Month: February 2026

Irritable mental gestures

Like 1897 rumors of Mark Twain’s death, an assessment of conservatism’s poor health in America was “greatly exaggerated” when in 1950 Lionel Trilling wrote:

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

Trilling wrote that years prior to Brown v. Board, the Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, Bloody Sunday, and passage of the Voting Rights Act. Post-war cultural rejection of 100 years of Jim Crow injected a shot of adrenaline into the conservative impulses Trilling considered largely out of circulation mid-century.

Trumpism’s primal scream is certainly more reactionary than Trilling could have anticipated, as Andrew O’Hehir writes at Salon:

MAGA envisions undoing nearly all of modern history and returning to some primal, purified state of nature, or rather a meme version thereof: The 1950s and the antebellum South and the American frontier and medieval feudalism and the Neanderthal fireside — everything, everywhere, all at once.

Trumpism is a movement Trilling would still recognize as one that expresses itself “only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Memes and AI slop, in current parlance. Or in mass deportations and state-sanctioned street violence and murder. If those “gestures” appear garbled, it is because the “the high priests of MAGA ideology,” Stephen Miller and Russ Vought, are not driven not by coherent ideas. What drives them is visceral rage at cultural change that fails to center men as base as themselves. And by the congenital insecurity of Donald Trump himself.

Admittedly, even the most articulate MAGA ideologues — not that there are many — haven’t gone that far. But that’s where the collective brotastic idiocies of Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson and Curtis Yarvin and Andrew Tate and Pete Hegseth and whomever else all converge: Somewhere in the recent or distant or mythical past, everything totally ruled and “we” (a term of art, I hasten to add) never felt bad about any of it. Guys were guys and women were hot and there was lots of feasting and stuff. There was no wokeness, no political correctness, no gender-neutral bathrooms. Nobody used pronouns or talked about inequality or intersectionality or was gay (except sometimes in the locker room) or tried to make us ashamed for being awesome.

If that sounds like a 1997 frat party elevated to political abstraction, fair enough. MAGA’s explicit promise is to reassert white supremacy — along with its inescapable corollaries, male dominance and mandatory heterosexuality — while cleansing it of all guilt, all self-doubt, all uncertainty. History’s newsreels will run backward such that the crimes of colonialism, imperialism, slavery and so forth either never happened or were never crimes. (Your mileage may vary.)

A nihilistic impulse to tear down modernity drives them. Perhaps not coincidentally, The Washington Post this morning describes a strain of violent extremism characterized by nihilism, “an online revival of the philosophical stance that arose in the 19th century to deny the existence of moral truths and meaning in the universe.” Miller, Vought, et al. approve that message. They find meaning only in the power to dominate others. Might makes right is not much of philosophy but, for MAGA and its antecedent movements, a powerful one.

Their effort to undo modernity is as doomed to fail as uninventing the light bulb, the airplane, or the computer. But not before MAGA does consequential damage, O’Hehir argues:

In its most distilled form, MAGA ideology promises to salve that unease and heal the fissure, transporting its believers into an AI-slop alternate universe where the heart of darkness has been whitewashed and no one remembers slavery or imperialism or misogyny or thinks any of that was a problem. That’s a lot more ambitious than simply undoing the major political and social reforms of the last century. It’s more like transforming human consciousness, and the fact that it can’t be done doesn’t mean it won’t be massively destructive.

Stephen Miller, as it happens, has an extensive history of public comments that echo white nationalist talking points about the historical errors of “the West,” which has engaged in “self-punishment” by opening its borders to “reverse colonization” and becoming “the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights.” (That the “foreign labor class” in question included Miller’s great-grandparents goes unmentioned.) He would presumably say that he just wants to purge “the West” of its toxic self-doubt. Or to put it another way, he wants to destroy Western civilization in order to save it.

For white Christian patriarchy, that’s the bottom line, with all the irritable mental gestures that attend it.

