We have to remember that, traditionally, an incoming administration awards the various constituencies that got it elected with some sort of representation.So the tech bros get Elon, anti-vax freaks get RFK Jr, dog killers get Noem, white nationalists get Hegseth, pedophiles get Gaetz…
The Onion, the satirical news company that repeatedly spoofed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, has won the bankruptcy auction for control over his media empire — most notably InfoWars, the far-right, conspiracy-minded website that served as Jones’ primary online platform.
“I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the U.S. trustee over our bankruptcy this morning and they said they are shutting us down even without a court order this morning,” Jones said.
“The Connecticut democrats with The Onion newspaper bought us,” he added.
These guys.Not these guys.
For those needing a reminder of what this is all about, The Washington Post explains:
Infowars and its property are among the personal assets Jones was forced to sell in a court-ordered auction after a bankruptcy judge in June sought to compel Jones to paythe roughly $1.5 billion in damages he owes for claiming the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.
Families from the Connecticut-based defamation lawsuit against Jones agreed to accept a smaller recovery to increase the overall value of the Onion’s bid, which enabled its success, according to a Thursday statement from the families’ lawyers.
The auction win gives the Onion control of Infowars’ website, archive, mailing list and production equipment, among other assets, ending Jones’s control of the media company after 25 years.
The “global conglomerate” that purchased InfoWars explains the decision on The Onion’s website:
Today we celebrate a new addition to the Global Tetrahedron LLC family of brands. And let me say, I really do see it as a family. Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market. And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice.
All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.
Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.
Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.
No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.
Make no mistake: This is a coup for our company and a well-deserved victory for multinational elites the world over.
What’s next for InfoWars remains a live issue. The excess funds initially allocated for the purchase will be reinvested into our philanthropic efforts that include business school scholarships for promising cult leaders, a charity that donates elections to at-risk third world dictators, and a new pro bono program pairing orphans with stable factory jobs at no cost to the factories.
As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.
All will be revealed in due time. For now, let’s enjoy this win and toast to the continued consolidation of power and capital.
Donald Trump is an idiot. He’s always been an idiot. And much, much worse. That much he’s proved. What’s kept him from falling out of the lifestyle into which he was born is Daddy Fred’s money and his feral instincts honed by Roy Cohn. Trump exerts dominance as instictively as Maverick flies jets. Don’t think. Just do. Not thinking is the easiest part.
Trump nominating a rogues’ gallery of misfits and lackeys to his cabinet is another loyalty test for a man who offers none in return, as Ezra Klein insists. But that’s just the first layer of this onion.
The second layer is Trump’s goal to demoralize any opposition, tweets Trump niece Mary Trump. “Elevating incompetent fascists” like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Matt Gaetz to the cabinet is meant to humiliate his opponents.
He’s gotten away with fomenting an insurrection and stealing state secrets. Now he’s testing how much lower he can go.
Thank you, sir. May I have another?
Getting the GOP-led Senate to confirm these clowns to the president’s cabinet is the third layer. It’s the dominance move. It will show Trump he has broken his allies’ will to his own. If they will roll over on their backs and pee in the air when he barks (submissive peeing), there’s no Trump whim to which they won’t accede. Confirming the unconfirmable is not the floor. It’s the celiing.
Republicans in the House are already on their backs, and Trump hasn’t even started barking.
There will be some opposition. But if they don’t roll over, they’ll be gone swiftly. Elon Musk is already making noise about funding primary opponents to Republicans who won’t kowtow low enough.
Melania Trump declined an offer to head to the White House Wednesday and meet with Jill Biden, citing the Biden administration’s raid on Mar-a-Lago as part of the federal government’s investigation into classified documents.
“She ain’t going,” a source familiar with Melania’s decision told The Post. “Jill Biden’s husband authorized the FBI snooping through her underwear drawer. The Bidens are disgusting,” the source said.
“Jill Biden isn’t someone Melania needs to meet,” the source added.
