War On Drugs? Give Me A Break!

Will the administration’s obvious war crimes finally motivate Congressional pushback? We can only hope.

As I write this, the media is filled with stories about the attacks on fishing boats ordered by Trump and Hegseth, and evidence of their illegality. Trump has been ordering these vessels blown out of the water, and Hegseth has reportedly ordered survivors murdered, in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war.

These actions are being investigated by Congress, and we can only hope that partisanship will not distort that investigation, because the purported reason for these attacks is patently phony. 

Trump insists that the attacks are efforts to stop drug trafficking–that the boats that have been blown out of the water aren’t really fishing vessels. Of course, as is typical for this administration, the boats have been attacked and their occupants killed with absolutely no evidence offered or due process occuring. We’re supposed to take Trump’s word for it (despite ample evidence that when Trump’s lips are moving, he’s lying.)

What makes these allegations even more suspect than other Trump lies is the enormous hypocrisy of Trump’s claim to be against the importation of drugs. As Charlie Sykes–among others–has pointed out, his attacks on these fishing boats and his threats to invade Venezuela come at the same time as his pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, a Honduran ex-president convicted of cocaine trafficking who has boasted about stuffing drugs “up the gringos’ noses.”

The American public is evidently supposed to believe that Trump blew up fishing boats and is threatening  a military campaign in an effort to deter drug trafficking–at the same time he is ordering the release of a man convicted of taking “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels–a man convicted of using the full power and strength of his state — military, police and justice system–to protect drug traffickers, a man who–as prosecutors convincingly demonstrated– allowed “bricks of cocaine from Venezuela to flow through Honduras en route to the United States.”

As Sykes summed it up:

  • Trump declares war on drug kingpins.
  • Trump’s uses the war on drugs as the justification for extrajudicial murders on the high seas; and calls for the execution of six Democratic members of Congress who tell members of the military they do not need to follow illegal orders.
  • As part of Trump’s war against drug kingpins, SecDef Pete Hegseth orders Seal Team 6 to “kill everybody,” including unarmed survivors.
  • We are inching toward the invasion of Venezuela, because its president is allegedly a drug kingpin.
  • Trump pardons notorious drug kingpin.

Paul Krugman also addressed the obvious hypocrisy,

At first glance, the juxtaposition seems bizarre – Trump is either murdering or committing war crimes against people who are at worst small-time drug smugglers, and may be innocent fishermen, while pardoning a drug lord who was responsible for thousands of American deaths while savaging his own country, Honduras. But there is a pattern to this murderous madness, once one connects the dots between Trump’s mob-boss persona and the billionaire crypto/tech broligarchy.

According to Krugman, Trump’s vendetta against purported penny-ante drug smugglers is intended to set the stage for an invasion of Venezuela. And he reminds us that Trump “positively revels in his association with big-time criminals, whether it’s Putin or Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman” or Ross Ulbricht, whose underground e-marketplace is known for drug trafficking, and whom Trump pardoned immediately after assuming office.

Still, why would Trump, whose poll numbers are cratering, generate even more negative headlines by pardoning Hernández, who was duly convicted of conspiring to send more than 400 tons (!) of cocaine to America?

The answer is the influence of the crypto/tech broligarchy. In fact, many of Trump’s pardons of the most egregious criminals are closely linked to their influence.

Krugman points out that Peter Thiel was a supporter of Ulbrict and that the ex-president of Honduras is also connected to  the titans of crypto-currency. Those ‘crypto-bros” were also behind Trump’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao, formerly the CEO of  cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Zhao pled guilty to charges of violating U.S. laws against money-laundering and was personally fined $50 million, in addition to Binance’s fine of $4.3 billion.

The revelations of wrongdoing go on. And on.

In one of the recently disclosed emails from Jeffrey Epstein, the predator wrote “I have met some very bad people … none as bad as Trump.” In several others, he referred to Trump as insane–and a danger to America.

Believe the predator. 

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An Inside Analysis

Those of us who loathe Donald Trump use a variety of words to explain that reaction. We note that he is ignorant, intellectually deficient and incompetent, that his maturation and vocabulary appear to have stopped developing around third grade, that he is mentally-ill, mean-spirited, selfish, vindictive and criminal…I could go on, but the bottom line is that he exhibits not a single redeeming human attribute.

But it has taken someone who actually worked with and for him to append the word that sums him up: evil.

As Lincoln Square has recently reported,

Ty Cobb, the former White House lawyer who once represented President Donald J. Trump, issued a public warning this week, saying the president’s conduct and his approach to the judiciary pose what Cobb described as a serious risk to the country’s constitutional structure.

“The Constitution really is not adequate to deal with a president as evil as Trump,” Cobb said in an interview broadcast on MSNow, adding that the president’s recent actions reflected “a desire to accumulate and abuse power.”

