Author: A.T.

Take one minute to review the nice things we’ve been doing for Putin.

We are treating our traditional allies as adversaries and rapidly becoming the world’s “bad guy” — see, e.g., U.S. to End Vaccine Funds for Poor Countries* — while our leader has exchanged love letters with the murderous dictator of North Korea and favored Russia’s murderous dictator over the FBI.

This strikes me as a huge, horrible, existential sort of thing, worthy of a larger font. 

OPRT

I already had a lot, but after reading today’s press release, I bought more.

CLIMATE

Tomorrow, “Al Gore delivers his most urgent climate presentation yet. And you don’t have to be in Paris to be in the room.”  Sign up to experience this moment live from wherever you are and discover how we can build a sustainable future together.

“BANKSPARENCY”

A friend has launched this site to Compare High-Yield Bank Accounts.  “I only soft-launched it last month. I’m still in the process of adding more banks and more bank products.  I’d appreciate any feedback your readers may have.”

For money, I guess, you truly can’t afford to lose.

FLAMINGOS

An entrepreneur on a Zoom seeking funds this morning was asked:  “What if someone just uses AI to invent a superior product?”

“AI is amazing for lots of things,” he said, “but until you can get an AI to draw a picture with 5 flamingos, I’m not worried.  Try it on Grok or any of the others.”

What a weird answer, I thought — and immediately went to Microsoft’s Copilot and typed: “draw me a picture of 5 falmingos.”  Unfazed by my typo, it produced a gorgeous picture . . . of 7.

“Why does the picture you drew have 7 flamingos when I asked for 5?” I asked.

“It seems like there may have been a glitch that caused the image generation to include seven flamingos instead of five. I aim to follow requests precisely, but occasionally the tools I use might interpret the description differently. If you’d like, I can try creating an updated image to match your original request more closely! Let me know.”

“Yes, please re-draw it with 5 instead of 7.”

This time, there were 6.

“Now there are 6 flamingos. Please re-draw with just exactly 5.”

“All right, I’ll create a new image with exactly five flamingos for you. Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like adjusted.”

And here it is: 6 flamingos.

At the rate AI is improving, I have to think the flamingo challenge will soon be overcome.  But — huh?

MUSK FEEDBACK

Kris M: “You say, ‘We have a lot to be thankful to Musk for’???  I’d say HE has a lot to be thankful to US for.  Without a 2010 loan from U.S. taxpayers, he would not have been able to build his factory in California and roll out the Model S.  His companies exist because of billions ($38 of them over the last 20 years) of government contracts, loans, subsidies, etc.  As a long-time taxpayer, I’d like to see some of the billionaires I’ve helped create show some gratitude to the country that enabled their success and give something back to that country in the form of tax dollars.”

Daniel N.: “In What’s Musk Really Up To? yesterday you propagate what can only be described as a wild conspiracy theory.  I have similar mixed feelings about Musk to yours.  But spreading this sort of nonsense is going too far.  Please stop.”

*”By Gavi’s own estimate, the loss of U.S. support may mean 75 million children do not receive routine vaccinations in the next five years, with more than 1.2 million children dying as a result.”

No question that Musk is a visionary genius (also “a pathetic man-child,” in the words of his daughter) — we have a lot to be thankful to him for.

But I wouldn’t buy his stock, now selling for 141 times its trailing 12-month earnings (Ford sells at 7 times and pays a 7% dividend) because Tesla’s sales are falling sharply around the world, including China (Tesla’s No.1 rival is practically taunting Elon Musk now) . . .

. . . and, like Marc Elias, whose powerful Open Letter to Musk I commend to you, I wouldn’t buy his cars, because he and Trump are wrecking American democracy and the post-War order.  Our allies are appalled; the world’s murderous tyrants are delighted.

Our economy, “the envy of the world” when they inherited it, now teeters on the brink of stagflation.

To the man with the chainsaw, nothing is off the table when it comes to addressing the deficit — except the income side of the equation.  Cut wages, cut health care, cut scientific research, cut our “soft power” around the world as you let babies starve to death (they’re African babies, so who cares?) . . . just don’t raise more revenue from billionaires, millionaires, and large corporations by allowing their 2017 tax cuts to expire.

