Category: Political issues

Krugman: Trump is destroying what he cannot dominate

Krugman’s Substack post today is a must-read (or must-watch). The YouTube video is above; the transcript is at Substack.

Krugman writes:

When we talk about Hitler’s last days, as I said, one of his last attempted acts was what’s called the Nero Decree, which was an attempt to destroy as much of Germany’s infrastructure as possible, supposedly to deny it to the victorious allies. But clearly, and even there’s some evidence that he actually he clearly thought this as a way of punishing the German people for failing him.

Now, historiography is a little more complicated than that, as it usually is, but that’s clearly the gist of it. That Hitler’s final acts were to basically try to bring everyone else down with him.

Do you really want to say that that’s not what’s going to happen with Trump?

Krugman is on sound historical ground on the Nero Decree:

German History in Documents and Images

Sealing the Third Reich’s Downfall: Adolf Hitler’s “Nero Decree”

Wikipedia on the Nero Decree

Jamelle Bouie calls them out

Elite conservative hacks apparently got a memo a week or two ago telling them to write a rant about “wokeness.” It wasn’t just David Brooks in the Atlantic. It also was Ross Douthat and Brett Stephens in the New York Times. They all wrote essentially the same piece. None of it corresponded to reality. Instead it was just a sickening look into the ugliness of conservative minds, case studies in how conservative minds unconsciously project their own demons out into the world to try to make their hallucinations true.

In this 9 minute video, Jamelle Bouie, who is far more civil than I know how to be, calls them out. It was Douthat, by the way, who used the word McCarthyite.

I suspect that Douthat, in a half conscious, dim-bulb sort of way, explained what’s going on in their minds. These elite conservative hacks have never doubted that they’re the good guys, that they’re the rare gifted souls qualified to morally instruct the rest of us. They are desperately looking for a way to deny how the things they believe in and crusaded for only greased the skids for fascism. They’re desperate to find someone else to blame.

A genius at being wrong


Ross Douthat. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Ross Douthat wrote his last column at the New York Times today. It’s Who Are the Good Guys and Who are the Bad Guys? I’m No Longer Sure.

Douthat’s high-flown but completely addled discourse over the years is a perfect example of why a conservative mind is so disgusting. As I have said many times before, all conservative discourse is derp. Conservative discourse, inevitably, contains intentional deception, or self deception, or both.

In this column Douthat includes a list of why non-conservatives are the bad guys. He states each charge as though it is self-evidently true, not even open to argument.

• The Obama “establishment” was morally permissive and smugly cosmopolitan.
• It failed to anticipate the downsides of expert-driven policy.
• It was caught flat-footed by the darker effects of technological change.
• It pushed social liberalism so far it left vulnerable people “adrift or abandoned to their vices.”
• It blundered in foreign policy by not expecting the non-Western world to push back.
• The Biden “establishment” repeated the same “meritocratic hubris” in a more left-wing key.
• It swapped experts for “interest groups.”
• It “maxxed out” on social liberalism.
• It “unraveled completely in the end.”
• The old elite has “no blueprint suited to contemporary governance.”
• “Peak woke” was “a McCarthyite experience.”
• Blue-state governance “yielded civic and educational collapse.”

Douthat doesn’t feel the need to present any evidence for any of this. To Douthat, it’s just self-evidently true. It serves a propaganda purpose — slandering the left as crudely and deceptively as any meme you’d find on X.

And it all boils down to this: It’s the left that is to blame for American fascism, and it’s no wonder that so many Americans turned to fascism given just how unbearable the Obama and Biden America was.

And then there is his main point: He’s still not sure who the bad guys are.

He does have some criticisms of the Trump regime, but he hedges them all, as though Trump is just some mild sort of person with no real power: “But as Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents. At the moment, Trump 2.0 has no great popularity, no legislative capacity, no policy legacy that a Democratic successor can’t easily roll back.”

So we just roll it back (easily!), and it was nothing but a nothing-burger?

