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You have three days left, if you got suckered in by those omnipresent ads for Medicare Advantage and left regular Medicare for the siren song of cheaper coverage, “free” vision, hearing, or dental, or even “free” money to buy groceries or rides to the doc.

The open enrollment period for real Medicare closes at the end of the day Saturday, December 7th; after that, you’re locked into the Medicare Advantage plan you may have bought until next year.

If you’ve had Medicare Advantage for a year or more, however, the open enrollment period is still “open” until December 7th, but you will want to make sure you can get a “Medigap” plan that fills in the 20% that real Medicare doesn’t cover.

Companies are required to write a Medigap policy for you at a reasonable price when you turn 65, no matter how sick you are or what preexisting conditions you may have, but if you’ve been “off Medicare” by being on Medicare Advantage for more than a year, they don’t have to write you a policy, so double-check that and sign up for a Medigap policy before making the switch back to real Medicare.

So, what’s this all about and why is it so complicated?

When George W. Bush and congressional Republicans (and a handful of bought-off Democrats) created Medicare Advantage in 2003, it was the fulfillment of half of Bush’s goal of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, dating all the way back to his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978 and a main theme of his second term in office.

Medicare Advantage is not Medicare. These plans are private health insurance provided by private corporations, who are then reimbursed at a fixed rate by the Medicare trust fund regardless of how much their customers use their insurance. Thus, the more they can screw their customers and us taxpayers by withholding healthcare payments, the more money they make.

With real Medicare, if your doctor says you need a test, procedure, scan, or any other medical intervention you simply get it done and real Medicare pays the bill. No muss, no fuss, no permission needed. Real Medicare always pays, and if they think something’s not kosher, they follow up after the payment’s been made so as not to slow down the delivery of your healthcare.

With Medicare Advantage, however, you’re subject to “pre-clearance,” meaning that the insurance company inserts itself between you and your doctor: You can’t get the medical help you need until or unless the insurance company pre-clears you for payment.

These companies thus make much of their billions in profit by routinely denying claims — 1.5 million, or 18 percent of all claims, were turned down in one year alone — leaving Advantage policy holders with the horrible choice of not getting the tests or procedures they need or paying for them out-of-pocket.

Given this, you’d think that most people would stay as far away from these private Medicare Advantage plans as they could. But Congress also authorized these plans to compete unfairly with real Medicare by offering things real Medicare can’t (yet). These include free or discounted dental, hearing, eyeglasses, gym memberships, groceries, rides to the doctor, and even cash rebates.

You and I pay for those freebies, but that’s only half of the horror story.

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This year, as Matthew Cunningham-Cook pointed out in Wendell Potter’s brilliant Health Care un-covered Substack newsletter, we’re ponying up an additional $64 billion to give to these private insurance companies to “reimburse” them for the freebies they relentlessly advertise on television, online, and in print.

And here’s the most obscene part of the whole thing: the companies won’t tell the government (us!) how much of that $64 billion they’ve actually spent. They just take the money and say, “Thank you very much.” And then, presumably, throw a few extra million into the pockets of each of their already obscenely-well-paid senior executives.

For example, the former CEO of the nation’s largest Medicare Advantage provider, UnitedHealth, walked away with over a billion dollars in total compensation. With a “B.” One guy. His successor made off with over a half-billion dollars in pay and stock.

Good work if you can get it: all you need do is buy off a hundred or so members of Congress, courtesy of Clarence Thomas’ billionaire-funded tie-breaking vote on Citizens United, and threaten the rest of Congress with massive advertising campaigns for their opponents if they try to stop you.

And while the companies refuse to tell us how much of the $64 billion that we’re throwing at them this year to offer “free” dental, etc. is actually used, what we do know is that most of that money is not going to pay for the freebies they advertise. As Cunningham-Cook noted, in one study only 11 percent of Advantage policyholders who’d signed up with plans offering dental care used that benefit.

Another study showed over-the-counter-drug freebies were used only a third of the time, leaving $5 billion in the insurance companies money bins just for that “reimbursable” goodie. A later study found that at least a quarter of all Advantage policyholders failed to use any of the freebies they’d been offered when they signed up.

That’s an enormous amount of what the industry calls “breakage”; benefits offered and paid for by the government but not used. Billions of dollars left over every month. And, used or not, you and I sure paid for them.

In my book The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, I lay out the story of this scam and how badly so many American seniors — and all American taxpayers, regardless of age — get ripped off by it.

And now it looks like things are about to get a whole lot worse.

When he was president last time, Donald Trump substantially expanded Medicare Advantage, calling real Medicare “socialism.” Project 2025 and candidate Trump both promised to end real Medicare “immediately” if Trump was re-elected; at the very least, they’ll make Medicare Advantage the “default” program people are steered into when they turn 65 and sign up for Medicare.

These giant insurance companies ripped off us taxpayers last year to the tune of an estimated $140 billion over and above what it would’ve cost us if people had simply been on real Medicare, according to a report from Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP).

If there was no Medicare Advantage scam bleeding off all that cash to pay for executives’ private jets, real Medicare could be expanded to cover dental, vision, and hearing and even end the need for Medigap plans.

But for now, the privatization gravy train continues to roll along. The insurance giants use some of that money to buy legislators, and some of it for expensive advertising to dupe seniors into joining their programs. The company (Benefytt) that hired Joe Namath to pitch Medicare Advantage, for example, was recently hit with huge fines by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive advertising.

The FTC news release laid it out:

“Benefytt pocketed millions selling sham insurance to seniors and other consumers looking for health coverage,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The company is being ordered to pay $100 million, and we’re holding its executives accountable for this fraud.”

And what was it that the Federal Trade Commission called “sham insurance”? Medicare Advantage. Nonetheless, the Centers for Medicare Services continues to let Benefytt and Namath market these products: welcome to the power of organized money.

And it’s huge organized money. Medicare Advantage plans are massive cash cows for the companies that run them. As Cigna prepares for a merger, for example, they’re being forced to sell off their Medicare Advantage division: it’s scheduled to go for $3.7 billion. Nobody pays that kind of money unless they expect enormous returns.

And how do they make those billions?

Most Medicare Advantage companies regularly do everything they can to intimidate you into paying yourself out-of-pocket. Often, they simply refuse payment and wait for you to file a complaint against them; for people seriously ill the cumbersome “appeals” process is often more than they can handle so they just write a check, pull out a credit card, or end up deeply in debt in their golden years.

As a result, hospitals and doctor groups across the nation are beginning to refuse to take Medicare Advantage patients. And in rural areas many hospitals are simply going out of business because Medicare advantage providers refuse to pay their bills.

California-based Scripps Health, for example, cares for around 30,000 people on Medicare Advantage and recently notified all of them that Scripps will no longer offer medical services to them unless they pay out-of-pocket or revert back to real Medicare.

They made this decision because over $75 million worth of services and procedures their physicians had recommended to their patients were turned down by Medicare Advantage insurance companies. In many cases, Scripps had already provided the care and is now stuck with the bills that the Advantage companies refuse to pay.

Scripps CEO Chris Van Gorder told MedPage Today:

“We are a patient care organization and not a patient denial organization and, in many ways, the model of managed care has always been about denying or delaying care – at least economically. That is why denials, [prior] authorizations and administrative processes have become a very big issue for physicians and hospitals...”

Similarly, the Mayo Clinic has warned its customers in Florida and Arizona that they won’t accept Medicare Advantage any more, either. Increasing numbers of physician groups and hospitals are simply over being ripped off by Advantage insurance companies.

Traditional Medicare has been serving Americans well since 1965: it’s one of the most efficient single-payer systems to fund healthcare that’s ever been devised. But nobody was making a buck off it, so nobody could share those profits with greedy politicians. Enter Medicare Advantage, courtesy of George W. Bush and the GOP.

While several bills have been offered in Congress to do something about this — including Mark Pocan’s and Ro Khanna’s Save Medicare Act that would end these companies’ ability to use the word “Medicare” in their policy names and advertising — the amounts of money sloshing around DC in the healthcare space now are almost unfathomable.

So far this year, according to opensecrets.org, the insurance industry has spent $117,305,895 showering gifts and persuasion on our federal lawmakers to keep their obscene profits flowing.

It’s all one more example of how five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court legalizing political bribery with Citizens Unitedhave screwed average Americans and made a handful of industry executives and investors fabulously rich.

They get away with it because when people choose to sign up for Medicare Advantage at 65 (or convert to these plans in their 60s or early 70s) they’re typically not sick — and thus cost the insurance companies little.

Tragically, the people signing up for these plans have no idea all the hassles, hoops, and troubles they might have to jump through when they do get sick, have an accident, or otherwise need medical assistance.

And since the last three years of life are typically the most expensive years for healthcare, the insurance denials are more likely to happen then — long after the person’s signed up with the Advantage company and it’s too late to go back to real Medicare.

This is why it typically takes a few years for people to figure out how badly they got screwed by not going with regular Medicare but instead putting themselves in the hands of private insurance companies.

The New York Times did an exposé of the problem in an article titled “Medicare Advantage Plans Often Deny Needed Care, Federal Report Finds.” It tells the story of “Kurt Pauker, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor in Indianapolis” who’d bought an Advantage policy from Humana:

“In spite of recommendations from Mr. Pauker’s doctors, his family said, Humana has repeatedly denied authorization for inpatient rehabilitation after hospitalization, saying at times he was too healthy and at times too ill to benefit.”

This is not at all uncommon, the Timesnotes:

“Tens of millions of denials are issued each year for both authorization and reimbursements, and audits of the private insurers show evidence of ‘widespread and persistent problems related to inappropriate denials of services and payment,’ the investigators found.”

If you have “real” Medicare with a heavily regulated Medigap policy to cover the 20% Medicare doesn’t, you never have to worry.

Your bills get paid, you can use any doctor or hospital in the country who takes Medicare, and neither Medicare nor your Medigap provider will ever try to collect from you or force you to pay for what you thought was covered.

Neither you or your doctor will ever have to do the “pre-authorization” dance with real Medicare: those terrible experiences dealing with for-profit insurance companies are part of the past.

But if you have Medicare Advantage — which is not Medicare, but private health insurance — you’re on your own.

As the Times laid out:

“About 18 percent of [Advantage] payments were denied despite meeting Medicare coverage rules, an estimated 1.5 million payments for all of 2019. In some cases, plans ignored prior authorizations or other documentation necessary to support the payment. These denials may delay or even prevent a Medicare Advantage beneficiary from getting needed care…”

Buying a Medicare Advantage policy is a leap in the dark, and the federal government is not there to catch you. And it’s all perfectly legal, thanks to Bush’s 2003 law, so your state insurance commissioner usually can’t or won’t help.

Thus, here we are, handing billions of dollars a month to insurance industry executives so they can buy new Swiss chalets, private jets, and luxury yachts. And so they can compete — unfairly — with Medicare itself, driving LBJ’s most proud achievement into debt and crisis.

Enough is enough. Let your members of Congress know it’s beyond time to fix the Court and Medicare, so scams like Medicare Advantage can no longer rip off America’s seniors while making industry executives richer than Midas.

And if you got hooked into switching out of real Medicare and now find yourself in a Medicare Advantage plan, you have three days to back out and return to real Medicare. For more information, you can also contact the nonprofit and real-Medicare-supporting Medicare Rights Center at 800-333-4114.

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South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose declaration of a state of emergency yesterday shocked the world, has often been referred to (both within and outside of his country) as “South Korea’s Donald Trump.” A political outsider, he came to power with anti-establishment and often outrageously inflammatory rhetoric, trash talking women’s rights, “reforming” their healthcare system, and pushing hard for a neoliberal agenda that included raising the workweek from 52 to 69 hours.

In that, he reflects a growing trend among advanced democracies around the world, as decades of neoliberalism have weakened multiple nations’ abilities to sustain middle class lifestyles while enriching an oligarch class that’s now reaching out — worldwide — to seize control of democratic governments to their own financial benefit.

Of all the events in world news over the past weeks — even more than the escalation of Putin’s murderous crimes against Ukraine — Trump and his authoritarian colleagues down at Mar-a-Lago are probably carefully watching what’s happening to Yoon and gaming out how a similar “emergency” action here in America might be recalibrated to have ultimate success.

Yoon has now backed down in the face of opposition from the South Korean parliament; he couldn’t get one single vote from his own party in Parliament, and is now facing demands that he resign or be impeached.

The challenges Yoon faced included a 17% approval rating, the legislature having been captured by the opposition party, and, most importantly, that he had never forced the members of his own party to degrade themselves and perform acts of obedience in front of him.

Thus, when he tried this strongman move of declaring a state of emergency but had not, in fact, first set himself up as a strongman, it failed.

Trump’s goal will be to avoid Yoon’s outcome and instead — like Putin and Orbán did in Russia and Hungary — ensure there won’t be any meaningful opposition within the GOP to his most extreme measures when they come.

Yoon’s rightwing populist People Power Party (PPP) had lost control of parliament in the April elections to the more progressive Democratic Party of Korea (DPK); Trump will not have such a constraint in a few weeks when he takes the White House. Instead of fighting Democrats, Trump must figure out how to deal with opposition to his most extreme impulses from within his own Republican Party.

Thus, his putting forward outrageous, unqualified, and even occasionally anti-American candidates for cabinet positions is Trump’s first big step in the classic strongman move of softening up Republicans in the House and Senate so when the real fights — like over a state of emergency (and the martial law that could accompany it) — happen, his party members and the handful of “problem solver” quislings in the Democratic Party will have already surrendered their ability to resist him.

This, as I noted but our media seems to be ignoring, is where Yoon failed. Trump — if he’s successful at cowing Republicans in the Senate into rubber-stamping his picks or allowing recess appointments — may not have those constraints, since he will have ended opposition in the Senate, and his MAGA-seized GOP now also controls the House and the Supreme Court.

Nonetheless, if he wants to imitate Yoon’s initial declaration and successfully follow through on it, Trump will need to intimidate and bring to heel any Republicans who still think of themselves as more loyal to the nation and our Constitution than to him. Will they still exist by next February?

This is not a new strategy, as Timothy Snyder, Heidi Siegmund Cuda, or Ruth Ben-Ghiat will tell you in their excellent Substack newsletters.

One of the big points Fritz Thyssen made in his book I Paid Hitlerwas to note how he and other industrialists and politicians were required to scrape and bow before Hitler in the early months and years. There was a competition among the industrialists and German politicians alike after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor to see who could be the most publicly obsequious, slavish, and unctuous toward the new German leader.

Today in America we see a similar spectacle as politicians, media figures, business leaders, and foreign dignitaries flock to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s golden ass.

It was that exact behavior that paved the way for Hitler to shut down the German press, subserviate the Reichstag, and essentially shatter all opposition to his regime in less than half a year.

And it wasn’t just the political class who bowed to him; so, too, did most average Germans, who had become exhausted by the conflict exploding across the political spectrum and so tuned out, immersing themselves instead in sports, family, and entertainment.

As a result, every day brought a new outrage, a new norm destroyed, a new red line crossed, but each was small enough — like appointing an accused rapist and drunk or drug user to run the Justice Department or the Pentagon — that it created a buzz in the political media but wasn’t sufficient to bring even a dozen people out into the streets.

Fascism comes in on cat’s feet, step by gradual but inexorable step. It never starts with one great clashing explosion of evil or corruption that causes an entire nation to suddenly wake up and pour into the streets. There are no trumpets, drums, or cymbals. As Hemmingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises using the metaphor of bankruptcy, it happens “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

It’s usually the story of an insidious gradualism, like what a German professor told Chicago reporter Milton Mayer about in 1954:

“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”

Yoon’s declaration of emergency and martial law was explicit: It banned all political activities of the National Assembly, local councils, political parties, and associations; prohibited gatherings, protests, and labor strikes; and placed the media under the authority of the Martial Law Command.

Trump has made similar threats to our media and promised to use the state’s power of guns and jails to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” claiming, like Yoon did, that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

Yoon’s effort to quickly convert South Korea into an autocratic state has so far backfired, in large part because of public opinion, a still-free press, and the courage of opposition and his own PPP politicians alike. The lesson Trump should learn from Yoon’s unsuccessful attempt is the need to avoid authoritarianism and instead embrace coalition-building, transparent governance, and a balanced approach to both domestic and foreign policy challenges.

Instead, it’s a virtual certainty that Trump is thinking Yoon should have acted before April, before the more progressive DPK took back over the parliament, and should have helped friendly oligarchs to seize the media in advance of his proclamation. And that he needs to move fast, before Democrats can regain power in the 2026 midterms that will be only 22 months away.

The resilience of democracy depends on the strength of its institutions, the vigilance of its citizens, and the commitment of its elected leaders of all parties to uphold democratic values. Yoon’s behavior serves as both a warning and a call to action: democracies must stand vigilant against the creeping authoritarianism that threatens their core principles. As Trump’s return looms, these lessons cannot be ignored.

