There will be no calm still point.
- Trump defying the Court; a Constitutional crisis, perhaps;
- The next phase of Trump’s dictatorship era;
- Following the dictator playbook;
- Concern about discrimination against whites, and how MAGA is about white supremacy;
- How narratives win over data and facts, and how Democrats should tell stories;
- The mythos on the right and the logos on the left;
- Musk’s idea of “freedom cities”.
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Back to current news. What’ the latest?
Trump seems to be defying judicial orders. The next step in a constitutional crisis.
NY Times, 17 Mar 2025: A Court Showdown on Deportations
A federal judge in Washington pressed the Trump administration at a hearing this afternoon to explain why the U.S. deported to El Salvador more than 200 migrants with little or no due process.
Over the weekend, the same judge had issued an order barring the expulsions, but the Trump administration went through with them anyway. At today’s hearing, the judge said he was trying to establish whether the government had defied his order. He made no ruling, but he told the Trump administration to return to his court on Friday to argue over the merits.
And:
NY Times, 16 Mar 2025: White House Denies Violating Judge’s Order in Deporting Venezuelans, subtitled “Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, also asserted that the federal courts “have no jurisdiction” over President Trump’s conduct of foreign affairs or his power to expel foreign enemies.”
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And so:
Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, 17 Mar 2025: We’ve Officially Entered the Next Phase of Trump’s Dictatorship Era
The Trump administration pushed forward into a new phase of the rolling national constitutional crisis over the weekend, reportedly defying two different federal court orders imposing limits on its deportation of immigrants without due process. First, immigrant authorities deported Rasha Alawieh, a kidney transplant specialist at Brown University, despite a judge’s Friday order halting her removal. Second, authorities deported about 250 Venezuelan migrants, flouting another judge’s explicit directive to turn around American planes that hadn’t yet landed in El Salvador, where the migrants were being sent. The Justice Department claimed that it could not comply with the order barring Alawieh’s removal because it arrived too late. But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrants—and that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens.
Also, Trump claimed he’d voided all the pardons Biden made during his final days in office. I mean, Trump’s a king, so whatever he says overrules everyone else, right?
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Or maybe Musk is the king? At least he didn’t order the judge’s summary execution.
Salon, Alex Galbraith, 16 Mar 2025: “Necessary”: Musk calls for judge who blocked Trump deportations to be impeached
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Meanwhile. Check another off the list.
The Atlantic, András Pethő, 15 Mar 2025: Trump’s Attempts to Muzzle the Press Look Familiar, subtitled “Much of what the U.S. president has done to curb independent media echoes the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán’s playbook.”
When Viktor Orbán gave a speech in 2022 at a Conservative Political Action Conference gathering in Budapest, he shared his secret to amassing power with Donald Trump’s fan base. “We must have our own media,” he told his audience.
As a Hungarian investigative journalist, I have had a firsthand view of how Orbán has built his own media universe while simultaneously placing a stranglehold on the independent press. As I watch from afar what’s happening to the free press in the United States during the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency—the verbal bullying, the legal harassment, the buckling by media owners in the face of threats—it all looks very familiar. The MAGA authorities have learned Orbán’s lessons well.
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Trump and the MAGA crowd are terribly concerned about purported discrimination …against whites. (But not against anyone else.)
AP News, 14 Mar 2025: Rubio says South Africa’s ambassador to the US ‘is no longer welcome’ in the country
Rubio linked to a story by the ultraconservative Breitbart news site about a talk Rasool [the ambassador] gave earlier Friday as part of a South African think tank’s webinar in which he spoke about actions taken by the Trump administration in the context of a United States where white people soon would no longer be in the majority.
Both Trump and his ally Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa, have criticized the country’s Black-led government over a new land law they claim discriminates against white people.
More to the point:
NY Times, 15 Mar 2025: Trump Tries to Use White South Africans as Cautionary Tale, subtitled “The president and his allies accuse South Africa of discriminating against and killing white people, and warn that it could happen in America if attempts to promote diversity aren’t stopped.”
