Trump's attack dogs come back to bite
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Trump's core belief is crippling him
Friends,
Trump’s domestic and foreign policies — ranging from his attempted coup against the United States in January 2021, to his ICE and Border Patrol excesses (including murders in Minnesota), to his incursion into Venezuela and abduction of its president, to his attack on Iran, and his threats against Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland — all undermine the rule of law, domestically and internationally.
But that’s not all. They threaten what we mean by civilization.
The moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.
Trump believes that might makes right — that the stronger are entitled to attack and exploit the weaker. Violence against those who are or appear weaker is a hallmark of his presidency and his outlook in general.
He is profoundly and dangerously wrong.
In January, he called the unilateral military intervention that ended in the kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro an example of the “iron laws that have always determined global power.”
What “iron laws” is he referring to? “Might makes right” is not an iron law. It marks the destruction of the rule of law.
When challenged about the Maduro operation, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller mocked Jake Tapper on CNN for his apparent naïveté about “international niceties” like the United Nations charter. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” said Miller.
Sorry, Stephen. Strength, force, and power do not “govern” anything. They’re the exact opposite of governing. They’re survival of the fittest — the law of the jungle.
On April 7, Trump told the Iranian regime to surrender to American might or “a whole civilization will die tonight.” That kind of talk doesn’t enlarge American power. It delegitimizes American power.
In reality, Trump is destroying any remaining faith that the United States can be trusted to exercise power responsibly. He is also, not incidentally, erasing any distinction between the exercise of American might and Russian conduct in Ukraine and Chinese behavior in the South China Sea or (potentially) over Taiwan.
If the United States stays on this course, it will find itself bereft of allies and friends, a lonely superpower in a lawless international system it has helped to create.
The genius of America’s post-1945 foreign policy was to embed America’s power in international institutions and laws, including the UN charter, emphasizing multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
America didn’t always live up to these ideals, of course. But all nations, regardless of their size or power, had a stake in them. They not only helped legitimize American power but also maintained international stability and avoided another world war.
The same moral underpinning provides the foundation for a good society. To be morally legitimate, any system of laws must be premised on preventing the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. If a system is to be broadly accepted and obeyed, the entire public must believe that it is in their interest to support it.
But this aspiration is easily violated by those who abuse their wealth and power. Maintaining it requires that the powerful have enough integrity to abstain from seeking short-term wins, and that the rest of us hold them accountable if they don’t.
Yet we now inhabit a society grown vastly more unequal. Political and economic power are more concentrated and less constrained than at any time since the first Gilded Age. This invites the powerful to exploit the weaker because the powerful feel omnipotent.
The wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Charles Koch, and a handful of others is almost beyond comprehension. The influence of Big Tech, Big Oil, and the largest aerospace and defense corporations extends over much of America and the globe. AI is likely to centralize wealth and power even more.
Meanwhile, Trump — enabled by cowardly congressional Republicans and a pliant majority on the Supreme Court — has turned the U.S. presidency into the most powerful and unaccountable agent of American government in history, arrayed on the side of the powerful, domestically and internationally.
A direct line connects Trump’s attempted coup in 2020 and January 2021 to his capture of Maduro, to his attack on Iran without congressional authority, to his blatant corruption. All are lawless. All are premised on the hubris of omnipotence.
You see much the same in Putin’s war on Ukraine. In Xi’s threats against Taiwan. In global depredation and monopolization by Big Tech and Big Oil. In Russian, Chinese, and American oligarchs who have fused public power with their personal wealth.
But unfettered might does not make right. It makes for instability, upheaval, depravity, and war.
History shows that laws and norms designed to constrain the powerful also protect them. Without such constraints, their insatiable demands for more power and wealth eventually bring them down — along with their corporations, nations, and empires. And threaten world war.
Trump’s blatant lawlessness is already bringing him down. It will haunt America and the world for years to come.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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This single word could cost progressives their US citizenship
Republicans are at it again, and it’s hard to overstate how chilling this is and what it tells you about the direction people in this Party want to take America.
Texas Congressman Chip Roy is preparing to introduce legislation he’s calling the “MAMDANI Act,” named after Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, that would let the federal government bar entry to, deport, and strip naturalized citizenship from any person who advocates for or is “affiliated with” what Roy calls “totalitarian” movements. The list includes, from Rep. Roy’s webpage:
“[A] socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”
The bill targets people who “write, distribute, circulate, print, display, possess, or publish” material supporting socialism or any of those other ideas.
“Possess?” That single word means that owning a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital, or a pamphlet from a Palestinian solidarity group, or a battered paperback of Howard Zinn — or maybe even one of my books on the New Deal — would be enough to make a green-card holder or a naturalized citizen “inadmissible or deportable.”
“Affiliated with?” That would prevent anybody who’s ever affiliated themselves with the Democratic Socialist Party in New York that Mamdami ran on behalf of (along with the normal Democratic Party; New York has fusion voting so you can run on two parties simultaneously) from staying in America. Gone to a meeting, rally, or put yourself on their mailing list? You’re toast.
“Write?” That means they’re coming for me, and for you if you’ve ever echoed in writing the kind of sentiments that Republicans call socialism, including food stamps and school lunches, free college, public libraries, a national healthcare system, police and fire, and highways that don’t have tolls. (When billionaire David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on an antisocialism agenda, he called for the end of all these forms of “socialism”.)
“Distribute?” And they’d be coming for Substack, too, it appears. Along with your local bookstore or library.
We haven’t seen anything this sweeping since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when then-President John Adams had roughly 30 newspaper editors and publishers thrown in prison for attacking him. Ben Franklin’s grandson was arrested for publishing an op-ed calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.” A town drunk in New Jersey was arrested for criticizing him while imbibing in a bar. Adams’ overreach lost him the election of 1800 to his then-political enemy Thomas Jefferson, who openly opposed the Acts.
But here we are again, and here’s another dangerous overreach on the GOP’s part in this legislation: Roy’s bill explicitly forbids judicial review of any inadmissibility, deportation, or denaturalization decision made under it.
In other words, if this law passes, then no court can stop or second-guess the government: no habeas corpus, no meaningful appeals; just an order from the Attorney General or some twit at ICE or Homeland Security and you’re on a plane or stuck in a hellhole “detention facility,” possibly for the rest of your life.
That’s not immigration policy, that’s the architecture of a police state, and it’s modeled on how the Nazis stripped citizenship from German Jews and political dissidents in 1935 under the Reich Citizenship Laws.
I’ve walked through Berlin’s Topography of Terror museum, and the documents on display tell the horrific story of how that the lawyers who drafted those Nazi laws studied America’s own racial and political exclusion laws for inspiration.
Now Republican Chip Roy wants to bring them back to America as Republicans try to reinvent or country in the image of Trump’s mentor Putin’s Russia or — as the authors of Project 2025 openly suggest — Orbán’s Hungary.
The bill’s namesake, Mayor Mamdani, became a U.S. citizen in 2018 after moving here from Uganda as a child. He hasn’t been credibly accused of any crime, and as the Brennan Center for Justice meticulously documents, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the use of stripping people of their citizenship as a political weapon like Putin now routinely does and Trump loves to threaten.
That goes all the way back to trying to overturn the 1943 Schneiderman Supreme Court ruling, which held the government must prove “lack of attachment” to the Constitution by “clear, unequivocal, and convincing” evidence. Disagreeing with someone’s politics doesn’t cut it by a long shot. But Roy and his allies aren’t interested in the existing jurisprudence; they want to write new laws that nullify that decision (and common decency) altogether.
