Trump announces his pick for deputy Middle East envoy — and scolds her in the same breath
In one of the weirdest press releases you'll ever read, Trump nominated Morgan Ortagus as deputy Middle East envoy...and then publicly trashed her. “Early on Morgan fought me for three years, but hopefully has learned her lesson. These things usually don’t work out, but she has strong Republican support, and I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for them. Let’s see what happens. I expect great results, and soon!" How's THAT for a vote of confidence?
VIDEO OF THE DAY: Rudy Giuliani gets legal news he's dreaded
Brian Tyler Cohen and legal expert Glenn Kirschner sit down to discuss the latest developments in the ever-worsening legal woes of Rudy Giuliani.
Trump launches full-scale attack on education
MoveOn: Donald Trump and his radical cronies like Linda McMahon and Vivek Ramaswamy want to ABOLISH the Department of Education, stripping away all protections for LGBT students and turning our public schools into for-profit scams. Will you add your name to demand he stop his efforts to kill the Department of Education?
My dinner with Andreessen
Rick Perlstein, The American Prospect: "Recently, I read about venture capitalist Marc Andreessen putting his 12,000-square-foot mansion in Atherton, California, which has seven fireplaces, up for sale for $33.75 million. This was done to spend more time, one supposes, at the $177 million home he owns in Paradise Cove, California; or the $34 million one he bought beside it; or the $44.5 million one in a place called Escondido Beach. Upon reading this, I realized it was time to stop procrastinating and tell you all a story I’ve been meaning to set down for a long time now about the time I visited that house (the cheap $33.75 million one, I mean). Strictly on a need-to-know basis. Because you really need to know how deeply twisted some of these plutocrats who run our society truly are. Andreessen, I learned, was “Tomorrow’s Advance Man.” He superintended the “newest and most unusual” venture capital firm on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road. He '“seethes with beliefs' and is 'afire to reorder life as we know it.' His enthusiasms included replacing money with cryptocurrency; replacing cooked food with a scheme called, yes, “Soylent,” and boosting the now-invisible Oculus virtual reality headset. Zero for three when it comes to picking useful inventions to reorder life as we know it, that is to say, though at no apparent cost to his power or net worth, now pegged at an estimated $1.7 billion. I knew from the New Yorker that Andreessen had grown up in an impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it. But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject. He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and alienation they suffered. It’s a libertarian commonplace, a version of their pinched vision of why the market and only the market is the truly legitimate response to oppressive conditions on the job: If you don’t like it, you can leave. If you don’t, what you suffer is your own fault. I brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and other benefits that small towns provide: things that make human beings human beings. I pointed out that there must be something in the kind of places he grew up in worth preserving. I dared venture that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community passes from the Earth; that maybe people are more than just figures finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life … And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it. “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.” There is something very, very wrong with us, that our society affords so much power to people like this."
In the GOP civil war over immigration, both sides are racists
Jeet Heer, The Nation: "The current intramural GOP strife is a familiar battle between a business elite that wants cheap immigrant labor and nativist agitators who believe restriction of immigration is central to the MAGA agenda. As New York magazine reports, 'Last week, while Americans were busy celebrating the holidays with their families, a contentious online rift emerged among the MAGA faithful after Donald Trump’s tech-world allies, led by billionaire Elon Musk, began pushing back on attacks on highly skilled foreign tech workers by the movement’s nativist wing.' The current GOP civil war is one where both sides have profoundly reactionary and bigoted views of society, although with slight variations. MAGA nativists such as Loomer and Bannon are dreaming of a return to the overwhelmingly white America of the 1950s, with middle-class jobs a patrimony reserved largely for the nation’s dominant ethnic group. Musk and Ramaswamy might want a more multiracial America, but it would still be a profoundly hierarchical one, with immigrants providing the cheap labor that allows the 1 percent to flourish. For progressives, there’s little reason to choose sides between Musk’s cynical racism and the racism of MAGA anti-system agitators like Loomer and Bannon. At best, we can hope that the internal strife will weaken both these noxious forces. The true path forward involves using the political space opened up by right-wing infighting to make a more principled argument for immigration—one based on the goal of creating a multiracial working class with a shared value of cosmopolitan solidarity that can overthrow the plutocrats and their racist coalition."
US military service is the strongest predictor of carrying out extremist violence
Nick Turse, The Intercept: "The two men who carried out apparent terror attacks on New Year’s Day — killing 15 people by plowing a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers in New Orleans, and detonating a Tesla Cybertruck outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas — both had U.S. military backgrounds, according to the Pentagon. From 1990 to 2010, about seven persons per year with U.S. military backgrounds committed extremist crimes. Since 2011, that number has jumped to almost 45 per year. Military service is also the single strongest individual predictor of becoming a “mass casualty offender,” far outpacing mental health issues, according to a separate study of extremist mass casualty violence by the researchers. From 1990 to 2022, successful violent plots that included perpetrators with a connection to the U.S. military resulted in 314 deaths and 1,978 injuries. In the years 1990 to 2022, 170 individuals with U.S. military backgrounds plotted 144 individual mass casualty terrorist attacks in the United States. These troops and veterans represent approximately one-quarter of all individuals who plotted mass casualty extremist attacks during this span, outstripping their representation in the U.S. population."
Read the NYPD’s Mangione report the media won't publish
Ken Klippenstein: "Post-Luigi, the 'extremist' threat is you. If you’re a social media user who’s expressed anything other than condemnation for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, counterterrorism authorities might consider you an 'extremist.' That’s according to yet another document the media refuses to publish in full. In the holiday spirit of generosity, we’ve included a copy below. Days after the murder, the NYPD circulated an intelligence report focusing not just on alleged killer Luigi Mangione but even ordinary people expressing sympathy for him online. Warning of 'a wide range of extremists' that 'may view Mangione as a martyr,' the report’s title singles out 'disdain for corporate greed.' The idea that angry social media posts amount to the beginnings of a violent insurgency against corporate executives is nonsense. Security experts have said as much, albeit gingerly. The NYPD’s intelligence bureau is just one node in a web of around 70 state-level 'fusion centers' surging these kind of threat reports to companies. Presumably the companies just think they’re being responsible by signing up for the reports. In reality they’re being subtly indoctrinated into the national security state’s way of seeing things. When this apparatus of fusion centers emerged in the wake of 9/11, the warnings pertained to al Qaeda. But as the global war on terror draws down, the supposed bad guy is increasingly the American people, on both the 'far-right' and 'far-left' (who decides what counts as 'far'?), from MAGA to anti-corporate '“extremists' online."
Food for thought
And in other news
Hope...
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