Don't Do Nothing

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These fucking guys

I had just updated "It's the lying" with a Steve Vladeck piece outlining why the mafia government was lying when it claimed there was nothing they could do about the illegal kidnapping and rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. 

And then the five MAGA justices on the United States Supreme Court did THIS: 

"We grant the application and vacate the TROs." 

Translation: The government can continue invoking the Alien Enemies Act and resume deporting whoever it wants--as long as the kidnap victims get a day in court first and that court is in the jurisdiction of the U.S. prison where they are being held and they can find a lawyer while they are locked up. 

What about the prisoners in El Salvador? What about Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia who was sent there by mistake? What about the 237 other Venezuelans, 75% of whom have no criminal record but who were renditioned (more mistakes?) to a torture prison in El Salvador in defiance of an order from Chief Judge James Boasburg of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia?

The majority doesn't have much to offer on those questions. They dodge the issue of whether or not this mafia government is acting legally re: the Alien Enemies Act ("But we do not reach those arguments.") and they pretend everything's just routine, as if the government hasn't just spent three weeks thwarting the judicial process and ignoring court orders. And though there haven't been further midnight planes reported (but how can we know for sure?), people continue to be kidnapped and disappeared to U.S. "facilities." Nevertheless, the majority reduces the crisis to a matter of procedure, of proper venue.

However, the dissent from Justice Sotomayor does not, and it is definitely worth reading, as is the separate, additional dissent from Justice Jackson. These dissents reflect what we are all really living through. They are compelling, sane responses to the ridiculous and corrupt and deliberately obtuse majority whose only objective seems to be to protect Donald Trump and advance his authoritarian agenda. 

I'm going to stop there, except to quote from Justice Sotomayor's opinion (emphasis mine):

What if the Government later determines that it sent one of these detainees to CECOT in error? Or a court eventually decides that the President lacked authority under the Alien Enemies Act to declare that Tren de Aragua is perpetrating or attempting an “invasion” against the territory of the United States? The Government takes the position that, even when it makes a mistake, it cannot retrieve individuals from the Salvadoran prisons to which it has sent them. See Defendant’s Memorandum of Law in Opposition in Abrego Garcia v. Noem, No. 25–cv–951 (D Md., Mar. 31, 2025), ECF Doc. 11, at 7–9. The implication of the Government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal. History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this Nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.

It is only a matter of time before the leader of a march or the writer of a substack, before a journalist or a member of the House of Representatives, is arrested and detained. If we're lucky, we'll read about it:

"Plaintiffs allege that, on [insert date], [insert name] was stopped by ICE officers, who informed him that his citizenship status had changed. He was detained, questioned, and transferred to a detention center in an undisclosed location."

Sorry I went on so long. Please don't let that stop you from reading these two excellent sources for analysis of the opinion:

One First
140. "The Disturbing Myopia of Trump v. J.G.G." by Steve Vladeck

Mark Joseph Stern's "The Supreme Court’s New 5–4 Bailout for Trump Couldn’t Be More Ominous" in Slate.

It's the lying. with an update

Our mafia government with its narcissistic sociopath-in-chief does not care about Social Security. It doesn't care about jobs or other nations' sovereignty or court orders telling it that it can't do some illegal thing it wants to do. It doesn't care about guilt or innocence or "due process." It cares only about power and expressions of power. It believes it has the right to decide who gets treated lawfully and who doesn't simply because it has the power to do it. It wants to demonstrate that. And it wants to lie about everything.

Trump can run for a third term.
Tariffs are paid by the other guy.
Trump really won in 2020.
Ivermectin! Bleach! Very Powerful Light!

The list goes on forever. 

A lot has been written, of course, about the use of lying and propaganda in politics and their function as a means of control. Hannah Arendt, George Orwell (Eric Blair) helped create the language that allows us to understand what's being done to us. 

Why all the lying?

1. To demonstrate power over subordinates

2. To compromise and implicate associates

    "In a gang or the Mafia, your first kill makes you trustworthy, because you’re now dependent on the group to keep your secrets, and can’t credibly claim to be superior to them."

