Monday, December 22, 2025

Blackouts

These documents are more blacked out than Pete Hegseth on New Years Eve.

- feral streep, on the redactions in the newly released Epstein material

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on January 5.

This week's featured post is "Three days in the life of a pathetic man".

Ongoing stories

  • Trump's assault on American democracy. He's trying to move CNN into the hands of an oligarch ally, and is maneuvering us towards war with Venezuela without consulting Congress.
  • Climate change. Based on the theory that what you don't know can't hurt you, the administration is planning to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, due to its "climate alarmism".
  • Gaza and Ukraine. I didn't run across anything new this week. Probably I was too busy with Christmas stuff.

This week's developments

This week everybody was still talking about the Epstein files

Friday was the deadline that the Epstein Files Transparency Act had set for the Justice Department to release all of its files about Jeffrey Epstein, with a few minor exceptions, mostly related to protecting the identities of the young women who were Epstein's victims.

But the EFTA is just a law, one passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed by President Trump himself. Why should the Justice Department consider itself bound to obey? So of course, DoJ waited until the final day to release anything at all. When it did, the release was not complete, and appeared to be much more heavily redacted than mere victim-protection could account for. (One 119-page document is entirely redacted. One commenter characterized the release as a whole as "more blacked out than Pete Hegseth on New Years Eve".)

on Friday morning, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, went on Fox News to say that the department wouldn’t actually be releasing all of the files on Friday as required by the law. “I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks, so today, several hundred thousand, and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” Blanche said on Fox News. “There’s a lot of eyes looking at these and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing, that we are protecting every single victim.”

By the time the department eventually did release thousands of pages of materials on Friday evening – not the hundreds of thousands Blanche promised - many of the documents had been heavily or completely redacted. Other than a few pictures, the materials made no mention of Trump, even though attorney general Pam Bondi reportedly told Trump earlier this year his name was in the files.

Some of the pictures released did include former President Bill Clinton, an apparent effort to support Trump's gaslighting that the Epstein affair was a Democratic scandal, not a Trump scandal. Trump doesn't seem to grasp that whattaboutism won't get him out of this jam. "Democrats did it too" or even "Democrats did worse" isn't a valid excuse. If Democrats are also guilty, expose them too.

The two sponsors of the EFTA, Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, both denounced the partial release, which fails to identify anyone who victimized the girls other than Epstein, who is dead, and Ghislaine Maxwell, who is already in prison for sex trafficking (after apparently trafficking the girls to no one, if what has been released is the whole story).

What can Congress do to force DoJ to obey the law? Not much, apparently. It could find Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress, but her own department would then be responsible for prosecuting her, which it would not do. Congress could impeach her, if it had the will to do so (which is doubtful). But Bondi could make the impeachment moot by resigning. Again, whatever Trump is hiding would stay hidden.

The only penalty Trump can be forced to pay is political, which they apparently believe they can mitigate by continuing to dribble out files little by little.

and war with Venezuela

Step-by-step, we are marching into a war with Venezuela. First we blew up their fishing boats, which may or may not have been smuggling cocaine and may or may not have been headed towards the US.

On December 10, the US seized a Venezuelan oil tanker. And then Tuesday, Trump announced an oil blockade of Venezuela. He did it in a Truth Social post that was barely coherent, making references to "the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us".

It's tempting to sanewash this by looking for some plausible reference -- maybe the nationalization of Venezuela's oil by Maduro's predecessor Hugo Chavez. But nations all over the world (Saudi Arabia, for example) have nationalized their oil industries without getting attacked. And why oil previously claimed by an oil company should be "ours" is a bit of a stretch.

But while I think justifications like that should be put to administration spokespeople, I'm not going to assume Trump's post makes sense at all until some official source explains it.

Here's something more people should be saying: The recent moves make it clear that the attacks on boats were never about drugs, they were about regime change. And changing the Maduro regime is about getting control of Venezuela's oil. Without the oil, Maduro could be five times as tyrannical and nobody in the Trump administration would care.

and the Bondi Beach shooting

On December 14, a father and son opened fire on a crowd gathered for a Hannukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia. 15 people were killed and 40 injured. The father was killed by police and the son badly wounded. No official statement of motive has surfaced, but antisemitism seems like an obvious guess.

I find two things noteworthy here: First, antisemitism really is rising around the world. I know some people falsely claim that any criticism of the current Israeli government is antisemitism, but you can brush off that canard and still recognize that antisemitism is real.

I'll repeat what I've often said before: You can think whatever you want about Netanyahu or Hamas, but that's no excuse to bring the war here. American Jews and American Muslims or Arabs are not the problem, and violence against them will not solve anything or prove anything. Ditto for Australians.

Second: Pro-gun people have been crowing about how Australia's more rigorous gun restrictions didn't stop this mass shooting. But they're not thinking this through. The shooters used a bolt-action rifle and a shotgun, rather than semi-automatic weapons, because that's what they could get their hands on in Australia. Because of that restriction, they only got off 83 shots in something like ten minutes. With American AR-15s, they could have unleashed hundreds of rounds and killed many more people. The 2017 Las Vegas shooter, by himself, fired over a thousand rounds and killed 60.

