- NYT’s M. Gessen on how the police state has arrived;
- A WaPo reporter goes looking for the “corrosive ideology” Trump thinks is in the Smithsonian;
- The next Project 2025 goal is to restore the ideal heterosexual family, and diminish everyone else;
- CDC is ordered *not* to release a measles report; Josh Hawley too is obsessed by “spiritual oppression”; what Trump’s “liberation” actually means; how our era echoes McCarthyism; and how moving fast and breaking things is about knowing their time is limited.
– – –
Even if most people don’t notice in their daily lives.
NY Times, M. Gessen, 2 Apr 2025: Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived. [gift link]
“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.
“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.
Then a series of paragraphs:
It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. …
It’s the growing irrelevance of the law and the helplessness of judges and lawyers. A federal judge ordered flights carrying the Venezuelan men to be turned around and demanded information about the abductees. … [others] The executive branch apparently ignored these rulings.
It’s the chilling stories that come by word of mouth. ICE is checking documents on the subway. ICE is outside New York public libraries that hold English-as-a-second-language classes. ICE agents handcuffed a U.S. citizen who tried to intervene in a detention in Harlem. ICE vehicles are parked outside Columbia. ICE is coming to your workplace, your street, your building. …
It’s the invisible hand of the authorities. The media outlet Zeteo reports that Homeland Security employees are revoking foreign students’ status in the database that’s usually maintained by universities. …
It’s the shifting goal posts. They are taking not only people who are in the United States without legal status but also those who are here on a visitor’s visa and then also legal permanent residents. They are targeting not only people who have criminal convictions but also those whom they say they suspect of belonging to a gang and also those who participated in or supported campus protests and then also someone, like Ozturk, who merely wrote, with three other people, an opinion essay in a student newspaper. …
It’s the way we dig down for the details of these stories to reassure ourselves that this won’t happen to us, or that there is some logic to these arrests. [examples] …
And, as the historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, if due process is routinely denied to noncitizens, it will be denied to citizens too, simply because it is often impossible for people to prove that they are citizens. This has happened before, …
It’s the lists. More than anything else, in fact, it’s the lists. A private company has launched an app called ICERAID, billed as a “protocol that delegates intelligence-gathering tasks to citizens that would otherwise be undertaken by law enforcement agencies.” …
The app, in other words, combines two time-tested secret-police techniques: incentivizing some people to denounce their neighbors and inducing others to add themselves to registries.
It’s the denunciations by concerned citizens. Before there was ICERAID, there were several groups compiling lists of people they consider antisemitic, especially university students and faculty. [examples] … When Rubio was asked if the State Department is using lists fed to it by these private groups, he said, “We’re not going to talk about the process by which we’re identifying it because obviously we’re looking for more people.”
… [concluding:]
But while we are still capable of looking, we have to say what we see: The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve seen it before.
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What does she find?
Washington Post, Monica Hesse, 2 Apr 2025: What exactly does Trump think is in the Smithsonian?, subtitled “Following his most recent executive order, I went in search of some ‘corrosive ideology.'”
It takes her a while. She begins with the sculpture shown in the photo above.
A few days ago, I spent 14 minutes standing in front of a single piece of artwork, a 1998 installation called “Las Twines.” Life-size, hyperrealistic sculptures of two little girls — the twins — sharing a swing. They were dressed identically in communion dresses and wore boxing gloves featuring Puerto Rican flags, but one had blonde hair and light skin and the other was dark-skinned with dark hair. They stared placidly ahead, while museum visitors like me were left to stare back and ponder how the world might treat these two girls with shared DNA and different complexions. It was uncanny, it was thought-provoking, it was beautiful and sad. I wasn’t sure whether I liked it, I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to. It’s art, after all.
She goes through many more examples of things targeted by Trump’s EO [I can’t imagine he wrote the order himself]:
The president had declared that federally run museums such as the Smithsonian were promoting a “corrosive ideology” that needed to be course-corrected. “Under this historical revision,” the order read, “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
[[ More conservative simplistic good/bad thinking, in which no flaws in American history can be acknowledged. ]]
She reflects:
Our nation’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” — for who? Whose happiness did we advance? Whose happiness did we overlook? Who got to have individual rights and who was coded as property in legal and official documents for centuries of our great nation’s history?
She visits the famous portrait of George Washington.
