A truly disturbing article in The Atlantic is one I need to reread to truly absorb. Noah Hawley created the FX series Fargo and Alien: Earth. What he learned from three nights at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in 2018 carries the ominous tenor of dystopian science fiction. Even worse for it being reality.
Bezos had recently beome the world’s second centibillionaire, his wealth then half what it is today. Wealth on such a scale, Hawley sensed, removes one almost completely from the moral universe. Where there is no moral universe, there is no arc, no bending toward justice, and no justice. Visiting this stop on a circuit of ideas festivals revealed just how alien is the world of the ultra rich. Not just their world is alien, but the metahumans themselves (gift link):
This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.
Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.
When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.
When, now and again, a politician proposes a wealth tax, the rich react with horror at the prospect of their agency being constrained by mere mortals. How dare society make any claim on them? Just as Hawley observes.
I’ve long seen the modern corporation as a kind of Frankenstein monster, a legal alien of our own creation and loosed upon the world. Let them grow large enough and they become the world-dominating Weyland-Yutani, the “company” of the Aliens franchise. Nation states become mere corporate tools. Humans become mere inputs to exploit. You see it already in “human resources.”
Fifteen years ago, I wrote about the resentment the rich feel about educating the golden gooses that fill their plates and coffers:
In the Atlantic’s “The Rise of the New Global Elite,” Chrystia Freeland describes the super-rich as “a nation unto themselves,” more connected to each other than to their countries or their neighbors. Freeland writes that “the business elite view themselves increasingly as a global community, distinguished by their unique talents and above such parochial concerns as national identity, or devoting ‘their’ taxes to paying down ‘our’ budget deficit.” Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, explains that globalization means, “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business …” Why should it be?
In a global economy driven more and more by bottom-line thinking, public education is just another community expense the elite would rather not bear, isn’t it? The rich can afford private schools for their children and have little need for educated workers in the multiple cities where they own houses. How much education do gardeners and waiters really need anyway?
But allow those legal fictions to grow planet-sized in their reach, and they spawn trillionaires who exist in a post-human universe where meat sacks such as yourselves are no longer fellow crew members on a shared celestial lifeboat. It’s their super yacht. Serve or be thrown off.
It seems more and more likely that this was the reason Melania gave that weird press statement last week:
In 2023, Amanda Ungaro, a Brazilian model who was brought to the United States on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane when she was 16, was trying to build a new life in South Florida with her teenage son, far removed from the modeling world she had grown up in New York.
Two years later, Ungaro, 41, was bound in handcuffs and thrown into an immigration detention center in Miami-Dade where she spent three months of misery before being abruptly transported to Louisiana and then deported back to Brazil.
Ungaro, a former diplomat in the first Trump administration, came to the attention of police in April 2024 after authorities received an anonymous tip that she and her husband, Joao Araujo, a Brazilian plastic surgeon, were conducting cosmetic procedures without a license at their wellness center in Aventura.
Her arrest by Aventura police last June led to her being deported to Brazil in October. Ungaro claims her deportation was instigated by her former partner, Paolo Zampolli, a longtime Trump ally and a Trump administration official. She accused Zampolli of using his influence to pressure the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport her to gain custody of their 16-year-old son. Now she is fighting back.
Ungaro, who was part of President Donald Trump and Melania’s social circle for years, issued a number of angry posts on X directed at the first lady, the president as well as former U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi. “I will tear down your corrupt system, even if it’s the last thing I do in my life. I will go all the way — I am not afraid. Maybe you should be afraid of what I know … of who you are, and who your husband is,” she said in a post dated April 8 that tagged the first lady’s X account.
She threatened legal action against the first lady “and your pedophile husband.”
To Bondi, she said in a post: “Do you fully understand the information I possess regarding you and the individuals associated with you? I strongly advise you to consider the seriousness of these matters. Any actions taken against me or attempts to escalate this situation could have significant legal consequences.”…
“I have nothing left to lose in my life,” Ungaro wrote on X that same day. “I will tear down the entire system —be careful with me bitch.”
Does she have any goods? Who knows? But she was on the inside of the Epstein scene as an underage model during the period when Trump, Epstein and Melania were all partying in New York and Palm Beach. Clearly she was close to them because he actually made her the U.N. ambassador to Grenada in the first term. And now she’s been treated very badly by the Trumpers who intervened on her ex-husband’s behalf in a custody battle and had her deported. Nothing could be more enraging and if she does have information, they played with fire.
If I had to guess I would think that she may very well have the goods but will never actually reveal it. Trump is the most powerful man in the world and he’s a vengeful monster. In fact, she may have already doomed herself by saying what she’s said. But you never know. She may just throw caution to the wind and let fly. Melania certainly thinks she might.
The NY Times uncovered a tremendous scoop about the Supreme Court this week (gift link) that proves this majority is just another arm of the GOP (as if that was ever in doubt.)
On Feb. 5, the internal correspondence obtained by The Times shows, the chief justice circulated a blast of a memo, insisting that the court halt the president’s plan. His arguments were forceful, quick, and filled with confident predictions. The court was going to give the case a full hearing eventually, he forecast. At that point, the justices would vote to overturn the Obama plan, he said, because it went beyond the boundaries of the Clean Air Act.
For now, the chief justice contended that the court had to act immediately because the energy industry “must make changes to business plans today.” “Absent a stay, the Clean Power Plan will cause (and is causing) substantial and irreversible reordering of the domestic power sector before this court has an opportunity to review its legality,” he wrote.
