The NYT wrote an 1800-word, 5-byline post claiming Elon Musk’s departure from DOGE reflected tensions over Trump’s Big Ugly Tax Bill without mentioning one additional — possibly far more important — factor that may have influenced his announced departure.

This may be an attempt to preserve the damage Elon did to government, up to and including the data consolidation that DOGE carried out.

Even NYT’s claimed basis for Elon’s departure is unpersuasive.

On Tuesday, CBS posted a clip from an interview that will air Sunday, in which Musk complains that the Big Ugly Tax Bill raises the deficit.

Elon Musk says he is “disappointed” by the price tag of the domestic policy bill passed by Republicans in the House last week and heavily backed by President Trump. The billionaire who recently stepped back from running the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, made the remark during an exclusive broadcast interview with “CBS Sunday Morning.”

“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said.

NYT claims that this tweet was a response to Elon. (These screencaps are ET+6.)

That led, NYT claims, to Elon’s announced departure from DOGE.

As it is, there are problems with this narrative. The non-inclusion of DOGE was not Elon’s prior complaint about the Big Ugly; the exacerbation of the budget deficit was. There were plenty of people, in Congress and outside, who were complaining that the Big Ugly didn’t codify DOGE cuts or did fund USAID, complaints more directly relevant to Stephen Miller’s comment. And Miller has been lying about the bill already.

Maybe the NYT’s portrayed drama is correct.

Or maybe this is yet more theater about Elon’s relationship with the Trump Administration.

There was an important DOGE-related development in recent days that may be impacted by Elon’s claimed imminent departure, one not mentioned in NYT’s long story.

After John Roberts, on Sunday, stayed a Christopher Cooper order regarding a FOIA that CREW served on DOGE, on Tuesday, Tanya Chutkan denied DOJ’s effort to dismiss an Appointments Clause lawsuit by blue states — led by New Mexico — against DOGE. [docket]

The DC Circuit (Henderson, Millett, and Walker) had earlier stayed a discovery order from Chutkan pending her decision on the motion to dismiss, holding that she should only grant discovery if the lawsuit will continue. If Chutkan’s decision stands, the government may have to provide the discovery on DOGE that John Roberts halted (in a different, FOIA, context).

Chutkan summarized a list of things the states allege Musk did that would require Senate confirmation.

States claim that DOGE, with Musk at the helm, “has inserted itself into at least 17 federal agencies” and exercises “significant authority” across the Executive Branch. Id. ¶¶ 70, 200. They identify the following categories of allegedly unauthorized actions by DOGE and Musk:

• Controlling Expenditures and Disbursements of Public Funds: States allege that DOGE obtained “full access” to payment systems at multiple agencies and used that access to halt payments. Id. ¶¶ 78–79, 85, 127–30. For instance, after the acting-Secretary at U.S. Department of Treasury refused to “halt” payments, DOGE personnel threatened the acting Secretary with “legal risk [] if he did not comply with DOGE.” Id. ¶ 84. Then, on February 2, DOGE obtained “full access” to Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Services payment systems, which disburses funds for social security benefits, veteran’s benefits, childcare tax credits, Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements, federal employee wages, federal tax refunds, and facilitates state recovery of delinquent state income taxes. Id. ¶¶ 78–79, 85. That day, Musk posted on X that “[t]he @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments,” in response to a post by a non-profit organization receiving funds pursuant to government contracts. Id. ¶ 86.
• Terminating Federal Contracts and Exercising Control over Federal Property: States allege that Musk and DOGE asserted responsibility for terminating federal contracts across the Executive Branch. Id. ¶ 203–04. DOGE reported the cancellation of “104 contracts related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) at more than a dozen federal agencies” on January 31, id. ¶ 205; of “thirty-six contracts across six agencies” on February 3, id. ¶ 206; of “twelve contracts in the GSA and the Department of Education” on February 4, id. ¶ 207; and “cuts of $250 million through the termination of 199 contracts” on February 7, id. ¶ 208. States also allege that DOGE and Musk exercise control over federal property by demanding access to secure facilities and threatening intervention by U.S. Marshals when agency officials refuse, id. ¶¶ 94–95; by “push[ing]” high-ranking officials out of their offices at agency headquarters, id. ¶¶ 164–66, by terminating leases for federal property, id. ¶ 206, and by announcing plans to “liquidate as much as half of the federal government’s nonmilitary real estate holdings,” id. ¶ 160.
• Binding the Government to Future Financial Commitments without Congressional Authorization: States point to the Fork in the Road Email, which offered federal employees pay and benefits through September 2025 if they resigned by February 6, as entering into binding financial commitments. Id. ¶¶ 116–20, 212.
• Eliminating Agency Regulations and Entire Agencies and Departments: States allege that DOGE personnel took steps to dismantle USAID and CFPB. On February 3, DOGE personnel allegedly “handed” USAID’s acting leadership “a list of 58 people, almost all senior career officials, to put on administrative leave.” Id. ¶ 102. The next day, USAID placed “nearly its entire workforce on administrative leave.” Id. ¶ 103. When “USAID contract officers emailed agency higher-ups” for authorization to cancel programs, DOGE personnel responded directly. Id. ¶ 101. Musk posted on X “CFBP RIP” on the same day that Musk’s aides “set up shop . . . at CFPB’s headquarters” and CFPB’s website was taken down. Id. ¶¶ 146–47. Three days later, CFPB’s acting Director Russell Vought told all employees to “[s]tand down from performing any work task” and “not come into the office.” Id. ¶ 148.
• Directing Action by Agencies: States allege that Musk and DOGE obtain compliance from agency officials and employees by threatening action by U.S. Marshals, legal risks, or termination. Id. ¶ 84 (threatening acting-Treasury Secretary with “legal risk”); id. ¶ 95 (threatening USAID personnel blocking access to facility with action by U.S. Marshals); id. ¶¶ 176–178 (DOL employees told to comply or “face termination”). States claim that if agency officials object or raise concerns, Musk and DOGE ignore or override the agency and place on administrative leave or otherwise remove non-compliant individuals. Id. ¶¶ 84– 85 (acting-Treasury Secretary “placed on administrative leave” after refusing to halt payments); id. ¶ 110 (DOGE “gained full and unfettered access to OPM systems over the existing CIO’s objection”); id. ¶¶ 137–38 (DOGE representative was “installed” as the Department of Energy’s (“DOE”) “chief information officer” after DOE’s general counsel’s office and chief information office opposed DOGE’s access to DOE’s IT system); id. ¶ 166 (DOGE personnel “pushed” the “highest-ranking officials” at the Department of Education (“ED”) “out of their own offices”).
• Acting as a Principal Officer Unsupervised by Heads of Departments: States allege that Musk acts and directs DOGE’s conduct without supervision by agency heads. For instance, States allege that Musk and his team sent the Fork in the Road Email “via a custom-built email system . . . without consultation with other advisers to the President or OMB officials,” id. ¶ 120; that DOGE personnel at agencies do not “interact at all with anyone who is not part of their team,” id. ¶ 165; and that Musk “reports only to President Trump,” id. ¶ 71.
• Obtaining Unauthorized Access to Secure Databases and Sensitive Information: States allege that Musk and DOGE personnel obtained access to secure databases and systems at Treasury, id. ¶ 85, USAID, id. ¶ 95, OPM, id. ¶ 110, the Department of Health and Human Services, id. ¶ 127, DOE, id. ¶ 137, ED, id. ¶¶ 164, 167, DOL, id. ¶¶ 177–78, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, id. ¶ 190, Federal Emergency Management Agency, id. ¶ 194, and Small Business Association, id. ¶ 198.

These are all the DOGE actions that might be imperiled if this lawsuit succeeds.

Chutkan’s opinion sustaining the lawsuit focused closely on Elon’s role in DOGE.

Elon Musk’s role, authority, and conduct within the federal government is a central issue in this case. Defendants formally classify Musk as a “special Government employee.” Compl. ¶ 25 (citing 18 U.S.C. § 202(a)); see also Decl. of Joshua Fisher ¶¶ 3–4, ECF No. 24-1. Plaintiff States allege that Musk leads DOGE and directs the actions of DOGE personnel. Compl. ¶¶ 51, 59. Specifically, they claim that the “statements and actions of President Trump, other White House officials, and Mr. Musk himself indicate that Mr. Musk has been directing the work of DOGE personnel since at least January 21, 2025.” Id. They allege that, in this role, Musk “exercise[es] virtually unchecked power across the entire Executive Branch, making decisions about expenditures, contracts, government property, regulations, and the very existence of federal agencies.” Id. ¶ 67.

And given the precedents, it necessarily focused on whether Musk’s position at the head of DOGE is “continuing.”

