Mentions Donald Trump

For over half a century, Trump has operated within a transnational organized crime network whose goal is to strip the US down and sell it for parts, much like the oligarch raids after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They have been aided in this endeavor by institutions, in particular the DOJ, which has long protected Trump, and by members of the Democratic Party serving as controlled opposition.

Many Americans did not want to believe this final twist. It is harder to reckon with betrayal than with a straight liar.

But the footage of a grinning Joe Biden with Donald Trump — the man who Biden claimed is a fascist who will destroy America and then handed the keys to the country, promising to accommodate him — seems to have finally woken folks up.

I warned you for nine years, because I wanted you to be prepared. Biden was a Placeholder President designed to fill the four years between two terms of Trump while plutocrats shifted American political culture sharply to the right. Media gutted, Twitter decimated, activism destroyed, books censored, minorities demonized, public health annihilated, victims blamed, empathy scorned.

That is the main thing they are after now: your empathy. They want you to hate each other so you don’t hate them first.

They want you to buy into every cheap cliché and every manipulated poll. They want you to hate each other so much, you agree to their plan of tearing this country into warring fiefdoms for oligarchs to plunder. They want you to prey on the vulnerable, even though you are vulnerable too, so that the powerful can escape scrutiny.

They want you to cheer your own demise, mistaking it for someone else’s.

Trump said at his Thursday news conference that his conclusion that diversity had something to do with the crash was “common sense”.

But common sense tells us he was being racist.

“ ‘It’s probably a black person’s fault this bad thing happened’ as a reflexive explanation is just a racist statement, there’s not a level of substantiation that makes it not racist,” Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer posted on Bluesky.

“He's not blaming DEI, he's blaming women and non white people,” wrote MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.

“These people are segregationists and their position is that no one who isn’t a white man is qualified to do skilled work of any kind,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote on Bluesky. He then added: "i think it is important to say that the open and explicit racism of the president and the vice president isn’t just uncouth or ‘controversial’ but a direct attack on tens of millions of americans and a dereliction of their duty to represent the entire country."

Republicans for years have tried to legislate their personal beliefs about life beginning at conception. They’ve introduced versions of a bill called the Life at Conception Act 13 times since 2011. These efforts have almost certainly influenced the “conception” language in Trump’s latest executive action.

Dr. Richard Bribiescas, an anthropology professor at Yale University and the president of the Human Biology Association, said the order’s definitions of “sex” and “gender” ignore all kinds of variations that take place in human development.

“Woman/man, boy/girl are gender identities that do not necessarily align with biological characteristics of sex,” he said in an email. “Genders are components of human variation that are influenced by culture, identity, and many other non-biological factors. To illustrate the difference between sex and gender, we can talk about male/female chimpanzees (our closest evolutionary relative) but it would be non-sensical to discuss chimpanzee women, men, boys or girls.”

Trump’s definitions of “female” and “male” are also flawed, said Bribiescas, because he is tying them to something called “anisogamy” in biology, or the observation that females of some species, including humans, tend to produce larger gametes (the reproductive cells that come from germ cells) compared to males.

Anisogamy is not a universal rule in biology, he said. But Trump’s executive order defines females as people belonging to the sex that produces “the large reproductive cell” and males belonging to the sex that produces “the small reproductive cell.”

The size of a person’s gametes is “just one characteristic among many (ie., genetic, hormonal, developmental, physical) that is used to describe sex,” Bribiescas said. “Clearly, this order is not fully informed by current biological science.”

I have had the notable displeasure of witnessing the evolution of anti-trans bills and the relentless attacks on transgender rights over the past five years. For much of that time, Republicans, buoyed by anti-trans organizations funded by billionaires and amplified by media outlets like The New York Times, have operated under the guise that their efforts were not “anti-trans.” Instead, they claimed to be “just asking questions,” “questioning the science,” or “engaging in a debate” about transgender people—as if these debates were somehow divorced from the rampant anti-trans animus that is undeniably pervasive in those circles.