In his final paragraph, the chief justice again told colleagues that the E.P.A. had done an end run around the court with the mercury regulation just months before and said the agency had signaled that it was planning to do the same thing again. The chief justice cited an unusual source for that last point, one that would not ordinarily figure in a Supreme Court opinion: an interview with the BBC in which the E.P.A. administrator at the time, Gina McCarthy, had said “we are baking” the Clean Power Plan “into the system.”
“The comments of the E.P.A. administrator herself indicate that without immediate action from this court, this rule will become functionally irreversible.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
In the memo, he weighed no potential downsides of his proposal and considered no alternatives. Justice Breyer responded later that day to the chief’s memo but did not address all its points. Such stays were unusual, he wrote, stating his objections mildly.
He skipped over the question of whether the plan was lawful, asking only: Why the rush? The circuit court had already set a date to hear the case in June. The first deadline for power plants to reduce their emissions was six years away; full compliance was not required until 2030. That was plenty of time for the case to play out through the legal system.
The chief wrote right back the next day sounding irritated and blunt. Speed was vital, he said, because environmental regulation was going to be very expensive for states and the power industry. The sums involved could approach $480 billion, he asserted, and industry groups would have to start preparations immediately.
“Without a stay of the E.P.A.’s rule, both the states and private industry will suffer irreparable harm from a rule that is — in my view — highly unlikely to survive,” he wrote. He was predicting the ultimate outcome of a case that had barely begun to be litigated.
As you can see, he was very worried that the GOP agenda would be imperiled if they followed the usual processes. He came to this conclusion without a full hearing by the lower courts or seeing any of the opposing arguments. He just “knew” that it would be a bad outcome and he was determined to stop it.
Therefore, it’s not entirely surprising that he is using exactly the same procedure to help Donald Trump use exactly the same tool Obama did, thereby proving that this is not about proper procedure or adherence to the constitution but simply a way to advance policies he, and the conservative majority, prefer. Worse than that they are enabling Trump to use the tactic that so inflamed Roberts, namely “you can just do stuff” and once it’s done it’s “already baked in.” Apparently, Roberts thinks Trump doing that is great leadership and he’s all for it. Hypocrisy or inconsistency are no longer operative when it comes to the Supreme Court.
Since then, even as the court’s approval ratings dropped, applications like the one it confronted a decade ago have proliferated, swamping the court’s ordinary work.
This is partly a consequence of a gridlocked Congress and presidents willing to push the boundaries of executive power, particularly Mr. Trump. But it is also the result of the justices’ decision to entertain emergency requests like the one in 2016, warping procedures that had developed over centuries.
In an appearance this month at the University of Alabama, Justice Sonia Sotomayor reflected on the unceasing flood of emergency applications. “We’ve done it to ourselves,” she said.
This article in NOTUS about that ad in the Oklahoma Governors race is interesting. It discusses a difference in approaches among the MAGA right in the upcoming election. On the one side is … that. On the other is the slightly less crazy approach favored by the current Governor Kevin Stitt who has actually bucked the president from time to time:
When I interviewed McCall in late January, I asked him about the banana ad. A law enacted in 2023, when McCall was House speaker, expressly prohibits gender-transition procedures for minors. Was there an effort underway to roll back the bill? Did the state need to pass an even more stringent prohibition? “There are a lot of people in the state of Oklahoma that are concerned about those value issues, and they want to know where you stand on them,” he responded. “It’s not the only thing we are talking about and have been talking about, but that’s important to the Republican electorate.”
Polling suggests he isn’t exactly wrong. In a January survey conducted by Oklahoma pollster Cole Hargrave Snodgrass and Associates, 53% of likely Republican primary voters said cultural issues such as banning Sharia law and transgender surgeries for youth would be vital when deciding which candidate to support. Just 39% said those topics were less important than day-to-day government functions, namely public education, tax policy and infrastructure.
And yet the favorite in the Republican primary, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, is taking a different tack. To be clear, Drummond is no centrist. He has frequently voiced support for the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts and criticized the current governor, Kevin Stitt — who is barred by term limits from running again — for collaborating with the Biden administration to resettle hundreds of Afghan refugees in 2021.
But Drummond also believes McCall has overestimated voters’ appetite for culture-war issues. The electorate, he maintains, is more interested in quality-of-life questions, like improving the state’s abysmal public education rankings and reining in soaring homeowner-insurance rates. “Right now in Oklahoma, you cannot wake up a male yesterday and wake up a female today and compete in sports,” Drummond told me in February. “It’s not permissible today to chop your banana in two as a minor. Now, if you want to have gender-altering surgery as an 18-year-old, knock yourself out. I don’t think it’s a good idea, but these issues that one candidate is promoting are really solved issues.”
As I mentioned, the current Governor takes the second tack. He’s the president of the Governor’s association and is the one who told Trump that Republicans would not attend if he didn’t invite the Democrats to the White House as is long-standing tradition. Trump backed down. Maybe Oklahoma is not as anti-woke as the rest of the red states but that would be interesting in itself. Why would that be? It’s as Republican as they come.
I don’t know how much influence this actually has but it must have some. These people are major parts of the right wing ecosystem and have commanded a great deal of attention, which is the greatest commodity in our society:
Prominent conservative pundits − from former Fox News hosts Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and podcaster Candace Owens − are suggesting the president is unwell.
The former Republican congresswoman from Georgia said she’s been “shocked and horrified” at the president’s recent rhetoric, such as his warning that “a whole civilization will die” and Iranians will be “living in Hell” if his demands aren’t met.