That does not end the court’s inquiry. Having concluded that special government employees are not automatically exempt from the Appointments Clause, the court must assess whether Musk’s particular position is “sufficiently ‘continuing’ to constitute an office.” United States v. Donziger, 38 F. 4th 290, 296 (2d Cir. 2022), cert denied, 142 S.Ct. 868 (2023). In doing so, the court takes a holistic approach, focusing on a position’s “tenure, duration, emolument, and duties,” and whether the duties are “continuing and permanent, not occasional or temporary.” United States v. Germaine, 99 U.S. 508, 511–12 (1878); The Test for Determining “Officer” Status Under the Appointments Clause, 49 Op. O.L.C. __, slip op. at 3 (Jan. 16, 2025) (“[T]he Supreme Court’s approach to assessing the ‘continuing’ nature of a position has been a holistic one that considers both how long a position lasts as well as other attributes of the position that bear on continuity.” (citations omitted)). Positions that do not qualify are “transient or fleeting,” “personal to a particular individual,” and assigned merely “incidental” duties. Donziger, 38 F.4th at 296–97 (citation omitted).

[snip]

States allege that Musk is DOGE’s leader. Compl. ¶¶ 59–60, 224. The court finds that States have sufficiently pleaded that this position qualifies as “continuing and permanent, not occasional or temporary,” Germaine, 99 U.S. at 511–12. The subsidiary DOGE Service Temporary Organization has a termination date of July 4, 2026, but there is no termination date for the overarching DOGE entity or its leader, suggesting permanence.

So on Tuesday, Judge Chutkan ruled that Elon’s continuing role in DOGE made this lawsuit viable. On Wednesday, Elon announced he would not be continuing at DOGE.

The government has already filed with the DC Circuit asking to offer additional briefing on its challenge to Judge Chutkan’s orders.

Way back in February I pointed out the viability of an Appointments Clause challenge before SCOTUS explained the obvious efforts to retcon Elon’s role.

In a response and declaration, the government blew off the first question [ordering details about DOGE firing plans], but on the second, denied that Musk has the power of DOGE. He’s just a senior Trump advisor, one solidly within the White House Office, and so firewalled from the work of DOGE, yet still protected from any kind of nasty disclosure requirements.

But as the attached declaration of Joshua Fisher explains, Elon Musk “has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself”—including personnel decisions at individual agencies. Decl. ¶ 5. He is an employee of the White House Office (not USDS or the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization); and he only has the ability to advise the President, or communicate the President’s directives, like other senior White House officials. Id. ¶¶ 3, 5. Moreover, Defendants are not aware of any source of legal authority granting USDS or the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization the power to order personnel actions at any of the agencies listed above. Neither of the President’s Executive Orders regarding “DOGE” contemplate—much less furnish—such authority. See “Establishing and Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency,” Exec. Order No. 14,158 (Jan. 20, 205); “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” Exec. Order 14,210 (Feb. 11, 2025).

The statement is quite obviously an attempt to retcon the structure of DOGE [sic], one that Ryan Goodman has already found several pieces of evidence to debunk.

But it is a testament that the suit in question — by a bunch of Democratic Attorneys General, led by New Mexico [docket] — might meet significant success without the retconning of Elon’s role.

[snip]

The retconning of his role is all the more obvious when you understand that the right wing judges on SCOTUS feel very strongly about the Appointments Clause. And Trump is on the record relying on it, most spectacularly in convincing Aileen Cannon that Jack Smith had to be confirmed by the Senate before he could indict Trump.

In practice, Trump is saying Elon can dismantle entire agencies without Senate confirmation, but Jack Smith couldn’t prosecute him as a private citizen without it.

Or he was. Now he’s arguing that all this is happening without Elon’s personal direction.

And here we are again, two months later, and the apparent retconning has not stopped.

This ploy has already worked once. After Judge Theodore Chuang ruled that a USAID-focused Appointments Clause lawsuit was likely to succeed, the Fourth Circuit overruled him. Then DOJ installed DOGE staffer Jeremy Lewin as USAID Administrator, and actions which, back in February, were done by DOGE, now appear to be agency actions. On Tuesday, Chuang denied plaintiffs in that suit discovery.

These lawsuits are different. DOGE did a number of things at other agencies — most notably the data consolidation — that weren’t a central feature of shutting down USAID. Elon’s role at some other agencies was even more clearcut than Judge Chuang found at USAID.

But even if the states can show that Elon exercised the authority to override agency heads, as he reportedly did in several instances, the government is likely to point to Elon’s departure as proof that his appointment was always temporary, and therefore did not require Senate confirmation.

DOJ has been retconning what happened with DOGE for four months now. There’s no reason to believe the drama at this point.

Yesterday, Trump moved to cut all remaining contracts with Harvard University via a letter from GSA instructing agencies to cancel or reassign $100 million in contracts the government has with the university.

The letter instructs agencies to respond by June 6 with a list of contract cancellations. Any contracts for services deemed critical would not be immediately canceled but would be transitioned to other vendors, according to the letter, signed by Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the G.S.A.’s federal acquisition service, which is responsible for procuring government goods and services.

Contracts with about nine agencies would be affected, according to the administration official.

Examples of contracts that would be affected, according to a federal database, include a $49,858 National Institutes of Health contract to investigate the effects of coffee drinking and a $25,800 Homeland Security Department contract for senior executive training. Some of the Harvard contracts under review may have already been subject to “stop work” orders.

“Going forward, we also encourage your agency to seek alternative vendors for future services where you had previously considered Harvard,” the letter said.

Meanwhile, SpaceX — among several Elon Musk companies that expect to get increased federal funding under Trump — experienced another failure. While his Starship didn’t blow to smithereens over the Caribbean in its latest launch, like it had on its previous two attempts, it lost control and hurtled to Earth.

The latest flight of SpaceX’s Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, got all the way up to space, but not all the way back down to Earth.

The upper-stage vehicle coasted through space on Tuesday, surpassing flights in January and March that ended in explosions and showers of debris over the Atlantic Ocean. But halfway through its journey, the spacecraft sprang a propellant leak. That caused it to start spinning out of control. The Starship vehicle used in the test flight was not able to survive the intense heat, breaking up as it fell back into the atmosphere.

By design, the debris fell into the Indian Ocean, far from areas inhabited by people.

I’m writing a longer post on the blasé way reporters are covering Trump’s all-out assault on Harvard, as if such a relentless and largely illegal attack on one of the longest standing bastions of civil society in the US would have no effect on democracy or American well-being.

I’ve been struggling to figure out a way to tell that story better.

The answer may be sitting right there: a comparison of Harvard with Elon Musk.

Which entity engages in more egregious antisemitic behavior, the pretext behind many of Trump’s attacks on Harvard?

The guy who made a Nazi symbol at Trump’s inauguration and welcomed Nazis back onto the platform that the government increasingly uses as an official messaging platform (and as such should be covered by Trump’s Executive Orders prohibiting spending federal dollars on antisemitism).

Which entity commands the more disproportionate profits, a complaint made about Harvard’s endowment in support of attacks on its non-profit tax status?

The guy being paid $46 billion by the failing Tesla, which rivals the size of Harvard’s entire $53 billion endowment.

Which entity engages in more obviously unethical behavior which, along with alleged antisemitism, was the basis GSA cited for canceling contracts with Harvard?

In light of this deeply troubling pattern each agency should consider its contracts with Harvard University and determine whether Harvard and its services efficiently promote the priorities of the agency Agencies should also of course consider various provisions of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR including without limitation provisions such as FAR 52.203-13(b ( (ii which requires contractors to otherwise promote an organizational culture that encourages ethical conduct and commitment to compliance with the law.

The guy firing regulators who had started investigations into $2.7 billion of alleged wrong-doing implicating Musk companies, the guy who bought a President for a quarter-billion dollars.

By Laura Loomer’s standards, Elon Musk has as many challenges with immigration as Harvard does, starting with the undocumented workers who helped build his plant in Texas, continuing to his alleged illegal discrimination against refugees,  including his expanded reliance on H1B visas in recent years. And all that’s before you consider the evidence that Musk himself violated immigration law while on a student visa.

Viewed as a university, Harvard might be an easy target for Trump — the Wharton grad — to attack as elitist.

But compared as a partner of the Federal government, Harvard has provided far more benefit to the public than Elon Musk.

Harvard was on the path to curing cancer. Meanwhile, like Icarus, Elon spins out of control on his quest to Mars.

The lawsuit [docket] by nine FBI agents attempting to prevent the public release of a list of the names of all agents who worked on January 6 has detoured into a debate about Eagle Ed Martin’s frustrations with rule of law.

That debate provides useful background to something going on more generally — the Trump Administration’s effort to sustain the conspiracism that fuels MAGAt in the face of judges and a law built around evidence.

After Eagle Ed failed to secure Senate confirmation to be US Attorney and was instead moved to head DOJ’s Weaponization and Pardon offices (in the latter of which he is considering freeing the men convicted of plotting to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer), Eagle Ed went on a media blitz promising to name and shame those he had long targeted as villains, but whose villainy consisted of no more than substantiating the crimes that Trump and his mob had committed.

