My message to Democrats: Don't you dare apologize for Biden!

Both mainstream and right wing media are once again obsessed with Joe Biden's age. Three events contributed to this renewed focus.

1. Publication of the book "Original Sin" by Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper,
2. The White House release of the audio tape of Joe Biden's interview with special counsel Robert Hur, and
3. The announcement that Biden has prostate cancer. 

The story being spun is that Biden was in mental decline during his presidency and that the truth about his condition was hidden from the public. Tom Bevan, publisher of the right wing site RealClearPolitics, said that "Gaslighting about Biden's mental conditions is one of the biggest scandals in American history." WOW, one of the biggest in American history?!

To believe that extreme hyperbole, you have to forget that President Biden took the historical step of stepping out of his race for reelection. You also have to completely ignore interviews like this one that Biden did with John Harwood nine days before the Hur interviews began - where he intelligently discusses some of the complex issues he was dealing with as president.

So where's this huge scandal? There isn't one. The truth is that Joe Biden's presidency was a tremendous success. There is a reason why that poses a big threat to Trump and Republicans. No one has consistently pointed that out better than historian Heather Cox Richardson. As an example, last August she wrote that "Under the direction of President Joe Biden, over the past three and a half years the Democrats have returned to the economic ideology of the New Deal coalition of the 1930s." What did that coalition accomplish?

Before 1935...the government served largely to manage the economic relationships between labor, capital, and resources. But [FDR's New Deal] recognized that the purpose of government was not to protect property; it was to protect the community...

This reworking of the American government to reflect community rather than economic relationships changed the entire fabric of the country, and opponents have worked to destroy it ever since FDR began to put it in place. 

The New Deal coalition survived those attacks until the 1980s. Here's what Biden faced when he took office: 

Biden set out to prove that democracy could work for ordinary people by ditching the neoliberalism that had been in place for forty years. That system, begun in the 1980s, called for the government to allow unfettered markets to organize the economy. Neoliberalism’s proponents promised it would create widespread prosperity, but instead, it transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%...

When he took office, Biden vowed to prove that democracy worked. With laws like the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats directed investment toward ordinary Americans. The dramatic success of their economic program proved that it worked. 

Republicans want Democrats on their heels apologizing for Joe Biden because, as the Trump administration focuses on undoing everything the former president accomplished, they want to ensure that no president in the future tries to replicate a return to the New Deal coalition of the 1930s.

I, for one, will not capitulate to that nonsense and I'll call out any Democrat who does. What President Biden accomplished during his four short years in office was a huge step forward for this country. I'm not only grateful to him personally, I proudly embrace his vision of making the government work for ordinary Americans.

Musk will be leaving the federal government deeper in debt than when he started

There has been some speculation about what Elon Musk really wants out of the DOGE efforts. For example, lots of questions arise about his access to reams of government data on private citizens. Of course, the same can be said about how DOGE will increase the wealth of the wealthiest man on earth. 

But when it came to selling the public on DOGE, the message was clear. Here is what Musk promised last October during Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden.

Musk promised that he would cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. He said that our tax dollars were being wasted and DOGE was going to fix that. 

Three months later, Musk dropped that number in half, going from promising $2 trillion in cuts to $1 trillion. Now that he's heading back to try and rescue his failing companies, Musk is bragging about saving $160 billion. 

But there are a couple of problems with that number as well. Journalists who have studied the numbers provided by DOGE have consistently found inaccuracies, some of which are eventually corrected. Additionally, only about $69 billion has been itemized, with $16 billion being verifiable. Finally, those cuts are spread out over an average of three years. Caleb Acarma and Judd Legum found that DOGE's verifiable cuts to contracts and grants would produce about $5 billion of savings in fiscal year 2026.

Because numbers that large are hard to visualize, here's a graph of promises vs. reality:

But it gets even worse. Not only has total federal spending INCREASED by $156 billion since Trump took office,  there's also this:

DOGE, meanwhile, could end up costing the federal government $135 billion this year when accounting for the lawsuits its cuts have triggered and loss of tax revenue from a depleted IRS, according to the Partnership for Public Service, a good government nonprofit.

So in about 5 months we've gone from Musk promising to cut $2 trillion per year from the federal budget to adding something like $286 billion to the deficit (156 + 135 - 5). Meanwhile, approximately 260,000 federal workers have been fired, U.S. Aid has been demolished, the Departments of Education and Veterans Affairs have been gutted, and Social Security is being threatened (to name just a few).

Musk will be leaving the federal government in chaos and deeper in debt than when he started. Let's rename his efforts the Department of Techbro Incompetence (DOTI). 

Trump and MAGA are using civil rights laws to reinforce white supremacy

The day after he was inaugurated, Trump signed an executive order titled "Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity." Six days later, right wing journalist Christopher Caldwell, wrote an article titled "The Biggest Policy Change of the Century." The tag line at The FreePress reads: "Trump is not simply eliminating the affirmative-action enforcement machinery. He is throwing it into reverse." What did he mean by that? Referring to Trump's executive order, here's what Caldwell told Andrew Sullivan (emphasis mine):

The first move is to say that you can longer do affirmative action, DEI, and that kind of thing. But the second move is to say, "we believe that DEI is actually racism"...Conservatives had always argued against the excesses of civil rights in a kind of principled way: "Actually, civil rights, well-meaning though it was, granted too much power to the federal government"...What the Trump administration has done...is lay claim to that power and is running the whole machine in reverse.