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If my hypothesis from yesterday — that Democrats best way to win elections and regain political power is to engage in class warfare against the GOP and the billionaires that fund it — the immediate question is, “How?”

The last century has seen two presidents engage in class warfare in a big and direct way that not only won them multiple elections but also altered the electoral map of America: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. There are multiple lessons to learn from both.

When FDR came into power in March of 1933, the nation was in shambles because of a decade of Republican mishandling of the economy. In the early 1920s, Republican President Warren Harding dropped the top income tax rate from 91% down to 25% and loosened oversight of Wall Street.

The short-term result was an explosion of riches at the top, referred to as “The Roaring 20s,” and violent actions against attempts to form labor unions. The longer-term result was the infamous Black Tuesday of October 29, 1929 which kicked off the Republican Great Depression.

President Roosevelt correctly identified America’s morbidly rich, who’d seized control of the GOP after the end of the Taft presidency in 1913, as the cause of the financial disaster and proclaimed that they and their captive Republicans had declared class war against average working class Americans.

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“For out of this modern civilization,” Roosevelt told America, “economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”

He used the language of class warfare; as with all wars, the first step is to identify the enemy. For FDR it was the morbidly rich of his era who weren’t content to just run their businesses and make money but also lusted for the political power they’d been given during the 1920s by Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt proclaimed. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”
He paused for a moment, then thundered, “Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”

The crowd at Madison Square Garden roared when he said that. They knew that Republican politicians had worked hand-in-glove with wealthy industrialists to suppress unions, evade taxes, and accumulate fortunes beyond anything ever seen in America. That the GOP had been running an often-violent class war against them for at least the past decade.

And they were over it. Over the greed, over the theft, and over the self-righteous proclamations that the Constitution protected their avarice. Average working people knew these “economic royalists” weren’t patriots; they were looters, vandals, and political arsonists. FDR gave voice to their anger, disillusionment, and disgust.

“In vain,” Roosevelt said, “they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Republicans had declared class warfare; FDR, like he would later do with the Japanese and Germans, led the charge to fight back and defeat them.

And defeat them he did (even in the face of an assassination attempt); by the end of his presidency, American oligarchs had gone back to doing business and getting rich, largely avoiding politics and keeping their noses clean.

Until, that is, President Nixon put Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court and Powell began the process — from the bench — of turning America back into a full-blown oligarchy like Hoover had done in the 1920s.

The Powell Memo and the Court’s Bellotti decision (written by Powell) set the stage and outline the battle plan for the Reagan Revolution, an all-out declaration of class war against average Americans and the Democrats who’d historically defended them.

In the 1980s, Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 74 percent down to 27 percent (while repeatedly raising taxes on working-class people’s wages, tips, and Social Security), kicking off an explosion of billionaires. He and other Republican presidents and members of the Supreme Court followed up by:

— Ending enforcement of our anti-trust laws and gutting our environmental regulations.
— Killing off our media guardrails like the Fairness Doctrine and Equal Time Rule, along with ending ownership limits on newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations and networks.
— Fighting every effort to reduce or end student debt.
— Opposing every program proposed to broaden access to healthcare coverage.
— Attacking our right to vote.
— Privatizing Medicare with the Medicare Advantage scam (Social Security is next).
— Assailing environmental regulations that protect us and our children from cancer and other diseases.
— Going to the mat to defend hundreds of billions in annual subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and its oligarchs.
— Deregulating social media (Section 230), now taken over by rightwing billionaires.
— Packing our courts with reliable toadies for giant corporations and the wealthy.
— Stripping over $50 trillion from the working class since 1981, handing that money to the morbidly rich to stash in their offshore money bins.
— Rejecting every effort to raise the national minimum wage.
— Most recently, Trump congratulated Musk on his union-busting success.

Through this entire period, Democrats have refrained from employing FDR’s class war rhetoric to fight back. Instead, they’ve worked hard to make life better for working class people when in power and tried to limit the damage from Republican proposals and policies when they’re out of power.

This is why Vice President Harris’ claims that Democrats are here for the average person while Republicans want more tax cuts and deregulation failed to catch fire during this past election; there was no rhetoric of warfare. Instead, astonishingly, Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney and kept saying that she’d give Republicans “a seat at the table.”

As billionaire Warren Buffett famously confessed:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

It’s far past time to take the gloves off and start punching.

Democrats have become so rusty, so wary of class warfare, that they haven’t even identified a term or metaphor to describe the rightwing billionaires for whom the GOP fronts.

From Democratic President Grover Cleveland in the 1880s saying the rich had working people under their “Iron heel” to the early 20th century when they were called Robber Barons, Democrats have had names for Republicans and the billionaires who own them.

FDR called them economic royalists. Teddy Roosevelt called them fat cats, malefactors of great wealth, parasites, and plutocrats. I’ve been calling them the morbidly rich, but there’s almost certainly a more evocative phrase out there that could be applied to greedy billionaires by this generation of progressives.

After all, elite conservatives and billionaires haven’t hesitated to use “othering” language in their war against Democrats.

Reagan and Republicans since have called us pointy-headed intellectuals, ivory tower elites, eggheads, limousine liberals, champagne socialists, latte liberals, the wine and cheese crowd, coastal elites, tax and spend liberals, bleeding hearts, do-gooders, tree huggers, environmental wackos, libtards, communists, and even feminazis.

And how do Democrats describe Republicans? “Our friends on the other side of the aisle.”

Screw that. It’s time to declare war.

And war requires a clear delineation between our side and their side, between the good guys and the enemy. Nobody is going to rush to the ramparts against somebody we’re “happy to work with on a bipartisan basis”: as Newt Gingrich taught Republicans in the 1990s and they’ve held to with a religious fervor, there can be no quarter against the other side if you want to take and hold power.

Class war sounds ugly, but it’s exactly what Republicans and their billionaire backers have been waging against working class Americans for 43 years now. It’s damn well time to fight back by declaring a class war of our own.

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This is the second in a two-part series about what Trump's return to the White House and Kash Patel's appointment as the next director of the FBI means for the agency's ongoing efforts to disrupt accelerationist terror plots.Read Part 1 here.

In August 2019, a 21-year-old white man named Patrick Crusius drove 650 miles to El Paso, Texas, walked into a Walmart with a rifle and opened fire, killing 23 people in an attack that deliberately targeted Hispanics.

The El Paso massacre made 2019 the deadliest year for domestic violent extremism since 1995, when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Crusius clearly stated in a manifesto that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” using language that directly echoed President Donald Trump’s claim during the 2018 mid-term elections describing a migrant caravan as “an invasion.”

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So devastating was the attack that Trump, not typically one to acknowledge right-wing extremism, was compelled to tell the nation during an address from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House: “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy.”

The president added: “We must shine a light on the dark recesses of the internet and stop mass murders before they start.”

Beyond the president’s words, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security — the two federal agencies most responsible for addressing domestic terrorism — seemed to get serious about white supremacist violence.

Mixed record on handling white supremacist terror

The Department of Homeland Security’s Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence, released in September 2019, observed that “white supremacist violent extremism… is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism,” while noting that deaths caused by domestic terrorists had eclipsed those caused by foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Five days before a Second Amendment rally in Richmond, Va. in January 2020 that received President Trump’s endorsement, the FBI arrested three men in Maryland who were members of the Base, an accelerationist group that promoted insurrectionary violence as a first step towards creating a whites-only homeland. According to court documents, the three men, who included a Canadian national, acquired 150 rounds of ammunition and trained at a Maryland gun range.

While planning to attend the Richmond rally, two of the men allegedly discussed conducting ambushes against police officers and unsuspecting civilians. One of them mused that “Virginia can spiral out to f---ing full-blown civil war,” while another fantasized that “if there’s like a po-po cruiser parked on the street and he doesn’t have a backup, I can execute him at a whim and just take his stuff.”

The three men eventually pled guilty to federal firearms charges and received sentences ranging from five to nine years in prison.

But the decisive manner in which the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security moved to combat violent extremism during the final years of his Trump’s first administration gives some reason for cautious optimism that they’ll be able to continue to do that work during the next administration — even as the president-elect pours rhetorical fuel on the fire.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, told Raw Story that the federal government’s pivot towards addressing the threat of white supremacist terrorism under the first Trump administration suggests that it is still viewed as a “bipartisan national security issue.”

“No matter what party they’re in, no president wants to see a massive terrorist attack on their watch,” she said.

Others are not so sure the field agents devoted to disrupting accelerationist terror plots will remain unscathed by politicization of the bureau.

Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Raw Story that it’s a safe bet that agents involved in the investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election will face the most intense scrutiny.

“But we’re fooling ourselves if we think that’s where it stops,” he added.

While the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security ramped up their efforts to disrupt violent white supremacists in 2019 and 2020, the final two years of the first Trump administration also showed how domestic terrorism could be politicized.

Elizabeth Neuman, who served as assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at the Department of Homeland Security, has said that officials in the Trump administration didn’t want to use the term “domestic terrorism” after the 2019 El Paso massacre. But when left-wing protests, some of which turned violent, erupted in response to the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr said: “The violence instigated and carried out by antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly.”

Assuming Trump carries through on his promise to initiate widescale deportations when he takes office in January, Lewis said the response from federal law enforcement will bear scrutiny.

“At a strategic level, the concern would be around resourcing if there’s a massive shift away from the domestic [terrorism] desks and a reprioritization to anarchists or environmental activists, where every left-wing threat against an ICE facility was viewed as terrorism,” Lewis said.

Despite clear evidence of the persistent threat of white supremacist violence and the FBI’s track record of aggressively disrupting terror plots over the past five years, it remains to be seen whether Trump will continue to support the agency’s counterterrorism focus when he returns to the White House.

Trump said little or nothing during the 2024 campaign about whether he views white supremacist domestic terrorism as a problem. Meanwhile, he and his allies have obsessively focused on their grievances against FBI investigations targeting Trump and supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Trump transition team and Kash Patel, whom the president-elect announced will lead the FBI, did not return messages for this story.

The emergence of Terrorgram

The white supremacist domestic terror threat didn’t end when the FBI dismantled the Base in 2020, or, for that matter, when Trump left the White House in January 2021. The El Paso massacre and an earlier, even deadlier attack — when a 28-year-old Australian national named Brenton Tarrant gunned down 51 Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019 — exemplified the kind of terror plots the FBI would scramble to disrupt during the Biden era.

The new threat would come not from groups, but from lone actors loosely networked through the internet and goaded into action by online propaganda.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security officially acknowledged accelerationism as a driver of domestic terrorism for the first time in May 2021.

“Themes like ‘gamification’ and ‘accelerationism’ partly inspired some of the attacks in 2019 and will likely continue to inspire future plots,” the two agencies said in their jointly issued Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism document. “Widely disseminated propaganda on online forums and encrypted chat applications that espouse similar themes regarding kill counts could inspire future attackers to mobilize faster or attempt increasingly lethal and more sophisticated attacks.”

The assessment included a definition of accelerationism: “a belief among some neo-Nazi and/or fascist RMVEs that the current system is irreparable, without apparent political solutions, and hence violent action is needed to precipitate societal collapse and start a race war.”

Fears among counterterrorism officials about recurring white supremacist violence driven by online propaganda and obsession with “kill counts” turned out to be warranted.

In May 2022, 18-year-old Payton Gendron drove three and a half hours from his home in Conklin, N.Y. and walked into a grocery store on the east of Buffalo, where he opened fire and killed 10 people, almost all of them African Americans. Gendron issued a manifesto that cited Tarrant as an inspiration.

The pattern would repeat more than a year later, in August 2023, when a 21-year-old man named Ryan Palmeter fatally shot three Black people at a Dollar Store in Jacksonville, Fla. Palmeter, like Gendron, praised Tarrant as an exemplar.

Following the Buffalo massacre, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security would observe “a significant shift in some of the [racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists’] coordinated efforts to spread overtly violent and racist propaganda within encrypted chat applications, specifically to encourage others to engage in violence.”

The online propaganda referenced in the agencies’ most recent joint assessment appears to be the Terrorgram Collective, a loose network that produces and distributes digital publications that provide detailed instructions for carrying out mass shootings and energy grid attacks, while extolling racist mass murderers as “saints.”

Dallas Erin Humber and Matthew Robert Allison, the two alleged leaders of Terrorgram, were arrested in September 2024 and charged with multiple felonies, including conspiracy and soliciting hate crimes, which could garner each of them up to 220 years in prison.

For every Payton Gendron who successfully carries out a lethal mass shooting, there are likely a dozen more plots targeting African Americans, Jews, Muslims and LGBTQ+ people that the FBI disrupts — almost always by using informants.

The FBI has demonstrated an increasingly “nuanced understanding of the threat” posed by neo-Nazi accelerationists, Lewis, the research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Raw Story.

“These agents have their finger on the pulse, no question,” he said.

The FBI arrested Kyle Christopher Benton, a 26-year-old resident of Snohomish, Wash. on Sept. 6 for illegal possession of a machine gun. According to the government, Benton had been arrested for domestic violence while serving in the U.S. Army in 2019. Witnesses interviewed for that case revealed that Benton expressed admiration for Tarrant and talked about a fantasy of getting in a shootout with federal law enforcement agents. He had also allegedly “communicated with another person about the idea of killing a homeless person to see how it would feel.”

For years, the government said, Benton had expressed support for accelerationism, and in 2021 he told an informant that he supported an initiative to create a white ethno-state in the Pacific Northwest. When Gendron opened fire in the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, Benton allegedly told an acquaintance in a private Instagram message: “Today has been another glorious entry into the annals of Aryan Terror. The harder the jew system presses back, the more the Aryan Will shall be unleashed to wreak havoc and death upon the hordes of our racial and spiritual adversaries.”

In August 2024, according to the government, Benton posted on the encrypted app Telegram that he was “going into random chats and hyping up saints," adding that he "might get some weirdo to become a saint because he knows people will love him.” Around the same time, the government said, Benton posted a video of himself firing a fully automatic firearm.

The Benton case illustrates the dilemma faced by FBI agents who are answering the charge given by then-President Trump in 2019 to “stop mass murders before they start.”

“There’s no charge for a neo-Nazi who’s talking about committing a mass shooting or taking overt steps to carry out a mass shooting,” Lewis told Raw Story. “Until he’s at the synagogue door, there are precious few options for the FBI other than the low-level charges like possessing an illegal machine gun.

“That’s just to take them off the playing field,” Lewis continued. “When you look at how these cases evolve, you’ve certainly seen the FBI responding to the conditions as they are — the legal conditions and the conditions on the ground.”

No matter how stark the evidence, if law enforcement makes an arrest before and not after the attack, the question of whether the violence is an actual plot or just someone’s fevered imagination often comes down to the discretion of a federal judge.

Noah Edwin Anthony, a 23-year-old soldier, was stopped during a random vehicle inspection while entering Fort Liberty in North Carolina in March 2022. Military police found a ghost gun, ammunition and a patch with an American flag altered to display a Nazi swastika in place of the stars.

Later, when police searched Anthony’s barracks, they discovered a military-style operational document entitled “Top Secret Goebbels” that described a “premeditated plan to physically remove as many of the” Black, Hispanic and mixed-race people from the four counties surrounding Fort Liberty “by whatever means need be.”

The document outlined a litany of methods, including ricin poisoning, arson and shooting, while naming “minority businesses, meeting places and neighborhoods” as targets.

“There are members of the government that believe that but for the actions of that gate guard at Fort Liberty, we could have very well seen a mass casualty event in the Eastern District of North Carolina,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Gabriel Diaz told the court during Anthony’s sentencing in March 2024.

Diaz argued that a prison sentence of three years and four months was necessary to deter violence and protect the public.

But when Anthony stood before the judge, he received only 18 months — the lowest sentence in the guideline range.

“My job is to protect the public from further crime by the defendant,” Judge Richard E. Myers II, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Trump, told Anthony. “If Mr. Diaz is right that there is a genuine risk going forward, then shame be on this judge. Right? If you go out and hurt somebody, I have failed. And believe me, I think about that.”

This is the second in a two-part series about what Trump's return to the White House and Kash Patel's appointment as the next director of the FBI mean for the agencies ongoing efforts to disrupt accelerationist terror plots.. Read Part 1 here.

“The ideas you are about to hear are not idle conjecture. I have built upon a foundation of indisputable first causes, so that the unifying force which controls the cosmos is revealed in full clarity.” — Jack Vance

Trump named the plans for his second term “Agenda 47,” although for reasons known only to them, America’s mainstream media persists in ignoring it. They shouldn’t.

At best, it’s a dystopian nightmare: at worst it means ending our current system of American government; aligning the US with Russia and other autocratic nations; and the USA leading the charge against democracy and in favor of authoritarian, strong-man forms of government across the world.

Over at his website, Trump lays out the details of his governing agenda, complete with short videos promoting each of the steps he plans to take. They, and his many statements about future plans — which we’ll probably see implemented during his first 100 days — include:

Back in the 1970s, Richard Nixon said he was going to use “impoundment” to strip funding from agencies his donors didn’t like, claiming that, even though Congress had appropriated budgets for them, he could, as head of the Executive Branch, simply “impound” the money and refuse to spend it. His plan to remake the federal government was interrupted by Watergate.

