November 28, 2024 (Thursday)
Happy Thanksgiving from our home to yours.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
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November 29, 2024 (Friday)
In 2008, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law an act making the day after Thanksgiving National Native American Heritage Day.
About a month ago, on Friday, October 25, President Joe Biden became the first president to visit Indian Country in ten years when he traveled to the Gila River Indian Community in Maricopa County, Arizona, near Phoenix. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland traveled with him. The trip was designed to highlight the investments the Biden-Harris administration has made in Tribal Nations.
At a press gaggle on Air Force One on the way to Arizona, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre noted that under Biden, Tribal Nations have seen the largest direct federal investment in history: $32 billion from the American Rescue Plan and $13 billion through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build roads and bridges, bring clean water and sanitation, and build high-speed Internet in Tribal communities.
Jean-Pierre added that First Lady Jill Biden has also championed Native communities, visiting them ten times to highlight investments in youth mental health, the revitalization of Native languages, and to improve access to cancer screening and cancer care in Native communities.
Secretary Haaland, herself a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, agreed that the Biden-Harris administration has brought “transformational change” to Native communities: “electricity on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona for homes that have never had electricity; protecting cultural resources, like salmon, which Pacific Northwest Tribes have depended on for thousands of years; new transportation infrastructure for the Mescalero Apache Nation in New Mexico that will provide a safer travel route and boost their economic development, their local economy; addressing toxic legacy pollution and abandoned oil and gas infrastructure that pollutes our air and water for the Osage Nation in Oklahoma; providing clean drinking water for Fort Peck in Montana.”
“Tribal leaders are experiencing a new era,” Haaland added. “They’re at the table. They’re being consulted.”
When Biden spoke at the Gila Crossing Community School, he said he was there “to right a wrong, to chart a new path toward a better future for us all.” As president of the United States, Biden formally apologized to the Native peoples—Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Native Alaskans—for the U.S. government policy that forced Native children into federal Indian boarding schools.
The apology comes after the release of an Interior Department study, The Federal Boarding School Initiative, that Secretary Haaland directed the department to undertake in 2021. According to Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland, a citizen and former president of the Bay Mills Indian Community (Ojibwe), the initiative was “a comprehensive effort to recognize the troubled legacy of Federal Indian boarding school policies with the goal of addressing their intergenerational impact and to shed light on the traumas of the past.”
The initiative set out to identify federal Indian boarding schools and sites, to identify the children who attended those schools and to identify their Tribal identities, to find marked and unmarked burial sites of the remains of Indian children near school facilities, and to incorporate the viewpoints of those who attended federal Indian boarding schools and their descendants into the story of those schools.
The report looked at the Indian education system from 1819 to 1969 as a whole, bringing together federal funding for religious schools in the early 1800s with later explicitly federal schools and their public school successors during and after the 1930s. But historians generally focus on the period from 1879 to the 1930s as the boarding school era.
In 1879, the government opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a boarding school for American Indian children in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, explicitly designed to separate children from their families and their culture and to train them for menial jobs.
The boarding school era was the brainchild of Army officer Richard Henry Pratt, a Civil War veteran who, in the years after the war, commanded the 10th United States Cavalry, a Black regiment stationed in the American West whose members Indigenous Americans nicknamed the “Buffalo Soldiers.” Pratt fought in the campaigns on the Plains from 1868 through 1875, when he was assigned to oversee 72 Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Caddo prisoners of war at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida (now known as the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument).
Many Indigenous prisoners at Fort Marion, taken from the dry Plains to the hot and humid coast of Florida where they were imprisoned in a cramped stone fort, quickly sickened and died. Pratt worked to upgrade conditions and to assimilate prisoners into U.S. systems by teaching them English, U.S. culture, Christianity, and how the American economy worked. He cut their hair, dressed them in military-type uniforms, and urged them to make art for sale to local tourists—it’s from here we get the world-famous collection of ledger art by the artists of Fort Marion—but focused on turning the former warriors and their families into menial workers.
After the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 and the subsequent pursuit and surrender of leading Lakota bands throughout that year and the next, leading to the murder of Crazy Horse in 1877, popular opinion ran heavily toward simply corralling Indigenous Americans on reservations and waiting either for their assimilation or extermination. At the same time, with what seemed to be the end of the most serious of the Plains Wars, Army officers like Pratt had reason to worry that the downsizing of the U.S. Army would mean the end of their careers.
