I write to advocate for starving people in Gaza. Yesterday, on-the-ground reporters for the New York Times told of doctors and nurses there charged with treating malnourished infants and children. These medics are having trouble, says the report, because they themselves are fainting from hunger and thirst. Gaza is starving. Israel's continued stranglehold on aid is unconscionable. The US should withdraw support and press Israel to allow food and other aid in.
In both the Biden and Trump administrations, the US has poured arms and money into Israel, especially after the vicious October 7 attacks by Hamas. Israel had the right to defend itself. But its actions since then have been disproportionate and ruinous. It has leveled Gaza. It's destroyed infrastructure. It's forced the relocation of millions of people. It's killed nearly 60,000 people, mostly women and children. It replaced UN-run food distribution with the US-Israel "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation," a group so badly conceived and inadequate that its own executive director resigned.
That Mr. Netanyahu claims "no starvation" in Gaza underlines how untrustworthy his government has become on this matter. Under him, Israeli solders have been ordered to fire on civilians. Aid workers have been shot by Israeli forces. Mr. Netanyahu seems intent on waging an out-of-control, no-end-in-sight campaign against not just Hamas but the Gazan people as a whole. President Trump seems willing to assist. It must stop.
The least the US can do is stop enabling Israel's de facto use of collective punishment as a weapon of war. We have supported Israel more than any other country on earth has. But we did not sign up to assist Israel with ethnic cleansing or mass starvation. It's past time that the well-being of Gazan civilians take priority over Mr. Netanyahu's politicking. Food aid must be allowed into Gaza--at once.
I urge you to do all in your power to stop the US from assisting Israel in perpetuating this humanitarian crime. I urge you to advocate shifting our support to coalitional, international, and effective aid for Gazans.
Kudos to Senator Corey Booker (D-NJ), who broke the record (set by Strom Thurmond) for longest speech given on the Senate floor. He filibustered against Trump for over 25 hours (25 hours, 4 minutes). He spoke the entire time save for questions from the floor and time given over to fellow speakers. He remained standing throughout.
As Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski noted, "Whether you agree with him or not, the past 24+ hours was what most people think a filibuster actually looks like." She congratulated him.
Social media that I looked at (Bluesky) seemed mainly supportive of Booker. Some detractors pointed out that he wasn't filibustering any one piece of legislation, that this made his performance more of a stunt than anything. Others disagreed, noting that Democrats have needed a coherent and inspiring leader since Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reversed course and (with nine other Democratic votes) helped Republicans to avoid a government shutdown.
I still don't know what to think about that decision. I was against it, in no small part due to arguments from Isaac Saul. Saul himself, however, withdrew his opposition to the continuing budget resolution. Friends and family who work for government agencies were likewise opposed to shutting down the government, fearing that would embolden DOGE's already drastic government cuts.
Those same friends, however, just got "the letter" today--a "better take it while it's offered" deal to retire early. Some are taking the deal. Some--those who haven't worked long enough or aren't old enough (there's a calculation that balances those factors)--can't afford to retire now. Thus they wait for a roll of the dice to see if they still have a job.
Mind you, the FAA will, I expect, still be relied upon to do all the tasks they currently do--prevent widespread death and chaos in air travel--at severe labor shortages.
Tomorrow, April 2, Trump is supposed to be announcing his "liberation day" tariffs on everyone everywhere. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board calls the "tariffs are really tax cuts" an Orwellian exercise. One gets the sense that Trump and his Commerce Secretary Howard "I Don't Know Anyone That Isn't Pissed Off At Him" Lutnick really do believe what, well, no one with any economic training agrees with. The Politico article I linked to suggests that Trump world is poised to blame Lutnick when things go south. "Bad advice." I hope that dodge fails. Trump owns "tariffs are good." And even if he didn't, isn't he supposed to be so good at hiring the best people?
I don't know. I'm back to hoping for bad things. Really, I'm not sure what good path Trump perceives by raising taxes on all imports. Nothing I've heard on that score seems realistic or coherent.
There's so much I'm losing track of what next to write about to my Republican Senators. I'm guessing it'll be about ICE overreach and the horror of doing away with due process for all. But it could be about how Trump's initiatives seem to do the opposite of what they aim to do. He's going to fix the economy by ruining it? He's going to create peace by going to war? He's going to improve government efficiency by gutting vital programs--including and especially those that make or save us money--randomly? He's going to fix immigration by creating no-human-rights-apply states of exception?
Credit where it's due: I gotta write one of my two mega-GOP senators today. I had written them previously to ask them to stand up to Trump's badmouthing of judges who rule against him. It seems now that some Republican senators are doing just that, including the one I wrote to. He was quoted saying, well, good things?
Of course, other Republican legislators are trying to replicate that end run with extra steps, proposing a bill to strip federal judges of blocking executive acts beyond the immediate parties bringing the challenge. That seems like a bad idea, one that GOP senators would have (rightly) decried had Democrats attempted the same to curtail challenges against Biden's or Obama's executive orders. Hopefully they'll see that.
Did my letter make any kind of difference, play any kind of role in that senator's stand? Almost certainly not. But it was good to see.
Thus he gets this letter tonight:
Dear [SENATOR]--
About a week ago I wrote to urge you to stand up to the White House's badmouthing of federal judges for rulings they don't like. I was pleased to see an article from thehill.com: "Senate Republicans urge Trump, allies to stop threatening courts." You were quoted, speaking against Speaker Johnson's plans to defund federal courts.
I applaud your stance and thank you for defending our system of checks and balances.
I am less thrilled by Senator Grassley's proposal to limit the injunctive power of federal judges. Limiting injunctions to the immediate parties bringing a challenge would seriously hinder a major check against executive overreach. Temporary stays and temporary injunctions already have a limiting factor: they're temporary. If the acts in question are legal, then they will find their way through judicial scrutiny. If they're illegal, then they should never have been issued in the first place.
By contrast, victims of ill-considered executive orders require broad and immediate protection. Waiting for a class action lawsuit to redress a sweeping illegal order by the President is like filling out mail-in request for firefighters while the house burns.
I note that Republicans have never taken a stance that judicial injunctions go too far when Democrats occupy the White House and issue executive orders. Nor should you. Executive orders that overstep should be challenged and when necessary paused. Thus we have judicial stays and injunctions.
That there have been many injunctions against the President indicates executive overreach, not judicial activism. Over the last two months, the White House has proudly adopted a "move fast and break things" attitude. The President has "flooded the zone" with sweeping executive orders and novel interpretations of old laws to justify a range of actions. It's no surprise that causing a flood triggers floodgates to close.
The broad powers the President claims call for extra caution. Already we've seen how imprudent acts such as the Venezuelan deportations to El Salvador turn out badly. News reports tell of mistakenly identified several innocent people as violent gang members. It's a nauseating abuse of power and flagrant disregard of due process. The worrisome practice of "disappearing" legal residents who break no laws at all likewise cries out for close scrutiny.
Great power requires great oversight and accountability. The White House has so far been reticent to accept oversight on its own. (Witness the shameful whataboutism and excuse-making around the Signal debacle.) Congress and the courts must step in to compensate for the White House's rashness.
I ask that you and the rest of Congress continue to hold the executive branch accountable to the law and to the Constitutional protections for all.
A friend of mine at church briefly let me know he'd been thinking of my work with Braver Angels and the entire endeavor of talking to the other side.
He was having a hard time with it lately. When a senator of ours was walking his dog through my friend's neighborhood, my friend rolled down his window and "said some unkind words."
I'm not a fan of unkind words per se. But I do see where my friend is coming from. Support for Trump--really, absolutely loving what he's doing--seems so foreign to me.
