Month: December 2025

I can hardly stand to listen to him right now so I understand if you don’t want to watch the above. But here’s the transcript which is still horrifying but somewhat easier to take. And excerpt:

Burns: The most. You’re right. Um, your team has been going back and forth between Putin and Zelenskyy with various drafts of his peace deal. Which country right now is in the stronger negotiating position?

Trump: Well, there can be no question about it. It’s Russia. It’s a much bigger country. It’s a war that should’ve never happened. Frankly, it wouldn’t have happened if I were president, and it didn’t happen for four years. Uh, I watched that taking place, and I said, wow, they’re gonna cause some problems here. And it started and it, uh, could’ve evolved into, uh, World War III, frankly. I think it’s probably not gonna be happening now. I think if I weren’t president, you could’ve had World War III. I think you would’ve had a much bigger problem than you have right now, but right now it’s a big problem. It’s a big problem for Europe. And they’re not handling it well.

[…]

Burns: On Sunday, your son, Donald Trump Jr., responded to a reporter’s question about whether you will walk away from Ukraine, and your son said, I think he may. Is that correct?

Trump: No, it’s not correct. But it’s not exactly wrong. We have to … you know, they have to play ball. If they, uh … if they don’t read agreements, potential agreements, you know, it’s, uh, not easy with Russia ’cause Russia has the upper … upper hand. And they always did. They’re much bigger. They’re much stronger in that sense. I give Ukraine a lot of … a lot of … I give the people of Ukraine and the military of Ukraine tremendous credit for the, you know, bravery and for the fighting and all of that. But you know, at some point, size will win, generally. And this is a massive size, uh … you … when you take a look at the numbers, I mean, the numbers are just crazy.

This is not a war that should’ve happened. This is a war that would’ve never happened if I were president. So sad millions of people are dead, many, many soldiers. You know, last month they lost 27,000 soldiers and some people from missiles being launched into Kyiv and o … Kyiv and other places. But, uh, what a … what a s … what a sad thing for humanity.

You know, this doesn’t affect us. Uh, the … our country is no longer paying any money ever since Biden gave them $350 billion so stupidly. And you know, if he wouldn’t have given it, maybe something else would’ve happened.

Burns: But you, sir ..

President Trump: But Putin has … had no respect for Biden, and he had no respect for Zelenskyy, didn’t like Zelenskyy. They really hate each other. And part of the problem is they hate each other really a lot, you know. And it’s very hard for them to try and make a deal. It’s harder than most. I … I settled eight wars, and this … I would’ve said this is the ninth. This would’ve been the easiest one, I would’ve said, or one of the easier ones. I mean, I settled one … one that was going on for 36 years. Uh, I settled Pakistan and India. I settled so many wars. I’m very proud of it. And I do it pretty routinely, pretty easily. It’s not hard for me to do. It’s what I do. I make deals. Uh, this one is tough. One of the reasons is the level of hatred between Putin and Zelenskyy is tremendous.

[…]

Trump: You know, think of it, if our election wasn’t rigged … there was a rigged election. Now everyone knows it. It’s gonna come out over the next couple of months, too, loud and clear ’cause we have all the information and everything. But if the election wasn’t rigged and stolen, uh, you wouldn’t even be talking about Ukraine right now.

Blah, blah, blah. He actually thinks Putin has respect for him which is just hilarious. And yes, virtually all he has to say is that it isn’t his fault, like the 12 year old whiny little bitch he is. It’s pathetic.

He got very agitated when Burns noted that some of his supporters don’t like the fact that he’s spending too much time on foreign policy and blathered angrily about the trillions and trillions he’s supposedly bringing back.(He is not) He said he didn’t think anyone would say that is really a supporter.

Burns asked him again about the economy and this is what he said:

Burns: But … but I do want to talk about the economy, sir, here at home. And … and I wonder what grade you would give your economy.

Trump: A-plus.

Burns: A-plus?

Trump: Yeah, A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.

