We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Ethics

If there is one thing Trump actually understands, it’s the utility of the “firehose” championed by Steve Bannon–the tactic of spraying the country with so much excrement each day that the body politic misses behaviors that would, in ordinary times, be scandalous.

Permit me an example.

While we have been distracted by “little things” like an illegal war on Iran, Pam Bondi’s transparent efforts to keep the lid on Trump’s multiple and damning appearances in the Epstein files, and the re-emergence of measles thanks to RNK, Jr.’s war on medical science, the goofball who is currently in charge of the Pentagon has been in a standoff with Anthropic, a tech company opposed to unregulated and unethical use of its AI product, Claude.

As the Atlantic has reported, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued an ultimatum to Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei. He ordered the company to strip the ethical guardrails from its AI models “or face the full weight of the state.” Hegseth accompanied that order with a threat that, unless Anthropic allowed the Pentagon “all lawful uses” of its Claude models, he would designate Anthropic “a supply-chain risk,” effectively blacklisting the company  from doing business with “any entity that touches the Department of Defense.”

To his eternal credit, Amodei refused, explaining that while he believed “deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries,” there is a narrow set of cases in which AI can “undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.” He concluded that the Pentagon’s “threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”

As the linked article argues, the company’s stance represents a principled objection to the use of its AI for mass surveillance.

It is not opposed to autonomous weapons per se and has already carved out exemptions for missile defense and cyber operations. The company’s hesitation regarding autonomy is technical: Large language models are simply not yet reliable enough to operate without a human in the loop. Pushing them too far, too quickly, invites a mistake that could prove disastrous. Anthropic is asking for an exclusion on autonomous weapons not out of an ideological refusal to fight, but to allow for the research and development necessary to make such systems safe.

People in the Trump administration, however, are impervious to both logic and ethics. Not long after the Atlantic published its article about the dispute, the Washington Post reported that Anthropic had been cut off from all government contracts. The Post reported that the action “shook the tech industry” and hardened the political and cultural battle lines across Silicon Valley over military use of artificial intelligence.

As the article noted, Trump has now put all of Silicon Valley on notice: if tech companies want to do business with the  Pentagon they should be prepared to accede to any and all administration policies and hand over control of how their technology is used.

Less ethical rivals of Anthropic (including–surprise!– Elon Musk) have rushed in to pledge that their own companies would not question Pentagon policies, styling themselves as “loyal patriots.”

It isn’t surprising that Trump’s transactional administration would favor companies willing to trade their ethical concerns for lucrative contracts.  Last fall, the administration characterized Anthropic’s ethical concerns as attempts to manipulate the government with “fear mongering” about AI technology. Media outlets reported that the White House was “displeased” when Anthropic raised ethical objections to the ways in which the administration wanted to use its technology–especially its intent to use the company’s product for surveillance. 

The Atlantic article called this ethical quandary over domestic surveillance an “unbridgeable divide.”

Under an administration that invoked the Insurrection Act, or that sought to map domestic dissent, the Pentagon’s demand for “all lawful uses” of Anthropic’s models could become a skeleton key. Amodei articulated this danger in a recent interview with Ross Douthat, noting that, although it isn’t illegal to record conversations in public spaces, the sheer scale of AI changes the nature of the act. As Amodei put it, AI could transcribe speech and correlate it in a way that would not only identify one member of the opposition but “make a map of all 100 million. And so, are you going to make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment by the technology finding technical ways around it?”

The answer to that question is obvious. The fascist regime that currently controls America’s federal government–and the Silicon Valley “bros” who are rushing to ignore those pesky ethical concerns–will be happy to make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment.

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Pro-America?

Americans have engaged in a longstanding argument about the nature of patriotism–and how it differs from nationalism. I agree with those who argue that a true patriotism requires allegiance to the nation’s founding principles, and includes an obligation to protest official actions that violate those original commitments. Nationalism, on the other hand, requires belief in “my country right or wrong”–blind support for wherever the nation’s leaders take us.

It has become abundantly clear that the various members of the Trump administration fall into the second camp, which brings me to the nationalist idiocy of FCC Chair Brendan Carr.

As a Daily Beast headline accurately put it, “Trump Goon Demands ‘Pro-America’ Content from the Networks.” Among Carr’s suggestions: broadcasters should start each broadcast day with the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ or Pledge of Allegiance” and offer viewers daily “Today in American History” announcements that explain “significant events that took place on that day in history.” (Somehow, I doubt that those history lessons would include the My Lai massacre or Emmitt Till’s murder…) Carr wants “patriotic, pro-America content that celebrates the American journey and inspires its citizens.”

