Category: Political issues

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Illustration by ChatGPT. Click here for high-resolution version.

Politico has a piece this morning busting Senator Rand Paul for sending staff to Pittsburgh on a chartered plane at a cost to taxpayers of $18,000. The purpose of the trip was to investigate whether the Secret Service should have done a better job of protecting Trump from an assassination attempt.

A train ticket to Pittsburgh costs about $150 round trip. A commercial flight would cost about $150 to $250 round trip. Congressional staff don’t normally fly on chartered planes. You can be sure, though, that they all want to now — the Republicans, anyway.

My oligarch aircraft tracker database has been running since May 10, 2026. Since then it has tracked 4,655 flights by people who have a lot of money and who are active in the project of making the world safe and profitable for oligarchs. It’s the status symbol that all the wannabes are so eager for now, the transportation version of Mar-a-Lago Face.

Today I had Claude Code run a query on the database to list where American oligarchs have been going to when they travel outside the country. Below, I’m including the raw report as written by Claude Code.

One pig in particular stands out: Kash Patel, Trump’s FBI director. Why does this plane go where it goes? I have no idea, but I suspect the media have stopped tracking Patel’s plane because they have so many other pigs to fry.

A note from Claude: Not every landing is a destination. Long-range private jets still have to refuel, and they do it at a familiar set of waypoints — which is why these lists include places no billionaire is actually visiting. A stop in the Faroe Islands (or Iceland, Greenland, or eastern Canada) is almost certainly a fuel stop on the North Atlantic crossing between North America and Europe. Likewise, brief touchdowns in obscure corners of West Africa — Gambia, Guinea, Cameroon, Cape Verde — are almost certainly refueling stops on the long haul down to South Africa, where the tanks won’t reach in one leg.

Miriam Adelson, 304 landings, including rural Faroe Islands; rural Greece; Petaẖ Tiqva, Israel; Astypálaia, Greece; Rocchetta di Vara, Italy; London, United Kingdom; Vienna, Austria; rural Canada; rural China; Chihuahua, Mexico; rural Cyprus; Larnaca, Cyprus; Kenitra, Morocco; rural Western Sahara; Rishon LeTsiyyon, Israel; rural Brazil; Nice, France; rural Italy; rural Morocco; Mílos, Greece; Tianjin, China; rural Japan; Barcelona, Spain; Pissoúri, Cyprus; Bnei Brak, Israel; Kobe, Japan; Kagoshima, Japan; Hsinchu, Taiwan; Hong Kong, Hong Kong; Zhuhai, China; rural Malaysia; Singapore, Singapore; rural Türkiye; rural Norway; rural Iceland; Toronto, Canada; Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei; rural Philippines; rural Ireland; Ceriale, Italy; Askeaton, Ireland; Fontcoberta, Spain; Venice, Italy; La Spezia, Italy; Sant Antoni de Portmany, Spain; Sixmilebridge, Ireland; rural Greenland; rural Spain; Toyohama, Japan; Makurazaki, Japan; rural Taiwan; rural Mexico; rural Hong Kong

Liberty University, 240 landings, all within the United States.

Steve Wynn, 176 landings, including rural Mexico; Colonia Teñhe, Mexico; Tijuana, Mexico; Mexico City, Mexico

Howard Lutnick, 164 landings, including rural Canada; Paris, France; Carterton, United Kingdom

Ken Griffin, 158 landings, including rural Canada; Kobe, Japan; Tokyo, Japan; Nice, France; Amsterdam, Netherlands; London, United Kingdom; Stabbia, Italy; Gazzola, Italy; Rome, Italy; Paris, France; Jerez de la Frontera, Spain; rural Algeria; Naples, Italy; Milan, Italy; Castelforte, Italy; rural Spain; Genève, Switzerland; Nîmes, France; Santon, Isle of Man; rural Gambia; rural Guinea; Luanda, Angola; rural Cameroon; Johannesburg, South Africa; rural South Africa; rural Italy; rural Dominica; rural Puerto Rico; Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom; Bournemouth, United Kingdom; rural Iceland

Elon Musk, 151 landings, including Reynosa, Mexico

FBI Director, 148 landings, including rural Greece; Ankara, Türkiye; rural Morocco; rural Canada; Seoul, South Korea; rural Japan; rural Philippines; Bangkok, Thailand; rural Cambodia; Jakarta, Indonesia; San Miguel, Philippines; Ningjin, China; Niudaokou, China; rural China; Xinkaikou, China; Larnaca, Cyprus

Lachlan Murdoch, 127 landings, including Sydney, Australia; Melbourne, Australia; rural Canada; London, United Kingdom; Sydney, Canada; rural United Kingdom; Dublin, Ireland; Swinford, Ireland; Sixmilebridge, Ireland; Charlestown, Ireland

Mark Zuckerberg, 115 landings, including rural Canada; London, United Kingdom; Steeple Bumpstead, United Kingdom; rural United Kingdom; rural Iceland; rural Italy; Cavtat, Croatia

Charles Koch, 73 landings, including rural Portugal; Lisbon, Portugal; Paris, France; Cowichan Bay, Canada; rural Bahamas; San Juan, Puerto Rico; rural Puerto Rico; Shawnigan Lake, Canada

Richard Uihlein, 70 landings, including Edmonton, Canada

Peter Thiel, 65 landings, including Shawnigan Lake, Canada; Victoria, Canada; Mill Bay, Canada

Franklin Graham, 64 landings, including rural Canada; rural Bahamas; Madrid, Spain

Tilman Fertitta, 60 landings, including rural Mexico; Lamezia Terme, Italy; Rome, Italy; rural Italy; Munich, Germany; rural Canada; Brindisi, Italy; Messina, Italy; Porto Azzurro, Italy; Casarza Ligure, Italy; Oschiri, Italy; Richmond, Canada; Ottawa, Canada; Montréal, Canada

Harold Hamm, 58 landings, including Bogotá, Colombia; rural Cuba; rural Jamaica; rural Honduras; Atenas, Costa Rica

Kenneth Copeland, 56 landings, all within the United States.

Jeff Bezos, 44 landings, including rural Canada; Paris, France; London, United Kingdom; Silistra, Bulgaria; rural Kazakhstan; Tianjin, China; Tokyo, Japan; rural Fiji; Nadi, Fiji; Sydney, Australia; Zaton, Croatia; Seget Vranjica, Croatia; rural Italy

Harlan Crow, 36 landings, all within the United States.

Donald Trump (family plane, not Air Force 1), 32 landings, including rural Bahamas; rural Canada; Aberdeen, United Kingdom; Prestwick, United Kingdom; rural Ireland; Sixmilebridge, Ireland

David Geffen, 25 landings, including rural Canada; Inca, Spain; rural Spain; Madrid, Spain

Rupert Murdoch, 24 landings, all within the United States.

Timothy Mellon, 5 landings, all within the United States.

Samaritan's Purse, 1 landing, none with a usable position fix.

How this works: Acorn Abbey’s oligarch aircraft tracker continuously monitors 127 aircraft from 22 countries, using publicly available data from the global ADS-B network. Ownership is cautiously assigned from publicly available records. However, aircraft ownership is often obscured behind holding companies such as LLCs, and in some cases cannot be determined with 100 percent confidence. Note too that ADS-B tracks aircraft, not people: who is aboard cannot be known. The Acorn Abbey database and its programming are on a virtual private server in Nuremberg, Germany.

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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?

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.”

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Source: Wikimedia Commons

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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.

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

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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.