In a story for WBEZ (signup required; Apple News+ link), Adriana Cardona-Maguigad writes that “attorneys with the National Immigrant Justice Center and the ACLU of have Illinois” accused the federal government of violating immigration law—arrests without probable cause, “making arrests without proper warrants and creating warrants in the field after the arrests,” which allegedly violate something called the Nava Settlement.

The story includes this revelation about one of the arrested people:

[…] Chicago resident Julio Noriega, 54, a U.S. citizen […] was arrested, handcuffed and spent most of the night at an ICE processing center […]. He was never questioned about his citizenship, and was only released after agents looked at his ID.

“I was born in Chicago, Illinois and am a United States citizen,” Noriega said in his statement, adding that on Jan. 31, after buying pizza in Berwyn he was surrounded by ICE agents and arrested. Officers took away his wallet, which had his ID and social security card. “They then handcuffed me and pushed me into a white van where other people were handcuffed as well.”

ICE arrested a US citizen—born here!—because, I presume, he “looks like” an immigrant and has “an immigrant’s” last name. No questions, no due process. He was held for ten hours:

He was released after midnight without any way to return home and without documentation of what happened […].

Appallingly, this isn’t the only instance of citizens being detained. Since Trump retook office, ICE agents are allegedly targeting people they presume don’t look or sound American, including Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans and Navajo Nation tribal members.

We’ve officially entered the snatching Americans and legal immigrants off the streets phase of fascism. Next, we’ll be told it’s merely protective custody.

Kaveh Akbar drops a searingly emotional piece for The Nation in reaction to the abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk:

This is, more than anything, a plea for principled leftists to rise en masse and not just decry but disrupt a nation helmed by gleeful genocideers. I’m writing frantically, aware my prose is ugly, overearnest, unvetted against worst-faith readers. It’s graceless, unlovely. So am I.

Tonight I want to be understood, not appreciated.

I could quote the piece at length, but to do so would be a disservice to both Akbar and to you.

It’s critical that I share this plea, however:

I want to tell you powerlessness is an alibi. Hopelessness too. I want to ask, what specifically are you going to do? Tomorrow, the next day? What’s your “I am Spartacus” move to protect the more vulnerable, the targeted, the invisibled, the next-on-the-list?

I want to say, it’s your turn now, help. This is us asking you while we still can.

I’ve taken one tiny step: I added the phone number for the San Francisco Immigrant Rapid Response Hotline (415-200-1548) to my contacts, so I’m prepared to act if I see someone being confronted by ICE.

Find the equivalent service in your area and add the number to your phone.

I finally brought myself to watch the video of ICE’s abduction of Tufts PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk. It’s even more disturbing than I expected after reading the story because, watching, it looks exactly like a random kidnapping off the streets—plainclothes men and women, with masks, approaching a woman and coercing her into an SUV. It was simply done quietly, with badges and handcuffs, instead of loudly, with guns and chloroform-soaked handkerchiefs.

Opportunistic criminals with two-bit tin badges can now confidently disappear someone off the street, and we’ll simply assume they’re with ICE. 

That ambushing people on the street or at home is tolerated, even applauded by a fraction of Americans—and defended by our government officials, no less—is profoundly alarming. That it’s done in such a casual manner is equally disturbing.

At what point does ICE become indistinguishable from the Gestapo?

The Wall Street Journal ran this story Wednesday evening (Apple News+ link) by Michael R. Gordon, Nancy A. Youssef, and Lindsay Wise, posted at 6:26 pm EDT, under the headline “Hegseth Comes Under Scrutiny for Texting Strike Details as Fallout Grows” and the subhead “Republicans react with concern about new details on posts about weapons used and timing of Yemen attack.”

It reads like the first sharp blows of an upcoming hit piece against Hegseth, presented initially as mostly Democratic criticisms, with a few Republicans tossed in so those criticisms aren’t dismissed out of hand.

The entire piece is filled with jabs and body blows, each one preceded by a slight feint of a defense of Hegseth’s actions before countering with a gut punch of reality.

One example: About his decision to share “specific times that F-18s, MQ-9 Reaper drones and Tomahawk cruise missiles would be used in the attack” and “that an unnamed target of the strikes was at a ‘known location’”, the WSJ dryly notes:

Such information is normally guarded carefully by the Pentagon before imminent strikes to avoid disclosures that could help adversaries. 

