#u.s. war shipping administration

[stone-cold-groove]

He knows... do you... Grace Line - 1944.

[afloweroutofstone]

The Trump administration accidentally included the conservative editor of The Atlantic in a group chat where they were discussing, in great detail, the US bombing campaign in Yemen

In all, 18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials; Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator; Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and someone identified only as “S M,” which I took to stand for Stephen Miller. I appeared on my own screen only as “JG.”

...I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president...

At this point, a fascinating policy discussion commenced. The account labeled “JD Vance” responded at 8:16: “Team, I am out for the day doing an economic event in Michigan. But I think we are making a mistake.” (Vance was indeed in Michigan that day.) The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

The Vance account then goes on to make a noteworthy statement, considering that the vice president has not deviated publicly from Trump’s position on virtually any issue. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”...

At 8:27, a message arrived from the “Pete Hegseth” account. “VP: I understand your concerns – and fully support you raising w/ POTUS. Important considerations, most of which are tough to know how they play out (economy, Ukraine peace, Gaza, etc). I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what – nobody knows who the Houthis are – which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.”

The Hegseth message goes on to state, “Waiting a few weeks or a month does not fundamentally change the calculus. 2 immediate risks on waiting: 1) this leaks, and we look indecisive; 2) Israel takes an action first – or Gaza cease fire falls apart – and we don’t get to start this on our own terms. We can manage both. We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should. This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered. But, we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC”—operations security. “I welcome other thoughts.”...

The account identified as “JD Vance” addressed a message at 8:45 to @Pete Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.” (The administration has argued that America’s European allies benefit economically from the U.S. Navy’s protection of international shipping lanes.)

It was the next morning, Saturday, March 15, when this story became truly bizarre.

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

The only person to reply to the update from Hegseth was the person identified as the vice president. “I will say a prayer for victory,” Vance wrote. (Two other users subsequently added prayer emoji.)

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.

[houseofbrat]

Bernie Would Have Won

By Krystal Ball

There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases. 

But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.

Let’s think a little bit about how we got here. The combination of the Iraq War and the housing collapse exposed the failures and rot that were the inevitable result of letting the needs of capital predominate over the needs of human beings. The neoliberal ideology which was haltingly introduced by Jimmy Carter, embraced fully by Ronald Reagan, and solidified across both parties with Bill Clinton embraced a laissez-faire market logic that would supplant market will for national will or human rights, but also raise incomes enough overall and create enough dynamism that the other problems were in theory, worth the trade off. Clinton after all ran with Reagan era tax cutting, social safety net slashing and free trade radicalism with NAFTA being the most prominent example. 

Ultimately, of course, this strategy fueled extreme wealth inequality. But for a while this logic seemed to be working out. The Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. Incomes did indeed rise and the internet fueled tech advances contributing to a sense of cosmopolitan dynamism. America had a swaggering confidence that these events really did represent a sort of end of history. We believed that our brand of privatization, capitalism, and liberal democracy would take over the world. We confidently wielded institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO to realize this global vision. We gave China most-favored nation trade status.

Underneath the surface, the unchecked market forces we had unleashed were devastating communities in the industrial Midwest and across the country. By the neoliberal definition NAFTA was a roaring success contributing to GDP growth. But if your job was shipped overseas and your town was shoved into economic oblivion, the tradeoff didn’t seem like such a great deal.

The underlying forces of destruction came to a head with two major catastrophes, the Iraq War and the housing collapse/Great Recession. The lie that fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply unjust in a system that placed capital over people. How could it be that the greedy villains who triggered a global economic calamity were made whole while regular people were left to wither on the vine?

These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic. Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an existential threat to their way of life. 

On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street, which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation. Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.  

These two movements traveled on separate tracks within their respective party alliances and met wildly different fates. On the Republican side, Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.

Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures. The uber-rich are not among the villains of the populist right (see: Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and so on), except in so much as they overlap with cultural leftism. The Republican donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests. This comfort with him was affirmed after he cut their taxes and prioritized union busting and deregulation in his first term in office.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party put its thumb on the scales and marshaled every bit of power they could, legitimate and illegitimate, to block Bernie Sanders from a similar party takeover. The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.

What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.

This identity politics sword has also been wielded within the Democratic Party to crush any possibility of a Bernie-inspired class focused movement in Congress attempted by the Justice Democrats and the Squad in 2018. My colleague Ryan Grim has written an entire book on this subject so I won’t belabor the point here. But suffice it to say, the threat of the Squad to the Democratic Party’s ideology and order has been thoroughly neutralized. The Squad members themselves, perhaps out of ideology and perhaps out of fear of being smeared as racist, leaned into identitarian politics which rendered them non-threatening in terms of national popular appeal. They were also relentlessly attacked from within the party, predominately by pro-Israel groups that an unprecedented tens of millions of dollars in House primaries, which has led to the defeat of several members and has served as a warning and threat to the rest.

That brings us to today where the Democratic Party stands in the ashes of a Republican landslide which will sweep Donald Trumpback into the White House. The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.

I have always believed that Bernie would have defeated Trump in 2016, though of course there is no way to know for sure. What we can say for sure is that the brand of class-first social democracy Bernie ran on in 2016 has proven successful in other countries because of course the crisis of neoliberalism is a global phenomenon. Most notably, Bernie’s basic political ideology was wildly successful electorally with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now his successor Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, Lula Da Silva in Brazil, and Evo Morales in Bolivia. AMLO, in fact, was one of the most popular leaders in the entire world and dramatically improved the livelihoods of a majority of his countrymen. Bernie’s basic ideology was also successful in our own history.

In the end, I got this election dead wrong. I thought between January 6th and the roll back of human rights for women, it would be enough. I thought that the overtly fascist tendencies of Donald Trump and the spectacle of the world’s richest man bankrolling him would be enough strikes against him to overcome the problems of the Democratic Party which I have spoken out about for years now–problems Kamala Harris decided to lean into rather than confront. Elevating Liz Cheney as a top surrogate was not just a slap in the face to all the victims of American imperialism—past and ongoing; it was a broad signal to voters that Democrats were the party of elites, playing directly into right-wing populist tropes. While the media talked about it as a “tack to the center,” author and organizer Jonathan Smucker more aptly described it as “a tack to the top.” And as I write this now, I have zero hope or expectation that Democrats will look at the Bernie bro coalition and realize why they screwed up. Cable news pundits are already blaming the left once again for the failures of a party that has little to do with the actual left and certainly not the populist left. 

Instead, Trump’s victory represents a defeat of social democratic class-first politics in America—not quite final, but not temporary either. The Democrats have successfully smothered the movement, blocked the entranceways, salted the earth. Instead they will, as Bill Clinton did in the ‘90s, embrace the fundamental tenets of the Trumpist worldview. 

They already are, in fact. Democrats have dropped their resistance to Trump’s mass deportation policies and immigrant scapegoating. The most ambitious politician in the Democratic coalition, Gavin Newsom, is making a big show of being tough-on-crime and dehumanizing the homeless. Democrat-leaning billionaires like Jeff Bezos who not only owns Amazon but the Washington Post have already abandoned their resistance.

Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly, mean, and harmful—because it already is.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

M. Wuerker

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 5, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 06, 2025

Five years ago, on February 5, 2020, Republican senators acquitted then-president Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial. Trump immediately vowed retaliation against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law for his actions. “It’s payback time,” one Republican said. “He has an enemies list that is growing by the day.”

Now Trump is back in office and purging the government of those he perceives to be his enemies. His administration is purging the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the civil service of anyone deemed insufficiently supportive of the president.

But it is not clear that the 78-year-old Trump is the one calling the shots. Although Trump maintained during his campaign that he had no idea what the right-wing Project 2025 was, multiple media outlets have established that most of his flurry of executive orders appear to have been lifted from the 922-page document. That document is the product of a group of far-right organizations led by the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to Viktor Orbán’s Danube Institute.

This week’s threatened tariff war blew up in Trump’s face. After his vow to put tariffs of 25% on most products from Mexico and Canada sent the stock market plunging, he was left declaring victory over Mexico and Canada after they essentially assured him they would do things they are already doing. In the meantime, as Carl Quintanilla noted today, Trump’s tariffs on products from China are increasing prices in the U.S.

Last night, Trump horrified even his own advisors by saying that the United States would take over Gaza and turn it into a resort area. Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported today that Trump’s team “had not done even the most basic planning to examine the feasibility of the idea” when Trump blurted it out. “[T]here had been no meetings with the State Department or Pentagon, as would normally occur for any serious foreign policy proposal,” Swan and Haberman wrote, “let alone one of such magnitude. There had been no working groups. The Defense Department had produced no estimates of the troop numbers required, or cost estimates, or even an outline of how it might work. There was little beyond an idea inside the president’s head,” an idea his own officials considered “fantastical even for Mr. Trump.”

Trump’s comments were so badly received in the Middle East that Matthew Gertz of Media Matters wondered if Secretary of State Marco Rubio had ordered additional security for the U.S. diplomatic facilities there.

Today, Trump praised Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for coaching Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes in college, although Mahomes arrived at Texas Tech after Tuberville had already left.

In his important piece “The Logic of Destruction and How to Resist It,” published February 2 in his Thinking about…, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder reflected on the president’s multiple photo ops signing executive orders to, for example, blame former Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for a plane crash that happened during Trump’s term. Snyder referred to the president as “a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras.”

Today journalist Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich noted that a thinker popular with the technological elite in 2022 laid out a plan to gut the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship. This would be a “reboot” of the country, Curtis Yarvin wrote, and it would require a “full power start,” a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power, which risks destroying the ship.

Yarvin called for “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization,” headed by the equivalent of the rogue chief executive officer of a corporation who would destroy the public institutions of the democratic government. Trump—whom Yarvin dismissed as weak—would give power to that CEO, who would “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts.” “Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.” Once loyalists have replaced civil servants in a new ideological “army,” the CEO “will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern.” The new regime must take over the country and “perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.” It must “seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections.”

Duran noted that Vice President J.D. Vance has echoed Yarvin’s prescriptions and that Trump sidekick billionaire Elon Musk appears to be putting Yarvin’s blueprint into action. “Musk is taking a systematic approach,” Duran wrote, “one that has been outlined in public forums for years.”

This morning, Anna Wilde Mathews and Liz Essley Whyte of the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk’s team has accessed payment and contracting systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Mathews and Whyte note that CMS sits at the center of the country’s healthcare economy. In 2024, it disbursed about $1.5 trillion, or about 22% of the total amount of the federal total.

On X, Musk said “this is where the big money fraud is happening.” But, in fact, CMS is not operating without oversight. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which operates out of the Department of Justice, investigates healthcare fraud. In June 2024 it announced criminal charges against 193 defendants across 32 federal districts who allegedly participated in healthcare fraud schemes that involved about $2.75 billion in intended losses and $1.6 billion in actual losses.

Indeed, as Eric Levitz of Vox pointed out, “DOGE has not presented evidence of ‘fraud’; they have highlighted millions of dollars worth of spending that Musk considers wasteful. By contrast, the [General Accountability Office] identified $233 billion of fraud in 2024. We don’t need to let a billionaire ignore federal law to do government oversight[.]”

“It is extraordinary how much access Elon Musk and his sort of creepy 22-year-old henchmen have to all of our data,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told MSNBC today. “They have information that would allow them to shut down your tax refund, your Medicare payment…. Potentially, they know everything about you and your family, and the reality is that this could get dystopian very quickly…. If you were to start speaking ill of Elon Musk on social media, Elon Musk might be able to stop or delay your tax refund, or your mom's Social Security benefit, in part because we have no window into what's happening inside the Department of [the] Treasury right now."

While Murphy didn’t say it explicitly, control over such information also gives Musk power over business rivals and political leaders. When Musk’s team went into the Department of Labor today, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that “[h]e could manipulate quarterly job numbers and much more. We are talking about MARKET MOVING INFORMATION! Do employers want Musk to have access to any of their confidential data?”

Today, when asked about Musk’s conflicts of interest as he reviews federal spending while also receiving more than $15 billion in federal contracts, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had already promised that “if Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing, that Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.” Donald Kettl, a scholar of public policy, told Dana Hull of Bloomberg: “I don’t know of any other case, anywhere, in which an individual could determine for himself whether he had a conflict of interest. In fact, self-determination of a conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest.”

In a shocking attack on the intelligence personnel who collect information around the world to keep Americans safe, today the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent a list of all employees the agency hired in the past two years to the White House, sending the list by unclassified email. Hugo Lowell of The Guardian reported that a former CIA agent called the reporting of the names “a counterintelligence disaster.” Lowell also reported that Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that he understands that the White House “insisted” on the list coming through unclassified email.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, posted: “Exposing the identities of officials who do extremely sensitive work would put a direct target on their backs for China. A disastrous national security development.”

Today, protesters gathered across the country to protest the takeover of the U.S. government by Musk and his cronies, and Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) noted on Facebook that the U.S. Senate phone system has been overwhelmed with around 1,600 calls a minute, in contrast to the 40 calls a minute it usually receives. Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI) announced he would introduce the ELON MUSK Act—the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy Act—which would ban federal contracts for Special Government Employees, similar to the bans for members of Congress and other federal employees.

Opposition might well continue to grow, as the bite of the cuts the Trump administration and Musk are making to the federal government is only beginning to be felt at home (the collapse of USAID is already an international crisis). Those cuts are poised to hurt Trump’s own rural voters worse than they hurt Democratic areas. In Virginia, about 400,000 people in rural areas receive healthcare from federally qualified health centers; half of these centers have lost their federal grants and are stopping some services or closing. Trump is currently planning to eliminate the Department of Education; the top six states that receive grants under the department—Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Nevada—all voted for Trump in 2024.