The subtitle in print was “Repeating a narrative contradicted by data”.
To hear President Trump and some of his closest supporters tell it, South Africa is a terrible place for white people. They face discrimination, are sidelined from jobs and live under the constant threat of violence or having their land stolen by a corrupt, Black-led government that has left the country in disarray.
The data tell a different story. Although white people make up 7 percent of the country’s population, they own at least half of South Africa’s land. Police statistics do not show that they are any more vulnerable to violent crime than other people. And white South Africans are far better off than Black people on virtually every marker of the economic scale.
Yet Mr. Trump and his allies have pushed their own narrative of South Africa to press an argument at home: If the United States doesn’t clamp down on attempts to promote diversity, America will become a hotbed of dysfunction and anti-white discrimination.
“It plays into the fears of white people in America and elsewhere: ‘We whites are threatened,’” Max du Preez, a white South African writer and historian, said of Mr. Trump’s description of his country.
Three points. First is that conservatives — most people actually — prefer narratives to facts. Second is that conservatives in particular prefer narratives even if they *defy* facts. And the third is that, increasingly, it’s clear that MAGA is about white supremacy — the existential dread by whites of losing their privileged place in American society.
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This ties to some advice for Democrats: tell stories. At least the advice is to tell “real people’s” stories. (Even though anecdotes are selective and prove nothing. But many people only think in anecdotes.)
Salon, Paul Rosenberg, 15 Mar 2025: How the left can win: Drop the statistics and tell real people’s stories, subtitled “Sociologist Jessica Calarco explains why the right keeps winning, and how progressive narratives can turn the tide”
This is an interview with sociologist Jessica Calarco, and the piece begins by quoting from Bluesky:
The right has united around a rejection of government as the solution to social problems. Which means they can generally agree to block new policies and programs. The left is united in its desire for government solutions. But that means they have to face the harder task of agreeing on what to do.
For related reasons, the right can also unite people around shared enemies. Because even if people don’t trust government to solve their problems, they still want someone to blame when they’re struggling. And the right gives them scapegoats in spades.
The right also blocks the left’s efforts toward solidarity. Because if the right’s default is to block everything, then the left has to make harder choices about what to try to push through. Which means there’s only money/time/energy for some factions to get the new programs/policies they want.
And notably, where the right does agree to implement some new program or policy, it’s usually a policy or program that: 1) attacks the scapegoats they’ve built their solidarity around, and/or 2) pushes the cost onto those least able to fight back.
Later is this exchange from the interview:
There seems to be a natural affinity between “mythos” on the right and “logos” on the left. For example, the right tells simple stories of praise and blame, resists the complexities of real history and assumes there are simple solutions to problems, however complex. Meanwhile, the left relies much more on facts and analysis, but as Matt Grossmann said, there’s a need for more attention to “mythos” on the left, for creating a shared reality that helps us understanding the problems we want to solve, and helps us communicate it to the public at large. Your book suggests that care can play a key role in doing this. What are your thoughts on how we might start doing that?
This is a great question. In terms of what’s happening on the right, stories, narratives, lend themselves to individual explanations to social problems. If the right is saying that the government is complicating things, they’re often saying that individuals can solve problems for themselves, it’s a very easy, uplifting story to tell. You can almost always find someone who has overcome adversity, whom you can then hold up and say, “Look, people don’t need support, they can do this all on their own.” This is “The Little Engine That Could.” It’s an easy kind of story to tell. And it makes sense, intuitively, to people that if you just try hard enough you can overcome these problems. You don’t need government support.