Hegseth’s lack of qualifications for the position is also called out—he’s “never held a senior national security post”—with the paper noting his experience as a “former Army National Guard major and Fox News host” and following up with a comment from “Sen. Mark Kelly, the Arizona Democrat who flew combat missions in the 1991 Persian Gulf war as a naval aviator,” who dubbed Hegseth “the most unqualified Secretary of Defense we’ve ever seen.”

Then, WSJ has other chat participants doing their best to distance themselves from Hegseth, basically saying “I didn’t post classified information in the chat.…”

But to me, the real tells about Hegseth’s future come from the various members of the military and security communities—past and present—making their (anonymous) opinions clear:

Several U.S. military officials said the strike information Hegseth included was still classified as secret when he shared it.

And:

Targeting plans and the employment of American forces have long been considered to be highly classified before action is taken because their disclosure can tip off adversaries and provide them with insights on how the U.S. conducts sensitive military operations, former officials and national security experts say.

The WSJ added:

Top national-security officials have access to secure communications on government networks designed for classified discussions about such information.

They then closed thusly:

Earlier this month, the Pentagon sent an advisory to all military personnel warning that a “vulnerability” had been identified in Signal and warned against using it for classified information.

“It borders on incompetence,” Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator and defense secretary during the Obama administration, said of Hegseth’s texts. “It’s certainly reckless.”

It’s tough to run the Department of Defense if the military you’re responsible for doesn’t trust you to keep their secrets and keep them safe.

To me, all of this adds up to Hegseth’s resignation because “the fake news media has made this story a distraction to President Trump’s important agenda to Make America Great Again.”

I expect a WSJ Opinion calling for his resignation within the week, Hegseth’s decision to step away soon after, and reluctant acceptance by Trump, who will undoubtedly cast it as a “witch hunt,” and be followed by the inevitable pardon.

Not too much new in this New York Times annotated version of The Atlantic’s leaked Signal chat, but I sniggered several times at the obvious delight the reporters took in slapping the Trump administration officials. For example, this, from Helene Cooper, on Pete Hegseth’s response to J.D. Vance:

Pete Hegseth: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.

Cooper: Mr. Hegseth is echoing here a Trump-administration critique that the U.S. Navy does more to keep shipping lanes through the Suez Canal open than European naval forces do. Using words like “loathing” and “pathetic” will likely make his next meetings with European counterparts dicey.

“Dicey.” Right.

Axios also has a great compendium of the Trump administration’s repeated denials of any classified information being leaked in that Signal chat:

After Goldberg published a partial version of the texts, withholding key details for national security reasons, national security adviser Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegsethswiftly went into shoot-the-messenger mode. […]

Here’s how those statements match with what we learned in the subsequent Atlantic story.

My favorite:

Ratcliffe in the Senate hearing said he was not “aware” of any “information on weapons packages, targets or timing” that was discussed in the chat. Gabbard concurred.

The texts include a detailed sequencing of the timing of the attacks, to include Hegseth’s to-the-minute breakdown of when F-18s and drones would take off and drop their payloads.

Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, and Shane Harris share the byline on this story detailing exactly what was shared in that now-infamous Signal chat. (Apple News+ link.)

So, about that Signal chat.

I chuckled at the dry acknowledgement that a chat thread is the biggest story of the week.

Much of the text thread reads like first-time managers receiving status updates from their teams and, having no understanding of what it is or means, naively share it, believing it makes them look like they’re “in the loop.”

I also get a distinct vibe (from Pete Hegseth, especially) of “check out what I know! I’m cool now!”

Goldberg and Harris:

On Monday, shortly after we published a story about a massive Trump-administration security breach, a reporter asked the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, why he had shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen on the Signal messaging app. He answered, “Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

It surprises no one that Hegseth (and Mike Waltz, Tulsi Gabbard, and the rest, all the way up to Trump himself) would deny any top-secret national security information was leaked. What’s surprising is those denials would come knowing Goldberg had screenshots of the Signal thread—and that it was already confirmed as legitimate by administration officials.

In my head canon, Goldberg presented the original story as he did, confident the administration would go into full-on denial mode, and claim, as they did, that the material shared was not classified, thus freeing him to post the thread in its entirety:

At a Senate hearing yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, were both asked about the Signal chat, to which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently invited by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz. “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group,” Gabbard told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ratcliffe said much the same: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

President Donald Trump, asked yesterday afternoon about the same matter, said, “It wasn’t classified information.”

