"... but ..."

It's a universal truth - as well as an immutable internet meme - that the opening phrase "I'm not a racist, but..." will always be followed by some scorchingly obvious racist shit. (obvious usually to everyone but the speaker, and to those who either share his beliefs or haven't quite thought it through)

So think it through, dammit

Opinion by Alexandra Petri

The word ‘But’ asks that it not appear in these sentences

INTERNET, October 2023 — The word “But” has been stunned to find itself appearing in an increasing number of sentences that begin “The killing of children is never acceptable ... ”

After finding itself in yet another Instagram comment, preceded by the phrases “I am devastated to read about the loss of life” and “I deplore the killing of civilians, especially children,” the word “But” described itself as “horrified” to be included. Although it did not specify what sentiment came after it — possibilities included the phrases “should have had different parents,” and a reference to making omelets and breaking eggs — “But” took to social media to beseech other posters to avoid making this mistake.

The coordinating conjunction begged that those phrases be added to the list of sentences in which it would not appear under any circumstances, a list that already includes: “You never have to compliment Stalin for any reason”; “I don’t want to suggest that slavery wasn’t an unmitigated evil”; and “Genocide is always bad.” The words “Nevertheless,” “Still” and “However” jointly concurred in “But’s” statement, though “Nevertheless” looked visibly tired and strained.

“‘I am against the killing of children, regardless of who their parents are or where they live,’ is a set of words that never should be accompanied by any of us,” their statement read. “If you notice that you are putting us in, please, we beg you, reconsider.”

“But” also asked to be left out of sentences that start with “Of course, I condemn the deaths of innocent civilians,” and, especially, “I object to war crimes.”

“‘I believe in the inherent dignity of human life’ is a sentence that is getting along just fine without me,” “But” observed, a sentiment with which “Nevertheless” said it concurred “a thousand times.”

In a separate statement, the noun “Collateral Damage” and the adjective “Inevitable” asked to stop being forced to appear together.

“But” concluded its statement by saying it would return to anxiously watching someone compose a post that began “There is no excuse for antisemitism” and praying not to be called into service.

Phrase-ology

A new one for me: Articulate ignorance.

A good salesman can make himself sound smarter and more knowledgeable than he actually is. (I've known this for quite a while, but I never gave it a name. So thanks, NYT)

The ability to do that is a skill that has to be mastered in order to play at the upper levels. And just as with any other skill or power, it can be abused and misused to less than honorable ends. With power comes responsibility, and all like that there.

The Articulate Ignorance of Vivek Ramaswamy

As our nation continues its march to 2024, a year that will feature not only a presidential election but also potentially four criminal trials of the Republican front-runner, I’ve been thinking about the political and cultural power of leadership. How much do leaders matter, really? What role does corrupt political leadership play in degrading not just a government but the culture itself?

Let’s talk today about the specific way in which poor leadership transforms civic ignorance from a problem into a crisis — a crisis that can have catastrophic effects on the nation and, ultimately, the world.

Civic ignorance is a very old American problem. If you spend five seconds researching what Americans know about their own history and their own government, you’ll uncover an avalanche of troubling research, much of it dating back decades. As Samuel Goldman detailed two years ago, as far back as 1943, 77 percent of Americans knew essentially nothing about the Bill of Rights, and in 1952 only 19 percent could name the three branches of government.

That number rose to a still dispiriting 38 percent in 2011, a year in which almost twice as many Americans knew that Randy Jackson was a judge on “American Idol” as knew that John Roberts was the chief justice of the United States. A 2018 survey found that most Americans couldn’t pass the U.S. Citizenship Test. Among other failings, most respondents couldn’t identify which nations the United States fought in World War II and didn’t know how many justices sat on the Supreme Court.

Civic ignorance isn’t confined to U.S. history or the Constitution. Voters are also wildly ignorant about one another. A 2015 survey found that Democrats believe Republicans are far older, far wealthier and more Southern than they truly are. Republicans believe Democrats are far more atheist, Black and gay than the numbers indicate.

But I don’t share these statistics to write yet another story bemoaning public ignorance. Instead, I’m sharing these statistics to make a different argument: that the combination of civic ignorance, corrupt leadership and partisan animosity means that the chickens are finally coming home to roost. We’re finally truly feeling the consequences of having a public disconnected from political reality.

Simply put, civic ignorance was a serious but manageable problem, as long as our leader class and key institutions still broadly, if imperfectly, cared about truth and knowledge — and as long as our citizens cared about the opinions of that leader class and those institutions.

Consider, for example, one of the most consequential gaffes in presidential debate history. In October 1976, the Republican Gerald Ford, who was then the president, told a debate audience, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”

The statement wasn’t just wrong, it was wildly wrong. Of course there was Soviet domination of Eastern Europe — a domination that was violently reaffirmed in the 1956 crackdown in Hungary and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. The best defense that Ford’s team could muster was the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft’s argument that “I think what the president was trying to say is that we do not recognize Soviet domination of Europe.”

In a close election with Jimmy Carter, the gaffe was a big deal. As the political scientist Larry Sabato later wrote, the press “pounced” and “wrote of little else for days afterward.” As a result, “a public initially convinced that Ford had won the debate soon turned overwhelmingly against him.” Note the process: Ford made a mistake, even his own team recognized the mistake and tried to offer a plausible alternative meaning, and then press coverage of the mistake made an impression on the public.

Now let’s fast-forward to the present moment. Instead of offering a plausible explanation for their mistakes — much less apologizing — all too many politicians deny that they’ve made any mistakes at all. They double down. They triple down. They claim that the fact-checking process itself is biased, the press is against them and they are the real truth tellers.

I bring this up not just because of the obvious example of Donald Trump and many of his most devoted followers in Congress but also because of the surprising success of his cunning imitator Vivek Ramaswamy. If you watched the first Republican debate last week or if you’ve listened to more than five minutes of Ramaswamy’s commentary, you’ll immediately note that he is exceptionally articulate but also woefully ignorant, or feigning ignorance, about public affairs. Despite his confident delivery, a great deal of what he says makes no sense whatsoever.

As The Times has documented in detail, Ramaswamy is prone to denying his own words. But his problem is greater than simple dishonesty. Take his response to the question of whether Mike Pence did the right thing when he certified the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021. Ramaswamy claims that in exchange for certification, he would have pushed for a new federal law to mandate single-day voting, paper ballots and voter identification. Hang on. Who would write the bill? How would it pass a Democratic House and a practically tied Senate? Who would be president during the intervening weeks or months?