Jones, founder of Infowars and a longtime Trump supporter, said during a March 31 episode of his new program, “The Alex Jones Show,” that GOP incumbents running for reelection need to “cut the bait” on the president before the 2026 midterm elections.
“And he does babble and, you know, sound like the brain’s not doing too hot,” he said.
If you combine the voters who follow those guys — who also say they will vote Republican no matter what — with the sort of old school Republicans who really don’t want to talk about “mutilizaton” all the time, it might be a majority in a state like Oklahoma.
Who knows? But it’s worth keeping an eye on. If this is happening in a red state, the swing states are definitely up for grabs.
This piece in the WSJ (gift link)shows that he is having a lot of trouble dealing with the fact that he has screwed up — bigly:
It was Good Friday afternoon in a nearly empty West Wing soon after the president learned that an American jet had been shot down in Iran, with two airmen missing. Trump screamed at aides for hours. The Europeans aren’t helping, he said repeatedly. Gas prices averaged $4.09. Images of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis—one of the biggest international policy failures of a presidency in recent times—had been looming large in his mind, people who have spoken to him said.
“If you look at what happened with Jimmy Carter…with the helicopters and the hostages, it cost them the election,” Trump had said in March. “What a mess.”
Trump demanded that the military go get them immediately. But the U.S. hadn’t been on the ground in Iran since the government overthrow that led to the hostage crisis, and they needed to figure out how to get into treacherous Iranian terrain and avoid Tehran’s own military. Aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said.
Yikes. If they have the capacity to keep him out of the room maybe they should do it all the time?
Seriously, that’s just terrifying. If he’s that nuts we have very serious problems on our hands.
Apparently, after the rescue he was so high from that “victory” he went to bed at 2AM and six hours later on Easter morning he wrote that inane post demanding “open the fuckin’ strait you crazy bastards.”
Trump has resisted sending American soldiers to take Kharg Island, for example, the launch point for 90% of Iran’s oil exports. While he was told the mission would succeed, and the territory’s capture would give the U.S. access to the strait, he worried there would be unacceptably high American casualties, the people said. They’ll be sitting ducks, the president said.
Still, he has made risky pronouncements without input from his national security team—including his post about plans to destroy the Iranian civilization—saying seeming unstable could help spur the Iranians to negotiate.
He IS unstable. Obviously.
Soon after Trump’s holiday post, aides fielded calls from Republican senators and Christian leaders. They asked, why would he say “Praise be to Allah” on Easter morning? Why would he use the F-word? Trump swears profusely in private but usually calibrates it in public and on social media.
When one adviser later asked him about it, he said he came up with the Allah idea himself. He said he wanted to seem as unstable and insulting as possible, believing it could bring the Iranians to the table, senior administration officials said. It was a language, he said, the Iranians would understand. But he was also concerned about the fallout. “How’s it playing?” he asked advisers. (Iran’s parliamentary speaker called the threat reckless.)
On the Tuesday after Easter, he issued the most dramatic ultimatum of his presidency, saying that unless Iran struck a deal in 12 hours, a whole civilization would die. Again, the post was improvisational, and not part of a national security plan, the administration officials said.
So, he tried the Madman Theory once and then did it again even though it didn’t work the first time? I have my doubts. I suspect he just gets mad and spouts off. This isn’t some kind of strategy. And he’s being aided and abetted by his staff.
People around the U.S. and the world were gripped with fear and confusion about what the president intended to do. Behind the scenes, top aides saw the move as a way to spur negotiations in a war the president was desperately ready to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told others privately it was language that might actually bring the Iranians to negotiate.
How’d it work out, Marco? (He’s supposed to be the same one…)
Because Trump is a child he thought he could “scare” the Iranians into crawling on their bellies and begging for mercy. They’re all delusional. Trump may be a madman but Iran isn’t a bunch of GOP cowards.
He’s also a full blown megalomaniac:
Still, Trump himself wasn’t up for re-election—and he thought a win over Iran would give him a chance to reshape the global order in a way he couldn’t in his first term, two top officials said. Trump said early in the military operation that if we get this right, we are saving the world, according to a person who heard his comments.
Certifiable.
He’s just incredibly ignorant about how the world works:
The strait has been a particular source of frustration. Before the U.S. went to war, Trump told his team that Iran’s government would likely capitulate before closing the strait, and that even if Tehran tried, the U.S. military could handle it, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Some of the president’s advisers were caught off guard that tanker traffic would grind to a halt so quickly after the bombing began, according to a person in contact with the White House.
Trump has since marveled at the ease with which the strait was closed. A guy with a drone can shut it down, Trump has said to people, expressing belated irritation that the key waterway was so vulnerable.
Maybe if he could stop obsessing about his stupid ballroom and child “mutilizaton” for a few minutes and pay attention, he would have heard his advisers tell him that. Or even read something that doesn’t talk about what a great man he is. He might learn the things that most of us already know.
Trump’s top aides have taken turns telling the president that he should limit the impromptu interviews because they were only convincing the public he had contradictory messages. At times, Trump would joke with Leavitt that he had talked to a reporter and made big news, but she would have to wait and see what it was, White House officials said. For a bit, he agreed to curb them—then soon returned.
[…]
After Trump’s subsequent threat to destroy Iranian civilization, White House officials talked to Pakistani counterparts about mediating a cease-fire. Trump was too mad at the Europeans for any of them to serve the role, administration officials said.