I can’t be sure that releasing the full chat was the plan from the outset, but it must be deeply satisfying to use a person’s (or administration’s) predilection for lying against them.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was added to a Signal thread with 17 high-ranking Trump administration officials, where the group proceeded to discuss what could only be considered top secret information (Apple News+ link):

At 11:44 a.m., the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” posted in Signal a “TEAM UPDATE.” I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts. The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.

The entire story demonstrates a stunning disregard—willful or otherwise—for even basic operational security procedures among people entrusted with our nation’s most sensitive secrets.

As Goldberg notes:

Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.

Every Monday, new Apple employees receive a stern lecture about keeping devices and communications secure, and ensuring sensitive information isn’t accidentally leaked to those not authorized to receive it. Literally on Day One. 

At Apple, this level of security malfeasance has cost people their jobs, and in any other administration—or, more precisely, in any Democratic administration—this would be a huge scandal, and people would be fired—and quite possibly prosecuted—for leaking this information. I’m also confident that had Goldberg shared the Signal thread prior to the bombings, he would be arrested and tried for treason.

I doubt the stunningly reckless behavior of these officials will result in even a hand-slap.

(Via Laffy.)

Jasmine Mooney writes in The Guardian about her harrowing experience being locked up in a series of ICE facilities after her visas were revoked:

I was taken to a tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights and a toilet. There were five other women lying on their mats with the aluminum sheets wrapped over them, looking like dead bodies. The guard locked the door behind me.

For two days, we remained in that cell, only leaving briefly for food. The lights never turned off, we never knew what time it was and no one answered our questions.

Stories about the inhumane conditions in these detention facilities mainly seem to make the news when it’s someone who “doesn’t belong there,” but the conditions are awful for everyone. It’s imperative that we continue to bring attention to this issue. I’m glad Mooney was willing to speak out and use her personal privilege.

To put things into perspective: I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for me. Yet, I was still detained for nearly two weeks.

Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there.

I can’t imagine having no way to reach someone who can help you, whether in the US or your home country, because you don’t have their telephone number or email address. It’s a nightmare—and there’s no incentive for the facilities to resolve things:

The reality became clear: Ice detention isn't just a bureaucratic nightmare. It's a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.

Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It's a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560mfrom Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.

The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.

If Donald Trump and Elon Musk were truly serious about cutting wasteful government spending, they’d abolish ICE.

Which I’m sure is next, right after “cancel Starlink contracts”.

Because rueful laughter is still laughter.

Garrett Bucks on the importance of taking small, seemingly insufficient actions:

Why? Because others will see you do them, and it will make it easier for them to take their own (slightly less lonely but equally beautiful) action by your side.

From February, but still (maybe even more) relevant today.

Here’s the first one:

The next time you read an article about how USAID or the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau or the Department of Education is being attacked, remember that no matter how impactful the agency, movements don’t coalesce around acronyms—they are always about empathy for each other. Take a few minutes to research a specific program administered by those agencies that help people, and ring the alarm for everybody you know. Stop saying “Trump and Musk are the worst” and practice saying things like “Trump and Musk are sentencing millions of AIDS patients to death” or “Trump and Musk want credit card companies to rip us off” or “Trump and Musk just cut mental health and math tutoring resources for your kids’ school.”

I’m working to do better at this when I rant on Mastodon. And I’ll try to do a few of the remaining 29, despite many of them giving me, as Bucks puts it, “anxiety about putting [myself] out there.”

From John Broich in The Conversation (via Smithsonian Magazine^[1]):

How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people?

These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

First published in December 2016. Our biggest newspapers have learned nothing since, and—dare I say—are even worse now.

By the later 1930s, most U.S. journalists realized their mistake in underestimating Hitler or failing to imagine just how bad things could get.

When will today’s journalists come to the same realization about Trump?

What will historians write about today’s newspapers one hundred years hence?

Priscilla Alvarez, Jennifer Hansler, and Alayna Treene, writing for CNN:

The Trump administration is expected to invoke a sweeping wartime authority to speed up the president’s mass deportation pledge in the coming days, according to four sources familiar with the discussions.

The little-known 18th-century law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, gives the president tremendous authority to target and remove undocumented immigrants, though legal experts have argued it would face an uphill battle in court.

[…]

The announcement, which could come as soon as Friday, has been a moving target as officials finalize the details.

This threat isn’t new—Trump has been making it since at least September 2023—but this latest report, coming just days after the illegal detention of Mahmoud Khalil, suggests a move may indeed be imminent.

(Not to get too conspiratorial, but today—Friday—marks Day 53 of the Trump regime, which some may recognize as significant.)