Indigenous survivors of Fort Marion returned home to see that the American government had no real plans for a thriving American Indian populace. There was little infrastructure to link them to the rest of the country to sell their art, and Indian agents rejected tribal members for jobs in favor of white cronies.
But Pratt considered his experiment at Fort Marion a great success, and he came to believe he could make his system work even more thoroughly by using a loophole in the treaties between Plains Tribes and the U.S. government to force Indigenous Americans to assimilate as children. He planned, he said, to “Kill the Indian and save the man.”
Treaties between Plains Indian Tribes and the government required the U.S. government to educate American Indian children—something their parents cared deeply about—but the treaties didn’t actually specify where the schools would be. So Pratt convinced the U.S. Army and officials at the Interior Department to give him the use of the Carlisle Barracks to open an industrial school, designed to teach American Indian children the skills necessary to be servants and menial workers.
In summer 1879, Pratt traveled to western reservations of the Lakotas and Dakotas, primarily, to gather up 82 children to begin his experiment in annihilating their culture from their minds. He forbade the practice of any aspect of Indigenous culture—language, religion, custom, clothing—and forced children to change their names, use English, practice Christianity, and wear clothing that mirrored that of Euro-American children.
Crowded together, many children died of disease; bereft of their family and culture, many died of heartache. Some found their newfound language and lessons tolerable, others ran away. For the next fifty years, the Carlisle model was the central model of government education for Indigenous children, with tens of thousands of children educated according to its methods.
In the 1920s the Institute for Government Research, later renamed the Brookings Institution, commissioned a study funded by the Rockefeller Institute—to make sure it would not reflect government bias—to investigate conditions among Indigenous Americans.
In 1928 that study, called the Meriam Report, condemned the conditions under which American Indians lived. It also emphasized the “deplorable health conditions” at the boarding schools, condemned the schools’ inappropriate focus on menial skills, and asserted that “[t]he most fundamental need in Indian education is a change in point of view.” In 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act reversed the policy of trying to eradicate Tribal cultures through boarding children away from their families, and introduced the teaching of Indian history and culture in federal schools.
But the boarding schools remain a central part of the experience of American Indians since the establishment of the U.S. government in North America, and the Federal Boarding School Initiative recommended that “[t]he U.S. Government should issue a formal acknowledgment of its role in adopting a national policy of forced assimilation of Indian children, and carrying out this policy through the removal and confinement of Indian children from their families and Indian Tribes and the Native Hawaiian Community and placement in the Federal Indian boarding school system.”
It continued: “The United States should accompany this acknowledgment with a formal apology to the individuals, families, and Indian Tribes that were harmed by U.S. policy.”
On October 25, 2024, President Joe Biden delivered that apology.
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November 30, 2024 (Saturday)
Cas Mudde, a political scientist who specializes in extremism and democracy, observed yesterday on Bluesky that “the fight against the far right is secondary to the fight to strengthen liberal democracy.” That’s a smart observation.
During World War II, when the United States led the defense of democracy against fascism, and after it, when the U.S. stood against communism, members of both major political parties celebrated American liberal democracy. Democratic presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower made it a point to emphasize the importance of the rule of law and people’s right to choose their government, as well as how much more effectively democracies managed their economies and how much fairer those economies were than those in which authoritarians and their cronies pocketed most of a country’s wealth.
Those mid-twentieth-century presidents helped to construct a “liberal consensus” in which Americans rallied behind a democratic government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. That government was so widely popular that political scientists in the 1960s posited that politicians should stop trying to court voters by defending its broadly accepted principles. Instead, they should put together coalitions of interest groups that could win elections.
As traditional Republicans and Democrats moved away from a defense of democracy, the power to define the U.S. government fell to a small faction of “Movement Conservatives” who were determined to undermine the liberal consensus. Big-business Republicans who hated regulations and taxes joined with racist former Democrats and patriarchal white evangelicals who wanted to reinforce traditional race and gender hierarchies to insist that the government had grown far too big and was crushing individual Americans.
