But, again, this is missing the wider context of just why it was insecure when many many activists and journalists use Signal around the world to avoid arrest. I find it frustrating that someone who does such sterling research can’t get this basic fact right or at least expand on it.
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March 30, 2025 (Sunday)
On the Fox News Channel this morning, Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett said: “President Trump has a long run vision of a golden age of America and we’re working really, really hard to get it out there in time. But I can’t give you any forward-looking guidance on what’s gonna happen this week. The president has got a heck of a lot of analysis before him, and he’s gonna make the right choice, I’m sure.”
The National Economic Council is the primary group the president uses to develop domestic and international economic policy, so the fact that Hassett appears to have no idea what’s coming is concerning. Trump has declared April 2 “Liberation Day” because he will announce big new tariffs, posting on his social media site on March 21: “For DECADES we have been ripped off and abused by every nation in the World, both friend and foe. Now it is finally time for the Good Ol’ USA to get some of that MONEY and RESPECT, BACK. GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!”
Other Trump regime officials appear similarly uninformed about Trump’s plans. Fox News Channel personality Shannon Bream asked Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, what to say to consumers who worry that tariffs are going to raise prices, he answered: “Trust in Trump.” He then claimed that “tariffs are tax cuts,” which makes sense only if he means that tariffs, which raise prices on consumers, might provide enough revenue for the government to enable Republicans to justify tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations.
Trump campaigned on the promise to “immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One,” but his tariffs have already helped to push inflation upward. Josh Dawsey and Ryan Felton of the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Trump warned the chief executive officers of “some of the country’s top auto manufacturers not to raise prices because of the 25% tariffs he has just put on cars and car parts, telling them that the tariffs are good for them.
On Saturday, Trump denied he had made such a request and told NBC News’s Kristen Welker that “I couldn’t care less if they raise prices, because people are going to start buying American cars.”
“I couldn’t care less,” he repeated. “I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are going to buy American-made cars. We have plenty.” A White House aide told NBC News that the president was referring to foreign car prices.
And then there is Friday’s story that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been taking not only his brother but also his wife along with him to “meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed.” Katherine Long, Max Colchester, Daniel Michaels, and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal note that her inclusion in such meetings is unusual. Jennifer Hegseth also accompanied Hegseth to his private meetings with senators during the process of his Senate confirmation, “making it awkward to ask questions about allegations related to infidelity and sexual misconduct.”
Both Trump and Hegseth have made it their goal to purge the United States of what they call “Marxism” and what Hegseth calls “woke sh*t”: that is, the racial, gender, and religious diversity that Americans have embraced since World War II. That means taking the government the country has built over the past 80 years down to the ground and rebuilding it as they imagine it was before, with men like them in charge.
The Trump regime is the result of at least 45 years of Republican rhetoric that undermined the idea of a government that worked for the good of everyone by claiming that such a government was “socialism” or “Marxism.” That argument had nothing to do with actual Marxism, which called for the people to take over farms and factories, and everything to do with America’s peculiar history.
During the Civil War of the 1860s, the Republicans in Congress both ended human enslavement in the U.S. except as punishment for crime and invented the nation’s first system of national taxation, including the income tax. After the war, racist former Confederates in the South refused to accept the idea that Black Americans were equal to their white neighbors and tried to force formerly enslaved people into subservience. To stop that from happening, Americans in 1868 added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, putting the weight of the federal government behind equal rights. In 1870, Americans added to the Constitution the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing the right of Black men to vote. Also in 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to prosecute those in the South who continued to persecute their Black neighbors on grounds of race.
In response, former Confederates in 1871 began to maintain—falsely—that they had never objected to Black rights on racial grounds. What they opposed, they said, was that poor Black men, impoverished because of their time in slavery, had the right to vote. Those men would, they said, vote for services like roads and schools and hospitals, and such services could be paid for only through tax levies on propertied Americans who overwhelmingly were white men. Thus, permitting Black men to vote meant “socialism” that would destroy the United States. To restore true American values, former Confederates and their northern counterparts insisted, Black Americans must be shut out of a voice in government.