This, my training tells me, represents a failure of my imagination. I remember my Chantal Mouffe. The classical trap is thinking your political opponents must be either irrational or immoral. They're deluded, poor things, misled by the right-wing mediasphere into believing the stories of immigrants flooding over the border to steal their jobs and infect their communities with fentanyl. Or they're just self-centered, ethically broken people who covertly or openly want a white supremacist (and patriarchal, anti-queer, anti-disabled, etc.) society.
The hardest truth to swallow is that people just as intellectually and ethically sophisticated as you are hold very different values and believe very different things. They think the same things about your side: how could anyone believe what they do? Are they stupid or just evil?
Our differences can't just be talked out. We can't just meet in the middle. Our struggle will determine the fate of democracy, the political and practical realities for everyone.
Mouffe argues that the challenge is to see such opponents not as antagonists--enemies we must crush utterly--but agonists--players in the same liberal democratic game. We play to win, not to draw. But winning does not mean annihilating our opponents. Nor does it mean breaking the system that allows them to play in the first place. That means anyone's victory is always partial, always temporary. The struggle continues.
At least, that's ideally how it is supposed to go.
I'm not sure Mouffe entertains enough the possibility that one set of players might operate via bad faith. I'm not sure she entertains the possibility that a majority of the populace may vote to do away with the fair-play rules altogether. Stanley Fish once wrote that democracy has a self-destruct button permanently installed inside of it. Any demos at any time could conceivably press it, abdicating rights and popular sovereignty in favor of monarchy or feudalism or something else.
It's hard not to see people who defend this administration's chaos and incompetence and pettiness and unlawfulness as mashing that button as hard and as often as they can. Does this make them evil? Deluded? Something else?
I don't know. But Mouffian agonism seems unlikely to muster an effective response. The alternatives, though, promise even less appealing paths.
All this to say: I don't know what Braver Angels has to offer right now. I've not yet been able to bring myself to watch some of the "debates" about Trump's first 100 days. I may need to summon some courage, if only to respond well to my friends--and my enemies.
I'm especially heartened Amendment 3 failed. It would have, essentially, made it easier to prosecute juveniles for a wider array of crimes. That 65% of voters said no to this gives me hope that the culture of justice-as-revenge-on-those-I-hate may be losing steam.
So much of the Trump administration's actions seem predicated on revenge against those Trump perceives as having slighted him: people, law firms, companies, universities, and whole countries and international organizations. Trump acts like a petty bully; this we knew already.
The really depressing part was how many US voters seemed happy to endorse that bullying. Decimating federal government agencies, firing qualified people for random reasons, and choking off research funding? Just what those stupid bureaucrats deserve! Disappearing people from other countries--even those here legally and legitimately--without due process? Screw 'em! Threatening universities and colleges? Love those know-it-all elites' tears!
I think we're starting to see some pushback even from Republican voters. This is especially so among those who find themselves directly affected by DOGE cuts and anti-DEI purges. John Stoehr, editor of The Editorial Board, however, argue that such stories do not indicate conversions to left/Democratic causes--just disillusionment with Trump. The woman CNN interviewed for the story, a Trump voter who lost her job due to DOGE, regrets her vote now. But, Stoehr skeets, "She expected the government to cut out people who do not belong, that is, cut out “waste, fraud and abuse,” and now that she has discovered that she is among the 'undeserving,' she is experiencing cognitive dissonance." She voted for Trump three times, Stoehr observes. Her problem isn't that Trump wanted to go after/take revenge on people; it's that she personally got caught up in those targeted people. For Stoehr, Democrats must focus efforts not on converting or appealing to voters like her--that's not a winning move for them. Rather, the aim should be to discourage her from supporting Trump. "Stay home if he's on the ballot" makes for a better and moer reachable goal.
Stoehr's rationale here presumes that Trump voters will never share the ethical stance Democrats might wish them to have--Perhaps it's wrong to treat people unfairly even if we don't know or like them. I don't know about that.
Maybe people voted down Amendment 3 just because they hate Amendments, or hate Landry, or just hate change. But maybe, just maybe, there was something in them that militated against the idea juvenile offenders deserve harsher and longer sentences.
I was going to post about how much I like toys, which toys I enjoyed as a kid, etc.
But I can't get over a story (one of many) about the Venezuelan men deported--against a federal judge's orders--to a brutal prison in El Salvador.
Here's a skeet about it.
“One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, ‘I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.’ I believed him. *** He “began to whimper,” as his head was roughly shaved, “folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell.” He “asked for his mother & cried as he was slapped again.”
Do I know if the man is lying? No. Do I know whether he is, as alleged by Trump's ICE, a member of a violent gang? No.
Does it matter? Not as far as my horror at this act goes.
Way back in the bad old days of the Iraq invasion, philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote about homo sacer (sacred man, set-aside man). This refers to the classification of biological human life excluded (set apart) from consideration as a fully political person. It was possible, Agamben wrote, to kill homo sacer without it being a crime. Homo sacer isn't so much murdered as exterminated. Agamben's larger argument suggested that something like this figure forms the necessary counterpoint to human rights discourse. When there exist "humans" with "rights," there also exists homo sacer--the human being with no rights.
Human rights are, in theory, universal. In practice, however, they require systems that recognize and honor such rights. These systems in turn inevitably distinguish between the humans who "count" as having rights and those who, for some reason, do not. Different eras offer different social-political technologies that define such groups: enslaved people, women, the poor, immigrants, unhoused people, children and adolescents, disabled people, queer people, incarcerated people, elderly people, Black or Indigenous or POC folk. The 2000s provided ample opportunities to see Agamben's theory play out:
"enemy combatants," some of whom still languish in Guantanamo in a
legal limbo. These "terrorists" were denied even Geneva Conventions consideration. It became legal to commit acts (torture, indefinite detention, lack of habeus corpus) that would be war crimes if committed against others.
Many of these technologies persist for these groups. Right now, "citizenship" seems to be asserting itself once more as a major dividing line between humans with rights and "others" whom it is legal to mistreat. This isn't new. "The right to have rights" has long been one of the major defining features of citizenship. The notion disrupts ostensibly universal human rights discourse--don't rights inhere in humanity itself?
As I tell my students, however, the core question of politics is "Who counts?" Which humans count as human? Which humans actually get considered as such by the State (and arguably by culture, the economy, etc.)? As long as that question exists, the possibility of not counting--or of counting not as much--persists. Indeed, how are the ones who count able to know what "counting" means except via constant reference to those who don't count as much? There's an old lefty adage that we have prisons to convince those not in prison that they're free. I know I have rights, in one sense, only to the extent that I can imagine and point to those who do not. That imagining and pointing can all too easily create or rationalize classes of homo sacer.
The men kidnapped and deported to a torture space under an authoritarian dictator--they are homo sacer. They have been deemed as "not counting"--apparently not endowed by their creator with unalienable rights. We don't know--can't know--whether they are actually guilty, let alone debate whether their guilt justifies shipping them off into what amounts to a concentration camp. We are expected simply to take the word of an administration whose first two months have been defined by incompetence, cruelty, and power-grabbing.
It is the job of every person who invokes the stirring rhetoric of human rights, of liberty and equality and democracy, to speak out against the curtailment of these rights. We must not claim the right to have rights--and then slam the door behind us, locking everyone else out into the space of bare existence as homo sacer.
God help those imprisoned there--and everywhere. Help those living in fear of being kidnapped by the State and sent into hell. Save them, Lord who sets prisoners free.
There was a period--back when I first started this blog--when I felt like I had a deep sense of what "the other side" was thinking. Doing research on conservative evangelicalism through the aughts and the early 2010s, I was able to listen carefully. I practiced Krister Stendahl's three rules for religious understanding:
Read/listen to the practitioners, not their critics
Don't compare your best with their worst
Find room for holy envy--aspects of their side that you wish your side had
I immersed myself in conservative evangelical books, podcasts, sermons, websites, blogs, interviews. I bled "conservative evangelicalism" from every orifice.