In their telling, a government that prevented businessmen from abusing their workers, made sure widows and orphans didn’t have to eat from garbage cans, built the interstate highways, and enforced equal rights was destroying the individualism that made America great, and they argued that such a government was a small step from communism. They looked at government protection of equal rights for racial, ethnic, gender, and religious minorities, as well as women, and argued that those protections both cost tax dollars for the bureaucrats who enforced equal rights and undermined a man’s ability to act as he wished both in his place of business, in society, and in his home. The government of the liberal consensus was, they claimed, a redistribution of wealth from hardworking taxpayers—usually white and male—to undeserving marginalized Americans.
When voters elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Movement Conservatives’ image of the American government became more and more prevalent, although Americans never stopped liking the reality of the post–World War II government that served the needs of ordinary Americans. That image fed forty years of cuts to the post–World War II government, including sweeping cuts to regulations and to taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, always with the argument that such a government was destroying American individualism.
It was this image of government as a behemoth undermining individual Americans that Donald Trump rode to the presidency in 2016 with his promises to “drain the swamp” of Washington, D.C., and it is this image that is leading Trump voters to cheer on billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as they vow to cut services on which Americans depend in order to cut regulations and taxes once again for the very wealthy and corporations.
But that image of the American government is not the one on which the nation was founded.
Liberal democracy was the product of a moment in the 1600s in which European thinkers rethought old ideas about human society to emphasize the importance of the individual and his (it was almost always a “him” in those days) rights. Men like John Locke rejected the idea that God had appointed kings and noblemen to rule over subjects by virtue of their family lineage, and began to explore the idea that since government was a social compact to enable men to live together in peace, it should rest not on birth or wealth or religion, all of which were arbitrary, but on natural laws that men could figure out through their own experiences.
The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or “liberty,” including the right to consent to the government under which they lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
In the early years of the American nation, defending the rights of individuals meant keeping the government small so that it could not crush a man through taxation or involuntary service to the government or arbitrary restrictions. The Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—explicitly prohibited the government from engaging in actions that would hamper individual freedom.
But in the middle of the nineteenth century, Republican president Abraham Lincoln began the process of adjusting American liberalism to the conditions of the modern world. While the Founders had focused on protecting individual rights from an overreaching government, Lincoln realized that maintaining the rights of individuals required government action.
To protect individual opportunity, Lincoln argued, the government must work to guarantee that all men—not just rich white men—were equal before the law and had equal access to resources, including education. To keep the rich from taking over the nation, he said, the government must keep the economic playing field between rich and poor level, dramatically expand opportunity, and develop the economy.
Under Lincoln, Republicans reenvisioned liberalism. They reworked the Founders’ initial stand against a strong government, memorialized by the Framers in the Bill of Rights, into an active government designed to protect individuals by guaranteeing equal access to resources and equality before the law for white men and Black men alike. They enlisted the power of the federal government to turn the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into reality.
Under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, progressives at the turn of the twentieth century would continue this reworking of American liberalism to address the extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power made possible by industrialization. In that era, corrupt industrialists increased their profits by abusing their workers, adulterating milk with formaldehyde and painting candies with lead paint, dumping toxic waste into neighborhoods, and paying legislators to let them do whatever they wished.
Those concerned about the survival of liberal democracy worried that individuals were not actually free when their lives were controlled by the corporations that poisoned their food and water while making it impossible for individuals to get an education or make enough money ever to become independent.
To restore the rights of individuals, progressives of both parties reversed the idea that liberalism required a small government. They insisted that individuals needed a big government to protect them from the excesses and powerful industrialists of the modern world. Under the new governmental system that Theodore Roosevelt pioneered, the government cleaned up the sewage systems and tenements in cities, protected public lands, invested in public health and education, raised taxes, and called for universal health insurance, all to protect the ability of individuals to live freely without being crushed by outside influences.
Reformers sought, as Roosevelt said, to return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”
It is that system of government’s protection of the individual in the face of the stresses of the modern world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and the presidents who followed them until 1981 embraced. The post–World War II liberal consensus was the American recognition that protecting the rights of individuals in the modern era required not a weak government but a strong one.
When Movement Conservatives convinced followers to redefine “liberal” as an epithet rather than a reflection of the nation’s quest to defend the rights of individuals—which was quite deliberate—they undermined the central principle of the United States of America. In its place, they resurrected the ideology of the world the American Founders rejected, a world in which an impoverished majority suffers under the rule of a powerful few.
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December 1, 2024 (Sunday)
Over the holiday weekend, President-elect Trump continued to name the people he wants in his incoming administration. His picks seem designed to destroy the institutions of the democratic American state and replace those institutions with an authoritarian government whose officials are all loyal to Trump.