While I disagree with Caldwell about almost everything, he is absolutely right in his description of what the Trump administration is doing. They aren't just attempting to roll back civil rights protections. They're claiming that any move to enforce civil rights is discrimination...against white heterosexual able-bodied men. Here are the opening paragraphs of the executive order:

Longstanding Federal civil-rights laws protect individual Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. These civil-rights protections serve as a bedrock supporting equality of opportunity for all Americans. As President, I have a solemn duty to ensure that these laws are enforced for the benefit of all Americans.

Yet today, roughly 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, critical and influential institutions of American society...have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) or “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation...Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex.

This is something that has surfaced regularly in writings by MAGA influencers. For example, in writing about Princeton University, Christopher Rufo accused the school of waging a "war on civil rights"...against white men.

James Piereson has written that the Democratic Party's diversity initiatives violate civil rights law. In making the case, he actually utilizes the court case against Bob Jones University. You might remember that as the one that galvanized evangelical leaders to eventually band together and form the Moral Majority to protect their right to discriminate. 

In 1970, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States based on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That not only affected segregation academies in the South, it also affected Bob Jones University, due to their discriminatory admissions policy. The case went to the courts, with the Supreme Court eventually ruling in favor of the IRS.

Now, Piereson is using that ruling to suggest that diversity initiatives in the Democratic Party violate civil rights law by suggesting that tax-exempt institutions may not violate “fundamental national public policy.” In MAGA terms, that last phrase means "anything Trump says."

Caldwell - who is obviously thrilled with this reversal by the Trump administration - has said that White Americans “fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

First of all, the notion that there is "an official hierarchy of races" is absolute nonsense. But even if there were such a thing, the idea that white people occupy the bottom rung is absurd. For most of us, that is proven by the disparities that continue to exist in areas like health care, education, housing, employment, and the criminal justice system. 

But for MAGA, those disparities are proof that "different groups have different preferences, talents, and capacities," as Rufo has written. In other words, their arguments are ultimately based on eugenics.

If your head isn't spinning over all of that, then you're not paying attention. MAGA and the Trump administration are utilizing civil rights laws to reinforce white supremacy. And yes, all of our deceased civil rights leaders are rolling over in their graves on that one. It's time the rest of us took notice.

J.D. Vance forecasted the attacks on charitable organizations

In November 2021, J.D. Vance gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference titled, "The Universities are the Enemy." We've all witnessed how that is playing out with this administration. 

But Vance's goals are bigger than just the universities. If you remember, he talked about ripping out the current American leadership class like a tumor. The vice president got specific about one of those "tumors" during an appearance on Tucker Carlson's show. Here's what he said (emphasis mine):

The basic way this works is that the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Harvard University endowment, these are fundamentally cancers on American society, but they pretend to be charities, so they benefit from preferential tax treatment...

We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in ill-gotten accumulated wealth. It serves as a tax haven for left-wing billionaires and what do they do with this? They fund critical race theory, they fund ridiculous racism, they fund teaching 6-year-olds that they should, you know, cast off their gender. We are actively subsidizing the people who are destroying this country, and they call it a charity. It's just ridiculous.

To inform yourself, you might want to take a look at what the Ford Foundation and the Gates Foundation actually fund. I would imagine that Henry Ford and Bill Gates would be surprised to learn that the current vice-president thinks that the money they made and gifted to their foundations amounted to "ill-gotten accumulated wealth." But that's a story for another day. 

This is all relevant today because there's lots of chatter about the Trump administration going after non-governmental organizations (NGO's) and the groups that fund them. The president has already asked the IRS to rescind Harvard's tax exempt status. Last week he said that tax-exempt status has "been abused by a lot more than Harvard. We’ll be making some statements. It’s a big deal.”

According to Andy Stephanian of The Sparrow Project, the administration will likely take aim at organizations like the Ford Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Gates Foundation, and Open Society (Soros). Not targeted will be the Bradley Foundation, the Koch Family foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family foundations, and the Adolph Coors Foundation - the top five right wing foundations.

As is always the case with these guys, every accusation is a confession.

Two minutes worth of Republicans JD Vance, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Jim Jordan, and John Thune criticizing the use of the IRS to punish organizations for their politics:

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— Republican Accountability (@accountablegop.bsky.social) April 16, 2025 at 5:59 PM

Here's the good news. Via the Council of Foundations, over 400 organizations have already signed a statement reflecting their resolve and solidarity.

We don’t all share the same beliefs or priorities. Neither do our donors or the communities we serve. But as charitable giving institutions, we are united behind our First Amendment right to give as an expression of our own distinct values. Especially in this time of great need, we must have the freedom to direct our resources to a wide variety of important services, issues, and places, to improve lives today and build a stronger future for our country. The health and safety of the American people, our nation’s economic stability, and the vibrancy of our democracy depend on it.