It’s a crazy, illegal, unworkable idea on every level. But that kind of fantastical thinking is par for the course for Ramaswamy. This year, for instance, he told Don Lemon on CNN, “Black people secured their freedoms after the Civil War — it is a historical fact, Don, just study it — only after their Second Amendment rights were secured.”

Wait. What?

While there are certainly Black Americans who used weapons to defend themselves in isolated instances, the movement that finally ended Jim Crow rested on a philosophy of nonviolence, not the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The notion is utterly absurd. If anything, armed Black protesters such as the Black Panthers triggered cries for stronger gun control laws, not looser ones. Indeed, there is such a long record of racist gun laws that it’s far more accurate to say that Black Americans secured greater freedom in spite of a racist Second Amendment consensus, not because of gun rights.

Ramaswamy’s rhetoric is littered with these moments. He’s a very smart man, blessed with superior communication skills, yet he constantly exposes his ignorance, his cynicism or both. He says he’ll “freeze” the lines of control in the Ukraine war (permitting Russia to keep the ground it’s captured), refuse to admit Ukraine to NATO and persuade Russia to end its alliance with China. He says he’ll agree to defend Taiwan only until 2028, when there is more domestic chip manufacturing capacity here in the States. He says he’ll likely fire at least half the federal work force and will get away with it because he believes civil service protections are unconstitutional.

The questions almost ask themselves. How will he ensure that Russia severs its relationship with China? How will he maintain stability with a weakened Ukraine and a NATO alliance that just watched its most powerful partner capitulate to Russia? How will Taiwan respond during its countdown to inevitable invasion? And putting aside for a moment the constitutional questions, his pledge to terminate half the federal work force carries massive, obvious perils, beginning with the question of what to do with more than a million largely middle- and high-income workers who are now suddenly unemployed. How will they be taken care of? What will this gargantuan job dislocation do to the economy?

Ramaswamy’s bizarre solutions angered his debate opponents in Milwaukee, leading Nikki Haley to dismantle him on live television in an exchange that would have ended previous presidential campaigns. But the modern G.O.P. deemed him one of the night’s winners. A Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll found that 26 percent of respondents believed Ramaswamy won, compared with just 15 percent who believed Haley won.

The bottom line is this: When a political class still broadly believes in policing dishonesty, the nation can manage the negative effects of widespread civic ignorance. When the political class corrects itself, the people will tend to follow. But when key members of the political class abandon any pretense of knowledge or truth, a poorly informed public is simply unequipped to hold them to account.

And when you combine ignorance with unrelenting partisan hostility, the challenge grows all the greater. After all, it’s not as though members of the political class didn’t try to challenge Trump. But since that challenge came mostly from people Trump supporters loathe, such as Democratic politicians, members of the media and a few Trump-skeptical or Never Trump writers and politicians, their minds were closed. Because of the enormous amount of public ignorance, voters often didn’t know that Trump was lying or making fantastically unrealistic promises, and they shut out every voice that could tell them the truth.

In hindsight, I should have seen all this coming. I can remember feeling a sense of disquiet during the Tea Party revolution. Republican candidates were pledging to do things they simply could not do, such as repealing Obamacare without holding the presidency and Congress or, alternatively, veto-proof congressional majorities. Then, when they failed to do the thing they could never do in the first place, their voters felt betrayed.

There is always a problem of politicians overpromising. Matthew Yglesias recently reminded me of the frustrating way in which the 2020 Democratic primary contest was sidetracked by a series of arguments over phenomenally ambitious and frankly unrealistic policy proposals on taxes and health care. But there is a difference between this kind of routine political overpromising and the systematic mendacity of the Trump years.

A democracy needs an informed public and a basically honest political class. It can muddle through without one or the other, but when it loses both, the democratic experiment is in peril. A public that knows little except that it despises its opponents will be vulnerable to even the most bizarre conspiracy theories, as we saw after the 2020 election. And when leaders ruthlessly exploit that ignorance and animosity, the Republic can fracture. How long can we endure the consequences of millions of Americans believing the most fantastical lies?

About The Polling

I've spent years bitching about how it seems like there must be something very wrong with the polling.

And while I think I have legitimate complaints about the incredibly stoopid way some of the questions are phrased, and the lack of followup questions that tease out what the respondents' answers really mean, I think I should be more assertively including the Press Poodles as a bigger part of the problem than I've done previously, because guess who pays for most of it.

Adage: A good marketing team knows their job security is often predicated on their ability to prove whatever foregone conclusion upper management cares to make.

The marketeers go out and poll the customers and the prospects, and golly gosh, look at that - everybody agrees that once again, our illustrious leaders are right about everything.

News outfits need to keep ad revenues up, so they're always going to believe they need to be sure not to turn off "half their audience" (because they've swallowed their own bullshit about a "deeply divided America"), and to appeal to any stragglers and undecideds who may be casting about for somebody to vote for. After all, buying dick pills and panty liners is a non-partisan down-the-middle kinda thing.

So they look at the polls - most of which have been financed by themselves, and their colleagues, and their competitors - and again, holy crap, look at how the polling confirms exactly what we need the polling to confirm.

I admit that's a bit cynical, but please tell me how I can be more positive and optimistic when I know that upwards of 85% of us are in favor of better gun laws, and reproductive choice, and cultural inclusion, and consumer finance protection, and taxing the mega-rich, and action on the climate problems, and labor-friendly laws, and and and - but somehow, the Press Poodles keep finding ways to report it out as a "close race between two equally contentious political rivals". 

Opinion

I don’t write about polls. You shouldn’t bother with them, either.

You might have noticed that I studiously have avoided dissecting the avalanche of 2024 polls. I don’t plan on deviating from this approach — at least not until mid-2024. And you should consider ignoring the nonstop flood of polling and the rickety analysis dependent on it. Here are five reasons we should all go on a poll-free political diet for at least six months:

First, the polling field is broken. Or, if you listen to pollsters’ complaints, it is consistently misapplied and misinterpreted. Polls didn’t come within shouting distance of the right result in either 2016 or 2020. And they misled voters about the fictitious red wave in 2022. Whatever the reasons — call blocking, excessive hang-ups, incorrect modeling of likely voters — even polls taken much closer to elections have consistently turned out to be far off base. The fixation on low-cost, horse-race coverage might satisfy the political media’s desire to project insider expertise or to appear neutral (hey, it’s the voters who say these things!), but there is no excuse to recycle highly suspect information from sources known to be flawed.

Second, voters tell us utterly contradictory things. Around 60 percent tell pollsters that four-time-indicted former president Donald Trump should drop out. But then nearly half say they’ll vote for him. Which is it? There is a hefty amount of research that what voters say they want doesn’t align with how they vote. Whether it is gas prices or the war in Ukraine or the candidates themselves, respondents often give contradictory answers, suggesting they either don’t understand the question, don’t really know what they think or respond based on tribal loyalty.

