Yeehaw!

 Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions. It's pointless following the caterwauling of conservative commentators who are alleging - without proof - that this was a corrupt proceeding. It's somewhat weird looking at folks like Chait, who argued against Bragg's case and now seem trapped in their priors. 

The reality is that Trump is a lifelong criminal. He has conducted fraudulent businesses and charities, he has lied to secure loans and reduce his taxes, he sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll (and most likely many more) and now he has been convicted of 34 felonies. He's a felon. He's always been felonious, but now it's an established fact. The odious apparatchiks like torture enthusiast John Yoo are promising and promoting retaliation. 

The problem that has stymied MAGAts for the past 8 years has been that the Courts don't give a shit about your outrage. They demand proof, and that's what has done in Trump. Was this the most serious charge? Absolutely not. Did he do it? Hell, yeah! It is a crime? Also yes. Trying to get a grand jury to indict Joe Biden for, I dunno, letting in trans immigrants will be really, really hard.

The unprecedented nature of this is most likely tied to Trump's other, more important crime: He refuses to admit he lost in 2020 and is running again in 2024. If he had not run, I doubt Bragg pushes this case. Maybe the Georgia case and the January 6th case would still be on, because...dude. But if Trump had conceded in 2020 and moved on with his life, there would be no election cases in Georgia and DC and they likely would've quashed the documents case - as bad as it is.

There is a famous tweet that was recirculated, it's from 2017 and it goes something like this:

"Ah ha! Now Trump will finally be held accountable!"
Trump somehow evades accountability.
"Ah, well, nevertheless..."

Today does not secure Biden's victory in November. But at the very least, Al Capone was finally nailed for something, even if it was just tax evasion.

You Can't Solve Climate Change

 And by you, I mean you. As this BlueSky thread explains well, climate change is about large polluters. The idea that your choices are the key to ending climate change is a narrative expertly created by large polluters and activists who fundraise off climate change. The most important thing - right now - that we need to do in the US is to upgrade our power grid, not tell people not to buy books or really any other thing. Sure, you should reduce your carbon footprint as much as YOU feel comfortable doing so.  I drive a hybrid and paid more to do to so up front, and now I'm benefitting from lower gas expenses. Plus, less carbon. 

As long as we say that personal consumption is the only cure for climate change, we let the big industrial polluters off the hook, we increase resistance for doing anything about climate and we increase climate doomerism.

Carson Is Dead Again

 This is hilarious.

And Away We Go

 Trump's trial - and likely the only one that will be adjudicated before the election - is with the jurors. 

I agree with Paul Campos' odds: 50% conviction, 49.9% hung jury, 0.1% acquittal. Except I think that there will be a conviction on at least one of the charges. Unless there is a die hard MAGAt on the jury, they will find their way to finding him guilty of at least one set of charges.

The sooner we here, typically the better for the prosecution. Especially since there seems to be some real incredulity by jurors over defense counsel's claims and behavior.

All we need is one felony conviction, I think. More are better. Jail time would be nice, but unnecessary - he can be free waiting for his inevitable appeals. But we could really use "convicted felon" added to "adjudicated rapist; multiple convictions for fraud; tax evader and coup plotter" to the list.

Payback

 I am hopeful that Joe Biden gets re-elected in November. Hopefully the jurors in New York make that more likely by affixing "convicted felon" to Trump's name. I also think he's going to look severely diminished in the debates with Biden - if he even shows. 

I am more sanguine about the House of Representatives. I think they flip it back to Democratic control. The Senate worries me, but the Republicans are nominating some real whack jobs and I think Dobbs will come into play in those elections perhaps more so than the presidential election, because of the weird thing where millions of Americans think Biden was responsible for Dobbs, because they don't understand how government works.

If Democrats win the Presidency, House and manage a tie in the Senate, then...phew.

