“The choice was made, let’s not give federal taxpayer dollars to institutions that exhibit a wanton indifference to antisemitism,” the lawyer defending the government’s case said in federal court in July.
Yet that lawyer, Michael Velchik, when he was a senior at Harvard 14 years ago, submitted a paper for a Latin class written from the perspective of Adolf Hitler, according to three people studyingin the department with knowledge of the incident. The assignment was to write from the perspective of a controversial figure, but Velchik’s choice of Hitler so unnerved the instructor that he was asked to redo the assignment.
And in an email to a peer about 18 months later,as he was preparing to enter law school, Velchik wrote that he‘d enjoyed Hitler’s autobiography and political manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” more than any other book he’d read recently during a year of travels, according to a copy of the correspondence obtained by The Boston Globe. He did not mention Hitler’s perpetration of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered.
He was into Hitler:
In the fall of 2011, Velchik’s senior year, his Latin class was asked to write a 250- to 300-word composition in Latin “from the perspective of a controversial historical or literary figure justifying your actions and defending yourself against potential accusations,” according to a copy of the assignment obtained by the Globe. The assignment said students could choose a “classical figure such as Nero or Cleopatra; a mythological figure such as Medea or Theseus; or anyone from the post-classical world, whether a Shakespearean villain or a twentieth-century tycoon.”
The students’ aim should be “syntactic rather than historical (or literary) accuracy,” the assignment said.
Velchik submitted a paper written in Latin from the perspective of Hitler, according to three people studying in the department at the time with knowledge of the assignment. Two of the sources read the paper and said they found it disturbing. The third had not read the paper but knew of the incident at the time. (The Globe was not able to review the paper.) The instructor declined to grade it, instead telling Velchik to re-do the assignment, according to all three sources, a decision meant to turn the incident into a teaching moment.
He’s the guy who argued the case against Harvard’s alleged antisemitism? I guess it takes one to know one.
This guy is apparently quite brilliant. And obviously a total fascist.
Remember that shocking case of the EPA freezing funds in an NGO’s private bank account because the administrator saw a Project Veritas video? Yeah, well:
An appeals court on Tuesday ruled against several nonprofit groups that had $16 billion in climate grants frozen this year by the Trump administration.
In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that it did not have jurisdiction in the case and that the Trump administration acted legally in its attempts to claw back the funds, dashing the environmental groups’ hopes of immediately accessing money they were awarded more than a year ago.
“While some grantees may be forced to shutter their operations during the litigation, their harms do not outweigh the interests of the government and the public in the proper stewardship of billions of taxpayer dollars,” the court wrote in the majority opinion.
There is no evidence of fraud. It’s more bullshit from the Trump administration. The money had been allocated in the previous administration and was actually disbursed. Trump’s EPA lackey Lee Zeldin had the bank freeze the funds.
Not long after entering office, E.P.A. administrator Lee Zeldin began calling for the return of the money, suggesting, without providing evidence, that the grants were vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse.
Mr. Zeldin cited a hidden-camera video made public by the right-wing group Project Veritas in which a Biden-era E.P.A. staff member compared the outgoing administration’s efforts to allocate money in its final months to tossing gold bars off the Titanic. In public comments, Mr. Zeldin began referring to the grants as “gold bars.”
It’s another form of rescission, basically:
In court, the E.P.A. has offered a different legal argument. It has said it can cancel the grants and reclaim the funding because its priorities have changed.
“It’s money that’s gone all the way through the fiscal process and is being pulled back, and that’s really not something administrations have done in the past,” said David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University.
No they haven’t. What a pandora’s box they’ve opened too. Normally, government doesn’t just get to “reclaim” money from contractors because a new administration has taken office. Freezing their accounts because of “potential fraud and abuse” is also unprecedented. If they can do that, no contracts are secure.
The two judges who made up the majority vote, Neomi Rao and Gregory Katsas, both worked in the first Trump administration and were appointed to the bench by President Trump.
“It’s fantastic to see reason prevail in the court system,” Brigit Hirsch, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, said. “The gold bar recipients were wrong about jurisdiction all along and wrong to act so entitled to these precious public funds that belong to hardworking American taxpayers.”
