TRUMP AND HIS FLUNKIES PLAN ANOTHER THEFT

BEZOS BLOWS

 

NEVER LET THIS CROOKED PIG AND TRAITOR FORGET HIS PAL EPSTEIN

 

WILHOIT'S LAW

 

 

1. I think most liberals are probably familiar with one part of what has become known as Wilhoit’s Law – that the true goals of the right are inequality, injustice, repression and control. This is how composer Frank Wilhoit put it in 2018: crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

 

 

2. I think liberals are probably less familiar with another part of Wilhoit’s “law” – that these goals are so indefensible in a country founded on liberty and equality that it is necessary for conservatives to cover them up with lies.

 

3. “As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly,” Wilhoit wrote, “it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny.”

 

4. On the right, US citizenship has always been a matter of white power. The overarching objective of conservatism since the founding has been maintenance of a social order in which rich white men are on top.

 

5. But that can’t be plainly said in the land of freedom and opportunity, where everyone is said to have an equal chance at success, or happiness, if they work hard and play by the rules. So the right lies.

 

6. The Republicans say “illegal immigration” is a matter of law enforcement. They say “border integrity” is a matter of national security. They say liberal immigration policies that fall short of enforcing the law and securing the border debase what it means to be a law-abiding US citizen.

 

7. They make endless appeals, all in bad faith, to higher principles in order to cover up for the fact that their true goal is the abomination of those same principles.

 

8. But as the right expands its power, it sometimes requires new and better rationalizations. It occasionally finds it necessary to slough off the old lies.

 

9. Since the 1990s, for instance, nothing has been more “sacred” than the 2nd Amendment. We were told the freedom to bear arms “shall not be infringed.” On the strength of this apparent conviction, little if anything has been done to address the spread of shooting massacres over the last decade.

 

10. Yet when the Trump regime needed an explanation for why Border Patrol officers were forced on January 24 to kill Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis, the sacredness of the Second Amendment was easily forgotten. bsky.app/profile/atru...

 

Trump: "With that being said, you can't have guns. You can't walk in with guns. You just can't. You can't walk in with guns. You can't do that. But it's just a very unfortunate incident."

 

11. Alex Pretti was legally permitted to conceal carry. (He did not brandish his weapon. CBP disarmed him before he was shot.) That, however, wasn’t enough. bsky.app/profile/atru...

 

12. The right refused to act on a decades’ worth of shooting massacres because it was in the right’s interest to allow terror to spread across the land. That could never be plainly said, of course, so it covered up that objective with the Second Amendment.

WILHOIT There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

 

Frank Wilhoit 03.22.18 at 12:09 am

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

For millennia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.

No, it ain’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Management Under a Mad King: The Courtiers Who Try to Clean Up.

'Governance' has become a matter of threats and decrees straight from Donald Trump's id. Three examples. And meanwhile, Jeff Bezos destroys a crucial American institution.

James Fallows Feb 4 ∙ Preview

It’s hard to be in Washington DC at this moment and react to anything except the devastating news that Jeff Bezos, with more than $250 billion at his personal disposal, and Will Lewis, the discredited Murdoch/Fleet Street refugee Bezos brought in to run (and ruin) the Washington Post, have today announced what is effectively the Post’s demise. Their statement starts out by announcing the elimination of two the paper’s strongest and most popular sections—Sports, and Books—and goes downhill from there.

The paper’s stellar, and usually tight-lipped, former editor Marty Baron—successor to Ben Bradlee, Len Downie, Marcus Brauchli—put out a blistering statement this morning. Baron said that “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world's greatest news organizations.”

It seems to me that this day stands alone.

Its only rival would be whatever day it was on which Jeff Bezos converted himself from the man who stood by Baron in his toughest calls at the Post (as Baron detailed in his autobiography), and once sponsored an extraordinary pro-journalism Super Bowl ad, narrated by Tom Hanks, to the courtier who grovels before Donald Trump and parades around at fashion shows with his new wife.