There are some really bad actors. Some people that did some really bad things to the American people. And if they can be charged, we’ll charge them. But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are shamed. And that’s a fact. That’s the way things work. And so, that’s how I believe the job operates. [emphasis original]

Plaintiffs pointed to this appearance, arguing that Eagle Ed’s promise to name and shame his targets confirmed the concerns of the plaintiffs that a list compiled in the first days of the Administration would be released to help freed insurrectionists retaliate against FBI agents. The government responded by claiming that Eagle Ed would follow DOJ rules (as if Pam Bondi’s DOJ follows even court rules about public comment!). Plaintiffs replied by quoting still more appearances from Eagle Ed’s media tour, including his complaints that he can’t get what he calls the truth out in Article III courts.

Mr. Martin’s comments during his May 15, 2025 interviews lead to several conclusions. First, he views his perceived mandate to “name” and “shame” as a legitimate alternative to following basic standards of federal criminal procedure. Second, he has indicated he is unconcerned about the consequences if he improperly or unlawfully “names” and “shames” government employees. (“Watch me” and “let the chips fall where they may.”) Third, he believes that the trigger to “name it and shame it” is when something does not personally “make sense” to him. This is particularly troubling when considering Mr. Martin’s frequently publicized views about the events of January 6, 2021, which includes his own representation of several criminal defendants and his dismissal of one of those cases as United States Attorney. 5

For example, on or about May 14, 2025, Mr. Martin sat for a one hour, twenty minute broad-ranging interview with television personality Tucker Carlson.6 On the January 6 riots, he lamented that “[m]illions of Americans are falling victim to the hoaxes, one after the other, and if you fall victim to the January 6th hoax, that it was an insurrection, armed, and this close to the end, then you might . . . rant and rave and things like that.”7 To say the least, this indicates a vast departure from the Department of Justice’s previous position that the January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol was not a hoax, and in fact involved the commission of serious, violent crimes. Far from enjoying the presumption of regularity, today’s Department of Justice is anything but regular. Al-Hela v. Biden, 66 F.4th 217, 237 (D.C. Cir. 2023) (“[The presumption of regularity] can be rebutted if a petitioner demonstrates internal inconsistencies or inconsistencies with other evidence.”).

After discussing his suspicions about the FBI’s involvement in January 6, including in the FBI’s investigation into the pipe bombs found near political party headquarters that day, Mr. Martin again addressed his frustration with Article III courts, and emphasized why publicizing private information is preferable to going through established procedures:

Mr. Martin: And by the way, one of the reasons why I say information is so key, you can’t, we can’t win the Article III battle fast enough. We can fight it, and we can eventually win lots of them, you can’t win it fast enough to get the progress we need, in terms of our, so you’ve got to be doing the information from . . .

Mr. Carlson: For people watching, what’s the Article III battle?

Mr. Martin: Yea, the Article III means like, the federal courts, we’re in federal courts, the President says you can’t let people come into the country, and then the courts say nationwide injunction, then you know you’re not allowed to do that, and you’re constantly in court. You know, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. has all of the cases of when the government is sued, and the President is sued, they all come into our office on the civil side, and so you see all that stuff coming in. During the Biden administration, the conservatives were suing in Texas, it was friendlier judges, now it’s in D.C. So you’re in the courts, fighting to get the truth out, fighting to make these things, prosecutions and all, but they take a longer time than just getting the word out, right? Getting the information out. I just, I feel like it’s a different moment in history, and that’s how I was as U.S. Attorney, that’s why you saw, people saw so much outfacing action, because I wasn’t just looking at courts, I was looking at making an argument for the public so they could see the policies.8

5 See Andrew Perez, Trump’s New Federal Attorney Withdrew Jan. 6 Charge Against His Own Client, Rolling Stone, Feb. 5, 2025 and United States v. Padilla, 1:21-cr-214-JDB (D.D.C.), Unopposed Motion to Dismiss Case by USA, ECF No. 125.

6 Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LotMJAdWyOs (last visited May 22, 2025). 7 Id. beginning at approximately 00:09:00. [my emphasis]

Eagle Ed doesn’t want to take the time to build cases. He wants to make an argument.

The problem, of course (besides those pesky rules on public comment), is that Eagle Ed’s “arguments” have no basis in reality, and never have. The problem Article III courts pose for Eagle Ed is they review the evidentiary claims the government makes. And once courts start reviewing conspiracy theories of the sort Eagle Ed favors, they poke holes in them.

That’s what happened — according to a recent NYT story — to Eagle Ed’s efforts to criminalize EPA grants.

A politically fraught investigation opened by the Trump administration into a Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency grant program has so far failed to find meaningful evidence of criminality by government officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

[snip]

While the investigation of some entities that received money through the program is continuing, agents and prosecutors see little evidence of any criminal conduct by E.P.A. officials who oversaw the funding. The vendor portion of the inquiry has yet to yield any strong evidence of criminal conduct, according to people with knowledge of the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Prosecutors and agents have shared their findings with senior political leaders at the Justice Department, according to people familiar with the matter.

When you chase James O’Keefe propaganda, it turns out to be false … what a shock!

Most of Eagle Ed’s complaints were directed at civil cases (where judges do keep catching DOJ in lie after lie after lie). But as Pam Bondi’s DOJ moves to weaponizing DOJ via criminal charges, it will likely become a still bigger problem.

In the criminal cases charging Democratic officials, Judge Hannah Dugan, Ras Baraka, and LaMonica McIver, the facts claimed using criminal complaints rather than grand juries deviate at least partly from reality and the inflammatory claims Trump’s aides have made publicly deviate further still.

For example, county officials released video from Judge Hannah Dugan’s interactions with an ICE team. Among other things, it clarifies that the doorway whence Eduardo Flores-Ruiz reentered the hallway from Judge Dugan’s courtroom was closer to the Chief Judge’s office where Dugan had sent the officers working with ICE than her own courtroom door; if she was really trying to hide him, she did a poor job of it. It also shows two DEA guys (possibly one of the ones she sent away) watch Flores-Ruiz just walk away down that hallway without arrest, undermining the claim that she concealed him (though success at concealing someone is not required to convict).

In New Jersey, the government told a different story in the felony criminal complaint against Congresswoman McIver, sworn out by HSI Special Agent Robert Tansey before Magistrate Judge Stacey Adams, than HSI Special Agent in Charge Rickey Patel swore out in the criminal complaint against Baraka before Magistrate Judge André Espinosa. Homeland Security told one story to a judge on May 9 and another story to a different judge on May 19.

The complaint against Baraka based its claim that Newark’s Mayor knowingly trespassed by pointing to the chainlink fence and No Trespassing signs.

3. The Delaney Hall Facility is surrounded by chain-link fences and is accessible only through granted access. In addition to maintaining security, it likewise displays No Trespassing signage.

But the complaint against McIver confesses that a security guard let Baraka in.

5. Perimeter cameras show that when the security gate of Delaney Hall opened momentarily to allow a vehicle to enter into the secure area of the facility, McIVER and two other members of Congress moved quickly inside the secured area as the gate closed.

6. Once the group entered the secured area, the Mayor arrived thereafter at the facility and was told he could not enter without authorization.

7. However, the Mayor returned with members of his security detail and was able to enter inside the gate because the guard was under the impression that the Mayor was part of the Congressional delegation.

8. While McIVER and the Mayor were in the secured area of the facility, V-1, an HSI agent, approached the Mayor and ordered him to leave the facility’s secure area.

9. V-1 spent approximately five minutes repeatedly ordering the Mayor to leave and issued multiple warnings that he would be arrested if he did not do so.

10. McIVER and the other Congresspersons overheard this conversation and challenged V-1, protesting the Mayor’s removal. V-1 explained to them that “Congress people are different,” indicating members of Congress had lawful authority to be there, and that the Mayor did not.

11. After numerous warnings to leave, and numerous warnings of potential arrest, the HSI agent announced he was going to place the Mayor under arrest. McIVER interjected, yelling “Hell no! Hell no! Hell no!” The HSI agent ordered the Mayor to put his hands behind his back and displayed his handcuffs. McIVER and other members of Congress surrounded the Mayor and prevented HSI from handcuffing him and taking him into custody.

12. McIVER initially remained inside the secured area as the Mayor was then moved outside the gate.[my emphasis]

These details of the complaint against McIver will be hotly contested. WaPo did a good assessment of what the video evidence shows. It shows Baraka remained unchallenged inside the perimeter of the facility for almost 45 minutes. WaPo describes that after an initial confrontation and after a guard told Baraka to “walk out,” he did (which is consistent with Baraka’s own claims), as compared to the complaint’s description that the Mayor, “was moved outside,” using the passive voice.

