FIFA officials know how to play Trump — they know he has the social maturity of a 2-yr-old, so, tell him how great his is and he’ll do whatever you want.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conservatives have spent the last week bitching and moaning about the academic merits of an obscure college essay, a topic in which right-wingers typically show little interest. But in this case, the story isn’t really about college or academia or essays but is instead about yet another front in the right’s never-ending culture wars and an attempt to bully another minority group.

University of Oklahoma junior Samantha Fulnecky has alleged that her First Amendment right to religious freedom is being infringed after her psychology professor gave her an “F” for a paper on the gender norms of middle school students.

Fulnecky, a conservative Christian, used her essay to attack transgender existence. She cited the Bible and said that “eliminating gender in our society would be detrimental, as it pulls us farther from God’s original plan for humans.” Fulnecky argued that “society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic.”

Mel Curth, the graduate teaching assistant who graded Fulnecky’s paper, gave the student a failing grade. Curth, who is a trans woman, wrote that the problem was not with the student’s personal views but because her essay “does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.” A second instructor agreed with Curth’s findings.

After Fulnecky filed a complaint with the school, the right-wing grievance industry went to work.

Turning Point USA is a college-based pressure group created by deceased racist and hate-filled conservative activist Charlie Kirk to push right-wing ideology on college campuses. The group, which itself has a long history of hiring bigots, attacked Curth in a social media post.

“We should not be letting mentally ill professors around students,” the group wrote, supporting Fulnecky’s bigoted worldview.

The school launched a review of Curth and removed her from her position in response to the controversy.

One of the major promoters of the campaign against Curth was Fox News, who featured the story in multiple segments and hosted Fulnecky for an interview. On the network the interview was advertised as “Trans Instructor Fails Student Over Gender Essay.”

The framing of the interview gives up the tactic at play.

Fulnecky is the sort of telegenic conservative figure that the right-wing outrage machine loves to amplify. Conservatism is at a period of extreme strength at the moment—with Republican control of the White House, Congress, and Supreme Court, along with state governorships and legislatures. But the right loves to play victim.

The college student purportedly standing up for “Christian values” against academia, even in very conservative Oklahoma, is too good to resist.  Don’t be surprised if she drops out of college, buys a wardrobe of short skirts and tops with plunging necklines and turns out to be the next big thing on Fox.

The story dovetails almost perfectly with the Trump administration’s assault on institutes of higher learning, defunding important research and shaking down colleges for money in exchange for suppressing speech and admissions.

The academic merits of Fulnecky’s essay are immaterial to the battle at hand. Instead she has been portrayed as an innocent under attack for holding conservative beliefs, which the right has asserted are fundamental American values—even if that means relegating transgender people to second-class citizenship.

The conservative machine is constantly searching for stories like that that tick all of the right’s preferred boxes. They are a way of keeping conservative activists and voters at a fever pitch, ready to turn out to vote—even when leaders they elect like Trump are failing on an array of issues.

The right would much rather have these voters intensely obsessing over a purported victim of “liberal” academia than investigating why food prices are up or why their neighbors are being abducted and harmed.

Focusing on the instructor’s gender identity adds to the right’s strategy of villainizing practically everyone who isn’t a straight white man. This allows the focus to be shifted from individuals and institutions negatively affecting their day-to-day living, be that Republicans in Congress or business leaders, and toward the “other” that they have demonized.

This type of campaign is a major contributing factor to the far-too-pervasive callousness that conservatives have for minorities, which can lead to death and neglect.

Conservatives and their allies in right-wing media like Fox don’t actually care about academic freedom or free expression at colleges and universities. They don’t care about academic merit, and they certainly don’t care about psychology essays.

What they intensely care about is creating another firestorm that can get them votes and allow them to retain and grow their power. It is a strategy that has worked for decades and continues to operate like a well-oiled machine.

 

Late last night (Dec 5), the Trump administration released the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America. It did so quietly, although as foreign affairs journalist at Politico Nahal Toosi noted, the release of the NSS is usually accompanied by fanfare, as it shows an administration’s foreign policy priorities and the way it envisions the position of the U.S. in the world.

The Trump administration’s NSS announces a dramatic reworking of the foreign policy the U.S. has embraced since World War II.

After a brief introduction touting what it claims are the administration’s great successes, the document begins by announcing the U.S. will back away from the global engagements that underpin the rules-based international order that the World War II Allies put in place after that war to prevent another world war.

The authors of the document claim that the system of institutions like the United Nations, alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and free trade between nations that established a series of rules for foreign engagement and a web of shared interests around the globe has been bad for the U.S. because it undermined “the character of our nation.”