Tonight, Democratic senators, led by Chuck Schumer (NY), Jeff Merkley (OR), Patty Murray (WA), Gary Peters (MI), and Brian Schatz (HI), will hold the Senate floor all night in a filibuster to stop the confirmation of Russell Vought, a key right-wing author of Project 2025, to direct the Office of Management and Budget. “Vought’s proposals to slash federal funding will threaten Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security,” the senators said. “Vought will also continue to carry out President Donald Trump’s illegal federal funding cuts, stopping taxpayer dollars from supporting local schools, police departments, community health centers, food pantries, firefighters, and other vital programs.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Nikki McCann Ramírez, Asawin Suebsaeng, and Andrew Perez at Rolling Stone:

Donald Trump and his White House have moved to deport green-card holders for espousing pro-Palestinian views, shipped hundreds of migrants to a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison without due process (in defiance of a judge’s order), and are now publicly musing about sending United States citizens to prison in El Salvador.    Trump said last weekend he would “love” to send American criminals there — and would even be “honored” to, depending on “what the law says.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed this week that the president has discussed this idea privately, too, adding he would only do this “if it’s legal.” El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has for months been offering to hold U.S. citizens in his country’s prison system, which he has turned into “a judicial black hole” rife with “systematic torture,” as one human rights advocate recently told Rolling Stone. Legal experts agree that sending American citizens to prison in El Salvador would be flagrantly illegal under both U.S. and international law — and that the idea itself is shockingly authoritarian, with few parallels in our nation’s history.  The Trump administration is indeed discussing this idea behind the scenes, two sources familiar with the matter confirmed to Rolling Stone. In their most serious form, these conversations have revolved around attempting to denaturalize American citizens and deport them to other countries, including El Salvador.  “You can’t deport U.S. citizens. There’s no emergency exception, there’s no special wartime authority, there’s no secret clause. You just can’t deport citizens,” says Steve Vladeck, a legal commentator and law professor at Georgetown. “Whatever grounds they try to come up with for denaturalization or expatriation, the one thing that is absolutely undeniable is that people are entitled to individualized processes, before that process can be effectuated.” 

In the United States, the grounds to strip a naturalized individual of their citizenship encompass serious material offenses. They include: committing treason or terrorism, enlisting in a foreign military engaged in opposition to the United States, or lying in applications for citizenship or as part of the naturalization process. 

[...] For instance, the sources add, Trump administration officials have discussed possibly denaturalizing and deporting activists and other individuals whom they label as having committed so-called “fraud” on their applications for citizenship by subsequently supporting what Team Trump decides are “pro-terrorist” causes or groups — similar to the specious arguments they’ve made to justify stripping pro-Palestine student activists of their green cards or visas.  According to these sources, Trump administration attorneys and some senior appointees have also discussed potential legal justifications and technicalities they can exploit for denaturalizing citizens who are accused or convicted of certain crimes, especially if the Justice Department or other offices deems their offenses to be gang-related.  The administration has already tried to justify deporting Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act — the notorious 1798 law used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II — by claiming the men had ties to gangs. As CBS News’ 60 Minutes has reported, the vast majority of the men who were sent to El Salvador “have no apparent criminal convictions or even criminal charges.” Some of the allegations appear to have been based entirely on the migrants’ completely anodyne tattoos and apparel.  In recent weeks, largely due to the president’s influence, some of the discussions among Trump officials and administration lawyers have touched on the idea of potentially sending some of these denaturalization targets to brutal facilities in El Salvador, the sources add. 

The fact that the Trump Regime is even considering sending US citizens to CECOT in El Salvador is an abomination. Watch his regime decide to throw political dissidents (Democratic Party members, pro-LGBTQ+ rights, pro-Palestine, etc.) there if he can get away with it.

[posttexasstressdisorder]

What we can VERIFY about Port of Seattle 'ghost town' rumors

As the Trump administration continues to impose up to 145% tariffs on most Chinese imports and as smaller tariffs on additional countries, a post is circulating online claiming the Port of Seattle is a “ghost town” because of it.

The post, shared Sunday, reads in part, “Not a single international cargo ship at the Port of Seattle. The port is effectively dead.”

We decided to verify.

Our sources are The Northwest Seaport Alliance, which manages all marine cargo operations for the Port of Seattle and Port of Tacoma, and Vessel Finder, which tracks vessel positions in real time.

According to both sources, three international cargo ships were docked Monday in the Port of Seattle. One is registered in Portugal, one in Singapore, and the third in Hong Kong.

The Northwest Seaport Alliance told KING 5 that 15 more cargo ships are expected to pass between the Port of Seattle (nine for Seattle) and the Port of Tacoma over the next week. Twelve of those ships are expected to contain goods from China.

The Seaport Alliance said port traffic in Seattle is up 7.3% in the last 30 days. The port saw an 18.4% increase in volumes in March, partially driven by shippers moving cargo before anticipated tariffs.

Northwest Seaport Alliance Port of Seattle Commissioner, Ryan Calkins, said the future does not look as good. 

"The last forecast I saw was forecasting out over the next three months, and each month was forecasted to be down around 25% per month,” Calkins said.

The Seaport Alliance said some ships are coming in with less cargo than anticipated. In some cases, it is 30% lower.

“Unfortunately, we are beginning to see a reduction in the total number of containers coming off any particular vessel when they come in," Calkins said. 

The organization said its imports and exports have been impacted. It told KING 5 it is hearing reports of canceled U.S. export orders, which are leaving some businesses scrambling to find other markets to send their goods to. 

“Unfortunately hearing stories right now of our agricultural exporters having to come back to the terminal and pick up containers full of agricultural exports to return back and store them as they wait for a customer because the sale that they had made to an overseas customer was canceled as a result of the tariff war,” Calkin said.

The Northwest Seaport Alliance said two of its commissioners will be in Vietnam and South Korea this week, working to build business back from those countries. 

“Those are growth markets for us, and we want to strengthen those relationships," Calkin said. 

He said he hopes there is a resolution in the trade dispute between the U.S. and China soon. 

“If we don't get a resolution quickly, I think we're all going to feel a lot of pain in the pocketbook,” Calkin said.

The Northwest Seaport Alliance said the Port of Seattle is not a “ghost town,” but it will be closely watching what happens in the next couple of weeks.

-----

Story Link from @misfitwashere

[calm-with-anxiety]

If I see or hear people defending their votes for Trump with “well I didn’t really know her policies and plans for her presidency” I will burst into flames. We live in a time where almost every piece of information is in your hand, you could’ve Googled her plans, it was on her fucking website for weeks, it was 80 pages of policy and how they planned to pay for it. Like you chose to be an uneducated voter that got information from commercials and short form video.

The economy line is bullshit because his plans will make everything more expensive, tariffs are payed for by you, you think the multibillion dollar company will take on the extra cost to buy and ship goods by lowering the CEO salary, no, they will make the item more expensive because they never promised you a $200 tv, but they did promise stockholders a dividend of $10/share. His mass deportation policy will cause the economy to collapse because immigrants, legal or illegal, do the jobs that others look down on. You never see a line of white guys in overalls hoping to be hired for below minimum wage to pick fruit for hours in the sun, you don’t see young white men showing up to construction jobs that the builder has subcontracted so it’s cheaper to build. The bedrock of the U.S. economy is cheap labor and a majority of that is immigrants who are looking for jobs that don’t require knowing perfect English and have employers that look the other way when you don’t have documents because they know you will work for anything.