That rhetoric resurfaced after World War II. In that era, the vast majority of Americans embraced a government that worked for everyone by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights. But those Republicans eager to avoid regulation and taxation reached back to Reconstruction to insist that a government that worked in the interest of all Americans was redistributing wealth from hardworking Americans to undeserving minorities and women. Restoring true American values, they said, meant making sure that “Marxists” and minorities could not influence politics, especially after the 1965 Voting Rights Act restored voting rights to Black Americans and people of color.
That rhetoric that tied racism and taxes elected Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980, and it has since metastasized until the top seven donors to the 2024 political cycle together gave almost a billion dollars to Republicans, with Elon Musk alone contributing more than $291 million. The list, compiled by Open Secrets, shows that Democratic donors don’t kick in until number eight on the list, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who gave slightly more than $64 million to Democrats. George Soros, the Republicans’ supervillain, didn’t make the top 25. As those wealthy donors wish, the Trump administration is shredding the post–World War II government and has prioritized tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
Trump’s government is also firing women, Black and Brown Americans, and gender minorities from public positions and working to erase them from our history. MAGA Republicans have fired up their base against immigrants they claim are “invading” the United States, an exaggerated vision in which White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, for example, claims that “[w]e were invaded and occupied. Entire neighborhoods were conquered. Entire towns were subjugated. Our treasury was in the plundered. [sic]”
That wildly exaggerated vision has enabled Republicans to justify throwing overboard the due process on which American rights are based. On Friday, Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN) told booing constituents: “You violated the rules, you are not entitled to due process.” In fact, in the United States, the due process of law is what establishes whether someone has violated the “rules,” otherwise known as the law.
Just how profoundly the administration is violating civil rights came through today when news broke of an “Alien Enemies Act Validation Guide” obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The guide lays out a point system by which officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can determine if an immigrant is eligible for rendition to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador. The guide tags people as members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang if they reach 8 points on a point system in which officers determine what seems to them a “gang tattoo” or a gang sign, or interact with those ICE says are gang members.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that nearly all of the criteria on the list are subjective, which helps to explain why so many people who are apparently unaffiliated with TdA were swept up in the rendition. “With this checklist,” Reichlin-Melnick writes, “ICE can declare any Venezuelan an ‘Alien Enemy’ without ANY concrete evidence—based solely on an ICE officer’s interpretation of tattoos and hand signs which may be completely innocent or the bad luck of having a roommate ICE thinks is TDA.”
The MAGA Republicans’ worldview is the same as that of the Confederates who preceded them: some people are better than others and have the right to rule. It is no coincidence that Trump recently called for the restoration of Confederate statues. But if that worldview is correct, then getting rid of President Joe Biden’s inclusive economy and hiring practices and putting white men in charge of everything should mean exactly what Trump is promising: a golden age of America.
Instead, the strong economy the Biden administration created is tumbling, and Trump administration officials seem to have no plan to stop it except to “Trust in Trump.” The officers in charge of keeping the nation safe have instead broken the law in an epic fail demonstrating that they have no foreign policy plan except military strikes highlighted with emojis. They appear to disdain national security procedures.
And the Signal scandal appears to have been just the tip of the iceberg. Tonight, Alexander Ward, Josh Dawsey, and Meridith McGraw of the Wall Street Journal reported that two U.S. officials told them that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz “has created and hosted multiple other sensitive national-security conversations on Signal with cabinet members.”
When the former Confederates called for cutting Black men out of the vote in the 1870s by insisting their votes would usher in socialism, Americans didn’t know whether a government elected by a wider range of Americans than in the past would thrive. In 2025 we have experienced not only 80 years of a government that created a strong economy and a stable world as it worked for all Americans. We have also experienced the four years recently past, in which the Biden administration demonstrated that such a government worked. It left us with a booming economy and strong national security that the Trump regime is now mangling.