Third, even if you think polling is somewhat reliable, there’s no evidence that polling more than a year (or even eight months) before a presidential election is accurate. Democratic consultant Simon Rosenberg (one of the few to debunk the red wave in advance of the 2022 midterms) recently wrote: “At the end of the day polling is only a snapshot into a moment, and cannot predict anything. Things change all the time in politics — change is the constant.”

Obviously, there is much that has yet to happen with regard to the economy, Trump’s indictments, the war in Ukraine and more. (And how people imagine they will react is a far cry from how they actually respond.) At this stage, we know little about voter intensity and turnout. So what is the point of filling newscasts and newspapers with what amounts to white noise?

Fourth, polling seems designed to make a point. Asking voters whether they want an imaginary, younger Democratic candidate when the only candidate who will get the nomination is Joe Biden is effectively asking people to underscore the point that the president is old. (Oddly, Republicans aren’t often asked whether they’d rather have someone not accused of 91 crimes.) It tells us nothing about what voters will do when presented with a choice between an 80-year-old, sane and accomplished incumbent running against an only slightly younger, unhinged, accused felon. (Apparently, because Trump has an indictment problem, “balance” means treating age as an equal liability for Biden.)

The most important reason, however, to minimize attention to polling has to do with the mission and credibility of journalism at a critical time in our democracy. What voters know might be wrong — objectively wrong. They tell pollsters we are in a recession. They tell us Biden was involved in his son’s business ventures. These beliefs are unsupported by evidence. This surely indicates that the media could try harder to explain what is going on. (Maybe more reporting on the changes happening around the country would be in order.)

Certainly, respectable media outlets cannot control where voters get their information, but evidence of such widespread confusion and ignorance indicates that we have a deficit of accurate, reliable information in the electorate. If the truth is getting lost in the shuffle, maybe parroting Republicans’ false claims (for the sake of “balance”) or fixating on polls is counterproductive.

Polling obsession might feed the desire, as media critic Jay Rosen said, to turn politics into “a savvy analysis of who was up, who was down, who’s winning or likely to win, the horse race, the spin, the strategy — all of that,” but it does not provide information with which voters can seriously, critically evaluate what is going on and what is at issue in the election. (Rosen expounded on this issue at length in a recent interview on my weekly podcast.) Surely, more time could be spent providing voters with a basic understanding of the charges, the court process and the implications of electing an indicted candidate.

When the stakes are so high, and the fate of democracy hangs in the balance, continuing to gamify politics with meaningless polls does little to improve journalists’ reputation or inform voters. As Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch aptly put it: “The news media needs to stop with the horse race coverage of this modern-day March on Rome, stop digging incessantly for proof that both sides are guilty of the same sins, and stop thinking that a war for the imperiled survival of the American Experiment is some kind of inexplicable ‘tribalism.’ ”

We all would do far better to apply our energy to stemming the tide of disinformation and facing hard truths about a MAGA movement that manages to bamboozle millions of Americans — and remains the greatest domestic threat to democracy we’ve seen.

Trials

Somewhere deep down in his brain - like at a sub-lizard level where not even the most adventurous of theoretical psychology nerds dare to go - Trump knows he can't win. He can't win at anything anywhere anytime again anyone.

He never has.

So that sub-lizard kernel of primordial brain-like substance sends a message up the chain, telling him he has to scheme and connive his way through life, doing whatever is necessary to avoid having to go head-to-head with any opponent - because he knows he's not going to win if he stands by the rules and behaves honorably.

He "beat" Hillary in 2016, by salting the earth (amping up the efforts of House Republicans), enlisting and taking full advantage of Russian dis-information techniques on social media, accepting (IMO) illegal contributions of foreign money laundered through the NRA, and by counting on enough people to be so sure Hillary would win that they threw their votes away in one way or another.

We got a little bit hip to the tricks, which meant he lost bigger than expected in 2018, got his ass kicked in 2020, lost pretty big again in 2022 as Republicans barely eked out a House Majority and lost a seat in the Senate.

He lost 62 of 63 court challenges filed regarding the 2020 election.

He lost to E Jean Carroll - twice - and he's about to lose another one to her.

His best good buddy CPA took the fall for him, and spent time in jail for business fraud.

and

and

and

For more than 70 years, he's done whatever he's wanted to do, and never once really faced the music - while learning the art of Life In Smarmspace®.

Opinion

Trump’s far-fetched defenses aren’t actually aimed at the courtroom

You do not need a law degree to understand that conspiring with someone to commit a crime isn’t protected by the First Amendment, despite thrice-indicted former president Donald Trump and his lawyer claiming the opposite. This is only one of their many half-baked defenses and extraneous excuses.

Trump’s defenses are far-fetched. So why make them?

Let’s start with the First Amendment. As former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti tweeted,

“Many crimes involve speaking to others. Fraud is one of them. It is well-settled in the law that freedom of speech does not give you the right to commit fraud or engage in criminal conspiracies.”

Two Sunday talk show hosts made the same point when interviewing Trump lawyer John Lauro. NBC’s Chuck Todd (“You’re not allowed to use speech, though, in order to get somebody to commit a crime”) and CNN’s Dana Bash (“But you can’t break the law … like approving fake electors”) didn’t need law degrees to puncture that Lauro canard.

Moving on to Lauro’s and Trump’s professed desire to move the trial in the election case from D.C. to West Virginia (because it’s more “diverse”?!), the relevant case in the circuit that has been followed in other cases related to Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. v. Haldeman, holds that only if an impartial jury cannot be found during voir dire is the defendant “entitled to any actions necessary to assure that he receives a fair trial,” which might include a change of venue. However, in cases of such national notoriety, there is no place unaffected by pretrial publicity (which Trump constantly drives). Trump does not have a right to find a more MAGA-friendly state for his trial.

Moreover, the alleged crimes occurred in D.C. — and D.C. residents have every right to have the case decided in their backyard with their fellow residents as jurors.

We’ve also heard Trump’s usual claptrap that the judge is biased. He has smeared and insulted every judge (and prosecutor) — except U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon (who has been roundly criticized by others and whose ruling on outside review of classified documents was harshly reversed by the 11th Circuit). Disqualification, as was discussed in connection with Cannon’s assignment to the Mar-a-Lago case, is governed by a statute. Under Section 455 of Title 28 of the U.S. Code, a party must show the judge’s “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” for example with a showing of “personal bias or prejudice.” There is zero evidence of any such bias on the part of U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan; no reasonable person could question her impartiality. Whether Lauro thinks he can make a good-faith claim for recusal, without violating his ethical obligation to forgo frivolous arguments, remains an open question.