Their vision of “our country’s inherent greatness and decency,” requires “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,” “an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age,” and “growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”

Observers referred to the document as National Security Council Report (NSC) 88 and noted that it could have been written in just 14 words. White supremacists use 88 to refer to Adolf Hitler and “fourteen words” to refer to a popular white supremacist slogan.

To achieve their white supremacist country, the document’s authors insist they will not permit “transnational and international organizations [or] foreign powers or entities” to undermine U.S. sovereignty. To that end, they reject immigration as well as “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threatened the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.”

The document reorients the U.S. away from traditional European allies toward Russia.

The authors reject Europe’s current course, suggesting that Europe is in danger of “civilizational erasure” and calling for the U.S. to “help Europe correct its current trajectory” by “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Allowing continued migration will render Europe “unrecognizable” within twenty years, the authors say, and they back away from NATO by suggesting that as they become more multicultural, Europe’s societies might have a different relationship to NATO than “those who signed the NATO charter.”

In contrast to their complaints about the liberal democracies in Europe, the document’s authors do not suggest that Russia is a country of concern to the U.S., a dramatic change from past NSS documents. Instead, they complain that “European officials…hold unrealistic expectations” for an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine, and that European governments are suppressing far-right political parties. They bow to Russian demands by calling for “[e]nding the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

In place of the post–World War II rules-based international order, the Trump administration’s NSS commits the U.S. to a world divided into spheres of interest by dominant countries. It calls for the U.S. to dominate the Western Hemisphere through what it calls “commercial diplomacy,” using “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” and discouraging Latin American nations from working with other nations. “The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity,” it says, “a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”

The document calls for “closer collaboration between the U.S. Government and the American private sector. All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts. Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”

It went on to make clear that this policy is a plan to help U.S. businesses take over Latin America and, perhaps, Canada. “The U.S. Government will identify strategic acquisition and investment opportunities for American companies in the region and present these opportunities for assessment by every U.S. Government financing program,” it said, “including but not limited to those within the Departments of State, War, and Energy; the Small Business Administration; the International Development Finance Corporation; the Export-Import Bank; and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.” Should countries oppose such U.S. initiatives, it said, “[t]he United States must also resist and reverse measures such as targeted taxation, unfair regulation, and expropriation that disadvantage U.S. businesses.”

The document calls this policy a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, linking this dramatic reworking to America’s past to make it sound as if it is historical, when it is anything but.

President James Monroe outlined what became known as the Monroe Doctrine in three paragraphs in his annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. The concept was an attempt for the new American nation to position itself in a changing world.

In the early nineteenth century, Spain’s empire in America was crumbling, and beginning in 1810, Latin American countries began to seize their independence. In just two years from 1821 to 1822, ten nations broke from the Spanish empire. Spain had restricted trade with its American colonies, and the U.S. wanted to trade with these new nations. But Monroe and his advisors worried that the new nations would fall prey to other European colonial powers, severing new trade ties with the U.S. and orienting the new nations back toward Europe.

So in his 1823 annual message, Monroe warned that “the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” American republics would not tolerate European monarchies and their system of colonization, he wrote. Americans would “consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” It is “the true policy of the United States to leave the [new Latin American republics] to themselves, in hope that other powers will pursue the same course,” Monroe wrote.

In fact, with very little naval power, there wasn’t much the U.S. could do to enforce this edict until after the Civil War, when the U.S. turned its attention southward. In the late nineteenth century, U.S. corporations joined those from European countries to invest in Latin American countries. By the turn of the century, when it looked as if those countries might default on their debts, European creditors threatened armed intervention to collect.

After British, German, and Italian gunboats blockaded the ports of Venezuela in 1902, and President Theodore Roosevelt sent Marines to the Dominican Republic to manage that nation’s debt, the president announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. On December 6, 1904, he noted with regret that “[t]here is as yet no judicial way of enforcing a right in international law. When one nation wrongs another or wrongs many others, there is no tribunal before which the wrongdoer can be brought.” If countries allowed the wrong, he wrote, they “put a premium upon brutality and aggression.”

“Until some method is devised by which there shall be a degree of international control over offending nations,” he wrote, “powers…with most sense of international obligations and with keenest and most generous appreciation of the difference between right and wrong” must “serve the purposes of international police.” Such a role meant protecting Latin American nations from foreign military intervention; it also meant imposing U.S. force on nations whose “inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.”

Couched as a form of protection, the Roosevelt Corollary justified U.S. military intervention in Latin American countries, but it still recognized those nations’ right to independence.

Now Trump has added his own “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, promising not to protect Latin American countries from foreign intrusion but to “reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy.” In a speech in January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that the administration is “more than willing to use America’s considerable leverage to protect our interests.”