In a dissenting opinion, Judge Nina Pillard, an Obama appointee, strongly objected to the decision. “The majority allows the government to seize plaintiffs’ money based on spurious and pretextual allegations and to permanently gut implementation of major congressional legislation.”
Pillard is right. That’s the whole idea.
If we survive and the Democrats ever take office, I will enjoy watching these hypocrites dance on the head of a pin trying to explain why it was ok for Trump but not for any Democrat to act like a king. I’m sure they’ll find a way. Intellectually consistency has been retired as a concept in right wing legal circles.
Just talk about eggs, people. Whatever you do don’t mention that the United States of America has its own Stasi now and is actively criminalizing dissent:
Bajun Mavalwalla II – a former army sergeant who survived a roadside bomb blast on a special operations missionin Afghanistan – was charged in July with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers” after joining a demonstration against federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Spokane, Washington.
Legal experts say the case marks an escalation in the administration’s attacks on first amendment rights. Afghanistan war veterans who know him say the case against Mavalwalla appears unjust.
“Here’s a guy who held a top secret clearance and was privy to some of the most sensitive information we have, who served in a combat zone,” said Kenneth Koop, a retired colonel who trained the Afghan military and police during Mavalwalla’s deployment. “To see him treated like this really sticks in my craw.”
The 11 June protest against Ice that led to Mavalwalla’s arrest was confrontational, leaving a government van’s windshield smashed and tires slashed, but Mavalwalla was not among the more than two dozen people arrested at the scene. More than a month passed before the FBI arrived at his door on 15 July.
[…]
But at 6am the FBI knocked on Mavalwalla’s door and they arrested him. Cell phone video shot by Mavalwalla’s father shows the veteran – tall, fit, with wire-rimmed glasses, tight ponytail and trim goatee – smiling in apparent disbelief, his hands shackled behind his back.
“This is not how I planned to spend my moving day,” Mavalwalla says, as agents search his pockets and force him into a black pickup truck. “I’m a military veteran. I’m an American citizen.”
At 3pm, Mavalwalla, who receives disability compensation for post traumatic stress disorder connected to his service in Afghanistan, appeared in federal court along with eight other people indicted in connection with a protest against an Ice transport that occurred a month earlier.
While the indictment alleges other protesters struck federal officers and let the air out of the tires of an Ice transport, Mavalwalla was not charged with obstruction or assault. Instead, he was charged with “conspiracy to impede or injure officers”. According to the indictment, Mavalwalla and his co-defendants “physically blocked the drive-way of the federal facility and/or physically pushed against officers despite orders to disperse and efforts to remove them from the property”.
Mavalwalla, who has no criminal record, pleaded not guilty.
It appears that the US Attorney for the area resigned two days before the indictment came down. Pretty clear why:
The indictment was handed down two days after career prosecutor Richard Barker, the acting US attorney for eastern Washington state, resigned. In a social post, Barker called his exit “a very difficult decision”.
“I am grateful that I never had to sign an indictment or file a brief that I didn’t believe in,” he wrote.
The current acting US attorney, nominated for the permanent post by Donald Trump, is Pete Serrano, a former litigator for the Silent Majority Foundation, a conservative advocacy group. In February, Serrano filed an amicus brief in support of Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, a position at odds with the 14th amendment. He has no prosecutorial experience and has described the January 6 US Capitol rioters as “political prisoners”.
Are we all ok with this? All the smart people are saying that Republicans are the party of “law and order” (well, except for the violent insurrection the felon in the White House) and Democrats should run in fear from that and just keep talking about “distractions” and eggs.
I’m not convinced that’s really going to convince Americans to vote for them but then I’m not a strategist. I guess we just have to hope that the new police state will allow us to hold an election when the time comes.
This morning, I joined CBS to report the facts about Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Instead, CBS shamefully edited the interview to whitewash the truth about this MS-13 gang member and the threat he poses to American public safety.
The careful viewer will notice that just about all of the remarks that did not air are lies, distortions, and charges that Abrego Garcia has merely been accused by the government of committing, not convicted of in court. Here’s a transcript of Noem comments that were supposedly “suppressed”:
This individual was a known human smuggler, MS-13 gang member, an individual who’s a wife beater, and someone who was so perverted that he solicited nude photos from minors. And even his fellow human traffickers told him to knock it off, he was so sick in what he was doing and how he was treating small children. So he needs to never be in the United States of America, and our administration is making sure we’re doing all that we can to bring him to justice.
