Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

In that Vanity Fair bombshell, Susie Wiles describes Trump as someone who “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.” It’s the truest thing she said. He is completely unleashed and is just saying “fuck it, I’m doing it” to anything that passes through his vacuous mind. And he’s getting away with a lot, either because nobody anticipated that we would ever elect such a delusional ignoramus or because others with power are letting him.

It’s dangerous but in the hands of someone with an agenda it would be even worse. The fact is that Trump is so inept that it keeps him from fully enacting the tyranny he already thinks he has. Zack Beauchamp at Vox has this:

If you want to understand how the US government works today, you should study President Donald Trump’s attempt to pardon a woman named Tina Peters last week.

Peters is a former Colorado election clerk and a die-hard believer in the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In 2021, Peters committed a series of crimes in an attempt to “prove” election fraud occurred — including, most seriously, allowing a fellow 2020 truther to make copies of the actual hard drives of Mesa County voting machines. A Colorado jury convicted her of seven crimes last year, and a judge sentenced her to nine years in prison.

Last Thursday, Trump intervened on Peters’s behalf, declaring he was “granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” On its face, this is menacingly authoritarian: the president abusing his powers to protect a woman who literally compromised the integrity of America’s vote-counting on his behalf.

Yet, Trump’s order is also something else: impotent.

The Constitution explicitly states that the presidential pardon power only applies to crimes committed “against the United States,” meaning federal rather than state crimes. Peters was convicted in a Colorado court under state law, and, thus, cannot be pardoned by the president. The state’s governor, attorney general, and secretary of state have all rejected the legality of Trump’s order; Peters remains incarcerated.

Trump’s actions were reported, in the New York Times and elsewhere, as a “symbolic” pardon. But that framing gives Trump too much credit. If you read his full post on Truth Social, there’s no indication that this is anything but a genuine attempt to do something clearly illegal. He genuinely seems to think that he can pardon her for state crimes, even though he very obviously cannot.

The Peters case represents an especially clear example of what I’ve come to see as the defining style of the second Trump administration: an incompetent form of authoritarianism that can best be described as “haphazardism.”

Haphazardism is authoritarianism without vision, a governing style defined by a series of individual attacks on democracy without any kind of overarching logic, strategic structure, or clear end state in mind. These attacks can do (and indeed have done) real damage to the American political system, but they are often poorly executed and even self-undermining — preventing Trump from ruling in the truly unconstrained manner he seems to desire.

“Is he succeeding at breaking democracy? Yes,” said Steve Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and author of How Democracies Die. “Is he succeeding at consolidating autocratic power? No.”

The whole article is interesting, particularly his insightful analysis of how the authoritarian ambition interacts with the ignorance and encroaching senility.

So, is the United States under Trump’s haphazardism a democracy or an authoritarian state?

Harvard’s Levitsky is one of the leading voices arguing that America is already living under a form of authoritarianism. Indeed, he published a new piece with frequent coauthors Dan Ziblatt and Lucan Way making this case just last week.

Yet, when I spoke to Levitsky on the phone, he distinguished between an authoritarian government and an authoritarian regime. The former refers to the way in which the people in power are ruling at the present moment; the latter refers to whether they are taking steps to permanently change the political system into something in which they and their allies can hold power indefinitely.

For Levitsky, Trump’s “systematic and regular abuse of power” is enough to establish that America currently has an authoritarian government. But, he does not believe that we are living under an authoritarian regime — believing that Trump’s authoritarian actions were likely to be “reversed” in the near future. He, thus, characterizes the current American situation as most likely to be a “mild and short-lived burst of authoritarianism” (with the major caveat that even “mild” authoritarianism is still quite dangerous).

Like Beauchamp I think we are still a democracy even if we’re hanging by a thread. And Al it depends upon what the Supreme Court decides to do. But I’ve always thought that our greatest defense is probably Trump’s stupidity so at least we have that.

Happy Hollandaise everyone

I know that many of you don’t have subs for Vanity Fair to read the Susie Wiles story. They don’t offer gift links so I can’t share that with you. But Peter Baker at the New York Times does a good run down and I can offer you a gift link for that. He hits the important highlights.