These kinds of restrictions make a difference, as do limits on the sizes of gun magazines. Shooters are most often stopped when they have to reload. The more bullets they have available without reloading, the longer it will take to stop them.

and Trump's sad sick week

The Rob Reiner post, the strange plaques Trumpifying past presidents, the self-serving national address, and then the Trump-Kennedy Center. All in three days. The featured post covers these incidents, emphasizing how Trump's attempts to aggrandize himself just make him smaller.

https://claytoonz.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/cjonesrgb12212025.jpg?w=1024

and Susan Wiles

For some reason nobody has been able to specify, White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles gave a series of interviews to a Vanity Fair reporter, and high-ranking members of the administration posed for a Vanity Fair photographer.

We learned that Wiles thinks:

  • Trump has an alcoholic's personality.
  • Vance's conversion to Trumpism has been "sort of political"
  • OMB head Russell Vought is "a right-wing absolute zealot".
  • The destruction of the White House's East Wing is just the beginning. "I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning."
  • There is no evidence to support Trump's claims about Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein.
  • The component parts of the Big Beautiful Bill are popular. "That will be a very big deal in the midterms."
  • Blowing up boats in the Caribbean isn't about drugs, it's about pressuring the Maduro government in Venezuela.
  • Trump's attacks on the high seas don't needs congressional approval, but an attack on the Venezuelan mainland would.
  • Trump believes Putin wants all of Ukraine, not just the provinces he has claimed so far.
  • If Vance runs in 2028, he'll be the Republican nominee.
  • Trump hasn't been asleep in cabinet meetings. He's just resting his eyes.
  • He insults female reporters because “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.”
  • Trump won't run for a third term.
  • Trump doesn't wake up thinking about revenge against enemies like James Comey, "But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

Amazingly, Trump has not denounced her.

and pro-Trump media consolidation

Viktor Orbán's government in Hungary is often cited as a model for Trump's authoritarian takeover. A key piece of Orbán's strategy was to make sure the major media outlets wound up in friendly hands, creating a state media unofficially.

Trump has been doing the same thing, partly by acquisition, partly by coopting the oligarchs who already own media properties. And so:

  • The richest man in the world (Elon Musk) is a Trump ally who owns X/Twitter.
  • The US's second-richest man (Jeff Bezos) owns The Washington Post, and blocked the Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024.
  • The US's third-richest man (Mark Zuckerberg) owns Meta, which controls Facebook.
  • The fourth-richest (Larry Ellison) controls Skydance, which owns Paramount, which owns CBS. His hand-picked news baron is Bari Weiss. She just spiked a 60 Minutes episode exposing the Trump gulag in El Salvador. Ellison also has wound up controlling the US version of TikTok.

Now Ellison's empire is bidding against Netflix for Warner/Discovery, which controls CNN, among other notable media properties. Trump is in a position to influence how this goes: He could hint that DoJ would sue to stop a Netflix acquisition as a violation of antitrust laws, but let the Paramount bid go through.

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To no one's surprise, Republicans in Congress still have no solution to the ObamaCare insurance premiums that are set to skyrocket. The House did pass a bill roughly along the lines I told you about in November: You can lower your premiums by buying the kind of junk insurance that the Affordable Care Act made illegal. You won't be insured if anything really bad happens to you or your family, but you can tell yourself you have insurance. And even that won't get through the Senate.

North Carolina's legislature is one of the most gerrymandered in the country. That's how a state that has had Democratic governors since 2017 and that Trump carried by a mere 3% in 2024 has substantial and rock-solid Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature: 30-20 in the Senate and 71-49 in the House.

It's a great frustration to NC Republicans that you can't gerrymander a statewide office like the governorship. So they've done the next best thing: Taken away nearly all the power of the governor and moved it to the legislature.

In essence, they have disempowered their own voters: The voters can control which party gets the governorship, but control of the legislature is baked into the maps.

The Democratic Party is about to go through its usual pattern in the Texas Senate race:

  • A firebrand progressive (Jasmine Crockett, who I love to watch on TV news shows) will excite the base and win the primary.
  • The national party will decide she can't win and will refuse to put any resources into the race.
  • She'll lose.
  • The finger-pointing will start: Was the problem that she's too liberal or that the national party sabotaged her?

I'm not taking a side here, I'm just pointing to the pattern. Until the Party goes all-in on one of these races, we won't know whose intuition is right.

In his testimony to Congress, FCC Chair Brendan Carr (last seen demanding that ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel) denied that the FCC is an independent agency. Instead, he sees the FCC as an instrument of Trump's political agenda.

Data from Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Press Freedom Tracker shows that every single investigation or social media tirade Carr has launched against licensees’ speech – be it 60 Minutes’ editing of its Kamala Harris interview, Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks about Charlie Kirk’s death, or Comcast’s accurate reporting that contradicted Trump’s lies about the Kilmar Abrego García’s immigration case – has involved content that upset Trump.

and let's close with something seasonal

Randy Rainbow's new parody: It's beginning to look a lot like f**k this.

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Monday, December 8, 2025

Decent World Order

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on December 22.