In 1974, Democrats in Congress got together and passed legislation outlawing this and Jerry Ford signed it into law. But Trump’s lawyers apparently think they can get it overturned through their appointees on the courts or even, as they will now have both branches of Congress, through new legislation. As Trump says on his website:

“I will use the president’s long-recognized Impoundment Power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings.”

Trump’s appointed Musk and Ramaswamy to identify “fraud and waste” in federal agencies, a mantra since the Reagan presidency used to strip agencies his donors and their corporations resent. Every Republican president has used this phrase in this way, but Trump promises to turn Reagan’s and Bush’s scalpel into a meataxe.

Since the fossil fuel companies, banks, refineries, anti-union big employers, and their billionaires who fund the GOP hate all of these agencies, it’ll be a bonanza for them.

Not so much for working people, retirees, and those of us concerned about a livable future environment for our kids and grandkids, though.

First, he wants to make it illegal for the federal government’s security services to notify social media platforms about Russian disinformation and other foreign efforts to swing elections, since nearly 100% of those efforts are coming from authoritarian countries in support of Trump and against democracy.

“I will ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-’ or ‘dis-information,’” Trump proclaims on his Agenda 47 website.

He also wants to force social media to carry his buddy Putin’s trolls’ lies and attempts to pit Americans against each other, and limit the companies’ ability to label or block lies and propaganda. As Trump puts it:

“I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business.”

In Hungary, one way Viktor Orbán got rid of actual news media and replaced the ownership of all the nation’s major radio and TV networks, websites, and newspapers was by changing the libel laws so that public figures (like Orbán himself) could sue for libel when they thought they were treated unfairly.

They then sued company after company, commentator after commentator, reporter after reporter, into bankruptcy.

Orbán’s rightwing buddies then bought the media properties out of bankruptcy which is why now virtually all the media in Hungary is like Fox “News,” broadcasting suck-ups to Orbán and criticism of “liberals,” immigrants, and gays 24/7.

Trump wants to do the same here in the US. Is the announced divestment of MSNBC by Comcast an early indicator that corporate media sees this coming?

When Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury came out with some unflattering characterizations of Trump in it, the then-president said:

“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws so that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts. And if somebody says something that’s totally false and knowingly false, that the person that has been abused, defamed, libeled, will have meaningful recourse.”

Similarly, Trump’s appointee to head the FBI says they’ll be coming after reporters and opinion writers and their publications:

“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Kash Patel said. “We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”

Simply reporting on what Trump’s up to could bring lawsuits that would bankrupt even the Times or the Post, and, like in Hungary and Russia, pretty much end the existence of a free and independent press in America.

Trump has promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists who tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House (and whose actions led to the death of four police officers), and put into place a national “stop and frisk” law that upends the 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

It would also — like Duterte in the Philippines who executed over 10,000 people during his reign of terror — authorize the federal government to immediately execute anybody convicted of trafficking in drugs without further due process or appeals.

Trump has already tested the limits of his own lawbreaking when it comes to creating a police state and gotten away with it. In 2020, he sent armed federal officers — without identification and in unmarked vehicles — into Portland to illegally snatch unarmed peaceful protestors off the streets, intimidate and beat them up, and dump them. Expect this test to go nationwide.

Republicans in Texas have already pioneered using vigilantes to hunt down women who’ve had abortions and the people who’ve helped them. Expect these vigilante-enforced laws to spread across the country with a second Trump administration, with groups like the Proud Boys and 3 Percenters becoming the modern-day equivalent of the old west’s 19th century bounty hunters.

In a flashback to Hitler’s “work camps” that preceded the death camps by five years, Trump’s also proposed building concentration camps around the country to house “millions” of undocumented aliens and his political enemies.

As he noted in a speech on Veterans’ Day last year, this will quickly go way beyond the “illegal immigrant criminals” he’ll use an an excuse to build the camps and mobilize the police and military:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” adding that Russia isn’t a problem. Instead, he said, “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

Presumably that means people like me and you, who would oppose his fascist agenda. Have you recently posted anti-Trump screeds on social media? Putin and Orbán put people in prison or sue them for such behavior.

And, as Europe’s most famous dictator did during our grandparents’ generation, he’ll start by rounding up unfavored groups with his promised incarceration and deportation of “millions” of undocumented immigrants. That’ll establish the physical infrastructure that he can later use to imprison members of the media and his “enemies within.”

Way back in 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau thought he’d properly bribed President James Garfield by giving the president, during an in-person visit in the White House, a speech he’d written for Garfield to use. Garfield was polite but didn’t offer Guiteau a federal speechwriter’s job, which provoked a murderous rage: shortly thereafter, Guiteau met Garfield’s train and shot him twice, killing him.

The explicit and institutionalized practice of exchanging gifts and personal loyalty for federal jobs dated back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), arguably the second-most depraved president in American history behind Trump (which is probably why Trump hung his picture in the Oval Office; Jackson’s favorite nickname for himself — given him by the Cherokee he slaughtered — was “The Indian Killer”).

Jackson had elevated the practice of bribing the president — himself, at the time — to get federal jobs into an art-form: it was called the “spoils” or patronage system and was insanely corrupt. It was also, by Garfield’s presidency in 1881, routine.

After Guiteau failed to gain his “spoil” or “patronage” from Garfield and killed him, President Chester Arthur oversaw the writing and passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.

It separated all those government jobs from the administration in power, turning federal workers from patrons of the president into permanent bureaucrats, whose first loyalty was to the nation instead of to the guy who happened to be in the White House at any particular time.

It also explicitly outlawed bribing the president for a job. The goal, which it accomplished and has held for 140 years, was to end corruption in the bureaucratic branches of the federal government.

Donald Trump wants to functionally end the Civil Service system and replace the top levels of the nation’s 2.7 million federal workers with people loyal exclusively to himself.

He tried to do this in the last months of his first presidency through an October 21, 2020 executive order, Schedule F, (which Biden reversed on his first day in office) that reclassified those workers out of their Civil Service jobs and into political appointee positions, doing the same work but now entirely dependent on the good will of the president to keep their jobs.

The next Republican administration will almost certainly put Schedule F back into force, reestablishing the 1829 spoils system for the federal government, and ending any possibility that people in the government will push back against Trump the way they did during his first presidency.

The Department of Justice was established by President Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War, in part to enforce federal laws protecting the rights of Black people in the South who’d recently been freed from slavery.

After Richard Nixon tried to use it against his enemies (and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, went to prison for his efforts), Congress in 1978 passed the Ethics in Government Act which put a wall of separation between the DOJ and the White House.

Trump has explicitly proclaimed his intention to tear that wall down and go farther than Nixon ever imagined by using our armed investigative services for personal revenge and harassment of people he perceives as his enemies.

He wants the nation’s premiere police agencies to become his own personal enforcers, and has already said they will be hunting down “liberals,” Black Lives Matter protest participants, and Joe Biden, his family, and members of his administration.

He wants to imprison them, as well as the prosecutors and judges who have been participating in the effort to hold him to account for the crimes he committed over the past 8 years.

Already Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick to run the DOJ, has said she wants to prosecute and imprison the people who participated in investigating and prosecuting Donald Trump.

This politicization of law enforcement has been a first-order and primary feature of every authoritarian or totalitarian regime that’s risen to power over the past few hundred years, worldwide. It’s always one of the first things fascist leaders do when they seize power.

Part of Agenda 47, Trump says, is “finishing the job” he started as president between 2017 and 2021.

Just two hours after he and Pence were sworn into office in 2017, they removed all mention of LGBTQ+ issues from the White House website.

Two days later, his State Department deleted former Secretary of State John Kerry’s apology to the nation for the “Lavender Scare” government persecution of gays and lesbians during the McCarthy era 1950s and early 1960s. A month later, Trump’s Justice Department announced they’d no longer defend the civil rights of trans kids.

His Education and HUD offices both withdrew their court defenses of queer people, particularly students and those in homeless shelters, and his Secretary of State refused to mention to the Russian Foreign Minister the detention and brutal executions of gay men by Russian soldiers in Chechnya. On May 4, 2017 Trump signed an executive order letting the DOJ ignore claims of illegal discrimination against queer people and women throughout every single one of the nation’s federal agencies.

In September, 2017, Trump’s Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, officially ended that agency’s Title IX guidance requiring schools to do something about sexual harassment, including sexual violence, against women and LGBTQ+ kids. In response to a question from the media about the change in policy and gay men, Trump said that his Vice President “wants to hang them all.”

In January of 2018, Trump rolled out the “Division of Conscience and Religious Freedom” at HHS, which would backstop people who wanted to use the excuse of “deeply held religious beliefs” to justify explicit discrimination against queer people and women, or to simply to make life difficult for government agencies.

All of this was just the beginning. The Human Rights Campaign has documented page after page of anti-queer policies put into effect by Trump that will be resurrected and put on steroids in his second term. Nancy Mace’s supercilious, vicious, and bigoted attack on trans Congresswoman Sarah McBride is just the earliest warning of what’s to come nationwide.

In the Agenda 47 section of his website, Trump explains how he’s going to use our schools and colleges to indoctrinate young Americans in rightwing ideology. He explicitly says:

“When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics. We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.”
Any colleges that continue to teach “under the guise of [racial] equity will not only have their endowment taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment.”

In other words, just like Viktor Orbán did in Hungary and Putin did in Russia, he’s going to bankrupt the nation’s schools and colleges if they continue to teach the true history of America and promote egalitarian values. As Trump notes at his website:

“[W]e are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all.”

At the same time, three states have now authorized or mandated Christian bible instruction in public schools. While all are currently on pause because of lawsuits, expect this trend to go national as Trump repays the multimillionaire televangelist and megachurch grifters who helped him get elected.

In an apparent attempt to portray himself as a visionary like JFK, with his promise to send men to the moon and bring them back safely, Trump is promising to build “freedom cities” in his second term. The main feature he’s discussed is that people will get around in them in “flying cars.”

While it’s being portrayed as a goofy stunt designed to make him seem like an imaginative idealist, in fact there has been a movement among rightwing billionaires for some time to create cities that they basically run as little feudal fiefdoms, the same way the morbidly rich run their companies and their football teams.

Some libertarian billionaires assert that the only reason there’s never been a successful libertarian nation in the history of the world is because true libertarianism — government doing nothing but running the police, army, and courts with everything else left to private charity and business owners — “has never been tried.”

The ”freedom cities” could be a new libertarian experiment, or they may be the 21st century version of the old “company town,” where nobody has rights or protection of the law but is subject to the whims of the local billionaire owner.

A group backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has already put forward what appears to be a plan to build a new city in California that they may or may not envision running along these lines. The group has so far purchased more than 53,000 acres of land, an area larger than the entire city of Beaumont, Texas, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Trump is also promising that he’ll end the brutal attacks against Ukraine on “day one” by, presumably, simply turning the country over to his good friend, Vladimir Putin.

For the first time since World War II, this would legitimize a nation criminally attacking another nation to seize their land, resources, and people.

It would greenlight China to do the same with Taiwan, and encourage every other tinpot dictator in the world to grab any nearby territory that he wants. It would encourage war, and could very easily lead to a world war.

Abandoning Ukraine like this, along with Trump’s oft-stated preference to leave or end NATO and stop support for the UN, would lead the autocracies of the world — particularly Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and North Korea — to destroy the democracies in their sphere of influence, replacing those democracies with strongman autocracies.

The democratic experiment on this planet is only 250 years old, more or less, and this signals a return to the way the world had been ruled for the 7,000 years prior to that: by kings, popes, mullahs, strongman warlords, and the morbidly rich.

Between Agenda 47 and Project 2025, Donald Trump and the rightwing billionaires who own the GOP have big plans next year for this nation. They’re dead serious and far more well-funded than any of the groups that fight for and advocate democracy.

If you thought it can’t happen here, I have an old Sinclair Lewis book to share with you.

Now is the time to join the resistance, while it’s still possible. Show up at your local Democratic Party meetings and help infiltrate the Party. Join Indivisible or one of the other great organizations. Get active on social media. Evangelize friends and family.

We have a hell of a lot of work ahead of us; let’s get started!

NOW READ: How to fix MSNBC

Kash Patel, the MAGA loyalist named by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the FBI, has financially backed a lawsuit against former Trump administration official derided as a “RINO” that raises questions about how he would wield power as head of the nation’s preeminent law enforcement agency.

Richard Grenell, who served as acting director of national intelligence during the first Trump administration, has confirmed in a court filing that the Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust (now known as the Kash Foundation) contributed $7,500 to support his defamation lawsuit against Olivia Troye, a former counterterrorism advisor to Vice President Mike Pence.

Grenell’s lawsuit, which is currently pending in federal court, alleges that Troye defamed him posting a reply on Twitter (now X). Troye’s tweet, a reply to Rep. Ted Lieu (R-CA) stated that prior to serving as acting director of national intelligence, Grenell, as ambassador to Germany, “tried to get Mike Pence to attend a white supremacist gathering.”

The German news outlet Der Spiegel has reported that members of the far-right party Alternative for Germany posed with Grenell at the U.S. Embassy’s Fourth of July party. The German courts have upheld a designation by the country’s domestic intelligence agency to place the party under surveillance for suspected extremism.

ALSO READ: Trump allies promise revenge as Dems ram through Biden judges

Troye testified in a deposition for the case that Stephanie Dobitsch, who served in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, told her that Grenell “tried to get Pence to meet with Nazis.” Troye also testified that Dobitsch told her that Pence did not attend the gathering. Dobitsch appears to have given the same account to Brian Murphy, who also worked in the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, based on a statement by Murphy that was submitted to the court by Troye.

Murphy wrote that during a 2020 conversation with Dobitsch, she told him that Grenell had advised her during a meeting in advance of Pence’s visit to Berlin that “the vice president should meet with a German civil society group.” Murphy said Dobitsch told him that she went to the group’s office to vet them and concluded that the “group Grenell suggested was a far-right extremist group… similar to a neo-Nazi organization,” and that she advised “that meeting with the group Grenell suggested would be a political disaster for the vice president.”

Patel announced the lawsuit against Troye on his Fight With Kash website in August 2022 in an article headlined, “Fight With Kash & Ric Grenell file defamation suit against fired deep state employee.”

He also posted on Truth Social at the time: “Today, “FightWithKash.com and @grenell took decisive action against the deep state and fake news mafia.”

Jesse Binnall, who represents Grenell in the lawsuit, is listed as a member of the board of directors for the Kash Foundation on its 2023 990 report.

Patel announced the filing of Grenell's defamation lawsuit against Troye on Truth Social in August 2022.Federal courts

In a motion to dismiss filed in federal court in May, Troye argued that the lawsuit, with Patel’s financial backing, is part of a “lawfare MAGA campaign to silence critics.” The lawsuit, she said, is intended by Grenell and his lawyers “to silence and punish those who criticize them and other MAGA luminaries.”

In another filing, Troye described the suit as “a political stunt at its heart to stifle criticism and cause perceived opponents to incur legal fees so that they would shy away from further comments.”

Reached by phone, Binnall acknowledged questions from Raw Story and said he would confer with Grenell, but the two men did not respond in time for publication.

Grenell, who was reportedly a final candidate for the secretary of state position before being passed over in favor of Sen. Marco Rubio, hailed Patel’s nomination on Instagram on Sunday. Grenell referred to Patel, who worked under him at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as “my brother from another mother.”

Former acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell congratulated Kash Patel on his appointment to lead the FBI in an Instagram post on Sunday.Instagram screengrab

Patel has made no secret of his desire to enact retribution against Trump’s perceived political opponents.

“We will go and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media,” he told Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, in 2023. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.”

In an interview with Raw Story, Troye warned that Patel could use his position as FBI director to carry out vendettas against anyone who runs afoul of Trump, including Republicans.

“There’s nothing to stop him from making up bogus charges and doing frivolous investigations,” she said. “And then the question is — it’s going to fall on the workforce to stand against things that they know are not legal or viable. But how long will that workforce be able to hold the line? Do I have faith in law enforcement and the integrity of many of these people who serve in these roles? Yes. However, depending on how many people they go in and fire, lawfully or unlawfully, just how many people fall in line remains to be seen.”

Patel could not be immediately reached for comment for this story.

Troye added that the combination of Patel and Pam Bondi, whom Trump has named to serve as attorney general, “is very dangerous because she could provide top cover for Patel to carry out some of these things.”

NOW READ: Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.

Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy-monger and MAGA propagandist, announced on his Election Day show that it was “doomsday for the globalists.” But he warned his listeners to be on the lookout for false flag attacks calculated to try to spoil candidate Donald Trump’s victory.

“And now, we’re beginning to see the signs,” Jones said. “But this, too, will fail. No one’s gonna buy it.”