Here’s an excerpt from the Vanity Fair piece:

Vance described Wiles’s approach to the chief’s job. “There is this idea that people have that I think was very common in the first administration,” he told me, “that their objective was to control the president or influence the president, or even manipulate the president because they had to in order to serve the national interest. Susie just takes the diametrically opposite viewpoint, which is that she’s a facilitator, that the American people have elected Donald Trump. And her job is to actually facilitate his vision and to make his vision come to life.”

In other words she is an enabler of a man she knows is psychologically damaged:

As a child, Susie also absorbed the zeitgeist of her father’s 1970s Manhattan. “Much of what Donald Trump remembers about the New York of the ’70s I lived through with my dad,” she said. “So when he talks about Frank Sinatra’s bodyguard, I know that name.” Steve Witkoff, Trump’s real estate friend turned special envoy, says Wiles and Trump are creatures of that same bygone era: “That whole world of the Copacabana and Sammy Davis Jr. and all, those are things that he wants to talk about.”

The most valuable gift Susie got from her dad was hard-earned. Summerall was an absentee father and an alcoholic, and Wiles helped her mother stage interventions to get him into treatment. (Summerall was sober for 21 years before his death in 2013.) “Alcoholism does bad things to relationships, and so it was with my dad and me,” Wiles said.

“Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say. But high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.” Wiles said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality.” He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”

She claims that he has a “possessive and addictive type personality.”

This is not news to any of us who have viewed him for the last decade. He believes his I omnipotent. And it’s largely because everyone around him is engaged in fervently licking his boots 24 hours a day. And because he is such a narcissist he doesn’t care if they are sincere about it — in fact he actually prefers them to be insincere because it shows how powerful he is to be able to make people suck up to him.

She calls Vance a conspiracy theorist and implies that he is a shape shifter without a center. Clearly she prefers Rubio as Trump’s successor whom she laughably claims would never betray his own sense of integrity. (They both come out of the Florida GOP.)

I have no idea why Wiles decided to do this. David Axelrod on CNN speculated that Wiles may have thought this was for a retrospective piece after she was out of office, it’s that revealing. (Yikes!) But she’s a pro and it seems unlikely that she didn’t know this would come out at this time.

So far, Trump is sticking with her giving a weird interview to the NY Post in which he says:

“No, she meant that I’m — you see, I don’t drink alcohol. So everybody knows that — but I’ve often said that if I did, I’d have a very good chance of being an alcoholic. I have said that many times about myself, I do. It’s a very possessive personality.”

He can’t read a long article so he doesn’t know the extent of her comments. And he doesn’t understand them, obviously.

He said he still has full faith in Wiles but we’ll see. I had already read some commentary that had Wiles in trouble even before this so I wouldn’t count on her being there next year at this time. Of course that assumes that Trump ever gets a sense of what she actually said. He’s so out of it that he may never know the extent of it.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Once again, thanks so much for your generosity. I’m always so surprised and grateful that people are still interested in our scribblings. It’s a privilege to be able to do it and we couldn’t continue without your kind support.

It’s been a tough few days. The violence and loss of the past weekend has cast a pall over this holiday season and it feels just a little bit discordant to celebrate, well… anything. Not that we don’t see an atrocity every day in one way or another. The economy is getting worse and worse, our standing in the world has collapsed, masked thugs are marauding in the streets and abducting people while the “Department of War” is conducing a murder spree on the high seas. And that’s in addition to the wanton destruction of the federal government as perfectly illustrated by Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House without any consultation or approval. But in the last few days we’ve been reminded of the ongoing horror of gun violence and terrorism — and the grotesque character of the president of the United States in the face of all that.

The mass shooting at Brown University in the same moments as a violent terrorist attack in Australia over the weekend was jarring enough. When the news of the Reiners’ death hit and Trump acted like the barbarian we know him to be it just felt like a knock out blow. The last thing I want to do — or, I suspect, you want to read —- is cheerlead.

But the fact is that as bad as things have been and continue to be, the country has not succumbed to this authoritarian onslaught. Sure Republicans are all fully in the tank and have proved themselves to be nothing more than potted plants. And yes, many of the elites have shown their true colors and eagerly capitulated to Trump, apparently under the assumption that they could maintain their respected reputations having done so.

