NO SIFT FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS. THE NEXT NEW ARTICLES WILL APPEAR ON MAY 12.
Resist. Rebel. Rebuild.
- Daredevil, from the season finale of Daredevil: Born Again
There's no featured post this week.
This week everybody was talking about Pope Francis
Pope Francis died this morning.
I have never been Catholic, so I view all papacies from the outside. But Francis was the first pope of my adult lifetime that I didn't instinctively think of as a political and social opponent. Previous popes, from my point of view, allowed Catholicism to be dominated by culture-war issues: anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-birth-control, pro-patriarchy, and so on.
People closer to the Catholic Church can comment on whatever doctrines he may have changed, which were largely invisible to non-Catholics. The church he leaves behind is still a patriarchal institution that teaches many ideas I view as wrong-headed. But to me, the main thing he did was shift the emphasis: from policing people's bedrooms to standing up for the downtrodden and those on the fringes of society.
Undoubtedly there will now be a battle for the soul of Catholicism. Will the church continue on the path Francis started down, or will it return to its traditional role as an ally of authoritarians and the privileged classes?
Two of the last things Francis did were to celebrate Easter and meet with J. D. Vance. Call me cynical, but I expect Vance to lie extensively about his papal audience. It is very easy for unscrupulous people to put words into the mouths of the dead.
and Pete Hegseth
Back when the Signal fiasco first surfaced a few weeks ago, many people speculated that this didn't come out of the blue. Nobody on the chat treated the situation as weird, suggesting they'd done it before.
Well, now we have another example:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.
The first Signal chat group was set up by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, but this one was set up by Hegseth himself.
This administration is filled with unqualified people like Hegseth who are not serious about national security. Showing off for friends, family, and coworkers is more important to them than keeping Americans safe.
Remind me: Why did anybody ever think Pete Hegseth belonged in this job?
and Harvard
Who expected Harvard to start leading the academic community's resistance to the Trump autocracy? How did we get here?
On April 11, representatives of the GSA, HHS, and Education Department sent a list of demands to the president of Harvard University and the leading member of the Harvard Corporation. The demands essentially would put in the university in receivership, with "an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith" empowered to audit "the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity". Departments that failed this audit would required to hire new faculty and admit new students until "viewpoint diversity" was achieved.
In other words: Acceding to the government's demands would authorize MAGA thought police to roam the campus, searching out dissent and bringing in Trump acolytes to "balance" campus viewpoints. This proposal directly contradicts the government's demand to eliminate DEI programs in favor of "merit-based" hiring and admissions. "Merit" only matters if you're Black, not if you're pro-Trump.
The letter warns that the government's "investment" in Harvard (i.e., research grants that Harvard wins in competition with other universities) "is not an entitlement", and depends on Harvard taking steps to prevent "ideological capture" by any ideology other than that of the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, Harvard could contemplate the sad example of Columbia, which knuckled under to Trump's demands and appears to have gotten nothing in return. Additionally, the law firms that have made deals with Trump are finding the terms changing on them. Once you start paying an extortionist, he's bound to demand more.
So all in all Harvard felt it had little choice in its response:
The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.
In a letter to the larger Harvard community, President Garber went further:
The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.
Various Trump officials then claimed the threatening letter had been sent by mistake. But that didn't square with the fact that the Trump administration then started carrying out its threats: $2.2 billion in grants are frozen, though they have been slow to announce which ones. The optics of that are going to be really bad for Trump. Cancellations we already know of stop research on tuberculosis and ALS. If you are counting on research like that to produce a miracle cure for yourself or your family, you're not going to be very happy.
Trump has also threatened Harvard's tax-exempt status, a move that he probably can't carry out within the law.
I know no one is shamed by hypocrisy any more, but The Bulwark's Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell went back to look at the outrage of people like J. D. Vance and Ted Cruz a few years ago when the Right (falsely) thought the Obama administration had instructed the IRS to target Tea Party groups. (In the wake of Citizens United, the IRS did heighten their scrutiny of new tax-exempt groups, which included a bumper crop of new Tea Party groups. But none inappropriately lost their tax-exempt status and no link to the White House was ever found.) Here's what Vance was saying:
This is about whether we have functional constitutional government in this country. If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we no longer live in a free country.
The biggest sham of this whole attack on American universities is that it has something to do with antisemitism. Trump cares nothing about antisemitism.