Don’t even get me started on healthcare, outside of women’s healthcare which will get worse, if he finally gets rid of the affordable care act, aka Obamacare, they will replace it with nothing. The man was president before and after John McCain put his thumb down they never tried to make a new policy that wasn’t throwing the whole program into the trash. Also the affordable care act is more than just low cost healthcare, it put in place pre-existing conditions, for those too young to remember, the insurance companies could deny you coverage all because you might get cancer one day because your mother had it, you would have to pay out of pocket for an inhaler because asthma was a pre-existing condition, even if you were diagnosed with it later in life. Don’t forget what the vaccine situation will be, especially if he puts RFK jr. anywhere near it, like there is actual fear that Polio will come back because guess what? Most people under the age of 40 are not vaccinated for it because it was considered eradicated due to the mass vaccination of children in the 50s and 60s. When you complain about feeling like shit after getting the flu shot or a Covid booster, that is the vaccine working in your body, your body is doing an internal workout so if and when you come in contact with those viruses you won’t be getting extremely sick or die because someone doesn’t know how to cover their cough.

I think this election was proof that you can have all the information and still know nothing because you chose to know nothing. People vote with their eyes, not their mind. Gas where I live has been under $3.00 for months, it’s been under $2.50 at the warehouse stores for weeks, but because an ad on tv said prices are rising people believed the tv over their own experience. People saw grocery prices increase and blamed the administration when in reality corporations took advantage of Covid shortages, raised prices, recorded historic profits, and didn’t start bring prices down until this summer after people realized what was happening to some extent and even then they didn’t return to pre-2020 prices because the profit still needed to be high, they looked at the $2 increase in a bag of chips over 4 years and blamed democrats and not Lays.

This is going to be a painful 4 years, for many people here and abroad, Ukraine will have to depend on Europe which is starting to lean conservative as well and the war in Gaza will take an extreme shift that will make the last year look like a paper cut in terms of humanitarian assistance and a possible end. It’s already getting on my nerves as people tweet “we keep fighting” and “we need to be strong so they can’t do all they plan to do like the first time”, it’s not going to be like the first time, the adults in the room he had with him, many who came out and supported Harris, are gone and now it will be yes men that he was told to put there by the extreme right like the supporters of project 2025 and billionaires. And for those saying “well maybe he will die in office”, you think JD Vance is better? He allegedly picked him because DT jr. suggested him and if you have ever seen jr. and his takes you would know Vance can be worse.

This is gonna hurt for many people that will now be seen as lower than second class citizens and you won’t even have lower prices to show for it as that seemed to be the reason you voted for him, enjoy your expensive goods as people lost rights.

[mariacallous]

Eleven years ago, I went on my first reporting trip to Guantánamo. It was 2014, and I was  covering a military commissions hearing for the five men accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The case was then, as it still is today, stuck in pretrial proceedings, mired in litigation over how to fairly prosecute people who were extensively tortured by the U.S. government. 

This was several years after the administration of President Barack Obama declared that no one from the previous administration of George W. Bush would be prosecuted for their role in the torture program. The Obama administration also promised to close the Guantánamo facility for good, a promise that was never fulfilled. The inability to bring about anything resembling justice in the 9/11 case is an enduring reminder that, despite Obama’s efforts, the country cannot simply “move forward as opposed to looking backwards” on its post-9/11 detention practices. 

Indeed, Obama’s and then President Joe Biden’s failure to close the prison at Guantánamo has rippled through to 2025 in a whole new way. 

Weeks after taking office a second time, President Donald Trump was able to ship hundreds of migrants, many of whom have never been charged with a crime, to the notorious offshore prison. The administration has claimed, without evidence, that it is targeting members of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua. But the point of sending migrants to Guantánamo was to evade judicial review of the government’s claims and to evoke the harrowing images of the so-called war on terror. 

“If you go back to the early days of the war on terror, Guantánamo was supposed to be the legal equivalent of outer space, where no law applied. It’s that threat that you saw the Trump administration invoking in order to terrorize immigrants,” J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told HuffPost. The civil liberties nonprofit has played a major role in challenging war on terror detentions at Guantánamo and is now challenging the Trump administration’s migrant detentions. 

But thanks to legal challenges brought by war on terror detainees, with help from attorneys like Dixon, Guantánamo is no longer the legal black hole the Bush administration envisioned it to be. The Supreme Court has held that although Guantánamo Bay is outside of U.S. sovereignty, people detained there have habeas rights, or the right to challenge the legality of their detention. 

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has pivoted, emptying Guantánamo of nearly all migrant detainees and invoking a wartime authority called the Alien Enemies Act to remove people it claims are tied to Tren de Aragua from the U.S. Last month, the administration flew hundreds of Venezuelans and Salvadorans to an infamous maximum security prison in El Salvador called the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). The White House has said it paid El Salvador about $6 million to imprison the detainees, who were removed from the U.S. against a judge’s orders. No one imprisoned at CECOT has ever left, and Trump administration officials have been clear that this is their hope for the people sent there from the U.S. 

Various legal challenges are now making their way through the courts, and there are some hopeful developments. But it is far from clear how much relief migrants targeted by the Trump administration will find in court — and how long the process will take. 

If Guantánamo is any indication of how this will go, the outcome is not encouraging. Even after the Supreme Court upheld prisoners’ right to challenge their detention, many spent more than another decade there. Nine people died. Fifteen are still there, including several individuals who have been cleared for release. 

And unlike Bush administration officials, the Trump administration isn’t trying to hide what it’s doing. Instead, officials are bragging about it, releasing glossily produced videos of detainees being manhandled or posing for photo-ops while wearing a $50,000 watch in front of a cell in CECOT packed full of prisoners with shaved heads. 

Why would they feel the need to hide what they’re doing? It’s not like their predecessors faced any consequences. 

[eretzyisrael]

by Lee Smith

The Arabs and Democrats are only the most vocal of the many opposed to Trump’s initiative. Left-wing governments from Europe to Australia are lining up to pledge their allegiance to the fantasy of a Palestinian state, in the hopes of propitiating Muslim and Arab constituencies at home—whose understanding of “peace” means eliminating Israel. But even leaving the patent bad faith of those professing “peace” aside, moving Gazans out of Gaza is the only sane option 14 months after they initiated a campaign of rape, murder, and hostage-taking that brought their own house down on their heads.

After all, what’s more fanciful, moving 1.7 million people out of Gaza, a large portion of whom would simply be required to board air-conditioned buses or walk across the nearby Egypt border, or compelling them to live in a giant rubble field booby-trapped by an Iran-backed terrorist group? Estimates vary as to how long it would take to clear Gaza of explosives—half a decade or more? 15 years? 20? Are the Gazans supposed to live quietly in tents for the next decade or two while their homes are rebuilt next door? Where? In “temporary cities” made of Dwell Magazine-like rehabbed shipping containers built by graduates of Birmingham University? In Hamas’ tunnels?