BY the way, Trump’s anything but gracious, but we knew that.
Trump has shown he understands a cardinal rule of strong man dominance: constantly force your allies to defend the indefensible & to make ever greater concessions they once would have considered beyond the pale. Each surrender paves the way for the next. Gaetz just an opening bid https://t.co/LR3j9Yk1VU
When I heard this I thought it was a joke. It is not a joke. Trump nominating Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz and Tusli Gabbard is nothing more than a gauntlet thrown in America’s face: “waddaya gonna do about it?”
Matt Gaetz is about as close as you can get to putting Sean Hannity in charge of the Justice Department. A total loyalist who will run investigations into whichever political enemies Trump wants hounded.
Those on Trump’s enemies list should probably be looking for legal representation right away. Matt Gaetz will have no interest in doing anything but prosecuting them.
Update —
About those recess appointments:
3/ The operative provision is Art. II, Sec. 3, which says only "in Case of Disagreement" between the House & Senate may the President adjourn them. That means if Johnson & Thune agree, Trump can't do it.It also means if they let him, Trump may adjourn them "to such Time as he shall think proper."
If Johnson and Thune must agree in order to stop Trump from doing this, I think he will do it. There is no universe in which Johnson doesn’t do what Trump wants whether Thune wants to resist or not.
Chris Hayes has this one right. Nobody should think they have the “one true analysis” of the election or the “one true path” going forward. Shit happens.
One of Trump’s Day One executive actions is expected to be an order on so-called interior enforcement, arresting and detaining immigrants in the U.S. illegally, the sources said.
Trump intends to scrap Biden administration guidance that prioritized people with serious criminal records for deportation and limited enforcement against non-criminals, they said.
The Trump order would call for deportations to prioritize people charged with felonies and people who have exhausted their legal avenues to remain, but would not restrict officers from picking up other potentially deportable immigrants.
An estimated 1.4 million immigrants in the U.S. have final deportation orders, according to ICE, a group that will be a focus for the incoming Trump administration.
“A federal judge said, ‘You must go home,’ and they didn’t,” Homan told Fox News on Monday.
Certain groups – such as international students who support Palestinian militant group Hamas and have violated the terms of their student visas – could also be listed as a priority, two of the sources said.
ICE could use military planes in deportations and seek help from other government agencies to transport deportees, one source said. “All options are on the table,” the source said.
Another order would deal with border security, the two sources said. Trump intends to send National Guard troops to the border and declare illegal immigration a national emergency to unlock funds for border wall construction, the sources said.
Wall construction in Arizona – where Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs has opposed Republican enforcement efforts – could be a priority, two sources said.
Trump plans to end Biden’s temporary humanitarian “parole” programs, which have allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants to enter legally and access work permits, the sources said.
The programs include an initiative for certain migrants with U.S. sponsors and another that allows migrants in Mexico to use an app to schedule border appointments.
The incoming Trump administration is considering locations and talking to private prison companies about drastically expanding immigrant detention centers that would hold immigrants before they are deported as part of President-elect Donald Trump’s promised mass deportation plan, two sources familiar with the planning told NBC News.
The goal is to double the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention beds — 41,000 are now allocated by Congress — to hold vast numbers of migrants for short periods of time while they await deportation after their arrests inside the U.S., the sources said.
The plan would also include restarting the policy of detaining parents with their children, known as family detention, which immigration advocates have criticized and the Biden administration stopped in 2021, the sources said.
So far, people working on the plans with the Trump transition team are assessing which of the facilities the Biden administration closed could be reopened, taking account of available space in county jails and assessing which areas might need temporary facilities to detain migrants as part of the deportation effort.
Trump’s transition team is looking at how many migrants each region can hold, including in Democratic-controlled metropolitan areas across the country. A source familiar with the plans said they prioritize areas with large migrant populations that lack detention facilities, rather than single out Democratic strongholds.
