  • Joshua Keating [02-20]: The Supreme Court just blew up Trump's foreign policy: "How will Trump get countries to do what he wants without tariffs?" Trump has regularly threatened countries to tariffs, demanding "policy concessions on a host of issues that often had little to do with trade." Tariffs were his "big stick," and pretty much the only tool he had, since "soft power" and good will were beneath him.

  • Karthik Sankaran [02-20]: Why SCOTUS won't deter Trump's desire to weaponize trade: "Today's Supreme Court decision only closes one avenue for the president to unilaterally impose tariffs."

  • Harold Meyerson [02-23]: Trump's tariffs weren't really about trade policy: "They were about his nostalgia, his ego, his bigotry, and his greed." Sure, but more than all that, he discovered in them a source of instant presidential power, which he could use for its own sake, as well as to shake down bribes.

  • David Sirota [02-23]: On tariffs, Neil Gorsuch is hardly apolitical.

  • Matt Ford [02-24]: Clarence Thomas has lost the plot: "The associate justice's dissent in the tariffs case deserves some extra attention, because it is hopelessly uncoupled from law, history, and the Constitution."

  • Elie Mystal [02-24]: The giant mess behind the Supreme Court's tariffs ruling: "The 6-3 decision was a rare victory, but it was crafted out of conflicts that leave almost nothing certain — including future tariff rulings."

Threatening/Attacking Iran: As has been standard policy since 1991 — for how and why this happened see Trita Parsi's book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2007) — Israel is once again pushing the US into war with Iran. Reminds me of the Iraq War-era quip about how "real men go to Tehran."

  • Joshua Keating [02-19]: It really looks like we're about to bomb Iran again.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos [02-19]: Military tankers for Iran attack deploying near Iraq War levels: "'Strikes could occur any time now,' say experts who explain what id-air refuelers mean for sustained operations."

  • Nick Turse [02-19]: Trump menaces Iran with massive armada capable of prolonged war: "The amount of military forces gathering near Iran dwarfs even the monthslong build-up before the US coup in Venezuela."

  • Trita Parsi [02-20]: No, even a 'small attack' on Iran will lead to war: "The deal Trump wants is a no-go for Tehran, which is resigned to retaliating if bombed again, limited or otherwise."

  • Ryan Grim/Jeremy Scahill/Murtaza Hussain

    • [02-20]: Trump privately dreams of Iran regime change glory as Democrats cynically weigh political benefits of war: "Trump says he wants to be the president who takes down the Islamic Republic. Democratic leaders see him walking into a political trap of his own making ahead of the midterms."

    • [02-23]: Iranian officials to Drop Site: Tehran is showing "unbelievable level of flexibility" in talks to prevent US war: "Iran understand it is dealing with an erratic US president, but its negotiators still believe they can thread the needle with Trump." Two probably unsurmountable problems with a possible deal: Trump cannot be trusted to honor even his own deal; and Israel still has effective veto over any deal (even if they give in for the moment, they know they can kill it later).

  • Eldar Mamedov [02-21]: Why Arab states are terrified of US war with Iran: "They see the military build-up and now that bombing and regime change can have consequences, especially geopolitical ones." Especially because they are much more vulnerable to Iranian reprisals than Israel or the US is.

  • Chris Hedges [02-21]: The suicidal folly of a war with Iran: While I agree that attacking Iran would be complete and uttery folly, I don't quite buy the word "suicidal." It's folly because the only way to achieve the stated goals is to get Iran to agree to something satisfactory, which probably means the US has to give up some points that don't really hurt and may even be for the better. And there's no real scenario where bombing Iran gets one closer to such an agreement. Indeed, the more you attack Iran, the more insistent you are on dictating a change of government and power, the more resistant you are to treating Iran with any degree of respect, the harder negotiation becomes. Given all the effort the US and Israel have already put into backing Iran into a corner from which they can only lash out in spite, it's remarkable how level-headed their leaders have remained. And that's why another attack doesn't seem likely to be provoke Iran into a response which inflicts serious harm on its attackers. It's not really clear how much harm Iran could inflict, but it's not something that should be dismissed out of hand. US bases and ships in the region are vulnerable, as is a lot of US-friendly oil infrastructure (and the latter is pretty conspicuously vulnerable, as is any shipping going through the Straits of Hormuz). And while Iran has consistently denied any desire to develop let alone use nuclear weapons, it's pretty widely agreed that they could if they wanted to. That mere fact should act as a powerful deterrent, but the US seems determined to push Iran into a corner where they have no other option. A sufficiently large attack could tip that balance. Also, while Iran's leaders clearly want to avoid provoking the US into a massive attack — that's probably why their responses to previous attacks have been muted and advertised — at some point the leaders may decide that their own survival matters more than their people, and risk the latter to save their own skins. (Iraq, Syria, and Libya offer recent examples of regimes that turned on their own people rather than giving up power.) So while the assumption so far has been that Iran's leadership is too responsible to respond to attacks irrationally, is that really something the US wants to depend on in the future? And if it is a dependable assumption, why all the fearmongering about a useless Iranian nuke?

  • James A Russell [02-22]: All aboard America's strategic blunder train. Next stop: Iran: "Our stumbling into war with Tehran would be the latest in a self-inflicted 30-year road to nowhere."

  • Dave DeCamp:

  • Sajjad Safaei [02-23]: What if today's Iran is resigned to a long, hellish war with the US? "Tehran learned from the June attack and its comparative advantage now is to drag Washington into a protracted regional conflict."

  • Sina Azodi [02-24]: History tells us coercion through airpower alone won't work: "Donald Trump won't commit troops because he knows it would hurt him politically. But that's what it would take if he wants Iran to capitulate." Iraq and Afghanistan are examples where air power alone failed, and ground troops were needed to seize the capitals. Whether ground troops worked is arguable: temporarily perhaps, but the US struggled to remain in control, and ultimately lost. The Nazi Blitz of England in 1940-45 and the US bombing of North Vietnam are also examples of air power failing to win. Still, Iran is roughly three times the size and population of Iraq. And while the regime has been weakened by sanctions, there is no reason to believe that the legacy of supporting the Shah, imposing sanctions, and sporadic attacks and subversion has made many Iranians long for a US-imposed, Israeli-directed puppet regime. Maybe Lindsey Graham still thinks that "real men go to Tehran," but I doubt that Trump could line up anyone in the actual Army leadership to sign up for a ground invasion. Even in Venezuela, they made no effort to occupy anything: that was just a snatch and grab operation, leaving the old system in place and hoping they can extort some slightly better deals. I could see Trump thinking he'd like to do something like that, but it's going to be much harder, for lots of reasons. The thing is, he could have cut a deal with Iran (and for that matter with Venezuela) if he only showed them some respect and allowed them to settle differences with dignity. He didn't do that, because he wants to show the world he's really a leg-breaking mobster, someone who can reduce his enemies to ash and dictate terms. The world doesn't work like that. (Although Netanyahu also thinks it does, and with America backstopping his every move and funding his perpetual war machine, he's been able to get away with it so far.)

  • Blaise Malley [02-25]: Who are the Dems giving tacit green light to Iran attack and why? Schumer and Jeffries, for instance.

  • Ori Goldberg [02-26]: Israel's lonely push for war with Iran: "Internationally isolated, restrained in Gaza, and unraveling at home, Israel sees another escalation as the only way to maintain its aggressive regional agenda." Iran doesn't want war with the US. Neither do the great majority of Americans. The only one who wants this war is Israel: they need an enemy to justify their permanent war machine (which provides cover for their continued usurpation of the West Bank), they fear that their right-wing political order will collapse without continued war, and they believe that trapping the US in conflict with Iran will keep American support coming.

Shortly after I posted this, Trump and Netanyahu unleashed a major bombing attack on Iran. I added a bit up top on this, and added a Jeffrey St Clair link below. I wasn't planning on searching for more, but a few early pieces came up anyway (I needed to update this on 03-03 because I missed a link, and wound up adding a couple more pieces; obviously, there is much more I am missing):

  • Richard Silverstein [02-28]: Iran: Trump's war of annihilation: One key point here, not widely reported elsewhere, is that Ayatollah Khamenei "reportedly prepares leadership plan if killed."

  • Al Jazeera [03-02]: Rubio suggests US strikes on Iran were influenced by Israeli plans: This makes it pretty clear that Israel is directing US foreign policy:

    US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suggested that a planned Israeli attack on Iran determined the timing of Washington's assault on the government in Tehran.

    The top diplomat told reporters on Monday that Washington was aware Israel was going to attack Iran, and that Tehran would retaliate against US interests in the region, so US forces struck pre-emptively.

    "We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action," Rubio said after a briefing with congressional leaders.

    "We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn't pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties."

  • Michael Hudson [03-02]: The US/Israeli attack was to prevent peace, not advance it.

  • Jonathan Larsen [03-02]: US troops were told Iran War is for "Armageddon," return of Jesus: "Advocacy group reports commanders giving similar messages at more than 30 installations in every branch of the military." This story is also reported by:

  • Trita Parsi [03-01]: Some observations and comments on Trump and Israel's war on Iran: I scraped this off Facebook, so might best just quote it here:

    1. Tehran is not looking for a ceasefire and has rejected outreach from Trump. The reason is that they believe they committed a mistake by agreeing to the ceasefire in June - it only enabled the US and Israel to restock and remobilize to launch war again. If they agree to a ceasefire now, they will only be attacked again in a few months.

    2. For a ceasefire to be acceptable, it appears difficult for Tehran to agree to it until the cost to the US has become much higher than it currently is. Otherwise, the US will restart the war at a later point, the calculation reads.

    3. Accordingly, Iran has shifted its strategy. It is striking Israel, but very differently from the June war. There is a constant level of attack throughout the day rather than a salvo of 50 missiles at once. Damage will be less, but that isn't a problem because Tehran has concluded that Israel's pain tolerance is very high - as long as the US stays in the war. So the focus shifts to the US.

    4. From the outset, and perhaps surprisingly, Iran has been targeting US bases in the region, including against friendly states. Tehran calculates that the war can only end durably if the cost for the US rises dramatically, including American casualties. After the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran says it has no red lines left and will go all out in seeking the destruction of these bases and high American casualties.

    5. Iran understands that many in the American security establishment had been convinced that Iran's past restraint reflected weakness and an inability or unwillingness to face the US in a direct war. Tehran is now doing everything it can to demonstrate the opposite - despite the massive cost it itself will pay. Ironically, the assassination of Khamenei facilitated this shift.

    6. One aspect of this is that Iran has now also struck bases in Cyprus, which have been used for attacks against Iran. Iran is well aware that this is an attack on a EU state. But that seems to be the point. Tehran appears intent on not only expanding the war into Persian Gulf states but also into Europe. Note the attack on the French base in the UAE. For the war to be able to end, Europe too has to pay a cost, the reasoning appears to be.

    7. There appears to be only limited concern about the internal situation. The announcement of Khamenei's death opened a window for people to pour onto the streets and seek to overthrow the regime. Though expressions of joy were widespread, no real mobilization was seen. That window is now closing, as the theocratic system closes ranks and establishes new formal leadership.

  • Vijay Prashad [03-03]: A war that cannot be won: Israel and the United States bomb Iran: Of course, I agree with this conclusion, but that's largely because I subscribe to the broader assertion, that no war can ever be won. The best you can do is to lose a bit less than the other guys, but that does little to redeem your losses. I think this is true even when you downgrade your ambitions: instead of regime destruction and regeneration, which happened in Germany and Japan after WWII, or the occupation and propping up of quisling governments that the US attempted in Afghanistan and Iraq, Trump seems to have adopted Israel's Gaza model which is that of periodically "mowing the grass," hitting Iran repeatedly in a forever war that ultimately points toward genocide.

Trump's State of the Union speech: The Constitutionally-mandated annual speech is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 24. That's approximately when I hoped to post this, so the section starts with speculation, including much Trump is unlikely to say anything honest about, and will be added to if need be.

  • Michael Tomasky [02-23]: The real state of the union: millions of Americans are just disgusted: "Yes, we're angry about what Donald Trump is doing to our country. But even more than that, we're heartsick over the countless ways in which he is destroying this nation."

  • Jeet Heer [02-24]: The state of the union will be even worse than Trump's polling numbers: "What's a flopping demagogue to do?"

  • John Nichols [02-24]: Summer Lee knows the real state of the union: "The progressive representative from Pennsylvania will speak truth to Trump's power tonight." I gather the Democrats' "official" state of the union response will be from centrist Abigail Spanberger, but this one should be more interesting.

  • Alex Galbraith:

    • [02-24]: "These people are crazy": Trump uses State of the Union to attack Democrats, SCOTUS. "I'm not sure this word is the dagger to the heart Trump thinks it is. It's rather like "weird," in that it not only attacks one party, it also shows the attacker to be an elitist, thin-skinned and super judgmental, a prig. I think that Walz calling Trump (and his supporters) "weird" backfired, for many reasons, including that it made Trump look like a possible alternative to a system that was being choked by the dictums of what respectable politicians can say. I doubt Democrats will try to play this by embracing the charge, but one can at least look askance at who's making the charge.

    • [02-24]: "Is the president working for you?": Spanberger hammers Trump on affordability. While Trump mocks them, Democrats have finally found a word which consolidates inflation, debt, wages, and costs into a single concept that better fits one's lived experience. The following is a useful primer:

      • Dylan Gyauch-Lewis [02-11]: What is affordability? "It's more than just prices." It's also more complicated, but perhaps not complicated enough. It's hard to factor in increasing precarity, partly because it strikes so hard in individual but rather random cases. Also the sense of powerlessness more and more people are feeling (because those in power are always pressing their advantages: that alone is enough for a "vibecession"). Quality also factors into affordability: while tech is generally improving, the transition is rarely smooth, creating losers as well as unintended consequences; on the other hand, business is always looking to cut corners, and shirking on quality is one way to do that.

  • Zack Beauchamp [02-24]: The most important line from Trump's State of the Union.

    It came during a discussion of the SAVE Act, a Republican bill designed to combat the fictitious scourge of noncitizen voting. Democrats, Trump claimed, only opposed the bill because "they want to cheat." And then he took it much further.

    "Their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat," Trump said on Tuesday night. "We're going to stop it. We have to stop it."

    Think about that for a second. This is the president of the United States, speaking to the country in a ritualized national address, claiming that the opposition party is not only wrong on policy but fundamentally illegitimate, so much so that if they win an election it must be because they cheated.

    Taken literally, that is the president announcing that the stated policy of his administration is preventing the opposition from winning any future election.

    Of course, the odd thing here is that most of the actual instances we can think of where a party tries to rig elections for their own advantage occur on the right-wing side: today's Republicans, or for white Democrats during the Jim Crow era. The purpose of the SAVE Act is to make it harder for poor people to vote. What Trump really wants is a system where Democrats can never win an election, no matter how unpopular Republican policies are. That's because, well:

    But Trump doesn't see Democrats as opponents. He sees them as enemies. . . . And indeed, this was how Trump talked about Democrats in the State of the Union.

    "These people are crazy. I'm telling you, they're crazy. Boy, we're lucky we have a country with people like this," he said. "Democrats are destroying our country, but we've stopped it, just in the nick of time."

    Beauchamp relates this to Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, but the Nazis studied America's Jim Crow laws for precedents. It's tiring to have to keep talking about democratic principles, but that's the line Republicans insist on drawing. The problem for Democrats is not that they lack moral high ground, but that a great many Americans simply dismiss the notion of moral high ground (except inasmuch as they claim it themselves, ideally as a grant from God), but also the principle allows for either side to win, and leaves it to the people to decide which. In defending that principle, which the other side flat-out rejects, Democrats tend to undermine what should be their real mission, which is to show that it is the Republicans who are the enemies not just of the political system but of the people the system is supposed to represent.

  • Ed Kilgore [02-25]: Trump's State of the Union was a bloated awards show. Much discussion before the speech about Trump's record low approval numbers, and how he desperately needs to turn a corner. No one seems to think that he did with this particular speech. Kilgore thinks it at least "thrilled his base," even if it convinced or much impressed anyone else. I'm left with two thoughts: that for someone who claims to love America, he sure hates an awful lot of actual Americans; yet he seems to sincerely believe in not just the righteousness but the inevitable success of his program. As Kilgore put it: "It appears he will go into difficult midterm elections standing pat on his record, his message, and his unshakable belief in his own greatness." I'm not really sure how Trump could rig the 2026 (and 2028) elections, but as long as he thinks he's winning, he's unlikely to try (at least beyond his habitual complaining about mail-in ballots, voter id, etc.).

  • Meagan Day [02-25]: Pay close attention to Trump's affordability rhetoric: "Donald Trump's State of the Union was mostly lies and grievances. But his aggressive play for economic populism — borrowing progressive ideas and branding them as his own — should be a warning for Democrats to get serious about affordability."

  • Paul Heideman [02-25]: Donald Trump is staying the course: "Donald Trump's inane self-aggrandizement made listening to his State of the Union speech an exercise in endurance. It was also a reminder of how lucky the nation is that Trump's pathologies prevent him from more ably seizing his historical moment."

  • Christian Paz [02-26]: How Democrats reorganized their State of the Union resistance: "The Democrats tried something new to rebut Trump's address." Aside from the "official" response by Abigail Spanbarger, there were others, plus two counter-programming events, one dubbed the "People's State of the Union," the other the "State of the Swamp."

  • Alec Hernandez/Dasha Burns [02-26]: The SOTU moment that Republicans hope saves the midterms: "Americans have soured on the White House immigration enforcement tactics, but the president's speech has the GOP strategizing on how to regain momentum on a favorite issue." Their initial is this 30-second ad, which shows Trump saying: "If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support. The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens." It then shows Republicans applauding en masse, and pans to various Democrats who look bored out of their minds. Given Trump's lackadaisical delivery, buried deep within a speech that rambled on for nearly two hours, who wouldn't be bored? Even had they been hanging on every word, Trump's challenge scarcely makes any sense — if you asked me, I'd say that the first job is to ensure equal justice for all, which no one would say ICE is doing. (Then I'd add a few more things, like regulating the economy, protecting the environment, and making war unthinkable. Granted, do those things and American citizens would be safer — most likely "illegal aliens" would neither be illegal nor aliens.) Trump then points to the Democrats, and says "These people are crazy." Really sick burn.

  • Harold Meyerson [02-26]: The SOTU clips that should prove disastrous for Trump and the GOP: "Democrats should stream and broadcast the president's odes to our economy over and over again." Jimmy Kimmel's 60-second edit gives you a taste, but jumps around too much.

  • Corey Robin [02-26]: On the Democratic Party style: Just focusing on style/rhetoric:

    I don't think I've ever encountered, outside academia, people with such a bottomless appetite for mountainous piles of meaningless, unnecessary, empty words and phrases, each genetically engineered, in whole or in part, to make any sentient being stop paying attention. Reading this speech, that is the only conclusion I can come to: that the sole purpose of this speech is to make people stop paying attention.

  • Sasha Abramsky [02-27]: For 108 minutes, Trump gives a tedious Mussolini impersonation. I've never listened to Mussolini, but I'm skeptical that he was ever so offhandedly wry and lackadaisical.

Major Threads

Israel: Enter "stage two" of Trump's Gaza War Peace Plan, which we can now safely say that Trump is implementing in the worst way possible, through his so-called Board of Peace. It is worth recalling my [10-21] piece on Making Peace in Gaza and Beyond, which lays out a different approach (one which cuts Israel considerable slack, arguably much more than they deserve, but which could be tolerated if the Trump and other key Americans decided the war had to end). As I noted last time, the minimal requirements for any serious peace plan are:

  1. Israel has to leave Gaza, and cannot be allowed any role in its reconstruction.
  2. The people who still live in Gaza must have political control of their own destiny.
  3. The UN is the only organization that be widely trusted to guide Gaza toward self-government, with security for all concerned.

Trump's Board of Peace not only bypasses the UN — forget that it's theoretically sanction by UN Security Council Resolution 2803, because Trump already has — it suggests a new alignment under Trump's personal control, excluding any nation not willing to bow and scrape up tribute money. This is reminiscent of Bush's "Coalition of the Willing," but where Bush's ad hoc club was mere propaganda, this is styled as a plot to control the world. Not even Ian Flemming has managed to concoct a villain as megalomaniacal as Trump.

  • Omar H Rahman [01-13]: Israel's Somaliland gambit reflects a doctrine of endless escalation: "By projecting power into the Horn of Africa, Israel aims to increase pressure on rivals, undermine regional stability, and narrow the space for diplomacy." Somaliland is region in northern Somalia, along the coast of the Gulf of Aden, that has broken away from the beleaguered Somali Republic (which Trump has bombed over 100 times). Israel is the only country to recognize Somaliland's independence. One speculation is that Somaliland could be used as dumping grounds for exiling Palestinians from Gaza.

  • Sam Kimball [01-27]: Zionist expansion: a first-hand account of Israel's illegal occupation of southwestern Syria.

  • Muhammad Shehada [01-29]: How Netanyahu is sabotaging phase two of the Gaza ceasefire: "By undermining a new Palestinian technocratic body, Israel is trying to make Gaza appear ungovernable — and prove the need for its sustained military rule." Many details loom large, especially the return of the spectacularly corrupt Mohammad Dahlan masquerading as a neutral "technocratic" functionary.

  • Basel Adra [01-30]: Inside a coordinated, multi-village settler-soldier pogrom in Masafer Yatta: "As settlers set homes ablaze and looted livestock across three villages for over five hours, Israeli soldiers blocked ambulances, arrested victims, and even took part in beatings. This is how it unfolded."

  • Jamal Kanj [02-02]: Weaponizing America's economy in service of Israel: Not only does the US subsidize Israel's wars, especially against "their own people"[*], but the US uses its financial power to punish dissent around the world. Thus, the US has "sanctioned international courts, punished UN officials, pressured humanitarian organizations and national leaders who dared to insist that Israeli crimes be judged by the same standards applied to all nations." In this context, US sanctions against states like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and North Korea are not just acts of war "by other means," but are threats to other countries of what could happen to them should they stray too far from US dictates in support of Israel.

    [*] One of the most effective propaganda lines used against Saddam Hussein was that he had "gassed his own people": Kurds resident in Iraq, suspected of sympathies with Iran during the ongoing war, and later in open rebellion against Iraq's regime, but still counted as "his own people." Israel bears at least as much responsibility for its Palestinian residents, some nominally citizens but most denied legal rights and standing. Israel is the only nation in the world where we accept that the political elite can divide the people who live there into a favored group of "citizens" and others that can be discriminated against.

  • Deema Hattab [02-03]: A catalog of Gaza's loss: "Recording what has been erased — and making sense of what remains." Part of a series on "A Day for Gaza."

  • Ramzy Baroud [02-06]: On the menu: how the Middle Powers sacrificed Gaza to save themselves.

  • Neve Gordon [02-09]: Demographic engineering connects record murder rates in its Palestinian towns and the weaponisation of antisemitism.

  • Qassam Muaddi [02-11]: Israel just started legalizing its annexation of the West Bank. Here's what that means.

  • Abdaljawad Omar [02-13]: How Israel is eroding life for Palestinians in the West Bank: "Israeli violence in the West Bank isn't as dramatic as in Gaza, but it is methodical, durable, and sometimes harder to understand. Here's how Israel is using settler terror, financial policies, and legal tactics to suffocate Palestinian life." One problem with focusing on the clear cut genocide charge in Gaza is that as far as Smotrich and Ben Gvir (and quite possibly Netanyahu) are concerned, Gaza is just a side show: the real battlefront is the West Bank. Gaza is a test of how much violence Israel can get away with (which has turned out to be quite a lot). Israel clings onto Gaza because no one that matters has told them the obvious, which is that they have to give it up and leave. If the US did make such a demand, I suspect that Israel would have no choice other than to accept the loss. Israel has, after all, already turned the strip into a wasteland. But Israel is unlikely ever to consider withdrawing from the West Bank. Their project there is to make so burdensome for Palestinians that they eventually give up, leaving Israel with the "land without a people" they've always longed for.

  • Mira Al Hussein [02-19]: In widening Saudi-UAE rift, Israel is at the heart of a narrative war: "Saudi accusations that Abu Dhabi acts as Israel's proxy have ignited a media firestorm. But similar anti-Israel sentiments circulate within the UAE itself."

  • Tom Perkins [02-23]: How data on the crackdown on Gaza protests reflects the increasing repression of activist movements in the US: "Data shows Gaza protesters faced harsher punishments than Black Lives Matter protesters did just a few years ago. Experts tell Mondoweiss this is the result of pro-Israel bias and a backlash against protest movements that has been building for years."

  • Farid Hafez [02-24]: Why Israel is joining hands with Europe's far right: "Tel Aviv is courting the same movements that once peddled lies about a global Jewish conspiracy — only now their target has shifted to Islam."

  • Brett Wilkins [02-24]: Huckabee accused of inciting murder after Israeli settlers kill Palestinian-American teen: "The US ambassador to Israel is engaging in empowering and allowing for actions that lead to the targeted lynching and killing of US citizens."

  • Nicholas Liu [02-25]: How the Gaza war changed America: Interview with Bruce Robbins, who "argues Gaza has shifted the debate over how and when the label is used." The label he focuses on is "atrocity," which is the subject of his recent book, Atrocity: A Literary History.

  • Michael Arria [02-26]: International outcry over Huckabee claim that Israel can control from Egypt to Iraq: "The Trump administration is in damage control mode after Mike Huckabee claimed Israeli has the biblically mandated right to stretch from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq." Fallout from a Tucker Carlson interview of Trump's Ambassador to Israel — a Baptist minister and an especially devout and belligerent Christian Zionist.

  • Trump's Board of Peace: The coalition of the willing to pay has had their first meeting, and the coalition of the vulture capitalists are licking their chops. Everyone understands that Israel's destruction of Gaza has been so total that the world community will have to chip in billions of dollars to restore even the bare necessities for modern life today. The purpose of the Board is to raise this money, and to make sure that as little as possible goes to the Palestinians, who remain (as Israel has long insisted) unwanted and unnecessary people. The obvious way to do this is to imagine Gaza as a blank slate for profitable real estate scams, where most of the money will ultimately be siphoned off by the insiders who control the purse strings. Chief among these is "chairman for life" Donald Trump, but the real brains behind this appears to be son-in-law Jared Kushner, whose Saudi-financed investment fund turned out to be the single biggest grift of Trump's first term.

    • Mohammed Haddad/Mohammad Mansour [01-27]: Map shows what would happen to Gaza under the US 'master plan': "The plan treats Gaza as vacant beachfront property, proposing glass towers and industrial zones over historic sites." The "plan" was unveiled at Davos, which was kind of like addressing the Balfour Declaration to the Rothschilds.

    • Tariq Kenney-Shawa [01-30]: Jared Kushner's "plan" for Gaza is an abomination: "Kushner is pitching a 'new,' gleaming resort hub. But scratch the surface, and you find nothing less than a blueprint for ethnic cleansing."

    • Ellen Ioanes [02-09]: Board of Peace is a Board of Profits.

      • Thomas Cavanna [02-19]: How Trump's Board of Peace is set up for a multibillion dollar fail: "A vague mandate and pay-to-play model suggest it'll become a bloated boondoggle in search of an expanded ission lacking full international legitimacy."

    • Dave DeCamp [02-19]: US plans to build a 5,000-person military base in Gaza for international force.

    • Nick Cleveland-Stout [02-20]: Board of Peace will be a bonanza for wealthy board members: "Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner downplayed the potential for profiteering but that's not exactly the case." This is worth quoting at some length, although this only hints at the extent of the coruption.

      Companies are already jockeying for contracts. This week, The Guardian reported that the Board of Peace issued a contract to build a 5,000-person military base for an international force tasked with protecting civilians and training "vetted Palestinian police forces." It's not clear who the contractor is.

      In December, a leaked document revealed that U.S. officials were searching for a "Master Contractor" that would "earn a fair return" for trucking. A U.S. disaster response firm, Gothams LLC, submitted a plan to the White House that would guarantee the company 300% profits for work in Gaza. The company would move goods into Gaza in exchange for a fee, as well as a seven-year monopoly over trucking and logistics for the Board of Peace.

      Administration officials and businesspeople affiliated with the Board have also promoted a new "Gaza supply system" which, according to a January slide deck, offers sovereign investors between 46% and 175% returns in the first year of investment.

      "Everybody and their brother is trying to get a piece of this," one long-time contractor told The Guardian. "People are treating this like another Iraq or Afghanistan. And they're trying to get, you know, rich off of it."

      Israel's representative on the Board of Peace, billionaire Yakir Gabay, said that Gaza's coastline should be "developed as a new Mediterranean Riviera with 200 hotels and potential islands." Gabay made his money largely through real estate, though he claims he will refrain from building hotels in Gaza himself.

      Another member of the Executive Board, Marc Rowan, runs one of the world's largest private equity firms, Apollo Global Management. Rowan touted the money to be made during yesterday's meeting. "The coastline alone? 50 billion in value on a conservative basis," he said. "The housing stock — more than $30 billion . . . The infrastructure — more than $30 billion." Altogether, Rowan said, Gaza contains some $115 billion in real estate value, but "it just needs to be unlocked and financed."

      The dominance of private equity and real estate moguls on the Board, combined with a lack of transparency surrounding policies and timetables for Gaza's reconstruction, raise concerns about abuse. Hugh Lovatt, a Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that the role of businesspeople such as Rowan and Kushner is "completely at odds with what the Palestinians in Gaza need."

      I'd edit that last line to change "need" for "want." This notion that other people (Americans, Israelis, Saudis), qualified exclusively by their wealth and hubris, are entitled to decide what Gazans need is profoundly not only disrespectful, it is a recipe for class war (even assuming the ethnic and religious "deradialization" proceeds according to plan, which I wouldn't bet on). Let's say, for the sake of argument, that some of this gets built, and some Palestinians are hired to work in these foreign-owned palaces and factories. Workers could strike for better wages and working conditions, but the Board is also running its own private police (think of the 19th century US Pinkertons), and many of the Board members (especially the Saudis and Israelis) are quite comfortable with the idea of importing foreign scab labor, which will further imiserate the Palestinians and kindle new conflicts (on top of the old). This probably ends in Israel leveling Gaza once more, hoping to drive the Palestinians out. And while this might seem like a setback for the war profiteers, they're taking their cut up front, and can always resurrect their graft with a new Board promising another new Peace. I may still be of the opinion that the Trump Plan is better than the naked genocide that preceded it, and perhaps is the best one can hope for given the unchallenged power of Netanyahu and Trump, but it it still far short of the very modest proposals I made back in October.

    • Ishaan Tharoor [02-21]: Donald Trump's pantomime United Nations: "The Board of Peace might be destined to fail, but it still threatens to undermine an international system in which the US was once the linchpin." First paragraph begins: "It didn't take long for the flattery to begin."

    • Michael Arria [02-25]: Meet the companies and billionaires looking to make a massive profit off Trump's plans in Gaza: "U.S. companies are aiming to make huge profits from the Gaza reconstruction plan, with several billionaires on Trump's Board of Peace openly discussing the opportunity to make billions."

    • Matt Wolfson [02-25]: The Gaza Plan's 'sick kind of detachment' and its dangers for America.

    • Ben Armbruster [02-26]: The White House wants Iran to attack Americans: "Trump officials are searching for ways to get into a war with Tehran.">

    • Jehad Abusalim [02-26]: Gaza does not need new overlords: "The U.S. plan for Gaza is the final stage of Israel's genocide. Bombs and bulldozers obliterated Gaza's landscape, and now skyscrapers and data centers aim to dismantle its social fabric and capacity to resist."

Around the World: Formerly "Russia/Ukraine," and that's still going on, but Trump seems to think the US is enjoying a unipolar moment like some Americans fantasized about after the Soviet Union dissolved, and that's having repercussions around the world. For Trump's own activities, see the next section. This one will look at the world is reacting, or sometimes just minding its own business.

  • David Broder [12-18]: The new Europeans, Trump-style: "Donald Trump is sowing division in the European Union, even as he calls on it to spend more on defense." He's probably confusing several different trends, in part because Trump's own foreign policy is so incoherent. I expect his threat to Greenland will spur the re-armament crowd, but not to buy more American arms. (If they're going to buy arms, they shouldn't they build up their own arms industries?) Moreover, the far right, which he has clear sympathies with, is more likely to turn against the US than nearly anyone in the despised center.

  • Dan M Ford [2025-12-31]: 6 stories that defined Trump's approach to Africa in 2025: "Minerals, peace deals, and a complete dissolution of relations with at least one country."

    1. Diplomatic scuffle with South Africa: This doesn't mention Israel, but does mention "genocide," which Trump claimed "was being perpetrated by the country's black population against white farmers."
    2. Massad Boulos' role as Senior Africa Advisor: Boulos is the father-in-law of Trump daughter Tiffany.
    3. Peace agreement between Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda: all the better to tap into the region's "vast mineral wealth."
    4. Effort to end the war in Sudan: ineffectively so far, but Trump has some leverage with outside forces (UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia) and, well, there's oil at stake.
    5. Economic engagement with Africa: Where he "secured a record $2.5 billion in business deals."
    6. The US bombs Nigeria: Merry Christmas!

  • Robert Skidelsky [01-30]: Much ado about a Chinese 'mega-embassy' in London: "British newspapers and politicians have taken to fighting an imaginary war with Beijing."

  • Joshua Keating [02-03]: Is a new US-Russia arms race about to begin? "We're about to lose our last nuclear arms control treaty with Russia. What does that mean?" New START, the last of several arms control treaties the US and Soviet Union negotiated, expires on Feb. 5. The treaty limited the US and Russia to 1,550 deployed warheads. As both already have many more warheads in storage, the arms race could be rapid, if either side count think of a rationale for deploying more. I can't think of one, but the US nuke industry has been pushing a multi-trillion-dollar "modernization" for some time.

  • Evan Robins [02-13]: Keir Starmer's failure is nearly complete: "The wildly unpopular UK prime minister is likely doomed in the wake of an Epstein-related scandal entirely of his own making. He deserves every bit of hell he's in." The Epstein connection was through Peter Mandelson ("a longtime Labour power broker and Starmer's handpicked former ambassador to the United States"). Starmer's takeover of the party from Jeremy Corbyn seemed doomed from the start: he purged Corbyn and jettisoned the last vestiges of democratic socialism, leaving the party with no principles other than corrupt compromise with financial power and US militarism. Not only couldn't he make it work, he had no defense when it failed.

  • Johnny Ryan [02-17]: Europeans are dangerously reliant on US tech. Now is a good time to build our own: Actually, now is the time to go open source, and not let any country or company tell you what you can or cannot do, let alone how much tribute you have to pay to keep the lights on.

  • Laura Wittebroek [02-20]: Profit over people: How the world fuels Sudan's war. Since 2019, Sudan has been torn apart by a civil war between two militia factions, each supported by an array of outside opportunists (especially the UAE, but everyone in the international arms trade seems to be involved), although this follows decades of conflict between whoever controlled Khartoum and the outer provinces.

  • Tanya Goudsouzian/Ibrahim Al-Marashi [02-20]: How Pakistan is busting the Great Power monopoly on air power: "The industry here is showing how emerging states are gaining leverage through the democratization . . . of weapons." Long dependent on the US for F-16 aircraft, Pakistan is now building its own fighter-bombers, dubbed the JF-17, co-developed with China, and available for export.

  • Anatol Lieven [02-23]: Ukraine marks biggest evolution in military tactics since WWII: "The transformation in weapons and conventional warfare has resulted in the bloodiest stalemate in generations." This, by the way, led me to a couple of earlier articles, also on futility:

  • Martin Di Caro [02-23]: What does Putin really want? "Four Russia-Ukraine experts tell us if aything has changed as the war enters its fifth year without resolve." Nikolai Petro, Sergey Radchenko, Sumantra Maitra, Nikolas Gvosdev. I have little confidence that any of them know. This is part of an anniversary series, along with the already cited Lieven piece, and:

  • Peter Rutland [02-24]: Ukraine's dilemma: "The nation has fought bravely but will it have the support to keep going, externally and internally, for a fifth year?" The problem is under Biden you had a president who refused to negotiate. Under Trump you have a president who cannot negotiate. Zelensky and Putin are just following their assigned roles, especially given that neither leader can afford to look like a loser, both can sustain what they're doing indefinitely (although Ukraine is in much more precarious shape, with limited resources and dependent on outside help), and outsiders aren't ready to sweeten the pot (end sanctions, offer reconstruction funds, take some steps toward disarmament). I've long believed this would be easy to solve, but the US and Europe have to value peace and cooperation more than division and war. Russia needs to meet them part way, too, but until the West is willing to settle this dispute, it matters little what Putin does.

  • Jason Ditz [02-26]: US demands Iraq end Maliki nomination by Friday: Iraq is another country where Trump feels he should be able to dictate its leader.

Trump Goes to War (International Edition): Formerly "Trump's War & Peace," but not much of the latter anymore. On opening this file, this includes actual or threatened wars in Venezuela, Iran, and Greenland.

  • Heather Digby Parton [01-08]: War has become fashionable again for the GOP: "The right's detour into pacifism under Trump was never going to stick."

  • Pavel Devyatkin [01-13]: Tech billionaires behind Greenland bid want to build 'freedom cities': "As Europeans try to redirect Trump, his Silicon Valley supporters have ideas of their own, involving low-regulated communities and access to rare earths."

  • Sara Herschander [01-30]: America's culture wars are killing people overseas: "When 'pro-life' foreign aid hurts women and children the most."

  • Martin Di Caro [02-02]: Geo-kleptocracy and the rise of 'global mafia politics': "Expert Alex de Waal explains how the capture of Maduro, leaving his corrupt regime in place, is a 'crystalline example' of regime change in the new era."

  • Rachel Janfaza [02-03]: The quiet reason why Trump is losing Gen Z: "They wanted fewer wars. He didn't deliver." Pull quote from a 22-year-old woman in Ohio: "The 'no new wars' thing is now the biggest joke of my life." But why is this just a "quiet reason"? Probably because Democrats don't talk about it. Harris blew the 2024 election by expressing no qualms about the major wars Biden (Gaza, Ukraine) boosted, let alone the piddly strikes that had become so routine they're rarely reported. Clinton blew the 2016 election by trying to come off as the tougher, more belligerent commander-in-chief. Democrats desperately need to find a way to stop looking like warmongers. They could start by relentlessly attacking Trump's tantrums. They could expand on that by developing a broad vision that puts American interests firmly on a foundation of peace and human rights.

  • Tara Copp/David Ovalle [02-03]: Pentagon warns Scouts to restore 'core values' or lose military support: "The relationship dates back decades, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has criticized the organization for allowing girls to join and changing its name from Boy Scouts." The new name is Scouting America. I haven't paid any attention to them, and had no idea that they were supported by the military. (Evidently, the military provides "medical, security and logistical support" for their National Jamboree, which I only recall due to a spectacularly off-color speech Trump gave them a few years back. Article includes a photo of Trump after his 2017 speech.) I joined the Cub and Boy Scouts in my youth, and some of what I learned there has stuck with me (as well as some trauma). In my annual music lists, I routinely note: "As the proto-fascist organization of my youth insisted, one should always be prepared."

  • Leah Schroeder [02-04]: Hegseth to take control of Stars & Stripes for 'warfighter' makeover: "Critics, including veterans and First Amendment advocates, say the proposed overhaul would usurp the storied military newspaper's independence." I suspect its "independence" has always been a mere "story." Still, Hegseth's vision for the "War Department" is uniquely disturbing.

  • Joshua Keating [02-13]: Trump's biggest war is one he almost never talks about: "Why did the US bomb Somalia more than 100 times last year?" The bombing started under Bush, increased under Obama, much more so in Trump's first term, continued at a lower pace under Biden, and accelerated under Trump II.

  • Rubio Goes to Munich: The Secretary of State gave an address to the Munich Security Conference:

    • Eldar Mamedov [02-14]: Rubio's spoonful of sugar helps hard medicine go down in Munich: "The Secretary of State' message on civilizational renewal and self-reliance wasn't too different than Vance's the year before, but it landed much softer." Author agrees that Rubio delivered "a peculiar mix of primacist nostalgia and civilizational foreboding," echoing Vance's more confrontational message a year back, but his "spoonful of sugar" was appealing to Europe's own post-imperial chauvinism, instead of writing it off.

    • AlJazeera [02-14]: Rubio slams European policies on climate, migration as he calls for unity.

    • Mehdi Hasan [02-17]: Forget Maga. Welcome to Mega: Make Empire Great Again: "Marco Rubio arrived at the Munich security conference with a disturbing message for European governments: empire is great." Quotes Rubio as saying: "We do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it."

    • Carol Schaeffer [02-17]: The Munich Security Conference marks the end of the US-led order: "US politicians flooded the summit — but Europe no longer sees the United States as a reliable partner."

    • Nick Turse [02-19]: More US troops are headed to Nigeria: "The Trump administration is sending more troops to a region where US military presence has coincided with increased violence."

    • Zak Cheney-Rice [02-19]: Heirs to plunder: "Marco Rubio's Munich speech made a sinister case for shameless western imperialism."

    • Jonathan Cook [02-19]: Rubio declared a return to brutal western colonialism — and Europe applauded: "Old-school, white-man's burden colonialism is unapologetically back." Not the way I would put it, but while they are unapologetic about their moral and military superiority, their divine right to lead a world that exists only to serve them.

    • John Quiggin:

      • [02-21]: The US state has proved itself dispensable: I doubt that the US was ever indispensable to its allies. At most, it was a convenient crutch, simple-minded enough in its initial anti-communism and later megalomania that it was easier (and more profitable) to humor it than to risk displeasure. But the net value of NATO security was never much, at least as concerned the Russians — more important was that it kept France, Germany, Britain, and maybe Italy from rearming against each other, which would have been a dangerous waste. The dollar, capital and trade flows weren't worth much either, but as long as the US was generous enough to pay for its primacy, it was easier to just go along. But "America First," with Trump's shakedowns and extortions, served notice that such a game couldn't last long. We're seeing some of that now, and will see more over time. One big change Quiggin notes is that Europe has already made great strides in arms development and production, as they've largely taken over supply to Ukraine. Trump's erratic tariff policy has further undermined their interest in America. As Quiggin notes, Rubio's ovation in Munich was mostly polite. But it also came from people who are tightly integrated into the decomposing alliance. Outside the room, the speech wasn't nearly as well received.

      • [2025-02-01]: The dispensable nation: Quiggin refers back to this piece he wrote a year ago. One thing I'd add is that while the notion that the US is uniquely virtuous has obvious attraction to the people who nominally run it, and through it imagine themselves as the natural rulers of the world, this conceit has little practical value to the overwhelming majority of Americans, and is at best humored by the leaders of other nations.

    • Steve Howell [02-24]: Rubio, rodeo, and tall tales of empire: "The secretary of state has provoked the ire of Britain's first black woman lawmaker and put the spotlight once again on how the US has historically treated people of his own heritage."

Trump Goes to War (Domestic Edition): This will carry on from "ICE Stories," and will also pick up skirmishes in the courts. It isn't a stretch to say Trump's waging war against his own people, except inasmuch as he doesn't consider most of us to be his own people.

Trump Regime: This is for stories about what the supplicants and minions in the Trump administration are doing day-in, day-out to make America less enjoyable and livable. This includes bad policies as well as bad actors, but some of the worst are dealt with in other sections. Trump himself merits his own section, a bit further down.

  • Kenny Stancil [01-26]: The Trump regime is making disasters worse: "DHS Secretary Kristi Noem sat atop millions of dollars in flood prevention grants while the West Coast was being inundated. Now she's slashing FEMA disaster response staff."

  • Jelinda Montes [01-29]: South Carolina measles outbreak hits record high: "This is the largest measles outbreak since the United States declared measles eliminated in 2000."

  • Kenny Stancil/Julian Schoffield/Chris Lewis [02-05]: DOGE lives on through Russell Vought: "Trump's White House OMB director has quietly institutionalized the government demolition agenda set in motion by Elon Musk's wrecking crew."

  • Annie Levin [02-10]: How the far right won the food wars: "RFK's MAHA spectacle offers an object lesson in how the left cedes fertile political territory." I'm not sure I'm buying any aspect of this argument.

  • Umair Irfan [02-12]: Trump just blew up a load-bearing pillar of climate regulation in the US. What happens now?

  • Matt Stieb [02-12]: The prediction-market scandals are getting bleaker: I'm not sure where to file this. If people can bet on anything anytime, it's very near certain that those with insider knowledge will try to take advantage. In high-class casinos like the stock market, the SEC at least tries to punish gross instances of insider trading, not that the last 50 years give us much confidence in their ability.

  • Hannah Story Brown/Toni Agular Rosenthal [02-13]: Doug Burgum, the regime today of our time: "Dashing the hopes of establishment Democrats, Trump's interior secretary and 'energy czar' has adopted his boss's excesses as his own."

  • Clyde McGrady [02-13]: Trump nominates an apostle of 'white erasure' for the State Department: "Jeremy Carl, President Trump's nominee to lead the State Department's outreach to international organizations, had a rough confirmation hearing, but he stood by his views on 'whiteness.'" Last section offered a list of "who opposes his nomination?" But then the piece ended by noting:

    Others appointees have weathered the storm, including Darren Beattie, a senior State Department official who was fired from the first Trump administration after speaking at a conference attended by white nationalists.

    "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities and demoralizing competent white men," Mr. Beattie once wrote on social media.

    Still, some on the right are rallying to Mr. Carl's side.

    The conservative activist Christopher Rufo defended Mr. Carl, writing that Americans have been bullied into believing that "white culture" is "inherently shameful or evil," which leads them to "pretend that it doesn't exist."

    Actually, "competent white men" would be an improvement over many of the Trump nominees, including some who are not men and/or not white (not that I'm recalling many of the latter). As for Rufo, it's fool's errand — an act of deliberate self-crippling — to try to separate "white culture" out of American culture. While the result may not be "inherently shameful or evil," the parts that are shameful and evil will be much concentrated.

  • Nia Prater [02-13]: USAID's remaining funds are paying for Vought's security detail.

  • Ed Kilgore [02-14]: Revoking climate-change regulation may be the worst thing Trump has done.

  • Hayley Brown [02-20]: The Trump administration's catastrophic census proposal.

  • Abdullah Shihipar [02-23]: The staggering costs of Trump's war on public service: "The administration's steep cuts to public service jobs and research opportunities are saving Americans very little money — but they're having a detrimental impact on society." While I share the headline alarm, the stats here about career choices have me wondering if the ideological campaign to deprecate pubic service won out 20-30 years before the mass firings. One factor here is education debt, which has pushed graduates toward more lucrative careers in predatory finance, and away careers in public service. (The military is the exception that proves the point. It has long featured education credits as compensation, and is widely seen as a way relatively poor people can get an education. However, it is nearly useless as public service.) Rekindling the notion of public service, and making it an attractive and fulfilling career choice, is essential for any decent post-Trump recovery. It's going to take more than just rehiring people Trump fired.

  • Emmett Hopkins [02-26]: Trump is threatening to cut transit left and right. This is totally in character:

    Taking away transit funding will also increase congestion and deliver chaos to the streets. It will not only hit people's household budgets but also ripple through small businesses, medical facilities, schools, and grocery stores, all of whom rely on functioning transportation systems — including transit — to move goods, customers, and employees smoothly. Drivers and nondrivers alike will feel the impacts. Transportation is also the largest sectoral source of US greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing public transit would make that even worse, adding further fuel to the climate crisis.

Donald Trump: As for Il Duce, we need a separate bin for stories on his personal peccadillos -- which often seem like mere diversions, although as with all madness, it can be difficult sorting the serious from the fanciful.

  • Sophia Tesfaye:

    • [12-13]: Jared Kushner is at the center of Trump's corruption: "From media mergers to foreign policy, Trump's son-in-law is consolidating power — and making millions." Thanks to his Middle East portfolio, he bagged much more graft in Trump's first term than anyone else. Now he's back as part of Trump's Board of Peace. And he's involved in "the biggest media merger in years."

      After leaving the first Trump administration, Kushner raised over $3 billion for Affinity Partners, including $2 billion from the Saudi government's Public Investment Fund. The Saudis' own advisers reportedly warned Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that Kushner's record did not justify such an investment, but the crown prince overruled them. The UAE and Qatar soon followed, adding another $1.5 billion to the pot. As of late 2024, Kushner had still not produced meaningful returns for these foreign governments, yet he had paid himself at least $157 million in fees. Forbes now calls him a billionaire.

    • [02-11]: MAGA blame game shows Trump in retreat: "Trump and Vance back down and blame unnamed staffers for controversial posts." The buck always stops . . . somewhere else.

  • Toby Buckle [2025-12-18]: The Americans who saw all this coming — but were ignored and maligned: "Call them Cassandra: the people — mostly not white and male — who smelled the fascism all over Trump from jump street. Why were they 'alarmists,' and how did 'anti-alarmism' become cool?" Minor point, but even some elderly white blokes saw this coming. I could measure this not just by what I wrote before the event, but how literally sick I felt on election night, 2024. Sure, I advised against using the word "fascism" during the campaign, but only because I didn't see the practical utility beyond people who already sensed what Trump was planning. I'm reminded here of the term "premature-antifascists," which was applied to leftists in the late 1930s, who in mainstream eyes were only vindicated with the war declarations of 1941. We'll be hearing much more about Trump the Fascist. For example:

    • Robert J Shapiro [02-17]: Hannah Arendt understood the forces behind Donald Trump: "The late scholar of mass movements, charismatic leaders, and government violence foreshadowed the president's rise and the MAGA movement in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Recent polling proves her prescience."

  • Bill Scher [01-19]: The ephemeral presidency: "Except for the damage, nothing Trump is doing will last." That's a pretty big exception, but it seems almost flippant to assume that executive orders can be rescinded at will, or that Democrats will find the will. The courts that helped Trump seize power won't be equally disposed to reversing him. And the world will have changed: mostly for the worse, but those who benefited from the changes will resist giving them up. Then there are the things that shouldn't be reversed. Scher is particularly keen on reverting to a Biden-Obama foreign policy, but they didn't have one worth saving, and their fumbling was a big part of the theory that even Trump couldn't do worse.