Nonetheless, Trump is digging into the position that some people are better than others and have the right to rule. Today he told NBC News that he is considering a third presidential term, although that is explicitly unconstitutional. “I’m not joking,” he said, “There are methods which you could do it.”
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It goes back much further than 45 years. I posted this in the religion thread, I think, but it’s related to this issue.
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Why did the “foreign military counterparts” not refuse to meet with Hogsbreath if there were people with him with no security clearance?
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Reminds me of how Pence wouldn’t meet with women alone. Either Whiskeyleak’s wife doesn’t trust him or someone in the administration thinks having his wife along will prevent him from sexually assaulting someone. Or cover for him when he’s falling down drunk
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Yeah I’m sure her relationship with him is very very normal, not at all codependent, and definitely never crosses professional boundaries that are completely inappropriate for his office!
I do understand there is some level of involvement in political families no matter what fwiw. But, the red flags in this family already got cut up and sewn into hats.
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Every time he puts out a statement like this all I hear is
“I’m smart! Not like everybody says… like dumb! I’m smart and I want respect!”
Every. Fucking. Time.
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I’m not sure it would matter, considering how many times leaders had meetings that included 
kids and in-laws:
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Apparently Roslyn Carter sometimes sat it on briefings when Jimmy Carter was President. He said she would have made a better politician than he did.
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Not her most inspired phrase. Sometimes I forgot that Heather Cox is, after all, american.
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Could you explain? This American is in the dark a bit too… Didn’t Marx call for workers to seize the means of production?
Edit: Oh wait, is it that Marxism isn’t a form of government?
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It took me a long time to deprogram myself from the shit I learned starting in social studies class in the 3rd or 4th grade all the way through college history, government, and economics classes. Hell, I’m probably not fully deprogrammed even now.
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March 31, 2025 (Monday)
On April 1, 1861, Secretary of State William Henry Seward wrote an astonishing letter to President Abraham Lincoln. Less than a month after Lincoln had taken office, Seward had little faith in the apparently uneducated president from the raw West and was angry that the Cabinet had overruled him to provision South Carolina’s Fort Sumter rather than evacuating it. Seward was convinced that he, rather than Lincoln, should lead the administration.
Seward complained that Lincoln had not yet established “a policy either domestic or foreign” and said he had figured out the solution to the nation’s political crisis, in which seven states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—had seceded from the Union in the weeks after Lincoln was elected president but before he took office. “[W]e must,” Seward wrote, “Change the question before the Public from one upon Slavery, or about Slavery for a question upon Union or Disunion.”
The way to do that, he wrote, was to rally Americans around the flag. To do so, he told Lincoln, “I would demand explanations from Spain and France, categorically, at once. I would seek explanations from Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada, Mexico and Central America, to rouse a vigorous continental spirit of independence on this continent against European intervention. And if satisfactory explanations are not received from Spain and France, Would convene Congress and declare war against them.”
Modestly, Seward concluded: “Either the President must do it himself…or Devolve it upon some member of his Cabinet…. It is not in my especial province. But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.”
In other words, Seward proposed taking charge of the U.S. government from the elected president, and then bringing Americans together by starting a war with Spain, France, Great Britain, or Russia—who was on the other side really didn’t matter. A crisis could be created with any of them. The point was to quell dissent at home by turning Americans against another country.
Lincoln spoke directly to Seward about his letter and then dropped the matter, leaving the secretary of state’s preposterous suggestion on the floor like the lead balloon it was. The two went on to forge a strong relationship, with Lincoln as the head of the administration and without starting a war with another country.
But Seward’s missive demonstrated a historical truism: when one country invades another, it usually reflects the problems of the invader’s domestic politics, no matter what the justification for the invasion is.
Although President Donald Trump never mentioned taking over Greenland—or Canada, or Panama, or Mexico—during the 2024 campaign, he has made such takeovers a key objective of his administration. On March 6, Trump addressed “the incredible people of Greenland” during a joint session of Congress, telling them that the U.S. needs Greenland “for national security and even international security…. And I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it.” On March 29, Trump told Kristen Welker of NBC News: “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah, 100%.” He said that there’s a “good possibility that we could do it without military force” but that “I don’t take anything off the table.”