The administration says it will promote “tolerable stability in the region” by turning the U.S. military away from its European commitments and focusing instead on Latin America, where it will abandon the “failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades” and instead use lethal force when necessary to secure the U.S. border and defeat drug cartels. Then, it says, the U.S. will extract resources from the region. “The Western Hemisphere is home to many strategic resources that America should partner with regional allies to develop,” the plan says, “to make neighboring countries as well as our own more prosperous.”

Walking away from the U.S.-led international systems that reinforce the principles of national self-determination and have kept the world relatively safe since World War II, the Trump administration is embracing the old idea of spheres of influence in which less powerful countries are controlled by great powers, a system in place before World War II and favored now by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, among others.

National security specialist Anne Applebaum wrote: “The new National Security Strategy is a propaganda document, designed to be widely read. It is also a performative suicide. Hard to think of another great power ever abdicating its influence so quickly and so publicly.”

European Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Ulrike Franke commented: “The transatlantic relationship as we know it is over. Yes, we kinda knew this. But this is now official US White House policy. Not a speech, not a statement. The West as it used to be no longer exists.”

Today, Gram Slattery and Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported that Pentagon officials this week told European diplomats in Washington, D.C., that the U.S. wants Europe to take over most of NATO’s defense capabilities by 2027.

This is the President of the United States.  This also is an adult man with the emotional and social maturity of a two-year-old.

Young people are furious. A survey released this week by the Harvard Institute of Politics finds that under-30 Americans are “a generation under profound strain” who’ve lost pretty much any confidence in government or corporate institutions.

By a 57% to 13% margin they told pollsters America is on the wrong track, and only 32% agree that the US is a healthy democracy or even one that’s “somewhat functioning.”

Fully 64% of young American adults say the system is either in trouble or has completely failed. Pollster John Della Volpe summarized the Institute’s findings:

“Young Americans are sending a clear message: the systems and institutions meant to support them no longer feel stable, fair, or responsive to this generation.”

Which raises the urgent question: How the hell did we get here from the widespread prosperity of the postwar years?

The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because they saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS.

Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.

Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91% and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders focused on running their companies, which were growing faster than at any time in the history of America, and avoided participating in politics.

Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower renewed America with:
— modern, state-of-the-art public labs, schools, and public hospitals across the nation;
— nearly free college, trade school, and research support;
— enforcement of antitrust laws which produced healthy small and family businesses;
— unions protecting a third of America’s workers so fully two-thirds of us had a living wage and benefits on a single salary;
— and an interstate highway system, rail system, and network of new airports paid for with tax dollars that transformed the nation’s commerce.

When we handed America over to Ronald Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class. Young people saw a lifetime of opportunity ahead of them, and wealthy people were doing well, too.

The seeds of today’s American crisis were planted just ten years earlier, in 1971, when Lewis Powell, then a lawyer for the tobacco industry, wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” It was a blueprint for the morbidly rich and big corporations to take over the weakened remnants of Nixon’s Republican Party and then seize control of the institutions of America.

Those groups, inspired by Powell, decided to take his advice and infiltrate our universities, create a massive, billion-dollar conservative media infrastructure, pack our courts, integrate themselves into a large religious movement to collect millions of votes, and turn upside-down our tax, labor, abortion, and gun laws.

That effort burst onto the American scene with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented, billionaire-owned GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts for the rich, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, ending Roe v. Wade, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered citizens (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them “dependent on the government”).

Their sales pitch was effective, so we’ve now had 44 years of Republicans’ so-called Reagan Revolution.

It’s time to simply say out loud — as our young people are yelling at us — that it hasn’t worked. For example:

— Republicans told us if we just cut the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was in 1980 down to 37% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else because, they said, the “job creators” would be “unleashed” on our economy.

Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the developed world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over those 44 years from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 65% of us to fewer than half of us. Because of 44 years of Reaganomics, it now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.

— Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted, wherever they wanted, it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.

“An armed society is a polite society” was the bumper sticker back during Reagan’s time, the NRA relentlessly promoting the lie that the Founders and Framers put the Second Amendment into the Constitution so “patriots” could kill corrupt politicians. Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court even got into the act by twisting the law and lying about American history to make guns more widely available.

Instead of a “polite” society or politicians who listened better to their constituents, we ended up with school shootings and a daily rate of gun carnage unmatched anywhere else in the developed world. We regularly terrorize young people with active shooter drills; the number-one cause of death for American children (and only American children) is bullets tearing their bodies apart.

— Republicans told us that if we just ended sex education in our schools, purged our libraries of books, and outlawed abortion, we’d return to “the good old days” when, they argued, every child was wanted and every marriage was happy.

Instead of helping young Americans, we’ve ended up with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and — now that abortion is illegal in state after state — a return to deadly back-alley abortions.

— Republicans told us that if we just killed off Civics and History classes in our schools, we’d “liberate” our young people to focus on science and math.

