Author: Tom Sullivan

On this St. Patrick’s Day

If you are not already chilled by the Trump administration’s defiance of a federal court order, Bill Kristol adds more fuel for your anxiety. He listened via computer to Saturday’s emergency hearing on the Trump 2.0 administration’s invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport two planeloads of detainees to El Salvador.

He reflects on Judge Boasberg’s ruling for the plaintiffs. This is how sober aplication of the law is supposed to work, Kristol thought. Orderly. Deliberate, and “with little in the way of emotion or soaring rhetoric.” That we live in a country with a centuries-old rule of law is something to cherish.

But this administration places that tradition, that culture at risk. Vice President J.D. Vance invoked the “great replacement” theory again over the weekend in an appearance with Laura Ingraham. He warned that Germany taking in millions of “culturally incompatible” immigrants puts it on the verge of “civilizational suicide.” Vance is a big believer in culture, just not the one Kristol values.

Kristol warns:

Of course, Germany did destroy itself almost a century ago. It almost destroyed civilization itself until America stepped in to help save it. That didn’t happen because Germany took in too many migrants. It happened because the German people fell for arguments uncomfortably close to Vance’s. Those were arguments that derided the very concept of the rule of law, a derision that was defended in part by warnings about immigrants and foreign blood.

In defying a federal court over the weekend and making outsized claims about the president’s Article II authorities, Trump 2.0 is not defending our U.S. culture of law but slashing its wrists. Drowning it in the bathtub feels less violent in the present context.

Kristol concludes:

One trusts that the United States isn’t going to go the way of Germany in the last century. But the slope toward lawlessness is a slippery one, and we have an administration that is eagerly leading us down it. There are still footholds we can grab onto in order to arrest the precipitous decline that lies ahead. But we are already part way down the hill, and the pace of decline is accelerating.

Faced with a lawless White House, the question many of us are asking ourselves this morning is what are we prepared to do arrrest that decline. It’s the question Officer Jim Malone (Sean Connery) famously asks Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) in The Untouchables (1987).

It’s the question Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut posed on Sunday. If we continue to observe norms and act like the U.S. is business as usual — if we won’t step outside our comfort zones — our democracy could be gone in under a year. We are “at immediate risk.”

BREAKING: Chris Murphy just issued an urgent warning about the fragility of American democracy on NBC’s Meet the Press. More Democrats need to be talking like this. The American people need to know just how dire of a situation we are in. pic.twitter.com/sF5Q5mejSi

— Trump’s Lies (Commentary) (@MAGALieTracker) March 16, 2025

“And then what are you prepared to do?” I haven’t answered that question for myself yet. But the clock is ticking.

Is it mere coincidence that Malone and Murphy are Irish?

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Don’t think you are not next

It’s a constitutional showdown (Axios):

The Trump administration says it ignored a Saturday court order to turn around two planeloads of alleged Venezuelan gang members because the flights were over international waters and therefore the ruling didn’t apply, two senior officials tell Axios.

Shortly before 7 p.m. ET on Saturday, the New York Times reports, “Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Trump administration to cease its use of an obscure wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, as a pretext for the expulsion of migrants, and immediately return anyone it was expelling under the act to the United States.”

Earlier in the day, five Venezuelans held by DHS “filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that their expulsion on that basis would violate federal law and the Constitution’s guarantee to due process.”

Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) against use of the Alien Enemies Act to affect their deportation. Besides, because none of the prisoners received a hearing, it is unclear how many of the 250 passengers on the planes were actual gang members, illegally in the country, on visas , on green cards, or innocent bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time when detained. The Trump White House didn’t so much as say “trust us.”

Immigration attorney Lindsay Toczylowski posted to Bluesky that she believes one of #Donalds_Desaparecidos is her client and an asylum-seeker.

This timeline will be scrutinized and argued in court (Axios):

The timeline: The president signed the executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act on Friday night, but intentionally did not advertise it. On Saturday morning, word of the order leaked, officials said, prompting a mad scramble to get planes in the air.