As the world waited on the president’s 8 p.m. deadline, Trump flitted between topics, aides said. He talked to officials about endorsements in an Indiana state race. His team prepped for the midterms. He listened to officials talk about cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence policy. He also asked Wiles and Steve Witkoff, the U.S.’s chief negotiator with Iran, where things stood. Push them to a deal, he told Witkoff repeatedly.
He’s all over the place. He’s fundraising with fervor and spending an inordinate amount of time on the ballroom considering himself the general contractor. I guess being president is his side gig.
At another gathering, one night after threatening to end Iranian civilization, Trump stood in the White House with donors and top staff for a reception ahead of America’s 250th celebration this summer. He mused about giving himself the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor, designed to honor bravery, courage and sacrifice, according to people who were at the reception.
He then told a story about why he said he deserved it: In his first term as he flew into Iraq for a surprise holiday visit to the troops, his jet descended in the dark toward an unlit runway. In dramatic fashion, he counted down the feet to the plane landing, and recalled how scary it was. The pilots kept reassuring him, he said, and they landed safely.
He couldn’t get the medal, he said, because White House counsel David Warrington, who was standing nearby at the event, wouldn’t allow it.
Leavitt says he was joking. I would guess he sort of was but not really. He wouldn’t have told the Iraq story if he was — it would be self-deprecating if he was kidding and Trump never, ever does that.
The man is an ignorant, malignant narcissist with unlimited power. He’s so out of his depth that we are having to hang on by our fingernails, hoping against hope that his luck holds out and he doesn’t destroy the world. It’s all we have.
Progressives are destroying everything you hold dear.
Like a modern-day Paul Revere, Clarence Thomas is sounding the alarm: Progressives are an existential threat, determined to destroy all you hold dear, unless you are willing to sacrifice and fight them with everything you have. Perhaps you think that’s a bit aggressive coming from a Supreme Court justice charged with making dispassionate decisions about the Constitution and the rule of law. But he made his position clear in an April 15 speech before invited faculty and students at the University of Texas at Austin. You have been warned.
The speech was supposed to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which the nation will be celebrating this summer. (For his part, Donald Trump is planning an IndyCar street race around Washington, D.C., and a UFC fight on the White House lawn.) Thomas used the opportunity to charge that “progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” adding that the ideology “holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.”
It does?
This is well-trod philosophical ground — referencing “negative” and “positive” rights, natural law and all the usual back and forth about originalism and whether the Constitution is living or static. We know where Thomas says he stands on those arguments, although these days he seems perfectly willing to throw precedent in the trash and back authoritarian policies if it suits his ideological whim.
Nonetheless, it was an interesting speech, and a highly political one — mainly because the justice chose to hark back to the original Progressive Movement that began in the 1890s and lasted until the 1920s as a way to attack those who call themselves progressives today. Thomas spent an inordinate amount of time attacking Woodrow Wilson as progressivism’s intellectual and spiritual leader, when I would guess that most people who identify that way today couldn’t tell you when he was president much less what he believed in. And if they do know who he was, they would almost certainly reject vast swathes of his philosophy. He was, after all, an unreconstructed racist and eugenicist — something Thomas seems to suggest is a feature of progressivism, which could not be more wrong.
At the heart of the movement, he suggested, was a scorn for the country. “You will not be surprised to learn that the progressives had a great deal of contempt for us, the American people,” the justice said. “Before he entered politics, Wilson would describe the American people as ‘selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn and foolish.’” The 28th president, Thomas said, “aspired to be like Germany, where the people, he said admiringly, were ‘docile and acquiescent.’”
You see where this is going. “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration was based,” he said, before adding, “Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people.”
That’s quite an indictment.
It’s true that there was a faction of the left that identified as communist and admired the Soviet Union from the time of the October Revolution and into the late 1940s and 1950s. But very few of those one would call progressives, such as Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, had those leanings. As for 20th-century fascism, there was indeed a strong attraction to the ideology among a certain group of Americans — but they were on the right, not the left. In other words, Thomas’ view of the philosophy isn’t completely wrong in some of the historical detail, but it’s as relevant to today’s politics as the Whigs or the Know-Nothings of the mid-1800s.
Throughout the speech, Thomas often used past tense in describing the movement. But the point he was making was evident — the ideology it unleashed remains a clear and present danger. At several turns, the justice shifted to present tense, and he did not mince words: “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government.” It “is not possible,” he declared, for the Declaration and progressivism “to coexist forever.”
Coming from the mouth of an associate justice of the Supreme Court, those words — and their implications — are jaw-dropping and cause for alarm. If you read between the lines, he is saying that the country is at war, and the battles are not just political or philosophical. They are also spiritual. But Thomas’ attack on the left is really just a slightly more elegant indictment than the ones you might read on an obscure Reddit thread, or have read on an old Usenet forum back in the 1990s. His argument — that the left is determined to take away individual freedom and destroy the Constitution — is an old one, and it’s as stale and tired as it gets. This being the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding, he was clever enough to attach it to a defense of the Declaration of Independence, all the while presumably knowing very well that its author, Thomas Jefferson, said that “it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual Constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation…” Were he alive today, Jefferson would likely have been among the first to sign on to the fundamental progressive philosophy that the Constitution is a living document designed to adapt and change as society evolves.