On my way to visit the corrosive art that I cannot imagine Trump has actually seen, I dropped in on a school tour where the guide plopped down a bunch of sixth-graders in front of a magnificent portrait of George Washington — the most famous one, the one by Gilbert Stuart — and there she revealed that there are actually multiple versions of this portrait in existence. They’re drafts. Some are just sketches; some contain just his face. They’re all just rough drafts that got closer and closer to the real thing, as the artist tried his best to capture this complicated man, this founder of our country, this enslaver, this hero. And that is how history is made. Rough drafts, again and again.
And at the end, she concludes:
If you are looking for something to be shocked by, you can probably find it. But no more so than anywhere else in the museum. No more so than anywhere else in our history. America is a shocking place — shockingly beautiful and shockingly violent. And the people in it will make you weep with every emotion that can prompt tears. Jubilant, sad, ridiculous, sublime. It’s America, after all.
You cannot love America without hating it a little bit. But you cannot hate it without loving it so, so much. Wanting it to be better. Wanting it to be what we all deserve.
As I stood with the tour groups and the lunch crowd and the tired families pushing strollers and doling out juice boxes — as I stood in this completely free institution that exists for no other reason than to help America learn something about itself, that was the most shocking realization of all: The Smithsonian is not filled with hatred toward our busted, struggling, awesome country; it is filled with the deepest love, and that is what I learned at the museum.
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The Atlantic, David A. Graham, 1 Apr 2025: The Top Goal of Project 2025 Is Still to Come, subtitled “The now-famous white paper has proved to be a good road map for what the administration has done so far, and what may yet be on the way.”
And what would this top goal be? Why, the one of prioritizing expansion of the tribe, via the ideal family, over all else.
“Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan said in 1967, in his inaugural address as governor of California. Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, approvingly quotes the speech in his foreword to Project 2025, the conservative think tank’s blueprint for the Trump administration. Roberts writes that the plan has four goals for protecting its vision of freedom: restoring the family “as the centerpiece of American life”; dismantling the federal bureaucracy; defending U.S. “sovereignty, borders, and bounty”; and securing “our God-given individual rights to live freely.”
Project 2025 has proved to be a good road map for understanding the first months of Donald Trump’s second term, but most of the focus has been on efforts to dismantle the federal government as we know it. The effort to restore traditional families has been less prominent so far, but it could reshape the everyday lives of all Americans in fundamental ways. Its place atop the list of priorities is no accident—it reflects the most deeply held views of many of the contributors—though the destruction of the administrative state might end up imperiling the Trump team’s ability to actually carry out the changes the authors want.
A focus on heterosexual, married, procreating couples is everywhere in Project 2025. “Families comprised of a married mother, father, and their children are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society,” writes Roger Severino… He argues that the federal government should bolster organizations that “maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family,” saying that other forms are less stable. The goal is not only moral; he and other authors see this as a path to financial stability and perhaps even greater prosperity for families.
The piece goes on to discuss how they intend to bring this goal about.
The point: they say it’s about “individual rights to live freely” but they don’t mean it; it’s about restricting your rights to live freely if you’re not part of a heterosexual family with children. If you’re not, you don’t count, and should be diminished. Thus the focus on *defining* two genders. [[ Is this truly what we need, in an era of expanding population leading to climate change that might threaten the survival of the species? Of course this question is beyond the range of tribalistic thinking. ]]
With this irony:
Turning these ideas into reality would require substantial engagement from the federal bureaucracy. Yet Trump and Elon Musk have spent the first months of the presidency haphazardly demolishing large swaths of the workforce at just the departments that would be necessary to make these things happen.
And concluding:
With a little imagination, we can glimpse the America that Project 2025 proposes. It is an avowedly Christian nation, but following a very specific, narrow strain of Christianity. In many ways, it resembles the 1950s. While fathers work, mothers stay at home with larger families. At school, students learn old-fashioned values and lessons. Abortion is illegal, vaccines are voluntary, and the state is minimally involved in health care. The government is slow to police racial discrimination in all but its most blatant expressions. Trans and LGBTQ people exist—they always have—but are encouraged to remain closeted. It is a vision that suggests Reagan was right: Freedom really is a fragile thing.
This is MAGA. The rest of the world will move on.
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Shorter items.
JMG, 31 Mar 2025, from ProPublica: CDC Ordered Staff Not To Release Measles Warning.
Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.