• At 2:31 p.m. Saturday, an immigration activist who tracks deportation flights, posted on X that “TWO HIGHLY UNUSUAL ICE flights” were departing from Texas to El Salvador, which had agreed to accept Venezuelan gang members deported from the U.S.
• Hours later, during a court hearing filed by the ACLU., Boasberg ordered a halt to the deportations and said any flights should be turned around mid-air.
• “This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately,” he told the Justice Department, according to the Washington Post.
• At that point, about 6:51 p.m., both flights were off the Yucatan Peninsula, according to flight paths posted on X.

But the Trump administration had no intention of complying. The White House worked feverishly to escape court review. The showman wanted to demonstrate who’s boss and send a signal worthy of Vladimir Putin defenestrating a political enemy. *

They just needed killin’ comes next

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller stage-managed the deportation, Axios reports, aided by Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem of dog-shooting fame.

“Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders,” an unnamed White House official told Axios. The judge’s ruling simply came too late to change course. “We wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out,” said the official.

“Court order defied. First of many as I’ve been warning and start of true constitutional crisis,” attorney Mark Zaid posted to Twitter/X. “Ultimately will lead to Trump #impeachment proceedings.”

Count me skeptical. Both on the impeachment and because the White House has a very slippery definition of defying.

The White House is doubling down on its strongman shtick (which looks less like a shtick). As I’ve written, their game is to find the legal line, step over it, and dare anyone to push back. Lather, rinse. repeat. Now with virtual immunity granted by the Roberts court, Trump feels he’s above the law and untouchable. He IS the law,

A defiant White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, “If the Democrats want to argue in favor of turning a plane full of rapists, murderers, and gangsters back to the United States, that’s a fight we are more than happy to take.”

Next up from the Trump WH, it’s the “They just needed killin'” defense. The Constitution and the rule of law are inconveniences.

* Doubly frightening, many in Trump’s base will cream their jeans over it. And they live in your neighborhood.

Update:

Something else I meant to add from ABC’s coverage: “top lawyers and officials in the administration made the determination that since the flights were over international waters, Boasberg’s order did not apply.”

I’m no lawyer, but I imagine complying with the judge’s order that the planes be instructed to turn around damn sure applied to Trump’s lawyers standing on U.S. soil who ignored it. What is Boasberg prepared to do about it and to them?

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Looks like we’re in for nasty weather

“What did they do?” a relation asked Saturday after hearing about two arriving foreign nationals detained for deportation at Boston’s Logan Airport.

Trump needs a reason? He’s doing it because he can, to show who’s boss, and to intimidate the rest of us into submission. (Do not obey in advance.)

To recap a busy weekend:

Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 35, a researcher at Brown Medicine on an H-1B visa, was detained at Boston-Logan airport for unknown reasons upon returning from visiting family in Lebanon. Immigration officials deported her in defiance of a federal court order. 1/www.providencejournal.com/story/news/l…

— Tom Sullivan (@tmsullivan.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T22:19:04.263Z

Fabian Schmidt, a German electrical engineer, was detained at Logan for unknown reasons upon arriving from Luxembourg. He's in Mass General after (mother claims) being pressured to surrender his green card, “violently interrogated,” stripped & put in a cold shower. 2/#www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2025…

— Tom Sullivan (@tmsullivan.bsky.social) 2025-03-15T22:19:04.264Z

Those actions were Thursday and Friday, and on top of the Trump administration’s March 8 detention and jailing Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and green card holder over political speech.

In a move CNN predicted on Friday, on Saturday the Trump administration took an even darker turn (The New York Times):

On Saturday, the administration published an executive order invoking the law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to target Venezuelan gang members in the United States.

But shortly after the announcement, James E. Boasberg, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., said he would issue a temporary order blocking the government from deporting any immigrants under the law.

The judge ordered any planes that had departed to return.