Cities with large populations of migrants — like Denver, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago — could need additional detention sites built nearby to hold migrants arrested there. The administration might also need to reopen, expand or build new facilities in the Northeast to hold migrants arrested around New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, the source said.
Homan has assured everyone that there is no plan for camps. But he didn’t say anything about prisons.
This may sound far-fetched but I’m fairly sure that Trump is dead serious about this one and I don’t know who is going to stop him. Even if the Supreme Court says no (which is unlikely) he will almost cettainly say, “you and what army?” This is one of his few fundamental policies that he really cares about. And it serves the double purpose of proving that he’s the toughest, meanest asshole on the planet which he translates to respect. He will do this.
I don’t know about you but this strikes me as very bad. Remember this is the guy who pardoned war criminals in his first administration and overruled the military chain of command to do it. He has expressly said that he wants to use the military to shoot protesters and round up immigrants. If we are depending on the military to resist illegal orders I’m not sure there will be any left to do it:
The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership. If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect’s past vow to fire “woke generals,” referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness.
As commander in chief, Trump can fire any officer at will, but an outside board whose members he appoints would bypass the Pentagon’s regular promotion system, signaling across the military that he intends to purge a number of generals and admirals.
The draft order says it aims to establish a review that focuses “on leadership capability, strategic readiness, and commitment to military excellence.” The draft doesn’t specify what officers need to do or present to show if they meet those standards. The draft order originated with one of several outside policy groups collaborating with the transition team, and is one of numerous executive orders under review by Trump’s team, a transition official said.
The warrior board would be made up of retired generals and noncommissioned officers, who would send their recommendations to the president. Those identified for removal would be retired at their current rank within 30 days.
The establishment of the board would be in line with Trump’s calls for purging what he views as failed generals, including those involved in the chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to people familiar with the policy discussions. Trump has said he would ask all generals involved in the withdrawal to resign by “noon on Inauguration Day.”
The president-elect previewed the move during a campaign event in October, telling an audience that he would create a task force to monitor the “woke generals” and get rid of diversity training in the military. “They’re gone,” Trump said of those generals, without naming specific officers.
One feared potential target of Trump’s threatened purge could be Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to two defense officials. During the 2020 George Floyd protests, Brown spoke about the impact that movement had on him and what it was like to rise through the military ranks as a Black fighter pilot.
Yeah, a Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs isn’t going to fly in the Trump adminstration. Not even if it’s a Black fighter pilot who I’m sure Trump and his cronies consider a DEI hire despite his record.
This is pretty scary stuff. I suspect there are plenty of people in the officer corps who think it’s terrific, however, and will be more than happy to take their places and line up with whatever Dear Leader wants them to do. Don’t ever think that the US Military isn’t full of General Buck Turgidsons.
It’s been a week since the election of Donald Trump and the shock is just now beginning to wear off. The ritual Democratic self-flagellation is calming a bit as most people finally take a breath and recognize that while the result was a terrible disappointment it was anything but a landslide for Donald Trump, nor was it a crushing rebuke of the Democratic party.
“Trump’s popular-vote victory will likely end up as the smallest since 2000. It is due, in part, to fewer people voting. Exit polls are imperfect, but they suggest where each party gained and lost votes since 2020…What we can say, though, is that this was not an electoral landslide, but a narrowly contested race in which Trump is likely to have benefited as much from who didn’t turn out to vote for his candidacy than who did turn out to vote for him.
Right now, the first order of business is to shake off the defeat and confront the challenge of Donald Trump’s ghastly agenda. As we have seen in the last few days it’s shaping up to be both more chaotic and more extreme than even in 2016.