 3. To erase the distinction between what is true and what is false. But why?

        In The Yale Review of International Studies in 2021, Liam Will put it this way:

Modern propagandists, however, have given up on this old model and invented something newer and far more effective. Rather than seeking to create a grand meta-narrative that can explain everything, modern authoritarians seek to destroy the concept of truth itself, making it impossible to explain anything, and possible to deny everything.

Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, in a 2016 Facebook post reminded us, "To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so."

And, from "Truth and Politics," Hannah Arendt has this for us:

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

Why all the lying? To destroy "the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world..." To destabilize reality and replace objective facts with the authority of the Leader, in this case Donald Trump, and by extension his minions. It's a familiar strategy dressed up in a ball cap and a big red tie.

Right now, as far as we know, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, having been kidnapped on March 12th from an IKEA parking lot "with his 5-year-old son in the car," is being tortured in a Salvadoran prison infamous for doing just that. The government admits his rendition was a mistake but claims it is powerless to effect his release and return. They are lying. There is a hearing tomorrow where, undoubtedly, the government will shrug and lie again, about what they did, about what they knew and when, most of all they will lie about Abrego Garcia. It's what they do.

(Update: This excellent "One First" piece from Steve Vladeck is a first-rate explainer for how and why the administration's claim that there's nothing they can do and you can't make me is a bunch of bunk.)

Vance lied about Abrego Garcia's being "a convicted MS-13 gang member" when, in fact, back in 2019 when Abrego Garcia actually did get his day in court, not only was ICE unable to make the gang charges stick, the judge instead granted Abrego Garcia protected status. 

More from Greg Sargent's piece:

Let us gently suggest that these facts don’t matter to Vance in the least. This is not meant glibly: For Vance, that is the case as a matter of principle. He is nakedly asserting the power to decree Abrego Garcia a criminal subject to expulsion, even if—or especially if—the facts show the contrary. The administration is doing this on many fronts, from this case to the efforts to remove foreign students to the deportations of Venezuelans to a Salvadoran prison.

Let me gently suggest that facts DO matter, to Vance, to Trump, to their evil gang of thugs, and to all the bowers and scrapers vying to be lickspittle of the month. Facts are the target and they establish what "contrary" means. Facts matter because they must be battered by lies while those who remember them are viciously attacked. Facts matter because by destroying them or overwhelming them, the Leader demonstrates dominance over them. His (in this case) story becomes the only legitimate story. They lie because they have to, and...

They continue to lie. Pay special attention to the reference to secret evidence.

They lie to break reality, to break the world we see around us, to break us. They lie for power. The truth has power, too. But it doesn't speak for itself.

"Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." 

 nineteen eighty-four, George Orwell

Not Nothing.

 Los Angeles, yesterday.

                                  

Yes. Enough is enough.

Thanks to everyone who showed up. It's not the whole thing, but it's not nothing. And it's only the beginning. We need to live these next few months and years in a way we can be proud of when it's over.

Speak to you soon.

Why is everything so fucked up?

                      The answer to all your questions is: Money.

According to teevee host and former sportswriter Tony Kornheiser, television producer and network big shot Don Ohlmeyer once told him, "The answer to all your questions is: Money."

When we try and figure out how we got into this mess, I'm sure many of us can point to our own favorite incident, policy, condition, cause, or villain, as the reason things are so fucked up. When it comes up among friends, individual lists grow and merge into a gigantic trail of crimes and outrages and, of course, they and we are all correct. I don't even have to open my mouth anymore. When it's my turn everyone just shouts "Reagan!" before I can open my mouth. 

Turns out I may have a case, of sorts. 