Congress—which represents the American people—designed governmental institutions like the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Department of Defense to support the mission of the Constitution, which is the fundamental law of the United States of America. The Constitution is not partisan, and in 1883, after a mentally ill disappointed office seeker assassinated President James A. Garfield, Congress passed a law requiring that the people who staff government offices be hired on the basis of their skills, not their partisanship.
The people who work in governmental institutions—and therefore the institutions themselves—are rather like the ballast that keeps a ship upright and balanced in different weathers. Nonpartisan government officials who clock in to do their job keep the government running smoothly and according to the law no matter whom voters elect to the presidency.
It is precisely that stability of the American state that MAGA leaders want to destroy. In their view, the modern American state has weakened the nation by trying to enforce equality for all Americans, making women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities equal to white, Christian men. But they have been unable to persuade voters to vote away the institutions that support the modern state.
Even in the 2024 campaign, voters so hated the blueprint for destroying the modern government and replacing it with a super-strong president who would impose Christian nationalism that Trump and his allies ran away from that blueprint: Project 2025.
Now, though, with Trump having won the 2024 presidential election by a razor-thin margin, MAGA leaders are claiming a mandate to destroy the American state and replace it with an authoritarian government staffed with partisans whose most obvious quality is their loyalty to Trump.
Russian specialist and military scholar Tom Nichols of The Atlantic notes that the Russians talk about “power ministries,” which are “the departments that have significant legal and coercive capacity.” Nichols notes that in the U.S., those include the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the FBI, and the intelligence community, all of which Trump is attempting to destroy by placing unqualified loyalists at their head.
For the crucially important post of attorney general, who is responsible for overseeing the enforcement of the rule of law across the nation, Trump first tapped former Florida representative Matt Gaetz, whose association with drug use and sex trafficking forced him to withdraw, and then named Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general who has insisted that the legal cases against Trump are proof that the justice system has been “weaponized” against Trump.
To head the FBI, the bureau Trump has long insisted was persecuting him through its investigation of the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives—ties that Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have confirmed in detail—Trump has tapped loyalist and conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, who has vowed to use the FBI to exact revenge on those Trump considers his enemies.
That Patel’s appointment is designed to destroy the FBI is clear not least because installing him would require Trump to fire current FBI director Christoper Wray. FBI directors serve ten-year terms precisely so they are not tied to any administration, and Wray was Trump’s own appointee in his first term. Indeed, the idea that the FBI is insufficiently right wing for Trump’s new administration speaks volumes: in its entire history, the FBI has never had a Democrat in charge of it. Under Patel, the nation’s chief law enforcement agency would be a tool of the president.
For director of the CIA, Trump has tapped unqualified loyalist attack dog John Ratcliffe; for director of national intelligence, the person who oversees all American intelligence agencies, Trump has tapped former representative Tulsi Gabbard, whose ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin and Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad make her loyalties suspect. Taken together, Trump’s appointments to these powerful departments amount to an attempt to destroy the nation’s fundamental institutions.
As Charlie Sykes points out, Trump’s appointments are not only a “[m]assive Fuq U to institutions…[b]ut also a huge FU to the Supreme Court because Trump doesn’t think they will be a check on his campaign of lawless retribution.”
The Atlantic’s Nichols told MSNBC today that Trump’s appointees are “there to build an authoritarian cadre and to put themselves beyond the reach of the rule of law.”
With loyalty trumping ability and merit under an autocrat, the quality of government officials plummets. This pays off for an autocratic leader because those appointed to serve in an autocratic government are usually unemployable in a merit-based system, making them fiercely loyal to the leader who has elevated them beyond their abilities.
Autocrats start by rewarding family, and Trump has certainly followed that suit. After years in which Republicans went after President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who was never a government employee, over the weekend, Trump announced that he intends to appoint his daughter Ivanka’s father-in-law, New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner, as ambassador to France. In 2004, Kushner pleaded guilty to 16 federal crimes and served time in prison before Trump pardoned him in 2020. Trump also announced that he will appoint his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law, Lebanese-born billionaire Massad Boulos, as White House senior adviser on Arab and Middle East affairs.