  • Jonathan Rauch [01-25]: Yes, it's Fascism: "Until recently, I thought it a term best avoided. But now, the resemblances are too many and too strong to deny." Mostly buried under the paywall, but I take his point. Before the 2024 election, I cautioned against using the F-word for two reasons: one is that it only resonates with people who understand the history but don't need the word to clarify why they oppose (or in rare instances support) Trump; the other is that historically-minded leftists are so sensitive to tones of fascism they tend to overuse the word, sometimes reducing its insight to a mere indictment, and that tends to be taken as too much "crying wolf." On the other hand, our ability to understand what's happening is strongly influenced (or simply limited) by our command of historical precedents. And what the Trumpists have done since the election has been so extreme that the only historical antecedents that come close to having the same impact are the fascists. We have, in short, moved from a state where associating something with "fascist" could suggest a dire future to one where it broadens out understanding of what's actually happening. One effect of this is that it no longer matters if the signs and analogies are precise. It only matters that the tone matches, and that the gravity is comparable. And the current tone and gravity is incomparable to damn near anything else that humans are experienced.

  • Andrew O'Hehir [01-25]: A fake presidency, but real tyranny: "Trump'slazy, crumbling regime values viral AI memes more than actual policy. But the brutality is real." Or as Marie Antoinette would have put it, "let them eat memes."

    By now it's become clear that content creation — feeding the beast, in an all-too-literal sense — is a principal driving force behind all this Nazi-cosplay street theater. The memes will continue, as indeed they must: Over and over again, we see ICE officers stage unnecessary confrontations, smashing car windows or pepper-spraying unarmed demonstrators in front of liberal observers and camera crews.

    Viral videos and meme-worthy images, whether they thrill the loyalists or outrage the libtards or both at once, are not byproducts of these blue-city occupations. They are not incidental to this moment of fascist terror but among its most significant instruments. They are deliberate injections of ideological poison meant to sow division, spread misinformation and render the truth valueless or irrelevant. . . .

    Hateful and stupid social media memes can serve to justify or excuse despicable acts of political violence. Just as important, they also serve to conceal them, as in the "King Trump" video, beneath an unstoppable downpour of crap. When millions of people have persuaded themselves that elementary-school shootings are staged by "crisis actors," the Jan. 6 insurrection was an FBI false-flag operation and the COVID pandemic was the work of a vast global conspiracy, the distinction between verifiable real-world information — an imperfect standard, but in my profession, the only one we've got — and paranoid or narcissistic delusion has become unsustainable. . . .

    I'm not sure any of that is meant to be convincing. It's the blatantly fake ideological wrapping of a crumbling regime built around a rapidly failing con man. His only actionable agenda is nihilistic rage, acted out as a brutal but incompetent reign of terror directed at his own people. Trump's version of fascism barely made it off the couch, and is still more comfortable there. Its vision of the past is imaginary and it has no future, but its destructive energy has changed the world.

  • Chauncey DeVega [01-29]: Vice signaling explains Trump's enduring appeal: "Minneapolis reveals why outrage alone fails to loose Trump's grip." This is a play on the notion of "virtue signaling," where people do good deeds just to appear more virtuous — a charge typically leveled at liberals by people who can't imagine anyone acting altruistically. Vice signalers want to impress on others how bad they are, often to intimidate others into submission as well as to elicit approval from people who yearn to see power used against their supposed enemies. A big part of Trump's popularity owes to his credibility as someone who's willing and eager to abuse his power.

  • Garrett Owen [01-30]: Trump and sons seek $10 billion taxpayer-funded payday in IRS lawsuit: "Leaked tax returns caused the Trumps 'public embarrassment' and reputational harm, lawsuit says."

  • Elie Mystal [01-30]: Want to support the fight against fascism? Boycott Trump's World Cup. Not much of a sacrifice for me, but I know people this would be a big ask of. The difference makes me think this would be a bad idea, but I should note that he's talking about teams boycotting (and even then, just US-hosted events, as opposed to events in Canada or Mexico).

  • Heather Digby Parton [02-03]: Trump is openly cashing in on the presidency.

  • Cameron Peters [02-06]: Trump's racist post, briefly explained: More specifically, since this isn't the only time, the one "depicting Barack and Michelle Obama's faces superimposed on apes."

  • Algernon Austin [02-06]: Trump get spectacularly richer, while putting the country on a path to poverty. The graft you know about, even if the numbers are hard to fathom. Also unsurprising is Fred Wertheimer's assertion that in terms of monetizing power, "the president most similar to Trump is Russian President Vladimir Putin." As for future poverty, there are many points, including:

    About 25,000 scientists have been cut from government agencies. Joel Wilkins of Futurism concluded that the administration's actions have resulted in a "colossal exodus of specialized expertise from institutions important to public health, environmental protection, and scientific research" and that "[t]he effects are likely to be catastrophic — and the reverberations could be felt for decades."

  • Eric Levitz [02-09]: Trump has a plan to steal the midterms. It will probably fail. "The nightmare scenario for American democracy is no longer unthinkable." Sure, he would if he could, but what I'm seeing here looks less like a plan than a set up for a rationalization for a probable loss.

  • Kelli Wessinger/Astead Herndon [02-09]: Just how healthy is Donald Trump, really?: "Why it's so hard to know whether the president is okay." Well, it took almost 200 years to figure out that George III had porphyria, although even that seems to be doubted these days. That he was a narcissistic asshole should have been more obvious at the time. Not that knowing helps much with Trump.

  • Toni Aguilar Rosenthal [02-13]: The antidemocratic zelots presiding over Trump's makeover of US history: "The administration's sketchily funded Freedom 250 project, which will oversee the celebration of America's semiquincentennial, is a pageant of right-wing extremism." This is going to be hugely embarrassing:

    This makeover has mostly been the handiwork of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who serves as ex-officio director of the NPF board. Burgum swiftly set about stacking the board with Trump loyalists, including top Trump fundraiser Meredith O'Rourke and Chris LaCivita, Trump's 2024 campaign co-manager. As a 501(c)3 nonprofit, NPF isn't required under federal tax law to disclose its donors and is even empowered to grant donors anonymity. Donations to the foundation are also tax-deductible — an added bonus for anyone seeking access to Trump's fundraising ecosystem.

    If that sounds like a recipe for grift dressed up as a charitable donation, that's because it is. The New York Times recently unearthed documents showing that Freedom 250 is a clearing house for donor perks. A cool $1 million gift offers photo opportunities with the president; $2.5 million can land you a speaking slot at the marquee July 4 celebration in Washington. And because of the NPF's opaque standing as a 501(c)3, the public may never know who its well-heeled benefactors are.

    There's also a wave of federal funding sluicing into the NPF's coffers. The Trump administration has redirected a $10 million grant initially earmarked for America250.org to the NPF. Another $5 million grant was shuffled out of the National Park Service and to the National Park Foundation to fund "A250 events."

    But these events are more than just vessels for influxes of cash — they're promoting a right-wing bid to whitewash the history of the country, and promote the dogmatic worldview of Christian nationalism.

  • Cameron Peters [02-19]: Trump's ballroom blitz, briefly explained: "How Trump is signing off on his own new ballroom."

  • Shawn McCreesh [02-19]: Why is Trump dumping East Wing rubble in a public park? "The East Potomac Golf Links is a municipal course that has been a fixture in Washington for decades. President Trump is turning it into something else."

  • Tad DeHaven [02-20]: Trump's dream is a giant slush fund Congress can't touch: "From Venezuelan oil to the Board of Pece, Trump is constantly looking for new sources of cash he can control."

    But the long-term risk is not just that Trump might be doing something illegal. The long-term risk is that his presidency is normalizing treating the receipt and disbursement of money as instruments of personal power.

    This is followed by a rhetorical hypothetical about the bloody murder Republicans would scream if a Democratic president was doing this sort of thing, but that misses the point. Democrats may be corrupt, but in the sense of doing favors for donors, possibly with some eventual kickbacks. In short, Democrats are servants of corruption. But what Trump is doing is trying to control the whole casino, so he gets a piece of every transaction, and that only adds to his future power.

  • Naomi Bethune [02-23]: Whitening American history: "Trump's efforts to remove Black people from America's story have been countered by scholars, activists, judges — and history itself." And yet the continue, a relentless effort to hide history that discomfits a few racist fabulists like Trump. There's a link here back to Robert Kuttner [2025-04-15]: Trump's Orwellian assault on Black history.

  • CK Smith [02-22]: Armed intruder shot dead at Mar-a-Lago: "An armed an was killed by Secret Service agents after entering a restricted area of Mar-a-Lago, officials say." Trump was in DC, far away from the site, so it's hard to credit this as an assassination attempt.

  • Margaret Hartmann: This month in Trump trivia (aside from the Melania movie, op. cit., and some Epstein bits):

Republicans: As bad as Trump is, I worry more about the party he's unleashed on America. Here are some examples, both bad actors and dangerous and despicable ideas.

  • Sasha Abramsky:

    • [01-30]: An open letter to Congressional Republicans of conscience: "For the good of the country, it's time to cross the aisle." I have no doubt this plea is falling on deaf ears, even among the very short list he mentions. "Conscience" is a dead letter among Republicans. The last one to claim such a thing was Barry Goldwater, and he was just striking a pose in defense of the indefensible.

    • [02-13]: The Republican crack-up has begun: "Even conservatives are fleeing the GOP as more and more Americans turn against Trump's authoritarian project." Don't get too excited here. His poster boy is "Gary Kendrick, a GOP council member in the red town of El Cajon, on San Diego's eastern outskirts." What we've seen repeatedly is that the few Republicans who have broken ranks have dissolved into nothingness almost immediately. Few of them have even dared run for reelection.

  • Jake Lahut [02-02]: Nancy Mace is not okay: "Something's broken. The motherboard is fried. We're short-circuiting somewhere."

  • Ian Millhiser [02-02]: Republicans are normalizing the one reform they should fear most: "The Supreme Court is the GOP's most durable power center. It makes no sense for them to endanger that source of power." He's referring to efforts at the state level to go to extraordinary legal means to pack courts in their favor: one example is adding two seats to the Utah Supreme Court, which has "sided with plaintiffs challenging Utah's GOP-friendly congressional maps," and "blocked Utah's ban on most abortions, temporarily stopped a law banning transgender girls from playing high school sports, and found the state's school voucher program unconstitutional." He could have mentioned efforts in Kansas, which thus far have been less successful. Republicans seem convinced that any power they grab will be permanent.

  • Ed Kilgore [02-25]: Cornyn's nasty attack on Paxton may haunt Texas Republicans.

Democrats: In theory the people we trust to protect us from Republicans. In practice, they're not doing a very good job, so I tend to latch onto stories about how to do better (then scoff at them).

  • Amanda Marcotte [02-06]: Shock Democratic upset in Texas shows voters still hate book bans: "Running against Moms for Liberty is a winning 2026 strategy." Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a state senate district that Trump carried by 17% in 2024, a "eye-popping swing of 31%."

  • Norman Solomon [02-06]: The actual Gavin Newsom is much worse than you think.

  • Michael Tomasky [02-12]: What the Democrats need to do now: "To win back working-class voters, then need to signal ore clearly to working people that they are on their side. That means picking fights on their behalf with the bad actors who are making their lives harder — and the democracy-hating billionaires." This is a long article which raises a lot of important questions regarding political strategy. As I've given these same issues considerable thought, I could see writing a whole Substack essay on the subject. I've read Tomasky's 2022 book, The Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity, and some of his earlier work, including many essays. The book is a strong defense of Biden's economic agenda, or what it could have been had Biden not been hobbled (by Republicans, by retro-Democrats, by his own advisers, by the media, and by his own incoherence — a personalized spin on problems that pervade the Democratic Party). Tomasky starts with "four core problems":

    1. Why don't the Democrats fight more? Meaning, against Republicans.
    2. Why do the Democrats fight so much? Among themselves.
    3. What the center gets wrong
    4. What the left gets wrong

    That's followed by sections on:

    1. Stories — and Villains
    2. What Biden Did — and Didn't — Do
    3. Targets
    4. An Economic Bill of Rights
    5. Conclusion: The Democrats' Third Great Challenge

    This is all pretty good, but doesn't quite get out of the mental ruts, especially between center and left. As Tomasky notes, "the left has become the chief source of energy and creativity in the party." The center needs to understand and appreciate that, but also they need to understand that the principles that drive the left are principles that they can and should also subscribe to (more equality; less corruption; peace and broader cooperation; less prejudice and discrimination; more personal freedom; public service; a more robust safety net; opportunity for all). And they need to let the left be itself, committed to principles regardless of consequences, and not demand conformity to the compromises that the center regards as pragmatically necessary. The left needs to think of itself not as an advocate for certain interest groups, but rather as the aspirations for virtually everyone. To do that, the left has to break a bad habit, which is the tendency to dismiss and disparage people they disagree with. This is wrong in principle and self-defeating in practice.

  • Perry Bacon [02-13]: Instead of pandering, Democrats should try changing voters' minds: "How can the party of liberalism make liberal ideas more popular? By creating a more liberal electorate. Yes, it can be done. Here are five ways how." Chapter heads:

    1. Use their bully pulpits
    2. Align with movements
    3. Work the refs — and seed new ones
    4. Become a more civic party
    5. Get more young people voting

  • Ross Barkan:

    • [02-17]: AOC's Munich stumble is a warning to the left: Her "stumble" seems to have been that she "stalled for about 20 seconds" when asked whether "the US should send troops to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion." As she later explained, making a point that most Democrats as well as Republicans find hard to grasp, "we want to make sure we never get to that point." I've tried to make this point before: that war should ever break out testifies to a catastrophic failure of diplomacy, and an even more fundamental misunderstanding of world politics. Democrats need to totally rethink foreign policy: the first point is that war is never an option (a stronger statement than that it is a "last resort," but not one that refuses to fight if one really does have no choice — I'm not personally disagreeing with the pacifist position, but I'm not insisting on it as policy, not least because I recognize that some people will take defenselessness as an invitation to rape and pillage); the second is that we need to build international cooperation through voluntary (not coerced by the dictates or leverages of power). I take these two points to be obvious, but they run counter to virtually every respected voice in US foreign policy — a bipartisan claque constantly spouting nonsense, including such leading questions as "would you commit to sending troops to defend Taiwan against China?" Even Barkan, who is a long-time critic of US foreign policy, gets sucked in to the logic of deterrence (which only deters those disinclined to war in the first place; otherwise the policy aggravates and provokes).

    • [02-23]: The Democratic Party's breakup with AIPAC is almost complete.

  • Jason Linkins [02-21]: There's only one way to eradicate Trumpism for good: His keyword is "accountability," but what does that mean? The examples here are all negative, like Obama's disinterest in holding the Bush administration accountable for its wars and economic disasters. I'm not particularly keen on putting people in jail, but we need to be very clear about what Trump has done, including his extraordinary personal enrichment. Otherwise, Democrats will continue to be punished for sins of their predecessors, as happened to Obama and Biden.

  • Conor Lynch [02-22]: Zohran Mamdani wants to reclaim efficiency from the right.

  • Hafiz Rashid [02-23]: DNC's 2024 election autopsy blames Kamala Harris's stance on Gaza: I've said all along that if Trump won in 2024, the main reason would be Biden's wars. Still, it's surprising to see the DNC admitting to any such error. By the way, the author previously wrote [2024-08-23]: The black mark on the Democrats' big party.

The Economy: Another old section, brought back recently as I needed to talk about the AI bubble. Now it occurs to me that I should split that section in two, so tech gets its own following section, and this deals with the rest of the economy, and what economists have to say about it.

  • Ryan Cooper [12-15]: America can't build homes anymore: "Cities stopped building not by accident but by design. Our housing system is constructed on scarcity, speculation, and private veto power."

  • Vivek Chibber [12-23]: Power, not economic theory, created neoliberalism: Interview: "Ideas become influential when they're latched to the correct constellation of interests. Without that, they remain in the wilderness forever."

  • Eric Levitz

    • [01-23]: Wall Street buying up houses is good, actually: "The surprising truth about corporate investment in housing." Really? First he argues that mega-investors are insignificant so have little effect on prices, then he changes the subject and argues that they're better because they discriminate less ("corporate investment in single-family homes is good for integration"). Levitz has been struggling for some time trying to get a handle on housing costs — e.g., see [2025-08-26]: What far-left cranks get right about the housing crisis, which is a defense of YIMBY-ism that admits it doesn't solve everything. There are lots of problems with housing and its unaffordability, but one of the deepest, and most politically intractable, is the idea that houses should function as long-term investments, indeed that for most people they represent most of their savings. If we get to where we have a housing surplus, the immediate effect will be not just to drive rents down but to reduce the nominal wealth of a big slice of the middle class. That's going to be a tough sell, and it's going to require much deeper thinking than YIMBY considers. (Side point: because Democrats spend nearly all of their time with donors and lobbyists, they only look for fixes that open up more profits, and they never consider savings that are too widely dispersed to organize their own lobbies. Thus, for instance, they subsidize more green power, but pay little attention to reducing energy use.)

    • [02-18]: Why voters hate Trump's (pretty decent) economy: "The data is solid. The vibes are atrocious. What gives?" Perhaps because even better data did so little to enamor voters to the Biden economy?

  • Heather Long [02-03]: We're in an economic boom. Where are the jobs? "AI is sending stocks soaring, rich people are spending big, and hiring is at a crawl."

  • Caitlin Dewey [02-12]: 2025 was a dismal year for jobs.

  • Joseph Stiglitz/Mike Konczal [02-13]: Trump's tariff fantasy collides with economic reality: "The president claims an 'economic miracle.' The data tell a different story." The article is paywalled, but a synopsis notes that "the administration's policies are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of economics, specifically regarding trade, and are leading to higher costs for Americans and long-term structural harm." Key points:

    • Tariffs as a Tax on Consumers: Stiglitz and Konczal argue that tariffs are not a strategic tool paid by foreign countries, but rather a "blunt tool" that functions as a roughly $1,000 tax on the average American family, fueling inflation.
    • Persistent Inflation: Despite claims of an "economic miracle," they note that inflation in early 2025 remained high (around 2.7%) rather than meeting targets, with tariffs contributing significantly to increased consumer prices.
    • Squandering Economic Advantages: They argue that the administration is "squandering" long-term competitive advantages by cutting funding for research, education, and public institutions while simultaneously damaging key trade alliances.
    • Uncertainty and Reduced Investment: Stiglitz notes that the erratic, "on-off" nature of tariff policies, combined with a disregard for the rule of law, creates a "scary place to invest," increasing volatility and decreasing confidence in the U.S. economy.
    • Missed Growth Targets: Stiglitz previously highlighted that, despite large deficits and low interest rates, the economic performance under these policies has failed to deliver the high growth rates promised, falling short of previous administration averages.

  • Ryan Cummings/Jared Bernstein [02-26]: Crypto is pointless. Not even the White House can fix that. "Nearly $2 trillion of wealth has evaporated from the global crypto market since October." But was it ever real in the first place? This also led to an older article:

  • Paul Krugman [02-27]: The economics of faltering fascism: "Unfortunately for Trump, and fortunately for us, he didn't inherit an economic crisis." Charts compare unemployment rates for Hitler, Putin, and Trump, showing how the first two came to power against a dire economic backdrop, whereas despite much bitching the Obama and Biden economies were relatively solid and stable.

    In the end, if Trumpist fascism is indeed defeated, I believe that there will be three sources of that defeat. First is the courage and basic decency of the American people, who refuse to bow down. Second is the egomania and malign incompetence of Trump, who tried to bludgeon and gaslight Americans into submission. And last is the weakness of a fascist movement that just can't deliver the goods.

Technology: Big boomlet here is AI. Some of this will be on business, and some on the technology itself, not that it's easy to separate the two.

  • Sophie McBain [10-18]: Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?: "From brain-rotting videos to AI creep, every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently." I've seen cascades of short videos that qualify as brain rot and found it very hard to pull away from them, but eventually I did, probably because I have some deeply embedded protestant ethic which keeps me forever working, allowing entertainment only if it adds to my store of knowledge and reason. Maybe the problem is that my sort of work ethic has gone out of most people's groundings. While the traditional explanation for this is the temptation of sin, I think there's also a pragmatic consideration: why pursue knowledge if there's nothing you can do with it? People don't keep up with technology because it's hard, but also because it's been black-boxed and trade-secreted and esotericized to the point where you have no control over it, even if you do mostly understand it. Same with politics, business, law, even medicine. These, and much more, are dedicated not just to shaking you down but to keeping you powerless. After all, powerlessness begets indifference and incuriosity, which is the secret formula for stupid.

    If brains need friction but also instinctively avoid it, it's interesting that the promise of technology has been to create a "frictionless" user experience, to ensure that, provided we slide from app to app or screen to screen, we will meet no resistance. The frictionless user experience is why we unthinkingly offload ever more information and work to our digital devices; it's why internet rabbit holes are so easy to fall down and so hard to climb out of; it's why generative AI has already integrated itself so completely into most people's lives.

    We know, from our collective experience, that once you become accustomed to the hyperefficient cybersphere, the friction-filled real world feels harder to deal with. . . .

    Human intelligence is too broad and varied to be reduced to words such as "stupid," but there are worrying signs that all this digital convenience is costing us dearly. . . . In the ever-expanding, frictionless online world, you are first and foremost a user: passive, dependent. In the dawning era of AI-generated misinformation and deepfakes, how will we maintain the scepticism and intellectual independence we'll need? By the time we agree that our minds are no longer our own, that we simply cannot think clearly without tech assistance, how much of us will be left to resist?

  • Eric Levitz [02-11]: AI's threat to white-collar jobs just got more real: "You've become increasingly replaceable."

  • John Herrman [02-13]: Oops! The singularity is going viral. "Insiders and outsiders are both feeling helpless about the same thing."

  • Russell Payne [02-26]: Hegseth threatens Anthropic over killer AI limits: I'm not sure which is more troubling: that the War Department has a $200 million contract for AI, or that Hegseth wants the software stripped of any "safeguards." I doubt if he even knows what the technical term means, but wimpy and nonlethal to him, so it's gotta go.

    • Bryan Walsh [02-26]: The Pentagon's battle with Anthropic is really a war over who controls AI. Evidently the points of contention are described here:

      Anthropic's policies allow its models to be used as part of targeted military strikes, foreign surveillance, or even drone strikes when a human approves the final call. But it has maintained two specific "red lines" it won't cross: fully autonomous weapons, meaning AI systems that select and engage targets without a human involved, and mass domestic surveillance of American citizens. Amodei said in his statement that "AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties," while frontier AI systems were "simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons."

    • Maria Curi/Dave Lawler [02-26]: Anthropic rejects Pentagon's "final offer" in AI safeguards fight.

The Free Press (for lack of a better term): Note that the recent sacking of the Washington Post has its own section this time.

  • Chris Lehmann [01-30]: The smug and vacuous David Brooks is perfect for The Atlantic: "The former New York Times columnist is a one-man cottage industry of lazy cultural stereotyping." I haven't read him in so many years I may not have noticed the move, and the new paywall is just one more reason to not care.

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

David Klion [2025-04-17]: The war on the liberal class: As the author tweeted: "Seems like a fine time to re-up this piece I wrote a year ago, about how the Trump Administration and its Silicon Valley oligarch allies are murdering liberalism as a class along with the cultural and intellectual institutions that sustain it." Back in the late-1960s, I grew up to be very critical of the era's liberal nostrums, but lately my views have softened and sentimentalized, now that we risk losing even their last few saving graces. I can now admit that, like the Stalinists of the 1930s they so loathed, they started with fairly decent intentions, before they allowed themselves to be adled and corrupted by power. Astra Taylor had a similar idea when she wrote Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone.

Klion locates liberalism in a "new class" (borrowing from Djilas, although one could also refer to Reich's "symbolic manipulators"), which gives the "war on liberalism" targets which can be attacked without having to grapple with concepts: universities, nonprofits, bureaucracies, publications — organizations that can be starved of funds and denied audiences. Klion provides numerous examples, including the promotion of right-wing alternatives, which help suck the oxygen out of the atmosphere sustaining independent thought. What isn't clear is why these fabulously wealthy individuals want to live in a world where most people are denied even the basic idea of freedom.

The crisis facing liberalism begins with the crisis of basic literacy. It was the expansion of literacy after World War II that made the ascent of the New Class possible in the first place, and it's only slightly hyperbolic to say that liberals today confront a society in which no one under 30 reads serious books or newspapers. A much-discussed article in the Atlantic last fall flagged that even undergraduates at the most elite universities struggle to read whole books that their counterparts a decade ago were able to handle. Their attention spans have been eroded since childhood by social media addiction, and now the social media they consume is no longer text-based.

In the 2000s and 2010s, the dominant social media platforms were Facebook and Twitter, both of which, whatever their faults (including Facebook's central role in bankrupting traditional news media), primarily circulated the written word. Both of these platforms are currently controlled by Silicon Valley billionaires in hock to Trump, and both have become increasingly degraded, poorly functioning, and saturated with scammers and hatemongers. Even more salient, both are losing market share to the Chinese social media platform TikTok, which prioritizes short-form videos that obviate any need for more than nominal literacy, much less for the critical-thinking skills that liberals have always regarded as essential to a healthy democratic polity. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is increasingly copying TikTok's approach.

Meanwhile, tech firms in both China and the U.S. aggressively compete to develop AI, which functions in part by plagiarizing, synthesizing, and undercutting the reliability of original written work while promising to render human-generated writing redundant and unmarketable. The combination of video-based platforms, AI, and algorithmically "enshittified" text-based social networks that suppress links to actual writing has rendered the internet fundamentally hostile to anyone who crafts words for a living. This is a threat not just to the basic finances of professional writers but also to their ability to socially reproduce a receptive public for what they're selling.

The same tech oligarchs who bankrolled Trump's victory have been using their unprecedented fortunes to fund alternative institutions to compete with, and ultimately sideline, the established ones. As Eoin Higgins documents in his recent book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, venture capital-backed platforms like Substack have been instrumental in creating lucrative new career opportunities for veterans of mainstream media, especially those who parrot the reactionary views of their funders. While these platforms are available to writers of any political persuasion, it is reactionaries who disproportionately get the most lucrative deals: Independent blogging doesn't tend to reward robust newsroom cultures and traditional editorial standards as much as invective and audience capture.

Eric Levitz [01-20]: A very simple explanation for why politics is broken: "Entertainment got too good." That's a bit too simple, but covers the right, which as long as Republicans still receive a competitive share of votes suffices to break the whole system. But it's only entertainment on the right. The center-left has its own fissures and chasms, but the only time we get entertainment is on the late-night comic shows, which serve as a palliative against the everyday horrors of the Trump mob. I took a break from Kimmel-Colbert-Myers after the election, and have only recently returned. It is comforting to know that not just these hosts but also their crowds are staunchly on our side. As for the right, I'm simply immune to their "entertainment": I can't recognize it as true, as honest, even as just sincerely misguided. It's based on an instinct for self-flattery, cult-worship, dominance, and cruelty I never acquired (not that I didn't notice its appeal to quite a few folks around me). But the entertainment didn't win over anyone who wasn't prepared in the first place. And the preparation was simple cynicism: first show that no one can be trusted, admitting everyone is crooked, even your own guys; but their guys are even worse, often working not just to feather their own pockets but as supplicants to even more diabolical conspiracies. To fight such people, you need your own fighters, willing to get dirty and bloody.

By the way, this opens with a series of charts showing the split of white presidential vote by income quintiles going back to 1948, each normalized to the national margin. Republicans won the upper two quintiles every year up through 2012, but lost it three times with Trump (small Democratic edge on 2nd quintile in 1956, 1960, 1968, 2000, and maybe 2012, but in each of those cases the top quintile broke strongly R). On the other hand, Democrats won the bottom two quintiles in all of the pre-Trump races except 1960 and 1968 — where the far-from-patrician Nixon was aided by some unusual splits. As for 2016-24, Levitz says:

This development surely reflects Trump's personal imprint on American life. Yet it was also made possible by long-term, structural shifts in our politics.

Aside from the somewhat muddled Eisenhower and Nixon elections, the pattern of Democrats winning the poorer quintiles and Republicans the richer ones has been pretty consistent. The clearest examples were from 1976-88, with 1984 the strongest correlation, but 2008 is nearly as strong. The pattern still held for 2012, but the divide was reduced, partly because right-wing media fanned white racial backlash, but also because the Obama recovery worked much better for the rich than for the poor. Not coincidentally, Obama seemed to identify (or at least socialize) much more with the rich than with the poor. I wouldn't call this a "structural shift," but it did offer Trump an opening that someone like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio would have had trouble navigating. But Trump also had the advantage of running against Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, who spent all of their energies cultivating the rich and famous. Even so, Trump was a dumb choice, but Democrats had squandered whatever credibility they once had to point such things out.

When I think of "structural shifts," I think of things that are beyond individual conscious control: technology, capitalism, mass culture, aspirations for freedom and self-determination. Even so, many of them are consequences of political decisions, as when the Democrats decided not to restore let alone expand support for labor unions after Taft-Hartley weakened them, or their decisions to cut taxes on the rich and loosen up regulations constraining finance, or their wrong-headed and mendacious war in Vietnam.

Those structural shifts have blighted the lives of many whites, stranding them in stagnant areas, with limited skills and vanishing opportunities. That many such people would turn against a Democratic Party that seemed to care little and offer less isn't surprising. Unfortunately, in Trump they've found a "savior" who will only make their lot worse, at most giving them hollow flattery, some kind of emotional release at seeing their supposed enemies attacked and/or ridiculed.

Jonquilyn Hill [01-26]: Are we getting stupider? "Technology is rotting our brains — but there are ways to stop it." Interview with neurologist Andrew Budson, "who specializes in and researches memory disorders." Title is broad enough we probably all already have answers, which will be seen to have little bearing on the very narrow subject broached here. Budson focuses on mental decline among individuals, and his main take is "use it or lose it." His main insight is that brains are meant for social networking, not compiling facts or computing results, so he sees isolation and loneliness as major contributing factors. He also notes that watching more than one hour of TV per day "rots your brain," but that's because it's a solitary activity — content seems to be irrelevant, but I'd guess that most people who see this headline will be expecting yet another critique of mind-devastating content. As I read along, I found myself thinking about assisted-care living, and how to better structure those organizations for sustained mental health. I think it's safe to say that's not a high criterion for our current mix of providers and customers, where economics rules, making quality of life an option few can afford. But that's a subject for a future essay.

It's commonly understood that people learn voraciously when they are young, a rate that slows down over time (although accumulated knowledge and insight may still produce qualitative breakthroughs), then usually declines in advanced age, sometimes catastrophically. Plot this out on a line and you'll find that most people most of the time are in decline. A different question is to compare generations using common sample points: how to 30-year-olds today compare to 30-year-olds in 2000 or 1980 or 1960 or 1940? I don't know, maybe because I'm skeptical of metrics (like IQ[*]). But my impression is that the totality of knowledge has only increased, and continues to do so, which makes it impossible for individuals to keep up. We depend on an ever-increasing division of labor to manage all this knowledge, but our inability to keep up with the whole falls ever farther behind, making us feel stupider, or at least less in charge. So it's possible to be smarter than ever before, yet less and less competent to check the intelligence of others. That would be less of a problem if we could trust the experts not just to know their stuff but to do the right thing with their knowledge. Unfortunately, the last 40-50 years has witnessed a boom in fraud and greed with little or no moral or political checks. When those people screw up, as happens pretty often these days, it's often unclear whether it was because they were crooked, or stupid.

[*] The data for IQ suggests that it increased steadily from 1900 to 2000, correlating with broad gains in education and science, but has since declined, which is often blamed on automation, although I could see the same correlation with inequality (time-shifted a bit).

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [01-30]: Roaming Charges: Bored of Peace: Eventually gets to Trump's insane counter-UN racket, but first half deals with ICE, Minnesota, and other instances of Trump fascism.

  • [02-06]: The story of Juan Hernández.

  • [02-09]: Roaming Charges: If you're not a scumbag, you're a nobody: "One of the world's richest jerks is gutting the once-storied newspaper he bought as a vanity project, used to promote his own narcissistic and predatory brand, ran editorial interference for Trump, eventually grew bored with the shredded like yesterday's news."

  • [02-13]: The Nazi origins of the South American drug trade: Klaus Barbie, cocaine and the CIA.

  • [02-16]: Roaming Charges: Trick or retreat in the Twin Cities?

    • On a chart of "% who are extremely/very confident that Donald Trump acts ethically in office," the score among white evangelical protestants has dropped from 55 to 40%; for white non-evangelical protestants, the drop is from 38 to 26%. The only group not showing a decline is black protestants, who have held steady at 7%.
    • Quotes Kristi Noem: "When it gets to Election Day, we've been proactive to make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country."
    • After "CBS Evening News loses nearly a quarter of its audience after editorial takeover": "Bari Weiss buries CBS News, which, like the emasculation of the WaPost, was probably the goal."

  • [02-27]: Roaming Charges: State of the empire in extremis. Just found this as I was trying to wrap up, so I didn't initially cite anything here, but there are various items on Trump's war threat. The one I was most struck by was a tweet from Robert A Pape: "This represents 40-50% of the deployable US air power in the world. Think air power on the order of the 1991 and 2003 Iraq war. And growing. Never has the US deployed this much force against a potential eney and not launched strikes." I'm reminded of the WWI story about how even if mobilization was meant as a threat, none of the powers could back away from war once they did. Also of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which the US anticipated on much the same evidence. Still, even with repeated evidence of how wrong people are to enter into war, I find it hard to expect that they would consciously blunder like that. Until it happened, I was skeptical that Russia would invade Ukraine, and suspected that the reports were just a taunt by the Biden administration hoping that Putin would fall into their trap. Trump's attack on Iran wasn't unannounced: it was repeaed so often that at some point he may have backed himself into a corner where no other option seemed possible. Still, it was a very stupid and careless maneuver, but it's only the last in a long string of totally avoidable mistakes.

  • [03-02]: Preliminary notes on a planned decapitation. The keyword here is "whacked": for Trump, that's all it comes down to, the solution to all problems. And if it doesn't work, just whack again.

    Trump has done the world a service. He has abandoned pretense and clarified the true nature of American power. There is no longer any need to manufacture a case for war, to make an attack seem conform to international law and treaties or to demonstrate its righteousness by acting as part of an international coalition. Now America can do what it wants to whomever it wants solely because the people who run its government want to. This has, of course, almost always been the case behind the curtain of diplomatic niceties. But Trump has ripped those curtains down and now the world is seeing American power in the raw: brazen, arrogant and mindless of the consequences, which will be borne by others and if they complain, they might be whacked, too.

Stefano Tortorici/R Trebor Scholz [02-11]: Socialist co-ops against Silicon Valley empires: While there is much to be said for cooperatives in general, they could be developed as an alternative to the big tech companies, where the fundamental flaw is that the services they offer are merely bait for their main purpose, which is collecting and exploiting user data.

Matt McManus [02-07]: Thomas Mann and the temptations of Fascism: "The resurgence of right-wing populism has set the table for the far right's renewed fortunes. Published in 1947, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus offers a guide to the mythmaking and rejection of reason that continues to animate authoritarian politics today." My wife read (or possibly re-read) Mann's book recently, and was so struck by the timeliness of his description of the onset of Nazism that she posted an excerpt, which I logged in my drafts file (and might as well move here):

No, surely I did not want it, and yet — I have been driven to want it, I wish for it today and will welcome it, out of hatred for the outrageous contempt of reason, the vicious violation of the truth, the cheap, filthy backstairs mythology, the criminal degradation and confusion of standards; the abuse, corruption, and blackmail of all that was good, genuine, trusting, and trustworthy in our old Germany. For liars and lickspittles mixed us a poison draught and took away out senses. We drank — for we Germans perennially yearn for intoxication — and under its spell, through years of deluded high living, we committed a superfluity of shameful deeds, which must now be paid for. With what? I have already used the word, together with the word "despair" I wrote it. I will not repeat it: not twice could I control my horror or my trembling fingers to set it down again.

McManus notes:

A well observed feature of the far right is its strange tendency to combine indifference to factual accuracy, or even honesty, with soaring rhetoric about truth, beauty, and greatness. Beyond just a well-documented willingness to obfuscate, bullsh*t, and lie, many of the far right's core ideological convictions seem like bloviated imaginaries and outright fabrications. Often figures on the far right openly acknowledge this tendency, as in a 1922 speech where Benito Mussolini admitted his adulation of the rejuvenated Italian nation was a manufactured myth:

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. It is a reality in the sense that it is a stimulus, is hope, is faith, is courage. Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And it is to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, that we subordinate everything else.

This willingness to conjure patently artificial values into being, while still insisting all else be subordinated to the products of one's fantasy, is hardly unique to the early twentieth century right. In 2004, a George W. Bush administration official widely believed to be Karl Rove dismissed the "reality based community" for failing to realize that, as an empire, "we create our own reality." In The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump anticipated his political style by admitting he engaged in "truthful hyperbole" that "plays to people's fantasies" and desire to "believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular." More recently J. D. Vance, himself well-versed in far-right thought, has insisted that if he has to fabricate stories to attract people to his cause, then by God, he'll do so.

Dolly Li/Jordan Winters [02-19]: The House of Representatives is too small: The size has been fixed at 435 for more than a century, during which US population tripled. The "one way to fix it" seems to be simply adding more members, each with more compact districts. I have alternative proposal, which I call "Representative Democracy," where districts of whatever size (larger, smaller, doesn't matter, nor do they even have to be all the same size) each elect two or more representatives, where each representative wields a vote weighted by the number of voters who backed he candidate (the weights could be 1-for-each-vote). Typically, this means that each district would have both a Republican and a Democratic representative. If the winner got 60% of the vote, and the runner-up got 40%, both would go to Washington, but when they voted, the winner would cast a vote of 60%, and the runner-up of 40%. This could get more complicated with third parties, and it is an open question whether one wants to promote or retard such things. But this solves several big problems. For starters, it takes away the incentives for gerrymandering. Also, by ending "winner take all" this should dampen the amount of money poured into competitive races. It also, perhaps most importantly, means that everyone will have a representative dependent on one's vote. Elections will still matter, as they will shift relative power, but they will be less susceptible to landslides, as well as other machinations.

Alfred McCoy [02-22]: Accelerating American (and planetary) decline: I'm starting to tire of stories about how America is in long-term decline, and how Trump is only accelerating that decline. But here it is again, in broad outlines. Even before Trump:

While the U.S. was pouring its blood and treasure (an estimated $4.7 trillion worth) into those desert sands, China was enjoying a decade of warless economic growth. By June 2014, in fact, it had accumulated $4 trillion in foreign currency reserves — and in a major strategic miscalculation, Washington had even lent a hand. In deciding to admit Beijing into the World Trade Organization in 2001, Washington's leaders proved bizarrely confident that China, home to a fifth of humanity, would somehow join the world economy without changing the global balance of power in any significant way.

In 2013, as Beijing's annual exports to the U.S. grew nearly fivefold to $462 billion and its foreign currency reserves approached that $4 trillion mark, President Xi Jinping announced his historic "Belt and Road Initiative." Thanks to that initiative and the lending of a trillion dollars to developing nations, within a decade China would become the dominant economic player on three continents — Asia, Africa, and, yes, even Latin America.

While Trump has personally skimmed extraordinary profits from his America First/Make America Great Again racket, tangible benefits to ordinary Americans are less than zero. More troublesome has been his stifling of innovation within the US economy, which not only means that the US is falling behind its old rivals, but crippling its ability to ever catch up. Even the much vaunted US military is nothing more than overpriced, faulty-performing high-tech crap that is useless for any practical purposes but which risks war and moral hazard, while wasting talent and money that could be used for something actually useful. McCoy is especially damning on how "Trump has essentially smothered America's infant green-energy economy in its cradle (and ceded a future green-powered global economy to China). But he has no way of reckoning the final costs of Trump's fossil fuel gambits. Another variation on this:

Zack Beauchamp [02-23]: How to stop a dictator: Compares case studies from Brazil, South Korea, Poland, and Trumpist America. This piece is part of a series Vox is running on America After Trump. Seems like premature optimism, but it's not much fun considering the alternative, which is how much worse things could get if "after Trump" turns out to be just more of the same. Some pieces in this series:

  • Zach Beauchamp [02-18]: How one country stopped a Trump-style authoritarian in his tracks: "What Brazil got right that America got wrong."

  • Julie Myers [02-18]: The Brazilian playbook for defending democracy: "The fall of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and what it proves about Trump-style authoritarians."

  • Jolie Myers/Noel King [02-24]: You got your democracy back. Now what? "What the United States can learn from Poland's experience with autocracy." One lesson: "once democratic norms are broken, they're hard to rebuild — and the temptation to stretch those norms doesn't disappear when power changes hands." Interview with Ben Stanley, who's written a book about Poland and the challenges of undoing the illiberal "Law and Justice" regime. He points to a "trilemma": "Voters want you to reform quickly, legally, and effectively, but it's almost always impossible to achieve all three at the same time." Democrats are gaining political ground by emphasizing the illegality and unconstitutionality of many Trump initiatives, but restoring norms, guard rails, checks and balances won't suffice to undo the damage, and may make it harder to show any effectiveness.

  • Zack Beauchamp [02-25]: Did the Constitution doom American democracy: "In 2015, Matt Yglesias predicted America's political system would collapse. Did Trump prove him right?" The Yglesias essay referred to is here: American democracy is doomed. Interview with Yglesias. I'd be more inclined to argue that the Constitution, with its snarl of checks and balances, was intended to keep democracy safe for the propertied interests (which initially, conspicuously and infamously, included slaveholders). But just because America was never able to develop as a democracy doesn't mean that what passed for democracy was doomed, except perhaps to disappointment. I attribute Trump's ascendancy to frustration: as the system precluded real reform, why not try to break the logjam by investing the guy who promised to break the rules? That the people made a rash and ill-advised choice should be obvious by now. But what better choice were they allowed?

  • Lee Drutman [02-26]: US democracy has repaired itself before. Here's how we can do it again. His argument "why the Progressive Era is the most like our own" has some resonance, in that systemic problems of oligarchy were treated with top-down reforms meant to prevent any major shifts of power (stifling the challenges of populists and socialists). The analogy to the 1960s is less clear, but maybe that's a cautionary tale. By the way, while I've always admired the progressive era reformers, I'm not very happy with many leftist's habit of calling themselves progressives. While I'm more up than down on progress, I don't like the idea that it is inevitable and necessarily good, and I suspect that we're losing votes by not acknowledging the need to limit or at least tone down its excesses. Right now, my preferred self-description is small-d democrats: its distinction from capital-R Republicans is crystal clear, and it reminds us that everything we propose should be aimed at majority support. On the other hand, the alternative of populists has been spoiled by right-wing demagoguery.

Books:

  • Laura K Field: FuriousMinds: The Making of the MAGA New Right:

    • Jennifer Szalai [2025-12-17]: The intellectuals fueling the MAGA movement: "Furious Minds, by Laura K Field, traces the ascendancy of hard-right thinkers whose contempt for liberal democracy is shaping American politics."

  • David Harvey: The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works:

  • Chris Jennings: End of Days: Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America:

      Sarah Jones [02-19]: Why is the right so obsessed with the apocalypse? I understand that there are people who believe that the future was literally foretold in the Book of Revelation, and who spend much of their waking lives deep in research on the subject. I understand this because my grandfather was one, as evidently was his father. My own father continued this old family tradition, albeit in his own idiosyncratic way, which I never attempted to understand, because the whole thing always struck me as completely fucking nuts (even, I'm quite sure, when I was still a faithful member in good standing of the Disciples of Christ, which had long been the family church). While my ancestors are long dead, I understand this because I still know otherwise decent people who still seem to believe such things. They, too, are nuts, at least in this one respect, but I try to politely ignore that, because there's simply no way I can wrap my brain around the notion that hastening the end of the world we know could be a good thing. I believe that it is important to try to respect different ideas, even in such shady domains as cosmology. Jones does a pretty good job of explicating this one — at least her story aligns with a dozen other versions I have read — but there's still this unbreachable gap between recognition and belief.

  • Clyde W Barrow [02-05]: Reading C Wright Mills in the Age of Trump: "Seventy years ago C Wright Mills published The Power Elite, a scathing indictment of corporate executives, state officials, and their academic apologists. His analysis has lost none of its bite as we confront an increasingly degenerate US power elite."

Other media/arts:

  • Anis Shivani [2017-05-29]: Four years later, Breaking Bad remains the boldest indictment of modern American capitalism in TV history: "The show's visual style is the greatest-ever rebuke to the gory hold neoliberalism has over our minds and bodies." Stumbled across this piece, not out of any particular curiosity about the 2008-13 Vince Gilligan series (five seasons, which I hated at first, broke with early on, but my wife persevered, and I wound up watching he end of; we also watched Better Call Saul, and have started Pluribus and will probably return to it, but with little enthusiasm, at least from me). While my disgust is undiminished, I'm likely to use its title as the second chapter of my "weird" political book: a brief sketch of how America "broke bad" from WWII to Trump. I don't much care whether the show works as critique or example, but I thought I should flag this for future reference. It also turns out that Shivani, who has also written novels and poetry, wrote a 2017 book called Why Did Trump Win? Chronicling the Stages of Neoliberal Reactionism During America's Most Turbulent Election Cycle, which I hadn't noticed, but looks sharp enough to order.

Some notable deaths: Mostly from the New York Times listings. Last time I did such a trawl was on January 24, so we'll look that far back (although some names have appeared since):

  • [02-27]: Neil Sedaka, singing craftsman of memorable pop songs, dies at 86: Brill Building songwriter, recorded a half-dozen classic hits 1959-62, staged a minor comeback in the 1970s with Sedaka's Back, and never really left.

  • [02-24]: Éliane Radigue, composer of time, silence and space, dies at 94: "Her Tibetan Buddhist spiritual practice and her experiments with synthesizers came together in vast, slow-moving works that drew wide acclaim."

  • [02-21]: Bill Mazeroski, 89, whose 9th-inning blast made Pirates champs, is dead: One of the all-time great defensive second basemen. Hero of the 1960 World Series, a gruesome affair still indelibly etched in my memory.

  • [02-17]: Anna Akhmatova, leading Soviet poet, is dead: "She was a towering figure in Soviet literature who was once silenced in a Stalinist literary purge."

  • [02-17]: Jesse Jackson: "An impassioned orator, he was a moral and political force, forming a 'rainbow coalition' of poor and working-class people and seeking the presidency. His mission, he said, was 'to transform the mind of America.'"

    • Robert L Borosage [02-18]: Jesse Jackson still provides light in these dark times.

    • David Masciotra [02-20]: The poetic symmetry of Jesse Jackson's life: love, rage, and leadership. Author has a previous book, I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (2023). He makes a good case here.

    • Jeffrey St Clair [02-20]: Up, down and around with Jesse Jackson: "Jesse Jackson's two runs, in 1984 and 1988, were the last Democratic presidential campaigns I had any interest in joining." He goes on:

      Those campaigns, which, among other things, warned about the coming neoliberal takeover of the Democratic Party, spawned dozens of great activists, including my late buddy Kevin Alexander Gray, who would later play vital roles in the movements that followed Jackson's political campaign: anti-World Bank and WTO protests, the Nader campaigns, the Occupy Movement, the Sanders campaign, BLM, and the migrant rights movement.

      The Democratic Party, in league with the Israel lobby, deployed every trick in the book, and some found only the apocrypha, to not only destroy his campaigns but to try to destroy Jackson both as a force in the Party and personally. (RFK and J. Edgar Hoover conspired to do the same with MLK.) Yet, even with the entire party apparatus working viciously against him, Jesse still crushed party stalwarts Joe Biden, Al Gore and Dick Gephardt. His ultimate loss to Michael Dukakis was preordained.

      To watch Jesse Jackson speak in 1984 was to be struck, and often mesmerized, by a voice few Americans had heard before: the fluid, rolling cadences, the urgent tone, the piercing anecdotes, a voice that didn't shout but summoned, that didn't sermonize but called for action. His speeches gave voice to the voiceless, to the destitute, the abandoned and stigmatized, the oppressed and the imprisoned.

      He then cites PJ O'Rourke as "an unlikely admirer of Jackson's oratorical skills," to quote:

      I did, however, want to hear Jesse Jackson speak. He's the only living American politician with a mastery of classical rhetoric. Assonance, alliteration, litotes, pleonasm, parallelism, exclamation, climax and epigram — to listen to Jesse Jackson is to hear everything mankind has learned about public speaking since Demosthenes. Thus, Jackson, the advocate for people who believe themselves to be excluded from Western culture, was the only 1988 presidential candidate to exhibit any of it.

      St Clair details much of the Democratic Party's demonization of Jackson. Some of this is familiar, but much slipped by me. I've often thought that had Jackson run again in 1992, he could have captured the Democratic Party nomination. But he probably would have lost in the fall, and didn't want to be blamed as the spoiler resulting in four more years of Reagan-Bush. Bill Clinton should have owed him a large debt for such circumspection, but never showed any signs of honoring much less recompensing Jackson.

  • [02-16]: Robert Duvall, a chameleon of an actor onscreen and onstage, dies at 95.

  • [02-14]: Roy Medvedev, Soviet era historian and dissident, is dead at 100: "His score of books and hundreds of essays documented Stalinist executions, Communist repressions, and the transition to post-Soviet Russia."

  • [02-11]: Ken Peplowski, who helped revive the jazz clarinet, dies at 66: "Also a saxophone standout, he served as stylistic bridge between the Benny Goodman swing era and the genre-blurring present"

  • [02-03]: Michael Parenti, unapologetic Marxist theorist and author, dies at 92: "A prolific writer and lecturer, he viewed US history through the lens of class struggle."

  • [01-30]: Catherine O'Hara, 'Home Alone' and 'Schitt's Creek' actress, dies at 71: "An Emmy-winning comedian with oddball charm, she got her start with the influential Canadian sketch comedy series 'SCTV.'" I would have led with films like Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and Waiting for Guffman. Not sure why I gave up on Schitt's Creek, but it probably wasn't her.

  • [01-28]: Sly Dunbar, whose drumming brought complex beats to reggae, dies at 72: "As one half of the famed rhythm duo Sly and Robbie, he played with some of the biggest names in music, including Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger." What about Bob Marley?

  • [01-21]: Rifaat al-Assad, paramilitary leader and 'Butcher of Hama,' dies at 88: "The brother and uncle of Syrian tyrants, he commanded a unit that killed up to 40,000 civilians in a 1982 uprising against his family's rule."

Some other names I recognize: Edward Hoagland (nature writer), Willie Colón (salsa musician), Richard Ottinger (D-NY), ElRoy Face (baseball relief pitcher), Ebo Taylor (highlife musician), Mickey Lolich (baseball pitcher), Lee H Hamilton (34-year representative, D-IN).

