| Sun, Nov 16, 9:47 PM (18 hours ago) | |||
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On Thursday, November 13, Michael Schmidt reported in the New York Times the story of the 17-year-old girl the House Ethics Committee found former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) likely paid to have sex with him. The girl was a homeless high schooler who needed to supplement the money she made from her job at McDonald's to be able to pay for braces. Through a "sugar dating" website that connected older men with younger women, she met Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg, who introduced her to Gaetz. Both men allegedly took drugs with her and paid her for sex, allegedly including at a party at the home of a former Republican member of the Florida legislature, Chris Dorworth. The Justice Department charged Greenberg with sex trafficking a minor and having sex with a minor in exchange for money. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a decade in prison. The Justice Department did not charge Gaetz. In 2022 the girl's lawyers asked Gaetz and Dorworth about reaching a financial settlement with her. She didn't sue, but Dorworth sued her, sparking depositions and disclosure of evidence. Dorworth dropped the case. That material has recently been released and made up some of Schmidt's portrait of the girl. Schmidt's story added another window into the world depicted in the more than 20,000 documents the House Oversight Committee dropped from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein the day before. Those emails show a network of elite people—mostly but not exclusively men—from politics, business, academia, foreign leadership, and entertainment who continued to seek chummy access to the wealthy Epstein, the information he retailed, and his contacts despite his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from a minor. When accusations against Epstein resurfaced in 2018, along with public outrage over the sweetheart deal he received in 2008 from former U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta—who in 2018 was secretary of labor in Trump's first administration—Trump ally Stephen Bannon worked together to combat the story. As Jason Wilson of The Guardian notes, Epstein and Bannon treated the crisis as a publicity problem to fix as they pushed Bannon's right-wing agenda and supported Trump. As David Smith of The Guardian put it, Epstein's in-box painted a picture of "a world where immense wealth, privileged access and proximity to power can insulate individuals from accountability and consequences. For those inside the circle, the rules of the outside world do not apply." On Tuesday, November 4, Elizabeth Dwoskin of the Washington Post described the ideology behind this world. She profiled Chris Buskirk of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization funded by tech leaders to create a network that will permit the MAGA movement to outlive Trump. Dwoskin wrote that political strategists credit the Rockbridge Network with pushing J.D. Vance—one of the network's members—into the vice presidency. Dwoskin explains that Buskirk embraces a theory that says "a select group of elites are exactly the right people to move the country forward." Such an "aristocracy"—as he described his vision to Dwoskin—drives innovation. It would be "a proper elite that takes care of the country and governs it well so that everyone prospers." When he's not working in politics, Buskirk is, according to Dwoskin, pushing "unrestrained capitalism into American life." The government should support the country's innovators, network members say. We have heard this ideology before. In 1858, in a period in which a few fabulously wealthy elite enslavers in the American South were trying to take over the government and create their own oligarchy, South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explained to his colleagues that "democracy" meant only that voters got to choose which set of leaders ruled them. Society worked best, he said, when it was run by natural leaders: the wealthy, educated, well-connected men who made up the South's planter class. Hammond explained that society was naturally made up of a great mass of workers, rather dull people, but happy and loyal, whom he called "mudsills" after the timbers driven into the ground to support elegant homes above. These mudsills supported "that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement," one that modeled itself on the British aristocracy. The mudsills needed the guidance of their betters to produce goods that would create capital, Hammond said. That capital would be wasted if it stayed among the mudsills; it needed to move upward, where better men would use it to move society forward. Hammond's ideology gave us the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court found that Black Americans "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States." In 1889, during the Gilded Age, industrialist Andrew Carnegie embraced a similar idea when he explained that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few was not only inevitable in an industrial system, but was beneficial. The wealthy were stewards of society's money, administering it for the common good by funding libraries, schools, and so on, to uplift everyone, rather than permitting individual workers to squander it in frivolity. It was imperative, Carnegie thought, for the government to protect big business for the benefit of the country as a whole. Carnegie's