His voice dripping with mockery, Jones said: “And then we’ve got the white supremacist — handled and run by the FBI, they built him the bomb, controlled him, were his leaders, they admit in the arrest documents and the press release.

“They’ve been telling you, ‘Oh, the white supremacist Trump supporters are going to blow up the power stations.’ Boom,” Jones continued. “Or do they just say it enough and loons go, ‘Oh yeah that’s a good idea!’ I mean, either way, they’re putting it out there.”

Law enforcement agents arrested 24-year-old Skyler Philippi on Nov. 2 as he powered up a drone and prepared to attach explosives to it while sitting in the back of an SUV. He had been planning to fly the drone into a nearby electrical substation in Nashville, Tenn., according to a federal complaint.

A drifter who had bounced from his hometown in Minnesota to the New Hampshire woods, and then to a Nazi “hate house” in Louisville, Ky., Philippi was living in Middle Tennessee by the summer of 2024. By then, according to the charging document, Philippi was talking to an FBI informant to whom he had confided that he wanted to commit a mass shooting at a YMCA.

This person put Philippi in contact with a second informant who lived close enough so that the two could meet in person. According to the charging document, Philippi mentioned his interest in carrying out an attack on an electrical substation that would “shock the system” and talked about accelerationism, a strain of white supremacist ideology that advocates hastening the collapse of society to lay the groundwork for a whites-only homeland.

“If you want to do the most damage as an accelerationist, attack high economic, high tax, political zones in every major metropolis,” Philippi allegedly texted the second informant.

Philippi’s arrest, which Jones dismissed as a “false flag alert” on his X account on Election Day, is only the most recent of at least half a dozen arrests by the FBI of accelerationists motivated by hatred of Black people, Jews, Muslims and LGBTQ+ people that Raw Story has tracked over the past year. The defendants are accused of planning infrastructure attacks, mass shootings and ambushes against law enforcement.

The arrests, including the two alleged leaders of the Terrorgram Collective, described by the FBI as “a transnational terrorist group,” reflect the agency’s aggressive and increasingly sophisticated effort — often using informants — to disrupt accelerationist terror plots.

“Protecting the American people from terrorism — both international and domestic — is the FBI’s top priority,” the FBI said in a statement to Raw Story. “In 2019, we elevated racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism to be the one of our top threat priorities and it has remained at that level.”

Alex Jones’ dismissal of the foiled Nashville substation attack as an FBI “false flag” represents a larger tendency within the MAGA movement to reflexively downplay domestic terrorism motivated by white supremacy, just as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House and is reportedly preparing to replace current FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Neither Trump nor his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris raised domestic terrorism as a significant issue during the presidential campaign. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies relentlessly attacked the FBI and Department of Justice as the “Deep State” while promising to carry out retribution against officials involved in the multiple investigations against him and supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Kash Patel, the MAGA loyalist Trump has announced as his pick for FBI director, previously served as chief of staff for the Department of Defense during the incoming president's first term and led a probe of the FBI's investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 campaign for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

Trump and Patel have given little indication of whether he will support the FBI’s campaign to combat domestic terrorism, which has assessed violent extremism driven by a belief in white supremacy as being among the agency’s “highest priority threats.”

The Trump transition team and Patel did not respond to emails for this story.

Patel’s book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, published last year, devotes the first eight chapters to the FBI and the Department of Justice, but says little to nothing about domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists. The book only addresses domestic terrorism as a whole to argue that the FBI has exaggerated the problem for the purpose of unfairly maligning conservatives.

Patel, who prosecuted members of ISIS and al-Qaeda as a lawyer in the Department of Justice’s counterterrorism division from 2013 to 2017, writes in a chapter entitled “Made-Up Domestic Terrorism” that “to pump up public support for their attacks on conservative Americans, the FBI leadership has been reportedly pushing agents to artificially inflate data about domestic terrorism to make the problem seem much worse than it is.”

As a source for his claim, the footnote in Patel’s book cites a news article about a letter written by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, to Wray. Jordan wrote that a “whistleblower explained that because agents are not finding enough DVE cases, they are encouraged and incentivized to reclassify cases as DVE cases even though there is minimal, circumstantial evidence to support the reclassification.

White supremacist violence in first Trump administration

The FBI told Raw Story that “between 2015 and 2019, the most lethal threat posed by domestic violent extremism in the United States was from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists driven by a belief in the superiority of the white race.”

Those years bookend the June 2015 massacre carried out by 21-year-old Dylann Roof at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. that resulted in the deaths of nine African-American parishioners and the August 2019 mass shooting that targeted Latinos at an El Paso, Texas Walmart, taking the lives of 23 people.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security recognized 2019 as “the most lethal year for DVE attacks since 2015,” when Timothy McVeigh set off a bomb that at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.

Shortly before 21-year-old Patrick Crusius opened fire at the Walmart in El Paso, gunman Patrick Crusius published a manifesto stating that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” using a word that directly echoed Trump’s claim during the 2018 mid-term elections that a Central American migrant caravan approach the southern border was “an invasion.”

The following day, Trump issued a formal statement from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House that addressed the manifesto, while omitting any mention of his rhetoric.

“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy,” Trump said.

“We must recognize that the internet has provided a dangerous avenue to radicalize disturbed minds and perform demented acts,” he added. “We must shine light on the dark recesses of the internet, and stop mass murders before they start.”

His condemnation of the El Paso massacre notwithstanding, Trump has only escalated his rhetoric against immigrants since 2019.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump likened migrants crossing the southern border to “a military invasion,” while claiming that the United States was being “conquered” and “occupied by a foreign element.”

In other respects, Crusius’ manifesto didn’t just echo Trump’s own rhetoric, but forecasted positions that would be adopted by Trump and the GOP at large years later.

Crusius wrote: “The Democrat party will own America and they know it. They have already begun the transition by pandering heavily to the Hispanic voting bloc in the 1^st Democratic Debate.”

Five years later, during his debate with Harris, Trump gestured towards his Democratic opponent, saying, “Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.”

Tom Homan, whom Trump has named as his “border czar” during the next administration, made a similar false claim during a speech at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival in Pennsylvania in October.

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the first administration in the history of this nation who unsecured a border on purpose,” Homan said. “This isn’t an accident, this isn’t incompetence, this is by design, folks…. They obviously perceive a political advantage, thinking maybe they are future Democratic voters.”

A key reason for the enduring appeal of accelerationism — the white supremacist ideology repeatedly cited by the FBI in charging documents for disrupted terror plots — is dehumanizing narratives in the political and media discourse, said Matt Kriner, the managing director of the Accelerationist Research Consortium.

“What we’re seeing now is there’s a lot of discussion in the mainstream media around the ‘great replacement’ theory,” Kriner told Raw Story. “That’s a central component of their radicalization gateway. You get this swirling mix of terrorist propaganda and manifestos and mainstreamed narratives like the anti-Haitian conspiracy in Springfield, which creates a highly toxic and compelling radicalization environment.”

This is the first in a two-part series on the FBI's efforts to disrupt accelerationist terror plots as Donald Trump returns to power.

NOW READ: Merrick Garland and his 'Justice' Department should never be forgiven

I want to borrow some of your valuable time today to explain how I would not only save the faltering MSNBC, but also help it positively thrive, all while putting Republicans’ ongoing attack on America and our flickering Democracy on the front burner of the national discussion.

I admit that I come to all this as an unlikely savior.

As a curmudgeonly newspaperman, I have not been a fan of 24/7 cable news ever since it so unfortunately came into existence. I mean, what in the hell prompted us to think we needed “BREAKING NEWS” shoveled at us all day via these oh-so-sweet and handsome television toothies to further complicate our busy lives?

Much better newspaper professionals packaged all you needed to know in a neat, tight bundle delivered at your doorstep so you could process it all with your coffee in the morning, or an extra-dry martini after work. And if you needed a stiff chaser, there was always Walter Cronkite kicking around to serve it to you straight.

When it was clear the never-ending news blaring from our TV sets was here to stay, I let go this stellar quote in the newsroom one gloomy afternoon: “Turn that shit off. Nobody has time to watch this amateur crap all day.”

Well, it turns out I was wrong about all that, and I’ll spare you what I said about the Internet when it barged into our lives, because chances are you’d quit reading right here and now.

(I did think the Beatles would be a major hit when they came long, so occasionally my predictions hit in spectacular fashion.)

Ever since the latest godawful election night in America, MSNBC’s ratings have been in the toilet, with some parts of their programming dropping audience share by nearly 50 percent. Turns out, many viewers aren’t happy with their appeasement of the American-attacking Trump in some parts of their 24/7 programming, or their attempt at “fair and balanced” news coverage that preceded the election by normalizing a hardcore racist who writes love letters to dictators. Then there was the not-so-subtle banging on the Democratic Party by some of their mouthy, daytime anchors, who just couldn’t acknowledge the party was correct on nearly every single major issue, but ironically lacked the bandwidth to tout their stellar work.

There’s speculation that MSNBC’s ratings dive will slow when the America-attacking Trump is sworn in on January 20th, and all the terrible things he ran on officially become all-too real. Good people are just tired right now, and trying to claim the next two months for themselves, before all the blood righteously pumps from their hearts with a gush straight into their exploding heads.

Fox News went through a similar down cycle after Joe Biden beat the America-attacker in 2020. The right-wing propaganda station lost lots of its viewers, but they all returned in time.

I am not sure that will be the case here — my shaky history of predictions aside.

The gods at Comcast, who own MSNBC, have announced they have plans to “spin off” the network, along with some other channels in their vast catalogue into a separate company. Nobody knows what in the hell all this means, but in researching this write, I can tell you there are a s----ton of “media insiders” who aren’t shy about making semi-educated guesses.

Some have speculated whatever it is that is spun will be sold to the highest bidder — maybe even Fox’s Rupert Murdoch. Others say the place will just look a little different, but remain under current ownership.

Only one thing seems crystal clear: America has never needed reliable, left-leaning news programming more than it does right now.

The notorious messaging problem wasn’t as prevalent for Democrats this past election cycle, but platforming their message was. They (we) simply no longer have the bandwidth to compete with the Republican’s myriad industrial pollutants that poison the air with their lies. They are literally everywhere. They control the radio airways, our TV channels, and the digital media. Billionaires like the grotesque Elon Musk are throwing their money and their allegiances to fascists like Vladimir Putin to help finish off America for good with their odious, never-ending lies.

Our corporate media is now officially disgraceful, and failed to do its job by giving the greatest internal threat to America since the Civil War the attention it deserved. Democracy and our rights as Americans are hanging precariously by a thread, and these incompetent, bought-off boobs in the working press are in large part to blame for it. Regular visitors to this space will know how I feel about all this and them, so for the sake of time, I’ll just leave it at that for now.

The communications landscape has been turned completely on its head, and liberals’ rigid, straight up approach to reaching people is honorable in its intent and embarrassing in its execution and results. Unless and until this is fixed and pronto, Democrats and left-leaners in this country are in deep, deep, trouble.

We are losing the communications battle, but if MSNBC would just get the hell out of its own way, we could start to reclaim the high ground.

Here’s how that happens:

• Start listening to your audience, MSNBC. They hate you right now. They believe you have failed and betrayed them. Stop trying to be some “both-sides-do-it” news organization, and start capturing the millions of people who are starving for truth, and know a revolting racist when they see and hear one. Stop trying to be too many different things to too many different audiences. Immediately dump the half-baked garbage on your station — like, Morning Joe, for instance. Seriously, what is it that show supposed to be doing? What crucial niche is it fulfilling? Is showcasing two lily-white people kissing the two-ton ass of a dictator that important? Their stupid show bleeds into a significant problem I’ll delve into a bit more shortly: What the hell is your penchant for recruiting Republican refugees as headliners on your station? It’s disgusting. Start listening to what your audience wants immediately. Start giving them what they want instead of what you think they should want. It’s haughty as hell. They, not you, are all that matters.
• Screw it, let’s deal with this Republican problem right now. The station is littered with them. Do these people really think their noxious party is coming back from the America-attacking Trump? Is being a part of the gruesome Tea Party movement something to be proud of and looked back on with reverence? Are trying to kill abortion rights and Obamacare a badge of honor? Were things “great” for them when they had the House and Senate back then? And former staffers for the hideous George W. Bush are everywhere. Here’s a bulletin: He is a terrible, terrible man. A damn war criminal. A complete idiot. I mean, what the hell am I supposed to make of all this, people? Look, I’m not here to entirely wipe ‘em out, but how is it they have ascended to such loud platforms in the Democratic communications ranks? The Lincoln Project, despite some pretty significant hiccups, has done some good work, but nobody deserves extra credit for simply doing the right thing and turning away from a revolting political party that falls at the fat, little feet of a complete lying racist, deviant, who assaults women and our country and brags about it. But MSNBC can’t seem to get enough these old, white Republican men, and as an old, white liberal man I find it really creepy and disturbing. Here’s what I’d like to hear them all say, “We were wrong. The party we supported is terrible, it really is. Turns out the folks on the Left were right about us all these years. I fervently hope they will accept our apologies.” Otherwise, they can hit the road, and shouldn’t be trusted. I have warned before that many of them are just dying to do the wrong thing again, and go back to their revolting party.
• Don’t be shy about letting your audience know that you are direct counter-programing to the ghastly Fox network, and in fact are taking them and their bulls--- head on. Make a point of destroying them. Belittle them. Fact-check the hell out of them. This will be delightfully easy to do and so much damn fun to watch. WE NEED SOME FUN, DAMMIT. Say what you will about Murdoch’s odious network, but it has succeeded beyond the ancient man’s wildest dreams. There is no America-attacking Trump without Fox. Period. They are ratings stalwarts that traffic in lies and are expert at exploiting what is buried in their audience’s cold, white hearts. They are proof as Mark Twain once quipped, that “a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Call them out on this 24/7.
• Focus. Make it clear as day you are 100 percent, left-leaning programming that proudly and unswervingly stands for women’s right, human rights, voters’ rights, environmental rights, workers’ rights, healthcare rights, and Social Security and Medicare rights. In other words, all the things the Democrats have stood for during the past 100 years. Except too many Americans don’t know that in 2024, because the message and that fact have been completely stolen. This horses--- that Republicans are running with the idea that they care about working-class Americans is grand larceny and should have NEVER been allowed to happen. By their dirty deeds, Republicans actually HATE working-class Americans. This has been a massive messaging problem for the Democratic Party, yes. But the pathetic mainstream media, with your help, MSNBC, helped people buy into this. Stop trying to do too many things half-decently, and home in on doing one thing great: spreading the truth.
• Give Pete Buttigieg a big, fat contract and as much airtime as he wants. I’m being partial here, but the dude might be the best communicator I have ever heard. Maybe even consider some Crossfire variant where he calmly smashes a conservative lackey to smithereens on a weekly basis. Again: WE NEED SOME DAMN FUN.
• Enough already with all these double-talking “legal experts” on your shows. This should need no explaining after what happened first with Bill Barr and the Mueller Report, and then Merrick Garland and the attack on America he ignored. It took forever to hear a single criticism of Garland from any of these on-air lawyers. Some still haven’t gotten there yet. They have been wrong about almost everything, but have proven the legal system in this country is in a complete shambles. The notion of law and order, and that nobody is above the law in the United States is a pathetic joke. Our Supreme Court is the most gory example of this. Give me legal people who say what need saying in plain, non-lawyered terms, and will be critical of other lawyers, and keep the rest of them the hell off the air.
• Create the biggest, ever-expanding, liberal, pro-Democracy bubble in history, and don’t apologize for it. If the worst thing that happens is that your growing audience is stuffed full of righteous, good-hearted people, while all hell comes raining down from the White House the next four years, things could be worse. You have a real opportunity here, MSNBC. Tens of millions of us, are looking for a place we can trust to hang our hats, while the storm rages. I suggest you get the hell out of your own way and just take it.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

— Trump is taking off the mask, after lying to us for over a year about not knowing anything about Project 2025. Former President Trump, who previously kept his distance from Project 2025, is now selecting its key architects for potential cabinet positions and wow, are they doozies. The 900-page conservative policy blueprint, which has alarmed Democrats, appears to be moving from the sidelines to center stage in Trump's plans for a potential second term. His choice of Russell Vought, a co-author of Project 2025, to lead the Office of Management and Budget, along with several other picks tied to the project, tells us he was lying (surprise!) when he repeatedly disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s project to take apart America’s government; we saw a smaller version of this in 1981 when Reagan took Heritage’s 1980 “Mandate for Leadership” and implemented nearly 80 percent of its suggestions, including massive tax breaks for billionaires and deregulation of pollution and consumer protections for corporations.