Note that the New York Times also offered overlooked no more obituaries for (mostly interesting people I wasn't familiar with, but these two are glaring omissions[*]):

  • Clifford Brown, trumpeter whose brief life left a lasting mark: "He was one of the most talked-about jazz musicians in the 1950s. After he died in a car accident at 25, his influence grew." Brown was already DownBeat's "New Star of the Year" in 1954, by which point he was probably more accomplished and regarded more highly than any other trumpet player in his cohort (he was slightly younger than Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, Art Farmer, Thad Jones, Chet Baker, Blue Mitchell — they were all b. 1924-30). I have 2 A and 4 A- albums by Brown, and I'm in a distinct minority as a non-fan of his With Strings or his featured collaboration on Sarah Vaughan (a Penguin Guide crown album).

  • Jimmy Reed, the bluesman everyone covered, then forgot (1925-76): "His most enduring hits were recorded by Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead. But his own career faded from view." I'd question who (beyond the NYT) forgot him. The year after he died, GNP/Crescendo released The Best of Jimmy Reed, which Robert Santelli ranked 11 of the best 100 blues albums ever. I have it and two later best-ofs (a Rhino from 2000, and Shout! Factory from 2007) as full A albums (all three focus on 1953-63), and a 6-CD box of The Vee-Jay Years (1994), as well as a compilation of his 1966-71 Paula records, just a notch behind.

[*] More typical are entries like: Frances B Johnston (photographer), Ruth Polsky (NYC music booker), Louise Blanchard Bethune (architect in Buffalo), Kim Hak-soon (who exposed Japan's "comfort women" program), and Remedios Varo (Spanish painter).

Current count: 400 links, 26903 words (33369 total)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Saturday, January 24, 2026

Loose Tabs

Note: I accidentally dated this ahead a day. It was initially posted on Saturday, January 24, and not 25. I will add a few items, denoted by red change bars, mostly when they update pieces already here, but will save up other items in my Loose Tabs [Draft File].

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared ? days ago, on November 24.

I have a little-used option of selecting bits of text highlighted with a background color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to use it sparingly.

I pretty much put this file on hold while I was working on the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll, only returning to it on January 13. Jimmy Kimmel opened his first January monologue by explaining that "we have a lot to cover," but he had only been off the air for a week. Only a couple pieces in my draft file were dated after December 5, so I've missed more than a month (actually, 7 Music Week posts have appeared in the interim). So this will be even more hit-and-miss than usual.

I was at 57 links, 4207 words when I started my catch up and wrap up. I initially pegged Friday, January 16 at my target posting date, then backed it up to Sunday, and now I'm just letting it chew up as much of the following week as it takes. I'm not in any hury to get back to Music Week, or anything else.

Finally wrapping this up on Saturday, January 25. I may add some more stuff later, but I'm basically caught up, and there is more than enough here to chew on.

I'm reposting this on January 28, along with my much delayed Music Week.

Table of Contents:

Let's start with this quote from Senator Roger Marshall's newsletter [01-21]:

President Trump's first year back in the White House has been nothing short of historic. From the moment he took office on January 20, 2025, the President set an unprecedented pace — operating under what I like to call "Trump time." Promises made, promises kept have defined this administration, starting with decisive action to secure the border, restore law and order, and put the safety of American families first. By enforcing our laws and backing those who protect us, President Trump has brought order where there was chaos and made our communities safer.

That same results-driven leadership has strengthened our economy and put working families back on solid ground. Through pro-growth policies like the Working Families Tax Cuts, fair trade, and a renewed commitment to American energy and manufacturing, the economy is moving in the right direction — creating jobs, attracting investment, and lowering costs. At the same time, the President has put us on a realistic path to healthier living, worked to bring down prescription drug prices, and restored peace through strength abroad. It has been a truly transformative year, and this is just the beginning, with the wins only continuing to pile up for the American people.

In my notebook, I originally just pulled a few select lines from this, but rather than chop it up with ellipses, I figured I should just give you the whole spiel. It's hard to find anything in this quote that is true, but it's noteworthy that this is what Republicans are telling themselves.

Topical Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent thmes of the following section.

Thanksgiving:

  • Jane Borden [11-26]: The Pilgrims were doomsday cultists: "The settlers who arrived in Plymouth were not escaping religious persecution. They left on the Mayflower to establish a theocracy in the Americas."

  • Kali Holloway [11-27]: Make Thanksgiving radical again: "The holiday's real roots lie in abolition, liberation, and anti-racism. Let's reconnect to that legacy."

Epsteinmania: Back by popular demand, as Republicans caved in and passed a law to "release all the files," leaving the cover up to the so-called Justice Department (which is a bigger oxymoron these days than the Defense Department used to be, not that renaming it the War Department is a good idea). But so far, nothing much has been revealed, and "Epstein" has mostly occurred as the reason for Trump's "wag the dog" warmaking.

  • Philip Weiss [12-19]: The New York Times ignores an essential part of the Jeffrey Epstein story — Israel: The Times article in question is The untold story of how Jeffrey Epstein got rich, which argues that "Epstein was the greatest conman and swindler that ever lived, and charmed the pants off of every powerful man he met."

    Epstein did numerous chores for Israel that investigative sites have documented and the Times does not touch: he helped Israel broker financial deals with neighbors, he had an Israeli spy living in his house for a time, and he had a close relationship with former Israeli PM Ehud Barak that included business ventures and politics in Israel.

  • Amanda Marcotte [12-21]: Epstein continues to explain everything about Trump: "From Greenland to Minneapolis, it's all rooted in his predatory ways." I don't quite buy this, but: "Like his friend Epstein — who enjoyed targeting small, helpless teenage girls — the most important thread throughout Trump's life is that he tries to feel big by harassing those who he feels can't fight back."

  • Kathleen Wallace [12-25]: Redacting our reality, one Epstein at a time.

  • Elie Honig [01-24]: How Bill and Hillary Clinton could soon become criminal defendants: This reviews their past brushes with possible criminal prosecution, but this time they may feel they're innocent and should stand on principle, as conscientious objectors.

    The Clintons almost certainly aren't going to prison, or even getting convicted. But with characteristic hubris, Bill and Hillary have walked themselves to the brink of federal charges by defying bipartisan congressional subpoenas on the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. And it's a good bet that our current Justice Department — which apparently makes critical decisions by a sophisticated litmus test that asks, "Do we like you, or not?" — will pursue criminal contempt charges.

Zohran Mamdani:

ICE stories: The last couple weeks is the point where Trump's goon squad has turned the corner from being overzealous civil servants rooting out unwanted immigrants to becoming an armed force that freely attacks ordinary Americans. They've been unleashed, with the full-throated support of Trump, Vance, and Kristi Noem, who all understand that their real problem isn't immigrants. It's Americans, especially ones that are guilty of the treason of living in cities that voted against Trump.

  • Cameron Peters [01-07]: Trump's immigration crackdown turns deadly in Minneapolis: "The fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis, briefly explained."

  • Eric Levitz [01-08]: Trump's menacingly dishonest response to the Minnesota ICE shooting: "Trump is telling us he doesn't care why Renee Good died."

    All this is both appalling and frightening. If ICE agents know that they can kill US citizens on video — and still count on the president to lie in support of their freedom — Americans' most basic liberties will be imperiled.

    Trump's response is also politically mindless. The administration could have declined to take a position on the killing until all facts were known. It could have left itself the option of declaring Good's killer one bad apple, whose recklessness undermined ICE's fundamental mission: to keep Americans safe.

    Instead, it has chosen to identify its broader ideological project with contempt for the lives of any Americans who gets in its way.

  • Alex Skopic [01-08]: The only "domestic terrorists" on our streets are ICE.

  • Caitlin Dewey [01-09]: How right-wing creaetors bend reality to their will: "How a scandal about day cares run by Somali Americans led to an ICE surge in Minneapolis."

  • Christian Paz [01-12]: The violent "randomness" of ICE's deportation campaign: "What ICE is doing in American cities is very distinct." Interview with David Hausman.

    ICE, specifically, is operating in a completely different way to how it has historically worked — with big shows of force in neighborhoods, seemingly indiscriminate arrests of immigrants (and citizens), and its careless treatment of bystanders and protesters.

  • Laura Jedeed [01-13]: You've heard about who ICE is recruting. The truth is far worse. I'm the proof. "What happens when you do minimal screening before hiring agents, arming them, and sending them into the streets? We're all finding out." For an update, see:

  • Christian Paz [01-15]: How right-wing influencers are bending reality in Minneapois: "The MAGA media system is going into overdrive." They're always in overdrive. At some point you just have to shut them off, and give them no respect at all.

  • Noah Hurowitz [01-14]: Federal agents keep invoking killing of Renee Good to threaten protesters in Minnesota.

  • Eric Levitz [01-14]: The Trump administration can't stop winking at white nationalists: "The government is recruiting ICE agents with (literal) neo-Nazi propaganda."

  • Ryan Cooper [01-15]: Trump's ethnic cleansing campaign in Minneapolis: "Every part of this illegal, violent occupation is based on lies."

  • Gillen Tener Martin [01-16]: Another way Republicans are overplaying their hand on immigration: "Now they're going after Americans who are also citizens of another country — like me, and Melania and Barron Trump."

  • Alain Stephens [01-16]: ICE agents are even worse at being cops than you think: "Videos of agents falling down and dropping their guns feel beyond parody. But under-trained law enforcement officers are a real danger to the public."

  • Nia Prater [01-19]: The Minneapolis siege is even worse than the videos show: Interview with Will Stancil ("over the past week, Stancil has become a mainstay of citizen patrols, tracking ICE agents around the city in his Honda Fit and sharing his experiences with his 100,000-plus followers").

  • Jacob Fuller [01-21]: We don't know how many people have been harmed by ICE: "How decades of inaction on police reform paved the road for ICE's lack of transparency."

  • Ed Kilgore [01-21]: Should Democrats try to abolish ICE or radically change it? I'm surprised to see such a notoriously middling liberal pundit even raising the possibility of abolishing ICE. I can certainly understand the impulse to abolish, and I doubt that much actual harm would ensue if it actually happened, but I've always been in the reform camp, and probably always will be. (There are, of course, things I would be happy to see abolished, like NATO, and Microsoft, but even there I could see ways of salvaging grams of value from the tons of destruction.) I certainly don't see this as a political fight I'm up for. While I have no particular beef with immigrants, I see them as tangential to what matters most, which is treating both citizens here and foreigners elsewhere much better than the US has been doing. I think it's extremely important that we treat all people decently, but that doesn't mean we should indulge them completely. Of course, Kilgore winds up on the reform side:

    There's no evidence that Americans actually want the "open borders" stance that Republicans have falsely accused Democrats of embracing in the past. Embracing it now makes little sense. The broadest and strongest position for Democrats right now is the abolition of both mass deportation and ICE terror tactics, alongside a new path to citizenship for noncriminal immigrants and fairer and more uniform enforcement of immigration laws without the sort of violence and cruelty perpetrated and celebrated by Trump, J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller. Anyone who thinks such a position represents a surrender to MAGA needs to remember how and why these terrible people rose to power in the first place.

    On the other hand, if you do manage to abolish ICE, I could go along with that too. Kilgore cites Bunch here:

  • Maximillian Alvarez [01-22]: "No work. No spending": Minnesota workers will strike tomorrow to protest ICE: "A critical conversation with Minnesota union leaders on the eve of a massive general strike."

  • Garrett Owen [01-22]: "Gas is coming!": Border Patrol commander Bovino throws gas cannister at protesters in Minneapolis.

  • Jason Linkins [01-24]: This year's first big stupid idea: "retrain ICE": "Some things get so evil that they forfeit their right to exist. Trump's rogue paramilitary gangs are one of them."

  • CK Smith [01-24]: Another Minneapolis resident shot and killed by ICE agent: "Deadly encounters in just a few weeks, residents and officials demand accountability for ICE operations."

    I picked up this story as I was rushing to wrap up, and spent much of Saturday ignoring further reports, including a lot of video. The victim was Alex Pretti, 37, an intensive care nurse at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System. The shooter was a Border Patrol agent (not ICE, but part of the same Trump-ordered operation). I'm not going to report on this at length, but this has become a very big story, and needs a bit more than I initially provided.

    • CK Smith [01-25]: A MN nurse is dead as the government's story falls apart: "Again, officials say ICE agent acted in self-defense, but video evidence and witnesses contradict their narrative."

    • Intelligencer Staff []: Is Alex Pretti's death the breaking point? "Here are the latest developments."

    • Cameron Peters

    • Zack Beauchamp

      • [01-25]: The killing of Alex Pretti is a grim turning point: "Trump's authoritarianism is becoming less subtle — and more vicious." Groping for words, but I don't think "subtle" was ever in play. But Beauchamp wants to contrast the "subtle" arts of a Viktor Orbán vs. pure brutes like Stalin. But all right-wingers want to be brutes. The difference between Orbán and Stalin is that the latter had deep power that the head of a nominally democratic state lacked. Trump may wish he had that sort of power, but he probably doesn't — how much he does have is being tested right now.

      • [01-26]: So what if Alex Pretti had a gun? "The unbearable hypocrisy of pro-gun conservatives defending the Minneapolis killing." This isn't an angle I care much about, probably because I've long ago understood that gun advocates don't care about logical consequences of so many people having so many guns. Part of this goes back to the general conservative belief that rights are something for themselves and not for other people. (Slavery is a pretty clear cut example.) But it does seem fair to ask law enforcement how they are able to tell, in real time and under less than ideal circumstances, when and how to respect one person's right to bear arms, when not to, and what to do about it.

    • Ross Barkan [01-26]: Trump's losing war on Minneapolis.

    • Eric Levitz [01-23]: You don't need to be a liberal to oppose Trump's ICE: "You just need to care about your own constitutional rights." But you may need to be at least a little bit of a liberal to understand that your and other people's rights are connected, so that denying rights to others also affects you. That's not a concern for conservatives, who believe different groups can and should be treated differently.

    • Jeffrey St Clair [01-26]: Where the sidewalk ends, the lies begin: on the execution of Alex Pretti.

      We live in a country where you can be charged with resisting arrest without having committed a crime to be arrested for. We live in a country where even the most passive acts of defiance and resistance are an excuse to kill you. . . . Americans of conscience also find themselves in the crosshairs of their own government.

      We also live in a country where people, ordinary people, are so revolted by what's happening that they are willing to go out every day in Arctic temperatures to confront and resist the paramilitary-style forces that are terrorizing their neighborhoods, knowing the kind of violence that might be visited against them.

      Alex Pretti was one of those "ordinary" Americans. He didn't do anything to deserve being assaulted, never mind shot. He did what nurses are trained to do: help someone who had been hurt, a woman gratuitously shoved to the ground and pepper-sprayed by a CBP agent, a woman who had also done nothing to deserve this brutal treatment. Alex Pretti wasn't the "worst of the worst." He was the best of the best.

    • Branko Marcetic [01-27]: Even law enforcement officers think this has gone too far: "The impunity with which ICE and other DHS agents are carrying out violence and murders in cities like Minneapolis is so awful that now scores of law enforcement officials themselves are speaking out against it."

    • Aziz Huq [01-27]: Where is the off-ramp from all this state violence? "It's hard to think of a parallel effort in US history to build a domestic agency of violence specialists at the scale of ICE."

    • Eric Levitz [01-27]: Trump's deportation forces finally went too far. Not his opinion, mind you. He's taking his cues from "many Republican senators, governors, and influencers [who] called for a thorough investigation into Pretti's killing, as did the NRA."

  • Jelinda Montes [01-28]: Rep. Ilham Omar attacked at town hall. And Trump applauded, tweeting "She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her."

Venezuela: Marco Rubio's 2016 presidential campaign was a pretty lacklustre affair — I was tempted to say "sad," but he had no substance to feel regrets over. But later, I found there was one topic that really animated him, and that is overthrowing the Chavez/Maduro government in Venezuela. I was surprised when he appeared on Trump's short list of VP prospects, along with JD Vance and Doug Burgum. I figured Trump was sniffing for money: Burgum had his own, and Vance belonged to Peter Thiel. I wasn't sure who Rubio's sugar daddy was, but he undoubtedly had one. Nobody makes a serious run for the Republican nomination without at least one billionaire backer. (Newt Gingrich famously complained that Romney beat him 5-to-1 on that critical score.) That Rubio wound up with the Secretary of State post pretty much guaranteed that Trump would make war on Venezuela. That's just happened.

  • Paul R Pillar [11-10]: Dick Cheney's ghost has a playbook for war in Venezuela: "Trump flirting with regime change in Caracas carries eerie similarities to the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq."

  • Joshua Keating [12-12]: The global shadow economy behind Trump's latest move on Venezuela: "A black market has been growing for years. The escalation puts a new spotlight on it."

  • Vijay Prashad/Taroa Zúñiga Silva [01-03]: The US attacks Venezuela and seizes its president.

  • Cameron Peters [01-03]: How Trump went from boat strikes to regime change in Venezuela: "The US just attacked Venezela. How did we get here?"

  • Caitlin Dewey [01-05]: America's century-long interest in Venezuelan oil: "The long, fascinating history of US entanglement with the Venezuelan industry." Seems to me this piece is missing a lot of detail, both on the rise and fall of Venezuelan oil; e.g., how much light oil can Venezuela still produce? Or, is the decline due to political factors, including lost skills, or are they just running out of easy oil? I'm inclined to believe that Chavez and Maduro have mismanaged the industry, but that doesn't explain that much decline. Another thing I'd stress is that Trump's understanding of the oil industry is almost nil, so his motivations needn't have anything to do with reality.

  • Eric Levitz [01-05]: Did Trump really invade Venezuela for oil? "No. Also, maybe." If he's a rational actor: "no." But he's not, so: "maybe." At least he's not making up any cockamamie stories about "restoring democracy," ridding the people autocrats, etc. Those aren't reasons he in any way cares about. "Taking the oil," on the other hand, is a reason he can get behind. But, as Levitz notes, the American oil industry doesn't need or even particularly want Venezuela's crude (especially the heavy/expensive stuff in the Orinoco reserves). Oil prices are fairly depressed at present, so the last thing the industry wants is more supply from countries like Venezuela and Iran (and for that matter, Russia).

  • Elie Honig [01-07]: Why Nicolás Maduro is facing trial in lower Manhattan.

  • Terry Lynn Karl [01-16]: Trump's petrostate dilemma in Venezuela: "By capturing his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolás Maduro, US President Donald Trump sought to project power abroad but instead exposed his own political vulnerability. Despite his promise to restore Venezuela's oil industry, his overt resource grab is far more likely to fuel regional turmoil."

  • Francisco Rodriguez [01-16]: In what world would Trump's oil play actually help Venezuelans? "It would take major systematic changes both commercially and in government, and it's unclear whether any of that is in the works yet."

  • Benjamin Fogel [01-17]: We're now in the Sopranos stage of imperialism: "the transformation of US hegemony into naked extortion. As with the Mafia, loyalty may ultimately buy nothing, and deals can be broken at gunpoint."

  • Chas Danner [01-18]: How is Trump's Venezuela takeover going? Not as badly as it would be had the US actually invaded and tried to run things directly. The big question is whether Trump will be satisfied with Delcy Rodríguez as "acting president," and whether Rodríguez will be able to satisfy Trump without having the still intact Chavista power base turn against her. Thus far she's mostly conceding things that Maduro wouldn't have had any problem conceding. One could imagine a very different outcome in Iraq had Bush allowed a more amenable Ba'athist leader like Tariq Aziz to remain in power, rather than allowing Paul Bremer to push the entire Ba'athist elite into opposition. Similarly, the US could have tried to negotiate some form of power-sharing agreement with the Taliban in 2001 instead of driving them into a civil war they won 20 years later. This type of "occupation" would have been a novelty for the US, but the concept goes way back. When Alexander destroyed an enemy army, he usually converted the previous king into a satrap, paying him tribute but depending on him to maintain order, as his own army moved on to conquer other lands. The obvious problem with Trump in Venezuela is that his greed and power lust will overshoot, putting US forces into another quagmire.

    The strange thing is that I could see Trump's smash-and-grab foreign policy becoming very popular: the idea is to act brashly, demonstrating his dynamic leadership, then behave sensibly and even generously afterwards, avoiding the usual consequences and blowback. Of course, he didn't have to snatch Maduro to get a pretty decent deal from Venezuela. He could get similarly good deals from Iran and North Korea. He could have had a big win on Gaza, but there the problem wasn't a regime he refused to deal with, but one (Netanyahu's) that didn't take his threat seriously. His failure in Ukraine is due to the same problem: Putin has no reason to doubt that he can just string Trump along. Sure, most of these conflicts can be traced back to Trump's earlier failures, but few people would notice that, or hold him accountable. The whole "peace through strength" line is an old con that still holds many weak minds in its thrall. Hence strong moves impress, if only one can make them without paying a price for hubris.

  • William D Hartung [01-22]: Trump's doubling down on imperialism in Latin America is a formula for decline.

When war breaks out, my first instinct is to find a good history book, to help put it into context. I could use one on Venezuela, preferably by a critical thinker with leftist instincts. I always start out hopeful and sympathetic to leftist political movements, even if they often disappoint. And I distrust their right-wing opponents, who may be right on specifics but remain fundamentally committed to oligarchy and repression. Here's a list of books I've noticed, omitting earlier (often more optimistic) books on Chávez (Tariq Ali, Rory Carroll, Nikolas Kozloff, Miguel Tinker Salas, etc.).

  • Raúl Gallegos: Crude Nation: How Oil Riches Ruined Venezuela (2016, Potomac Books): WSJ reporter on "how Maduro inherited a mess and made it worse."
  • Richard Hausmann/Francisco R Rodriguez, eds: Venezuela Before Chávez: Anatomy of an Economic Collapse (2015, Penn State University Press).
  • Carlos Lizarralde: Venezuela's Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart (2024, independent): Goes deep into history, but works backward, where the first chapter covers 1999-2019 (Chavez/Maduro), then 1922-1998 (oil), then 1498-1821 (colonial period, Columbus to Bolivar), then he returns to Chavez. Some of the missing 19th century shows up in an epilogue on "Politics Without a State, 1834-1837."
  • Carlos Lizarralde: One in Four: The Exodus that Emptied Venezuela, 2019-2024 (2025, independent).
  • William Neuman: Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela (2022, St Martin's Press): New York Times reporter, did a stint in Caracas 2012-16, critical of Trump.
  • Anya Parampil: Corporate Coup: Venezuela and the End of US Empire (2024, OR Books): Grayzone journalist, so very critical of US.
  • Joe Emersberger/Justin Podur: Extraordinary Threat: The US Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela (2021, Monthly Review Press).
  • Timothy M Gill: Encountering US Empire in Socialist Venezuela: The Legacy of Race, Neocolonialism and Democracy Promotion (2022, University of Pittsburgh Press).
  • Dan Kovalik: The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela (2019, Hot Books): Also wrote The Plot to Scapegoat Russia (2017), The Plot to Attack Iran (2018), and The Plot to Control the World: How the US Spent Billions to Change the Outcome of Elections Around the World (2018).
  • Francisco Rodríguez: The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012-2020 (2025, University of Notre Dame Press).
  • Kike Jiménez Vidal: The Collapse of Venezuela: The Untold Story of How a Rich Country Became a Failed State (2025, independent): Sees 1958-78 as a Golden Age, 1979-1998 as the Great Illusion, followed by Initial Demolition, Totalitarian Offensive, Economic Collapse, and Diaspora and Deinstitutionalization. This looks very polemical, but what I've read makes sense.
  • Javier Corrales: Autocracy Rising: How Venezuela Transitioned to Authoritarianism (2023, Brookings Institution Press): The two most reliable common code words for organizing American liberals against a foreign foe. Previously co-wrote (with Michael Penfold) Dragon in the Tropics: Venezuela and the Legacy of Hugo Chavez (2015, Brookings Institution Press).
  • Alistair Pemberton: On the Precipice: The Trump Administration and the Escalating Path Toward War With Venezuela (2025, independent): Short (45 pp), published in November.
  • Pedro Santos: USA Vs Venezuela War: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (2025, independent).
  • Anderson M Bean, ed: Venezuela in Crisis: Socialist Perspectives (2026, Haymarket): "Writing from an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-authoritarian perspective, this volume never loses sight of the need to stand with the Venezuelan people rather than their government — even when it claims to be struggling to build socialism." [Scheduled for 02-17]

Here's an excerpt from Gallego's Crude Nation:

Politicians, like regular Venezuelans, spend oil money generously while they still have it, because oil prices will fall eventually. And when that happens, Venezuela is usually left with little to show for it, with no savings to speak of. It soon dawned on me that Chávez and his leftist movement were really just a blip in a long history of larger-than-life leaders who promised to use oil to quickly turn Venezuela into a modern, powerful nation, only to disappoint voters in the end. For the better part of the twentieth century, Venezuela served as a cautionary tale for other nations and regions rich in natural resources, an example of the fate they must avoid.

Venezuela's troubles go beyond left and right political ideas: the world's largest oil patch hasn't learned how to properly manage its wealth. Venezuela is a country that has played and will play an important role in the global energy industry, as long as cars still run on gasoline and not on electricity, water, or cow manure. Three centuries from now, when most of the world's oil is gone, Venezuela could still be pumping crude, if no other energy source has rendered oil obsolete. Venezuela's reality is a tale of how hubris, oil dependence, spendthrift ways, and economic ignorance can drive a country to ruin. Venezuela can teach us all an important lesson: too much money poorly managed can be worse than not having any money at all.

And here's an excerpt from Vidal's The Collapse of Venezuela:

Before oil, Venezuela was a poor nation, yes, but with a real productive structure. An economy based on coffee, cocoa, and livestock farming, where value was created by labor, capital, and land. It was a country of producers, not of parasitic rentiers. Exchange was voluntary, private property was respected — the the clear limitations of the time — and the currency, though weak, was backed by the tangible production of goods.

The arrival of the oil companies wasn't a "blessing." It was the beginning of a curse. It was the equivalent of injecting a healthy but poor patient with a miracle drug that generates instant euphoria while destroying vital organs. This is what serious economists call the Resource Curse or the Dutch Disease. And what did the state do? Instead of creating the conditions for oil wealth to strengthen the private sector, it instead siphoned off revenue through concessions and centralized it in the hands of the elite in power, first under the rule of Gómez and then the military.

And then, no doubt, Chávez and Maduro. It's interesting how often revolutionaries return to the form of those they overthrew, as Stalin became another Tsar, and the Ayatollah became another Shah. I suspect the worst cases are where external pressure puts the revolutionaries on the defensive, and emboldens the old class. That's been a big part of the story in Venezuela. It also reminds us that no matter how unsavory the Chavistas are, their opponents are worse.

Iran: I haven't been following news, but my X feed blew up with tweets on Iran (protests and/or war threats) to which I ascribe very little credibility. Trying to catch up, I checked out this Wikipedia article, which tells me that anti-government protests began on December 28, spreading to many cities, and that they were met with a stiff government crackdown, including "a massacre that left tens of thousands of protesters dead." There have also been counter-protests, defending the regime. While few people doubt that the Iranian people have grievances with their government, these events are occurring against a backdrop of severe sanctions and war threats coming from Israel and the US, who are believed to support violent subversive groups within Iran, and who have long promoted propaganda against the regime. Iran has also responded by shutting down the internet. Thus we have ample reason to doubt pretty much everything we hear from anyone about what is going on. I'll pick out some representative articles below, but I don't expect to get much credible information.

  • Behrooz Ghamari Tabrizi [12-25]: Iran and the price of sovereignty: what it takes not to be a client.

    Now, the so-called 12-day war is over. Iranians have returned to the devastating perpetual violence of U.S. led sanctions and targeted assassinations by the Mossad. The Trump administration and its European allies have called on Iran to accept its defeat, surrender unconditionally, and "return" to the negotiating table. They ask Iran to dismantle its nuclear technology, halt the production of its advance missile program, cease its support of the Palestinian cause, and terminate its network of what is known as the "axis of resistance" against the Israeli and American expansionism. In other words, become a client state. Iran is one of the few remaining fronts of defiance against the American extortionist posture and the Israeli carnage that has engulfed the Middle East. That defiance comes with a very hefty price.

  • Cameron Peters [01-13]: The scariest thing about Iran's crackdown:

  • Hamid Dabashi [01-13]: How Israel and the US are exploiting Iranian protests

    : "Genuine rage over economic stagnation is being manipulated to serve western political ends."

  • Sina Toosi [01-16]: This is not solidarity. It is predation. "The Iranian people are caught between severe domestic repression and external powers that exploit their suffering."

  • Robert Wright [01-16]: The Iranian blood on Trump's (and Biden's) hands. Everything here is important and worth reading, but one could add more, especially on Israel's malign influence.

    We'll never know if the hopes for Iran that Obama's nuclear deal fostered would have been realized had Trump not intervened. Maybe commercial engagement with the world wouldn't have had any internally liberalizing effect, politically or even economically. And maybe more economic interdependence with other countries wouldn't have moderated Iran's policies toward them.

    But even if things didn't pan out on those fronts, it seems safe to say that Iran's people would be much better off economically and no worse off politically, and some now-dead protesters would still be alive. And as of today — with another war in the Middle East one distinct near-term possibility and the violent and chaotic implosion of Iran another one — that scenario doesn't sound so bad.

    It now seems pretty clear that Biden's failure to restore the Iran deal was evidence of his more subservient posture toward Israel: his failure on Iran presaged his failure on Gaza. But Obama doesn't merit much acclaim either. His rationale for negotiating the deal was that he took Israel's fears of a nuclear Iran seriously, recognizing that the only way to stop a determined Iran was to negotiate restrictions that could be enforced. On the other hand, he was careful not to resolve any other issues, let alone normalize relations, which had the effect of preserving decades of kneejerk hostility. That attitude was what made it possible for Trump to break the deal, and it gave Biden cover to keep from reversing Trump's damage.

    Three more charts of interest here: Global AI Computing Capacity (increasing quite rapidly); President Trump's Approval Rating (down markedly since the ICE shooting of Renee Good); Evening News Estimates of Iran Protest Deaths (CBS, since Bari Weiss took over, is claiming 5-24 [or 40?] times as many deaths as CNN/ABC/NBC). Also see Wright's earlier post:

    • [01-09]: Some useful Trump-Hitler comparisons (in light of Minneapolis and Venezuela).

      The joy Trump takes in the use of intimidating force extends from the domestic arena into the international arena. Indeed, it's hard to explain the escalating holiday-season campaign against Venezuela — boat bombings, then a port bombing, and finally invasion — without invoking this kind of visceral motivation. After all, Venezuela isn't the country you'd go after if drugs were your real concern. And as for oil: The basics of the administration's current plan for Venezuela — leave an authoritarian regime in place but profit from its petroleum — didn't require invading the country and snatching Nicolas Maduro; Maduro himself had agreed to that kind of deal. And, though Trump can presumably get somewhat better terms now than he'd have gotten from Maduro, there seems to be a consensus among oil experts that the foreseeable benefits are meager; with oil prices low, and Venezuela still a shaky place, US companies won't want to make the big investments required to extract oil in large quantities.

      I doubt I'll ever see a man more evidently full of pride and self-satisfaction than Trump is when he's talking about his various unprovoked international assaults — the assassination via missile strike of Iran's top general during his first term, the bombing of Iran last year, the attack on Venezuela last week. But I'm guessing that if I spoke German and combed through some recordings of Hitler in the wake of the Poland invasion I'd come close.

  • Orly Noy [01-16]: On Iran's protests, Israeli hypocrisy knows no limits: "Only moments ago, Israelis were cheering on a holocaust in Gaza — and now they dare to celebrate the valiant uprising of the Iranian people."

  • Farshad Askari [01-22]: Iran's protests have gone quiet. But the revolution isn't over. This feels like a bit of a stretch, but to the extent that the protests were real, a news blackout isn't likely to keep them away forever.

  • MEE [01-23]: Trump says US 'armada' moving towards Iran: "President warns Washington is watching Tehran closely as US naval forces move into region."

Jerome Powell: Trump, who originally appointed Powell to the post of Fed Chair, is unhappy with him, ostensibly because Trump wants him to lower interest rates, which Powell had raised as the conventional antidote to inflation. So Trump is threatening to prosecute Powell, which isn't going over well with the Fed Chair, or with the bankers who effectively have captured the Fed.

  • Cameron Peters [01-12]: Trump vs. the Fed, briefly explained: "Why Trump is making a bid to control the US economy." This is somewhat misleading. The Fed doesn't control the economy. The Fed controls the money supply. This has bearing on some important aspects of the economy, like inflation and employment. And those aspects are important enough to people who have a lot of money (especially banks) that they've long insisted on keeping the Fed free of "political interference," which is to say to keep it captured by a higher power: themselves. Thus, for instance, Bill Clinton ditched his entire economic platform after being elected in 1992, because Alan Greenspan convinced him it would unsettle the bond market, probably by threatening to wreck Clinton's economy. Clinton was the first of the last three Democratic presidents to reappoint a Republican Fed chair (as Obama did Bernanke, and Biden did Powell). Like all good Democrats, they recognize that there are higher powers in America, and behave accordingly. So sure, Trump's move is a power grab, but we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that Powell is on our side, or think that the "independent Fed" is really a good idea. Trump's beef with Powell is supposedly about interest rates, but also about power. The thing to understand about interest rates is that high interest rates can throttle a booming economy, and very high interest rates can strangle it; but while lower interest rates can stimulate the economy, and increase employment (especially when recovering from a recession induced by high interest rates), low interest rates can also cause inflation. So Trump's move here is exactly wrong for fighting inflation. But when the Fed makes it cheaper to borrow, not everyone benefits equally. The Fed loans money to banks, who loan money to rich people, who sometimes use it to build things, but more often (especially when it's cheap) they use it for speculation, pushing up the price of assets so as to make themselves feel even richer. And that, of course, is exactly what Trump wants to see: an asset bubble.

  • Ian Millhiser

  • Mike Konczal [01-13]: The enormous stakes of Donald Trump's fight with Jerome Powell: "The Fed is the final frontier of his quest to dominate every economic institution."

  • Thomas L Friedman [01-13] Trump's scheming to sack Powell paves the road to constitutional ruin: Sure, Friedman's an idiot, and there are hundreds of other things that he could have recognized as "the road to constitutional ruin," but this (unlike, say, genocide in Gaza) seems to be his red line.

  • Ryan Cooper [01-14]: Trump's prosecution of Jerome Powell is even crazier than it looks: "Messing with Federal Reserve independence might spark inflation, and everyone hates that." That seems like something people might say, but I'm less and less convinced that the Fed's rate control is a very practical tool for controlling inflation. The belief is largely based on memory of the Volcker recession (1979-82), based on some pretty sketchy economic theories (like NAIRU), and employed like a wrecking ball to the entire economy.

  • Robert Kuttner [01-21]: The high court sinks Trump's Federal Reserve ploy: "The administration's clumsy effort to oust Fed governor Lisa Cook is stymied again."

Major Threads

Israel: I collected a bunch of articles early on, in the immediate aftermath of the ceasefire/hostage swap. Since then, well . . . Israel has regularly violated the cease fire they had "agreed" to, and their violations haven't bothered Trump in the least. I don't have time to seriously update this section, so the few additions are at best a random sampling.

  • Jonah Valdez [11-25]: Gaza humanitarian foundation calls it quits after thousands die seeking its aid: "The aid group oversaw relief in Gaza during a period defined by the killings of Palestinians seeking food during famine." This is "the U.S. and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation." When I saw this headline, I assumed that the foundation was legit, and the headline reflected some sort of Israeli win against the world's humanitarian impulses. Now it looks like "aid" was really just bait. And sure, not just to kill Palestinians, which Israel was already doing regularly and could have escalated without resorting to such tactics. Rather, the point was to psychologically bind seeking food to the experience of terror. With the ceasefire, the need for aid is undiminished. If aid was GHF's purpose, it would still have much to do. That they're quitting suggests that their real purpose was something else.

    Rather than maintain the existing model of bringing food and supplies to individuals with most need by delivering goods directly to communities, GHF established four distribution sites. The foundation also hired two American logistics and security firms — UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions, led by a Green Beret veteran and former CIA officer, respectively — to oversee distribution. The result was the funneling of thousands of desperate people who traveled long distances into aid sites where long lines often devolved into stampedes. Gunfire from Israeli soldiers, or private American contractors, largely former U.S. special forces, was a near-daily reality. While some of those who survived the deadly queues managed to bring home boxes of food, the supplies failed to slow the famine conditions across Gaza which only worsened. The food provided by GHF was widely criticized by nutritional experts and aid groups as inadequate to prevent hunger and difficult to prepare (most items needed water to boil, itself a scarce resource in the territory).

  • Marianne Dhenin [11-27]: International tribunal finds Israel guilty of genocide, ecocide, and the forced starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza: "The International People's Tribunal on Palestine held in Barcelona presented striking evidence of Israel's forced starvation of the Palestinian people and the deliberate destruction of food security in Gaza." The tribunal is sponsored by ILPS (International League of Peoples' Struggle), which of course would find that, not that the evidence can really be interpreted any other way.

  • Mitchell Plitnick [11-27]: Israel is violating ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, and Trump is allowing it: "Israel's goals are clear enough: endless war." The Trump administration's goals, to the extent one can speak of them coherently, were to win a couple immediate news cycles, free the hostages, and set up negotions to make amends to Qatar and sell more arms to Saudia Arabia. Netanyahu, as he has so many times before, chose to bend to America's will rather than risk a break, confident that he will soon enough rebound, because Trump is just another fickle American fool.

    Israel had never heeded the ceasefire to begin with. More than 340 overwhelmingly non-combatant Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire was put in place, and over 15,000 more structures in Gaza have been destroyed, just as flooding, overflowing sewage, rains, and the cold weather of approaching winter start to hit the already battered population.

    In just the past few days, though, Israel has killed more than 60 Palestinians in Gaza, a sign of escalation. It is no coincidence that this uptick comes on the heels of Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman's (MBS) visit to Washington where he once again insisted, much to Trump's annoyance, that if Donald Trump wanted to see a normalization deal between his kingdom and Israel, there would need to be a clear, committed path to a Palestinian state with a timeline. Whether MBS was sincere about that or not, Netanyahu has no intention of making even the slightest gesture in that direction, and the escalation in Gaza was, at least in part, his response to that part of the Trump-MBS confab.

  • Qassam Muaddi

  • Huda Skaik [11-28]: Gaza's civil defense forces keep digging for 10,000 missing bodies: "Members of Gaza's Civil Defense force describe pulling decomposing bodies from collapsed buildings, and digging in hopes that someone remains alive."

  • Connor Echols:

  • Craig Mokhiber [12-01]: How the world can resist the UN Security Council's rogue colonial mandate in Gaza. This offers "several ways that states and individuals worldwide can challenge its illegality." I'm far less concerned about the legal issues, which get an airing here, or even the political ones. The resolution is inadequate, and probably doomed to failure, but do we really want to "block the implementation"? The pre-resolution baseline was genocide. The only path away was to get Israel and the US to agree to stop, which could only happen on terms favorable to those powers, and therefore far short of justice. While a better resolution would ultimately be better for all concerned, the immediate need is to hold Israel and America to the terms they've agreed to — starting with recognition of Israel's violations of the ceasefire, and Israel's continued aggression elsewhere (beyond the scope of the Gaza resolution). Moreover, even if Israel relents and honors the ceasefire, the delivery of aid, etc., Israel still merits BDS due to its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and within the Green Line.

  • Philip Weiss [12-02]: The Israel lobby is melting down before our eyes: "The American Newish community is in open crisis over its support for Israel after two years of genocide in Gaza. A key issue in this crisis is a topic once considered too taboo to criticize the Israel lobby."

  • Ramzy Baroud [12-02]: The US-Israeli scheme to partition Gaza and break Palestinian will: "United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 is destined to fail. That failure will come at a price: more Palestinian deaths, extensive destruction, and the expansion of Israeli violence to the West Bank and elsewhere in the Middle East."

  • Matt Seriff-Cullick [12-02]: Stop calling right-wing criticism of Israel 'anti-Zionism': "Recent comments by Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have drawn more attention to right-wing critiques of US support for Israel., However, it is a serious mistake for those on the left to see this anti-Israel criticism as 'anti-Zionist.'" Response to pieces like Jeet Heer [11-07]: The return of right-wing anti-Zionism — and antisemitism. While it's generally the case that antisemites support, or at least endorse, Israel — it's local Jews they hate, and Israel offers a convenient option to rid themselves of Jews — while leftist critics of Israel are almost never antisemitic (we see diaspora Jews as our natural allies, and indeed many are among us). The primary motivators here are domestic politics, although the more Israel acts like a fascist state, the more consistent the left-right differences become. The subject here is the small schism of right-wing critics of Israel, who may well be antisemitic, but could just as well be driven by something else: especially the notion that Israel has been dragging the US into wars and/or globalization that impinges on their "America-first" fetishism. In this it helps to distinguish between pro-Israel (which is mostly about military dominance and alliance) and Zionist (which is about Jewish immigration to Israel). Right-wingers can favor Zionism while rejecting the notion that we need to send arms to Israel.

  • Joe Sommerlad [12-03]: Hilary Clinton claims TikTok misinformation is influencing young people's views on the Israel-Palestine conflict: "unreliable media on TikTok, making it difficult to have a 'reasonable discussion' about events in the Middle East." This is pretty short on details, but Clinton's remarks were delivered at "Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom's New York City summit," so her complaint seems to have less to do with "pure propaganda" than with whose "a lot of young Jewish Americans who don't know the history and don't understand" are exposed to.

  • Michael Arria:

  • Michael Leonardi [12-12]: The criminalization of solidarity: The global war on Palestinian voices and their supporters, from Israel to Italy and across the western world.

  • Eve Ottenberg [01-09]: By suspending 37 aid orgs is Israel pushing toward a final expulsion? "At the very least, the decision to cut loose every major Gaza humanitarian group could led to the utter collapse of Trump's peace plan."

  • Ramzy Baroud [01-18]: A war without headlines: Israel's shock-and-awe campaign in the west bank. I've always been skeptical of "shock and awe" as a military tactic: in order to be shocked, you have to survive, in which case whatever awe there may have been has been dissipated by the fact that it's now something you have survived. However, while a single blow dissipates, multiple poundings accumulate:

    In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein defines "shock and awe" not merely as a military tactic, but as a political and economic strategy that exploits moments of collective trauma — whether caused by war, natural disaster, or economic collapse — to impose radical policies that would otherwise be resisted. According to Klein, societies in a state of shock are rendered disoriented and vulnerable, allowing those in power to push through sweeping transformations while opposition is fragmented or overwhelmed.

    Though the policy is often discussed in the context of US foreign policy — from Iraq to Haiti — Israel has employed shock-and-awe tactics with greater frequency, consistency, and refinement. Unlike the US, which has applied the doctrine episodically across distant theaters, Israel has used it continuously against a captive population living under its direct military control.

    Indeed, the Israeli version of shock and awe has long been a default policy for suppressing Palestinians. It has been applied across decades in the occupied Palestinian territory and extended to neighboring Arab countries whenever it suited Israeli strategic objectives.

    In Lebanon, this approach became known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the Dahiya neighborhood in Beirut that was systematically destroyed by Israel during its 2006 war on Lebanon. The doctrine advocates the use of disproportionate force against civilian areas, the deliberate targeting of infrastructure, and the transformation of entire neighborhoods into rubble in order to deter resistance through collective punishment.

    Gaza has been the epicenter of Israel's application of this tactic. In the years preceding the genocide, Israeli officials increasingly framed their assaults on Gaza as limited, "managed" wars designed to periodically weaken Palestinian resistance.

There's no way to catch up on what's been happening in Israel, so let's just jump ahead to the last week or so, where we find the genocide little inconvenienced by Trump's so-called peace plan. For what little it's worth, I don't think Trump and Netanyahu are on the same page regarding Gaza: the former is fitfully pushing his peace/corruption agenda forward, while the latter sabotages it wherever possible, knowing that even when he has to bend a bit he can outlast his dullard opponent. And while it would be nice for the world to reject them both, it's easy to think that the US is the only party capable of influencing Israel, so the best we can possibly do is to go along with Trump. Given the people involved, it's a lose-lose proposition, but one hopes that not every loss is equal. And nobody's willing to risk bucking the trend. Russia, China, and Europe have their own problems with Trump, as do lesser powers like Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. None of them care enough about the Palestinians to make a stink. Nor are they inclined to risk anything for the principle of a more rational, more just world order.

  • Paul R Pillar [01-19]: Phase farce: No way 'Board of Peace' replaces reality in Gaza: "There is no ceasefire, no aid, no Hamas disarmament, IDF withdrawal or stabilization force. Just a lot of talk about Trump-run panels with little buy-in." According to Steve Witkoff, we are already in Phase Two of Trump's 20-Point Plan.

  • Davie Hearst [01-20]: 'Board of Peace': Trump is running Gaza, and the world, like a mafia boss.

  • Michael Arria [01-22]: Trump unveils so-called 'Board of Peace': "On Thursday, Donald Trump formally announced his so-called 'Board of Peace' during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The body has been widely criticized as an attempt by Trump to undermine the UN and 'takeover the world order.'"

  • Craig Mokhiber [01-22]: A world on its knees: Trump's 'Board of Peace' and the darkness it promises: "Donald Trump's 'Board of Peace' is the result of the world bowing before the global rampage of the US-Israel Axis. Once again, the Palestinian people are being offered as sacrifices, and along with them, the entire global system of international law."

  • Qassam Muaddi [01-22]: How Israel and the US are using the 'shock doctrine' to impose a new administration in Gaza.

  • Mitchell Plitnick [01-24]: The Middle East is at a tipping point as the US fuels crisis across the region: "Long-standing crises in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, and Iran are deepening as the U.S. imprint on the Middle East shows no signs of weakening."

  • Michael Arria:

    • [01-22]: The Shift: Israeli-American Council summit was the latest reflection of Israel's failing brand.

    • [01-22]: Trump unveils so-called 'Board of Peace': Announced at Davos — kind of like the Balfour Declaration first appeared as a letter to the Rothschilds — "the body has been widely criticized as an attempt by Trump to undermine the UN and 'takeover the world order.'" While this article is as negative as you'd expect, you really need to read the "facts only" report in Wikipedia to get a sense of how truly deranged this organization is. Some of this was prefigured by Trump's Gaza peace plan, which led to the prisoner exchanges and Israel's half-hearted (and since oft-violated) agreement to a ceasefire and resumption of humanitarian aid to Gaza. That plan had some serious flaws, but it put the genocide on pause, and the fixes were obvious. My key points were:

      1. Israel has to leave Gaza, and cannot be allowed any role in its reconstruction.
      2. The people who still live in Gaza must have political control of their own destiny.
      3. The UN is the only organization that be widely trusted to guide Gaza toward self-government, with security for all concerned.

      I had some more points, especially on refugees, a right to exile, and reconstruction aid, but they concerned details. These three points are fundamental, and the only people who still dispute them are those who want the wars and injustices to continue. Unfortunately, their names are Netanyahu and Trump, and they are deeply invested in their atrocities and corruption. Trump's vision included a Gaza Executive Board, designed to bypass the UN, ignore the Palestinians, and keep Netanyahu and Trump involved. The Board of Peace adds additional layers: a superior Executive Board ("with a focus on diplomacy and investment"), the Board itself ("mainly leaders of countries": 60 were invited, to form an alternative to the UN, and finally its permanent chairman:

      Trump is explicitly named in the charter as the chairman of the Board of Peace. He is not subject to term limits and holds the sole authority to nominate his designated successor. Only he may invite countries to join the Board, according to the charter's delegation of the right to the chairman alone. As chairman, he also has the exclusive authority to create, modify, or dissolve subsidiary entities of the Board of Peace. All revisions to the charter, as well as administrative directives issued by the Board of Peace, are subject to his approval. Trump's chairmanship of the Board of Peace is independent of his presidency of the United States, and he has indicated that he wants to remain chairman for life.

      Also note that:

      Countries that wish to be permanent members of the Board of Peace must pay US$1 billion into a fund controlled by Trump; otherwise, each country serves a three-year term which may be renewed at his discretion.

      Trump has already withdrawn the invitation to Canada, after Prime Minister Mark Carney crossed him at Davos. The 7 initial members of the BoP Executive Board include Tony Blair and six Americans (Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, along with billionaire Marc Rowan, Trump adviser Robert Gabriel Jr., and the India-born president of the World Bank, Ajay Banga). Four of them are also on the Gaza Executive Board (Witkoff, Kushner, Blair, and Rowan), along with representatives of several states (Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, UAE), two token UN representatives, and Israeli billionaire businessman Yakir Gabay.

      This is off-the-charts hubris even for Trump. It's hard to see how anyone else with an iota of intelligence and/or self-respect can even entertain such a notion. While hardly anyone is optimistic about this organization, it's also hard to find anyone who fully gets just how totally fucking insane the proposition is. This is just a quick sampling:

Russia/Ukraine: This has become the forgotten war. It's been a stalemate for several years, prolonged initially because Biden had no desire to negotiate, continued because Trump has no "art of the deal," and because Putin isn't losing enough to cut his losses. One thing that isn't clear to me is how intense the war has been in 2025. It does seem to have been much less intensely reported, perhaps because Trump sees less value in demonizing Russia so has cut back the propaganda effort, perhaps because an exhausted media has had to turn to many other conflicts.

  • Jackie Abramian/Artin Dersimonian [01-01]: Listening to what regular Ukrainians are saying about the war: "A number share their views on how to end what they are calling the 'conveyor belt of death.'"

  • MarkEpiskopos [01-06]: Despite the blob's teeth gnashing, realists got Ukraine right: "As usual, critics are still trying to launder their abysmal policy records by projecting their failures and conceits onto others." On this evidence, I'm not very impressed by the "realists" either.

  • Stavroula Pabst [01-07]: US capture of Russian-flagged ship could derail Ukraine War talks: "Experts say this could also give Europeans permission to seize Moscow's ships and kill relations." Refers to this, which suggests the target wasn't Russia but Venezuela:

  • Tamar Jacoby [01-07]: Germany's rearmament is stunning: "The country is determined to strengthen its armed forces in the wake of Moscow's aggression and Washington's volatility, but doing so doesn't come easily to a nation chastened by its past." I'm old enough to think that rearming Germany and Japan is backsliding of the worst sort, but the US has pursued both for decades now, and has customarily been indulged, mostly as a form of tribute. The US has few worries, given continued occupation of bases and control of the supply chain: US weapons are fragile and inefficient, which makes them both lucrative and harmless. But it's also a stupid waste on the part of the countries that indulge us, and it could easily become worse if/when Germany and Japan find they can no longer trust the US (which is certainly true with Trump). By the way, Jacoby's main beat is Ukraine, where Europe tends to be more hawkish than Trump (if not more hawkish than Biden). Recent pieces:

    • [10-23]: Can Europe turn tough talk on Russia into action? "Facing the Russian threat with less help from America, the continent forges closer ties to beef up defense."