As someone who worked at non-profits for my entire professional career, you can bet that I'll be keeping an eye on this one! 

Watch what they're doing, not what they're saying

As the Trump administration talks openly about deporting U.S. criminals to prisons in El Salvador, it is worth taking a look at how they're abusing language in an attempt to make that case.

The first thing to notice is that they are twisting the meaning of the word "criminal." The definition of the word crime is "an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government." In our judicial system, a criminal is someone who has been convicted of committing a crime. 

When it comes to the men this administration has already sent to El Salvador, Bloomberg reports that 90% of them have no criminal record. In other words, they're sending immigrants to those prisons - not criminals. So when Trump talks about sending "homegrown criminals" to El Salvador, take just a minute to think about what that means. 

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem might have said the quiet part out loud when she suggested that "We should only have people in our country that love us." When you pair that with statements the president has made accusing critics of being treasonous, you get some idea of what they mean by the word "criminal." 

The second word that is worth noting is the suggestion that the administration is "deporting" people to El Salvador. Here's the definition of that word: "the removal from a country of an alien whose presence is unlawful or prejudicial."

The Trump administration isn't simply removing immigrants from the U.S. He's sending them to a prison in El Salvador. The correct words for that are "extraordinary rendition" - which is defined as "the seizure and transfer of a person suspected of involvement with a terrorist group to another country for imprisonment and interrogation without legal process." Confirming that as the correct term, the White House and its allies regularly refer to those non-criminal immigrants as "terrorists."

Some parallels are starting to emerge.

Seems like a good day to remind everyone that Auschwitz — a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps — was not located in Nazi Germany either.

— Andrea Junker (@strandjunker.com) April 14, 2025 at 2:16 PM

Given all of that, there is a more accurate term we should use to describe the Salvadorian prison.

While I always want to avoid being overly-alarmist, the picture that begins to emerge when we look at what they're doing is pretty threatening. Their actions suggest that they are preparing to use extraordinary rendition to send their critics to concentration camps in El Salvador. 

How Trump is killing this country's reliability

In the eleven days since Trump ignited a trade war with the rest of the world, here's what has happened:

• The White House bounced back and forth on whether the announced tariffs were permanent or negotiable. 
• Commerce Secretary Lutnick said, "I don't think there's any chance that President Trump's going to back off his tariffs. This is the reordering of global trade."
• One of the rationales given for the tariffs is that they would bring manufacturing jobs back to America - with Lutnick specifically citing the making of iPhones. 
• When it became clear that these moves were causing a major sell-off of U.S. bonds, Trump paused the tariffs that the administration was referring to as "reciprocal."
• Treasury Secretary Bessent said the pause in "reciprocal" tariffs was the strategy all along.
• The higher tariffs on China were not paused. But members of the Trump administration were confused about whether they were 125% or 145%. 
• Smartphones (including iPhones) and computers were exempted from the tariffs on China. But as Paul Krugman noted, "we’re now putting much higher tariffs on intermediate goods used in manufacturing (ie, Chinese batteries) than on final goods. This actually discourages manufacturing in the United States."
• The next day, Lutnick and Trump announced that the exemptions for electronics would be temporary.

I defy anyone to claim that, behind all of this, is some three-dimensional chess strategy. It's simply nuts! 

The truth is that, as economist Justin Wolfers said, we are currently in the midst of two crises: "A tariff crisis, and a crisis of confidence built upon incompetence." According to experts, it is that crisis of  confidence that caused the sell-off of U.S. bonds. 

As Jerusalem Demsas points out, all of this poses a long-term problem for the United States.

Countries can and will move on without the United States. Their firms will establish new supply chains and pursue other markets. Even if the U.S. were the ultra-dominant trading partner it used to be, the credibility of the nation’s promises, its treaties, its agreements, and even its basic rationality has evaporated in just weeks...

America’s economic dominance has long been supported by alliances, faith in U.S. debt, and the independence of the Fed. Those three things “were all built on trust that took decades to build,” the economist Ernie Tedeschi told me...

The problem facing future administrations—and this one, in the unlikely event that it gains a modicum of rationality—is that the country has killed its reliability.

In case you needed some more gaslighting, the administration that killed this country's reliability is responding by simply saying, "Trust Trump." That's like asking you to trust the pyromaniac who is in the process of burning down your house. 

Donald Trump is incapable of making rational decisions. Instead, he openly brags about making them "instinctively." For example, when asked how he would decide whether to give tariff relief to particular companies, the president responded by saying, "Instinctively, more than anything else. You almost can’t take a pencil to paper. It’s really more of an instinct, I think, than anything else.” 

As a recovering therapist, let me assure you that the instincts of a narcissistic sociopath are the opposite of rational. 

It's the insanity, stupid!

As Heather Cox Richardson documented, "Wall Street billionaires tried desperately and unsuccessfully to change Trump’s mind on tariffs. This week they have begun to go public, calling out what they call the 'stupidity' of the new measures." 