Regardless, should the Palestinians remain in Gaza, they would invariably return to war no matter how much munificence the Gulf Arab states, the European Union, and perhaps even the U.S. might shower on the toxic sand-castle built over the past two decades with billions of Western aid money. Proof the Palestinians can’t and won’t keep the peace is that even after they won a reprieve when Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff forced the Biden administration’s ceasefire on Jerusalem, Hamas and its NGO-supported human shields celebrated in the streets as if the Hamas space program had successfully landed Palestinians on Mars. Even as Israel released jailed murderers, the Gazans paraded Israeli hostages through the ruins of Gaza like trophies of war.

The Saudis, Qataris, Emiratis and others who now rend their clothes while lamenting the likely fate of their ant-farm death cult might well have counseled: Quiet brothers, you have been spared. Don’t bring attention to yourselves. For the winds of Gaza shift on a whim and who knows if you are not next to be swept away by fate—or the American President.

Here is the stark reality: Gazans, not just the enlisted members of the Hamas brigades, waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At virtually any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.

Trump’s generous offer to the Gazans therefore signals a return to history, but with a twist. Trump has not only spared them, but vowed to provide them with new lives, better lives, work, new homes, a chance to raise their families in peace, an existence not premised on total and permanent war with a more powerful adversary destined to rout them entirely, and would have already done so if not for the objections of other powerful global players.

Trump, in his innovative mercy, has offered to save the Palestinian people from their own history, and give them a new idea to live by. They should thank their maker for the chance to start anew—and give thanks as well to the American President, who realistically promises them a better future, backed by U.S. global power. Given the repeated failure of the multi-decade-long dream of eliminating and replacing the Jews of Israel, it seems unlikely that the Palestinians will receive a better offer.

[mareislandfoundation]

Industrial Powerhouse

In the decade prior to 1940, America's shipyards launched only 23 ships. In the five years after 1940, American shipyards launched 4,600 ships. San Francisco Bay Area shipbuilders produced 20 percent of warship tonnage and almost 45 percent of all the cargo shipping tonnage built in the entire nation during World War II. The war lasted 1,365 days. In that span of time Bay Area shipyards built 1,400 vessels--a ship a day, on average. In addition, ships arrived constantly for maintenance and repair, sometimes scheduled, but often battle damaged and in urgent need of repair. This incredible industrial effort depended on a combination of shipyards and workers that had not existed prior to the outbreak of war.

One astounding example was due to the U.S. Maritime Commission’s dire need for cargo ships, San Francisco’s Bechtel Company was approached on March 2, 1942, and asked to propose a new shipyard location that could be operational within a year. Bechtel proposed building a shipyard with 6 building ways in Sausalito and the site was approved on March 12, 10 days later. Six days after that dirt was being blasted and moved to construct what became Marinship. Construction of Liberty ships on the building ways began in parallel with construction of the ways. Keel blocks were added as every foot of the ways was built extending inland from Richardson Bay. Similar feats took place around the San Francisco Bay Area as shipyards sprung up in Alameda, Richmond, Napa, South San Francisco, Oakland, and Antioch, while at the same time Mare Island and Hunters Point Naval Shipyard facilities doubled and tripled in size.

Tens of thousands of workers of every type were required to support the construction and repair activities resulting in a huge influx of workers from around the country. That workforce overwhelmed the existing housing stock in the Bay Area. In 1942 Mare Island officials decried the fact that workers were quitting as fast as new ones could be hired to due to the lack of housing. Federal agencies and local governments mobilized and together found innovative ways to rapidly create the housing needed for the burgeoning workforce. Those agencies accomplished so much so fast because of unprecedented cooperation amongst them, readily available funds and the dearth of regulation.

San Francisco grew from a city of 634,000 residents in 1940 to 774,821 by 1950. In Contra Costa County, the little towns of Walnut Creek, Orinda and Concord saw their populations double, then double again. In Vallejo housing units were constructed by the Public Buildings Administration, the Farm Security Administration, and the newly formed Vallejo Housing Authority. Incredibly, during a time of war and scarce personnel and construction resources, housing developments in Vallejo were generally completed within 6 months of contract award and would eventually provide housing for over 27,000 people. But even that was not enough, Mare Island Naval Shipyard's workforce had swollen to over 40,000 workers that simply could not all be housed within Vallejo. That problem was solved with an around-the-clock bus Service that brought 14,000 workers to and from Mare Island from as much as 75 miles away 7 days a week. Those buses would travel the equivalent distance of the circumference of the earth every day.

The enabler for this incredible productivity was the existence of total war involving the entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities of our country. That threat to our freedom created a unity our nation had never experienced before or since. The San Francisco Bay Area with its over 30 shipyards, large and small, and scores of machine shops, and metal and wood fabricators joined together to create the world's largest combined shipbuilding complex. In all, 244,000 people worked in Bay Area shipyards and prefabricated components were shipped by rail to Mare Island Naval Shipyard from construction shops across the nation. The output from San Francisco Bay Area joined the stream of material pouring out of shipyards and factories throughout the country providing the force behind Franklin Roosevelt’s use of the slogan “America as the Great Arsenal of Democracy.” This was all accomplished with no satellites, no internet, no computers, and no cell phones.

Dennis Kelly

[nicklloydnow]

“The escalating tension between the Trump administration and Ukraine in recent weeks has been accompanied by an alarming surge of extreme anti-Ukraine rhetoric in pro-Trump quarters. Some of this rhetoric has even implied that Ukraine is America’s enemy. On Monday, Trump administration official Elon Musk called Arizona’s Democratic senator Mark Kelly a “traitor” for travelling to Ukraine in support of that country’s defensive war effort.

Hostility to Ukraine is becoming a party line on the MAGA Right. The issue isn’t just the cost to American taxpayers. The US$128 billion that the US has given Ukraine over the past three years amounts to less than US$120 per year per American. And as a recent article on the Council of Foreign Relations website noted:

A large share of the money in the aid bills has been spent in the United States, paying for American factories and workers to produce the various weapons that are either shipped to Ukraine or that replenish the U.S. weapons stocks the Pentagon has drawn on during the war. One analysis by the American Enterprise Institute found that Ukraine aid is funding defense manufacturing in more than seventy U.S. cities.

Nor is antipathy to Ukraine simply about bringing an end to the bloodletting, notwithstanding the Right’s professed disdain for “warmongers” eager to “fight to the last Ukrainian” and Trump’s own claim that he wants to “stop the death.” When Trump suspended air-defence supplies and intelligence-sharing to Ukraine earlier this month in an attempt to pressure the country into “settling,” Russia began bombing Ukrainian cities with renewed vigour. Asked during a press conference on 7 March if Vladimir Putin was “taking advantage of the US pause right now on intelligence and military aid,” Trump was phlegmatic about the loss of life: “I actually think [Putin’s] doing what anybody else would do. I think he wants to get it stopped and settled, and I think he’s hitting them harder than he’s been hitting them. And I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now.”

The party line is now strong enough that even some “heterodox” pundits and publications with large right-wing audiences have pivoted away from their initial support for Ukraine. In the first two years of the conflict, coverage at the Free Press was firmly pro-Ukraine. But since the reelection of Donald Trump last November, the publication’s position has become more sympathetic to “right-wing peaceniks” (once described by Free Press contributor Eli Lake as “Code Pink Republicans”) and correspondingly unsympathetic to Ukraine’s cause. Some of this commentary has been shoddy and even dishonest.