Evidently, truly “pro-American” material would exclude televised interviews with Democratic candidates, since the memo followed a widely-publicized episode in which Stephen Colbert was forbidden to air a segment with Texas Democrat James Talarico, who is running for the Senate. Colbert had been told by CBS lawyers that airing the interview would run afoul of Carr’s decision to enforce the FCC’s “equal time” rule for talk shows, which had traditionally been exempt from that rule. This was not a one-off; a couple of weeks before this incident, Carr had launched an investigation into The View after it broadcast an interview with Talarico.

Carr is evidently as stupid as the rest of Trump’s appointees: Colbert published the video on his YouTube channel, where it has garnered more than 8 million views to date–far more than most of his late-night interviews. (It also generated $2.5 million for Talarico’s campaign in a mere 24 hours.)

An article in The Independent also covered Carr’s request that broadcasters join his Pledge America Campaign–a promise to air “patriotic, pro-America content that celebrates the American journey and inspires its citizens by highlighting the historic accomplishments of this great nation from our founding through the Trump Administration today.”

Carr rather clearly doesn’t understand what it means to be a truly patriotic “pro American.” Anna Gomez–who is the only Democratic Commissioner at the FCC, took to X to school him, writing that “Nothing is more American than defending our constitutional rights against those who would erode our civil liberties. If broadcasters choose to participate in this FCC campaign, they can do so by defending their First Amendment rights and refusing government interference.”

Carr and his tone-deaf efforts to undermine the First Amendment are just one aspect of the Trump administration’s nationalism–a nationalism that is far from patriotic. Historians and political scientists define patriotism as affection, pride, and support for the shared values of one’s country, and a commitment to support national improvement. Nationalism, on the other hand, is a devotion to “blood and soil.” It emphasizes the superiority of the nation over others, and fosters exclusionary, competitive, and aggressive attitudes toward foreign nations.

There’s an excellent quote attributed to someone named Sydney Harris: “the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does.” Precisely.

After the close of the Olympics, the New York Times published an article titled “At the Olympics, I Saw the Difference Between Nationalism and Patriotism.” It traced that distinction with references to the conduct of both athletes and audiences, and strongly rebutted J.D. Vance’s insistence that America’s “distinct national culture is part of what makes international institutions suspect, immigration threatening and alliances based on shared principles unwise.” The essay concluded:

With our wallets, our attention, our time and our collective groans with every fall and cheers for every newly realized lifelong dream, the world’s citizens are sending a message: We proudly root for our countries, but we are more than just our countries. And in many cases we are better — much better — than the governments in charge of them.

To be “pro America” is to be patriotic–not nationalistic. Too bad Trump and Carr don’t understand the difference.

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Who’s Benefitting?

The corruption on display by the Trump administration just keeps growing. Metastasizing, actually.

A reader recently sent me a video that reported on a little-noted element of ICE’s efforts to acquire warehouses. There’s been a lot of pushback from locals who object to the purchases on the grounds that they will be barely-veiled concentration camps, but I had not previously encountered a different objection, an itemization of the obscene overpayments being made— sales prices that are wildly inflated over assessed values and/or recent, previous acquisition costs, with the identity of those profiting from these transactions difficult to determine.

The woman in the linked video asks a reasonable question: who’s benefiting from this boondoggle?

It’s difficult to grasp the astonishing degree of corruption of the Trump administration–not just the official favors being done for the president’s billionaire cronies (the tax cuts and official permits and terminations of investigations begun under previous administrations), but the numerous outright bribes from foreign countries and domestic fat cats. (The Center for American Progress estimates the Trump family has taken in 1.8 billion in cash and gifts.)

This outright looting has certainly not been accompanied by any moves benefitting the American people. It’s a shame that the length of Trump’s meandering, bloated and mendacious State of the Union speech kept so many people from seeing or hearing the Democratic rebuttal presented by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger–as a recent post from the Contrarian reported, it was a concise and effective 13 minutes.

Spanberger began with three simple questions: Is the president working to make life more affordable for you and your family?Is the president working to keep Americans safe — both at home and abroad? Is the President working for YOU? She proceeded to point out that Trump’s reckless trade policies have cost American families an average of $1,700 each. (Despite Trump’s insistence that tariffs are paid by foreign countries, they aren’t–as every economist, liberal or conservative, has pointed out, they are a tax on Americans, intended to offset the revenues lost thanks to the deep tax cuts for the wealthy.)  