— Trump picks herd immunity advocate to lead National Institutes of Health (NIH). Want more death with your health policy? The appointment of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a vocal critic of COVID-19 lockdowns and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, as the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by President-elect Donald Trump represents a radical departure from established public health strategies. The Great Barrington Declaration called for achieving herd immunity through natural infection — a strategy widely criticized by health experts, including former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, who labeled it as dangerous and not aligned with mainstream science. If America had pursued herd immunity it could have meant millions more deaths, particularly among the vulnerable. Bhattacharya’s stance against lockdowns and vaccine mandates, coupled with his promotion of herd immunity, raises questions about how far the NIH will be degraded under his leadership. This appointment, alongside other controversial nominations such as Bob Kennedy, a known vaccine skeptic, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, suggests a shift away from science-based public health policies in our agencies that were specifically created to promote science-based public health. This could not only undermine efforts to control infectious diseases but also erode public trust in health institutions, posing a direct threat to the integrity of American public health and scientific research. More death and disease? Apparently that’s what many Americans just voted for, whether they knew it or not…

— Trump Chooses Megadonor Art Collector To Head U.S. Navy. Yep, an art collector and investment guy. To run the Navy. Trump’s nomination of John Phelan, an art collector and Republican megadonor who has never served in the military, as Secretary of the Navy, represents another radical departure from traditional appointments. Phelan, who leads the private investment firm Rugger Management and previously managed investments for billionaire Michael Dell, hosted a high-profile fundraiser for Trump at his $38 million Aspen, Colorado, home, raising a huge pile of money. Now Trump’s rewarding him. Phelan’s lack of military background undermines the leadership of the Navy, since his primary qualification is apparently his shoveling cash to Trump. This appointment raises alarm bells across the military about the prioritization of political loyalty over expertise in critical defense roles, potentially compromising the effectiveness and integrity of military leadership. Exactly the sort of thing Putin would love Trump to do. Surprised? No…

— So much for that “wall of separation between church and state” that Jefferson wrote about. Trump’s selection of Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) signals a significant shift toward embedding Christian nationalist ideologies within federal governance. Vought, a self-identified proponent of “Christian nationism,” claims — incorrectly — that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed accordingly. Vought’s organization, the Center for Renewing America, prioritizes affirming the U.S. as a Christian nation, advocating a form of Christian supremacy, where, despite the presence of diverse faiths, Christianity is at the core of a government-approved American identity. This blows apart the separation between church and state, marginalizing non-Christian communities and undermining the pluralistic foundations of American democracy. If you’re not a Christian — or you’re not the rightwing variety of Christian promoted by Trump and his multimillionaire televangelist huckster supporters — buckle up. The ride is going to get bumpy.

— Musk wants to get rid of the anti-fraud police. Why? Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has raised significant concerns that the grifter in the White House wants to empower banking and investment grifters to rip us all off. Musk has publicly called for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), stating, “Delete CFPB. There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies.” The CFPB, established in 2010 following the Bush Crash, is the main agency safeguarding consumers from predatory financial practices. Its dissolution will leave consumers vulnerable to exploitation and massive rip-offs by financial institutions. Musk’s leadership of DOGE, combined with his substantial business interests and political influence, also means he and his friends may even benefit from silencing the regulators and increase the problem of crony capitalism. He’s already called for de-funding a government agency that helps low-income rural people get broadband, saying his company Starlink should provide that service. This move aligns with longstanding Republican efforts to curtail the CFPB’s authority in exchange for massive contributions from banks and investment firms, raising alarms about the preservation of essential consumer safeguards for average working people. Get ready to get ripped of big-time.

— Embarassed Tesla owners are taking steps… Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump and engagement with far-right conspiracy theories have grossed out many Tesla owners, leading to a explosion of anti-Musk sentiment within the community. Matt Hiller, a Hawaii-based aquarium worker, has seen a surge in sales of anti-Musk stickers, with hundreds sold daily to Tesla owners seeking to distance themselves from Musk’s political affiliations. These stickers feature slogans like “Anti Elon Tesla Club” and “I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy.” Hiller, who decided against purchasing a Tesla due to Musk’s behavior on Xitter, notes that many customers now feel embarrassed driving their Teslas. Will rightwing Tesla buyers make up for the loss of environmentally conscious peple who’d previously been the car’s base? Apparently that’s what Elon is betting on, as Tesla is the largest source of his wealth.

— Jair Bolsonaro — aka “Brazil’s Trump” (he fled to Mar-a-Lago when his followers attacked the legislature like Trump’s did on January 6th) — thinks Trump and his people will get him back into power. Fascists of a feather gotta stick together, or at least that’s what Bolsonaro thinks: he told an interviewer that he’s relying on Trump’s help to get back into power in Brazil. He’s been charged with attempting a coup in his own nation, and says he’s hoping Trump will slap harsh sanctions on Brazil if they continue to prosecute Bolsonaro or prevent him from running for president again. It’s like the gang is getting back together to destroy democracy worldwide: Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Putin, Xi and every tinpot dictator in the world…

— Crazy Alert! JD Vance posts a re-do of the famous Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting with him as Trump’s wife — and rightwingers are going nuts with cringe. Seriously, here’s the picture. You can’t make this stuff up.

— Hunter in a Farmer’s World:

— Wisdom School:

For Thanksgiving, I published a short history of Jefferson’s and his Democrats’ reaction to John Adams’ fearmongering for political power around the “XYZ Affair.” I referenced Adams’ shutting down the opposition newspapers in America, but a surprising number of people responded with:

“What??? Really????? An American president shut down all the opposition newspapers because they insulted him? That really happened?”

So here’s the rest of the story:

Some Americans are suggesting that the ascendance of a strongman president who wants to shut down America’s press is totally new in the experience of America and may spell the end of both democracy and the Bill of Rights. History, however, shows another view, which offers us both warnings and hope.

Although you won't learn much about it from reading the “Republican histories” of the Founders being published and promoted in the corporate media these days, the most notorious stain on the presidency of John Adams began in 1798 with the passage of a series of laws that would give him virtually unlimited strongman powers to attack his political enemies and, like Trump says he wants to do, end the First Amendment right of a free press.

It started when Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin and editor of the Philadelphia newspaper the Aurora, began to speak out against the policies of then-President John Adams. Bache supported Vice President Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party (today called the Democratic Party) when John Adams led the conservative Federalists (who today would be philosophically close to today’s Republicans).

Bache attacked Adams in an op-ed piece by calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.”

To be sure, Bache wasn’t the only one attacking Adams in 1798. His Aurora was one of about 20 independent newspapers aligned with Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, and many were openly questioning Adams’ policies and ridiculing Adams' fondness for formality and grandeur.

On the Federalist side, conservative newspaper editors were equally outspoken. Noah Webster wrote that Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans were “the refuse, the sweepings of the most depraved part of mankind from the most corrupt nations on earth.”

Another Federalist characterized the Democratic-Republicans as “democrats, momocrats and all other kinds of rats,” while Federalist newspapers promoted a weird collection of bizarre conspiracy theories about Jefferson and his colleagues.

But while Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans had learned to develop a thick skin, University of Missouri-Rolla history professor Larry Gragg points out in an October 1998 article in American History magazine that Bache’s writings sent Adams and his wife into a self-righteous frenzy.

Abigail wrote to her husband and others that Benjamin Franklin Bache was expressing the “malice” of a man “possessed by Satan.” The Democratic-Republican newspaper editors were engaging, she said, in “abuse, deception, and falsehood,” and Bache was a “lying wretch.”

Abigail insisted that her husband and Congress must act to punish Bache for his “most insolent and abusive” words about her husband and his administration. His “wicked and base, violent and calumniating abuse” must be stopped, she demanded.

Abigail Adams followed the logic employed by modern-day “conservatives” who say that those opposed to Trump’s policies are “unpatriotic,” by writing that Bache’s “abuse” being “leveled against the Government” of the United States (her husband) could even plunge the nation into a “civil war.”

Worked into a frenzy by Abigail Adams’ and Federalist newspapers of the day, Federalist senators and congressmen — who controlled both legislative houses along with the presidency — came to the defense of John Adams by passing a series of four laws that came to be known together as the Alien and Sedition Acts.

The vote was so narrow — 44 to 41 in the House of Representatives — that in order to ensure passage the lawmakers wrote a sunset provision into its most odious parts: Those laws, unless renewed, would expire the last day of John Adams’ first term of office, March 3, 1801.

Empowered with this early gift of presidential power, President John Adams ordered his “unpatriotic” opponents arrested, and specified that only Federalist judges on the Supreme Court would be both judges and jurors.

Bache, often referred to as “Lightning Rod Junior” after his famous grandfather, was the first to be hauled into jail (before the laws even became effective!), followed by New York Time Piece editor John Daly Burk, which put his paper out of business. Bache died of yellow fever while awaiting trial, and Burk accepted deportation to avoid imprisonment and then fled.

Others didn't avoid prison so easily. Editors of seventeen of the twenty or so Democratic-Republican-affiliated newspapers were arrested, and ten were convicted and imprisoned; many of their newspapers went out of business.

Bache’s successor, William Duane (who both took over the newspaper and married Bache’s widow), continued the attacks on Adams, publishing in the June 24, 1799 issue of the Aurora a private letter John Adams had written to Tench Coxe in which then-Vice President Adams admitted that there were still men influenced by Great Britain in the U.S. government.

The letter cast Adams in an embarrassing light, as it implied that Adams himself may still have British loyalties (something suspected by many, ever since his pre-revolutionary defense of British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre), and made the quick-tempered Adams furious.

Imprisoning his opponents in the press was only the beginning for Adams, though. Knowing Jefferson would mount a challenge to his presidency in 1800, he and the Federalists hatched a plot to pass secret legislation that would have disputed presidential elections decided “in secret” and “behind closed doors.”

Duane got evidence of the plot, and published it just after having published the letter that so infuriated Adams. It was altogether too much for the president who didn't want to let go of his power: Adams had Duane arrested and hauled before Congress on Sedition Act charges.

Duane would have stayed in jail had not Thomas Jefferson intervened, letting Duane leave to “consult his attorney.” Duane went into hiding until the end of the Adams' presidency.

Emboldened, the Federalists reached out beyond just newspaper editors.

When Congress let out in July of 1798, John and Abigail Adams made the trip home to Braintree, Massachusetts in their customary fashion — in fancy carriages as part of a parade, with each city they passed through firing cannons and ringing church bells. (The Federalists were, after all, as Jefferson said, the party of “the rich and the well born.” Although Adams wasn’t one of the super-rich, he basked in their approval and adopted royal-like trappings, later discarded by Jefferson.)

As the Adams family entourage, full of pomp and ceremony, passed through Newark, New Jersey, a man named Luther Baldwin was sitting in a tavern and probably quite unaware that he was about to make a fateful comment that would help change history.

As Adams rode by, soldiers manning the Newark cannons loudly shouted the Adams-mandated chant, “Behold the chief who now commands!” and fired their salutes. Hearing the cannon fire as Adams drove by outside the bar, in a moment of drunken candor Luther Baldwin said:

“There goes the President and they are firing at his arse.” Baldwin further compounded his sin by adding that, “I do not care if they fire thro’ his arse!”

The tavern’s owner, a Federalist named John Burnet, overheard the remark and turned Baldwin in to Adams’ thought police: The hapless drunk was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for uttering “seditious words tending to defame the President and Government of the United States.”

The Alien and Sedition Acts reflected the new attitude Adams and his wife had brought to Washington D.C. in 1796, a take-no-prisoners type of politics in which no opposition was tolerated.

For example, on January 30, 1798, Vermont's Congressman Matthew Lyon spoke out on the floor of the House against “the malign influence of Connecticut politicians.” Charging that Adams’ and the Federalists only served the interests of the rich and had “acted in opposition to the interests and opinions of nine-tenths of their constituents,” Lyon infuriated the Federalists.

The situation simmered for two weeks, and on the morning of February 15, 1798, Federalist anger reached a boiling point when conservative Connecticut Congressman Roger Griswold attacked Lyon on the House floor with a hickory cane. As Congressman George Thatcher wrote in a letter now held at the Massachusetts Historical Society:

“Mr. Griswald [sic] [was] laying on blows with all his might upon Mr. Lyon. Griswald continued his blows on the head, shoulder, & arms of Lyon, [who was] protecting his head & face as well as he could. Griswald tripped Lyon & threw him on the floor & gave him one or two [more] blows in the face.”

In sharp contrast to his predecessor George Washington, America’s second president had succeeded in creating an atmosphere of fear and division in the new republic, and it brought out the worst in his conservative supporters.

Across the new nation, Federalist mobs and Federalist-controlled police and militia attacked Democratic-Republican newspapers and shouted down or threatened individuals who dared speak out in public against John Adams.

Even members of Congress were not legally immune from the long arm of Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts.

When Congressman Lyon — already hated by the Federalists for his opposition to the law, and recently caned in Congress by Federalist Roger Griswold — wrote an article pointing out Adams’ “continual grasp for power” and suggesting that Adams had an “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice,” Federalists convened a federal grand jury and indicted Congressman Lyon for bringing “the President and government of the United States into contempt.”

Lyon, who had served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, was led through the town of Vergennes, Vermont in shackles. He ran for re-election from his 12x16-foot Vergennes jail cell and handily won his seat.

“It is quite a new kind of jargon,” Lyon wrote from jail to his constituents, “to call a Representative of the People an Opposer of the Government because he does not, as a legislator, advocate and acquiesce in every proposition that comes from the Executive.”

Which brings us to today. The possible ray of light for those who oppose the attempts of Donald Trump to emulate John Adams is found in the end of the story of Adams' attempt to suborn the Bill of Rights and turn the United States into a one-party state:

— The Alien and Sedition Acts caused the Democratic-Republican newspapers to become more popular than ever, and turned the inebriated Luther Baldwin into a national celebrity. In like fashion, progressive websites and talk shows are today proliferating across the internet, and victims of Trump’s ending women’s right to abortion are often featured in the press.

— The day Adams signed the Acts, Thomas Jefferson left town in protest and never again saw John Adams face-to-face. Even though Jefferson was Vice President, and could theoretically benefit from using the Acts against his own political enemies, he and James Madison continued to protest and work against them. Jefferson wrote the text for a non-binding resolution against the Acts that was adopted by the Kentucky legislature, and James Madison wrote one for Virginia that was adopted by that legislature.

— Jefferson beat Adams in the election of 1800 as a wave of voter revulsion over Adams’ phony and self-serving “patriotism” swept over the nation (along with concerns about Adams' belligerent war rhetoric against the French).

— When Jefferson exposed Adams as a poseur and tool of the powerful elite, the rot within Adams’ Federalist Party was exposed along with it. The Federalists lost their hold on Congress in the election of 1800, and began a 30-year slide into total disintegration (later to be reincarnated as Whigs and then as Republicans).

— In what came to be known as “The American Revolution of 1800” (the title of a book by Dan Sisson and me), Thomas Jefferson freed all the men imprisoned by Adams as one of his first acts of office. Jefferson even reimbursed the fines they’d paid — with interest — and granted them a formal pardon and apology.

Two weeks before the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed, June 1, 1798, as Adams was already rounding up newspaper editors and dissidents in anticipation of his coming legal authority, Jefferson sat down at his desk and, heart heavy but hopeful, put quill pen to paper to share his thoughts with his old friend John Taylor, one of his fellow Democratic Republicans and a man also in Adams cross-hairs.

(Two decades later, Taylor would write down his thoughts on the issue of government in a widely-distributed book, “Construction Construed, and Constitutions Vindicated,” noting that: “A government is substantially good or bad, in the degree that it produces the happiness or misery of a nation...”)

Several states had gone completely over to Adam’s side, particularly Massachusetts which was filled with preachers who wanted theocracy established in America, and Connecticut, which had become the epicenter of the wealthy who wanted to control the government’s agenda for their own gain.

It was red states and blue states, writ large. There was even discussion of Massachusetts seceding from the rest of the nation, which had become too “liberal” (to use George Washington’s term) and secular.

“It is true that we are completely under the saddle of Massachusetts and Connecticut,” Jefferson wrote to Taylor, his friend and compatriot, “and that they ride us very hard, cruelly insulting our feelings, as well as exhausting our strength and subsistence. Their natural friends, the three other Eastern States join them from a sort of family pride, and they have the art to divide certain other parts of the Union, so as to make use of them to govern the whole.
“This is not new,” Jefferson added, “it is the old practice of despots; to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order. And those who have once got an ascendancy and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantage.
“But,” he added, “our present situation is not a natural one.”

Jefferson knew that the theocrats and the rich did not represent the true heart and soul of America, and commented to Taylor about how Adams had been using divide-and-conquer politics, and fear-monger about war with France (the infamous “XYZ Affair”) with some success.

“But still I repeat it,” he wrote to Taylor, “this is not the natural state.”

Our nation’s wisest political commentator noted the problem of politics:

“Be this as it may, in every free and deliberating society, there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties, and violent dissensions and discords; and one of these, for the most part, must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time. Perhaps this party division is necessary to induce each to watch and delate to the people the proceedings of the other.”
“But,” Jefferson asked rhetorically, “will the evil stop there?”

Apparently he thought so, and his next paragraph to Taylor gives progressives a reminder for these times.