This weekend, an email from the mother of Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, came to light. Written in 2018, when Hegseth was in the middle of a divorce from his second wife, who filed for divorce after Hegseth got a co-worker pregnant, the email told Hegseth to “get some help and take an honest look at yourself.” Writing “[o]n behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way,” Penelope Hegseth said: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”
Penelope Hegseth has since praised her son.
Meanwhile, those loyal to a rising regime attack public servants to make others afraid to speak out. On Friday, billionaire Elon Musk posted on X that Alexander Vindman, former National Security Council director for European affairs, is “on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarchs and has committed treason against the United States, for which he will pay the appropriate penalty.” Vindman was a key figure in Trump’s first impeachment after being on the phone call in which Trump tried to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear the Democratic opponent he considered most dangerous to his reelection prospects, then–former vice president Joe Biden, before Trump would release money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russian incursions.
But Vindman, who famously told Congress that he had assured his father that he was safe speaking up against the president because “here, right matters,” wasn’t taking such an attack quietly.
“Elon, here you go again making false and completely unfounded accusations without providing any specifics,” Vindman posted back. “That’s the kind of response one would expect from a conspiracy theorist. What oligarch? What treason?
“Let me help you out with the facts: I don’t take/have never taken money from any money from oligarchs Ukrainian or…otherwise.
“I do run a nonprofit foundation. The HereRightMattersFoundation.org to help Ukraine defend itself from Russia’s unprovoked attack on Feb 24, 2022. I served in the military for nearly 22 years and my loyalty is to supporting the U.S. Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. That’s why I reported presidential corruption when I witnessed an effort to steal an election. That report was in classified channels and when called by Congress to testify about presidential corruption I did so, as required by law.
“You, Elon, appear to believe you can act with impunity and are attempting to silence your critics. I’m not intimidated.”
As Trump sets out to turn the government into an instrument for his own power and vengeance, President Biden tonight pardoned his son Hunter Biden. Laying out the history of Republicans’ persecution of Hunter to weaken his father, the president said in a statement, “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son—and that is wrong… [A]nd there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough…. I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice…. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”
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Treason is one of the few crimes defined by the Constitution instead of by statute. It’s in Article III, Section 3:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
For Vindman to be guilty of treason, even if he had taken money from Ukrainian oligarchs, Ukraine would have to be our enemy. Trump and Musk may well switch our nation’s allegiance from Ukraine to Russia after January 20, 2025, but at the time of Vindman’s actions, Ukraine clearly was not our enemy.
Musk isn’t trying to scare or intimidate Vindman. I don’t even think he’s trying to scare or intimidate others who might oppose Trump in the future. I think this is purely performative, designed to keep the MAGA based riled up, and to set the table for blaiming the inevitable economic downturn on Trump’s enemies. It will be the Deep State’s fault, not Trump’s.
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December 2, 2024 (Monday)
Last night, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported that Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, Fox News Channel weekend host Pete Hegseth, had been forced to leave previous leadership positions at the advocacy groups Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America because of serious allegations of “financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.”
Under his direction, Veterans for Freedom ran up huge debt for what appears to have been inappropriate expenses; the group’s donors squeezed Hegseth out of his job and then shuttered the organization. He moved to Concerned Veterans for America.
A whistleblower for Concerned Veterans for America reported that Hegseth was repeatedly so drunk at events that he had to be carried out, and that he once tried to join dancers on stage at a strip club to which he brought his work team. Their report said that Hegseth and other members of his team divided the female staffers in the organization into “party girls” and “not party girls” and sexually pursued them, leading to allegations of sexual assault. Another complaint said that at a bar in the early hours of May 29, 2015, Hegseth began to chant drunkenly: “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”
An email from one of the whistleblowers to Hegseth’s successor at Concerned Veterans for America said that “[a]mong the staff, the disgust for Pete was pretty high.” The letter detailed Hegseth’s “history of alcohol abuse” and said he had “treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account—for partying, drinking, and using CVA events as little more than opportunities to ‘hook up’ with women on the road.”
By 2016, Hegseth was out at Concerned Veterans for America but had joined the Fox News Channel as a contributor. It was during this period that he appeared in October 2017 as a speaker at the California Federation of Republican Women’s convention, where he allegedly sexually assaulted a woman.
Also last night, President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden after repeatedly saying that he would not.