Burns: Well, it’s interesting because I … I talked to a supporter of yours. Her name is Melanie from Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. And she loves you. She gave you overall an A-plus-plus grade. But here’s what she said about the economy. She said, “Groceries, utility, insurance, and the basic cost of running small business keep rising faster than wages.” She also says that not enough is being done. Mr. President, this is one of your supporters.

Trump: Okay. Good. And I’m … I love her because you said I got an A-plus on everything, I guess. I don’t know. But here … here’s …

It goes on with more whining about how none of this is his fault and some lies about how great everything really is.

Good luck with that. He’s headed to Pennsylvania today where he will get a tongue bath from his most ardent supporters and I’m sure the media will interview them and conclude that he’s actually massively popular. I’m sure it will be the same old greatest hits. But from what we understand, this is what the White House has decided will win the midterms for the Republicans:

Susie Wiles, whom President Trump calls the most powerful woman in the world, says she has a plan to save the midterms for the Republican Party.

She says Trump will campaign like it’s 2024 all over again, and admits she hasn’t even told him this yet.

Her strategy is to make the… pic.twitter.com/qXxQdf5x2m

— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) December 9, 2025

I’m sure all those Republicans are thrilled to be yoked to a senile, orange clown with a 38% approval rating. Go for it!

Brian Beutler has an excellent piece up today that frames our current situation perfectly. He first makes the case that we need to be much more relentless in “stopping or slowing the process of public forgetting [and] … for mobilizing well in advance of harmful policy changes, so that we stand a better chance of stopping them.”

Then he focuses on Venezuela:

The last antiwar movement in the United States did not win the argument, but it won the battle for historical memory, and birthed a real progressive movement. It provided a moral foundation for ambitious and dissident politicians, one of whom would become America’s most unlikely president just a few years later. It is conceivable that absent mass, vocal, but unpopular opposition to the war, there would be no Affordable Care Act for Republicans to sabotage.

But in 2001 and 2002, the country was vengeance-minded. War was likely unstoppable. Strange as it sounds almost a quarter-century later, George W. Bush was as popular as any president had ever been, and his party had spent the past decade refining the art of partisan demagogy.

Most Democrats in Congress (thus) joined the march to war, rather than stand athwart it. They had elections to win. They wanted to be associated with the American flag, rather than the radical and iconoclastic ones scattered about antiwar rallies that attracted tens and hundreds of thousands of citizens.

Today is nothing like that.

Trump is terribly unpopular. The very idea of going to war with Venezuela is more unpopular still. The question of whether we should be murdering boaters in the Caribbean and Pacific is sensitive to question wording, but the fact that Trump’s policy of indiscriminate extrajudicial killing has engulfed his administration in a war-crimes scandal suggests Republicans don’t feel very sure-footed. And it is the opposition that has claimed the mantles of patriotism and freedom.

We’ve come a long way since, ‘you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists.’

The broad left should thus foster another antiwar movement, isolating Trump and his vicious regime as the lawless aggressor, and nobody in Democratic politics should be afraid of it. If anything, the first ambitious Democrat to take a leadership role in galvanizing an antiwar movement will credential themselves for the next presidential primary.

He points out that this attack on Venezuela is as unpopular as Iraq was popular, nobody can figure out just what it has supposedly done to America and the administration isn’t even trying to get congressional fig leaf to authorize its action. It is out on a limb.

Beutler believes that it is both morally and politically right to oppose this war (of course) and that Democrats should not fall for the idea that it is a “distraction” from what people care about: affordability. It is part and parcel of the MAGA power grab and we should oppose it on principle but also for the political purposes he writes about above.

His headline “No Kings Means No Colonial Wars” is excellent and suggests that the No Kings movement might be a good platform for this message. It just rings true and reminds people that Trump is acting like one in every way.