But one company - Fundstrat Market Strategy & Sector Research - went even farther than that, writing this is their newsletter today (emphasis mine):

In the last few days, we have had many conversations with macro fund managers. And their concern is that the White House is not acting rationally, but rather on ideology. And some even fear that this may not even be ideology. A few have quietly wondered if the President might be insane.

That is something that many of us have been talking about for years now.  As others search for a political or economic strategy behind the president's actions, Jamelle Bouie goes to the heart of things.

It is a fool’s errand to try to rationalize President Trump’s obsession with tariffs... 

[Trump] did not reason himself into his preoccupation with tariffs and can neither reason nor speak coherently about them. There is no grand plan or strategic vision, no matter what his advisers claim — only the impulsive actions of a mad king, untethered from any responsibility to the nation or its people. For as much as the president’s apologists would like us to believe otherwise, Trump’s tariffs are not a policy as we traditionally understand it. What they are is an instantiation of his psyche: a concrete expression of his zero-sum worldview.

The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance...For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win, and someone has to lose...

The upshot of this understanding of Trump’s personality is that there is no point at which he can be satisfied. He will always want more: more supplicants to obey his next command, more displays of his power and authority and more opportunities to trample over those who don’t belong in his America.

During a speech last night, Trump shared his delusional thinking about his own dominance. 

Trump: "These countries are calling us up. Kissing my ass."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 8, 2025 at 7:27 PM

Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter for Trump's "The Art of the Deal," laid it all out for us eight years ago.

To survive, I concluded from our conversations, Trump felt compelled to go to war with the world. It was a binary, zero-sum choice for him: You either dominated or you submitted. You either created and exploited fear, or you succumbed to it...

Trump grew up fighting for his life and taking no prisoners. In countless conversations, he made clear to me that he treated every encounter as a contest he had to win, because the only other option from his perspective was to lose, and that was the equivalent of obliteration.

I recognize that it's hard for a lot of people to come to terms with the idea that the U.S. has elected a president who is insane. They want to console themselves with the idea that, behind these policies is some kind of political and/or economic strategy that can be countered via rational arguments. But the reality is that we have a president who is bragging that our (former) allies are now calling him up to kiss his ass. It is an affront to three year olds to claim that is simply childish. It is insane.  

As a musical side-note, I've been thinking about this one a lot lately. Paul Simon said it's the most neurotic song he's ever written. But on a communal level, it perfectly describes Trump's "America first" mentality.

In this moral moment, perhaps Cory Booker is exactly what we need

As someone who has been impressed with Cory Booker since the days before he was a United States Senator, it didn't surprise me that on Tuesday, he rose to the occasion. Here is just one clip of his 25-hour speech on the Senate floor (you can find more here). 

"I don't want a Disney vacation of our history! I don't a whitewashed history, I don't want a homogenized history. Tell me the wretched truth about America, because that speaks to our greatness" -- 20 hours into his speech, Cory Booker is spitting absolute 🔥

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 1, 2025 at 2:46 PM

Joining in the kind of rhetoric that we heard from Bishop Mariann Budde, Booker ended with a clarion call: "This is a moral moment. It’s not left or right, it’s right or wrong.”

I'd like to share just one reaction that I saw on BlueSky. A mother wrote:

If you could see the look on my 14 year old son’s face watching Senator Booker filibuster on behalf of Americans. My son is a historian, in honors history, a passionate expert on world history. He was devastated when Trump was re-elected and this is the first time I’ve seen hope in his eyes.

 Wow, bringing the first glimmer of hope to a 14 year old is a BFD! 

As I've watched Booker over the years, I've seen how mainstream journalists basically dismiss him. Hayes Brown captured that in his response to Booker's efforts yesterday.

“Is Cory cringe or is this refreshing?” a colleague messaged me at one point during Booker’s speech. The answer, as my colleague immediately noted, is “yes.” Booker can be the cringiest of senators, which is saying something, wearing his heart on his sleeve and brandishing an inspiring quote at every possible chance. His lack of cynicism can be off-putting in a time when doomerism is rampant and hope can feel like a lie in the face of harsh reality. But maybe what America needs right now is a little cringe, a recommitment to being genuine and earnest in our desire to help others.

I'd suggest that, while some journalists dismissed Booker as being "cringe," he has often been a source of inspiration for many of us. As just one example, I'd remind you of the time Booker demonstrated what it means to be an ally. 

Here's what I wrote about that at the time:

The senator from New Jersey just gave us a master class on how to be an ally. He didn't settle for simply debunking the attacks on Judge Jackson. He built her up in the midst of others trying to tear her down. He gave her room to breath again, shoring up her ability to continue to take on those attacks with dignity and grace. Booker focused - at least for a moment - on what Judge Jackson needed rather than use his time to preen for the camera in order to score political points. That's precisely what it means to have empathy.

I've always believed in Cory Booker. While cynics might cringe at his open-heartedness, I've seen it for long enough to know that he's the real deal. Beyond that, he's smart as a whip and consistently supports policies that are not only progressive...but pragmatic. Here's just one example:

Booker is proposing “baby bonds” to give each child in the United States a savings account with $1,000. The account would grow in size every year, depending on the income of the child’s family, to as much as $50,000.