Other excuses do not seem to meet the straight-face test. It’s no defense to say that Trump did not “order” then-Vice President Mike Pence to overthrow the election. It will be enough to prove Trump attempted to engage him in an illegal plot to overthrow the election.

Lauro’s claim that Trump’s alleged arm-twisting of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,870 votes was merely “aspirational” is a real head-scratcher. Most conspiracies are aspirational (e.g., “I’d like to rob a bank”). But, of course, Trump allegedly implicitly threatened Raffensperger if he didn’t “find” the votes: (“It is more illegal for you than it is for them because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.”) Arguing that a “technical” constitutional violation is not necessarily a criminal violation, as Lauro did, is equally perplexing. Surely, he knows some actions — such as depriving others of the right to have their vote counted — can be both criminal and constitutional violations.

Somewhat more serious, we have heard many Trump apologists raise the defense that he was simply following advice of counsel. That dog won’t hunt, either.

As a factual matter, attorneys — his White House counsel, Justice Department officials, including then-Attorney General William P. Barr, and even those conspiring with Trump — told him the plan wouldn’t fly. Paragraph 11 of the indictment documents numerous instances in which attorneys told him no fraud was detected. Even “Co-Conspirator 2” (John Eastman) wouldn’t say the plan was legal, only that it had never been tested (Paragraph 93). Moreover, the indictment says, “After that conversation, the Senior Advisor notified the Defendant that Co-Conspirator 2 had conceded that his plan was ‘not going to work.’” Yes, even the author of the phony elector plan conceded it would lose overwhelmingly at the Supreme Court.

As a legal matter, an advice of counsel claim defense fails if the lawyers are part of the illegal scheme and/or if the advice is unreasonable. The so-far unindicted co-conspirators Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro cannot shield Trump from the crime they allegedly were committing together. Given that Trump’s entire campaign staff, Justice Department and vice president knew the plan was bonkers, it’s fair to say reliance on the Eastman scheme could not have been reasonable. (Legal scholars and case law have clarified that you cannot shop around for legal advice to justify illegal conduct. If you do, you’re obviously looking to find a stooge, not independent legal advice.)

Likewise, the argument that Trump really thought he won is both wrong and irrelevant. Both the indictment and the Jan. 6 House select committee testimony underscored that at times Trump dropped the facade and acknowledged Joe Biden had won the presidency. Moreover, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth already rejected the “but he really believed it” defense in the case of another Jan. 6 defendant. He found that even if the Jan. 6 defendant “genuinely believed the election was stolen and that public officials had committed treason, that does not change the fact that he acted corruptly with consciousness of wrongdoing.” Lamberth added: “Belief that your actions are serving a greater good does not negate consciousness of wrongdoing.”

So, what is going on here? Norman L. Eisen, a co-author of a Just Security model prosecution memo, practiced at the same criminal defense firm, Zuckerman Spaeder, with Lauro. Eisen speaks highly of Lauro’s legal skills. Eisen told me, “He will have tricks up his sleeve by the time we get to trial, which I think will be as soon as the first quarter of ’24. Don’t expect to hear these cartoon versions of the defenses but something more sophisticated.”

Why, then, make these arguments? Trump’s legal strategy in all three criminal cases so far — the Mar-a-Lago documents case pending in Florida, the state-level business records case pending in Manhattan and the election case — has rested not on winning in court but on delaying and then winning the election. To do the latter, he feels compelled to give his supporters some rationale, however specious and silly, to excuse their voting for him.

Fortunately, if the election case moves briskly ahead and Trump is convicted, only the most bamboozled MAGA voters will be left to parrot his excuses.

Out Of Balance

I admit that I spent a lot of time and energy in the 70s and 80s hating on unions. I was convinced they'd outlived their usefulness. And maybe, at the time, I was at least partly right. There was plenty of corruption and feather-bedding going on.

But now I think I was getting suckered into believing it was just the unions that were fucked up, and that the companies had practically nothing to do with any of it - they were being victimized by union members who were just looking for a free ride.

As per usual, there's some truth to it, but mostly, it's PR - purely cynical and manipulative bullshit put out by coin-operated politicians and their plutocratic paymasters.

There's some pretty unsavory history to be written about American Economic Evolution over the last 50 years, and about Labor Relations in particular during that time. And if we survive the next few election cycles, I hope to see a little muckraking that would do Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell proud.

Anyway, the Hollywood strike may well be in the process of telling an important story that we all need to internalize.

Opinion --Joseph Gordon-Levitt

If artificial intelligence uses your work, it should pay you

Actors love residuals. Don’t worry, this is not some annoying Hollywood thing like quinoa or crystal healing. I actually do like quinoa — sorry. Anyway, what are residuals?

Residuals are an important part of how actors get paid. They’re checks you get long after you’re done shooting, because audiences are still watching the movie, perhaps on a new channel or in a new country. Some residual checks can be for pennies, some for thousands of dollars or more.

At the moment, Hollywood’s labor unions for writers and actors, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA, are on strike, and streaming residuals are one of the main deal points being negotiated. I’m a proud member of both of these unions, and I strongly support their demands. But zooming out, so to speak, I think there’s a larger conversation to be had about residuals that goes well beyond Hollywood.

Actors, writers and the rest of us film and television professionals might be some of the first (but not the last) to have our jobs threatened by so-called artificial intelligence — technology that ingests enormous amounts of “training data,” crunches the numbers and spits out new combinations of the data, following the patterns it was trained on. Tech giants, entertainment giants and every other profit-hungry giant will soon claim that AI can do human-level work at an astonishingly small fraction of the cost.

However, this claim will be hiding something, like the Wizard of Oz bellowing, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” What’s behind the curtain of AI? The cost of the human labor it took to produce the training data. “Generative AI” cannot generate anything at all without first being trained on massive troves of data it then recombines. Who produces that training data? People do.

And those people deserve residuals.

For example, let’s say a new AI program could generate a complete feature film at the click of a button. (Some industry insiders think this could actually happen pretty soon.) Building that AI will require a bazillion past movies to be used as training data. Therefore, anytime this AI yields revenue, the people who made those past movies will deserve a substantial piece. And I’m not just talking about actors and writers. I also mean people who don’t get residuals today: the camera operators, the costume designers, the sound mixers, everyone whose work the AI will be ingesting, mashing up and mimicking.