(…)

Much of this hatred for a country valiantly resisting a war of aggression reflects Trump’s own prejudices and sense of personal grievance. The “Russiagate” investigation that dominated his first administration perversely fortified his preexisting sympathy for Vladimir Putin, while his antipathy to Ukraine increased following his 2019 impeachment for pressuring Zelensky to provide dirt on Biden in return for US armaments. (Conservative writer Jeff Blehar thinks these grievances are justified. I do not.) And because the MAGA movement is cultish, its leader’s likes and dislikes are automatically adopted by many of his supporters.

But some of the reasons given for the anti-Ukraine stance are transparently bogus. In a 2023 speech at the Heritage Foundation, then-Senator JD Vance—one of the staunchest opponents of aid to Ukraine since the start of the war—paid lip service to the courage of Ukrainian troops before asserting that “they have the most corrupt leadership and government in Europe and maybe the most corrupt leadership anywhere in the world.” Like all formerly communist countries, Ukraine does have a serious corruption problem, but Vance’s statement is blatantly untrue.

According to Transparency International, the leading global anti-corruption watchdog, Ukraine currently ranks 105th in public-sector corruption out of 180 countries with a score of 35 out of 100, while Russia ranks 154th with a score of 22 out of 100 (the lower the score, the more prevalent the corruption). Before the 2014 popular revolution that toppled the pro-Kremlin regime of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine was plagued by Russian levels of corruption and a score of 25, but Ukraine’s record on corruption has been improving ever since. It is also worth noting that Vance is inconsistently bothered by corruption: Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is only slightly less corrupt than Ukraine (and its corruption score is moving in the opposite direction) and the most corrupt country in the European Union, but Vance believes that American conservatives ought to emulate Orbán’s illiberal democratic model.

Claims that Ukraine is “not a true democracy” because it persecutes Christian churches, or controls the media, or forcibly mobilises men are usually made in equally bad faith. Ukraine is a country fighting a defensive war on its own territory, a situation in which restrictions on civil liberties are not remotely unusual. The United States instituted a draft and suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, and it introduced forced conscription and censorship during World War II when it was not fighting an invasion. While there have been reports of forcible conscription in Ukraine, which is deplorable, the number of such conscripts is dwarfed by the number of Ukrainian soldiers who either comply with draft orders or volunteer at recruitment centres.

(…)

In a bizarre segment on the Free Press podcast, the publication’s regular contributor Batya Ungar-Sargon argued that support for Ukraine is related to an “elite” tendency to “villainise” Putin because the chattering classes hold him responsible for helping Trump win the 2016 election. But the late Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen was already complaining about the “relentless demonisation of Putin” by the American media in February 2014, and lamenting that not even Stalin’s Soviet successors were “so personally villainised.” This was before Putin’s seizure of Crimea the following month, and over a year before Trump announced his first run for president. It does not appear to have occurred to Ungar-Sargon that Westerners dislike Putin’s destruction of Russia’s fledgling democratic freedoms, his habit of jailing and murdering journalists and political opponents, his brutal wars against Chechen separatists in the 2000s, and his invasion of Georgia in 2008.

Ungar-Sargon is correct that Trump’s 2016 candidacy had a partisan effect on American views of Putin, but she has misidentified the party most affected. Polling indicates that Republicans had a slightly more negative opinion of Putin than Democrats in 2014. Around the time of the 2016 presidential election, Democrats’ approval of Putin fell by eight percentage points, from -54 to -62. Republican approval of the Russian dictator, on the other hand, rose by 46 points, from -66 to -10. The number who regarded him “very unfavourably” dropped from 51 percent in July 2014 to fourteen percent in December 2016, while the overall “favourables” jumped from ten percent to 37 percent.

As I wrote in the early days of the war, growing sympathy for Putin on the US Right is partly explained by a shift towards the populism and “anti-globalism” of which he is seen as a champion—and by the implausible belief, cultivated by Putin and his propaganda machine, that the Kremlin stands for traditional religious and sexual values in opposition to an increasingly godless, “woke,” and pathological West. The corollary is that Ukraine is suspect because it wants to leave the Russian orbit and join Western liberal degeneracy—specifically, the European Union, which the Right believes is a cesspit of progressive authoritarianism and creeping Islamisation.

(…)

Attention inevitably turned to USAID’s assistance for Ukraine. Altogether, Ukraine-related projects received about US$5 billion in US funds between 1991, when Ukraine became independent, and 2014—mostly through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, a formally private nonprofit that received an annual appropriation from the US State Department as part of the USAID budget. While most of this money was spent on nonpolitical projects like healthcare and environmental protection, a portion of it also went to various anti-corruption, election-integrity, and civic-education NGOs involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity.

(…)

The idea that the Ukrainian state is a stronghold of “the woke Left” is as detached from reality as the idea that Ukraine is a Nazi regime. Indeed, as a number of people have pointed out, Ukrainian patriotism and military valour are precisely the sort of virtues that one would expect national conservatives to applaud—unless, of course, national conservatism is less about conservatism or national sovereignty than it is about the appeal of authoritarianism.

(…)

Likewise, those on the Right who see Putin’s post-communist Russia as a conservative-friendly state ignore the degree to which his regime valorises Russia’s Soviet past. Ukraine’s post-2014 “decommunisation” drive has been a sore point for the Kremlin. Putin may have blamed Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks for creating the modern Ukrainian state and giving it historically Russian lands—but in the areas of Ukraine under Russian control, the authorities have been restoring previously demolished Lenin monuments as well as Soviet-era street names honouring Lenin, Karl Marx, and other communist heroes. Conquered and devastated Bakhmut has had its name changed back to the Soviet Artemovsk—after “Comrade Artyom” (Fyodor Sergeyev), a Bolshevik revolutionary and close friend of Stalin’s. In a particularly cruel mockery of their victims, Russian occupiers recently opened a museum honouring Stalin’s henchman Andrei Zhdanov in his native Mariupol, a city taken in spring 2022 after a particularly horrific siege.

This “recommunisation” in the occupied areas of Ukraine isn’t about communist ideology per se; it’s about imposing Russia’s imperial will on Ukrainians and suppressing their cultural legacy. Even so, it honours an unspeakably evil left-wing totalitarian regime. Unfortunately, many people on the modern US Right seem to despise liberalism more than communism.”

[misfitwashere]

March 27, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 28 READ IN APP

Today, Wired reported that it had found four more Venmo accounts associated with the Trump administration officials who participated in the now-infamous Signal chat about a planned military attack on the Houthis in Yemen. A payment on one of them was identified only with an eggplant emoji, which is commonly used to suggest sexual activity.

The craziness going on around us in the first two months of the second Trump administration makes a lot more sense if you remember that the goal of those currently in power was never simply to change the policies or the personnel of the U.S. government. Their goal is to dismantle the central pillars of the United States of America—government, law, business, education, culture, and so on—because they believe the very shape of those institutions serves what they call “the Left.”