Calling it an “uphill battle” is a bit of a gloss, though. Here’s the relevant section of the Act (emphasis mine):

Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.

To my layman’s eyes, a plain reading of the Act makes it clear that it cannot be invoked without a declared war or invasion from a foreign country.

The “first” group Trump wants to use this Act against:

The primary target remains Tren de Aragua (TDA), a Venezuelan organized crime group that is now operating in the United States and other countries.

Are we supposed to believe we are at war with or threatened by an invasion from Venezuela—a country with fewer people than Texas? Does Trump even know where Venezuela is?

Attempting to use it in this situation would be, at best, misleading and at worst, blatantly illegal. Not that such trivialities matter much to Trump.

Trump wants to use this Act for one, simple reason:

Those subject to the Alien Enemies Act would not be allowed to have a court hearing or an asylum interview since they would be processed under an emergency, wartime authority — not immigration law. Instead, they would be eligible to be detained and deported, with little to no due process, under Title 50, the section of the U.S. code housing America’s war and defense laws.

Bypassing the courts and the legal system: the preferred tactic of every would-be dictator.

This Act has been invoked just three times since 1798, all in times of war. By first threatening to invoke this little-used law against a foreign criminal gang, Trump is defying us to defend them, daring us to stand with “the enemy.” After all, who’s against cleaning up our streets from dangerous gangs, right?

If he succeeds with this abuse, who gets flagged as a “member” of the gang will expand, followed by which gangs get targeted. You can bet Mexico and other South and Central American “gangs” are on his list. Muslim and African “gangs” won’t be too far behind. Eventually, it won’t even need to be couched as “members of a gang.” It’ll just be dehumanized “vermin” from “shithole countries.” By the time the country realizes what he’s doing, it will have been normalized.

Every immigrant—legal or undocumented, recently arrived or decades settled—is at risk to the whims of the Trump regime.

It’s just a matter of time before Trump starts detaining natural-born citizens, too.

Joseph Gedeon, writing for The Guardian:

The mayor of Miami Beach is attempting to evict an independent cinema from city-owned property after it screened No Other Land, the film about Palestinian displacement in the West Bank that just won the Oscar for best documentary.

Steven Meiner’s proposal would terminate O Cinema’s lease and withdraw $40,000 in promised grant funding. In a newsletter sent to residents on Tuesday, Meiner condemned the film as “a false one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people that is not consistent with the values of our City and residents”.

An American government official should understand that, in America, screening this movie is a First Amendment right:

“Screening movies to make sure they conform to local censors’ tastes is a practice we left behind with the red scare,” said Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire).

“If the first amendment doesn’t mean that a movie theater can show an Oscar-winning film, something is seriously wrong.”

Something is, of course, seriously wrong.

Madiba K. Dennie, writing in Balls and Strikes about the backlash against Justice Amy Coney Barrett for daring to dissent, even briefly, from the conservative orthodoxy:

Barrett’s fellow travelers on the right felt betrayed, and voiced that betrayal with the kind of vitriol they normally reserve for minorities and poor people. Often, when a marginalized person ventures outside of the box conservatives try to put them in, Republicans attack their credentials and character, painting them as undeserving and ungracious. Barrett, a lifelong conservative less than three years removed from casting the deciding vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, got to experience a version of that this week. Republicans have from time to time been disappointed in the Republican men on the Court too, of course, but they aren’t telling Roberts that he’s unqualified, that he has kids at home, or that he should go back to Indiana and smile on his way out. Barrett is a dutiful foot soldier of the patriarchy, but she’s still a woman.

In this circle, “DEI,” of course, means “not a white man,” and “conservatism” is all about following the white male playbook. Failure to do so will be punished, regardless of how much in the tank for their cause you otherwise are.

This New York Times piece, from Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, purportedly about serious disagreement inside Trump’s Cabinet over which of his sycophants are in charge, reads more like a Television Without Pity recap of an episode of The Apprentice, only with less clever writing.

It’s filled with weird quotes-that-aren’t (reading like a lightly altered transcript of a surreptitious recording), and contains some truly awful New York Times-isms, like this one:

Cabinet officials almost uniformly like the concept of what Mr. Musk set out to do — reducing waste, fraud and abuse in government — but have been frustrated by the chain saw approach to upending the government and the lack of consistent coordination.

One: There is zero reason to believe this “concept” is Musk’s goal (and plenty of evidence to believe otherwise). It’s unadulterated mendacity.