Spanberger also highlighted the escalating closures of rural health clinics, thanks to provisions in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” 

And tonight, the President celebrated this law — the one threatening rural hospitals, stripping healthcare from millions of Americans, and driving up costs in energy and housing. All while cutting food programs for hungry kids.

Spanberger–who was an intelligence officer with the CIA before entering politics–then turned to the question of public safety, pointing out that ICE’s time spent sowing fear is time “not spent investigating murders, crimes against children, or the criminals defrauding seniors of their life savings.” Worse still, Trump has destroyed America’s reputation as a force for good in the world–outcomes she attributed to the appointment of “deeply unserious people to our nation’s most serious positions.”

Turning to the third of her questions, Spanberger ticked off the multiple grifts of an administration that she quite accurately accused of being the most corrupt in memory. Not only is Trump enriching himself, his family, and his friends at a scale that is unprecedented–“cozying up to foreign princes for airplanes and billionaires for ballrooms”–there’s the ongoing cover-up of the Epstein files, the crypto scams, and the embarrassing plastering of his name and face on buildings all over our nation’s capital.

Spanberger ended her thirteen minutes by reminding her listeners that We the People have the power to stop the desecration of the American Idea. We have the power–and the obligation–to put an end to what is truly a massive theft, not just of our funds, but of America’s founding philosophy.

As she concluded,

George Washington warned us about the possibility of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” rising to power. But he also encouraged us — all Americans — to unite in “a common cause” to move this nation forward.

That is our charge once more. And that is what we are seeing across the country.

It is deeply American and patriotic to do so, and it is how we ensure that the State of our Union remains strong, not just this year but for the next 250 years as well.

If we’ve learned anything from the slow drip of the Epstein files, it is that a class of wealthy and entitled individuals consider themselves above the laws that govern us “little people.” That sense of impunity has now led to unprecedented corruption and the wholesale looting of dollars meant to provide for the public good.

“It’s time for a change” has never been a more powerful slogan.

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Speaking Of Education..

There are many ways to “slice and dice” the U.S. citizenry–ways to distinguish between the Americans who support our mad, would-be monarch, and those who don’t. Research strongly suggests that one of those ways is education–not just the wide distinction in voting patterns between Americans with college degrees and those without (in 2024,college graduates went for Harris by 13 points), but between voters with and without such degrees who continue to cheer the persistent, arguably hysterical war that the administration and the Republican Party is waging against science, history, and genuine education of all sorts.

That war is wide-ranging.

MAGA’s White “Christian” nationalist base is once again trying to post the (cinematic version of the) Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. Red State legislators–very much including Hoosier lawmakers–continue to confuse education with job training, evaluating the “merit” of high school and college programs on the basis of student’s later earnings. RNK, Jr. has led the battle against medical science and probative evidence, while others in the administration continue to force changes to accurate historical displays in the nation’s parks and museums, turning them into “patriotic” propaganda.

But the administration continues to wage its most ferocious war on the nation’s universities. And as Arne Duncan, the former U.S. education secretary, and David Pressman, a former ambassador to Hungary recently argued in the linked essay, America’s universities need to dramatically improve their response to the unremitting assaults on academic freedom.

For decades, universities have cast themselves as guardians of free inquiry and intellectual independence. Yet when confronted with political coercion aimed squarely at those values, too many have revealed a troubling gap between rhetoric and practice.

In their essay, they draw a troubling parallel between what happened to the universities in Hungary and what they see unfolding in the United States. They point out that the early responses were the same, and predict that if the current spinelessness continues, the outcome will also be the same.

In Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Hungary, a kleptocratic and illiberal political movement began not with tanks in the streets, but with pressure, “compacts” and quiet accommodation. Storied institutions of higher education and research were slowly captured, their leaders coerced through financial threats and political pressure.

There, university rectors told themselves that going along was the best way to protect their institutions and their work. But they were wrong. Accommodation did not moderate the regime; it emboldened it, signaling weakness and inviting further demands.

Duncan and Pressman list the Trump administration assaults: conditioning federal research grants on ideological conformity; threatening investigations; freezing funding; intrusive oversight; turning money meant to cure disease and advance knowledge into political ransom. But, as they charge, with only “a handful of notable exceptions,” academic leadership has responded “with timidity, silence or preemptive concession.”