However, in the long term, I think Democrats should be looking at some of their loose cannons and think about primaries or even re-districting them. Let's start with Rashida Tlaib. You don't get to effectively campaign against your party's presidential candidate - in this election no less - and get to keep any leadership positions. Come 2030, they should carve up her district, too. This is absolute bullshit. 

Frankly, the ideal result is that Trump craters once voters get another long look at him and the cognitive decline he's experienced. Dobbs and the general chaos of GOP congressional members gives the Democrats control of both Houses while the "progressive" left campaign against them.

Biden has been easily the most left wing president of my lifetime. He has embraced a TON of leftist positions, though obviously not all of them. They have not only not given him credit, they seem to be working against him. If Biden can return to power without them, then he can safely marginalize them for the next four years and give Harris or whomever a fighting chance without the luxury of going against Trump.

Car Salesman In Chief

 In Philip Bump's column about Trump's rally in the Bronx, there was this nugget:

The rally had the familiar microeconomies that accompany Trump as he campaigns. There were merchants outside selling hats (a visor with fake orange “Trump hair,” for example) and T-shirts. (“I WAS THERE!” one popular shirt read. “BRONX NEW YORK / TRUMP.”) A number of people had placards showing Trump’s mug shot photo from his arrest in Georgia, but those were being given out by the campaign. There was also a surfeit of members of the pro-Trump media universe that has been fostered by the overlap of his popularity and the advent of cheap tools for streaming content.

Some of America’s more famous hustlers also showed up. Former New York congressman George Santos was there, as was Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival infamy. As rapper Sheff G made his way through security, fans called out to him from the line of people waiting to get in. He would later join Trump onstage, each of them dealing with the criminal justice system in New York City. This was the first Trump rally I’ve attended where the smell of marijuana was pervasive, though it was not the first park in the city where I’ve experienced that.

There are many things that surprise me about Trumpistan. Sure, the casual cruelty is its defining characteristic along with its dedication to destroying "norms" in all their variety.

However, Trump is a car salesman. A used car salesman. A used car salesman before there were lemon laws. The people around him are used car salesmen from before there were lemon laws. They are con artists and hustlers and you can't trust them any further than you can throw them.

Naturally, this is caused millions of Americans to adhere to him like a messiah. 

There are plenty of us who are aghast at how many of our countrymen love the cruel fascist. I'm one of them. But I'm also befuddled why people would be so eager to line up for a conman. 

Does Any Of This Land?

 The feeling in many quarters that Trump will never suffer consequences for his many deeds comes from his upset win in 2016. After the Access Hollywood tape, mocking a Gold Star family, being crude, cruel and racist, he managed to run his inside straight and break the Blue Wall. 

Since then, he has lost control of Congress in 2018, lost the White House in 2020, his party had a very poor showing in 2022 and yet somehow the race is currently a toss up. It's easy to assume that he will not be found guilty of any of his very real crimes before election day, because his handpicked judiciary is running interference for him, leaving only the NYC case.

What's striking about this is that Trump continues to violate any normal laws of politics. Take his recent statement about Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter being held hostage in Russia. Basically, in his typical mob boss fashion, Trump says that Gershkovich will be released when he's re-elected - or put another way, the only way to get him back is to elect Trump. Hell, Putin could invite Trump to Moscow, they could have a "summit" and Trump could return with Gershkovich. That's a brilliant political move, because it would show Trump actually doing something as opposed to talking about doing something.

Instead, we have this statement or the one shaking down petrochemical executives that would be the end of any normal candidate. 

I saw some photos of Trump's rally in the Bronx. It was sparsely attended but quite a few of the attendees were of the "young male and transgressive" variety. For them, Trump is the ultimate middle finger to normal people (like their parents). Some of this goes to the Likely Voter/Registered Voter dynamic we are seeing in the polls. Trump does much better when irregular voters are included, but falls behind when you screen for people who actually voted in the last two elections. Also, keep in mind that Trump's Get Out the Vote apparatus is likely to be starved for funds as he funnels RNC money to his legal defense. 