Roy told Breitbart his target is what he calls a “Red-Green Alliance” of socialists and Islamists, and a summary from his office goes further, claiming current immigration policies — echoing Clarence Thomas‘s recent speech that I wrote about Monday — have produced “dangerous levels of opposition to classical American political doctrines, like free-market capitalism.”
That’s an extraordinary admission, because Roy isn’t proposing to deport people who commit crimes, or who support terrorism, or even who lied on their citizenship applications. He wants, instead, to strip of citizenship and then deport people who don’t sufficiently believe in the unregulated, low-tax version of the so-called free market capitalism advocated by the rightwing billionaires who now own the GOP.
This is a loyalty test for an ideology rather than a country, and, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, it’s the kind of legislation the robber barons of the 1920s and the John Birchers and McCarthy movement of the 1950s dreamed of but could never ram through Congress and neither Taft nor Eisenhower would ever have signed.
We’ve actually run a smaller, more local version of this experiment before, and it ended in disgrace. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 saw roughly 10,000 immigrants rounded up without warrants and 556 of them deported, including the anarchist Emma Goldman, all for the crime of holding the wrong politics.
The Communist Control Act of 1954 put into law by Republicans at the height of McCarthyism, was eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1973 and most of its provisions repealed. Each time we’ve tried this sort of neofascist thing the country looked back in shame, having relearned that the First Amendment doesn’t have an exception for people who say we should tax the morbidly rich to build and support a middle class.
History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.
There are nearly 25 million naturalized citizens and 12.8 million green-card holders living in the United States today, and every single one of them would, under Roy’s bill, be subject to having their citizenship reviewed and potentially revoked based on some rightwinger complaining about them to a federal bureaucrat or police agency or the discovery of a book in their house.
It would threaten millions of legal permanent residents and visa holders working in our hospitals, building our houses, teaching our children, designing our electronics, and even farming our food. The fear alone is the point: if you’re a naturalized citizen or green-card or visa holder and you want to attend a Free Palestine rally, a labor union meeting, or a tenants’ rights organizing session, you’d now have to ask yourself whether some aide in Stephen Miller’s office might decide that constitutes “advocacy for socialism.”
And it’s one of dozens of similar laws that have been proposed by Republicans in recent years.
Presumably, this is the sort of thing that the billionaire who funded JD Vance’s rise to the Senate and vice presidency meant when he famously said, “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” That’s the billionaire whose company now compiles information on Americans on behalf of the Trump regime.
Call your member of Congress through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and tell them you oppose the MAMDANI Act and any legislation that creates thought, publishing, and speech crimes, then use the ACLU’s action tool to make sure your senators hear from you, too.
Support the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has been on the front lines fighting Roy’s earlier “Sharia-Free America Act,” and back the American Immigration Council as it readies the inevitable legal challenges. Get involved with Indivisible and your local Democratic Party to make sure the 2026 midterms send Roy and every co-sponsor of this bill back home permanently.
The Constitution doesn’t defend itself and neither does freedom; that work belongs to us, and the time to engage with it is right now.
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This mess proves Trump is no longer in charge
Friends,
The fog of war is getting thicker.
According to the Washington Post, a “U.S. delegation was expected to depart Tuesday for a second round of face-to-face peace talks with Iran” but “was delayed for ‘additional policy meetings’ involving Vice President JD Vance.”
So, the reason for the delay was additional policy meetings in Washington?
Not quite. According to the New York Times, Vance’s trip was “suspended because Tehran did not respond to American negotiating positions.”
Well, not really. The Wall Street Journal reports that plans for negotiations are “in flux” because “Tehran hasn’t yet decided on sending a delegation.”
Wait. According to CNN, Iran isn’t participating in peace negotiations because of “contradictory messages, contradictory behaviors, and unacceptable actions by the American side.”
These are just the latest in a series of confused reports.
Why the confusion? Is it because these news organizations are getting inconsistent information? Because the U.S. is getting inconsistent messages from Iran? Because U.S. decision makers don’t themselves know what’s happening? Or because no one on the U.S. side is in charge?
It’s probably all of the above, but I fear it’s largely the last — no one on the U.S. side is in charge.
On April 18, the Journal reported:
“After the president learned that an American jet had been shot down in Iran, with two airmen missing … Tump screamed at aides for hours….
Aides kept the president out of the room as they got minute-by-minute updates because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, instead updating him at meaningful moments, a senior administration official said ….
Six hours later, the chest-thumping president was back with another audacious gamble to loosen Iran’s grip on its most powerful point of leverage, the Strait of Hormuz. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he blasted on social media Easter morning from the White House residence, adding an Islamic prayer to the post.
A president who thrives on drama is bringing an even more intense version of his unorthodox, maximalist approach to a new situation—fighting a war. He is veering between belligerent and conciliatory approaches and grappling behind the scenes with just how badly things could go wrong.
At the same time, the president sometimes loses focus, spending time on the details of his plans for the White House ballroom or on midterm fundraisers—and telling advisers he wants to shift to other topics.”
I’ve served three presidents and advised a fourth. I’ve been in and around several White Houses. When presidential aides tell reporters that they’ve had to keep a president out of the room because they believed his impatience wouldn’t be helpful, what they’re really saying is they’re dealing with someone who’s so irrational they don’t trust his judgment.
This is the most chilling thing I’ve heard so far about Trump and his war in Iran. It means Trump isn’t in charge. But neither, presumably, is anyone around him — neither JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Dan Caine, or the staffers clustered around each ot them. Even assuming that each of them is trying to do the best job they can, even assuming they’re trying to coordinate with each other, the most likely scenario is an ongoing mess.
At best, the fog of war causes many to lose sight of where they are and what their priorities should be. At worst — when the judgment of the commander-in-chief isn’t trusted — the fog is impenetrable. I fear that’s where we are now.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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This Supreme Court fool earned a dubious honor
Friends,
I’ve long assumed that Samuel Alito was the worst.
Alito — who authored the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), the case that ended constitutional abortion rights by merely asserting that the high court’s prior opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973) was wrongly decided; who accepted a 2008 luxury fishing trip to Alaska, including private jet travel, from hedge fund billionaire and GOP donor Paul Singer yet failed to disclose it on Alito's financial forms and didn’t even recuse himself from decisions involving Singer’s subsequent business before the Supreme Court; who hoisted an inverted American flag outside his Virginia home shortly after the January 6 Capitol riot, a symbol of support for Trump's false claims of a stolen 2020 election — has the moral and intellectual stature of a poisonous toad.
But I’ve come to revise my view of the court’s worst Justice.
Clarence Thomas is 77 years old. He has now served on the Supreme Court for over 34 years, making him the longest-serving member of the Court. He is a bitter, angry, severe hard-right, intellectually dishonest, ideologue. After reading his latest thoughts on America, I’ve concluded Thomas is even worse than Alito.
Last Wednesday, Thomas gave a rare public address at the University of Texas in Austin that began as a banal tribute to the Declaration of Independence before degenerating into a misleading screed against progressivism.
“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream,” Thomas intoned. “The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.”
Thomas went on to blame progressives for the worst crimes of the 20th century, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao” were all “intertwined with the rise of progressivism,” as was “racial segregation,” “eugenics,” and other evils.
This is pure rubbish.
