“As a young adult, I entered the Jesuits, a Catholic religious order, where among other missions, I worked with orphaned children and internally displaced people in El Salvador during their civil war. It was a dangerous time, and people were frequently ‘disappeared.’ I never thought I’d be watching similar scenes play out here in America. In March, President Donald Trump invoked the archaic Alien Enemies Act to disappear over 100 Venezuelan immigrants to a megaprison in El Salvador. … The law has been used just three times: in the War of 1812, World War I, and, infamously, in World War II to imprison Japanese-Americans in internment camps — a shameful chapter in our history. Trump has illegally used this law now to sidestep due process.” (05/05/25)
“Boycotting foreign countries is an American tradition older than the United States. The Boston Tea Party that preceded the American Revolution came at the tail end of a boycott campaign against British goods. But since the 1970s, the U.S. government has tried to stop Americans from participating in unauthorized foreign boycotts. This week, the House of Representatives was set to vote on the International Governmental Organization (IGO) Anti-Boycott Act, which would arguably be the most draconian measure of this kind to date: It would impose a maximum 20-year prison sentence or $1 million fine for complying with international human rights sanctions against a U.S. ally, including by ‘furnishing information.’ … Although the bill is on ice for now, the antiboycott laws that it is built on are still on the books.” (05/05/25)
“Trump declares: ‘I know what I’m doing.’ Whatever he’s doing, whatever game he is playing, Trump is talking out of both sides of his mouth. With one breath, he believes that the tariff is ‘the most beautiful word in the dictionary.’ This leads us to Position A: that tariffs will increase domestic manufacturing by insulating domestic producers from foreign competition, while punishing other countries for their ‘unfair’ trade practices. … Position A is tied to a nationalist conservative industrial policy, in which tariffs are just one aspect of a larger toolkit that allows Trump to protect domestic producers, while subsidizing those economic sectors hurt by his trade policies. That this weaponization of trade relations violates the most elementary principles of economics is beside the point. But there’s always Position B to fall back on: For Trump, tariffs are not an end in themselves. They are negotiating tools. Toward what end?” (05/05/25)
“The right is trying to kill global trade to protect the ‘traditional family.’ The first funny thing about this is that they’re actually talking about the male breadwinner model of marriage and not, as discussed, the actual traditional family of subsistence farmers. They’re confused because everyone on the right is either allergic to an accurate depiction of history or is a lying (sorry, ‘Straussian’) Nazi fuck. The second funny thing about this is that the male breadwinner model of marriage was only ever available to anyone because: 1. The US military had reduced everyone else’s factories to rubble … 2. FDR and his allies legalized and streamlined international trade to take advantage of global demand … Free(r) trade with the rest of the world created the post-war prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s that made the US the richest country on Earth.” (05/05/25)
“In 1977, East Germany ransomed hundreds of its leading intellectuals and artists to West Germany, partly because it did not wish to endure public criticism by its own citizens during an International Rights Conference. In spite of the human sale, there was no general revulsion against the East German government in the international community. The East German regime was considered by many social scientists to have more legitimacy than the West German government because of its more expansive social welfare system and its grandiose paternalist pretensions. Romania engaged in similar sales during the 1980s with its Jewish and ethnic-German subjects. How many of its citizens does a government have to sell before it loses legitimacy?” (05/05/25)
“President Trump has proposed using the revenue from his increased tariffs to lower or even eliminate income taxes — with a priority on removing Americans making less than 200,000 dollars a year from the tax rolls. Exempting more Americans from income taxes — and lowering taxes on other Americans— is certainly a worthwhile endeavor. However, replacing income taxes with tariffs may have negative consequences for the very Americans President Trump wants to help.” (05/05/25)
“‘My suggestion: AmeriCorps is proof that if ‘we hold hands and believe … we can change anything we want to change,’ President Bill Clinton declared in 1999. But after more than 30 years of fraud, false claims and political racketeering, AmeriCorps — the federal paid volunteer oxymoron — just got hit by a DOGE torpedo. ‘AmeriCorps has failed eight consecutive audits and is entrusted with over $1 billion in taxpayer dollars every year,’ White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly declared. The agency’s Office of Inspector General condemned it in 2014 for ‘shocking waste of taxpayer funds, lax oversight, unauthorized contractual commitments and widespread noncompliance with rules, regulations and sound contracting practices.’ Things have only gotten worse since then. DOGE froze $400 million in grants to more than a thousand organizations, terminating more than 30,000 AmeriCorps members. Most AmeriCorps staffers have either quit or were placed on paid leave.” (05/05/25)
“‘Look around.’ John Hasnas’s main political advice may sound extravagant. But his remarkable book, Common Law Liberalism, is a caveat against ‘inattentional blindness’ of the sort social scientists often fall victim to — and those who like flirting with theory more than the others. Inattentional blindness consists in the ‘failure to notice a fully visible, but unexpected object because attention was engaged on another task, event, or object.’ That fully visible object, the gorilla that nobody notices, is the law.” (05/05/25)
“In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.” (05/05/25)