They will not. We won’t forget what they did. These were powerful people with the means and the expertise to fight back and they chose not to. The law firms, universities, CEOs and Wall St Masters of the Universe either made a calculation that Trump was omnipotent and therefore they needed to be on his good side or that jumping on his bandwagon presented some lucrative opportunities. It was either cowardice or greed. In no case can it be justified.

However, even all that has not been enough to sustain Trump’s assault. His trajectory has been slowed, if not halted, by the public, the lower courts and his administration’s ineptitude. (His own mental deterioration is taking a toll as well.) MAGA is at each others’ throats, Republicans in Congress are running around like Chicken Little unable to make any decisions and the vaunted White House discipline is starting to fail as evidence by the publishing of a startling series of interviews with Trump’s (formerly?) trusted chief of staff Susie Wiles:

We often spoke on Sundays after church. Wiles, an Episcopalian, calls herself “Catholic lite.” One time we spoke while she was doing her laundry in her Washington, DC, rental. Trump, she told me, “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vance’s conversion from Never Trumper to MAGA acolyte, she said, has been “sort of political.” The vice president, she added, has been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” (She says she doesn’t have first-hand knowledge.)

Their incompetence, extremism and corruption combined with the public rising up in rebellion stands a very good chance of ending this awful experiment in reality show politics. But it’s not going to be easy. Cornered animals tend to lash out with violence.

I hope you’ll stick with us as we continue to document the atrocities heading into the midterms when maybe we can truly stop the bleeding. We follow the news cycle closely, keeping our eyes on the zeitgeist 24/7 and try to give you the highlights as we see them. Hopefully you find that useful as you try to make sense out of the cacophony of news, propaganda and hype.

Those of you who support us are instrumental in keeping the blog free for those who don’t have the means and that means the world to me so thank you for that. After all, we’re all in this together.

If you’d like to toss a few coins in the Christmas stocking, you can do so here or at the snail mail address over on the left.

And Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers,

digby

Come November 2026, Alabama voters could see two familiar names on the ballot for governor. On Dec. 13, former Democratic Sen. Doug Jones announced his candidacy, joining current GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who defeated him in his 2020 reelection bid by 20 points. (Both candidates have primary elections in May.)

With President Donald Trump and the GOP’s declining poll numbers, the stage appears to have been set for Democratic wins in the 2026 midterms — and possibly including surprise victories like the one that took Jones to the Senate in 2017 and foreshadowed a big blue wave the following year. 

The 2017 Alabama Senate special election pitted Jones against Republican nominee Judge Roy Moore to fill the seat of GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions, who had been tapped as Donald Trump’s attorney general. 

But that race foreshadowed more than Democrats’ victory in the 2018 midterms. It was a referendum on what we now know to be common behavior among many of our political and business elites: the creepy habit of powerful older men targeting underage girls for sex. It’s not that such a thing was unheard of before, but with #MeToo and, more recently, revelations from the Epstein files — that show no signs of stopping — we now know it has been a much more pervasive activity among the nation’s elite than previously understood. 

In 2017 it was quite a revelation that Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court whose claim to fame was an insistence on displaying the Ten Commandments in (and outside) public buildings, allegedly had a long history of coercing girls and young women into tawdry sexual situations. Although he had been under clouds of corruption for some years and was highly controversial, this came as a shock to the Alabama electorate — and it opened the door for Jones to be the first Democrat elected statewide in nearly two decades.

Best known as the man who prosecuted Ku Klux Klan members responsible for one of the most notorious events in the Civil Rights Movement — the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four Black girls on Sept. 15, 1963 — Jones had an excellent reputation in the state as a former U.S. attorney. Unfortunately, because the special election was only to serve out the remainder of Sessions’ term, Jones had to run again in 2020 and was beaten by former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, a man who said during his campaign that the three branches of government are “the House, the Senate and the executive.”

Since then, Tuberville has been a train wreck in the Senate. He has continued to display an astonishing ignorance about civic life, such as when he suggested postponing Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, apparently unaware that the Constitution sets the date as Jan. 20. But Tuberville has also become infamous for a series of racist gaffes, which have been beyond the pale even for MAGA politicians. In October 2022, he compared the descendants of enslaved people to criminals. The following year, he claimed that white nationals are unfairly labeled as racist. (He later attempted to walk back his comments.) At a Trump rally in 2024, he said that Democrats “want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.” 