A working paper from RAND released in February examines income inequality among U.S. workers. It builds upon an earlier study, and RAND describes it this way: "This short analysis extends the results from a prior study about the gap between what the majority of workers earned from 1975 to 2018 and what they would have earned with more evenly distributed income growth (Price and Edwards, 2020)." It's a short, clear, easy read and I encourage you to take a look at it here, but the money shot is as follows (emphasis mine):

These values are intended to provide an indication of the scale of rising inequality and its durability over the last nearly five decades. Looking at the net effects of these trends, if we had the income distribution from 1975, the majority of workers (the bottom 90 percent by income) would have made an additional $3.9 trillion dollars in 2023. Cumulatively, the gap between what workers from 1975 to 2023 earned and what they would have earned with the counterfactual income distribution amounts to $79 trillion (in 2023 dollars). Compared to the $47 trillion from the 2020 study, the additional $32 trillion dollars comes from extending the time-period by five years, inflating from 2018 to 2023, and additional growth in inequality.

Seventy-nine trillion dollars is a lot of money. A lot of child care and college educations and homes that could have been passed down to help create generational wealth. Instead, "the bottom 90 percent" did not fully participate in the growth of the American economy they helped produce. You know who did? You know who reaped their own benefits and a giant share of everybody else's? Sure you do. 

And not for nothing, there's this from the RAND paper:

For three decades following the Second World War, incomes for workers across the income distribution grew at the same pace as the broader economy. This changed in the late 1970s, when earnings growth began disproportionately flowing to those with the highest incomes leading to four decades of rising inequality.

The late 1970's. Arthur Laffer. Jack Kemp. William Roth. Voodoo supply-side trickle down "economics." And do you know who endorsed this nonsense, who ran on it and was elected in 1980? Sure you do. 

That is a huge part of how we went from thirteen U.S. billionaires in 1980 to over 900 today (+ around 7000 percent). Since geographical distinctions are not what they used to be, it's also instructive to note that Forbes reports its own count as rising from 140 billionaires worldwide in 1987 to 3,028 today. Up 2162% give or take. It's been a good run if you're a billionaire and/or heir to one. For the rest of us, not so great. 

And that is a big reason why everything is so fucked up.

Thanks for reading. Speak to you soon. 

Don't Do Nothing.

                                     

So many people have written or said it that I can't find a clear original source, but it's too true not to use. If anyone knows, please share its origin. Goes like this:

"If you ever wonder what you would have done in Nazi Germany, take a look at yourself. You're doing it right now."

I'll be at the rally tomorrow in downtown Los Angeles. Where will you be?

Free Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia

 and all the rest of them, too.

This isn't about crimes or "very bad people" (except those in our mafia government h/t Sarah Kendzior) or tattoos. It's about due process. Jeffrey Dahmer got due process. Timothy McVeigh got due process. Nazis got the Nuremberg Trials. The people being disappeared right now--from Abrego Garcia to college students to "the worst of the worst of the worst"--DESERVE DUE PROCESS. 

As Greg Sargent wrote yesterday in The New Republic:

It should go without saying that even if we ultimately learn terrible things about all these defendants, they are still entitled to due process. That’s how due process works: It’s afforded to everyone regardless of their eventual guilt or innocence. Indeed, this is precisely how we can be confident in the final decision that they are guilty or innocent under our laws.

Except it doesn't go without saying. The truth doesn't speak for itself; it has to be spoken by someone. And the truth is that this administration, our mafia government, doesn't care about guilt or innocence. It cares only about power and expressions of power. It believes it has the right to decide who gets treated lawfully and who doesn't simply because it has the power to do it and it wants to demonstrate that. 

It simply cannot be that one vicious racketeer with his evil band of thugs gets to decide who lives and who dies. We cannot allow it. 

Every detainee, and every deportee, and every one of us deserves to face our accusers and have our charges tried in front of judges and lawyers and the people who write it all down. We deserve it because it's right there in the American Bible everyone pretends to care so much about (emphasis mine):

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Persons have a RIGHT TO DUE PROCESS. It's what prevents Abrego Garcia--or you, or me--from ending up in a torture prison in El Salvador or Cuba--or Louisiana--by mistake with the mafia government shrugging that there's nothing they can do.

We are all Abrego Garcia. 

U.S. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey