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Nero’s Guests Chris Hedges

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I gave this talk in Blackburn, England during a campaign event for my friend Craig Murray who is running for parliament. Like George Galloway, who was recently elected to parliament, Craig’s central campaign issue is the genocide in Gaza. He calls for a permanent ceasefire, the establishment of a full and independent Palestinian state and backs the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against the apartheid state of Israel.

Transcript

Craig Murray: Good evening. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for coming along. I’m Craig Murray. I’m here in Blackburn, as you may know, as a candidate in the general election and one thing I’ve made absolutely plain is that I’m standing here because of the genocide in Gaza. That’s what has brought me here to raise the issue and fight the election here and we’re having a meeting here today which is not like your normal election meeting in that it’s very much focused on that subject and which I hope will give you a lot of information and food for thought and I am extremely proud to have two of the best speakers on the subject in the world, two world leading authorities on the subject who’ve come here to Blackburn.

I had difficulty persuading people today that they are actually here and that it’s not a Zoom meeting or something along those lines. And they’ve both come large distances to be here. And without further ado, because I’m going to be here, as comedians used to say, I’m here all week. I’m here for the next month so you’ll have lots and lots of chances to hear me talk but this is a man who you probably very seldom get to hear talk.

He is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, a man of enormous experience, who’s just flown in from Egypt, where he won the Arab World’s Top Prize for Journalism — and we look very much forward to hearing Chris Hedges.

Chris Hedges: Thank you.

Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that is even more savage than that of apartheid South Africa. Its ‘democracy’ — which was always exclusively for Jews — has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country towards fascism. Human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalistsIsraeli and Palestinian — are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America’s democracy, along with a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Black racism.

By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare that will continue at least until the end of this year — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation – which it successfully sold to its western audiences – will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as the ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel. Its popular support will come from reactionary Zionists and America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and celebration of white supremacy. 

Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will join the club of the globe’s most despotic regimes. 

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity. 

When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit Indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. 

All Israel has left is escalating savagery, including torture and lethal violence against unarmed civilians, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship, the British occupation of India, Egypt, Kenya and Northern Ireland and the American occupations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the long term, it is suicidal.

The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas’ resistance fighters into heroes in the Global South. Israel may wipe out the Hamas leadership. But the past — and current — assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance. The genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation of deeply traumatized and enraged young men and women whose families have been killed and whose communities have been obliterated. They are prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. 

Israel was at war with itself before Oct. 7. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. Its religious bigots and fanatics, currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protestors from decrying the government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. The Palestinian “human animals,” when eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by Jewish apostates and traitors. A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability, exploited by those seeking the destruction of civil society.

Israel was far down this road on Oct. 7 when it promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish settlements to bar applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” 

Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom Isaiah Berlin called “the conscience of Israel,” warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end the occupation, it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult.

“Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism,” wrote Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war that captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, was dangerous. “Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution,” he warned.

He foresaw that, “the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police — mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.” 

“Israel,” he wrote, “would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”

Settler colonial states that endure, including the United States, exterminate the native population through genocide and the spread of new infectious diseases such as smallpox. By 1600 less than a tenth of the indigenous population remained in South, Central and North America. Israel cannot kill on this scale, with nearly 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation and another nine million in the diaspora. They cannot, as many Israelis wish, wipe them all out. 

Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza means there will be no two-state solution. Apartheid and genocide will define existence for the Palestinians. This presages a long conflict, but one that the Jewish State cannot ultimately win.

Run, the Israelis demand of the Palestinians, run for your lives. Run from Rafah the way you ran from Gaza City, the way you ran from Jabalia, the way you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way you ran from Beit Hanoun, the way you ran from Bani Suheila, the way you ran from Khan Yunis. Run or we will kill you. We will drop GBU-39 bombs on your tent encampments and set them ablaze. We will spray you with bullets from our machine-gun-equipped drones. We will pound you with artillery and tank shells. We will shoot you down with snipers. We will decimate your tents, your refugee camps, your cities and towns, your homes, your schools, your hospitals and your water purification plants. We will rain death from the sky.