Chris Geidner of Dork Law elaborates:

A little before 7:00 p.m. Saturday, a federal judge issued an order temporarily stopping deportations set in motion by President Donald Trump hours earlier when he announced that he had invoked a law last used to justify Japanese internment camps.

With planes departing nearly immediately following Trump’s announcement that he had invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — planes full of people the Trump administration would be deporting with no process — Chief Judge James Boasberg said at the conclusion of a Saturday evening hearing, “I am required to act immediately.”

Boasberg issued a nationwide temporary restraining order blocking removal of “all noncitizens in U.S. custody who are subject to [Trump’s order]” — people who the government decides are members of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a Venezuelan gang — for the next 14 days or until a further order from the court.

At the hearing, Boasberg added that planes in the air were to be turned around, telling the Justice Department lawyer that his clients needed to be informed of the TRO “immediately.”

Yeah, good luck with that. The Times follows up with a report that “As of early Sunday morning, it was unclear whether any such planes had departed or returned.”

The ACLU and Democracy Forward filed suit to stop the deportations under the law, arguing that the law “plainly only applies to warlike actions: it cannot be used here against nationals of a country—Venezuela— with whom the United States is not at war, which is not invading the United States, and which has not launched a predatory incursion into the United States.”

Furthermore, the filing states, “The government’s Proclamation would allow agents to immediately put noncitizens on planes without any review of any aspect of the determination that they are Alien Enemies. Upon information and belief, the government has transferred Venezuelans who are in ongoing immigration proceedings in other states, bringing them to Texas to prepare to summarily remove them and to do so before any judicial review—including by this Court.”

Except the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, suggests (posted to Twitter at 8:13 AM ET this morning) DHS may have defied the federal court (depending on the flight timing). Bukele states that “238 members of the Venezuelan criminal organization, Tren de Aragua” arrived in his country last night along with “23 MS-13 members wanted by Salvadoran justice.” It appears that the U.S. is paying El Salvador for jailing the Venezuelans.

If indeed these people are criminals in the U.S. illegally, as the Trump administration claims — it also declared Ned Johnson, 82, of Seattle dead, deducted Social Security deposits from his bank, stopped future Social Security checks, and cancelled his Medicare insurance — few will regret their removal. But Americans will have time to regret the administration’s ignoring a federal court at their leisure. And likely sooner rather than later.

First they came for the noncitizens, etc., is going to get old really fast. Trump is looking for an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law. With his invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, he’s not even trying to conceal his intentions.

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From the people who make “self-driving” cars

Did Elon Musk and his DOGE hackers never have to produce answers for grades?

David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine reported last week how Musk’s DOGEes “repeatedly posted error-filled data that inflated its success at saving taxpayer money. ” Called out on it by people who don’t reflexively believe what’s spit out by a computer, DOGE has made its exaggerated claims impossible to reality-check. They removed embedded identifiers from their “wall of receipts”:

The New York Times, at first, found a way around the group’s obfuscation. That is because Mr. Musk’s group had briefly embedded the federal identification numbers of these grants in the publicly available source code. The Times used those numbers to match DOGE’s claims with reality, and to discover that they contained the same kind of errors that it had made in the past.

Looks like the people looking for fraud are committing fraud. pic.twitter.com/ZbOsz0r3EF

— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) March 16, 2025

And then the identifying codes were gone. Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, tells the Times, “They responded by giving less information publicly, so that it’s harder to question them … without doing anything to suggest that they’re actually correcting the mistakes, or learning from them.”

But the Times had downloaded what was live before DOGE stripped the data. The paper’s team used it to match savings claims with the actual programs.

At least five of the 20 largest “savings” appeared to be exaggerated, according to federal data and interviews with the nonprofits whose grants were on the list.

The largest item on the list was savings of $1.75 billion, which the group said it achieved by cutting a U.S. Agency for International Development grant. But the organization that got the grant — a public-health nonprofit called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — said that information was wrong twice over.

For one, the grant had not been terminated. Second, the government had already paid out all the money it owed. So even if the grant had been terminated, the savings would have been $0.