Tuberville’s rhetoric on immigration is as bad as Trump’s. During a June interview in which he was discussing immigration and sanctuary cities, he lambasted “these inner-city rats [that] live off the federal government…it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home.”

Republicans are confident that Tuberville will win the governorship — even though he apparently doesn’t live in Alabama — and don’t see Jones as any real competition. Jones, however, clearly believes that conditions have changed dramatically since 2020 and that Tuberville now has a record he will have to defend — unlike five years ago, when he was just a good-old boy-football coach. That record includes acting as Donald Trump’s rubber stamp and embarrassing the state with his ignorance. 

It’s untelling if that will be a deal breaker; Republicans outnumber Democrats in voter registration by 19%, and a majority of Alabama voters could agree with Tuberville. But 2025 has seen upsets in unexpected places. Mississippi Democrats broke a Republican supermajority in the state Senate in November by flipping two seats. On Dec. 9 in Georgia, a Democrat won a deep red seat in the state House. For the first time in three decades, Miami’s mayor will be a Democrat. On the other hand, despite the party’s hopes, Democrats lost the chance for a pickup in a widely watched race in Tennessee’s seventh congressional district.

Based on Alabama’s electoral map, a Jones victory in November seems impossible. No Democrat has held the governorship since 1998. Then again, back in 2017 most people thought there was no way Roy Moore could be beaten — and Doug Jones surprised them. Maybe it will happen again.

Salon

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

He may be rude, but he speaks for me:

As a young kid whose parents didn’t care what I watched, I loved All in the Family. And I didn’t see Rob Reiner’s Michael Stivic as Archie Bunker did, as “Meathead.” I was inspired by Michael’s passion and activism. I wanted to be like him because it pissed off the Archie Bunkers.

— The Rude Pundit (@rudepundit.bsky.social) 2025-12-15T04:32:57.348Z

Not unlike the rude fella, I was first exposed to All in the Family at an impressionable age; I was 14 years old when it  premiered in 1971. I may not have fully grasped all the sociopolitical undercurrents running through Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin’s groundbreaking sitcom (which went on to run for 9 seasons and achieve “classic” status) but I instinctively glomed onto Michael Stivic as my hero.

The funny thing about actors is, they act for a living. More often than not, the character you see on the screen doesn’t necessarily reflect the person portraying that character (“never meet your idols”, and all that). However, as it turned out, “Michael Stivic” was largely simpatico with the actor portraying him, Rob Reiner. I’m referring to the “passion and activism” mentioned at the top of my post:

In a world where fewer and fewer people concern themselves with the plight of others, the loss of Rob Reiner, who cared deeply about humanitarian causes, feels that much more devastating. RIP: 1947-1925.[Selfie: July 2022, NYC]

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neildegrassetyson.com) 2025-12-15T13:52:11.548Z

This was the statement from the family of the late Norman Lear:

Here’s just a taste of Reiner’s activism over the years:

Two of Reiner’s biggest political contributions were his work in defending marriage equality and establishing critical child development programs.

Reiner co-founded the American Foundation for Equal Rights in 2008 to help fight against California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in the state.

Reiner helped spark the court challenge of Prop 8, leading to a 2010 trial that preceded the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage at the federal level.

 While speaking about the importance of his fight against Prop 8, Reiner invoked the civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education.

  “We don’t believe in separate but equal in any other legal position except this,” Reiner said in 2011, referring to same-sex marriage. “We feel that this is the last piece of the civil rights puzzle being put into place.” […]

His work extended beyond LGBTQ+ rights; Reiner was also a fierce advocate for children. In 1998, Reiner led the campaign to pass California’s Proposition 10. The initiative formed First 5 California, a collection of childhood development services in the state funded by a tobacco tax. Reiner served as the organization’s first chair for seven years, from 1999 to 2006.

 “Nobody did more to create universal preschool in California,” political consultant Roy Behr, who worked with Reiner on the campaign to pass Prop 10, told PEOPLE. “Literally tens of thousands (maybe even hundreds of thousands) of kids got access to preschool entirely because of him.”

Reiner also proposed California’s Proposition 82 in 2006, which would have raised taxes on the wealthiest residents in order to fund free preschool for all 4-year-olds in the state. The proposition failed to pass, though his suggestion to tax the rich as a means for expanding government services has became a popular element of the progressive platform in recent years.