    • [11-25]: Three lessons from Trump's latest plan for Ukraine: "Whatever emerges from US-Ukrainian talks in Geneva, nothing good is likely to come from this recipe for appeasing Moscow." But paranoia over "appeasement" is a recipe for perpetual war. This derives from the notion that the conflict is purely a power contest between Russia and NATO, both of which are unlikely to be phased by costs which are largely suffered by Ukrainians. We need to refocus this on finding a better outcome for the people involved.

  • Anatol Lieven [01-15]: If Europe starts attacking Russian cargo ships, all bets are off: "The consequences will be negative, from shattering the order it claims to defend all the way up to a possible nuclear confrontation."

Trump's War and Peace: We might as well admit that Trump's foreign policy focus has shifted from trade and isolation to war and terror.

  • Pavel Devyatkin [10-30]: Reckless posturing: Trump says he wants to resume nuke testing: "The president thinks he is signaling power to Russia and China but this could be the most dangerous gambit yet."

  • Jack Hunter [12-31]: 4 ways Team Trump reminded us of Bush-Cheney in 2025: "From WMDs to bombing Iran, the president who consistently mocked the GWOT is now pushing the same old buttons."

  • Vijay Prashad [12-02]: The angry tide of the Latin American far right. I know little about this, but the news, especially from nations that had leaned left of late (like Bolivia and Chile) seems grim. Popular anger against the establishment should favor the left, but periods of ineffective power only seem to revitalize right-wing politicians whose own period of power should have thoroughly discredited them.

  • Joshua Keating:

    • [12-02]: Why is Trump suddenly so obsessed with Honduras? "As the US considers strikes on Venezuela, another Latin American country has caught the president's attention."

    • [12-27]: Why is the US bombing Nigeria? "Humanitarian intervention, MAGA-style."

    • [01-06]: What is the "Donroe Doctrine"? "Trump's new approach to Latin America is a lot like America's old one." Evidently the New York Post coined the term "Donroe," which is where it should have died. My own coinage, which I haven't seen elsewhere (even though it's pretty obvious) is Bad Neighbor Policy — a reversion to the pre-FDR era that at the time was most often referred to as "Gunboat Diplomacy," or as Smedley Butler put it, "a racket." Of course, you can't exactly go back. America's old attitude toward Latin America was formed from a sense of racist superiority. Trump's is tinged with envy, especially for caudillos like Bolsonaro, Millei, and Nayib Bukele, who exemplify the abuse of power Trump aspires to. If Maduro really was the "narco-terrorist" of his indictments, Trump would probably love him.

  • Elie Mystal [12-03]: Pete Hegseth should be charged with murder: "Nop matter how you look at the strikes on alleged 'drug boats' — as acts of war or attacks on civilians — Hegseth has committed a crime and should be prosecuted."

  • Eric Levitz [12-03]: The twisted reason why Trump is bombing Venezuelan boats: "For this administration, war crimes are a feature, not a bug."

  • Blaise Malley [12-04]: Trump's USIP [United States Institute of Peace] rebrand wields an olive branch as a weapon: "Trump's name was added to the independent institute after his administration purged staff." It's now the "Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace," in honor of "the greatest dealmaker in our nation's history."

  • Andrew Ancheta [12-04]: Washington's gallery of puppets: "From Venezuela to Iran, the United States can always find ambitious would-be leaders willing to advocate regime change. But they don't have their countries best interests in mind."

  • Cameron Peters [12-04]: Trump's war crimes scandal, briefly explained: "War crimes allegations are engulfing the Pentagon after a deadly strike in the Caribbean."

  • Eldar Mamedov [12-30]: Five restraint successes — and five absolute fails — in 2025: "Trump's promise of an 'America First' realism in foreign policy has delivered not a clean break, but a deeply contradictory picture." I will note that the "successes" are relative and marginal, while the failures are Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Israel (which they soft-pedal, but is really much worse), and "Congressional derelict in of duty on War Powers."

  • Zack Beauchamp [01-05]: Donald Trump was never a dove: "How critics of American interventionism fell for a myth." These are all important points. I'd add several points. One is that while some "critics of American interventionism" defected to Trump (e.g., Tulsi Gabbard), in some ways the bigger problem was how so many supporters of American interventionism fell for the myth and flocked to support Harris (e.g., the Cheneys), and the welcome she showed them cemented her credentials as a warmonger (relatively speaking). My second point is that while Trump might not be as enthusiastic about war as some conservatives (e.g., Hitler, Netanyahu), he shares with virtually every other conservative a lust for violence in the support of power, and this is what in a pinch predisposes him to start wars that people with more democratic instincts would wish to avoid. My third point is that it was his opponents (Harris and Hillary Clinton, who both felt more need than Biden felt to signal "commander-in-chief toughness") who let Trump get away with his "man of peace" con. It shouldn't have been hard to expose Trump, but they didn't know how or dare try.

    The truth is that an unconstrained Trump, acting on his longstanding hawkish impulses, could cause all sorts of chaos in his remaining three years. While US military interventionism is very precedented, Trump's particular brand of it — naked pre-modern imperialism backed by a modern globe-spanning military — is not.

    Americans should be prepared for things to go very, very wrong.

  • Eric Levitz [01-06]: The one line that Trump's foreign policy still hasn't crossed: "After Venezuela, how far could Trump really go?" He's referring to sending large numbers of American troops into a hostile country. That may be a matter of time — the argument that he can't control a nation like Venezuela without putting troops in is hard to resist once you've decided that control you must — but for now it is also a matter of design. Trump is basically just a gangster, seeking tribute, employing extortion to get it. He will break any nation that resists. He won't promise to rebuild the nations he breaks. If they don't fall in line he'll just break them again. This, by the way, isn't an original idea. The neocons c. 2000 were very big on this idea, which like much of their mindset was based on Israel. Rumsfeld pushed this line viz. Iraq, but Bush couldn't let all that oil go to waste, so he set up a crony government and spent a debilitating decade trying to defend it, to little avail. I'm not going to argue that Trump is too smart to make that mistake again, but his basic attitudes — favoring hard power over soft, never making amends, complete disregard for however his acts impact other people — are consistent with Israel's ultra-nationalism writ large, on a global scale.

  • Ben Freeman/William Hartung [01-08]: The reality of Trump's cartoonish $1.5 trillion DOD budget proposal: "This dramatic escalation in military spending is a recipe for more waste, fraud, and abuse." While promoting "waste, fraud, and abuse" is by far the most likely rationale between any Trump increase in spending, one shouldn't overlook the name change from Department of Defense to Department of War, which would seem to imply a mission change way beyond ordering new stationery.

  • Michael Klare [01-08]: Plunging into the abyss: "Will the US and Russia abandon all nuclear restraints?" The New START treaty lapses on February 6, which is the last of the historic arms reduction treaties that Reagan and Bush negotiated with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. I don't know to what (if any) extent Putin wants to unshackle Russia from the agreements of the Soviet era, but several times during the Ukraine conflict he's threatened to use nuclear weapons should the US/Europe/Ukraine overstep imaginary "red lines." A sane US president would take this as a signal to tone conflict down, settle disagreements, and restore peaceful coexistence, but Trump isn't one, and in this regard I can't say much better of Biden and Obama. The neocons have been chafing at any sort of restrictions on American power since the 1990s, and they have a powerful lobbying ally in the nuclear industry, which has been pushing a $1.5 trillion "modernization" of an arsenal the only purpose of which is apocalypse. Not only is Trump's sanity open to question here, he is blatantly using the threat of US military and economic power to extort submissive behavior, including tribute, from friends and foes alike. He has crossed the fine line between legitimate business sharks and gangsters. And nowhere is that more dangerous than in unleashing an unbridled nuclear arms race.

  • Cameron Peters [01-09]: Trump's Greenland push, briefly explained: "Is Trump really serious about Greenland?" I doubt it, but we suffer from this cognitive limit, where we find it hard to comprehend that other people believe things that make no sense whatsoever. The real question with Trump isn't is he serious? It's can he get away with it? And he's getting away with a lot of crazy shit no one took seriously when he first broached it. Sometimes he does it as distraction — it's probably no accident that Greenland is back in the news after Venezuela. But once he floats an idea, it then becomes a test of his power, and he's always up for that. He certainly doesn't want or need Greenland for bases or business, as the US already has free access to all that. There's no reason to think he wants the people. The only reason I can come up with is that he looked at a Mercator map, which shows Greenland as huge, but also it would add a bit of visual symmetry with Alaska, like a pair of huge Mickey Mouse ears floating above the face of America. Maybe he also thinks that Canada will surrender once it sees itself surrounded on three sides. Or maybe he's just recycling 19th century fantasies of ever-expanding American imperialism? Is he really that stupid? Well, he's also embraced the idea of tariffs, which comes from the same period, and is every bit as discredited as colonialism and slavery — another old idea he's disconcertingly fond of.

    Other pieces on Greenland, some taking this seriously:

    • Fred Kaplan [01-08]: Trump is talking about taking over Greenland. The world is taking him seriously. He dismisses security concerns, and minerals, but does bring up an idea that has occurred to me: that Trump is easily fooled by the distortion of Mercator projection maps, which make Greenland look much larger and more strategic than it actually is. He notes alarm about US reliability, not just in Europe but in South Korea and Japan. "The world is very worried, and we should be too."

    • Ryan Cooper [01-08]: Donald Trump's degenerate plans for Greenland: "The worst president in history wants conquest for its own sake, even if it opens America up to nuclear attack."

    • Joshua Keating [01-08]: Can anyone stop Trump from seizing Greenland? "Europeans and Greenlanders are strongly opposed to an American land grab. But their options are limited." I can think of a few options if anyone wants to take this seriously:

      1. Expel the US from NATO. Cancel all existing US arms orders, and replace them (if needed) with European products (reverse engineering US ones if that helps, but most US weapons, like the F-35, are crap). Free from NATO, Europe could probably cut a better deal with Russia over Ukraine, etc., which might save them from having to re-arm. (I suspect that Russia fears independent European re-armament more than they do US global adventurism, which in any case is more focused on China.)
      2. Sanction the Trump family personally, including seizing their properties in Europe, and impounding their funds. This could be selectively extended, but they don't need to sanction all American businesses, or boycott American companies.
      3. Have the ICC file charges against Trump and his chief operatives, and not just over Greenland.
      4. Pull the plug on Israel. This can involve sanctions and trade restrictions.
      5. Overhaul intellectual property laws, to phase out American claims in Europe, or at least to tax exported royalties. I'm pretty certain that Europe would come out ahead if most or even all such laws were abolished. [PS: See Dean Baker [01-19]: Time for Europe to use the nuclear option: Attack US patent and copyright monopolies.]
      6. Shut down US bases in Europe, as well as agreements that allow US vessels to dock, planes to land or overfly, etc.

      It's time for Europeans to realize that the US isn't their friend, and that Trump in particular cannot be trusted and should not be appeased. Literally fighting to defend Greenland may be out of the question. And fueling a guerrilla operation to drive the Americans out, like happened in Afghanistan and Vietnam, could be a lot more trouble than it's worth. So sure, "options to stop it are limited," but so is America's desire to paint the map with its colors. And note that most of what I just suggested would be worth doing even without Trump's provocation in Greenland. The main thing that Trump is doing here is to drive home the point that after so many years of "going along to get along" America has led Europe into a dark and dreary cul de sac. Realization of that was bound to happen sooner or later. Trump will be remembered as the accelerant in the great bonfire of the Americas.

    • Pavel Devyatkin:

    • Lois Parshley [01-16]: The tech billionaires behind Trump's Greenland push.

    • Sam Fraser [01-17]: On Greenland, Trump wants to be like Polk: "The president's motivation isn't security or money, it's manifest destiny."

    • Kevin Breuninger/Luke Fountain [01-17]: Trump says 8 European nations face tariffs rising to 25% if Greenland isn't sold to the US.

    • Anatol Lieven [01-18]: Trump's new 'gangster' threats against Greenland, allies, cross line: "The president declares that he will tariff the life out of countries if they do not obey him."

    • Jeffrey Gettleman [01-19]: Read the texts between Trump and Norway's Prime Minister about Greenland: "In the exchange on Sunday, Norway's leader sought to 'de-escalate' the growing conflict over Greenland and Trump's latest tariff threat."

    • Jonathan Alter [01-21]: Greenland and the Benjamins: "There's a method behind Trump's madness and it's colored green." Greenland has lots of physical assets, and very few people to claim them, which makes the land ideal for Trump's kind of graft. Sure, this fits roughly into "an 19th and 18th century imperialism tradition, where big countries and big businessmen use these smaller and weaker countries to extract resources." But that's only part of the hustle:

      The new way they want to do this, ultimately, is through what are called crypto-states. The reason that Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, who was a drug dealer, was because he and other conservatives in Honduras, plus Peter Thiel (JD Vance's mentor) and like-minded free-enterprise authoritarians (no longer a contradiction in terms) in the U.S., favor the establishment of an island state off the coast of Honduras that would be backed by non-transparent crypto and free of any regulation by the Honduran government.

      The goal now is to do the same with other countries, to create crypto-states attached to the Marshall Islands, Nigeria, Panama (one of the reasons Trump is going after the canal) and Greenland.

      These crypto-states would be unregulated, yielding huge profits not just for crypto bros, but for companies trying to extract resources, and for the politicians (and their families) who helped them do so.

    • Pavel Devyatkin [01-21]: Trump's threats against Greenland: When "national security" becomes imperial expansion: "America has become the threat its own allies need protection from."

    • Lukas Slothuus [01-21]: Trump's Greenland push is about global power, not resources: Interesting info here on mining on Greenland, which seems like a very long-term proposition at best. I don't really buy the "global power" argument either, at least beyond the matter of Trump ego.

    • Matt Stieb [01-25]: Will Trump's Greenland deal come with any actual benefits: Evidently, on his way home from Davos, Trump backed down from his Greenland threats and claimed victory with some kind of nebulous deal. Malte Humpert tries to explain.

    PS: An old friend of mine wrote on Facebook:

    I don't always agree with what President Trump says, but I trust him to do the right thing. As a 20 year military veteran, I know that Greenland is a vital part of our global defense. This share shows a long history of our involvement in Greenland. I believe Trump wants some form of alliance, treaty or more to secure our defense as well as the citizens of Greenland.

    I wrote a comment on this, but when I returned to Facebook, the post had disappeared:

    I never trust Trump to do the right thing. Even when he gets boxed in and forced to make a decent gesture, as when he finally told the Jan. 6 rioters to go home, he makes plain his discomfort. But the argument that there is some defense necessity for seizing Greenland is a flat out lie. The US already has all the alliances and treaties needed to build any imaginable defense network in Greenland. Moreover, the way he's going about this threatens to break NATO apart, which if you buy any of the US "defense" dogma is a much bigger risk than any possible gain in Greenland. I don't know what Trump's real reason for his aggressive pressure on Greenland is, because nothing I can think of makes much sense (even given his clearly deranged mind), but one thing I am sure of is that it has nothing to do with defense.

  • Peter Kornbluh [01-13]: Trump's predatory danger to Latin America: "The United States is now a superpower predator on the prowl in its "backyard."

  • Leah Schroeder [01-14]: Trump's quest to kick America's 'Iraq War Syndrome': "Experts say the 'easy' Venezuela operation is reminiscent of George H.W. Bush's 1989 invasion of Panama, which in part served to bury the ghosts of Vietnam." Not a very precise analogy, not least because it involves forgetting that the Panama operation wasn't as fast and easy as they'd like to remember. But even there, the key to success was getting out quickly — a lesson they ignored in invading Afghanistan and Iraq. But thus far, Venezuela is a far more limited operation than Panama was. It's more akin to the "butcher and bolt" small wars Max Boot writes about in his 2002 book, The Savage Wars of Peace, which was meant to affirm that "small wars" always work out fin, so don't worry, just fly off the handle and let the chips fly. Of course, at that point Afghanistan was still a "small war" in its "feel good" days, and Iraq was just another hypothetical cakewalk. Thus far, there is a big gap between what the US has done in Venezuela and Trump's talk about running the country. If he's serious, and with him it's impossible to tell, he's not going to kick anti-war syndrome, but revive it.

  • Edward Markey [01-15]: Donald Trump's nuclear delusions: "The president wants to resume nuclear testing. Is he a warmonger or just an idiot?"

  • Valerie Insinna [01-16]: First Trump-class battleship could cost over $20 billion: That's the CBO estimate, with follow-on ships in the $9-13 billion range.

    • Alfred McCoy [01-20]: Trump's foreign policy, the comic book edition: "How to read Scrooge McDuck in the age of Donald Trump." Refes back to Ariel Dorman's famous Marxist critique of capitalism, How to Read Donald Duck (1971). Plus ça change, . . .

    • Mike Lofgren [01-21]: The Trump-class battleship: Worst idea ever: "It's not just ruinously expensive; it would weaken the Navy." This opening is pretty amusing, but it's also rather sad to see critics resort to Bush-Obama-Biden madness to argue against Trump madness:

      It is virtually impossible to name a single initiative of Donald Trump's that isn't either supremely stupid or downright satanic. From dismantling public health to pardoning criminals who ransacked the U.S. Capitol to brazen international aggression, Trump and his toadies seem hell-bent on destroying the country. With help from Pete Hegseth and other Trump lackeys in the Pentagon, the president has set his sights on weakening the military that Republicans claim to love so fervently.

      I agree that they're "hell-bent on destroying the country," but I'd caution against confusing the country with the Navy. What I see in the battleship is a probably futile attempt to take a real and inevitable decline in strength and dress it up as egomaniacal bluster, especially as the latter's existence will surely tempt the egomaniac-in-chief to use it.

  • Peter Kornbluh [01-21]: Is Cuba next? "As the US attempts to reassert its imperial hegemony across the hemisphere, Havana is clearly in its crosshairs."

Trump Regime: Practically every day I run across disturbing, often shocking stories of various misdeeds proposed and quite often implemented by the Trump Administration -- which in its bare embrace of executive authority we might start referring to as the Regime. Collecting them together declutters everything else, and emphasizes the pattern of intense and possibly insane politicization of everything. Pieces on the administration.

  • Matt Sledge [11-26]: This commission that regulates crypto could be just one guy: an industry lawyer: "Mike Selig had dozens of crypto clients. Now he will be a key industry regulator."

  • Zack Beauchamp [12-03]: The dark reality behind Trump's new anti-immigrant policies: "His administration is now openly advancing a worldview built by white nationalists in the 2010s."

  • Umair Irfan [12-04]: Trump's anti-climate agenda is making it more expensive to own a car: "The president hates EVs. But is policies are making gas cars more expensive too."

  • Dylan Scott [12-05]: RFK Jr.'s anti-vax committee is recklessly overhauling childhood vaccine policy: "America's vaccine playbook is being written by people who don't believe in them."

  • Sara Herschander [12-05]: 200,000 additional children under 5 will die this year — thanks to aid cuts: "The historic increase in global child deaths, explained in one chart."

  • Cameron Peters [12-10]: The "Trump Gold Card," briefly explained: "A fast-tracked green card — for $1 million." Of course, where there's gold, platinum is sure to follow.

  • Merrill Goozner [12-17]: Trump's concepts of a non-plan on health care: "The so-called Great Health Care Plan would do next to nothing to lower overall costs or premiums paid by individuals, families, and employers."

  • Christian Paz [12-18]: Is the Trump administration just a reality TV show? "What influencers can tell us about Trump's second term." Inerview with Danielle Lindemann

  • Avishay Artsy/Noel King [12-21]: What does Trump's AI czar want? "David Sacks, Trump's go-to adviser on all things tech, may help decide who wins the AI race between the US and China." I seriously doubt there is an actual race, except perhaps to determine which vision of the future bottoms out first. A race implies a set of common goals. In America, the goal is what it always is: to build shareholder value for the companies that control the technology. In China, that may be part of it, but they may also have other factors to consider. Sacks is also "crypto czar," so he's no doubt up on all kinds of scams.

  • Dylan Scott [12-29]: The year measles came back.

  • Sophia Tesfaye [12-31]: Project 2025 has been a success — with the help of the press: "Too often, mainstream journalists treated Project 2025 as a claim to be adjudicated rather than a document to be analyzed. They asked whether it was 'Trump's plan' instead of examining how likely its proposals were to be implemented by a Trump administration staffed with its authors." Related here:

    • Amanda Becker/Orion Rummler/Mariel Padilla [12-22]: How much of Project 2025 has actually been accomplished this year? Quite a bit, but I think the key thing was how quickly and forcefully Trump seized control of and politicized the federal bureaucracy — something that conventional rules should have made very difficult. The key thing here was not just the policies being defined, but the personnel being lined up for a blitzkrieg. I don't think that DOGE was part of the Project 2025 plan, but it built on the model of seizing executive control, including the power to fire people and impound funds, thereby gaining an unprecedented amount of political control. So even if the media had recognized that Project 2025 was the master plan, and debunked Trump's denials of relationship or interest, they still would have come up short in anticipating the threat. I think that's because they had little insight into just who the Republicans were, and how committed they were to what they saw as their mission to save America and remold it in their own image. They knew full well that had Harris won, a good 80% of the issues she campaigned on would never have gotten off the ground — as indeed had been the case with Clinton, Obama, and Biden. Democratic campaign failures are not just due to the perfidy of the politicians. It's also because to change anything significant, they have to buck a lot of established but well hidden power centers (especially business lobbies). Republicans don't have that problem, and can easily ignore countervailing forces like unions, so they're able to move much more forcefully than Democrats or the media could ever imagine.

  • Miles Bryan [01-02]: How the US shut the door on asylum-seekers: "One of the most consequential changes to immigration in the US under Trump, explained." Interview with Mica Rosenberg, of ProPublica. I have several thoughts on this, including a certain amount of sympathy with the feeling that the US should limit the number of people it gives asylum to. But sure, I disapprove of the callousness and cruelty that Trump is campaigning on. There should be a universally recognized right to exile. One thing this would do is provide a firmer standard of applicability than the notion that anyone who has fears should be eligible for asylum. Also, from the exile's viewpoint, it shouldn't matter where they move, as long as the conditions that led to exile no longer exist. A right to exile doesn't mean a right to move to the US, or any other specific country. You could come up with a formula to make the distribution more equitable. You could also allow rich countries to pay other countries to fulfill their obligations. But this also sets up some criteria for rich countries to calibrate aid in ways that generate fewer exiles. That could include reducing gang crime, overhauling justice systems, promoting civil liberties, reducing group strife, restricting guns, better economic policies with wider distribution of wealth. The main forces driving people to emigrate are war, repression, economics, and climate change. Asylum policy, for better or worse, only treats the symptoms, not the problems. If Trump was serious about reducing the number of asylum seekers, he'd change his foreign policy (especially viz. Venezuela, but Somalia is another glaring example) to help people stay where they are.

  • Cameron Peters [01-05]: Trump's big change to childhood vaccines, briefly explained.

  • Arwa Mahdawi [01-13]: Stephen Miller wants us to fear him. Speaking of Miller:

  • Umair Irfan [01-14]: Trump's EPA is setting the value of human health to $0: "The agency's new math to favor polluters, explained." The whole idea of trying to run a cost-benefit analysis on public health hazards has always been fraught with moral hazard: who can, or should, say how much government or business should spend to save a life, or one's heath? There's no valid answer, and much room for debate in adjusting the cost-benefit models, there are two answers that are certainly wrong: infinity, which would make it impossible to do anything, no matter how unlikely the risks, and $0, which would allow everything, no matter how grave the risks. Trump's cronies just picked one of the wrong answers — the one that best fits their model of corruption. This is one of the worst things Trump has done to date. Moreover, this is going to have longer term consequences beyond the Trump administration: any project approved under these rules will be all that much harder, and more expensive, to kill in the future, and the sunk costs will be unrecoverable.

  • Cameron Peters [01-14]: The latest on Trump's weaponization of the DOJ, briefly explained: "A big week for Trump's DOJ doing what he wants."

  • Emma Janssen [01-16]: The student loan report the Trump administration didn't want published: "CFPB's whitewash of the report comes on the heels of repeated attempts to fire virtually the entire staff and defund the agency. . . . The bulk of the deleted content from Barnard's report focuses on the struggles borrowers face and the private student loan companies that exacerbate them."

  • Ryan Cooper [01-20]: How Trump doomed the American auto industry: "Ford and GM made a big bet on electrification. Then Trump plunged a knife into their backs."

    Almost all of the EV subsidies in the IRA were repealed, as part of Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Now, thanks to that betrayal, plus Trump's lunatic trade and foreign policy in general, the American auto industry is bleeding out. . . .

    Contrary to the triumphalism of various EV critics, all this horrendous waste does not mean that the global EV transition is now in question. As I have previously detailed, in 2025 a quarter of global car sales were EVs, led by Southeast Asia, where the EV share of new car sales in several nations has soared past the 40 percent mark, with many more nations just behind. China, the largest car market in the world, went from almost zero to more than half in just five years. America's failure to gain a serious toehold in EV production — particularly very cheap models — is a major reason why the Big Three's share of the global auto market has fallen from nearly 30 percent in 2000 to about 12 percent today, while China's share has risen from 2 percent to 42 percent.

  • Brandon Novick [01-23]: Encouraging crime: settlement rewards Medicare Advantage fraud.

  • Spencer Overton [01-23]: 12 ways the Trump administration dismantled civil rights law and the foundations of inclusive democracy in its first year.

  • Corey G Johnson [01-24]: Complaint accuses Trump's criminal attorney of "blatant" crypto conflict in his role at DOJ: "Todd Blanche ordered changes to crypto prosecutions while owning more than $150,000 in digital assets."

Donald Trump (Himself): As for Il Duce, we need a separate bin for stories on his personal peccadillos -- which often seem like mere diversions, although as with true madness, it can still be difficult sorting serious incidents from more fanciful ones.

  • David Dayen [10-28]: Here's what Trump's ballroom donors want: "A comprehensive rundown of Prospect reporting on the companies that gave to Trump's monument to himself on the White House grounds."

  • Cameron Peters [12-02]: Trump's confounding pardon of a drug lord, briefly explained: "The former president of Honduras was convicted of trafficking cocaine. Why did Trump pardon him?"

  • Rebecca Crosby & Noel Sims [12-04]: Trump Jr.-backed startup receives $620 million Pentagon loan. This is followed by a related piece, "Trump family crypto scheme runs into trouble."

  • Jason Linkins [12-06]: Hey, does anyone want to talk about Donald Trump's infirmities? "He's clearly slipping, mentally and physically, but the political press suddenly finds it less newsworthy that we have a woefully aging president."

  • Constance Grady [12-08]: The Kennedy Center Honors continue Trump's vengeance on liberal Hollywood.

  • John G Russell [12-12]: Sgt. Trump: The art of implausible deniability: Starts by quoting Sgt. Schultz from Hogan's Heroes ("I know nothing"), a claim I've heard Trump saying many times.

    One would think Americans would have had enough of Trump's falsehoods. Credited with telling 30,573 lies during his first term, he repeats them so relentlessly that the media, numbed by their frequency, no longer bothers to keep count.

    Lies may endure forever, but liars themselves are mortal. At 79, Trump's days in political power are numbered, yet the damage he has wrought will outlast him. We must brace ourselves for a post-Trump America, one that, I fear, may prove as corrosive as his current reign. The Pandora's box he has opened has unleashed a flood of white supremacism, misogyny, xenophobia, and transphobia, leaving Hope to cower meekly inside. Whether that pestilence can ever be contained again remains uncertain, particularly as it thrives on post-Obama white racial resentment and dreams of restored hegemony.

    I'm less concerned about the "Pandora's box," which I believe remains long-term decline even without the inhibitions that before Trump made it less visible, than by how difficult it's going to be to restore any measure of public trust. It is for this reason that Democrats along Clinton-Obama-Biden lines have been shown to be total failures. Most of what Trump has been able to do has been made possible by the view that Democrats cannot be trusted. One result is that it will be even harder for Democrats to regain that trust.

  • Christian Paz:

    • [12-12]: Trump's support is collapsing — but why? "How Trump's winning coalition is unraveling in real time." This is mostly theories, with three offered to explain parts of the "coalition" that have gone wobbly:

      1. Low-propensity voters
      2. Affordability voters
      3. "New entrant" voters

      But aren't these all just variants on the theme of people who simply didn't know any better? That such voters exist at all is an indictment of the Harris messaging campaign, and the conflicted, confusing, and apparently corrupt stances of many Democrats. For Democrats to regain a chance, they're going to have to campaign for votes, and not just expect Republicans to drive voters into their arms, while they raise cash and spend it on ads nobody can relate to. One more point here: "affordability" isn't the only issue that Trump misled voters on and has since proven them to be naive at best and more likely stupid: what about all the folks who thought they wee voting against the Biden-Harris war machine?

    • [12-29]: The most volatile group of voters is turning on Trump: "There's a new line dividing young Americans." New polling shows: "Younger Gen Z men are more pessimistic about the state of the nation." They're also "slightly less likely to disapprove of Donald Trump," but the numbers there are from 64% to 66% for their 23-29 elders.

  • Garrett Owen [12-18]: Kennedy Center board vote to rename venue after Trump: "The president's hand-picked board voted to add his name to the performing arts venue."

  • Heather Digby Parton

    • [12-18]: Trump's primetime speech was a master class in gaslighting: "The president's false claims about economic conditions are the latest indication that he's in serious trouble."

    • [12-21]: Trump's crackdown on the left has decades of precedent: "The Justice Department's plans to target leftist organizations is taking alarming shape." This was in response to Trump's NSPM-7 (a presidential memorandum on "Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence"), targeting the phantom "antifa organization" or maybe just the general idea that fascism — or Trump, since he's the prime example of fascism these days — should be opposed. (For more, see Trump's orders targeting anti-fascism aim to criminalize opposition.) The "decades of precedent" reflects how easy it's always been to red-bait supporters of labor unions, civil rights, world peace, and freedom of speech, but is that still the case? Trump repeats the magic words about "radical leftists" endlessly, but who still listens to them? His true believers, and a few shell-shocked liberals whose cowardice and lack of principles helped the red-baiters run roughshod over decent, reform-minded people.

    • [01-01]: Trump's cultural coup is doomed to fail: "Artists are protesting Trump's Kennedy Center takeover — and creating art in defiance of his repression."

    • [01-08]: War has become fashionable again for the GOP: "The right's detour into pacifism under Trump was never going to stick."

    • [01-15]: Trump is something worse than a fascist: She's pushing for "tyrant": "an ancient word that should nonetheless be familiar to anyone who recalls the founding ideals of this country." But finding the perfect epithet is not the real point: each one illuminates (or doesn't) some facet of a more complex and fractious whole. The question is whether it helps you understand the problem Trump presents. But once you do understand, they're all pretty much interchangeable.

  • Ron Flipkowski:

    • [12-26]: 25 worst villains of the Trump admin: "The most difficult part of this exercise was only picking 25." Nonetheless, your favorites are here, with Stephen Miller at 1 ("the easiest selection"), followed by Howard Lutnick, Pete Hegseth, Russ Vought, and Todd Blanche, with Kristi Noem and Tom Homan down at 8 and 9.

    • [12-27]: 500 worst things Trump did in 2025: "A comprehensive list": This is just the first 100, which still leaves us in February, with more than 300 employees of the National Nuclear Security Admin fired then reinstated after they realized "no one has taken any time to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation's national security. Also: "After JD Vance met with the co-leader of Germany's far-AfD party, one German expert here in Munich said: 'First, America de-Nazified Germany. Now, America is re-Nazifying Germany.'"

  • Zack Beauchamp [12-16]: Trump's war on democracy is failing: "And it's his own fault." Author diagnoses something he calls "haphazardism." I think he's trying to impose reason on madness. Trump doesn't really care whether he kills democracy as a concept, as long as it falls into place and does whatever he wants. Maybe if he did have a master plan to destroy democracy, he'd do a more effective job of it. But actually, he's pretty much succeeding, even if he suffers occasional setbacks by making it look inept and, well, haphazard. And while haphazardism isn't as ruthlessly efficient as, well, Hitler, its incoherence offers a bit of deniability that lets people so inclined to cut him some slack. One can say something similar about Israel and genocide. Ineptness and inefficiency seems to be part of the plan, but both in terms of intent and practice, that's exactly what they're doing. Just not as efficiently as, well, Hitler.

    Beauchamp spends a lot of time quoting the following piece, which I'd argue is a good example how focusing on ideological terms like "democracy" and "authoritarianism" misses the mark:

    • Steven Levitsky/Lucan A Way/Daniel Ziblatt [12-11]: The price of American authoritarianism. Levitsky splits hairs arguing that Trump is running an "authoritarian government" but not an "authoritarian regime," because Trump's "systematic and regular abuse of power" is "likely to be 'reversed' in the near future." That's a novel definition of "regime," the only purpose being to posit a hypothetical system even worse than Trump's. I tend to use "regime" to describe any government, however stable or fleeting, that flaunts and abuses its power. Trump may not do that 100% of the time, but he's gone way beyond any previous norms, which is why I'm more inclined to say "regime" than "administration." What's new with Trump isn't ideology but an opportunism that is rooted in a gangster mentality: the power has long been there when presidents want to abuse it, but Trump has done so to an unprecedented degree. That's because gangsters believe in force, don't believe in limits, and pursue wealth and power until someone stops them.

  • Cameron Peters [01-06]: Trump's January 6 victory lap: "Five years later, the White House is still rewriting January 6."

  • Dustin DeSoto/Astead Herndon [01-07]: How Trump brought the World Cup to America: "The Trump-FIFA connection, explained."

  • Moustafa Bayoumi [01-13]: 2026 is already pure chaos. Is that Trump's electoral strategy? The key argument here is that Trump wants to take the challenge of making himself the central issue in the 2026 Congressional elections. This shows a degree of partisan commitment that recent Democratic presidents never even hinted at. Trump understands that he needs loyal Republicans to implement his extremist programs, whereas the Democrats rarely tried to do anything Republicans didn't buy into. It also expresses confidence that Trump's charisma is so strong he can motivate his most clueless voters to come out and vote as he directs. That's a big ask given that Democrats have been much more motivated in midterms where Republican presidents were the issue (e.g., in 2006 and 2018). It also depends on Trump being much more popular in November 2026 than he is now, or ever has been.

  • Sasha Abramsky [01-16]: The week of colonial fever dreams from a sundowning fascist: "The news was a firehose of stories of authoritarian behavior. We can't let ourselves drown."

  • New York Times Editorial Board [01-17]: For Trump, justice means vengeance: Well, where do you think he ever got such a stupid idea? It's almost impossible to watch a cop or law and order show and not be told that the good guy's chief motivation is "to get justice" for someone. And that almost always boils down to vengeance. I've never managed to read John Rawls' much-admired A Theory of Justice, which evidently ties justice to a concept of fairness, but I'm probably fairly close in asserting that the point of justice is to restore one's faith in the fair ordering of society. That suggests to me that the pursuit of justice can never be attained by simply balancing off injustices. Any punishment the state metes out must make the state appear to be more just than it appeared before. Vengeance doesn't do that. Vengeance just compounds injustice, in the vain hope that somehow two wrongs can make a right. Ergo, Trump's pursuit of vengeance (or redemption, as he often calls it), is anti-justice.

    PS: In looking up Rawls, I see that Robert Paul Wolff wrote Understanding Rawls: A Reconstruction and Critique of A Theory of Justice (1977). That's out of print, but probably the place to start. I read several of Wolff's books early on — A Critique of Pure Tolerance, The Poverty of Liberalism, In Defense of Anarchism — probably before I went to college. Those books showed me that it was possible to derive intuitively correct moral postulates from reason alone, and that in turn convinced me to use reason to try to find my way out of schizophrenia (at least as Bateson defined it). More than anything else, I owe those books my life, and what little I have accomplished in the 55 years since I read them.

    By the way, here's a brief quote from Wolff's A Credo for Progressives:

    The foundation of my politics is the recognition of our collective interdependence. In the complex world that we have inherited from our forebears, it is often difficult to see just how to translate that fundamental interdependence into laws or public policies, but we must always begin from the acknowledgement that we are a community of men and women who must care for one another, work with one another, and treat the needs of each as the concern of all.

    In my formulation of this, "complex" is of critical importance, as the more complex life becomes, the more trust matters, and that in turn depends on justice, in the sense of confirming that the world is ordered in a fair and reasonable manner.

  • Melvin Goodman [01-19]: Donald Trump, poster child for megalomania:

    Megalomaniac: Someone with an extreme obsession for power, wealth, and self-importance, characterized by grandiose delusions of being more significant or powerful than they are, often linked to a tenuous grip on reality.

    "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." H.L. Mencken, "Baltimore Evening Sun," 1920.

    The mainstream media continues to describe Donald Trump as an "isolationist," or a "neo-conservative," or more recently as an "imperialist." These terms are irrelevant; the term that should be applied is "megalomaniac" or "narcissist." These terms fit Trump and help to understand the threat he poses to the peace and security of the United States and much of the global community.

    As he notes, "Trump's narcissism has been on display for decades. What turns narcissism into megalomania is power.

  • Harold Meyerson [01-20]: 25th Amendment time for Mad King Donald: "His narcissism has become psychotically megalomaniacal." I expect a regular stream of 25th Amendment pieces, but the chances of his hand-picked cabinet of cronies taking his keys away are extremely slim, even if he was basically a good sport, which he isn't. His staff are even less likely to move against him (as we saw with Biden). And sure, this article mentions Mad King George III, but not that he ruled for 43 years after he lost the American colonies in 1776.

  • Ed Kilgore [01-22]: Trump only accepts polls that proclaim his greatness. Trump polls seem to be part of Kilgore's beat:

  • Trump in Davos:

    • Sasha Abramsky [01-23]: At Davos, the world watched the rantings of a despot: "President Donald Trump has turned his back on the liberal world order — and Europe is unlikely to follow." While I don't doubt that Europe would be wise to break with Trump, I'm not optimistic, either that they will, or that they'll opt for something better. Right now, Europe is much more hawkish over Ukraine than the US is. While Obama did most of the dirty work in Libya, it was largely at Europe's behest — Libya meant little to the US (or Israel), but much to France and Italy. More generally, while Europe is more "social democratic" than the US, in theory at least, the EU is pretty completely in thrall to neoliberal ideologists, and the continent is chock full of revanchist right-wing parties, making it more likely that an anti-US backlash will come from the right than from the left.

    • Heather Souvaine Horn [01-23]: Trump's terrifying Davos speech is a wake-up call to the global elite: "The World Economic Forum has long suggested that its annual lavish party is about saving the world. Trump just shredded that myth."

    • Sasha Abramsky [01-23]: At Davos, the world watched the rantings of a despot: "President Donald Trump has turned his back on the liberal world order — and Europe is unlikely to follow."

    • Margaret Hartmann [01-21]: The 12 stupidest moments from Trump's Davos speech.

  • Margaret Hartmann: She's been busy of late, as her main theme is "Trump's stupidest moments":

We should also make brief mention of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's Davos speech, which provided a stark contrast and a rare moment of opposition to Trump:

Democrats:

  • Timothy Shenk [09-29]: Democrats are in crisis. Eat-the-rich populism is the only answer. Much here on Dan Osborn, whose independent campaign for a Senate seat from Nebraska in 2024 fell 7 points short, in a state where Trump beat Harris by 20. His pitch: "a blistering assault on economic elites, a moderate stance on cultural issues and the rejection of politics as usual." But he also talks about Mamdani, and what they have in common. This is the first piece in a series, which doesn't look all that promising — devoted Israel war hawk Josh Shapiro is "the future of the Democrats"?

  • Zach Marcus [11-12]: Draining the online swamp: "Instead of accepting the existing digital political battlefield as inevitable, Democrats should challenge it as a root cause of our dysfunctional politics, and vow to be the party that cleans it up." When I saw this article, I was hoping for something rather different, but this is a big subject, with many components, and eventually some things that I would focus on do show up in the fine print. But the key points are: (1) the online cybersphere is indeed a swamp, where money functions like water in physical swamps, and could just as well be drained; (2) Democrats should see draining this swamp as a political opportunity, not with a view toward biasing politics in their direction, but because the swamp is imposing hardships on literally everyone. A large book could be written about this: abuse comes in many forms, but it mostly comes down to attempts to profit: to sell or solicit, directly or through by exploiting information. One should take care, as few politicians do, not to impose their own moral and political stances. But any serious effort to cut back the scams and fraud is bound to be popular, and how hard can it be to have a significant impact? What is hard is getting Democrats to see that they need to do a much better job of serving their voters than their current focus, which is raising money from the exploiters.

  • Virginia Heffernan [12-05]: No, progressives don't want "purity." They just want some courage. "When left-leaning Democrats complain about corporate influence, it's not a 'purity test.' It's a demand for a better politics."

  • Elizabeth Warren [01-12]: Elizabeth Warren's Plan for a Revived Democratic Party: "The Massachusetts senator argues that, in order to prevail in the midterms, the party needs to recover its populist roots — and fighting spirit."

  • Erica Etelson [01-15]: Democrats really can compete in rural America: "The results for the 2025 election cycle send a powerful message regarding strategies that connect outside of urban centers." Given who they're running against, Democrats should be able to compete in literally every district in America.

  • Perry Bacon [01-21]: Abigail Spanberger's first move as Virginia Gov. was a masterstroke: "Even moderate Democrats can be boldly anti-MAGA. Other centrist Democrats should follow her example." What she did was move to force the resignation of several Republican appointees to university boards. That's the sort of thing Trump has done like crazy, and the people she's replacing are the sort of partisan hacks Trump has been appointing.

Republicans: A late addition, back by popular demand, because it isn't just Trump, we also have to deal with the moral swamp he crawled out of:

Economy and technology (especially AI): I used to have a section on the economy, which mostly surveyed political economics. Lately, I run across pieces on AI pretty often, both in terms of what the technology means and is likely to do and in terms of its outsized role in the speculative economy. I suspect that if not now then soon we will recognize that we are in a bubble driven by AI speculation, which is somewhat masking a small recession driven largely by Trump's shutdown, tariffs, and inflation. In such a scenario, there are many ways to lose.

  • Robert Wright [01-23]: Which AI Titan should you root for? He makes something of a case for Demis Hassabis ("head of Google's DeepMind"). While the technology is difficult enough to understand, the business models are even harder to grasp, because they are based on very large bets on very strange fantasies of world domination. In this world, even a tiny bit of self-conscious scruples seems to count for a lot. Still, this is shaping up as a race to the bottom, where even tiny scruples will be quickly discarded as signs of weakness.

  • Jez Corden [11-29]: OpenAI is a loss-making machine, with estimates that it has no road to profitability by 2030 — and will need a further $207 billion in funding even if it gets there. I'm not even trying to follow things like this, but somehow found the tab open, and decided to note before closing. My impression is that most tech companies over the last 30-40 years have been overvalued without a realistic profit path, but a small number of survivors seem to be reaping the monopoly rents the speculators hoped for. Still, it wouldn't be hard to deflate them if we had the insight and political will.

  • Robert Kuttner [12-01]: Sources of America's hidden inflation: "How market power jacks up prices, and how Trump's policies add to the pressure." I've been alluding to this often of late, so it's nice to see so many of these points being made.

  • Ronald Purser [12-01]: AI is destroying the university and learning itself: "Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education." I'm not sure this is the right analysis, and not just because I don't have much love for the old meritocracy that is being wrecked, and not just becuase it never secured much merit in the first place. The "system" has always been crooked, which is something folks with the right skills or hunches have always been able to take advantage of. AI changes the rules, which means that different strategies and different people will win, and some of that will seem unjust. I personally know of a recent case in Arkansas where an AI program was used by a school to detect possible AI use and falsely accused the bright daughter of a friend of cheating. We had a long and fruitless discussion after this on how can someone so charged prove that the AI program is wrong, but the more important question is why does it matter? Which gets us back to politics: in your hypothetical meritocracy, do you want the "merit" (for more people) or the "ocracy" (to empower and enrich the few)? The stock bubble behind the AI companies assumes that AI can be monopolized (kept artificially scarce) allowing its masters extraordinary powers over everyone else. Does anyone but a few monomaniacal entrepreneurs actually want that? Much more that can be unpacked here.

    As for the death of higher education, Jane Jacobs analyzed that in her 2004 book, Dark Age Ahead, where higher education was one of the five "pillars of civilization" she identified decay in (the others were: community and family; science; government; and culture. In education, she blamed the focus shifting from learning to credentialism. I think that shift largely happened in the 1980s, when conservatives decided that education should be reserved for elites, and enforced that by jacking up the costs to ordinary people, creating scarcity and desperation, while the rewards for avarice became ever greater. While AI may be useful as a tool for learning, its applicability to scamming credentialism is much more obvious. I'm not someone who believes that technology is "value neutral," but the values of the politico-socio-economic system do have profound effects on how any given technology is used.

  • Eric Levitz [12-17]: Can money buy Americans happiness? "The real cause of America's 'vibecession.'" Part of a series on The case for growth ("supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures"), the point of which is that the "degrowth movement" is wrong, because, well, "more is more." These arguments seem shallow to me. Sure, there are areas where growth would still help. But there are other areas where all you really need is better distribution. And there are other areas where we already have too much, and would be better off slowing down, or even reversing course. To my mind, "degrowth" is a useful conceptual tool, one that moves beyond the kneejerk notion that growth fixes everything. Some (not all) more pieces in the series:

    • Andrew Prokop [12-12]: Why America gave up on economists: "Both parties have turned their backs on traditional economic advice. Is the country paying the price?" Seems like a lot of false equivalence here. Republicans use economists to ratify their schemes, and sometimes applaud a crackpot idea that they can use (e.g., the Laffer Curve), but they make little pretense of following economics, and will readily dispose of any arguments that question their pet projects (like Trump's tariffs). Clinton and Obama, on the other hand, sought out neoliberal economists and gave them a lot of power, because they start from shared pro-business principles. Biden too, except that a few past figures (like Larry Summers) have been discredited. Prokop offers an example where Democrats supposedly have broken with economic orthodoxy, but I've never seen any evidence of it: price controls. (Unless he means rent control, which is a way to address certain market failures?)

    • Bryan Walsh [12-06]: Breaking free of zero-sum thinking will make America a wealthier country: "The affordability crisis is a growth crisis." Title is true. Subtitle is false, stuck in a mindset that sees growth as a panacea. That so much is unaffordable is only partly due to scarcity (which in many cases is deliberately imposed). It's mostly due to systematic maldistribution.

    • Marina Bolotnikova [12-19]: We need to grow the economy. We need to stop torching the planet. Here's how we do both. "Let's fix the two massive efficiency sinks in American life." She identifies those two "sinks" as "animal agriculture" and cars, and spends most of the article attacking them (and implicitly those of us who like and want them), all the while insisting that vital growth would be much better elsewhere.

  • Ryan Cooper [12-23]: Bari Weiss is the propagandist Donald Trump deserves: "The would-be dictator would get a much better class of censor if his regime didn't hoist the biggest morons in the country in to leadership positions." I'm reminded of an old adage attributed to David Ogilvy: "First-rate people hire first-rate people. Second-rate people hire third-rate people." That's far enough down the slope to make the point, although with Trump and his flunkies, perhaps you should denote inferior classes. Trump seems to hire people who are unfit for any other job. Sure, Weiss only indirectly works for Trump, but his worldview infects his supporters.

  • James Baratta [01-08]: Ransomware recovery firms share in the hacking spoils: "Incident response firms negotiate with hackers while also processing payments to them, leading to potential betrayals of their clients' trust." Sounds like the principal-agent problem, or more specifically the risks of trusting agents who are also paid by other sources (which is most of them these days, even without considering self-interest conflicts). Needless to say, the problem is worse in high-inequality societies, especially where marginal variations take on considerable importance. The greater the inequality, the harder it is to trust anyone. America is more inequal now than ever before, which is reflected in the dissolution of trust.

  • Adam Clark Estes [01-10]: AI's ultimate test: Making it easier to complain to companies: "Imagine actually enjoying a customer service experience." Sure, it could work, sometimes. I like the idea of being able to get answers without having to interact with workers, but I've rarely connected with something the robots could actually answer or handle, so we spend a lot of time thrashing, which is aggravating to me, but of course neither the machine nor the company care. AI is mostly used these days to insulate companies from human contact with customers, and to train customers into expecting less service. Perhaps if we had competitive companies, such tactics would be self-limiting, but more and more we don't.

  • Constance Grady [01-10]: Grok's nonconsensual porn proble is part of a long, gross legacy: "Elon Musk claims tech needs a 'spicy mode' to dominate. Is he right?"

  • Harold Meyerson [01-19]: A new low for American workers: "The share of American income going to labor is at its lowest level since measurements began."

  • Jeffrey Selingo [01-20]: The campus AI crisis: "Young graduates can't find jobs. Colleges know they have to do something. But what?" Starts with a young college graduate who applied to 150 jobs, to no avail. "How much AI is to blame for the fragile entry-level job market is unclear." The author sees an analogy to his own college years, 1991-94, when the Internet suddenly became a big thing, causing disruptions as colleges had to scramble to seem relevant — as they are doing now with programs like "AI Fluency." I'm afraid I don't have any insight here. AI still strikes me as a lot of hype wrapped around a few parlor tricks, most of which have very little relevance to the core economy of goods and services. But then no one can see the future, or even the present. All we can do is look back, and try to imagine what that portends. But the 1990s analogy reminds me of Robert Reich's 1991 book The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, where he came up the the idiotic idea that we didn't need manufacturing jobs anymore, because we'd just get high-paying jobs as "symbolic manipulators" and everything would be wonderful. His buddy Bill Clinton read that and saw it as a green light to implement NAFTA. We're still reeling from the consequences of Reich's fantasy. (Clinton may have realized what would happen to US manufacturing, and simply not cared, but was he prescient enough to anticipate the damage to Mexican agriculture, the subsequent explosion of emigration to the US, and the repercussions for American jobs and politics?) About the only thing I'm sure of viz. AI is that if Reich's cornucopia of "symbolic manipulator" jobs had occurred, AI would devastate them, because symbolic manipulation is literally all that AI does and can ever do. Sure, it may, like all stages since the dawn of computing, contribute some productivity, but we'll still depend on real people doing real work for everything we need to sustain life.

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

Spencer Kornhaber [05-05]: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture? "An emerging critical consensus argues that we've entered a cultural dark age. I'm not so sure." I don't recall why I opened this loose tab — possibly because the article opens with a quote from Ted Gioia, who used to be a reliable Jazz Critics Poll voter but abandoned us as he became a Substack star. So, unable to read the piece, I asked Google to summarize it, and got this gibberish back:

Spencer Kornhaber's "Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?" argues that modern pop culture suffers from stagnation, cynicism, isolation, and attention rot, driven by nostalgia-focused economics (IP, old music catalogs), identity politics stifling creativity, technology fostering loneliness, and algorithmic distractions eroding focus, leading to a "gilded age" of superficially polished but shallow content. While acknowledging real problems like AI and pandemic disruptions, Kornhaber explores this "narrative of decay" in music, film, and art, but also discusses potential counter-narratives and signs of hope. . . .