For nearly 45 minutes, Baraka remained just inside the secured area, occasionally chatting with members of his security detail, according to time-stamped videos. Then, at around 2:33 p.m., Homeland Security agents exited the building and confronted Baraka. In snippets of the conversation captured in video, agents told Baraka he had to leave because he was not a member of Congress. The three members of Congress joined the discussion as it grew tense.

Minutes later, video shows, an agent took a step toward Baraka, and Watson Coleman can be heard urging calm.

Referencing that moment, the Justice Department’s complaint said a Homeland Security agent ordered the mayor to “put his hands behind his back and displayed his handcuffs.”

McIver grew animated, calling the agent’s intervention “unnecessary” and “ugly.” One of the agents can be heard in videos saying: “All right, then. Walk out.”

At 2:39 p.m., within moments of that remark, and six minutes after agents first confronted Baraka, he turned and walked away, arm-in-arm with Watson Coleman. The guard reopened the gate, and Baraka exited to an area in front of the facility, recessed from the sidewalk.

Then, after Baraka walked out, the guards plotted to arrest him within earshot of Rob Menendez, Jr, who warned Baraka.

With concerns about Baraka’s presence seemingly resolved, the three House members returned to the building for a tour, according to interviews with congressional staffers. The mayor remained outside the gate, speaking with reporters and protesters. Inside the building, congressional staffers said, lawmakers saw agents huddled and overheard them discussing plans to arrest the mayor.

Menendez then quickly exited the building and approached the gate, videos show. He spoke to Baraka through the chain-link fence, warning that agents were going to arrest him.

About a dozen agents then massed behind the fence. Some pulled masks up over their faces, and the group exited the facility gate and approached Baraka with handcuffs.

This was a premeditated confrontation on public land. And, WaPo describes, after Baraka’s arrest, the members of Congress — including McIver — returned to the facility.

After the scrum, agents accompanied McIver and the other House members as they resumed their tour of the facility — part of nearly two hours combined she remained on the grounds.

As Menendez noted in an interview with the Hill, “If you would witness an assault of an officer, you would not bring a group of people in to do a tour for 45 minutes.”

The government’s priorities — first arresting Baraka for trespassing after he left the premises into which he had been freely admitted, then letting McIver back in after she purportedly assaulted two officers — betrays what a stunt this is. And all that’s before you look at Kristi Noem’s typically batshit comments, which DHS did not defend when WaPo inquired about them.

Speaking about the events outside the Delaney Hall detention facility, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem last week testified to Congress that a “mob of protesters including three members of Congress stormed the gate and they trespassed into the detention facility.” Her department published a news release claiming the lawmakers used an arriving “bus of detainees” as a decoy to gain entrance, then “holed up in a guard shack.” A department spokeswoman said lawmakers attacked officers, including “body slamming a female ICE officer.”

The videos examined by The Post did not support those descriptions of the events, and the government did not include them in its charges against McIver. In response to a request for comment, Noem did not directly address The Post’s findings about her remarks but noted in a statement that McIver had been charged. “No one is above the law,” she said.

Noem’s thugs ginned up this confrontation and then she blew them out of proportion. None of their actions — letting Baraka remain uncontested for a period, arresting Baraka after he left, allowing McIver back in after she purportedly assaulted them — make sense. But having ginned up that confrontation, with Noem further escalating them with false claims, DOJ had to do something. They first charged, then abandoned charges against Baraka. Now they’re attempting to prosecute McIver. And if this goes to trial, all the equivocations will be evidence of the unreliability of those behind the arrest.

The clown show has not gone unnoticed.

In comments made while dismissing the case against Baraka, Judge Epsinosa admonished Stephen Demanovich, the AUSA who picked up the Baraka case from a colleague and who is listed as the lead prosecutor in the case against McIver, for charging Baraka before investigating what really happened.

Mr. Demanovich, beyond those 9.5 million constituents and above any individual or agency interests, federal prosecutors serve a singular paramount client: Justice itself.

Your role is not to secure convictions at all costs, nor to satisfy public clamor, nor to advance political agendas.

[snip]

The hasty arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, followed swiftly by the dismissal of these trespassing charges a mere 13 days later, suggests a worrisome misstep by your Office. An arrest, particularly of a public figure, is not a preliminary investigative tool. It is a severe action, carrying significant reputational and personal consequences, and it should only be undertaken after a thorough, dispassionate evaluation of credible evidence.

[snip]

The apparent rush in this case culminating today in the embarrassing retraction of charges suggests failure to adequately investigate to carefully gather facts and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power Your Office must operate with higher standard than that.

This is something I’ve been anticipating, as Trump and Eagle Ed and Pam Bondi and Noem promise prosecutions: They’re creating the expectation among Trump’s mob that there will be slam dunk prosecutions — precisely the same thing Eagle Ed kept promising but failing to substantiate — but in the process demonstrating the government’s unreliability. “[T]oday’s Department of Justice is anything but regular,” the nine FBI agent plaintiffs argued, because the government has “demonstrate[d] internal inconsistencies or inconsistencies with other evidence.”

I’m interested in this for two reasons: first, the possibility that these prosecutions will backfire, not just by creating sympathetic political martyrs, but also by further exposing Bondi and her top aides as liars violating legal ethics. Just as important, I’m interested in whether, as Trump’s people have to abandon false claims when faced with judges, they’ll lose credibility with Trump’s rubes.

Several people entertained the latter possibility after Dan Bongino and Kash Patel debunked conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein’s death last week.

Phil Bump described what happened here.

Over the weekend [now the weekend before last], Bongino — now the deputy director of the FBI, thanks to the president Bongino championed relentlessly for years — sat down alongside his boss, FBI Director Kash Patel, for an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” Bartiromo, never one to shy away from a right-wing conspiracy theory, asked about Epstein.

“You said Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide,” Bartiromo said. “People don’t believe it.”

“Listen, they have a right to their opinion,” Patel replied. But given his own experience and background, he said, “you know a suicide when you see one, and that’s what that was.”

“He killed himself,” Bongino added. “I have seen the whole file. He killed himself.”

When he subsequently posted his assessment of Epstein’s death on social media, the response from many of his followers was furious. Who’d gotten to him? Where was the Bongino from the podcast? He was offering a truth about America that wasn’t immune to the facts (as his podcast once promised) and his fans didn’t want to hear it.

Conspiracy expert Mike Rothschild reflected on the event and contemplated the possibility that conspiracists may no longer get away with contradicting their own past claims.

[B]ecause contradiction is inherent to conspiracism, nobody minds if a trusted and cherished influencer says something wildly at odds with something they said another time. Sure, Mike Flynn can support QAnon while also saying QAnon is nonsense, or Alex Jones can get unreasonably excited about Trump seizing total power despite having spent years decrying presidents who sought total power. It doesn’t matter, because these people are trusted. And trust is everything among people who don’t trust anyone.

But that might be changing, and recent adventures in contradiction haven’t gone well for major figures in conspiracism. We might be going back to a time when certain ideas in fringe spheres are so ingrained and taken as infallible gospel to the point where even these trusted figures can’t go against them.

As Trump 2.0 grinds on, and the brain-rotting of the west accelerates at Ludicrous Speed, even major figures in the world of cranks and frauds are running up against the immovable object of their conspiracies moving past the need for the people who popularized them. The idea is starting to outweigh the person who communicates the idea. And it’s a shift that doesn’t bode well for many major figures in the intersection of politics, conspiracy, and commerce.

[snip]

No matter how much the conspiracy faithful like or trust Patel and Bongino, it’s not enough to override their belief in the idea of Epstein being murdered (probably by the Clintons) and his death made the subject of a coverup. That idea is sacrosanct to them. It is unshakable. And it’s telling that even two of the biggest purveyors of conspiracy theories in American politics didn’t embrace it in an official capacity when they had the chance to.

And now they’ve lost the trust of their audiences, at least for now. They can probably recover from this and sweep it away with some kind of justification, but the two are finding that it’s a lot easier to spout nonsense from the sidelines than it is to have to deal with it personally – particularly when your boss is connected to the guy at the center of the conspiracy theory.

Bump provides a possible explanation why: conspiracy theories are the weapon of the weak, not people in powerful positions like FBI Deputy Director.

“Powerful people can’t use conspiracy theories very well,” Joseph Uscinski, associate professor of political science at the University of Miami and the co-author of “American Conspiracy Theories,” told me in 2017. “They’re tools of the weak to attack the powerful. But what we’ve seen in this instance is … Trump has built his entire machine on conspiracy theories.”

He’s built his machine in that way because reality doesn’t comport with his rhetoric. His claims about immigration or his criminal cases or Joe Biden are indefensible if left to rely on actual evidence. So he relies instead on rumors, lies and baseless claims. It works largely because he’s built a universe of compliant voices — like Bongino’s — in an isolated information environment. He can make obviously false statements and be confident that his supporters will never encounter (much less seek out) the countervailing evidence.