If on the left you’re saying instead that the problems people face in their lives aren’t just about bad choices and aren’t just about the government doing bad things, but are deeply rooted in historical and structural inequalities and systems, it’s often much harder to show that kind of harm. This is part of the challenge of sociological research, that people often aren’t aware of the structures that are operating in their own lives. We may not be fully aware of the way that the socialization we received as children, or the kinds of opportunity structures available to us, are shaping our choices in ways that we can’t fully articulate and aren’t fully aware of.
Because of that, the left has increasingly leaned on statistics, on data, to show, “Look, there’s disproportionality here,” that we have these deep racial disparities, deep economic disparities and persistent gender inequalities, that we can show systematically that it’s not just one person, but this is affecting people in patterned ways across all of society.
Numbers help to demonstrate that those problems are real and likely have structural causes. But numbers are not great for persuading people. If we say that women do almost twice as much care work as men do, for example, that’s a powerful statistic, but it doesn’t necessarily motivate men to change their behavior. And it doesn’t necessarily give women a lot of solace or a way forward to solve that problem. You can easily push back and say, “Well, OK, but what if that’s what they’re happy doing? Maybe that’s just the way it’s supposed to be.”
And so, the left needs to tell stories. In other words, conservatives appeal to basic human nature by telling stories, and Democrats are losing by expecting voters to appreciate data and logic, and to comprehend the actual real world.)
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Moving on. Musk grew up in South Africa, and perhaps has taken too much science fiction too seriously. I knew that much, but this is new to me:
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 17 Mar 2025: The dystopian “freedom cities” dream fueling Elon Musk’s destruction, subtitled “Tech’s plans for billionaire-rule expose why Musk wants to end government by the people”
This responds to a piece in Wired (still haven’t received my first print issue).
In our cynical times, most people are familiar enough with doublespeak to understand that anything called a “freedom city” is likely to be the opposite. It’s a sign of the delusional self-confidence in their own mendacious powers that the tech oligarchs who are financing this idiotic idea insist on going with that branding anyway. Investigative reporters Vittoria Elliott and Caroline Haskins published an in-depth report on this scheme for Wired earlier this month. What immediately becomes clear is that what the Silicon Valley billionaire class considers “freedom cities” is simply neo-feudalism, a plan to end the concept of citizenship and make every working person a serf whose entire life is controlled by the whims of their boss.
… Advocates want the federal government to set aside land to build cities exempt from federal and state laws. Instead, the cities would function as mini-dictatorships, where the CEO of each town runs everything, and the people who live and work there are subject to the boss’s whims. It would be like being an employee of a controlling company, except you don’t clock out at the end of the day or have a life — or rights — outside of what the boss allows you.
… In the tech bro world Elon Musk comes from, the definition of “freedom” is that rich people get to treat everyone else however they like, without that pesky government coming in to protect people’s safety, autonomy or civil rights.
… It sounds too preposterous to believe, but Musk’s close friend Peter Thiel has been spending lavishly on organizations designed to make it a reality. Pilot programs have begun to create artificial islands where the rich owners rule like kings. One such corporate city, named Próspera, has been built in Honduras, though the government is currently trying to kick them out, disagreeing that the city’s owners get to reject any national laws they don’t like. And, of course, Donald Trump loves the idea of creating cities that exist outside of federal authority, putting out a video in 2023 promising to give over federal lands to oligarchs to begin their mini-dictatorships. Tech executives, fueled by their ill-gotten crypto gains, are heavily lobbying congressional Republicans right now to make this dystopian dream happen.
Actually, Cory Doctorow anticipated, or perhaps merely depicted, this idea in his 2023 novel The Lost Cause, but I’ve been negligent at writing up recent SF novels I’ve read here or I would have noted this earlier.
Yet again, this idea reflects the dichotomy of human nature: the conservative desire to return to a world of base human nature, with authoritarians and hierarchies, “without that pesky government coming in to protect people’s safety, autonomy or civil rights.”
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Outside my window looking down onto the street, there are kids jogging past, and then jogging back again. I’ve never seen such groups of kids, well, teenagers, jog past and forth the house before.