Kornhaber suggests these issues create a paradox: a Gilded Age where prestigious shows look amazing but lack substance, and where technological abundance paradoxically leads to cultural scarcity and decline. He questions if it's truly the worst era, but details the significant challenges facing creators and consumers, pointing to a breakdown in cultural progress and originality.

Google also offered a link to:

My own thought on this is that culture increasingly became wedded to big business over the 20th century, but the bindings have started to fall apart, as artists are becoming less dependent on capital, and capital is less able to profit from art. As a consumer, or just as a person with the luxury of some leisure time beyond what it takes to satisfy baser needs, I don't see this as, on balance, a particularly bad thing. While capitalism promoted art in the 20th century, there is every reason to expect art to continue being created even without the profit motive. The art will be different: it will be smaller, less flashy, more personal, more in tune with people's feelings, as opposed to the ubiquitous sales schemes of the culture industry. I can think of numerous examples, especially in jazz — which is much more vital as an art than as a business.

On the other hand, I'm pretty vigilant about picking the music I listen to, the video I see, the links I follow, and so on. So I'm inclined to think I'm relatively immune to the effects found in Kyle Chayka: Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, but it's hard to be sure, and they've certainly warped the size and shape of everyday culture. It's hard to maintain any semblance of control when you're constantly bombarded by too any options: a state which reduces both creators and consumers while extracting maximal shares for the platform.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro [10-18]: The culture wars came for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales is staying the course. Interview, airs out numerous political attacks on Wikipedia, mostly from people who don't understand facts, or who understand them all too well. Kurt Andersen linked to this, and commented: "Reading this Jimmy Wales interview reminded me in our Fantasyland age what a remarkable and important creation it is. True pillar of civilization. Runs on only $200 million a year. Requires out support. So I'm finally donating." By the way, Wales has a book, The Seven Rules of Trust: A Blueprint for Building Things That Last.

Current Affairs [07-16]: Rent control is fine, actually: "Regulating rent prices is often called 'bad economics.' But it isn't. The effects of rent control are complex." Unsigned, but substantial article, covering most of the bases. A still more obvious point is in the very name: although "rent" is a word most often used regarding housing, the word itself has more general economic significance, in that it represents any profits in excess of free competition. It is, in other words, a market failure, which can only be constrained by regulation.

Alex Skopic [10-09]: This is why you don't let libertarians run your country: "In Argentina, President Javier Milei has screwed the economy up so badly he needs a $20 billion bailout. That's because his 'free market' economics don't actually work."

Even more so than Donald Trump to his north, Milei was the kind of erratic crackpot you can see coming a mile off. This was a man who dressed up in a superhero suit to sing sad ballads about fiscal policy, "floated legalizing the sale of human organs" on the campaign trail, and told reporters he takes telepathic advice from his dogs, who are clones of his previous dog. You didn't need any special insight to know he wasn't leadership material. But even those personal foibles would be inoffensive, even charming, if Milei had a sound economic agenda. More than the psychic dogs or the yellow cape, the really unhinged thing about him was that he took libertarianism seriously, aiming to slash the functions of the Argentinian state wherever he could. Now, Milei is facing a spiraling series of crises, from unemployment to homelessness to the basic ability to manufacture anything. He should serve as a big, red alarm bell for people far beyond Argentina's shores — because right-wing leaders in the U.S. and Britain are explicitly modeling their economics on his, and if they're not stopped, they'll lead us to the same disastrous end point.

Bad as this sounds:

Dean Baker: This is mostly catching up, but doesn't include every post, especially in December, but most are worth noting:

  • [12-08]: In search of Donald Trump's booming economy: "Trump's claims of historic economic success collapse under data showing rising costs, declining manufacturing, and no evidence of his imagined investment boom."

  • [12-13]: Jeff Bezos uses the Washington Post to promote inequality: "The Washington Post's defense of massive CEO pay illustrates how billionaire-owned media justify inequality despite weak evidence that it benefits workers, shareholders, or society." Refers to a column by Dominic Pino [12-11]: Starbucks's CEO was paid $95 million. It could be worth every cent. The rationale is: "Brian Niccol's compensation history reflects a turnaround skill that can mean billions of dollars."

  • [12-21]: How many manufacturing jobs has Trump actually lost? "More comprehensive employment data show manufacturing job losses under Trump may be worse than standard monthly reports suggest."

  • [12-23]: Donald Trump wants us to pay more for electricity because he is angry at windmills: "Trump's move to cancel wind projects will increase power costs, kill jobs, and slow the clean energy transition."

  • [12-27]: Washington Post's Trumpian ideology boils over: "A critique of Washington Post editorials that distort healthcare and EV economics to align with Trump-style ideology."

  • [12-28]: Did Mark Zuckerberg throw $77 billion of our money into the toilet? "Mark Zuckerberg's $77 billion Metaverse gamble wasn't just a corporate misstep, but a massive diversion of talent and resources with real economic costs as Big Tech now pours even more money into AI." I think what he's saying here is that when a company blows a huge amount of money, that's not just a book loss for the investors, it's also an opportunity loss for everyone. I'm not sure where he wants to go with this, but I'm tempted to say that tech companies aren't necessarily good judges, especially as so many of their schemes are little better than scams.

  • [01-05]: Venezuela will pay for its own reconstruction: "Comparing Iraq in 2003 to Venezuela today shows that Trump's claims of an easy, self-financing intervention are far less believable than Bush's already-failed promises." While the analogies are too obvious to ignore, the differences may matter more. In 2003, there were real fears of running low on oil, so bringing more oil to market could be seen as a general economic gain, even if the oil companies would prefer to just drive the prices up. But we have a glut of oil right now, and that's with Venezuela, Iran, and Russia largely out of the market. So I wouldn't bet on Trump wanting to reconstruct Venezuela, regardless of who plays for it.

  • [01-05]: Walz pulls out: chalk up another one for racism, coupled with Democratic Party and media ineptitude: "Tim Walz's exit shows how exaggerated fraud claims, media failure, and racialized politics can end Democratic careers."

  • [01-07]: Trump's United States as number three: "Trump's threats and economic bluster ignore the reality that the US is now only the world's third-largest economy and increasingly isolated from larger democratic blocs." Behind China and Europe (EU + United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Norway). Lots of smaller economies are also gaining ground: add them together and the US could slip a notch. Baker cites several examples where Trump's tariffs failed because the US simply didn't have the economic muscle to enforce them. That leaves American superiority in arms, which may explain why Trump is becoming increasingly trigger-happy, but converting that to genuine economic power may be difficult:

    Ordinarily, the old line about herding cats would apply here, but a government that claims it can do anything it has the military force to do can help focus minds. Hitler managed to bring together Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. Trump may have a comparable effect in uniting the world today.

  • [01-08]: Donald Trump's $6 trillion tax hike and increase in military spending: "Trump's $600 billion military plan would be financed by higher tariffs that raise prices for US consumers." But surely it wouldn't just be tariffs paying for this. Income taxes are a more practical option. If that's impossible, and it goes straight to the deficit, won't it ultimately be paid for with inflation? And what about opportunity costs? Imagine spending that kind of money on something actually useful. Then, of course, there are risks: the chance that some of these extra weapons will be used in wars, and everything that entails. Risks on that level cannot even be hedged against.

  • [01-09]: Jobs report and remembering Renee Good "The official response to the killing of Renee Good — marked by falsehoods from Trump administration figures — signals a dangerous erosion of accountability for state violence."

  • [01-12]: Three bad items and three good items in the December jobs report: "The December jobs report shows a softening labor market, with higher underemployment offset by lower unemployment and slightly faster wage growth."

  • [01-12]: Donald Trump, Mineral Man, vs. sodium batteries: "Trump's mineral strategy is undermined by China's move toward sodium batteries that make lithium less critical."

  • [01-13]: The billionaires and the November election: "Markets barely reacted after Trump moved to threaten the independence of the Federal Reserve."

  • [01-14]: Trump takes responsibility for post-pandemic inflation: Trump's attempt to blame Biden for inflation nearly a year into his term undercuts his own record and exposes the lagged effects of Trump-era policies."

  • [01-15]: Can the AI folks save democracy? "The AI stock bubble is sustaining Trump's political support — and its collapse could change US politics fast."

  • [01-16]: We're paying the tariffs #53,464: "Import price data confirm that Trump's tariffs are largely a tax on Americans, not foreign countries.

  • [01-19]: Trump wants to hit us with a huge tax hike for his demented Greenland dreams: "Trump's Greenland fixation would hit Americans with a massive tariff tax while serving no real security or economic purpose."

  • [01-19]: Time for Europe to use the nuclear option: Attack US patent and copyright monopolies: "Trump's Greenland obsession would raise prices for Americans, while Europe has a far more effective response by suspending US patent and copyright protections." As I noted under Greenland above, this is the kind of medicine that's actually good for you.

  • [01-21]: Patent applications drop 9.0 percent in 2025: not good news: I doubt the signal here is as strong as Baker thinks, but that Trump is having a negative impact on research and development is almost certainly true, and only likely to get worse. The obvious one is that many (most?) engineers in America are immigrants, and Trump is trying to drive them away. He's also undermining education, and any sort of culture of innovation. His tariffs help companies profit without having to compete, and amnesty for criminals will only make fraud more attractive. But I don't feel sad here, because I think patents are bad in general. By the way, Baker also has a section on "The Imagined Crisis: China Running Out of People." This is, of course, wrong on many levels.

  • [01-23]: Spending under Trump: drugs up, factories down. Trump claims "he lowered drug prices 1,500 percent and we're bringing in $18 trillion in foreign investment." The former is mathematically impossible, and the latter is nearly as absurd. And that's without even going into the question of what foreign investment does to a country: mostly it means that they own it, and now you're working for them.

  • [01-24]: Mark Carney: world hero: a take on the Canadian Prime Minister's Davos speech, also noted elsewhere.

  • [01-25]: When it comes to the stock market, Trump is a loser.

  • [01-26]: Doing well by doing good: dump your American stocks.

  • [01-27]: Donald Trump's $300 billion temper tantrum over Canada: "Feel like paying another $2,400 a year in taxes because an old man suffering from dementia got humiliated? . . . Donald Trump is threatening to impose a 100 percent tax (tariff) on items we import from Canada.".

Ray Moulton [12-30]: Children and helical time: Starts with a chart which asserts that half of your subjective experience of life occurs in childhood, between age 5 ("start of long term memory") and 20 ("midpoint of subjective life"). The math is just a log function. The question is whether this intuitively makes sense. I'm not sure it does, and not sure it doesn't. Perhaps that's because most of the story is focused on kids, and I only know about being one, not about having them, or even much about living vicariously through other folks' kids. But I do feel that, in thinking about memory, I feel an intensity of focus between ages 5-20 that I lack for anything that came after then

Ian Millhiser: Vox's legal beat reporter, author of Injustices (2015). If he writes a sequel, it will be twice as long and only cover 10 years. Some more pieces filed elsewhere.

Pete Tucker [12-04]: How the game is played: Pull quote talks about how the Koch network put Antonin Scalia's name on the George Mason law school, and added something called "the Global Antitrust Institute" ("which works to ensure that Big Tech isn't broken apart like the monopoists of over a century ago"). But the article itself starts with a long prelude on Stephen Fuller, a Washington Post-favored pundit whose "quotes came cloaked in academic objectivity, owing to his dual titles as an economics professor at George Mason University and leader of the school's Center for Regional Analysis" (later renamed the Stephen S. Fuller Institute).

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [12-12]: Gaza Diary: They bulldozed mass graves and called it peace. The only things that are dated here are the number of Palestinians killed since the "cease fire," and the amount of money the US has spent in aid to Israel, including military operations in Yemen, Iran, and the wider region (then pegged at $31.35-$33.77 billion since 2023-10-07).

  • [12-19]: Roaming Charges: The politics of crudity and cruelty: Starts with a story about Rob Reiner, which leads into his murder, followed by Trump's tweet, where Reiner "passed away, together with his wife," after long suffering from "the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME." As St Clair notes:

    This is evidence of a sick mind: petty, petulant, crude and sadistic . . . but but also one that likely needed help writing this depraved attack on two people whose blood was still wet from having their throats slit by their own tormented son, since the words "tortured" "unyielding" and "affliction" don't come naturally to Trump's limited lexicon.

    Some more notes (and I'm writing this nearly a month after the fact):

    • In the last five years, the wealthiest 20 Americans increased their net worth from $1.3 trillion to $3 trillion. Whether the economic policies are those of the neoliberals or the Trump Republicans, the same people keep making out.

    • David Mamet has always been a jackass, but whatever's below rock bottom, he just hit it . . . [Reference to Mamet's piece, "Why Dr King, Malcolm X and Charlie Kirk were modern prophets."]

    • Erika Kirk, already a millionaire before the Lord Almighty claimed her husband, has raked in another $10 million+ since Charlie ascended to the heavens, according to a report in the Daily Mail. It really is the prosperity gospel!

    • John Cassidy, writing in the New Yorker, on how the Trump family ventures have cashed in on his presidency:

      As the anniversary of Donald Trump's return to the White House approaches, keeping up with his family's efforts to cash in is a mighty challenge. It seems like there is a fresh deal, or revelation, every week. Since many of the Trump or Trump-affiliated ventures are privately owned, we don't have a complete account of their finances. But in tracking company announcements, official filings, and the assiduous reporting of several media outlets, a clear picture emerges: enrichment of the First Family on a scale that is unprecedented in American history . . . in terms of the money involved, the geographic reach, and the explicit ties to Presidential actions — particularly Trump's efforts to turn the United States into the "crypto capital of the world" — there has never been anything like the second term of Trump, Inc.

  • [12-25]: Goodbye to language: the year in Trumpspeak. The earth's atmosphere is divided into various layers — troposphere, stratosphere, ionosphere (which now seems to be subsumed into the mesosphere) — as the density of air changes various physical properties. Perhaps we could subdivide the media into analogous layers. One would be the Trumposphere: the fantasy realm where only what Trump says — and to some extent what others say about Trump, although that's reported mostly to keep the focus on Trump — and this seems to account for at least a third of all "national" news. This is a long piece which offers pretty comprehensive documentation of 2025 in the Trumposphere. It is horrifying, or would be if you weren't so used to it by now.

  • [12-05]: Roaming Charges: Kill, kill again, kill them all: Starts with this:

    Pete Hegseth is a producer of snuff films. The media-obsessed, if not media-savvy, Hegseth has produced 21 of these mass murder documentary shorts in the last three months, featuring the killings of 83 people — if you take his word for it. Hegseth introduces these kill shots like Alfred Hitchcock presenting an episode of his old TV show — without the irony, of course. There's no irony to Pete Hegseth. No intentional irony, that is. It's all bluster and protein-powder bravado to titillate the Prime-time Fox audience as they nibbled at their TV dinners. . . .

    The irony, lost on Hegseth, is that these are the precise kinds of videos that ethical whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning used to scrape from the secret vaults of the Pentagon and ship to Wikileaks. Videos of crimes committed by US forces. In his dipsomaniacal mind, Hegseth seems to believe these snuff films are proof of the power and virility of the War Department under his leadership. In fact, each video is a confession. The question is: will he be held to account and who will have the guts to do it?

  • [01-09]: Roaming Charges: An ICE cold blood. Opens with:

    Many of the people who have spent the last five years denouncing the killing of Ashli Babbitt for raiding the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election are celebrating the murder of Renee Nichole Good, a terrified mother killed by masked men from unmarked cars who chased her down a neighborhood street and shot her in the face. . . .

    These kinds of raids, while shocking to most Americans, are familiar to many immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, countries still haunted by the death squads funded, armed and trained by the CIA. Horrors that they fled and have now reappeared like ghosts from the past here on the streets of Chicago and Minneapolis and Los Angeles. They know all too well that collateral damage is a feature of all paramilitaries.

    With the murder of Renee Good, ICE has now advanced from scaring the hell out of American citizens to killing them.

    Also lots of good information here on Venezuela, including "The New York Times interviews Beelzebub [Elliott Abrams] on Venezuela, who, surprise!, wants more kidnappings and bloodshed." He also notes that Israel has violated the ceasefire 969 times over 80 days, "including the killing of 420 Palestinians, the wounding of 1,141 and allowing only 40% of the aid tracks mandated by the truce into Gaza." Also: "Israel has killed more than 700 relatives of Palestinian journalists in Gaza." Also:

    • Stephen Miller: "We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time." Almost invariably, people who have lived by this "iron law" have tended to come to rather unpleasant ends. [I would have unpacked this view rather differently. One of the maxims I learned early was "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Even if one starts with good intentions, the resort to power perverts them, and ultimately becomes an obsession with obtaining and defending ever more power. And that, of course, produces a backlash, which if unsuccessful drives the powerful to ever greater atrocities. Whether such people die in a bunker like Hitler or in bed like Stalin isn't really the issue. Either way, their memory is cursed by our wish to have stopped them earlier. Of course, if you don't start with good intentions, you descend faster, as Miller has done.]

    • Of course, there was something deeply wrong with this country long before Donald Trump came to power. Imagine playing a New Year's Day football game just down the road from Ground Zero in Nagasaki, as a celebration of an atomic blast that killed 70,000 people only five months earlier?

  • [01-16]: Roaming Charges: What a fool believes:

    • It's revolting, but hardly surprising, that a woman (Kristi Noem) who thought bragging about the time she shot her puppy in the head for disobeying a command and dumped its body in a gravel quarry would advance her political career, also thinks it's entirely justified to shoot a mother of three in the head for "disobeying" confusing commands from her ICE agents.

    • Trump has sent 13.6% of all ICE agents to Minneapolis, a city that represents .13% of the population of the United States.

  • [01-23]: Roaming Charges: Are we not men? No, we are DAVOS: "But a funny thing happened on the way to Davos":

    The stock market collapsed. The Prime Minister of Canada cut a trade pact with China and urged other countries to do the same. Denmark told Trump to fuck off (literally). Unhelpfully for Trump, the Russians chose this week to publicly endorse his scheme to snatch Greenland from the Danes. The European Union, usually so timid and fractious, resisted his impetuous bullying and threatened to join military exercises in defense of Greenland and levy retaliatory tariffs of their own against the increasingly frail US economy.

    Trump landed a deflated man. During his nearly incoherent speech at the World Economic Forum, Trump looked morose and sounded peevish. The words slurred, the fraying sentences trailing off into the ether. His insults lacked fire and punch. He rambled aimlessly. His cognitive decline, never a fall from alpine heights to begin with, was on full public display.

    Was this the fearsome tyrant, so many had trembled in obeisance before? He looked like an old man, frail in body, infirm in mind. Not the new Sun King of his cult-stoked fantasies, but a patriarch deep into his autumn, struggling to find the words for retreat. Trump's strategy (if you can call it that) for cultivating more enemies than friends was always doomed to backfire on him. The only question was how long it would take and how many he'd drag down with him.

    So, Trump backed down. The intemperate bombast was spent, replaced by wheezing and stammering. He backed down on invading Greenland. He backed down on imposing new tariffs against European nations. He backed down in front of the elites he both despises and envies.

    Bullet points:

  • Bari Weiss memo to CBS News reporters and anchors: "Yes, Trump referred to Greenland as Iceland 7 times in his speech, but make clear that he referred to Greenland as Greenland 13 times."

  • This week, there was another death in ICE custody. That's 6 in the last 18 days, one every 72 hours — not counting the people they shoot in their cars.

Matt McManus [01-02]: Why Fascists always come for the Socialists first: "Here's why the left poses such a threat to them." This is a long and very well researched and thought out piece. I've long been skeptical of the usefulness of labeling anyone fascist, but I've changed my thinking somewhat over the past year. I think the key thing is that we mostly understand events through historical analogy. Those of us on the left were quick to pick up the early warning signs of fascism, but as long as alternative explanations were possible, most people resisted the diagnosis. What's different now is that we've reached the point where fascism is the only close historical analogy. Sure, there are minor minor deviations, but no other historical analogy comes close. The point of identifying Trump as a fascist is less to check off a list of similarities than an assertion that we take him very seriously as a threat to our world. While many other comparisons may occur to us, none quite match our fear of fascism.

Eric Levitz [01-12]: The fiction at the heart of America's political divide: I don't quite understand why someone who recognizes and basic difference between left and right can twist himself in such knots of nonsense as the Hyrum and Verlan Lewis book The Myth of Left and Right. Levitz shows he understands the difference when he writes:

The ideological spectrum was born in France about 237 years ago. At the revolutionary National Assembly in 1789, radicals sat on the left side of the chamber and monarchists on the right, thereby lending Western politics its defining metaphor: a one-dimensional continuum between egalitarian revolution and hierarchical conservation. The more a faction (or policy) promoted change in service of equality, the farther left its place on this imaginary line; the more it defended existing hierarchies in the name of order, the farther right its spot.

There are some corollaries, but that's it: hierarchy on the right, equality on the left. Perhaps the most obvious corollary is that the right's defense of hierarchy is inherently unpopular, so they are quick to defend it with violence. The left, on the other hand, has become increasingly opposed to violence. This should be simple, but Levitz, like most political analysts, likes to muddy the waters by saddling left and right with arbitrary positions on other issues that don't intrinsically divide between hierarchy and equality. He doesn't fully accept the Lewis case that parties are just competing interest groups whose policy differences follow group rather than ideological dynamics, but he readily assumes that all Democrats are leftist and all Republicans are on the right.

Robert P Baird [01-15]: The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age: "Whether it's the financial crash, the climate emergency or the breakdown of the international order, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we've entered." There's more here — Tooze has moved from academia into the public intelligentsia racket as impressively as anyone else I can think of, and that includes Jill Lepore, Paul Krugman, and Stephen J Gould — but let's start with the section on Biden Democrats that Jeffrey St Clair pointed me to:

It was notable, then, that after joining the Brussels panel, Tooze didn't waste much time before stating flatly that the Biden team had "failed in its absolutely central mission, which was to prevent a second Trump administration". Not only that, he argued, but the dismantling of the liberal world order — something discussed with much rueful lamentation at the conference — had been hastened, not hindered, by the Biden veterans on stage. As he'd written a few months earlier, Tooze saw Biden no less than Trump aiming "to ensure by any means necessary" — including strong-arming allies — "that China is held back and the US preserves its decisive edge".

"I feel the need to say something," [Katherine] Tai said, when Tooze was finished. She recalled a parable Martin Sheen had delivered in front of the White House during the 25th anniversary celebration of The West Wing, the haute-liberal political fantasia that remains a touchstone for professional Democrats. Sheen's story concerned a man who shows up at the gates of heaven and earns an admonishment from St Peter for his lack of scars. "Was there nothing worth fighting for?" St Peter asked the man. Tai turned the question on Tooze: "Where are your scars, Adam? I can show you mine."

Recalling this exchange several months later, Tooze was still flabbergasted. "I'd be silly if I didn't admit that it was a bruising encounter," he told me recently, in one of three long conversations we had over the past year. Nevertheless, he said, "it confirmed my underlying theory about what was going on. These were a group of entirely self-satisfied American liberal elites who were enacting a morality tale in which Sheen and The West Wing and that whole highly sentimental vision of power and politics is a central device. She says this, I think, meaning to sound tough, like, 'I'm the warrior. Who are you? You're just some desktop guy.' Which just shows how little she understands what I'm saying, which is: 'You people are a bunch of sentimental schmucks who don't understand that you lost. If you had any self-respect, you would not be on any podium again, ever, sounding off about anything. Because comrades, if we were in the 30s, I would have taken you out and shot you. You fail like this, you don't get to come back and show off your wounds.'"

That's a bit extreme for me: the 30s aren't exactly remembered for best political practices, and even as a lapsed Christian I'm still inclined to forgive sins that are sincerely repented. But Tai and her other Biden hands not only haven't repented for their failures, they're still in denial, blind-sided by events they thought they were handling just fine. (In this, the Queen Bee of denial remains Hillary Clinton, which is why she has absolutely nothing to contribute to the party she once led.) The piece has much more on Tooze — enough to convince me to order his book Crashed. It also summarizes a critique of him by Perry Anderson.

Kate Wagner [01-21]: The Line, a Saudi megaproject, is dead: "It was always doomed to unravel, but the firms who lent their name to this folly should be held accounable." I knew nothing about this project, so found the Wikipedia entry to be helpful background. Also see the longer List of Saudi Vision 2023 projects, of which NEOM (including The Line and Trojena) was by far the most expensive. This reminds me of some of the Shah's extravagant projects shortly before the revolution overthrew his regime. I've been thinking a bit about Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states in relationship to the "resource curse" theory, which explains so much of what went wrong with Venezuela. Saudi Arabia doesn't look like the economic basket case we find in Venezuela and Iran, but perhaps that's just because they've been able to keep selling oil, and thereby able to keep their own bubble economies from collapsing. They've managed this by being very submissive to the US and western capitalism, while they've managed political stability at home through a generous welfare state for their citizens, combined with the large-scale import of "guest" workers. Still, their oil wells generate so much money that they wind up investing in a lot of extravagant schemes — the Line is relatively benign, at least compared to the jihad-fanning, gun-running, war-mongering adventurism in Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. In terms of GDP, these petrostates are among the richest in the world, but one can't help but feel that there is rot and mold just under the surface, and that whole edifices could suddenly collapse (as they did in Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela). Also that the risk of that happening is much sharper with megalomaniacs in charge like Mohammed Bin Salman, and especially as Trump turns the US into a pure gangster state.

Chas Danner [01-24]: All the terms you need to know for the big winter storm: "From frost crack to Arctic blast to thunder ice."

Music end-of-year lists: I started collecting these when they were few and far between, and didn't keep it up. See the AOTY Lists for more. Also the Legend for my EOY Aggregate. While substantial (2776 albums), I've done a very poor job of keeping this file up to date, as is obvious when you compare this year's legend (116 sources) to the one from 2024 (610 sources). While I'm likely to add more data to this year's EOY aggregate, I'm unlikely ever again to match the 2024 total.

Of course, the most important EOY list [for me, anyhow] is: The 20th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll: See the essays on ArtsFuse, by yours truly except as noted:

On listmaking:

  • Album of the Year: 2025 music year end list aggregate: Rosalia edging out Geese (413-404) was a surprise, especially as a late-breaker among two albums I didn't especially are for, but both the landslide wins over two of my A- records — Wednesday (203) and CMAT (187) — and a following mixed bag: my A- records were by Clipse (6), Lily Allen (11), Billy Woods (14), Water From Your Eyes (27), Big Thief (29), Sudan Archives (32), Tyler Childers (43), and Rochelle Jordan (50). One interesting note here is that they systematically devalue unranked lists, allowing 5 points each if the list is 10 albums or less, 3 for 25 or less, and 1 for ore than 25 albums; ranked lists are given 10 points for 1st place, 8 for 2nd, 6 for 3rd, 5 for top 10, 3 for top 25, 1 for other. That's a bit more generous to unranked lists than my own scheme for my EOY aggregate, and also offers a bit more spread for 1-2-3 albums, but the basic logic is similar.

Some miscellaneous music links:

  • Tom Lane [01-20]: 2026 Rock Hall Nominee Predictions: Something I have no opinion about, not least because I have no idea who's in or out, what the eligibility rules are, and therefore who's missing, even though hall of fames are something that has always fascinated me. My rough impression is that the R&R HOF has always been too lax in its selections, unlike virtually every other HOF. (In jazz, DownBeat's HOF is hopelessly backlogged, and their peculiar Veterans Commitee rules have actually made the missing seem to be more glaring.) Only one on this list I'd be tempted to vote for is B-52s, although Beck had a couple of very good albums, my early dislike of De La Soul may have been misguided, and I wouldn't scoff at Oasis or Luther Vandross (although I wouldn't pick them either). Speaking of B-52s, I wonder whether Pere Ubu is in, and if not why not? [Not: eligible in 2001.] They're linked in my mind because I saw both bands at Max's Kansas City in the late 1970s, back when they both only had singles (and really great ones at that).

  • RiotRiot [01-28]: RIOTRIOT's official 2026 Grammys predictions: I'm not sure I ever took the Grammys seriously, but certainly not after Robert Christgau skewered them in 2001's Forever Old. But this suggests they're not a total wasteland, for someone who knows where to look.

  • Nathan J Robinson [01-20]: Jesse Welles is the antidote to everything that sucks about our time. I was tipped off to the folksinger-songwriter recently, and will review albums in the next Music Week.

Books:

  • Sasha Abramsky: American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government: "follows eleven federal workers, in eight government agencies, from the time they were told they were fired in the early weeks of Donald Trump's second presidential administration through to the summer of 2025. . . . Their stories, which show a country in a profound moment of crisis and dislocation, are America's stories. What happened to them — the bullying, the intimidation, the deliberate removal of financial stability — also happened to hundreds of thousands of other employees."

  • Sven Beckert: Capitalism: A Global History:

    • Nelson Lichtenstein [12-04]: Sven Beckert's chronicle of capitalism's long rise. Review provides what looks like a good summary of the book, which is huge and sprawling. Most interesting point to me is that he starts early and looks everywhere:

      "There is no French capitalism or American capitalism," writes Beckert, "but only capitalism in France or America." And there is also capitalism in Arabia, India, China, Africa, and even among the Aztecs. In his narrative of merchants and traders in the first half of the second millennium, Beckert puts Europe on the margins, offering instead a rich and, except for specialists, unknown account of how the institutions vital to commerce and markets, including credit, accounting, limited partnerships, insurance, and banking flourished, in Aden, Cambay, Mombasa, Guangzhou, Cairo, and Samarkand. These are all "islands of capital," a recurrent metaphor in Beckert's book. For example, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Aden was host to a dense network of merchants who played a pivotal role in the trade between the Arabian world and India. It was a fortified, cosmopolitan city of Jews, Hindu, Muslims, and even a few Christians.

      Capitalism spread from these "islands of capital," initially through trade but increasingly through war, especially where forced labor proved advantageous for producing fungible goods.

    • Seven Beckert [11-04]: The old order is dead. Do not resuscitate. The "old order" he is referring to is what is commonly alled "the neoliberal order" ("and that held sway until very recently"):

      Capitalism is a series of regime changes. Thinking about what unites them will help us better navigate the current reverberations and think more productively about the future. All these transitions, and perhaps the present one as well, were characterized by the inability of the old regime, in the face of economic crisis and rebellions, to reproduce itself. All featured disorientation, and an elite belief that a few tweaks to the old order would allow it to continue. All confronted a world in which the previous economic regime felt like the natural order of things — slavery in the mid-19th century, laissez faire in the 1920s, Keynesian interventionism in the 1960s and market fundamentalism in the 2000s.

      Not once was the old regime resurrected. Instead, capitalism forged ahead in entirely new directions. We had better accept this about today, as well.

      Unclear what his answer is here, or even whether he has one. He sees critiques of neoliberalism both on the left and on the right. He notes that "China was never beholden to the neoliberal agenda." Also that "the politicization of markets is rapidly making a comeback," for which he offers both Trump and Biden examples.

  • Marc J Dunkelman: Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back:

    • Sean Illing [01-12]: How America made it impossible to build: "A system built to stop government from doing harm stopped it from doing anything." An interview with Dunkelman. I'm someone who's strongly oriented toward building things, so I should be sympathetic to books like this (the more famous one is Abundance), but I often choke when I see actual project proposals (especially things like new sports stadia). One thing I agree with here is "the trust problem is enormous." That's largely because projects are being driven by private greed-or-glory-heads, and depend on public finance from politicians beholden to their sponsors. What we need instead are more projects driven by consumer/user groups, with compensation for anyone adversely affected, and some clear criteria for when the downside exceeds the benefits. If you could do that in a system that most people could trust, ticking off the checkboxes could go much quicker (and if they don't tick off, the reasons will be clear, and not just a game of who bribes whom).

    • Miles Bryan/Astead Herndon [12-28]: Ezra Klein's year of Abundance: We've kicked this around before, so might as well file it here. Klein notes in here that his original title was "Supply-Side Progressivism," which makes more explicit that this is a pitch to business that at best hopes to trickle down some more general value.

  • Eoin Higgins: Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left:

    • Ed Meek [08-02]: How to buy left-wing journalists: Review of Owned, where the most prominent journalists mentioned are Matt Taibbi and Glen Greenwald.

      Higgins follows Taibbi's investigation into Hunter Biden's laptop (a favorite target of MAGA supporters). The Biden administration, with Twitter's cooperation, may have suppressed information about wrongdoing in these files, but Taibbi never really found anything substantial. Meanwhile, he was critiqued by the left, relentlessly, for investigating what partisans saw as a trivial distraction. This led to Taibbi's move to Substack, where he has a big following. Higgins points out that Substack was funded by Andreessen (founder of Netscape) as a way to move liberal journalists out of mainstream publications. Along with creating a space for independent voices, Owned posits that the right wing has been very effective at manipulating and creating new media to influence Americans to support Republicans. Substack was part of that divide-and-conquer strategy.

      I read Greenwald's initial 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act?, but didn't follow up with later books, and haven't tried since he bowed out of The Intercept. I read Taibbi as long as he was in Rolling Stone (but Rolling Stone itself is paywalled these days), then followed him on Twitter. I read most of his books up through 2019's Hate Inc.. He's always had a weakness for both-sidesing (e.g., singling out "9-11 Truthers" as a left-equivalent of the right's paranoid tendencies), but his critical views of the right remained sharp. If he was still freely available, I'd check him out. I don't consider him to be a traitor/enemy, like David Horowitz.

      I hadn't read that point about Substack before, but there is considerable logic to it. Yglesias and Krugman are prime examples, although their former publications are also paywalled these days. I've rarely looked at their Substacks, but so far have managed to see everything I've looked at. The bigger point is that they're trying to price any sort of critical commentary out of the reach of most folks. This follows the same general logic as the move to quell student demonstrations in the 1980s by making college much more expensive: on the one hand, you exclude the riff-raff; on the other, you saddle those who survive the gauntlet with a lifetime of debt, forcing them to keep their nose to the grindstone, which is to say work for the increasingly dominant rich. They probably didn't plan on Google and Facebook sucking up all of the advertising revenue, but that's what's given them the chance to starve out any sort of free press.

    • Will Solomon [2025-01-05]: How tech billionaires bought the loudest voices on the left and right: An early review of Eoin Higgins: Owned.

    • Eoin Higgins [12-27]: Yes, I'm being sued by Matt Taibbi: This is the story that got me looking at Higgins' book, so that's why I'm digging up links from a year ago. I don't see a lot more, at least recent, on his Substack (and sure, he has one) to stick around, but a couple titles are Marjorie Taylor Greene makes her move and Weasel World comes to Minnesota.

  • Gene Ludwig: The Mismeasurement of America: How Outdated Government Statistics Mask the Economic Struggle of Everyday Americans: Former Treasury official under Clinton, a connection that gets him a nice blurb from Hillary here, set up a nonprofit in 2019 "dedicated to improving the economic well-being of low- and middle-income Americans through research and education," starting with his 2020 book, The Vanishing American Dream: A Frank Look at the Economic Realities Facing Middle- and Lower-Income Americans.

    • Jared Bernstein [10-03]: Measuring the Vibecession: "Why top-line federal statistics miss the economic pain average Americans feel." Biden's best economic adviser reviews Ludwig's book, quibbling that the standard measures aren't "mismeasurement" but merely incomplete. For instance, the Consumer Price Index is an average, which masks different impacts among various groups. Unemployment understates underemployment and other precarity.

  • Harriet Malinowitz: Selling Israel: Zionism, Propaganda, and the Uses of Hasbara:

  • Olivia Nuzzi: American Canto: A journalist of some fame and ill repute, wrote a memoir, teasing dirt on an affair with RFK Jr.

    • Scaachi Koul [12-02]: Olivia Nuzzi's book has the audacity to be boring: "Never mind the dogshit writing, the self-mythologizing, the embarrassing metaphors. How can you make this story so incredibly dull?"

      Historians will study how bad this book is. English teachers will hold this book aloft at their students to remind them that literally anyone can write a book: Look at this, it's just not that hard to do. Three hundred pages with no chapter breaks, it swerves back and forth through time, from Nuzzi's interviews with Donald Trump over the years to her combustible relationship with fellow annoying journalist Ryan Lizza to her alleged affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he was running for president himself. Reading it is like spending time with a delusional fortune cookie: platitudes that feel like they were run through a translation service three times.

  • Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity:

    • Rhoda Feng [12-10]: The internet's tollbooth operators: "Tim Wu's The Age of Extraction chronicles the way Big Tech platforms have turned against their users."

      The process by which companies metastasize from creators into extractors goes something like this: First, they make their platform "essential to transactions"; next, they hobble or buy rivals; then, they clone winners, lock partners in, and finally ratchet up fees for both buyers and sellers. The convenience we prize — our one-click orders, our autoplay queues — becomes, in Wu's mordant phrase, "a long slow bet on laziness": a wager that users will tolerate almost any indignity rather than face the costs of leaving.

      If the platform extraction model has become the dominant template of 21st-century capitalism, Wu emphasizes that it is by no means confined to technology. Since the 2008 financial crisis, investors have begun platformizing entire industries and reorganizing them around centralized ownership and predictable revenue streams.

      He offers examples from health care and housing, showing that this is not just a high-tech issue. But right now, big future bets are being placed on tech monopolists:

      According to a recent report by Public Citizen, Trump's return to power has brought a bonanza for Big Tech. Of the 142 federal investigations and enforcement actions against technology corporations inherited from the previous administration, at least 45 have already been withdrawn or halted. The beneficiaries read like a who's who of Silicon Valley: Meta, Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, eBay, and a constellation of cryptocurrency and financial technology firms.

      Since the 2024 election cycle began, tech corporations and their executives have spent an estimated $1.2 billion on political influence — $863 million in political spending, $76 million in lobbying, and a further $222 million in payments to Trump's own businesses. The return on investment has been immediate: a sweeping "AI Action Plan" directing the Federal Trade Commission to review and, where possible, rescind consent decrees that "unduly burden AI innovation." Among the cases at risk are investigations into OpenAI and Snap for generative AI harms and antitrust cases against Microsoft.

    • Tim Wu [10-25]: Big Tech's predatory platform model doesn't have to be our future.

A few end-of-year books lists:

  • Connor Echols [12-26]: The 8 best foreign policy books of 2025:

    • Seth Harp: The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces
    • Francisco Rodriguez: The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012-2020
    • William D Hartung/Ben Freeman: The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us at Home
    • Emma Ashford: First Among Equals: US Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World
    • Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man/Sarah Leah Whitson: From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine
    • Kenneth P Vogel: Devils' Advocates: The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington Insiders on the Payrolls of Corrupt Foreign Interests
    • Charles L Glaser: Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America's Future Against a Rising China
    • Hussein Agha/Robert Malley: Tomorrow Is Yesterday: Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Pece in Israel/Palestine

  • Constance Grady [12-16]: The 10 best books of 2025: In addition to The 9 best books of the year so far (from back in July).

Some notable deaths: Mostly from the New York Times listings. Last time I did such a trawl was on November 24, so we'll look that far back (although some names have appeared since):

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas, but maybe I should just use it to bookmark some of our leading horribles.

  • Molly Jong-Fast [11-29]: Cites quote from OpenAI is a loss-making machine, with estimates that it has no road to profitability by 2030 — and will need a further $207 billion in funding even if it gets there: "All of this falls apart if humans don't adopt the tech. This is why you've seen Meta cram its lame chatbots into WhatsApp and Instagram. This is why Notepad and Paint now have useless Copilot buttons on Windows. This is why Goodle Gemini wants to 'help you' read and reply to your emails."

    Imagine if they just subsidized newspapers and magazines the way they're subsidizing this slop

  • Doug Henwood [01-06]: Recalls a Michael Ledeen quote, from 1992:

    "Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

  • Tom Carson:

      [01-16]: Minneapolis or no Minneapolis, it's ridiculous and insulting to say MAGA supporters are a bunch of Nazis. A good many of them, perhaps a majority, are innocuous Nazi sympathizers, Nazi enablers, Nazi-neutral in a Too Soon To Tell kinda way, Nazi-curious thanks to The Night Porter or Ilsa, She-Wolf of The SS, or else plain dimwits who used to go into daily comas during history classes back when they still had 'em at good old Lowenbrau High. There, does that clear everything up? We may be angry, but that doesn't give us a license to be unfair.

    • [01-18]: Some of you stunned people have caught on over the years I'm not the world's biggest Trump fan. I know, I know, strange but true. But that's not the most urgent business at hand. The bottom line is that he's gone drooling loco, stone crazy, beyond barking mad, Old Yeller would sue for plagiarism AND libel if they hadn't shot him and Rin Tin Tin's gone MAGA and won't take the case, pretty soon Merriam-Webster will redefine "white as a sheet" as the penultimate step in the Republican Party before canonization. He's beyond Renee Good and Evel Knievel, I stole that from Nietzsche but never trust a Kraut who can't even take charge of his own mustache, let alone Poland, at least Hitler knew how to dress for success. He's beyond delusional and so deep in transactional the last man up his butt will have to bring along a comb to tart up the President's hair. Arse brevis but hair longa as Mussolini only wished with his drying Fred Trumpth I mean dying breath, chump. Siri where's the nearest gas station he's all hung up on learning to fly and you alone can fix it. He's as goofy as the Black Plaque his dentist can't find a final ablution for, probably a Jew ya know, you'd be getting long in the tooth yourself if we hadn't taken care of those with the pliers, Dr. Rosenfeld. He's non compos Mentos (he needs candy), looney as Looney iTunes, more gaga than a gag order shutting Kristi Noem up for Christ's sake, just plain nuts as the 101st Airborne used to say at Bastogne only this time we'll get creamed, no sugar. He's got so many screws loose a whorehouse madam would go bankrupt. And none of the earthworms in baggy boxcar suits and red ties overrunning the WH, the Capitol, and SCOTUS are going to do a blessed thing about it, so you can rest easy in this green land, Mr. President. With love to Allen Ginsberg, your fellow citizen, Tom.

    • [01-22]: The interview I'm hoping to see, and who knows but I may get my wish. Q: "General Spackleheimer, are you concerned about the President's mental state?" SPACKLEHEIMER: "Well, I'm not a psychiatrist, so I don't have any standing to attest to that as a licensed mental-health expert, of course. That said, it's kind of jazzy to remember I DO have standing as a professional soldier who's got so many medals the Army had to tailor a special jacket that currently reaches to my knees, and I'm as tall as Fred Gwynne on stilts. So yeah, he's fucking nuts. I mean loco, [gestures with his former saluting hand], zoom!, you know? I mean, we're so deep in the shithouse all the cows are on strike."

    • [01-25]: I'm a government/Washington D. C. brat and I'd like to think I can recognize what a well-run Federal agency answerable to the public looks like. So if anybody out there thinks ICE agents are a) only hired if they meet rigorous standards qualifying them for law-enforcement and public-safety duties, b) adequately supervised by competent professionals who understand the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, c) adequately overseen by a Congress alert to its responsibilities as the public's watchdog and ready to restrict or deny taxpayer dollars to ICE unless the agency submits to agreed-on guardrails that protect citizens' rights and safety, d) adequately backstopped by a rough popular, legislative and judicial consensus regarding said agency's purpose and necessity, e) adequately restrained by the consequences they'll face if they go rogue, and f) adequately trained in any field other than brutality, street brawling, and terrorizing their fellow Americans with threats of harassment, sanctioned violence, and Mob-style murders of absolutely anyone who gets in their way or just bugs the shit out of them, lemme know.

Memes noted:

  • A felon who married an immigrant is telling a lot of y'all that the problems in this country all stem from felons and immigrants. But keep buying that stupid red hat that's made in China.

Original count: 459 links, 31382 words (38692 total)

Current count: 502 links, 34126 words (42166 total)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, November 24, 2025

Loose Tabs

Note that I previously weighed in on the elections, the shutdown, Dick Cheney, Jack DeJohnette, and more in my [11-12] Notes on Everyday Life.

Also that I've completely lost control of the collection process here. This column has never been more than a collection of notes, and its publication has tended to be driven less by a sense that now I have something complete to say than by the realization that my notes are fading into the deeper recesses of history, losing relevance day by day, and I should kick them out before they lose all purpose and meaning. Still, while much is missing, many of the things I do latch onto elicit serious thoughts, which I hope will be useful, and not too repetitive. Editing in these quarters is very haphazard. I apologize for that, but options are few when you're already running late. I do hope to do a better job of editing my Substack newsletter. I may even return there with a reconsideration of what I'm posting here, as I did on Sept. 24 with my More Thoughts on Loose Tabs.

Given how much other work I have to do today, tomorrow, and the rest of the week, I might as well post this today (Monday, Nov. 24). It's already pushed Music Week off until Tuesday, at the earliest. I may return with change marks here, or may just move on to the draft file — probably depends on the story. Meanwhile, I'm restarting my day with the Deluxe Edition of Jimmy Cliff's The Harder They Come, which I reviewed here.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared ? days ago, on October 21.

I'm trying a experiment here with select bits of text highlighted with a background color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to use it sparingly.

Topical Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent thmes of the following section.

November Elections: November 4 was the first significant chance voters had to re-evaluate the choices they made a year ago. Democrats won pretty much everywhere, despite little evidence that voters are very pleased with their current Democratic leadership. By far the most publicized election was the mayoral race in New York City, so I'll separate that out in a following section.

And more specifically, Zohran Mamdani:

  • Zohran Mamdani [09-08]: New York City is not for sale.

  • Astead W Herndon [10-14]: Inside the improbable, audacious and (so far) unstoppable rise of Zohran Mamdani. Pull quote from Mamdani: "Being right in and of itself is meaningless. We have to win. And we have to deliver." Also quotes Mark Levine, saying Mamdani "is the first nominee in memory that has made a concerted effort to reach out to people who were against him in the primary."

  • Nathan J Robinson [11-05]: Follow Mamdani's example: "This is how you run. This is how you win. This is the politics we need right now. Democratic socialist candidates can inspire people again, and fight the right effectively."

  • Nia Prater [11-06]: ICE wants NYPD cops who are mad about Mamdani: "The agency put out a new recruitment ad that tries to promote and capitalize on postelection angst within the NYPD."

  • Michael Arria [11-06]: The Shift: Pro-Israel groups melt down over Mamdani win. Not that the mayor of New York City could do anything about Israel, but this shows they may not be as all-powerful as they've long wanted people (especially Democrats) to think.

  • Thomas B Edsall [11-11]: Steve Bannon thinks Zohran Mamdani is a genius. It's not a feint. Much here about the mobilization of the youth vote, especially how Mamdani's mobilization of the youth vote dramatically expanded the electorate, which made it possible to overcome the enormous advantages Cuomo had in money and regular party support. As for Bannon, the key quote is: "Modern politics now is about engaging low-propensity voters, and they clearly turned them out tonight, and this is kind of the Trump model. This is very serious."

  • Paul Krugman [11-17]: The plutocrats who cried "commie": "About that 'fleeing New York claim." This cites a pre-election article claiming to have a poll showing that "Nearly a million New Yorkers ready to flee NYC if Mamdani becomes mayor — possibly igniting the largest exodus in history." Post-election: not really.

  • Brett Wilkins [11-21]: After threats throughout NYC campaign, Trump lauds Mamdani at White House: "'I feel very confident that he can do a very good job," Trump said of Mamdani after their White House meeting. 'I think he is going to surprise some conservative people, actually.'" The pictures of an uncharacteristically beaming Trump have circulated widely, at least in my circles. I'm not particularly interested in unpacking their meaning, but should note this odd twist.

  • Astead Herndon/Cameron Peters [11-22]: How Zohran Mamdani won over Donald Trump — for now.

  • MJ Rosenberg [11-25]: Morris Katz, Jew, 26, is Mamdani's top guy: "Some antisemite, that Zohran! And Katz is a typical Gen Z Jewish kid."

Federal government shutdown:

  • Cameron Peters [10-17] Why is this government shutdown so weird? "Four questions about the ongoing deadlock, answered by an expert." Interview with Matt Glassman ("a senior fellow at Georgetown" and "author of the Five Points newsletter"). I don't know him, but a glance at his latest Linkin' and Thinkin' post is more than a little interesting. I'm getting less from his shutdown analysis here. "Weird" just isn't much of an analytical tool.

  • Dean Baker [10-21]: Roadmap to the shutdown: This is a pretty good summary of the issues.

  • Michael Tomasky [11-10]: Once again, Senate Democrats show they don't get who they represent: "The party was riding high on election wins, a fractured GOP, and a flailing Trump. And then the Senate Surrender Caucus handed Republicans a win." The "Surrender Caucus" names: Catherine Cortez Masto, Dick Durbin, John Fetterman, Maggie Hassan, Tim Kaine, Angus King, Jacky Rosen, Jeanne Shaheen.

  • Andrew Prokop [11-10]: Democrats were never going to win the shutdown fight. Note that Prokop was advising against shutdown from the beginning. One thing he doesn't appreciate is that in shutting down the government, Democrats acted like they cared enough about Trump's abuses to fight against him. There aren't many ways one can do that.

  • Ed Kilgore [11-10]: Why Democrats couldn't hold out any longer on the government shutdown: "It only took eight Senate Democrats to decide the pain outweighed the gain, and now the party must decide whether to fall into civil war or move on."

  • Joan Walsh [11-10]: The bill to end the shutdown is full of giveaways to Republicans.

  • Corey Robin [11-12]: Democrats caved in the shutdown because of the filibuster. "For Democrats, the main issue in the shutdown wasn't electoral backlash — it was the filibuster. Leadership feared its removal, viewing it as a safeguard to keep the party's rising left wing in check." This doesn't make a lot of sense. The filibuster allows a large but determined minority to obstruct bills that have thin majority support. The left may be rising, but they are nowhere near the range where the filibuster works. I'm not aware of anyone on the left who thinks the filibuster is a good idea. For now, the filibuster does allow Democrats to hold up bills like the continuing resolution, but Republicans could at any point have ditched the rule (as they've already done for presidential appointments). Since the filibuster more often helps Republicans than Democrats, there's an argument that it would be good for forcing the Republicans to get rid of it. But the "surrender caucus" kept that from happening, perhaps because they wanted to preserve the filibuster. But if so, it wasn't from fear of the left. It's because they wanted to preserve what little leverage they have from being Democrats willing to break ranks. Even though Schumer didn't vote to surrender, I can see him thinking preservation of the filibuster helps his leverage. Robin quotes a piece arguing that some Senate Republicans want to preserve the filibuster as an excuse "to avoid doing things they don't see as sound policy or politics without infuriating Trump." If so, it's them, as opposed to the Democrats they needed to cave in, who are breathing a sigh of relief at the filibuster's survival.