He’s also more adept at keeping the conspiracy theories alive. This is someone who, as president, refused to disavow adherents of QAnon, a bizarre theory about how he was secretly battling a cabal of Democrats and movie stars who were stealing children and extracting chemicals from them. (“I know nothing about it,” he said of the movement at one point. “I do know they are very much against pedophilia.”) He never flatly rejects any idea that his base supports, from theories about Epstein’s death to false claims about vaccines.

Others in his administration can’t do that as readily.

In some cases, reality is rewritten to accommodate the argument advanced by Trump. Experts who rejected a link between a Venezuelan gang and that country’s government were fired. Tattoos on a man sent to El Salvador are presented as reading “MS-13” when they don’t.

In other cases, the can just keeps getting kicked down the road. When Attorney General Pam Bondi (Patel’s boss) attempted to meet the roar of demand for ties between Epstein and prominent people on the left, she invited right-wing social media influencers to the White House and handed them binders of already available material. It was a flop — so Bondi keeps promising more to come. Those promises, incidentally, are one reason that the backlash against Patel and Bongino was so robust.

You can manipulate public releases — Eagle Ed’s preferred tactic — by cherry picking and relying on propagandists. Stephen Miller deliberately pursued a legal tactic, the Alien Enemies Act, he believed afforded him the ability to make shit up about human beings with no pushback.

But, thus far at least, criminal cases are different, because they come with Speedy Trial deadlines, the ability to confront accusers, and — in the case of public events captured by video — compelling proof of government lies or overreach.

For now, until Trump packs the courts with more judges who adopt his conspiracy theories, DOJ will be a uniquely important sphere where Trump officials like Bongino will face the awkward moments where conspiracy theories experience gravity, where even past enthusiastic adherents to conspiracy theories cannot sustain them, where Eagle Ed attempts to resort to name and shame rather than criminally charge the people who arrested thousands of January 6 mobsters. Even Pam Bondi, one of the most rabid parrots of Trump’s propaganda, has earned the distrust of Trump’s rubes with her own failure to deliver proof of the Epstein conspiracy theories.

None of that eliminates the pain and legal risk of those targeted with Trump’s legal conspiracies. Baraka’s lawyer, Rahul Agarwal, cataloged the cost being unjustly charged had had in just two short weeks.

MR AGARWAL Judge the only other thing I’d say and I think it’s worth noting publicly is you know the fact of this dismissal 10 days after the charges were — or lodged nearly two weeks after the charges were lodged does not undo the things that happened over the last two weeks; namely the fact that the mayor was detained for five hours in custody and the fact that he’s been under these criminal charges We can’t erase those things And think it’s worth noting that notwithstanding this dismissal the mayor had to undergo you know public scrutiny and interrogation and detention all because of charges that are now being dismissed.

None of that guarantees the effort to use DOJ as an instrument of Trump’s conspiracies will fail. And we saw in the Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko cases — Trump’s prior attempt to weaponize DOJ — that the cost can extend far beyond five hours of detention.

But there’s a way in which Trump and Bondi and Eagle Ed’s abuse of DOJ could backfire. Because it creates a sphere in which the legal claims made in court and the political claims made on Fox News dramatically split. It creates a sphere in which those stoking conspiracy theories, like Bongino, publicly debunk them. It creates the possibility that those seizing power by selling fear of the Deep State become it.

[NB: Check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Six years ago — what seems like forever ago — I published a post about the origin of Memorial Day.

Today’s All-American holiday didn’t come about in one fell swoop. Its origins have been a bone of contention — did it begin in the South? did it start in the North? Was it an African American celebration?

Depending on who you ask you may find yourself in a discussion not unlike those surrounding Confederate statuary — fraught with past and present politics.

And good old-fashioned racism.

The first large formal observation of this holiday was marked by African Americans of Charleston, South Carolina in 1865 when their Civil War dead were reburied.

Read more about it at Zinn Education Project.

Most Americans aren’t aware of this history, not even lifelong residents of Charleston. The reason is racism manifest through cultural erasure.

I live in the first state to declare Memorial Day a statewide holiday. In 1871 Michigan set aside what was then called Decoration Day to pay tribute to its war dead. We lost more than 14,000 of the 90,000 men sent to fight in the south — about 3.5% of the state’s population lost to the Civil War.

A Union soldier from Michigan wrote to his wife,

The more I learn of the cursed institution of slavery, the more I feel willing to endure, for its final destruction … After this war is over, this whole country will undergo a change for the better … Abolishing slavery will dignify labor; that fact of itself will revolutionize everything … Let Christians use all their influence to have justice done to the black man.

He was killed not long after by a Confederate sniper.

We sent this man and others, our flesh and blood, to fight for what is right, to defend a more perfect union, to defeat the denigration of fellow Americans then enslaved. We’ve allowed the lingering toxins of the Confederacy to obscure why it was this nation went to war — not because of states’ rights but because of an economic system dependent upon the reduction of humans to mere chattel.

We’ve sent our family members to defeat oppression in other wars, too many paying the ultimate sacrifice.

Now we’ve strayed from fighting for the ideals our country was founded upon. What was once defense against oppression has become offense for corporations, serving the US ill over the long run. It has become an excuse to create profits for the military industrial complex while ignoring the exercise of soft power through diplomacy. Our friends and loved ones who’ve died or have been injured or sickened for life are merely collateral damage along the way. …

Now more than ever before it is critically important we remember not only our war dead who defended our nation, but the Americans who commemorated their war dead in the face of oppression, thereby establishing this holiday.

Remembering all who served regardless of their sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religious creed, national origin, physical or mental disability is absolutely essential in the face of the current administration’s politicide, ethnocide, and cultural genocide by erasure.

This year, instead of news stories about statues to prominent figures of the Confederacy being removed from public spaces, statues that represented crypto-celebrations of white supremacy, we are instead faced with widening gaps where Americans who served with honor and distinction once appeared, as these examples show:

Trump’s anti-diversity push comes for Arlington Cemetery’s rich, diverse history
To comply with the administration’s anti-“DEI” policies, the cemetery has scrubbed its webpages on minority veterans and Black history.
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/arlington-cemetery-black-veterans-women-history-website-dei-trump-rcna196586

1st all-female veterans Honor Flight from Chicago photo pulled from Pentagon website after DEI order
President Trump issued executive order to get rid of images, words related to diversity, equity, inclusion
https://abc7chicago.com/post/operation-herstory-1st-female-veterans-honor-flight-chicago-photo-removed-pentagon-website-trump-dei-order/16065051/

VA Dismisses Directors of Centers for Women, Minority Veterans
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/01/30/va-dismisses-directors-of-centers-women-minority-veterans.html

They’re celebrations of white supremacy but this time wholly overt. We should not be passive about these excisions because they cut out our own.

And when I say our own it’s personal for me; my father and sibling are AAPI and veterans, and they are proud of their service. It’s infuriating to watch white supremacy treat them as if they never existed.

Commemorate ALL the veterans who served this country today. Honor them further by defending their living compatriots who earned benefits that should not be arbitrarily stripped from them.

This day belongs to ALL of us as Americans and not just some hateful fortunate sons.

I am the rare person who thinks Trump’s authoritarian push has not, yet, gone as far as it might as quickly as I imagined.

I think that for two primary reasons. First, I expected far more violence than we’ve seen, both from jack-booted thugs and from Trump’s terrorists. While ICE has definitely done horrible things and wielded unnecessary violence, they have thus far limited their targets to people who are or look like they are migrants or those who’ve defended migrants’ due process. It doesn’t make what they’ve done right. It makes that violence an entrée.

That may change if Trump’s budget authorizing 20,000 more immigration cops–which should be viewed as a wholesale shift in the United States from law enforcement to policing–gets passed by the Senate. That may change as Trump and Stephen Miller continue to gin up violence targeting judges. That may change as Trump’s rubes begin to lose their livelihoods and need someone besides Trump to blame. But thus far, Trump has not wielded the kind of violence he has tested in the past.

The other thing I expected to happen more quickly was a solidification of an alliance with the great authoritarians of the world — the Middle Eastern autocrats who had been bribing Trump in plain sight throughout the Biden term, Russia, which had partnered with those same autocrats in Putin’s effort to destroy the United States, and eventually China. Such an alliance would leave Europe — already undermined by the Orbanist project — as the rump defender of once dominant Western ideals.

My concern about such a plight is more than my own parochial interest, living within that rump world protecting human rights and democracy.

If Trump joins such an alliance, it would turn all the tools the US has used to uphold a tainted version of the Western order for most of a century against itself, in precisely the same way Trump has turned the strengths that Made America Great — immigration, diversity, debate, science — against the United States.