On Friday, Vice President J.D. Vance led a delegation to Greenland, an island of about 56,000 people that is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark. As founding members of both the United Nations in 1945 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, Denmark and the United States are allies of long standing. Immediately after World War II, the American military maintained 17 bases and installations in Greenland, with thousands of soldiers, but now it maintains only the Pituffik Space Base on Greenland’s northwest coast with about 200 soldiers. It was there that Vance landed with his wife, as well as disgraced national security advisor Mike Waltz, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) on Friday after Greenlanders and Danes opposed a more extended itinerary.
Vance told Denmark it had “underinvested in the people of Greenland, and you have underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful landmass filled with incredible people. That has to change.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen dismissed Vance’s assertion, saying that Denmark is “a good and strong ally.” Danish foreign minister Løkke Rasmussen noted that a 1951 agreement between the U.S. and Denmark “offers ample opportunity for the United States to have a much stronger military presence in Greenland. If that is what you wish, then let us discuss it.”
Greenland sits between the United States, Europe, and Russia on the Arctic Circle, where melting ice is making the seas more navigable. Climate change also offers access to Greenland’s rare earth minerals that are of strategic importance for modern economies, as well as oil and gas reserves.
The Trump regime wants those resources, but perhaps even more to the point, the U.S. invading another country—any other country, but particularly an ally—demolishes a key founding principle of the post–World War II order: that countries will respect each other’s borders and sovereignty. In seizing Greenland from Denmark, the U.S. would justify Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory.
That the United States is even talking about this is bonkers. Leaders from Greenland and Denmark have said the island is not for sale. National security scholar Tom Nichols posted: “The President of the United States just implied he would use force against an ally in an unprovoked war of aggression and conquest—and the entire world is so used to ignoring him like a crazy grandpa in the attic that it’s not the biggest story on the planet.”
A Fox News poll conducted from March 14 to March 17 showed that only 26% of Americans like the idea of taking over Greenland.
Americans also aren’t keen about the regime sweeping up legal U.S. residents in its deportation programs. A CBS News/YouGov survey from March 27–28 showed that 71% of Americans thought it was “not acceptable” for immigration authorities to mistakenly detain legal U.S. residents as part of the regime’s larger deportation program, while only 29% thought it would be acceptable.
And yet, today Nick Miroff of The Atlantic reported that Trump administration attorneys admitted in a court filing that officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement had seized and deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia by accident. Abrego Garcia fled gang threats in El Salvador when he was 16, and came to the U.S. He has no criminal record, works full time as a union sheet metal apprentice, is married to an American citizen, and is the father of a disabled U.S. citizen. He had been granted legal protected status from return to El Salvador after a judge found he was likely to be targeted by gangs if he was sent back.
The U.S. government did not charge Abrego Garcia with a crime but deported him to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) because of an administrative error. “This was an oversight,” the government told the court. But, because he is no longer in U.S. custody, the government said it is beyond the reach of U.S. courts to get him back.
Abrego Garcia’s attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, told Miroff he had never seen a case where the government ignored protective legal status and deported someone. “They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief,’’ he told Miroff. “If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless—all of them—because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”
Tomorrow, voters will have a chance to weigh in on the government when elections take place in two Florida districts to fill seats vacated by the resignations of Mike Waltz, now national security advisor, and Matt Gaetz. Wisconsin, too, will hold an election, for a ten-year term on the state supreme court. That position will likely determine whether Wisconsin’s congressional maps remain gerrymandered in favor of Republicans, permitting them to pick up more seats than they have earned. Such skewing has made it possible for Republicans to retain control of the House of Representatives, and candidate Susan Crawford is likely to vote in favor of fair maps to replace the gerrymandered ones.