Two: It admits these cabinet officials want to bring about the destruction the US government and the pain it inflicts on the American people, just slower and with more meetings.

It’s an infuriating passage—a demonstrably false premise, paired with a disingenuous conclusion—and sanitized through the antiseptic language of propriety.

This exchange really struck me, though:

At another point, Mr. Musk insisted that people hired under diversity, equity and inclusion programs were working in control towers. Mr. Duffy pushed back and Mr. Musk did not add details […].

The exchange ended with Mr. Trump telling Mr. Duffy that he had to hire people from M.I.T. as air traffic controllers. These air traffic controllers need to be “geniuses,” he said.

Many of us have known about Musk’s racism for almost a decade, and about Trump’s for far longer, so we understand that when they say “diversity, equity and inclusion” they mean “not white men.”

The additional “tell” is the suggestion to hire from MIT, because in Trump’s mind, “geniuses” = “MIT” = “white”.

Just 7.6% of MIT’s student population is Black.

Brandi Buchman breaks this story for HuffPost: 

Commemorative bronze duplicates of the Congressional Gold Medal awarded to Jan. 6 police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol appear to have been removed for sale from the U.S. Mint’s website.

There’s also this apparently independent report from NBC News where the author, Ryan J. Reilly, describes the removal as:

another instance of President Donald Trump’s administration moving to take down material related to the violent episode stemming from his falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election results.

I saw this just days after I questioned if some US Mint coins this administration might deem “woke DEI” would even get minted today, so I was immediately outraged, but held off on linking to it. As tempting as it was to unleash righteous indignation on Trump for this, I didn't want my confirmation bias leading me to the wrong conclusion about a change that could have a perfectly innocuous and reasonable explanation. After all, there was only the HuffPost report (and later, the NBC one), with no indication of why or when this medal was removed. 

The why remains uncertain, but the when has a smidge more clarity: The Internet Archive’s January 9, 2025 snapshot of the US Mint’s Medals page shows an entry for “Those Who Protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.” I presume it’s the medal in question. That page has a “last updated on” date of November 26, 2024.

(The Medals page lists all medals available from the US Mint.)

A February 22, 2025 snapshot—with a “last updated on” date of February 5, 2025—does not list the medal.

I can therefore say with some confidence that this entry—and, I presume, the medal—was removed sometime between November 26, 2024 and February 5, 2025. That’s a pretty broad window, spanning the last months of the Biden administration and the first weeks of Trump’s.

I can also say with confidence that the only change to the page was, in fact, the removal of that one medal entry.

This is not dispositive. It’s possible the Biden administration or the US Mint decided—for completely practical, pragmatic, and uncontroversial reasons—to remove this medal from the site.

The alternative is to suggest that Donald Trump—who denied the insurrection, pardoned 1,500 rioters, purged Department of Justice prosecutors and FBI agents who worked the Jan. 6 cases, scrubbed the DOJ’s “comprehensive website cataloguing the largest criminal investigation in modern department history,” and has lied, repeatedly about Jan. 6—directed the US Mint to remove a commemorative medal “Honoring the service and sacrifice of those who protected the U.S. Capitol” on Jan. 6.

It’s quite the coin flip.

As I explored the American Innovation $1 Coin site for my aforelinked Steve Jobs piece, I came across several interesting—even inspiring—coins:

• Arkansas: Features “Raye Montague visualizing a United States Navy Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate, a ship she designed by computer.”
• South Carolina: Features “Educator and activist Septima Poinsette Clark […] called the ‘Mother of the Civil Rights Movement’” with a design depicting her “with three African American students carrying books and an American flag, representing that education and literacy are necessary for empowerment and enjoyment of civil rights.”
• Pennsylvania: “Focuses on the extraordinary work of Dr. Jonas Salk and his team at the University of Pittsburgh in the discovery of the polio vaccine.”
• Massachusetts: Honors Alexander Graham Bell’s “tele-phone” and “depicts the dial of an early rotary dial telephone.”

A Black female naval engineer, a Black female Civil Rights leader, a Jewish scientist who developed vaccines, and an immigrant. How many of these innovators would be decried by this regime as “woke DEI”.

Would any of these coins be minted today?

A reminder from Schoolhouse Rock, that most cherished and enduring of educational institutions, in light of recent proclamations.

A dozen years after John Scalzi wrote this, it continues to resonate—perhaps even more so now than then:

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

I have been sharing this concept since I first read it in 2012. It’s instantly understood and makes for great fodder for… discussion. The strongest pushback I received (and I always received pushback) was invariably some form of “Not all straight, White Males”. Which, of course, was missing the point.