Trump-appointed Special Counsel David Weiss charged Hunter Biden on firearms and tax charges, but as former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance made clear in her Civil Discourse, Hunter Biden would not have been charged if he had been anyone other than the president’s son. He was charged with possession of a firearm by someone who is addicted to illegal drugs, a charge that prosecutors do not usually bring. Biden owned a gun for eleven days and apparently lied on the paperwork for it by saying he was not a drug addict when he was, in fact, in the throes of addiction.
The other charges stem from Hunter Biden’s failure, while dealing with addiction, to pay about $1.4 million in federal income taxes, which he has since paid in full plus interest and penalties. Vance explains that the government usually handles cases like his with administrative or civil penalties rather than criminal prosecution, as it did in the case of Trump henchman Roger Stone, with whom the government reached a settlement in 2022 for more than $2 million in unpaid income taxes, interest, and penalties without criminal charges.
But President Biden’s pardon covers not just those charges, but also “those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.” The pardon’s sweeping scope offers an explanation for why Biden issued it after saying he would not.
Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch notes that Biden’s pardon came after Trump’s announcement that he wants to place conspiracy theorist Kash Patel at the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Filipkowski studies right-wing media and points out that Patel’s many appearances there suggest he is obsessed with Hunter Biden, especially the story of his laptop, which Patel insists shows that Hunter and Joe Biden engaged in crimes with Ukraine and China.
House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) spent two years investigating these allegations and turned up nothing—although Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia used the opportunity to display pictures of Hunter Biden naked on national media—yet Patel insists that the Department of Justice should focus on Hunter Biden as soon as a Trump loyalist is back in charge.
Notably, Trump’s people, including former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his ally Lev Parnas, spent more than a year trying to promote false testimony against Hunter Biden by their Ukrainian allies. Earlier this year, in the documentary “From Russia with Lev,” produced by Rachel Maddow, Parnas publicly apologized to Hunter Biden for his role in the scheme.
As legal commentator Asha Rangappa noted: “People criticizing the Hunter Biden pardon need to recognize: For the 1st time, the FBI and Justice Department could literally fabricate evidence, or collaborate with a foreign government to ‘find’ evidence of a ‘crime,’ with zero accountability. That’s why the pardon goes back to 2014.”
And yet, much of American media today has been consumed not with the story that Trump has appointed a deeply problematic candidate to run what could be considered the nation’s most important department, overseeing about 3 million personnel and managing a budget of more than $800 billion, or with the reality that Biden’s distrust of our legal system under Trump is a profound warning for all of us.
Instead, they have focused on President Biden’s pardon of his son, many of them condemning what they say is Biden’s rejection of the rule of law.
Some have suggested that Biden’s pardoning his son will now give Trump license to pardon anyone he wants, apparently forgetting that in his first term, Trump pardoned his daughter Ivanka’s father-in-law, Charles Kushner, who pleaded guilty to federal charges of tax evasion, campaign finance offenses, and witness tampering and whom Trump has now tapped to become the U.S. ambassador to France.
Trump also pardoned for various crimes men who were associated with the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian operatives working to elect Trump. Those included his former national security advisor Michael Flynn, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, and former allies Roger Stone and Steve Bannon. Those pardons, which suggested Trump was rewarding henchmen, received a fraction of the attention lavished on Biden’s pardon of his son.
In today’s news coverage, the exercise of the presidential pardon—which traditionally gets very little attention—has entirely outweighed the dangerous nominations of an incoming president, which will have profound influence on the American people. This imbalance reflects a longstanding and classic power dynamic in which Republicans set the terms of public debate, excusing their own objectionable behavior while constantly attacking Democrats in a fiery display that attracts media attention but distorts reality.
The degree to which the media endorsed that abusive power dynamic today does not bode well for its accurate reporting during Trump’s upcoming term. It also leaves the public badly informed about matters that are important for understanding modern politics.
Among other stories that received less attention than Biden’s pardon of his son was that today right-wing activist Dinesh D’Souza publicly apologized to a man depicted in D’Souza’s film “2000 Mules.” That film claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and Trump used it to push the Big Lie that he was the true winner of that election, a lie that by 2023 close to 70% of Republicans believed.
While he continued to stand by the lie, D’Souza admitted that the film’s claim that the “mules” shown delivering ballots to dropboxes had been located through geolocation of their cell data was false. Earlier this year, after a man depicted in the film sued, the publisher of the film and the book on which it was based withdrew the book and the film from its platforms and issued a sweeping apology.