This must be our mantra, even as we work harder every day:

“A little patience,” Jefferson wrote, “and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolved, and the people recovering their true sight, restoring their government to its true principles. It is true, that in the meantime, we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war, and long oppressions of enormous public debt. ...
“If the game runs sometimes against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost. For this is a game where principles are the stake.”

Ever the optimist and the realist, Jefferson ended his letter with both hope and caution.

“Better luck, therefore, to us all, and health, happiness and friendly salutations to yourself," he closed the letter. But under his signature, Jefferson added:
“P. S. It is hardly necessary to caution you to let nothing of mine get before the public; a single sentence got hold of by the Porcupines, will suffice to abuse and persecute me in their papers for months.”

It is time, now, for us to once again follow Jefferson’s wise advice. Hope for the best, organize for a better America, and recognize the power and evil unleashed by politicians who believe that campaign lies are defensible, laws gutting the Bill of Rights are acceptable, and that the ends justifies the means.

America has been through crises before, and far worse. If we retain the vigilance and energy of Jefferson and his contemporaries — as today we face every bit as much a struggle against the same forces that he fought — we shall prevail.

For the simple reason that, underneath it all, “this is a game where principles are the stake.”

NOW READ: Inside the billionaires' plan to silence democracy

The stürm und drang all over the media this week is about Trump, on Monday, doubling down on his tariffs saying that he’d impose across-the-board 25 percent tariffs on all goods from China, Mexico, and Canada until there’s no more fentanyl or undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers coming into the US.

That’s a substantial lift, and if he follows through with the threat (which seems likely, although I’d bet money that he’ll drill lots of holes in those tariffs to satisfy corporate donors) it’ll cause a considerable disruption in American commerce. Those three countries, after all, account for more than 40 percent of all American trade.

Weirdly, Trump may be doing the Democrats a favor by taking this position, and I don’t mean the possibility that he’ll wreck the economy and thus his party’s chances in 2026 and 2028 (although that’s real, too).

Tariff-free trade was a central cornerstone of Reagan’s neoliberal agenda; he and Bush wrote the NAFTA agreement that Clinton later signed, for example. I lay this out in considerable detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America. Tragically, Bill Clinton and his Larry Sommers/Robert Rubin crew embraced neoliberalism with gusto, putting the final nail in the meaningful use of tariffs to protect American manufacturing and the jobs associated with it.

Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been working for years to pull the Democratic Party back from the neoliberal free trade brink, and if Trump pushes through his tariffs in a big way it may help shatter what’s left of the neoliberal consensus (at least with regard to trade) in the Democratic Party. That would be a Very Good Thing, both for the Party and for the nation.

Tariffs can be a good thing for a country, if done right. People who grew up in the Midwest (like me) know all about tariffs; we learned about them as children (I remember 5th Grade civics!).

Trump, however, did them so badly last time that they backfired, cost us a fortune, and forced the federal government to subsidize Midwestern farmers. Odds are, if he keeps to his current rhetoric, he’ll do the same, and Democrats should be ready with reasonable talking points; this could end up working tremendously to their advantage if they’re willing to embrace reasonable tariffs and other trade protections to bring manufacturing back to the US.

So, let’s re-examine how tariffs can work when done right, their role in American history, and why we should be discussing them now without hysterics.

Tariffs are taxes paid to the federal government on imported goods. And, like all taxes, they have two purposes: to raise revenue and to alter behavior. In the case of import tariffs, the second purpose (changing behavior, in this case encouraging entrepreneurs to start manufacturing companies aka factories here in America) is far more important than the first.

It all began here in America when General Henry Knox rode up to Mount Vernon in the late summer of 1789 to tell George Washington that Congress had just elected him as the first President of the United States. Washington took the news, and had two requests for his old friend.

First, he asked Knox to let folks know he’d be delayed by a few days because he wanted to say goodbye to his mother, who was elderly and ailing (turned out, it was the last time he saw her alive).

Second, Washington asked General Knox to ride all the way up to Connecticut to visit Daniel Hinsdale, a man who’d been secretly manufacturing black-market American-made fine men’s clothing in defiance of British law for decades. Knox took Washington’s measurements and then, a month later, brought to New York (where the swearing-in took place on what is now Wall Street) a fine American-made suit, which Washington proudly wore. (The suit was brown; the black suit of his later, famous painting was British formal wear.)

This incident highlighted the manufacturing crisis facing our new nation, and Washington was acutely aware of it.

The British, for two centuries, had been extracting wealth from the American colonies by forbidding us from manufacturing everything from fine clothing (thus Hinsdale’s illegal business) to weaponry to sophisticated machinery: all such items had to be imported from British manufacturers. We sold England cheap raw cotton, for example, and they forced us to buy back expensive fine cotton clothing manufactured on the looms of British cities. (Homespun was still legal in the colonies.)

They also forced us to buy tea — then the primary American beverage — from the East India Company, an outrage that led directly to the Boston Tea Party of 1773, which arguably kicked off the American Revolution. Thus, when Washington came into office, the first challenge he faced was how to build an American manufacturing base that wasn’t dependent on British imports.

Thirteen years before Washington’s inauguration, British economist Adam Smith had made worldwide headlines with his bestselling 1776 book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, proposing that the main thing that made a country rich was independence in manufacturing.

The process of converting raw materials of little value into finished products with a high value (manufacturing) was, to Smith’s mind, the best and only practical way a nation could grow wealthy without overseas conquest and plunder.

A tree limb laying on the forest floor, for example, had no monetary value, but when labor and the tool of a knife were applied to it and it was turned into an axe-handle — a process called manufacturing — it now had a value that could be passed down through generations.

Smith called that wealth. That axe-handle became part of the aggregate wealth of the entire nation, and even if it was sold overseas that wealth would still remain here because its value was simply converted into currency which stayed in America.

This understanding led President Washington to commission his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, to propose to Congress in 1791 an 11-step Report on the Subject of Manufactures, also known as “The American Plan.”

At the core of Hamilton’s plan were protective tariffs on goods that were then being imported but could be easily made in the USA. The tariffs would increase the price of the imported goods so much that they’d encourage American entrepreneurs to start factories to make the same things here.

(Hamilton’s plan also included government subsidies for companies that wanted to move manufacturing to the US, federal subsidies for the development of new technologies, a massive investment in infrastructure [particularly roads and water-power systems] to support industry, and a requirement that the US government purchase only American-made products whenever possible.)

Within two decades, Congress and the Washington, Adams, and Jefferson administrations had put nearly all of Hamilton’s plan into effect, and major parts of it stood all the way up until Reagan’s neoliberal revolution kicked off in 1981.

Hamilton’s plan was such a successful and important part of how America became the wealthiest nation on Earth, and produced so much revenue, that virtually 100% of the cost of operating our federal government — from our founding until the Civil War — came from tariffs. The salary of every president from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln was paid by tariffs (some were domestic interstate tariffs, like on alcohol), as was the salary of every federal official and the cost of everything else the federal government did.

Fully two-thirds of federal government revenue came from tariffs from the end of the Civil War until the World War I era and the 1913 passage of the 16th Amendment (the income tax); a third of federal government revenue came from tariffs between WWI and WWII.

Today, however, it is under 2%.

Prior to Reagan, American manufacturing — kept on this continent by the force of tariffs — was at the core of the American Dream, with good union manufacturing jobs offering stability and prosperity to a growing American middle class from the 19th century until the 1990s. Tariffs also made America the technological leader of the entire planet.

The concept was simple: if a product could be made for $70 with cheap Chinese labor, but cost $100 to make with US labor, we’d put a $30 tariff on it to equalize the labor costs. Ditto if overseas manufacturing was subsidized by governments or by a lack of expensive pollution controls or worker safety protections: we’d match those cost advantages with tariffs.

There was still a heck of a lot of trade going on in the world when tariffs were common. As late as 1975, our imports and exports were pretty much in balance (we had a $12 billion surplus).

And then came the neoliberal sales pitch of the 1980s, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

If only we could get rid of those nasty tariffs — we had over 20,000 categories of products with specified tariffs — by reducing them to zero or very, very low numbers, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton told us, then American consumers would benefit because big retailers like Walmart could buy products made with cheap labor from overseas instead of from higher-paid American workers. Prices, in other words, would be lower for consumers.

The result has been the shuttering of over 70,000 US factories and the loss of around 8 million good often-unionized manufacturing jobs. It typically takes companies between one and two decades to shift manufacturing overseas, given how large a logistical operation it involves, and reversing the process will probably also take a decade or two.

Entire regions of America were wiped out, producing a swath of our country now referred to as the “rust belt.” The situation was compounded by the Bush administration’s and the Supreme Court’s hostility to union rights.

Since Reagan’s “free trade” we’ve had nothing but annual trade deficits, each representing trillions in American worker’s wealth that’s been shifted to overseas manufacturing countries.

Sam Walton’s autobiography, titled Made in America, epitomized the situation prior to Reaganism when Walmart stores had big “100% Made In America” banners hanging over their front doors. Today, you’ll search for hours to find a single made-in-America product in most big-box stores.

Around that same time, another rationale for corporations seeking cheap labor and easy pollution regulations overseas began to take hold in the minds of the neoliberal intelligentsia: “Free trade,” they said, was so magical it could even bring about world peace!

The argument was simple, the neoliberals told us: history showed, they said, that countries that traded heavily with each other rarely went to war with each other. The example most often cited was that no two countries with MacDonald’s burger outlets had ever, at that time, gone to war (although they have since: see Russia and Ukraine).

Thomas Friedman jumped into the act at the end of the 20th century, promoting the MacDonalds’ Peace Theory and the transfer of American manufacturing overseas with his now-discredited 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

Its impact, along with major campaigns encouraging “free trade” funded by American industrial and retail giants and their billionaire owners, echoed across American manufacturing and foreign policy for the next 20 years, as America continued to hemorrhage jobs along with the middle class “American Dream” wealth that accompanied them.

As a vast proportion of American manufacturing shifted to China, that nation — just like Hamilton predicted and proved with the US — underwent the most rapid transformation from Third World poverty to First World affluence in the history of the world.

All because the “wealth” of America was transferred to China every time a cash-register rang at Walmart, an Apple Store, or in pretty much any other American retail outlet. And continues to this day.

So, how do we bring back tariffs and how do we avoid a trade war disaster like Trump caused during his first presidency?

The main goal of a import tariff is to encourage Americans to buy the products of domestic — rather than foreign — manufacturing. For that to work, companies that may consider investing billions in factories here in the US need to know that the tariffs aren’t just a whim or election stunt like they were with Trump, but will be around for the coming years or even decades necessary to recover their initial billion-dollar investments in new manufacturing facilities.

Tariffs also need to be brought in on an item-by-item basis, organically, with each imported item that we want to put a tariff onto examined for the tariff’s impact, both on domestic inflation and international relations.

We really have no need to put a tariff on, for example, imported artwork from Mexico or moose-skin jackets from Canada; there’s no competing domestic industry here. It’s why Trump’s proposed “across-the-board” tariffs are so stupid.

But the manufacture of cars, steel, chips, computers, toys, clothes, pharmaceuticals, and hundreds of other products and categories of goods can be brought back to the US by appropriate tariffs, introduced gradually and predictably, done in a way that allows both foreign companies and US entrepreneurs to adjust without major disruptions.

There’s also a national security aspect to this. Right now, it’s nearly impossible for the US to manufacture a battleship or advanced aircraft without parts from overseas. Because tariffs had kept virtually all manufacturing here in the US prior to WWII, shifting to a war-based manufacturing economy in the 1940s, before Reagan’s neoliberal “reforms,” was easy. Today it would be extremely difficult.

On top of that, we no longer make most therapeutic drugs here in America. China makes many of the raw ingredients for the drugs we use here, and most pharmaceuticals used in America are manufactured there and in India.

One result is that often drugs we take are contaminated because they’re made in plants outside the US; an old friend got cancer from taking a drug contaminated by a toxic chemical, and my father got bladder cancer from taking a drug contaminated in India with N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA).

Also alarming, if we got into a serious conflict with China (for example) and they cut us off from all their manufactured goods, our economy would collapse overnight and we’d find it very, very difficult to manufacture some of our most important weaponry and telecommunications equipment. Not to mention the crisis of a massive drug shortage.

Thus, tariffs have to be put into place intelligently; after all, we’re reversing a neoliberal free trade process that took 44 years to get as bad as it is today.

We don’t want to start trade wars — like Trump did the first time with his tariff stunt and is threatening to do again in January — or wipe out people in poor countries (like Bangladesh or Malaysia, where much of our clothing is made), but we do want the “wealth of [our] nation” to be built and kept here.

We do this by having Congress openly discuss and debate tariffs, apply them gradually, and accompany them with supports for the poorer parts of the world that may be harmed by them, assisting them in developing sustainable domestic industries to replace their export losses.

This is not a radical idea.

China uses tariffs (and dozens of other trade restrictions) to protect its domestic industries. The European Union imposes tariffs on agricultural products to protect its farmers (averaging around 11.4%) as well as industrial goods (averaging around 4.1%). Some industries, like dairy products (38.4% EU tariffs) and confectionery products (24.6%), have asked for and gotten even higher EU tariffs to keep them viable domestically.

And, of course, that’s how America became the richest country in the world, and the loss of tariffs is a major part of why our standard of living has slipped so badly over these past 44 years of our neoliberal Reaganism experiment. Our wealth, along with our manufacturing and jobs, was simply shipped overseas — and now we must begin the process of bringing it back home.

Democrats know this, even if they’re unwilling to talk about it. The Biden administration took some good steps in this direction by imposing or maintaining multiple tariffs, and they’re already increased American prosperity, particularly for working people.

Biden increased tariffs on steel and aluminum products from 7.5% to 25% this year; tariffs on semiconductors will rise to 50% by 2025; tariffs on electric vehicles (EVs) hit 100% this year; tariffs on lithium-ion EV batteries and magnets for EV motors will go up by 25% by 2026. After the Covid crisis, the Biden administration put a 50% tariff on syringes and needles to jump-start domestic production, and personal protective equipment (PPE) tariffs went up 25%.

This is not a black-and-white issue. Yes, tariffs are a tax and, until domestic manufacturing replaces foreign imports, they’re a tax that’s mostly passed along to consumers, resulting in higher prices for goods.

But when done right and gradually, those higher prices open the door for American companies to again become competitive, to manufacture goods here — and thus keep our jobs and our “wealth” here — while raising the wages and standard of living of American workers and people around the world.

Just because Trump was conceptually right about tariffs (but terribly wrong in how he executed them) doesn’t mean Democrats should freak out at any mention of them. They’re an important part — as Alexander Hamilton and George Washington taught us — of creating and maintaining wealth and independence for our nation.

And voters in the Rust Belt states know all this already.

As Trump behaves like a bull in a china shop, ready to slap punitive and politically-motivated tariffs on our top trading partners, expect considerable market and overall economic dislocation; a recession is a probable outcome.

But as he shatters the neoliberal tariff consensus, Democrats should rise to the occasion and argue for rational, targeted, and gradual tariffs, taking the Party back to its pre-1980s positions on trade.

And then they’ll be well positioned to both exploit the issue and rescue the American economy in 2026 and 2028 after Trump’s done his worst.

NOW READ: A dark mystery from America's past could save us from Trump's tyranny

It’s probably, politically and spiritually, the darkest Thanksgiving for our nation in my lifetime. So how about a quick story out of America’s earliest history that somewhat echoes this moment and may give us some hope?

Donald Trump has told us he’s going to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to declare a state of emergency, which will allow him to round up not only undocumented immigrants but also his political opponents, who he refers to as “the enemy within.” He came to power using Willie Horton-like ads trashing trans people and is happy to demonize anybody else who stands up to his hunger for absolute power.

In an age-old technique usually employed during wartime, Trump regularly uses the rhetoric America has employed against foreign enemies to characterize Americans who disagree with him and his policies. Remember the “raghead” slurs against Arabs from the Afghan and Iraqi wars? Or politicians referring to Vietnamese in the 1970s as “slants” and “gooks”?

My dad, who volunteered to fight in WWII straight out of high school, called Germans and Japanese “krauts” and “Japs” to his dying days; American propaganda during wartime encouraged popular usage of these racist characterizations.

In this regard, Trump’s trying to lie us into a war. But not an external war; this time he’s pushing for something very much like a 21st century version of a second civil war. A war by Americans against Americans.

Often history tells us how the future may turn out: Trump isn’t the first American politician to use lies and slanders to whip up a war-like frenzy. Or to use the language of war for political gain.

Bush Junior wasn’t the first president to have lied to us about foreign affairs and war, or to use lies to justify eviscerating the Constitution. For example, Lyndon Johnson lied about a non-existent attack on the US warship Maddox in the Vietnamese Gulf of Tonkin. William McKinley (the presidency after which Karl Rove has said he’d modeled the Bush presidency) lied about an attack on the USS Maine to get us into the Spanish-American war in The Philippines and Cuba.