In the interview, Cobb expanded on his observations, noting that his concerns have sharpened as the administration has experienced setbacks in the courts. (An appeals court threw out Trump’s attempt to revive a defamation lawsuit against CNN; another federal judge found his deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., illegal; and yet another called the president’s cuts of millions of dollars of local government funding “probably illegal.”) Cox noted that–as we all now know– Trump reacts intensely to setbacks and perceived personal slights.

“Any insult tweaks his narcissism in a way that brings out a fight or flight instinct,” Cobb said, “and with Trump, the flight instinct really doesn’t kick in. It’s really just fight, and it’s fight by any means possible — legal or otherwise.” He said he viewed actions such as “sending in the National Guard” and “zip tying mothers and separating [them] from their children” as examples of this pattern.

Congress came in for its (richly deserved) criticism. Cobb decried that body’s lack of response to the administration’s lawlessness, and the reality that members have “neutered themselves through their cowardice and greed.” And he pointed out that the ability of the courts to constrain the administration is limited to constitutional violations. Only Congress has the constitutional authority to override policies, censure and impeach.

Trump’s contempt for both the Constitution and bodies of law is demonstrable. He continues to pardon people whose criminality (and lack of remorse for that criminality) is manifest. He’s committing blatant war crimes in Venezuela and Colombia.

Cobb concluded that “It’d be nice to have a Nuremberg trial of all these people,” although he admitted such a trial is unlikely. In his opinion, the judiciary is America’s only institutional safeguard– and if he acknowledged the corruption of the current Supreme Court, the article doesn’t mention it. The lower courts, at least, have been holding the constitutional line, and not every setback can be appealed.

So here we are. Recent polling shows that large majorities of Americans strongly oppose Trump and his administration, and it seems very likely that it will be up to We the People to exact whatever retribution or accountability is feasible. Most of us have come to realize that the only viable cure for Trumpism is political, As genuine public servants like Jamin Raskin have reminded us, We the People need to build and maintain a new coalition dedicated to serving the common good through the institutions of a democratic republic.

That–as we all understand–is easier said than done.

We need to be clear about how we got here. The apathy that kept some 80 million voters from the polls merged with the racial animus of MAGA Republicans to elect–albeit by a very slim margin– the vicious, dangerous man who is wreaking havoc with America’s legitimacy both at home and abroad. If survey research is to be believed, a significant portion of both those groups is experiencing remorse.

We have just under a year until the midterm elections, and the GOP is trying desperately to rig that election. Given public opinion, I don’t think those efforts will succeed, and I anticipate a large “Blue wave” in 2026. Between now and then, the resistance must increase the pressure in every way we can–through protests, boycotts, and lawsuits.

When we finally neuter this criminal administration, the first order of business will be to repair the structural flaws in our government that facilitated what historians will mark as a tragic episode in America’s history.

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Protecting The Right To Vote

One of the (far too many) newsletters I get is one from Democracy Docket. Founded by lawyer Marc Elias in 2020, the platform is dedicated to information, analysis and opinion about voting rights and elections. It’s especially focused on the multiple lawsuits Elias and his firm have brought against the Trump administration–most of which they’ve won.

A recent newsletter was a bit different: it was a list of suggested laws that would protect voting rights.

The newsletter presented the list for consideration by Blue states, presumably because the adoption of such protections would be highly unlikely in Red states like Indiana. (Actually, I think a strategically-smart campaign to protect the vote might do better than the organization thinks…at least, it would be worth a try. Opposing people’s right to cast a ballot is a dicey position–at least, it should be.)

So what are the laws that Democracy Docket believes would strengthen voting rights?

The first is somewhat surprising–passing a statute protecting the right to vote. There is no right to vote in the federal constitution, and although some state constitution include such protections, Elias tells us that “too often these rights are ill-defined or have been limited by past legal precedent.” An explicit, statutory right to vote would correct the ambiguities.

The second is common sense; we need to get over the “signature matching” that states employ to (theoretically) authenticate  mail-in votes. As Elias writes,

The problems with this approach are serious. Every election, hundreds of thousands of lawful ballots are discarded because an election official decides that, in their opinion, two signatures do not match. We need to ban this harmful practice.

First, there is no requirement that a voter maintain a consistent signature to exercise the right to vote. Many voters, particularly young voters, do not keep a consistent signature across documents. With more voters registering on tablets, this problem is worsening with each passing election.

Second, there is simply no science supporting the current practice of having election workers compare a single signature to the image of a specimen signature on file. Election officials are not experts in signature comparison, and true experts have repeatedly testified that the methods used by states to compare signatures cannot support the current practice.

This proposal really resonated with me, because my own signature has changed immensely since I began using the computer for most of my communications. Even on the rare occasion when I have to write a check rather than paying online, my current chicken scratches bear little resemblance to the handwriting of my younger days.