On X, D’Souza’s own comment about Biden’s pardon pointedly illustrated the partisan double standard: “No one is above the law—except my son Hunter!” he wrote above a picture of Biden and his son. This prompted progressive journalist Brian Tyler Cohen to reply: “You were literally pardoned by Trump.” Cohen was right: Trump pardoned D’Souza in 2018 after his conviction for committing campaign finance violations.
Another important story today was that the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) announced that on January 20, 2025, it will stop posting content on X. EFJ’s president, Maja Sever, explained that the organization could not “continue to participate in the social network feed of a man who proclaims the death of the media and therefore of journalists.” General secretary Ricardo Gutiérrez noted the “threat to democracy and freedom of expression posed by the cooperation between the president of the most powerful country in the world, Donald J. Trump, and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who is also the owner of social network X.”
Sever added: “The social media site X has become the preferred vector for conspiracy theories, racism, far-right ideas and misogynistic rhetoric. X is a platform that no longer serves the public interest at all, but the special ideological and financial interests of its owner and his political allies.”
Indeed, the extraordinary growth of the Bluesky social media site as the right wing has taken over X is turning X into another right-wing echo chamber. It was there that Representative Comer turned to post his reaction to Biden’s pardon, using it to resurrect the claims he could not substantiate in two years of searching from the head of the Oversight Committee.
“Joe Biden lies for a living,” he wrote. “He lied about not talking to his son about his shady business dealings. He lied when he said his family didn’t take in [money] from China & Russia. He lied when he said he wouldn’t pardon Hunter.” And then, after stating claims his own hearings had proved false, Comer got to the heart of the matter: “Joining [Sean Hannity] at [the Fox News Channel] TONIGHT 9pm. Tune in!”
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This might actually kill Hegseth’s nomination. Trump hates alcoholics.
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I hope so. But then he’ll just find someone who’s sober, but just as awful. 
He’s bound and determined to weaponize the DoD against the American people.
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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Trump is considering dumping Hegseth and replacing him with Ron DeSantis. Jesus fucking Christ.
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Perfect reaction, especially for, as Tromp used to call him, Ron DeSanctimonious.
There really is a lot of scum at the bottom of the barrel that Tromp is scraping.
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Santorum, in fact.
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This drives me crazy, all the people crying about, “this will give Trump all the justification he needs to pardon whomever he wants”. As if he ever sought permission or council for anything he did last time around. He just fucking did it. His entire presidency was all about shattering norms and when that wasn’t good enough, simply breaking laws with impunity.
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December 3, 2024 (Tuesday)
For an astonishing six hours today, South Korea underwent an attempted self-coup by its unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, only to see the South Korean people force him to back down as they reasserted the strength of their democracy.
In an emergency address at nearly 11:00 last night local time, Yoon announced that he was declaring martial law in South Korea for the first time since 1980, when special forces under a military dictatorship attacked pro-democracy activists in the city of Gwangju, leaving about 200 people dead or missing. South Koreans ended military rule in their country in 1987, writing a new constitution that made South Korea a republic.
Yoon claimed he had to declare martial law because his political opponents were sympathizing with communist North Korea. It was a thin pretext.
A member of the conservative People’s Party, Yoon was elected to a five-year presidential term in 2022 after a misogynistic campaign fueled by young men who saw equal rights for women— whose average monthly wage is 67.7% of that a man, according to the BBC’s Laura Bicker—as reverse discrimination that is taking away their own rights and opportunities.
Before his election, Yoon had no experience in the National Assembly, and once he was in office, his popularity slid to record lows. In legislative elections held last April, voters crushed Yoon’s party, giving opposition parties 192 of 300 seats in the National Assembly. The legislature fought with Yoon over his budget and launched a number of corruption investigations into Yoon’s allies as well as his wife.
And so, Yoon declared martial law, bringing the media under his control and banning political activities, “false propaganda,” “gatherings that incite social unrest,” and strikes. Police officers formed a blockade around the National Assembly, and helicopters landed on the roof to prevent lawmakers from getting inside to overturn Yoon’s declaration.
The South Korean people reacted immediately. Reporting from Seoul, John Yoon of the New York Times recounted the story of a real estate agent who watched President Yoon’s speech, got in his car, and drove for an hour to get to the National Assembly. The man told journalist Yoon, “I thought, ‘The end has come,’ so I came out. The president of a country has exerted his power by force, and its people have come out to protest that. We have to remove him from power from this point on. He’s in a position where he has to come down.”