In reality, America’s Progressive era emerged at the start of the 20th century from the corruption and excesses of America’s first Gilded Age (we’re now in the second, if you hadn’t noticed) — its record inequalities of income and wealth, its “robber barons” who monopolized industries and handed out sacks of money to pliant legislators, it’s dangerous factories and unsafe working conditions, its violent attacks on workers who tried to form unions, its corporate control over all facets of government, its widespread poverty and disease, and its corrupt party machines.
In many ways, the Progressive Era — whose most prominent leader was Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, not Woodrow Wilson, by the way — saved capitalism from its own excesses by instituting a progressive income tax, an estate tax, pure food and drug laws, and America’s first laws against corporate influence in politics.
Then, under Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin (Franklin D.), came Social Security, the 40-hour workweek (with time-and-a-half for overtime), the right to form unions, and laws and regulations that limited Wall Street’s ability to gamble with other people’s money.
Clarence Thomas got it exactly backwards. Had we not had the Progressive Era and its reforms extending through the 1930s, America might well have succumbed to fascism — as did Germany under Hitler, and Italy under Mussolini, or to communist fascism, as did Russia under Stalin. Progressive and New Deal reforms acted as bulwarks against the rise of fascism in America.
In fact, it’s been the demise of such reforms since Ronald Reagan that have opened the way to Trumpian neo-fascism.
Over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized in the 1950s, giving them bargaining leverage to get higher wages and better working conditions. Now, fewer than 6 percent are unionized, which has contributed to the flattening of wages, a contracting middle class, inequalities of income and wealth rivaling the first Gilded Age, and an angry and suspicious working class that’s become easy prey for demagogues.
Wall Street has been deregulated — allowing it to go on gambling sprees such as the one that produced the financial crisis of 2008, which claimed millions of working peoples’ homes, savings, and jobs.
America’s social safety nets have become so frayed that almost a fifth of the nation’s children are now in poverty. Yet Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump have slashed taxes on the rich and on big corporations and have allowed giant corporations to merge into giant monopolies rivaling the trusts of the first Gilded Age. And Trump has ushered in an era of corruption the likes of which America hasn’t seen since that earlier disgraceful era.
Thomas claims that, “The century of progressivism did not go well.” Baloney. It helped America create the largest middle class the world had ever seen, while also extending prosperity to millions of Black and brown people.
The tragedy is that America turned its back on progressivism and on social progress, in part because of the Supreme Court and Justice Clarence Thomas.
Flashback: I was in law school in 1973 when the Supreme Court decided Roe, protecting a pregnant person’s right to privacy under the 14th amendment to the Constitution.
Clarence Thomas was in my law school class at the time, as was Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Clinton) and Bill Clinton.
The professors used the “Socratic method” — asking hard questions about the cases they were discussing and waiting for students to raise their hands in response, and then criticizing the responses. It was a hair-raising but effective way to learn the law.
One of the principles guiding those discussions is called stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided.” It’s the doctrine of judicial precedent. If a court has already ruled on an issue (say, on reproductive rights), future courts should decide similar cases the same way. Supreme Courts can change their minds and rule differently than they did before, but they need good reasons to do so, and it helps if their opinion is unanimous or nearly so. Otherwise, their rulings appear (and are) arbitrary — even, shall we say? — partisan.
In those classroom discussions almost 50 years ago, Hillary’s hand was always first in the air. When she was called upon, she gave perfect answers — whole paragraphs, precisely phrased. She distinguished one case from another, using precedents and stare decisis to guide her thinking. I was awed.
My hand was in the air about half the time, and when called on, my answers were meh.
Clarence’s hand was never in the air. I don’t recall him saying anything, ever.
Bill was never in class.
Only one of us now sits on the Supreme Court. And he has shown no respect for stare decisis.
Nor has he respected judicial ethics.
A federal law — 28 U.S. Code § 455 — requires that “any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Thomas’s wife, Ginni, actively strategized with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on overturning the election results. Between Election Day 2020 and the days following the January 6th attack on the Capitol, she exchanged 29 text messages with Meadows, in which she spread false theories about the election, urged Meadows to overturn the election results, and called for specific actions from the White House to help overturn the election. She also served as one of nine board members of a group that helped lead the “Stop the Steal” movement and called for the punishment of House Republicans who participated in the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack.
Yet Clarence Thomas has repeatedly participated in cases that have come to the high court directly or indirectly involving the 2020 election results, refusing to disqualify himself.
In addition, he failed to disclose his wife’s income from her work at the Heritage Foundation, in violation of the Ethics in Government Act.
Finally, there’s his speech last week in Austin. How can Americans be expected to believe in the impartiality of the Supreme Court in general and Clarence Thomas in particular when he condemns an entire philosophy of government — progressivism — and all the people who continue to call themselves progressives, in effect labeling them neo-fascists?
At the start of his speech last week in Austin, Clarence Thomas noted that “My wife Virginia and I have many wonderful friends and acquaintances here, and it is so special to have our dear friends Harlan and Kathy Crow join us today.”
He was, of course, referring to the Republican mega-donor who has spent the last twenty years lavishing Thomas with personal gifts, luxury yacht trips, fancy vacations, and funding for Ginni Thomas’s political organization.
Small wonder that Clarence Thomas prefers the Gilded Age over the Progressive Era. He’s the living embodiment of The Gilded Age’s public-be-damned excesses.
Hence, he’s my nominee for the worst justice in modern Supreme Court history.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Kash Patel has destroyed himself with this stupid stunt
There is an image burned into the minds of anyone paying attention to the machinations of Donald Trump, his Cabinet and advisors, aka his minions and sycophants. It is not the picture I bet you’re thinking of — the one of Donald Trump, bloodied ear and fist clenched toward the sky, wrapped in an American flag at Butler, Pennsylvania.
Nope, that’s not it.
The image that should haunt you is something different. More joyous? Loutish? It’s Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, standing in the locker room of the United States men’s Olympic hockey team, chugging a beer like a frat boy who stumbled into a party where he wasn’t invited, drinking beer he didn’t pay for.
Not only is he a cheapskate, but do I need to remind you that he is the country’s top domestic intelligence officer? You’d be hard-pressed to think of a man pining for a keg stand.
He is the man who runs the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world, surrounded by elite athletes who just won a gold medal, treating their locker room like he was the uninvited guest of honor.
No sense of gravitas. No self-awareness. No decorum. No suit and tie congratulating the players with a handshake instead of shotgunning a beer. Just Kash, a putrid person in over his head, beer, job and all.
That photograph alone told a story. The Atlantic then told the rest, with an investigative piece aptly titled, “The FBI Director is MIA.”
In a thoroughly reported, meticulously sourced investigation, The Atlantic laid out a damning portrait of Patel as a man who drinks heavily, publicly, and without concern for rolling out of bed with a hangover and trying to run the FBI.
The piece drew on firsthand sources, accounts from bars, restaurants, and Las Vegas clubs, and a pattern of behavior that would disqualify most people from managing an abandoned building, let alone a federal intelligence agency with 38,000 employees and a classified portfolio of state secrets.
It described heavy drinking, late nights that bled into workdays, and concerns among colleagues about his reliability and judgment. This was not gossip. It was journalism, and the kind that makes powerful people uncomfortable.
So what did Kash Patel do? He went on Fox News and sat down with Maria Bartiromo, where he imploded on live television.
Bartiromo asked him directly whether he had a drinking problem. It was a yes-or-no question. Patel answered it the way a hungover drunk answers when the answer is yes — he hemmed and hawed. He rambled. He told America how great the FBI is.
Then the bleary-eyed Patel said: “You watch. I’m gonna sue them.”
Well. On Monday, he did.
Patel has filed a $250 million lawsuit against The Atlantic, claiming malice. Two hundred and fifty million dollars against a publication that did what journalism is supposed to do — investigate a powerful public official and tell the public what it found.
Before we go further, I have a confession. “You can’t fool a fellow drunk.”
I have spent over 30 years in Manhattan, and I drank heavily for most of them. I quit over four years ago, but I know that if someone wrote about my drinking exploits, I’d do everything possible to not draw attention to myself.
I had a wildly successful career in PR; however, I went to work many mornings hungover, straining to be at my best. So the stories in The Atlantic rang true. They felt authentic because I did the same thing.
Patel should stick his head in the sand, but instead the arrogant, obtuse faux-FBI person is trying to blow it all up.
Actual malice, as established in New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964, means the defendant published something knowing it was false, or with reckless disregard for the truth. It is an extraordinarily high bar because the First Amendment does not exist to protect the powerful.
The Atlantic didn’t write a hit job. They investigated. They reported. That is the opposite of malice.
If Patel pushes this lawsuit forward, and if it somehow survives a motion to dismiss, discovery opens up. Depositions. Sworn testimony. Subpoenas. The sources, all those people in bars, restaurants, Vegas clubs, colleagues, even those in that locker room who saw what he did and how he acted, will all potentially be called to testify under oath.
Patel’s strategy to stop the world from talking about his drinking would require the world to talk about his drinking in a federal courtroom, on the record.
And the media will be all over it. What was said to The Atlantic is likely only the tip of the iceberg.
Here’s why I know that. When I get together with friends, once the stories about my drinking exploits start, they never end. They get worse, more detailed. If Patel is like any of us who partied hearty, then the proverbial glass is only half full right now.
The lawsuit will almost certainly be thrown out. The threshold for actual malice is high. This case is a stunt. Patel is trying to emulate his boss — to look like a fighter who blindly sues, like Trump.
But not only is Patel stupid for suing The Atlantic, he’s doubly stupid for following Trump’s lead. Trump loses almost every single time.
The Trump playbook is for other losers like Patel.
I’m almost hoping the case proceeds, because a trial would be scandalous. All that dirty laundry in a federal courtroom. All those witnesses. All those stories dragged into the public eye under the threat of perjury, where B.S. and Fox News talking points don’t help you survive.
And neither, by the way, does two aspirins, a Gatorade, and a greasy egg sandwich.
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Trump's boss from hell made a fatal mistake
Friends,
I want to make sure you know that Lori Chavez-DeRemer has resigned as Secretary of Labor [translated: she was told to resign by the White House], after facing investigations by the Department’s inspector general into multiple allegations of misconduct.
She’s alleged to have been drinking during the workday from a “stash” of alcohol in her office, arranging official trips for herself that were extended vacations, taking subordinates to an Oregon strip club while on one such trip, showing no interest in the work of the department, and having an affair with a member of her security team.
Sources have described Chavez-DeRemer as the “boss from hell,” saying she demanded staffers run personal errands for her or perform other menial tasks unrelated to their government jobs. More than two dozen department employees from across the political spectrum described in interviews with The New York Times a toxic workplace characterized by an absentee secretary, hostile aides, and a deeply demoralized staff.
In other words, Chavez-DeRemer was turning the great department I once headed and loved into s--t. And I hold Trump responsible because he appointed her.
As I shared with you a few weeks ago, I loved the Department of Labor from the moment I entered the Frances Perkins Building on Constitution Avenue as secretary of labor in January 1992. I loved its mission: to protect and raise the standard of living of working Americans.
I loved its history. The first secretary of labor, Frances Perkins — appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 — was also America’s first female Cabinet secretary. She was the guiding light behind the creation of Social Security, the 40-hour workweek, the National Labor Relations Act, and much more.
I hung the painting of Frances Perkins behind my desk in my huge second-floor office. Whenever I felt discouraged, I looked at her, and she bucked me up. (Although I’m Jewish, I called her Saint Frances.)
I admired the Department of Labor’s career staff, who were dedicated to helping American workers. I was deeply impressed by the assistant secretaries, the deputy secretary, the chief of staff, and other appointees with whom I toiled, often six or seven days a week from early morning to late at night.
Never before or since have I had the privilege of working with such talented people who cared so much about what they were accomplishing for the American people, and who made such a positive impact on so many lives.
We raised the minimum wage for the first time in many years, even under a Republican-controlled Congress. We implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act. We fought against sweatshops. We took on big corporations that were cheating their employees. We kept workers safe. We … well, I could go on and on. (And I have, in my book Locked in the Cabinet, which you can also find here, but please don’t order from here.)
But like so much else Trump has done, he’s turned what was once a great department into a f---ing mess. And it frankly breaks my heart.
It’s what you get when you have a president and White House staff who don’t give a rat’s a-- about whom they appoint to positions of power except for their loyalty to Trump and how they look on television.
Trump and his White House assistants don’t mind if his appointees wreck our government because they don’t care about government. Hell, they came to government to wreck it. If the public loses confidence in, say, the Department of Labor, that’s perfectly fine. If Congress slashes its funding, so much the better.
What they do mind is if a cabinet member makes Trump look bad, which is why Krisi Noem and Pam Bondi are now history — along with Chavez-DeRemer.
It infuriates me because I’ve seen government work for the people. I’ve witnessed public servants who care deeply and bust their a--es in service to this country. I know how important government can be if it’s doing the job it should be doing.
I loved the Department of Labor because it has improved the lives of millions of Americans. I worked like hell as secretary of labor because I believed in what we were doing. That it’s been treated like crap is an insult to generations of hardworking DOL employees, to American workers, to America.
The least we can all do is flip Congress in November, so senators and representatives who care about this country can oversee the departments of the government and try to remedy some of the wreckage that Trump and his appointees have wreaked on America.
In the meantime, goodbye and good riddance to Madam Secretary Chavez-DeRemer.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Clarence Thomas' bluster exposed a lie at the heart of the Republican Party
People feel like there’s a darkness that’s spread across America in the 15 months since Trump took office a second time. It’s being noticed all over the world, from the Pope to the leaders of our (formerly) allied nations, and is being embraced by dictators like Putin and Saudi Arabia's ruler, Mohammed bin Salman.
The most corrupt Supreme Court justice in history, Clarence Thomas, who’s taken millions from billionaires and then voted to promote their interests, inadvertently helped us all see clearly the source of this depravity that’s permeated so much of our government at all levels. Last week, he gave a speech at the University of Texas, Austin, and blamed the ills of the world (and America) on the rise of “progressivism.”
Thomas blamed progressivism for everything from the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to racial segregation and the eugenics movement that Hitler borrowed from America and Britain to excuse his Final Solution.
In fact, Thomas is following an old tradition that was explained a century ago when arch-conservative propagandist Joseph Goebbels famously said, “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.” It’s the foundation of the modern saying, “Every accusation is a confession.”
My father fancied himself a conservative back when I was a kid during the Eisenhower and Kennedy era, but in his mind that simply meant that one doesn’t radically or rapidly change society without first thinking through the consequences in detail, and then, when you do decide to make changes to the rules of society, you move forward in measured increments. Conservatively.
At least that’s how Dad explained it to me, and how both Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his then-VP Richard Nixon explained it in their own ways.