At least we’re rid of Douthat at the Times. I don’t watch television. I don’t have any insight into how much harm people like Douthat can do at CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

It’s both baffling and hilarious. Minds exist that think Donald Trump is noble, wise, godly, and admirable. And minds exist that think Ross Douthat is smart.

Such is the conservative mind.

Posing the wrong question


The cover of a new novel by Michael Tomasky, which I have not read.

It’s a very old trick question, so it’s not surprising that someone wrote a novel about it. The trick question is, “If you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you do it?”

The trick in the question, of course, is to shame the person who says yes and then say that that person is no better than Hitler for being willing to kill a baby.

Why does no one ever seem to see through the trick? It’s the wrong question, and it’s a loaded question.

The right question is: Would the world be better off if one of the attempts to assassinate Hitler had succeeded? Depending on how you count them, there were between 15 and 40 schemes or actual attempts to assassinate Hitler after it was clear that he was a monster.

Framed that way, the obvious answer is: Hell yes. The world would be enormously better off. Millions of lives would have been saved. That question also leaves some room for hedging. To say that the world would be better off stops short of actually advocating a killing.

Would any morally decent person advocate killing a baby? I don’t think so.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on the baby version of the question and reframes the question in the right way: Can you hold a baby responsible for something it has not done? Still, the Wikipedia article thinks that utilitarians would have to say yes.

If you acknowledge that the world would be better off if the adult Hitler had been successfuly assassinated, then you’ve taken a stand on a question that is frequently asked today: Is political violence ever justified? You’ve taken the position that yes, political violence is sometimes justified. That’s a slippery slope, and it’s not a conversation that nice people want to have. Some people’s monsters are other people’s heroes.

A quote is often attributed to Oscar Wilde, though as far as I can determine Wilde never actually said it: “Some people improve the world only by leaving it.”

As a political question, I think the answer boils down to something that we already know quite clearly. That is that democracy contains appropriate solutions when governments go rogue, but that despotism, dictatorship, and tyranny do not.

Historians filled a vacuum. Why is that odd?


Heather Cox Richardson with President Biden. Source: Official White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The New Republic has a rather silly piece today by an obscure academic: How Historians Took Over Liberal Punditry: The hottest resistance talking heads during Trump 2.0 are academics. What happened?

The essay never attempts to answer the question of what happened. After sloshing around quite a bit in her academic specialty — the political mythologies of eastern European countries and how they were shaped by orthodox religion — the author’s point seems to come around to something entirely irrelevant. That is, she accuses historians such as Heather Cox Richardson of paying too little attention to the political mythologies of American evangelicals.

Oh, give us a break. We liberals know all we need to know about the political mythologies of American evangelicals. After all, we’ve seen the consequences of it. And we held our noses against the stench of it long before it led to Trump 2.0. Not to mention that Heather Cox Richardson pretty much wrote the book on how those mythologies were perpetuated after the Civil War.

Since Katherine Kelaidis never offers an answer to the question of what happened, I’ll have a go at it. What happened is that the mainstream media, terrified by fear of attacks from the radical right and held in check by corporate owners, simply cannot tell the plain truth about what has been happening in America. Liberals are not the sort of people to pay attention to know-nothing pundits. So we turned to academics, who just happened to be academics whom we already knew and trusted, like Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman.

There’s a bit of an ancient trap in this — if your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. Katherine Kelaidis, whose only tool is the intersection of religion with national mythologies, just has to believe that there is something in that idea that we all need to have our noses rubbed in.

No we don’t, Katherine Kelaidis. We’re way ahead of you, because we don’t share your blinkers. Now please go back to being obscure.

There’s nothing radical about it


Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The lead story in the New York Times and elsewhere this morning is about how candidates backed by Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor, won their primaries for New York City congressional seats. This, the Times writes, “sent shock waves through the Democratic Party.”

Horse wash.

There are 535 members of the U.S. Congress, and we are talking only about voters in New York City, who are some of the most liberal voters in the country. I don’t see what is so shocking about the idea that members of Congress should represent their districts.