Last time, Trump at least had a transition team put together by his transition chief former Gov. Chris Christie in place, even if he threw most of their plan out almost immediately. They held meetings in Trump Tower in New York to vet candidates and policies in a more or less formal atmosphere. Now they’re meeting at Mar-a-Lago in free-wheeling gab sessions around the golf course and the dining table at the resort. Apparently, Elon Musk is a fixture, “weighing in on staffing decisions, making clear his preference for certain roles,”
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Trump has been wasting no time in naming his cabinet members and other staff. Musk himself was named, along with former presidential primary candidate Vivek Rammaswamy (who has also been in attendance in transition meetings) to head an outside advisory board they’re calling the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. (Both Musk and Ramaswamy think that acronym is adorable because it’s an older internet meme and a cryptocurrency in which Musk is heavily invested. The techno boys are having a rousing good time. By the look of that lunch table above, Trump is spending most of his time golfing and tweeting, as usual.
The other cabinet officials chosen so far have been typical Trump toadies and henchmen such as his former acting Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to CIA, S. Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to DHS, and former Congressman Lee Zeldin to the EPA. They did cause a stir on Tuesday when they named Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, for Defense Secretary whose main qualification for the job appears to be pushing Trump to pardon war criminals. Who knows who this braintrust is going to choose for Attorney General and Secretary of State? There have been some semi-respectable names floated but there are also some Hegseth level choices as well.
This explains why Trump is demanding that the new Senate Majority Leader, whoever that runs out to be, will ensure that his nominations are handled by recess appointments rather than the usual constitutionally required confirmation process. It’s very possible that even with a 53 vote majority, they couldn’t get some of these unqualified extremists passed.
It’s clear they plan to hit the ground running with the mass deportation agenda. Trump has already officially named his “Border Czar,” an unofficial position he apparently plans on imbuing with immense power, Tom Homan a former border patrol official best known for fashioning Trump’s family separation policy. He has been all over TV assuring America that he plans to deport every undocumented immigrant and he’ll use whatever force it takes to do it, including the military.
incoming Trump "border czar" Tom Homan on Fox Business says he expects the military to be involved in his mass deportation pic.twitter.com/wAUEe9PudW
At this point it’s hard to know what Democrats in Washington will be able to do to push back on any of this. The Senate will be in Republican hands so the confirmation of Trump’s cabinet and judges are pretty much a done deal. It’s still possible that the Democrats could control the House although it’s a long shot. If that happens budgets and appropriations will have a necessary check. Otherwise, it’s a GOP candy store.
As for the other branch, the judiciary, we don’t know for sure what the Supreme Court would definitely do should anyone try to stop Trump’s appalling agenda from coming to fruition but we do know that they believe virtually nothing he does could possibly be criminal so he pretty much has a free hand. However, in our federalist system there is another institutional check on his power and that’s in the states. And in those that are run by Democrats we are already seeing a strong pushback, which they have been planning for months in case Trump managed to do the unthinkable again.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California immediately called a special legislative session to shore up the state’s legal defenses to challenge Trump’s plans around the environment, reproductive and LGBTQ rights and immigration. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker held a news conference two days after the election and put the President elect on notice, saying “To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom and opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans: I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people, you come through me.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Leticia James pledged to “protect New Yorkers’ fundamental freedoms from any potential threats.” Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, who made her name as Attorney General filing lawsuits against the first Trump administration, said she would defend the freedoms of her people “in the face of any attempted federal overreach.”
Democratic states passed laws protecting reproductive health care, stockpiled abortion pills and got as many protections for threatened constituencies as they could on the November ballots. These governors are reportedly talking among themselves about how to get promised federal funding for state projects into their treasuries before Trump takes over. He has, after all, explicitly threatened to withhold aid if any Governor balks at his plans.
And he’s not happy at all about this. He called out Newsom in a rambling Truth Social post:
At the moment, the push back from these lawmakers will be done through lawsuits. But you have to wonder what the new “Border Czar”, who insists that he will have the military at his disposal, means when he says that governors from sanctuary states have to “get the hell out of the way” and if they don’t “we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City.” Is he planning on having an armed stand off with the state police or something?