But Clarence Thomas, like many conservatives in this misbegotten era, suffers from Fox News brainrot, a condition that encourages them to wallow in the bitterness of their own experience while believing the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of people who refuse to accept the way things are supposed to work. The perspective of Thomas and others like him has become so warped that they can work themselves into a paranoid frenzy about “progressivism” wielding government power at the expense of the individual, even as they defend a president who is systematically tearing up the Constitution and setting it on fire. In his speech, Thomas said that many Americans no longer accept that “all men are created equal” and deserving of “unalienable rights” protected by limited government. He’s right about that. But it’s his own compatriots who feel that way, not progressives.
Following his speech, Thomas took some questions from the audience. When one person asked him about friendship on the court, the man who had just spent nearly an hour ripping progressives to shreds and drawing parallels to Nazis and mass murderers replied, “I joined the court that dealt with differences as friends, as we respected each other. And I don’t know how that civility — I don’t know how you bring it back in the current environment with social media and name-calling and all people accusing each other of various things and animus.”
Contrasts in Jamie Ager’s NC-11 campaign against Republican incumbent Rep. Chuck Edwards will reach beyond the two men’s occupations. Ager is a fourth-generation farmer from a storied political family. * Edwards owns six McDonald’s franchises. Also at issue will be the region’s ongoing recovery from the devastation from Hurricane Helene’s deadly visit on Sept. 27, 2024. And the pace of it. Over a year and a half later, WNC is still waiting for promised federal funds.
Helene caused $60 billion in damage across North Carolina. For all of Edwards’s cozying up to the Trump administration in his R+5 district, the region had seen only 9 percent of promised recovery monies, Gov. Josh Stein (D) noted last fall. Stein nevertheless requested another $13.5 billion for storm recovery from Congress this month.
Helene recovery also will be an issue in former Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) bid for the open U.S. Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Thom Tillis. Cook’s Political ranks the race Lean D.
To get a sense of Edwards, consider his trolling a town hall crowd in Asheville last March. Or his lending his campaign $250,000, then collecting interest when he repaid himself 2 years later (Asheville Watchdog). Or his response to Leslie Boyd, a former beat reporter who turned activist after the death of her son (The Assembly):
Boyd’s son Mike died from colon cancer in 2008; he was uninsured due to a pre-existing condition. She shared this with Edwards when he was a member of the state House, she said, while she was advocating for Medicaid expansion.
“His first question was whether my son had a job when he got sick,” Boyd recalled. “Nobody had asked me that before. And I was stunned. I said, ‘Are you implying that my son was too lazy to deserve to live?’ He said, ‘No, but you know, a lot of people just want a handout.’”
A spokesperson for Edwards’ office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
After a small (4-10 person), weekly sidewalk protest in front of an Edwards-owned McDonald’s in Hendersonville, NC grew to 40-some and briefly moved inside on March 15, Edwards sent Boyd a letter banning her from his six properties.
Freight is back on track
In better news, rail service to WNC from the east returned this weekend for the first time since Helene hit in Sept. 2024 and washed out large sections of track (Blue Ridge Public Radio):
The railway, known as the Old Fort Loops, has been a lifeline for many local businesses. The first train since Helene will roll through this weekend — and that has rail advocates excited.
The twisting, turning stretch of railway known as the Old Fort Loops runs about 13 miles between Old Fort and Swannanoa. Climbing more than 1,000 feet through the Blue Ridge Mountains, it’s one of the most treacherous sections of rail in the country.
The rail route crosses over the Eastern Continental Divide east of Asheville.
The railway sustained heavy damage from Helene, and for months, it wasn’t clear whether the owner, Norfolk Southern, would rebuild it. Finally, last May, the construction began. And now, less than a year later, the first freight train is about to roll through since the storm.
Norfolk Southern posted on Saturday, “The 59‑car westbound train traveled from Hickory and Old Fort before entering the iconic Old Fort Loops, climbing the mountains through tunnels and sweeping horseshoe turns on its way toward Asheville.”
Speaking of tunnels.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee placed Jamie Ager’s NC-11 race on its Red to Blue list as a potential flip in February. Cook’s Political Report moved the race from Solid to Likely Republican in September.
I worked for the state party on Heath Shuler’s successful 2006 NC-11 race. That was the last time the seat flipped from red to blue prior to REDMAP redistricting in 2011. Ager’s campaign is the first time since then that I see daylight at the end of the tunnel. Get onboard.
For a sense of the historic Old Fort Loops, watch this drone video shot before Helene.
* After Jamie’s father John won an NC state House seat in 2014, he often showed up to local meetings in muddy boots. John did eventually start wearing ties, albeit dated ones.
That bully is, of course, United States President Donald Trump – whose idea of diplomacy is to strut around the globe spewing puerile, profanity-laced threats meant to frighten or intimidate other presidents and prime ministers into acquiescence or submission.
For years, Trump’s modus operandi worked. Too often, too many presidents and prime ministers opted to mollify him, instead of challenging him.
Their myopic reasoning – that assuaging Trump’s ego would soothe his petty, vindictive instincts – only emboldened a president who, like every bully, takes keen pleasure in exploiting weakness to satisfy a narcissism-centred hunger for dominance.
With 1.4 billion Catholics backing Pope Leo XIV and a mere 325 million American citizens (only citizens count in Trump’s America, right?), but only 135 million approving of Trump (41.5% RCP average), the man who would be Orange Julius Caesar finds himself outmatched in every way except militarily. Leo is 10 times the man Trump never was.
Leo is also more of a leader than many nominal ones in government and business who’ve attempted to deal with Trump’s bullying by placating him and offering gifts. Yet “Leo made his objections plain – without hesitation or even a hint of qualification,” writes Andrew Mitrovica.