I published my book, enjoyed the mostly positive feedback--and then watched as, over the next few years the "other side" that I examined morphed into something I didn't recognize. I suppose the influence of early-to-mid-2010s-era trolling, the birth and growth of the "alt right," played a part. A kind of nihilistic irony, a sharpening of the South Park poke-fun-at-every-sincere-belief mentality, wormed its way into the American right's structure of feeling. Cheap, one-sided victories--owning the libs, getting the lulz--came to supplant and eventually replace gains for long-term visions about a shared future.
It's easy to rose-color-tint the early twenty-first-century right. Plenty of cynicism drove the Bush II era's militant patriotism. Yet one gathered that George W. Bush himself actually believed the faith he professed, and that faith--unappealing as I personally found it--gave him some kind of coherent core of sincere values. And yes, I think there were plenty of bad-faith pretenders and grifters willing to mouth churchy platitudes in order to win audience.
But the first-wave trolls of early Facebook, Twitter, 4chan, Reddit, etc., didn't even pretend to coherent ethical or religious conviction. Instead you had webs of anonymized bullying and chaos for chaos's sake--all for anonymized fame and anonymized approval. These networks granted users a sense of power (I can make people outraged=I have power) and community (likes, lulz). Naturally, such an ethos attracted and intensified parts of online culture who felt themselves in need of power and community (young white men, mainly). This group in turn found a useful (and easily provoked) antagonist in the burgeoning online social justice movement.
The sometimes brittle sincerity of the online left proved an appealing target for the "just joking" trolls eager to push buttons. The reaction from the left (and everyone else) to such puerile bullying soon crystallized around framing lonely white cishet men as infantile bullies. That framing in turn spurred some trolls to affirm and strengthen their male cishet non-SJW whiteness as a core identity. Thus Gamergate and other flashpoints advanced the polarization of trollish masculinity versus social justice warriors (feminists, Black and brown people, queer folk, etc.).
Enter Trump as candidate. He and his campaign leaned happily into the trollish joy of provocation for provocation's sake. Trump's own ethos seems grounded in a petty bullying mentality: you're winning if--and to the extent that--you insult the other side. Their being outraged just proves how weak they are. It's shocking and funny at once to his audience. He gets the lulz. No wonder he so often praised his "army of trolls."
Trump II's governance advances this ethos, only without the laughs. Shock and awe--He can't be serious, can he?--defines his style so far. Yes, he really does mean it. Yes, he really will do that thing. The fact you're offended proves he's winning.
All this (and I'm super-simplifying) seems clear enough. The missing player here in my overview so far is the right-wing media ecosphere, a masterful hegemonic accomplishment. Its messages are consistent: Everything Trump does is good; everyone critical of Trump is deranged; only he alone can save us from The Threat. And, quelle suprise, The Threat turns out to be the same antagonists of Gamergate-era trolls: women, Black folk and POC, queer people. It's anyone who would dare to say that their puerile bullying is, well, puerile and bullying.
And the government. This, I sense, comes more from TEA Party (and then Pizzagate and then Q-Anon) streams than from disgruntled gamergaters. From this source comes the deep-seated distrust and resentment of institutions, especially schools and government agencies. The right-wing mediasphere has over the past few decades supecharged such distrust into a reflexive hatred of complexity of any sort. Elon Musk and his DOGE seem the perfect blend of anti-SJW troll (with a bad boy hacker genius spice) and anti-big-government savior. Their cuts don't need to be smart or well considered, just grandiose and outrageous to Trump's enemies. That those people are getting upset about DOGE must, in this mentality, mean that it's doing something right.
The big question I have, though, is where conservative Christianity fits in. The evangelical intellectuals whose thoughts and stances I got to know so well--what's happened to them? I'm hardly the first to marvel at evangelicals' fawning over an amoral narcissist like Trump. I recognize that this support has happened. I'm still wondering how and why, which tells me I need to do some listening.
(By far the most difficult to contact online is my Democratic House member. There are multiple pages and CAPCHAs before you get to the text field. And the text field itself has a 2,000 CHARACTER limit. That's disappointing.)
Anyway--here's my sure-to-be-ignored letter:
###
Dear [congressman/senator] and Staff--
I am a Louisiana voter, one of your constituents.
I have read, with growing unease, reports of the White House's refusal to recognize judicial authority. Specifically, I am concerned about the administration's evasion of Judge Boasberg's orders regarding the deportation of dozens of Venezuelan men to a hard labor camp in El Salvador.
I understand the White House believes itself to be in the right. I understand that they believe Judge Boasberg to be in error. There are established, effective procedures for handling such disagreements. It disturbs me greatly to see the White House choosing instead to call for the judge's impeachment.
I see this call echoed and amplified by Trump-adjacent officials and Trump-supporting media--and not just about Judge Boasberg but about any judge ruling against the White House.
To be clear: I find the deportation itself highly suspect. ICE
claims that these men are
members of a violent criminal gang. Subsequent reporting indicates that
this is not the case at least for several of them. I think it shocking
we are shipping people to a foreign dictator's prison
with no trial, no evidence, and no right of appeal. It does not lend credence to the White House's case for it to be responding to judicial inquiries about such issues with cries for impeachment.
I realize you may disagree. Perhaps you, like the President, see Judge Boasberg's ruling as wrong. And perhaps he is! Right now, though, the point is that the President is refusing to recognize a clear judicial order. Instead of simply appealing the ruling, the White House is ignoring it and heaping public abuse on judges.
Regardless of your feelings about the deportation or about Judge Boasberg's ruling, I ask you to support the process. I ask you to defend the basic legitimacy
of Constitutional checks and balances. The President must, like everyone else, follow the law. He cannot simply ignore judicial rulings. He ought not threaten urge impeachment for judges whose rulings he does not care for. As Justice Roberts tweeted, such threats are inappropriate and dangerous.
Executive overreach threatens not just the judiciary but the legislative branch as well. What happens when Congress tries to assert its authority as a coequal branch of government? Will President Trump call for your impeachment, claiming that you have no right to check his power?
Please join Justice Roberts's rebuke of President Trump's anti-Constitutional rhetoric. Please affirm the legitimacy of judicial checks and balances.
Today the roller coaster stayed at the low altitudes. If anything, it dove lower still.
My colleague informed me that my university had spent the evening purging hundreds of its webpages of any language now considered forbidden by Trump's new (soon to be dissolved?) Department of Education. A memo from an Ed Department official, sent on Valentine's Day, made various noises about how awful discrimination on the basis of is...
Can you guess the answer? White people, of course. White people, who (along with Asian people) have apparently been the victims ALL ALONG: "These institutions’ embrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have emanated throughout every facet of academia."
The memo makes for a fascinating study in supported argumentation. On certain points, the memo dutifully footnotes various court cases it summons to support the judiciary's resistance to race-based admissions schemes. But these footnotes--any evidentiary citations at all--disappear as the memo moves into its tirade about accepted sociological history:
Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon “systemic and structural racism” and advanced discriminatory policies and practices. Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them—particularly during the last four years—under the banner of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (“DEI”), smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.
Moreover:
Other programs discriminate in less direct, but equally insidious, ways. DEI programs, for example, frequently preference certain racial groups and teach students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not. Such programs stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes. Consequently, they deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school.
Again: no evidence, no argumentation, just pure assertion drawn from the right-wing media echo chamber. What these allegations have to do with race as a factor in admissions is unclear.
The memo concludes with scary-sounding demands that all educational institutions be ready to prove they're snapping into line against DEI:
All educational institutions are advised to: (1) ensure that their policies and actions comply with existing civil rights law; (2) cease all efforts to circumvent prohibitions on the use of race by relying on proxies or other indirect means to accomplish such ends; and (3) cease all reliance on third-party contractors, clearinghouses, or aggregators that are being used by institutions in an effort to circumvent prohibited uses of race. Institutions that fail to comply with federal civil rights law may, consistent with applicable law, face potential loss of federal funding.
I am not a lawyer, but these demands seem (1) ridiculously broad--is this about admissions or any mention of race whatsoever?--and (2) practically unenforceable given the Trump administration's wild-machete-thrash-cutting of all federal workers and its stated intention to dissolve the Department of Education altogether. Who's going surveil institutions? How? Using what criteria? Will this be a patchwork of private-citizen bounty hunter laws a la Texas's anti-abortion regime? What?
Given the vagueness of this memo, I'm all the more dismayed to see my University not only stumble over itself to comply but to go so far beyond what the memo mentions. Apparently deans got a (not-yet-released) memo from the university's legal council with a list of no-no words that needed to be memory-holed from the university's website.
Were faculty and staff consulted? Of course not! Do we know what those words are? Nope! I'm guessing they're similar to the lists given to National Science Foundation grantees. The Louisiana Illuminatornotes that several of these words (diversity and equity, for example) appear in very different contexts in lots of departmental webpages, e.g., studying private health equity firms or cataloging a state's ecological diversity.
I found out about the purge only through my colleague's text link to the article. I found out that a bio of mine had been removed (along with those of other faculty) on a particular page only when my school's newspaper contacted me to ask if I knew about it. The reporter also asked what I thought about the anti-DEI purge.
Here's what I said (after necessary qualifications that I was speaking for myself, not for the school, the department, etc.):
I'm dismayed by the moral panic against all things DEI. I'm
disturbed by the reactionary, short-sighted, and undemocratic actions
being taken to satiate that panic. In my view, both the fear and the
reactions are being driven by a mix of honest ignorance held by some,
persistent misinformation spread by others, and bad faith provocation
stoked by outrage profiteers.
It's a bad idea
for LSU to feed into that reactivity. Censorship does not make our
University stronger. It does not make education better or more
affordable. It weakens our reputation, undercuts our research profile,
and drives away talented faculty, staff, and students.
Most
of all, it won't prevent future ultimatums by anti-DEI crusaders.
Historically, moral panics aren't satisfied by just one purge.
If
we submit to this--or, worse, if we just do the censoring for
them--what next sacrifices will Washington demand from us? Today it's a
list of forbidden terms. What's tomorrow: forbidden topics? Forbidden
books, plays, music, works or art? Forbidden disciplines? Forbidden
groups of people? Where does this stop?
It
has to stop with us--students, employees, staff, alumni, community
members, and citizens. We can decline invitations to censor ourselves.
We can refuse to alter our teaching, our research, or our services. We
can say no to accommodating cynical fear mongering.
We
teach our students about academic integrity--doing our work honestly,
rigorously, and openly. I want LSU to model that integrity now.
I am trying to keep in mind that the folk behind the purge are probably operating in good faith, doing their best to protect our federal funding. But I'm surprised at the eleventh-hour, slipshod editing here. Did they think no one would notice? It's the weekend before Mardi Gras break, so perhaps they hoped they could get away with "quietly doing away with"?
I'm not interested in keeping it quiet. This is a grave failure of courage on the part of the institution. I know it's not always easy to distinguish between preemptive camouflage and obeying in advance. But this act seems much more like the latter. Do better, please.
My mood roller-coasters. Today was a downward slope. I could tell by the number of irreverent and off-color jokes I kept making in my grad seminar.
Why? Oh, I could do the [gestures at everything] move. But I guess a few immediate shots to my mood happened when I read one of my senators--deep, deep red--dismissing constituents' worries about federal workers as mere whining. So GOP representatives are getting booed and criticized in town hall meetings? The GOP solution: stop having town hall meetings. If you aren't a billionaire or a bully, they don't care to hear from you.
I had some hopes for some bipartisan action against the nightmarish budget proposal by the House Republicans, but those got dashed. Reclaim Congress's power of the purse from an overreaching executive branch? No thanks, says the GOP. Speaker Johnson seems to be curving his entire political will and power into one end: please Donald Trump.
And then there's RFK, our new top health official, cancelling the annual meeting to hash out next year's flu vaccine, dismissing the first measles death in the US in ten years, saying framing it not only as normal (it is not) but caused by the MMR vaccine itself (it is not). My other senator, supposedly the moderate-sane one, is a medical doctor. He approved Kennedy's appointment, promising that he'd watchdog Kennedy to make sure he didn't waver on promoting this tried-and-true lifesaving public health intervention. Where is he?
And I saw the assembled presidential cabinet being hailed and addressed not by Trump but by Elon Musk, who still has no officially appointed role in DOGE but is still somehow the de facto president as Trump himself fades into senescence. I repeat my therapist's amazed observation: Trump defers to Musk in a way he rarely defers to anyone, save perhaps Putin. With Musk tweeting openly about wanting to go the way of El Salvador (getting rid of any judges that dare to challenge the executive branch, taking over the country by force), I wonder how much support he's winning from the armed forces.
I keep hearing from my lefty sources how even rank-and-file Trump voters seem increasingly restive about the mass firings and coming economic collapse. And the reaction from the administration only underlines how little the billionaire-bully krato-kakistocracy cares. But maybe I'm just stuck in my echo chamber? I do occasionally hear about non-AI-produced folk absolutely charmed by the wholesale destruction of our government.
I wrote to my Representative--one of our state's few democrats--to complain about the GOP and thank him for his vote against the "big, beautiful budget."
I suppose I'll call my senators' offices tomorrow, even though one at least has communicated as clearly as possible he does not care to hear from the likes of me.
It's . . . hard to keep going when the roller coaster is at the bottom of the hill.
I agreed this last week to a writing assignment: a short piece about some kind of right-wing performance practice. It's for a special issue of an international theatre journal focusing on how the lurch away from liberal, plural democracies and toward authoritarianism and ethnocentrism expresses itself through performances.
I have to decide on what to write about in the next few days. As such, I've turned on my scholarly radar, opening myself to input from the universe about what kind of right-wing/authoritarian performances I can generate 2,500 words or so about.
Zach Brand-Wiita on Bluesky summarized the debate well:
I think the idea the Army Choir was trolling Trump is wishful thinking. I love Les Mis and it's a much more progressive story than people realize, but it's also big and bombastic and over-the-top romanticism schmaltz -- the kind of stuff Trump loves. Sorry, this was just them singing a popular song.
Call it Poe's Law of protest: can't tell if subversive or just clueless. Of course, Trump's supporters believe they are standing up (violently, if necessary) against oppressive forces who seek to kill them.
Perhaps, then: call the performance of the song an empty signifier (in Ernesto Laclau's sense): compelling (spectacular in Amy Hughes's sense of makes you stop and pay attention) but alsofloating enough to be coded with whatever ideological content its producers (I don't know about its performers) would endorse.
I sense a disappointment with this openness in myself. It's similar to that expressed by the poster I mentioned yesterday who was livid that so-called universal human rights could be questioned or undermined. There's the same yearning for a more perfect system--or in this case a more perfect dramatic script--that would prevent usurpation by malign forces. But, again, that's just not how it works. Performance forms--song, dance, theatre, spoken word--can be wrenched from their original context and intention and repurposed for use opposed to that intention. Heck, "YMCA" is now a Trump standard, the Village People's only living member now insisting that the song has no homosexual subtext.