ideology gave us the 1905 Lochner v. New York Supreme Court decision declaring that states could not require employers to limit workers' hours in a bakery to 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week. The court reasoned that there was no need of such a law for workers' welfare or safety because "there is no danger to the employ[ee] in a first-class bakery." The court concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protected "freedom of contract": the right of employers to contract with laborers at any price and for any hours the workers could be induced to accept. In 1929, after the Great Crash tore the bottom out of the economy, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon did not blame the systemic inequality his policies had built into the economy. He blamed lazy Americans and the government that had served greedy constituencies. He told President Herbert Hoover not to interfere to help the country. "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate," he told Hoover. "It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people." Mellon's ideology gave us "Hoovervilles"—shantytowns built from packing boxes and other salvaged materials—and the Great Depression. Today, an ideology of "aristocracy" justifies the fabulous wealth and control of government by an elite that increasingly operates in private spaces that are hard for the law to reach, while increasingly using the power of the state against those it considers morally inferior. Yesterday Arian Campo-Flores of the Wall Street Journal reported that the net worth of the top 0.1% of households in the U.S. reached $23.3 trillion this year, while the bottom 50% hold $4.2 trillion. Campo-Flores outlined a world in which the "ultrarich" are living in luxury and increasingly sealed off from everyday people. "They don't wait in lines. They don't jostle with airport crowds or idle unnecessarily in traffic," Campo-Flores writes. "Instead, an ecosystem of exclusive restaurants, clubs, resorts and other service providers delivers them customized and exquisite experiences as fast as possible. The spaces they inhabit are often private, carefully curated and populated by like-minded and similarly well-heeled peers." On the other end of the spectrum is the Trump administration's crusade against not just undocumented immigrants but also against legal immigrants and darker-skinned Americans in general. But using the power of the state against those outside the "aristocracy" is more widespread than attacks on Brown Americans. Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle reported on October 29 in the New York Times that the future of Trump's policy for criminalizing unhoused people is taking shape in Utah. On the outskirts of Salt Lake City, the state is building a facility where it will commit 1,300 inmates. Refocusing homeless initiatives from providing housing toward rehabilitation and moral development, the involuntary confinement will end a harmful "culture of permissiveness" and guide homeless people "towards human thriving" through social and addiction services, according to political appointee Randy Shumway, who chairs the state's Homeless Services Board and whose business promotes software used in case management for unhoused people. Critics note that funds are not currently available for those seeking such services, and with the Republicans' deep cuts to Medicaid it's hard to see where more funding will come from, although at least some of it is being redirected from currently-operating housing programs. On November 6 the Supreme Court reinstated a Trump policy requiring all new passports to reflect a person's biological sex at birth. As Steve Vladeck explained in One First, from 1992 to 2010 the State Department had allowed people who had undergone surgical reassignment to change their identification on their passports; from 2010 to 2025 they could submit a certificate from a doctor saying they had undergone clinical treatment for gender transition. When he took office on January 20, Trump issued an executive order overturning this 33-year policy, saying "[i]t is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female," which it defined as "an individual's immutable biological classification" as assigned "at conception." Transgender identity, the order said, is "false" and "corrosive" to the country. Plaintiffs led by Ashton Orr sued, and on April 18 U.S. District Judge Julia E. Kobick granted a motion to make the case a class action. She also granted a stay, finding that the plaintiffs would likely win on the merits of their claim that the new policy violates their right to equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. The administration went to the Supreme Court for emergency relief. In Trump v. Orr the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court reinstated Trump's policy, writing: "Displaying passport holders' sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth—in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment." In addition to using a passport to travel, transgender Americans who live in states that don't recognize their transition often use their passports as identification in the U.S. On Friday the State Department updated its website, committing to the new policy that effectively erases those people and forces them to conform to the MAGA ideology. In 1858, the year after the Dred Scott decision, rising politician Abraham Lincoln explained to an audience in Chicago what a system that set some people