Whether the Big Blue states have the ability to successful push back Trump’s larger agenda is unlikely. Unless the courts are amenable, which is a crap shoot these days, Trump will likely be able to get away with much of it if he can find the wherewithal to actually get it done. But it’s hard to imagine that even his loony crew will allow Tom Homan to send the military into New York and LA to roust immigrants in their homes against the wishes of the state and local authorities. So there is a pretty good chance that these governors can “Trump proof” their states and at least stymie his plans in the big population centers. We’d better hope they can do it. It’s pretty much all we’ve got.
Self-flagellation over the 2024 presidential race loss continues among Democrats. It is fueled by simplistic press narratives that I hear as: Millions face violent deportation, Ukrainians face losing their country, Gazans face continued slaughter, and the world faces the collapse of NATO and the rise of fascism American-style because Democrats have a messaging problem. The 75 million whose votes empower those outcomes? Their hands are clean.
For all the unfolding recrimination, a fairly strong consensus has already formed across the left that last week’s election results are part of a global, post-Covid, post-inflation backlash against incumbents. And for what it’s worth, I agree with this consensus; Occam’s razor applies too neatly to start the analysis elsewhere.
Operative word: start. The information environment itself is a place to continue:
For instance:
If nothing about the information environment changes between now and Inauguration Day, I predict Trump will quickly claim credit for the economy he inherited, and for economic sentiment to shoot upward, as millions of Republicans reverse their stated views on the material world.
Once he’s in power, I suspect many, many Trump-aligned or Trump-sympathetic media figures will trash their old scripts and either start talking about how many groceries they can afford all of a sudden, or simply stop talking about the economic status quo at all.
If Trump’s policies or corporate blackmail practices don’t reduce prices, or if prices go up, I suspect he and his aligned media will blame all the hardship on Biden from the outset, that about half of Americans will come to believe this, and that Democrats will be ill-equipped to deliver a louder, simpler, more accurate message. It’s not that I think Trump would be completely immune from backlash to another burst of inflation, but that the bottom wouldn’t fall out from under him the way it fell out from under Biden.
“Working the refs” was once an art. Under Democrats’ noses, the right has made it a science. (They won’t call it that, of course.) The right attacks. The left fails to respond, resulting in what this TikToker finds:
This gentleman asked MAGA fascists for examples of countries with Trump-style policies that are thriving today. The ignorance of these fascist imbeciles will surprise no one. 😳👇 pic.twitter.com/K3WMcQiiej
Charlie Sykes is also skeptical of the emerging narrative.
“Apparently, the Democrats have decided to bypass the autopsy and move straight to an orgy of self-flagellation,” he begins. He agrees with a lot of the criticism of Democrats but sees it in a broader context of what won out: Trump’s amorality, Republicans’ ethical collapse, “the utter failure of the criminal justice system,” and journalism’s failure as fearless truth-tellers.
I know that it is now unfashionable to criticize the wisdom and sagacity of American voters, but this ought not be sanewashed as a normal choice in a rational or sane democracy.3When we are done flagellating other institutions, we need to admit the possibility that something is profoundly broken in the American psyche and character.
For decades we have told ourselves stories about American exceptionalism and leadership — a beacon of freedom and democracy to the world. And, indeed, we remain the world’s greatest superpower.
But we found out last week that we are a profoundly unserious country.
Americans, those lovers of freedom, TikTok and reality TV, chose a profoundly unserious man for dictator-in-waiting. He’s already making predictably unserious choices for his administration.
Sykes references an observation by Neil Postman that I hadn’t seen elsewhere:
Four decades ago, Neil Postman prophesied an apocalypse of moral idiocy in the age of mass media. “When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” he wrote, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”
To wit:
Our national idiocracy was a pre-existing condition just waiting for the coming of a cynical demagogue like Trump. Our guardrails and norms proved to be far more fragile than we imagined, because they had been hollowed out and dumbed down.
Postman wrote that Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” was more likely where our world was headed than George Orwell’s “1984.” Postman wrote:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
Kurt Vonnegut was more memorable. Welcome to the monkey house. Only in Vonnegut’s future, people were numb from the waist down.