Josh Marshal discusses the necessity of Supreme Court reform:

I’ve become something of a broken record on this. But repetition sometimes serves a critical purpose. Supreme Court reform is now the sine qua non of any reformist program in the United States, any program to re-implant/re-secure civic democracy in the United States. Filibuster reform, abolition of the filibuster, is comparably important. In fact, the two are interwoven with each other in such a way as to be almost indistinguishably joined together.

But a lot of people know the filibuster has to go. Reforming the Supreme Court, which involves one of several ways of breaking the power of the six corrupt Republican appointees, is a much harder lift. It’s not a harder lift in voting terms. It can be done by passing an ordinary law (once you’ve done away with the filibuster) and having a president to sign it. But for many in the political class, for many elected officials, it remains unthinkable. On the plus side, Democratic voters and opinion leaders have some time to lay the groundwork. The soonest anything can happen is January 2029. (You need Congress and the White House.) But there’s a huge amount of work to do. Because my sense is that Democratic officeholders, party elites, aren’t even close to being there. And there’s really no future without it.

After reviewing the arguments yesterday (and observing everything they’ve done in the last year) it’s clear that the Court is nothing more than an undemocratic, partisan faction in the U.S. political system. There may be a few instances where they push back on behalf of their wealthy patrons or reward some discrete conservative group that one of their wives is involved with that may not fully comport with Trump and MAGA but for the most part they are just part of the GOP political apparatus. They don’t even adhere to their own ideology anymore. It’s pretty much just serving Trump and his corruption and criminality. They are so beset by Fox News Brain Rot that they believe that drag queens are a bigger threat than authoritarianism and flagrant graft and cronyism.

We shouldn’t be surprised. most of the conservatives were political operatives in one way or another before they got on the court. The others are all corrupt themselves.

Marshall has written quite a bit about this reform agenda and here’s what he wrote recently about the Supremes:

Supreme Court reform. I said above that some of the decisions are hard. They cut against a lot of what we were taught about political life. This is one of them. It’s only in the last three or four years that I’ve come around to the necessity of it and it’s still sometimes hard to get my head around. But it is essential. With the filibuster in place, no broader anti-authoritarian reform, no retrofitting the house is possible. It’s the same with the Supreme Court. The current Republican majority is thoroughly corrupt and has hijacked the Constitution. They have cut free not only from precedent but from any consistent or coherent theory of the Constitution, no matter how wrongheaded. The purpose of the high court is not to run the country. It is to render decisions on points of constitutional and legal ambiguity in a good faith and broadly consistent manner. It is now engaged in purely outcome-driven reasoning, mixing and matching doctrines and modes of jurisprudence depending on the desired ends, with the aim of furthering autocratic and Republican rule. That is the heart of the corruption. Passing laws doesn’t matter if they can and will be discarded simply because six lifetime appointees don’t like them. That’s a perversion of the constitutional order. I know this one is hard to swallow for many people. It doesn’t come easily to me either. But the facts of the situation and fidelity to the Constitution require it. I’m not going to get into the specific kind of reform here. There are various ways to go about it. You can judge it by the end result. If you are for leaving intact the corrupt Republican majority’s absolute control over the political and partisan direction of the country, you should leave or be driven from office.

I suspect that it’s going to take a full scale repudiation of the Republican Party at the polls to enable this. What that means in American politics is that the Democrats probably need to win at FDR 1932 levels which is a 60-40% landslide. With our current media diets it’s hard to picture that but it is possible. And even with that kind of mandate, it will be a very heavy lift, especially with the right having been so radicalized over the past few decades. But that’s what has to happen.

IOKIYAR

Time from this morning:

The U.S. is showing signs of undergoing a “rapid authoritarian shift” as civic freedoms in the country decline following President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, a group that tracks the status of such liberties and the threats they face around the world is warning.

CIVICUS, an international network of civil society groups that advocates for stronger civil liberties, downgraded its assessment of U.S. civic freedoms from “narrowed” to “obstructed” in a new report on Tuesday, months after it added the country to a global human rights watchlist earlier this year.

“Long-established democracies are showing signs of rapid authoritarian shift, marked by weakened rule of law and growing constraints on independent civil society. Argentina and the USA exemplified this trend,” the report said.