This principle holds true whether we’re talking about entertainers, doctors, engineers or pretty much anyone whose work involves a computer. AI can’t do our jobs yet, but it might be able to soon. And people whose jobs are threatened by AI will be the same people who produced the data used to train it. A new kind of residuals for these human data producers could potentially provide some much-needed economic relief.

And by the way, I’m not the only one advocating this kind of thing. Renowned technologists and economists, including Jaron Lanier and E. Glen Weyl, have long argued that Big Tech should not be allowed to monetize people’s data without compensating them. This concept of “data dignity” was largely responding to the surveillance advertising business models of companies such as Google and Facebook, but Lanier and Weyl also pointed out, quite presciently, that the principle would only grow more vital as AI rose to prominence.

Technologically speaking, the type of residuals program I have in mind would be a tall order. An AI system would have to track every piece of its training data, and then be able to determine which of those pieces influenced any given output generated and to what degree. On top of that, each of those pieces of data would have to be attributed to a verified human or set of humans, and there would need to be a channel of payment for those humans to receive their residuals. We did something a little bit like this at my company, HitRecord, producing pieces of art and entertainment with sometimes thousands of online collaborators and paying each contributing artist. Residuals from AI, in comparison, would require an astronomically huge scale, keeping track of zillions of bits and bytes, as well as billions of people, dollars, cents and microcents. (Disclosure: My wife serves on the board of directors of the OpenAI Nonprofit.)

So, now that I’ve said how hard the tech will be, let’s talk about the really hard part.

Tech companies won’t be incentivized all by themselves to build the necessary software. The law will have to make them do it. The U.S. Copyright Office recently issued an official statement that completely AI-generated works are not eligible for registration, saying, “These technologies ‘train’ on vast quantities of preexisting human-authored works and use inferences from that training to generate new content.” I imagine the copyright question will force tech companies to come up with a solution to attribute some sort of human authorship to an AI’s outputs. But here’s the question: Who owns the copyright to the training data? Who will therefore reap the benefits?

The answer to that key question, in the case of the film and television industry, is not the writers, actors, camera operators, costume designers, sound mixers or any of the other people who made the creations. The copyright is owned by the big studios. See the problem?

When I do a movie, and I sign my contract with a movie studio, I agree that the studio will own the copyright to the movie. Which feels fair and non-threatening. The studio paid to make the movie, so it should get to monetize the movie however it wants. But if I had known that by signing this contract and allowing the studio to be the movie’s sole copyright holder, I would then be allowing the studio to use that intellectual property as training data for an AI that would put me out of a job forever, I would never have signed that contract.

And again, this doesn’t apply just to the film and television industry but to many, many others as well. Take the medical industry. A doctor’s work produces lots of intellectual property in the form of medical records — and many doctors sign contracts allowing hospitals (or whoever) to take sole ownership of those medical records. But if the doctors had known this intellectual property would be used as training data for an AI that would put them out of a job forever, they, too, would never have signed those contracts.

So, if residuals from AI training data are based on existing copyright, then the aforementioned profit-hungry giants might indeed get to stop paying humans for their labor. How do we deal with this? Both of the Hollywood unions on strike today have expressed grave concern over AI, but their demands regarding AI will not address the pitfall I’m describing here. Nor do I think the problem can be solved by the courts. A number of independent visual artists have sued the AI companies Midjourney and Stability AI, claiming their work was used as training data without consent or compensation. Similar lawsuits are cropping up more and more. I hope these artists win these lawsuits. But I’m not sure they will without new intellectual-property law on their side.

I’m well aware that implementing this kind of residuals program would take a ton of work. It would require technology that doesn’t exist yet. It would also require new public policy, and most governments don’t exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to regulating new tech. Still, there are encouraging signs out there that the White House and Congress are moving toward regulating AI. So here’s my request: Residuals from AI training data should be made mandatory and intellectual-property law amended to make sure those residuals go to the people who deserve them. The seemingly miraculous outputs of generative AI should not be allowed to fill the coffers of tech giants or any other giants without paying the people whose data made those outputs possible.

AI is going to change things faster and harder than our intuition can predict. Will those changes be for the better or worse? I believe we still have a real shot at a world in which our careers are both more productive and more meaningful, and in which our compensation is both more honorable and more equitable than any we’ve ever known. But that kind of bright future won’t arrive automatically. As always, it’ll be us doing the work.

Again With The Florida?

I'll bet dollars to dingleberries that somebody in the DeSantis campaign brain trust is thinking, "Any press is good press - no such thing as bad publicity."

Opinion

Worried by Florida’s history standards? Check out its new dictionary!

Well, it’s a week with a Thursday in it, and Florida is, once again, revising its educational standards in alarming ways. Not content with removing books from shelves, or demanding that the College Board water down its AP African American studies curriculum, the state’s newest history standards include lessons suggesting that enslaved people “developed skills” for “personal benefit.” This trend appears likely to continue. What follows is a preview of the latest edition of the dictionary to be approved in Florida.

Aah: (exclamation) Normal thing to say when you enter the water at the beach, which is over 100 degrees.

Abolitionists: (noun) Some people in the 19th century who were inexplicably upset about a wonderful free surprise job training program. Today they want to end prisons for equally unclear reasons.

Abortion: (noun) Something that male state legislators (the foremost experts on this subject) believe no one ever wants under any circumstances, probably; decision that people beg the state to make for them and about which doctors beg for as little involvement as possible.

American history: (noun) A branch of learning that concerns a ceaseless parade of triumphs and contains nothing to feel bad about.

Barbie: (noun) Feminist demon enemy of the state.

Biden, Joe: (figure) Illegitimate president.

Black history: (entry not found)

Blacksmith: (noun) A great job and one that enslaved people might have had. Example sentence from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R): “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”

Book ban: (noun) Effective way of making sure people never have certain sorts of ideas.

Censorship: (noun) When other people get mad about something you’ve said. Not to be confused with when you remove books from libraries or the state tells colleges what can and can’t be said in classrooms (both fine).

Child: (noun) Useful laborer with tiny hands; alternatively, someone whose reading cannot be censored enough.

Christian nationalism: (noun) Certainly constitutional; probably what the Founding Fathers would have preferred!

Classified: (adjective) The government’s way of saying a paper is especially interesting and you ought to have it in your house.

Climate change: (noun) Conspiracy by scientists to change all the thermometers, fill the air with smoke and then blame us.

Cocaine: (noun) A substance discovered in the White House; the only fit subject for news cycles.

Constitution: (noun) A document that can be interpreted only by Trump-appointed and/or Federalist Society judges. If the Constitution appears to prohibit something that you want to do, take the judge on a boat and try again.

