News and commentary for understanding and coping with the years ahead...
Obama to quisling universities: Grow a spine
Have a listen to this recent appearance at Hamilton College by former President Barack Obama, who expressed polite contempt for the formerly renowned universities that have caved into the Trump regime's demands to destroy social justice in higher education. They have multi-billion-dollar endowments, Obama noted, and they should be using some of that money to fund the research the regime is cancelling in its war on higher education and health.
That was my key takeaway, though Obama ranged far more broadly during this conversation with Hamilton's president, Steven Tepper. It was good to see that Obama was moving more forcefully to challenge the lies and destruction coming out of the Trump regime. (George W. Bush remains silent, to his eternal disgrace; Hillary Clinton has been braver than Bill Clinton, at least in public.)
It's also worth noting that Obama chided those in academia who gave into absurd speech restrictions from the left in recent years. Freedom of expression should be at the absolute core of higher education, and we have to acknowledge that the left caused some damage the past few years.
That said, the right wing has done, and is now accelerating, almost infinitely worse campus speech restrictions. The (relatively) few instances of intolerance on the left, mostly at name-brand institutions, came in handy for the bad-faith censors who now are in charge. But what's happening now is a key element in an unprecedented war on higher education. Sadly, so far, it's mostly working.
ICE releases kidnapped family, thanks to local protests
On Saturday locals gathered to march through town—and specifically by Honan’s house—to raise hell about the heinous injustice. Honan called it bullying; but protesters got the final word. The people of Sackets Harbor—and especially the school administrators and teachers—should serve as an example for us all that resistance can work. You do not need to comply in advance. The Trump administration is powerful, but not invincible.
This story, based on interviews with insiders and thousands of newly obtained emails, texts, and other records, including internal ICE communications, provides the fullest account to date of the extent of the company’s far-right origins and of the implementation of its facial recognition technology within the federal government’s immigration enforcement apparatus. It reveals how Ton-That, who obsessed over race, IQ, and hierarchy, solicited input from eugenicists and right-wing extremists while building Clearview, and how, from the outset, he and his associates discussed deploying the tech against immigrants, people of color, and the political left. All told, this new reporting paints a chilling portrait of an ideologically driven company whose powerful surveillance technology is now in the hands of the Trump administration, as it bulldozes democratic institutions and executes an authoritarian takeover.
Clearview is a vile enterprise whose motto should be "You want privacy? Fuck you." It has screwed everyone but its investors in amassing one of the surveillance state's ultimate tools. I first heard about its sleazy founder and operations via great reporting by Kashmir Hill in the New York Times; she followed that up with a must-read book on the company.
Now comes a new investigation by another excellent journalist and posted at Mother Jones. It revisits many of Hill's themes, and adds details about the founder and his friends/investors that I didn't fully know or grasp before. The bottom line is that these are transcendentally evil people. If we lived in a society that gave even half a damn about justice or privacy, I believe they would be in jail.
When you combine this with the gutting of the IRS itself, it basically means a radical diminution of tax enforcement in the United States. If you make more than, say, a million dollars a year, paying taxes is probably going to be voluntary going forward. It’s a new feature of billionairedom.
[C]rypto lobbyists and other industry figures are hard at work4 trying to argue that “Sure, Trump nixed the Crypto Enforcement Team, directed Major Fraud prosecutors to stop prosecuting crypto cases, and is trying to exempt crypto platforms from the BSA, but look! They wrote right here that they care about stopping crypto crime!” Reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.
The above two links are peas on a pod – only the latest evidence that the Trump regime is rigging government as an operation that reward the rich and screws everyone else. In these cases, the mechanism is similar: effectively legalizing what had been crimes.
The first piece, from Talking Points Memo, shows how the Trump-Musk co-presidency is destroying the Internal Revenue Service. You may not be a fan of paying taxes, but if you are paid by an entity that takes withholding from your check, you'll soon be among the people who are actually paying income taxes. The Trump moves are visibly designed to invite tax evasion by the rich. Tax evasion will still be a crime, remember, but simply not one that is prosecuted.
The effect of this policy will be even worse than giving wealth a new way to evade paying anything resembling their fair share – which they already don't do. It will destroy federal revenues. You can see what comes next: drastic cuts from Medicare and Social Security and "privatizing" of those and other programs in ways that will enable sleazy financial types to rip us off even more.
The second piece – from our foremost observer of the endlessly slimy cyptocurrency "industry" – makes clear that Trump and his wave of corruption are only just getting started. There is no way to look at the actions they've just taken as anything other than legalizing crypto crime. Keep in mind that the Trump family's own crypto plays are transparently corrupt, but that's just a perk of being a president whom the Roberts court has given explicit permission to break every law in sight without the possibility of accountability.
Legalizing tax evasion and crypto fraud will (further) enrich a relative few scumbags. It will leave the rest of us at higher and higher risk. Just the latest in ending democracy and handing over everything of value to the billionaire class.
Pitchforks.
Kidnapping, torture, enslavement – not deportation
CECOT [El Salvador's Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo] is an opportunity for the Trump administration to have what the Bush administration meant Guantanamo Bay to be: a place truly beyond the reach of the law. It represents a reset to the ambitions of the first stage of the War on Terror, one that learned from the reversals of the subsequent stages. After all, no court ever injuncted the U.S. from extraordinary renditions—and we will never know basic information about those renditions, including just how many people the U.S. rendered.
The Trump regime learned from George W. Bush, as this Forever Wars piece explains, when it consigned the new batch of "deportees" to a third country prison "where torture is rampant, confinement can be indefinite, and slave labor such a feature that right-wing President Nayib Bukele posts about it." The cynicism is breathtaking, and the danger to everyone is expanding fast.
The point is not that it's likely to happen to you, or your neighbor, or a member of your family. The point is that it could – and that it's certain to happen to more and more people, including American citizens, going forward. The regime's enemies list is infinitely expandable. And what Trump and his apparatchiks are doing today is practice for much more ambitious plans.
As usual, Big Journalism remains weak-kneed in explaining the abject danger. One of these days, when a "mainstream media" reporter or editor becomes a slave laborer behind the CECOT wall, that may change – but too late to matter.
This newsletter is a compendium of the reporting and commentary that best explains the America's political, economic, and social conditions – and, most important, how we can find a way back from the dark days ahead. You will rarely find anything here from the New York Times or Washington Post or any of the other Big Journalism companies that failed us so completely during the 2024 elections and are now sucking up – even more than usual – to Donald Trump, his cult, and corporate oligarchs. My focus will be on smaller, more honorable outlets (and individuals). I hope you'll support them with your attention and your money. For more details, please read my About page.
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Luke O’Brien
Josh Marshall
Molly White
Spencer Ackerman