Just another one of those damn Hollywood lefty busybodies.

His acting credits are numerous. Previous to All in the Family, his appearances include Enter Laughing (his 1967 acting debut, and father Carl’s directorial debut), and the 1970 cult comedy classic Where’s Poppa (another Carl Reiner film). He appeared (uncredited) in Steve Martin’s 1979 comedy The Jerk, and had memorable supporting roles in Throw Momma From the Train, Postcards From the Edge, Sleepless in Seattle, Bullets Over Broadway, and Primary Colors.

He also directed a film or two you may have heard of. He was on a roll in the 80s, delivering five exceptional films in a row:This is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally. His streak waned a bit in the 90s, nonetheless that decade yielded three more gems: Misery, A Few Good Men, and The American President. 

Reiner co-founded Castle Rock Entertainment in 1987, an independent television and film production company. In addition to a number of Reiner’s own films, the company’s canon includes City Slickers, Year of the Comet, In the Line of Fire, Barcelona, The Shawshank Redemption, Before Sunrise, Lone Star, Waiting for Guffman, The Last Days of Disco, The Green Mile, Best in Show, Before Sunset, The Salton Sea (a 2002 neo-noir that needs more love) and Michael Clayton.

Glancing at his filmography, I have some catching up to do; with the exception of his wonderful 2023 documentary Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, I’ve somehow missed his entire output since 1996’s Ghosts of Mississippi. As fate would have it, his final directorial project, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is currently sitting in my DVR, waiting to be watched (it just dropped on HBO/MAX this week).

Speaking of “the Tap”,  my favorite Rob Reiner joint will forever and always be his 1984 directorial debut, This is Spinal Tap.

Reiner co-wrote this mockumentary with Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean, who play Spinal Tap founders Nigel Tufnel (lead guitar), Derek Smalls (bass) and David St. Hubbins (lead vocals and guitar), respectively (several actors portray the band’s revolving door of drummers, who tend to meet untimely ends such as spontaneous combustion, “a bizarre gardening accident”, and perhaps most famously, choking on “somebody else’s vomit”).

Reiner casts himself as “rockumentary” filmmaker Marty DiBergi (a goof on Martin Scorsese, who similarly interjected himself into The Last Waltz) who accompanies the hard rocking outfit on a tour of the states (“their first in six years”) to support the release of their new LP “Smell the Glove” (DiBergi has been a fan since first catching them at the “Electric Banana” in Greenwich Village in 1966).

By the time the film’s 84 minutes have expired, no one (and I mean, no one) involved in the business of rock ’n’ roll has been spared the knife-musicians, roadies, girlfriends, groupies, fans, band managers, rock journalists, concert promoters, record company execs, A & R reps, record store clerks…all are bagged and tagged.

Nearly every scene has become iconic in muso circles; ditto the plethora of quotable lines: “These go to eleven.” “I mean, it’s not your job to be as confused as Nigel.” “You can’t really dust for vomit.” “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” “No…we’re NOT gonna fucking do ‘Stonehenge’!” “We’ve got armadillos in our trousers-it’s really quite frightening.”

The great supporting cast includes Tony Hendra (who steals all his scenes as the band’s prickly manager, clearly modeled after Led Zeppelin’s infamously fearsome handler Peter Grant), Bruno Kirby, Ed Begley, Jr., Fran Drescher, Parick Macnee, June Chadwick, Billy Crystal (“C’mon…mime is money!”), Howard Hesseman, Paul Shaffer, and Fred Williard.

So if you are looking for one Rob Reiner film to watch tonight in memoriam, I say go for the sights, the sounds…and the smells of this joyous romp. And as for your off-screen time…follow the advice someone offered on BlueSky today:

In a world full of Archie Bunkers, be a Meathead.R.I.P. Rob Reiner

— Truth Social(ist) (@twitterrefugeeog.bsky.social) 2025-12-15T14:14:14.453Z

More reviews at Den of Cinema

UPDATE: Damn. No one does these like TCM:

— Dennis Hartley

Some Montana Trump voters are never thought their faces would get eaten:

Zink, 57, is a third-generation houndsman who hunts big game, including mountain lions and bears. He also owns an archery target business. He’s a rural Montanan whose way of life and livelihood depend on public lands.