I do think that some of this is going to accumulate on him as we get closer to voters making an actual choice in November, but I'm disgusted that it hasn't already done so.

Candidate Brainworm

 Jon Chait wonders - along with Karl Rove and the rest of us - exactly who Robert Kennedy Jr's campaign is going to hurt. As Chait notes, the Kennedy name casually brings in low information Democrats, which is why Steve Bannon and Roger Stone were plumping his candidacy. But, as Rove has noted, Kennedy's crazy ideas tend to overlap more with certain Republican demographics.

Yesterday, I was driving through a very unusual part of Connecticut - Terryville, Plymouth and Bristol. These are the remaining enclaves of White Working Class or Whites Without College in the area (our town is another). I saw at least three RFK signs in the 12 miles I drove.

If we do get into a situation where Trump is convicted in NYC, and Biden is able to consolidate his base a bit more, then the exodus of a certain sort of WWC voter who can't stomach January 6th or Trump's closeness with Russia, then Candidate Brainworm could siphon off enough votes to tilt a few important states, especially in the Blue Wall. I do think that the close polls in PA/MI/WI are understating Biden's strength there, and that he winds up winning there - especially with a Trump conviction. If Krazy Kennedy helps tilt the field a bit more, that would be great, too.

Harbinger Of Good?

 This summer, in July, Britain will have a general election. It is widely expected that Labour will wipe the floor with the Conservatives who have ruled Britain for 14 years and overseen the single biggest own goal in recent political history: Brexit. Brexit was, in many ways, the harbinger of Trump. It was a product of casual bigotry and xenophobia; it was poorly thought through and it was a policy disaster.

Repudiation of the Tories took a while, as the implications of Brexit have no become abundantly clear. Of course, it remains to be seen what Labour will do about Brexit, but the Conservatives should have been punished long ago for the Boris Johnson-Liz Truss nonsense.

Of course, the same goes for the GOP, who should've been punished a long time ago for foisting that ambulatory orange shitsack on the country. Yeah, yeah, yeah...POLLS! But I do think that once people start tuning in this fall when Trump could very well have a felony conviction on his record, I think the sniping at Biden will abate and America's own goal can be reveresed.

Today In Creeping Trumpist Facism

 There have been two stories about the creeping fascism within the GOP orbit. The first is "impartial umpire and strict constructionist" Samuel Alito flew an upside down American flag during the coup-period. He's blaming it on his wife, in some of the same way that Clarence Thomas says that his wife was the one working for Trump and he's just completely unaffected by that. It's really cool that two pro-insurrectionists have lifetime tenure and are currently deciding whether Trump will stand trial for his manifest crimes against America. This has elicited the usual "He should resign" nonsense. Of course he should, but he's not going to so I'm not sure what "should" has to do with anything.

The second is that some staffer on Trump's social media team used Nazi-ish language in one of his online ads. Did Trump "know" about this? Almost certainly not. Does he care? Almost certainly not.

The intersection of these stories - a Supreme Court justice and a low level social media intern - are about the complete freakification of the GOP. From 2017-2021, Trump was largely constrained by some normie types like Jon Kelly, HR McMaster, Steve Muenchin and others. 

What Trump is explicitly saying this time around is that he will hand over the reins of government to the sort of freakish assholes who think it's edgy to post literal Nazi shit on his social media. Part of the 2025 Project is to eviscerate government functionaries and replace them with sycophants - and the larger part of those sycophants are either actual Nazis or Nazi-adjacent. 

Because Trump is so outsized in the American political imagination, it's tough to see the forces lurking in his shadows. They are really, really scary and unlikely to disappear even after he finally shuffles off to either prison, electoral defeat, death or all three. 

We can - I think - defeat Trump this fall, especially if he's convicted in NYC. Defeating Trumpism is going to take years.

UJPDATE: Paul Campos on how media, in particular, is in denial about the fact that one of our parties has slipped into facism.