They never truly were, of course, but to gain a foothold in American politics, they maintained a façade of concern for the welfare of transgender people. This is why, when reading the original Arkansas trans care ban, you won’t find overt charges that transgender people are lesser human beings who deserve to be erased in the purpose section. Instead, you’ll encounter pseudo-scientific statements like “the risks of gender transition procedures far outweigh any benefits” and “the majority come to identify with their biological sex.” Both are demonstrably false, but carefully crafted to carry a veneer of scientific credibility—providing a shield against accusations that such bans are rooted in hatred toward transgender people.

That all changed yesterday. President Trump, in justifying his transgender military ban, leaned on a new argument for why such an action restricting the rights of transgender people was necessary: that transgender people are lesser human beings, dishonorable liars, and worse.

[…]

This marks a chilling and undeniable shift. The attacks on transgender people are no longer cloaked in the faux respectability of “evidence,” “science,” or “protecting kids.” They never truly were, but now even the pretense has been abandoned. The thin veneer provided by New York Times op-eds, SEGM’s pseudo-scientific “reviews,” and the disingenuous claims of debate is no longer required. Instead, the justification is laid bare in black and white: transgender people are “dishonorable,” “liars,” “false.” The language is stark, deliberate, and unmistakable—it dehumanizes us. This is the very rhetoric historically used to justify atrocity.

The Trump administration cruelly and abruptly stopped the distribution of live-saving antiretroviral drugs to almost 26 million people worldwide. The program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—PEPFAR—is the global health program started by Republican president George W. Bush in 2003. He celebrated the 20 year anniversary in 2023 at his presidential library.

[…]

Without the drugs for any length of time, HIV will replicate inside the bodies of these HIV-infected people in poor countries across Africa, Asia and elsewhere, who have been living and thriving, as HIV has thankfully become a manageable illness because of the drugs. HIV will be able to transmit from them to others—transmission is suppressed while taking the drugs—and more powerful strains could emerge.

And they will develop full-blown AIDS, suffer immensely, and die.

It’s as simple as that.

Let’s be clear, for Trump this is eugenics, killing off the non-white people in the “shithole” countries who he surely believes we shouldn’t be spending money on.

Trump has promoted eugenics—spouting off about “good genes” and “bad genes” in talking about immigrants he wants to deport who he says are “poisoning the blood” of Americans—and, according to his own nephew, said disabled people should “just die” in the context of his nephew’s own son.

Over the last four days, the bizarre Cybertruck fire outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas has run from comical interlude to possible terrorist incident to tragic suicide of another veteran of America’s forever wars. Each of these descriptions still captures an important part of the story. As I noted yesterday, while Matthew Livelsberger appears to have had a series of combustible and likely abusive relationships going back many years he also appears to have suffered from PTSD and possibly a traumatic brain injury since returning from a tour of duty in 2019. (I’m tentative on the spousal abuse front only because for now the direct evidence for that that I’m aware of comes only from the friend of his ex-wife.) But at least for the moment there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents or what I guess we might call minifestos that investigators found on his iPhone.

Those documents denounce Democrats and demand they be “purged” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Did you miss that stuff?

Yeah, me too!

Most headlines I’d seen in the news report only that he warned of national decline and bore “no ill will toward Mr. Trump,” in the words of one of the investigators. That gloss on Donald Trump is, shall we say, a bit of an understatement, as you can see in these excerpts.

Fully diluted valuation is an estimate so flawed that even publishing it should be considered journalistic malpractice. It is calculated by taking the current going price for a crypto token on an exchange and multiplying it by the total number of tokens that may ever exist for that cryptocurrency. To use $TRUMP as an example, people are currently trading these coins for around $53 apiece. There are 200 million of them in circulation, which puts the token’s (already highly questionable, as I explain in a moment) “market cap” at around $10.7 billion. Eventually, over a period of three years (assuming Trump does not lose interest or change the parameters of the deal), 1 billion tokens are set to be released. It is this supply — three years from now — that is being multiplied by the current price of the tokens to achieve estimates in the several tens of billions for how much Trump’s “net worth” has increased, as though it can be safely assumed that not only will the price remain stable over the next three years, but that there is another more than $40 billion that is guaranteed to just materialize.