When the child turns 18, that money could be used for a number of things but not anything — including a down payment on a house or money to go to college.

One estimate from Columbia University researcher Naomi Zewde found that baby bonds would come close to wiping out the racial wealth gap, in part by increasing the assets held by young people across the board.

With all of that said, perhaps you will understand why it was no surprise to me that Senator Booker is the one who stepped up to the plate during this moral moment. He's exactly what we need right now.

In his own words, Musk is a fraudster

Ever since November 5, 2024, things have been pretty dismal. But recently, MN Governor Tim Walz did what he does best - brought some laughter to those of us in despair. 

That drew some pretty explosive criticism from our shadow president.

Musk: I mean, have you Tim Walz, who is a huge jerk, running on stage with the Tesla stock price.. What an evil thing to do. What a creep, what a jerk. Like who derives joy from that?

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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) March 28, 2025 at 6:22 PM

But here's the interesting thing. During that same interview, Musk parroted a talking point we heard recently from Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, who claimed that the only people who would complain about Social Security cuts would be the "fraudsters." 

Elon Musk says this is a revolution and suggests people who complain about it are fraudsters

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 27, 2025 at 5:39 PM

Here are Musk's own words: "You know who complains the loudest, with the most amount of fake righteous indignation? The fraudsters. It's a tell."

So Musk is the one who is complaining the loudest about Walz's remarks. In his own words, doesn't that make Musk a fraudster? 

I report...you decide :-)

Reckoning with the evil in power right now

Back in 2007, David Simon said this about his show The Wire:

I am wholly pessimistic about American society. I believe The Wire is a show about the end of the American Empire. We are going to live that event. How we end up and survive, and on what terms, is going to be the open question.

While I've always thought that The Wire was the best show ever produced for television,  I used to assume that Simon was too pessimistic. These days, I'm starting to question that.

I suspect that is something a lot of us in this country are beginning to wonder about. We've been raised on the idea that this country always ends up on the right side of history - even as it can take us a while to get there. But this time, we're not so sure.

Embedded in that optimism is a struggle to accept that those in positions of power in this country can be truly evil. That's what I began to think about when I read this description of Musk and his techno-pals from Amanda Marcotte:

Musk and his fellow techno-fascists often cast themselves as the saviors of "civilization," but that rhetoric is only there to put an ennobling gloss on a deeply sociopathic view: that human beings exist to serve the system, and not that the system is there to serve humanity...It's an attitude that's inherently eugenicist, measuring people's value solely in terms of whether they can be utilized to make more money for the already-wealthy investor class. It's why Musk has no respect for federal workers whose labor is centered around helping people, not profits. And it's certainly not a worldview that has space for retirees, people who, by definition, are out of the paid labor market.

Musk has demonstrated disdain for anyone who doesn't produce profits for the already-wealthy owner class: federal workers, the disabled, retirees, non-profits employees (NGO's), etc.  He even went so far as to suggest that empathy for others is "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization."

In case you think Musk is a one-off in the world of techno-fascists, I'd like to introduce you to Curtis Yarvin, the guy who said that Americans need to get over their "dictator phobia" and has inspired everyone from J.D. Vance to Peter Thiel. Back in 2008, Yarvin was writing a blog under the pseudonym, Mencius Moldbug. He laid out his ideal of "Patchwork realms," which would be city-scapes ruled by techno-CEOs (what some folks are referring to as "Freedom cities" these days). 

In laying out his vision for these Patchwork realms, Yarvin addressed the issue of what should be done with people who are unproductive (the people Musk refers to as "the parasite class"). Apparently, he likes to joke around about stuff like this.

I think the answer is clear: alternative energy. Since wards are liabilities, there is no business case for retaining them in their present, ambulatory form. Therefore, the most profitable disposition for this dubious form of capital is to convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.

Okay, just kidding. This is the sort of naive Randian thinking which appeals instantly to a geek like me, but of course has nothing to do with real life. The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass.

Things don't get much better when Yarvin is serious.

The ideal solution achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society), but without any of the moral stigma...

The best humane alternative to genocide I can think of is not to liquidate the wards—either metaphorically or literally—but to virtualize them. A virtualized human is in permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell which is sealed except for emergencies. This would drive him insane, except that the cell contains an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.

That's how the world of techno-fascists think about the "undesirable elements of society." You think they're going to give a damn about retirees losing their Social Security or the disabled losing access to education? Not for a minute! 

A few reporters have delved into the world some people refer to as the "Dark Enlightenment," or the "NRx movement" from which these tech-bros emerged. But for now, suffice it to say that it is the world inhabited by the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and J.D. Vance. While they might not publicly endorse the idea of "virtualizing" people they view as unproductive, it is clear that they hold the same kind of disdain for anyone who doesn't contribute to the already-wealthy owner class.

That is the evil that has gained power in the United States right now, which is why I'm joining Simon these days in being pessimistic about American society. 