Gambling and sports: My interest in sports has declined steadily since the 1994 baseball lockout broke my daily habit of box score analysis, although over time the political metaphors and the cultural spectacle have also taken a considerable toll. My dislike of gambling goes back even further, and not just to my mother (who loved playing cards, but never for money). The combination is toxic, but that doesn't begin to convey the many levels of disgust I feel. So what, now we have a scandal? That's even more predictable than providing free guns and ammo to psychopaths.

Dick Cheney: Dick Cheney died, at 83. I'm showing my age here, but for sheer political evil, no one will ever replace Richard Nixon in my mind. I'm not alone in that view. I've loathed Bob Dole ever since his execrable 1972 campaign — not that I didn't dislike his 1966 campaign, or his tenure in the House — but I had to concede that he had some wit, especially for his quip on seeing a "presidents club" picture of Carter, Ford, and Nixon: "see no evil, hear no evil, and evil." But if you're 20-30 years younger than me, Dick Cheney could have left you with the same impression. I'll spare you the details, which like Nixon were foretold decades before his ascent to real power, other than to remind you that the great blogger Billmon regularly referred to the Bush years as "the Cheney administration." If you're 20 years younger still, you probably have Trump in that slot — he's the only one who exercises power on that level, although the cunning behind it is harder to credit as sheer evil (but maybe that's just proof of the great dumbing down).

Epsteinmania, again: Back in the news, by popular demand I guess, or at least by Congressional demand.

Major Threads

Israel:

  • Spencer Ackerman [10-15]: Sharm El-Sheikh shows that the US has learned nothing from Gaza: "Palestinians are expected to accept the same deal that led to October 7: permanent subjugation under the guise of 'prosperity.'" Tell me more about this "prosperity" stuff. Even if Trump's buddies make a killing on some real estate/finance transactions doesn't mean that anyone in Gaza will get a fair share of the gains — especially if they don't have the political power to support their claims.

  • Michael Arria [10-17]: As support for Israel drops, the mainstream media is becoming even more Zionist: "Support for Israel is plummeting among the US public, but Zionism dominates mainstream media more than ever. Several recent high-profile examples show the staggering disconnect between the media establishment and its viewers."

  • Avrum Burg: Former speaker of the Knesset, still trying to keep something he believes in:

    • [10-20]: More ethics less high-tech: I saw this in Mazin Qumsiyeh's newsletter as his "quote of the day," but the link was mangled:

      In global interviews and conversations, one question keeps returning: how could the Jews, a people who once saw themselves as a moral messenger for all humanity, commit such horrific crimes in Gaza? It is a question that cuts to the rawest nerves of our identity, our faith in our righteousness, and our understanding of who we are. . . .

      How cruel the irony. The so-called start up nation, proud to call itself the only democracy in the Middle East, has created the most sophisticated and repressive death industry in the region, exporting its poisonous fruits to any authoritarian buyer for profit. The cult of security has turned high tech into an endless military service. Civilian companies develop for the defense establishment new tools of killing, occupation, and violation of human rights, while the army feeds the civilian market with skilled manpower and profitable technology. Thus an entire economy has been built on domination, oppression, smart sensors, and a dead conscience. . . .

      The Judaism I grew up with was a moral system, not a cult of power. A way of life that sanctified life, not death. It placed the human being, not the land, at its center. It did not seek to rule the world but to repair it. . . .

      Israel after the crimes of Gaza does not need more advanced tanks or sophisticated algorithms. It needs an education system that teaches people to think and to feel. . . . For in the end, all the technology in the world, every smart system, every precise weapon, is worthless when placed in the hands of a hardened heart. Like ours have been in these terrible years.

    • [10-12]: The showman, the reconciler and the cynic — who this trinity must succeed: "Netanyahu will kick and scream, but Trump and Blair can drag Israel into a brighter future for the Middle East." Of course, he's much too generous to all three, but at least he realizes that there is no "brighter future" with Netanyahu still anywhere near power.

  • Lydia Polgreen [10-23]: What happened in Gaza might be even worse than we think. I think that's very likely, and in this I'm concerned not just in whether the counted deaths reflect reality but in the overwhelming psychological toll this war has taken, and not just on Palestinians, but on others not comparable but still significant. I think most people find what has happened to be beyond imagination, even ones close to the conflict but especially those of us who are well buffered from the atrocities, and even more so those trapped in the Israeli propaganda bubble.

  • Qassam Muaddi [10-24]: Trump's push to uphold Gaza ceasefire is creating a political crisis in Israel. Starts with a Vance quote about Israel not being a "vassal state," but the bigger revelation is that Trump seems to be breaking free of the notion that the US is a vassal state of Israel. Much of Netanyahu's credibility within Israel is based on the belief that he possesses magical power to manipulate American politicians, and that belief starts to fade when he slips. The subordination of American interests to Israeli whims really took hold under Clinton, and reached its apogee with Biden, but mostly depended on American indifference to consequences, which genocide is making it harder to sustain. And as Netanyahu slips, Israel is not lacking for others who would like to take his place, whispering sweet nothings into the ears of Americans while keeping a steady course.

  • Robert Gottlieb [10-25]: From Apartheid to Democracy - a 'blueprint' for a different future in Israel-Palestine: A review of a book by Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man and Sarah Leah Wilson, From Apartheid to Democracy: A Blueprint for Peace in Israel-Palestine, which "describes in granular detail the conditions for dismantling apartheid in Israel-Palestine." While I'm happy to see people inside Israel thinking along these lines, I have to ask what world they think they are living in? Democracy has always been a struggle between interest groups to establish a mutually satisfactory division of power. It has sometimes expanded to incorporate previously excluded groups, but mostly because an established insider group thought that expansion might give them more leverage, but it's never been done simply because it seemed like a good idea. Yet that seems to be the pitch here:

    Thus, the Blueprint places the onus on the State of Israel — as the state exercising effective control over all peoples in Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza — to meet its international legal obligations by ending its crimes and respecting the rights of all people under its rule. Only once Palestinians have political, civic, and human rights equal to Israeli Jews living in the Territory will Palestinians and Israelis be able to democratically determine what political structures and outcomes best server their collective, national, political, ethnic, and religious interests. The Blueprint is not a plan for achieving national self-determination; it is a plan to create the conditions under which achieving self-determination and deciding political issues of governance are possible.

  • James P Rubin [10-27]: The only thing that can keep the peace in Gaza: Author is credited as "a senior adviser to two secretaries of state, Anthony Blinken and Madeleine Albright," which suggests that the only thing he's qualified to do is to write New York Times op-eds. He proves his cluelessness here by focusing on the "international force for Gaza," which he sees as necessary to fill "the growing security vacuum in Gaza." At every step on the way, he puts Israel's phony security complaints ahead of aiding Palestinians. Israel has always been a source of disruption in Gaza, never of stability. Their removal is itself a step toward order, which can be augmented by an ample and unfettered aid program. Granted that the supply lines need a degree of security to prevent looting, but the better they work, the less trouble they'll elicit. Rubin's claim to fame here seems to be that he's spent a lot of time talking to Tony Blair about this. Blair is pretty high up on the list of people no honest Palestinian can trust in. Rubin's earned a spot on that list as well.

  • Jamal Kanj [10-27]: How Israel-First Jewish Americans plan to re-monopolize the narratives on Palestine.

  • Vivian Yee [10-27]: US assessment of Israeli shooting of journalist divided American officials: "A US colonel has gone public with his concern that official findings about the 2022 killing of a Palestinian American reporter were soft-pedaled to appease Israel." The journalist, you may recall, was Shireen Abu Akleh. The Biden administration "found no reason to believe this was intentional," and attributed it to "tragic circumstances."

  • Abdaljawad Omar [10-27]: Israel seeks redemption in the Gaza ruins: "Throughout the Gaza war, Israel has debated what to call it. The military says 'October 7 War,' while Netanyahu wants 'War of Redemption.' What's clear is that Israel believes it can only resolve its ongoing cycle of crisis through genocidal violence." Notes that name chosen for the military operation was originally "Swords of Iron" (derived from "Iron Wall": "the fantasy of unbreakable security through permanent domination"), but that's hard to distinguish from every other exercise in collective punishment inflicted on Gaza since 2006. The military preference "fixes the war to a date of trauma, as if to anchor the nation's moral position in the moment of its own suffering," which is to say that they see one day's violent outburst as justifying everything that came after, the details hardly worth mentioning. But that at least treats the war as a collective national experience. Netanyahu's "War of Redemption" is his way of saying that the war (by which we mean genocide) simply proves that he and his political faction were right all along. This makes it a war to dominate Israel as much as it is a war to destroy Palestine.

  • Adrienne Lynett/Mira Nablusi [10-26]: From the margins to the mainstream: how the Gaza genocide transformed US public opinion: "Two years into the Gaza genocide, public opinion on Israel, Palestine, and US policy has undergone a profound shift. A close examination of poll data shows Palestine is no longer a niche issue but one with real electoral consequences." Which might matter in a real democracy, but in a nation where politics is controlled by the donor class, Israel still exercises inordinate influence. Still, as long as Israel remains a niche issue — something a few people feel strongly about, but which most people can ignore — I doubt that shifting opinion polls will have much effect. But it's impossible to be a credible leftist without taking a stand against genocide and apartheid. And Democrats need the left more than ever, because they need to provide a credible, committed, trustworthy opposition to the Trump right.

  • Louis Allday [10-30]: Palestinian scholar who wrote iconic book on Zionism reflects on the Gaza genocide and our duty to history: "Mondoweiss speaks to celebrated Palestinian scholar Sabri Jiryis about his life, Zionism, the genocide in Gaza, and the judgements of history."

  • Haaretz [11-14]: Israel's violent Jewish settlers are neither marginal nor a handful.

  • Mark Braverman [11-16]: Charting Judaism's moral crossroads at the Gaza genocide: Book review of Susan Landau, ed., Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By: Jews of Conscience on Palestine. "The moral clarity of its contributors is more needed than ever as the self-proclaimed Jewish state commits a genocide in Gaza." [PS: Links available on book page to read online or download.]

  • Craig Mokhiber [11-19]: The UN embraces colonialism: Unpacking the Security Council's mandate for the US colonial administration of Gaza: I don't doubt the validity of the complaints, but it's not like there's any other game in play. No one can force Israel to heal, other than perhaps the US, and then only within narrow limits — both constraints imposed by Israel, and by the peculiar mentality of the Trump administration. So I can see an argument for rubber stamping this now, then as various aspects of the scheme fail, lobbying for improvements later. One thing other countries can do is to put some BDS structures in place, which can be triggered if/when Israel and/or the US fails, violates and/or reneges on their promises, or simply doesn't produce a just result.

  • Mitchell Plitnick [11-14]: Why normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia won't happen now, regardless of what Trump wants.

  • Mattea Kramer [11-20]: Trump's most original idea ever: An unexpected con to end free speech: Trump has taken the classic fascist focus on suppressing free speech and dressed it up as a noble campaign to protect Jews from antisemitism — their code word for any criticism of Israel, even if it's plain as day that Israel is committing not just atrocities but genocide. But I'm not sure the irony works here, because I'm not sure it's ironical. There isn't that much daylight between Israeli and American fascism, especially when it comes to suppressing truths and ridiculing justice.

Russia/Ukraine: Nothing much here until Trump, or wheover speaks for him in such matters, issued his "28-point plan" to end the war. Reaction predictably, much like his 20-point Gaza plan, splits between those who realize that Trump's support is necessary to end the war, even if it is ill-considered, and those willing to suffer more war for the sake of some principles, no matter how impractical. Examples of both follow below, and the ones I list are far from exhaustive. Perhaps at some point I'll find time to look at the "plan" and tell you what I think should happen, as I did with Gaza here and here. (By the way, the second piece was partly written with Ukraine in mind, if not as an explicit subject.)

Trump's War and Peace: We might as well admit that Trump's foreign policy focus has shifted from trade and isolation to war and terror.

Trump Regime: Practically every day I run across disturbing, often shocking stories of various misdeeds proposed and quite often implemented by the Trump Administration -- which in its bare embrace of executive authority we might start referring to as the Regime. Collecting them together declutters everything else, and emphasizes the pattern of intense and possibly insane politicization of everything. Pieces on the administration.

  • Daniel Larison

  • Jonathan V Last [11-03]: Donald Trump is a Commie: I scraped this quote off a tweet image, before trying to figure out its source (this appears to be it):

    On Friday I wrote about the Trump administration's latest foray into national socialism:

    • Trump wants to build nuclear power plants.
    • He has chosen Westinghouse to build them.
    • He will pay Westinghouse $80 billion for the projects.
    • In return he has compelled Westinghouse to pay him the government 20 percent of any "cash distributions."
    • Between now and the end of January 2029, the government can compel Westinghouse to go public via an IPO, at which point the government will be awarded 20 percent ownership of the company, likely making it the single largest shareholder.

    This is literally seizing the means of production. But to, you know, make America great again. Or something.

    Other of Trump's national socialist policies include:

    • Refusing to enforce a 2024 law requiring the sale of TikTok until he was able to compel that business be sold at an extortionately discounted price to his political allies.
    • Creating a Golden Share of U.S. Steel for his government.
    • Requiring Nvidia and AMD to pay the government 15 percent of all revenues from chip sales to China.
    • Acquiring a 10 percent ownership stake in chipmaker Intel.
    • Acquiring a 15 percent stake in rare earth producers MP Materials, a 10 percent stake in Lithium Americas Corp., and a 10 percent stake in Trilogy Metals Inc.
    • Creating a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile."
    • Taking steps to create a sovereign wealth fund to be used as a vehicle for government investment.
    • He has demanded that Microsoft fire an executive he does not like and demanded that private law firms commit to doing pro bono work on behalf of clients he chooses for them.

    At first this read like a right-wing parody rant against socialism, but the adjective "national" deflects a bit. Still, some of these steps aren't totally bad — e.g., I can see some value in "a sovereign wealth fund to be used as a vehicle for government investment," but I wouldn't trust Trump (or Clinton or Obama) to run it.

  • Brad Reed [11-17]: 'Americans should be enraged': Reports expose unprecedented corruption at Trump DOJ.

Donald Trump (Himself): As for Il Duce, we need a separate bin for stories on his personal peccadillos -- which often seem like mere diversions, although as with true madness, it can still be difficult sorting serious incidents from more fanciful ones.

Democrats:

  • New York Times Editorial Board [10-20]: The partisans are wrong: moving to the center is the way to win: Their main evidence is that 13 Democrats who won in districts Trump won are less left than average Democrats, and 3 Republicans who won in districts Harris won are less right than average Republicans. Duh. For a response:

    • Nathan J Robinson [11-04]: The case for centrism does not hold up: "The New York Times editorial board is wrong. Principled politics on the Bernie Sanders model is still the path forward." I basically agree, but I rather doubt that the issues are well enough understood or for that matter can even be adequately explained to make much difference. The bigger question isn't what you stand for, but whether you stand for anything. Why vote for someone you can't trust? Sure, someone else may be even more untrustworthy, and many of us take that into consideration, but you can never be sure, and the less you know the more confusing it gets. If the only thing that mattered was the left-right axis, the centrists should have an advantage, because they promise to expand on their left or right base. But centrists are deemed untrustworthy, partly because they try to straddle both sides, and because the easy out for them is corruption. Sanders stands for something, and you can trust him not to waver. But also if all politicians were honest, the left would have a big advantage, because their policies design to help more people. Conversely, when centrists flirt with and then abandon leftist policies, it hurts them more, because it undermines basic trust. Clinton and Obama may have won by straddling the middle, but as soon as they got elected, they joined the establishment and betrayed their trust. Right-wingers are more likely to get away with discarding their platforms, because people expect less from them, so have fewer hopes to dash.

  • Timothy Shenk [09-29]: Democrats are in crisis. Eat-the-rich populism is the only answer. I've read the author's Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy, which made some interesting choices in the search for pivot points in American politics, but not his more recent Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, which tries to anticipate history by focusing on similar figures whose legacies are as yet unclear: Stanley Greenberg and Doug Schoen. Here he tries to draw a line between Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Zohran Mamdani in New York. "Eat-the-rich" is a gaudy image I'm not partial to, but they do make juicy targets, especially when you see how they behave when they think they have uncheckable power.

  • Chris Hedges [11-03]: Trump's greatest ally is the Democratic Party: Easy to understand this frustration with the Democratic Party, especially its "leadership," but harder to find a solution. I'm especially skeptical that Hedges' preference for "mass mobilization and strikes" will do the trick.

    If the Democratic Party was fighting to defend universal health care during the government shutdown, rather than the half measure of preventing premiums from rising for ObamaCare, millions would take to the streets.

    The Democratic Party throws scraps to the serfs. It congratulates itself for allowing unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on for-profit health care policies. It passes a jobs bill that gives tax credits to corporations as a response to an unemployment rate that — if one includes all those who are stuck in part-time or lower skilled jobs but are capable and want to do more — is arguably, closer to 20 percent. It forces taxpayers, one in eight of whom depend on food stamps to eat, to fork over trillions to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and endless war, including the genocide in Gaza.

    The defenestration of the liberal class reduced it to courtiers mouthing empty platitudes. The safety valve shut down. The assault on the working class and working poor accelerated. So too did very legitimate rage.

    This rage gave us Trump.

    I'm more inclined to argue that what gave us Trump wasn't rage but confusion. Democrats deserve more than a little blame for that — they haven't been adequately clear on what they believe in (perhaps, sure, because they don't believe in much) nor have they done a good job of articulating how their programs would benefit most people (perhaps because they won't, or perhaps because they're preoccupied with talking to donors at the expense of voters). Still, this is mostly the work of what Kurt Andersen called Evil Geniuses. Give them credit, not least of all for making Hedges' reasoned complaint sound like enraged lunacy.

Republicans: A late addition, back by popular demand, because it isn't just Trump, we also have to deal with the moral swamp he crawled out of:

  • Zack Beauchamp

    • [10-17]: Inside the war tearing the Heritage Foundation and the American right apart: "A Heritage insider alleging 'openly misogynistic and racist' conduct shines a light on the right's inner workings." Much ado about Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Kevin Roberts.

    • [10-27]: The GOP's antisemitism crisis: "Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and the looming Republican civil war over Jews." Author puts a lot more effort into untangling this than the subject is worth. The natural home for anti-semitism (prejudice against Jews in one's own country) is on the right, because it depends on a combination of malice and ignorance, and that's where the right thrives. The left is, by its very nature supportive of equality and tolerant of diversity, so it is opposed to prejudice against anyone. The Israel lobby has tried to play both sides of this street. With liberals, they stress the common bond of American and Israeli Jews, each with its own history of oppression, as well as their common legacy of the Holocaust. With the right, they emphasize their illiberalism, their common beliefs in ethnocracy and the use of force to keep the lesser races in place. With Christians, they can stress their joint interest in Jewish repossession of the Holy Land (albeit for different purposes). And with even the rawest anti-semites, they welcome the expulsion of Jews from the Diaspora. However, the more Israel breaks bad, the easier it is for the right to sell anti-semitic tropes not just to white nationalists but to Blacks and Latinos who recognize racism when it becomes as obvious as it is in Israel.

  • Merrill Goozner [11-06]: Republicans have stopped pretending to care about health care: "The long-term medical cost crisis can't be solved without universal coverage. For the first time in US history, the GOP doesn't even have a concept of a plan."

  • Hady Mawajdeh/Noel King [11-15]: The insidious strategy behind Nick Fuentes's shocking rise: "How a neo-Nazi infiltrated so deep into the Republican Party."

  • Christian Paz [11-22]: What Marjorie Taylor Greene's feud with Trump is really about: "MTG isn't turning against MAGA. She's trying to save it." Since this piece appeared:

Economy and technology (especially AI): I used to have a section on the economy, which mostly surveyed political economics. Lately, I run across pieces on AI pretty often, both in terms of what the technology means and is likely to do and in terms of its outsized role in the speculative economy. I suspect that if not now then soon we will recognize that we are in a bubble driven by AI speculation, which is somewhat masking a small recession driven largely by Trump's shutdown, tariffs, and inflation. In such a scenario, there are many ways to lose.

  • Whitney Curry Wimbish/Naomi Bethune [10-02]: Microsoft is abandoning Windows 10. Hackers are celebrating. "Advocacy groups warn this will leave up to 400 million computers vulnerable to hacks or in the dump." Also: "But about 42 percent of Windows computers worldwide are still using Windows 10." My counter here is that any orphaned technology should become public domain. In particular, any orphaned software should become open source. Moreover, there needs to be minimum standards for support, beyond which it can be declared as orphaned, so we don't just wind up with a lot of tech controlled by sham caretakers. I could see payouts as a way of expediting the transfer of technology to the public domain, so companies have some incentive to let go of things they don't really want anyway. I'd be willing to consider a staged approach, where instead of going into the public domain, the tech is initially transferred to non-profit customer/user groups, who can take over the support function, and possibly decide later to give it to the public. Of course, we could save ourselves a lot of trouble by getting rid of patents and other forms of censorship in the first place.

  • Zephyr Teachout [10-15]: So long as oligarchs control the public square, there will be corruption: "It's time to break up Big Media, Big Tech, and the finance system that binds them together."

  • Eric Levitz [11-04]: The most likely AI apocalypse: "How artificial intelligence could be leading most humans into an inescapable trap." He wobbles a lot between things that could be good and things that could be bad, but the latter don't quite rise to the level of apocalypse, unless he really expects the people who own the AI to use it to target and wipe out the no-longer-needed workers. I don't quite see how that works. His point that the way to avoid this "apocalypse" is to build socio-economic support institutions to spread out benefits and reduce risks. He sees AI as a resource bounty, like discovering oil and minerals, and gives Norway as an example of one country that handled its newfound wealth relatively well, as opposed to Congo, which hasn't.

  • Dean Baker: I've cited several of his pieces elsewhere (on shutdown, health care expense), but much more is worth citing, and he is an economist:

    • [11-05]: New York Times pushes blatant lies about neoliberalism. Always, you may be thinking, but specifically an op-ed by Sven Beckert [11-04]: The old order is dead. Do not resuscitate. Which argues that "capitalism is a series of regime changes," and notes that "If Davos was the symbolic pilgrimage site of the neoliberal era, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference may be emerging as the spiritual center of a new order." So it sounds like he's come to bury the old neoliberalism, but his new regime smells suspiciously like the old regime, except run by people whose only distinguishing characteristics are meaner and dumber.

  • Dani Rodrik [11-10]: What even is a 'good' job? Good question.

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

Daron Acemoglu [01-26]: A renewed liberalism can meet the populist challenge: Liberalism is an honorable political philosophy, which for most of its history has helped not just to increase individual freedom but to more broadly distribute wealth and respect. (Unlike conservatism, which has rarely been anything but an excuse for the rich and powerful lording it over others.) However, something is amiss if this is the best you can do:

At its core, liberalism includes a bundle of philosophical ideas based on individual rights, suspicion of and constraints on concentrated power, equality before the law and some willingness to help the weakest and discriminated members of society.

That "some willingness" doesn't get you very far. That reminds you that these days liberalism is defined not by what it aspires to but by what it's willing to discard to preserve self-interest. Meanwhile, those who still believe that individual rights can be universal have moved on to the left.

Henry Farrell [10-16]: China has copied America's grab for semiconductor power: "Six theses about the consequences." Mostly that the adversarial relationship between the US and China can easily get much worse. Or, as the last line puts it: "The risks of unanticipated and mutually compounding fuck-ups are very, very high."

Yasmin Nair:

  • [03-15]: It's freaky that movies are so bad, but AI is not the problem: No, capitalism is. Although what's freaky is how much the speculative wealth of capitalism is being propped up by the idea that whoever controls AI will dominate the world, much like how private equity companies buy up productive companies, loot them, and drive them into bankruptcy.

    PS: I found this piece from a Nathan J Robinson-reposted tweet. I was rather taken aback to find this on the bottom of the page:

    Don't plagiarise any of this, in any way. I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent.

    I'm probably safe here in that I cited her article, but just to be clear, while I often paraphrase arguments put forth by other writers in cited articles, nothing I wrote above was actually derived from her article, which I barely scanned. The title simply struck me as an opportunity to make a point, so I ran with it — as indeed I'm doing here. I did do some due diligence and searched my archives, and found that I had cited Yasmin Nair twice before:

    • Yasmin Nair [2024-03-27]: What really happened at Current Affairs?: I described this as "looks to be way too long, pained, deep, and trivial to actually read," but noted that I once had a similar experience.
    • Yasmin Nair [2024-08-23]: Kamala Harris will lose: Cited with no comment. While this was written in August, I didn't pick it up until I was doing my post-election Speaking of Which [2024-11-11]. Her ideas were pretty commonplace among left critics back in August (which is not to say they had been plagiarized, either from or by her), and were largely vindicated by her loss. Her main points were: Harris stands for nothing; Democrats are taking voters for granted; Even liberal and progressive values are being shunned; COVID is still around. The latter is a somewhat curious point she doesn't do much with, but it's rather extraordinary how quickly and thoroughly lessons and even memories of the pandemic were not just discarded but radically revised.

    My own view was that Harris had made a calculated gamble that she could gain more votes — and certainly more money, which she actually did — by moving right than she stood to lose from a left that had no real alternative. Given that, I didn't see the value in either arguing with her experts or in promoting her left critics. Her gamble failed not because she misread the left (who understood the Trump threat well enough to stick with her regardless) as because her move to the right lost her cred with ideologically incoherent voters who could have voted against Trump but didn't find reason or hope to trust he.

  • [11-12]: Kamal Harris's memoir shows exactly why her campaign flopped: A review of her campaign memoir, 107 Days: "In her new book, Kamala Harris insists she only lost the election because she didn't have enough time. But she accidentally demonstrates the real reason: she's a terrible politician."

  • [04-10]: Kamala Harris and the art of losing: Same article, pre-memoir. Just a stray thought, not occasioned here, but one big difference between Haris and Mamdani is that she was obviously reluctant to leave her safe zone, which made her look doubtful, while Mamdani seems willing to face anyone, and talk about anything. Perhaps one reason is that he seems to always speak from principles, but he doesn't use them as cudgels: he's confident enough in what he stands for to listen to challenges, and respond rationally. Nair's charge that Harris has no principles may be unfair, but unrefuted by her campaign.

Thomas Morgan [10-14]: A universe of possibilities within their resource constraints: "all about the new album Around You Is a Forest." Morgan is a jazz bassist of considerable note, out with his first album as a leader after 150+ albums supporting others. The album was built using a computer program called WOODS, which takes input from a musician and turns it into a duet of considerable variety and charm.

Sean Illing [10-26]: Why every website you used to love is getting worse: "The decay of Google, Amazon, and Facebook are part of a larger trend." Interview with Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. I've been reading a book called The Shock of the Anthropocene, which invents a half-dozen synonyms (Therocene, Thanatocene, Phagocene, etc.), but misses Doctorow's Enshittocene. Still, when I mention this concept to strangers, they grasp its meaning immediately. It's that obvious. I recently read Doctorow's The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, which covers much of the same ground.

Nathan J Robinson:

  • [10-08]: The rise of Nick Fuentes should horrify us all: "A neo-Nazi is trying to fill the void left by the failures of the two major parties. Unless Americans are offered a visionary alternative, Fuentes' toxic ideology may flourish."

  • [09-30]: The right's latest culture war crusade is against empathy: "Blessed are the unfeeling, for they shall inherit the GOP. Books, sermons, and tweets now warn that 'toxic empathy' is destroying civilization." Cites recent books by Allie Beth Stuckey (Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion) and Joe Rigney (The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits).

  • [11-18]: There have to be consequences for advocating illegal wars: "Yet again, the New York Times' Bret Stephens advocates the overthrow of a sovereign government. Why do the readers of the 'paper of record' tolerate this dangerous propaganda?" Pundits like Stephens have a long history of failing upward, because their services are always in demand no matter how shoddy their track record: they're not paid for getting it right, just for saying the "right" things. As for consequences, Robinson proposes to give anyone who cancels their New York Times subscription a free year of Current Events.

Dylan Scott

  • [11-04]: Why are my health insurance premiums going up so much?: "One of the Democrats' best political issues is to defend the Affordable Care Act. Is it worth defending?" Up to a point, but valuable as it is, it was never more than a stopgap solution to some glaring problems (like exclusion of benefits for "previous conditions").

    • Dean Baker:

      • [10-03]: Health care cost growth slowed sharply after Obamacare: This is a key story that is easily overlooked, largely because Republicans have carped endlessly about "Obamacare," and because doing so has obscured the trends before passage.

        In the decade before Obamacare passed, healthcare costs increased 4.0 percentage points as a share of GDP — the equivalent of more than $1.2 trillion in today's economy. By contrast, in the 15 years since its passage, health care costs have increased by just 1.4 percentage points.

      • [11-03]: Why is healthcare expensive? While the ACA slowed down increases in health care expenses, it didn't eliminate the really big problem, which is monopoly rents ("the costly trinity: drugs, insurance, and doctors").

  • [11-14]: Meet the newly uninsured: "Millions of Americans will soon go without insurance. We spoke with some of them."

Julio C Gambina [11-14]: How Milei prevailed in Argentina's midterms despite economic and political problems.

Danielle Hewitt/Noel King [11-22]: The 2 men fueling Sudan's civil war: "The fall of El Fasher and Sudan's ongoing conflict, explained by an expert." Alex DeWaal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts.

Some notable deaths: Mostly from the New York Times listings. Last time I did such a trawl was on October 21, so we'll look that far back (although some names have appeared since):

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas, but maybe I should just use it to bookmark some of our leading horribles.

  • Corey Robin [11-11]: Responds to a complaint by Paul Begala that: "Zohran Mamdani had the weakest win of a successful New York Democrat in 35 years." Begala compares Mamdani's 50.4% to Eric Adams (67%) and Bill DeBlasio (66-73%), without noting that turnout this time was 40% vs. 23-26% in recent elections, so Mamdani actually got a third more votes than any of his predecessors. In the comment section, Glenn Adler explains:

    Begala might have added that splitting the vote is the predictable result when losers of Democratic Party primary elections refuse to 'vote blue no matter who,' and choose to contest the general.

    But how many losers of Democratic primary elections for mayor of New York ever do such a thing? In the last 50 years only two, both named Cuomo.

    After losing a crowded primary to Ed Koch in 1977, Mario Cuomo lost again to Koch in a run-off, and ran again and lost to Koch in the general. With the party vote split, Koch received precisely 50% of the vote. (And, contra Begala, few would have called Koch's win 'weak'.)

    The campaign manager in this three-peat defeat? Andrew Cuomo.

    My wife worked on a financial newspaper in the late '80s, and one of the older editors reminisced about playing basketball with Cuomo when they both attended St John's Prep: "Mario was the only player who used to steal the ball -- from his own teammates!"

    A motto for the Cuomo family crest?

  • Rick Perlstein [11-18]: Responding to Richard Yeselson: "Hating Ezra Klein—as opposed to just disagreeing with him when you think he's wrong—is a weird, yet common pathology expressed by leftists here."

    For me, rooted in a pattern since his desperation to elevate Paul Ryan as worthy good-faith interlocutor. Charlie Kirk is the apotheosis: seeing politics as an intellectual game between equal teams, "left" and "right," systematically occluding fascism's rise. I hate him for it.

    It gets the better of his deeply humane impulses. And makes him far more powerful than he deserves to be, because there will always be a sellers market for anyone who helps elites play up the danger of "left" and play down the danger of "right."

    I'm pretty sure I don't hate Klein — I mostly find his interviews, essays, and the one book I've read (Why We're Polarized, not the Abundance one) to be informative and sensible, albeit with occasional lapses of the sort that seems to help him fail upwards (a pattern he has in common with Matthew Yglesias and Nate Silver). On the other hand, in my house I can't mention Klein without being reminded of his Iraq war support, so some people (and not only leftists) find some lapses unforgivable. (On the other hand, Peter Beinart seems to have been forgiven, so there's something to be said for making amends.)

  • Jeet Heer [11-21]: In response to a tweet with a video and quote from Sarah Hurwitz, where she argues that "Jewish schools should ban smartphones to keep youths from seeing the carnage in Gaza." I'm quoting there from Chris Menaham's tweet. The actual Hurwitz quote is: "I'm sorry if this is a graphic thing to say, but . . . when I'm trying to make arguments in favor for Israel . . . I'm talking through a wall of dead children." Heer responds, "if this is the case, maybe you should really reconsider your job?" My wife played me much more of Hurwitz opining, and I found the thinking to be really circular, but it really boils down to a belief that Jews are really different from everyone else, and that only Jews matter, because "we are family." That may explain why some Jews, feeling very protective of their "family," are willing to overlook "a wall of dead children," but how can anyone think that argument is going to appeal to anyone outside the family? "We're family" is something you tell your family, along with "and I love you," but before pointing out the atrocities members of your family have committed, sometimes in your name. But, let's face it, sometimes your family screws up real bad, and you have to do break with them to save yourself. For example, the Unabomber was turned in by his brother. That couldn't have been easy, but was the right thing to do. Mary Trump wrote a book, which was uniquely sympathetic to her cousin, but didn't excuse him. Too many Jews to list here have broken with Israel over the genocide, and many of them over decades of injustice toward Palestinians. That Hurwitz hasn't suggest to me that she has this incredibly insular worldview, where the only problem facing the world is antisemitism, because the only people who matter are Jews. If you take that view seriously, you might even argue that genocide in Gaza is a good thing, because it's pushing the world's deep-seated antisemitism to the surface, so you can see that Zionism is the only possible answer. But unless you're Jewish, why should you care? And if you are, why deliberately provoke hate, especially in countries like the US where most people are tolerant of Jews?

    Had I planned better, I would have given this its own subsection, back under Israel, but my wife got worked up enough of the Hurwitz panel discussion that she pointed me to a couple more articles worth mentioning here:

    • Alison Glick [11-25]: Sarah Hurwitz and liberal Zionism's hail mary: "Sarah Hurwitz's now-viral appearance at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly has exposed the crisis of Zionism in the U.S. and Jewish leaders' desperation to confront it."

    • Rabbi Sandra Lawson:

      • [10-20]: When power confuses equity for a threat: Regarding Hurwitz, she writes:

        Let's be clear about what she's actually saying: The problem isn't what's happening. It's that young people can see it. The issue isn't the carnage; it's the loss of narrative control. She's not disagreeing with the moral lesson that we should stand against the powerful harming the vulnerable. She's upset that people are applying it universally. The lesson was supposed to stay contained, meant only for certain victims.

        This is what it looks like when people who've always controlled the narrative suddenly don't. Hurwitz frames this as a "generational divide," but that's a misdiagnosis. Younger Jews aren't rejecting Jewish values. They're taking them seriously. They learned tzedek, tzedek tirdof ("justice, justice you shall pursue"), Tikkun Olam (our obligation to repair the world), and "do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor" — these values actually mean something to them. They were taught "Never Again" and they believe it applies to everyone. The divide isn't generational; it's between those who see Jewish ethics as universal and those who see them as exclusive. When someone with that much institutional power experiences the widening of moral concern as a threat, when visibility itself becomes the enemy, that tells you everything about who has been centered and who has been erased. . . .

        Equity is not a modern invention. It's Torah. It's the demand that we build a world where every person's divine image is honored, not just the ones historically centered. Our sages taught Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh: all of us are responsible for one another. And responsibility only works if everyone has access, voice, and dignity. Communal solidarity is impossible without equity.

        So when people respond to equity with fear or rage, I see it clearly: They're mourning the loss of unexamined advantage, not the loss of dignity.

      • [11-07]: The ADL is no longer a civil rights organization. Here's what we all lose: Worth noting a couple earlier pieces. Probably muich more where these came from.

      • [10-28]: Fear is not a strategy: why this letter does not make us safer: "This letter" is one signed by more than 1000 rabbis and cantors targeting New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

  • Brett Wilkins [11-19]: Top Dem speechwriter says young Jews' empathy for Gaza shows Holocaust education has backfired.

  • Adam Parkhomenko: Picture of Trump and Obama sitting at some distance, looking away from each other, which Trump glum and Obama indifferent. Meme reads: "The next time someone tells you that America isn't a sick & racist country, just remind them that this nation is willing to accept treason, rape, and child abuse from a white president but not healthcare from a black one." Much more wrong with this, but I limited my comment to this:

    I'm not sure it's even possible to malign Trump, but this seems rather tone deaf a week after the Trump-Mamdani photo op. While Trump is guilty of much, these particular charges are hardly clear cut -- neglect, carelessness, entitlement, abuse of power, and lots of lying and conniving are more than obvious -- meanwhile Obama's contribution to health care was little more than fine tuning, protecting insurance companies and the rest of the industry from the ire their policies were provoking, while helping some people afford a bit better care.

Current count: 185 links, 11365 words (14443 total)

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Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Loose Tabs

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 36 days ago, on September 14.

I rather arbitrarily rushed this out, partly because it had been so long that some of the old stories have started to fade — like Charlie Kirk and Jimmy Kimmel, in the new "Topical Stories" section — while others have taken significant turns. Back when I was doing Speaking of Which I had a routine of cycling through a series of websites and sorting out whatever I found. This isn't normally anywhere close to that systematic, with this time even less than usual. Another reason for doing it now is that I have better things to do this week, and I don't want the draft file hanging over my head. I figure I can add more if need be, and possibly revisit some bits, like I did ten days after my last one, in More Thoughts on Loose Tabs. No guarantee that I'll do that again, but it seems like there's always more to say.

Topical Stories

Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent themes of the following section.

Charlie Kirk: Right-wing activist, hustler, and media personality, shot and killed on September 10, his martyrdom quickly refashioned as an excuse to purge any critical discussion of the right. Wikipedia offers a comprehensive biography as well as a sampling of his views. He ran Turning Point USA, an organizing group reputed to be popular on college campuses and instrumental in getting the vote out for Trump -- one of many ways he was closely aligned with Trump (I'm tempted to say, like Ernst Röhm was aligned with Hitler, but less muscle and more mouth). He had a prominent talk radio program, and wrote several books:

  • Time for a Turning Point: Setting a Course Toward Free Markets and Limited Government for Future Generations, with Brent Hamachek (2016)
  • Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can WIN the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters (2018, forward by Donald Trump Jr)
  • The MAGA Doctrine: The Only Ideas That Will Win the Future (2020)
  • The College Scam: How America's Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America's Youth (2022)
  • Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West (2024)

Some more articles on Kirk:

  • Jeffrey St Clair [09-15] An occurrence in Orem: notes on the murder of Charlie Kirk. Much of this appeared in a Roaming Charges at the time, but here has been restructured for this one subject.

  • Kyle Chayka [09-17]: Charlie Kirk and Tyler Robinson came from the same warped online worlds: "The right-wing activist and his alleged assassin were both creatures of a digital ecosystem that rewards viral engagement at all costs."

  • Eric Levitz [09-20]: The comforting fiction that Charlie Kirk's killer was far-right: "Why some progressives lied to themselves about Tyler Robinson." Not a lot of good examples of "progressives" lying to themselves here (Heather Cox Richardson, Jimmy Kimmel, although few reports are detailed enough to tell). I see little value in trying to tag a label on a shooter, and much risk, of confusion or worse. But in general, shooting your opponents isn't a very left thing to do, while on the right it's both more common and more in tune with their ideology (inequality bolstered by power ultimately based on force) and custom (like their gun fetishism). But it's also likely that the more violent people on the right become, the more tempting their victims will find it to fight back in kind. When they do, that shouldn't suggest that their violence is somehow the consequence of left thinking — where inequality is seen as the key problem, and violence is opposed both on moral and political grounds — as opposed to a stray impulse from the broader American gun culture. I'd go so far as to say that if/when someone who identifies with the left shoots an alleged enemy of the left, that such a person is experiencing a (perhaps temporary) suspension of principles, not acting from them. I can even imagine scenarios where anti-right violence is reasonable — e.g., "self-defense" (which I reject as a right, where as with our "stand your ground" laws can easily be construed as a license to kill, but may accept as a mitigating factor, one rooted less in ideology than in our common human culture).

  • Katherine Kelaidis [09-24]: MAGA's first martyr: "The killing of Charlie Kirk could turn the movement into a faith that outlives Donald Trump. "As MAGA's first martyr, the myth being crafted around Kirk both mirrors that of earlier religions' martyrs while still bearing the unique marks of the MAGA faith."

  • Zack Beauchamp [09-24]: The right wants Charlie Kirk's death to be a "George Floyd" moment. Not that they want anyone to react quite like Kirk himself reacted to George Floyd's murder. Interview with Tanner Greer ("a conservative author and essayist who had written brilliantly about what Kirk meant to the right on his blog the Scholar's Stage"). This starts with a pretty thorough description of why Kirk mattered to the right ("second only to Donald Trump himself"). Beyond the media prowess, the grass roots organizing, and the networking, Greer claims him as a model: "an example of how this conservative national populist thing can be done without authoritarian measures and be very popular."

  • Steven Pinker [09-28]: The right's post-Kirk crackdown has a familiar mob logic.

  • Art Jipson [10-01]: Charlie Kirk and the making of an AI-generated martyr.

  • Alain Stephens [10-14]: The right wing desperately wants to make Charlie Kirk its MLK: "On Kirk's 'National Day of Remembrance,' white supremacists want to replace a tradition of justice with their own manufactured myth."

Jimmie Kimmel: His late-night show was suspended in response to orchestrated outrage over some speculation over Charlie Kirk's shooter, but reinstated (with numerous local stations blacked out) after a week or so. The suspension appears to have been triggered by the affiliates, which are often owned by right-wingers who jumped on this opportunity to exert their political preferences, but they did so in the context of inflammatory rhetoric by Trump's FCC chair. This goes to show that while acquiescence to fascism can be coerced, it's often just eagerly embraced by previously closeted sympathizers.

  • Zack Beauchamp [09-17] Let's be clear about what happened to Jimmy Kimmel: He "was just taken off the airwaves because the Trump administration didn't like what he had to say — and threatened his employer until they shut him up." Trump's agent here is FCC head Brendan Carr, who earned his appointment by writing the FCC section for Project 2025.

    Carr's threat should have been toothless. The FCC is prohibited by law from employing "the power of censorship" or interfering "with the right of free speech." There is a very narrow and rarely used exception for "news distortion," in which a broadcast news outlet knowingly airs false reports. What Kimmel did — an offhand comment based on weak evidence — is extremely different from creating a news report with the intent to deceive.

    But months before the shooting, Carr had begun investigating complaints under this exception against ABC and CBS stations, specifically allegations of anti-conservative bias. Stations had to take Carr's threat seriously — even though Carr himself had declared (in a 2024 tweet) that "the First Amendment prohibits government officials from coercing private parties into suppressing protected speech."

    Hours after Carr's Wednesday threat, Nexstar — the largest owner of local stations in America — suddenly decided that Kimmel's comments from two nights ago were unacceptable. Nexstar, it should be noted, is currently attempting to purchase one of its major rivals for $6.2 billion — a merger that would require express FCC approval.

  • Constance Grady [09-18] How Jimmy Kimmel became Trump's nemesis.

  • Jason Bailey [09-18] Jimmy Kimmel's cancellation is un-American: "Everyone concerned about free speech should be concerned about his show being pulled from the air."

  • Cameron Peters [09-18]: Trump's brazen attack on free speech: "How the Trump administration took Jimmy Kimmel off the air."

  • Jeet Heer [09-18]: Jimmy Kimmel's bosses sold us all out: "The mainstream media is complicit in the biggest attack on free speech since the McCarthy era. Kimmel's suspension is just the latest proof."

  • Adam Serwer [09-18]: The Constitution protects Jimmy Kimmel's mistake.

    What happened to Jimmy Kimmel is not about one comedian who said something he should not have said. The Trump administration and its enforcers want to control your speech, your behavior, even your public expressions of mourning. You are not allowed to criticize the president's associates. You do not even retain the right to remain silent; you must make public expressions of emotions demanded by the administration and its allies or incur its disfavor, which can threaten your livelihood.This is the road to totalitarianism, and it does not end with one man losing his television show.

  • Eric Levitz [09-19]: The right's big lie about Jimmy Kimmel's suspension: "the right believes that liberals are getting a taste of their own medicine."

  • Paul Starr [09-22]: Capture the media, control the culture? "Trump's attack on Jimmy Kimmel helps spotlight an even bigger problem."

  • Christian Paz [09-24]: Jimmy Kimmel's return showed the potential — and limits — of celebrity: "An emotional monologue, a takedown of Trump, and a victory for individual action." But note: "Sinclair and Nexstar are continuing their boycott of his show."

The right-wing war on free speech: The Kimmel suspension was just one headline in a much broader offensive.

  • Benjamin Mullin [09-15] Washington Post columnist says she was fired for posts after Charlie Kirk shooting: "Karen Attiah said she was fired for 'speaking out against political violence' and America's apathy toward guns."

  • Shayan Sardarizadeh/Kayleen Devlin [09-18] What is Antifa and why is President Trump targeting it?.

  • Zack Beauchamp [09-17]: The third Red Scare: "The right's new assault on free speech isn't cancel culture. It's worse."

  • Charlie Savage [09-18]: Can Trump actually designate Antifa a terrorist group? Here are the facts.

  • Jeff Sharlet [09-26]: Rubber glue fascism: "A close reading of "National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence."

  • Louis Menand [09-26]: Where the battle over free speech is leading us: Starts by quoting Trump's Jan. 20 executive ovder on "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship," then this:

    The President and his Administration then proceeded to ban the Associated Press from certain press events because it did not refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, sanction law firms that represented clients whose political views the Administration regards as unfriendly, arrest and seek to deport immigrants legally in the United States for opinions they expressed in speech or in print, defund universities for alleged antisemitic speech and leftist bias, sue the Wall Street Journal for libel, extort sixteen million dollars from the corporate owner of CBS because of the way a "60 Minutes" interview was edited, set about dismantling the Voice of America for being "anti-Trump" and "radical," coerce businesses and private colleges and universities to purge the word "diversity" from their websites, and order the National Endowment for the Arts to reject grant applications for projects that "promote gender ideology."

    After threats from the head of the Federal Communications Commission, a late-night television personality had his show suspended because of some (rather confusing) thing he said about Trump's political movement. Other media outlets were advised to get in line. Trump has proposed that licenses be withdrawn from companies that air content critical of him. The Administration has opened Justice Department investigations into and yanked security details from people whose political views it dislikes. It has also warned that it may revoke the visas of and deport any foreign nationals who joke about the death of Charlie Kirk. West Point cancelled an award ceremony for Tom Hanks, after having already winnowed its library of potentially offensive books.

    This piece goes on to review a couple of books: Christopher L. Eisgruber: Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right; Fara Dabhoiwala: What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. "Eisgruber thinks that the maximalist character of American free-speech law is the best thing about it, but Dabhoiwala thinks it's the worst."

  • Matthew Whitley [09-27]: What liberals get wrong about Trump's executive order on antifa: "Liberals dismiss antifa as just an idea — instead of acting to defend the activists, researchers, and organizers facing persecution."

  • Nicole Hemmer [09-30]: We have seen the 'woke right' before, and it wasn't pretty then, either.

  • Thor Benson [09-16]: Republicans want to protect free speech for themselves and no one else: "The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress continue to attack free speech in numerous ways." Based on an interview with Adam Serwer, who sums up: "Conservatives can say what they want, and everyone else can say what conservatives want. So it basically means that only conservatives have a right to free speech." Or: "I sometimes refer to it as conservatives believing they have a right to monologue. They can speak, and you have to listen and like it. But you can't talk back."

Trump's political prosecutions: He's been collecting his grudge list. Now his DOJ has it, and is moving against his "enemies," including his investigation of John Bolton, and indictments so far against James Comey and Letitia James.

Trump, Hegseth, and the rally at Quantico: They're certainly making it look like they want to use the military to dominate and control their political enemies. The New Republic did a series of articles in 2024 about What American Fascism Would Look Like, and they're worth revisiting now that it takes less imagination to see their relevance. In particular, see Rosa Brooks [2024-05-16]: The liberal fantasy is just that: on the military in fascist America. While she starts dismissive of "liberal fantasy," she does concede this much:

Even without the specter of a president bent on retribution, the vast majority of military personnel will err on the side of obedience if there is even the slightest uncertainty about whether a particular presidential directive is unlawful. And if the senior officers most inclined to object have already been demoted or dismissed, it is implausible that Trump's orders will face widespread military resistance.

No one should kid themselves about the degree of legal latitude President Trump would enjoy. Bush administration lawyers had to turn themselves into pretzels to argue that torture wasn't really torture­. But most of Trump's stated plans won't even require lawyerly contortions. Historically, there's been a strong norm against domestic use of the military to suppress protest or engage in law enforcement activities, and some legal safeguards exist. But under the Insurrection Act, the president can employ the military domestically in response to rebellion or insurrection, or when "any part or class of [a state's] people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution," or when an act of rebellion or violence "opposes or obstructs the execution" of the law.

The Supreme Court has historically interpreted this as giving the president complete discretion to decide what kind of activity justifies domestic use of the military. "The authority to decide whether the exigency has arisen belongs exclusively to the President," opined the court in Martin v. Mott in 1827. If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and deploys military personnel domestically to quell protests or round up immigrants, there will be plenty of unhappy military personnel—but they are unlikely to have any basis on which to claim such deployments are unlawful.

And when it comes to military action outside the United States, the news is worse. Notwithstanding Congress's constitutional powers and legislation such as the War Powers Act, successive presidents have enjoyed a virtually unconstrained ability to use military force beyond our borders. There would be plenty of military unhappiness if Trump directed attacks on Mexican soil or the use of tactical nuclear weapons, but it's unlikely military leaders would have any lawful basis to object.

Military leaders who dislike the orders they receive sometimes engage in the time-honored Pentagon tradition of stonewalling and slow-rolling, looking for ways to quietly thwart the objectives of their civilian masters while maintaining a facade of compliance. But if President Trump uses his power to fire or demote insufficiently loyal general officers, as he says he will, even this dubious avenue of military resistance will likely be closed off.