In other cases, Mr. Musk’s group seemed to misunderstand a key figure in U.S.A.I.D. grants.

Nonprofits said these grants often contain a ceiling value — an upper limit on what the government might pay. But the groups said that this top amount is not always guaranteed. In some cases, the actual payments are worked out separately, they said, and often total far less.

“It’s not a promise, in any sense,” said Traci Baird, the chief executive of a nonprofit called EngenderHealth.

There’s more in the reporting, including the White House claiming that terminating the grants saves what might have been spent, blah, blah, blah.

In other words, the DOGE naifs don’t know what they’re looking at and don’t know that they don’t know. Or don’t care, if it hastens the techbro efforts to install a techno-monarchy and quash “political dissent [using] algorithms that no citizen can vote against and no court can oversee,” warns The UnPopulist:

If we do not act now, we may wake up one day to find that democracy was not overthrown in a dramatic coup—but simply deleted, line by line, from the code that governs our lives.

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Fighter for me or not fighter for me?

While grocery shopping the other day, a friend asked how we were doing (in Trump 2.0). A lot of stress-eating, I said. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is hearing the same sort of thing as he travels the country.

There are a couple of reasons for my stress just this week, but even people who don’t immerse themselves in politics (and blog politics every day) are feeling it. People on Donald Trump’s target list are feeling it.

Sanders asks his audiences how living in this America makes them feel. He asks about their stress level, and it connects more than a discussion about policy. It is a big change from the Sanders who campaigned for president in 2016 on income and wealth inequality in a rigged economy. In 2020, he ran on people’s pain. Anand Giridharadas writes at The Ink:

It was something of a departure for a man who is not necessarily the most touchy-feely guy you’ve ever met. I tried to dig in to what Sanders was doing, and why. I spoke to many of his advisers and his wife and him. What I learned is excerpted below.

It was, in short, that he was trying to help citizens better connect their individual pain to the larger forces misgoverning the country.

And it appears now that he is doing it again. While many are banging the drum about fascism and a coup and all the rest, Sanders is reminding us that connecting those issues to the emotional life of voters is vital.

Oligarchy and autocracy and the like are not textbook concepts. They make life suck.

@bernie

In America today, working class people live, on average, 7 years shorter lives than the wealthy. Stress kills. In Altoona, Wisconsin this weekend I asked people how economic stress impacted their lives. The responses I got were painful, but not surprising.

♬ original sound – Bernie Sanders

Democrats need to learn from Sanders, Giridharadas explained this week on “Morning Joe.” Because the key decision point for politically less-engaged people (unlike blog writers and readers) may not be left/right, Democrat/Republican, but “fighter for me or not fighter for me?”

Or as I use again and again, How many Rocky  movies did Stallone make?

Voters want leaders — even phony ones — willing to fight for them and to risk themselves in the effort. Wimps need not apply. Stern words to not count.

Democrats have a lot of work to do on that.

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Marco Rubio’s adventures in diplomacy

It’s said that Donald Trump has no friends. Not real ones. Sycophants, yes. Transaction partners, sure. Plus dictators who leverage his ignorance and pliability to use him. But making friends is not his strong suit. Quite the opposite.

Trump’s knack for alienating people is manifest in the government he now leads. See how he goes out of his way to piss off the country’s closest ally, Canada, and calls the “European Union ‘nasty’ while sitting alongside NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.“

He’s rubbed off on Secretary of State Marco Rubio who, in a rare move, is expelling South Africa’s ambassador over comments taken as hostile to Trump and his proclivities:

“South Africa’s ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country,” Rubio posted on X on Friday.

Rubio accused ambassador Ebrahim Rasool of being “a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS”, referring to Trump by his White House X account handle. “We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered persona non grata.”

The up-is-downism in that statement is obvious.

Neither Rubio nor the state department gave an immediate explanation for the decision. However, Rubio linked to a Breitbart story about a talk Rasool gave earlier on Friday as part of a South African thinktank’s webinar in which he spoke about actions taken by the Trump administration in the context of a US where white people would soon no longer be a majority.