Perhaps you noticed. Trump is weaponizing the rule of law against his enemies. Following the law and respecting civil liberties is now optional for those assigned to protect and defend yours.

“Somewhere along the line, [Democrats] decided that resisting Trump meant resisting the rule of law,” Laura Ingraham alleged on her Monday show. To illustrate, she played clip of people protesting an ICE raid in Tucson. Specifically, Rep. Adelita Grijalva. The freshman from Arizona, Ingraham claimed, was “brazenly” obstructing the agents. The rest was a predictable Great Replacement Theory rant about a Democrat plot to flood the country with noncitizen Democratic voters (or something).

I spotted several social media posts which featured Grijalva “breaking the law” for which she was noticeably not arrested (although she did catch some second-hand pepper spray). In the clip, Grijalva noticeably neither blocked, brushed, hit or attacked any federal officer. She just protested their presence and, presumably, ICE deporting peaceful undocumented residents without repecting their due process rights. I’ll have more to say on that another time.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration carries out extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean in violation of the rule of law, domestic and international. Here’s where this gets extra interesting for Pete Hegseth. The Society for the Rule of Law reports on a column in The Hill by Chris Traux, one of its members:

Truax establishes the legal distinction that prevents Hegseth’s actions from enjoying pardon protection. Although the President may pardon someone for offenses against the United States, “The War Crimes Act that authorizes the Department of Justice to prosecute war crimes using international law defines them as, among other things, a ‘grave breach of the Geneva Convention’ and violations of Articles 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the 1907 Hague Convention.” Since war crimes violate international law, and since those crimes can still be prosecuted by the U.S. government, Hegseth’s actions remove him from the protection that a presidential pardon could give. “While Hegseth could be pardoned for committing murder in violation of federal law, he cannot be pardoned for committing a war crime, any more than an American president could have pardoned the Nuremberg defendants.”

Truax emphasizes the unique breadth of war crimes law and the range of penalties that can be applied. These consequences extend beyond the ability of any single president to mitigate, and raise serious legal and ethical questions for not only the Secretary of Defense, but for any armed service-members involved. “If you commit an act that violates the laws of war — especially one that results in an intentional killing — sooner or later, you can be held accountable, and the president cannot save you.”

Fingers crossed. As for holding Kristi Noem’s stormtroopers accountable for flagrantly (if not gleefully) violating residents’ civil liberties, that’s TBD.

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

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Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

To Trump, you’re all Suckers And Losers, America

Donald Trump is gonna need new hats. SALA hats. Or maybe SASA hats (Short Attention Span America). Whatever. Another marketing coup to go with Trump’s administrative coup. Except the new Trump hats might need lots of ticky-tacky gold appliqué and a Chinese tariff waiver. What he won’t need is a fan base gullible enough to buy them in bulk. Trump is no rocket scientist, but he knows there’s a sucker born every minute.

Which brings us to the mortal threat that is Venezuela. Readers not from Short Attention Span America may have noticed striking similarities between the Bushies’ pitch deck for invading Iraq and how the Trump administration is selling his planned, undeclared and illegal war of choice against our South American neighbor.

Jon Stewart did, and last night issued a warning: “If you’re going to bring back early 2000s geopolitics, I’m gonna have to bring back early 2000s ‘Daily Show’ gotcha clips.” It seems like Trump is using the neocons’ sales manual. Stewart brought receipts.

.@jonstewart goes old-school Daily Show to show how Trump’s push for war in Venezuela is Iraq all over again pic.twitter.com/aOoiRNAlzl

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) December 9, 2025

I’d missed Sen. Tom Cotton (R) of Arkansas arguing on “Meet the Press” that “President Bush has every power under the Constitution to strike boats in international waters.”

Game. Set. Match.

I’ve complained that Democrats are in a rut. They keep doing the same things and expecting better results. Except Repunblicans keep running the same plays because they get the results they want.