This is not to downplay the extent to which Trump is grifting his devotees and those crypto traders looking to make a buck on memecoin speculation. But it is important that we accurately report on his cons and do not contribute to misleading crypto hype for the sake of large numbers.

There can be no doubt that while Biden rhetorically discussed a more humane approach to the border, his actual tenure has been devastating for migrants. Biden deported 271,484 people in 2024 alone — the highest number of any year since 2014. He maintained Trump-era border restrictions, such as the misuse of the Title 42 public health statute to deny migrants access to the U.S. and violate due process of asylum seekers. In its opening days, the Biden administration detained 14,000 Haitian migrants seeking asylum, and summarily deported them en masse. The devastating episode involved U.S. border agents on horseback whipping Haitians, producing photos reminiscent of slavery.

[…]

Will Trump be worse than Biden? This has been a complicated question to answer for many on the left in light of Biden’s unwavering participation in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For sections of the population, there will be a dramatic, catastrophic change from Biden to Trump. The new attacks on reproductive rights, LGBTQ folks and women, immigrants and Muslims should not be underestimated. We should also prepare for a new round of attacks on organizing, beginning with especially vulnerable activists, such as international students, Muslim and immigrant organizers. But such attacks are already happening under Biden, who has presided over mass arrests of student protesters and the criminalization of organizing for Palestine.

[…]

This continuity between Biden and Trump — and convergence between the Democratic Party and MAGA — complicates an assessment of Trump and made it difficult for many progressives to support Kamala Harris’s campaign.

Bannon said after Zuckerberg’s visit, “the floodgates opened up and they were all there trying to be supplicants. I look at this, and I think most people in our movement look at this, as President Trump broke the oligarchs. He broke them and they surrendered.” Bannon added, with a laugh: “They came and said: ‘Oh, we’ll take off any constraints, no more checkings, everything.’”

“I view this as September of 1945, the Missouri, and you have the [Japanese] imperial high command, and he’s like Douglas MacArthur. That is an official surrender, OK, and I think it’s powerful”, Bannon added.

The comments come as Joe Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy” and of “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy people”.

But according to the White House archives, Biden had not uttered the word “oligarchy” in the context of American politics until last week. Progressive Democrats called out Biden for being an imperfect messenger having courted and relied on big-ticket donors during his 50-year career.

“It’s cowardly that after representing the oligarchs for 50 years in office, he calls out this threat to our nation with just days left in his presidency,” said Nina Turner, a national co-chair for the senator Bernie Sanders’ last presidential campaign.

Every time a farm worker is infected with H5N1, it’s like a game of Russian Roulette for the rest of us. The virus is making trillions of copies of itself, and many of them carry random mutations. If any of those copies carry mutations that allow it to achieve human-to-human transmission, it will likely be passed on to a contact- or contacts- of that worker. You’ve just witnessed the potential birth of a new pandemic.

So basically, you really, really don’t want this thing- this Spillover Event- to happen even a single time. Every time you do, you’re potentially gambling with 8 billion people’s futures. The Biden Administration has allowed it to happen 61 times in less than a year. And instead of treating it like an emergency, which they almost certainly would’ve before COVID, the USDA, FDA, CDC and White House keep treating their Russian Roulette “wins” like permission to play another round.

Like most of the conclusions the White House appears to have drawn about public health, this betrays a poor understanding of statistics. When you win a round of Russian Roulette, it doesn’t mean you’re “good” at Russian Roulette, or that the game is easy, or that you’re on a hot streak, although gamblers believe these sorts of things about gambling all the time. It just means you got lucky. It shouldn’t be taken as an invitation to go around again.

Where Hong Kong, Finland, Spain and many other governments took immediate and drastic action to avoid spillovers, the US has watched the virus spread and worsen, looking the other way as infections among farmers crop up. Through negligence and incompetence, the US government is creating the conditions for another global pandemic, despite having had months to avert it entirely.