The degree to which America is clearly a country that is open for sale is also really remarkable. But countries that are buying your goodwill by bringing cash to the president, that is a different form of leadership than the kind where we’re guaranteeing their security and trying to have a decent world order for all of us.

- Robert Kagan

This week's featured post is "A MAGA National Security Strategy".

Ongoing stories

  • Trump's assault on American democracy. Thanks to the Supreme Court, Texas will conduct its 2026 congressional elections with a racially gerrymandered map.
  • Climate change. There are interesting and somewhat ironic developments in geothermal power. Details in a short note below.
  • Both Gaza and Ukraine fell off my radar this week.

This week's developments

This week the focus was on Pete Hegseth

Secretary of War Defense Pete Hegseth is under fire from two directions:

  • Did he really give a "kill everybody" order that led to an attack on two men clinging to the wreckage of their boat? (If we're not at war, that's murder. If we are, it's a war crime.)
  • The DoD inspector general's report on Signalgate says Hegseth violated military regulations and endangered pilots engaging in an attack, but apparently stops short of finding a crime. The loophole here is that Hegseth himself had the power to declassify the information he released, even if it was irresponsible to do so.

Thursday, members of the House and Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees were briefed on the September 2 attack where a boat was sunk and then a second attack killed survivors clinging to the wreckage. All the reactions I've seen quoted followed party lines. Democrats like Mark Warner said the video was "very disturbing", while Republican Tom Cotton said:

I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States back over so they could stay in the fight, and potentially, given all the context we've heard of other narco-terrorist boats in the area coming to their aid to recover the cargo and recover those narco-terrorists

To me, the phrase "stay in the fight" is telling. What fight? Who were the boatmen trying to fight against?

The bottom line here is that eventually the video will come out, and the American people can resolve this argument for themselves. The question is whether people will be able to simply use their eyes, or will they see the scene through a haze of dehumanizing labels like "narco-terrorist"?

As for the legality of the whole boat-sinking campaign, Ron Filipkowski sums it up well:

The US government is summarily executing people on a weekly basis without telling the American people any of their names or presenting any proof of their guilt, for alleged crimes that do not carry the death penalty in the US.

Of course SNL had to get into the act.

and the national strategy

I discuss this at length in the featured post.

An important related article: Overmatched by the NYT editorial board. It discusses how our big complicated and expensive military systems repeatedly fail us in war simulations where we try to defend Taiwan against China.

The basic problem was identified already in James Fallows' 1981 book National Defense: We need small, simple weapons that are easy to produce in large numbers, but our procurement system favors big, complex weapons that are hard to keep running and hard to replace if they get damaged in battle.

It's been decades since I read that book, but I think I remember one key example: how Nazi Germany lost the tank war in Russia. Individually, the Russian tanks were no match for the German Tigers and Panthers. But the Russian tanks (and the Shermans imported from America) were easy to make and maintainable by any good street mechanic, while the German tanks were much more complicated and much harder to fix if they broke down.

At some point, which may already have arrived, swarms of hypersonic drones will be able to overwhelm an aircraft carrier like the Gerald Ford, which we just deployed to the Caribbean.

and the Supreme Court

It shouldn't be surprising when the Court ignores facts, laws, and precedents to give the Republican Party an advantage, but for some reason I still was taken aback when the Court OK'd the Texas congressional map that lower courts had found violated legal guarantees against racial gerrymandering.

I'll leave the details of the case to Paul Waldman, but the gist is that the district court held extensive hearings about whether the new Texas map was drawn according to race, and found that it was. By precedent, higher courts are supposed to defer to a lower court's findings of fact unless they spot a clear error. (There's a reason for that: Higher courts don't have as much time to devote to assembling and evaluating evidence. The district judge saw and heard the witnesses, while the justices could only read the transcripts.) But the Supreme Court ignored that provision, claimed that the lower court should have given more deference to the State of Texas, and then invoked the Purcell doctrine, that courts should not change maps on the eve of an election.

But of course, as Justice Kagan points out in her dissent, it was the Texas legislature that wanted to change maps, and the legislature that controlled the timing. Letting the old map stand would have disturbed nothing and confused no one.

If Purcell prevents such a ruling, it gives every State the opportunity to hold an unlawful election. The District Court, once again aptly, made the point: Were judicial review so broadly foreclosed, then to implement even a “blatantly unconstitutional map,” the “Legislature need only to pass” it on a schedule like this one. That cannot be the law—except of course that today it is.

This is yet another abuse of the Court's "shadow docket", a preliminary finding that applies in this case only and may be reversed eventually. But a temporary finding is all Texas Republicans need to deliver more House seats to Speaker Johnson.

Waldman goes on to argue that Democrats have to start running against the Supreme Court.

Any Democrat who says “Voters don’t really care about this stuff” needs a good smack in the head. The answer to that problem is to make them care. Republicans do this all the time; if they have something they wish was on the agenda, they force it on the agenda, no matter how ridiculous it is or how removed it is from people’s lives. How many Americans cared five years ago about whether some middle school trans kid a hundred miles from where they live wanted to play softball? But they care about it now, because Republicans made them care.