Could it be that simple?  That he genuinely believes there’s tremendous “waste fraud and abuse” to be cut even though he’s yet to identify much of it at all?  And that all he really cares about is keeping his taxes low?

Maybe not.

Here’s one view recently posted on Facebook:

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If you’re a little confused about what Musk is trying to achieve with DOGE, here’s the breakdown:

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel cofounded a company that became PayPal.

Other executives at PayPal went on to found or lead other huge tech companies including YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Affirm, and many VC firms.

This group became known as the PayPal mafia because they exerted an outsized influence on Silicon Valley.

Peter Thiel mentored a young JD Vance and helped him get set up in his first VC firm.

Peter Thiel and the PayPal mafia funded JD Vance’s successful Senate run. Amazing because he had absolutely zero political experience.

Thiel and Musk all but forced Trump to choose JD Vance as VP in exchange for funding his presidential campaign.

The three of them, plus a lot of other tech billionaires subscribe to an ideology called the Dark Enlightenment espoused by this super weird, creepy dude: Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug.

Yarvin preaches that the media and academia represent “The Cathedral” that secretly controls power and must be dismantled.

He advocates for a corporate run monarchy led by a CEO-Dictator.

Says that Democracy is an “outdated software” and openly opposes it and that:

– Government agencies should be dismantled and The U.S. should be broken up into “patchworks” controlled by tech oligarchs.
– That the elite tech billionaires should rule because they have the intelligence to “fix” society
– That the “masses are asses” too dumb to govern themselves.

The strategy is to gut the government via R.A.G.E – Retire All Govt Employees to make government incapable of operating.

Then to replace government with private corporations.

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→ This may be completely crazy.  Or visionary — like going to Mars, annexing Canada and Greenland, or boring tunnels from LA to NY.  I don’t know.

But I’d like Congress and the courts to have a real say in how our future is shaped, not just Trump and Musk.

Instead, they are doing what tyrants always do when snuffing out democracy.  As Robert Reich makes clear, they are going after the four pillars of society: universities, science, the media, and the law.

And it falls to us lovers of liberty, he argues — whether on the right (Liz Cheney) or the left (AOC) — to find the courage to stop them.

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PRKR

The Supreme Court ruled against inventors yesterday by declining to hear their case.  Not surprising given how few cases they do accept and how full their plate is these days — but still.  Fortunately, as I understand it, while it would have been nice if the Court had agreed to hear Parker’s argument — and good for patent holders everywhere if they had agreed with it — their failure to do so has no bearing on PRKR’s 13 outstanding lawsuits.  The stock briefly fell off a cliff yesterday but then largely recovered.  It remains (in my view) the compelling speculation it’s always been.  But ONLY with money you can truly afford to lose.

There Is a Way for Democrats to Stop Trump and Save America, writes Ben Rhodes in the New York Times, concluding:

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If you don’t like what is happening to this country, you don’t need to wait for someone to come along and save it: You need each other. That should be the message that Democrats embrace, because most Americans don’t want to go where Donald Trump and Elon Musk are leading us.

The opposite of shame is pride. Let’s be proud of fighting back, of caring about one another, of committing to rebuild what is being destroyed. Because America is not just about the powerful becoming more powerful; at its best, it is about the underdog beating the longest of odds.

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Hurray, by the way, for Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chris Murphy, Greg Casar, and SO many others.

The movement is building.

Join Indivisible!

Join one of 600 events April 5 — or organize one of your own.

Consider these 15 Ways You Can Fight for Democracy!

BONUS

Tesla is facing a major problem that could cost it billions but its stock jumped 13% yesterday, to 137 times its trailing 12-month earnings.  (Ford trades at 7 times.)  The stock market is not always rational.

. . . but first:

Kudos to Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat, who explains:

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. . . These big MAGA-red boards welcome passersby to a completely alternate reality.

. . .“President Donald J. Trump, Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure. . . .”

. . . As the signs say, the project is funded by the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. But when that bill passed in the fall of 2021, it succeeded only despite a historic sabotage campaign waged against it by the then ex-president.

Trump, operating out of Mar-a-Lago at that point, called the bill “a loser for the USA, a terrible deal.”