Speaking of homosexual subtext, my only other radar blip about a performance to write about would be the AI-produced video of Trump going to town on ("worshiping" would be the term of art) Elon Musk's bare feet propped up on the Resolute Desk. It showed on all TV screens in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. "Long Live the King," notes the caption, referencing at once Trump's "Long Live the King" post about (supposedly) freeing New York City from congestion pricing, Musk's clear-to-everyone-else control of Trump ("Trump actually defers to Musk," marveled my therapist today), and Musk's email last Friday arbitrarily demanding that all federal workers produce a report of five things they accomplished last week--or be fired.
I've not watched the video. I . . . would prefer not to watch it. Look: some people find feet gross. Some people find feet great. I lean toward the latter, and precisely for that reason I have no desire to have deepfake Elon's deepfaked feet--slobbered over by passionate Trump--uploaded into my brain. No thank you.
And yet. If I'm going to think of an activist-performance signifier that is absolutely full, one that Trump and Musk would be very hard-pressed to recruit to their ends--surely it's this one. What's the secret? Homophobia, obviously, drives the critique here (haw haw lookit how gay they are together!), spiked with a side of kink-shaming. And it's porn-y. Porn as threatening signifier--something beyond Trump's control--has haunted his campaign before. Witness the legendary "pee tape" supposedly floating around somewhere. There again we see the blemish of kink distorting the cishet sex god image Trump has long been keen to foster. Witness his first-term fixation on the size of his hands (with the clear implication about what that suggested about his genitals). Or consider the rumors about Vance's couch-humping.
Dagnabbit. I may have a paper here, somehow about both a Les Mis song and deepfake foot porn.
I guess I need to start working on clever puns to join those two.
I doubt I'll do better than this exchange on John Scalzi's Bluesky thread:
"You have to keep living." I was on a zoom for LGBTQIA+ United Methodists and their allies earlier. The Bishop of our conference formed a ministry team to address the needs of queer folk in our state. We face the happy conundrum of deciding what to do and how to advocate after a systemic victory. The last General Conference (the quadrennial meeting of worldwide United Methodists) vaporized sections of the Book of Discipline (the polity and policy document for the UMC) that were gay-exclusionary and homophobic. Each conference can tailor regulations to fit its culture best. (This was primarily with a nod to UMC conferences in African and the Philippines.)
So we won! After decades of struggle, we had achieved some degree of equality. What now?
I've argued elsewhere that one primary mode of activism aims to put activists out of work. Suffragists succeed when there's no more need for suffragists. Abolitionists win when they no longer need to be abolitionists.
Social movements achieving such victories have two basic paths before them. They can go out of business, switching to the Next Great Cause. Or they can shift the quality of their work from oppositional change to something more like a church. They might deepen and widen their cause to embrace other struggles. They might adopt a maintenance and preservation mode, solidifying their victory as hegemonic.
I use hegemonic in the good sense here. When Antonio Gramsci (the first theorist of political hegemony) wrote about this term, he meant it not as the Big Bad System to fight but as a name for the mutually buttressing functions of consent and coercion that maintain a political status quo. Social movements (parties, in Gramsci's writing) want hegemony. They want their (initially minority) views of what Ought To Be not only to prevail in a single election. They want these views to become the political common sense of the whole society, so integrally part of the political sense of normalcy that the views cease to be political (in the sense of "contested") at all.
Women's suffrage is a good case in point. The right of adult women citizens to vote in the US has for decades been hegemonic. It enjoys widespread consent (most people think it a good thing that women won the right to vote), and it's protected with the armor of coercion. If someone blocked a woman from voting, some kind of state force--lawyers, judges, police, or, beyond that, the armed forces--would enforce her right to vote. And, up until recently, to seriously call into question whether women should be allowed to vote is to mark yourself bizarrely out of step with political consensus.
And yet.
Political realities are inherently unstable, discursive. A political victory, however solidly won, is not eternal. Women have the right to vote--anyone has the right to vote, for that matter--only so long as there's a system of consent-coercion strong enough to recognize and enforce that right.
This is a hard reality for some. I read a post on Bluesky that asserted that any right that could be taken away was not in fact a right at all, and that the aim of activism should be to create a system where rights become truly unquestionable.
But this just isn't how human societies work. How could they? There's inevitable disagreement and friction about exactly how to define, apply, and delimit rights. Systems that ignore or quash such disagreement tend to be totalitarian, stuck in a singular, frozen vision. They eventually lose some vital hegemonic element--consent, coercion, or both--and fall apart.
I write this because so many of the victories we thought won--specific rights for queer folk, but deeper and ostensibly more durable political systems as well--are proving perilously fragile. Trump seems to be hijacking many of the coercive systems of the state, forbidding them from defending certain rights formerly protected and directing them to enforce other rights--the rights of "bullies and billionaires" to use the phrasing of activist Anat Shenker-Osorio.
Gramsci would hardly approve. Aside from being an ardent foe of fascism (Mussolini's OG Fascist party threw him in prison), Gramsci would note that the Trumpian wrecking ball of coercion seems to be losing popular consent. This lays a lethal groundwork for some pretty awful and bloody conflicts between segments of the armed forces and executive branches loyal to Trump and, well, everyone else. But history suggests that pure coercion alone rarely holds for long.
I hope it doesn't come to that even. I hope folk can realize the bullies and billionaires only hold power as long as everyone else gives them power. I hope we take it from them soon.
Yeesh, but this timeline keeps taking turns for the worse. And by "timeline" I mean "Trump administration." Trump just nominated right-wing podcaster Don Bongino as the deputy director of the FBI. Federal employees face an uncertain Monday after Musk's government-wide email demanding that they list five things they accomplished last week or lost their jobs ("failure to reply is taken as resignation" or some such). Ukraine looks to Europe, which now charts a path ahead with America as adversary rather than ally. The wave of universities suspending PhD applications keeps growing.
"I would just like to live in less interesting times for a while," one of my friends on Discord said.
I concur.
Someone on Bluesky posted that it's like Musk has fixated on the "What do you do here actually" scene from Office Space--and taken it ask a true guide to what most government employees do. That is, they're lazy and/or incompetent wastes of space. Viewing the world through that lens, why not take a machete to the employee rolls?
We keep seeing and hearing about good, hardworking, and often irreplaceable people losing jobs to the detriment of basic government function. But I don't predict Musk recognizing an error and correcting course.
I do foresee public outcry growing to the degree that Trump finally throws him under the bus. It would constitute the latest in that signature Trump maneuver: threaten to create a crisis, back down from the threat, and then loudly crow about having solved the crisis. Musk's doing all of this via DOGE serves Trump well. He's coated in plausible deniability for if/when DOGE goes belly-up. (Though how it has avoided getting stalled or stopped after dozens of stories ripping apart its so-called "wall of receipts" about how much it's saved, I don't know.)
I wonder what the tipping point will be? What volume or quality of public outcry would be sufficient to either move the GOP majority into reclaiming Congress's power or--miracle of miracles--cause Trump to flip on Musk? So far, I don't sense the level of "here's how he's causing pain to the people you hate" propaganda necessary to overwhelm the "I voted for Trump, but now my daughter's out of a job!" stories bubbling on social media. But then--I'm not the audience for such propaganda. I'm sure there are lots of useful idiots happy to sing praise hymns to Trump/Musk's genius.
But still. I know that the competence of totalitarian regimes ("they made the trains run on time") is largely a myth. But I'm still struck by the sheer chaotic amateurism that seems to define Trump 2 so far--amateurism spiked with pettiness, cruelty, and (a Trump constant) whining. To be sure, Trump 2 has already delivered crushing blows to vital sectors of government, research, outreach, and diplomacy. I don't know how our international reputation recovers. We'll be decades repairing the destruction he's wrought in just a month. But it's not hard to imagine a smarter, more coordinated coup rather than the clumsy toddler-smashing-the-tower-of-blocks-and-crying-that-it-falls performance we've witnessed so far.