So let’s revisit early 2000s “Daily Show” and see. In a 2004 interview, former President Bill Clinton cited a Republican smear campaign run against Sen. John McCain during the 2000 South Carolina presidential primary. (Sorry, the clip link is dead.)

Stewart: Do you believe that politics has gotten so dirty … that these kinds of tactics become so prevalent that this is the reason half the country doesn’t vote? Or this is the reason that we don’t get, maybe, the officials that we deserve?

Clinton: No, I think people do it because they think it works.

Stewart: That’s it? Simply a strategy?

Clinton: Absolutely. And as soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it.

The Bushies took Americans for suckers in the run-up to invading Iraq. It worked. Now the “isolationist” Trump 2.0 administration is running the same play to justify invading Venezuela. As Clinton suggested 21 years ago, as soon as a strategy doesn’t work, Republicans will stop using it.

“There’s a sucker born every minute” could be on Trump’s headstone. He’d claim the quote as his own. Americans keep proving it right.

* * * * *

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50501 
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Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Paul Krugman talks about the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy document in his news letter today, pointing out that there was a time when the U.S. was earnestly called “the leader of the free world.” But the assault on Europe is truly astonishing. He writes:

The political scientist Henry Farrell sums it up this way:

This is, quite straightforwardly, a program for regime change in Europe, aimed at turning it into an illiberal polity. Accomplishing this transformation would involve undermining existing liberal governments in cahoots with Europe’s own far right, and turning Eastern Europe into an ideological wedge against its Western neighbors.

Where is this attack on Europe coming from? Some readers may remember the old slogan from the War on Terror days, “They hate us for our freedom.” Clearly, MAGA hates Europe for its freedom. The people trying to turn America into an authoritarian, white supremacist state, who want us to forsake democratic ideals in favor of Volk, of blood and soil nationalism, want to see Europe go down the same path.

There’s also the role of the tech bros — billionaires who still describe themselves as libertarian but have in practice become hardline authoritarians with enormous sway over the Trump administration. After the European Commission imposed a modest fine on X for failing to obey its rules on transparency, Elon Musk declared that the EU should be abolished and threatened personal retribution against the “EU woke Stasi commissars” responsible for the ruling. And the Trump Administration is acting as the tech bros’ enforcer against Europe, threatening to keep steel tariffs high unless the EU scales back its tech regulations.

Moreover, this is part of a general pattern: the broligarchs hate Europe because the Europeans are trying to impose sensible limits to protect their societies from the well-documented psychological and economic harms that are inflicted by an unrestrained Silicon Valley agenda. For example, the EU is trying to limit the proliferation of digital hate speech as well as the pernicious effects of social media on the young. And more so than the US, it has sought to constrain the monopoly power of the tech titans like Google and Facebook. We should remember that the moderate antitrust and AI regulations adopted by the Biden Administration prompted the tech broligarchy to swing hard behind Trump in the 2024 election.

He points out that this leaves the field clear for China to step into the breach:

As of now, China is clearly the world’s largest single economy. But the group of nations that constituted the “free world” (as we knew it) is a much greater economic power than China. So by treating Europe and Canada as enemies rather than allies, Trump has destroyed any plausible capacity to stand up to China. In effect, Trump has chosen white supremacy over actual national greatness.

Second, that goes for Russia as well. Although Russia is far weaker than China, the US or the EU, the war in Ukraine has shown that an emboldened Russia can wreak long-lasting devastation. By attacking the EU, notably on the same blood and soil grounds that Putin attacked Ukraine — as well as by insulting Zelensky and releasing a “peace plan” that was clearly a Russian wish list — Trump has made it clear that our erstwhile allies cannot rely on us to stand up to Russian aggression. Should we be surprised that some allies have recently begun to refuse intelligence sharing?