UPDATE 2: Oooops. Alito did another fascism.

Butlerian Jihad NOW!

 The book and now movie series, Dune, has as a pre-story pivot point something called the Butlerian Jihad, when humanity arose and overthrew "thinking machines." When I Googled "butlerian jihad meaning", the first answer I got was from Google's new "Overview" feature, whereby an AI program plagiarizes the internet to answer your question for you. Here's one presumably written by humans.

My school is "engaged" with AI in ways that trouble me. While my wife and I have been luxuriating in our sabbatical, we see emails about workshops and panels on the subject of how to best leverage AI in the classroom. At the heart of the fictional jihad against machines is the worry that thinking machines will enslave and replace humans. This is the plot of roughly half of all science fiction (I made that fraction up without help from Google's AI program). The reason is that thinking - especially advanced abstract thinking - is what separates humanity from animals and, at least to this point, machines. 

Now, we are learning that animals think a lot more than we assumed, but abstract thinking seems unique to humans. What's more, we make a conscious effort to teach - as opposed to train - our offspring. Training is simply "don't touch the fire." Teaching is explaining what fire is, its history and its potential future applications. We teach our young to be thinkers. I can say from 30 years of experience, that this not always easy.

A while back, we teachers struggled with Google and Wikipedia when it came to research. The quaint days of combing the stacks are pretty much dead for students, except maybe in graduate school. I'm trying to write, and right now I have a Wikipedia tab open giving a thumbnail sketch of the Grange organization of the 1870s. It's really easy! It also feels like something is lost, cognitively, when I can just type in "the Grange" and get an easy sketch. Helpful to me, because I'm writing about the Gilded Age in general in a book about American economic history in general. It would be bad if I was writing and thinking more deeply about agrarian organization and protests.

In other words, search engines are shortcuts to actual research, and as a shortcut it's shallow. Sometimes that's fine, but as students rely more and more on the easy shortcuts, the shallower their thinking becomes. 

Now, we appear to be galloping towards an AI future where more and more of the actual thinking is done for us. The one good thing about the internet age is that knowledge - which is to say facts - have never been easier to access.  It took me 5 seconds just now to look up the atomic weight of strontium. (It's 87.62!) However, I don't really know what atomic weight is. I don't know what its importance is. I could spend a few more minutes looking that up, but I know young people simply don't engage with that next level of comprehension, unless they are naturally curious about the topic. 

The first real incursion of AI into the classroom were the various translation apps that one can access. If you are trying to teach some indifferent 15 year old kid Spanish, it's difficult when they can simply type a sentence into Google Translate and get the answer. Now, that's VERY helpful when you are travelling in a Spanish speaking country and don't speak much or any Spanish. However, pedagogically it makes foreign language instruction almost obsolete. The reason that's bad is that foreign language instruction is not simply about communication in a non-native tongue, but expanding how you think about language. 

Education is not the cramming of facts into young people's minds. That's more akin to training. Education is teaching people to think beyond superficialities. Instead, we seem to be accepting AI as the next natural state of technology that will "help" us teach. And there are some interesting examples: Math teachers can use AI to create sample problems that help strengthen a student's weaker skills and provide feedback. The thing is, that's OUR JOB. That's what teaching is!

When smartphones came out and became ubiquitous in our students' hands, we somehow concluded that they were adept at technology. They were not. You had freshmen who didn't know how to respond to email. Their interaction with technology was overwhelmingly forced through the warped lens of social media.

This now constitutes a mental health crisis in America.

Meanwhile, we are going to blithely usher AI into our classrooms thinking that we have this under control, while our students use increasingly sophisticated programs to write their essays, do their thinking and get their education for them. This will defeat the very purpose of education.

Interesting

 Biden's speech at Morehouse was an interesting moment in his re-election campaign. Young Black voters seem to be cool on him, and he will need them to "come home." The politics of Gaza make this even more complicated, in that many college aged Blacks see Gaza as a proxy for other social justice movements. I personally think Hamas is a thin reed to lean on when it comes to "justice" but that's beside the point.