In reality, Trump officials utterly failed to produce anything serious tying Abrego Garcia to MS-13, even though they actively searched for such evidence for many months in what became a kind of whole-of-government mission involving numerous senior officials and multiple major agencies.
As for the “human smuggler” claim, the government has charged him in Tennessee with trafficking migrants. But the whole case stinks: A senior prosecutor in that office resigned, reportedly because the case seemed dubious. More importantly, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have plausibly claimed that the administration tried to coerce him to plead guilty to those charges by threatening to deport him to Uganda if he did not.
It’s bad enough for government officials to go on national television and rattle off a litany of hideously damning charges as fact when they haven’t yet been proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. In this case, officials apparently went to extraordinarily depraved lengths to try to coerce a guilty plea, which doesn’t exactly exude confidence in the strength of those charges to begin with.
Indeed, on the photo-solicitation charge, Politifact points out that this isn’t even in the indictment against Abrego Garcia, and is a matter the government is merely investigating. Yet Noem keeps repeating the claim as if it’s an established truth, as she did on CBS here.
I do not think CBS has any obligation to show anything this monster says. Or any of the rest of them, for that matter. I suppose they could have shown it and fact checked it as this does. But that would have taken up a huge chunk of the broadcast.
US factory construction continues steadily declining as CHIPS & IRA projects either complete or cancel—in official data released today, overall US manufacturing construction activity is down 7% compared to last year & electronics/electrical manufacturing construction is down 14%
This is not new. But I at least hadn’t heard any of these dots connected. I wasn’t even aware of the dots. A friend mentioned to me over the weekend that he’d heard about Wall Streeters buying up the rights to tariff refunds from big corporate importers. So the idea is that a Wall Street firm goes to an importer and says, you’ve now paid $10 million in tariffs. I’ll pay you $2 million right now for the right to collect the refund if courts ever end up deciding the tariffs were illegal. My friend had also heard that one most aggressive buyers was Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm until recently headed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and now run by Lutnick’s sons. Twenty-something Brandon Lutnick, pictured above on the left in a 2016 photo, is the current Chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald. (He must be hella talented!)
Damn, I thought: That’s a hot story, crooked as the day is long. But I’m not sure how I or we would track it down without better finance world sources. Still, it was worth some quick googling. It turns out this is happening and Cantor’s role has already been reported. Wired and others reported this more than a month ago.
In mid-July, according to WIRED, Cantor was buying up the rights to your potential tariff refund at between 20 and 30 cents per dollar. Needless to say, I bet that price has gone up a lot since last Friday’s federal appellate court upheld the lower court ruling that almost all of Trump’s tariffs are illegal. So in paper terms Cantor has probably already made a ton of money on this.
Now, before going any further I want to make clear that in itself this transaction is fairly unremarkable. A huge amount of modern finance is about making bets on uncertain outcomes, bets which can be structured in various ways. It might be commodities futures. In this case, it’s the right to collect a refund that may never happen. The sale of debt – a ubiquitous feature of modern finance – is similar. Purchasing debt, whether it’s a government bond or your home mortgage, is fundamentally a bet on the likelihood of repayment. I don’t want to belabor the point, only to make clear that the transaction in concept is neither outlandish or suspect, at least no more than any other part of modern finance.
All that said, it’s hard to imagine anything more emblematic of the Trump Era than what is for all intents and purposes still the Commerce Secretary’s company (yes, yes, arms length hand off to his twenty-something sons) making bets on something Lutnick himself has significant influence over. Indeed, far more important than whatever influence Lutnick has over tariff policy is that significant visibility he has into the bet’s probable outcome.
Will the high court eventually vote in favor of Trump on this issue? It’s hard to say. They tend to give him what he wants but this is an issue that isn’t completely predictable. Lutnick and the boys are covering their bases.
They aren’t trying to hide their corruption. And why should they? Nobody will stop them.
“Also, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the economy is falling apart. And judges are overturning not quite everything but a whole lot. The polls say that they’re alienating most of us, and the opposition remains fierce.
“Never mind 2028; I have no idea what on earth the US will be by Christmas.”