In Charlottesville, Trump was careful to differentiate between actual Nazis and the "very fine people" who marched next to the Nazis. But there is no similar consideration for any "fine people" who participated in campus protests in honest sympathy with the plight of Palestinians, or out of horror at the genocide in Gaza. To Trump, the presence of antisemites in the demonstrations tars everyone involved. The double standard here has an obvious interpretation: Antisemitism is just a club to use against the universities, which he sees as his enemies anyway.
and the courts
The Trump administration had another bad week in court. First, there's the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who came to the US illegally in 2011 and was granted withholding-of-removal status by an immigration court in 2019. The Trump administration ignored his legal status and deported him to the CECOT prison in El Salvador on March 15, in what an administration lawyer has since described as "an administrative error". On April 10, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the administration to "facilitate" Garcia's return to the US, where he might then face renewed attempts to deport him within the law. The Court sent the case back to district court Judge Paula Xinis to work out the details of Garcia's return.
The administration has defied that order while claiming that it is not defying it, by putting a ridiculous spin on "facilitate" that does not require it to do anything at all. Trump had an oval office meeting with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, where they each professed their powerlessness to do anything for Garcia, essentially making a joke out of the Court's unanimous order.
Xinis has ordered a two-week inquiry into the case that will include sworn depositions from administration officials, creating a record that could lead to contempt proceedings. Trump's lawyers tried to put a stay on her order, which an appeals court unanimously rejected on Thursday. More than just the order itself, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson's opinion rejected Trump's arguments in their entirety.
The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.
The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.
As Jay Kuo notes, Wilkinson is a Reagan appointee whose conservative credentials are impeccable. This isn't about left-and-right, it's about right-and-wrong.
Trump administration rhetoric continues to try to make this case about illegal immigration and its mythical immigrant crime wave. As J. D. Vance tweeted
The entire American media and left wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien)
The problem with that argument should be obvious: Vance assumes what so far has not been proved. If Garcia actually is a gang member who poses a threat to public safety, then by all means deport him. No one argues against that. But so far all we know is that the Trump administration SAYS he's a gang member who threatens public safety. They could say that about me or you or anybody. If Trump can send someone to his concentration camp in El Salvador just by accusing him of something, then we really are in a totalitarian state.
After all, Trump himself has been very credibly accused of crimes, and even convicted of some. I've seen a lot more evidence of Trump's crimes than of Garcia's.
The Supreme Court also ordered 7-2 that further deportations to CECOT be stopped.
In a brief order released at about 1 a.m. Saturday, the court directed the administration to temporarily halt any plan to deport a group of Venezuelan nationals who have been detained in northern Texas and have been designated as “alien enemies.”
Again, Trump wants to make this about immigrant crime, assuming without proof that all the people he wants to deport are actually dangerous. So far, though, everything we know suggests the administration isn't being particularly rigorous about establishing guilt.
The essential difference between a legitimate prison and a concentration camp is legal process. If you can be sent there on somebody's unsupported say-so, you'll stay there until somebody else says you can leave, and while you're there you have no way to protest your treatment, then you're in a concentration camp.
Wednesday, Judge James Boasberg
found probable cause Wednesday to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for willfully disobeying his order to immediately halt deportations under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act and turn around any airborne planes. ... “The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”
Another judge has ordered the administration to stop its firing of the 1500 employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Like Judge Xinis in the Garcia case, Judge Berman is demanding testimony under oath from Trump officials who seem to have ignored her previous order.
The gist of all these rulings is that time is running out on the administration's claims that it isn't disobeying court orders, based on obviously ridiculous interpretations of those orders. Before long they're going to have to either obey the orders or openly defy them.
and you also might be interested in ...
If you need to hear an optimistic voice, read this piece at The Contrarian by Norm Eisen.
I'm pretty much where Eisen is. When Trump took office, I anticipated a lot of the ways he would assault American democracy. The real question in my mind was how clever he would be and whether anyone would oppose him.
Well, three months into his second administration, we can see that he's not being very clever at all, and opposition is forming, both in the courts and in public opinion. The Economist shows Trump's net approval rating crossing below his sorry showing from the same point in his first term.