Trump and his Christian nationalist mob got right miffed at the pope’s urging to “think deeply” about the “innocent people” harmed by Trump’s war.
“Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” Leo said in last Sunday’s homily. “He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood.’”
Leo did not name him, yet his stinging broadside was, no doubt, directed at America’s preening secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, and the gaggle of faux “Christian” preachers cheerleading a calamitous war of choice.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not escape Leo’s piercing rod.
The Trump administration responded with characteristic peevishness, chest-puffing, declaration that military might makes right, “and that the Church had better take its side.”
“I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the church is here to do,” Leo said.
Leo has Trump outgunned. He possesses moral clarity. Trump has none.
In this contest of personalities and will, the divide is stark: One side offers the familiar tropes of the strongman, while the other reminds us that dignity is a dividend of tolerance and understanding.
The bully may have the missiles and a presidential seal, but he has finally met a principled antagonist who will not be cowed, bought, or brow-beaten into collusion or silence.
And that, it seems, is the one idea Donald Trump cannot abide.
Look at the powerful people Stealing the sun from the day Wish I could do something about it When all I can do is pray
– from “Powerful People” by Gino Vannelli
If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.
Near the Day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky.
A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans
– Hopi Prophecies sung in the soundtrack of the film Koyannasqatsi
Next Wednesday (April 22nd) is Earth Day. You don’t seem to hear much about Earth Day anymore; I suppose the media has had other shiny things to chase after; important and impactful stories to be sure, but from a planetary perspective…will all of this fussing and fighting really matter in 50 years? As Grace Slick once sang, doesn’t mean shit to a tree. Believe me, over the millenniums Mother Nature has seen worse; and from her perspective, Earth is only mostly dead.
The Trump administration started 2026 off with an especially grim policy change: When placing limits on certain deadly air pollutants, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will no longer factor in the value of human health — only the expense of regulations for polluters.
The new policy will apply to two particularly harmful pollutants: fine particulate matter and ozone. Both have been linked to a range of health impacts, including asthma, dementia, heart disease, and premature death.
“The Trump administration is saying, literally, that they put zero value on human life,” Marshall Burke, an environmental economist at Stanford University, told The New York Times. “If your kid breathes in air pollution from a power plant or industrial source, EPA is saying that they care only insofar as cleaning up that pollution would cost the emitter.”
The change marks a significant break from precedent. For decades, the federal government has placed a monetary value on a human life — $11.7 million, to be exact — and used that metric to weigh the costs of regulation against the benefits to human health. It’s believed that this long-term practice has prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths from air pollution in the United States. […]
The Trump administration has been slashing its way through the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), claiming that states can take on more responsibility for environmental oversight. But guess what? More than half of US states are woefully unprepared. It turns out they, too, have been hacking away at their own environmental agencies for the past 15 years.
According to a new report by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), since 2010, 27 US states have downsized budgets and 31 have cut staff at their own public health and environmental agencies that usually work in collaboration with the EPA. Collectively, these states have cut about $1.4 billion from their environmental agencies, or about 33 percent of the nation’s spending on state-level environmental regulation, says the report.
“These deep reductions mean that … not only will the federal pollution cop no longer be on the beat, state authorities may not show up either,” the report notes. As a result, there will be fewer inspections of polluting industries and weaker enforcement. “It really means that more American communities are at risk of being exposed to industrial pollution,” Jen Duggan, EIP’s executive director, told usa today.
Seven states — including Texas, where industry is growing rapidly — have reduced pollution-control funding by at least one-third, increasing the risk of industrial accidents and exposure to pollution. Mississippi slashed its environmental agency’s budget by 71 percent from 2010 through 2024; South Dakota by 61 percent.
One bright spot from the report: A handful of states — including California, Colorado, and Massachusetts — have moved in the opposite direction, building up their state environmental agencies.
The four astronauts of Artemis II say their mission gave the world a sense of hope and unity at a time when both feel in short supply.
At their first Nasa news conference since returning last Friday, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen said they left as friends and came back as something closer – bound by an experience that no earthly language can fully contain.
More than the technical milestones, the mission reminded them of what being human actually means: laughter, joy, tears, and an instinct toward one another that transcends borders. […]
Artemis II carried its crew further from Earth than any humans have ever gone, swinging around the far side of the Moon in just over nine days. Victor Glover became the first black astronaut to reach deep space; Christina Koch the first woman; Jeremy Hansen the first Canadian.
For Koch, the scale of what they had done only became clear through others’ eyes when her husband told her on a video call that the mission had cut through divisions and united people. She found herself undone.
“When my husband looked me in the eye on that video call and said, ‘No, really, you’ve made a difference’,” she told reporters, “it brought tears to my eyes, and I said, that’s all we ever wanted.”
Glover talked about it being an experience shared by the entire world.
“I think something that we all feel and we try to share is how much we want to reflect back to you all how we did this, not we as a crew, we as countries and as humans did this,” he said.
Thinking about that, he said, brought to mind “the picture of the Earth as we started to go farther” as they traveled close to the moon and how they talked about “looking at you and how beautiful Earth is”.
Yes, it is quite beautiful, isn’t it?
So don’t fuck it up. Or, as Carl Sagan (more eloquently) put it:
To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
To honor that “pale blue dot”, my top 10 eco-flicks for Earth Day:
Chasing Ice – Jeff Orlowski’s film is glacially paced. That is, “glacial pacing” ain’t what it used to be. Glaciers are moving along (“retreating”, technically) at a pretty good clip. This does not portend well. To be less flowery: we’re fucked. According to nature photographer (and subject of Orlowski’s film) James Balog, “The story…is in the ice.”