Jeff Bezos could have done absolutely anything in the world. He has chosen to destroy. And to spend $75 million on the Melania movie, including the $28 million payoff directly to her.¹

Unlike this era’s other great destroyer, Bezos does not even have the excuse of being insane.

There will be more on this front. For now let’s move quickly to three other illustrations of the risk of putting so much power into the hands of so few.

---

‘White House officials clarified…’

Donald Trump has clearly lost control of his emotions, his contact with reality, and such fidelity to truth as he ever had.

This is a problem for everyone on Earth: That a furious 79-year-old has asserted one-man authority to disrupt the world economy, destroy historic alliances, sell pardons to criminals, and conceivably start a nuclear war.

It’s a problem in a specific way for the subset of people on Team MAGA—within the White House and on Capitol Hill—who realize that much of what Trump says each day is literally insane.

This is a for-the-record post, to note three recent examples of Trump saying and ordering things that his own people know are insane, and where this leaves the rest of us.

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1) February 3, about elections: States are ‘agents’ of the federal government.

Yesterday in the Oval Office, as part of his standard “stolen election” riff, Donald Trump said that if “Democrat” states couldn’t clean up their elections, then federal authorities would exercise their right to step in. As he put it:

If you think about it, the state is an agent for the federal government in elections. I don't know why the federal government doesn't do them anyway.

If you think about it, the states are in fact not an agent for the federal government in elections. If you don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do them anyway, it is because the US Constitution explicitly says that this is a job for the states.

To wit, from Article I, Section 4, Clause 1:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.²

Everyone else in the US government knows this. Nearly everyone on the MAGA team realizes it’s a problem that the sitting president either doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, how the Constitution works. And so could never pass a naturalized-citizenship test.

Thus they pirouette around this awkward reality. Last week, they had to pretend not to have heard Trump’s comment, after the Alex Pretti murder, that no one should be allowed to carry a loaded gun to a public rally. (Notwithstanding the Second Amendment, the NRA, Kyle Rittenhouse, and many others.)

This time, the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, tactfully said after Trump’s comment that he personally was “not in favor” of “nationalizing” elections. Karoline Leavitt used her trademark deflection to say, reassuringly, that Donald Trump “believes in the Constitution.” And that his real point was concern about “election integrity” and the desirability of “nationwide standards” toward that end.

Fine. But that’s not what he said. And apparently not what he thinks, or knows.

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2) January 29, about aircraft: How to cut off travel throughout much of the US, via one nighttime tweet.

Six days ago, something brought an arcane aspect of aircraft regulation to Donald Trump’s attention. It is arcane, not worth going into here, and not the kind of thing a normal president would be bothering with. The issue involved certification timetables for private-jet aircraft in the US, versus those in Canada. Some explanatory links are below.³

However he got wind of this issue, Donald Trump apparently decided that it was one more way in which Mark Carney and his Canadians were showing him up, and one more instance of foreigners cheating Americans.

Therefore Trump declared, online, an immediate grounding in the US of “all Aircraft made in Canada.” Plus a 50% tariff on imported Canadian jets that sell for tens of millions of dollars.

As Trump put it in a Truth Social post last Thursday night. (Emphasis added.)

Based on the fact that Canada has wrongfully, illegally, and steadfastly refused to certify the Gulfstream 500, 600, 700, and 800 Jets, one of the greatest, most technologically advanced airplanes ever made, we are hereby decertifying their Bombardier Global Expresses, and all Aircraft made in Canada, until such time as Gulfstream, a Great American Company, is fully certified, as it should have been many years ago…. If, for any reason, this situation is not immediately corrected, I am going to charge Canada a 50% Tariff on any and all Aircraft sold into the United States of America. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
DONALD J. TRUMP PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”

As I write, Trump’s post is still online. And it still is insane.

Why? Because “decertifying” means that planes could no longer legally fly in the United States. And if implemented, this decree would have effectively ended air service to hundreds of medium-sized and smaller-city destinations across the country.