Agreed. Get out in the streets every chance you get. Create “I’ll have what she’s having” events to give neighbors permission to join the resistance. This is stepping-up time. Make your resistance visible in your community. Don’t expect others to do it for you.
If you are like me, you are more a reluctant Frodo than a steely Aragorn. I’m a behind-the-scenes activist. Still, as a friend said over eight years ago, “The Ring has to go to Mordor. It won’t help to carry it back to The Shire.” Reach inside and find the hero who will take it. I’m in the streets four-to-five days a week for the first time in my life, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. At one street action, I bring dance music to make it as much party as protest. The resistance won’t build itself.
Donald Trump’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, didn’t breast feed him, poor thing. Maybe why he’s so needy. And Papa Fred? Well, he wanted eldest son Fred Trump Jr. to take over the family’s real estate empire. But Fred Jr. said screw that. He wanted to get out from under Dad’s imperious thumb and become a commercial pilot. He did. So Fred Sr. had to settle for his second son, Donald, the unruly idiot they had to send to off military school where he received a “five-year lesson in bullying.” But not before Fred instilled in him that there were only two kinds of people in the world: killers and losers.
Donald famously avoided the draft by finding a doctor who would diagnose bone spurs. Donny sneaked his way into Wharton Business School, niece Mary Trump alleges in her book, “Too Much and Never Enough,” by enlisting “Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him.”
Per a second-hand account, William T. Kelley, a former marketing professor at the Wharton, said “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddam student I ever had.”
“I strongly suspect that he had a relationship with his father that accounts for a lot of what he became,” Tony Schwartz, who co-authored “The Art of the Deal” with Trump, told PBS Frontline.
Trump’s “surrogate father,” former HUAC attorney Roy Cohn schooled the insecure and undereducated heir in bluster and bullying after their meeting in 1973.
His taste, or lack of it, is seen again in Trump Tower and what he’s done to the Oval Office and the White House Rose Garden. It’s legendary:
In the documentary Trump: What’s the Deal?, a designer who once worked for the real estate mogul relates how Trump couldn’t comprehend why 200 year-old, Louis XVI furniture he saw at Christie’s was so expensive. He insisted he could have it reproduced for much less. As the designer tells it, Trump’s sister-in-law (who worked there) said, “Donald, you’re just never going to understand, are you?”
We learned in 2018 that Papa Fred, along with teaching Donny all his tax avoidance tricks, that Fred had to keep bailing out his failson’s businesses. Donny couldn’t even make a go running casinos.
We could go on. Donald Trump has been a laughingstock in New York City for decades, long before being the butt of jokes from Seth Meyers and Barack Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. David Letterman ran a segment I must have missed in 2004. “Trump Or Monkey?” inspired this morning’s rant.
When David Letterman would have people play Trump or monkey on his show back in the day! 👇👇👇 pic.twitter.com/n516xnA7BO
The chip on Donny’s shoulder has been growing since his youth. It’s made him vengeful toward critics (especially those who mock him), a sucker for vapid flattery, and insistent on seeing others bow before him. But he’s grown no smarter. What skills he has stem from resentment and feral instinct.
S.V. Date brings receipts over at Huffington Post. For example, Trump’s hydrologically impossible claim that he opened a huge valve to send water from Canada to fight Los Angeles wildfires:
University of Michigan psychology professor David Dunning, one of the co-discoverers of the “Dunning-Kruger effect” that describes how some people with little competence in any specific field nevertheless overestimate their level of expertise, said he was hard-pressed to explain Trump’s belief that water from Canada somehow flows to California, except for their relative placement on a standard map of North America.
“People take things they know and misapply them,” Dunning said. “In his case, north is up and south is down, and I’m guessing here, because water flows down, if he opens up the tap, water will flow down from Canada to irrigate the crops in California.”
The 47th president believes “comically incorrect” ideas and then clings to them in the face of all logic and evidence. Because he’d look stupid?
“I’ve never met anyone else remotely like him,” said Charles Leerhsen, who co-wrote Trump’s book, “Surviving at the Top” in 1990. “He is and was profoundly stupid, completely lacking in intellectual curiosity.”
Of course, there’s more.
“He can’t tell the difference between truth and falsehood,” said John Bolton, who served as one of Trump’s national security advisers in his first term and who was recently raided by the FBI following his repeated criticisms of Trump on television. “A lie is knowing something is not true and saying it anyway. For Trump, it’s sort of what he wants it to be, and he kind of makes up things.”