Breath, center, stand strong

I assume the image above is AI, but it wouldn’t be the first time the Fine Arts has used it marquee to send a message. The 1940s theater in downtown Asheville has an interesting history you can read here. It’s hardly unique as such theaters go, but it’s ours.

Thanks to Andrew Aydin for reposting on Threads where I spotted it.

This is not normal. (What is?)

Last spring, the National Security Agency (NSA) detected evidence of an unusual phone call between an individual associated with foreign intelligence and a person close to Donald Trump, according to a whistleblower’s attorney briefed on the existence of the call.

The highly sensitive communique, which has roiled Washington over the past week, was brought to the attention of the director of national intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard – but rather than allowing NSA officials to distribute the information further, she took a paper copy of the intelligence directly to the president’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, the attorney, Andrew Bakaj, said.

One day after meeting Wiles, Gabbard told the NSA not to publish the intelligence report. Instead, she instructed NSA officials to transmit the highly classified details directly to her office.

Details of this exchange between Gabbard and the NSA were shared directly with the Guardian and have not been previously reported. Nor has Wiles receipt of the intelligence report.

[…]

Two attorneys and two former intelligence professionals who reviewed details of the incident and ensuing complaint shared with the Guardian have identified what they believe are a series of procedural anomalies that raise questions about Gabbard’s handling of national intelligence and the whistleblower disclosure, which was reported to the inspector general as a matter of “urgent concern”.

Members of the “gang of eight”, a group of Senate and House leaders privy to classified information from the executive branch, received a heavily redacted version for review on Tuesday night. They have disagreed about the legality of Gabbard’s conduct, as well as the credibility of the whistleblower complaint.

I’m sure it’s entirely on the up and up. it’s not as if there’s ever been even a whisper about Gabbard’s loyalty to the U.S. Or Trump’s for that matter. I’m sure there’s nothing to this.

“The law is clear: when a whistleblower makes a complaint and wants to get it before Congress the agency has 21 days to relay it,” said the senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, in a Thursday press conference. “This whistleblower complaint was issued in May. We didn’t receive it until February.” Warner said that the months-long delay reflected an effort to “bury the complaint”.skip past newsletter promotion

The contents of the whistleblower complaint are still largely unknown. Bakaj, the whistleblower’s attorney, said that Gabbard’s office had redacted much of the complaint that was released to intelligence committee members on Tuesday, citing executive privilege.

“I don’t know the contents of the complaint, but by exercising executive privilege they are flagging that it involves presidential action,” he said.

It’s someone “close to Trump” so… yeah.

Congress needs to mind its own business. Do they think they’re there to oversee the executive branch or something?

This one always seemed bogus to me but because there were no observers with cameras, we really didn’t know:

Immediately after a US border patrol agent shot two people in Oregon last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the targets were “vicious” gang members connected to a prior shooting and alleged they had “attempted to run over” officers with their vehicle.

In the weeks since, key parts of the federal government’s narrative have fallen apart.

The events took place on the afternoon of 8 January, one day after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.

According to a DHS press release and social media posts issued the following day, border patrol agents were conducting a “targeted” stop of a vehicle in Portland occupied by two members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang. Yorlenys Zambrano-Contreras, a woman in the passenger seat, had been “involved” in a Portland shooting last year, the agency wrote.

During the border patrol stop, the driver, Luis Niño-Moncada, “weaponized their vehicle against” officers, DHS said, prompting an agent “to defend himself and others” by shooting the occupants. Zambrano-Contreras was hit in the chest, Niño-Moncada was hit in the arm and both were hospitalized, then taken into federal custody, DHS noted. The agents were uninjured.

But court records obtained by the Guardian reveal a Department of Justice prosecutor later directly contradicted DHS’s Tren de Aragua statements in court, telling a judge: “We’re not suggesting … [Niño-Moncada] is a gang member.” An FBI affidavit issued following the incident also suggests that in the previous shooting cited by DHS, Zambrano-Contreras was not a suspect, but rather a reported victim of a sexual assault and robbery. Neither Niño-Moncada or Zambrano-Contreras have prior criminal convictions, their lawyers have said.