Balog’s journey began in 2005, while on assignment in the Arctic for National Geographic to document the effect of climate change. Up until that trip, he candidly admits he “…didn’t think humans were capable” of influencing weather patterns so profoundly. His epiphany gave birth to a multi-year project utilizing modified time-lapse cameras to capture alarming empirical evidence of the effects of global warming.,
The images are beautiful, yet troubling. Orlowski’s film mirrors the dichotomy, equal parts cautionary eco-doc and art installation. The images trump the montage of inane squawking by climate deniers in the opening, proving that a picture is worth 1,000 words. Full review
The Emerald Forest– Although it may initially seem a heavy-handed (if well-meaning) “save the rain forest” polemic, John Boorman’s underrated 1985 adventure (a cross between The Searchers and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan) goes much deeper.
Powers Boothe plays an American construction engineer working on a dam project in Brazil. One day, while his wife and young son are visiting the job site on the edge of the rain forest, the boy is abducted and adopted by an indigenous tribe who call themselves “The Invisible People”, touching off an obsessive decade-long search by the father. By the time he is finally reunited with his now-teenage son (Charley Boorman), the challenge becomes a matter of how he and his wife (Meg Foster) are going to coax the young man back into “civilization”.
Tautly directed, lushly photographed (by Philippe Rousselot) and well-acted. Rosco Pallenberg scripted (he also adapted the screenplay for Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur).
Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster – I know what you’re thinking: there’s no accounting for some people’s tastes. But who ever said an environmental “message” movie couldn’t also provide mindless, guilty fun? Let’s have a little action. Knock over a few buildings. Wreak havoc. Crash a wild party on the rim of a volcano with some Japanese flower children. Besides, Godzilla is on our side for a change. Watch him valiantly battle Hedora, a sludge-oozing toxic avenger out to make mankind collectively suck on his grody tailpipe. And you haven’t lived until you’ve heard “Save the Earth”-my vote for “best worst” song ever from a film (much less a monster movie).
An Inconvenient Truth – I re-watched this recently; I hadn’t seen it since it opened in 2006, and it struck me how it now plays less like a warning bell and more like the nightly news. It’s the end of the world as we know it. Apocalyptic sci-fi is now scientific fact. Former VP/Nobel winner Al Gore is a Power Point-packing Rod Serling, submitting a gallery of nightmare nature scenarios for our disapproval. I’m tempted to say that Gore and director Davis Guggenheim’s chilling look at the results of unchecked global warming only reveals the tip of the iceberg…but it’s melting too fast.
Koyannisqatsi – In 1982 this genre-defying film quietly made its way around the art houses; it’s now a cult favorite. Directed by activist/ex-Christian monk Godfrey Reggio, with beautiful cinematography by Ron Fricke (who later directed Chronos, Baraka, and Samsara) and music by Philip Glass (who also scored Reggio’s sequels), it was considered a transcendent experience by some; New Age hokum by others (count me as a fan).
The title (from ancient Hopi) translates as “life out of balance” The narrative-free imagery, running the gamut from natural vistas to scenes of First World urban decay, is open for interpretation. Reggio followed up in 1988 with Powaqqatsi (“parasitic way of life”), focusing on the First World’s drain on Third World resources, then book-ended his trilogy with Naqoyqatsi (“life as war”).
Manufactured Landscapes – A unique eco-documentary from Jennifer Baichwal about photographer Edward Burtynsky, who is an “earth diarist” of sorts. While his photographs are striking, they don’t paint a pretty picture of our fragile planet. Burtynsky’s eye discerns a terrible beauty in the wake of the profound and irreversible human imprint incurred by accelerated modernization. As captured by Burtynsky’s camera, strip-mined vistas recall the stark desolation of NASA photos sent from the Martian surface; mountains of “e-waste” dumped in a vast Chinese landfill take on an almost gothic, cyber-punk dreamscape. The photographs play like a scroll through Google Earth images, as reinterpreted by Jackson Pollock. An eye-opener. Full review
Princess Mononoke – Anime master Hayao Miyazaki and his cohorts at Studio Ghibli have raised the bar on the art form over the past several decades. This 1997 Ghibli production is one of their most visually resplendent. Perhaps not as “kid-friendly” as per usual, but many of the usual Miyazaki themes are present: humanism, white magic, beneficent forest gods, female empowerment, and pacifist angst in a violent world. The lovely score is by frequent Miyazaki collaborator Joe Hisaishi. For another great Miyazaki film with an environmental message, check out Nausicaa Valley of the Wind.
Queen of the Sun – I never thought that a documentary about honeybees would make me laugh and cry-but Taggart Siegel’s 2010 film did just that. Appearing at first to be a distressing examination of Colony Collapse Syndrome, a phenomenon that has puzzled and dismayed beekeepers and scientists alike with its increasing frequency over the past few decades, the film becomes a sometimes joyous, sometimes humbling meditation on how essential these tiny yet complex social creatures are to the planet’s life cycle. Humans may harbor a pretty high opinion of our own place on the evolutionary ladder, but Siegel lays out a convincing case which proves that these busy little creatures are, in fact, the boss of us. Full review
Silent Running – In space, no one can hear you trimming the verge! Bruce Dern is an agrarian antihero in this 1972 sci-fi adventure, directed by legendary special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull. Produced around the time “ecology” was a buzzword, its message may seem a little heavy-handed today, but the film remains a cult favorite.