The follow-ups (first, second) are also important reads, but especially Ten Years On, where Scalzi reflects on the impact of his post, and adds the very important cis identifier to his description.

This crossed my mind again because so much of America’s problems can be traced directly to Cis, Straight, White Males complaining the game has gotten harder for them, and that “DEI” makes it harder still.

This was brought into stark relief by a Mastodon post from @susankayequinn, which included this (altered) Calvin and Hobbes image:

Or, I didn’t have to compete before, now I do, and I don’t like it.

Quinn added:

Thing is, the lower-qualified white people understand this, it’s why they’re Big Mad about white dudes losing their divine right to run everything with zero consequences.

Cis, Straight, White Males want to reset the game to when they had all of the advantages. It’s a driving motivator for the Trump regime, and a significant reason why they’re in power.

“Parenting In the Age of Trump,” from the irreplaceable Elie Mystal in The Nation, is a brilliant examination of the mechanisms of resistance his kids (and we) need to employ. I’m tempted to quote the piece at length, but it’s best if you just read the whole thing.

But allow me these two:

I already know that my kids will encounter a civil rights environment more like the one faced by my grandparents in the segregated South in the 1920s, than the one I faced in 1980s Queens. My skills of fighting the white man through argument and lawsuits seem completely irrelevant to the lives MAGA will force them to live. I’m a classically trained effete liberal columnist trying to prepare children to live in a Hobbesian state of perpetual white violence against us. What the hell do I know about what they must learn to do? We are well past the point where “pulling your pants up” and engaging in respectability politics designed to appease “reasonable” white folks is of any use.

And:

People can entirely miss me with “But golly gee, Elie. If we use the tactics of our enemy we are no better than them.” That way of thinking is obsolete. That way of thinking is how you get whatever the hell the “Democratic Party” is doing right now. Everybody wants to raise Barack Obama. I’ve got to start trying to raise Harriet Tubman. In a worst case scenario, I have to be raising Oskar Schindler. I need my kids to be able to chloroform a baby they’re hiding in their attic when ICE comes around, then walk downstairs and pay Musk’s troops in Bitcoin to make them go away.

Seriously, just go read it.

(Via @echoz@kopiti.am.)

One final note on the ERA, from Associate White House Counsel, Ainsley Hayes:

(Via Aaron Sorkin.)

A helpful explainer^[1] from Emily Amick on the history of the ERA, and the legal issues that suggest President Biden’s recent assertion is legally meaningless, in large part due to the amendment’s ratification deadline—plus an interesting take:

Legally, I think it’s pretty clear the congressional ratification deadline is law, and therefore needs to be extended in order to ratify the ERA. There is a political argument here to push for ratification, and even to steamroll Biden into doing this to force Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court to overturn it (under Trump’s watch). This could create a galvanizing moment for further political organizing.

The problem is that this isn’t who Joe Biden is. He isn’t someone who will do something contravening Supreme Court precedent, and I don’t think this is the issue he is going to evolve for.

She wrote this in December, 2024 and later added a postscript:

The more I’ve thought about this the more I’ve realized what a terrible strategic move this idea was. If Biden were to force the Archivist to publish the ERA, it would have gotten litigated and gone to the majority-conservative Supreme Court. They would undoubtedly overturn the decision, and in doing so would likely make arguments similar to those we saw in the 2020 Trump OLC memo. They would give us a binding decision that Congress can’t fix the ratification deadline. The actual result of this would be to make it nearly impossible to ever get the ERA as an actual part of the Constitution. This strategic mess is emblematic of the leadership we’ve seen from feminist organizations who oversaw the fall of Roe, legally, politically and optically flawed.

I don’t think President Biden was “steamrolled” into this, and clearly he’s “evolved” at least a little bit on the matter. While he hasn’t pushed the Archivist to ratify, I agree with Amick’s assessment that Biden’s decision was meant to create a “galvanizing moment,” but I don’t agree that it was a strategic blunder.

Time will tell, but I’m glad President Biden is doing something to nudge along a 50-plus-year amendment.

President Joe Biden, in a White House statement:

On January 27, 2020, the Commonwealth of Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. The American Bar Association (ABA) has recognized that the Equal Rights Amendment has cleared all necessary hurdles to be formally added to the Constitution as the 28th Amendment. I agree with the ABA and with leading legal constitutional scholars that the Equal Rights Amendment has become part of our Constitution.