Fact-checking Musk/Trump lies about entitlements

On at least two occasions, Elon Musk has admitted to making mistakes when it comes to his use of a chainsaw to go after federal spending. He followed that up by saying that, when confronted with mistakes, he would immediately fix them.  That was a lie.

To demonstrate, let's take a look at what he said about entitlements last week during an interview with Larry Ludlow. 

At about the 1:45 minute mark, Musk says that there is a tremendous amount of waste and fraud in federal spending. He referred to a 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) which, he said, estimated half a trillion dollars in government fraud. Here's the headline from that report: "2018-2022 Data Show Federal Government Loses an Estimated $233 Billion to $521 Billion Annually to Fraud." Right off the bat, you can see that Musk only mentioned the top number in the estimate. 

But a deeper look at that report provides us with some needed context. First of all, it states that the total represents 3-7 percent of federal obligations - which, while cause for concern, doesn't sound like a "tremendous amount." Secondly, they made their estimates by looking at fraud that was adjudicated, investigated, and/or suspected. In other words, it was based on fraud that the various departments knew about and were dealing with. For example, that would include the work of the Health Care Fraud Unit, which "has charged more than 5,400 defendants with fraudulently billing Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurers more than $27 billion."

I would note that, while DOGE is reporting $115 billion in savings from their efforts (not a reliable number), not one case of fraud has been referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution. Meanwhile, many of the staff who previously identified, investigated, and prosecuted fraud have been fired.  Whatever it is that is motivating the DOGE chainsaw, it has nothing to do with investigating fraud.

From there, Musk goes on to suggest that there is something nefarious going on with Social Security by pointing to the 20 million people who are dead, but marked as alive in the system. That one has been explained over and over again - even by the Trump administration's acting SSA commissioner. The fact that Musk continues to bring it up demonstrates that he is deliberately lying.

Musk's remarks at about the 14:35 mark are the ones that got the most attention. He said, "The waste and fraud in entitlement spending — which is most of the federal spending is entitlements — so, that’s, like, the big one to eliminate. That’s the, sort of half-trillion, maybe $6-700 billion a year.”

Giving Musk the benefit of the doubt, he wasn't suggesting that entitlements be completely eliminated. He was suggesting that there is a "half-trillion, maybe $6-700 billion a year" in entitlement fraud that he wants to eliminate. He seems to be relying on the top number from that 2024 GAO report, which was based on the entire federal government, not simply entitlements. Then he threw in an additional $1-200 billion for good measure.

In an attempt to defend those remarks from Musk, the White House issued a statement purporting to provide "facts" about entitlement fraud. They referred to the same 2024 GAO report on estimated fraud. But the rest of the so-called "facts" are all reports on "improper payments," which we have discussed before. Here's a reminder about what that term means: 

The vast majority of improper payments occurred in situations where a reviewer could not determine if a payment was proper because of insufficient documentation...Improper payment estimates are not fraud rate estimates.

Even so, the most recent figures on improper payments puts them at 6% for Medicare, 5% for Medicaid, and 0.8% for Social Security. That, my friends, is pretty damn efficient! 

Now that we've dealt with the policies, numbers, and definitions to debunk Musk's lies about entitlements, the shadow president got to the tin foil hat part of his claims. He ends the interview with Kudlow by making an argument adjacent to the white supremacist's Great Replacement Theory, claiming that it is access to entitlements that draws undocumented immigrants to this country. That is a bald-faced lie.

By law, one must “either be a U.S. citizen or lawfully present noncitizen in order to receive monthly Social Security benefits.” Similarly, Medicare benefits are only available to “U.S. citizens and qualified lawfully present immigrants age 65 and older.” In other words, undocumented immigrants—who are not lawfully present—cannot receive these benefits, even though their work strengthens these trust funds.

What we can take from all of this is that Trump/Musk are coming after Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid - programs that primarily benefit seniors and the disabled. In order to pave the way for that, they'll tell a voluminous amount of lies. We must arm ourselves with facts in order to stave off those attacks. 

MAGA is also about an attack on the disabled

The list of words the Trump administration is banning tells us all we need to know about their attack on civil rights. But a couple of words have gotten less attention than the rest. Included on the list are "accessibility" and "disability." They've made it abundantly clear that their fight isn't just about DEI, it is about DEIA (the "A" is accessibility for the disabled). 

We all learned about Trump's disdain when he mocked a reporter with a disability during the 2016 campaign. The president recently  implied that February’s deadly plane and helicopter crash was linked to the FAA’s hiring of people with “severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions.”

Elon Musk's favorite attack on people he disagrees with is to call them a "retard." He's done so more than 16 times in the last year. It's spreading to his followers on X, where use of the term increased 200%. When Trump won in November, a “top banker” told Financial Times: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled.”

But it's not just about words. Both Musk and House Republicans have set their sights on defunding Medicaid, which was created in part to ensure people with disabilities had access to affordable healthcare. Similarly, the administration's promise to eliminate the Department of Education would deal a death blow to funding for students with disabilities. 