The “major” carriers like United, Delta, American, and Southwest carry people among the big hub cities, on big Boeing and Airbus planes. But at least 400 other US communities—Wichita, Dayton, Duluth, and so on—get most or all of their air service from a “regional” carrier. These flights are usually ticketed and branded as American, Delta, or United. But they’re operated by separate smaller companies, and nearly all of their service is via smaller jets or turboprops.

Bombardier is one of the two globally dominant suppliers of these planes. The other is Embraer, based in Brazil. Boeing and Airbus don’t make planes like these. On a typical day, more than 600 Bombardier CRJ regional jets are in flight over the US. Bombardier itself employs in the US some 3,000 people directly, and says it buys from 2,800 suppliers. (The aircraft-building business is globally integrated, and very complex.)

This means that Trump’s edict, if anyone took it seriously, would cut off all but the biggest cities in the US from crucial business, medical, touristic, and other ties.

Of course Trump did not know this, just as he doesn’t know about elections or gun laws. Of course he had not thought through this whim. But how could the rest of the world know that this was just ranting, even though it came from a sitting president?

The CBC in Canada had an immediate followup, based on talking with people who had thought through the consequences:

John Gradek, a lecturer on aviation and supply chain management at McGill University in Montreal, told CBC News he was “flabbergasted” by Trump’s outburst, given the ramifications for the industry…

“There’s probably been some misunderstanding about the impact that such a decertification of Canadian aircraft would have on the U.S. domestic air services currently operated by U.S. carriers,” he said…

It does not appear the FAA has the legal authority to revoke certifications for planes based on economic reasons, as it can only do so for safety ‍reasons under existing regulations.

Eventually Reuters got an unnamed source “in the White House” to clarify that the statement would apply only to future planes from Canada, not the ones already going to Montgomery or Fresno. Phew! The New York Times reported the “clarification” clown shown this way. Emphasis added.

The president said on social media that he would decertify “all aircraft made in Canada,” a move that would ground thousands of planes and upend air travel in the United States. But industry officials said federal regulators clarified that his statement was meant to apply only to new aircraft certifications….

The Federal Aviation Administration, which issues aircraft certifications in the United States, referred questions about the statement to the White House, which did not respond to a request for clarification… Two industry officials said that federal regulators had advised that the statement was intended only to refer to new certifications. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share the government’s guidance.

In short: The president is insane. And we’re left with “officials” who are afraid to be named, to serve as grownups in the room.

3) February 2, about Harvard: How the word ‘backtracked’ infuriated Trump.

For nearly a year now I’ve chronicled the MAGA assault on Harvard—so famous, so fabled, so rich. And Harvard’s rock-ribbed determination, starting last April after some initial hesitation, to resist. Some early entries in this series were here and here.

I also chronicled the “Harvard about to cave” series in the NYT, as detailed here. In short, I thought many items in this series gave too much weight to unnamed sources on the Trump team, who wanted to promote the idea that not even Harvard could stand up to them—and made its capitulation seem ever-imminent.

Thus I did a double-take two days ago, on Monday evening, at this headline on the Times’s web site. ...

SIMON ROSENBERG

 

American People Firmly Behind Drive To Rein In ICE, On The Hill Powerful Stories of ICE's Violence, Greater Focus Needed On The Detention Centers

Paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm EST. We have much to discuss

Simon Rosenberg Feb 4

Morning all. Yesterday Senator Blumenthal and Rep. Robert Garcia held an extraordinary shadow hearing on the Hill, one focusing on the lawless violence ICE has brought to our communities. Many of you watched parts of it live. Below is a link to the full hearing and testimony. The video above is the deeply emotional testimony of Luke Granger, one of Renee Good’s brothers.

Sit down and steady yourself before watching.