Instead, we’ve raised two generations of Americans who can’t even name the three branches of government, much less understand the meaning of the Constitution’s reference to the “General Welfare.” And forget about trying to explain to them the difference between Hitler’s fascism, Stalin’s communism, and the modern-day governments of Russia, Hungary, and China. Or what Trump and his cronies are up to.

— Republicans told us that if we cut state and federal aid to higher education — which in 1980 paid for about 80% of a student’s tuition — so that students would have “skin in the game,” we’d see students take their studies more seriously and produce a new generation of engineers and scientists to prepare us for the 21st century.

Instead of happy students, since we cut that 80% government support down to around 20% (with the 80% now covered by students’ tuition), our nation is groaning under a $2 trillion dollar student debt burden, preventing young people from buying homes, starting businesses, or beginning families.

While students are underwater, the banksters who own Republican politicians are making billions in profits every single week of the year from these bizarrely non-negotiable student loans, the consequence of legally paid-off legislators (because of Clarence Thomas‘s tie-breaking vote in Citizens United).

— Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and thus “more efficient.”

Instead, we’ve seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, inflation-causing price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s hard to find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many being sucked dry by hedge funds or private equity as we enter the cancer stage of capitalism. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants and the door to entrepreneurialism is largely closed to Zoomers.

— Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.

Stock buybacks used to be called felony stock manipulation, but Reagan legalized the practice in 1983. As a result, every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives while workers, the company, communities, and even the businesses themselves suffer the loss.

— Republicans told us that if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy most of our media, a thousand flowers would grow and we’d have the most diverse media landscape in the world. At first, as the internet was opening in the 90s, they even giddily claimed it was happening.

Now a small handful of billionaires and often-rightwing companies own our major media/internet companies, radio and TV stations, as well as local newspapers across the country. In such a landscape, progressive voices, as young people will tell you, are generally absent.

— Republicans told us we should hand all our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who would decide which of our doctor’s suggestions they’d approve for payment and which they’d reject. They said this “pre-approval” process would “lower costs and increase choice.”

Instead, in all of the entire developed world — all the 34 OECD countries on 4 continents — there are ~500,000 medical bankruptcies a year…and every single one of them is here in America. And now, as Republicans fight to prevent the renewal of Obamacare subsidies, millions — particularly young people working low-wage jobs — will simply be forced to drop health insurance altogether.

— Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.

As everybody can see, they lied. And are still lying as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization (around a third of us) we had before Reagan’s Great Republican Experiment (now only a tenth of us have a union).

— Republicans told us if we went with the trade agreement the GHW Bush administration had negotiated — NAFTA — and then signed off on the WTO, that we’d see an explosion of jobs.

There was an explosion all right; lots of them, in fact, as over 60,000 American factories were blown up, torn down, or left vacant because their production was moved to China or elsewhere. Over 15 million good-paying union jobs went overseas along with those 60,000 factories.

Republicans told us global warming was a hoax: they’re still telling us that, in fact. And therefore, they say, we shouldn’t do anything to interfere with the profits of their wealthy donors in the American fossil fuel industry and the Middle East.

The hoax, it turns out, was the lie that there was no global warming, a lie that the industry spent hundreds of millions over decades to pull off. By purchasing the GOP, they succeeded in delaying action on global warming for at least three decades and maybe as many as five. That lie produced trillions in profits and brought us the climate crisis that is today killing millions and threatens all life on Earth.

— And then, of course, there’s the biggest GOP lie of them all: “Money is the same thing as Free Speech and corporations are persons with rights under the Bill of Rights.” Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court told us that if we threw out around 1000 anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws at both the state and federal level so politicians and political PACs could take unaccountable billions, even from foreign powers, it would “strengthen and diversify” the range of voices heard in America.

It’s diversified it, for sure. We’re now regularly hearing from racists and open Nazis, many of them elected Republican officials, who would have been driven out of decent society before the Reagan Revolution. American political discourse hasn’t been this filled with conflict and violence since the Civil War, and much of it can be traced straight back to the power and influence of dark money unleashed by those five billionaire-bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court.

— So now Donald Trump tells our young people that it’s time to make take the next big step — to reject democracy — as the logical outcome of the Reagan Revolution.

He says if we just abandon the rule of law and make him an uncountable emperor for life; punish with prison his political enemies; make women, Blacks, and Hispanics second-class citizens; end immigration for everybody except white South Africans; and forge alliances with dictators around the world, that life in America will become wonderful.

It should shock no one that young people aren’t buying this GOP bullshit.

The bottom line is that we as a nation have now had the full Republican experience. We’ve done pretty much everything they suggested or demanded.

And as a result, young Americans are increasingly disgusted when they hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).

Or welfare (that the GOP damaged and then exploited).