Immigration and criminal justice experts who reviewed the case records characterized the federal government’s communications as a “smear campaign” against the two Venezuelan immigrants, with mischaracterizations of their pasts and unsubstantiated allegations of criminality.

Niño-Moncada, the 33-year-old driver, who is undocumented, remains detained, facing charges of aggravated assault of an officer based on claims he tried to “intentionally” hit agents with his car. Zambrano-Contreras, 32, was not criminally charged, but has pleaded guilty to improper entry to the US, a misdemeanor. Prosecutors have said the two were dating.

[…]

“The federal government cannot be trusted. Our default position should be skepticism and understanding they lie very regularly,” said Sameer Kanal, a Portland city councilor. “There’s a playbook of demonizing people … and claiming vehicles were used as ‘weapons’. We see a pattern of victim-blaming, and it’s important we push back, because it’s propaganda.”

They shot at a car that was driving away. This is what they do. If you dare to defy them, they will kill you. It has nothing to do with self defense.

The New York Times reports:

Hours after an immigration agent fatally shot Renee Good inside her S.U.V. on a Minneapolis street last month, a senior federal prosecutor in Minnesota sought a warrant to search the vehicle for evidence in what he expected would be a standard civil rights investigation into the agent’s use of force.

The prosecutor, Joseph H. Thompson, wrote in an email to colleagues that the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that specializes in investigating police shootings, would team up with the F.B.I. to determine whether the shooting had been justified and lawful or had violated Ms. Good’s civil rights.

But later that week, as F.B.I. agents equipped with a signed warrant prepared to document blood spatter and bullet holes in Ms. Good’s S.U.V., they received orders to stop, according to several people with knowledge of the events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The orders, they said, came from senior officials, including Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, several of whom worried that pursuing a civil rights investigation — by using a warrant obtained on that basis — would contradict President Trump’s claim that Ms. Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer” who fired at her as she drove her vehicle.

This piece by Reuters looks at 6 different incidents in which it’s pretty clear that the DHS came out of the gate with a dishonest narrative. It includes Pretti and Good and four others. You literaly can’t believe anything they say.

That’s not a joke. That crap is all over the internet right now. Overwhelming Trump worship and loathing of the left. This one’s going viral.

We are living in separate dimensions.

Daniel Dale writes, “you can see in the transcript of Trump’s National Prayer Breakfast speech how he went from a factual staff-written line giving Christians credit for Mariam Ibrahim’s release (red) to an ad-libbed lie giving himself credit (green).”

He just says whatever self-aggrandizing lie that passes through his head these days:

At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Donald Trump spoke from prepared remarks as he discussed the persecution of Mariam Ibrahim. Ibrahim was unjustly imprisoned and sentenced to death in Sudan in 2014, in a case centered on her Christian faith, until she was released that same year following a global outcry.

Trump correctly said: “Believers all over the planet rallied to Mariam’s cause, prayed for her protection, and successfully pressured for her release.” But then the president appeared to ad-lib – and claimed that he was the one who got Ibrahim freed.

“I did that. I did that. I did that with one phone call, actually,” he said. “And she had such support, it was so easy. And when I explained it to the powers that be: ‘Yes, sir, we will do it right away.’ I just wish I knew earlier. But it’s a big world with a lot of people.”

For years, Trump has told fictional stories that feature unnamed people referring to him as “sir.” This was another one.

Ibrahim was released in 2014, during the Obama administration. Trump did not become president until January 2017. He was not even a presidential candidate until June 2015. There has never been the slightest indication that a private citizen in the US, a businessman and celebrity at the time, was the person who convinced Sudanese authorities to let her out of prison.

A former Obama administration official who served on the National Security Council in 2014 told CNN on Friday: “I neither had at the time nor have now any knowledge of Trump’s involvement whatsoever. It’d be very surprising if he were.”