He led me into the Hilltop, where half the people inside knew his name, to a corner where we sat drinking diner coffee. “You won’t meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn’t vote for this,” Zink said.

“This” is the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) deep cuts earlier this year to federal public lands agencies’ funding and to the staff at those agencies who administer that funding and steward public lands and wildlife.

Zink voted for Trump but said he doesn’t agree with everything the president does. Zink clarifies he calls himself a “conservative” over calling himself a “Republican.” He doesn’t like Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. “I prefer common sense in the middle,” he said.

He believes wolves need to be hunted to manage their numbers; abortion should only be legal in cases of rape, incest and to protect the mother’s life; and he’s an ardent Second Amendment supporter. He’s also a passionate advocate for public lands and wildlife. And the cuts have, frankly, ticked him off.

Oh really? He cares about public lands and wildlife? Did he think Trump gives a damn about any of that? Lol.

Trump wants to open public lands to development and he’s quite serious about doing it. He’s already opened up ANWR in Alaska.

hanks to an outpouring of opposition from across the political spectrum, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) was forced to withdraw language from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that would have sold millions of acres of public lands to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.¹ Nonetheless, a flurry of orders and proposals from the Trump administration—some supercharged by lesser-known provisions in the OBBBA—are still in motion to open up vast amounts of public land for extractive development, allowing it to be leased and claimed by drilling, mining, and logging companies.

The Trump administration has made little secret of its plan to let private companies drill, mine, and log America’s public lands. In fact, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum—who is charged with overseeing the majority of U.S. public lands—recently told those extractive corporations that he views them as “the customer” for his department.

When he was sparring with Canada over lumber early in he said he wants to open the national forests to commercial logging so we aren’t “dependent” on the Canadians.

He does not care about preserving anything, anywhere. It’s all about making money for himself and his rich friends and stroking his ego. Since he doesn’t value nature (and he hates animals) destroying America’s natural beauty is the least of his concerns.

Leopards (and wolves) love the taste of “very conservative Trump voters.” And they are starting to feast.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

A warning from MI6

BBC News:

The new MI6 chief has said “we are now operating in a space between peace and war” as she laid out the “interlocking web of security challenges” that the service is working to tackle.

Blaise Metreweli’s first public speech since taking the role focused on the multi-faceted threat posed by Russia, which she said was “testing us in the grey zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war”.

She also highlighted the “the menace of an aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia” while referring to the war in Ukraine, insisting the UK would maintain pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine’s behalf.

“[T]he front line is everywhere,” cautioned Metreweli Monday as the first female Chief of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

There are short clips like this posted around the internet.

@bbcnews The new MI6 chief said Britain’s overseas spy agency is dealing with an “interlocking web of security challenges” during her first public speech. #MI6 #Spy #Security #NationalSecurity #UK #BBCNews ♬ original sound – BBC News

>

Truth Matters (@politicsusa46) commented on X:

I can’t tell you just how profound a statement this is from the head of MI6 Blaise Metreweli.

It is VERY uncommon for the head of the UK’s foreign intelligence agency to make such a public statement. There may now be a slow shift towards considering the US as representing a threat to UK national security if aligned with Russian interests.

But let’s escerpt a bit more from the transcript:

Let’s be in no doubt. Our world is more dangerous and contested now than it has been for decades. Conflict is evolving and trust eroding, just as new technologies spur both competition and dependence. We are being contested from sea to space, from the battlefield to the boardroom. And even our brains, as disinformation manipulates our understanding of each other and ourselves. Across the globe, we are now confronting not one single danger, but an interlocking web of security challenges – military, technological, social, ethical even – each shaping the other in complex ways.

We are now operating in a space between peace and war.

This is not a temporary state or a gradual, inevitable evolution. Our world is being actively remade, with profound implications for national and international security. Institutions which were designed in the ashes of the Second World War are being challenged. New blocs and identities forming and alliances reshaping. Multipolar competition in tension with multilateral cooperation.

But new technologies form a threat as well, said the former head of Q Branch:

Advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and quantum computing are not only revolutionising economies but rewriting the reality of conflict, as they ‘converge’ to create science-fiction-like tools.