Run for your lives. Again and again and again. Pack up the few belongings you have left. Blankets. A couple of pots. Some clothes. We don’t care how exhausted you are, how hungry you are, how terrified you are, how sick you are, how old, or how young you are. Run. Run. Run. And when you run in terror to one part of Gaza, we will make you turn around and run to another. Trapped in a labyrinth of death. Back and forth. Up and down. Side to side. Six. Seven. Eight times. We toy with you like mice in a trap. Then we deport you so you can never return. Or we kill you.

Let the world denounce our genocide. What do we care? The billions in military aid flows unchecked from our American ally. The fighter jets. The artillery shells. The tanks. The bombs. An endless supply. We kill children by the thousands. We kill women and the elderly by the thousands. The sick and injured, without medicine and hospitals die. We poison the water. We cut off the food. We make you starve. We created this hell. We are the masters. Law. Duty. A code of conduct. They do not exist for us.

But first we toy with you. We humiliate you. We terrorize you. We revel in your fear. We are amused by your pathetic attempts to survive. You are not human. You are creatures. Untermensch. We feed our lust for domination. Look at our posts on social media. They have gone viral. One shows soldiers grinning in a Palestinian home with the owners tied up and blindfolded in the background. We loot. Rugs. Cosmetics. Motorbikes. Jewelry. Watches. Cash. Gold. Antiquities. We mock your misery. We cheer your death. We celebrate our religion, our nation, our identity, our superiority, by negating and erasing yours. 

Depravity is moral. Atrocity is heroism. Genocide is redemption.

This is the game of terror played by Israel in Gaza. It was the game played during the Dirty War in Argentina when the military junta “disappeared” 30,000 of its own citizens. The “disappeared” were subjected to torture — who cannot call what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza torture? — and humiliated before they were murdered. It was the game played in the clandestine torture centers and prisons in El Salvador and Iraq. It is what characterized the war in Bosnia in the Serbian concentration camps.

Israeli journalist Yinon Magal on the show “Hapatriotim” on Israel’s Channel 14, joked that Joe Biden’s red line was the killing of 30,000 Palestinians. The singer Kobi Peretz asked if that was the number of dead for a day. The audience erupted in applause and laughter.

We know Israel’s intent. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way the United States annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews. The specifics are different. The goal is the same. Erasure. 

We cannot plead ignorance. 

But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a permanent ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt — the hospitals, the universities, the mosques, the housing. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.

The vaunted democratic values, morality and respect for human rights, claimed by Israel and the United States, has always been a lie. The real credo is this – we have everything and if you try and take it away from us we will kill you. People of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. The hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom of those outside the empire are worthless. Global domination will be sustained through racialized violence

This lie — that the American empire is predicated on democracy and liberty — is one the Palestinians, and those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans, not to mention those who live in the Middle East, have known for decades. But it is a lie that still has currency in the United States and Israel, a lie used to justify the unjustifiable.

We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we, as Americans, are Israel, infected with the same white supremacy, and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our advanced weaponry. 

The world outside of the industrialized fortresses in the Global North is acutely aware that the fate of the Palestinians is their fate. As climate change imperils survival, as natural resources, including access to water, diminish, as mass migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as coastal areas are flooded, as droughts and wildfires proliferate, as states fail, as militias and armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians. 

“Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths,” the Roman historian Tacitus wrote of those the emperor Nero singled out for torture and death. “Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”

Sadism by the powerful is the curse of the human condition. It was as prevalent in ancient Rome as it is, 200 miles to the north from us, in Gaza. 

We know the modern face of Nero, who illuminated his opulent garden parties by burning to death captives tied to stakes. That is not in dispute.

But who were Nero’s guests1? Who wandered through the emperor’s grounds as human beings, as in Rafah, were burned alive? How could these guests see, and no doubt hear, such horrendous suffering and witness such appalling torture and be indifferent, even content?

There is nothing hidden about this genocide. Over 147 courageous Palestinian journalists have been murdered by the Israelis because they have conveyed the images and stories of this slaughter to the world, martyred for their people, for us.