Jack Jenkins, a reporter for Religion News Service, first raised skepticism about Trump’s story on Thursday. Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor who is a prominent conservative legal scholar, said in a Friday email: “As Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2014, I advocated for Mariam Ibrahim. I do not recall Donald Trump being involved in the case or assisting our Commission’s efforts. Of course, he was not President at the time. Whether he was working privately outside our view, I cannot say. It is certainly possible.”

It is possible in theory. But even if Trump did contribute in some way to the international pressure campaign to achieve Ibrahim’s release – some way Trump’s White House team and congressional allies could not identify when invited to do so by CNN on Friday – that wouldn’t make it true that he personally got Ibrahim released with a phone call.

The White House did not respond to CNN’s Friday request to describe any Trump involvement in Ibrahim’s release. A Friday search of the LexisNexis database of news articles brought up hundreds of articles about the case but none that mentioned any Trump involvement.

Of course it is another ridiculous lie. In 2014, Trump was blathering about his birther conspiracy and running around bragging about grabbing women by the pussy. The last thing on earth that he would have been involved in was a persecuted Christian in Sudan. He couldn’t find Sudan on a fucking map.

There is no question what happened here. We know that this psycho just took credit for something he knew nothing about and had nothing to do with because he does this ALL THE TIME. He takes credit for others’ successes and blames others for his failures He is a narcissistic, pathological liar. And now that he’s completely unhinged and operating with no constraint he just does it reflexively. Look for this to get more and more absurd as time goes on.

The globe was our concern

Back when telephones had cords and “long distance” was still a thing (late 1970s), this Baby Boomer called the Government Printing Office (GPO) in D.C. trying to buy a detailed CIA world map I’d read about. (I’d previously bought a few hardcover Foreign Service area guides for specific countries from the GPO. The good old days.) The woman on the D.C. end admitted that the GPO did not have the CIA item in its inventory.

“You need to contact GMAODS,” she said casually.

Not fluent in acronym, I asked her to render that in English.

“Government Mapping Agency Office of Distribution Services.”

“Of course,” I thought, figuratively smacking my forehead. (I never obtained the map.)

One of my sisters worked in D.C. as an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld’s personal attorney around that time. She kept a book of government acronyms on her pre-PC desk so she wouldn’t be similarly flummoxed. (Pre-PC meaning pre-personal computer not the other PC.)

David Graham shares a similar reminiscence at The Atlantic:

The CIA World Factbook occupies a special place in the memories of elder Millennials like me. It was an enormous compendium of essential facts about every country around the world, carefully collected from across the federal government. This felt especially precious when the World Factbook went online in 1997 (it had previously been a classified internal publication printed on paper, then a declassified print resource), a time when the internet still felt new and unsettled. Unlike many other pages on the World Wide Web, it was reliable enough that you could even get away with citing it in schoolwork. And there was a special thrill in the idea that the CIA, a famously secretive organization, was the one providing it to you

Memories are now the only place the World Factbook resides. In a post online yesterday, the agency noted that the site “has sunset,” though it provided no explanation for why. (The agency did not immediately reply to my inquiry about why, nor has it replied to other outlets.) The Associated Press noted that the move “follows a vow from Director John Ratcliffe to end programs that don’t advance the agency’s core missions.”

The demise of the World Factbook is part of a broad war on information being waged by the Trump administration. This is different from the administration’s assault on truth, in which the president and the White House lie prolifically or deny reality. This is something more fundamental: It’s a series of steps that by design or in effect block access to data, and in doing so erode the concept of a shared frame for all Americans. “Though the World Factbook is gone, in the spirit of its global reach and legacy, we hope you will stay curious about the world and find ways to explore it … in person or virtually,” the CIA wrote in the valedictory post. Left unsaid: You’re on your own to figure it out now.

If the World Factbook was indeed shut down because it didn’t meet Ratcliffe’s standard for core CIA functions, that reflects the Trump administration’s impoverished view of the government’s role. The World Factbook was a public service that helped Americans and others around the globe be informed, created a positive association with a shadowy agency, and spread U.S. soft power by providing a useful service free to all. I’ve been unable to determine how much it cost the government to maintain, but there’s no reason to think it would be substantive.