What's interesting is that he seems to have won over the crowd. That's not his best feature - public speaking - but if he can continue to do that, it should help him consolidate his base. I also thought it was interesting that parents were telling their kids to be respectful. An underrated feature of Democratic politics is the mild conservatism of many older Black and Brown voters. There's a clear lane for Biden there, and hopefully the parents will open that lane to their kids.

This Is Big

 The president of Iran may have died in a helicopter crash. Ibrahim Raisi is from the "hardline" faction of Iranian politics. He's staunch religious conservative - he was behind the hijab mandates that created a massive protest backlash - and an implacable enemy of "the West". Iran seems to ping pong between hardliners like Raisi and Ahmadinejad and more moderate figures like Khatami and Rouhani.

The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, is 85 years old and in perpetually poor health. He is probably the last significant Iranian leader with actual ties to the Revolution of 1978-9. The only hope the Middle East has of really lasting peace is that when he does die, he is not replaced by someone like Raisi. If Raisi is, in fact, dead, that opens up a potential improvement in the long term prospects of bringing Iran back into a more positive relationship with the rest of the world. Make no mistake, revolutionary governance in Iran has been immensely negative for the average Iranian.

The helicopter went down in mountainous terrain during bad weather. This will not stop Iran from blaming Israel and/or the United States (though I would highly doubt we had anything to do with it). A distracted Iran is good for the world, though. Post ergo propter hoc.

UPDATE: It's dark there now and cold. I'd say the odds of him being alive are rapidly declining.

UPDATE 2: Tweet of the day:

https://twitter.com/agraybee/status/1792243073579209173

Doomerism

 Anne Laurie collects some thoughts on "doomerism" or the belief that everything everywhere is awful. In it, there's a discussion of depression as a manifestation of doomerism. It's clear that they are linked, but it goes back to my post the other day about how everything is pathologized. 

If you are a depressive person, then doomerism is going to find an easy home in your head and heart. However, there are things that make depression worse: drinking, too much time on your hands, a lost sense of purpose. 

For doomerism, I'd add one more: watching the news on TV. 

Social media is bad for kids, but I'd argue that CNN et al are terrible for a certain type of adult. My wife watches that shit as background noise when she's cooking, and when I hear it from the other room, I want to tear the TV off the wall. We all know "If it bleeds, it leads" as a mantra for sensational news practices, but TV news does something more, as TV is more immediate than print. Because it seems to activate emotions more than print, TV can amplify negativity.

Again, as a historian, this is a remarkable period to be alive in. There are challenges today as there are challenges in every age, and it's our responsibility to be fucking grown ups about it and do the work necessary to meet those challenges. That does not mean the world is doomed, but it is in the interest of cable news and people who fundraise off doom to make you think so.

After Bibi

 This is an interesting take by a reader at TPM. Like Marshall, I don't agree with all the points, but I agree with the overall thrust of the piece. Unlike the author, however, I do think we are close to seeing the collapse of the current government. Netanyahu has pulled so many rabbits out of so few hats that - like Trump - it's tough to imagine a scenario when the reckoning finally comes.

Biden is not a fool, especially on foreign policy. I would hope that he has embraced Israel with two eyes towards the day when Bibi is gone. That would mean having a plan to restrict and dismantle some settlements on the West Bank and steps towards greater autonomy there. The payoff for wrapping your arms around that villainous cretin has to be in the West Bank, not Gaza. Gaza is a tragedy that will take a decade to put back together. The West Bank is where you can give back to Palestinians some of what they have lost. Those gains will accrue to Fatah, who hates Hamas just about as much as Israel does.

Hopefully, the Likudnik government collapses sooner rather than later, because there's a lot of work to be done and nothing will be accomplished with Netanyahu in charge.