A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
- the Declaration of Independence
This week's featured post is "Capitalism vs. Socialism? Get Serious."
Ongoing stories
- Trump's assault on American democracy. Courts are blocking Trump's efforts to use the postal service to cheat in the midterms. He wants to force states to turn over their voter databases, and compile a federal list of eligible voters, so that only those voters could receive mail-in ballots. This plan would shift power over elections from the states to the federal government, contradicting the Constitution.
- Climate change. Last week's European heat dome was answered this week by one covering the US east coast. World Weather Attribution assesses the (large) role climate change plays in these heat emergencies.
- Iran. Is the Strait of Hormuz open? Sort of. Tanker traffic is picking up, but is nowhere near normal.
- Ukraine. The two sides have very different strategies. Ukraine is targeting Russia's oil industry, which undermines both the Russian war effort and civilian morale. Russia is stepping up missile attacks on civilian targets. More Russian missiles are getting through because Trump stopped sending Patriot air-defense missiles to Ukraine.
This week's developments
This week everybody was talking about America's 250th birthday
This week has been a sad time for those of us who remember the 200th birthday in 1976. That was truly a national celebration. As Paul Krugman recalls, then we celebrated in spite of widespread pessimism about the state of the nation:
This sunniness may seem odd, given that the U.S. was troubled in many ways. We had just suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam. Our cities were a mess: New York had 1600 murders in 1976, more than 5 times the rate last year, and Times Square was an eyesore of drug addicts and porn shops. Oh, and the city had recently gone bankrupt.
But we celebrated together as a country. One reason was that President Ford -- who was facing a tough reelection race in the fall -- largely stayed out of the way. Whatever you thought about Ford made no difference. Have you ever watched New Years at Times Square on TV, or even gone there yourself? It's a party, not a referendum on the Mayor of New York. That's how the bicentennial was. Republicans and Democrats celebrated together, because we were all Americans.
But this year Trump had to be Trump: He made the 250th about himself, turned it into a grift, and screwed it all up. I've seldom seen the National Mall as empty as it has been during his Great American State Fair. It got so embarrassing that Fox News stopped broadcasting from the site.
Kevin Elliott posted on Bluesky:
The reason America as a whole is going to walk on by its 250th birthday with nary a thought about it is that it is profoundly embarrassed, ashamed, and angry at what we've allowed to happen to our country
Thinking about what we have to celebrate shines a spotlight on the whole right-wing effort to whitewash our history. Here's an inside look from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello mansion. For years, the staff went to considerable effort to present a rounded picture of Jefferson, which included Monticello's slaves (and particularly Sally Hemmings) in addition to all the evidence of Jefferson's genius. I saw it myself during this period and was impressed.
Then began the right-wing denunciations of Monticello "going woke", which resulted in the harassment of staff and ultimately turning over the museum's leadership.
Again and again, you will hear about how woke teachers want to make students "ashamed of their country". To me, this accusation is a confession: The people who make it are so ashamed of America that they have to cover up the nation's true history.
I think American history invites us to embrace complexity. Yes, Jefferson was a slaver who even enslaved the children he fathered on one of his slaves. That's just as bad as it sounds.
But Jefferson also wrote the Declaration of Independence, founded the University of Virginia, purchased the Louisiana Territory from France and sent Lewis and Clark out to explore it, started the Library of Congress, and had many other noteworthy accomplishments. He is sometimes put forward as the world's "last Renaissance man", who was up-to-date in all human knowledge before it began to splinter into specialties. JFK once quipped to a group of Nobel laureates he was hosting: "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
You don't have to choose between the hero-Jefferson and the villain-Jefferson, or between the Jefferson you admire and the Jefferson you despise. He was all of it.
American history is like that. We enslaved people and then fought a war that ended slavery. We saved Europe from Hitler while sending our own Japanese citizens to internment camps. We extended freedom further down the social ladder than any previous nation, but we still haven't finished the job.
We are one of history's great nations, not because we were founded by saints under God's special attention, but because we have never stopped struggling to overcome our flaws.
The struggle continues.
In contrast to Trump's ridiculous denunciation of "communism" as "the greatest threat to our country" (see the featured post), Saturday saw a march of masked White nationalists in the nation's capital. Patriot Front is a group that formed after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, the one where Trump found "good people on both sides".
I suspect that if a similarly masked Black Power group marched, Trump would sic the National Guard on them. But White nationalists are on his side, so he will never acknowledge the threat they pose.
The Declaration of Independence seems oddly relevant today, as Trump repeats the offenses of King George. Robert Reich brings the specifics.
and birthright citizenship
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against Trump's executive order refusing to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States whose parents are undocumented. The three liberal justices (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) were joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett in respecting the plain wording of the 14th Amendment.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
The Trump regime has tried to make a loophole out of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof", and three justices (Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch) were sufficiently craven to follow their master this far. But this phrase has always been interpreted as applying to children of foreign diplomats, and to Native American tribes before they were fully incorporated into the United States. There's a simple rule of thumb: Suppose an American law enforcement agency (town, state, or federal) wants to arrest you. Do they have to deal with some foreign government first? If so, then you are not fully "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.