Here is a description of what was happening in the United States prior to the 1970s:

As of the early 1970s, U.S. public schools accommodated 1 out of 5 children with disabilities. Until that time, many states had laws that explicitly excluded children with certain types of disabilities from attending public school, including children who were blind, deaf, and children labeled "emotionally disturbed" or "mentally retarded."...More than 1 million children had no access to the public school system, with many of them living at state institutions where they received limited or no educational or rehabilitation services.

With passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990, the federal government required public schools to create educational opportunities for children with disabilities and pledged to cover 40% of the average per-student cost. The latter promise has never been fulfilled, with the federal government currently covering only 13% of the costs. 

If the Trump administration eliminates the Department of Education, there will be no guarantee that even these minimal funds (should they survive) would go towards the education of students with disabilities. And, as the Trump administration shows preference for private schools, it is important to note that they are not required to provide special education services.

Justin Kirkland links all of this to eugenics - which is a powerful accusation. So it's important to take a look at how he justifies such a claim.

Starting in 1910, the term “mental retardation” was used to diagnose those who were “feeble-minded”, failed to develop on the average timeline, and were deemed by some doctors as “incurable”. Around the same time, the belief that undesirable traits – specifically intellectual disabilities, and eventually race and sexual orientation – could be “bred out” of existence was growing in popularity in the US. This eugenics movement was endorsed by political powerhouses and substantial research on eugenics was bankrolled by the likes of the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Advocates of eugenics suggested people with disabilities should be institutionalized and separated by gender, so as to discourage “bad breeding”. It was the popularity of the eugenics movement that served as inspiration for the Nazi party: in 1939, the Third Reich began systematically murdering Germans with disabilities in institutions; an estimated quarter of a million people were killed during this “euthanasia” program, at least 10,000 of them children. Stateside, tens of thousands of people with intellectual disabilities were forcibly sterilized from the turn of the century and into the 1970s. People with disabilities didn’t secure sweeping civil rights, including equal access to employment and housing assistance, until the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 – just one generation removed from present day.

We've already seen a return to eugenics from Trump in his description of immigrants. 

Immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he said at a rally last year.

“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” he said earlier this month. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Here's where MAGA's attacks on empathy come into play. To return to that kind of cruelty towards people with disabilities, they can't allow themselves to identify with the suffering caused by the eugenics movement. 

In order to prevent a return to our pre-1970s past, we need to learn more about this recent history, recognize what's going on right now, and stand up for the rights of people with disabilities.  A good place to start would be to watch the documentary "Crip Camp" and celebrate the heroes who brought us the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Why the MAGA movement fears empathy

When Elon Musk went on Joe Rogan's show last week, he said that "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy." He also referred to empathy as civilizational suicide. 

But Musk isn't the only one who sees empathy as a threat. There is a whole movement among Christian nationalists warning of the dangers of empathy. For example, Conservative Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey recently published a book titled Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. A few months later, Joe Rigney published one titled The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits. Several other Christian nationalists have joined the fray, including Josh McPherson, Doug Wilson, Joel Webbon, and James White.

The attacks on empathy were perhaps best captured by how these folks responded to Bishop Mariann Budde's call for mercy towards those who are afraid. Here's the author of that book about "toxic empathy."

Whoa! So for these folks, showing mercy to those who are afraid isn't just against God's word - it's satanic. I have no idea what Bible she's reading, but whenever folks get that riled up, I start wondering what they're afraid of. Here's a list of what comes to mind:

Conversation 

Empathy emerges when we engage deeply in conversation - often with those who disagree with us or have different life experiences. As Julian Sanchez pointed out years ago, that kind of conversation bursts MAGA's epistemic bubble (emphasis mine).

This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile…If disagreement is not in itself evidence of malign intent or moral degeneracy, people start feeling an obligation to engage it sincerely…And there is nothing more potentially fatal to the momentum of an insurgency fueled by anger than a conversation.

Feminization 

As we see in Stuckey's tweet above, she expects this kind of thing from a female Episcopalian priest. Joe Rigney was more explicit. Here's what he wrote:

Budde’s attempt to “speak truth to power” is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation and victimhood that has plagued us in the era of wokeness. And for Christians, it’s a reminder of how destructive the feminist cancer is in the Church.

Josh McPherson, Pastor of Grace City Church in Wenatchee, Washington and founder of Stronger Man Nation, said that "empathy is dangerous, empathy is toxic, empathy will align you with Hell." He also said that "women are especially vulnerable" to empathy, and that husbands should control who their wives are friends with.

It is clear that, for these folks, empathy threatens the status quo of patriarchy. 

Vulnerability/Uncertainty

Here's what Shane Moe, a licensed marriage and family counselor, said about the anti-empathy crowd:

Yes, allowing ourselves to experience empathy can make us more vulnerable to (gasp!) the influence of those who think differently than we do. And if one lives in a perpetual state of spiritual hypervigilance or fear of potentially being wrong or corrupted — and, thus, with deep-seated existential anxiety surrounding theological/ideological difference and change — one might consequently come to see empathy as a threat.

Those who have a "deep-seated existential anxiety" about difference and change must protect their vulnerability by maintaining certainty. All doubt must be eradicated. 