Dern plays the gardener on a commercial space freighter that houses several bio-domes, each dedicated to preserving a species of vegetation (in this bleak future, the Earth is barren of organic growth).
While it’s a 9 to 5 drudge gig to his blue-collar shipmates, Dern sees his cultivating duties as a sacred mission. When the interests of commerce demand the crew jettison the domes to make room for more lucrative cargo, Dern goes off his nut, eventually ending up alone with two salvaged bio-domes and a trio of droids (Huey, Dewey and Louie) who play Man Friday to his Robinson Crusoe. Joan Baez contributes two songs on the soundtrack.
Soylent Green – Based on a Harry Harrison novel, Richard Fleischer’s 1973 film is set in 2022, when traditional culinary fare is but a dim memory, due to overpopulation and environmental depletion. Only the wealthy can afford the odd tomato or stalk of celery; most of the U.S. population lives on processed “Soylent Corporation” product. The government encourages the sick and the elderly to politely move out of the way by providing handy suicide assistance centers (considering ongoing threats to our Social Security system, that doesn’t seem much of a stretch anymore).
Oh-there is some ham served up onscreen, courtesy of Charlton Heston’s scenery-chewing turn as a NYC cop who is investigating the murder of a Soylent Corporation executive. Edward G. Robinson’s moving death scene has added poignancy; as it preceded his passing by less than two weeks after the production wrapped.
Bonus Tracks!
Here’s an environmentally-sound mixtape to accompany your Earth Day activities:
With so many lives at risk in the Middle East in recent weeks, it seemed frivolous if not immoral to care whether the White House got a new ballroom. It just did not seem to matter much, then, now or ever. And yet the president of the United States, who would seem to have more reason than most to obsess over the war, insisted even as bombs were falling that the ballroom was “very important”. And so maybe attention should be paid.
[…]
[O]n March 31st a federal judge, Richard Leon, ruled that in demolishing the old East Wing and starting to build his addition, which at 90,000 square feet is nearly double the size of the White House mansion, Mr Trump usurped Congress’s authority. Judge Leon, a conservative, peppered his irate opinion with exclamation marks, responding to some of Mr Trump’s claims with an eye-rolling “Please!” Still, all Mr Trump needed to do, Judge Leon wrote, was to get Congress’s authorisation. Pending that, he blocked construction except as needed for security. Mr Trump’s lawyers responded on April 3rd with exclamation points of their own, in an appeal declaring the president to be within his rights. With Trumpian redundancy they thrice called the ballroom “desperately needed”, and they declared it beautiful. But they also insisted it “serves mission-critical national security goals”. The roof, for example, is meant to be proof against drones.
Regardless of who prevails in court, the legal papers help illuminate why the ballroom matters: because it is the most complete model to date of Mr Trump’s ambition, methods and means. It is, in short, the Trumpiest thing he has attempted. However vast the ballroom proves to be, it will not provide jobs or health care, or even state-dinner invitations, to the left-behind, anti-elitist, anti-swamp voters Mr Trump relies upon. And yet, though most Americans oppose the project, MAGA adherents overwhelmingly support it, revealing the direction in which MAGA loyalty truly runs. These Republicans are devoted to serving Mr Trump in his great goal, also exemplified by the ballroom: to make his enduring mark. “I’m fighting wars and other things,” he acknowledged recently, but he wanted to talk to reporters about the ballroom instead “because this is going to be with us for a long time”.
It is—again—just a ballroom. And yet it also reveals Mr Trump’s contempt for the Framers’ foundational preoccupation with checking executive power. Just as he claimed he could impose tariffs on any country for any reason, also to protect national security, he has asserted awesome power over federal property. His theory is so sweeping, Judge Leon wrote, that it would license him to tear down the White House and replace it with a skyscraper. “No statute comes close to giving the president the authority he claims to have,” the judge wrote. Congress, he pointed out, has historically exercised such close oversight of the White House that it prescribes the number of staff and their pay.
In my mind the following is what says it all. This monstrosity is nothing but a slush fund for various wealthy players to gain favor with the president. And they are all falling all over themselves to do it:
And the ballroom is proving a very temple of bootlicking. To any doubts, Mr Trump’s aides respond by extolling him as a “master builder” or the best developer “in the entire world”. His lawyers declare the project to be under budget, though the price tag has already quadrupled from the $100m the president initially declared. They make a virtue of what in previous presidencies would be a vice, that Mr Trump has raised the money from private sources through another signature move—soliciting donors eager for presidential favour, some of whom may never be named. Mr Trump’s allies insist the project will not cost taxpayers anything. That claim values the time of the president and his aides, along with all future maintenance of the colossus, at nothing.
He figured, probably rightly, that once he tore down the east wing they’d have to let him build it rather than leave a big ugly hole in the ground.
When the Supreme Court considered Mr Trump’s use of tariffs, his lawyers argued, unsuccessfully, that what was done was done: it would be too hard for the government to refund the money… They are trying the same move now, lamenting the “large hole beside the Executive Residence”.
And this is why the hole itself, rather than Trump’s Folly if it is built in the end, would be the most apt monument to this presidency.
Yes, a gaping hole would be the perfect tribute. Short of that the Democrats should have it torn down immediately upon taking office just as the Iraqis tore down Saddam’s statue in Baghdad. Symbolism matters. And leaving it up would be the worst symbol of all —a disgusting reminder that an American president who cares nothing for the rule of law and behaves like a tinpot dictator of a banana republic can get away with it.