We are Nero’s guests. 

The Palestinians have long been betrayed, not only by us in the global north, but by most of the governments in the Muslim world. We stand passive in the face of the crime of crimes. History will judge Israel for this genocide. But it will also judge us. It will ask why we did not do more, why we did not sever all agreements, all trade deals, all accords, all cooperation with the apartheid state, why we did not halt weapons shipments to Israel, why we did not recall our ambassadors, why when the maritime trade in the Red Sea was disrupted by Yemen an alternative overland route into Israel was set up by Saudi Arabia and Jordan, why we did not do everything in our power to end the slaughter. It will condemn us for not heeding the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which is not that Jews are eternal victims, but that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable.

“The opposite of good is not evil,” Samuel Johnson wrote. “The opposite of good is indifference.”

The Palestinian resistance is our resistance. The Palestinian struggle for dignity, freedom and independence is our struggle. The Palestinian cause is our cause. For, as history has also shown, those who were once Nero’s guests soon became Nero’s victims. 

Thank you.

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

1

The title and concept of Nero’s Guests comes from a lecture by P. Sainath about the suicides of Indian farmers.

 

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The NSA’s “Big Delete” Judd Legum

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National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. (Photo by NSA via Getty Images)

Today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a “Big Delete” of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including “privilege,” “bias,” and “inclusion.” The “Big Delete,” according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences. Although the websites and other content are purportedly being deleted to comply with President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or “DEI,” the dragnet is taking down “mission-related” work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is “very chaotic,” but is plowing ahead anyway.

A memo distributed by NSA leadership to its staff says that on February 10, all NSA websites and internal network pages that contain banned words will be deleted. This is the list of 27 banned words distributed to NSA staff:

Anti-Racism
Racism
Allyship
Bias
DEI
Diversity
Diverse
Confirmation Bias
Equity
Equitableness
Feminism
Gender
Gender Identity
Inclusion
Inclusive
All-Inclusive
Inclusivity
Injustice
Intersectionality
Prejudice
Privilege
Racial Identity
Sexuality
Stereotypes
Pronouns
Transgender
Equality

The memo acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term “privilege” is used by the NSA in the context of “privilege escalation.” In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to “techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.”

The purge extends beyond public-facing websites to pages on the NSA’s internal network, including project management software like Jira and Confluence.

The NSA is trying to identify mission-related sites before the “Big Delete” is executed but appears to lack the personnel to do so. The NSA’s internal network has existed since the 1990s, and a manual review of the content is impractical. Instead, the NSA is working with “Data Science Development Program interns” to “understand the false-positive use cases” and “help generate query options that can better minimize false-positives.” Nevertheless, the NSA is anticipating “unintended downtime” of “mission-related” websites.

While Trump’s executive order claims to target “illegal and immoral discrimination programs,” the NSA’s banned-word list demonstrates that the implementation is far broader. The Trump administration is attempting to prohibit any acknowledgment that racism, stereotypes, and bias exist. The ban is so sweeping that “confirmation bias” — the tendency of people “to accept or notice information if it appears to support what they already believe or expect” — is included, even though it has nothing to do with race or gender.

Popular Information is an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism since 2018. It is made possible by readers who upgrade to a paid subscription.

The government memory hole

Since Trump took office, thousands of web pages across various federal agencies have been altered or removed entirely. Federal agencies have taken down or edited resources about HIV, contraceptives, LGBTQ+ health, abortion, and climate change. Some web pages have later come back online “without clarity on what had been changed or removed.”

An analysis by the Washington Post of 8,000 federal web pages “found 662 examples of deletions and additions” since Trump took office. The analysis found that words like diversity, equity, and inclusion were removed at least 231 times from the websites of federal agencies, including the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Transportation.

One example included a job listing page for the Department of Homeland Security that removed language about maintaining an “inclusive environment.” The Post also found examples of words being removed that had nothing to do with DEI, such as a page on the Department of the Interior’s website that boasted of its museums’ “diverse collections,” removing the word “diverse.”