Or even whatever these sanctimonious Republicans are calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women and pre-teen girls to give birth against the threat of imprisonment, hiding Trump’s association with Epstein and Maxwell, or burning books.

Or having masked secret police kidnap people, including children, off the streets of our cities and throwing them into god-awful hellhole prisons.

Not to mention Donald Trump’s sinister “revenge” campaign against the Americans he sees as his “enemies,” his eliminating pollution controls that protected our environment in exchange for a billion dollars in fossil fuel industry donations, and giving his billionaire donors another massive tax cut, to be paid for by the same next generation who’re protesting against him.

America’s young people are over it, Republicans, and they’re going to reboot this nation to fulfill its potential and promise.

A new, progressive America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution and the GOP and its billionaire owners can’t stop it much longer.

Thursday, Dec 4,  served as a bracing reminder of the damage that Trump is inflicting on the rule of law, the Constitution, and norms of democracy—and the challenge we will face in repairing that damage when we regain control of Congress and the presidency.

The damage is so deep and pervasive that we must resolve to act boldly and decisively in restoring democracy. We will face a generational challenge that must not consume a generation to correct. While we should act responsibly and lawfully, we must act with ‘all deliberate speed’ to restore the Constitution and the rule of law to their proper places of primacy in American democracy.

In short order, Trump has managed to corrupt the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice, and the senior leadership of the US military (among other government agencies). He did so by compromising, neutralizing, or replacing small groups of leaders in each of those organs of democracy. But for the cowardice and complicity of men and women like Chief Justice John Roberts, Special Operations Commander Admiral Frank Bradley, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump’s lawless reign could be slowed or stopped.

But instead of honoring their oaths to the Constitution and defending the rule of law with intellectual honesty and moral clarity, they resort to cunning and equivocation to exalt Trump above all else. History will remember them as cowards and quislings who were called to defend democracy but chose to betray it.

Remember their names: John Roberts, Frank Bradley, Pete Hegseth, and Pam Bondi. History will consign them to the special infamy reserved for the likes of Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump.

The point of this article is not to catalogue “bad news.” It is to remind us that we are being called to reverse damage to the very infrastructure of democracy. That task demands that we be bold and relentless in redeeming democracy. Half-measures and performative bipartisanship are luxuries that are freighted with an intolerable cost—the perpetuation of Trump’s racist, misogynistic, anti-science, and anti-democratic policies that are infecting every branch of government and harming Americans as we speak.

We must act with moral clarity, firmness of purpose, and urgency while adhering to the Constitution and embracing truth and compassion as our twin compasses.

For those fighting to defend democracy, it was a rough day—but one that must serve as a reminder of why we are called to ‘dare mighty things’ in redeeming democracy.

 

Supreme Court uses “shadow docket” to reinstate the race-based new districts demanded by Trump.

As you will recall, Trump has demanded that red states engage in a dubious mid-census gerrymandering to create additional “safe” Republican seats going into the 2026 midterms. The Texas legislature re-drew those districts by manipulating the concentration of Latino voters—as explicitly suggested by the Trump administration. A three-judge panel found that the race-based gerrymander violated the Voting Rights Act and ordered that Texas revert to the congressional districts as drawn in 2021.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a stay of the three-judge panel’s order. I could describe the Supreme Court’s flimsy rationale, but doing so would elevate a nakedly partisan decision to a status it does not deserve.

The Court once again used its “shadow docket” to decide a momentous case without briefing or argument. The decision follows a long line of “shadow docket” decisions in which the Court granted Trump partisan political victories at a shockingly high rate. The Court’s decisions are so partisan that they make no effort to provide a legal rationale. Instead, the Court states a conclusion—“Trump will likely win”—without explaining why.

The abuse of the shadow docket to advance Trump’s partisan interests is corruption, plain and simple. The Court has destroyed the net reserve of legitimacy accumulated over two-and-a-half centuries.

The Supreme Court is both a joke and an insult to the Constitution and the American people. When Democrats regain control of Congress and the presidency, the precondition for restoring democracy is expanding the Supreme Court to curb the influence of the reactionary majority.

The newly enlarged court must then systematically and rapidly reverse a dozen or more of the reactionary majority’s worst decisions: Citizens United, Dobbs, Shelby County v Holder, Trump v. US, Rucho v. Common Cause, Kennedy v. Bremerton, NY Rifle v. Bruen, and more.

Expand the Court to 27 justices (the same size as the 9^th Circuit). Not 13. Not 15. No more half measures. Prevent the situation where 2 or 3 “swing” justices can make “deals” that affect the fate of 340 million Americans. The 9^th Circuit works just fine with 27 judges. The nation has expanded nearly a hundredfold since 1789. The Supreme Court has added just 3 justices during the nation’s hundredfold expansion. The Court is severely undersized, given the growth of our union and our economy.