above others meant. Arguments that those deemed "inferior" "are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow…are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world," he said. "[T]hey always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. [This] argument…is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it." "Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent…." In Lincoln's day, and in the Gilded Age, and in the 1930s, Americans pushed back against those trying to establish an aristocracy in the United States. That project appears to be gaining speed as well in today's America, where the rich and powerful are increasingly operating in cryptocurrencies and avoiding accountability, but where a majority of people would prefer to live in a world where a child does not have to sell her body to older men in order to save enough money to get braces on her teeth. — |
| 8:02 AM (8 hours ago) | |||
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The Confederacy Was Right: America Has Always Been Two NationsAnd forcing them together has given white supremacists the tools to destroy democracy from within
Federal agents in masks are conducting sweeps through cities across the nation, arresting people without warrants based on the color of their skin, the language they speak, or if they say something that hurts the agent's feelings. The Supreme Court just overturned lower court rulings that said this violated the Fourth Amendment. ICE detention facilities in Texas face armed attacks as the administration ramps up deportation operations despite local opposition. Blue state governors watch federal power deployed against their residents while their own authority gets stripped by a Court that spent decades being captured by the same people who started this fight in 1860. This isn't new. This is the same war. The Confederacy recognized something the Union refused to admit: they were fundamentally incompatible nations that could not coexist under one government. They were monstrous about why, but they weren't wrong about the fact. I spent years inside the white supremacist power structures of American law enforcement and corrections. I know how deeply this ideology is embedded in every institution meant to protect us. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that the conflict we're living through right now isn't a temporary political crisis. It's the continuation of a war that never ended because we never addressed what caused it. We kept two incompatible visions of America in the same government, and now the vision built on white supremacy has partisan control over all three branches of the federal government. The founders thought they could kick the can of resolving the slavery debate and it would eventually resolve itself. It didn't. It got worse. The nation was born schizophrenic, with two completely opposed value systems forced to share the same government. One side believed in expanding human rights and progress. The other believed in christian extremism and white supremacy as organizing principles for society. These cannot coexist. They never could. When Southern states drafted their own constitution in 1861, they made only one significant change from the U.S. Constitution: they explicitly stated that white people were the superior race and that slavery was the cornerstone of their civilization. This wasn't some fringe position. These provisions passed with overwhelming support across Confederate states. Lincoln and Congressional Republicans offered them everything. The Corwin Amendment, passed by Congress and supported by Lincoln himself, would have made slavery permanent and impossible to abolish through constitutional amendment. Lincoln sent this proposed amendment to every governor.. He said in his first inaugural address that he had "no objection" to making slavery protection "express and irrevocable." They rejected his offer. Lincoln offered to pay slaveholders to free their slaves. They said no. He offered constitutional protection for slavery where it already existed. Not good enough. They recognized what Lincoln wouldn't admit: this wasn't about finding the right compromise. It was about two nations with completely opposite values being forced to share a government. They didn't want to negotiate. They wanted to leave. And you know what? They were right to recognize the incompatibility. They were catastrophically, monstrously wrong about white supremacy being good or justified. But they correctly identified that you cannot run a nation when half of it is built on the principle of racial hierarchy and the other half claims to believe in equality. So what did Lincoln do with this recognition? He preserved the Union because he believed secession would lead to anarchy and the death of democratic government. His reasoning was mostly legalistic: states couldn't just leave whenever they lost an election. The precedent would destroy any possibility of stable government. But he never seriously grappled with the alternative question: what if forcing people who reject democracy to stay in the democratic system actually destroys democracy more thoroughly than letting them go? Look, this isn't about relitigating the choices of a man who literally has his face carved into a mountain. This is about honestly reviewing where we are today and how we got here. We could have built the democracy we claimed to want without being constantly sabotaged by people who never believed in it. Instead, we fought a war to force them