The purpose of the Quantico gathering of all of the military's general officers was pretty clearly to assess and police their loyalty to the administration, which increasingly matches Trump's political agenda. One big thing on that agenda is staying in power beyond Trump's elected term. Using the military to do that seems desperate and risky, but it is something to think about, if only because it is something Trump's people are definitely thinking about. The following are some articles on the Trump-Hegseth military — rechristened the War Department, because they want you to fear it, and because they see a growing cult of "warrior ethos" as serving their needs:

Shutdown: The federal government was nominally shut down on October 1, with the expiration of the earlier continuing resolution that allowed the government to spend appropriated money pending new authorization. For an overview, see Wikipedia: 2025 United States federal government shutdown. it has continued at least 12 days, making it one of the longest of the increasingly frequent shutdowns. I've paid very little attention to this, but have noted a few articles below. Without careful study, I'm inclined to believe that Democrats are historically so opposed to shutdowns that if they're responsible for this one — and they are blocking cloture on some kind of continuing resolution in the Senate — they must have an awful good reason for doing so. And with Trump politicizing every nook and cranny of government, I'm not sure that shutting things down will be much worse than letting them continue to run amok as they've been doing. But that's not a reason for or against shutdown; it's just a reason not to get overly worked up over the issue.

Bari Weiss: Former "anti-woke" New York Times commentator keeps failing upwards, now to the top editor spot at CBS News.

Epsteinmania: Not dead yet, especially if you're a Democratic pol, but fading fast.

Kamala Harris: She's in the news (barely) with her campaign memoir, 107 Days.

  • Jeet Heer [09-26]: The shortest presidential campaign: "a devastating indictment of Joe Biden. It also documents the limits of her own politics."

  • Eoin Higgins [10-07]: Jonathan Chait thinks Kamala Harris went too far left. He's just falling for Trump's demagoguery. I haven't read Chait since he moved to The Atlantic — not that I wouldn't have taken the opportunity to ridicule recent pieces like Democrats still have no idea what went wrong, but paying for him seems a bit much — but he seems stuck in the idea that the left-right axis is all there is to politics, and that implies that the left party should hew as close as possible to the right party in order to obtain the most votes. But politics doesn't work that way: some issues don't have a left-right divide, and there are other traits to consider, like integrity, competency, fortitude, and leadership skills. But perhaps most foolishly, he assumes that the right's talking points matter to the mugwump voters he reveres as centrists. The problem is centrism isn't merely a shade between left and right. Centrists are conflicted, embracing some things the right says, and some things the left says. The trick isn't to muddy the waters, as Chait would have you do, but to make your points seem more important than theirs. Soft-pedaling rarely if ever works, because they pick up on your doubts and don't believe you.

    By the way, for an idea of what Chait's been writing over there, see this list of titles. His anti-Trump pieces are probably as good as ever.

  • Amy Davidson Sorkin [10-08]: Who can lead the Democrats? "Kamala Harris almost won in 2024. So why does her new book feel like another defeat?" Possibly because henceforth the losing is what people remember, what defines her, and what she'll never escape from. "One of the puzzles of 107 Days is that such details do not, on the whole, come across as humanizing, let alone endearing, but as dreary and even sour." Maybe because she's a loser? And nothing she has to say is substantial enough to overcome that? "Harris was dealt an enormously difficult hand and for the most part she played it well, galvanizing much of her party while enduring an immeasurable level of misogyny and racism. And she almost won." But she didn't. And the "galvanizing" had less to do with her than with a party base that desperately wanted her to be the leader they needed. The party was psyched to move beyond Biden, and readily accepted her as their leader. I can nitpick now, but I didn't have a problem with going with her back then, nor did other Democrats. We trusted her, and even her team, and they let us down. That's not easily forgiven. Still, one thing I wonder here is since she does have some kind of critique of Biden, would it have helped had she been more explicit about it during the election.

  • Ross Barkan [10-11]: The emptiness of Kamala Harris: "The lack of vision in her book tour shows why she lost."

No Kings protests: I've never had much interest in demonstrations. My first was against the Vietnam War, and while I was not just opposed, the war had shaken all my faith in American justice and decency, I only went because my brother insisted. I only went this time because my wife insisted. We wandered around the northwest perimeter, and left early. Lots of people, all sorts, many in costume, most with a wide range of homemade signs. They were lining Douglas, but hadn't blocked traffic. It was very loud, with chants of "this is what democracy looks like," and car horns (presumably in approval, but I saw one Trump pickup with four flags blasting out "YMCA"). Here's some video (caption says "8,000 to 10,000 people"). I'm not making a search for articles, but ran across some anyway:

  • Quinta Jurcic [10-18]: Resistance is cringe: "But it's also effective."

    Idealism helped motivate Trump's opponents during his first term. But it has the potential to carry even more weight during his second, given how the president's anti-democratic project is not as constrained as it was the first time around. As Levin of Indivisible told me, "The real enemy in an authoritarian breakthrough moment is nihilism and cynicism and fatalism." This idea was a regular subject of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who famously argued that totalitarian regimes depend on eroding their subjects' sense of political possibility. Such governments, she wrote, aim not "to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."

    "I didn't like resistlib cringe content in the first Trump administration," wrote Adam Gurri, the editor in chief of Liberal Currents, in a social-media post two months after Trump's second inauguration, admitting: "I was wrong. I was just being a snob." As Gurri suggests, the administration's insistence on irony and insincerity has given a new power to plain, old, corny symbols. Recently, a photo published in the Chicago Tribune went viral, showing a Marine veteran protesting amid clouds of tear gas in front of an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Illinois, stoically holding not one but two American flags. Even the name of the No Kings protest is a reclamation of foundational American heritage that might have felt cheesy a year ago, but today carries a new seriousness.

Major Threads

Israel: Worse than ever, but main news story as been "Trump's Peace Plan," which (without much research yet, I can safely say) doesn't show much understanding of "peace" or "plan," and is probably just a deniable, insincere feint by Netanyahu. Still, it's hard to imagine Israel accepting any measure of peace without strongarming by the US, so hopeful people are tempted to read more into this than is warranted. Many articles scattered below. I'll try to sum them up later.

  • Muhannad Ayyash [07-13]: Calling the world to account for the Gaza genocide: Review of Haidar Eid's book, Banging on the Walls of the Tank, which "reveals a disturbing but irrefutable reality: the world has abandoned the Palestinian people to be annihilated as a people in the most calculated and brutal fashion possible."

  • Amos Brison [08-01]: Germany's angel of history is screaming: "As Israel obliterates Gaza with Berlin's backing, German public support is plummeting. Yet the government is crushing dissent and refusing to change course — all in the name of atoning for Germany's own genocidal history." One sign from the demo pic: "NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE."

  • Ben Lorber [08-20]: Israel's iron grip on the American right is slipping away: "Generational shift, isolationism, and nationalist anger are breaking the GOP's pro-Israel consensus. But the left must remain wary of their motives."

  • Alaa Salama [08-29]: Forget symbolic statehood — the world must recognize Israeli apartheid: "To push to recognize a Palestinian state creates the illusion of action, but delays the real remedies: sanctioning and isolating Israel's apartheid regime."

  • Bernie Sanders [09-17]: It is genocide: "Many experts have now concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. I agree." It took him quite a while, but he's pretty clear (and blunt) about it here.

  • Lili Meyer [09-18]: How "antisemitism" became a weapon of the right: "At a time when allegations of antisemitism are rampant and often incoherent, historian Mark Mazower offers a helpfully lucid history of the term." Review of Mazower's book, On Antisemitism: A Word in History.

  • Abdallah Fayyad [09-19]: The growing conseusns that Israel is committing genocide: "A UN commission joined a chorus of experts in calling Israel's actions a genocide. Will the world listen?

  • Joshua Keating [09-23]: Turning point or political theater? The big push for Palestinian statehood, explained.

  • Nick Cleveland-Stout:

    • [09-25]: Israel is paying influencers $7,000 per post: "Netanyahu referred this week to a 'community' pushing out preferred messaging in US media -- and boy are they making a princely sum."

    • [09-29]: Israel wants to train ChatGPT to be more pro-Israel: "In a new $6M contract, US firm 'Clock Tower X' will generate and deploy content across platforms, help game algorithms, plus manage AI 'frameworks" to make them more friendly to the cause." Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale "is at the center of the Israeli government's new deal," so aside from whatever misinformation they produce, there is an element of old-fashioned payola at work.

    • [10-07]: Israel wants to hire Chris Pratt and Steph Curry: "The Jewish state is seeking to target Christian Evangelical churches for support, using celebrities and an anti-Palestinian message in a new $3.2M effort."

  • Lama Khouri [09-26]: The necropolitics of hunger: man-made famine and futurity of the Palestinian nation. This stresses that both the short-term and long-term impacts of Israel's starvation tactic concentrate on children. Even those who survive will bear the scars as long as they live. This is sometimes hidden in jargon, like "the mental architecture of unchilding" and "intergenerational biological inheritance," which may take you a while to unpack, but is no less hideous in abstraction.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos [09-27]: Israel wins TikTok: "Larry Ellison and a constellation of billionaires will finally get their way, buying the very app they wanted to kill a year ago for being too 'pro-Palestinian'. Hard to credit this, but note: "TikTok has now become where 30% of Americans get their news." Related here:

  • Jonah Valdez [10-01]: The Trump-Netanyahu peace deal promises indefinite occupation.

  • Joshua Keating:

  • Phyllis Bennis [10-03]: Trump and Netanyahu's 20-point Gaza ultimatum: "The plan for Gaza does not promise to end Israel's genocide — but does promise indefinite occupation."

  • Qassam Muaddi

  • Shaul Magid [10-07]: The Zionist consensus among US Jews has collapsed. Something new is emerging: "Two years after the 7 October massacre and the onset of Israel's slaughter in Gaza, American Jewry has been profoundly transformed." Magid is the author of an interesting book on the relationship between American Judaism and Zionism, The Necessity of Exile.

  • William Hartung [10-07]: $21.7 billion in US military aid has fueled Israel's war on Gaza: "A new report shows how American support has been essential to what many experts are now calling a genocide."

  • Jeffrey Sachs/Sybil Fares [10-08]: A decolonised alternative to Trump's Gaza peace plan: "Only a deoclonised plan centered on Palestinian sovereignty can bring lasting peace to Gaza." They list 20 points, in parallel to the Trump points. The most problematic part of this is the extension of Palestinian sovereignty to include some (or all) of the West Bank, with all of it governed by the PA. Although I can imagine Israel, under pressure, giving up its claims to Gaza, there is no chance of it doing so with the West Bank settlements let alone the (illegally, sure) annexed Jerusalem and Golan Heights. While the situation for Palestinians in the West Bank is grim, the situation in Gaza is far more dire, so much so it has to be addressed separately — which means bracketing the broader and more intractable issues of ethnocracy and apartheid. A second point is that the PA is more accurately seen as an Israeli client than as a representative of the Palestinian people. They have no more right to administer Gaza than Hamas does. While I expect that whoever organizes aid to a post-Israel, post-Hamas Gaza will be in the driver's seat, the goal there should in a fairly short time frame to stand up a new polity, which will certainly still have to negotiate with donors but will practice sovereignty. One big problem is that Israel (and before them the UK, and before them the Ottomans) has never allowed the establishment of democracy in any Palestinian territory. Hence, leadership has either been appointed to quislings, or seized by revolutionaries, with neither serving the people well, giving Israel an excuse to run roughshod over all of them.

  • Trita Parsi [10-09]: Trump Gaza Deal will work: If he keeps pressure on Israel: That assumes that Trump has any independent will in the matter. No evidence of that yet.

  • Gershon Baskin [10-09]: A first short note on some thoughts this morning. I was pointed to this piece with a tweet from Michael Goldfarb, who wrote: "Simply the most important piece written about the deal to end the war in Gaza written by a man with two decades of negotiating experience negotiating with Hamas including the last two years since the war started." Baskin is a New York-born Israeli columnist, who founded the think tank IPCRI. He was an adviser to Rabin during the Oslo years, and was involved in the Gilad Shalit negotiations, and has been involved in later "back channel" negotiations with Hamas (via Qatar). He offers some details here:

    During the period between the Israeli attack in Doha and September 19, I was working on ways to get back to the point where we were negotiating the end of the war, with all of the details. Hamas was in a paralysis mode and did not know what to do or how to get back to talks about ending the war.

    On September 19, in the late evening Witkoff called me and said "we have a plan." We had a long conversation and I supported what the Americans were planning and I made a few suggestions on how to get Hamas on board. I was requested to convince the Hamas leadership that Trump was serious and wants the war to end. Throughout the last months I have been in contact with 8 members of the Hamas leadership outside of Gaza. Three of them engaged with me in discussions. I did not make suggestions regarding the Israeli side because for over a year I believed that if President Trump decides that the war has to end, Trump will force Netanyahu into the agreement. That is exactly what happened.

    So he seems to have some inside connections, but isn't really an insider, especially on the Israeli side. He admits to having very few details, but stresses that this isn't just a ceasefire, but an end to the war. He's very generous to Trump, Witkoff, and Kushner. I'm skeptical — perhaps he is also, and simply realizes that these are very vain people who respond to flattery, something I'm in no position to care about — and in any case I'm less forgiving, but it does appear that Netanyahu's decision to bomb Qatar finally crossed a red line, which at least temporarily moved Trump to what seems to be Witkoff's deal. Netanyahu has always preferred bending to breaking, so he bent, trusting his own skills to win out in the end. (After all, he signed Wye River, but kept it from being implemented.) One more quote here (my bold):

    The new government in Gaza — this has to be a Palestinian government and not a neo-colonial mechanism which the Palestinians do not control. The names of independent Gazans with a public profile have been given to the Americans and also to other international and Arab players involved with the day after and the reconstruction of Gaza. The names that Samer Sinijlawi and I submitted to these important players were Gazan civil society leaders that we met with several times on zoom. They drafted a letter and signed it to President Trump that I delivered to Witkoff for the President stating that they were willing to play a role in the governance of Gaza. We don't know how this new government will be formed and when it will take over. Hamas agreed from the outset to this kind of government, even from last year. We don't know if Mahmoud Abbas will ask Dr. Nasser Elkidwa to play a role in the governance of Gaza — something that he has said that he is ready to do.

    I would go much farther in separating Gaza from Israel, including from the Palestinian Authority, which is of necessity an instrument of occupation. I also worry about the thinking on future governance and development by everyone involved, which is another reason to stress the importance of self-determination in Gaza. On the other hand, the people need help, and humoring the rich is inevitably baked into that deal.

  • Refaat Ibrahim [10-10]: When the bombs in Gaza stop, the true pain starts: "The ceasefire brought a silence that revealed Gaza's deepest wounds — the grief, loss and exhaustion that war had only buried."

  • Ramzy Baroud [10-13]: The defeat of Israel and the rebirth of Palestinian agency: It's hard to argue that either of those things happened, but there is still life in Gaza after two years of genocide, and the current "mere pause" (Baroud's term) offers a moment to reflect on the many failures of Israel's vilest schemes and the West's indulgence of Israeli atrocities. Baroud's prediction that "there will certainly be a subsequent round of conflict" depends primarily on whether Israel can be permanently separated from Gaza, which is not yet envisioned in the Trump plan. Then, of course, there is the West Bank, which is still up for grabs, and will be until Israel learns from its failures, including the damage to its reputation, and sets out on another course.

  • Juan Cole [10-14]: Terror from the skies of the Middle East: a hug airbase with a small country attached to it. Cole, by the way, as a new book: Gaza Yet Stands.

  • Jonah Valdez [10-15]: Israel's mounting ceasefire violations in Gaza: Israel has repeatedly violated ceasefires in the past, and one has good reason to be wary, but I'm not seeing a lot of detail here, beyond the aid restriction from 600 to 300 trucks per day.

  • Connor Echols [10-16]: Gaza ceasefire hanging by a thread: "Repeated violations of Monday's agreement could provoke a return to war." The both-sides-ism here, as everywhere regarding Gaza, is remarkably asymmetrical: Hamas is accused of dragging its feat on repatriating the bodies of dead hostages, some or many of which are likely buried under the rubble of Israeli bombing; Israel, on the other hand, is killing people, and hindering the delivery of aid. The reports about Hamas executing Israel-supported gang members are troubling, but could well be fake (easy to understand why Hamas might execute Israeli agents, harder to see why they would take and publish videos) — in any case, if Israel cared, they should prioritize the release of gang members over hostage corpses. And by the way, Israel's decimation of the Hamas civilian administration is making the transition to peace all the more treacherous. Israel's support for gangs to sow chaos shows even more bad faith. That, too, was undoubtedly part of the plan.

  • Tom Hull:

    • [10-17]: Gaza War Peace Plan: "Twenty Trump points, for better or worse." The first of two pieces I've written on plans to end the war. This one takes Trump's 20 points one-by-one, noting the hidden assumptions and various possible meanings. I promise a second piece, more on what I think should be done.

    • [10-21]: Making peace in Gaza and beyond: A second piece, fairly long, tries to put the Gaza War Peace Plan back into its broader context, so peace can work for everyone. Along the way, I sketch out several ideas for developing international law to provide a framework that puts people about nation states and their power interests.

  • Win McCormack [10-19]: The crime is nationcide: "This is the precise offense of which Israel is guilty." I find this less useful than Baruch Kimmerling's term "politicide" (the title of his 2003 book, subtitled "Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians, which I recall as the first book to really get to the core of Sharon's agenda). Sharon's goal was to destroy the Palestinian Authority, leaving Palestinians with no political options or hopes: with none, all they could do was fight, and Sharon was confident in his ability to kill any who do. This is where the "utterly defeated people" phrase came from. But nationcide makes two mistakes: it assumes that there is a nation to kill, and it suggests that the genocide is incidental to some other aim. There never has been a Palestinian nation to kill. The idea of one was a reaction to Israeli nationalism, and Israeli has struggled mightily (and successfully) to prevent one from forming, but there is a Palestinian people. While Sharon was content merely to reduce them to powerlessness, the current mob has gone much further. I'm not sure "genocide" is the best word for what they're doing, but it is a word that that has legal weight, and if it is to mean anything it has to be applied here.

Russia/Ukraine:

  • Connor Echols:

  • Anatol Lieven [09-30]: 'The West demanded that we get involved in a war with Russia': "In an interview, Georgian President Mikheil Kavelashvili talks about how external interference has poisoned his country's chances for EU ascension."

  • Carl Bildt [10-19]: Putin is out of options: "Whether Russian leaders realize it or not, they have no path to victory." That's been true for a long time. But Ukraine also has no path to victory, and it's long proven futile for either or any side to think in those terms. Perhaps Putin's hope was that Trump would throw Zelensky under the bus, but he missed his chance to dicker in Alaska, and when Europe regrouped behind Zelensky Trump had to pick sides. So the war slogs on, under the dead weight of leaders who were selected not for insight and reason but because they projected as tough and tenacious, cunning and/or stupid.

Trump Regime: Practically every day I run across disturbing, often shocking stories of various misdeeds proposed and quite often implemented by the Trump Administration -- which in its bare embrace of executive authority we might start referring to as the Regime. Collecting them together declutters everything else, and emphasizes the pattern of intense and possibly insane politicization of everything. Pieces on the administration.

Donald Trump (Himself): As for Il Duce, we need a separate bin for stories on his personal peccadillos -- which often seem like mere diversions, although as with true madness, it can still be difficult sorting serious incidents from more fanciful ones.

  • John Whitlow [09-18]: The real estate roots of Trumpism and the coming clash with democratic socialism: "Trump's brand of authoritarianism emerges out of New York's real estate industry. As mayor, Zohran Mamdani vows to curb that sector's outsized power."

  • Michael M Grynbaum [09-19] Judge dismisses Trump's lawsuit against the New York Times: "The judge said that the complaint failed to contain a 'short and plain statement of the claim.' Trump has 28 days to refile." Trump was asking for $15 billion in damages, because four New York Times reporters were "disparaging Mr. Trump's reputation as a successful businessman."

  • Cameron Peters [09-23]: Trump's weird day at the UN, briefly explained.

  • Abdallah Fayyad [09-25]: Why voters keep shrugging off Trump's corruption.

  • Eric Levitz [09-26]: The big contradiction in progressive thinking about Trump: "The Democratic debate over whether 'moderation' works is very confused."

  • Brian Karem [10-03]: I've covered Trump for years -- and I've never seen him this scared.

  • Margaret Hartmann [10-10]: Will Trump win a Nobel Peace Prize? All about his desperate bid. Lots of grotty details, but all? The main thing that's missing is the calculation behind the bid. Trump surely knows that he has no real interest in the prize, what it stands for and/or the legacy behind it. And given that he focuses much more on being seen as a warrior (or maybe just a thug), wouldn't he be a bit embarrassed if he actually won? Even Obama was embarrassed when he won. I'll never forget Ariel Sharon's face when GW Bush introduced him as "a man of peace." Sharon's autobiography was Warrior, and he wasn't exactly reknown for his wit. But most importantly, Trump surely understands that the absurdity of his bid guarantees that it will be huge publicity either way. And his supporters will add his loss to the long list of slights and insults he has endured as their champion.

  • Alex Shephard [10-10]: Why Trump will never win a Nobel Peace Prize: "He's embarrassingly desperate for the honor, but his presidency is becoming ever more dictatorial and bloodthirsty."

  • Michael Tomasky [10-10]: Memo to future historians: This is fascism, and millions of us see it: "From Chicago to Portland, James Comey to Letitia James, and so much else — this is no longer America.

  • Nia Prater [10-12]: Trumpworld goes to war over Nobel Peace Prize loss: "The White House and Trump allies are attacking the Nobel Committee, which gave Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado this year's prize."

  • CK Smith [10-13]: Trump saves Columbus Day from "left-wing arsonists": No more Indigenous Peoples' Day.

  • Kim Phillips-Fein [10-14]: A family business: "Trump's theory of politics." A review of Melinda Cooper's book, Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance.

  • George Packer [10-17]: The depth of MAGA's moral collapse: "How we got to 'I love Hitler.'" Paywalled, of course, but looks to be a major review of the recent prevalence of Nazi paraphernalia among young MAGA Republicans -- I've already skipped over dozens of such stories, figuring that there is little reason to nitpick among the excrescences of people we already know to be vile and/or stupid. But if you need to be reminded that "Professing love for Hitler is more than anti-Semitic — it's antihuman," Packer is here for you. My only question was whether to give this its own slot in the miscellaneous articles, or to dedicate a whole section to recent right-wing ideologizing. But then I realized I already had a section on that explains his subtitle. While one could just as plausibly argue that Trump is merely the vessel of Fox's fermented rot, is unique contribution was in freeing the right from any second-thoughts of shame. In such a universe, the new normal is to seek out the most extreme expressions, which brings them back to Hitler.

  • Simon Jenkins [10-20]: In Gaza, and now Ukraine, Donald Trump may be peace activists' greatest ally. That deserves our backing: "It's a fool's game trying to understand the president's true motives, but do our misgivings matter if the outcome is a speedy end to war?" Yes, it does matter. Peace terms matter, and their variances reflect the intents and goals of those who negotiate or dictate them. Never trust the fascist, even if it seems like the trains are finally running on time. They won't be for long, because the inequity and arrogance, the belief above all in the efficacy of force, is fundamental for them, and will always come back to bite you. Other key point here is don't assume that what Trump is pushing for is really peace. Real peace requires that people on all sides feel safe and secure. That's not Trump's thing. I'd also worry about giving Trump any praise, even ironical, that can be taken out of context (as you know he will do). I don't have a problem acknowledging real accomplishments, but we should keep in mind that the wars Trump supposedly is ending were ones that he helped start in the first place, and has helped sustain as long as he's been president.

  • Devlin Barrett/Tyler Pager [10-21]: Trump said to demand Justice Dept. pay him $230 million for past cases: "Senior department officials who were defense lawyers for the president and those in his orbit are now in jobs that typically must approve any such payout, underscoring potential ethical conflicts."

Democrats:

Republicans: A late addition, back by popular demand, because it isn't just Trump, we also have to deal with the moral swamp he crawled out of:

Miscellaneous Pieces

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [07-25]: Un-hinged: Trump at the UN. Mostly excerpts from the speech, as they practically write their own critiques. For instance, when Trump says, "Under my leadership, energy costs are down, gasoline prices are down, grocery prices are down, mortgage rates are down, and inflation has been defeated," all St Clair needs to add is: "Energy costs are up, gas prices are up, grocery prices are up, inflation is rising."

  • [09-26]: Roaming Charges: What's the frequency, Donald?

  • [10-03]: Roaming Charges: He loves a (buff) man in uniform: Quotes from Trump's nonsense at Quantico, then moves on to recent ICE tactics, then to Israel. He quotes an Israeli rabbi praying for all the children in Gaza to starve, and another "frequent commentator on NewsMax" as saying he wants Greta Thunberg terrified, "rocking in a corner, covering her eyes, pissing." Then there's this Mike Huckabee quote:

    I've been married 51 years . . . There comes a point where there's just no point in even thinking about getting a divorce. The reason Israel and the US will never get a divorce is because neither country can afford to pay the alimony . . . We're hooked up for life.

    It's hard to tell what he understands less of: international relations, America, Israel, or marriage. But he must be thinking of divorce if he's rationalizing so hard against it.

  • [10-10]: Roaming Charges: United States of Emergency. Opens with (examples follow):

    The fatal flaw in Donald Trump's scheme to whitewash American history of its most depraved and embarrassing episodes is that his administration is committing new acts of barbarity and stupidity in real-time on an almost hourly basis. Consider the last week in Chicago and Portland.

    Much more, including:

    • The Energy Department has added "emissions" and "climate change" to its banned words list. Too bad George Carlin isn't around to expound upon the 1,723 words you can't say in the Trump Administration . . .

Marcy Newman [08-17]: Sarah Schulman tackles the urgency, and pitfalls, of solidarity: A review of her book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity.

Zack Beauchamp

  • [08-20]: How conservatives help their young thinkers — and why liberals don't: This is a basic asymmetry: the right wants hierarchy and inequality, and those who profit can afford to hire propagandists; the left, lacking such incentives, depends on good will/altruism, which can be tough to muster when everyone has to scratch out a living. That may have been good enough for a long time, but the big right-wing media push since the 1970s has flooded the zone with crap — a surprising amount of which was taken seriously during the New Democrat vogue. We don't need our own counter-crap, but we do need a way for scholars and reporters to do honest work about the real world, and to make a living doing so.

  • [09-03]: The right debates just how weird their authoritarianism should be: "A roundtable discussion among leading MAGA intellectuals suggests they might be suffering from success." Not an interview, but a review of a 2-hour video roundtable featuring Curtis Yarvin, Patrick Deneen, Chris Rufo, and Christopher Caldwell. "The overall direction, it is clear, is giving more and more power over our lives to Donald J. Trump." For background, refer back to:

  • [2024-09-25]: The 6 thinkers who would define a second Trump term: Caldwell, Deneen, and Yarvin again, plus James Burnham, Harvey Mansfield, Elbridge Colby.

  • [09-19]: This is how Trump ends democracy: "The past week has revealed Trump's road map to one-party rule." Having just read his chapter on Orban's Hungary in his The Reactionary Spirit book, much of this seems pretty familiar.

Katha Pollitt [09-09] We're living in an age of scams: "The anonymity of the Internet makes us all vulnerable to being swindled — and it's making us trust each other less." This is very true, and very important, aside from the obvious point that the age of scams didn't start with the Internet: scams have plagued us at least since the snake oil salesmen of the medicine shows, accelerating with every media advance. They grew out of the invention of money as a representative of value, and the spirit of capitalism, which considered all profits morally equal. This article hardly scratches the surface, not even mentioning AI, which is already a major source of fabricated scam props. I'm surprised that nobody has taken this up as a political issue, given that nearly everyone would support measures to cut down on fraud, spam, and non-solicited advertising. (I wouldn't have a problem with people producing ads and putting them on a public website where people could request them.)

Henry Giroux [09-26]: The road to the camps: echoes of a fascist past.

Julian Lucas [09-29]: Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Now he wants to save it." "Today, in the era of misinformation, addictive algorithms, and extractive monopolies, he thinks he can do it again." Not real clear to me how he intends to do that, but I suppose more of it is laid out in his new memoir, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web.

[PS: I was struck by this book title by one of Berners-Lee's blurbists: The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It. This also led me to Tim Wu: The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity, and (only slightly blunter) Cory Doctorow: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse, and What to Do About It.]

Umair Irfan [09-29] America's flood insurance system is doomed to fail: "Between Congress, property development, and climate change, there's no easy fix."

Peter Balonon-Rosen/Jolie Myers/Sean Rameswaram [09-30]: How Rupert Murdoch took over the world.

Peter Turchin [10-02]: Hundreds of societies have been in crises like ours. An expert explains how they got out. "An analysis of historical crises over the past 2,000 years offers lessons for avoiding the end times." I read Turchin's 2023 book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, which is based on a database of crisis periods that increasingly looks like a misguided AI training set. Here he reduces the wisdom of ages to something he calls "the wealth pump," where:

  1. It causes growing popular discontent.
  2. The wealth pump creates too many wealthy elites — more than there are high-power positions.
  3. The wealth pump creates too many youths pursuing not just college but even more advanced degrees in hopes of escaping looming "precarity."

Thus he sees frustrated, desperate "wannabe elites" driving nations to ruin. He suggests some remedies here that I don't disagree with: regulation encouraging production over rent extraction; progressive taxation; worker empowerment (including unions); reducing concentrations of political power. Still, when I read his title, my gut reaction is emphasize new aspects of the present instead of recurring patterns of inequality — and not because I discount the problems posed by significant inequality. It's just that the quantity and quality of changes from 250, 100, even 50 years ago are so overwhelming.

Whitney Curry Wimbish/Naomi Bethune [10-02]: Microsoft is abandoning Windows 10. Hackers are celebrating. "The company will stop supporting the OS on October 14. Advocacy groups warn this will leave up to 400 million computers vulnerable to hacks or in the dump." Ok, here's an idea to mull over: any time a company effectively ceases to support a copyrighted software product, that product must be surrendered to the public, as open source software, so that the public can pick up the slack. Stuff that's officially mothballed obviously should qualify. There also needs to be a mechanism for to appeal cases of inadequate support, so companies that aren't serious about support can't simply lock up their old products by pretending to go through the motions. Selling off the technology to a sham company might be another way to work around this, and another loophole that could be tightened up. There are probably more angles to consider, but the general point is that we should do what we can to make forced obsolescence unviable as a business strategy.

Jared Bernstein [10-03]: Measuring the vibecession: "Why top-line federal statistics miss the economic pain average Americans feel."

Tom Hull [10-04]: Cooking Chinese: My own piece, but surely worth a mention here. Some pictures and links to recipes. Not much technique, but all you really need are some knife skills, a glossary of ingredients, and a willingness to turn the heat up and work fast. Some philosophizing on the theme that a possible path to world peace is learning that all food, no matter how exotic it seems, lands on the same universal taste buds. I also wrote a postscript here:

Dan Grazier [10-07]: US gov't admits F-35 is a failure: "With some wonky, hard to decipher language, a recent GAO report concluded the beleaguered jet will never meet expectations." It was conceived in the 1990s in Lockheed's famous "skunk works" as a state-of-the-art stealth fighter-bomber. The contract was awarded in 2001, but the first plane didn't fly until 2006. It's been a fiasco, but has made Lockheed a lot of money. Lately, you mostly hear about it when some sucker ally agrees to buy some, less because they need or even want it than to please America's arms exporters.

Ruth Marcus [10-09]: Nixon now looks restrained: Author focuses on cases where a president weighs in on a pending criminal case, as Nixon did with Charlie Manson, and Trump with James Comey, but the point can be applied almost everywhere. "But the thirty-seventh President looks like a model of restraint when compared with the forty-seventh, and his supposedly incendiary commentary anodyne by contrast to what emanates daily from the current occupant of the White House. What was once aberrant — indeed, unimaginable — is now standard Trumpfare, demeaning not only the Presidency but to the rule of law." Still, one shouldn't hold Nixon up as a "model of restraint," or as any sort of moderate or liberal, as he consistently did things that in their context were every bit as extremely reactionary as Trump is today. Indeed, Trump's argument that nothing he does as president can be illegal has a singular precedent: Richard Nixon. The slippery slope that Nixon started us on leads directly to Trump.

Bruce E Levine [10-10]: Celebrating Lenny Bruce's 100th birthday: "The world is sick and I'm the doctor".

Democracy Now! [10-10]: 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for anti-Maduro leader María Corina Machado "opposite of peace": interview with Greg Grandin, who pointed out (per Jeet Heer, link below):

Machado's brand of democracy promotion, reliant as it is on US military intervention, deserves skepticism. Speaking on Democracy Now! on Friday, Yale historian Greg Grandin described her winning of the Nobel as a "really a shocking choice." Grandin noted that Machado supported a coup against democratically elected President Hugo Chávez in 2002. Her hard-line position on economic matters has both hampered and divided the anti-Maduro coalition. And the fact that she's praised both the bombing of Venezuelan boats and welcomed further American interventions into Venezuela is likely to strengthen Maduro's hold on power, since it vindicates his claim that the opposition is filled with US puppets. Grandin also pointed out that if the Nobel committee had wanted to legitimize the anti-Maduro opposition, they could've given the award to feminist leaders who are both critics of the regime and oppose US intervention.

    Jeet Heer [10-13]: The Nobel Peace Prize just surrendered to Trump: "Trump is mad that he didn't win. But by honoring Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Committee has endorsed his war against Venezuela — and continued Europe's MAGA groveling." Heer concludes:

    Trump is foolish to think he needs to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He has all the power and glory he could want, because the people who could theoretically stop him have decided to surrender.

  • Greg Grandin:

    • [09-09]: The rift in Trump world over Venezuela: "The Trump administration wants to exert more control over Latin America. Will it come by deal-making or by force?"

      The latter question isn't even rhetorical. To Trump, a "deal" is an occasion when someone else surrenders to his ultimatum. Such deals tend to be as resented as force, just less dramatically opposed. But also note that Trump's maneuvers against Latin America are easy to pin on Marco Rubio, who often seems even more excited to restore reaction there than he is here, and will be no less so when they blow up. Ominous section here on "importing the logic of Gaza."

    • [10-14]: Trump's Caribbean killing spree: "The president's unprecedented and lawless attacks supposedly target drug cartels, but serve a far more troubling political agenda."

  • Gabriel Hetland [10-14]: How María Corina Machado's Nobel Peace Prize could lead to war: "Machado's record makes a mockery of the idea she is a committed champion of peace, promoter of democracy, or unifying figure."

Some notable deaths: Mostly from the New York Times listings. Last time I did such a trawl was on July 20, so we'll look that far back (although some names have appeared since):

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas, but maybe I should just use it to bookmark some of our leading horribles.

  • Jamelle [09-30]: Links to After volatile summer, Trump's approval remains low but stable, poll finds, and adds:

    Perhaps instead of cowering under a blanket labeled "health care," Democrats should respond and advance on the issues that move people. This, of course, would require a foundation of conviction and principle, which may be asking too much of the party's leadership and strategists.

    Note that the image cut off before showing the most damning poll results, that Trump is -20 on "the war between Russia and Ukraine," and -19 on "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict": two issues that Biden blew even worse.

  • Josephine Riesman [10-05]:

    It is morally wrong to want a computer to be sentient. If you owned a sentient thing, you would be a slaver. If you want sentient computers to exist, you just want to create a new kind of slavery. The ethics are as simple as that. Sorry if this offends.

    • Apologies in advance for including an Amazon book link, but I doubt any review can really do this one justice. The book is: John Kennedy: How to Test Negative for Stupid — And Why Washington Never Will. Senator Kennedy ("the one from Louisiana") is being billed as "one of the most distinctive and funny politicians," lauded for "his perceptive (and hilarious) takes on the ridiculousness of political life in this scathingly witty takedown of Washington and its elite denizens." I've seen him dozens of times, and can't say I've ever noticed his wit, but he does offer a pretty good impersonation of the dumbest person in all of America, as well as one of the most repugnant politically. On the other hand, his most quotable quotes turn out to be more humorous than I expected:

    • "Always be yourself . . . unless you suck."
    • "I say this gently: This is why the aliens won't talk to us."
    • "If you trust government, you obviously failed history class."
    • "I believe that our country was founded by geniuses, but it's being run by idiots."
    • "Always follow your heart . . . but take your brain with you."
    • "I'm not going to Bubble Wrap it: The water in Washington, D.C., won't clear up until you get the pigs out of the creek."
    • "I have the right to remain silent but not the ability."
    • "Common sense is illegal in Washington, D.C., I know. I've seen it firsthand."
    • "I believe that we are going to have to get some new conspiracy theories. All the old ones turned out to be true."

    Granted, on balance we're not talking Groucho Marx level here, or even Yogi Berra. But he's possibly funnier than Bob Dole, who was much wittier than anyone so evil had any right to be.

  • Comfortably Numb [08-18]: Features a New York Times headline from Sept. 18, 1931 [most likely fake]: "HITLER CONDEMNS RIOTS.; He Says They Were Provoked by Paid Agents in Germany." This appeared in my feed just below a picture of mink-clad protesters with signs for "Rai$e the Rent," "Frack Brooklyn," and "Billionaires Against Mamdani." And just above a Fox News headline: "Billionaire's cash flows to anti-Israel activists in nationwide 'No Kings' rallies." More signs noted on placcards:

    • First they came for the immigrants and I spoke up because I know the rest of the God damn poem"
    • No crown for the clown
    • Trump gave my nut to Argentina [chipmunk costume]
    • I caught the woke mind virus and all I got was empathy and critical thinking skills

    Other comments:

    • Imagine what a shitty president you have to be to have nearly 7 million Americans use their day off to protest you.

    Miscellaneous memes:

    • Republicans have $200 million for a ballroom, $1 billion for a new jet and $72 million for endless golf trips. They have money to give ICE $50,000 bonuses. They have $1 million per day to occupy American cities. They have $3.8 billion to send Israel weapons and $40 billion to bailout Argentina. But there's no money for healthcare.

Current count: 255 links, 13953 words (18491 total)

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Sunday, September 14, 2025

Loose Tabs

I moved an already long draft file into the blog queue on Friday, after posting my Notes on Everyday Life piece, More Thoughts on Bernie Sanders and Capitalism. In doing so, I set an implicit deadline for posting this before Monday, when I normally expect to post a Music Week. I could spend an infinite amount of time wrapping this up, trying to make sense of it all, so the budget was hopeful self-discipline. But at 3AM Sunday night/Monday morning, I'm sick and tired of working on this, with no good answer, so I'm opting for the short one, which is to post what I have. If I look at it Monday, I may add a few more similar things, edits some of what I have, write extra notes, or maybe just shrug and move on. There is certainly no shortage of material here. Whether it does any good is another question I can't begin to contemplate, much less answer.

This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments, much less systematic than what I attempted in my late Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer back to. So these posts are mostly housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I collect these bits in a draft file, and flush them out when periodically. My previous one appeared 28 days ago, on August 17.

I'm trying a new experiment here with select bits of text highlighted with a background color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to use it sparingly.

Index to sections:

The first section here are major categories, where I didn't wait for a keynote article. These are not necessarily regular features.

Epsteinmania: I'm ready to retire this one, but Trump keeps squirming, so his most opportunistic opponents still hope to reel him in. Since last time: the appearance of Ghislaine Maxwell as Trump's character witness ("a perfect gentleman"); the leak of Trump's contribution to Epstein's "birthday book."

Israel: This is just a small sampling on what remains the single gravest issue in American politics -- even though, by looking at both parties in Congress, it barely seems to register. That's not just because the slaughter and devastation has grown to immense proportions, not because Israel has discredited itself to most people around the world, nor because in providing so much economic and military support the US is now widely viewed as complicit and discredited. It's because Israel is the example Trump is following to secure his own domination domestically. (I explain some of this in my latest Notes on Everyday Life post, but if you know what to look for, you can spot numerous examples throughout this and other Loose Tabs posts. Israel has become a veritable laboratory for fascism. America is not only following their model, but has been bankrolling them for decades. The neocon right understood this at least as far back as their 1996 paper A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. The religious right got an even earlier jump with their apocalypse mongering. Democrats, on the other hand, have cut their own throats by pledging eternal loyalty to a regime that is completely inimical to their own stated beliefs and values. It's no wonder why so many Americans find them undeserving of trust.)

Russia/Ukraine: Last time I posted was just after the Alaska summit, but before Zelensky and his European allies descended on Washington to derail whatever impression Putin had made and return Trump to his usual path of fickle incompetence. As I've since noted, "all sides seem to have lost sight of the ball and are just kicking air." What I mean is that we need to focus more on the people involved than on the land that both sides feel so entitled to. The war started in 2014 when three divisions of Ukraine rejected election results and attempted to split from Ukraine. Russia aided their division, especially in Crimea, but it still seems likely that most of the people there supported realignment with Russia then, and still do now. They should be given the right to decide on their own, free of military coercion, where they want to belong. Of course, the war, both before and after the 2022 invasion, has brought changes, mostly in turning large numbers of people into refugees, but it probably means that the people on both sides of the front line are on the side they want to be. If so, neither side should fear a referendum, as it would very likely legitimize lines that are basically stalemated. One should also be talking about refugees, their rights to return and/or compensation, minority rights in the postwar settlements, and the options of people who find themselves stranded to move wherever they want. Unfortunately, leaders like Putin and Trump have little concern for people. They're much more into symbolic bragging rights. But both sides have done nothing but lose since war broke out. They both need to stop. Refocusing on people is one way out.

Trump regime exploits: Practically every day I run across disturbing, often shocking stories of various misdeeds proposed and quite often implemented by the Trump Administration -- which in its bare embrace of executive authority we might start referring to as the Regime. Collecting them together declutters everything else, and emphasizes the pattern of intense and possibly insane politicization of everything. Pieces on the administration.

Donald Trump (himself): As for the Duce, we need a separate bin for stories on his personal quirks -- which often seem like mere diversions, although as with true madness, it can still be difficult sorting serious threats from fanciful ones.

  • Zachary Small:

  • Margaret Hartmann: Basically a gossip columnist who's made "tremendous content" out of Trump's follies. (She also covers the British royals, Michelle Obama, and some Epstein matters I filed [or ignored] elsewhere.) After the newer pieces, some older ones for your amusement.

  • Ed Kilgore [08-24] Trump sees whitewashed US past and dystopian present: Well, as Mort Sahl once said about Charlton Heston, if he were more preceptive, he'd be a happy man. But Trump doesn't want to be happy. His stock in trade is being angry, which gives him a mission in life, and a readymade excuse for everything. This starts off with the Trump tweet I cite below. It's impossible to rank all of the ways Trump offends me, but his insistence on recasting history to suit his prejudices is fundamental to all his other lies.

  • Arwa Mahdawi [08-27] Why does the MAGA elite love conspicuous cosmetic surgery? Picture of Kristi Noem.

  • Ashlie D Stevens [08-28] Don't buy the Cracker Barrel fallacy: "Online petitions and viral outrage give the illusion of influence — but real power lies elsewhere."

    • Katrina Vanden Heuvel [09-09] What was the Cracker Barrel skirmish really about? "Trump is repaying rural voters' loyalty by shafting them." Sure, but the thing to understand is that the right is really just a rage machine. Any sort of change can kick them into high gear.

  • Brian Karem [08-29] As America implodes, Trump can do anything he wants.

  • Laura Beers [09-02] The Orwellian echoes in Trump's push for 'Americanism' at the Smithsonian.

  • Elie Mystal [09-05] Donald Trump really is the biggest loser. For starters:

    The Trump administration repeatedly lost in court this week. A federal judge in California ruled that Trump violated the Posse Comitatus Act when he deployed federal troops to Los Angeles. A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that Trump violated the law when he attempted to cut off federal funding to Harvard. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that most of Trump's tariffs are illegal. And a panel of judges from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — the most conservative and reactionary appellate court in the country — ruled that Trump's targeting of Venezuelans was an illegal use of the Alien Enemies Act.

    One reason for not celebrating is that the Supreme Court can still reverse most of these rulings. But they all reflect Trump actions, so (a) they've already had impact, and (b) frustrating them reinforced the idea that Trump needs even more support and power to overcome the forces against him and those he represents. This is a column which rounds up a lot of miscellany: notably this:

    In her new book, Amy Coney Barrett positions herself as a helpless cog in a legal machine that gives her no choice but to rule the way she does, even if she doesn't like it. As Joe Patrice explains over at Above the Law, her entire act is risible. But it's an act we've seen from every first-year, fascist-curious law student who wants to make a career as a Federalist Society judge.

    Mystal also references:

    • Elie Mystal [09-04] The military has officially entered the deportation business: "The administration's decision to deploy military lawyers as immigration judges is terrible and illegal, but when has that ever stopped Trump?"

    • Steve Vladeck [09-02] 176. Illinois v. Texas: "A quick look at President Trump's (apparent) plan to send uninvited and unfederalized Texas National Guard troops into Illinois — and how it could (and maybe should) quickly end up in the Supreme Court."

  • Amanda Marcotte [09-03] Trump's long weekend of humiliation: "The harder he tries to be a dictator, the more he's mocked by both Americans and foreign leaders." Same theme as Mystal's piece, but less obviously written by a lawyer:

    Alas, Trump is still alive, but there is a consolation prize for those who were holding vigil: He and the White House reacted with over-the-top defensiveness, removing all doubt that the infamous narcissist was feeling deeply embarrassed by the gleeful speculation of his demise.

    While it may be impossible to dissuade the faithful, it certainly isn't hard to get under il Duce's paper-thin skin. [Original draft had der Führer, but upon reflection I opted for the diminutive form. I also changed "thin" to "paper-thin" per Marcotte.]

  • Richard Luscombe [09-04] Trump's second presidency is 'most dangerous period' since second world war, Mitch McConnell says: "Former Senate leader likens administration's fixation with tariffs to isolationist policies of the US in the 1930s." As I'm not alone in pointing out, McConnell blew his chance to get rid of Trump during the second impeachment vote: had he and a handful of other Republicans voted to convict, Trump could have been disqualified under the 14th amendment from running again, which would have kept him off the ballot in 2024. At the time, it would have cost Republicans nothing, as Trump was already out of office.

  • Daniel Warner [09-05] Donald Trump's media domination. Pardon me while I scream: Why anyone has even the slightest interest in this flaming asshole is one of the few things about the world I find utterly incomprehensible. But Warner has a theory (or two):

    Like an avalanche, Trump news gathers speed and buries everything in its path only to pop up in another place. It's exhausting, and overwhelming. As for intentionality, the former Trump chief adviser Steve Bannon described the strategy in 2018, "The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit." . . .

    This is how the former CNN executive sees Trump's relation to the media:

    "Donald Trump was chosen by Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp. Mr. Thomson understands the media business better than all the rest. Mr. Thomson found a true believer in the power of television with highly addicted viewers, typically those offended by smart people. This was — still is — the Fox audience. The money flowed in from cable TV subscriptions and advertisers selling cheap goods."

    The relationship between Trump and the media is perfectly symmetrical. He wants to be front page every day. The media believes he sells. The result is that the public gets its dose of Trump news daily. So whether or not Trump sets out to headline the daily news, he manages to be there. The media can't get enough of him.

    This points to:

    • Stef W Kight [2017-09-22] The insane news cycle of Trump's presidency in 1 chart. While the topic labels are cryptic, and the events 8 years old, I remember literally every one of them, even though most are trivial and stupid, and those that aren't trivial (e.g., Putin, North Korea, repealing Obamacare) were handled as stupidly as possible.

  • David Friedlander [09-06] Trump bump: "The president has jumped into the mayor race. But is he helping Cuomo or Mamdani?" He probably sees this as win-win: if Cuomo does win, he can claim credit; if not, he gets an enemy he can hate from a distance -- actually two: Mamdani and New York City -- and he knows how to play that with his base.

  • Andrew Lawrence [09-08] Trump's strongman image got boos at the US Open, and perhaps that was the point: "It was just the authoritarian image Donald Trump hoped to project at the US Open: the president himself, looming from Arthur Ashe Stadium's giant screens like Chairman Mao at Tiananmen Gate, as he stood at attention for the national anthem." Also this:

    • Bryan Armen Graham [09-07] The USTA's censorship of Trump dissent at the US Open is cowardly, hypocritical and un-American: "By asking broadcasters not to show any protest against Donald Trump at Sunday's final, the governing body has caved to fear while contradicting its own history of spectacle." Doesn't this article just feed into his cult? Trump thrives on being hated more than any president since FDR (or probably ever). And is anything more American than hypocrisy? (I could riff on cowardice as well, but probably would wind up defending it.)

  • Radley Balko [09-08] Roundup: One month of authoritarianism. "Here's what happened in just one month of the Trump administration's dizzying push toward autocracy." This is a very long bullet list. It's likely he has more in the archives, but as with Amy Siskind's The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump's First Year (2018, 528 pp), it risks turning into numbing overkill. You really don't have to know everything bad that Trump has ever done to decide whether to vote him up or down. A fairly modest random sampling should suffice.

  • Moira Donegan [09-09] Trump apparently thinks domestic violence is not a crime.

  • John Ganz [09-09] Trump's petty-tyrant brand of fascism: "The GOP president is both a dire threat to democratic governance and a clownish mob boss."

  • Kojo Koram [09-09] From Washington to Westminster, the populist right needs to erase history to succeed. It's up to us to resist: Trump you know about. Farage is also pushing his own "patriotic curriculum."

  • Jeremy Varon [09-11] Trump is already at war:

    Trump's current penchant for military aggression has odd roots in his professed disdain for the "stupid wars" of recent decades. His "peace" persona is skin deep. Trump supported the Iraq War before it began, turning against it only when it bogged down.

    One gets little sense that he grew to question dodgy interventions based on judicious assessments of what conflicts are, for reasons of principle or national interest, worthy of military sacrifice. "Stupid wars" are for him simply ones that America can't decisively win. And winning is the ultimate measure of strength, or virtue, or sound policy.

    Trump's fondness for this view has long been clear. Recall his claim that Senator John McCain, for the sin of being captured, was "not a war hero." Or his disparaging the U.S. dead in a French World War Two cemetery as "losers" and "suckers" because "there was nothing in it for them." Even winners can be losers, when the victory is not a life-sparing blowout. True to form, Trump praises the "Department of War" moniker for sending "a message of victory."

    Military victory, most simply, means overwhelming one's foe, with minimal loss of American life. So Trump punches down, attacking those with little capacity or will to fight back. Hapless, alleged drug smugglers on the high seas are no match for U.S. missiles. Neither is the Venezuelan army, should President Maduro be baited into a response that triggers a full-bore U.S. assault. Nor can undocumented immigrants — vulnerable, frightened, often poor — physically resist ICE agents with big guns. Americans outraged at the assault on their communities and neighbors are stymied as well. The homeland, for Trump, is a soft target, with a near-guarantee of zero losses. Winning indeed.

    Actually, the Bushes aimed to "punch down" as well. The younger just underestimated the risks, as bullies are wont to do. The author has a book: Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror.