But most relevant to today's situation were John Adams’ version of Trump’s slanders when Adams sent three emissaries to France and criminals soliciting bribes approached them late one evening. Adams referred to these three unidentified Frenchmen as “Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z,” and made them out to represent such an insult and a threat against America that it may presage war.

Adams’ use of “The XYZ Affair” to gain political capital — much like Trump demonizes Hispanic and Haitian immigrants for political gain — nearly led us to war with France and helped him carve a large (although temporary) hole in the Constitution. Similarly, much like Trump’s anti-media “enemy of the people” rhetoric, John Adams then used that frenzy to jail newspaper editors and average citizens alike who spoke out against him and his policies.

The backstory is both fascinating and hopeful.

At that time in the late 1790s, Adams was President and Jefferson was Vice President. Adams led the Federalist Party (which today could be said to have reincarnated as the Republican Party), and Jefferson had just brought together two Anti-Federalist parties — the Democrats and the Republicans — into one party called The Democratic Republicans. (Today they’re known as the Democratic Party, the longest-lasting political party in history. They dropped “Republican” from their name in the 1820-1830 era).

Adams and his Federalist cronies, using war hysteria with France as a wedge issue, were pushing the Alien & Sedition Acts through Congress, and even threw into prison Democratic Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont for speaking out against the Federalists on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Adams was leading the United States in the direction of a fascistic state with a spectacularly successful strategy of vilifying Jefferson and his Party as anti-American and pro-French. He was America’s first Trump, albeit nowhere near as toxic or psychopathic.

Adams rhetoric was described as “manly” by the Federalist newspapers, which admiringly published dozens of his threatening rants against France, suggesting that Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans were less than patriots and perhaps even traitors because of their opposition to the unnecessary war with France that Adams was simultaneously trying to gin up and saying he was working to avoid.

On June 1, 1798 — two weeks before the Alien & Sedition Acts passed Congress by a single vote — Jefferson wrote a thoughtful letter to his old friend John Taylor.

“This is not new,” Jefferson said. “It is the old practice of despots; to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order. And those who have once got an ascendancy and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantage.
“But,” he added, “our present situation is not a natural one.”

Jefferson knew that Adams’ Federalists did not represent the true heart and soul of America, and commented to Taylor about how Adams had been using divide-and-conquer politics, and fear-mongering about war with France (the XYZ Affair) with some success.

“But still I repeat it,” he wrote again to Taylor, “this is not the natural state.”

Jefferson did everything he could to stop that generation’s version of Trump, but Adams had the Federalists in control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, and pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts. In protest, Jefferson left town the day they were signed, never to return until after Adams left the presidency.

Jefferson later wrote in his personal diary:

“Their usurpations and violations of the Constitution at that period, and their majority in both Houses of Congress, were so great, so decided, and so daring, that after combating their aggressions, inch by inch, without being able in the least to check their career, the [Democratic] Republican leaders thought it would be best for them to give up their useless efforts there, go home, get into their respective legislatures, embody whatever of resistance they could be formed into, and if ineffectual, to perish there as in the last ditch.”

Democratic Republican Congressman Albert Gallatin submitted legislation that would repeal the Alien & Sedition Acts, and the Federalist majority in the House refused to even consider the motion, while informing Gallatin that he would be the next to be imprisoned if he kept speaking out against “the national security.”

Adams then shut down almost thirty newspapers, throwing their publishers, editors, and writers in prison. The most famous to go to jail was Ben Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache. Within a few months, Adams had effectively silence the opposition.

Then he went after average citizens who spoke out against him.

Adams and his wife traveled the country in a fine carriage surrounded by a military contingent. As the Adams family entourage, full of pomp and ceremony, passed through Newark, New Jersey, a man named Luther Baldwin was sitting in a tavern and probably quite unaware that he was about to make a fateful comment that would help change history.

As Adams rode by, soldiers manning the Newark cannons loudly shouted the Adams-mandated chant, “Behold the chief who now commands!” and fired their salutes.

Hearing the cannon fire as Adams drove by outside the bar, in a moment of drunken candor Luther Baldwin said, “There goes the President and they are firing at his arse.” Baldwin further compounded his sin by adding that, “I do not care if they fire thro’ his arse!”

The tavern’s owner, a Federalist named John Burnet, overheard the remark and turned Baldwin in to Adams’ thought police: The hapless drunk was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for uttering “seditious words tending to defame the President and Government of the United States.”

It was the darkest moment in our new nation’s short history. But then a new force arose.

When Adams shut down the Democratic Republican newspapers, pamphleteers — that generation’s version of Substack writers not affiliated with national publications — went to work, papering towns from New Hampshire to Georgia with posters and leaflets decrying Adams’ power grab and encouraging people to stand tall with Thomas Jefferson.

One of the best was a short screed by George Nicholas of Kentucky, “Justifying the Kentucky Resolution against the Alien & Sedition Laws” and “Correcting Certain False Statements, Which Have Been Made in the Different States” by Adams’ Federalists.

On February 13, 1799, then-Vice President Jefferson sent a copy of Nicholas’ pamphlet to his old friend Archibald Stuart (a Virginia legislator, fighter in the War of Independence, and leader of Jefferson's Democratic Republicans).

“I avoid writing to my friends because the fidelity of the post office is very much doubted,” he opened his letter to Stuart, concerned that Adams was having his mail inspected because of his anti-war activities.

Jefferson pointed out that “France is sincerely anxious for reconciliation, willing to give us a liberal treaty,” and that even with the Democratic newspapers shut down by Adams and the Federalist-controlled media being unwilling to speak of Adams’ war lies, word was getting out to the people.

Jefferson noted:

“All these things are working on the public mind. They are getting back to the point where they were when the X. Y. Z. story was passed off on them. A wonderful and rapid change is taking place in Pennsylvania, Jersey, and New York. Congress is daily plied with petitions against the alien and sedition laws and standing armies.”

Jefferson then turned to the need for the pamphleteers’ materials to be widely distributed.

“The materials now bearing on the public mind will infallibly restore it to its republican soundness in the course of the present summer,” he wrote, “if the knowledge of facts can only be disseminated among the people. Under separate cover you will receive some pamphlets written by George Nicholas on the acts of the last session. These I would wish you to distribute....”

The pamphleteer — today he would have been called a Substack writer — was James Bradford, and he reprinted tens of thousands of copies of Nicholas' pamphlet and distributed it far and wide. Hand to hand, as Jefferson did with his by-courier letter to Stuart, was how what would be today’s independent progressive writings were distributed.

In the face of the pamphleteering and protests, the Federalists fought back with startling venom.

Vicious personal attacks were launched in the Federalist press against Jefferson, Madison, and others, and President Adams and Vice President Jefferson were no longer on speaking terms. Adams’ goal was nothing short of the complete destruction of Jefferson’s Democratic Party, and he had scared many of them into silence or submission.

“All [Democratic Republicans], therefore, retired,” Jefferson wrote in his diary, “leaving Mr. Gallatin alone in the House of Representatives, and myself in the Senate, where I then presided as Vice-President.
“Remaining at our posts, and bidding defiance to the brow-beatings and insults by which they endeavored to drive us off also, we kept the mass of [Democratic] Republicans in phalanx together, until the legislature could be brought up to the charge; and nothing on earth is more certain, than that if myself particularly, placed by my office of Vice-President at the head of the [Democratic] Republicans, had given way and withdrawn from my post, the [Democratic] Republicans throughout the Union would have given up in despair; and the cause would have been lost forever.”

But Jefferson and Gallatin held their posts and fought back fiercely against Adams, thus saving — quite literally — American democracy. Jefferson and Madison also secretly helped legislators in Virginia and Kentucky submit resolutions in those states’ legislatures decrying the Alien & Sedition Acts. The bill in Virginia, in particular, gained traction.

As Jefferson noted in his diary:

“By holding on, we obtained time for the legislatures to come up with their weight; and those of Virginia and Kentucky particularly, but more especially the former, by their celebrated resolutions, saved the Constitution at its last gasp. No person who was not a witness of the scenes of that gloomy period, can form any idea of the afflicting persecutions and personal indignities we had to brook. They saved our country however.
“The spirits of the people were so much subdued and reduced to despair by the XYZ imposture, and other stratagems and machinations, that they would have sunk into apathy and monarchy, as the only form of government which could maintain itself.”

The efforts of that century’s truth-tellers made great gains. As Jefferson noted in a February 14, 1799 letter to Virginia’s Edmund Pendleton:

“The violations of the Constitution, propensities to war, to expense, and to a particular foreign connection, which we have lately seen, are becoming evident to the people, and are dispelling that mist which X. Y. Z. had spread before their eyes. This State is coming forward with a boldness not yet seen. Even the German counties of York and Lancaster, hitherto the most devoted [to Adams], have come about, and by petitions with four thousand signers remonstrate against the alien and sedition laws, standing armies, and discretionary powers in the President.”

Americans were so angry with Adams, Jefferson noted, that the challenge was to prevent people from taking up arms against Adams’ Federalists.

“New York and Jersey are also getting into great agitation. In this State [of Pennsylvania], we fear that the ill-designing may produce insurrection. Nothing could be so fatal. Anything like force would check the progress of the public opinion and rally them round the government. This is not the kind of opposition the American people will permit.”

Like today’s progressive movement led by people like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren, Jefferson knew that peaceful protests had greater power than violence or threats.

“But keep away all show of force,” he wrote to Pendleton, “and they will bear down the evil propensities of the government, by the constitutional means of election and petition. If we can keep quiet, therefore, the tide now turning will take a steady and proper direction.”

A week later, February 21, 1799, Jefferson wrote to the great Polish general who had fought in the American Revolution, Thaddeus Kosciusko, a close friend who was then living in Russia. War was the great enemy of democracy, Jefferson noted, and peace was its champion. And the American people were increasingly siding with peace and rejecting Adams' call for war.

“The wonderful irritation produced in the minds of our citizens by the X. Y. Z. story, has in a great measure subsided,” he noted. “They begin to suspect and to see it coolly in its true light.”

But Adams was still President, and for him and his Federalist Party war would have helped tremendously with the upcoming election of 1800. In France some leaders wanted war with America for similar reasons.

Jefferson continued:

“What course the government will pursue, I know not. But if we are left in peace, I have no doubt the wonderful turn in the public opinion now manifestly taking place and rapidly increasing, will, in the course of this' summer, become so universal and so weighty, that friendship abroad and freedom at home will be firmly established by the influence and constitutional powers of the people at large.”

And if Adams’ rhetoric led to an attack on America by France?

“If we are forced into war,” Jefferson noted, “we must give up political differences of opinion, and unite as one man to defend our country. But whether at the close of such a war, we should be as free as we are now, God knows.”

The tide was turned, to use Jefferson’s phrase, by the election of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I document in our book The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction — and What This Means Today.

The abuses of the Federalists were so burned into the people’s minds when Jefferson's party came to power and he freed the imprisoned newspaper editors so reform-minded newspapers were started back up again, that the Federalists disintegrated altogether as a party over the next two decades.

As may well happen to Trump’s GOP two or four years from now.

All because average citizens and pamphleteers — and a handful of progressive politicians — stood up and challenged the lies of a fear-mongering president, and politicians of principle were willing to lead.

America has been burdened by lying presidents before, and even one who tried to destroy our Constitution like Trump is today threatening to do. But in our era — like in Jefferson’s — we are fortunate to have radical truth-tellers and political allies to warn us of treasonous acts for political gain.

If we stand in solidarity with today’s truth-tellers, and more politicians step forward to take a leadership role, then its entirely possible that with the elections of 2026 and 2028 American democracy can once again prevail.

Some of Donald Trump's fans are outraged about his latest move involving the Navy, according to posts on the former and incoming president's social media.

Trump late Tuesday took to his Truth Social to announce several new picks, including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who was tapped to serve as director of the National Institutes of Health. That choice was hit with sharp criticism, with one journalist calling his appointment a "remarkable turn" — given he was a "pariah four years ago, dismissed by the then-NIH director for his 'fringe' views."

Trump also announced another pick, John Phelan, the co-founder and chairman of Rugger Management LLC, a private investment firm based in Palm Beach, Florida, to be United States Secretary of the Navy.

ALSO READ: Multiple Republicans reveal plan to boot Mike Johnson as speaker

"His Record of Success speaks for itself - a true Champion of American Enterprise and Ingenuity!" Trump wrote, adding, "John's intelligence and leadership are unmatched."

That decision didn't sit well with some of Trump's fans.

A user identified as @WriterJanine, who shares pro-Trump content and supported former GOP lawmaker Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, said, "This one is an odd pick, unless he's going to be a businessman breaking through logjams in the supply chain."

"No military experience? Feels like you're rewarding a friend/donor so will need a better explanation," the user added.

Another user, @Xjhawkr, shares pro-Trump content and identifies as a "Navy Vet" and a "Constitutional Conservative Patriot." That user wrote, "A c--- pick!"

"As a Veteran of the U.S. Navy, I want a Sailor in charge!! Not some Wall Street billionaire with ZERO Military experience!!" they added. "You got this wrong DJT!!!"

@kprett, who shares pro-Trump memes on Truth Social, asked, "Why?"

"This guy has zero military service," the user added.

@DonnaSwimminUpstream, who shares Trump's posts directly and shares pro-Fox News content, said, "I did not read any NAVY service or experience."

A self-identified Trump voter identified as @KelceyB said, "DELL??? YOU ARE SELLING OUT THE NAVY TO TRAITORS!!"

"EVERY PICK YOU KEEP MAKING IS DOOMING OUR NATION & GOD IS P-----!" the user added. "YOU DECEIVED MILLIONS OF US, GOD’S CHILDREN OUT OF OUR VOTE & YOUR DECEIT CURSES THIS NATION!"

Writing, for me, is easiest from the confines of a small, dark room. When I was younger I preferred a view, but now we live on a river where an unidentified bird or duck glues the binoculars to my face. It’s hard to care about rotating Trump buffoonery when a green Heron is standing in stealth, watching his breakfast have its last swim beneath the surface.

Writing columns for a national audience I’ll never meet can feel isolating, but it is ultimately an act of hope. Sussing out man’s inhumanity toward man (and animals) is an expression of shared humanity, an understanding that we are capable of evolving, that eventually we will do better.

In particular, writing about the intersection of politics and law during this tragic time in American history is difficult. Watching leaders act with malice toward innocent victims can cause lingering psychological harm, while experts tell us that gratitude can reverse the damage. So for this Thanksgiving, from a shabby worn recliner shoved sideways into a dark closet, I’m determined to find and share my heartfelt gratitude. This year I’m thankful for:

• The ethically compromised Roberts Court, for liberating all of us from the rule of law and teaching me that 30 years in federal litigation was for naught. Alito and his rightwing band of zealots threw out the constitutional right to abortion not because science or legal precedent had changed, but because they finally had the political power to do it. Now that I understand how Constitutional law is mutable and contingent on who is in power, I, too, am untethered from it. If my advocacy in resisting a corrupt government exceeds legal bounds, who cares? Next year, or the year after that, the legal boundaries will change depending on the High Court’s mood. Or religion. Or the weather.

• Fox News, for teaching me that repeated false propaganda, no matter how preposterous, works. Murdoch and his aligned fossil fuel interests will do whatever is necessary to preserve big oil, and thereby their own wealth. If that means lying constantly to defraud their viewers into putting a huckster in charge of the country, on his promise to drill, baby, drill, that’s what they will do. They have taught Democrats that to win in this media environment, we need to start lying, the more outrageous the lie, the better. They have also freed us, once we realize the jail door is unlocked: it doesn’t matter what we say or do, Fox will gaslight viewers and falsely accuse us of Trump’s own nefarious crimes, so it’s time to earn the accusation.

• Elon Musk, for teaching me that all the money in the world can’t buy happiness. When someone as wealthy as Musk, with the literal means to solve world hunger, decides instead to use that money to harm, defraud and manipulate as many people as possible, it’s a reflection of profound unhappiness, not to mention mental illness. I’m sorry Elon feels hatred for his own transgender daughter, and that he tortured her for being gay while growing up, but hatred, in the end, always consumes its host.

• Christo-nationalists like House Speaker Mike Johnson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, for spewing such ignorant venom in the name of Jesus Christ that Christ returned to his empty tomb, just so he could roll over in it. The original woke hippy, Jesus said we should love each other and consider the lilies. He said we should wash the feet of homeless people, feed them, and treat everyone with dignity, the way we’d like to be treated. I’m not a religious person but Jesus is credited with saying the most beautiful, loving things, only to have these freaks invert his words into weapons of hate. It makes me hope there really is a vengeful god, sitting on a pearly throne, waiting to open an Old Testament can of whoop-ass on these anti-Christ “Christians.”