Their definition of “the Left” includes all Americans, Republicans and Independents as well as Democrats, who believe the government has a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights and who support the institutional structures Americans have built since World War II.

In place of those structures, today’s MAGA leaders intend to create their own new institutions, shaped by their own people, whose ideological purity trumps their abilities. As Vice President J.D. Vance explained in a 2021 interview, he and his ilk believe that American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.

This plan is central to Project 2025, the plan President Donald Trump insisted before the election he knew nothing about but which, now that he’s in office, has provided the blueprint for a large majority of the administration’s actions. Project 2025 author Russell Vought, who is now Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, called for a “conservative President” to “use…the vast powers of the executive branch” aggressively “to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.”

Last month, journalist Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich noted that Curtis Yarvin, a thinker popular with the technological elite currently aligned with the religious extremists at Project 2025, laid out a plan in 2022 to gut the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship. This would be a “reboot” of the country, Yarvin wrote, and it would require a “full power start,” a reference to restarting a stalled starship by jumping to full power, which risks destroying the ship.

Yarvin called for “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization,” headed by the equivalent of the rogue chief executive officer of a corporation who would destroy the public institutions of the democratic government. Trump—whom Yarvin dismissed as weak—would give power to that CEO, who would “run the executive branch without any interference from the Congress or courts…. Most existing important institutions, public and private, will be shut down and replaced with new and efficient systems.” Once loyalists have replaced civil servants in a new ideological “army,” the CEO “will throw it directly against the administrative state—not bothering with confirmed appointments, just using temporary appointments as needed. The job of this landing force is not to govern.” The new regime must take over the country and “perform the real functions of the old, and ideally perform them much better.” It must “seize all points of power, without respect for paper protections.”

Earlier this month, Yarvin cheered on the idea of hacking existing infrastructure “to operate in an unusual way that its designers, its previous operators, or both, did not expect,” and complimented DOGE for the way it has hacked into existing bureaucracies. The key performance indicator of DOGE, he wrote, “is its ability to take power from the libs, then keep it.”

Far from saving money for the United States, as Jacob Bogage at the Washington Post reported on March 22, billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” has cost the government $500 billion, 10% of what the Internal Revenue Service took in last year. Bogage reports that the administration has demolished the IRS, firing nearly 20,000 employees, especially in the divisions that focus on enforcement, and dropping investigations of corporations and the richest taxpayers. Officials project that these changes will result in more tax evasion, and they are expecting a sharp drop in tax revenue this spring.

If the administration is working not to save money but rather to destroy the government, the cuts that threaten the well-being of American citizens make more sense. Today, Emily Davies and Jeff Stein of the Washington Postreported that Trump officials are looking for cuts of between 8% and 50% of the employees in federal agencies. They obtained an internal White House document that calls for the Department of Housing and Urban Development to be cut in half, the Interior Department to lose nearly 25% of its workforce, and the Internal Revenue Service to lose about one third of its people. The Justice Department is set to lose 8% of its workforce, the National Science Foundation 28%, the Commerce Department 30%, and the Small Business Administration 43%.

Cuts to the government have led to the Social Security Administration’s website crashing four times in ten days this month, and there are not enough workers to answer phones. Yesterday, Sahil Kapur and Julie Tsirkin of NBC News reported that lawmakers, including Senate Finance subcommittee on Social Security chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA), have been kept in the dark as the men working for DOGE have cut SSA phone services and instituted new rules requiring that beneficiaries without access to the internet prove their identity with an in-person visit to an SSA office.

Washington Post reporters Lisa Rein and Hannah Natanson warn that “Social Security is breaking down.” Senator Angus King (I-ME) told them: “What’s going on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out, and it’s accelerating…. What they’re doing now is unconscionable.”

In a televised Cabinet meeting on Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she planned to “eliminate FEMA,” the Federal Emergency Management Agency that responds to national emergencies like hurricanes. This news comes on top of Trump’s executive order last week calling for the Department of Education to be shuttered, along with cuts of about half of its workforce.

Yesterday, Apoorva Mandavilli, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Jan Hoffman reported in the New York Times that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has suddenly cancelled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states. That money supported mental health services, addiction treatment, and programs to track infectious diseases. Today HHS announced it will be cutting 10,000 employees on top of the 10,000 who have already left and the more than 5,000 probationary workers who were fired last month. These cuts will include 3,500 full-time employees from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and 2,400 employees from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In addition to slashing and burning through government agencies, the administration is trying to undermine the rule of law. Trump has signed executive orders suspending security clearances for law firms that represent Democratic clients and barring the government from hiring employees from those firms.

Trump and his team have challenged the judges who have ruled against Trump, working to destroy faith in the courts. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has suggested that Republicans in Congress could eliminate some federal courts, telling reporters: “We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things.”

Trump’s administration is also working to take over colleges and universities, beginning with a high-profile fight against Columbia University in which the administration withheld $400 million in grants, allegedly over antisemitism at the school, until the university bent to the administration's will. Columbia’s leaders did so, only to have the administration say the changes are only “early steps” and that Columbia “must continue to show they are serious in their resolve to end anti-Semitism…through permanent and structural reform. Other universities…should expect the same level of scrutiny and swiftness of action if they don’t act to protect their students and stop anti-Semitic behavior on campus,” a member of the administration said.

Chillingly, on Tuesday federal authorities in plain clothes took Tufts University international student Rumeysa Ozturk into custody on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, saying she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” apparently a reference to a pro-Palestinian op-ed she had written for the Tufts newspaper. On Wednesday the Department of Homeland Security said she was being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Louisiana.

The administration is also working to reshape American culture according to their vision. The project of stripping words like “climate crisis,” “diversity,” “health disparity,” “peanut allergies,” “science-based,” “segregation,” “stereotypes,” and “understudied” from government communications are an explicit attempt to reshape the way Americans think. Today, in an executive order “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” Trump tried to change the ways in which Americans understand our history, too. He called for Vance, who as vice president serves on the Smithsonian Board of Regents, “to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.”

The problem for those who embrace this vision of America is that it is not popular. Before the election, only 4% of voters liked Project 2025, and it has not gained in popularity as the dramatic cuts to the government have hurt farmers by killing grain purchases for foreign aid, cut funding for cancer research, and thrown people out of work. Because Republican-dominated counties rely more heavily on government programs than Democratic-dominated counties do, cuts to government services are hitting Republican voters particularly hard.

On Tuesday, Democrat James Andrew Malone won a special election for a state senate seat in a Pennsylvania district that Trump won in November with 57% of the vote. Today, Trump was forced to withdraw New York Republican representative Elise Stefanik’s name from consideration for ambassador to the United Nations out of concern that a Democrat might win her vacant seat, although Trump won her district in 2024 by 21 points.