He dubbed it the “Non-Infrastructure Bill.” In an unprecedented move by a former president, he attempted to rally Republicans to torpedo the effort, branding any party member who voted for it “weak, foolish and dumb.”

When 19 GOP senators and 13 House members joined with most Democrats to pass it anyway, he. . . compared [them] to appeasers of the Nazis. One of his allies, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, labeled them “traitors” to the nation.

The atmosphere was so poisonous that a constituent of one House Republican [threatened] to kill him.” The constituent was arrested and charged with harassment.

All this over a roads-and-rail bill.

Given this history, that the government’s now putting up signs giving Trump credit is a new level of Orwellian.

. . . The facts are that Trump the builder tried for four years to pass an infrastructure bill but flopped. Biden the supposedly doddering geriatric came along and pushed one through with bipartisan support — in his first year.

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Join Indivisible!  Get your local chapter to design and fund a billboard near any Democratic infrastructure project: “Funding for this project was made possible by [your representative and senators, if it was] and OPPOSED by Trump and 94% of Congressional Republicans.”

Watch this National Park Service clip.  Post billboards: “Park Ranger Layoffs Ahead.  Elon Musk Needed A Tax Cut.”

Trump and Musk are forcing the elderly and disabled to travel to Social Security field offices to handle issues heretofore handled over the phone — even as staff and field offices are being cut.

Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah had sensible things to say about Social Security yesterday.  Watch.  I don’t know what reforms he plans to introduce . . . you know what MY bill would propose . . . but this is the sort of discussion we should have.  If only more Republicans were like John Curtis!

And now!  Teen Vogue.

Musk’s daughter, now 20, calls him “a pathetic man-child.”

And — not that 16-year-olds and their mothers and doctors should have any say in this (Trump feels these are his decisions to make) — but her opinion is that “Transitioning as a minor was something that was medically necessary for me to do in order to be not suicidal, and it is really important that we protect access to trans care for trans youth.”

You can read it all in Teen Vogue.

But first . . .

Something else you can do if you’re not already doing it:  Watch Rachel Maddow every night.  To save time, listen here.  (Advance 30 seconds at a time to skip the ads; click the “1X” to listen faster.)  The ones you’ve missed are all there . . . the perfect companions to your power walks.  Rachel will quicken your step.  This is no time to amble.

Trump Forced to Listen to 45 Minutes of Balalaika Music After Putin Puts Him on Hold.  Andy Borowitz’s headlines say it all.  No need to click.

David P.: “When I saw your ‘bonus‘ . . . <<New tool reveals Musk has overstated verified DOGE savings by at least 92%>> . . . I said to myself, ‘92%’ does not sound like a Musk lie. He’s at least an order-of-magnitude-liar.  He stated the savings are $105 billion, so if they were overstated by 92%, they would be $55 billion (192% of 55 is 105).  Sure enough, the DOGE Tracker says, ‘The total Verifiable Canceled Funding is currently $8.6 billion.’  So the savings are overstated by 1,110% (105=1210% of 8.6)!  The tracker needs more precise language.  And even then, these ‘savings’ within the $8.6 billion are bull. For example, when you unilaterally cancel a lease, you get sued and will most always lose.  So maybe it was a $1 million lease, you can chalk up those savings, but you will later have to pay $1 million in back rent plus interest plus the landlord’s court costs on your intentionally tortious act. Negative net savings — just like the negative savings when you illegally fire someone and then hire them back.”

And now . . .

Both these items are surely old news to you now, but I mean really: how dumb is Howard Lutnick?

“I think if you want to learn something on this show tonight,” he told FOX viewers, “buy Tesla. It’s unbelievable that this guy’s stock is this cheap. It’ll never be this cheap again.”

TSLA is selling for more than 100 times its trailing 12-month earnings.  Its next 12 months should be awful.  Sales have dropped precipitously worldwide among people concerned with climate change and/or democracy.  So maybe 10X or 20X trailing earnings might make more sense?  (Ford trades at 7X.)  A $20 or $40 stock instead of the $225 Howard touted as “unbelievably cheap?”