When I wrote a post on the “terrifying complexity of tech oligarch obeisance to Trump,” I was thinking of the US power wielded through US tech giants, in the form of spying, platforming and promoting violent and fascist speech, and serving as the digital infrastructure for the world’s commerce and communication. I was imagining what Quinn described, where Trump wielded US power over Microsoft to cut off an ICC prosecutor targeting Israel and Russia, Karim Khan. I was imagining the tools once used against people the US called terrorists, now targeting human rights defenders as if they were terrorists.

It’s not just the Internet. So long as the dollar remains the reserve currency, it’s banking too, which Trump also used to debank Khan.

Trump has used the tools the US used to use against terrorism and dictators to instead make a prosecutor of war crimes a person non-grata. He has made it a crime to uphold human rights.

The reports of Khan’s targeting came out while Trump was in his triumphant Middle East tour, where oligarchs who want the ability to chop up journalists with bone saws with impunity feted Trump’s return and threw more bribery at him. Trump brought many of the tech oligarchs who had earlier bowed in obeisance, which turned it into an orgy of oligarchy. While there, Trump handed away American tech advantage on AI. While there, Trump assured the men who chop up journalists that he, that America, wouldn’t tell them what to do anymore. That was the message of his triumph. Probably Trump will, probably he did, share the intelligence that went into chopping up a WaPo journalist, but that didn’t stop WaPo’s owner Jeff Bezos from following along like a puppy.

And through it all, even Trump’s supporters criticized Trump’s plans to accept a flying bribery palace from Qatar, an expensive sign of how goddamned easy it was to purchase Trump with a bit of gilt.

But Trump has no self-control in the face of a shiny bribe, so he accepted it with no consideration of the symbolic and national security implications of doing so.

Trump is an insanely easy mark for ruthless autocrats bearing bribes.

Most commentators have been measuring Trump’s authoritarian project in terms of Orbán’s model, and they’re not wrong. That’s what Project 2025 had in mind. But Trump already went far beyond Project 2025 in key areas, starting with the gutting of USAID, including the projects Republicans favor, a move that likely eliminated good will to the US in areas threatened by authoritarianism.

But Trump seems to be pursuing an additive model, one adopting the excess of the Gulf. There was a video (I’m still looking for it again) of the end of a receiving line with Trump and — I think — Mohammed bin Zayed. Stephen Miller was last in line and whichever Sheikh it was shook Miller’s hand and then didn’t let go, embracing him, engaging in an extended discussion with him. There were smiles everywhere. (Update: From SteveBev, here’s that video.)

The project is larger than Orbán’s. Orbán’s was just a package to sell it to the Christian nationalists.

And Trump came back from the Gulf, determined to flaunt his flying bribery palace from Qatar, on the verge of ending sanctions on Russia having achieved absolutely nothing in the way of peace concessions to excuse it, even while 80 Senators support more sanctions on Russia. In recent days Trump has done several things (besides accepting the flying bribery palace).

He has floated draconian 50% tariffs for the EU. If imposed, they would treat the EU as a greater adversary to the US than China (which is exactly how Trump’s aides treated the EU when thinking of their short-lived campaign against the Houthis). He is complaining about more than trade. He is also complaining about non-monetary barriers — the kinds of rules that make EU life safer and more civilized than in the US — and lawsuits of the sort that impose limits on American tech.

And, under the same kind of dereliction Marco Rubio brought to dismantling USAID, Trump is now dismantling the NSC so as to eliminate the possibility that actual experts will advise him against stupid policies. Axios provided the propaganda version, but FT provides the best explanation of the import.

“By whittling down the NSC staff to almost nothing, you kneecap the US government’s ability to generate foreign policy options, or to potentially act as a brake on Trump’s preferences. All that remains is presidential power.”

That would be dangerous enough if Trump were smart, sophisticated, or fully cognizant.

He’s not.

As such, he remains suggestible to whoever is in his office, starting with Stephen Miller (who’ll expand his portfolio with this move), but undoubtedly including whatever dictator can get him on his phone, those autocrats bearing bribes.

Admittedly, Trump’s complete reversal of sanctions on Syria will provide the country needed relief. It’ll also help his Gulf buddies consolidate power.

We should expect to see more instances where Trump takes sudden actions that empower authoritarianism. And as he proceeds, he will look for ways to start chipping away at democracy where it remains.

Listen on spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

The Death of the Internet and Karim Khan’s Inbox

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan is not having a good year, and neither is the ICC in general. It was never an easy job, going after people who commit Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. The ICC tries to prosecute crimes in opposition to regimes like Russia, who do things like murder whole cities and steal children so routinely it’s like doing the laundry for them.

The ICC often have to do that work with few resources, and a ever-growing list of true bastards who need to be stopped. This is complicated by countries who leave the ICC’s legal regime like Russia and America. They (and we) signed up, but left later in order to wage insane and illegal wars against peoples who posed no danger to them (or us).

But right now, it’s even worse than normal, because Khan’s work on Israel has angered the US president.

Khan is under both a cloud of personal scandal and the international political pressure the comes with catching the eye of Donald Trump. His staff have been warned that they could be detained or arrested if they try to enter the United States (including American staffers). His bank accounts have been frozen, he’s been put on leave pending investigation of sexual misconduct in his work place.

All The Tech, None of the Democracy

But the most frightening part of this for the rest of the world is that his email account has been shut down by Microsoft, according to ICC staffers. This may seem like a small thing, especially in the list of other problems he’s facing. In fact, he opened an account with Switzerland-based Proton mail, and presumably got back to emailing people, at least the ones whose email addresses he could remember.

What makes his account suspension so chilling, is what it implies, how it threatens much of the world. His suspension from a Microsoft email account wasn’t court ordered, nor did it legally need to be. Big Tech companies use click-though contracts on everything we use. What they give they can take away at any time, for the benefit of anyone they like, even if who they like is a big angry Cheeto president with tiny, tiny hands.

Big tech companies were always a flaw in democracy, but it’s never been so apparent. It’s subtle, but what Khan’s troubles with email tell us is that our ability to function in the modern world, especially in the west, is contingent on the good will of American Tech companies. And they don’t have any.

From the moment you sign up, or are signed up by your work, you have almost no rights Big Tech are obliged to respect. Most of the time, this doesn’t matter or isn’t even visible to you. They have the world’s best PR, they have customer support, they even have departments dedicated to making their products easy to use and ubiquitous. But they have no obligation to serve anything or anyone beyond their shareholders, and the government of the United States of America. In 2025 life without access to Big Tech is hardly functional, like not having access to roads or plumbing.

Today it is just one man’s email, and it may seem far away and irrelevant to most people. But any US-based digital service could be next, at the whims of the Donald and his crew of sycophantic weirdos, the same sycophantic weirdos who all came to bend the knee and sit behind him during his inauguration. They are the same ones who effectively rule the internet you’re reading this on.

Revenge of the Nerds

Plenty of annoying nerds have been ringing alarm bells since the 90s, going on about code and privacy and open source software and FREEDOM, mostly in annoying ways. And it is genuinely annoying, even to me, to say this, but they were right all along. When the internet became real life, internet freedoms became real freedoms. And right now, not many of us have much freedom on the internet.

The Trump Administration may have told Microsoft to shut off the ICC’s head prosecutor’s email, or Microsoft may have done it themselves to comply in advance. Either way there was no open and clear legal process for his digital exile, no review, no appeal, and none of the rights we enjoy offline. Our internet lives are subject to the imperial whims of Mad King Donald, and our rights end at the beginning of our internet connection.

The Dead Internet

The internet being a corporate space diminishes it for everyone who isn’t in a tech company C suite. It kills our internet inch by inch. There’s a theory, started on Reddit, that the internet died years ago. By dead, the Redditors meant that most of the traffic on the net is bots talking to other bots, spam, automated grifting, and the like. There is some truth to this, and we all feel it when we go to a social media site or look at unfiltered email.

It’s become much worse with the rise of AI and more sophisticated bots, suggesting that not only is the internet largely dead, it’s kind of undead. The tech companies have found more ways to influence and monetize us, and the terms of service have stayed just as exploitative as ever.

Zombie bots march across the wires, algorithmically fighting and fucking and deceiving each other uselessly while the world’s energy and water are slowly eaten up by data centers. We humans are outnumbered. That’s bad enough without it also becoming the dominion of MAGA, but the sycophancy of tech companies is doing just that.

We are stuck in the fiefs our governments and employers have staked out for us. Whether it’s Google or Microsoft or Apple, your digital life belongs to a few companies, not you. And now, these companies answer to Donald of Orange. Don’t annoy him, and if you do, pray you have good back-ups in some kind of open format. Our digital lives have become contingent on not coming to the attention of the current US administration. Our enterprises everywhere are contingent on obedience to the American oligarchy.

It’s bad, but there are ways to fix this. Alternatives have been around since before Big Tech, but they aren’t always as easy to use. The internet started free and open, and the free and open internet is still out there. None of the Big Tech tools we use are unique and irreplaceable. There are open and free versions of all of them… and those versions often came first. (Big Tech had to steal their ideas from somewhere.)