Following Trump’s executive orders targeting transgender individuals, multiple federal websites have removed transgender and intersex people from the acronym “LGBTQI,” NBC News reported. On the State Department website, a web page that used to provide resources for “LGBTQI Travelers” now addresses “LGB Travelers.” The Social Security Administration has made similar changes, with a page heading now reading “Social Security for LGBQ People.” Some agencies, including the Department of Education, have removed web pages with LGBTQ resources altogether.

On X, Elon Musk’s United States DOGE Service is celebrating the deletions:


We started a new publication, Musk Watch. NPR covered our launch HERE. It features accountability journalism focused on one of the most powerful humans in history. It is free to sign up, so we hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think.

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Federal agencies have also been scrubbing websites for mentions of climate change, which Trump has called a “hoax.” The Department of Agriculture’s Office of Communications issued a directive to “archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change,” the Guardian reported. Resources on the Forest Service website, including the Climate Change Resource Center and the Climate Action Tracker, appear to still be unavailable. The Department of Transportation website replaced the phrase “climate change” with “climate resilience.”

Among the agencies with the most deleted web pages is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which took down over “3,000 pages,” according to the New York Times. In one example, data from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which tracks important health metrics, was temporarily unavailable, only to come back online later with “at least one of the gender columns missing and its data documentation removed.” A banner on the top of the CDC website states it is “being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

Last week, the Trump administration was sued by Doctors for America, a physicians’ group, for removing health resources and data from government websites, arguing that it “deprived clinicians and researchers of tools necessary to treat patients.”

 

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The Vibe Shift Comes to the Super Bowl. Plus. . . River Page

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It’s Monday, February 10. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Why USAID is the wrong hill for Dems to die on; why Trump is flooding the zone; how American educators are conning kids; and much more.

But first: The Super Bowl.

Boring game, huh? The Eagles beat the Chiefs in a 40–22 blowout that will have pleased my colleague Joe Nocera, but will not be remembered as a classic.

The Super Bowl isn’t just a game, it’s a cultural barometer—and sometimes, a crystal ball. In 2016, Beyoncé danced on the Super Bowl stage to her new song “Formation,” flanked by backup dancers dressed like Black Panthers. Controversy ensued, foreshadowing the great war over woke that would dominate for years to come.

This year, another vibe shift. The NFL changed the message stenciled into the end zone from “End Racism” to “Choose Love.” Trump showed up—the first sitting president to do so—and his favorite patriotic walk-on song, “God Bless the USA,” was heard playing in the stadium. Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance featured a nagging Uncle Sam character (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who told the rapper not to be “too ghetto,” but when backup dancers dressed in red, white, and blue formed the American flag, it felt more patriotic than political, even though his song “Alright” is perhaps best known as BLM’s unofficial anthem. And in another patriotic move, Kendrick performed “Not Like Us,” his Grammy Award–winning diss track against one of America’s new trade war enemies—Canadian rapper Drake.

Speaking of Canada, even the ads couldn’t escape the vibe shift. In the wake of Trump’s proposed, but currently delayed, 25 percent tariffs against Canadian goods, the province of Ontario ran an ad reminding Americans that Canucks are important trade partners and good neighbors, eh bud?

Speaking of “bud,” Bud Light launched a new ad to convince America they aren’t woke anymore. Still reeling from its disastrous 2023 campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which spurred an effective conservative boycott, the beer’s new commercial featured Peyton Manning, Post Malone, and Shane Gillis—a comic who was infamously fired from Saturday Night Live in 2019 for affecting a Chinese accent on a podcast. (Read Anson Frericks’ great essay on the Bud Light saga.)

Bud Light wasn’t the only company with a subtle rebrand. After a backlash last year over their support for trans women participating in female sports, Nike launched a new ad putting female athletes front and center. The tagline: You can’t win, so win. Well, maybe they can’t win because they’re competing against biological males, Nike. Still, the ad is about female sports and features only female athletes, which is radical conservatism by Nike’s standards.