Eisenhower, writing to his brother in 1954, warned that any party that tried to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, or other social programs would “disappear,” noting that only “a tiny splinter group” believed such a rollback was even possible. Nixon, two decades later, was just as blunt about the need for pragmatic, incremental governance, famously observing in a 1971 message to Congress that “we are all Keynesians now.”
In other words, the conservatism of that era wasn’t about blowing up the New Deal with its programs of Social Security, the minimum wage, labor protections, funding scientific research and education, etc.; it was about tending it carefully, changing it cautiously, and conserving what worked.
Today’s modern conservative movement, though, isn’t conservative at all, and hasn’t been since the Reagan Revolution: it’s reactionary and, through the two Trump presidencies and the Project 2025 embrace of Orbánism and Putinism, has now become fully fascistic.
It all began in a big way when, in 1954, the Supreme Court reversed their 1898 Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” decision with Brown v Board of Education, mandating that Black children must participate in racially integrated classrooms.
Petrobillionaire Fred Koch, who’d made his initial fortune in the Soviet Union, was offended and threw major funding into the virulently anticommunist John Birch Society, which was running billboards across America calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren over the Brown decision.
While that impeachment never happened, the movement grew (my dad introduced me to the JBS when I was 13, saying, “You should hear what the crazies are saying”) and soon JBS’ morbidly rich funders decided that paying taxes to fund programs that would benefit “poor people” (aka Black people) was also an abomination just as bad as white kids having to sit with Black kids in public school classrooms.
In 1980, Reagan rode that racist message (along with sabotaging Jimmy Carter by cutting a deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages until after the election) to the White House with millions in dark money support from those same petrobillionaires.
Reagan’s first official campaign stop had been to speak at an all-white county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in 1964. The subject of his speech was “states’ rights,” which everybody knew was code for “let the Southern states continue their segregation programs.”
On the 1980 campaign trail, Reagan told the story of the “strapping young buck” in line at the supermarket upsetting all the hard-working white people when he whipped out his food stamps to pay for his “steak and beer”; it was the male counterpart to Reagan’s Black “welfare queen” myth. Cut off his food stamps, the logic went, and he’ll be forced to look for gainful employment…even if there were no jobs within miles and white employers wouldn’t then hire Black people.
But Reagan didn’t just talk about stopping affirmative action: he took steps to push America back to the white supremacist 1950s. As The Washington Post noted:
“In the 1980s, the Reagan administration began to roll back civil rights protections and legally designated targets for affirmative action hires, thus bringing the politics of reverse discrimination to the White House. Under the now familiar banner of ‘Let’s Make America Great Again,’ Reagan campaigned vigorously against affirmative action in 1980, promising voters he would overturn policies that mandated, in his view, ‘federal guidelines or quotas which require race, ethnicity, or sex . . . to be the principle factor in hiring or education.’”
Clarence Thomas, of course, worked for Reagan back then, doing everything he could to sabotage affirmative action programs. He began hanging out with billionaires in a classic example of, “I’ve got mine, screw you.”
Once the petrobillionaire’s agenda — gut social programs and regulations that protect working class people and children, all to pay for over $38 trillion in tax cuts for themselves — got rolling, other billionaires from other industries jumped on board, funding think tanks, publications, radio and TV stations and networks, universities, and a massive legal effort to pack the courts with Clarence Thomas-type judges and justices.
Because the New Deal — which they were explicitly trying to repeal, root and branch — was so popular, they had to lie to the American people with an intensity and ferocity that America hadn’t seen since the “Horse and Sparrow” days of the last Gilded Age:
— Tax cuts for billionaires would “trickle down” to workers.
— Unions hurt and rip off their members.
— Regulations stunt economic growth and thus kill jobs.
— Social Security is going broke.
— “Free Trade” will “lift all boats.”
— For-profit schools and prisons do a better job.
— America can’t afford a national healthcare system.
— Corporations are “persons” and should have rights under the Bill of Rights.
— Giving millions to a politician or president isn’t bribery; it’s “free speech.”
— When young people get free college, they don’t value it.
— More CO2 is good for plants and climate change is a hoax.
— Government isn’t the solution to our problems; it is the problem itself.
— Corporate monopolies “increase efficiency” and are thus a good thing.
Once the system got up and running, it began to run on autopilot, fueled into hyperdrive by Clarence Thomas’ deciding vote in Citizens United (at the same time he was taking big bucks from the same billionaires the decision freed to bribe judges and politicians). It was spread across America by Limbaugh and an Australian billionaire who made his initial fortune complaining about Black American GIs “raping” white Australian women when US troops were stationed there during WWII.
And now we have a low-IQ nepo-baby psychopath sitting in the White House because he promised a roomful of petrobillionaires and Elon Musk that he’d cut their taxes, kill off green programs, and let Musk dismantle any agency that was investigating him or his businesses. Trump’s so certain of his royal prerogatives that this past weekend he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a clip of Frank Sinatra singing My Way.
Like other conservative/fascist movements across history, from Mussolini to Stalin to Hitler to Putin to Orbán — all grounded in first defining an “other” who must be feared and stopped — today’s GOP has morphed into something that Eisenhower and even Nixon wouldn’t recognize.
And now he’s threatening to start World War III, all because neither he nor his nepo-baby son-in-law nor any of the 13 billionaires in his cabinet know the first thing about how to actually negotiate on the world stage.
Although Pope Leo XIV says his remarks weren’t specifically directed at Trump, his claim that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants” certainly hits the mark.
This is not conservatism, this new “one man above all” ideology that drives today’s GOP. It’s raw, naked evil. And it’s about damn time that Democrats and Americans of goodwill begin to call it out for what it is.
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Kash Patel gets a fresh uniform to match new fame
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
This slap in Trump's face is a catastrophic warning
“The Strait of Hormuz isn’t social media. If someone blocks you, you can’t just block them back.” That snarky but perceptive taunt, posted by an Iranian diplomat on X shortly after Tehran reversed its decision to open the waterway, should be the epitaph for the Trumpian school of foreign policy.
It was intended as a slap in the face to Trump, who actually does treat the most volatile chokepoint on the planet like a digital word game on his smartphone.
For over four decades, prior administrations’ understanding of global macroeconomics warned that poking the religious extremism that is the Iranian bear would possibly lead to the shuttering of the Strait. They warned that Tehran’s leverage had the power to pull the plug on the global economy and plunge the world into an oil crisis or worldwide recession.
But Donald Trump thinks decades of advice about Iran consist of scrawling on a bar napkin to be disposed of. He relies solely on the “stable genius” that lives in his gut, the only decision-making process he thinks is relevant.
That unstable, moronic rotgut then transmits signals to his swollen fingers that punch out nonsensical blabber posted to Truth Social. He regards that as official policy procedure.
He does it all by impulse. He frantically spits out herky-jerky Truth Social posts at 3 a.m. with a demented mind that pontificates nonsense and typos, treating the Strait of Hormuz as just more content to be uploaded, alternating between calling it the “Strait of Iran” and the “Strait of Trump,” while misspelling “strait” itself.
He continually invites chaos and potential catastrophe by diabolical typing in ALL CAPS.
The offshoot of Trump’s recklessness is a terrifying pivot in the global balance of power. While the world has spent years obsessing over Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear warhead, Tehran has discovered a weapon far more effective and immediately deployable than any bomb — an absolute, unchecked leverage over the world’s oil super-highway.
And Iran now understands that Donald Trump is nothing more than a social media blowhard.
Because of Trump’s irresponsibility, Iran may find that it doesn’t actually need a nuclear weapon to bring the West, and the world, to its knees. Why bother with the international pariah status of uranium when you can simply prompt U-turns from cargo ships in the Strait?
By weaponizing the world’s oil supply in response to Trump’s digital diplomacy, Iran has found a way to bypass traditional diplomacy and upend carefully calibrated treaties, and what might be called the world’s decades-long slavish deference to Iran’s hold on trafficking black gold.
And the Iranians are clearly relishing the irony. Iran has reciprocated with Trump’s Truth Social negotiations by posting Lego-character AI videos of American and Israeli officials. They aren’t afraid of us, particularly if the dialogue initiated by Trump is a series of wacky Truth Social posts, some of which are more like 900-word opinion pieces.
Although his diatribes are not as thoughtful and articulate as this column.
Iran is mocking us. And the tragedy is that Trump, a man so thoroughly incapable of distinguishing between being feared and being laughed at, cannot tell the difference. And the evil empire that is Iran understands this about Trump.
That’s what makes them dangerous, because Trump has no understanding of Iran, its leaders, or its history.
The domestic fallout of this precarious situation is already gutting the proverbial American pocketbook. Seven weeks into this conflict, U.S. gas prices have soared past $4m a gallon, spiking grocery and other costs and causing a slump in discretionary spending.
Economists are now sounding the alarm about the risk of a global recession this year, with inflation proving impossible to dislodge as long as 20 percent of the world’s oil remains hostage to Iranian whims.
Meanwhile, our alliances are being shattered under the weight of Trump’s go-it-alone, social media–driven insults. When Trump demanded NATO allies “take care of” the passage, he was met with a resounding no (if they were responding like Trump on social media, it would have been in all caps) from nations across Europe and elsewhere, who refused to be dragged into his whim of a war.
While a fragile coalition of 22 nations led by the UK has agreed to help clear mines and restore traffic, the damage is done. Trump’s Truth taunts, calling our closest partners “COWARDS” and NATO a “paper tiger,” have only reinforced the idea that the U.S. is no longer a reliable guarantor of global security. Nations abroad are figuring out ways to move forward without the U.S.
Here is what our allies understand, and what Trump never will — the Strait of Hormuz is not a way to capture the latest news cycle. It is not a creativity award for AI-generated images. It is a 21-mile-wide choke point through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil flows every single day.
Nations have spent decades building entire military doctrines, diplomatic frameworks, and economic contingency plans around keeping that waterway open.
The moment you start treating it as a random opinion screed that you hope goes viral, you don’t just lose a negotiation, you lose years of carefully constructed diplomacy that held up global stability.
That is the once-and-future danger of the Trump doctrine. It isn’t just about the mistakes of today, but the unprecedented chaos that looms in the future.
When you treat a delicate strategy like a social media feud, you teach your enemies that the old rules of deterrence, steady diplomacy, and predictable consequences are out the window.
You teach them that the American superpower is the real “paper tiger,” because at its core it is just a very loud, knock-off Twitter-like account with a short attention span.
In other words, Iran is treating Trump like an obsessed teenager who can’t let go of his phone long enough to pay attention to the urgency of what’s going on around him.
Iran knows that in the real world, when the Strait closes, the block button doesn’t just silence an obtuse opponent. It blocks everyone.
The Iranians have learned something profound from this catastrophe that will linger: you don’t need a nuclear warhead to bring a superpower to its knees. You just need a stupid social media addict as the leader of its arch nemesis.
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Trump's insane reversal is set to make your 4/20 celebration a federal crime
If you’re celebrating 4/20 today, consider marking the occasion with a drink — a THC-infused beverage that’ll get you buzzed without all the sloppy, soppy effects of alcohol.
There are a few reasons a "cannabis cocktail” might just be this year’s optimal option. For starters, even if you live somewhere where marijuana is super illegal, you can still find THC drinks — because the majority derive their THC from hemp, which was legalized in all 50 states by the 2018 Farm Bill. They hit faster than edibles, come in seltzer, juice, tea and mocktail form, and are sold everywhere from Target to gas stations to vape shops to, yes, liquor stores and bars.
In terms of bang for your buck, the price of drinkable cannabis is roughly $5 to $10 a can, about the same as craft beer, but without the attached hangover. Or the reputation for being precious.
So bottoms up — because it’s that time of year!
And because, by this time next year, it’ll probably be a federal crime.
The impending recriminalization of hemp-derived THC drinks stands as an almost too perfect example of the insane arbitrariness of America’s byzantine drug laws. Seven years after signing the aforementioned bill that made hemp legal during his first term, this past November, Trump signed another bill — a spending package, not even a drug law — that garnered lots of headlines for ending the longest government shutdown in American history. But buried in the fine print was a provision that will, as of Nov. 12, make any product with more than 0.4 mg of THC illegal under federal law. It effectively outlaws not just THC drinks, 95 percent of which contain at least 5 to 10 mg of THC, but every other “intoxicating hemp” product on the now -legal market. The law sets the threshold so low, in fact, it will even criminalize hemp-derived products with mere trace amounts of THC incapable of getting anyone high, including CBD lotions, lip balms, dog treats and more.
Virtually every CBD and hemp-derived THC product will become a Schedule I controlled substance, same as marijuana. And heroin.
It is dumb that our longstanding drug laws pretend that pot is as addictive as black tar heroin. It’s doubly dumb that this legal reversal will, yet again, treat your favorite THC and elderberry-infused tea the same way.
It’s not public health advocates who led us to this change. The frontlines do not include, for example, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who in 2025 stated that alcohol causes “100,000 cases of cancer in the United States each year and 20,000 cancer deaths” — figures that led him to call for alcohol labels to include warning of increased risk for cancers of the liver, esophagus, mouth, larynx, breast and colon. Nor did it involve researchers from the CDC, who cite excessive drinking as the cause of nearly 180,000 deaths in this country each year.
It was not a rollback that Americans in general — whose alcohol consumption in 2025 hit the lowest rate since Gallup began tracking it in 1939 — were asking for. In national surveys, about 75 percent of Americans say hemp should remain legal, a figure outpaced by the near 90 percent of Americans who say marijuana should at least be legal in medical form. Asking for this least of all were members of Gen Z, who drink less than prior generations and whose supposed teetotaling, polls suggest, has been greatly exaggerated — it’s just that cannabis is what they’re mostly drinking instead.
It was, instead, Big Alcohol groups that lobbied for this, including the American Distilled Spirits Alliance, Beer Institute, Distilled Spirits Council of the U.S. and Wine America. Not unrelatedly, as the conservative Cato Institute notes, recent years have seen “a surge in hemp-related lobbying from Anheuser-Busch, Molson Coors, Bacardi, and other big companies that compete directly with the upstart THC beverage industry.”
Then there’s the corporate cannabis industry, or Big Weed — a term that, full disclosure, I didn’t even know existed until I started writing this but promise to get plenty of future mileage from — which also lobbied for the bill and doesn’t look kindly on the new untethered-by-rules competition. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who notably pushed the hardest for the law that legalized hemp back in 2018, was the key Congressional figure behind the measure. Ironically, he spent years proselytizing about hemp to farmers in his home state of Kentucky, per a 2015 Politico article headlined “Mitch McConnell’s Love Affair with Hemp.” In 2014, he even put out a press release touting his role as “the author” of a provision that launched hemp pilot projects around Kentucky, calling them “a means for job creation and economic development.” There is a straight line connecting that bill, and McConnell’s help advocacy to the bill that legalized hemp four years later. Now that the hemp industry is worth somewhere between $7 and 28 billion dollars and employs roughly 330,000 people, he’s decided to burn it all down.