That may be giving Trump too much credit for actually thinking.
Former top aides from his first term in office famously made their views known to one another to describe their boss. Defense Secretary James Mattis reportedly said Trump had the understanding of a “fifth- or sixth-grader,” while chief of staff John Kelly once called him an “idiot.”
Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is said to have called him a “moron,” which was clarified later as a “fucking moron.”
Author and commentator Fran Lebowitz opined in 2018, two years before Trump suggested injecting disinfectant to cure COVID-19, “Everyone says he is crazy – which maybe he is – but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.”
Trump is Wharton’s most innumerate graduate, as Date recounts:
More recently, Trump has taken to claiming that he will reduce the price of prescription drugs by mathematically impossible amounts.
“We’re going to get the drug prices down — not 30 or 40%, which would be great, not 50 or 60. No, we’re going to get them down 1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%,” he said at a July reception for Republican members of Congress.
For Trump’s claim to be correct, pharmacies would have to refund many times the value of a prescription each time they filled one. A medication costing $100, for instance, would have to be handed to the patient at no charge along with $1,400 in cash.
Farce, tragedy or both
“I’ve come to accept how morally depraved Donald Trump is. But I’ll never get over how blindingly imbecilic he is,” attorney George Conway remarked in response to Date’s essay.
This country’s founders were perhaps the world’s most educated people of their day.
James Madison wrote in 1822, “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowlege will for ever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own Governours, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
Men like Madison could not conceive that their grand experiment in popular sovereignty might be ended by a man so profoundly stupid and placed in office by people who’ve disarmed themselves of knowledge. All with chips on their shoulders the size of Manhattan.
Those of you who don’t spend time on social media probably haven’t heard about the fact that Trump has weirdly gone without making an appearance with the press since last Tuesday, which is unprecedented. He stayed n DC all weekend instead of going to bedminster and has only been seen in pictures from a distance (or ones with dubious provenance.) It’s odd.
But the press isn’t saying much of anything although I did see one segment on MSNBC where everyone on the panel scoffed at the idea that there could be anything wrong with his health. That concern has gone out of fashion now that Joe Biden is out of office.
If you haven’t been paying attention, Washington and social media have spent Labor Day weekend in a frenzy over Donald Trump’s health. The president, who seems like he can’t stomach staying out of the public eye and spotlight for even a few hours, had no public appearances on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday — nor any over the long weekend. That’s an unusually long period of time out of public view. Searches for “Is Trump dead?” soared on Google Saturday and became one of the most-searched terms of the holiday weekend, and #whereistrump trended on other social media sites.
After he was glimpsed from a distance by the White House press pool leaving to golf on Saturday, social media Carrie Mathisons picked apart his golf photos wondering whether the White House was circulating old photos of the president on the links. Uncharacteristically, during the golf outing, he never even wandered up to the press pool to rant or rave about recent world headlines. Illinois governor JB Pritzker trolled Trump by demanding a proof-of-life photo. On Sunday, group chats around the capital lit up with a 31-tweet-long thread by a crypto investor named Adam Cochran alleging that Trump was in ill health. This morning, the press corps was kept about 100 yards from the president.
The speculation wasn’t helped by a series of strange answers J.D. Vance gave in a USA Today interview last week, where he said he was ready to be president if needed: “I’ve gotten a lot of good on-the-job training over the last 200 days.” Maybe that’s just Vance being awkward and strange — it’s hard to think of any subject where Vance giving an interview has helped — but Trump himself (or someone on his social media accounts) also engaged with the speculation by posting a “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE” post on Truth Social, which might rank second only this weekend to Rudy Giuliani’s bizarre car accident for raising more questions than it answered.
“Weekend at Bernie’s” jokes and memes have abounded, but this morning, there’s not a single story on the homepage of the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or CNN about Trump’s health — but there is a story on the New York Post about how robust the president’s health surely is! (One of the few very good treatments of the subject in recent days has come from Public Notice.)
Trump is 79 years old. He has a very serious case of cankles. His hands are all bruised up. He has gone underground for the best of a week. It’s all very weird. But none of this is of interest to the press, apparently.