And the least subtle rebrand of all? Hardee’s—or, for some reason, Carl’s Jr., if you’re west of the Mississippi—brought back its sexy bikini ads after ditching them eight years ago. The real MAHA? Make America Horny Again.

Defending USAID Is Political Suicide for Democrats

On Friday, a judge temporarily blocked Musk and Trump’s plans to put 2,200 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) staffers on paid leave, in response to a lawsuit brought by two unions. The judge also reinstated 500 employees who had already been placed on leave. The order will remain in effect until midnight on Valentine’s Day, and the judge will also consider a request for a longer-term pause at a hearing on Wednesday. The unions argued that the government was violating the Constitution and harming workers by taking them out of their jobs.

Unions and judges aren’t the only ones trying to stand in the way of Musk and Trump’s plans for USAID. Congressional Democrats have suddenly become USAID’s greatest defenders, leading a rally in Washington to protect the agency.

The D.C. crowd may have cheered them on but the rest of the country won’t, says Free Press columnist Ruy Teixeira. He points out that most Americans agree that the U.S. spends too much money on foreign aid, and the working class is particularly skeptical of foreign handouts. In their rush to shoot down Musk, have Democrats aimed the gun at their own feet?

Read Ruy’s new column, “Defending USAID Is Political Suicide for Democrats.”

Cancel a Subscription, Win a Subscription

This week, one mysterious and presumably wealthy reader is offering free FP subscriptions to readers who prove that they unsubscribed from a legacy media outlet. That’s right. That means free podcasts, free TGIF, and free access to a backlog of God-only-knows-how-many articles. Send proof to tgif@thefp.com, and do it fast: You have to be one of the first 100 entrants to win. What counts as “legacy media”? Use your judgment: The New York Times certainly counts. Paying for articles on CNN.com for some reason? That counts. Cosmo too. The Washington Post? Absolutely. How much more money does Bezos really need? Highlights magazine is an edge case but if you can make the argument, we’re all ears. Happy unsubscribing!

Tyler Cowen: Why Trump Is Flooding the Zone

The first month of the Trump administration has been a whirlwind: dozens of executive actions on everything from DEI to birthright citizenship; short-lived trade wars; massive restructuring of the federal bureaucracy; and so many Truth Social posts. His latest move? Signing a proclamation making February 9 the first Gulf of America Day while aboard Air Force One flying over said Gulf en route to the Super Bowl. It all seems so chaotic—even those of us who are paid to keep up with it all barely can. But is there a method to the madness? Economist, polymath, and podcaster Tyler Cowen says yes.

Read his latest article, “A Unified Theory of Trump’s Hyperactive Start.”

How American Educators Are Conning Kids

The state of America’s public education is bleak: U.S. students are further behind in reading and math than they were in 2012. American kids in the bottom 10th and 25th percentiles are performing worse than they did in the early 1990s, and the “achievement gap” between our highest- and lowest-performing students is now one of the worst in the developed world. In a shocking new report, Free Press journalist Frannie Block writes that instead of solving the problem, educators in a number of states are covering it up.

Read Frannie on “How American Educators are Conning Kids.”

In other Frannie Block education news, her reporting on Qatari influence in American education was cited in Congressional testimony last week.

Can the FAA Be Fixed?

The shocking midair collision above the Potomac last month has prompted many to ask whether America’s air-traffic control system needs reform. The answer, writes John Tierney, is yes—and urgently. He describes an outdated system that still uses paper and pen instead of infrared and high-resolution cameras. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency that oversees America’s skies, has delayed modernization for decades. Will this crash provide the impetus for long-overdue reform?

Read John Tierney: “America’s Air-Traffic Control System Is an International Disgrace.

(Olivier Douliery via Getty Images)
  • A new CBS/YouGov survey found Trump has a positive approval rating across all age groups—with younger voters particularly enthused. The poll found 53 percent of voters approve of the overall job Trump is doing—a higher level of approval than he ever reached during his first term.