And look — there are valid reasons why modifications to the legal hemp law would be worth investigating. Legalization was intended to make hemp accessible for industrial use in things like fiber, rope and textiles, and maybe even some CBD wellness stuff. Nobody, least of all McConnell, seems to have anticipated that people would be creative enough to extract and convert compounds from hemp that can get people really high. Certainly, McConnell could not imagine the dizzying array of psychoactive products that would yield, all of which are subject to little oversight and even less quality control. (Hemp and marijuana are from the same plant but the former has less than 0.3 percent THC. I’m not going to get into the delta-9, THCA, HHC-ness of it all here, because a million stoners and others have already done that on YouTube, so go there if you need more deets.) This is the “loophole” so often cited as the justification for the hemp ban. And groups that oppose legal hemp argue that without regulation, what’s to stop kids from getting their hands on the intoxicating hemp products on store shelves?
But abrupt bans on things people have grown accustomed to accessing don’t really work. We should know this as a country, because we’ve done it before. Multiple times, actually. (There’s a whole historical period called the Prohibition Era for a reason.) If the ban is motivated by a fear of the lack of quality control and regulations on hemp-derived THC products, I’m not sure the way to solve that problem is helping create an underground black market. I mean, I get that America has a long and seemingly proud history of blanket criminalizing things it is forced to think too hard about. It’s a tendency that springs directly from its indifference to collateral consequences and incuriosity about things like science. But the old "think of the children"routine comes off as stale in a country that’s considering resurrecting a draft for 18-year-olds. Not to mention wantonly killing children abroad.
I should mention that efforts to stop this thing are kicking into high gear, and they’re being led by alcohol distributors — who also distribute and profit from THC drinks. The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America even launched a whole microsite advocating for regulation over prohibition. And this past Dec., Trump issued an executive order (hear me out) calling for marijuana to be recategorized as a Schedule III drug, and ordering that CBD remain not just legal, but made accessible to Medicare and Medicaid recipients. None of that can actually be legally mandated with an executive order, but what’s a Constitution or a Congress these days, really? This is, after all, a White House that, during its first term, got caught freely and illegally handing out uppers and downers to every staffer who asked. Never forget!
Just last year, the cannabis drink market hit a new high, bringing in roughly $1 billion dollars in sales. With those kinds of returns, they’re betting on staying in business. So throw back one of those beverages today. In just a few months, you might need a dispensary, a dealer or a time machine — but for now, you just need a reason. Might as well make it 4/20.
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This obscenity has women furious — and they're naming and shaming
If you’ve noticed an uptick in female rage online over the last week, we have our reasons.
Women have been reeling over the Eric Swalwell scandal, which saw our former collective Dem Crush fall from grace in the span of a mere 11 days. Republicans really could learn a lot about accountability from Democrats, but why would they bother doing anything that makes sense?
And while we were still trying to sort out the disappointment of learning that a supposedly Good Guy Ally is actually the polar opposite, we found out about the “Online Rape Academy,” exposed by a lengthy global CNN investigation.
All of the details revealed about the “Motherless” website are unspeakably horrifying. While women have always been fully aware of the potential dangers of sexual assault as a result of being drugged in public spaces, we never considered the possibility of it happening thanks to a trusted intimate partner. The website received 62 million unique hits in the month of February, and over 82 million in March. While its founder has been arrested, the site was still very much active at the time of this writing.
The site contains multiple subforums where men share videos of themselves assaulting and raping their female partners, who are fully passed out thanks to drinking spiked tea or being drugged some other way. They also share tips on which drugs are better than others, meaning which ones stay in a woman’s system for the shortest amount of time so that they can’t remember any of the rapey parts and therefore can’t report the men they trust most in the world to the police.
These and other horror movie details have created the kind of reaction from women that you’d expect, while too many men are pulling the “Not All Men” defense. And fellas, you need to drop that one like a counterfeit $100 bill.
Women are rightfully enraged by our collective lived experiences. After all, we’ve been watching men get away with sexual crimes since the dawn of recorded history. It’s only now in the digital age that women are finally able to shed the shame so often associated with sexual assault. We have lived with “harmless” catcalls on the street (my first one was at the age of 14 in Manhattan). We know what it’s like to be sexualized by adult men from very young ages (including by our own fathers), to be shamed over our bodies as a male power move, to be assigned our value from men based on our breast sizes, hip widths, belly fat, leg lengths, and ass shapes.
All too many of us know what it’s like when men cross the line into committing crimes against women, ranging from stalking to rape and murder. We have a man found liable of sexual abuse currently squatting in the White House who’s being enabled by the entire Republican Party, including members of his Cabinet who’ve been named along with him in the Epstein Files.
It also doesn’t help that Substack is platforming accused international sex trafficker Andrew Tate, who was given safe harbor in Florida by Donald Trump, who also welcomed Tate’s brother, Tristan, back to America. Andrew is somehow the #1 Bestseller this week, with over 1.1 million subscribers, which just shouldn’t be allowed on the app where the smart kids post. Or ANYWHERE ELSE, because he’s an accused CRIMINAL.
I’m very proud to say that all three of them blocked me on Twitter, because women need to stand up to men who abuse women, not enable them with our silence.
Understandably, women are gathering online to figure out how to channel this rage in the most effective ways. The main conversations are happening on Threads and Instagram, where women have dubbed the movement “MeTwo.” They can simply ask the Threads algorithm to put fellow raging females in their feeds so we can all take over everything as quickly as possible.
Along with the rightfully furious women are the male allies who are standing with us and calling out their fellow men to join them in smashing the patriarchy in the right way. We need much more of this energy, fellas.
Of course, there are the fragile MAGA snowflakes who are triggered and freaking out over women holding men accountable--and therefore keep proving our points for us. We know it’s “not all men,” but it is ALWAYS men, and it’s happened to literally ALL women.
ALL OF US.
If you’re a man reading that, read it again. And again. And really take it in.
Because when I say all of us, I’m telling you that there’s not a woman who’s ever walked this planet who, at the very bare minimum, hasn’t been the target of an inappropriate comment from a man. It’s really not a question of IF a woman you know--from your mom to your sister to your aunts, cousins, friends, girlfriends, and wives--has a story to tell about a Bad Man. The question is WHEN was the first time she can remember something happening to her?
Any follow-up questions? Before you ask them, remember that no woman “asks for it.” Especially not a woman who’s been drugged by her partner. More men need to be taught never to shame the victims of sexual violence, only the perpetrators. And yet, protecting a man’s professional reputation has all too often been the focus, instead of believing the women.
Women have had it, guys. There’s been a very real and perceptible shift in our attitudes. Women are naming and shaming their attackers, going back to their childhoods. Women are done protecting the men who’ve hurt us, and we’re also done staying silent if you start anything with us in public.
Women are going to get louder and louder. I’d advise all men trying the “not all men” thing to think about what all women live with, and then say nothing instead.
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Salivating right-wingers have set a trap for Dems
I recently came home from the studio and turned on the TV to see an MSNOW host and her guest agree on how important it is that Democrats “unite around the issue of term limits” for members of Congress. Last week, the Democratic governor of a swing state said on my program that he was pushing for term limits.
In just the past 48 hours, I’ve heard three different commentators on MSNOW and CNN speak of them as if term limits are the “solution” to “elderly” legislators or to the naked corruption that’s so rampant in DC.