Third on the list should be a no-brainer. Count every ballot postmarked before election day, even if they arrive a few days later due to postal delays. Voters who follow the rules shouldn’t be disenfranchised because of post office delays.

Number Four will never get passed. Elias wants states to guarantee voters that they won’t have to wait in line more than 30 minutes. He’s absolutely correct when he points out that long lines discourage voters and disproportionately penalize voters who can least afford time off work, but there are numerous reasons such a rule would be impractical–everything from machine breakdowns to unanticipated rates of turnout could make compliance a nightmare. Extending early voting and voting hours might be a more practical way to reduce wait times.

The fifth proposal is a ban on third-party voter challenges and other forms of what Elias calles “vigilantism.”

No one should have their registration or right to vote challenged by a random stranger they do not know and have never met. Yet that is what is happening in too many places.

Republicans have built private voter databases used to encourage third-party activists and election vigilantes to submit spreadsheets of voters they want removed from the rolls or hassled at polling places. This practice should be banned and outlawed.

Along the same lines, his sixth proposal is to impose civil and criminal penalties for voter harassment and intimidation, and the seventh and final item on his voting wishlist is to strengthen the vote certification process. As we’ve seen in the Trump “big lie” era, that process has been weaponized– local election offices are increasingly filled with election deniers, and people serving on county election boards are being pressured not to certify accurate results.

Some of these measures would be difficult to pass in Red states, but assuming a vigorous grass-roots campaign, others might actually be adopted. Even if they weren’t, such a campaign would force wider recognition of the barriers people face to having their votes counted.

Worth considering…..

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Our New Digital Reality

Transparency can be so inconvenient.

Elon Musk’s X recently added a new feature that–among other things– allowed users to see where an individual poster was located. Guess what? A huge number of those supposedly “real Americans” turned out to be what we might delicately call “foreign agitators.”

As Lincoln Square (among many others) has reported,

MAGA is not just a political movement of goateed, 50-ish white dudes who all rock that same avatar of them copping what they imagine is an expression of manly vigor in the front seat of their behind-on-the-payments Ford F-350.

It’s a delivery system.

A supply chain for chaos that starts in Moscow and Tehran and Beijing, runs through bot farms in industrial parks outside St. Petersburg or the Pardis Technology Park north of Tehran, or some Nigerian click farm, or a Chinese-criminal-owned social media and tech scam prison in the wilds of Burma, bounces off a rage-merchant influencer “from Ohio” who has never set foot in America, and ends up in your pissed off MAGA uncle’s Facebook feed as a “patriotic truth.”

What conclusions can we draw-should we draw–from the revelation that, as the linked article says, “a bunch of ‘red-blooded American MAGA patriots’ were not American at all. Why would posters from places like Russia, Nigeria, Iran, India, Thailand, and Eastern Europe be cosplaying as neighbors and “real Americans” who were patriotic MAGA partisans?”

It turns out that a significant percentage of MAGA’s online “grassroots” is AstroTurf shipped from overseas. The multiple accounts that make a fringe movement feel much bigger isn’t composed of real people exchanging real attitudes and beliefs. Instead, it’s thousands of fake ones, formed to promote divisive and polarizing content and turn Americans against each other.

Researchers have been documenting this fake MAGA ecosystem for years: foreign accounts that become amplifiers of actual American MAGA propagandists, plus engagement farms, plus MAGA-centric media outlets who either don’t know or don’t care they’re serving as useful idiots. This Twitter reveal was just the icing on the cake.

These aren’t random trolls freelancing for clicks. The U.S. government (until Trump’s second term, of course) has repeatedly disrupted Russian-directed influence networks aimed at American politics, including domain seizures and sanctions for coordinated malign-influence campaigns.

It turns out that our “techie” world has changed the nature of warfare. In the Ukraine war, battles are fought with drones; in today’s version of the Cold War, Russia and other countries with grievances against America don’t need to fire bullets or endanger their soldiers. Instead, they can use tweets to set one American against others, to disrupt the political environment, to encourage enmity. They can turn Americans against each other, with a minimal financial investment and no need to buy weapons of war. As the article quite accurately points out, “social media is a perfect asymmetric weapon; nations that could never take on America in hard power use the addiction of social media that defines our entire culture to hack our politics, our society, and our brains.”

And why does this work? Why do their domestic American targets fall for the tactic?

Because MAGA’s media ecosystem is already pre-programmed for foreign capture, give it a big, loud, dumb narrative that says American liberals eat babies, the U.S. is a decadent and failing experiment, democracy is fake, all the most lurid conspiracies are real, liberalism is a disease, and strongmen should rule. The whole machine lights up like a Christmas tree….