Undocumented immigrants are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. You can't round up people and put them in camps, and then claim they aren't subject to your jurisdiction.
Kavanaugh tried to have it both ways: He voted against the executive order but didn't find a constitutional right; instead, he based his judgment on immigration laws that Congress could repeal at any time.
I have a lot to say about this, but Atlantic's Adam Serwer has already said it: In 1898, an era of widespread lynchings, the same racist Supreme Court that created the separate-but-equal loophole for Jim Crow laws affirmed the plain text of the 14th Amendment 6-2. No one has challenged that ruling since, and it was not the least bit controversial until Trump's executive order. But now, four justices can't find a constitutional right here. We are one vote away, not just from a Republican Congress repealing birthright citizenship, but from Trump being allowed to define the Constitution however he wants.
Neither the text of the Constitution nor more than a century of precedent have proved a match for the partisan-motivated reasoning of several supposedly impartial right-wing justices, whose views on what the Constitution says shift with the ideological currents. ... Thomas observed in his dissent that “the President’s initiative generated a groundswell of new scholarship.” Indeed it did, to the extent that you can call it such. That some right-wing legal academics rushed to fabricate a justification for Trump’s goals is not to the credit of the scholarship or those scholars, nor to the justices who embraced them.
Serwer echoes what I wrote last week in "Immigration is about Race": that the goal here is a nation by and for White people, especially conservative White Christians. The objection
is not to birthright citizenship. It is to the idea that “all men are created equal.”
He also echoes what I wrote in 2014's "Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party": When today's conservatives claim to be following the Founders, they are actually following slavery-advocate John Calhoun's misappropriation of the Founders.
One measure of how Republicans have changed during my lifetime is summed up by this quote from Ronald Reagan:
Since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: ``You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American."
and trans athletes
Predictably, the Supreme Court sided with West Virginia and Idaho against transgender athletes. The two states have enacted bans against trans girls and women in public schools participating in female sports leagues.
At this point in our cultural evolution, trans people, especially male-to-female transitions, still seem strange to most Americans, with a high ick-factor. That's why it's so hard to have a rational discussion about their lives and their rights. Many people don't want to hear about the challenges faced by actual trans people. They just get to "ick" and their brains shut down.
If you are old enough or from certain parts of the country, you may remember when gays and lesbians had a similar ick-factor. Two men holding hands or two women kissing could make large numbers of Americans feel physically nauseous. If you ever experienced that sense of nausea, it didn't even register as bigotry. They seemed to be the aggressors. They were making us feel ill.
What changed over the decades is that more and more gays and lesbians came out, and same-sex couples became a fact of everyday life. Gay men stopped being seen as some sinister underground trying to undermine Western civilization. They lived next door and had that garden you envied. The woman who was your ally at the PTA went home to a wife, not a husband.
It may seem hard to believe at the moment, but the same evolution of attitudes will happen with transfolk. You can see it already in the national debate: The people who want to persecute transfolk are talking about abstractions, while the people who defend trans rights are talking about people they know. Outrageous claims tend to fall apart when you try to apply them to a real person. Eventually, we'll all know somebody.
The column I wish everybody would read is "The Four Fallacies at the Heart of SCOTUS’ Decision on Trans Athletes" by George Theoharis, a Syracuse professor who has been a public school principal, teacher, and coach. His four fallacies are
- trans youth are pretending to be trans
- the harm of exclusion is acceptable
- anti-trans bans protect girls
- trans athletes create an urgent fairness crisis in school sports
Theoharis applies these fallacies to a trans athlete he actually knows, Cal. Cal is not "pretending" to be female in order to compete unfairly. Cal took drugs to avoid changes in puberty that would produce an unfair advantage. Her presence in a female locker room harms no one (beyond perhaps producing an occasional "ick" response). Athletes like her are not rewriting the record books or making it impossible for cisgender women to compete. If you ignore "ick", it's hard to find any harm at all that results from her participation. Conversely, it is easy to see the harm she would suffer from exclusion.
It's also easy to see the harm female athletes in general will suffer. These bans are about putting more restrictions on women, not freeing them from unfair competition.
What I find more trying than the underlying issue is the political case many are making: Democrats shouldn't criticize the Court's act of bigotry, because most Americans agree with it.
Arguments like this should disturb anybody whose rights might become unpopular at some point in the future. It's saying: "We don't have any principles. If your rights are violated, we'll have to take a poll before we decide whether to defend you."
It is undeniable that an avalanche of money ($215 million, by one estimate) was spent late in the 2024 campaign to push the slogan: "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you." Harris never responded, and damage was done. Maybe that's why she's not president.
But I think never-take-an-unpopular-position is the wrong lesson to learn. It looks timid and unprincipled -- because it is.
Republicans don't behave that way. They have a long list of unpopular positions: tax cuts for billionaires, raising the retirement age, sending long-term residents with no criminal records to concentration camps, outlawing abortion, and so on. But does any Republican ever say: "We have to stop talking about abortion"?