Coral: (noun) Superfluous refuge for fish, others who have failed to adapt to life on land.

DeSantis, Ron: (figure) Governor who represents the ideal human being. Pronunciation varies.

Disney: (noun) A corporation, but not the good kind.

DOJ: (noun) Schrodinger’s legal entity that is both good and evil simultaneously, used for investigating legitimate country-shaking crimes (Hunter Biden possessing a firearm) and conducting illegal raids (Donald Trump kindly opening his home to some classified documents).

Election: (noun) Binding if Republicans win; otherwise, needs help from election officials who will figure out where the fraud was that prevented the election from reflecting the will of the people (that Republicans win).

Elector: (noun) Someone Mike Pence should or should not have accepted, depending.

Emancipation Proclamation: (noun) Classic example of government overreach.

Firearm: (noun) Wonderful, beautiful object that every person ought to have six of, except Hunter Biden.

Florida: God’s paradise on Earth; sometimes Ohio; see “The Courage to Be Free”! All parts of the country at once. Real estate here will only get more valuable.

FOX: News.

Free speech: (noun) When you shut up and I talk.

Gun violence: (noun) Simple, unalterable fact of life, like death but unlike taxes.

Immigration: (noun) When someone leaves their country of origin to seek a better life elsewhere; huge insult to the receiving country, to be prevented at all costs.

Independence Day: See Jan. 6.

Jan. 6: (noun) A day when some beautiful, beloved people took a nice, uneventful tour of the U.S. Capitol.

King Jr., Martin Luther: (figure) A man who, as far as we can discern, uttered only one famous quotation ever and it was about how actually anytime you tried to suggest that people were being treated differently based on skin color you were the real racist. Sample sentence: “Dr. King would be enraged at the existence of Black History Month.”

Liberty: (noun) My freedom to choose what you can read (see Moms for Liberty).

Moms for Liberty: (noun) Censors, but the good kind.

Nature: (noun) Something it is okay to boil, probably. Like soup.

Orca: (noun) Enemy of the state, vessels.

Orwellian: (adjective) When people are mad about a book written by Josh Hawley or another Republican, not when people try to erase slavery from history.

Pregnant (adjective): The state of being a vessel containing a Future Citizen; do not say “pregnant person”; no one who is a real person can get pregnant.

Queer: (entry not found)

Refugee: (noun) Someone who should have stayed put and waited for help to come.

Slavery: (noun) We didn’t invent it, or it wasn’t that bad, or it was a free job training program.

Supreme Court: (noun) Wonderful group of mostly men without whom no journey by private plane or yacht is complete.

Alexandra Petri: Supreme Court, consider justice sponsorship!

Trans: (entry not found)

United States: (noun) Perfect place, no notes.

Unfree: (adjective) The best way for thought and people to be.

To Sum It Up

1. Putin sucks
2. Ukrainians are awesome
3. NATO is getting off cheap

Money quote:

(paraphrasing Yitzhak Rabin) "Ukrainians are going about their everyday lives as if there is no war, while waging war as if there is no everyday life."

What I Learned in Ukraine

WARSAW — Last week, a friend asked me what I could learn from a four-day trip to Ukraine I was planning that I couldn’t glean just by reading the news. It was a fair question. With the trip now behind me, I can answer.

I learned how strange it is to visit a country to which no plane flies and, as of last Monday, no ship sails — thanks to Vladimir Putin’s cruel and cynical withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative through which Ukrainian farm products reached hungry countries like Kenya, Lebanon and Somalia. The only feasible way for a visitor to get from the Polish border to Kyiv is a nine-hour train ride, where the sign inside the carriage door urges, “Be Brave Like Ukraine.”

I learned that you need to download the Air Alert! app to your smartphone as soon as you enter the country. It sounds an alarm every time the system detects drones, missiles or other incoming aerial threats in your vicinity, something that happened time and again during my short stay. Following the alarm, a recording — in English by the “Star Wars” actor Mark Hamill — intones: “Proceed to the nearest shelter. Don’t be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness.”

I learned that Kyiv is hopping. Despite what the U.S. Embassy says have been 1,620 missile and drone attacks on the city — and despite an economy that contracted 29 percent in the first year of the war — cars jam the roads, people dine in outdoor cafes on well-swept sidewalks and activists, civil servants and elected officials freely share divergent views with visiting columnists. To adapt a phrase attributed to Yitzhak Rabin, Ukrainians are going about their everyday lives as if there is no war, while waging war as if there is no everyday life.

I learned that every member of the American Embassy staff in Kyiv, led by our courageous and cleareyed ambassador, Bridget Brink, volunteered for the duty. They have been separated from their families and living for months on end in hotel rooms. They have the job of overseeing one of the largest U.S. assistance efforts since the Marshall Plan, ensuring that tens of thousands of individual pieces of American military hardware in Ukrainian hands are properly accounted for, reconstituting an embassy that was gutted on the eve of Russia’s invasion and keeping tabs on Russian war crimes — some 95,000 of which have been documented so far by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office.

I learned what it was like to sit in conference rooms and walk along corridors that would soon be shattered by Russian ordnance. On Tuesday, I joined a diplomatic group led by Administrator Samantha Power of the United States Agency for International Development on a visit to the port of Odesa. Power met first with Ukrainian officials to discuss logistical options for their exports after Putin’s withdrawal from the grain agreement, then with farmers to discuss issues like de-mining their fields and de-risking their finances. The stately Port Authority building in which the meetings took place, a purely civilian target, was struck barely a day after our departure.

I learned that Ukrainians have no interest in turning their victimization into an identity. Years ago, in Belgrade, I saw how the Serbian government had preserved the wreck of its old defense ministry, hit by NATO bombs in the 1999 Kosovo war, in keeping with its self-pitying perceptions of that war. By contrast, in Bucha, the Kyiv suburb that suffered some of the worst atrocities during Russia’s brief occupation in the early days of the war, I witnessed the transformation of apartment buildings dotted with patched-up bullet holes into trendy co-working spaces. As Anatoliy Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, told Power, “Memory will stay in memoirs but residents want to rebuild without reminders.”

I learned that Ukrainians aren’t likely to trade sovereign territory for Western security assurances, much less for some kind of armistice deal with Moscow. They tried the former in the 1990s with the Budapest Memorandum, in which they surrendered the nuclear arsenal on their soil to Russia for the sake of toothless guarantees of territorial integrity. They tried the latter with the equally toothless Minsk agreements after Russia’s first invasion in 2014. The goal of Western policy should be to provide Ukraine with the military means they need to win, rather than to pressure Ukraine into again bargaining away its rights to sovereignty and security for the sake of assuaging our anxieties about Russian escalation.