What really remains to be seen, I guess, is whether a clumsy coup is still coup enough to topple us as a democracy. The stopgaps that we rely on to prevent such collapse--well, they seem muted or absent (with some strong exceptions).
So my friend and colleague texted me this morning at 8. I was asleep, having successfully fended off my cat from nudging me awake at my usual 6:30 time.
Bad news.
My university's board of supervisors decided, last night, to restrict the rights of instructors in classrooms. They clarified that classrooms are not spaces where first amendment protections apply. Thus did they seek to prevent instructors from "imposing" their political views on students. The statement declined to define what "imposing" might constitute.
More bad news: the University of Pittsburgh is pausing all PhD recruitment efforts in light of uncertainty about federal funding. Worse, the University of Pennsylvania appears to have done that and more, actually rescinding some assistantship offers. To call that shocking understates its seriousness. It's akin to hiring someone in a competitive field, having them accept the offer (and presumably turn down competing offers)--and then take it back. How horrible for the students affected. How embarrassing for the universities.
No one would accuse me of optimism, but I doubt that Trump's executive order on NIH funding will survive judicial review. I think one court has already put it on hold. Either Trump has doubled down on cutting funding despite court orders, or the universities have decided to take preemptive action.
I worry this might spark a more widespread panic-wave of grad program admission freezes. I've already made four offers to prospective students. Thinking about the awkward "well, actually..." conversation I'd have to have with them should my university join that wave makes me queasy.
Regarding the Board of Supervisors' decision . . . well, that doesn't upset my stomach in quite the same way yet. Oh, it angers me. Similar to the post-the-Ten-Commandments-in-every-classroom thing, this decision seems transparently unconstitutional. I expect it to be restrained by a judge in the next week. From there, it will wind its way up layers of judicial review until it lands somewhere consequential and nudges the Overton Window a bit closer to tyranny--or not! So--infuriating? Definitely. I'll join whatever hell gets raised about it.
But in terms of immediate threat, I worry more about PhD recruitment than I do about being fired for something I say in class--at least right now.
Perhaps naivete clouds my vision. Unconstitutional or not, this maneuver (instigated by our utterly anti-higher-ed governor) highlights the conservative movement's war on tenure, if not on university education itself. I recognize that we all have targets painted on our backs. Rumors suggest that most of our upper-administrative personnel have plotted (or been shown) escape routes from my institution in the next few weeks. Who knows how long we have before colleagues start following them?
And what do I tell students, prospective and current, without someone thinking that I have "imposed" my views on them?
Hopeful signs that majorities of people are noticing--and disapproving of--the Trumpian "find out" phase. Polls of Trump's first weeks in office register a broad sense that he's overstepped his power in several ways. Almost no one likes the mass firings. (Even Fox News's Jesse Waters pleaded with DOGE to spare a friend of his from firing.) And Trump's baffling new insistence that Ukraine and not Putin's Russia is to blame for, well, the Russian invasion of Ukraine--even some prominent Republicans balk at that.
Nor is Trump's (master? buddy? co-President? hanger-on?) pal Musk helping things. Musk commands perhaps the most powerful propaganda network (the Trump-X-Fox News Pipeline) yet realized. But the guy seems bound and determined to become as unpopular as possible with as many people as possible as quickly as possible. The massive savings DOGE initially crowed about shrink considerably--by about $14 billion--on closer inspection. I'm hoping such slip-ups (as well as his childish tirades with [checking notes for today] astronauts) start chipping away at his intellectual and entrepreneurial bona fides. Right now this vague reputation appears to be all that justifies the unprecedented power he's being granted. I don't know how he survives when that reputation goes belly up.
All of this turmoil makes it tough to know how to proceed in terms of depolarization groups like Braver Angels. Our local meeting on Sunday was very well-attended, but the attendees were manifestly left-leaning (or at least Trump-critical). We gathered ostensibly to discuss/debate whether we need a new labor movement. But the video of Braver Angels talking heads debating this issue tended toward broad consensus: labor good, even as it could be better. Our own live guest speaker, head of the state's AFL/CIO, found little to dispute in any of the video speakers' words. He had harsh words for Democrats, but his main sympathies were for working class people trying to organize.
Most of the breakout conversations I was part of dealt with marches and protests spinning up to speak out against Trump's mass firings, DOGE's depredations, and general chaos of Trump II.
One of our exec members wrote a brief but honest letter to our chair afterward, saying that if he had been a red visiting this meeting, he'd not have felt welcome. We've drifted, he points out, from the core functions of Braver Angels--to get two sides to talk to each other and learn from each other (even if they end up disagreeing).
I concur that a deep-crimson MAGA Trump supporter would have hated this gathering. But then, I'm hard pressed to imagine a Braver Angels meeting that such a person would enjoy. I'll indulge in a little both-sides-ism: I don't think a revolutionary anarchist would enjoy the average BA meeting either.
But we're at a point where the reds in power--the GOP platform--has sorted itself almost entirely into the likeness of Trump. And what that shade of red shares with the radical anarchist of the left is a basic disagreement with many of the premises of liberal constitutional democracy. Here we're beyond polarization.
Indeed, as recent polls attest, there's actually very little strong polarization about folks' opinions on the mass firings: we're against it! Ditto issues like sensible gun laws or moderation in abortion regulation. There's broad agreement. These issues seem polarized only if you give the vocal minority that's taken over the GOP pride of place as 50% of an argument.
Up until recently, though, even this vocal minority stayed basically within the bounds of democratic norms. Trump and MAGA-ites simply do not care to have a pluralized democracy. Or at least, their version of democracy looks radically different than anything we've seen for hundreds of years. They don't want checks and balances between branches of government (even those they control). They don't want liberal concerns (I mean classically liberal--respect for human rights, etc.) getting in the way of profit for a few billionaires or autocrats. The very
I'm not sure BA has many full-on-pro-Trump fans in its midst any more. Instead it has an explosion of "purples" and other independents. They don't like Trump, but they can't stand the left. But the awfulness of Trump II has the potential to make some foxhole coalitions.
And that's a problem for Braver Angels. BA proceeds from the premise that polarization (affective polarization) is the biggest problem facing US politics today. And I think most of the time, that argument has teeth. But not right now. Polarization isn't the biggest issue. The biggest issue is Trump II. Whether you call it a coup or chaos, whether you disagree with his ideas or dispute his implementation--the guy is going to be pretty unpopular pretty soon. Yet he's in power and causing great harm--directly and indirectly.
Are there still die-hard Trump supporters? Definitely. But for how much longer?
I'll be curious to see what BA does in response to all this.
A friend sent me a video yesterday that, I admit, captures a recurrent theme in my thoughts about the awfulness:
It's from the Lincoln Project's co-founder Rick Wilson. The title says it all: "If You Voted for Trump, You're Not Allowed to Act SURPRISED!" As the thumbnail says: "Welcome to the FIND OUT phase."
It's an angry cri du coeur directed at Trump voters. Like me, Wilson has already started to detect elements of backfire in Trump's wrecking-ball attack on federal institutions and norms. People are dying due to USAID monies being frozen. People are shocked and scared at their jobs being ripped away from them for no reason other than a group of early twentysomethings (and Elon Musk) decided (how? using what criteria?) that their job was not important. (Take, for example, the hastily retracted firings of nuclear weapons experts.) And people are livid upon finding out that Trump's long-stated brilliant plan of "tariffs on everything" is leading to--as everyone else predicted--higher prices.
Fuck Around and Find Out currently wins out for "phrase of the year." Or, in its G-rated version: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. We're all finding out, winning stupid prizes.
And some I frickin' TOLD YOU SO is understandable. I certainly feel it. I've created many a mental monologue just like Wilson's here.