Now, it’s important to admit that America often failed to live up to its own ideals in the past. For decades we championed freedom and equality abroad while practicing Jim Crow at home. We were a force for democracy and freedom in Europe, but we often propped up dictators and sometimes engineered the overthrow of democratically elected governments — often at the behest of American business interests — in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. So in a very real way, the tech broligarchy is trying to use the power of the US government to subjugate the EU the same way the United Fruit Company once used the power of the US government to subjugate Central America.

In truth, Europe is much closer to being Reagan’s shining city on the hill than Trump’s America. Yet it’s important to acknowledge that in the face of economic and immigration challenges, it too is having a hard time preserving its liberal democratic values. Those “patriotic” — i.e., neo-fascist — European parties are indeed on the rise. Yet, on the whole, Europe is dealing with its economic and social strains without giving up on its core values. For example, the recent Dutch elections, while not a decisive victory for the center, did at least push the far right out of government.

He concludes by pointing out that most Americans aren’t with Trump on this and still do have some ideals about freedom and democracy. (And they may value them much more than they did in the past after this brush with fascism.) All is not lost, by any means, but it’s going to take whole lot of work to get us back to a place where we can pursue those values.

I think Andrew McCarthy at National Review has this right. NBC reported that the first boat strike was based upon some list of alleged “narco-terrorists.” Since they are claiming that drug runners are the equivalent of ISIS and Al Qaeda, they are apparently using the rules of engagement that were used in the drone war over the past decade under every president since Bush. As McCarthy points out, however, that was authorized under the AUMF passed by Congress after 9/11 to fight terrorism. Just calling these people terrorists, or “narco-terrorists” doesn’t change the fact that they are trying to stuff the drug war into the war on terrorism without the congressional authorization that makes those actions legal. Neither does it change the laws of war, or the criminal code that makes these strikes shockingly immoral.

He surmises that Hegseth believes he’s just “killing terrorists” and what could be wrong about that? Well, as McCarthy explained, narcotics traffickers are not analogous to Jihadist terrorists for a variety of reasons. But he points out another twist in logic that I haven’t heard anyone else discuss:

These rudimentary distinctions inexorably caused the press and the public to question the double-tap strike in a way they would not have questioned a follow-on strike against actual terrorists (especially if, say, such terrorists had been transporting explosives rather than cocaine). In response to the intense criticism (as I related here), President Trump distanced himself from the double-tap strike, and an effort was made to distance Hegseth from it. The administration also pivoted to a defense that focused on the boat and its cargo rather than the operators against whom Hegseth had said it had been his intent to apply “lethal, kinetic strikes.”

This seemed to work for a few days because, habitually zeroing in on the wrong thing, the anti-Trump press had made the issue about whether the double-tap strike was a war crime, whereas the real issue is whether the campaign of lethal strikes against suspected drug boats without congressional authorization is illegal. Once it was clear that Hegseth hadn’t issued a second order specifically telling Admiral Bradley to kill the shipwrecked survivors, many lost interest in the underlying, flawed analogy between drug traffickers and jihadists and between cocaine and bombs.

Nevertheless, the NBC report regarding Bradley’s briefings to Congress shifts the spotlight back onto the boat operators. Indeed, according to NBC’s sources, when asked if Hegseth gave an order along the lines of “Kill them all,”

Bradley told lawmakers that the orders he received from Hegseth were to kill the individuals on the approved target list, which included everyone on the boat, then destroy the drugs and sink the boat.

Translation: the priority was killing the people who were on the boat; the drugs and the boat were secondary concerns. Now, while I am not a military veteran, it doesn’t make sense to me to think about the missile strikes in such sequential terms. The U.S. strikes simultaneously kill people, destroy cargo, and damage vessels to the point that at least some of them are instantly sunk — you don’t kill the people, then destroy the drugs, then sink the boat. Still, if NBC’s version of Bradley’s account is correct, what matters is that the top military priority was the people. That’s why there’s a list of them.