This hearing represents a dramatic evolution in how Democrats can bring the harms of Trumpism to the American people. It is the second hearing organized by Senator Blumenthal and Rep. Robert Garcia on the abuses of DHS/ICE/CBP. It took place in a formal Senate hearing room. It had compelling witnesses and searing testimony. It got coverage in the mainstream media and was widely covered by our emerging pro-democracy media ecosystem, including Hopium yesterday. Simply, it was powerful and it broke through. It needs to become a model for how we, despite not controlling Congress, use our bicameral Congressional convening power to bring the harms of Trumpism to the American people this year. It is an example of the how we must innovate, “come together,” and organize ourselves differently and more effectively to meet the moment in year two of Trump’s second term.

Reps Garcia and Ansari - and Stephen Miller - in yesterday’s hearing

Four months passed the legal deadline for adopting the fiscal 2026 budget this terrible MAGA Congress yesterday finally got 10 appropriations bills to Trump’s desk. Most of the government is now funded through September 30th and re-opened - with the exception of DHS. DHS is now operating on a Continuing Resolution (CR) which expires next Friday. If no deal is reached by then DHS will run out of our money and operations across the Department - including TSA, the Coast Guard, FEMA - will slow or cease.

Leader Schumer posted this yesterday:

While the words may be simple “abide by the same rules as local police” would fundamentally change how ICE operates across the US. It’s an intriguing new formulation - simple, common sense, hard to criticize. Based on that comprehensive YouGov polling we reviewed last week, and some new polling we’ve received this morning, the public is firmly behind such an approach. The polling also shows how badly Trump-Vance-Miller have lost the big arguments driving their terror campaign.

As we will see in this new data from the pro-democracy consortium, Navigator, Democrats enter the fight over reining in ICE on very, very firm ground:

ICE’s favorability is -22 with the overall public, -37 with independents.

A majority want Miller gone:

Only 24% want to keep ICE as it is. 70% want ICE fundamentally overhauled. Democrats are on very, very firm ground right now.

Democrats are on very, very firm ground right now.

Democrats are on very, very firm ground right now:

Leaders Schumer and Jeffries are having a joint press conference this morning at 1115am where we assume they will be laying their game plan for the next few weeks. You can watch it here.

And while I am content with the current direction of this critical fight, there is one area I think Democrats need to develop more fully, that, for example, you don’t see in any of this Navigator polling - we simply must take on the detention centers, both their current inhumanity and their planned $40b expansion.

I wrote a long piece about this a few days ago, but here’s a recap - if the goal of Trump’s policies are to remove criminal migrants, numbering perhaps between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people, we do not need a vast expansion of detention capacity. What is the purpose of the expansion of detention capacity? Who is going to go in there? Who is the regime actually targeting for removal? For right now they are already targeting millions of LEGAL immigrants for removal, and they have started detaining journalists and people perceived as their political enemies.

Here’s a rough breakdown of the immigrant population in the US today:

While we need more granular polling on how the public feels about removing legal migrants, look at how Americans feel about removing long-settled undocumented immigrants - 65% oppose, only 22% support.

Trump-Vance-Miller are using the false cover story that they are ONLY targeting criminal migrants to create a vast, violent, and dangerous mass deportation regime and domestic American gulags. Simply, we cannot let this happen. There is no support for this in the public, and it must become a goal of our campaign to not just rein in ICE but to roll back the funding of the vast ICE detention expansion, perhaps using that money to replenish SNAP and the ACA subsides Republicans have cut.

The urgency of this part of our fight against ICE became clearer last week when the regime arrested and detained five journalists. If these detention centers get built they will get filled, by migrants, by opponents of the regime, by journalists, by uppity entertainers - by us.