But the New York Times’ spin is much worse than that. The Times’ story reveals how hard the mainstream media work to marginalize common-sense liberal values as though they are radical. The Times felt obliged to include a quote like this one:

“Republicans will very quickly seek to elevate, as they always do, the most radical voices in the Democratic Party,” said Howard Wolfson, a former head of the House Democrats’ campaign arm and a top adviser to Michael R. Bloomberg. “And after tonight, they will have more radical Democrats to choose from.”

Radical, my foot. There is nothing radical about the political values of these supposedly far-left candidates. The media always write about political conflict and rarely about what “far left” Democrats actually want. If they did, they wouldn’t be able to pass it off as radical and far left. Even worse, if the media told people what these “far left” candidates actually want, then more people might vote for them. Here’s a list:

• Higher taxes on high incomes

• Higher taxes on corporations

• Expansion of federal funding for housing, health care, and child care

• Higher minimum wage

• Large-scale investment in renewable energy

• Opposition to fossil fuel expansion

• Stonger emphasis on human rights in foreign policy

• Restrictions on federal surveillance

• Stronger ethics rules in Congress

• Diplomatic rather than military-first foreign policy

Why is it so shocking that people in New York would vote for these things? Our political and media ecosystems regard these ideas as radical. These are the same political and media ecosystems that laundered, sane-washed, and normalized right-wing political values right up to the edge of overt fascism. Why is it radical to start undoing what right-wing government for and by the oligarchy has done to this country?

If we really have a national government, including Democrats, that regards values like those in the list above as dangerously radical, then Mamdani is right. Only the Guardian was brave enough to quote Mamdani:

“The old politics that got us into this crisis is not the politics that’s going to get us out of this crisis.”

Ezra Klein: Snake in the grass. Now we know.


Source: Wikimedia Commons

Ezra Klein triggered my snake-in-the-grass detector long ago. It was clear that he’d sold out to someone, but previously I thought that it was only New York Times management that he’d sold out to, because the New York Times requires both-sidesism in its progressive commentary, and of course Klein wants to keep his job and his elite perch.

But now we know that it’s much darker than that. Yesterday, Wired magazine came out with a horrifying piece about Peter Thiel’s secret “Dialog” society, in which the names of its secret members were leaked. Ezra Klein is on the list, along with other elite snakes such as Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, and even some old snakes like Grover Norquist. The Wikipedia article includes some of the names.

The Wired piece is Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society. It is an invitation-only group. They are all snake aristocracy, and they all know each other.

There is much about Ezra Klein that is irksome, starting with his attitude. Certainly he is smart, but his narcissistic belief that he is ever-so-much smarter than everyone else oozes like pus into everything he writes. His lofty insights, he thinks, are eminently elevated above anything the rest of us common folk can see. So he condescends to point it all out for us, rub our silly noses in it, and then reframe the dialogue.

His grand discovery of the “abundance” theme was one of the things he tried to sell us — Reagan-style supply-side economics warmed over. Too many people fell for it. His brand of liberalism is to save liberals by berating them and bamboozling them. Just think of the gall it takes to repackage anti-regulatory business agendas and right-wing abundance theology as just the thing to save the Democratic Party.

The next Dialog retreat, by the way, is scheduled for August in Ireland.

It will be interesting to see whether the New York Times will be bothered to be embarrassed by this. We stand to learn something about how New York Times management thinks these days.

According to Wired, it was a Swiss hacktivist, who, acting on a tip, found the data and leaked it. This emphasizes how important it is to use every means possible to surveil the global elite to try to track, and expose, what they are up to and how they coordinate their strategy. It’s no surprise that people like Peter Thiel, Jared Kushner, Rick Warren, Ted Cruz, and Tulsi Gabbard are on the list. That we now know that the likes of Ezra Klein and Jonathan Haidt are on the list is a huge breakthrough in open-source intelligence. Some of us saw through Klein’s and Haidt’s disguised agendas long ago. Now, it is to be hoped, nobody (other than Republicans) will ever again take seriously anything they say.