(TSLA opened at $29 five years ago, long after Musk had begun predicting his cars would that year be able to self-drive from a parking lot in LA to a parking lot in New York with never a human input.  It’s still at least year off, no?    So why is it cheap at eight or ten times the price?  Or look at it this way:  Is Howard really sure it’s worth more than the $147 it closed at last April 15?  Has the Tesla brand become that much more valuable in the last 11 months?  A friend who paid $100,000 for his top-of-the-line Tesla 5 years ago just got an offer of $24,200 when he went to sell it.)

Lutnick also now-famously suggested it could be a good idea to delay Social Security checks by a month.  Honest recipients, he said, wouldn’t mind (and so wouldn’t paralyze the administration with millions of unanswered calls?) — only “fraudsters” would complain.  A good way to ferret them out.

What does it say about Musk’s judgment that he was pushing Lutnick to be Treasury Secretary?  Bessent — though surely a disappointment if he could have prevented the DOGE kids from gaining access to the nation’s crown jewels — has at least some judgment and credibility.

And yes, of course, Musk is a genius.  That his rockets can land the way they do?  And Starlink?  But, tragically, he has become a mad genius — well-intentioned no doubt, but evil.

BONUS

I mentioned yesterday that Warren Buffett is apparently finding some investment refuge in Japan.

Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter Laurie Garrett sends her Google group konichiwa from Kyoto:

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March 20, 2025

Folks,

It’s such a relief to not be in America now. Japan is civil, kind, beautiful, sane, rational, congenial– everything we are losing. Took match tea today with a man from Greenland who is enjoying the first foreign trip of his life. He loathes Trump, of course. But he said everybody is trying to steal Greenland’s minerals, so America is on a list that includes China, Russia, and most of Europe.

A pair of women my age, from Chile, told me every big American oil and mining company is trying to get their hands on Chilean lithium. It’s a relief for them, too, to feel quiet and serene in Japan.

I hope that all of you are following what is happening to science in America.  A French scientist was denied entry to attend a conference because of his political criticism of Trump.

After years of hard work, Dr. Ian Lipkin had to shut down a research program that was caught up in Trump’s attack on Columbia U.

RFK Jr is proving even more disastrous than his cousin, Caroline, warned he would be. He ordered the CDC to review vaccine/autism links, is downplaying vaccines in favor of Vitamin A and cod liver oil to address measles, and wants farmers to let H5N1 flu spread among their chickens and dairy cows so that herd immunity will emerge.

Here’s the thing, Bobby: H5N1 has been circulating in chickens and 100s of other animal species since it first emerged in the mid-90s, and nobody has seen herd immunity yet, anywhere in the world.

Since 1988 the US and Japan have convened an annual high level scientific conference, attended by top government officials and more than 200 research scientists. This year in Tokyo I found the Americans deeply distressed for the Mar. 14-15 meeting, as the Trump Administration barred all federally employed scientists and officials from attending. A few were allowed to present their talks via Zoom, but none were permitted to come to Tokyo. It was a shameful snub of Japan, as well as another slap against science.

Few people outside of science understand the damage that is being done. Consider the example of the Lipkin program that has shut down. The ME/CFS study spent more than a decade creating cohorts of chronic fatigue patients and sufferers of other metabolic disorders whose cause has been mysterious. The work involves 1000s of stored blood samples, several scientists and technicians and years of 24/7 lab work. They had a huge breakthrough 3 years ago, discovering a specific malfunction in the mitochondria of patient’s cells. Mitochondria and the energy engines of cells, and Lipkin’s group made a mind-blowing finding.

With continued work, they hoped to cure these diseases, and get to the bottom of how profound metabolic disorders of this kind occur.

But now, it’s all shut down.

Even if the Democrats miraculously swing Congressional victories in 2026 and retake the White House in 2028 (BIG IFS), the damage has been done.  Technicians and scientists will be laid off, samples will be lost, patients will no longer be accessible.

Back to Square One.

Multiply the Lipkin example by 1000s of research labs working in biology, medicine, public health, climate, biodiversity, and dozens of other fields, and you begin to get a hint of the scale of these heinous acts of devastation.

I must return to staring at Sakura — cherry blossoms.

BREATHE…..

Laurie

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Human Intelligence Is Sharply Declining, reports this piece (feel free to supply your own joke), in part because our attention spans are getting shorter.  Arguably, we all have attention deficit disorder.