We must also demand oversight, accountability, and a raising of standards in the make shift detention centers already in use. Listen to this testimony from Aliya Rahman in the ICE hearing yesterday. Not only will you be shocked by the story of her arrest, but listen to her describe how detainees were treated in the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis. ICE has descended into a dangerous inhumanity, an othering, that we know from history will only bring about greater atrocities. Steady yourself, and watch, listen:

Greg Sargent has a terrific new column in the New Republic this morning, Trump’s New “Prison Camp” Unleashes Fury Even In MAGA Country. Here’s an extended excerpt:

The public backlash unleashed by Trump’s immigration agenda runs far deeper than revulsion at imagery of ICE violence. It’s now seemingly coalescing against the goal of mass removals as a broader ideological project.

We’re now learning that this year, ICE plans to retrofit around two dozen vast new facilities. In keeping with Trump-Miller’s visions, ICE vows to detain an additional 80,000 people in them. Some will reportedly hold up to 10,000 detainees apiece. In other words, the Trump-Miller threat to create a system of new detention camps is just getting underway in earnest.

To put a ghoulish twist on the oft-discussed ideal of bureaucratic “capacity,” this will allow Trump and Miller to imprison and then deport vastly more people a whole lot faster. Right now, more than 70,000 migrants are languishing in detention—a record—but the administration is running out of space. Add another 80,000 beds and it would supercharge expulsion capacity.

Yet these detention dreams are hitting stiff opposition. ICE wants to buy a warehouse in Virginia’s Hanover County, which went for Trump by 26 points in 2024 and combines rural territory with Richmond’s northern suburbs. Residents recently turned out in force and angrily condemned the proposed sale, with local reports suggesting only a “handful” backed it. The GOP-heavy Board of Supervisors opposed the transaction. The warehouse owner canceled the sale.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the Republican-dominated Roxbury Township Council, in slightly-Trump-leaning Morris County, recently voted unanimously to oppose ICE’s plans to buy a warehouse there, with some locals sharply protesting the scheme for humanitarian reasons. The Republican mayor of Oklahoma City came out against a proposed ICE warehouse, with the owner also nixing the sale. Officials in places like Kansas City, Missouri and Salt Lake City, Utah are also dead set against plans for ICE camps in their locales.

Guess what: The opposition is only getting started. As MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow noted in a useful overview of the opposition Monday night, we’re already seeing mass protests outside existing facilities. Those are smaller than some of the gargantuan new camps ICE hopes to create, yet migrant deaths are already soaring in the current facilities, and the bigger ones will be even worse. “If they build them, they will fill them,” Maddow said, labeling them “prison camps.” She added: “How do you think those facilities are going to be run?”

The pushback has come together surprisingly quickly. What explains this? A bizarrely overlooked finding in a recent Pew Research poll sheds some light: It finds that a huge majority of Americans oppose mass immigrant detention. The wording is critical here:

Do you favor or oppose keeping large numbers of immigrants in detention centers while their cases are decided?

• Favor: 35 percent

• Oppose: 64 percent

Note that huge majorities are against keeping immigrants in detention while their cases are being decided. This is a decisive repudiation of a key pillar of MAGA ideology. Trump and Miller have long treated the release of immigrants awaiting court dates as something akin to profound national humiliation, even a harbinger of cultural decay and civilizational decline.

But the broad American mainstream—including 59 percent of white voters in the Pew poll—appears to oppose detaining them. With majorities also opposing deporting non-criminal undocumented immigrants and longtime residents, that MAGA understanding is just not widely shared. For Trumpworld, mass detention isn’t merely about facilitating deportations. It’s also supposed to correct the grievous national wound that previous presidents inflicted by releasing migrants into the interior. Is it really possible that majorities are actually okay with such a horror? Apparently it is.

Paid Hopium subscribers will getting together to talk about all this tonight at 7pm EST (register here). And today I am only recommending one action - contact your Senators, your House Member, your Governor, your AG, you state legislative leaders and demand that they fight to rein in ICE (if you want to support our candidates and party committees please head back to yesterday’s post).

However we got here this has become a defining moment not just in reining in ICE and DHS, but in reining in Trump. The Europeans got him to retreat a few weeks ago. It is our turn now. Let’s get to work people and good luck everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Simon