The Kremlin doesn’t need to invade America to build a Ministry of Propaganda; it buys it cheap, drop-ships it here, and MAGA sells it in bulk.

And the foreign architecture of amplification is at its very center. Every time a MAGA influencer runs a pro-Russia theme, or anything else that deepens the engineered political and social divides in America, these foreign engagement networks show up like a flash mob.

The posts spike. The replies swarm. A million clicks and likes make the MAGA faithful feel like they’re in the biggest, baddest tribe.

What’s most infuriating is that the tech bros could stop this, but they’ve chosen not to.

Independent reporting has documented this activity, and Meta, YouTube, and the others have promised to address it. They haven’t. As we know, the social media business model is engagement, and engagement comes from outrage. If that outrage is manufactured by foreign propaganda, well…it still works. So, as the article concludes, “MAGA gets a firehose of artificial oxygen from abroad, and Silicon Valley stands there with its hands in its pockets.”

Once Trump is gone, we have our work cut out for us.

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About That Misuse Of Language…

In yesterday’s post, I focused on the Right’s habit of using words to mean their opposites, exemplified by MAGA’s insistence that working for social amity and equal treatment for all Americans was really playing “identity politics.” In reality, MAGA’s core belief–that the country should privilege White Christian men–is the essence of “identity politics.”

MAGA’s tactic of using language to undermine the actual meaning of the words being used isn’t limited to that one example. As an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently pointed out, in last year’s legislative session, Indiana Republicans provided another, even more egregious example. Under the pretext of protecting “intellectual diversity,” Indiana’s Act 202 is  aimed at limiting the plurality of viewpoints on campus. The Act is a frontal attack on academic freedom, masquerading as the opposite.

The essay began by noting the removal of a social work professor from her classroom for the unpardonable sin of making one graduate student “uncomfortable.” His discomfort was triggered by the instructor’s use of a chart distinguishing between overt and covert racism. The chart included “Make America Great Again” as one of several slogans that can be used as covert white supremacy, and it was used in a class on “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice.”

As the essay pointed out, IU’s suspension of the instructor (after the student complained to Indiana’s ultra-MAGA Senator Jim Banks) actually violated the clear terms of the act, both procedurally and under terms which prohibit institutions from limiting the freedom of faculty members “teaching, researching, or writing publications about diversity, equity, and inclusion or other topics.” (This language was intended to protect critics of DEI, but it clearly applies here.)

As the essay’s author points out, attacks on universities on pretexts of protecting intellectual diversity have a long history.

The right has taken the language of the left, mockingly imitating the words and then turning them into tools of repression.

In 2003, David Horowitz urged conservatives to “use the language that the left has deployed” and declare that there is “a lack of ‘intellectual diversity’ on college faculties.” Horowitz tried to invoke “academic freedom” to justify suppressing it, creating the Academic Bill of Rights and his “Students for Academic Freedom,” claiming that protecting the rights of students meant banning professors from expressing political views.

Act 202 undermines both intellectual diversity and due process by permitting university trustees to fire professors deemed “likely to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.” Note that no evidence of actual misconduct is needed, simply a belief–founded or not– that a professor might be “likely” to say something forbidden.

Act 202 also prohibits professors from saying anything unrelated to their classes. Anything. That’s in clear contrast to AAUP’s appropriate standard, which is for “teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.”

It’s not the presence of any ideas unrelated to a class that violates academic norms, but only persistently intruding material. And this rule must be applied in a viewpoint neutral manner. Colleges cannot punish unrelated speech about politics more than they punish unrelated speech about football or the weather or any other topic. By targeting political viewpoints alone for penalties, SB 202 clearly violates the First Amendment.

Act 202 also weakens tenure protections–protections that were specifically created to protect intellectual diversity. Act 202 requires–okay, threatens– a “post-tenure review” by trustees–officials with no demonstrated competence to judge academic work. A professor’s work should be judged by academic peers rather than unqualified political appointees.

I can attest to the chilling effect of these provisions and IU’s over-eager implementation of them. During numerous conversations, former colleagues have shared dismay and discomfort, given that–under the Act’s language– it is impossible to know what ideas might be deemed “unrelated” to a professor’s academic field by a trustee who knows nothing about that field. (And in Indiana, where our MAGA Governor has personally chosen all of the trustees, that ignorance is pretty much a given.)

The tactical brilliance of laws like Act 202 is obvious. People resisting a law that is dishonestly framed as protective of intellectual diversity invites critics to charge that they are denouncing the concept rather than trying to protect it.

Indiana’s legislature may be accomplishing the true purpose of Act 202. The state is losing some of its best academic minds, who are decamping to institutions willing to protect genuine intellectual diversity, and under its current administration, a formerly proud and storied academic institution is poised to descend to the self-satisfied mediocrity of that legislature.

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