Editor of The Verge Sarah Jeong, who works out of the U.S. and does not cover South Korean politics, happened to be working in Seoul this week and was on site after a night of drinking, giving an informed and honest account of what she was seeing. “[T]he crowd is a pretty even mix of young people and the older folks (mostly men) who would have been young during the dictatorship…. I heard tanks were here but I haven’t seen one yet. [O]ld men swearing ‘how dare the military come here.’”
Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Washington Post Tokyo/Seoul bureau chief, reported that the National Assembly managed to pull together a majority of its members—190 of 300—in about two and a half hours to participate in a unanimous vote to overturn Yoon’s emergency declaration of martial law. That vote included members of his own party.
Political commentator Adam Schwartz shared a video taken by the leader of South Korea’s Democratic Party, Lee Jae-myung, as he climbed over the wall of the National Assembly to vote against Yoon’s martial law declaration. Other videos showed people in the streets boosting legislators over the walls for the vote.
Yet another video showed South Korean soldiers trying to get into the National Assembly during the voting thwarted by people wielding a fire extinguisher and flashes from cameras.
While the law said Yoon had to abide by the legislators’ vote, it was not clear whether Yoon would do as the law required. About six hours after he had declared martial law, Yoon bowed to the National Assembly and the popular will and lifted his declaration.
Yoon has been widely condemned, and South Koreans from all parties, including his own, are calling for his resignation or impeachment. Raphael Rashid of The Guardian reported today that on the morning after the attempted coup, South Koreans are bewildered and sad. “For the older generation who fought on the streets against military dictatorships, martial law equals dictatorship, not 21st century Korea. The younger generation is embarrassed that he has ruined their country’s reputation. People are baffled.”
For the rest of the world, though, South Koreans’ immediate and aggressive response to a man trying to take away their democratic rights is an inspiration. Among other things, it illustrates that for all the claims that autocracy can react to events more quickly than democracy can, in fact autocrats are brittle. It is democracy that is determined and resilient.
The events in Seoul also cemented the shift in social media from X to Bluesky, where news was breaking faster than anywhere else, in a way that echoed what Twitter used to be. Since Twitter was a key site of democratic organizing until Elon Musk bought it and renamed it X, that shift is significant.
And finally, the events in South Korea emphasize that for all people often look to larger-than-life figures to define our nations, our history is in fact made up of regular people doing the best they can. Journalist Sarah Jeong found herself entirely unexpectedly in the middle of a coup and, recognizing that she was in a historic moment, snapped to work to do all she could to keep the rest of us informed. “I’m f*cking blasted and hanging out in the weirdest scene because history happened at a deeply inconvenient hour,” she wrote on Bluesky. “[S]o it goes.”
When she finally went home, Jeong wrote: “I expensed my cab ride home. I’m tired so I put ‘korea coup’ down in the expense code field.”
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That is an amazingly hopeful story. I can only hope we learn from it.
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WTF? I think Desantis has got his own skeletons, but not as deep as Hegseth’s it seems. Desantis taught for a bit at a fancy private school up in North GA and apparently went to some of the parties the kids had… Trump wants a loyalist in the position to try and weaponize the DoD against us, it seems, so either would do that job.
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I mean Giuliani… It’s not a diagnosis but I dunno if I’ve ever seen him not drunk.
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Emphasis mine. After enabling his overreach (ignoring regulations or exploiting loopholes in procedures), refusing to hold him accountable for his crimes, and using his administration to increase their own power or profits, I see little incentive for GOP pols to change course now. Another concern is that our military and citizens who support the incoming administration might react differently to a similar attempt to seize power.
I hope so too, because the folks who are promoting authoritarian rule here are probably updating their project plan. We need to learn how to mount effective resistance in a scenario that is much more violent. Better to be prepared, because the J6 event showed us how that group responds when they don’t get what they want. Fortunately, on that day the police and military were not on the side of the mob.
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JFC is right!
while getting MoRon into DC and out of Tallahassee, the immediate thought is “oh dear dog, that is just the fucking twisted situation that gives us Matt fucking Gaetz as governor for the remainder of desantis’ term.”
i can’t even anymore.
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THIS!!!
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