Democrats need to do the same with the Supreme Court — loudly, angrily, personally, relentlessly. If they don’t, the next Democratic president is utterly screwed.

and geothermal power

Normally, you think about geothermal power in places like Iceland or New Zealand -- places with volcanoes, where hot lava is close to the surface. But the center of the Earth is 5000 degrees Celsius, so you can find heat just about anywhere if you drill deep enough.

For years that's been considered impractical, but maybe not much longer. Ironically, the technology to make this work has been developed by the oil and gas industry. Want to drill deep as cheaply as possible? The oil companies know how. Want to get water through rock so you can heat it in the depths? That's been solved by the fracking companies.

Check out this New Yorker article for more detail.

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The fundamentally anti-Christian nature of the Trump regime is being pointed out in Christmas nativity scenes all over the country. This one is from Dedham, Massachusetts:

The small print below the "ICE WAS HERE" sign says that the Holy Family is safe inside the church's sanctuary, and gives the number of a hotline to report local ICE activity.

At a time when there is a ridiculous backlog of asylum cases, Trump has been firing immigration judges. The immigration courts that decide such cases are not part of the judicial branch, but belong to the Department of Justice. So DoJ is looking to recruit.

DHS is trying to help by posting DoJ recruitment ads on its Facebook page. The scary thing is what their ads tell you about the kind of people they're looking for. Here's one:

The text that goes with it is: "Deliver justice to criminal illegal aliens. Become a deportation judge. Save your country."

If you're not up on comic-book-based movies, that's Judge Dredd. Wikipedia describes him like this:

Judge Dredd is a law enforcement and judicial officer in the dystopian future city of Mega-City One, which covers most of the east coast of North America. He is a "street judge", empowered to summarily arrest, convict, sentence, and execute criminals.

So if you fantasize about summarily arresting, convicting, sentencing, and executing "criminal illegal aliens", the Trump regime has just the job for you.

I'm not sure what to make of this theory, but it sounds plausible: James Throt, who claims to be a neuropathologist from the UK, says that the lasting neurological effects of Covid changed our brains, reducing our executive function and making us less empathetic. He claims you can see the change in behavior on dating apps.

Since 2020, apps report the same pattern: shorter messages, less reciprocity, fewer follow-ups, lower meet-up rates & a collapse in sustained conversational ability. This isn’t just “people being tired”. It’s a measurable degradation of attention, initiative & social cognition.

It might also explain why the public so easily falls for the regime's depersonalization of vulnerable groups like immigrants or the trans community.

Speaking of depersonalizing attacks, Jamelle Bouie looks at Trump's smearing of all Somali immigrants.

It's hard to let go of the Trump MRI story, because what he says about it doesn't add up. There's no such thing as a "routine" MRI, and it's hard to believe doctors did one without telling him what they were looking at or for.

Joyce Strong, a nurse, puts clues together and says he probably got a CT-based vascular imaging with contrast. She's speculating, but her guess is that the testing was motivated by what I've been calling Trump's symptoms of dementia -- babbling, falling asleep at meetings, random outbursts, and so on.

and let's close with something feral

The Washington Post newsroom had to be smiling when it published this: "Drunk raccoon passes out in bathroom after ransacking Va. liquor store".

A Virginia state-run liquor store was ransacked by a masked bandit on Friday evening, authorities said, leaving a trail of broken spirit bottles strewn across the shop floor.

Apparently this kind of thing happens from time to time. The article also includes a 2016 video from Tennessee of another racoon doing something similar.

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Monday, December 1, 2025

Killing People

I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.

- President Donald Trump
Oct 23 (at 58:50 in the video)

This week's featured post is "Crime in the Cabinet".

Ongoing stories

  • Trump's assault on American democracy. Courts continue to push back against Trump. Trump's spiteful indictments of James Comey and Letitia James got thrown out.
  • Climate change. COP30 was dispiriting. The fossil fuel industry seems to be winning the information war.
  • Gaza. In spite of the "ceasefire", the death toll keeps rising. It's now over 70,000.
  • Ukraine. It looks like Marco Rubio has managed to stop the attempt to force Ukraine to surrender to Putin's demands.

This week's developments

This week the Ukraine peace negotiations got more confusing

Initially, we heard that the Trump administration had negotiated a 28-point plan to end the Ukraine/Russia War. Trump's amateur diplomat Steve Witkoff (a real estate mogul) supposedly had worked it out with Putin's representative Kirill Dmitriev (who is the head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund).

Ostensibly, this was "the Trump plan". But the deal looked suspiciously one-sided, and was essentially a reiteration of Putin's demands: Ukraine would yield all the territory that Russia claims (including territory it has been unable to conquer), Ukraine would limit the size of its army, NATO would agree not to station peacekeeping troops in Ukraine or let Ukraine join the alliance, and a few more points. Russia would yield essentially nothing, beyond making commitments similar to ones it had already broken by invading Crimea in 2014 and attacking the rest of Ukraine in 2022. Western sanctions against Russia would be dropped, opening up lots of business opportunities for men like Witkoff and Trump, if Putin felt inclined to look on them favorably.