Rasool pointed to Elon Musk’s outreach to far-right figures in Europe, calling it a “dog whistle” in a global movement trying to rally people who see themselves as part of an “embattled white community”.

Rubio this week dropped a peace demand that Russia return the children it abducted in its Ukraine invasion. It was, as Digby pointed out, a concession to Vladimir Putin, but also another jab at our friends in Ukraine. But then, Trump and friends….

Maybe Rubio really is too “little” for the job.

More up-is-down

In a precedent-breaking visit by a president to the Department of Justice, Trump railed in a speech against his own employees, calling department officials and private attorneys who took legal action against him “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”

He called for his opponents to be prosecuted:

“It’s a campaign by the same scum you’ve been dealing with for years,” Trump said of the lawyers and officials who have targeted him. “We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government. … We will restore the scales of justice in our country.”

Then he defended Judge Aileen Cannon, the Florida federal judge who ran interference for him in cases brought by the DOJ. Criticism of judges should be “illegal,” Trump insisted.

Yes, that guy: Trump escalates attack on ‘Mexican’ judge.

Undesirables

What’s yet to be seen is the extent of the career con man’s and his SecState’s fluid definition of “rogue actors and corrupt forces.” It could be, like the South African ambassador, whoever rubs Donald Trump the wrong way. Like Mahmoud Khalil. Or the Rhode Island doctor who traveled to Lebanon recently to visit family:

Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 35, had been studying and working in the U.S. for the last six years and had been in Rhode Island, working for Brown Medicine in the Division of Kidney Disease & Hypertension, since last July, said her friend and fellow doctor Basma Merhi.

Alawieh was returning to the U.S. on an H-1B visa she had recently acquired at the American consulate in Lebanon, said lawyer Thomas S. Brown, who handles immigration and visa issues for doctors affiliated with Brown Medicine.

She is being detained at Boston’s Logan Airport and awaits deportation over some “wrinkle” in her visa application approved and issued by Rubio’s department. Unless they already deported her Friday night as officials indicated.

Lebanon is not even among the 43 undesirable countries on Trump’s new travel ban proposal.

Watch your backs.

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We are so screwed

Come on down to the White House Tesla Auto Mall! pic.twitter.com/DjVZY0R8wL

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) March 12, 2025

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Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) ignores advice not to meet voters

Credit NC-11 Rep. Chuck Edwards for actually holding a town hall meeting Thursday evening in Asheville. And for staying 90 minutes.

Beyond that, few of the 400 people who got into the tech school auditorium came away with much more than the satisfaction of heckling him. Local news reports that 2,000 outside Ferguson Auditorium [that number feels inflated] had to content themselves with holding an ad hoc rally.

In a preview earlier in the day in Canton, N.C., the former paper mill town flooded twice in recent years, Edwards dodged a shouted question about cuts to Medicaid harming local schoolchildren.

“I agree with a lot of what’s going on in Washington,” Edwards said early in his Asheville presentation. The comment elicited loud boos, as did criticisms of FEMA and mentions of Donald Trump, bureaucracy, etc.

Edwards was reading a prepared speech including a checklist of facts on what’s been accomplished with Helene relief efforts. The impatient crowd didn’t want to hear it, some shouting, “We know all that. We lived it. Listen to us now!”

After each outburst, Edwards returned to his speech. but at mention of Trump seeking American economic dominance and Edwards’ vote for the the Republican budget resolution, the crowd exploded. A veteran stood up and started cursing that Edwards didn’t “give a f@ck about me.” Edwards waved at sheriff’s deputies to have him escorted out.

Edwards hadn’t gotten to the Q&A part yet.

As the Associated Press reported it, the town hall got “rowdy”:

For about an hour and half, Edwards endured a constant barrage of jeers, expletives and searing questions on Trump administration policies. About 300 people crammed inside a college auditorium for the town hall, while the boos from more than a thousand people outside the building rumbled throughout the event.