The New York Times, in a multi-bylined article notes:

Under the Constitution, however, the president has no direct role in approving amendments and his statement has no legal force by itself. The archivist of the United States, a Biden appointee, has refused to formally publish the amendment on the grounds that it has not met the requirements to become part of the Constitution.

President Biden did this knowing there’d be court and congressional battles, and is effectively daring them to argue that women aren’t equal under the law, rather than cowering behind “there’s no law that says they are, so who can tell?” Such battles could force many national and state leaders to go on the record and might prove quite distracting to the incoming regime.

To which I say: Fantastic! Do more! President Biden should throw more progressive-but-controversial acts behind him as he strides out of the Oval Office, like caltrops strewn in front of a speeding car.

Anna Betts, reporting for The Guardian:

American flags at the US Capitol will fly at full-staff for President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington DC on Monday, despite a White House order for flags to remain at half-staff for 30 days after the death of former president Jimmy Carter last month.

The House speaker, Mike Johnson, first announced the change on Tuesday. In a post on social media he wrote: “On January 20th, the flags at the Capitol will fly at full-staff to celebrate our country coming together behind the inauguration of our 47th President, Donald Trump.” He added: “The flags will be lowered back to half-staff the following day to continue honoring President Jimmy Carter.”

How does the Speaker of the House get to decide what happens to flags on the Capitol? Isn’t that federal property, under the control of (still) President Joe Biden?

This, of course, follows Donald Trump’s childish griping about the flags being flown at half-staff during his inauguration, calling Democrats “giddy” about it. As I noted previously, no one is giddy, it’s the law. But apparently no one has to follow the law anymore if it makes them feel insecure.

It’s not just Trump and his Johnson worried about being at half-staff. Robert Jimison at the New York Times reports:

Republican governors in Alabama, Iowa, Nebraska and Florida also announced that flags in their states would be raised on Monday and returned to half-staff the next day.

Plus the Republican governors of Texas, North Dakota, Idaho, and Tennessee, according to Iris Seaton at the Asheville Citizen Times.

These “leaders” have no respect for the flag or the laws of this country. They’ve pledged fealty to one man, patriotism or common decency be damned.

In Trump’s social media whining, he also wrote:

[…] the Flag may, for the first time ever during an Inauguration of a future President, be at half mast.

He’s wrong, of course. From the January 21, 1973 edition of the New York Times, in which R. W. Apple Jr. wrote about the second inauguration of Richard Nixon:

The President spoke from temporary portico erected adjacent to the Capitol, with the United States Marine Band, in scarlet tunics, arrayed before him. All flags on the Capitol were still at half‐staff in memory of former President Harry S. Truman, who died last Dec. 26.

Even Nixon had more integrity and empathy.

Harry Litman disputes, in an article for The New Republic, the very common criticism (including my own) that Merrick Garland slow-walked the Trump investigation:

The charge of foot-dragging has become a meme. Elie Honig, writing in New York magazine, was particularly cocksure: "The debate about whether Garland took too long to charge the Trump cases—or to appoint a Special Counsel to get the job done—is over. Exhibit A: there's not going to be a federal trial before the 2024 election. End of story."

But the charge is a bum rap.

The record demonstrates that Garland made investigating Trump a top priority, even as he also focused on restoring integrity to the Justice Department. The investigation was extraordinarily complicated and slowed by unusual and unpredictable obstacles, including the Supreme Court's lawless immunity ruling. Moreover, events entirely outside of Garland's control ensured that Trump would not have been held accountable before the election. Finally, Garland's efforts, among others, made Trump's criminality more than clear to the voters, but they nevertheless were content to reelect a felon and serial sexual offender.

The storyline that Garland let moss grow on the investigation—some say until Jack Smith came aboard, others until the work of the January 6 committee embarrassed the department—doesn’t gibe with even the publicly available evidence, which likely will be supplemented over time with details that we still don’t know.

Litman outlines a compelling rebuttal, suggesting Garland may deserve more credit for pursuing this case than I (and others) have given him.

He concludes:

It’s understandable that some of the frustration over Trump’s escape from justice has been displaced onto Garland. We put our hope in him to bring Trump down, and it didn’t happen. It’s easy to make him a scapegoat. But once you factor in all the other reasons for delay, it never was in the cards to bring Trump to justice before Election Day. And that was notwithstanding an overall diligent focus on the prospect from Garland’s first days in office.

Perhaps instead we should focus our ire on those who allowed Trump to remain a politically viable candidate after January 6, 2021, like Mitch McConnell and the 42 other Senators who voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial.