I learned that, for all the aid we’ve given Ukraine, we are the true beneficiaries in the relationship, and they the true benefactors. Ben Wallace, Britain’s usually thoughtful defense minister, suggested after this month’s NATO summit that Ukrainians should show more gratitude to their arms suppliers. That gets the relationship backward. NATO countries are paying for their long-term security in money, which is cheap, and munitions, which are replaceable. Ukrainians are counting their costs in lives and limbs lost.

I am writing this column from Warsaw Chopin Airport. Parked outside the terminal are jetliners destined for Doha, Istanbul, Rome, Toronto, New York. The sight of them here could scarcely have been imagined 40 years ago. It came true because the Polish people remained, in Ronald Reagan’s apt words, “magnificently unreconciled to oppression.”

Today, it is Poland’s neighbors in Ukraine who are magnificently unreconciled to invasion. What I learned from four days under closed skies is never to take a bustling airport scene like this for granted.

Mr Cop-Out Cops Out

There is disingenuous, and there is naiveté, and there is willful ignorance, and there is purposefully nefarious.

Put all that together, and then launch it into full-blown, Daddy-State-gaslighting, cynically-manipulative, who-me? fantasyland, and you're almost to where you can just barely start to make out the blurry outline of David Brooks, way off in the distance.

This jackass has played a significant role in dismissing, and apologizing for, and normalizing, and promoting exactly the kind of political atmosphere necessary to produce and then exalt a dick like Donald Trump.

Give it a fuckin' rest, Dave.

I Won’t Let Donald Trump Invade My Brain

And yet I’ve found that Donald Trump has confounded me at every turn. I’ve found that I’m not cynical enough to correctly anticipate what he is capable of.

I have consistently underestimated his depravity. I was shocked at how thuggishly Trump behaved in that first debate with Joe Biden in 2020. As the Jan. 6 committee hearings progressed, I was stunned to find out just how aggressively Trump had worked to overthrow the election. And then, just last week, in reading his federal indictment, I was once again taken aback to learn how flagrantly he had breached national security.

And yet I can’t quite feel ashamed of my perpetual naïveté toward Donald Trump. I don’t want to be the kind of person who can easily enter the head of an amoral narcissist.

I’d rather not let him infect my brain. I’d rather not let that guy alter my views of the world. If occasional naïveté is the price for mental independence from Trump, I’m willing to pay it.

I’ve been thinking about all this while bracing for the 17 months of campaigning that apparently lie ahead, with Trump probably once again the central focus of the nation’s consciousness. I’m thinking about how we will once again be forced to defend our inner sanctums as he seeks, on a minute-by-minute basis, to take up residence in our brains.

I cling to a worldview that is easy to ridicule. I hold the belief that most people, while flawed, seek to be good. I hold the belief that our institutions, while fraying, are basically legitimate and deserve our respect. I hold the belief that character matters, and that good people ultimately prosper and unethical people are ultimately undone.

I don’t think this worldview is born of childish innocence. It comes out of my direct experience with life, and after thousands of interviews, covering real-life politicians like Barack Obama, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Donald Trump, by his mere presence, is an assault on this worldview. Trump is a tyrant. As Aristotle observed all those many years ago, tyranny is all about arbitrariness. When a tyrant has power, there is no rule of law, there is no governing order. There is only the whim of the tyrant. There is only his inordinate desire to have more than his fair share of everything.

Under political tyranny external laws become arbitrary. Even when Trump doesn’t wield state power, when he is merely campaigning, Trump wields cultural power. Under cultural tyranny internal values become arbitrary too — based on his whims and lusts of the moment.

The categories we use to evaluate the world lose their meaning — cruelty and kindness, integrity and corruption, honesty and dishonesty, generosity and selfishness. High-minded values begin to seem credulous and absurd, irrelevant to the situation at hand. Trump’s mere presence spreads his counter-gospel: People are basically selfish; raw power runs the world. All that matters is winning and losing. Under his influence, subtly and insidiously, people develop more nihilistic mind-sets.

Trump has already corroded the Republican Party in just this way. Let me focus on one value that Trump has already dissolved: the idea that there should be some connection between the beliefs you have in your head and the words that come out of your mouth. If you say something you don’t believe, you should at least have a twinge of guilt about your hypocrisy.

I used to at least hear Republicans express guilt privately when they publicly supported a guy they held in contempt. That guilt seems to have gone away. Even the contempt has gone away. Many Republicans have switched off the moral faculty, having apparently concluded that personal morality doesn’t matter.

Trump’s corrosive influence spreads far beyond his party. Any stable social order depends on a sense of legitimacy. This is the belief and faith that the people who have been given authority have a right to govern. They wield power for the common good.

Trump assaults this value too. Prosecutors are not serving the rule of law, he insists, but are Joe Biden’s political pawns. Civil servants are nothing but “deep state” operatives to take Trump down. This cynical attitude has become pervasive in our society. Proper skepticism toward our institutions has turned into endemic distrust, a jaundiced cynicism that says: I’m onto the game; it’s corruption all the way down.

Over the coming months, we face not merely a political contest, but a battle between those of us who believe in ideals, even though it can make us seem naïve at times, and those who argue that life is a remorseless struggle for selfish gain. Their victory would be a step toward cultural barbarism.

who coulda knowed?

Ms Dowd

None of our irritations with the perceived inadequacies of the media should ever allow us to suggest even faintly that the independence of the press could be compromised or coerced.

A bad free press is preferable to a technically good subservient press.

-- Nelson Madela

Is it possible the Sulzberger family has finally gotten the message?

It's unlikely, but even though Maureen Dowd starts her piece out like she usually does (hiding the razor blade deep in the apple, by "cleverly" disguising the Both-Sides bullshit as a cute little anecdote about Eugene Debs - inviting the inference that of course the situations involving Trump and Debs are exactly the same - oy).

She starts to redeem herself a bit when she finally gets around to saying there's no comparison (5th paragraph - I guess "columnists" are subject to the whole journalism thing.)

The problem I have with NYT is that they seem to think they can sit there in their Manhattan condos and pretend they have no dog in the fight - that no matter what happens, they'll be totally insulated from the shit that will roll down on them if the more radical of the plutocrats prevail.

And of course, some will thrive under a new regime because they've become extraordinarily adept at their sycophancy. (like the David Spade character in The Coneheads - total suck up to whoever has the power - sorry, I couldn't find a good video clip)

Bathroom Reading at Mar-a-Lago

WASHINGTON — It’s shocking how easy it is to imagine Donald Trump campaigning for the presidency from prison.