There’s incredible promise in all this for all of us, from green technologies to hyper-personalised medicine. But also peril. AI-powered robots and drones are brilliant for scaled manufacturing but devastating on the battlefield. Discoveries that cure disease can also create new weapons. And as states race for tech supremacy, or as some algorithms become as powerful as states, those hyper-personalised tools could become a new vector for conflict and control.

Power itself is becoming more diffuse, more unpredictable as control over these technologies is shifting from states to corporations, and sometimes to individuals.

You can probably name a few of those individuals Metreweli doesn’t.

And at the same time, the foundations of trust in our societies are eroding. Information, once a unifying force, is increasingly weaponised. Falsehood spreads faster than fact, dividing communities and distorting reality. We live in an age of hyper-connection yet profound isolation. The algorithms flatter our biases and fracture our public squares. And as trust collapses, so does our shared sense of truth – one of the greatest losses a society can suffer.

The defining challenge of the twenty-first century is not simply who wields the most powerful technologies, but who guides them with the greatest wisdom. Our security, our prosperity, and our humanity depend on it.

I’d suggest that top officials in Washington, D.C. are reading between the lines of that speech Metreweli’s distrust of the Trump administration and its cozy relationship with Moscow. But that assumes there is anyone left competent enough to interpret anything more nuanced than a meme or an overt racial slur.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

We’re still here

Dennis, as I’d hoped, popped in Monday evening, my time, with an in memoriam for Rob Reiner. His “Inconceivable” title first elicited a wide-eyed “of course” followed by a wave of grief.

I never met Reiner, just like I’ve never met Dennis. People who don’t live online don’t get that netizens often collaborate without (or rarely) seeing each other. When I was a consulting engineer, people asked why I didn’t telecommute. It wasn’t that kind of job. This is.

Digby, gracious as always, wrote some very nice things yesterday about my morning work here. We met at a conference in D.C. in 2009. I haven’t seen her in person since Netroots 2013. We text and rarely talk. (Actually, I was so floored when she asked me to join her in August 2014 that it took me years to start even texting.) I met Spocko at the same 2013 conference and didn’t see him again until he and his wife were in town for a wedding two years ago. We had pizza. As Harry Chapin once sang, “That’s how this business goes.”

Weeks like this take a toll. When news is so bad that many people want to tune out, we have to carry on. There are rare days when Digby has a string of posts scheduled ahead of time, and I think, “Thank God, she’s getting out.” I immerse myself in morning headlines, write up my posts, then spend four miles walking it off. I watched MS Now’s Nicole Wallace Monday afternoon sniffle and hold back tears while still facing the cameras and hoping to collect herself during the breaks. Some mornings, the news is so bad, one doesn’t know where to start. But we do somehow.

Another old-school blogger I haven’t seen since 2015 lamented that lefties were helping Donald Trump claw back attention by reposting and commenting on the “Truth” he issued on Reiner’s death. Don’t do that, please. And I wish pundits wouldn’t.

Maria Shriver managed to say something substantive about Trump’s latest atrocity without reposting it. Better.

Maria Shriver obviously comes from a very political family and has supported candidates for office, like her now-former husband Arnold Schwarzenegger and Barack Obama, but for the most part she has always chosen to focus on storytelling and journalism.

She has clearly hit her… pic.twitter.com/ZKuIMCRxrW

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) December 16, 2025

Thanks for reading our processings every day. For you, I hope it’s helpful. For me, it’s therapeutic. It would be great to see more of my remote colleagues in person on a regular basis. But we make due. The internet means that there are many “friends” I think of more as serial acquaintances. Lizz Winstead, one of “The Daily Show” co-founders, is one of those. I see her maybe once a year. Last night on FB she gave me a laugh I desperately needed. Hope it helps.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

'The frontline is everywhere," warned new UK MI6 chief Blaise Metreweli today. Highlighting a wave of inter-connected threats to western democracies, she added: "We are now operating in a space between peace and war.”https://t.co/L0JS5XflpP

— POLITICOEurope (@POLITICOEurope) December 15, 2025

Semafor:

European officials are raising the alarm over Russia’s expansionist agenda and hybrid warfare tactics. “The new frontline is everywhere,” the UK’s MI6 chief said in her first speech atop the agency, warning that Russia poses an “acute threat” to the West. The EU on Monday tightened sanctions against Russian ally Belarus, following incursions by weather balloons into Lithuanian airspace, which officials believe are part of Moscow’s intensifying covert sabotage campaign to sow instability.