Congress will be slower to come around, but I think that will happen, at least partially. It will start with Republicans' inability to unite around an FY 2026 budget proposal. What they have so far
- cuts rich people's taxes
- cuts programs that many small-town and rural Trump voters rely on, like Medicaid and food stamps.
- still has a huge deficit.
A lot of Trump voters still believe that the spending cuts will all be "waste and fraud" cuts that target illegal aliens and maybe some other dark-skinned people they don't like. (In MAGAland, spending on non-whites is inherently wasteful.) They're going to see that it really means kicking Mom out of the nursing home, closing their small-town hospital, and skipping a few meals of their own.
Trump could even sell those White working-class "sacrifices" as necessary to control an out-of-control government debt. But calling for sacrifice and not controlling the debt is going to be a hard case to make.
Alaska's Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said out loud what a lot of people have been whispering: Republicans in Congress are afraid to cross Trump. "I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real. And that’s not right."
Now there's data to back up what a lot of people intuited some while ago: Foreign tourists are viewing the US as a risky and unpleasant place to visit.
A transwoman runner in Virginia had to leave the girls cross-country team when the Virginia HIgh School League changed its rules to get into harmony with the Trump administration. So she did what a lot of anti-trans rhetoric suggests she should do: join the boys team.
So now somebody who presents as female is on the male team, presumably raising a new set of locker room issues. Is this better?
RFK Jr. says he will identify the "environmental toxin" that causes autism. People who have spent their lives studying autism don't believe such a thing exists, but cranks like Kennedy always know better.
Remember when Candidate Trump said that ending the Ukraine War was easy, and that he could do it in 24 hours? Well, now that he's president, Trump is complaining that the two countries aren't cooperating, so he's thinking about taking his Peace and going home.
Trump pledged to lower grocery prices on Day 1, and has even claimed success by making up completely false statistics about the price of eggs. Actually, egg prices hit a record in March.
Average grocery prices were about 2.41% higher in March 2025 than they were in March 2024, Consumer Price Index data shows. This was the highest year-over-year grocery inflation rate since August 2023. And average March 2025 grocery prices were up about 0.49% from February 2025. That was the highest month-to-month grocery inflation rate since October 2022.
And that's before we see the effect of tariffs on imported foods like coffee and fruit, which should kick in soon.
More evidence that DOGE is a grift: Musk has
spared the jobs of US Department of Transportation employees who provide support services for spacecraft launches by Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Starlink ... While the administration and Doge have targeted hundreds of thousands of federal employees, critics say the decision shows Musk is willing to allow federal workers to remain employed if their work benefits him.
DOGE cuts are literally killing people.
The myth behind DOGE is that Musk commands a small army of smart nerds who can revolutionize how government works. But wouldn't you know it? The Pentagon had already thought of that idea back in 2015 and has assembled its own nerds in the Defense Digital Service. Unlike Musk's minions, these folks have actually done a few things that worked.
One former senior Pentagon official, who asked not to be named because of possible retaliation, described DOGE’s wider incursion into the Defense Department as damaging and unproductive: “They’re not really using AI, they’re not really driving efficiency. What they’re doing is smashing everything,” the former official said. At the DDS, “The best way to put it, I think, is either we die quickly or we die slowly,” Hay said.
In this era where so many institutions are yielding to autocracy without a fight, I've been interested to see what Marvel Studios and their Disney overlords have done with the new Daredevil series Daredevil: Born Again.
No one ever refers to Trump during the series, and if the words Republican or Democrat were spoken, I don't remember them. But it's hard to imagine a major studio making a stronger anti-MAGA statement.
The story arc of the season is how Daredevil's nemesis, Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. the Kingpin, escapes accountability for his criminal past and gets elected Mayor of New York on a very MAGA-ish platform: New York is in crisis and only a crusading outsider like Fisk can fix it. Once in power, he uses a combination of legal and illegal power to co-opt the city's other power centers. He recruits NYPD's most brutal officers into an elite "anti-crime" squad that operates outside normal rules, then artificially creates a crisis that justifies a near-complete authoritarian takeover. The "resist, rebel, rebuild" quote at the top of the page is from Daredevil's rallying message to his allies at the end of the season, presumably setting up the fall of Fisk in season 2.
and let's close with something embarrassing
I explained last week how my town of Bedford often finds itself in the shade of its neighbors Lexington and Concord. So I felt a little schadenfreude when this particular celebration in Lexington didn't go exactly as planned.