We know who they are. We know what they want.


Graphic by ChatGPT 5.5. Click here for high-resolution version.

Hillary Clinton called it “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” That’s exactly what it is. I should hasten to add that it is not a conspiracy theory, though, because it’s all out in the open now where we can see it. Still, the right-wing elite are as secretive and covert as possible, so it’s a constant challenge to uncover as much as we can of what they’re up to and bring it out into the open.

Once upon a time, so-called conservatives could lie to us about what they really want, mouthing noble-sounding lies about limited government, fiscal responsibility, and personal liberty. But only a tiny handful of them were actually serious about that. (Liz Cheney, please take a bow.)

Now they have revealed what they really want and have wanted all along — a cruel and Stalinist chief executive, a legal system that does not apply to elites but which can be brutally enforced against the little people by militarized police, extreme (and untaxed) wealth, the destruction of institutions that support democracy and expertise, and elite right-wing rule that cannot be challenged by the little people, whether through law, protest, or elections.

What a bunch of nasty people! Part of the work that must be done is helping those who have been deceived by them to see what they really are and what they really want. That’s much easier to see now than it used to be.

I was impressed at Simon Schama’s putdown of J.D. Vance’s outrageous remarks at a D-day ceremony in France. Schama called Vance’s speech “a special kind of loathsomeness: a blend of historical deafness, grotesque stupidity and comically ludicrous self‑importance.” He called Vance “a comic book nobody.”

I’m also thinking of the DNC’s response to Stephen Miller’s vile insult of James Talarico: “Shut up you ugly fuck.”

We don’t have to choose between the high road and the low road. There are no noble terms with which to describe the lowest of the low — the comic book nobodies and ugly fucks who want to own the world and treat the rest of us like cattle.

Remembering that there are smart people in the world


Sarah Paine. Source: YouTube. The interview from which the screen shot was made is here.

Every day and every hour, idiots and fascists flood the zone with you-know-what. The media scramble to deal with it and even manage to expose a lie or two occasionally. But the zone is still flooded with you-know-what, and there’s hardly any bandwidth left over for anything else.

Consequently those of us who know you-know-what when we hear it not only have to do a lot of filtering for the sake of our sanity. We also have to work extra hard to find, and hear, the voices of those who actually know something about the world and whose purpose is to improve the world rather than to rape it.

Sarah Paine is one of the wisest voices out there. Reading about her background in the Wikipedia article reminds us that there are still people who spend their lives learning and teaching rather than making deals, lying, and ripping people off.

Paine has been making herself available for YouTube interviews lately. Almost a million people have watched that interview in the last two months, so people are paying attention. She also had an article in Foreign Affairs last fall. Foreign Affairs is behind a paywall, but there is a PDF of the article available here: By Land or by Sea: Continental Power, Maritime Power, and the Fight for a New World Order. The article is a must-read about how MAGA, if not stopped, is leading the United States toward impoverishment and collapse.

The American intelligentsia have mostly been pushed into the margins today. Fortunately they’re doing their best to continue a real conversation in venues such as YouTube and Substack, where they are needles in a haystack waiting for you to find them. We can dream of a day when we take the microphone away from idiots. Until then we’ll have to work a little harder.

⬆︎ Roger Penrose is 94 years old. He is the Einstein of our time, and for as long as he is still with us, every word he says is priceless. Brian Cox, by the way, though he is television personality in the U.K., also is one of the few people who know enough to do a good interview with Penrose.

⬆︎ Those who have been reading this blog for years will recognize Ken in the video above. I’m linking to this video because it’s charming and because it shows how transformational voices that are drowned out in a zone flooded with you-know-what never go silent. Rather, they do what they can wherever they are, and they keep at it. It was Ken who organized “No Mow May” in the Scottish village of East Linton.