Question: Won’t Republicans do the same thing if they regain a trifecta in the future?

Answer: If we constrain our efforts to restore democracy for fear of what “Republicans might do” in the future, we will do nothing. We must be bold and decisive. And if Republicans ever seek to expand the Court to overcome the Democratic appointee majority, Republicans will need to expand the Court to 55 justices. At that point, people may see the wisdom of a constitutional amendment to limit terms, allocate appointments among presidential terms, etc.

Trump has destroyed the Court by converting it into an arm of the executive branch. Accept that fact and rebuild it from scratch.

Objection: If you expand the Court to achieve a partisan super-majority, you will destroy the Court’s legitimacy.

Answer: Too late for that. Trump and John Roberts have already destroyed the Court’s legitimacy.

 

A federal grand jury refuses to indict Letitia James on fabricated charges of mortgage fraud

The disqualification of Lindsey Halligan as the “acting” US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia resulted in the dismissal of indictments previously obtained by Halligan against James Comey and Letitia James.

On Thursday, assistant US Attorneys in the Eastern District of Virginia attempted to obtain an indictment against Letitia James for mortgage fraud. Per reports of people with knowledge of the situation, the grand jury refused to indict Letitia James. See CBS News, Grand jury refuses to re-indict Letitia James.

The refusal of a grand jury to indict is exceedingly rare. Per the CBS article, the DOJ sought 150,000 indictments in 2024. Grand juries refused to return indictments in only 6 of those cases.

The fact that a grand jury refused to indict Letitia James demonstrates the manifest bad faith and vindictive motivation of the charges against James. Any responsible Attorney General would order prosecutors to stand down. But Pam Bondi will order that different US attorneys attempt to obtain an indictment from different grand jurors.

It pains me to say this, but the DOJ is a corrupt institution. Yes, individual attorneys may be serving honorably, but the head of the Justice Department is corrupt. Every honest attorney and staff member serves at the pleasure of Pam Bondi’s corruption.

In a perfect world where people didn’t have to worry about the financial consequences, the 37,000 attorneys employed by the DOJ should resign en masse. As it is, Bondi will just move on to the next set of pliable attorneys willing to sacrifice their reputations to retain their jobs by seeking an indictment against an innocent woman.

Sad.

Reforming the DOJ will be one of the first orders of business of the next Democratic president.

 

DOJ considering “seditious conspiracy” charges against six members of Congress who made video telling troops to refuse illegal orders.

Speaking of the corruption at the DOJ and the willingness of some attorneys to sacrifice their reputations to please Trump and Bondi, the DOJ is considering bringing charges for seditious conspiracy against the six members of Congress who made a video telling troops that they could disobey illegal orders. See Talking Points Memo, Dems Targeted By Trump FBI Respond to ‘Seditious Conspiracy’ Report: ‘This Isn’t About Me’.

Per TPM,

FBI HQ is reportedly pressuring its domestic terrorism agents to launch a seditious conspiracy investigation into the six Democrats who recently published a video calling on active duty service members to remember their oath to the Constitution and their duty to refuse illegal orders, according to Bloomberg. [¶]

Three people familiar with the situation told Bloomberg that career officials in the FBI’s Washington Field Office have, at least for now, rebuffed the request for a seditious conspiracy investigation:

The Washington office supervisors cited a lack of legal and factual basis to initiate a criminal case against the senators and House members who posted a video Nov. 18 reminding service members and the intelligence community of their rights to “refuse illegal orders.

 

Admiral Bradley meets with members of Congress, describes cold-blooded killing of defenseless survivors of boat attack

Admiral Frank Bradley, the head of the Navy’s Special Operations Command, met with members of Congress to convince them that the Navy did not commit a war crime or murder of defenseless civilians in an attack on an alleged “drug boat.”

Admiral Bradley told a stark story that dropped many of the fabricated justifications for the second attack (like the claim that the survivors were using a radio to ask for help).

In summary, the two survivors clung to the partially destroyed, capsizedhull of a boat that had been torn apart by missiles. The survivors were in the water for 48 minutes, struggling to save themselves. Under the law of war, the Geneva Convention, the UCMJ, and maritime law, the obligation of the Navy was to save those survivors.

Instead, it dropped two bombs on two men struggling to stay alive in open waters by clinging to a portion of a destroyed hull.

Admiral Bradley said that he believed they still presented a “threat” because they might be able to “continue their drug mission.”

Bradley’s excuse is pathetic. An honorable member of the military would admit the truth, resign, and face the consequences. By quibbling and fabricating, Admiral Bradley brings dishonor on all members of SOCOM, SEAL Team Six, and the Navy. He is a disgrace, and he will eventually be held accountable for ordering that two helpless survivors of a shipwreck be killed by dropping two bombs on them.