David Smith, writing for The Guardian:

Donald Trump would have been convicted of crimes over his failed attempt to cling to power in 2020 but for his victory in last year’s US presidential election, according to the special counsel who investigated him.

Special Counsel Jack Smith concludes Volume 1 of his just-released 174-page Special Counsel Report thusly:

The Department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a President is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Office stands fully behind. Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the Presidency, the Office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.

While every prosecutor is expected to claim “we would have won,” the depth and scope of the report suggests an extremely solid case—unsurprising, considering we all watched the events it charges unfold live as they happened.

But Donald Trump did exactly what he set out to do: Delay, delay, delay, and hope to convince a plurality of Americans to grant him a get-out-of-jail-free card. And while I can’t say definitively, I think it’s reasonable to suggest that had Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special prosecutor a year earlier—or perhaps had President Biden nominated someone else for AG—Trump would have likely been convicted of his attacks on democracy, or at least found himself severely weakened politically, well before the election, and we would not be in the nightmare position we now find ourselves of having a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and clearly criminal politician as president.

The American people were denied justice, and democracy might be Donald Trump’s next victim.

Jamison Foser over at Finding Gravity brings the receipts in a great takedown of the aforelinked Washington Post’s all-but-useless capsule approvals of Trump’s nominees, highlighting their five worst endorsements. I only wish he'd done all of them.

The Washington Post Editorial Board weighed in over the weekend on Donald Trump’s cabinet picks:

We would not have picked any of his choices for our hypothetical Cabinet. But, as we have argued for decades, that is not the standard we — or U.S. senators — should apply when evaluating potential executive nominees for Senate confirmation. The president-elect won the election. He deserves deference in building his team, and the Americans who elected him deserve an operational government, absent disqualifying deficiencies in competence, temperament or philosophy.

By that standard, all but two of Trump’s planned Cabinet nominees seem confirmable — as well as all but two of his picks for Cabinet-rank jobs that require confirmation.

These are little more than thumbs-up or thumbs-down for each, with a sentence or two capsule review (at best; some have no commentary at all).

For example, for Doug Burgum, nominee for Secretary of the Interior:

The outgoing North Dakota governor and Stanford MBA built a successful software company that he sold to Microsoft.

I’m unclear how this is relevant experience for running the Department of the Interior—unless, perhaps, there’s a plan to sell federal land to Microsoft.

Or for Sean P. Duffy, nominee for Transportation:

The former reality TV star is also a former congressman from Wisconsin. He’ll still need to study.

That’s it. Remember, the Post Editorial Board’s criteria for approval is they’re “absent disqualifying deficiencies in competence, temperament or philosophy.” I guess “reality TV star” is the new mark of competence in the coming Trump regime.

This is especially deep brown-nosing following the Post’s cowardly refusal to endorse a presidential candidate this election cycle. The editorial board should be ashamed of itself.

Mike Allen and Sara Fischer for Axios:

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is terminating major DEI programs, effective immediately — including for hiring, training and picking suppliers, according to a new employee memo obtained by Axios. […]

From the memo itself (reportedly written by Janelle Gale, vice president of Human Resources):

The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms longstanding principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics. The term "DEI" has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.

Every word of this is utter bullshit. It falsely equates “DEI” with “discrimination”, when DEI programs are about providing opportunity and ensuring equality. It uses a deeply conservative, far-right Supreme Court to buttress the company’s (and by that I mean Mark Zuckerberg’s) own believes about the value of these programs. You could win good money betting these folks also think Dred Scott v. Sanford and Plessy v. Ferguson were decided correctly.

Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, Meta Quest, Ray Ban Meta Glasses) is just the latest in a long list of companies which never really believed in these programs. As I wrote back in July when Microsoft announced their DEI dissolution,

It was always just lip service. Companies never really bought into the progressive ideals. They just wanted to shut up Black folk.

Last month, Costco strongly defended its DEI practices. They’re the only large company I’ve seen take a (semi-) public stance in favor of inclusion and diversity. Even Apple, which I (still) believe takes DEI seriously, has been quiet (while they seem to be hiring for I&D roles, they’ve quietly ended Apple Entrepreneur Camp). Will Apple ever make a public statement about the importance of inclusion and diversity?

These companies are merely using the Supreme Court and “changing landscapes” as convenient cover. The programs are being rolled back because the class of people most affected by a push for equality are those who’ve benefited from a lack of it. Once again, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.