back in. And we won the war but lost everything that came after. Reconstruction lasted barely a decade before it was effectively counteracted. The federal government abandoned freed slaves to the very people who had enslaved them. Jim Crow wasn't some separate social problem. It was the South winning the peace after losing the war. Every single progressive achievement in American history has been clawed back by the same regions for the same reasons. The New Deal got gutted. Civil Rights legislation got undermined through voter suppression and mass incarceration. Every time we make progress toward the multiracial, free and fair democracy we claim to want, the descendants of the Confederacy use every tool available to reverse it. This isn't cyclical politics. This is one continuous conflict. The fault line has never moved. The states that fought to preserve slavery are the states that fight against voting rights today. The ideology that demanded white supremacy as the foundation of society is the ideology that demands the same now. The cold civil war never ended. It just got colder for a while. Now it's heating back up. And here's what people miss about the current moment: Texas isn't trying to do things differently in Texas. They're using federal power to impose their vision everywhere. The Supreme Court just overturned lower court rulings protecting California residents from detainment based on skin color, the language they speak, and any other explicitly racial or religious indicator. Racial profiling is now legal, the term being used by legal scholars is a "Kavanaugh Stop." SCOTUS is systematically striking down blue state attempts to regulate their own affairs. Federal agents are conducting military-style raids in our homes, businesses, schools, and churches. They never stopped waging their war, and we have never held them accountable. They control the Supreme Court. They've gerrymandered enough state legislatures to block constitutional amendments. They've rigged enough election systems to maintain minority rule. And they're using all of that captured power to impose their will on states that voted against it. You cannot "agree to disagree" with people who are trying to criminalize your existence. You cannot compromise with a movement that sees democracy itself as the enemy. Look at what they've accomplished. Six Supreme Court justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote now control constitutional interpretation for a generation. They've gutted voting rights. They've legalized corruption. They've granted the president immunity from prosecution, but only if you understand that SCOTUS has made it perfectly clear the difference between a prosecutable act and an immune one is whether it was done by a Democrat or a Republican. The structure Lincoln preserved has given them the tools to win. The Senate they control overrepresents their states. The Electoral College gives them the presidency even when they lose the popular vote. The Supreme Court they've captured interprets everything in their favor. The federal law enforcement apparatus I once served in is overwhelmingly sympathetic to their ideology. This isn't some passing phenomenon. This isn't going away when Trump dies. The movement he leads is the continuation of the Confederate project: white supremacist, christian extremist, committed to power at all costs. Here's the hard truth: preserving the Union didn't preserve democracy. It gave white supremacists 160 years to capture the mechanisms of government and use them against the very people Lincoln was ostensibly protecting. You cannot run a democracy with a large faction committed to destroying democracy. We have 160 years of evidence proving this. Reconstruction failed. Jim Crow happened. The New Deal got rolled back. Civil Rights gains eroded. And now they control enough of the federal government to impose their vision on everyone. Every compromise has failed. Every attempt at national unity has failed. Every appeal to shared values has failed because we don't share values. We never did. On occasion we had shared enemies and mistook that for national unity. One part of America believes in freedom and justice, in separation of church and state, in protecting vulnerable people, in using the government to promote general welfare. The other part believes in racial hierarchy, in christian nationalism, in using state power to punish the different, in democracy only when it produces their preferred outcome. These cannot coexist. The Confederacy knew this in 1860. We need to accept it now. The solution isn't abandoning America. It's defending ourselves from a death cult and building the nation we can believe in. Real democracies that are interested in actual governance and progress. We just have to accept that we can't build it while being actively assaulted by people whose entire identity is opposition to those values. If you live in those states, we can make grants to help Louisiana refugees fleeing the People's Republic of MAGA. The Confederacy told us who they were. We should have believed them. Better late than never. For more on the specific tools blue states can use to actually start winning, see The Existentialist Republic Introduction to Soft Secession. https://theexistentialistrepublic.myshopify.com/products/intro-to-soft-secession |
| 8:07 AM (8 hours ago) | |||
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A Very Stable ThanksgivingTurkey up 40%, truth down 100%, Trump's America serves us another helping of fiction.