The right lesson is to be ready to defend your positions, even if the majority disagrees with you. You have to stand by what you believe and refuse to act as if you are ashamed. 2028 hopefuls like Gavin Newsom may hedge their bets, but I think Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has it right:
I know there are transgender people right now, looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for their simple right to exist. Well, I am. We are. We will. And we want them to thrive.
I know that amidst the ongoing assault on our democratic institutions, it's easy for people to fall into despair about our democratic system. But I love this country too much not to fight for it.
and you also might be interested in ...
My need to stay on top of the national conversation causes me to subscribe to publications I don't necessarily recommend. I've been been a Washington Post subscriber for many years, but I've also been down on it ever since Amazon centi-billionaire Jeff Bezos started interfering directly in the paper's editorial positions, like when he blocked its endorsement of Kamala Harris. I watched him toady to Donald Trump at his inauguration, and make the sycophantic claim that second-term Trump is a more "disciplined" and "mature" version of first-term Trump. I have occasionally noted on this blog how the WaPo editorial page has turned into the voice of the billionaire agenda.
But Saturday I finally cancelled. Their editorial criticizing the Supreme Court for one of the few good things it did this term -- reading the plain text of the 14th Amendment and protecting birthright citizenship -- pushed me too far. (It didn't help that they then published a call to abolish the National Institute of Health.)
There's a free press in this country (at least for billionaires), and Bezos can print whatever he likes. But he can spend his own money on that. I have better things to do with mine.
Wednesday, Air Force Major Jason Watson stood on the Capitol steps in full uniform and denounced President Trump, calling for his impeachment, conviction and removal. He was arrested.
To the extent that mainstream media covered this event at all, it focused on the wrong thing. Yes, what Watson did politicized the military (as Pete Hegseth does every day), and is a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It is entirely appropriate that he be arrested and punished. (Hegseth is still at large.)
But this isn't a somebody-trying-to-get-away-with-something story, it's a civil-disobedience story. Watson knew he was breaking the rules and knew he'd pay a price for it. When officers came to arrest him, he did not run or fight.
The story is that Watson, a man who had made a career out of serving his country, is willing to pay the price of his actions. That's how much he believes in his message.
This insight about using AI in education rings true to me:
Cognitive load theory has told us since 1988 that the productive struggle — the moment a student has to reach, fail, and reach again — is exactly where learning happens. Vygotsky called it the zone of proximal development: not too hard, not too easy, the precise difficulty that requires a human to stretch.
What the causal evidence shows is that AI, deployed as a general-purpose answer machine, collapses that zone. Students feel better. They learn less. They enjoy the session and can’t recall it the next day.
Elon Musk can't handle the truth.
This particular episode started on June 21, when Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) called him out for gutting USAID, which "possibly sentenced to death" 4.5 million children around the world. Musk threw a fit on X -- it's easy to act out on a platform you control -- saying it was "time to sue this liar".
There is not even a single dead child! ... They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!
NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof has a long history of calling attention to the plight of the desperately poor, particularly in Africa. So he began giving Musk the names he asked for.
Jibia was a 10-year-old girl, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class in Rwamwanja, Uganda. Aid cuts meant that the local clinic ran out of $2 bed nets to protect from mosquitoes, as well as anti-malaria medicines. Jibia died of malaria last July, her mother told me outside the family home. Medical records confirmed that, and health workers told me that she would have been fine without the aid cuts: Replacing her tattered bed net with a new one could have prevented malaria, and in any case drugs would have helped her to recover promptly.
Yamah Freeman hemorrhaged while pregnant with her third child in her village in Liberia. The United States had provided ambulances to the local hospital, but the aid cuts under Musk and President Trump meant that the ambulances had no fuel. The strongest young men in the village placed her on their shoulders and raced down the path toward town, shouting encouragement to her as they ran, but she bled to death along the way. Her parents and sister told me about this, and I visited her grave.
Achol Deng, 8, had been infected with H.I.V. at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and the resulting chaos meant that she lost her caseworker and access to medicines, and soon died of an opportunistic infection, health workers told me.
"I could go on," he wrote. And then he challenged Musk:
Come with me on a reporting trip to South Sudan or Somalia or Mozambique. Meet starving children whose lives can be easily saved. Hold them. Look into their eyes. Talk to their terrified moms.
Musk seems unlikely to accept the challenge.
Musk replied with a multi-post tantrum, calling Kristof “utterly evil” and a “piece of shit and liar” who is “lying through his teeth.” He also called another researcher, Alonso Gurmendi, “a piece of shit who loves murder” after Gurmendi mentioned a 10-year-old child in South Sudan who died after being cut off from his HIV medication.
Trump is refusing to renew the trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, the USMCA. The agreement, which replaced the Clinton-era NAFTA, was promoted as a diplomatic triumph of the first Trump administration. The agreement does not automatically lapse now, but has to go through annual reviews, creating uncertainty for any company looking at long-term investments.
It's a bad time to be a Russian oil refinery.
and let's close with something messy
Lately I've been looking into wedding rituals, for reasons I'll explain in a couple months. In Hinduism there's a haldi ceremony that is held before a wedding. Friends and family assemble to smear the bride and groom with an orange tumeric-based paste. The photos make it look like fun, but I have my doubts.