  • On Friday, Trump backed DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts and said Elon would be heading to the Pentagon next, causing shares of defense stocks like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to tumble. Yesterday, Trump predicted that his administration will find “billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse” at the Defense Department. Yeah, probably. But it’s still unclear whether or not cuts will be possible. Elon’s potential role in searching the Pentagon has already raised conflict of interest concerns, given that his companies SpaceX and Starlink have contracts with the government. Plus, there is an open constitutional question about the administration’s ability to stop funds already appropriated by Congress.

  • Then, early Saturday morning a federal judge blocked DOGE’s access to Treasury records and payment systems, and ordered the Trump advisory board to destroy any material they’ve already downloaded. The ruling was the result of a suit brought by 19 Democratic state attorneys general who say that giving Musk and his team access to Treasury data puts Americans’ private information at risk. Musk says that the judge who ruled against DOGE should be impeached.

  • Trump ruled out deporting Prince Harry on Friday during an interview with the New York Post, saying “he’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.” He went on to say that he believes the prince is “whipped” by his American wife, former actress Meghan Markle. It’s part of a long-running feud: The Duchess of Sussex called him “divisive” and “misogynistic” during his 2016 presidential run, and Trump has since repeatedly criticized the couple over their reported disagreements with the royal family.

  • The CDC says nearly 100 people became sick with an unspecified gastrointestinal illness on board a Royal Caribbean cruise ship. The maritime cesspool left Tampa on February 1 en route to Mexico, Honduras, and Belize, before returning to port Saturday. It’s the sixth disease outbreak the CDC has recorded on a cruise this year. Disease-ridden, numerous, and rat-like as they scurry about from port to port, cruise ships are the vermin of the sea and it’s high time we called an exterminator! Clean them up!

 

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February 9, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

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On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”

In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.

The United States Constitution that establishes the framework for our democratic government sets out how the American people will write the laws that govern us. We elect members to a Congress, which consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. That congress of our representatives holds “all legislative powers”; that is, Congress alone has the right to make laws. It alone has the power to levy taxes on the American people, borrow money, regulate commerce, coin money, declare war, “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper.”

After Congress writes, debates, and passes a measure, the Constitution establishes that it goes to the president, who is also elected, through “electors,” by the people. The president can either sign a measure into law or veto it, returning it to Congress where members can either repass it over his veto or rewrite it. But once a law is on the books, the president must enforce it. The men who framed the Constitution wrote that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” When President Richard Nixon tried to alter laws passed by Congress by withholding the funding Congress had appropriated to put them into effect, Congress shut that down quickly, passing a law explicitly making such “impoundment” illegal.

Since the Supreme Court’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, the federal courts have taken on the duty of “judicial review,” the process of determining whether a law falls within the rules of the Constitution.

Right now, the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. They have the power to change any laws they want to change according to the formula Americans have used since 1789 when the Constitution went into effect.

But they are not doing that. Instead, officials in the Trump administration, as well as billionaire Elon Musk— who put $290 million into electing Trump and Republicans, and whose actual role in the government remains unclear— are making unilateral changes to programs established by Congress. Through executive orders and announcements from Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” they have sidelined Congress, and Republicans are largely mum about the seizure of their power.

Now MAGA Republicans are trying to neuter the judiciary.

After yet another federal judge stopped the Musk/Trump onslaught by temporarily blocking Musk and his team from accessing Americans’ records from Treasury Department computers, MAGA Republicans attacked judges. “Outrageous,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) posted, spreading the lie that the judge barred the Secretary of the Treasury from accessing the information, although in fact he temporarily barred Treasury Secretary Bessent from granting access to others. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said the decision had “the feel of…a judicial” coup. Right-wing legal scholar Adrian Vermeule called it “[j]udicial interference with legitimate acts of state.”

Vice President J.D. Vance, who would take over the office of the presidency if the 78-year-old Trump can no longer perform the duties of the office, posted: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

As legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted: “Just to say the quiet part out loud, the point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that *whether* acts of state are ‘legitimate’ can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance.” Of Vance’s statement, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice added: “this is the sort of thing you post when you’re ramping up to defying lawful court orders.”