Lefty-libs like me enjoy such righteous reversals. It's the stuff of The West Wing--people being put in their place with a well-crafted, well-delivered speech. Such speeches fueled that show, gave us a romanticized view of how disagreements resolve: someone is forcefully and irrefutably corrected. And oh my stars do I ever want some folk in this country to be forcefully and irrefutably corrected (for the record: corrected with words/results, not with, you know, actual force or violence).
But West Wing style putdowns. . . aren't how things work in real life. That TV show is a fiction. As I tell my students, even the most slice-of-life, naturalistic play is edited reality, life distilled into entertaining chunks.
In real life, interpersonal arguments seldom resolve cleanly before a commercial break. They rarely conclude with one person getting a pristine last word and the other person simply surrendering. Usually there's hot words and high volumes, and both parties stalk away feeling like they're in the right.
Few people who voted for Trump are going to respond well to a rant like Wilson's. I mean, would you? It takes a special kind of person to be able to absorb an acid-soaked jeremiad like this with equanimity, let alone contrition. I am not that special kind of person, especially when the acid is coming from my political opponents. I don't trust their view of reality most of the time. Why would I trust their evaluation of who's to blame when the economy crashes, our global reputation tanks, and more people start suffering and dying?
I'm hardly the first to say it: we on the left would rather denounce a heretic than win a convert. Our recruitment sucks. We make it worse when we assume that "reality itself" or "the obviously bad results of Trump's policies" will do our recruiting for us. We also make it worse when we expect contrition, silence, or loud repentance from apostates of from the Church of Trump. People are attracted to Trump--just like people are attracted to the left--because he gives them a story that makes them feel seen, important, and cared about. I think Trump's story is a con, a promise offered in bad faith. But just because people might come to recognize Trump's story as repellent doesn't mean they'll find the left's story appealing.
Dare I say, we need to be better evangelists--winsome witnesses to a better way. And part of that evangelism must involve suppressing or moderating our frustration with the bad results of the majority's choices.
Make no mistake: I'm often furious at those who voted for Trump. I'm incensed at those who chose not to vote at all or who decided that both sides were equally bad. There's part of me that cheers along with Wilson. But not everything we feel is a good guide to how we should act.
Right now, we need more people who feel like we do about Trump's policies. We need them to make common cause with those of us who have been fed up for a long time. For that to happen, we long-term-anti-Trumpers have to swallow the urge to chide or lecture newcomers about why it's taken them as long as it has to come to our conclusions.
Satisfying as Wilson's rant is, then, I'm hopeful that we can generate some better evangelists--and soon. Because when the "find out" phase really hits, Trump et al. are going to spin some wicked lies about who's to blame (spoilers: it'll be the usual suspects: immigrants, people of color, queer/trans folk, university folk, women, etc.). We need a better--not just truer but more appealing--counter-narrative.
There's an episode of The Simpsons (season 11, episode 12) where the evil, decrepit Mr. Burns goes to the Mayo Clinic. After a montage of examinations (including Mr. Burns getting stuck in the gears of an MRI machine), the doctor gives Burns the bad news: he's got everything. Every disease.
"You mean I have pneumonia?" asks Burns.
"Yes," the doctor answers.
"Juvenile diabetes?"
"Yes."
"Hysterical pregnancy?"
"A-a little bit, yes."
But this isn't as bad as it sounds, the doctor reassures him. To explain, he takes out a tiny model doorway and a pile of little fuzzy toys of different colors. The fuzzies, he says, represent different diseases. The door represents Mr. Burns's body. They all try to cram in at once--the doctor grabs a handful and stuffs them into the doorway--but they get stuck.
"We call it 'Three Stooges Syndrome,'" the doctor says, punctuating the explanation with sound effects and catchphrases from Larry, Curly, and Moe.
Mr. Burns is enraptured. "So what you're saying," he concludes, "is I'm indestructible?"
"Oh, no, no," the doctor counters. "Why, even a slight breeze--"
"Indestructible," Burns interrupts, savoring the word.
This image crops up whenever I read the daily news about the latest mix of cruel, craven, and confused moves by the Trump (Trump/Musk) administration. They're doing so much, all at once, that's so objectionable on so many levels simultaneously.
I get that's the aim--flood the zone and all that. But I'm wondering--hoping, at this point--that we might start to see some backfire here. Most of Trump's big-news executive orders (e.g., rescinding birthright citizenship, cutting funding for national agencies, firing independent councils, granting DOGE free rein and zero independent oversight) have been balked by court orders. Even some GOP senators (not nearly enough!) are now murmuring that Trump needs to back down and respect the rule of law. But instead he just keeps producing more and more toxic/unlawful/unenforceable executive orders.
Trump I was deft at deflecting blame. Since he faced a divided Congress, he was often able to foist responsibility for his administration's blunders onto the opposing party.
But right now Trump's wackadoodle plans (and/or their confusing and disastrous) are crowding the doorway of media attention. It's a thousand stooges syndrome--110% Trump craziness, all the time. And there just isn't a lot there that's positive. Even as so many of his moves appeal to the most fanatical parts of his base, their sweeping nature (and clumsy execution) impacts even his own supporters. I saw a clip of some farmers, for instance--Trump voters all--griping about how his tariffs-on-everything policy was making their lives worse. (I could wonder how these gentlemen could have been surprised by Trump's move; he was crystal clear that he was going to step boldly onto that rake.)
And right now, there's no other moves on offer that Trump could lift up as blameworthy. Now, it may be that he and the Fox/rightwing mediasphere can frame his crusade against the judiciary--the "activist judges" who dare to check his executive overreach--as a righteous battle by an embattled David (Trump, in his mind) against a corrupt Goliath. But I'm not seeing that catch on.
Trump has a lot of trouble sharing a spotlight. He wants to be seen stuffing all those executive orders into the public consciousness, moving fast and breaking things, making strong (stupid, alienating, utterly unwise) gestures. I think--I hope--it might be harder for him to avoid the "find out" part of such F-ing around.
He thinks he's indestructible. I'm hopeful such hubris will prove vulnerable to a slight breeze soon.
So many people are just plain stressed out right now. There's trans folk who have lost access to health care or even basic human regard. There's immigrants--legal and otherwise--who find themselves left out in the cold (at best) or hunted down by ICE (at worst). There are federal workers whose jobs have now become precarious based on the whims of unaccountable billionaires and their teen/twentysomething cronies. There are USAID employees out of work as well as USAID beneficiaries cut off from HIV meds and other vital care. Researchers dependent upon NSF funding suddenly face an uncertain future. Federal workers across dozens of agencies now have to scour their materials to delete references to any of a hundred newly forbidden words.
And then there's a whole lot of other people who just shrug and wonder why so many people let themselves get worked up over politics.
I was wondering to my sister what might have to happen to get them to wake up and realize the magnitude of haphazard, blitzkrieg changes sweeping federal government. What trickle-down effects would possibly move them from either pox-on-both-houses apathy or full-throated MAGA support?
I read that Trump's bizarre obsession with emptying Gaza of Palestinians and claiming it for US-own development--ethnic cleansing on a massive scale--got some bewildered pushback on Twitter at least. Perhaps if he starts a war?
No one seems to have noticed his inability to end the Ukraine war in a single day, with a single phone call. Courts seem to be stopping many of his most objectionable executive orders from happening. Musk may find himself the target of multiple class-action lawsuits soon.
But still, so much damage is being done. I confess to some morbid curiosity about how exactly Trump will spin the massive blowback of his massive (and so often clumsy, thoughtless, and unworkable) edicts. But more than that I'm just worried about all the lives he's ruining so casually.