Worse, some odd phrasing in the proposal suggested it had been translated from Russian. In other words, Witkoff had received a Russian plan and passed it off as "the Trump plan", which Trump seemed content to go along with. Trump gave Ukraine until Thanksgiving to respond to the plan, warning that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy "is going to have to approve it" or face an even worse future for his country.

Two major things have happened since. First, Marco Rubio managed to insinuate himself into the process, pull Ukraine and our NATO allies back in with him, and rewrite the plan in a more balanced way that Putin is likely to reject. In other words, Trump's Secretary of State for now has managed to scuttle "the Trump plan" to force Ukraine's surrender.

Second, Bloomberg (behind a paywall) released transcripts of phone calls Witkoff had with Dmitriev and Putin's top foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov. The calls raise serious doubts about Witkoff's true loyalties. (The Foreign Office blogger Michael Weiss refers to Witkoff as "Dim Philby", a play on the name of the famous Cold War British traitor Kim Philby. The nickname seems to be catching on.) In the transcripts, Witkoff coaches the Russians in how to pitch their proposal to Trump, as if Witkoff's job were to manipulate Trump for the Russians, rather than the Russians for Trump.

Slate's Fred Kaplan summarizes:

Trump is left with two choices: to either fire Witkoff, who is not a formally appointed official anyway, or essentially confirm that he is acting as a Russian tool as well. The fact that Trump has decided to send Witkoff to Moscow for further talks in the coming days suggests the latter.

Three sources tell the story in more detail: Marcy Wheeler, Fred Kaplan, and Michael Weiss.

My two conclusions:

  • The 28-point "Trump plan" is dead, at least for now. Ukraine will not be pressured to surrender for at least another week.
  • We're going to see more of this kind of behind-the-throne maneuvering, as Trump's cognitive abilities continue to fade. Strong-willed lieutenants like Witkoff, Rubio, J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller et al will keep trying to manipulate Trump's increasingly simple thought processes to get their own pet projects through, or just do things and hope the details never rise to the level of Trump's attention.

and someone killed one of the National Guard troops Trump posted to DC

Two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot near the White House Wednesday. One, Sarah Beckstrom, has died. The other, Andrew Wolfe, is in critical condition. The two were victims of what appears to have been a planned attack. No motive has been identified.

The alleged gunman, identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, came to the US in September 2021 under an Operation Allies Welcome program that gave some Afghans who had worked for the US government entry visas to the US. He was granted asylum in April this year, under the Trump administration, Reuters reported. Lakanwal’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, which worked alongside US special forces in Afghanistan, were confirmed by the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, to media outlets. The New York Times reported that the shooting suspect had worked for several US government agencies in Afghanistan, including CIA-backed units in the southern province of Kandahar, a stronghold of the Taliban.

Trump, of course, did what he always does: blamed the Biden administration, took no responsibility for his own administration's role, and cast collective blame on all asylum seekers.

The Trump administration has halted all asylum decisions following the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington DC, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director has said. Joseph Edlow said the pause would be in place "until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible".

That article is an example of "sanewashing". It makes Trump's actions sound like a reasonable, if maybe misguided, response. But you get a different impression if you read what Trump actually posted:

Even as we have progressed technologically, Immigration Policy has eroded those gains and living conditions for many. I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization. These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process. Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for — You won’t be here for long!

So:

  • Trump wants us to believe that immigrants (and not billionaires or Trump's tariffs) are responsible for the dismal current economy and the long-term hollowing out of America's middle class.
  • In general, even illegal immigrants are not a "disruptive population". The vast majority keep their heads down, try not to draw attention to themselves, and work hard for very little money.
  • Trump is promoting the Biden-autopen conspiracy theory, which has no evidence to back it up.
  • Terminating Biden's "illegal admissions" means getting rid of 1.3 million people who came here entirely legally, through programs like temporary protected status for victims of natural disasters.
  • "Denaturalization" is not a thing, unless your path to citizenship was based on fraud, as Melania's probably was. Naturalized citizens are like native born citizens; you can't get rid of them by labeling them "non-compatible with Western Civilization" or making vague claims about "undermining domestic tranquility".

This is all White supremacist rhetoric otherwise unhinged from reality.

Some background: The US fought a war in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, until President Biden finally faced the reality that we were accomplishing nothing and pulled out in 2021. The pullout was chaotic, which only emphasized the need to get out: Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump had been telling us for 20 years that we were building a viable government with a viable military, but in fact everything collapsed before we could even get our people out of the country.

In the chaos, everyone who had helped the US military or the CIA was in danger. Operation Allies Welcome was designed to get them out of the country before the Taliban could find and kill them. It was followed by Operation Enduring Welcome. About 200,000 Afghans got at least temporary legal status in the US.

Now one of those 200,000 has done something terrible. So of course we should have left them all to the mercy of the Taliban. And refugees from every other country are also suspect -- except Whites escaping South Africa.

and Trump continues to lose in court

Not long after last week's Sift posted, a federal judge threw out the James Comey and Letitia James indictments because Lindsey Halligan had not been lawfully appointed as US attorney for eastern Virginia. Halligan is a former personal attorney of Trump's and has no previous experience as a prosecutor. She was appointed after the previous US attorney refused to prosecute the Comey case.