European leaders are further grappling with how to respond to Washington’s disdain toward the continent amid precarious Ukraine peace talks. The US’ disengagement “could give Russia a window of opportunity to escalate before Europe is ready to resist,” Lithuania’s former foreign minister wrote.

Those comments are pretty intense.

The Guardian has more:

The order of world institutions “designed in the ashes of the second world war” was, she said, being deliberately contested “from sea to space, from the battlefield to the boardroom” and “even our brains” through the deliberate spread of disinformation online.

She said Britain and the world were “operating in a space between peace and war” – which the spy agency, traditionally focused on running agents and working with human sources, had to contend with. She said MI6 had to become “fluent in technology” and anticipate the impact of future advances.

Metreweli, 48, took over as the head of MI6, the UK’s international spy agency, in September, becoming the first woman to hold the post. As its chief, or C, she is the only member of the organisation to be publicly named.

An Arabic speaker, her early career included running agents in the Middle East as well as deployments in eastern Europe. She was appointed to the top job by the prime minister after running MI6’s technology department, or Q branch.

Metreweli said she would “break with tradition” and not “give you a global threat tour”. This allowed her to sidestep any direct analysis of China, which has been accused of trying to run espionage and hacking campaigns against the UK.

[…]

Russia, the focus of remarks trailed in advance, was described as “aggressive, expansionist and revisionist, seeking to subjugate Ukraine and harass Nato”. She said Putin was not serious about trying to end the war in Ukraine, describing him as “dragging out negotiations” and shifting the burden of the conflict on to his own population.

Meanwhile, the head of Britain’s armed forces said on Monday that Britain needed to develop “a whole of nation response” to deal with the growing military threat posed by Russia.

Richard Knighton, the chief of the defence staff, said that while there was a “remote chance” of a direct attack on the UK, the invasion of a Nato ally in eastern Europe by Russia’s 1.1 million-strong army was more likely.

Just because she refers to the threat against “the west” and doesn’t specifically call out America, if you think her complaints aren’t aimed at the U.S as well as Russia, you’re missing the point. We are abandoning the European alliance in favor of Putin and everyone knows it. They see the writing on the wall.

Happy Hollandaise everyone

On all (waves hands) this:

How did we become a country that inflicts itself on people the way it has on Zoe Weissman?

She has popped up on TV in the aftermath of the murders at Brown University in Providence. She is a sophomore there. In 2018, she was in a middle school that was attached to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when Nikolas Cruz and his very large gun came to call. On Saturday night, she was in her dormitory room when another shooter with another very large gun showed up on campus.

How did we end up with two of our children at the same university experiencing the second mass shooting of their lives? In 2019, Mia Tretta was wounded by a mass shooter at her California high school in which her best friend was one of two people killed. And on Saturday night, on a campus in Rhode Island, she was sheltering in place. And Tretta was asking all the right questions. From NBC News:

“No one in this country even assumes it’s going to happen to them,” Tretta said. “Once it happens to you, you assume or are told it will never happen again, and obviously that is not the case.”

Obviously.

Obviously?

Obviously!

It was a brutal weekend around the world. Brown. Bondi Beach in Australia. The murders in Brentwood, California, of Rob and Michele Reiner. The news reminded me of the dispatches from World War II. There was insupportable violence on many fronts in many places.

He discusses the right’s reaction to all this, led by the president which I’m sure you’ve seen by now, and he concludes:

There is a cost to the sickness that has been unleashed on the world. The current president, with his merciless predator’s instincts, recognized not a soul-deep crisis but a golden opportunity. There is a price to living on the edge the way this country has been and the uncertainty we’ve unleashed on the world, a mortgage on the body and a lien on the soul, as the old bluesmen sang. For those of us on the outside of these cascading tragedies but fully immersed in their effects on our lives, we have heroes to follow. We have Mia Tretta and Zoe Weissman, double survivors giving witness. And we have Ahmed al-Ahmed, an immigrant from Syria who ambushed one of the shooters at Bondi Beach and disarmed the bastard, taking several bullets for his trouble. One small step back from the cliff and the abyss below.

We do have heroes, famous and obscure. We need to remember that.

Happy Hollandaise everyone.