Isn’t this, like, an abnegation of their duties? How are these people different from foreign invaders bent on destroying the country?
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This aligns with the item yesterday about Karoline Leavitt and spiritual warfare. These people live in a fantasy world of absolute good and evil. In which they’re on the side of good, of course.
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 31 Mar 2025: Sen. Josh Hawley Says The U.S. Is Being Destroyed By Secular ‘Spiritual Oppression’
He hasn’t read the Bible thoroughly enough, is my take; or he’s cherry-picking.
“Every civilization is founded on a set of religious convictions and the United States of America, I firmly believe, is the greatest nation in the history of the world because our spiritual convictions are the convictions of the Bible,” Hawley declared. “They are the convictions of the truth of the word of God, but the forces of secularism seek to cut us off from that truth. It seeks to destroy it and in so doing, to oppress our nation.”
Actually, the US was founded on decidedly *non*religious principles, and either he’s dumb not to understand that, or is lying.
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This talk of liberation is more Orwellian speak.
LA Times, Jonah Goldberg, 31 Mar 2025: What will Trump’s tariffs ‘liberate’ us from?
I am writing this from the last days of our captivity.
Indeed, by the time some of you read this, we will be free. If all goes according to the White House’s plan, April 2 will go down in history as America’s “Liberation Day.”
Steve Bannon, a prominent unofficial Trump advisor, is so confident about its success, he’s already talking about making Liberation Day a federal holiday next year.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. From what will we be liberated on Liberation Day?
Details.
White House trade advisor Peter Navarro expects these tariffs to raise $600 billion annually. Nearly every serious economist across the ideological spectrum understands that American consumers would pay the bulk of that. Thus, if “successful,” Trump would be imposing the largest, most regressive tax increase in history.
He echoes the last item in yesterday’s post.
The wellspring of this geyser of asininity is the simple fact that Trump doesn’t understand how trade works.
…
Every time you get a haircut, you have a trade deficit with the barber. Are you being ripped off?
Trump’s obsession with Canada illustrates his confusion. We have a trade deficit with Canada, under a trade agreement he crafted in his first term. Hence, Trump claims we “subsidize” Canada $200 billion a year (a made-up number, but that’s beside the point). The only reason we have a trade deficit with Canada is that they sell us oil at a price below global market rates. If we stopped buying their cheaper oil, we’d be worse off. Gas prices would go up and American jobs dedicated to refining that oil and exporting it would vanish. But the metric Trump cares about would improve.
Hold on here. Stuff we need would have become more scarce and expensive. Americans would be worse off. And that’s a win because … why?
During the years of our supposed economic captivity, the American economy became the “envy of the world.” That’s what Trump seems bent on liberating us from.
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That he is on Musk’s side completely discredits him, to me.
JMG, 1 Apr 2025: Franklin Graham: Pray For Jesus To Protect Elon Musk
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This has happened before. Our institutions are good, they were well-intentioned, but are not strong enough to keep this happening, over and over.
LA Times, Catherine Fisk, 31 Mar 2025: Echoing McCarthyism, federal firings will inflict generations of trauma
Today, as in the Red Scare, we should lament the damage that arbitrary firings do to scientific research, medical care, government services and academic freedom. The media have reported all this. But those who are fired are not faceless bureaucrats, as the government says. They are people who have devoted themselves to public service and have expertise that will be hard to use in the private sector. Many have families dependent on their income.
I teach and write on employment law, so I know that each case of a fired employee is a story of dashed hopes, anger and pain. When, as during the McCarthy era and now, government inflicts that pain on a mass scale, it magnifies the trauma to families and communities. Perhaps history will remember these mass firings as a tragic mistake the way so many of the Red Scare firings are now remembered. But the harms cannot be undone and will ripple through America for decades to come.
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I’ve thought about this before. There’s a hidden agenda behind “move fast and break things.”
LGBTQNation, John Gallagher, 31 Mar 2025: Trump & Musk are moving fast because they know their time is limited, subtitled “The administration’s destructive policies are already taking a toll in polling, but the damage is already done.”
Trump—or, more properly, the people who are advising him—has three goals. One is to solidify presidential power. The other is to do as much damage to the government now as possible, recognizing that most of the damage can never be undone. The third goal is to pass tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of safety-net programs like Medicaid.
Does Trump not realize, as he speculates serving a third term, how unlikely it is he will survive his second?