As the authors charge, “When institutional self-preservation replaces moral leadership, universities abandon their core mission. This is a striking abdication of responsibility — particularly from leaders entrusted with educating the next generation of citizens.”

It’s hard to disagree with their warning that allowing legal caution to displace moral leadership is anticipatory surrender.

Lest we be tempted to shrug off that warning, we might want to take a look at what is happening in Florida right now, where Ron DeSantis is making Florida the poster child for the GOP’s war on reality. The state has just handed down a sociology curriculum that they are requiring all public colleges to use– and the Florida Department of Education is already working on a similar framework for American history classes.

Aligned with the state-sanctioned sociology textbook, the framework requires that the courses do not “include a curriculum that teaches identity politics” or one that “is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.”

The Florida Department of Education also distributed an instructor’s manual and textbook, while demanding that institutions submit their current sociology syllabi, “including detailed assignment schedules, topic calendars, or modules to show course coverage.” The state has entirely banned class discussions that “state an intent of institutions today to oppress persons of color,” “that argue most variations between men and women are learned traits and behaviors,” and “that describe when, how, or why individuals determine their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.”

Welcome to Fantasy Island….

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Rights Aren’t Just For People We LIke

One of the pithier explanations of the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment was written by Supreme Court Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in a case titled United States v. Schwimmer. In that opinion, Holmes wrote that “if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”

Holmes was acknowledging the obvious: majorities don’t seek to censor popular opinions. They seek to suppress the “ideas we hate,” the beliefs and utterances that they find offensive.

That lesson–that rights are universal, and not reserved for people with whom we agree or people we consider part of our “tribes”–was one of the most difficult for my undergraduate students to learn. Surely the government can sanction people we know are lying! Surely the City Council can pass ordinances against material we consider smut! Surely religious liberty doesn’t mean that atheists and Satanists have the same rights as good Christians!

That pesky principle–that rights also apply to disfavored folks–was the subject of a recent article in the Washington Post,describing yet another aspect of Trump’s inability to grasp that simple concept, or the fact that people he hates (and boy, there are a lot of them!) are entitled to equal treatment under the law.

This particular evidence of Trump’s ignorance involved the pardon power.

As Biden prepared to leave the presidency, he had used that power to commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal prisoners awaiting execution. He didn’t free them; the commutation meant that they will serve life in prison. The article reports that Trump “was outraged at this decision and set out to roll it back.”

Ironically, if Biden had pardoned the murderers altogether or had them released (which would have been constitutionally possible but politically scandalous), Trump couldn’t have done anything about it. But because they remain under life sentences, his administration can still influence their fates. It can’t lawfully kill them, but it can dictate the conditions of their confinement.

Our vicious President issued an executive order on his very first day back in office, declaring his intent to “ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes.” The Justice Department that he has turned into a weapon he controls proceeded to implement the directive by sending those prisoners to the most isolating imprisonment possible — “a ‘supermax’ facility that cuts inmates off from most human contact.”

A number of the affected prisoners brought suit.  U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee in the District of Columbia, ruled that the transfer violated the Constitution’s guarantee of due process, at least in their cases.

As the article points out, It’s a decision that “cuts to the heart of the rule of law.”

Kelly’s opinion is on appeal, and given the unprecedented leeway granted to Trump by the Supreme Court, there’s no telling what the final outcome will be. But as the article points out, Trump’s effort to undo Biden’s clemency is a warning about Trump’s own flagrant misuse of the pardon power, including the threat that it might encourage future presidential successors to “reach for more boundary-pushing ways to get around past pardons.”

Trump has been nothing but “boundary-pushing.” Most pundits attribute that boundary-pushing–more properly labeled illegality–to Trump’s overwhelming desire for power, to the self-aggrandizement that he has displayed throughout his life. That explanation, however, assumes a degree of “knowingness”–a deliberate decision to ignore restraints that he doesn’t believe should apply to him.

I think that’s wrong.

If We the People have learned anything about this sad excuse for a human being, it is that he isn’t just mentally ill, isn’t just slipping into a senility that is getting harder and harder to ignore. He is also profoundly ignorant. He has consistently manifested a lack of understanding of–or even a basic familiarity with– the Constitution he took an oath to defend. He is quite clearly incapable of understanding the quote by Holmes with which I began this post, and if he did understand it, he would reject it.

What We the People have come to understand is the immense–and in many cases, irreversible– damage that can be done to a nation when it elevates a profoundly flawed, incompetent and thoroughly vicious man-child to a position of power.

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