While it is supposed to be a nonpartisan election, President Trump has thrown his weight behind candidate Brad Schimel. Billionaire Elon Musk has thrown his checkbook, putting almost $20 million behind Schimel. On Sunday Musk traveled to Wisconsin, where he said the election could determine “the future of America and Western Civilization,” warning that a court with Crawford on it would redraw the gerrymandered districts and “add seats for Democrats.”
On Sunday, Musk gave away two checks for $1 million each to individuals who attended his rally for Schimel and signed a petition against “activist judges”. Musk got around the Wisconsin law against exchanging an item of value to get someone to vote or not to vote by claiming the checks were for “spokesperson agreements.” But the video recorded by one of the recipients linked her vote to Musk’s check, saying, “I did exactly what Elon Musk told everyone to do: sign the petition, refer friends and family, vote, and now I have a million dollars.”
The other check for a million dollars went to the chair of the Wisconsin College Republicans, who has worked for Republican campaigns.
“Let me talk for a minute or two about my opponent, Elon Musk,” Crawford told supporters on Monday. She announced her candidacy for the race before Trump was elected, and according to Scott Bauer of the Associated Press, she said she never imagined she would be fighting against “the richest man in the world.”
Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler said he thought “people do not want to see Elon Musk buying election after election after election. If it works here, he’s going to do it all over the country.”
Meanwhile Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) has been speaking on the floor of the Senate since 7:00 tonight because, he said, “I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis.” “These are not normal times in America. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.”
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Booker is still speaking, I think. He’s been on the floor over 12 hours.
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Ok. First of all let me preface that despite my avatar, I’m no communist. I have friends who are, and usually are gracious enough to let me participate in some of the conversations (the avatar is a chinese meme that I though was very funny, and was the first thing I had in hand when setting up the account 
)
My understanding is that while trending economic theories of the time predicted that progressive industrialization would free time for everyone, he feared that the rent extraction nature of capitalism would progressively worsen the condition of workers. His solution was, of course, to colectivize the means of production (which includes farm and factories but also houses: rising rent prices was already a problem then, and only the massive destruction of wealth during the world wars allowed for a temporary reprieve in capital hoarding). This is what he called communism.
So communism comes in many flavours, of which marxism is one. Marx did not advocate for violent revolution: he believed that the system could be transformed by peaceful means by putting the wealth back in society through democratic control. He also advocated for transforming factories/farms into cooperatives in which workers owned a part of the enterprise as opposed as earning a fixed wage.
He was not all flower power though, he mentions class vs class and even intra-class violent clashes early in his writings. It is something we are seeing now: rich people using racism, religion and nationalism (and gender identity, and whatever they can use to split us) to turn the workers against each other. I do not pity the neonazis, but they exist because capitalism needs the proletariat divided.
Marxists usually will say that no revolution is bloodless, and will point things like the american revolution, or the french revolution, etc… And thats usually where I start to disagree with my friends, as in: we know that, unchecked, most systems of goverment seem to tend towards authoritarianism, but communist regimes seem to devolve faster. To be fair, my friends seem to be very good at finding explanations and I have not been sent to a reeducation camp yet
I guess my issue is that it sounds like an extremely cliché phrase learned from young age to help rejecting good socialist practices like controlling rent and monopolies, universal healthcare and redistributing excess wealth via judicious taxation. “Taking over the means of production” (with the violent connotation which seems to imply that phrase) is extremely reductionist and spits in all advances socialism (which basically is marxism, too) has done to curb the excesses of capitalism.
Sorry for the long rant.
ETA: my communist and anarchist friends describe me as “left leaning, well intentioned, puts his foot in his mouth often, but at least is trying” 
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Yep. Whenever I hear someone use “Marxist” as an epithet, I point out to them that they are objecting to the radical idea of employee-owned companies - like that one over there (Winco Foods) or that one (Bob’s Red Mill).
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See also: Publix, Hy-Vee, and King Arthur Baking. What is it about grocery stores and flour companies that make them go employee owned?
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My favorite response to that sort of argument (knowing full well that ‘it’s complicated’ is very much in play here):
And it’s a perfect example for you in particular!
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