As Rich Lowry observed in his column (and I contended in the aforementioned discussion of Obama’s drone strikes), such a priority makes perfect sense when one is dealing with actual terrorists or the military forces of a foreign enemy…

But it is impossible to apply such logic to drug traffickers, which is why federal law’s extensive definitions of terrorist activity do not include narcotics-dealing. With drug dealers, the priority is always to prevent illegal narcotics from entering the U.S. market. Capturing and prosecuting the drug dealers is important but secondary. (You may notice that the Justice Department and law enforcement agencies host big press conferences every time they seize a significant narcotics shipment or stash, even on occasions when they arrest few if any of the drug traffickers.)

[…]

Bradley was also adhering to the Trump administration’s conceit that the boat operators are terrorists and that the cocaine packages are akin to bombs. By his lights, then, even though this seems perverse, it was okay to kill the boat operators as long as they weren’t too badly wounded. That is, if they were hors de combat (such that it would have violated the laws of war to kill them), there would have been no double tap. But, since they were still alive and functioning, they remained viable targets for “lethal, kinetic strikes” because they could theoretically have continued their “mission” of transporting the “weapons” (cocaine packages) that were strapped inside the remnant of the ship’s hull to which they clung.

Trump says that every boat blown to smithereens saves 25,000 American lives. That’s just insane, particularly since most of the boats they incinerated are carrying cocaine, which isn’t killing people, and that cocaine is going to Europe rather than the U.S.

We all know this is really about deposing Maduro (and possibly Petro in Colombia) and seizing the oil thus proving that Trump and his minions have the huge male appendages supposedly required to dominate the Western Hemisphere. They think they can scare everyone into bowing down and sucking their toes because they’ve been so successful at getting virtually every American elite institution (and plenty of foreigners) to eagerly demonstrate their eagerness to do just that.

All of this horrific murderous behavior is in service of that twisted, sick agenda.

America’s new landlords

Let’s not talk about affordability. Let’s talk about pain.

“We have a housing crisis, as you probably, painfully, know,” writes Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic. “Wouldn’t you like to have someone to blame for it?” I already knew who to name, but her headline was a dead giveaway: Private Equity Is America’s New Landlord.

Rental costs here in the Cesspool of Sin are out of control like most other places. But in fact single family home rentals here are ranked the highest in North Carolina. Apartments are not as high as Chapel Hill, but that’s not saying much. The average rent here is $1,451/month for a 781 sq ft apartment. I mentioned a month ago a 20-yr-old summer intern struggling to save any summer cash on his stipend while paying $1200/mo. for a short-term apartment. (It might have been $1500.)

The housing crisis has many fathers, Lowry explains: “restrictive zoning codes, arcane permitting processes, excessive community input, declining construction productivity, expensive labor, and expensive lumber.” It’s the kind of problem Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson complained about in “Abundance” while ignoring the gobbling of existing housing stock by private equity. They may be bit players in the grand scheme of things but that depends on where you live and work.

Lowrey writes (gift link):

Last month, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Center for Geospatial Solutions published a report showing that corporations now own a remarkable one in 11 residential real-estate parcels in the 500 urban counties with data robust enough to analyze.  In some communities, they control more than 20 percent of properties.

I figured that big investors might be picking up vacation rentals in Colorado and expensive apartment buildings in the Bay Area and the Acela Corridor. They are, the report’s authors told me. But these investors are pouring the most money into “buy low, rent high” neighborhoods: communities, many of them in the South and the Rust Belt, where large shares of families can’t afford a mortgage.

Struggling 20- and 30-somethings here feel the pain. So does Cleveland:

In Cleveland, corporations own 17.5 percent of residential real-estate parcels. In the city’s East Side, which contains many predominantly Black neighborhoods, just one in five homebuyers in 2021 took out a mortgage. The rest—many investors, presumably—paid in cash or took out a loan from a non-traditional financier.

Private equity is not why housing is so expensive in traditionally expensive cities, Lowrey explains, but “investor money is distorting the housing market in communities with low wages and decent-enough housing supply, pushing thousands of Black and Latino families off the property ladder.”