See CNN, Exclusive: Survivors clinging to capsized boat didn’t radio for backup, admiral overseeing double-tap strike tells lawmakers.

Per the CNN article, here is Admiral Bradley’s reasoning for believing that it was appropriate to kill two men clinging to the wreckage of a destroyed boat:

Bradley told lawmakers, he ordered a second strike to destroy the remains of the vessel, killing the two survivors, on the grounds that it appeared that part of the vessel remained afloat because it still held cocaine, according to one of the sources. The survivors could hypothetically have floated to safety, been rescued, and carried on with trafficking the drugs, the logic went.

If you think Bradley’s rationale is fatuous, you are not alone. The CNN article quotes a participant in the conference call in which Bradley laid out his thinking as follows:

The other source with direct knowledge of the briefing called that rationale “f**king insane.”

Bradley’s rationale could apply to any survivor in any battle: Survivors could go on to fight another day, even though they are incapacitated on the battlefield and therefore (under Admiral Bradley’s rationale) can be killed. That conclusion flies in the face of the law of war, the Geneva Convention, the UCMJ, and maritime law.

The Inspector General report says Hegseth’s use of Signal App endangered lives of US troops

The report of the Pentagon’s inspector general concluded that Pete Hegseth endangered the lives of US troops by his use of the consumer app, Signal, to inform family and friends about the US attack on the Houthis. See The New Republic, Hegseth risked troops’ lives with signal messages, watchdog concludes.

The Inspector General’s Report says the following:

We concluded that the Secretary sent sensitive, nonpublic, operational information that he determined did not require classification over the Signal chat on his personal cell phone. . . . [W]e concluded that the Secretary’s actions did not comply with DoD Instruction 8170.01, which prohibits using a personal device for official business and using a nonapproved commercially available messaging application to send nonpublic DoD information.

The Secretary sent nonpublic DoD information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those strikes.

Using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send nonpublic DoD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DoD personnel and mission objectives.

Hegseth refused to cooperate with the investigation, refused to turn over his phone, and refused to provide Signal messages that he forwarded to others because the messages were set to self-destruct—a violation of federal law.

Although the inspector general concludes that Hegseth’s actions “risks . . . harm to DoD personnel and mission objectives,” Hegseth claims that the report “completely exonerates” him—which is the opposite of the conclusion in the report.

Hegseth should resign or be fired at the first possible moment.

 

A few quick notes:

Healthcare: Republicans are attempting to come up with a healthcare plan in the next three weeks. Unfortunately, they don’t have a plan and there is no consensus in the Republican caucus on the broad parameters of a plan. See HuffPo, Republicans Under Pressure To Deliver Long-Awaited Health Care Plan.

East Wing Architect resigns. The architect chosen by Trump to design the East Wing ballroom has resigned, reportedly over a disagreement about the size of the ballroom Trump wants built in the proposed replacement for the East Wing. See USA Today, Trump taps new architect for White House ballroom amid clash over size.

Per USA Today,

The move comes after James McCrery II, the project’s original lead architect, expressed concerns to Trump about the size of the project and the ballroom overshadowing the main White House building, according to a report from the Washington Post.

The new architect is Shalom Baranes of Washington, DC.

The United States has a drug problem. Provisional data (as of May 14, 2025) from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate there were an estimated 80,391 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2024—a decrease of 26.9% from the 110,037 deaths estimated in 2023. That’s more deaths than from kidney disease and less than from diabetes. Opioid use disorder affects 2.1 million people in the US, statistic as of 2024.

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have decided that the most effective way to deal with this problem is to kill people with small boats off South America, which may be trafficking narcotics. They accuse the people they are killing of “poisoning” Americans.

The standard treatments for opioid use disorder involve social and psychological interventions, along with supportive medication to lessen the effects of the opioids. The Trump administration has cut money for such treatments.

The accusation of “poisoning” and the claims for the numbers of American lives saved with each boat destroyed make sense only if a network of attackers are forcibly injecting Americans with the drugs. Those Americans use the drugs themselves as a result of psychological and physical disabilities.  The numbers are absurd – 25,000 lives per boat out of a total of 80,000 deaths last year.

If the boats being destroyed are carrying drugs, which the administration has asserted but not shown to be the case, they may not be headed for the United States, but other points in the Caribbean and Central America. Major drug trafficking routes to the US come in other directions.

The administration also claims that the sales of these drugs support the control of cities by drug cartels, another assertion not proved. While there may be skirmishes between gangs, none are in control of any cities.

The Coast Guard has been interdicting drug runners for decades. They stop the boats, confiscate the cargoes, and turn the people over to law enforcement.

There is no reason to use the military for this civil problem. We all know this, but I thought it was worth spelling out.