This is the wrong issue for Democrats to be promoting now: term limits actually do more damage than good, which is why Republicans and the Heritage Foundation have been pushing them for decades.
For example, they’d get rid of good, effective, high-quality legislators like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, and Pramila Jayapal, among others.
But the problem with term limits goes far deeper than that.
Unfortunately, term limits are popular because they seem like an easy fix to the corruption crisis in American politics (over 70 percent of Americans favor them), but in reality, they simply hand more power over to giant corporations and the morbidly rich. Here’s how:
First, term limits shift the balance of power in a legislature from the legislators themselves to lobbyists, which is why corporate-friendly Republicans so often speak fondly of them.
Historically, when a new lawmaker comes into office, he or she will hook up with an old-timer who can show them the ropes, how to get around the building, where the metaphorical bodies are buried, and teach them how to make legislation.
With term limits, this institutional knowledge is largely stripped out of a legislative body, forcing new legislators to look elsewhere for help.
Because no Republican has ever, anywhere, suggested that lobbyists’ ability to work be term-limited, we have an actual experiment we can look to. Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, and South Dakota all have term limits.
Research has shown, repeatedly and unambiguously, that in those states with term limits the lobbyists end up filling the role of permanent infrastructure to mentor and guide new lawmakers, and thus have outsized power and influence, far greater than they had before the term limits were instituted.
Of course, lobbyists — and the billionaires and corporations that pay them — love this. It dramatically increases lobbyists’ power and influence, giving them an early and easy entrée into the personal and political lives of the individual legislators who, in those states with term limits, are forced to lean on them for guidance.
This simple reality is not lost on the GOP, which has been pushing these restrictions on service at the federal and state legislature level for years: term limits are law in 16 states, all as the result of heavy Republican PR efforts and lobbying during the George HW Bush presidency.
Pappy Bush rolled the idea out in 1990 as a central part of his failed run for re-election in 1992. An unpopular president who was being blamed by voters for the destruction of unions and factories rapidly moving offshore, his advisors thought it would be a great way to blame Congress for the problems that neoliberal Reaganomics had inflicted on the nation.
As The New York Times noted on December 12, 1990:
“President Bush has decided to push for a constitutional amendment to limit the number of terms for members of Congress, his chief of staff, John H. Sununu, said today. Doing so as he prepares for his re-election campaign will put Mr. Bush squarely and publicly on the side of an idea that is as widely popular among voters as it is wildly unpopular among members of Congress…
“But even though passage of such an amendment is unlikely, there is little risk for Mr. Bush in associating himself with this movement. Politically, the move fits nicely with the growing effort by the White House to depict Congress as the source of most of the nation’s problems.”
While the US Congress never seriously took up the idea, Bush’s advocacy of it echoed through the states and was heavily promoted by Rush Limbaugh, whose national hate-radio show had rolled out just two years earlier in 1988.
Newt Gingrich made term limits the cornerstone of his 1994 Contract On America, but the issue died at the federal level in 1995 when the Supreme Court, in U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, ruled term limits imposed on federal officials are unconstitutional.
This doesn’t mean Congress can’t impose term limits on itself; it would just require them to be done as a constitutional amendment or via some other mechanism that gets around the Supreme Court, like court-stripping (which, itself, is dicey). Term limits were imposed on the presidency by Congress in 1951, a GOP backlash against FDR’s having won election to four consecutive terms in office, but that took ratification of the 22nd Amendment.
Following Bush’s promotion of them, Oklahoma picked up term limits for its legislature in 1990, with Maine, California, Colorado, Arkansas, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, South Dakota, Montana, Arizona, and Missouri debating them during the 1991 and 1992 legislative sessions and all putting them into law in 1992. Louisiana and Nevada put them into law in 1995 and 1996, respectively, Nebraska in 2000, and North Dakota finally got around to them in 2022.
In every single case, term limits have worked to the benefit of billionaires and special interests and against the interests of average citizens. It’s why the Koch brothers and rightwing think-tanks have been pushing them for decades, like you’ll find in the article “Term Limits: The Only Way to Clean Up Congress” on the Heritage Foundation’s website.
In addition to strengthening the hand of lobbyists, term limits also prevent good people who aren’t independently wealthy from entering politics in the first place.
What rational person, particularly if they have kids, would take the risk of a job they know will end in six years when instead they could build a career in a field that guarantees them security and a decent retirement?
Also because of this dynamic, term limits encourage legislators to focus on their post-politics career while serving.
Many busily legislate favors for particular industries in the hope of being rewarded with a job when they leave office. This is just one of several ways term limits increase the level of and incentives for corruption.
Because term limits encourage independently wealthy people to enter politics and push out middle-class would-be career politicians like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they always shift the Overton window of legislatures — regardless of the party in power — to the right.
Probably the strongest argument against term limits, though, is that they’re fundamentally anti-democratic. In fact, we already have term limits: they’re called elections.
The decision about who represents the interests of a particular state or legislative district shouldn’t be held by some abstract law: it should be in the hands of the voters, and term limits deny voters this.
And, because term limits weaken the power of the legislative branch by producing a constant churn, they strengthen the power of the executive branch, a violation of the vital concept of checks-and-balances.
Even where governors or presidents are term-limited by law or constitution, the concentration of power in a single executive is inherently problematic, requiring a robust legislative branch to balance it. Term limits thus neuter a legislature’s ability to mount a muscular challenge to a governor or president grasping for excess power.
States that have instituted term limits generally suffer from “buyer’s remorse.” As the Citizens Research Council of Michigan noted in a 2018 report titled Twenty-five Years Later, Term Limits Have Failed to Deliver On Their Promise:
“Legislative term limits in Michigan have failed to achieve their proponents’ stated goals: Ridding government of career politicians, increasing diversity among elected officials, and making elections more competitive.
“Term limits have made state legislators, especially House members, view their time as a stepping stone to another office. Term limits have failed to strengthen ties between legislators and their districts or sever cozy relationships with lobbyists. They have weakened the legislature in its relationship with the executive branch.”
A scholarly study of term limits in Florida similarly concluded:
“The absence of long-serving legislators under term limits equates to a significant loss of experience and institutional memory. … Those who had built a career in the Legislature were not applauded for the expertise they had developed but were castigated…
“After the first full decade with term limitations in place, the Florida Legislature is a dramatically different institution. Term limits increased legislator turnover and drastically affected legislative tenure, all but destroying institutional memory.”
The Brookings Institution, in a paper titled Five Reasons to Oppose Congressional Term Limits, notes that the primary results of term limits are to:
— “Take away power from voters,”
— “Severely decrease congressional capacity,”
— “Limit incentives for gaining policy expertise,”
— “Automatically kick out effective lawmakers,” and
— “Do little to minimize corruptive behavior or slow the revolving door.”
As a result, Idaho, Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming have all repealed their legislative term limits.
For people who’ve never worked in politics or held elective office — which is most of us — term limits sound like a quick and easy answer for the complex problems of corruption and congressional dysfunction. But the only truly reasonable place for term limits to be applied are to the presidency (which we’ve already done) and the unelected members of the Supreme Court (18 years is generally suggested as an appropriate limit to their terms).
So, the next time you hear some politician or TV pundit proclaiming that term limits are the “best solution” to the “problem” of corruption or congressional dysfunction, consider their real agenda.
Unless they’re simply naïve or cynical, it’ll almost always be that they are or once were (before Trump) a Republican and just can’t help themselves.
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