Reclaiming Our Online lives

The open and free versions of software are often not as polished or usable as Big Tech products are. The communities behind alternative software can be annoying, but they are getting better, given the urgency of the problems.

Tools like NextCloud cover many tech company offerings. Mail hosting from places like Proton are privacy-preserving, and almost every kind of consumer software has a free and open alternative for anything you might want to do. Krita for Photoshop, Jitsi for video conferencing, Audacity for audio recordings. (Personally, I find Audacity easier and quicker than the commercial offerings.)

Anyone can leave the toxic ecosystems of Big Tech, but it’s a lot of work and not worth it for most of us. It’s unlikely, to the point of impossibility, that the public will revolt and leave the current tech ecosystem to become millions of independent small lights on the net. But there’s better ways to approach the problem than everyone having to become a nerd.

Can Democracy Fix the Internet?

I think it can, and whether it does is, as always, up to us. What is possible is this: nations, communities, and blocs, structures democratically answerable to their people, will create public resources. Your government gives you water and waste disposal, electricity and roads. Why can’t they give you online alternatives as well, guided by the rule of law that all the other infrastructure has to obey?

Communities, from national to neighborhood, can also become nodes on the net. We just haven’t known, culturally, to ask for that. We can set ourselves free from the corporate interests of a few billionaire enclaves on the West Coast of the United States.

Freeing our societies from Big Tech is not just something we should do, it’s something we will have to do if we wish to thrive in a free and open society that respects our human rights. The last decade have seen not only the internet dying, but human freedom and flourishing slowly covered in a gray goo of algorithmic lies crafted to serve the powerful and the venal at the expense of our health and hope. Our children are paying for this, our planet is being plundered for this.

It will be hard work, and it will take a while, but freedom is always like that. I hope Karim Khan, and the rest of us, can one day rely on an internet ruled by democratically chosen laws, rather than a few rich and powerful men.

 

The introduction to this series should be read first. It has the index to all posts in this series.

Yarvin explains why he’s writing in this post. He opens with a poem by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, Que Fecit — Il Gran Rifuto, which, roughly translated, is He Who Makes The Great Refusal. Here’s the text:

For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,

he goes forward in honor and self-assurance.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he would still say no. Yet that no—the right no—
undermines him all his life.

Translation by Keeley and Sherrard. Writing in 2007, Yarvin says:

Journalists and professors are all associated with what is essentially one large institution, the press and university system. There are few, if any, ideological quarrels between major universities, or between universities and mainstream journalists.

He says that they all agree on practically everything. The differences between universities are marginal, as are the differences between professors at these institutions, and the differences between journalists. He doesn’t agree with this consensus.

He notes the recent rise of right-wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation , the Cato Institute, and the Manhattan Institute, but these are weak, and in no way competitive intellectually with the universities and their acolytes.

He says he’s trying to create an entirely new perspective. He reads Cavafy’s poem first as a paean to the dominant system, and second to the value in dissent. The dominant system rewards joiners, and accomplishes many things. A world of refusers would be a horrible thing. But he wants to be the one who refuses to participate in the Great Consensus, he wants to create an entirely new perspective.

What I’m trying to assemble here at UR is a view of the world we live in that is genuinely alien—at least, as genuinely alien as I can make it. By “alien” I just mean strange, different, or unfamiliar. …

Snip

An alien perspective is useful because it is not, at least not obviously, influenced by the ideas that are loose in the world today.

He says that there are two ways to do this. One is to start from scratch. This approach opens the door to appalling mistakes. One alternative is paleoconservativism. This is perhaps the most alien perspective on our times that he can think of.

Paleoconservatives evaluate the present by the standards of the past. He claims that their views aren’t taught anywhere, there is no education grounded in paleoconservatism. He doesn’t like present-day paleoconservatives, though. He thinks they’re too clubby, too esoteric, and probably too much in love with past regimes. Yarvin isn’t interested in recreating the Holy Roman Empire, or the Byzantine Empire.

He wants to look at 2007 the way people in 2107 do. In the end, he writes because he enjoys doing it and a bunch of people talked him into writing.

Discussion

1. I’m not wiling to read any posts based on Dungeons and Dragons. Or religion. And no more The Matrix, either. Checking ahead, no comparisons between humans and computer hardware.

2. I am sympathetic to the urge to look for different perspectives. I imagine that’s something everyone does when they’re dissatisfied with the status quo; and that academics do it in search of advancement. I’m also sympathetic to the idea of reading older books. Wisdom isn’t the special province of the present.

3. I don’t think it’s possible to start from scratch, as Yarvin claims he wants to do. There is no such place.

I also don’t think that we benefit from considering the present through the lens of the past. The wisdom of the past was directed at the conditions that existed when it was generated, and much of it was dreamed up to support the then status quo. We have to examine each idea in light of our present situation before we try to use it.

That means we have to identify the problem we want to solve carefully. Yarvin hasn’t precisely stated the problem that drives him to consider paleoconservatism. Based on what I’ve covered so far, I’d suggest some possibilities:

a. The people with power are unable to exercise all their power.
b.. Governmental regulation and public opinion are too cumbersome, and should be removed.
c. Democracy can’t solve irreconcilable differences, so civil war is inevitable.
d. The only serious problem facing our society is violence against person and property. Democracy won’t solve that problem so we need another system.
e. There’s something, as yet undefined, wrong with the way the universities and reporters pursue truth.

As to e., there is a consensus at the root of our education system, one shared with all academics and more widely across society. It’s what Jonathan Rauch calls the epistemic regime, the system we use to construct knowledge. I discuss it here, and in the three posts in that series.

We also use that system to construct and evaluate solutions to problems. Yarvin’s Heritage Foundation and other think tanks aren’t trying to solve problems. They exist to create justifications for undoing solutions currently in place as demanded by their donors. They have no new solutions, and their use of the epistemic regime is intellectually suspect.

Yarvin is toying with the idea of rejecting the epistemic regime but has nothing to suggest as a replacement.

4. As I wrote in the introduction to this series, I’m trying to take this guy seriously. That’s not easy. I have trouble ignoring the possibility that Yarvin is just a contrarian, a jolly gadfly, skittering about puncturing platitudes with outrageous claims like this: “Safeway will sell you a whole, salted rhinoceros head before Harvard will teach you that Lincoln was a tyrant.”

5. Yarvin seems to think that scholars are all liberals. Whatever. I don’t suppose Yarvin has read Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. I wonder if he would say that Foucault was a liberal, or that he was part of the consensus he so dislikes?

6. Finally, a word about the Cavafy poem. Here’s the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on the title of the poem:

The great refusal (Italian: il gran rifiuto) is the error attributed in Dante’s Inferno to one of the souls found trapped aimlessly at the Vestibule of Hell, The phrase is usually believed to refer to Pope Celestine V and his laying down of the papacy on the grounds of age, though it is occasionally taken as referring to Esau, Diocletian, or Pontius Pilate, with some arguing that Dante would not have condemned a canonized saint. Dante may have deliberately conflated some or all of these figures in the unnamed shade.

The canonized saint in ths passage is Celestine V. Here’s the Dante line:

After I had identified a few,
I saw and recognized the shade of him
who made, through cowardice, the great refusal.

Dante says the speaker of the Great Refusal is a coward. Cavafy thinks that the great refusal is right for some people in some cases. The world needs people who refuse to accept the dominant social narative. Yarvin makes a point of saying that he’s made the right decision for himself.

 

One thing even good reporting on Stephen Miller’s attempt to deport hundreds of Venezuelans under Miller’s nested false claims that they are members of Tren de Aragua and that Tren de Aragua is a terrorist group directed by the Venezuelan government to invade the United States misses is that Miller is doing it to aid in false equivalences.

Both Miller and Trump propagandist Mike Davis illustrated this the other day.

Davis falsely claimed that the Supreme Court, in ruling against Trump’s attempt to render detainees over Easter weekend, provided habeas in just 24 hours. But, Davis claimed, it took the same court 30,000 hours to “provide relief” to Jan6ers “persecuted by Biden,” by which he meant those who were prosecuted under 18 USC 1512(c)(2).

Ultimately SCOTUS narrowed the application of the law to those who corruptly tampered with evidence involved in a proceeding. Almost everyone charged with obstruction premeditated their effort to disrupt the vote certification, to deny Joe Biden his victory and his supporters their right to have their vote counted.

Miller called these people who attacked democracy, “innocent Americans.” He, like Davis, called the Venezuelans “terrorists.”

CATO’s David Bier released a report yesterday showing that 50 of the men already sent to to Nayib Bukele’s concentration camp were not only not proven to be terrorists, but had been admitted into the United States legally. Most were detained because of their tattoos.