Which is why you might not actually sit still long enough to read Chris Hayes’s The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource but perhaps should.  (I read it with my ears, walking.)

I say “perhaps” because, although Hayes does a masterful and engaging job of describing the problem, the only sensible solution he comes up with at the end — albeit an important one — is to ban smart phones in schools (and perhaps require some sort of age verification as we do with alcohol).

And then there is the correlation of on-line social connection with loneliness, depression, and lack of real social c0nnection.  Much in the book to ponder — though I, for one, would not give up my smart phone for anything.  It is a miracle for which I am endlessly grateful.

Speaking of short attention spans . . .

Glenn P.:  “NATO leaked a memo sent to them by the State Department. It advised that a briefing for Trump should:

1. Be a max of three pages long
2. Should be mostly pictures
3. Should praise Trump regularly or he wouldn’t read it.

This was in preparation for a vital summit on the security of the Western world.”

Dan M.:  “One of my cousins, who briefed Trump daily during his first term, said much the same:   Trump almost never read anything, regardless of how short.  To get/keep his attention one needed to use the name ‘Trump’ as frequently as possible.  To brief him on the size of the islands China is building in the South China Sea, for example, they used a scale model of the Trump Tower.”

As long-time readers know, I’ve been suggesting OPRT for quite some time.  The company offers no-credit borrowers a high-interest alternative (28%-36%) to the 300%-600% effective rate pay-day lenders charge.

OPRT went public at $15 before I had ever heard of it (thankfully) and quickly rose to $26; then quickly mucked things up.  Even so, management recently announced a return to profitability and projected 2025 earnings in the range of $1.10-$1.30.

The company’s largest shareholder today released this letter, arguing that earnings on the order of $3.75-$4.75 would be possible if one more board seat could be flipped.  Either way — at $1.10 per share or $3.75 — the stock seems awfully cheap at $6.20.  I just bought more — though only with money (needless to say by now?) I can truly afford to lose.

And speaking of losing money:

I worry that the Trump/Musk/Putin demolition of democracy and the post-War world order may not turn out as well for the American stock market as all of us would all like.  (Warren Buffett has apparently been shifting some of his focus to places like Japan.)

The potential success of most of the speculations I suggest here from time to time is not tightly correlated to the market (e.g., if PRKR wins its lawsuits or ANIX’s cancer treatments prove effective or HYMC is seen mainly as a leveraged way to buy gold).

Even so, in a really bad market, few names are spared.

Including fine companies like Home Depot (HD), suggested here a decade ago at $91, climbing over time to a high of $435 before Trump took office, with dividends along the way.  Selling long-held stocks like that in a taxable account guarantees a “loss” of the tax due.  Instead of selling, you could write short-term calls against them if you know what you’re doing, rolling them over every month or two as they expire (or as you buy them back so as not to have your stock called away from you).

If you don’t want to hassle with that . . . let alone with every stock you own . . . but prefer to hedge against a collapse of the market as a whole, you might consider — definitely with money you can afford to lose because no one wants a market collapse! — something like puts on the Dow (DIA) or the S&P (SPY) or NASDAQ (QQQ).

As I type, one DIA December 18, 2026 DIA 430 put costs about $3,000.  It gives you the right to “put” 1 “share” of the Dow to someone at $43,000 any time between now and the end of 2026.  So with the Dow at 42,000, the right to do that has an “intrinsic” value of $1,000.  The extra $2,000 that you’re paying is the cost of “insurance,” as it were.  If the Dow just climbs from here, albeit with customary ups and downs, but never really looks back, you will have lost the full $3,000.  (Just as you “lose” your insurance premium if your house doesn’t burn down.)  Then again, if in a panic the Dow plunged to 26,000, you’d have a gain of $14,000.  Not that it would be easy to know when to cash in.  At 26,000 you might think the Dow had yet further to fall (it’s a panic, after all!) and hold on, only to see it rise . . . so now you think it really has further to fall so you hold on some more . . . and then it keeps rising — and maybe by the time it expires it’s worthless without your even having sold.  Not a terrible outcome — you collected nothing on your “insurance” because your house did not burn down.