Democrats:

  • Jamelle Bouie [2024-12-18]: Now is not the time for surrender: Reminded of this because he quoted a chunk of it on Bluesky:

    This is a grave mistake. Trump's hand is not as strong as it looks. He has a narrow, and potentially unstable, Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a small, but far from filibuster-proof, majority in the Senate. He'll start his term a lame duck, with less than 18 months to make progress before the start of the next election cycle. And his great ambition -- to impose a form of autarky on the United States -- is poised to spark a thermostatic reaction from a public that elevated him to deal with high prices and restore a kind of normalcy. But Democrats won't reap the full rewards of a backlash if they do nothing to prime the country for their message.

    Obviously, the big miss here was that Congressional Republicans have been totally aligned with and subservient to Trump, so their thin majorities have held, even to the extent of bypassing their own filibuster rules in the Senate. Moreover, corporate America, including big media companies, have jumped at the opportunity to debase themselves to please Trump. (And they've kept very quiet whatever reservations they may have felt to his tariffs and other economic policies.) Much of this is unsurprising, given the way the election spun in its last couple months -- although I admit I resisted recognizing it at the time. But the last line is spot on, and you can prove it by noting that while Trump's popularity has steadily dropped since January, the Democrats not only haven't picked up his losses, they've actually lost approval alongside him.

  • Matthew Sheffield [2024-12-09] Local political ecosystems are vital to protecting democracy nationally: "Author Erik Loomis discusses how labor unions and liberal religious organizations preserve institutional memories and explain progressive viewpoints." Interview with Loomis, who has written books like A History of America in Ten Strikes, Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice, and Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe. First thing I was struck by here was the section "Democrats only talk to their voters for three months every two years." I would have followed that immediately with "but they talk to their donors all the time." The donors are their patrons, their constant companions, their friends, and ultimately their eyes and ears. And politician, like fishers, naturally value, and tend to obsess over, landing the big donor over the little voter. In the short term, that's seen as the key to success. Over the longer term, it's their ticket to the revolving door. The next section is "The decline of unions and liberal religion has significantly hurt the Democratic party." Everything else here is useful, ending with "Campaigns need coherent and simple narratives to win."

    I mean, that's the lesson Democrats need to take care of, right? You, having a candidate who could articulate a policy is not going to win. Nobody cares. Having a candidate that can articulate your hopes, your dreams, your fears, or your hatreds, that's a win. That's a much more winning approach, right?

    And they'd better learn that, right? Some, I don't know, like. The conditions in 2028 are likely to be different, right? So maybe a Josh Shapiro Gretchen Whitmer, some of these people on a fairly deep Democratic bench could win, but if they are going up against somebody, presumably not Donald Trump, but who can continue to channel the kind of Trumpian resentment.

    There's a very good chance that while we may think that these people are clowns, that they are in fact incredibly strong candidates because the everyday low information voter sees them as articulating their again, hopes, dreams, fears, and or hatreds. And if Democrats don't learn that. Then it's going to be very difficult for them to tap into what is a very clear desire for a populist politics in this country.

    And populism could go either way, right? Populism can be incredibly reactionary as in Trumpian populism, or it can be channeled for a progressive, for progressive aims as it was in the 1930s. Democrats have to figure out how to manage that. And if they don't, then people that we might think are idiots and clowns, like anybody who's been appointed into the Trump administration, like one of them is probably going to be the candidate in 2028, whether it's a Vance, or another candidate, or Laura Trump, I mean, or Dana White, the head of UFC, like maybe a perfect Republican candidate.

  • Harold Meyerson [08-28] The idiocy (both moral and strategic) of the Democratic National Committee: "At its meeting this week, the DNC opposed a ban on US provision of offensive weapons to Israel." The article stops there, but unfortunately the idiocy doesn't. This title can be recycled regularly.

  • Katrina Vanden Heuvel [09-03] What the Democrats can learn from Gavin Newsom's Trump mockery. I don't see Newsom as a viable presidential candidate, and I suspect his trolling will only reinforce that view, but I don't mind him having a little fun at Trump's expense, and given his target, it's hard to imagine that he could escalate into excess -- that may be a fundamental flaw in his strategy. But his example reminds us that Democrats are looking for someone who can and will fight back, and he understands that much, and is auditioning for the role.

  • Anthony Barnett [09-03] Stephen Miller calls Democrats a "domestic extremist organization": "Congressional Democrats should demand that he retract his grotesque claims or resign." No, they shouldn't. They should reply in kind, or just shrug him off, as in why should anyone care what a fascist troll thinks? He's so clearly obnoxious that you could use him as the public face of the Trump regime. Demanding an apology just grants him power he doesn't deserve.

  • Chris Lehmann [09-03] What makes Democrats so afraid of Zohran Mamdani? More on Mamdani:

  • Jeet Heer [09-05] Old, wealthy Democrats are sabotaging their won party: "The problem of gerontocracy includes the donor class."

  • Ross Barkan:

    • [09-05]: Imagining an imperial Democratic president: Sure, dream on. I expect the courts to spin on a dime, pretty much like they did when Trump took charge. The only things that might limit them are overwhelming popular support, and fresh legislation that explicitly allows a Democratic president to do what Trump can only do with executive orders. And if the courts still obstruct, you can impeach some miscreants, and create new court positions which can be filled with more reasonable jurists. But Biden and Obama wound up making extensive use of executive orders, especially after Congress was lost, and both took heat from Democrats for not going farther. Trump has demolished many of the inhibitions they felt, and many Democrats will push their next president to do much more, especially how important it has become to revise his rules and replace many of his personnel.

    • [08-31]: Democrats will have to shift on Israel. But when? That, of course, is a theme of his recent book on the 2024 election. More generally, Democrats have to decide whether they're for or against war, for or against racism, for or against universal rights, or they want to spend their remaining days trying to convince voters that Israel deserves to be exempted from the standards of justice and decency they expect everyone else to adhere to. The main reason Democrats lose elections isn't that people disagree with the ideals they like to tout. It's that they don't find Democrats to be credible advocates because, well, they're conflicted and incompetent.

    • [2021-03-28]: The three factions of the American left: "Understanding what it means when we talk about 'the left' in America." This is an old (2021) piece that popped up in some discussion somewhere. Seemed like it might be useful, although I'm having trouble following it. I think he's saying the three factions are: (1) The Socialist Left (specifically, the DSA, but he sees Sanders are the leader); (2) The Liberal Left (here Warren is a leader; but under them he also mentions "The Alphabet Left," of which WFP is the only example given; and (3) The Moderate Left, which needs some more explanation:

      The moderate voter is not more fiscally conservative, in a classic sense, than even the socialist voter, but the moderate retreats from certain left signifiers. Unlike the socialist, the moderate is proudly pro-capitalist. Unlike the liberal, the moderate does not treat patriotism or religion as an embarrassing or ironic vestige of a lost world. Many moderates earnestly embrace nationalism and American iconography. They go to church on Sundays and, if they live in small towns, might organize their lives around religious institutions. Secularism is the default in both the socialist and liberal left; moderates are far more likely to turn to religion to give meaning to their lives.

      There is good news for those who want Americans to embrace incredibly progressive or even socialistic economic policy: moderates are in full support, as long as it's packaged appropriately.

      He then goes on to say that "unlike 20 or 30 years ago, there is no moderate faction of the Democratic Party complaining about deficit spending or the growth of welfare. RIP the Atari Democrat. RIP neoliberalism." The "Atari Democrat" article is dated 2016. I've heard the term, but needed a refresher, so we're basically talking about Clinton + Silicon Valley. "Neoliberal" I know all too well, both as Charles Peters and Milton Friedman. I wouldn't dismiss the existence of either of them within the Democratic Party. What progress may have been made under Biden is that some of them may now agree that some things should be done to actually help labor and the poor, instead of just assuming that everyone who loses their job to globalization and financialization will land on some kind of ritzy "symbolic manipulator" job (per Robert Reich). But lots of Democrats like that are still around, still chasing money, even if they've loosened up a bit.

  • Isaac Chotiner [09-08] Texas's gerrymander may not be the worst threat to Democrats in 2026: An interview with Nate Cohn, "the New York Times' chief political analyst, on a consequential Supreme Court case and why Republicans are registering so many new voters."

  • Eric Levitz [09-10] Democrats can't save democracy by shutting down the government: "The party should only force a shutdown for its own political gain."

  • Gabrielle Gurley [09-12] Virginia special election shaves GOP House margin: "Democrat James Walkinshaw triumphs in a ginormous victory." This was one of the seats elderly Democrats won in 2024 then lost through death, so this isn't really a pickup. Another one, in Arizona, is up for a vote on Sept. 23.

  • Andrew Prokop [09-12] Democrats are on the verge of a dangerous mistake: "There's one big guardrail left on Trump's ambitions." He means the Senate filibuster. Republicans have used long used it to keep Democrats from passing much-needed reforms, or at least to dilute them to ineffectiveness. But if Democrats use the filibuster to block some Republican outrage? Republicans could just change the rules to get rid of the filibuster — as, indeed, they've already done to keep Democrats from blocking their extremist judicial nominations. Unexplained is what good a rule is if you can't use it, but they're free to use it against you? Not much, as far as I can see.

The following articles are more/less in order published, although some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related articles underneath.

Current Affairs:

Ezra Klein [01-17] Democrats are losing the war for attention. Badly. Actually, just an interview with Chris Hayes, relating to his book, The Siren's Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, with a title cleverly chosen to grab your attention. Why was Trump able to win with lies while Democrats struggle to make anyone aware of their accomplishments? Attention is one obvious metric which is skewed ridiculously in favor of Republicans and especially Trump. I've read Hayes' book, and he makes a lot of interesting points. But he also engages in hyperbole, because he knows the surest way to get attention is to stick your neck out, become conspicuous, and flaunt it as far as you can get away with it. And he wants attention as much as his subjects do. It is, as he admits, his business. So it's not surprising that he overrates it, especially its fungibility -- which in his business may translate directly into advertising revenues, but for most people the profit motive is less obvious. Still, it's useful as a prism, not least because it renders part of the scheme opaque.

  • Derek Thompson [02-28] The end of reading: Only an excerpt of a transcript from a podcast, probably got here from a link in the Klein/Hayes interview. One stat: "50 years ago, about 40 percent of high school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the past year compared to about 12 percent who hadn't read any. And now those percentages have flipped."

George Salis [06-30] Borne back ceasefully: a rare interview with Tom Carson: He was one of the rock critics Christgau cultivated in the late 1970s. I first heard about him when he wrote a review of Brian Eno's Another Green World that was good enough it almost bumped my assigned piece. I met him once in New York, uneventfully, and read him as regularly as I could, though not as often as my wife read his Esquire reviews (usually on the newsstand). He was one of two critics Christgau tapped to fill in while he was off doing the CG-70s book -- the other one I remember better, probably because he didn't do as good a job. So I had something of a bond with him, with mixed feelings, but he wrote a brilliant piece on 1945, especially the observation that winning WWII was the worst thing that happened to America. Shortly after that, he published a novel called Gilligan's Wake, and I felt like he could have written it just for me. (I knew the TV show intimately, and most of the literary and historical references -- not that I ever made any headway through Joyce, but that seemed unnecessary. The only choice he made that I strongly differed with was saying nice things about Bob Dole.) I still frequently refer back to a couple of key concepts from the novel: the notion of America's perpetual innocence illustrated by Mary-Ann's self-healing virginity; the argument that America exists only for a certain group of people: the true Americans. I became reacquainted with him when he edited my essay in the Christgau Festschrift Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough: A Rock & Roll Critic Is Something to Be.

Robert Kuttner [07-30] Tom Lehrer and Mort Mintz, RIP: "Both challenged American smugness, one with satire and the other with great journalism."

Daniel Felsenthal [08-01] A book called Fascism or Genocide that's reluctant to discuss either: A review of Ross Barkan's "engrossing, literary analysis of the 2024 election disappoints with its blinkered vision of US politics." The book is Fascism or Genocide: How a Decade of Political Disorder Broke American Politics. The title comes from a Palestinian activist's view of the Trump or Harris choice, although the review tells us Barkan was reluctant to go deeper into either topic (but especially Gaza). This sounds like a version of the book I've been contemplating on the 2024 election, perhaps one where the focus is on the cognitive dissonance that allowed voters for both candidates to ignore much of what each stood for (which in the case of Harris included democracy, at least as we knew it, and some semblance of justice under law and economic opportunity for many, if not really all). Instead, people voted on phantom fixations and whims, which tilted to the macabre, bequeathing us a suddenly real dystopia.

Nick Turse: National security fellow for The Intercept, has been covering the Trump military everywhere, with a unique specialty in Africa. I've touched on many of these stories above, and could have distributed them accordingly, but for now, let's keep them together to see the pattern:

David Dayen:

Sarah Jones [08-20] The manifest destiny of J.D. Vance. I can't say as the analogy occurred to me, but not since McKinley has there been an American president so ebullient about expanding American territory, from Greenland down into Mexico (or perhaps Venezuela is next?). One snag may be that land comes with people already on it, but Israel has some ideas about that (updating Hitler's use of America's own Manifest Destiny idea).

It's not hard to understand why Manifest Destiny might appeal to the Trump administration, and particularly its Department of Homeland Security, whose agents carry out another act of conquest, a purge they justify in the name of Western civilization. The administration has occupied the streets of Washington, D.C., because it wants to punish the people who live there, because it wants to remove immigrants who it does not like, and because it sees itself as a conquering force. The streets properly belong to it, and not to locals. Manifest Destiny was about blood and soil, too. "A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending," as DHS wrote in its post of Gast's work. Trump even used the term in his inaugural address this year.

Harold Meyerson [08-25] A federal appellate court finds the NLRB to be unconstitutional: "And just like that, it frees Elon Musk -- and any fellow employers -- to violate whatever rights their workers thought they enjoyed." This reverses 88 years of rulings upholding the act's constitutionality. It's like they're daring us to revolution.

The New Republic: David W. Blight edited a special issue on Trump Against History, asking "how is Trump changing our sense of who we are?" Probably a lot more to talk about here than I had time for. Titles:

  • Johann Neem: Trump is the enemy of the American Revolution: "He has produced a crisis much like the one the colonists faced two and a half centuries ago. Now it's our responsibility to uphold the Founders' legacy."

  • Molly Worthen: What besieged universities can learn from the Christian resurgence: "Educators can fight back against Trump's attacks by re-embracing 'old-fashioned' disciplines and ideas."

  • William Sturkey: Trump's white nationalist vision for the future of history: "The administration is using the tools of the state to influence — even poison — how America's racial history will be taught in our public forums and schools."

  • Edward L Ayers: Trump's reckless assault on remembrance: "The attempts of his administration to control the ways Americans engage with our nation's history threaten to weaken patriotism, not strengthen it."

  • Michael Kazin: The two faces of American greatness: "It is the task of historians to grapple with Trump's favorite concept — and to redefine it."

  • Jen Manion: Learning history is a righteous form of resistance: "It's a way to combat Trump's attempts at remaking the past to justify erasing protections for the most vulnerable."

  • James Grossman: "Indoctrination"? We call it "education." "It's not 'divisive' to teach about division. It's divisive to bury it."

  • Geraldo Cadava: The diversity bell that Trump can't un-ring: "The biggest problem with the history Trump wants to impose on us is that it never, in fact, existed."

  • Amna Khalid: Authoritarianism is made — and it can be unmade: ""Autocrats do not merely fade away; they have to be countered and stopped."

  • David W Blight: What if history died by sanctioned ignorance? "We must mobilize now to defend our profession, not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion." Includes a useful summary of the Nazi ascent in 1930s Germany (I edited this to use a numbered list):

    In Richard J. Evans's trilogy on the Third Reich, he shows indelibly how the Nazis achieved power because of eight key factors:

    1. the depth of economic depression and the ways it radicalized the electorate;
    2. widespread hatred for parliamentary democracy that had taken root for at least a decade all over Europe;
    3. the destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities;
    4. the Nazis' ritualistic "dynamism," charisma, and propaganda machinery;
    5. the creation of a cloak of legality around so many of their tactics, stage by stage of the descent into fear, terror, and autocracy
    6. the public manipulating and recrafting of history and forging Nazi mythology to fit their present purposes
    7. they knew whom and what they viscerally hated — communists and Jews — and made them the objects of insatiable grievance;
    8. vicious street violence, with brownshirts in cities and student thugs on college campuses, mass arrests, detainment camps, and the Gestapo in nearly every town.

    All of these methods, mixed with the hideous dream of an Aryan racial utopia and a nationalism rooted in deep resentment of the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, provided the Nazis the tools of tyranny.

    In 2025, our own autocratic governing party has already employed many, though not all, of these techniques. Thanks to a free press and many courts sustaining the rule of law, Trumpism has not yet mastered every authoritarian method. But it has launched a startlingly rapid and effective beginning to an inchoate American brand of fascism.

  • Leslie M Harris: The high price of barring international students: "Global collaboration is necessary for success, if not survival, in our hyper-connected world."

Trevor Jackson [08-25] The myth of clean energy: "Is all the hope placed in renewables an illusion?" Review of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. Part of the argument here is that new energy technologies don't directly replace old ones, and often require more use of the old ones, at least in the short term (e.g., a lot of oil and gas, and still some coal, goes into making the turbines that generate electricity from wind). That isn't news, and certainly doesn't discredit the shift from fossil to renewable energy sources. Fressoz is co-author of an earlier book, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us, which I've ordered.

Henry Giroux [08-29] Domestic terrorism and spectacularized violence in Trump's warfare state: I don't often read, much less cite, his pieces, because the language and hyperbole don't strike me as all that useful (e.g., Resisting the deadly language of American fascism; Against the erasure machine; Trump's reign of cruelty; Trump's theater of cruelty; Childicide in the age of fascist theocracies; Neoliberal fascism, cruel violence, and the politics of disposability; The nazification of American society and the source of violence). But we've entered a stage where reality is rising to meet its most fevered denunciation, so maybe we need to invoke the specter of nazi/fascism not to scare the naive but to grasp the full enormity of what is happening.

The spectacle operates both as distraction and as pedagogy. By dramatizing state violence as entertainment, whether through militarized parades, campaign rallies, or sensationalist media coverage, the Trump regime trains the public to see authoritarian repression as normal, even desirable. The spectacle is a form of civic illiteracy: it numbs historical memory, erodes critical thought, and recodes brutality as patriotism.

The spectacle is more than distraction; it is a smokescreen for systemic violence. Behind the theatrics lie black-site detention centers, the militarization of U.S. cities, and surveillance technologies that monitor everyday life. The media's complicity, obsessed with immediacy and balance, enables this process by masking the deeper truth: the rise of an authoritarian warfare state at home. . . .

Here the spectacle does not conceal fascism but embodies it. Each act dramatizes the message that Trump alone decides who is safe, who is punished, who is disposable. Reich's insight into the fascist "perversion of pleasure" is central: the staging of cruelty is not only meant to terrify; it is meant to gratify. Citizens are invited to experience the humiliation of the weak as a form of release, to find satisfaction in the punishment of the vulnerable. Theodor Adorno's warnings about the authoritarian personality come into sharp relief here: the blending of obedience and enjoyment, submission and aggression, produces subjects who come to desire domination as if it were freedom.

What emerges is an authoritarian economy of desire in which cruelty is transformed into theater. Images of militarized parades, mug shots of political enemies, or caged immigrants circulate across media platforms like advertisements for repression, producing both fear and illicit pleasure. The spectacle trains citizens to consume cruelty as entertainment, to eroticize domination, and to accept vengeance as the highest civic virtue. Watching becomes complicity; complicity becomes a source of satisfaction; satisfaction becomes a form of loyalty.

Besides, this piece led me to others, like:

Jeffrey St Clair:

  • [09-01]: Defender of the backwoods: the good life of Andy Mahler.

  • [09-05]: Roaming Charges: Multiple megalomaniacs. Starts with the US attack on a boat near Venezuela. When I asked google for "us sinks boat near venezuela," AI replied:

    There are no recent or documented incidents of the United States sinking a boat near Venezuela, although there have been historical concerns about Venezuelan narcotics trafficking and tensions between the two nations regarding foreign involvement.

    However, further down the same page, we find:

    The Wikipedia entry notes:

    James Stavridis, a former US Navy admiral, characterized the strike and other US military activity around the same time as gunboat diplomacy intended to demonstrate the vulnerability of Venezuelan oil rigs and materiel. He wrote that drug interdiction was likely not the sole reason for the increased US military activity. On September 5th Trump ordered the deployment of 10 F-35 fighters, to conduct combat air patrols in the region and support the Southern Caribbean fleet, amid growing tensions. Following the flyover of the USS Jason Dunham, Trump gave permission to shoot down Venezuelan planes if they presented a danger to U.S. ships.

    In an exchange on X in which writer Brian Krassenstein said "killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime", Vice President JD Vance responded "I don't give a shit what you call it."

    Much more here, of course. Notable quote from Benjamin Balthasar: "It's funny how the Right likens everything to slavery, except slavery, much the way everything is antisemitism, except actual antisemitism."

  • [09-12] Roaming Charges: The broken jaws of our lost kingdom: Starts with a personal story about being shot at while protesting the Iraq war in 2003, then notes: "The murder of Charlie Kirk is awful, disgusting and about as American as it gets." He also notes that Trump said nothing about the recent assassination of Democrats in Minnesota, or the "173 shots at the CDC HQ in Atlanta last month," although he added that Trump's quiet "was probably welcome, given what he might have said." He then lists some of the right-wing incitements to further violence I noted below. He digs up more, of course, including a 2023 Kirk quote: "I think it's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the 2nd Amendment. That is a prudent deal. It is rational." It's not often you see a right-winger put their body where their mouth has gone. St Clair also notes, "After these kinds of traumatic episodes, Fox News invariably tries to coax Trump into saying something humane, but time after time, he shows that he just can't do it."

    On other fronts, note:

    • The 400 richest people in the US are now worth a record $6.6 trillion. Their wealth grew by $1.2 trillion in the past year.

    St Clair also cited a tweet from Sen. Elissa Slotkin:

    We are in an AI Race with China right now. The last ti me we were in such a race - with Russia on nuclear technology - we won because we set up the Manhattan Project. We need that level of ambition again, for the modern age.

    I've often sympathized with Slotkin when she was critiqued from the left, but this is wrong on more levels than seemed possible in just three sentences. She assumes: that AI and nukes are comparable; that both are worth pursuing; that there is a race with a definite goal; that the "race winner" gets some kind of advantage; that the "race loser" is a failure; that "ambition" is measured by such a race. She also gets basic history wrong: the Manhattan Project was set up out of the misplaced fear that Germany was developing such weapons; Russia's nuclear program was a response to the US using nuclear weapons, and threatening Russia in what became known as the Cold War only after both sides had but respected and refrained from using nuclear weapons (although most vocal threats came from US warriors, from 1940s calls for preëmptive attack before Russia could respond in kind up through Nixon's "madman" theory). Also note that Slotkin is falling back on one of our dumbest tropes, the notion that declaring war proves we are serious -- although in examples like the "war on poverty" and "war on drugs," that seriousness quickly dissipated after the PR campaign, not so much for lack of serious effort as because war didn't work on abstract targets.

Harold Meyerson [09-01] Trump celebrates Labor Day as the most anti-union president ever: "His unbound union busting is one front of his war on democracy." More on labor:

Doug Muir [09-09] Five technological achievements! (That we won't see any time soon.) Crooked Timber's "resident moderate techno-optimist" presents "five things we're not going to see between now and 2050."

  1. Nobody is going to Mars.
  2. Speaking of space woo, we are not going to see asteroid mining.
  3. Coming down to Earth, we are not going to have commercial fusion power.
  4. There will be no superconductor revolution.
  5. There will be no useful new physics. No anti-gravity, telepathy, faster-than-light communication or travel, time-travel, teleportation booths, force fields, manipulation of the strong or weak nuclear forces, or reactionless drives. We're not going to get energy from the vacuum, or perpetual motion, or glowing blue cubes.
  6. Airships.

Matthew Duss [09-09] Encased in amber: "Biden's wars and the unmaking of liberal foreign policy." The subtitle suggests a ringing and much deserved indictment, but the article itself is just a review of Bob Woodward's latest insider blabfest, succinctly titled War. While Woodward has no opinions of whatever he writes about -- or perhaps I should say, conveys from his insider sources -- Duss is fairly admiring of Biden's "restraint" regarding Ukraine. While as I'm sure I've made clear by now, I mostly blame Putin, we still haven't seen a clear history on what Biden did or did not do between taking power and Putin's invasion. After all, it took Putin 8 years between the 2014 coup and secession and the 2022 invasion, so what spooked him? Where the record is clearer is how little Biden did after the invasion, and especially after the war stalemated, to negotiate a peace. That's been bad for Ukraine, bad for Russia, and bad for the world, including the US. But if Ukraine suggests that Biden and his crew didn't feel like peace was worth their effort, Gaza not only proved it, it showed that they had no regard for human rights, they had no clue how to talk about war, and they had no willpower to back up what few humanitarian sentiments they could muster. As Duss notes, not only did Biden's wars cost them the election, they still have no comprehension of their failures.

Jill Lepore [09-10] How Originalism killed the Constitution: "A radical legal philosophy has undermined the process of constitutional evolution." Another Atlantic article I can't read (and you probably can't either), on a subject various people have written entire books on (just from my roundup files: Erwin Chemerinsky, Madiba K Dennie, Jonathan Gienapp, Eric J Segall, Cass R Sunstein, Ilan Wurman), but none as long as Lepore's own new We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, which this is most likely tied to. The short definition is that "originalism" is whatever Antonin Scalia thinks at any given moment. While the article and book are no doubt interesting, you might start with a review:

David Dayen [09-10] Political violence and the reality distortion field: "Sadly, we've always had violence in America; what's different today is the aftermath, and the battle to define political opposition amid violence." The occasion for this article was the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed today. Dayen starts by decrying and condemning all political violence, and offers very little information about Kirk -- probably for the best, given that it's hard to say anything about Kirk that couldn't be misconstrued, especially by trigger-happy right-wingers, as suggesting that he had it coming. Dayen does place the shooting among the "47 episodes of mass violence on school campuses this year" (by the time of writing, Kirk's wasn't even the most recent). But his bigger point was how the right sought to exploit this shooting not just for political advantage but to direct violence against the left:

My view of this is not very controversial or provocative. It has been shared by every Democratic political leader who has made a statement about this, at least the hundreds that I've seen. But what I say in this moment, or what any of those leaders say, doesn't really matter when there's an open struggle, in these moments of confusion, to redefine reality.

"The Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization," said Sean Davis, a conservative activist who was merely echoing the words of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller just a couple of weeks ago. "Every post on Bluesky is celebrating the assassination," said writer Tim Urban. "The Left is the party of murder," said incipient trillionaire Elon Musk on his personal microblogging site, X.

I'm not interested in collecting opinions about Charlie Kirk, but for an example for the first quoted paragraph, consider this from Barack Obama:

We don't yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie's family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.

As a non-believer, "praying" always triggers my bullshit detector, but then I start wondering what Obama's selection algorithm is for who he prays for -- I doubt that he has time to qualify thousands of Gazans (or Africans, or hundreds of ordinary American citizens) for personal attention (like knowing spouse names and counting children). And if he's so selective, why single Kirk out, except perhaps that he's semi-famous? Surely he's not a fan? I also don't care for the motivation clause, which suggests that condemning some murders turns on motivations. But then, as someone who's ordered and rationalized murders, that may be the way his brain works.

Along these same lines, Eric Levitz tweeted:

We do not yet have any confirmation of the shooter's political ideology or motivation.

In recent years, political violence has emanated from both the left and the right.

The way to honor the memory of a "free speech" proponent is not to crack down on progressive speech.

The casual "both sides do it" tone is completely baseless, as is claiming Kirk as a free speech proponent. And scoring shooters by incidental ideological attachments is just a pointless game, unless you can show that the ideology promotes violence (which, come to think of it, right-wingers often do, including implicitly in their opposition to regulating guns). In his usual too-little, too-late mode, Levitz qualified his "both sides" assertion with statistics, a chart show 444 total deaths from "Domestic Extremist-Related Killings in the U.S. by Perpetrator Affiliation," where right-wingers were responsible for 75%, Islamists for 20%, and "left-wing extremism (including anarchists & Black nationalists)" 4%, with 1% unaccounted for.

As for the second quoted paragraph, the first example I ran across was a tweet from someone named Matt Forney:

Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire. It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism. They caused this.

I don't know who this guy is -- but his X handle is @realmattforney, so he must think he's somebody special, and the image showed 687K views by 3:09PM, so less than 3 hours after the shooting -- but you have to not just reel in disgust but actually marvel at some pundit whose first thought after a news event was "what would Hitler do?" Similar, minus only the explicit Nazi appeal, reaction from Laura Loomer (who I have heard of):

It's time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.

If Charlie Kirk dies from his injuries, his life cannot be in vain.

We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all.

The Left is a national security threat.

Trump himself took up this same line of argument, here:

For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges and law enforcement officials.

And while right-wingers are lambasting Bluesky for "cheering the assassin," the closest thing to an off-color comment I've seen there was from "Kim," who wrote:

Remember while they are chastising you for not mourning a dead Nazi, these are the same cunts who cheered Kyle Rittenhouse and gave him a television contract.

Calling Kirk a Nazi may be rude, and may even be technically inaccurate (not something I'm expert enough, or interested enough, to argue one way or the other), but its relationship to terrorism isn't real, not even in some hazy stochastic correlation. Trump just fixates on it because it hits close to home. But the use of violent hate speech is hundreds or maybe thousands of times more prevalent on the right than on the left. It's so common it rarely gets noticed. But the incredible whining on the rare occasion the tables get turned is pretty disgusting.

By the way, everyone dies in vain. That may not be right, but it's just the way the world works. That's just a rhetorical device that sounds sensible until you give it any thought. Someone should write up a full guidebook to how to make bogus right-wing arguments, not because the right needs one, but to simplify deciphering -- much like Gramsci argued that Machiavelli wrote The Prince not for actual princes, who grew up learning those tricks, but for the rest of us, to understand what they were doing.

More background on Kirk and/or reaction to his shooting:

  • A Mighty Girl [09-10] Three months, two political killings: the poison in our politics. The other assassination featured here was Emerita Melissa Hortman, a Democratic leader of the Minnesota House, although her husband, also killed, was mentioned only in passing (see 2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators.

  • James H Williams [10-10] New York Yankees hold moment of silence for Charlie Kirk.

  • Rev. Graylan Scott Haglar [09-11] The killing of Charles James Kirk: Violent speech leads to violence.

  • Susan B Glasser [09-11] Did Trump just declare war on the American left? "After Charlie Kirk's tragic killing, the President speaks not of ending political violence but of seeking political vengeance." Well, that's what he said. Granted, he's sometimes unclear on what he can and cannot do, and on when and if what he says will be taken seriously by his staff, his fans, and everyone else. But what he says does give you some insight into what he's thinking and what he wants to see happen, which is mostly evil.

  • Avishay Artsy/Noel King [09-11]: What Charlie Kirk meant to young conservatives: "The late Talking Points USA [sic] leader built a movement that will outlive him."

  • Ben Burgis/Meagan Day [09-11]: Charlie Kirk's murder is a tragedy and a disaster: This joins "most on the Left [who] have rightly condemned his murder," but focuses more on the threat of right-wing vengeance for martyrdom, which they worry may be facilitated by failing to show due remorse and contrition. No doubt the treat is real. But why should we set ourselves up for a moral test, and blame ourselves for offenses they've long wanted to do, that Kirk himself was at the center of. It's not like Kirk ever felt the slightest twinge of guilt over the genocide in Gaza, or all sorts of other offenses. He lived to amass power to inflict terror, and his followers have no interest in anything but exploiting his death to further those same goals. I don't know how to stop them, except by making clear how horrible what they want to do really is. But blaming anyone other than the one who killed him won't help. Nor does offering sympathy when all it will do is inflate his importance and be used to hurt others.

  • Eric Levitz [09-11]: The right's vicious, ironic response to Charlie Kirk's death: "They're calling him a martyr for free speech as they demand a violent crackdown on progressive dissent." Even here, and even though he clearly knows better, he can't help but kick at some phantom leftists to burnish his both-sidesism.

  • Joan Walsh [09-11]: Let's not forget who Charlie Kirk really was: "The right-wing influencer did not deserve to die, and we shouldn't forget the many despicable things he said and did."

  • Ian Ward [09-12]: Why Charlie Kirk had no counterpart on the left: "Over the past decade, Kirk built an entirely new infrastructure for the GOP." This seems quite plausible, not that I've ever had any interest in understanding how this sort of politics works.

  • Chris Hedges [09-12]: The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk: He calls the killing "a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration."

    His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr. Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.

    Martyrs sacralize violence. They are used to turn the moral order upside down. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities become heroism. Crime becomes justice. Hate becomes virtue. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. Murder becomes good. War is the final aesthetic. This is what is coming.

    "We have to have steely resolve," said conservative political strategist Steve Bannon on his show "War Room," adding, "Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are." . . .

    The cannibalization of society, a futile attempt to recreate a mythical America, will accelerate the disintegration. The intoxication of violence — many of those reacting to Kirk's killing seemed giddy about a looming bloodbath — will feed on itself like a firestorm.

    The martyr is vital to the crusade, in this case ridding America of those Trump calls the "radical left."

    It seems significant that Bannon called his program "War Room" long before the killing, to show us that he had already resolved to wage war, long before Kirk gave him excuse and rationalization. It's worth noting that while Democrats seek to marginalize the left, reducing us to a harmless minority, right-wingers insist on obliterating us. This suggests that they fear something more fundamental, like exposure. They want a public that follows them uncritically, unaware that there is any other alternative.

  • Alain Stephens [09-12] Charlie Kirk's assassination is part of a trend: spiking gun violence in red states: "It's not Washington or Chicago but Republican-run, reliably right-wing states that lead the nation in gun violence rates."

  • Elizabeth Spiers [09-12] Charlie Kirk's legacy deserves no mourning: "The white Christian nationalist provocateur wasn't a promoter of civil discourse. He preached hate, bigotry, and division."

  • Elie Mystal [09-12]: How to canonize a white supremacist: "On the brutal murder of Charlie Kirk, the certain blowback, and this country's raging gun problem." One piece Mystal spend some time critiquing is Ezra Klein [09-11]: Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.

  • Zach Beauchamp

    • [09-12]: Let's be honest about Charlie Kirk's life — and death: "We can hold two thoughts in our head at the same time." Sure, but oddly enough the right can't do honest: to them it's only how can this help us and/or hurt them (which in their zero-sum worldview amount to the same)? People who can hold two thoughts can be conflicted. They can feel ambivalent. They can act confused. Carried too far, felt too intensely, they can be schizophrenic: floundering, acting in contradictory ways, even lapsing into catatonia. The right have it so much easier. They're wrong, but at least they're sure of themselves. They can act, boldly, decisively, Too bad they're sociopaths.

      Ok, I'm just riffing on the line. The article sticks to its subject. Beauchamp says, "I want you to think about two sentences," but when I do I'm not sure the distinction they make is significant, or even that he's deciphering them right. Inflection, which isn't clear written down, would reveal more than order. He cites a lot of pieces (some cited elsewhere in this section, some I'm not bothering with), then attempts to draw a set of "red lines" around what one can and cannot say, proscribing every other possible reaction — especially ones that are quite natural for those who have been personally injured by Kirk's bigotry. I'm not saying Beauchamp's wrong, and I agree that conscientious leftists should avoid unnecessary offense, but before Kirk and his cohort can lecture us on how to speak, they need to show some discretion themselves.

    • [09-11]: Our country is not prepared for this: "On the horrible murder of Charlie Kirk — and the threat to democracy it created."

  • Christian Paz [09-12]: How Charlie Kirk remade Gen Z: "Three reasons his message resonated so strongly with young conservatives." The third is the most interesting: "He tapped into a nascent oppositional culture on campuses, and among youth." I don't really get how or why, or even how much, but this doesn't seem right, and certainly not necessarily so.

  • Jamelle Bouie [09-13]: Charlie Kirk didn't shy away from who he was. We shouldn't either.

    It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn't seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.

    But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk's influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.

    Also notable by Bouie:

    • [09-10]: They don't want to live in Lincoln's America: A "response, of sorts, to Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri, whose speech for 'national conservatives' was a direct rebuke of the creedal nationalism of the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg." I'm not surprised that right-wingers should hate iconic credos of American liberalism like "all men are created equal" and "government of, by, and for the people" -- I save my own ire for the avowed liberals who are so quick to sell their fellow citizens out. But it's rare, and perhaps a sign of the times, to see "conservatives" like Schmitt come out so explicitly against the original aspirations of American patriotism.

    • [08-27] We are not 'property of Donald Trump'. "The White House does not belong to Donald Trump. It is the property of the United States -- of the American people." "The Smithsonian Institution does belong to Donald Trump, either." Yet Trump feels entitled to remake both in his own image, with no consult or consideration of anyone else.

  • John Ganz [09-13] Reflections on violence: "Two reasons for Kirk's murder." The 2nd amendment, and the 1st. I don't particularly agree with either explanation, or with the first section below: I think it's possible to objectively distinguish hate speech, and that it should also be protected as free speech, although one should also be free to reply, even in kind. The real variable is power (as the 2nd section below notes), and that is not symmetrical either in fact or in theory: it is almost invariably the right that feels entitled to suppress the speech of others, or to require that their own favored speech be propagated, because their notion of order requires power to establish and maintain, and cannot withstand scrutiny. (I'm not denying that there are people who identify with the left who are tempted to take up the tools of the right, especially when they have been victimized, and that such people become more and more dangerous as they gain power, but it is not their leftness that drives them to abuse power — it is power itself.)

    It's long been my contention that almost no one really believes in free speech in principle; people believe free speech is what we do, hate speech is what they do. It's actually a difficult principle to hold to without contradiction. . . .

    Norms of civility are also impossible to enforce without abrogating someone's freedom of expression. For instance, some believe that at this time one should refrain from criticizing Kirk and his ilk. That's an exercise of power. Calls to decorum exist to circumscribe what can be said. . . .

    I think Charlie Kirk made the country a worse place. I believe his murder makes the country even worse. But I also won't engage in the dirty rhetorical trick that slyly suggests that a speaker created the unruly conditions for his own murder, as that late lamented beau idéal of civility, William F. Buckley, once did about Martin Luther King Jr. I opposed both the substance and form of Kirk's politics and still do. That's my opinion, and I feel it's a reasonable opinion shared by many — by millions in fact — although there are now efforts to drown it out as being unacceptable and disrespectful to the dead. I consider such talk tantamount to intimidation and blackmail, and I resent it. It's the same kind of droning idiocy and enforced conformity that led us from 9/11 to the destruction of civil liberties and to disaster in Iraq.

  • Media Matters [09-10] Fox News host on mentally ill people who commit crimes: "Just kill them": Brian Kilmeade. Given the people Trump has pardoned, and the ones he wants to prosecute, it's hard to give him or any other Republican any credit for anything they say about "law and order."

  • Intelligencer Staff [09-12] Charlie Kirk's assassination and the manhunt for his killer: What happened: "A running account of the shooting and its aftermath." This is the first piece on the shooter I've seen, and as one of the subtitles puts it, "Misinformation about the suspect is all over the place." As I tried to point out before, I don't really care what his motivations and/or identities are. But one tweet by Zachary D Carter seems fairly plausible:

    I see no point in searching for left/right valence in Tyler Robinson. He fits the school shooter archetype: young, disaffected, ideologically amorphous, extremely online and raised in gun culture. The theater of such violence is just expanding to include political assassination.

  • Joseph L Flatley [09-11]: Death of a troll "Charlie Kirk, 1993-2025." Like the author, one of the first things I thought of on hearing of Kirk's assassination was the 1967 assassination of George Lincoln Rockwell. Maybe Kirk wasn't as flagrant a Nazi as Rockwell, but Rockwell never had a shred of respectability or influence, and his killing had no discernible consequences or import. It merely removed a shit stain of an individual from the public eye. Kirk differs not in being a better person but in having rich and powerful promoters, who still seek to use his death for their own gain. One thing I had forgotten was that Rockwell was killed by one of his own disgruntled followers. Makes sense. Who else would consider him worthy of a bullet? By the way, good pull quote here: "Charlie Kirk died as he lived — making very little sense."

Tweets: I've usually used this section for highlighting clever responses and/or interesting ideas, but maybe I should just use it to bookmark some of our leading horribles.

  • Donald J Trump:

    • The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of "WOKE." The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen, and I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made. This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE is BROKE. We have the "HOTTEST" Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.

    • Here's another one, which seems to be Trump reminiscing about his days as a Democrat:

      The confused and badly failing Democrat Party did nothing about Jeffrey Epstein while he was alive except befriedn him, socialize with him, travel to his island, and take his money! They knew everything there was to know about Epstein, but now, years after his death, they, out of nowhere, are seeming to show such love and heartfelt concern for his victims. Does anyone really believe' that? Where were they during his very public trials, and for all of those years before his death? The answer is, "nowhere to be found." The now dying (after the DOJ gave thousands of pages of documents in full compliance with a very comprehensive and exacting Subpoena from Congress!) Epstein case was only brought back to life by the Radical Left Democrats because they are doing so poorly, with the lowest poll numbers in the history of the Party (16%), while the Republicans are doing so well, among the highest approval numbers the Party has ever had! The Dems don't care about the victims, as proven by the fact that they never did before. This is merely another Democrat HOAX, just like Russia, Russia, Russia, and all of the others, in order to deflect and distract from the great success of a Republican President, and the record setting failure of the previous administration, and the Democrat Party. The Department of Justice has done its job, they have given everything requested of them, it's time to end the Democrat Epstein Hoax, and give the Republicans credit for the great, even legendary, job that they are doing. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!

  • I've seen several this several times, without a source:

    Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul—all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair. Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn't but has always been—arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel. It is America's shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn't just lose its soul—it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader.

    I would have left out the "draft dodger" bit, which I consider a mark of real courage (although not really in Trump's case).

  • cassius marcellus clay [08-23]: [PS: sorry, lost the link]

    in 10 yrs dem voters asks have gone from "please improve something" to "please stop trump/fix what is being broken" to "you dont even need to accomplish anything just pretend to have the same contempt for the GOP that you do for your voters" and the answer has been "no, send us $3" every time

  • Doris Ravenfeather Gent [08-17]: Meme with picture of Putin and caption: "we did not get Trump elected because we like Trump. We hate America, and he is weak and stu pid, and that is good for us." Gent comments:

    No doubt this is Putin's thought process . . . it may not be an actual quote, but definitely believable . . . Because Trump is weak and Stupid and very manipulative! . . . Annnd, Agent Krasnov is and has been an asset for Putin all along.

    I seriously doubt this, on many counts (not Trump being weak and stupid; while that clearly hurts America, how, or whether, that helps Russia is a different; but first you have to figure out what Putin wants, rather than just assuming he started with hating America, and deriving everything from that, projecting your own global ambitions onto a country with limited means for attaining them). I am saddened to say that the meme was forwarded by a local leftist friend, who isn't normally affiliated with the warmongering Democratic cabal, which just goes to show how poorly the world is understood by even our friends, and how much work it's going to take

  • Nate Silver: not a direct link to something that evidently appeared on X (where it looks like an attempt to flatter the algorithm). Normally "more" is followed by "than" (not "that"), but that incoherency is easily lost in trying to imagine what the fuck "Blueskyism" might possibly mean, especially if you assume that it must fit somewhere in the remaining tangle of nebulous concepts.

    Electorally speaking it's more important for Democrats to avoid Blueskyism that leftism. Not that Bluesky is important but it embodies all the characteristics that make progressivism unappealing to normal people. If you could subtract those the left would win more often.

    Kim draws more conclusions from this than I would, including, "he's a miserable being choosing a miserable life when choosing the be less miserable requires so little action from him." I'm more of the view that he's a spreader of misery than a victim.

  • Dave Roberts [09-01]: Tweet and additional comments, something that could have been said more succinctly and calmly in 2 or 3 paragraphs, but for the record, let's unravel it here:

    To me, the lesson of the pandemic is a very familiar one, although as far as I can tell, no one is talking about it or learning it (which is also familiar). It's about the contrast between America's two political parties.

    When Covid popped up, the parties' reactions were extremely on brand.

    Dems, America's A students, scrambled to do the responsible thing. Strained, sweated to do the responsible thing, to be seen doing the responsible thing, to get the gold star from the (imaginary) teacher.

    Now, of course there were lots of decisions made by Dems in the heat of crisis, with insufficient information, facing no-win trade-offs, that one could go back and second guess. (Indeed, that is US pundits' favorite indoor sport!) Perhaps you would have made the trade-offs differently.

    But the entire Dem professional establishment was desperately trying to do the right thing & be responsible.

    Contrast: immediately upon the arrival of the virus, the right started spreading insane conspiracy theories, attacking public health officials, & refusing to act in solidarity.

    At every single second, they worked their hardest to destroy trust, to foment doubt & anger & resentment, to prevent solidarity.

    And those lies mattered. The vaccine skepticism deliberately spread by the right led to 100s of 1000s of preventable deaths. Again: they caused mass death.

    And then afterward -- this is the part that makes me feel crazy -- all the retrospective analysis & discussion shit on Democrats. They've been on the defense ever since, criticized from all quarters for this or that decision. Much of that criticism is fact-free bullshit, but . . .

    . . . even if you buy it all, surely the party that worked desperately to save lives & end the pandemic deserves more credit, a higher grade, than the party that worked desperately to spread lies & get people killed! Surely they're not the ones that should be apologizing!

    But it's always like this. Democrats try to do the right thing. They fall short, like humans do. Everyone teams up to shit on them.

    Republicans don't even bother pretending. They lie, they smear, they destroy lives, they get people killed, & they face NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT.

    Somehow our diseased information environment has produced the net outcome that the pandemic is considered a political problem for Dems, not the party that lied about it & got people killed at every juncture. The party that tried, but not perfectly, to save lives, is being forced to apologize.

    I've written a million threads on this theme, it's pointless, I know. But it's insane. Dems have to try, to be responsible, to please everyone. Republicans just have to jump around like fucking gibbons, throwing shit at the wall, and if they occasionally, accidentally hit something . . .

    . . . it's their targets who must apologize. They're never held responsible for the lies. Never held responsible for getting so many people killed. Never held responsible for anything. It's just the people who care, who try, that we hold responsible, that we shit on & demonize. Never the gibbons.

    Think about it. "Dems were too zealous in trying to prevent the spread of the virus" is, in US politics, a greater disadvantage, a bigger problem, than "Republican lies got hundreds of thousands of Americans killed for no reason."

    Just a pathetic fucking country. Pathetic.

    Adding one thing: this whole dynamic is neatly replicated around the issue of climate change. Dems take shit constantly: they're acting too fast, too slow, doing the wrong things, focusing on the wrong tech, bad Dems!

    GOP gibbons just throw shit & lies & block all policy & that's fine I guess.

    Dems care, and try, and for that are punished.

    GOP lies, hurts people, doesn't give a shit, and is rewarded.

    Various comments, including this from Ben Weinberg:

    The way this pathetic state of affairs is such a mass scale self-inflicted regression feels unique to our history. While people went thru far worse for the good of the country, this is the most unsympathetic populace we've ever had.

    My belief is that big tech decided technofascism was preferable to regulation and tried to align algorithms to that in late 2021-22. The idea of a shift absent that just doesn't hold up.

    I don't put a huge amount of stock in the notion that Democrats care where Republicans don't. Another way of looking at this is to go back to Karl Rove's argument that Democrats are bound to study reality, while Republicans are free and bold enough to act and, thereby, create their own better reality. Democrats responded to this by embracing the "reality-based community," but it also locked them into an orbit of conventional thinking where it became impossible to do anything that wasn't underwritten by their corporate sponsors. In effect, they substituted their own phony reality, which constrained them as apologists for the status quo. Democrats sometimes remind me of the "shoot and cry" Israelis, who could never see a way to avoid a war they were bound to regret. And while they could point to their crying as proof that they're living, caring humans, they're effectively no different from the shameless right-wingers they hope to guilt-trip. It's a losing proposition, because if you're going to shoot anyway, it makes sense to go with the side that's really into shooting.

  • Bari Weiss [09-12]: Matthew Yglesias responded to this, adding that "the core of free speech and a liberal society is precisely that I don't need to agree with the hagiographic accounts of Kirk's life and work to find his murder unacceptable and chilling."

    Someone in the newsroom said that this shattering event feels like the aftermath of another Charlie: Charlie Hebdo. It was a decade ago that Islamists burst into the offices of the satirical Paris newspaper and murdered 12 people who worked there.

    One similarity was that the killings were condemned by people all across the left-right political spectrum, as opposed to the killings that are only condemned by the left. Another similarity is that in both these cases, the right jumped on their victimhood as an excuse to foment violence against their supposed enemies. One might contrast this with, say, the bombing of Gaza, where several US Senators skipped the "hopes and prayers" and jumped straight into cheers and jeers, like "finish the job!"

  • Keith Edwards [09-12]: asks "Why did Laura Loomer delete this [tweet from 7/13/25]?"

    I don't ever want to hear @charliekirk11 claim he is pro-Trump ever again. After this weekend, I'd say he has revealed himself as political opportunist and I have had a front row seat to witness the mental gymnastics these last 10 years.

    Lately, Charlie has decided to behave like a charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next.

    Here's another (or possibly just longer) Loomer tweet attacking Kirk. Evidently Kirk's treason against Trump was in criticizing Trump's Israel-directed bombing of Iran.

  • erictastic:

    He was killed on camera. No one's family deserves to have to witness that. It's unthinkably cruel that people would then go on the internet and use their platform to say about an innocent man that "I don't care that he's dead." "He's not a hero." "He's a scumbag." "He shouldn't be celebrated."

    I'm talking about George Floyd. You thought I was talking about Charlie Kirk? No, those are actual quotes BY Charlie Kirk about George Floyd. Outrageous that anyone would say that of the dead, right?

    Further down my Facebook feed, I ran across this, which quoted California D governor Gavin Newsom:

    I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate. His senseless murder is a reminder of how important it is for all of us, across the political spectrum, to foster genuine discourse on issues that deeply affect us all without resorting to political violence.

    The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate — never through violence.

    I shouldn't complain about safe pablum coming from politicians, who know better than most that anything else will get them crucified. I also don't mind the occasional ironic twist that presents a foe as an unwitting ally, as long as it is remotely credible and/or amusing. But this is more than a bit excessive, and it makes you wonder who Newsom knows, and why.

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