Owners of lower-priced apartments in historic neighborhoods here are letting maintenance lapse to force out renters and make the properties unaffordable to renovate. This renders them less-habitable and makes them easier to sell off to developers who buy them for the land and raze them to build high-rent condos and town homes in this tourist town. And further reduces affordable housing supply. What America saw Donald Trump do to the East Wing we’ve seen developers do to Victorian homes that once offered affordable apartments for lower-income residents.

Or private equity snaps up existing older single-family homes, does some modest renovation, and rents them out at high-dollar. And that’s in largely white neighborhoods.

Neighborhood activists typically find out about such plans after they are already done deals. By then their protests are to no avail. Out of curiosity, I perused new online property transfer records one Sunday for half an hour. I found that a real estate investment firm out of Boca Raton had snapped up four older homes on one street near downtown. They paid $1,050,000 for all four on 8/17/21. One they renovated was a 1925 2 BR, 1 BA, 1280 sq ft home they rented for $3,000 per month. I rented a similar one (1,000 sq ft) in ~1998 for ~$350/mo.

What activists might do instead is divvy up neighborhoods and assign someone to do what I did for a half hour once a month. If out-of-town investors begin snapping up homes on a street, a nonprofit collective might spot it and purchase key properties to thwart plans to raze the whole block to build town homes or new hotels. Better to intervene early than protest too late. Citizens are having to defend their communities from ICE. Why not from private equity?

Something must be done. Lowrey concludes:

If nothing is done, what’s happening to majority-Black communities in Ohio and Virginia and Georgia and Michigan might start happening in communities around the country. Private equity might not be causing the housing crisis, but corporate owners could end up making it a lot worse for everyone.

What are their names and on what streets do they live?

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

THAT, you see, would be the appearance of a conflict of interest

They’re not even trying to hide that fact that Javanka is pulling strings with the White House. Why should they? Nothing will ever be done about it:

Affinity Partners, the private equity firm led by Jared Kushner, is part of Paramount’s hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros Discovery, according to a regulatory filing.

Paramount is telling WBD shareholders that it has a smoother path to regulatory approval than does Netflix, and Kushner’s involvement only strengthens that case.

• Paramount is led by David Ellison, whose billionaire father Larry is a major supporter of President Trump.

Zoom in: Affinity Partners was not mentioned in Paramount’s press release on Monday morning about its $108 billion bid, nor were participating sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar.

It’s just straight up corruption, no holds barred. Kush and the Saudis are affiliating with Trump’s MAGA buddy David Ellison and Trump’s going to approve the merger. He said over the weekend that he’d be involved in the decision.

In a way it’s at least clarifying. They’re robbing the country blind and taking over the media the way they did in Russia and Hungary. At this point I think the only way to survive will be for the people to just stop buying what they’re selling. The only “guardrail” left is financial losses.

🚨 BREAKING: In an explosive moment on 60 Minutes, Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed Trump was “furious” that he signed the Epstein files discharge petition, because “it was going to hurt people.”

Let that sink in. pic.twitter.com/n57QsnlJu2

— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) December 6, 2025

That’s not the first time he said it. See this interview from before the election:

Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy (wife of Trump’s current transportation secretary, Sean Duffy) began by asking the then-candidate whether he would declassify government files related to 9/11, and Trump said he would. She then asked about declassifying John F. Kennedy assassination files, and he again said he would. The co-host went on to ask, “Would you declassify the Epstein files?” referring to the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the late millionaire pedophile who was arrested during Trump’s first term.

What viewers saw at the time was Trump replying, “Yeah, I would.”

But what those who tuned into the interview didn’t see was the rest of his answer.

In a video that resurfaced in light of the ongoing controversy surrounding his team’s handling of Epstein-related documents, Trump, after saying he supported access to the files, quickly added, “I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would.”

Asked if such a move would help restore public trust, he added, “Yeah. I don’t know about Epstein so much as I do the others. Certainly about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc., etc. But yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one.”

He loves to hurt people. Who is he so worried about?

I’m sure one person is himself. But who else?