Our church's social justice team met. We dithered. What can we do? We're trying to define a lane, areas of local help and impact. But things are moving so quickly it's hard to tell even whom in our church is being affected.
Surely this momentum can't continue like this for much longer. There's so much energy being burned by the administration right now. Elon's attention, I suspect, is finite. Trump's willingness to share the spotlight with him certainly is. Already I hear reports of Musk's young men screaming at White House officials.
How long before even some on the GOP Congress start throwing up their hands? Trump I's administration turned into a revolving door as even the most loyal loyalists either flamed out or got fed up or failed to meet Trump's idiosyncratic preferences.
The other day my sister asked me if I can recommend any good/trustworthy news sites. I listed some of my favorites, starting with my long-time aggregator of choice, Joemygod.com.
But I have a new one of late, recommended by someone on Bluesky: whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com. Essentially a headline aggregator, the site was founded by journalist Matt Kiser. His shtick is simple: "neutral-ish," no opinion pieces, few adjectives or adverbs ("It’s unnecessary to add a “just” in front of 38% of Americans approve of the job the president is doing," he explains in his "About" page), no ads, no paywall, and all sources cited (and a diversity thereof).
The effect is that each day's post offers a slimmed-down rundown of top news stories refreshingly free from alarmist, if-it-bleeds-it-leads framing.
Now, I'm not a huge fan of fetishizing neutrality when it comes to reporting. Especially when (for example) the Trump administration transgresses longstanding norms and laws, it's the journalist's job to provide that context. Just how unusual or out-of-bounds is this act? I concur that, all too often, major news media "sanewash" or "both sides" acts that should shock the conscience.
Intriguingly, though, WTFJHT's plain vanilla reportorial tone manages to be somehow more shocking than any three headlines put together. I misplaced the skeet, but someone online quipped that we're in a time when a simple list of what Trump and his administration did in a single day would read like laughable conspiracy plots.
I mean, I find the daily list on that site shocking and unbelievable. But I put that dry rendering side-by-side with the posts I read on Bluesky and other sites, where people who know (and plenty of people who don't know) shatter the alarm bells trying to get folk to understand how outre it is to, for example, grant access to secure financial servers to a private citizen and his cronies.
I wonder, in other words, whether a Trump supporter could read the site (whose name likely weeds out certain conservative audiences) and conclude, "Good job! Hurrah!"
For more nuanced coverage of what the other side thinks, I usually consult Tangle News, Isaac Saul's newsletter that does "both sides" reporting the right way. He introduces a news item, shares representative right-leaning views, representative left-leaning views, and then his (or his staff's) own view. I don't always agree with them. (For example, I think Tangle's take on Trump's tariffs as mainly unobjectionable, even effective, flouts the consensus of experts that call them dangerous--though the site does acknowledge those experts' opinions.) But I appreciate the reality check of "not everyone thinks like the folk you follow on Bluesky."
Related to yesterday's post: Apparently Congressional Democrats have roused themselves to a more coordinated response to Trump's blitzkrieg volley of executive orders. Meanwhile, Trump today announced a pause on the right-now-to-stop-an-emergency tariffs on Canada and Mexico. He will of course claim victory: See? Being strong works! I am unclear exactly what kind of victory he won apart from confirming his love of self-aggrandizing chaos. Apparently just asserting victory works very well for him. We'll see how effectively Democrats--or the calamitous effects of Trump's bull-in-china-shop tactics--mute his crowing.
Today's mood has improved over yesterday's, which is good. After I posted the down-in-the-dumps post, I did push myself to do a short workout, take a shower, and . . . well, absorb the news about the helicopter-passenger jet collision in Washington, DC. God be with the victims' families.
Today's press conference by President Trump featured the expected bromides about togetherness in tragedy before (apparently--after I stopped listening) detouring into the expected scapegoat for the crash from the administration: Biden (and Pete Budigeig) and DEI. He offered no evidence or substantiation, of course, even after some (admirable) pushback by some reporters. Trump is well beyond the need for proof. Apparently, so are his supporters. Some news media are instead noting how the FAA chief had stepped down at Musk's command on Jan 20, how air traffic controllers had been suffering from overwork and shortages for years, how the (again, Musk-spawned) scare letter to all federal employees yesterday provide at least some points of curiosity--for other people, obviously, not for Trump or his administration.
Just before sitting down to write this (after cleaning up yet more of Solo's projectile barfing--I'm really worried about our little guy), I read the report of a national call from Braver Angels (the depolarization group I'm part of). The call concentrated on the results of a long survey/study about one of the major problems Braver Angels faces: red (i.e., conservative) recruitment. The results identified two familiar reasons. First, reds report feeling unwelcome in BA spaces, usually thanks to offhand comments from uncareful blues. Second, many reds simply don't see why BA is worth their time and trouble; it's all talk and no action. I've heard the latter expressed by many of our red attendees.
With effort, I quash my first reaction--how far back to we need to bend over in order to make reds feel welcome? In no other realm of society or politics do I ever see reds worrying about whether they're making blues feel welcome. Looking beyond that, I think there are some other issues going on--at least where I am--that contribute to the red-recruitment problem.
The first is that partisan sorting into reds and blues (Braver Angels's longstanding default) leaves out a great many self-identified independents, often (but not exclusively) of some flavor of libertarian. Now, a lot of times BA will label these (or encourage them to self-label as) red. But that shade of red doesn't fit well.
One of the solutions offered by the BA official in charge of the call (whom I know as a really stand-up red-identifying guy) involved including a prominent red, a podcast host, on the call. But this prominent red is described as having "a personal relationship with a Trump nominee for the NIH"--the nominee being of course Robert Kennedy. Here's the thing: Kennedy is much more libertarian than MAGA red. He's kissed the ring enough to be NIH nominee (he'll likely get through despite a long history of cackle-brained, anti-vax opinions). Trump has recruited more libertarian bros like Kennedy and Musk into his circle this time around. I'm assuming that this podcast host falls more into that red-leaning libertarian mold, not the bright-red MAGA. (Checking Wikipedia--apparently he's been described as libertarian but now rejects that label--which is still different than a full-on-Trump loyalist a la Kash Patel.)
It remains to be seen how stable such libertarian-authoritarian bonds will remain. Libertarian authoritarianism is increasingly a thing, but it's not quite the same as MAGA white-nationalist-Christian-fundamentalist authoritarianism (not that everyone is white or Christian in that group, e.g., Patel). Some fractures between them have so far been slight, and it may be that Trump's main feat this time around involves forging and maintaining that fusion between "no government telling anyone what to do" and "no government telling me what to do--but definitely telling those other people what to do."
In any case, I don't know that we have that many dyed-in-the-wool MAGA Trump supporters in the organization. When I hear folk complain about BA being "all talk, no action," I hear more the libertarian streak than the authoritarian streak.
Why is that? Well, one reason is that I don't hear the authoritarian streak at all. Religious fundamentalists and [substitute whatever gradation of white nationalism you'd like here] just don't come to Braver Angels meetings so far as I can see. And why would they? What's in it for them?
There's a difference, in other words, between "BA is all talk and no action, so it's not worth my time" and "BA is interested in getting the two sides to talk to and work together for the common good--and thus it's not worth my time." If you really believe that you have a deadlock on the True and the Right and that the other side really is just fundamentally Wrong and Malicious--well, it's immoral to work with them or talk to them. Authoritarians do not care to depolarize. They aim to conquer, and anything that reeks of compromise is a turnoff.
Frankly, I think both modes of thought--no government at all! and much stronger government that makes others do what I want!--represent dealbreaker positions for Braver Angels, which if anything embraces democratic governance moderated by protected liberties.
As for the second objection--blues are mean--well, I agree that's a complaint I often here (more at the national level than at local levels). But again, I'm not sure it means what we think it means.