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In Trump 1.0, professionals were sometimes able to curtail the worst impulses of Trump and his closest cronies. In Trump 2.0, these people get pushed out:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shocked official Washington in mid-October when he announced that the four-star head of U.S. military operations in the Caribbean was retiring less than a year into his tenure.

But according to two Pentagon officials, Hegseth asked Adm. Alvin Holsey to step down, a de facto ouster that was the culmination of months of discord between Hegseth and the officer. It began days after President Trump’s inauguration in January and intensified months later when Holsey had initial concerns about the legality of lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, according to former officials aware of the discussions.

Not long after, Hegseth announced that Holsey would be retiring.

Hegseth’s move, which hasn’t been previously reported, sheds new light on a brewing controversy over the legality of the military’s campaign in the Caribbean, and raises questions over whether servicemembers with concerns about the attacks are being listened to.

While Hegseth has dismissed a number of high-ranking military leaders since taking over the Pentagon, the ouster of a commander during an unfolding military operation was an extraordinary move, lawmakers and experts note.

“Having [Holsey] leave at this particular moment, at the height of what the Pentagon considers to be the central action in our hemisphere, is just shocking,” says Todd Robinson, who served as assistant secretary for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs until January.

Remember that Hegseth’s support of war criminals was the main reason Trump selected him in the first place.

A sickening moral slum of an administration

George Will;  Washington Post, Dec 2

 Regarding Venezuela, Ukraine and much more, Trump and his acolytes are worse than simply incompetent.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.

In 1967, novelist Gwyn Griffin published a World War II novel, “An Operational Necessity,” that 58 years later is again pertinent. According to the laws of war, survivors of a sunken ship cannot be attacked. But a German submarine captain, after sinking a French ship, orders the machine-gunning of the ship’s crew, lest their survival endanger his men by revealing where his boat is operating. In the book’s dramatic climax, a postwar tribunal examines the German commander’s moral calculus.

No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. His order was reported by The Post from two sources (“The order was to kill everybody,” one said) and has not been explicitly denied by Hegseth. President Donald Trump says Hegseth told him that he (Hegseth) “said he did not say that.” If Trump is telling the truth about Hegseth, and Hegseth is telling the truth to Trump, it is strange that (per the Post report) the commander of the boat-destroying operation said he ordered the attack on the survivors to comply with Hegseth’s order.

Forty-four days after the survivors were killed, the four-star admiral who headed the U.S. Southern Command announced he would be leaving that position just a year into what is usually a three-year stint. He did not say why. Inferences are, however, permitted.

The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine demonstrated.

Marco Rubio, who is secretary of state and Trump’s national security adviser, seemed to be neither when the president released his 28-point plan for Ukraine’s dismemberment. The plan was cobbled together by Trump administration and Russian officials, with no Ukrainians participating. It reads like a wish-list letter from Vladimir Putin to Santa Claus: Ukraine to cede land that Russia has failed to capture in almost four years of aggression; Russia to have a veto over NATO’s composition, peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and the size of Ukraine’s armed forces. And more.

Rubio, whose well-known versatility of convictions is perhaps not infinite, told some of his alarmed former Senate colleagues that the plan was just an opening gambit from Russia — although Trump demanded that Ukraine accept it within days. South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, a precise and measured speaker, reported that, in a conference call with a bipartisan group of senators, Rubio said the plan was a Russian proposal: “He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.” Hours later, however, Rubio reversed himself, saying on social media that the United States “authored” the plan.

The administration’s floundering might reflect more than its characteristic incompetence. In a darkening world, systemic weaknesses of prosperous democracies are becoming clearer.

Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell’s 1976 book, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” argued that capitalism’s success undermines capitalism’s moral and behavioral prerequisites. Affluence produces a culture of present-mindedness and laxity; this undermines thrift, industriousness, discipline and the deferral of gratification.

Today’s cultural contradictions of democracy are: Majorities vote themselves government benefits funded by deficits, which conscript the wealth of future generations who will inherit the national debt. Entitlements crowd out provisions for national security. And an anesthetizing dependency on government produces an inward-turning obliviousness to external dangers, and a flinching from hard truths.

Two weeks ago, the chief of staff of the French army said: “We have the know-how, and we have the economic and demographic strength to dissuade the regime in Moscow. What we are lacking … is the spirit which accepts that we will have to suffer if we are to protect what we are. If our country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children … or to suffer economically because the priority has to be military production, then we are indeed at risk.”

Putin has surely savored the French recoil from these words. And he has noticed that, concerning Ukraine and the attacks on boats near Venezuela, the Trump administration cannot keep its stories straight.

This probably is for reasons Sir Walter Scott understood: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/ when first we practise to deceive!” Americans are the deceived.