Knowing what to do isn’t easy — and (in my view) we wouldn’t have to be thinking about any of it if we had elected a normal president in 2024.  Instead, Putin and the Proud Boys won, and we are in really serious trouble.

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BONUS

Introducing: The Musk Watch DOGE Tracker . . . as described here: New tool reveals Musk has overstated verified DOGE savings by at least 92%.

(On why he’s now anti-Trump.)

“I never took an hour off from MAGA.  It was my life, it was my being, my personhood, my identity.”

Listen . . . and share?

Join Indivisible!

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Give time or money to Wisconsin!*

*I checked: early voting has begun, but it’s truly not too late.  Musk has already given more than $13 million to beat us — the race is that important!

Let the Trump tax cuts expire on schedule (but only on income above $400,000) and use that revenue to restore all the cuts DOGE has made — except those Congress agrees were wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive.

Also:

> Raise the estate-tax rates above $100 million / $1 billion / $10 billion and tighten the loopholes.  Because once you’re dead, how painful will it really be for you, the deceased, to toss a bigger chunk of your fortune back into the pot as thanks to the country that helped you make it in the first place?  I mean: You’re dead!  Stop complaining!*

> Adequately fund the IRS so the revenue owed by the wealthy and large corporations is, in fact, collected.

> Make the Social Security tweaks I’ve been suggesting for decades.  By the time they kicked in, we might actually not need them to kick in . . . although they would be relatively painless if they did.

Together, those four simple changes would buoy the bond market — i.e., lower interest rates — which would be good for almost everybody and lower the deficit.

*If you hate the U.S. government so much that you don’t want it to have a nickel of your vast fortune — swell.  Just build a new science lab bearing your name or a new opera house or endow an oceanographic institute or make tuition free at your favorite medical school.  That would lower your estate tax to zero.

Herewith the lens through which this must all be seen — and a call to action:

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We are living through moral collapse
by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Authoritarianism is a political system built on a logic of betrayals: betrayals of others and betrayals of self. It cultivates, and rewards, a state I call moral deregulation: a rolling back of civic and ethical norms against defrauding, silencing, bullying, and physically harming others. Democratic societies inculcate such norms in schools, religious spaces, workplaces, and other social institutions and networks. Authoritarian takeovers mean such norms are discredited and dismantled.

When moral deregulation advances because violence and corruption have been institutionalized, including in the behavior of national leaders, then a society can experience moral collapse. We hear about how authoritarians “hollow out” institutions by removing anyone not loyal to the leader and the party, but they also hollow out people to the point where they will participate in acts of violence, corruption and sabotage against their compatriots.

We are living through processes of moral deregulation and moral collapse in America today under the authoritarian government of President Donald Trump and unelected co-President Elon Musk. Their policies are wrecking a robust national economy, paralyzing government, allying with dictators, creating conditions for the spread of disease, and abandoning the rule of law.

Rather than denounce the clear and present dangers to our country, many business, religious, media, and other elites continue to support Trump and Musk. Some do this by staying silent, while others follow hollowed-out GOP politicians and Christian nationalist charlatans in claiming that the smash-and-plunder operation masquerading as a government is “saving the nation.”

Trump has worked hard for a decade now to encourage moral collapse among Americans. In 2016, two months after he boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Trump raised the issue of changing collective behavior to favor violence and cruelty. “Part of the problem…is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore,” he said when security guards treated protesters at a campaign rally too politely for his tastes.

The strongman’s goal is always to make his collaborators descend to his level, and Trump realized that “giving permission” to Republicans to be their worse selves was key to his domestication of the party. He made Republican elites complicit in his criminal efforts to overturn the 2020 election and then shocked them into submission on Jan. 6 by targeting them for physical harm.

The Jan. 6 insurrection pushed the party into a full-blown state of moral collapse: Republicans now justified violence as a way of doing politics and submitted to the leader’s needs. Politicians who had called their families to say goodbye on Jan. 6, thinking they might die, now accepted a pact of silence about their traumatic experiences in order to maintain their standing in the party.

The drama of Senator Josh Hawley pumping his fist to encourage the insurrectionists and then running for his life from those same people has a devastating third act: his silence about that near-escape from harm when he re-emerged as a MAGA loyalist. In 2022, the GOP officially declared the Jan. 6 attack to be “legitimate political discourse,” meaning the party accepted the violence that was used against it.