These legal immigrants include a temporary visa holder and four men who were authorized to travel through the US refugee program. The government vetted these refugees abroad and concluded that they would face persecution, letting them resettle in the United States. The other 45 legal immigrants scheduled appointments using the CBP One app, through which they were permitted to seek entry. Among those with appointments, 24 were paroled into the United States, where they could live and work legally for up to two years, while the other 21 were detained at the port of entry.

[snip]

These people came to the United States with advanced US government permission, were vetted and screened before arrival, violated no US immigration law, and the US government turned around and “disappeared” them without due process to a foreign prison. It is paying the Salvadoran government to continue to keep them incarcerated.

[snip]

Most, at least 42, were labeled as gang members primarily based on their tattoos, which Venezuelan gangs do not use to identify members and are not reliable indicators of gang membership. According to court documents, DHS created a checklist to determine that heavily weights “dressing” like a gang member, using “gang signs,” and, most critically, tattoos. No criminal conviction, arrest, or even witness testimony is required.

DHS’s images of “TdA tattoos” include the Jordan logo, an AK-47, a train, a crown, “hijos,” “HJ,” a star, a clock, and a gas mask. But as the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin Melnick has shown, all of these supposed TdA tattoos were not taken from Venezuelan gang members but rather stolen by DHS from social media accounts that have nothing to do with TdA or Venezuela. For instance, DHS obtained its TdA “Jordan” from a Michael Jordan fan account in the United States. It pulled its AK-47 tattoo from a Turkish tattoo artist.

Because these men were denied due process, the public had no opportunity to obtain a real accounting of any evidence against them.

By comparison, those charged with obstructing the vote count for January 6 were arrested on criminal complaints sworn out to a judge, given initial hearings, and convicted via a trial or confession. They got due process.

Stephen Miller called them innocent, even those who admitted to willfully attempting to obstruct the certification of Joe Biden’s win.

Monday, SCOTUS lifted the stay on a Temporary Postponement of Kristi Noem’s efforts to deport Venezuelans from whom Trump withdrew Temporary Protected Status. Those with individual challenges can continue their challenges but Trump can move forward with deportations.

As part of the same effort to decriminalize January 6, DOJ has agreed to pay Ashli Babbitt’s estate almost $5 million to settle a wrongful death claim related to Babbitt’s invasion of the Speaker’s Lobby where Congress was trying to escape an armed mob.

The Trump administration has agreed to pay just under $5 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit that Ashli Babbitt’s family filed over her shooting by an officer during the U.S. Capitol riot, according to a person with knowledge of the settlement. The person insisted on anonymity to discuss with The Associated Press terms of a settlement that have not been made public.

The settlement would resolve the $30 million federal lawsuit that Babbitt’s estate filed last year in Washington, D.C. On Jan. 6, 2021, a Capitol police officer shot Babbitt as she tried to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby.

The officer who shot her was cleared of wrongdoing by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which concluded that he acted in self-defense and in the defense of members of Congress. The Capitol Police also cleared the officer.

This is Trump’s goal, Stephen Miller’s goal; it is how Miller got Trump elected. Trump has always claimed investigations into himself and his mob were unjust, but his own investigations into Joe Biden’s kid and before that Hillary Clinton was a hunt for corruption.

Trump’s power rests on claiming up is down, attacks on the US are noble and the defense of rule of law is a crime, accountability for anyone on his team is unjust.

Finally, today, Alina Habba announced on Xitter (nothing appears to be filed yet) that she is dismissing the petty trespassing case against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka “for the sake of moving forward” — or, more likely, because video evidence shows that when he was asked to leave Delaney Hall, he did so, and only after that was he arrested. But in the same statement, Habba announced she was has charged Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, who was shoved while she was objecting to the arrest of Newark’s mayor, which right wingers describe as an attempt to body slam the cops arresting Baraka. McIver is being charged with the same assault charge used against hundreds of Jan6ers who have since been pardoned for their crimes.

Habba claims she,

persistently made efforts to address these issues without bringing criminal charges and [has] given Representative McIver every opportunity to come to a resolution, but she has unfortunately declined.

Uh huh. McIver probably declined to do what CBS is about to, to falsely admit guilt when there is none. In a statement, McIver called the charges political.

McIver, D-10th Dist., called the charges filed by Habba, an appointee and former lawyer for President Donald Trump “purely political.”

“Earlier this month, I joined my colleagues to inspect the treatment of ICE detainees at Delaney Hall in my district,” McIver said in a statement. “We were fulfilling our lawful oversight responsibilities, as members of Congress have done many times before, and our visit should have been peaceful and short.

“Instead, ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation when they chose to arrest Mayor Baraka. The charges against me are purely political—they mischaracterize and distort my actions, and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight.”

The charge comes amid a WaPo report that Pam Bondi is (was?) considering eliminating the requirement that investigations into Members of Congress and other public officlas involve DOJ’s Public Integrity Division. The Division would have, in this case, warned DOJ officials that in past cases (most notably with people like Scott Perry and Jim Jordan) DOJ determined charges for such actions might violate separation of powers.

Trump not only doesn’t care about things like that, infringing on Congress’ powers is the point.

As I said to Nicole Sandler Friday, Trump was always going to find a way to charge a Member of Congress, just like he found a way to charge a judge. Habba has done so here where McIver has a clear immunity claim, and has done so as someone who clearly has conflicts. Habba’s statement lacks DOJ’s boilerplate comment asserting that charges are just allegations. And the siren in her tweet will add to any claim McIver makes that this violates due process.

Sure, Habba claims she tried to avoid this. But the entire scene at Delaney Hall was designed to elicit such confrontation, to create nesting legal attacks out of which Stephen Miller can spin his lies.

These developments are all of a piece. They are all an effort — one Trump has been pursuing for a decade — to replace rule of law with rule of mob.

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

While waiting for the worst of the supply shock to hit consumers thanks to Trump’s misbegotten tariffs, I have been working on the three Rs.

Not reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic but reduce, recycle, repair.

You may already have noticed the supply shock beginning wherever you live in your local stores. I had to hunt for flax seed last week; I knew flax was grown all over the world including the US, but for some reason I had it in my head this wouldn’t be a food product affected by the tariffs.

Nope, illusion shattered – the label on the packages I found show origin USA and Canada.

The price wasn’t out of line with expectations but I bet the next time I hunt for flax seed it will be more expensive even though some of it is likely grown in North Dakota and Minnesota.

Flax isn’t just a food product; the plant is also not just a source of fiber for fabric. It’s the source of linseed oil used in many applications including painting and wood finishing.

In other words, the ripple effect of tariffs on this one agricultural product could be widespread.

I haven’t gone looking for linen fabric but I imagine worse results because the US has very little if any linen fabric production even though the US grows flax seed.

The cost may not be as bad as imports from China since linen is grown and produced in northern Europe, but it’s still not going to be good if you rely on natural fiber fabrics.

Fortunately I anticipated the supply shock back in March. I bought an entire bolt of unbleached 100% cotton muslin while it was on sale, thinking I would use it for repairs and craft work over time.

That time is now. I am patching up a vintage muslin quilt, one too ratty for conservation techniques and too beloved to cut up for other purposes. It’s not a good weather project but it’s perfect for rainy days like we’ve had this week.

This week I’ve also patched up a hot mitt for my daughter and hot pads for my own use with scrap denim from old jeans; patched a spun poly shopping bag with a weakened bottom using a woven poly rice bag; stitched up some jeans with holes and fraying hems; repaired a couple well-worn aprons with canvas and denim patches; made some reusable gift bags using thrifted fabric table napkins; and worked on re-stuffing a couple of favorite buckwheat hull pillows.

The next project I should take up is making covers for some old outdoor furniture cushions. I’ve had fabric squirreled away for a year now to freshen up some ratty-looking pads I can’t bring myself to trash. They’re polyester foam and fiberfill with a polyester-nylon cover – in other words they’re nothing but refined oil on its way to becoming a tax burden taking up space in a municipal landfill.

Ugh — I refuse to do that when I can simply recover and reuse them, especially when I can’t be certain there will be more new chair pads at the store due to the impending supply shock.

It’s going to be inconvenient for many of us if not downright painful — many families will struggle as the worst of the supply shock hits store shelves. But one of the effects should be a greater awareness about our consumption habits and how they affect the rest of the world. The climate may actually benefit from our reduced consumption of so many items requiring fossil fuels as both a raw material and fuel for production.

Let’s home this expanded consciousness has a long-term positive effect, not the least of which is the need for smarter and less corrupt governmental leadership — the kind that doesn’t tell businesses to “EAT THE TARIFFS” in all caps via social media when the tariffs look more like a shakedown and less like a rational, targeted instrument of effective policy.

What about you? Are you seeing the effects of the Trump supply shock? What are you doing to reduce, repair, recycle? Who can you help with the three Rs and how will you do it?

This is an open thread.