At least the raw information the World Factbook collected is available elsewhere (and the current version of the Factbook is available on the Internet Archive). The same is not true of some of the other casualties in the war on information, which have fallen victim to both ideology and incompetence. The executive branch has removed data from its websites, such as those of the CDC, the Census Bureau, and other departments, or removed the webpages that hosted them. Almost 3,400 data sets were removed from Data.gov in the first month of Trump’s term alone. At the start of the second Trump administration, some nongovernmental bodies worked to preserve government data by scraping information from existing sources. That’s valuable as far as it goes, but it doesn’t help with future data—or data that never get collected in the first place.

I came of age when the U.S. was still the leader of the so-called “free world.” We made mistakes. Plenty of them. But the world was not only our oyster then, it was our responsibility. We were in control, not out of control.

Good times?

I’m not laughing

Dean Baker pointed to this anecdote from the legendary Mike Elk. He’d just arrived in Rio de Janeiro after a 24-hour flight with three connections when authorities pulled him out of line. They’d flagged his passport:

A customs agent led me to a room, where the Brazilian federal police told me to wait. I nervously began texting my journalist friends, worried that I might be sent back.

​See, in 2024, when I was covering the assassination of Rio city councilwoman Marielle Franco, I misread the legal instructions for a visa and accidentally overstayed by about two weeks.

The visa instructions had said that I could stay for 6 months. However, I forgot to read the fine print that after three months, I needed to go to the federal police and register for another 3 months, so I had “illegally” stayed in Brazil.

​As I sat in the Brazilian federal police office in Rio de Janeiro airport, I began texting my dad, terrified. Everyone knows that in Brasil, the police can do whatever they want to you, allegedly without repercussions.

​Finally, after about an hour, a Brazilian federal police officer emerged and said, “Don’t worry, we’re just gonna make you pay a fine for overstaying your visa.” My muscles tensed up as I waited for him to tell me how much… 132 reals, the officer told me, the equivalent of $27.

​I breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Thank God.” The Brazilian federal police officer immediately started joking with me, “What do you think, we were gonna throw you in jail? We’re not ICE, we’re Brazilians.”

Stephen Miller probably finds that funny. Mike didn’t. Nor do I.

​As I paid my fine and left the federal police office, I thought that if a Brazilian had done the same as I did in the United States, they would likely be thrown into painful prison conditions, perhaps even in solitary confinement for months at a time. But in Brasil, they welcome immigrants and tourists, so I was allowed to go on my way.

​The Brazilian federal police officer wasn’t the only person to joke about ICE with me. Nearly everywhere I go in Brasil, though, people are asking me about the immigration situation in the United States. The other day, at a street-food vendor’s cart, the owner was watching a video of 5-year-old Liam Ramos being released from ICE detention.

I really miss Tom Lehrer about now. He was warning foreigners about visiting the United States in 1965 (and he wasn’t talking about Bloody Sunday or the Watts riots). God knows what Lehrer would have done with ICE wilding.

It’s baby animal season!

The San Diego Humane Society is asking the public to help stock its nurseries during the 16th annual virtual Wildlife Baby Shower.

Thousands of vulnerable baby squirrels, raccoons, hummingbirds, ducklings, bobcats and many other species are expected to arrive at the society’s Project Wildlife program during the busy spring breeding season.

Members of the community can purchase items such as soft bedding, specialized formula, feeding tools, pop-up habitats and baby bird diets from registries at Amazon, Target and Walmart. All gifts are shipped directly to the San Diego Humane Society.

“The supplies donated are used every day to stabilize, feed and house fragile young animals until they’re ready to return to the wild,” said Dr. Alexis Wohl, SDHS’ wildlife veterinary manager. “Community support truly determines how many lives we can save.”

The SDHS Project Wildlife program cares for more than 10,000 injured, orphaned and sick wild animals each year.