The regime may find another way to prosecute James, but the statute of limitations has run out on what Comey is accused of.

Another court just took out a different Trump prosecutor: An appellate court panel upheld a lower court ruling that Alina Habba was not legally appointed as acting US attorney for New Jersey. Every case she has prosecuted since July 1 is now subject to challenge. The issues here are slightly different than in the Halligan situation, but similarly concerns a scheme to keep a Trump-friendly and unqualified US attorney in office without Senate confirmation, beyond the 120-day period allowed for acting appointments.

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The Epstein files issue hasn't gone away. The Epstein Transparency Act gives the regime until December 19 to release the files. The clock is ticking.

During the shutdown, Democrats were holding out to get ObamaCare subsidies extended, in an effort to avoid premiums skyrocketing on January 1. Republicans said no, but that they'd deal with the problem after the Democrats caved on the shutdown.

Well, Democrats eventually caved, and guess what? Republicans can't get a proposal together. Trump briefly seemed to be pushing for a plan to extend the subsidies for two years. But that ran into opposition in the House and vanished.

The basic problem is that a sizeable number of Republicans favor a plan they can't defend in public: Let poor people die.

Kristi Noem's contempt of court got covered in the featured post. But that wasn't even the only Noem scandal this week: $220 million of DHS money has gone to an ad firm with close ties to Noem. The money is for image-building ads starring Noem herself.

Under Noem, DHS bypassed the normal competitive bidding process when awarding the contracts — allocating the majority of the money to a mysterious Delaware LLC that was created days before the deal was finalized. The Strategy Group does not appear on public documents about the deal.

My annual dose of humility: The NYT's 100 Notable Books list for 2025. This year I've read three: 1929, Katabasis, and Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.

In stark contrast to Trump's apparent concern with drug smuggling, which has caused him to have the US Navy murder 80 or so Venezuelan fishermen -- see the featured post -- he said this week that he intends to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who is serving a 45-year sentence in US prison for drug trafficking and related offenses.

Who knows what this is about? Maybe Hernandez paid somebody off. Or maybe Trump is just showing loyalty to a fellow criminal president, or his characteristic sympathy for people at the top of a pyramid, no matter how corrupt the pyramid is.

Similarly mystifying: Trump commuted the sentence of convicted fraudster David Gentile from seven years to 12 days. Gentile ran a Ponzi scheme that defrauded more than 10,000 investors. Does Trump just identify with fraudsters? Or is there something more sinister happening?

The War Defense Department is investigating Senator Mark Kelly for his role in an ad reminding members of the armed forces not to obey unlawful orders, which is just what the Uniform Code of Military Justice says.

President Bone Spurs and Secretary Drunkard don't seem to understand that any story placing them next to decorated-pilot-and-astronaut Kelly works to his benefit, not theirs.

Meanwhile, South Park has its sites on Hegseth in its Thanksgiving episode. The episode ends on a song that obscenely insults Hegseth, then asks "Pete Hegseth, what you gonna do? Your kids will watch this, and their friends will see it too."

and let's close with something fishy

No doubt this question has been keeping you up nights: Can an octopus learn to play the piano? The answer is: kinda/sorta, if you apply huge amounts of time and ingenuity to the project.

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Monday, November 24, 2025

Don't Believe It

At some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent.

- US District Judge Sara Ellis,
commenting on ICE and Border Patrol testimony
contradicted by their body camera footage

This week's featured post is "The Vibecession and the AI Bubble".

Ongoing stories

  • Trump's assault on American democracy. A judge found that federal agents in Chicago repeatedly instigated violence against protesters, then lied about it in reports that painted the protesters as violent.
  • Climate change. According to Grist, the COP30 conference in Brazil closed with "no new agreements to wind down fossil fuel use or curb deforestation".
  • Gaza. Ostensibly there's a ceasefire, but there are still attacks and people still die. The famine conditions have abated but "the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) reports that a quarter of households in Gaza are eating just one meal daily".
  • Ukraine. Representatives of Trump and Putin put together a 28-point peace plan, which Trump has given Zelenskyy until Thursday to accept. It comes at a time of internal Ukrainian weakness, and amounts to a demand for surrender. It's currently being revised in talks with Ukraine and Europe, who were left out of the original formulation.

This week's developments

This week Trump did a lot to raise your outrage

Maybe it comes from the sting of his defeat on the Epstein Transparency Act, or from worsening dementia limiting his ability to control himself, but Trump has said and done outrageous things recently at a pace that is unusual even for him. It's hard to know how to cover them. It would be easy to fill the entire Sift with nothing else, and several hour-long news shows I watched on the rechristened MS NOW did precisely that. But I'm torn.

On the one hand, these incidents only reinforce things you already know:

  • Donald Trump is a disgusting human being.
  • He regularly gets away with outrages that would have ended the career of any previous president, or just about any previous American politician. We're a long way from the era when Obama could spark outrage by wearing a tan suit or putting his feet up on the Resolute Desk.

Meanwhile, substantive things have been happening in foreign affairs, in the economy, in the courts, and so on. Being drawn into Trump's Crazytown antics removes us from the world of events that have lasting consequences for our lives and for the future of our nation.