The capitulations continued throughout the re-election campaign. At an August 2023 GOP presidential debate which Trump did not bother to attend, all but two candidates debased themselves by pledging with raised hands that they would support Trump even if he became a “convicted criminal.” “The Republicans are very high class. You’ve got to get a little bit lower class,” Trump had commented a month earlier. On that and many other occasions, the GOP obliged him.

. . . This trajectory of moral collapse explains how GOP elites such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance, both of whom called out Trump’s strongman ways in 2016, now collude with his destruction of democracy and alliances with autocrats.

Co-President Musk set the tone for these officials by taking moral collapse global, encouraging members of the extreme-right Alternative for Germany party to stop feeling guilty for the genocidal regime of Nazism. Vance echoed him in telling European leaders they should stop shunning that party, which includes neo-Nazi sympathizers. “There is no room for firewalls,” Vance said. Dismantling firewalls against the circulation of hate speech is a good example of moral deregulation.

Of course, the GOP has been working on a domestic version of this for years now, through state legislation that bans teaching the history of institutionalized racism so that Americans don’t have to feel “emotional distress”—i.e. the voice of conscience.

As for Rubio, he provided the face of moral collapse during the Feb. 28 Oval Office Trump and Vance ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Rubio may have been feeling discomfort, but more likely he was sulking and feeling left out: strongmen often privatize foreign policy, as Trump has done through his personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, reducing the foreign minister’s prestige and power.

In fact, after his moody performance ended, Rubio sprang into action to debase himself further, praising Trump’s open prioritizing of Putin’s aims in Ukraine as patriotic: “Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before,” was his take.

Authoritarians try to normalize extreme actions through states of emergency and exception. Yet, as a Chilean victim of state torture during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship told me, “states of exception can be normalized in people too.” Moral collapse begins as an individual process and, when the conditions are right, generates new collective norms of behavior that can support large-scale repression.

Consorting with kleptocrats, dehumanizing immigrants, and banning books that speak of injustice so people don’t feel empathy for the vulnerable are among the ways Trump and his morally collapsed GOP seek to get ordinary Americans to forget their consciences so they will accept whatever abuses the government has planned.

Strike Back by Prioritizing Democratic Values and Moral Authority

This gives Democrats a big opportunity. Pro-democracy movements that claim the mantle of moral authority and show care and solidarity in the face of plunder and violence can have an impact. In fact, even a relatively tiny percentage of the population –often just 3.5%, according to the political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s study of successful civil resistance movements—can make a difference if they mobilize on behalf of democratic values in situations of tyranny.

Creating a big-tent opposition movement that includes progressive faith traditions and organized labor —two sectors of civil society that privilege values-guided action— would be key. Individuals can refuse to betray others, deciding not to stay silent and hide away as rights vanish and abuses are perpetrated. As some people disappear, being visible on behalf of others becomes even more important.

So does having conversations with family and community members who still support Trump, and explicitly raising with them questions of dignity and decency and the betrayal of national and self-interests by this administration. As the government paralysis deepens and affects everyday life, these conversations will likely become easier.

Each time we show solidarity with others, or support those who are protecting the rule of law, helping the targeted, or exposing the lies and the corruption, we are standing up for democratic values of justice, accountability, equality, and more. In doing so, we model the behaviors the authoritarian state wants us to abandon. Joining with others, we transform our individual righteous indignation into a potent moral force for good.

Republicans may feel empowered right now, but there will be a reckoning as Americans come to understand the scale of Republican sabotage of the country. Lately I have been returning to a 2016 Atlantic essay in which I warned that the GOP was setting itself on a path of self-destruction in supporting Trump. As I wrote, Italian conservatives who supported Benito Mussolini through all the early violence and corruption “never recovered from their acquiescence to Il Duce. Of the many lessons the GOP can take from its experience with Trump so far, this might be the most valuable.”

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Strike back!  Join Indivisible!

Get ready to peacefully demonstrate.

Be part of the 3.5% referenced above.