Hummus

⬆︎ Before there were food processors, there were mortars and pestles. I thought of hummus because my cucumber plants just started blooming, and I’ve seen two tiny tomatoes coming along, smaller than peas. Nothing goes better with fresh, raw, summer vegetables than hummus — except maybe pesto. My basil is growing fast. The drought here finally gave way to a rainy spell, and the garden has started taking off.

About that jet that Qatar gave to Trump …


A palace in a Boeing 747 for free? Ha! Source: YouTube

The San Antonio Express-News reported last week that modifications are almost complete in the “flying palace” that Qatar gave to Trump last year: Trump’s Qatari dream jet sets course for Air Force One duty by July 4.

The ultra-rich who already own a big chunk of the planet and who intend to own and control the rest of it all fly around the world in private jets. Increasingly they are contriving to keep these flights secret, but to some degree they can still be tracked.

The Washington Post had a fascinating story last week on how someone built a system for tracking “business jets,” monitoring for a situation in which a large number of these jets converge in one place. The story is Want to track the apocalypse? One theory: Follow the billionaires’ jets.

That’s a brilliant idea. That apocalypse-watch system avoids intimidation by not tracking any oligarch in particular. You may remember the case of the young guy who was targeted by Elon Musk after the guy tracked Musk’s jet and reported the jet’s moves on social media.

All this gave me an idea. I have been using Claude Code to write programs for me, and it has done a fine job. For example, I now have a searchable database of the complete works of Sir Walter Scott, as well as a searchable database of Scott’s letters.

I asked Claude if it would be feasible to track a bunch of planes belonging to super-rich evildoers, log the data into a database, and use that database as a tool for open-source intelligence, which is the only kind of intelligence available to those of us who are poor but who crave to understand what is going on in the world. (I am hardly the only person doing this kind of thing.)

Claude said sure. The work took about two days of Claude time. Claude Code built the system for me in 14 steps — among them acquiring the “tail numbers” and other information about jets to track, creating a database schema, finding a free source of ADS-B tracking data, capturing the data and poking it into the database, and building interfaces to query the database using a web page and an RSS feed.

My system has been running now for only three days. It will take a while to build a strong database containing some very useful history. Most of those planes don’t fly every day. But even after three days, it’s getting interesting.

I don’t have any data yet on American tech billionaires. I’m not sure yet whether that’s because they haven’t flown in the past three days or they have a means of keeping their ADS-B tracking data out of public databases. (I won’t try to describe ADS-B here except to say that every plane of any size is required to constantly transmit a stream of data about its location, altitude, etc. Thousands of ground receivers collect this data. It’s perfectly legal. It’s how you can go on line to see whether the plane you have to meet at the airport is going to be on time. It’s how I know that an Air France flight from Atlanta to Paris often passes right over my house at 9 p.m.)

I am seeing, though, a great deal of flying about by foreign royalty and oligarchs — Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Russia in particular. For example, what does Qatar, a tiny but super-rich oil country ruled by a royal family, have to do with China? I have no idea, but a Qatari Airbus landed in Beijing on Monday, a couple of days before Trump arrives. Is that merely a coincidence? I don’t know, but one of the things to watch for is the sneaky ways global oligarchs meet up to coordinate their moves. The database that Claude built for me has some special logic to monitor for convergences. As for Qatar and Trump, it has long been obvious that they’re trading favors.

As much as I would like to, I can’t put this database on line, because it would attract the wrong kind of attention. But this is one of the ways I try to watch a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere.


A screen capture from my database built by Claude

Update:


Source: Flightradar24

This morning my flight tracking database reported that a plane owned by the U.S. Department of Justice, and believed to be Kash Patel’s plane, was over the North Atlantic. I verified this with FlightRadar24, which says the plane is en route from Richmond, Virginia, to Ankara, Turkey. Why would Patel be going to Turkey? A Google search doesn’t find anything written about that. Patel was just dragged over the coals by a Senate committee for his promiscuous travel at taxpayer expense.