Jack Smith spoke last week at the University College London law school, which has now posted online the hour-long conversation, which I moderated. There are lots of interesting substantive aspects to the conversation, but what struck me most was that the talk permits you to get a measure of the man himself, and not the caricature of him that many depict. He comes across as sincere, thoughtful, by-the-book, and apolitical. A career person through and through.
It’s easy to see why the Republicans don’t want this guy testifying in public. He is clearly a very competent, articulate, straight-arrow. He will remind many people of what many prosecutors used to be like before we had beauty queens and shitposters running the DOJ.
A couple of weeks ago he gave a lecture at George Mason University and he said this:
“My career has been about the rule of law and I believe that today it is under attack like in no other period in our lifetimes.”
That may seem obvious but coming from someone like him it’s chilling. He’s seen all the evidence of the first term crimes. We don’t even have to imagine what’s happening now.
Media Matters reports on Glenn Beck advising the FBI on who to go after in their purge of leftists. He’s been “gathering the evidence” for years and back in the day when he was a huge star on the Tea Party circuit, he would lay it out in great, hilarious detail.
He’s back on the case:
“The FBI showed up to my house to discuss my TV show exposing Antifa’s network,” Beck posted to social media on Monday, referencing the umbrella term for a broad and decentralized grouping of militant far-left activists who say they oppose fascism. “If you are a member of Antifa or providing material or financial support for Antifa, I might be a little concerned because the FBI is DEADASS serious about investigating you.”
Beck appended a clip from his radio show in which he said that he had met for two hours on Saturday with agents sent at the behest of extremely online FBI Director Kash Patel.
“This is information that I first gave on Fox years ago,” he added. “Let me just say this: Finally, we have an administration and an FBI director that is willing to go in deep.”
Beck’s claim of FBI interest in his antifa report comes as President Donald Trump and his administration are attempting to reframe the concept of antifa as a framework to target their political enemies. Trump responded to the September killing of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk by seeking to implicate as many of his political opponents as possible, and he has ordered federal law enforcement, including the FBI and its Joint Terrorism Task Forces, to target nebulously defined “organized political violence.” In recent days, Republican officials have sought to blur the distinction between antifa activists and protesters who plan to participate in Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies.
On October 8, at Trump’s White House roundtable on antifa, Patel promised that his bureau would “find every single seed money, donor organization and funding mechanism that we have.”
That same day, Beck published to YouTube his “off the cuff” review of what he mocked as “ANTIFA’s ‘De-centralized’ Network.” He explicitly pitched his work as “a starting point for people at the FBI or Justice Department as they begin investigating leads.”
Beck’s list of purportedly antifa-linked organizations worthy of federal investigation meshed well with reports about the administration’s targets of interest, including Democratic megadonor George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and ActBlue, the platform Democratic candidates and affiliated organizations use to marshall small-donor fundraising.
If they have to go to Glenn Beck for investigation advice they are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Not that it isn’t dangerous. They’ve already shown they’re willing to indict on the thinnest of pretexts.
Here’s what he told them:
Beck has been waiting for this moment for almost 20 years. He almost disappeared before they finally found a use for his “research”:
It’s hard to know exactly what kind of historical moment your in when you’re at the center of the maelstrom. I feel strongly that this is a crucible in America like very few in our history and I struggle daily to tamp down the rising panic. But not everyone sees it that way to, which I find very weird. Whether because of propaganda or self-preservation or just plain different worldviews, we are not all on the same page.
One view, dominant at this point among mainstream liberals and centrists, is that the United States has entered a dangerous new era of authoritarian crisis. Followingaplaybook used in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, and other illiberal regimes, the Trump administration is attacking independent institutions such as the media and universities, turning the Justice Department and other government agencies into instruments of extortion and retaliation, manipulating official data, pardoning violent allies, dehumanizing marginalized communities, declaring endless emergencies, and preparing the military to suppress “the enemy from within.” The emerging authoritarian crisis is also a constitutionalcrisis, as an ever more emboldened and presidentialized executive branch sidelines Congress and the civil service, deploys troops domestically over the objections of state and local officials, and flirts with ignoring judicial rulings. Variously framing the threat as one of autocracy, kleptocracy, fascism, patrimonialism, gangsterism, or another cousin of authoritarianism, this view insists that things have ceased to be “normal.” American democracy is beginning to fall apart.