Good morning! Pull up a chair, pour something strong, and prepare to give thanks, not for abundance, but for the rich feast of delusion we've been served by the Trump administration this week. It's shaping up to be a Thanksgiving of thin gravy and thick hypocrisy, a national meal where the rising price of turkey can barely keep apace with the president's lies. Before leaving Palm Beach, Donald Trump held what can only be described as a press gaggle for the ages, the kind of spectacle that leaves even the Secret Service reaching for Tums. Standing before reporters with the confidence of a man who's never read a balance sheet or a calendar, Trump declared, "Our prices are coming down very substantially on groceries." He assured the gathered press that Walmart had confirmed this economic miracle and that a Thanksgiving meal is now "25 percent lower than it was under the Biden administration." This, of course, is false. Gobble-gobble-grade nonsense. In reality, the Department of Agriculture reports turkey prices up forty percent from last year, the largest jump since the great bird flu outbreak of 2015. Beef's up fifteen percent. Canned vegetables are pricier thanks to those steel and aluminum tariffs Trump slapped on earlier this year, a move so brilliant that even his economic advisers had to pretend to be on mute during meetings. Trump now says he's rolling some of those tariffs back "to help families," which is a bit like an arsonist promising to put out the fire, next week, if the polls look bad. Economist David Ortega of Michigan State University offered the most restrained academic translation of this chaos: removing tariffs might "slow down the increase in prices." Translation for the rest of us: you'll still overpay for the turkey, just slightly less dramatically, and you'll have Trump to thank for that modest "achievement." Trump wasn't done. He used the same gaggle to pivot to Venezuela, Jeffrey Epstein, Nick Fuentes, and Marjorie Taylor Greene in under five minutes, a sort of verbal triathlon of paranoia, misogyny, and projection. When a reporter mentioned Greene's claim that her life was in danger, Trump replied, "I don't think anybody cares about her." Which, to be fair, may be the first bipartisan statement of his career. Pressed on the Epstein files, Trump snarled that talk of Epstein was a "deflection" from his "tremendous success", before muttering the tell of the week: "I don't know what they may have added to the files." And there it is. The preemptive disclaimer, the built-in conspiracy clause. If something ugly emerges, he's already declared it forged by Democrats. If it doesn't, he'll claim he's been cleared. It's the same move every mob boss makes before a subpoena, call it the "I don't know that guy, but if I did, he was great" defense. Within hours, Trump reversed his position on the House vote to release the Epstein files, urging Republicans to support it "because we have nothing to hide." Sure. He's not fighting transparency; he's choreographing it. After weeks of leaning on GOP members to bury the measure, he flipped only once Pam Bondi's DOJ had time to quietly scrub or reclassify the incriminating parts. Now he can grandstand about "openness" while his lawyers file redactions in triplicate. It's government by optical illusion, all light, no transparency.
Meanwhile, the broader economy keeps gasping for air. Trump insists inflation is "down to a normal level," even as households brace for the most expensive Thanksgiving since the Nixon administration, and not for lack of domestic production. His immigration policies are choking the labor pipeline just as his tariffs punish supply chains. Case in point: international student enrollment dropped seventeen percent this fall, the steepest non-pandemic decline in over a decade. Universities are hemorrhaging revenue, research programs are losing grad assistants, and the U.S. economy is down another $1.1 billion this year. Fanta Aw of NAFSA summed it up in one heartbreaking line: "The U.S. is no longer the central place that students aspire to come to." Under Trump, even ambition is being deported. The same country that once lured the brightest minds with promise and freedom now greets them with backlogs, suspicion, and bureaucratic barbed wire. Not to worry, you can always get a 25% cheaper Thanksgiving meal at the imaginary Walmart in Trump's mind. So as we approach the holiday, it's worth reflecting on what kind of "affordability" this administration has really given us. Affordable truth? No. Affordable education? Not anymore. Affordable turkey? Only if you catch one yourself and hope the game warden's still furloughed. The only thing that's truly affordable in Trump's America is the cost of shame, and he's distributing that for free, wholesale, straight from Palm Beach. As for me, Marz and I plan to steal a couple of hours of beach time today. It's that or he'll keep pestering me until he tries to climb into my lap, not an easy maneuver for a 140-pound mastiff with boundary issues. Given how everything from turkey to dog food has gone up this year, maybe it's time for him to slim down anyway. The price of loyalty, like everything else in 2025, just keeps rising, but at least he never lies about it. |