—

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Gertz at MMFA:

In their quest to undermine the scandal about key Trump administration national security officials discussing detailed military attack plans on a commercial messaging app, President Donald Trump and his media propagandists repeatedly claimed that the uproar was a minor sideshow that paled in comparison to the fact that the mission had been a resounding military victory. “The mission in Yemen was operationally a complete success,” Fox News host and sometime Trump adviser Sean Hannity proclaimed on his show. “Why focus on the successful military operation when you can trash Donald Trump and people that work for him?” But that defense of the administration has withered under scrutiny in the intervening weeks. Any tactical victory achieved during the initial March 15 attack has not fulfilled the intended U.S. goal of curbing Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, a major international trade route. When The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he had been inadvertently added to a Signal group chat where Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and other senior officials discussed a planned attack on the Houthis, the MAGA commentariat scrambled to respond.  Trump’s media allies lashed out at Goldberg and sought to downplay the importance of his reporting, even as stunned experts pointed out that Hegseth’s sharing the exact strike times and the weapons packages to be used hours before their deployment over an insecure channel put U.S. forces at risk. As part of their PR strategy, Trump’s Fox News propagandists instead touted the effectiveness of the strike on the Houthis — then stopped talking about the campaign. But two weeks after Goldberg published the administration’s messages, and nearly a month after the first bombs fell, U.S. forces are still embroiled in an open-ended air war in Yemen that has reportedly cost nearly $1 billion, with no conclusion in sight. 

Trump, Fox hosts declare U.S. strikes on Houthis “successful”

Trump sought to downplay the scandal, in part by driving attention toward the purportedly effective strikes he claimed had received insufficient coverage.  “The main thing was nothing happened, the attack was totally successful,” the president told reporters on the afternoon of March 25. He said during a media availability the next day the press coverage of the Signal saga was “a witch hunt,” adding that “the attacks were unbelievably successful, and that’s ultimately what you should be talking about."  Hannity, the Fox star and Trump political operative, apparently heard his music. He lashed out at “the state-run legacy media mob” on his March 25 broadcast, claiming that “perhaps most importantly, something they'll never think about, the military mission thankfully was a complete success.”  [...]

In Yemen, an open-ended U.S. air war without a plan for victory

Recent reporting contradicts Trump’s Fox-echoed claims of success in Yemen, finding instead that the U.S. is engaged in a costly fight that has had little impact on Houthi attacks and with little apparent strategy for victory.  “In closed briefings in recent days, Pentagon officials have acknowledged that there has been only limited success in destroying the Houthis’ vast, largely underground arsenal of missiles, drones and launchers, according to congressional aides and allies,” The New York Times reported on April 4. 

A couple of weeks after Signalgate broke the news, the USA is still in war with the Houthis without a real endgame.

[darkmaga-returns]

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Housing Minister Sean Fraser have resigned, signaling a potential end to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's tenure due to mounting internal dissent and external pressures.

Freeland's resignation letter highlighted the government's fiscal mismanagement and its inability to prepare for a potential tariff war with the U.S. under the Trump administration, raising concerns about Canada's economic vulnerability.

Nearly two dozen backbenchers urged Trudeau to resign in October, citing concerns over the party's performance and the potential for electoral disaster, intensifying pressure for a leadership change.

The opposition Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre, has gained ground in polls, positioning themselves as a potential alternative leadership capable of facing the challenges posed by the Trump administration.

The Trudeau administration's failures in addressing economic and pandemic-related challenges have eroded public confidence, creating a critical need for a strong and decisive new leader to navigate the "America First" era and unite the country.

The era of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on the brink of collapse as Canada braces for a second Trump administration and a new threat of steep tariffs.

[mariacallous]

Ukraine is outraged by the unwavering American support for Israel, calling it a "double standard" as the United States refuses to intercept Russian missiles and drones over Ukraine, Politico reported on Oct. 16.

This week, the United States deployed the advanced THAAD missile defense system to protect Israel from Iranian ballistic missiles. However, Ukraine receives no similar level of assistance despite facing daily attacks from Russian drones, missiles, and bombs, the article states.

The reason for this discrepancy is that Russia possesses nuclear weapons, making Washington wary of escalating tensions with Moscow.

"The tough answer that Ukrainians may not like to hear but is unfortunately true is that we can take the risk of shooting down Iranian missiles over Israel without triggering direct war with Tehran that could lead to nuclear war," a high-ranking U.S. Senate aide working on Ukraine policy told Politico.

“There’s a lot more risk in trying that with Russia.”

Two officials from the Biden administration confirmed this. The White House fears that sending U.S. troops to Ukraine to intercept Russian missiles could provoke a direct military confrontation between the two leading nuclear powers, with potentially apocalyptic consequences.

"It is sad to look at all this as an ordinary citizen of Ukraine — when in an agreement to prevent escalation on the part of Moscow, your country and citizens are being sacrificed," said Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the Ukrainian National Institute for Strategic Studies.

Kyiv wants Poland and Romania to help intercept Russian targets over western Ukraine. This option is being discussed, but the countries have not changed their policies yet, Politico writes. Warsaw has stated that it will not act without full NATO alliance support.

Meanwhile, two Ukrainian air defense officers, speaking on condition of anonymity, explained that it is easier for the United States to defend Israel's skies because it is a small country, and America can use ship-based air defense systems. In contrast, Ukraine is vast and inaccessible to Western fleets; its allies would need to place air defense systems on the country's western border, from which they could only protect adjacent territory.

"NATO members entering into the aerial defense of Ukraine would need to bring a much larger contribution, over a broader area, with a greater risk of ‘entering the war’ for uncertain gains," said Matthew Savill, military sciences director at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

“The cost would also be greater, as the frequency of Russian attacks is far greater than the significant but reactive Iranian attempts to strike Israel directly.”

However, Ukraine's frustration is growing as the Biden administration is not doing enough to help Kyiv stop Russian attacks, Politico notes. This includes slow weapons deliveries and a ban on using long-range missiles to strike Russian territory.

According to the outlet, U.S. officials are aware of Kyiv's growing dissatisfaction. They stated that they are working on new weapons supplies, which they hope will address the outrage.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin authorized on Oct. 13 the deployment of a THAAD battery and associated U.S. military personnel to bolster Israel's air defense following Iranian attacks on April 13 and Oct. 1.

Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh said on Oct. 15 that the United States will not intercept missiles over Ukraine as it does over Israel because "the wars are different."

[countesspetofi]

You've probably been having the same experience I have lately: lots of Trumpists telling you that if you don't like what the fascist administration is doing, you should just leave the U.S.

Despite this not even being an option for the most vulnerable people affected by the new government's policies, it ignores the fact that it's Trump and his goons we hate, not our country.

Back in the 1960's, the issue was U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. Critics of the war were told that their abhorrence of the national policy and leaders was tantamount to abhorrence of the nation itself. Conservatives repeated the slogan "My country, right or wrong," meaning unquestioning belief that their leaders' policies must be right.

In 1967, Peter Tork of The Monkees said, "I don't believe in 'My country, right or wrong.' My country wrong needs my help.” And my response to those "If you don't like it, move" Trumpists is usually some variation on that. My country has its flaws, deep flaws. My ancestors came here, stole land from the indigenous people, and extracted its wealth using slave labor. But none of that is any reason to abandon our efforts to do better. I'm not speaking out against the madmen at the helm of our ship of state just because what they're doing is going to hurt ME. I love the ship and I don't want her to sink or lose her crew through mismanagement, or get torpedoed when every other vessel in the ocean decides she's too big a threat.