The Republicans have the power to make the changes they want through the exercise of their constitutional power, but they are not doing so. This seems in part because Trump and his MAGA supporters want to establish the idea that the president cannot be checked. And this dovetails with the fact they are fully aware that most Americans oppose their plans. Voters were so opposed to the plan outlined in Project 2025—the plan now in operation—that Trump ran from it during the campaign. Popular support for Musk’s participation in the government has plummeted as well. A poll from The Economist/YouGov released February 5 says that only 13% of adult Americans want him to have “a lot” of influence, while 96% of respondents said that jobs and the economy were important to them and 41% said they thought the economy was getting worse.

Trump’s MAGA Republicans know they cannot get the extreme changes they wanted through Congress, so they are, instead, dictating them. And Musk began his focus at the Treasury, establishing control over the payment system that manages the money American taxpayers pay to our government.

Musk and MAGA officials claim they are combating waste and fraud, but in fact, when Judge Carl Nichols stopped Trump from shutting down USAID, he specifically said that government lawyers had offered no support for that argument in court. Indeed, the U.S. government already has the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that audits, evaluates and investigates government programs for Congress. In 2023 the GAO returned about $84 for every $1 invested in it, in addition to suggesting improvements across the government.

Until Trump fired 18 of them when he took office, major departments also had their own independent inspectors general, charged with preventing and detecting fraud, waste, abuse, misconduct, and mismanagement in the government and promoting economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in government operations and programs.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation also investigates corruption, including that committed by healthcare providers.

According to Musk’s own Grok artificial intelligence tool on X, the investigative departments of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as USAID, have all launched investigations into the practices and violations of Elon Musk’s companies.

But Trump has been gutting congressional oversight, apparently wanting to make sure that no one can oversee the president. Rather than rooting out waste and corruption in the government, Musk and his ilk have launched a hostile takeover to turn the United States of America into a business that will return huge profits to those leaders who, in the process of moving fast and breaking things, are placing themselves at the center of the lives of 332 million people. Breaking into the U.S. Treasury payment system puts Musk and his DOGE team at the head of the country’s nerve center.

The vision they are enacting rips predictability, as well as economic security, away from farmers, who are already protesting the loss of their markets with the attempted destruction of USAID. It hurts the states—especially Republican-dominated states—that depend on funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education. Their vision excludes consumers, who are set to lose the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as protections put in place by President Joe Biden. Their vision takes away protections for racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities, as well as from women, and kills funding for the programs that protect all of us, such as cancer research and hospitals.

Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars.

But the mission of the United States of America is not, and has never been, to return huge profits to a few leaders.

The mission of the United States of America is stated in the Constitution. It is a government designed by “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Far from being designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a single man, it was formed to do the opposite: spread wealth and power throughout the country’s citizenry and enable them to protect their rights by voting for those who would represent them in Congress and the presidency, then holding them accountable at the ballot box.

The people who think that bearing arms is central to maintaining American rights are the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election by storming the United States Capitol because they do not command the votes to put their policies in place through the exercise of law outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/protecting-second-amendment-rights-7b90/

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/09/trump-courts-block-early-agenda-00203230

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/07/judge-blocks-trump-administration-plan-usaid-workers-leave-00203205

https://www.gao.gov/press-release/gaos-work-yields-70.4-billion-savings-federal-government-fy23

https://oig.ftc.gov/what-you-need-know-about-office-inspector-general

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econtoplines_c1AfT3R.pdf

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5129353-gop-support-for-musk-influence-with-trump-falls-dramatically-poll/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/bama-senator-howls-like-stuck-pig-after-she-sees-nih-cuts-impact-in-state

Bluesky:

donmoyn.bsky.social/post/3lhpxjdo6gk2y

atrupar.com/post/3lhrce37puk2l

joshtpm.bsky.social/post/3lhr2d6nuck2f

X:

steve_vladeck/status/1888581987532788100

AaronBlake/status/1888582415137780065

emptywheel/status/1888616052004946080

Msdesignerlady/status/1888356802028585190

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