Edwards attempted to answer submitted questions drawn randomly from a bin and for the most part gave answers expected from a Republican congressman.

What about plans to eliminate the Department of Education? The answer is block grants. And again later, block grants.

What about plans to cut Social Security benefits? Edwards won’t vote to abolish the system, which didn’t exactly answer the question.

“Are you willing to cut 25% of your staff like DOGE is doing with other agencies? Edwards praised his staff, then read off a familiar list of small contracts DOGE characterized as frivolous and waste, some from Trump’s speech to Congress. The audience jeered, calling them debunked.

A woman stood and shouted, all those things are great, but what do they have to do with people losing their jobs? Edwards replied with something about DOGE looking for efficiencies.

At some point it seemed Edwards was simply trolling the crowd by mentioning Trump and “the art of the deal,” knowing it would elicit an angry response.

In one answer that stood out as nonsensical, Edwards said (emphasis mine), “What my job is is to listen to the information that I hear coming out of the administration and then to look at how that might be affecting our district. And then go back to that administration and make a case for why some of those changes might not be in the best interest of NC-11.”

Seriously? Edwards is a legislator in the arm of Congress that sets the budget, but speaks as if he must go to Trump on his knees to beg for crumbs.

Asked how Trump can legally impound funds appropriated by Congress, cancel contracts, and fire workers, Edwards replies that there’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president has to spend every single dollar Congress appropriates. [Because that’s in statute, IIRC.]  

The crowd outside is shouting and can be head through the exit door.

And so it went. Full video here for those interested.

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Out-gunned and out-invested by the right

Direct your attention to a Sunday post by strategist Rachel Bitecofer, “Here’s Why Democrats Can’t Meet This Moment.”

Bitecofer’s post concerns the 2024 book by Tina Nguyen, now with The Verge. Formerly with Puck/Politico/Vanity Fair, Nguyen was also formerly and briefly “employed” by The Daily Caller (more on that in a moment). Her memoir, “The MAGA Diaries,” details her upbringing as a young libertarian and Claremonster (a student at Claremont McKenna College where John Eastman is or was on the faculty) and her eventual escape from conservative politics. Subtitle: My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right Wing & How I Got Out.

Bitecofer recounts from the book how Nguyen, an aspirng journalist, realized she’d been groomed instead as a propagandist:

Then she got what felt like a the break of a lifetime for an aspiring conservative “journalist”: a job at The Daily Caller working with a pre-Fox News Tucker Carlson.

A few months into that job, where she was hired to cover the tech beat, it began to dawn on her that things at The Daily Caller were not what they appeared to be. The moment of realization hit when a co-worker asked her to lunch and she responded she was waiting for edits from her editor, John Henke: a man her co-worker had never heard of.

That got Nguyen asking herself, if the Daily Caller isn’t paying me, who is?

Turns out her real boss was a Republican communications firm and what they wanted from her wasn’t reporting, they wanted her to write hit pieces on their political and corporate enemies.

Before she could resign, Nguyen got fired as “not a good fit.”

Those who have read closely know that the left and Democrats are in an asymmetrical political battle with a network of right-wing think tanks and media outlets supported by conservative billionaires who, unlike moneymen on the left, think like longterm investors. The biggest lefty funders get behind the latest shiny object that promises a quick win.

The left doesn’t build the kind of infrastructure the right has spent the last half century building. The right mentors promising conservative college kids like Nguyen, sends them to training camps, connect them to conservative networks, and gets them placement at media outlets until they appear, as if fully formed, on your TV screens or in your news feeds.

It wasn’t until she left that world and joined Vanity Fair that Nguyen realized that “there is no such thing as the professional left.” Bitecofer summarizes:

She was pitched a story about a program Dems launched in 2005 to supposedly build the bench (a problem, by the way, we still have today despite at least 5 groups I can think of working on it for two decades) which was pitched to her as “revolutionary, unique, and new.”