I am reminded that, in the film Conclave, Cardinal Lawrence (played by Ralph Fiennes) says that "There is one sin which I have come to fear above all others - certainty....Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance."

Unity

One of the lessons we can learn from history is that authoritarian regimes require people to embrace an us vs them narrative about an enemy that must be punished and/or annihilated. That's why Trump/Vance keep talking about "the enemy within." The specifics are malleable and can be anyone they feel like targeting at the moment. Empathy for those targets is, therefore, a huge threat. 

In 2008, Barack Obama gave a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Here is the theme of his remarks:

“Unity is the great need of the hour.” That’s what Dr. King said. It is the great need of this hour as well, not because it sounds pleasant, not because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exits in this country.

I’m not talking about the budget deficit. I’m not talking about the trade deficit. Talking about the moral deficit in this country. I’m talking about an empathy deficit, the inability to recognize ourselves in one another, to understand that we are our brother’s keeper and our sister’s keeper, that in the words of Dr. King, “We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.”

To the extent that we believe that we are our bother's/sister's keeper, we would unify against the forces that are tearing us apart.

That is why MAGA is referring to empathy as civilizational suicide, toxic, and a sin. They are scared to death of real conversation, women, vulnerability, and unity because all of those things will bring down the edifice of cruelty they are in the midst of building. Isn't it a pity. Isn't it a shame! 

What Trump has done for Putin in just 43 days

With all of the daily outrages coming from the White House, it is important every now and then to step back and take a look at the big picture. Here's what Trump has done for Putin in his first 43 days:

February 14th - Trump administration made it easier for Russia to interfere in our elections.

February 14th - Vance told European countries that the real threat isn't Russia, but their own attempts to disrupt misinformation.

February 18th - Trump repeated Kremlin talking points - blaming Ukraine for starting the war. 

February 19th - Trump repeated Kremlin talking points - calling Zelensky a "dictator."

February 24th - U.S. voted against a UN resolution condemning Russia for Ukraine war.

February 28th - Trump and Vance attacked Zelensky during their meeting in the Oval Office, leading to this tweet from the deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia.

March 2nd - Trump administration ordered U.S. Cyber Command to halt offensive cyber operations and information operations against Russia.

March 3rd - Trump administration is planning to give Russia relief from sanctions imposed as a result of their invasion of Ukraine.

March 3rd - Trump halts all military aid to Ukraine.

Of course, none of that includes all of the things that the Trump administration is doing that has Putin applauding - like shutting down USAID, alienating all of our foreign allies, and basically destroying the federal government. 

Is it any wonder, then, that the Kremlin spokesperson said that "The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.”

After Trump's first term in office, it became increasingly difficult to dismiss the idea that the President of the United States was acting as an asset of the Kremlin. Forty-three days into his second term, he's wiping out all doubt.

At least one conservative British politician is saying the quiet part out loud.

With the Republican plan to increase the deficit by $4.5 trillion, they need a new argument to go after entitlements

For decades now, Republicans have demonstrated that one of their main goals has been to eliminate the social safety net. While they've used various arguments, the one they've depended on the most is to claim that we can't afford it by pointing to the federal deficit. 

But that argument is increasingly hard to make when the House budget proposal includes a $4.5 trillion addition to the deficit from tax cuts aimed primarily at the wealthy. So Republicans find themselves having to pivot to a new argument for doing away with the social safety net - especially when it comes to programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. 

It is becoming increasingly clear that the new argument is that these programs are infected with waste, fraud and abuse. As I noted previously, that is the lie Speaker Johnson is spreading about Medicaid. On Sunday, he said the same thing about Social Security.

Mike Johnson on Elon Musk: "We meet late into the night in his office and we've looked at that. What he's finding with his algorithms crawling through the data of Social Security system is enormous amounts of fraud, waste, and abuse."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 2, 2025 at 11:54 AM

Of course, Johnson didn't provide any evidence for "enormous amounts of fraud, waste, and abuse" in the Social Security system. And when Welker pointed out that the Social Security administration's internal watchdog found that less than 1 percent of benefit payments were improper, Johnson responded by simply saying "Don't believe it."

Call me crazy, but if Musk and Johnson want to use that chainsaw to go after Social Security, they're going to have to provide some actual evidence of fraud, waste, and abuse. We now know that their claims about millions of dead people getting Social Security checks was a lie. 

Overall, when it comes to Musk's claims of fraud, here's a good tracker:

To demonstrate how twisted this has all become, Musk recently told Joe Rogan that "entitlements fraud for illegal aliens is what is serving as a gigantic magnetic force to pull people in from all around the world and keep them here." Of course, that's all a lie. But Musk used it as a way to pivot to the great replacement theory, suggesting that Democrats are using entitlement fraud to "buy voters."

The bottom line is that, whether they're pearl-clutching about the deficit, lying about fraud, or blaming immigrants, the point of all of this is to dismantle programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. That's the end game. They know that these programs are not only popular, they are a lifeline for millions of Americans. So they keep searching for a convincing lie to justify their destruction.