• Donald Trump. On this day of giving thanks where due, I am most grateful to Donald Trump, for helping me overcome my imposter syndrome. Like too many Americans, I hail from poverty, domestic violence, and repeated cycles of trauma. You name it, it happened, if not under our roof, in the basement of the house next door. Whenever I succeeded in life, no matter where I went, my past always accompanied me, uninvited. First as a Governor’s Fellow, then as General Counsel, then as candidate for US Congress, my imposter’s syndrome wouldn’t shut up. You don’t belong here anyway, it said during business dinners, so have another martini. Your shoes aren’t as nice as your colleagues’, it said, so don’t bother going to their parties. Your parents wouldn’t be welcome in this room, or at this table, and any minute now, you’re going to drop an F bomb during a public debate and everyone will see what an imposter you are.

Well…. Trump silenced that loud and incessant inner voice of self-doubt. If a man with six bankruptcies can market himself as a business expert, if a man with 34 felony convictions can hold the most powerful office in the world, if he can grab women by the p—- and still get their votes, I’d say there’s no such thing as an imposter. We are whatever we claim to be. Perhaps next month I’ll be an astronaut, and for that simple paradigm shift, I will spend this Thanksgiving day in Trump’s debt, feeling a simple, ‘thank you’ in my heart.

And now, with the bread laid out to get stale for the stuffing, I can get back to watching Sandhill Cranes migrate over Chicago.

NOW READ: Democratic leadership missing in action as Trump tightens his grip

I am still thinking about the election. Yeah, I figured. You probably are, too. Well, as I’m thinking, I’m realizing. Today, my realization was this:

I undervalued the importance of Joe Biden’s unpopularity.

It never recovered, not even as he dropped out. More than anything, that fact gives credence to the claim that the economy was the driving factor in the election. The electorate, still reeling from the effects of pandemic-relation inflation, simply voted against the party in power.

Whether it was the economy or perceptions of it is something I have discussed and will discuss again in future editions. For now, I want to stick with this realization – that I undervalued Biden’s unpopularity.

If you take Donald Trump out of the picture, as well as the fact that he’s an adjudicated rapist, a felon and an insurrectionist who stole government secrets – not to mention that he campaigned explicitly as dictator-in-waiting – this election would be more comprehensible.

Which is to say: of course the incumbent party lost.

It was not popular.

But of course, we can’t take Trump out of the picture. He’s a lying, thieving, philandering sadist who led an attempted paramilitary takeover of the United States government after he botched, as president, the country’s response to the pandemic so badly that the electorate threw him out of the White House at record rates.

And it’s because we can’t take him out of the picture that I undervalued Biden’s unpopularity. I figured no matter how badly voters rated Biden’s performance, no matter how old he seemed to be, no matter how poor he might be at communicating his transformational record, it was still going to be better than how they saw the former president. After all, they already threw Trump out for the worst job performance ever. Why on earth would they rehire him after having fired him?

This affected my thinking about Kamala Harris, too. Even if a lot of the electorate was too sexist and too racist to vote for a biracial woman, no matter how great she is, I figured that the electorate had already fired Trump for gross negligence. As long as she acted normally, even a biracial woman would be seen as the superior option when compared to a deranged man who tried overthrowing the will of the people and who, nearly four years later, was clearly in the throes of dementia.

But all this was premised on an assumption: that Biden’s and by extension Harris’ low approval rating was not that important. Virtually every article I have written about the 2024 election was based on the idea that Trump’s blinding horribleness would overwhelm whatever deficit there was on the other side. I even assumed that it didn’t matter who that was, because the electorate would still vote against Trump.

I was wrong, obviously, but I didn’t start to understand why until I read an interview with some Harris campaign staffers. Specifically, I didn’t start to understand until I read what advisor David Plouffe said about the campaign’s internal polling. It never showed her ahead of Trump.

Let me say that again, with feeling:

Internal polling never showed her ahead of Trump.

How is that possible?

How is it possible when Trump himself was already unpopular, was indeed never popular, even when he was the president? And how can that be when Trump ran not a campaign so much as a vengeance movement in which he practically declared himself unfit? He even vowed to defund schools that required children to be vaccinated, reminding voters why they booted him out the first time around.

I have been thinking about this all day. At first, I thought Plouffe was lying, covering his ass, as it were, saying that there was nothing they could have done differently so don’t blame them for failing. They did the best they could, blah blah blah, but she was doomed from the start.

But then I thought about Biden’s unpopularity and by extension hers, and how that fact, under any other circumstances in any other election, would explain why she was never ahead. The president has been underwater since the last quarter of 2021. The vice president had a hundred days to turn that around. She came close, but fell short by about 230,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Some will say that Biden should have dropped out sooner, and they would be right, but only because they have the benefit of hindsight. While we don’t know what Biden’s internal polling was showing, we do know that Biden himself had enormous faith in the electorate to choose someone who was not promising to be a petty tyrant. For those of us who were so focused on stopping Trump that we were willing to overlook Biden’s liabilities, especially the fact that he hadn’t been popular in three years, his faith in America was good enough.

Why is Biden unpopular, even now? Perhaps it’s the economy. Perhaps it’s perceptions of the economy. (The rightwing media apparatus is larger today than it was four years ago and it’s getting bigger.) Whatever the reason, his unpopularity carried over to Harris, who was already shouldering a deficit in terms of time (100 days) and in terms of her sex and race. She came close to overcoming it all, but didn’t. (Would distancing herself from Biden have worked? Maybe, but I doubt it.)

I would like to end this on a note of hope, but honestly, I don’t know how. Like Biden, I had faith in the ability of voters to decide between a candidate who may not be the greatest for some and another who was the absolute worst for everyone. They fired Trump, but forgot why.

If there is hope, it’s in thinking about the destructive shortsightedness of the majority of voters. Just as they forgot why they fired Trump, they’ll forget why Biden and Harris were so bad that they had to give a criminal a second chance, putting him above the law. In victory, Trump is experiencing a popularity he never had as president. Given the attention span of voters, he’ll be back to where he started before long.

NOW READ: Democratic leadership missing in action as Trump tightens his grip

President-elect Donald Trump is following through on a key campaign promise of imposing double-digit tariffs on goods imported into the United States. One small business owner is worried that the new tariffs could set American companies back in more ways than one.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Trump's proposed new day one 25% tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico and 10% on Chinese imports is already provoking a back-and-forth with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. She warned that if Trump followed through, she would retaliate with a new tariff on imports from the United States. The Times pointed out that the tariffs would affect a vast number of industries, including auto manufacturing, where many American car companies depend on parts imported from Canada and Mexico.

In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced an emergency meeting with premiers of Canadian provinces to discuss how the proposed new tariffs could impact their local economies. Trump pledged that the tariffs would remain in place until the flow of undocumented immigrants and illegal drugs like fentanyl stop coming across U.S. borders.

READ MORE: 'Not immune': Walmart confirms new tariffs will mean higher prices for customers

In a recent interview with AlterNet, Prevelo Bikes founder Jacob Rheuban said the tariff will impact American businesses and consumers far more than international governments. Walmart — whose inventory is primarily made up of goods imported from China — has already signaled that the new tariffs would most likely be passed onto customers in the form of higher prices. Rheuban said while he'll do all he can to cut production costs to make up for the tariff, it may not be enough as his company doesn't "have a surplus operating budget."

(Jacob Rheuban)(Jacob Rheuban)

Rheuban's California-based company — which has six employees — primarily sells its bikes made for children domestically, though he said certain raw materials like tires and brakes are made in Asia and emphasized that the bicycle manufacturing industry as a whole uses those same Asian suppliers. He added that if Trump's goal is to make companies source their raw materials domestically, that would be a "really big undertaking" that would require years of planning.

"We're going to need support for that," Rheuban told AlterNet.

He added that his company — which was launched in 2016 — has prior experience with Trump tariffs implemented during his first administration. In March of 2018, Trump announced tariffs of 25% on imported steel and 10% on imported aluminum. Rheuban said the rapid timeline for implementation caught businesses like his off-guard. He also said that many businesses that imported goods scrambled to make orders before the tariff was imposed, which he said "snarled the global supply chain."

READ MORE: How Trump's tariffs would 'aggressively transfer wealth from the poor to the rich: journalist

"There was a little bit of chaos," he said. "the last tariffs were implemented relatively quickly without time to make supply chain shifts."

The Prevelo founder told AlterNet that he hopes the incoming administration takes a hard look at reforming the de minimis exemption, which President Joe Biden started to do this fall. That exemption makes it so products valued at $800 U.S. dollars or less is exempted from import duties, which Chinese companies like Temu and Shein have taken advantage of. Rheuban said small American companies like his suffer as international competitors are able to flood the market with cheap goods.

"[The de minimis exemption] puts domestic brands at a disadvantage to companies shipping direct from China," he said.

Trump has framed his tariffs as a tax paid by other countries, though economists say that this is false. During her campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly warned that Trump's proposed tariffs would amount to an additional sales tax that would hit American families to the tune of roughly $4,000 dollars each year.

READ MORE: Trump's newest policy proposal would be a 'huge tax increase' for the middle class: analysis

So much for American democracy and the concept that “no man is above the law.”

There is no law and not a word in the Constitution that requires Attorney General Merrick Garland to order Jack Smith to drop charges against Trump.

It’s merely a policy written in a letter by Richard Nixon’s corrupt Justice Department (whose director, Attorney General John Mitchell, went to prison for his corruption) when Nixon was being investigated…and doubled down on by Bill Clinton’s Justice Department when Clinton was being investigated for lying under oath.

It has no force of law. It’s merely policy. Written by an agency lawyer who was never elected by anybody to anything.

Merrick Garland — Republican Senator Orrin Hatch’s suggestion to Obama for SCOTUS — could have easily ignored it, and you know that if the shoe was on the other foot a Republican president would have done just that. Joe Biden would be in confinement right now.

ALSO READ: Inside Trump’s testosterone-poisoned choices

As the Supreme Court wrote in the 1978 case Butz v. Economou:

“No man in this country is so high that he is above the law. No officer of the law may set that law at defiance with impunity. All the officers of the government, from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law, and are bound to obey it.”

That our nation’s highest “officer of the law” Garland is forcing Smith to allow a convicted and multiple-grand-jury-indicted criminal to go free because he gamed the system through an election is, itself, a crime. It’s a clear violation of the foundational principle of Anglo-American justice and politics, the Magna Carta, first signed into law by King John on the plain at Runnymede in 1215: That no man is above the law.

As Merrick Garland and his Department of Justice “obey in advance,” America is in crisis and Democratic leadership seems completely absent.

Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies on social media and in the checkbooks of billionaires. And, as we saw vividly in this month’s election, it dies when democracy’s sworn advocates fail to show up to fight for it.

And right now democracy’s advocates among America’s political class are shockingly quiet. Or they’re going on TV to pathetically claim that ending prosecutions against Trump means “the system has worked.”

That has to stop.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa — the first journalist to win the prize since 1935 when it was awarded to Carl von Ossietzky, then a prisoner in a German concentration camp — makes this point over and over in her brilliant new book How To Stand Up To A Dictator.

The Philippine journalist writes that the war against democracy in her own country was fought “on two fronts: President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.” Noting that in 2016 “most of Donald Trump’s Facebook likes came from outside the United States and one in every twenty-seven Trump followers was from the Philippines,” she writes:

“[T]he absence of rule of law in the virtual world is devastating. We live in only one reality, and the breakdown of the rule of law globally was ignited by the lack of a democratic vision for the internet in the twenty-first century. Impunity online naturally led to impunity offline, destroying existing checks and balances.”

We saw the same thing here in the United States over the past year. Billionaire Elon Musk turned Xitter into a massive rightwing echo chamber, allegedly spreading lies and Russian propaganda in service of Trump’s election and his own rise to political power.

Several hundred other rightwing billionaires poured a tsunami of cash into the world’s first $20 billion election (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court), saturating the airwaves with the message that Kamala Harris only cared about trans people in jail, while “Donald Trump cares about you!”

Not only did the Harris campaign fail to respond before the election — just like the Dukakis campaign failed to respond to Bush Sr.’s vicious, racist Willie Horton ads — but for almost four years both President Biden and Vice President Harris have been almost completely absent from the American media scene.

Biden, practicing the “normal” politics of the pre-social-media era, relied on the occasional speech or signing ceremony and the nation’s legacy media to carry the message of all the extraordinary — and they were extraordinary — accomplishments of his administration.

Thus, as a result of his and his advisors’ failure to exploit the media, 59 percent of Americans (and 88 percent of Republicans) falsely believed the Fox “News” lies that America was in a recession and inflation was still out-of-control as they went to the polls.

And, as history vividly shows, when there’s a recession during a presidential election the party in power almost always loses.

What this election taught us is that reality is no longer important in this social media-controlled world: perception is. And the GOP controlled the economic perception all year with their relentless appearances in media and on social media.

As incompetent as the Biden/Harris administration was on bragging on their economy, Trump and his billionaire supporters had a massive success in their effort to gaslight Americans about both Biden’s and the Trump-presidency’s economy.

While Trump’s economy had never been as good as, for example, Obama’s (and was far behind Biden’s), fully 69 percent of voters who pulled the lever for Trump this year falsely believed the economy during his presidency was better than either of those two Democratic presidents.

How did Trump pull this off?

He and his social media army (many from outside the US pretending to be Americans) hit the ’net and the airwaves literally every day of the week bragging about how well things were doing, even during the depths of the pandemic and the recession it provoked.

Fox “News” and 1,500 rightwing radio stations provided the chorus, along with rightwing newspapers owned by the Murdoch family from Australia, and hundreds of rightwing “news” websites funded by petro- and other billionaires.

While Biden spent almost 4 years only occasionally talking with the press, during Trump’s four years he did a mini-press-conference (often on his way to playing golf) virtually every single day. All the billionaire oligarchs and social media trolls had to do was amplify that message (which they did, as CBS’ CEO Les Moonves bragged), and it became widely believed.

While Biden and Harris did a marvelous job of getting meaningful legislation that aided working people through Congress and into law, neither ever did even a fraction of the self-promotion that Trump has proven is so necessary to build media narratives in this short-attention-span news era.

Biden and Harris apparently think that leadership means getting things done; how quaint is that almost childlike belief that it’s still the 1970s! Trump knows that in this era of social and electronic media, of newsletters and podcasts, repetition and outrage that triggers social media algorithms are the name of the game of leadership.

Trump’s mantra could easily be: “You’re not a leader if you’re not seen in the media daily.” And it appears that, in our modern era, he’s right.

Biden and Harris thought the media would stand up for democracy; the editor of The New York Times argued instead that advocating for democracy was “partisan” and he “won’t do it.” Leadership, even in the media, the Times would apparently argue doesn’t involve defending Jeffersonian principles of democracy.

By that definition, the Democratic Party is currently — and has been since 2015 — without leadership.

Think about it. Who stands up daily for Democratic priorities? Who hits the media several times a week to accuse Republicans and their billionaire owners of class warfare and theft from the middle class? Who’s all over social media fighting the good fight?

Was it DNC Chair Jaime Harrison? President Biden? Vice President Harris? Sadly, No.

Outside of Harris’ carefully-scripted campaign events, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) were far more visible in the media than any of them.

And so when AOC reached out to voters in her district who voted both for her and Trump and asked them why, the answers she got validated Trump’s “speak out bluntly and often” approach to leadership in the 21st century:

— “It’s real simple… Trump and you care for the working class.”
— ”Trump is going to get us the money and lets men have a voice. You’re brilliant and have amazing passion!”
— “I feel like Trump and you are both real.”
— “You are focused on the real issues people care about. Similar to Trump populism in some ways.”

Meanwhile, Trump not only built his own social media site, but with Elon’s and Saudi Arabia’s help his followers and the overall right wing and Nazi movements took over a substantial presence on Twitter. Trump’s name has appeared in headlines on virtually every major social, online, and legacy media outlet virtually every single day for the past nine years.

Another part of the Democrats’ problem is that there isn’t one single message; the party ranges from solid progressives to sellout “problem solvers” eager to suck up to corporate donors to those pandering to (or afraid of) AIPAC and Netanyahu.

In addition, the Overton window embraced by mainstream media has shifted hard to the right, largely the result of billions invested over the past 40 years in think-tanks and media silos.

But none of that should excuse the Biden administration and the DNC for having ignored the media all these years.

And what has happened to our champion, Kamala Harris? She seems to have vanished during her family vacation in Hawaii. That’s not leadership during a time of crisis, and if Trump’s plans for his presidency aren’t a crisis then the word has lost its meaning.

Democrats have a long and illustrious history of strong, visible leadership: FDR, Truman, Kennedy, LBJ, Clinton, Obama. Where is this generation’s??

If Trump is successful in going after “the enemy within,” the window for Democratic activism may close soon, much as it once did in Argentina, Chile, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, the Philippines, Egypt, Russia, Turkey, and every other democracy once taken over by strongman authoritarians.

Where is our clear leader? Our Donald Trump? The Democratic Party needs to get its media act together right away.

Define its message. Identify unambiguously the “enemies” of American democracy and call them out daily. Fully embrace the American working class. Declare class warfare. Express outrage, offer opposing policies, and point out GOP hypocrisy. Stop “obeying in advance.”

And they must do it now, before it’s too late. There’s still time…but it won’t last long…

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