A second view, espoused by prominent voices on the left as well as some libertarians, asserts that Trump has not ushered in a new order so much as highlighted and exacerbated preexisting pathologies. It’s mainly more of the same. FollowingastandardRepublicanplaybook, his administration has embraced sweeping tax cuts, a selective gutting of economic and environmental regulations, and hostility to abortion and affirmative action. With some coarsening of the discourse and hardening of anti-immigrant policies, we could be in Ronald Reagan’s America. This through line is no cause for comfort. Whether styled as homegrown fascism, racial fascism, or simply the unreconstructed core of American political ideology, more of the same means more harsh immigration enforcement (as in Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” or Obama’s record-setting deportation program), more vilification of dissidents (as in the Red Scares or Nixon’s “Enemies List”), more expansion of the national security state, and more runaway deficits that fail to address runaway inequality. The real constitutional scandal is not the sudden arrival of “executive lawlessness”—the War on Terror had that in spades—but a long-festeringrot that has eaten away at our system’s ability to produce responsive governance and thereby created the conditions for Trump 2.0.
According to a third view, embraced by many of Trump’s advisors and supporters, U.S. politics are indeed undergoing transformation but in a familiar or at least not unprecedented way, as part of a process of constitutional regime change. Trump’s decisive Electoral College victory in 2024, after a campaign with more sharply defined stakes than in 2016, put a popular (if not quite majoritarian) imprimatur on such change. Followingaplaybook developed during the New Deal and refined in the civil rights era, Trump’s team is employing all the tools at its disposal to reshape the balance of power across state and society in line with campaign pledges to curb illegal immigration, shrink the federal workforce, restore religion in the public sphere, and advance a “colorblind” conception of racial equality. To be sure, some of these shifts may be alarming to those socialized in the prior regime. But that’s what happens in a constitutional democracy when voters choose the other side. And if there has been some overreach or misadventure, well, the same could be said of any regime change. This revolution in law and governance, moreover, isathearta “counterrevolution”—not so much a turn toward any foreign model as a return to principles that prevailed before the assaults of wokeism and Warren Court liberalism, the rise of the administrative state, and the proliferation of identitarian rights.
Yeah, I’ll pick door number one for $10 billion, Alex. As they say:
The stakes of this disagreement are high, the shape of it disorienting. From within each script, people in the others tend to look either dangerously complacent or risibly hysterical. Americans are deeply divided not just over partisan preferences or “alternative facts” but over the basic direction and meaning of our politics.
The piece goes on to flesh all this out in some very interesting ways. There are not a lot of solutions to offer except for one big one. Door number one and door number two can, and must, find common ground because together they constitute the majority. So far, it’s an uphill task.
I saw “One Battle After Another” the other day and was struck by the message which was both clarifying and daunting: saving our country is going to be, as the title suggests, one battle after another. I think we just have to gird ourselves for the fight.
I will admit that this has succeeded in freaking me out a little bit:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on Charlie Kirk’s show and said the quiet part way too loud: calling Kirk’s assassination a “domestic 9/11” and promising to “compile lists” of left-wing groups to investigate. Tim Miller breaks down how this rhetoric crosses every line and why this “war on terror 2.0” mentality is straight-up un-American.
Donald Trump has demonstrated his administration’s programmatic commitment to weaponizing the government to settle scores with political adversaries or weaken their opposition to him and his policies. Much of the fiercest public controversy has involved the Department of Justice and, so far, the president’s direction of the criminal prosecutions of old foes such as former FBI Director James Comey and New York State Attorney Letitia James. Now, according to Wall Street Journalreporting, his administration is turning its attention to an overhaul of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that would enable the agency to “pursue criminal inquiries of left-leaning groups” and “major Democratic donors.”
As reported, this is a full-on assault on a long-standing policy, expressed in law and norm, that the IRS should be kept clear of political misuse. President Nixon was impeached for attempting to abuse the IRS’s power for political gain. Following that incident, and with overwhelming bipartisan support, the tax code was amended to prohibit “the President, the Vice President, any employee of the executive office of the President, and any employee of the executive office of the Vice President” from “conduct[ing] or terminat[ing] an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.” The law imposes fines and imprisonment as penalties for violations, and it requires that any employee who receives any request or directive to violate the statute report it to the Inspector General for Tax Administration.
It is also a striking development because it comes some years after Republicans in Congress investigated alleged political abuse of the Service’s authority to grant or deny exemptions to nonprofits engaged in various forms of issue advocacy. To simplify a complicated story, the IRS Inspector General found that the IRS had discriminated against conservative organizations in the application of its power over exemptions. Democrats joined Republicans in decrying any such political misuse of tax regulatory authority but argued that the record pointed to “equal opportunity mismanagement and equal opportunity bedlam” that also affected progressive organizations. Congress subsequently enacted a freeze on all further rulemaking activity in this area.
Now the Trump administration appears to be breaking with the bipartisan consensus that the IRS should be insulated from politics. And it is notable that reports of this weaponization policy have surfaced within days of a federal court decision, in Freedom Path v. Internal Revenue Service, that highlighted the dangers of the IRS’s power to grant or deny exemptions from tax for organizations active in the political process. The case brought by Freedom Path, a nonprofit social-welfare organization that supports conservative fiscal policies and has financed ads calling for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, illustrates how this intersection of tax regulation and politics is a problem at all times—and, now, one that could become far worse under the reported plans for IRS weaponization.
Bessent is nuts, as Tim Miller amply demonstrated in that rant above. And I guess he wants a big piece of the police state action.
I would just add that the the Wall St. Journal reports that the guy they’ve put in charge of this is a hard core MAGA fellow by the name of Gary Shapely who was a big “whistleblower” in the Hunter Biden case and was ousted as head of the IRS under Trump after only three days. Let’s just say I wouldn’t be too sanguine that this is a person of good judgement.
CNN offers a wrap-up on the Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s CNN town hall on the government shutdown. I assembled clips below, but wanted to grab this quote from CNN:
[AOC] said Democrats won’t accept a short-term extension of those subsidies, including for one year, a proposal she described as an effort to delay the political blow of skyrocketing health insurance premiums until after next year’s midterm elections.
“I think we know what we will not accept, and what we will not accept is for the ACA premiums to skyrocket on the American people. What we will not accept is the doubling of these premiums. And what we will not accept is allowing the teetering of this system to collapse right before everyone’s eyes,” she said.
A friend on Tuesday reported that her health care premiums are slated to jump from under $200/month to over $900 if the GOP kills off the subsidies. That’s far more than double. More than double is the national average.
AOC: The problem is that the Trump administration, folks like Russ Vought, they think that destroying our health care, making sure that housing is too expensive to live in, that jacking up the cost of our groceries—they think all of this is about hurting Democrats. What they are… pic.twitter.com/2J7Z6OfYx7
AOC: Right now, House Democrats are in Washington, Senate Democrats are in Washington. Even Senate Republicans, I believe, are still in Washington. The only people who are not in Washington, are the over 200 elected Republicans in the House because Mike Johnson refuses to call… pic.twitter.com/HB5zfHZpdg
No “measly one year extension of the ACA” just so Republicans can get past the 2026 midterms.
AOC: Let me tell you why it's laughable because it's cynical. Republicans want to sign on to just a one little extra year of these ACA subsidies. You want to know why? What's happening next year? Midterm elections. They want to extend these subsidies just a year extra so that… pic.twitter.com/Ieca9LOsHM
Sanders: Are you ready for a radical idea? Let's do what the American people want. Do a poll. Do a poll on CNN. Ask people. Ask people. How many do you think it's a great idea to give $1 trillion in tax breaks to the 1% and decimate the American health care system? And if you do… pic.twitter.com/ig249b53lI
No IOUs or “pinky promises” accepted from Republicans on extending ACA subsidies, insists AOC. “That’s not the business that I’m in.” She wants “ink on paper.”
Collins: Let’s say the WH says they will extend these subsidies…What does that need to look like before you would vote to reopen the government? Is a commitment from the WH enough?
Sanders: The president is a very honest man. And if he says something, man, you can take it to… pic.twitter.com/wktS8M2o0f
Sanders: I worry very much that we are increasingly becoming an oligarchic form of society, where a very small number of people not only control our economy, but through their campaign contributions, have huge influence over both political parties. And if there was ever a time in… pic.twitter.com/7GkwwdDMZP
AOC: And they are able to radicalize a generation of young boys in particular, away from healthy masculinity and into an insecure masculinity that requires the domination of others who are poorer, browner, darker, or a different gender than them. pic.twitter.com/Ci1JjgrpV5
AOC: We heard that CNN is not disclosing the party affiliation of the federal workers that are here tonight. And that's for a reason—because there is a fear over political retaliation by this administration and a singling out and isolating of career federal workers based on party… pic.twitter.com/pEu1YM21fg
AOC: You’re damn right that it’s a Democratic priority to keep people from getting poisoned, from dangerous chemicals that are being dumped and causing cancer in people without their knowledge.