The Republicans had The Heritage Leadership Institute so the idea of an organization to build the bench did not sound “revolutionary, unique, or new” to Nguyen. Her first thought was, “I thought the Democrats had the same resources my old team did?”

SPOILER ALERT: We don’t.

The Heritage Leadership Institute’s Young Leaders program has graduates like Josh Hawley, who they basically grew in a lab.

I finished Nguyen’s audiobook in the car yesterday. Nguyen’s bigger shock was finding out years later that the Claremont mentor who helped her get The Daily Caller gig belonged to a secret network screening for young white nationalists, grooming them in mentoring networks, and working to place them at outlets where they could sublty advance white nationalist ideology. Nguyen told the Columbia Journalism Review that “in no universe” would the Caller “have ever explicitly courted white nationalists when I was there.” Yet her WTF moment was realizing that she herself had been nurtured by that system.

Bitecofer concludes that the right out-invests the left and it shows:

So, if you want to understand why Democrats seem inept right now its because we have no brain trust. We have no small room of very smart people with a shit ton of money and authority strategizing on to how fund, build, and run the infrastructure we need to compete with the propaganda machine Republicans have spent decades financing and perfecting.

Instead we have a series of barely connected party organizations, tons of 501c3s, and SuperPACs like Future Forward, who managed to waste nearly a billion dollars on positive ads on Harris that allowed 60% of swing voters to have positive memories of Trump’s first term.

And many of them duplicate each others’ work while struggling to find funding.

These are things most of us already know. But reading Nguyen’s first-hand account as a product of the conservative farm system carries more punch.

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Travel my way, take the highway that is best 

Donald Trump brought two of his friends (at least in puppet form) to an anti-DOGE rally organized by the North Carolina Democratic Party across from the North Carolina State Legislative Building on Wednesday. Perhaps 400-500 people filled Bicentennial Plaza to protest Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump’s chainsaw approach to (ostensibly) making government more “efficient.”

Raleigh News & Observer:

“Stop the GOP Coup.” “America Has No King.” “DOGE Musk Go.”

Hundreds wielded signs with messages like these in Raleigh’s Bicentennial Plaza on Wednesday, protesting the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-led cost-cutting initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency.

Hosted by North Carolina Democrats, the protest kicked off around noon with a speech from NC Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton. She spoke in support of federal workers and defended programs like Medicaid and Social Security.

Hampton Dellinger returned to North Carolina to speak at the rally. Dellinger, former head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, was preparing to restore fired federal workers to their jobs before Trump fired him. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld his firing on Monday.

“We need to let Republicans know how much the cuts are actually hurting North Carolina. That’s the point of what we’re doing today. And yes, it’s specifically targeted at Republicans because my legislative colleagues need to be talking to Senator Tillis, Senator Budd, their Republican colleagues in Congress and saying, Congress, do your job, take care of our people, take care of our state,” said Sen. Graig Meyer, a Democrat who represents Orange, Caswell, and Person counties.

Debbie from Greenville told WRAL she worries about children not being fed, “I’m concerned about children not being covered under Medicaid if that gets canceled.” Other programs targeted by DOGE impact her life:

“Today it’s the Department of Education,” Debbie said. “Next week, it might be Social Security. It might be Medicare. I’m on Medicare … I’m concerned.”

On Tuesday, Department of Education leaders announced plans to lay off more than 1,300 of its employees as part of an effort to halve the organization’s staff — a prelude to President Donald Trump’s plan to dismantle the agency.

ABC11 Raleigh:

Our friend Lauren Windsor of The Undercurrent brought the puppets.

As a practical matter, I-40 begins in Wilmington, runs the length of North Carolina, and extends west to Barstow, California, joining the legendary Route 66 in Oklahoma City. I’ve driven most of its 2,556.61 miles and drove 500 round-trip in North Carolina on Wednesday. One wonders how long it will be before DOGE will decide that federal highway funds that support placing rest areas about every 50 miles represent waste, fraud and abuse.

If the poors can eat cake, they can pee into empty bottles.

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