On the other hand, ignoring these persistent outrages makes us complicit in normalizing them. American presidents have never acted like this before, and no one should want this kind of behavior to become acceptable.

So here's my compromise: I'm going to list the three biggest outrages and link to longer accounts of them, because you should know what happened. But I'm also not going to let them take over and drive out all other news.

  • He threatened six Democratic lawmakers with arrest, trial, and death for making a video repeating the standard Defense Department doctrine that soldiers should refuse to carry out unlawful orders. (No one seems to remember the origin story of the right-wing Oath Keepers after President Obama took office: "More specifically, the group's members, which number in the thousands, pledge to disobey orders they deem unlawful". Right-wingers considered that position patriotic in 2009.) Trump has since denied that he was making a death threat, but who knows how his more rabid followers might interpret his statements? If somebody actually does shoot at (rather than just threaten) one or more of the Democrats, it will be a textbook case of stochastic terrorism. Notably, one of the Democrats is Arizona's Senator Mark Kelly, whose wife Gabby Giffords has already survived a shooting.
  • He called a female White House reporter "piggy". A week ago Friday, Catherine Lucey from Bloomberg was part of a press gaggle on Air Force One. She asked the kind of hard, direct question reporters are supposed to put to presidents: “if there’s nothing incriminating in the [Epstein] files”, why was he blocking their release? Trump pointed to her in a threatening way (see photo above) and said, "Quiet, quiet piggy." The White House press secretary later defended this response as "frank and honest".

This wasn't an action of Trump himself, but falls into the same outrage category: The Coast Guard briefly considered reclassifying swastikas and nooses as "potentially divisive" rather than hate symbols. Public outcry made them walk that back.

Meanwhile, we still haven't seen the Epstein files. The Epstein Transparency Act gives the Justice Department 30 days to produce the files. Trump says his DoJ will because there's nothing to hide, but we'll see what happens.

The Trump-ordered sham investigations into Epstein's links to prominent Democrats opens the possibility that DoJ will claim it can't release information related to an ongoing investigation.

It bears repeating that Trump could have ordered the files released at any time and still could. He didn't need an act of Congress to force his hand. It's absurd to claim that you support doing something that you could have done a long time ago and chose not to do.

The best people to deal with absurdity are comedians, so here's The Daily Show's take on the situation, where Jordan Klepper applies "Occam's Giant Fucking Machete". The whole routine is amusing, but if you're pressed for time skip ahead to about the 12:30 mark.

and Marjorie Taylor Greene

It's been interesting these last few months watching MTG become estranged from the Trump regime on issues like Medicaid, ObamaCare subsidies, and the Epstein files. In every case, she has taken the path consistent with Trump's base and the promises he made them, while Trump has done something else. Just before he flipped back to the release-the-files side (sort of), Trump branded MTG as "Marjorie Traitor Greene", which MTG claimed (believably) resulted in death threats.

Sadly, like Jeff Flake, Adam Kinzinger, and others before her, MTG decided not to stand and fight. Friday night she released a video announcing that she will resign from Congress on January 5 (coincidentally, just after her pension vests).

Her video is worth watching, mostly because of how well she describes the people she claims to represent. There's some Christian-right stuff in there about abortion and trans rights, but mostly she's talking about working-class people who have seen their prospects diminish and who have little hope for their children to have a better life. She's not wrong about that, and Democrats have to figure out how to speak to and for these people.

Two places in the video stand out for other reasons. Around the 6:30 mark, she has just finished outlining all the ways she has fought for Trump and the Trump agenda in Congress before differing with him on a few issues. But then she says:

Loyalty should be a two-way street, and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district's interests, because our job-title is literally "representative". ... Standing up for American women who were raped at 14 years old, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States, whom I fought for.

Around 9:15, she compares her relationship with Trump to a broken marriage:

I refuse to be a battered wife, hoping it all goes away and gets better. If I am cast aside by the President and the MAGA political machine and replaced by neo-cons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, military-industrial war complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can never ever relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well.

But there was real news about Ukraine

Thursday, Axios published a leaked draft of a 28-point peace plan worked out by representatives of Trump and Putin, without input from either Ukraine or its European allies. The plan is shockingly one-sided. Ukraine gives in to Russia's demands: limiting the size of its army, rewriting its constitution to outlaw NATO membership, and even surrendering more territory than Russia has conquered. In exchange it gets only nebulous commitments without clear enforcement mechanisms. Timothy Snyder goes through the proposal point-by-point.

Snyder points to something others have noticed: The plan's curious phrasing suggests that it was translated from Russian. In other words, Trump's peace plan was really just Trump's name attached to Putin's demands. Much of the plan is in the passive voice, like "Ukraine's sovereignty will be confirmed." Exactly who is doing this confirming is never specified. Treaties and other agreements are not written like this.

At first it wasn't clear whether this was a final product, but Trump quickly got behind it and insisted that Ukraine accept it by Thanksgiving. "He's going to have to approve it," Trump said of Zelensky, who is politically weak right now because of a corruption scandal in his administration.