You’re damn right that it’s a Democratic priority to bring down the cost of housing and mortgages and rent, and you’re damn right that it’s a democratic priority to raise the minimum wage in this country, to allow people to get a fair shot at the American dream.
If they want to say that that’s a Democratic priority, they’re right
AOC: You're damn right that it's a Democratic priority to keep people from getting poisoned, from dangerous chemicals that are being dumped and causing cancer in people without their knowledge.
You're damn right that it's a Democratic priority to bring down the cost of housing… pic.twitter.com/l54KfHAjCh
“And until there is accountability for people who refuse to work, to work, then we’re going to continue to be in this cycle.”
AOC: They're saying that they're doing all this work. They are twiddling their thumbs and talking to each other. I've never seen people who hate working so much in my life. I mean, genuinely, they won't even pick up the phone.
AOC: The VP has been trafficking this other misconception, saying that the emergency medicaid program is doing is providing health care to undocumented people…
The truth of the matter is that we have a federal law, as it should be, that any person who walks into a hospital in desperate need of medical attention receives that medical attention, regardless of their insurance status and regardless of who they are.
And I don’t know about you, but me as a human being, I don’t want to live in a world where if a human being is struck by a car or is getting rushed into a hospital, that the people in the E.R. Surgical room are asking for your insurance information or asking for documents before they save your life
AOC: The VP has been trafficking this other misconception, saying that the emergency medicaid program is doing is providing health care to undocumented people…
The truth of the matter is that we have a federal law, as it should be, that any person who walks into a hospital in… pic.twitter.com/tDU6RYiJix
AOC: I don't care if someone likes me or not. That will never change the fact that I'm going to fight for them to have health care. I want MAGA to have health care. I want MAGA to be paid a living wage.
AOC: If I, as a Democrat, disagree with you as a Republican, I'm not going to question your allegiance to this country. And I believe that when we devolve into that, that is when we are actually stoking division—when we call those who disagree with us un-american—that is what is… pic.twitter.com/fcRYsCZUdD
Sanders: Saturday, millions of people are going to come out on a No Kings day. Speaker Johnson said this is a hate America rally because people are coming out expressing their concerns.. It’s not a hate America rally, it's a love America rally. pic.twitter.com/w6Sio5XJdg
The man angrily shouting out of his car window on Wednesday was barely decipherable above the traffic noice and music from my Bluetooth speaker behind me. He said something about the number of words on my sign: NO SECRET POLICE. (The others side promoted the local No Kings rally this Saturday.)
I figured it out later. The sign was a radical leftist lie, Angry Driver thought, and the real message was NO POLICE. Like “Defund the Police” after George Floyd’s murder.
Fine, I thought. What part of losing your Bill of Rights protections to a totalitarian dictator backed by masked secret police makes your heart sing, I’m proud to be an American | Where at least I know I’m free ?
It is remarkable how many neighbors have lost the plot on the whole 1776 and “We the People” thing. It may be that Angry Driver is not paying attention to the lawless behavior of ICEmen in Chicago and Portland. But likely the idea of busting heads on people he thinks are not like him gives Angry Driver a visceral thrill. He’ll have a rude awakening when it’s someone he knows or he himself is thrown to the ground and dragged off my masked thugs in violation of multiple once-constitutional rights.
“This is not law enforcement; this is the playbook of authoritarian regimes,” an attorney said.
"This behavior is a painful parallel to the days of the KKK patrolling the streets with their faces covered, terrorizing people of color." https://t.co/Aw7Je8Ie6j
“Sorry, the only king is Jesus,” spat a woman passenger in another passing car. That non sequitur was her reply to the No Kings ad.
It is remarkable, too, how many neighbors have lost the plot on the whole Jesus thing.
Former youth pastor John Pavlovitz experienced that at and after Wake Forest Pride Fest last weekend. It was all rainbows and music and dance, “a glorious thing to behold.” Until the “Christians” showed up, “a sullen, stone-faced cadre of almost exclusively young white men from local (and out of state) Evangelical churches.”
One of the disrupters later posted that he and his partners were celebrating that “the Gospel was preached.” What he doesn’t understand is that their “Gospel” provided no good news, brought no love for neighbor, exuded no joy, and was bereft of Jesus.
All that stuff came from those they were targeting.
One of the protesters on Wednesday accosted Pavlovitz in the grocery store:
The first thing out of his mouth was, “Do you want to make enemies or do you want to have a conversation?”
I said, “You come screaming through bullhorns, waving signs about eternal damnation, and invading people’s personal space, and you’re gonna try and gaslight me into believing you were interested in conversation?”
He wasn’t pleased.
The takeaway was that his accuser’s anger wasn’t about the LGBTQ community, Pavlovitz concluded. “They’re out to get rid of everyone who isn’t like them.”
Like the Donald Trump administration’s lawless law-enforcement. Or like Jesus-less Christians. Americans for Un-Freedom mean to wring America out of America in America’s name. Founders be praised.
“Everyone’s on my side now,” Trump told advisers this summer. “They were fighting me last time.”
He was talking a bout the business community but he might as well have been talking about the Republican party:
Inside the White House, top advisers joke that they are ruling Congress with an “iron fist,” according to people who have heard the comments. Steve Bannon, the influential Trump ally, likened Congress to the Duma, the Russian assembly that is largely ceremonial.
I think that’s right. In fact, I think we should call the GOP Congress The Duma from now on. That’s what it is and the members are totally fine with it.
Increasing prices of goods…. increased the prices of goods? THAT cant be right.
How about this?
As Americans continue to struggle with high costs and looming tariffs, 5.1% of those with auto loans are delinquent on at least one account as of the first quarter of 2025. By state, that figure ranges from 3.2% to 9.8%.
And:
🚨 JUST IN: CREDIT CARD DELINQUENCIES REACHING HIGHEST POINT SINCE 2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS. pic.twitter.com/0uliwpt3s6
I still can’t believe that I’m positively quoting Bill Kristol but when he’s right, he’s right. And he’s more right about Trump and the threat he poses than some of my erstwhile allies on the other side who are more interested in pursuing their personal political vendettas than facing down fascism. (I’m not interested in that right now. I’ll join the circular firing squad when the AR-15s pointed at my head have been disarmed.)
Any and all critics of the administration are now at risk of legal assault. Following up on their earlier executive order and national security memorandum, the administration and its allies routinely claim that peaceful protests are controlled by “antifa”—which they in turn claim is a criminal and terrorist conspiracy. And they assert that such speech is a cover for and an incitement to violence. The administration is thus laying the groundwork for subjecting speech critical of it to suppression and prosecution. There are indications that new crackdowns on dissent, on dissenters, and on the institutions that employ them and their funders, are imminent.
It’s of course comical when President Trump says, as he did yesterday, that
You see people holding this gorgeous sign with beautiful wood, beautiful cardboard, wood, everything, everything’s perfect, paint job, and they’re all the same. There are thousands of them, you know, that they weren’t made in the basement out of love. They were made by anarchists.
Beware of the well-organized anarchists at work!
It really is too funny.
He goes on to urge people to join the No Kings protest this weekend, ruefully admitting that some of his old friends find it hilarious that someone such as him would be endorsing protests against the government. But he does it, saying rightly:
… what’s not comical, what is in fact sinister, is the assumption here that there would be something wrong if protest signs weren’t being made in basements but in print shops; and that it would be wrong to attempt to organize others who agree with their message. This is all protected speech. But the president and his administration barely conceal any longer that they want to suppress both free speech and free political activity.
There is no doubt about it. In fact, they seem to be preparing to provoke violence at the DC protest at least and I wouldn’t be surprised if they do it elsewhere. Look at this:
Supercut of comments from Republicans today alone about the No Kings rallies taking place this weekend. This has to be some of the worst, and most anti-American, coordinated messaging of all time. pic.twitter.com/6UC38vrx8s
The Founders tried to construct a government that featured all kinds of guardrails to protect liberty: separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances. They didn’t want to count too much on uncommon courage or wisdom from the people. As Federalist #51 puts it,
A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs…These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.
But the “auxiliary precautions” that were to supply “the defect of better motives” haven’t proved, in this crisis, up to the task. We do ultimately depend on the common sense and common courage of the people. “No Kings” is an expression of protest. But it is also an affirmation of responsibility. We the people ordained and established our free government. It’s up to us to keep it.
I seriously hope that many millions show up this weekend. If people become too frightened to make their voices heard we may already be lost.