And then there’s this:

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Navajo Code Talkers stupidly erased from military websites by Trump’s DEI orders
EJ Montini
Arizona Republic – opinion

I thought that Donald Trump’s unhinged obsession with eliminating anything he thought to be the result of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives could get no worse than dishonoring the heroes buried at Arlington National Cemetery by scrubbing information about some Black, Latino and women from the cemetery’s website.

I was wrong.

Axios is reporting that articles and information about World War II’s heroic Native Code Talkers have disappeared from some military websites.

According to the report, when asked about the missing pages, Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot replied in a statement: “As Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. … We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms.”

Pleased?

Code talkers were vital to military success in the Pacific during WWII.

Who could possibly be pleased by an effort to erase the history of a group of native men who were vital to the success of every major Marine Corps operation in the Pacific Theater of World War II, particularly America’s victory at Iwo Jima.

. . . Every elected official in Arizona from every party should be pounding on the doors of the Defense Department to reverse the idiotic DEI overreach that is trying to erase the Code Talker legacy.

They were not an example of DEI hires.

They were an example of honor. Of bravery. Of patriotism.

Of everything the people behind this atrocity are not.

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And this:

“The secret history of the secret history of the U.S. intelligence business is not widely known in this country,” writes Lucian Truscott IV, as he reveals its outlines, “but you can be sure of one thing: it is known to Vladimir Putin and his henchmen.”

And they are loving the way Trump is destroying the capabilities and good built up over 80 years.

Worth reading in full.

CORRECTION

Earlier today:  << Floating around the ether: a photo of Aldous Huxley bellowing, as if he were alive today (he died in 1963), “I wrote 1984 as a warning, not as a f—ing instruction manual!” >> 

Never mind that it was George Orwell who wrote it.  Huxley wrote Brave New World.  (Oops.)  The point stands!

A two-minute view from Canada — Trump is evil.

Another from France (if you missed the subtitled clip I posted last week) — Trump is a traitor.  (The translation comes courtesy of Robert Reich.  If you have time to feel really good, read his remembrance of the late Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, who died last week.)

If you don’t have time to watch Trump’s 40-Year Entanglement with the FBI and Organized Crime from the beginning, you’ll see I’ve cued it up to just the last few minutes.

It’s also fun to watch this minute, where Trump swears under oath that he’s met Felix Sater so few times that “if he were sitting in the room right now I really wouldn’t know what he looked like” . . . followed by Sater saying he met Trump “hundreds, maybe thousands of times.”

Putin is winning.

Floating around the ether: a photo of Aldous Huxley bellowing, as if he were alive today (he died in 1963), “I wrote 1984 as a warning, not as a f—ing instruction manual!”  Never mind that it was George Orwell who wrote it.  Huxley wrote Brave New World.  The point stands.

CNF — If you bought this one when I first suggested it, you’ve lost a lot of money.  Like me, you may have sold those original shares for a tax loss, waited 31 days, and then bought many more shares much cheaper.  (Or reversed the order, first buying the cheap shares, then waiting 31 days to sell the expensive ones.)

Friday, I saw it trading at 65 cents — less than 3X earnings.  I tried to buy a lot of shares, but some Fidelity algorithm that had apparently been designed to protect me from myself (did I really know what I was doing?) limited my order to 10,000 shares.  By the time I reached a human who reached a human who — eyebrow raised, as I imagine it — lifted the restriction, the stock was 80 cents, so they had managed to protect me from making many thousands of dollars.  Yesterday it changed hands at 90 cents in after-hours trading.  But that’s still just 3.5X earnings.

CNF is in China . . . so who knows?  And if memory serves, there is a 2-cent-a-share annual fee paid to the American custodian of these “American Depositary Receipts.”  But my CNF guru — who had considered it a great buy at $4 years ago — says that, as far as he knows, “There is really nothing new or bad other than the Chinese market. Business is fine.”  He owns a ton of it, and I own a small ton — though only with money I can truly afford to lose.

PRKR doesn’t need the Supreme Court to accept its petition for review . . . or grant the petition if it does.  Its pending cases don’t depend on that.  But if, like me, you own shares, and/or care about American innovation . . . and thus care about American inventors . . . and thus care about having a patent system that actually protects American inventors . . . then this podcast could be of interest.