Europe pushed back, and Trump fumed. But today it looks like a second draft will happen after consultation with Europe and Ukraine. Probably Russia will reject this, and we'll be back to square one.

and the AI bubble

That's covered in the featured post.

and the regime's bad week in court

Thursday, US District Judge Sara Ellis ordered ICE and Border Patrol thugs to stop brutalizing the people of Chicago. But an appeals court stayed her order, claiming it was too broad. Then she released 233 very damning pages of her findings. Specifically, federal agents and their leader Greg Bovino repeatedly lied, submitting reports that didn't match what their body cameras recorded.

After reviewing all the evidence submitted to the Court and listening to the testimony elicited at the preliminary injunction hearing, during depositions, and in other court proceedings, the Court finds Defendants’ evidence simply not credible. ... Defendants specifically directed the Court to certain videos and timestamps “to aid the Court in its review of those videos.” Presumably, these portions of the videos would be Defendants’ best evidence to demonstrate that agents acted in line with the Constitution, federal laws, and the agencies’ own policies on use of force when engaging with protesters, the press, and religious practitioners. But a review of them shows the opposite—supporting Plaintiffs’ claims and undermining all of Defendants’ claims that their actions toward protesters, the press, and religious practitioners have been, as Bovino has stated, “more than exemplary.”

Quite the opposite, the videos repeatedly show federal agents as the provocateurs, introducing violence into otherwise peaceful protests:

For example, Defendants directed the Court to two videos of agents outside the Broadview facility the evening of September 19, 2025. In those videos, agents stand behind a fence preparing to leave the facility’s gates and disperse what Defendants described as an unruly mob. The scene appears quiet as the gate opens, revealing a line of protesters standing in the street holding signs. Almost immediately and without warning, agents lob flashbang grenades, tear gas, and pepper balls at the protesters, stating, “fuck yea!”, as they do so, and the crowd scatters. This video disproves Defendants’ contentions that protesters were the ones shooting off fireworks, refusing orders, and acting violently so as to justify the agents’ use of force.

Or this:

Defendants also highlighted an October 3, 2025 video, presumably to show that agents driving the streets faced constant danger from cars ramming them on purpose. But instead of leaving this impression, the video ... suggests that the agent drove erratically and brake-checked other motorists in an attempt to force accidents that agents could then use as justifications for deploying force.

After listing other examples and alluding to many others, Ellis conclude:

[A]t some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent. ... Overall, after reviewing all the evidence, the Court finds that Defendants’ widespread misrepresentations call into question everything that Defendants say they are doing in their characterization of what is happening at the Broadview facility or out in the streets of the Chicagoland area during law enforcement activities.

Slate's Mark Joseph Stern quotes Skye Perryman to respond to the objection that none of this matters because the Supreme Court will knuckle under to Trump anyway:

Listen, this is why we’re doing what we’re doing in the district courts. We are fully aware that somewhere down the line we can lose. But this is the place where the fog of war doesn’t enter the room. What enters the room is people telling the truth and the judge making findings. That is the story we tell, and it’s what we can do to hold the line right now. ... [I]t’s frustrating that this order has been stayed. In other words, this changes nothing on the ground. But it is important to have the judge who ordered agents to wear bodycams now make findings in which she says: You just lied. And I think that is the value of all this.

Also Thursday, US District Judge Jia Cobb ruled that Trump's deployment of the National Guard to DC was probably illegal. Her preliminary injunction gives the government until December 11 to get the troops out of DC.

And the prosecution of James Comey continues to be a comedy of errors. Recall: The career prosecutors found no case worth bringing to a grand jury, so Trump fired the US attorney and brought in Lindsey Halligan, his former personal lawyer. She couldn't get any other lawyers in her office to accompany her, so she went to the grand jury alone. Having never prosecuted a case before, and trying to move quickly before the statute of limitations ran out, she made a botch of it.

Law-fare's Benjamin Wittes comments:

It is actually hard to keep up with the pace of developments. Multiple times a day, documents land on this docket that contain new inanities, new abominations in the sight of the law, new factual revelations, new reasons to wonder not whether this case will collapse but only how. At the hearing the other day, Judge Michael Nachmanoff seemed to be struggling with exactly this question, asking an attorney for Comey—in effect—which motion he wants the judge to dismiss the case based on.

US District Judge James Boasberg will hold hearings next week to determine whether contempt charges are justified in the case where administration officials refused to turn around a plane deporting detainees to El Salvador.

and you also might be interested in ...

One of the week's great mysteries is why Trump's Oval Office meeting with NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani was such a love-fest. In the photo above, Trump is wearing the expression that South Park uses when Trump looks at his lover Satan.

The NYT is staying with the Kash Patel abuse-of-government-perks story. There are two pieces of it: use of his government jet for personal travel (something he criticized previous FBI Director Christopher Wray for), and assigning FBI SWAT agents as a protection team for his country-singer girlfriend.

and let's close with something to be thankful for

I've long thought that the Fox News canard of a "war on Christmas" had it backwards: Christmas is the aggressor and is rapidly advancing against all our other holidays. As soon as Halloween was over, Christmas decorations started appearing, and the deluge of Christmas music can't be far behind.

If you want to try to hold the Thanksgiving line, though, Country Living has a playlist of Thanksgiving songs you can use.

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