He’d have the joint wired, like the mob guys in “Goodfellas.” He’d be enjoying all kinds of privileges, DJing Elvis and Pavarotti; getting a steady flow of Viagra, cheeseburgers and conjugal visits (not from Melania). Maybe he’d even be able to smuggle in his special Tang-colored hair bleach.

It wouldn’t be the first time someone tried for the White House from the Big House. In 1920, after being imprisoned on sedition charges for excoriating American involvement in World War I, which he considered a capitalistic war, Eugene Debs won about 900,000 votes as the Socialist Party nominee.

“I will be a candidate at home in seclusion,” he joked when asked how he would campaign. “It will be much less tiresome, and my managers and opponents can always locate me.” He was allowed to give one bulletin a week to the United Press. With Trump, it will be Newsmax.

Trump wouldn’t be in prison for sticking by his principles, though. He’d be in prison because he has no principles. We’re watching him spiral down to his essence. At bottom, he’s a humongous, dangerous liar and a criminal. As Logan Roy would say, this is not a serious person.

The dramatic unsealing of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump is a fitting switch. Until now, it has been Donald J. Trump v. United States of America. He tried to engineer a coup against the government he was running. I bet Jack Smith will be bringing those charges later.

The special counsel made it clear that this isn’t just a “boxes hoax,” as Trump called it. You can’t purloin classified documents; leave them in the gilt-and-crystal glare of the bathroom, shower, bedroom and ballroom at Mar-a-Lago; and show them off to remind people how important you are. Trump’s ego is his greatest weakness. He couldn’t resist self-aggrandizing. Hey, I got these secret documents.

The indictment — charging Trump with violating the Espionage Act and other laws — offered devastating photos of America’s secrets stacked up like something on “Hoarders,” spilling out under the dry cleaning, a guitar case and other items.

“The classified documents Trump stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries, United States nuclear programs, potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack,” the indictment said. “The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”

Well, that’s bad.

The indictment is based on information from Trump’s own lawyers, staffers, phone records and security cameras. This isn’t the work of some insider or Trump hater who’s out to get him. And it makes clear that there was a very deliberate effort by Trump to hold on to and conceal these documents that he was going to use for heaven knows what and show to God knows whom.

The former president directed his valet, Waltine Nauta (named as a co-conspirator with Trump), to move about 64 boxes from a storage room to Trump’s residence and bring about 30 boxes back to the storage room — without informing the Trump attorney who was supposed to be reviewing the material.

On top of that, the attorney said, Trump later encouraged him to go through the documents that he did review and pluck out anything really bad. Trump even made a plucking motion.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump was always boasting about his devotion to protecting classified information, to mock Hillary. The prosecutors thoughtfully included some of his old comments, like this one: “In my administration I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”

Those statements obviously carried the same weight as his 2016 comments vowing to be so busy as president that he would never play golf. What an utter phony.

The Republicans who jumped out in front of the indictment to defend Trump should be ashamed. Unfortunately, shame is long gone from the Republican Party, except for a vestigial smidge in Mitt Romney’s office.

Up until now, Trump has managed to slink away from innumerable seamy episodes, from bankruptcies to vile personal misconduct, by proclaiming himself a victim.

I was trepidatious, after watching the lame performances of James Comey and Robert Mueller. But Jack Smith seems to be bringing an impressive skill set and temperament to his prosecution of Trump. Maybe he developed them in his years nailing war criminals at The Hague.

In his brief appearance at the Justice Department Friday afternoon, Smith emphasized the risks that this kind of mishandling of sensitive information poses to the people who have volunteered to protect us.

He praised the F.B.I., the agency that Trump and the Republicans have been trying to tear down and defund, saying the agents there work “tirelessly every day, upholding the rule of law in our country.”

Republicans used to embrace the rule of law. Now, many describe the Jan. 6 rioters as martyrs and say Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted. Kevin McCarthy called the indictment “a dark day for the United States of America.”

But Smith is intent on reminding Americans that the rule of law is a fundamental tenet of our country.

Trump ranted on Friday about Smith being “a deranged psycho.” Naturally, he also attacked Smith’s wife, the award-winning documentarian Katy Chevigny, who produced a documentary about Michelle Obama and contributed to Joe Biden’s campaign, as “the biggest Hater of them all.”

But Smith is not likely to be cowed. The guy’s tenacious. In an interview a few years ago, Smith discussed his passion for Ironman competitions. He talked about the time he got hit by a truck while riding his bike and fractured his pelvis. He was back doing a triathlon 10 weeks later.

The Alarm Keeps Clanging Away

A Sinister New Page in the Republican Playbook

On Tuesday, I wrote about the Republican effort to limit the reach and scope of initiatives and referendums as another instance of the party’s war on majority rule. One thing I wanted to include, but couldn’t quite integrate into the structure of the column, was a point about the recent use of legislative expulsion to punish Democratic lawmakers who dissent from or challenge Republican majorities.

We saw this in Tennessee, obviously, where Republicans expelled two Democratic members — Representatives Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin J. Pearson of Memphis — for loudly supporting a youth protest for gun control from the statehouse floor using a bullhorn.

We saw another example this week, in Montana, after State Representative Zooey Zephyr, a transgender woman, spoke out against a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for minors. Calling her comments (“If you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.”) “disrespectful and “inappropriate,” Montana Republicans have barred Zephyr from attending — or speaking during — the House session for the rest of the legislative term, which ends next week.

In Nebraska, a Democratic lawmaker is being investigated by an ethics panel for a conflict of interest regarding her filibuster of another bill to ban gender-affirming health care for minors. The conflict? She has a transgender child.

And if we look back to last year, we’ll recall that House Republicans censured former Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their roles in investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

What to make of this?

Expelling or censuring members isn’t necessarily an attack on majority rule or popular government, and yet it feels more sinister, in a way, than an impenetrable partisan gerrymander or even a strict voter ID law. I think that’s because these moves against dissenting members constitute an attack on representation itself.

No one forced Tennessee Republicans to expel Representatives Jones and Pearson. They could have ignored them. But they were so incensed by the show of opposition that they deprived about 130,000 people of their representation in the legislature. Silencing and effectively banning Representative Zephyr means that about 10,000 people in Montana’s 100th District don’t have a voice in the legislature.

The foundation of modern American democracy is that all Americans deserve some kind of representation in the rooms where law and policy are made. Not content to control those rooms in states where they dominate the political scene, some Republicans have said, in essence, that representation is a privilege for communities whose chosen lawmakers don’t offend their sensibilities.

The Constitution guarantees to each state a “republican form of government.” I’ve written before about how this “republican form” is mostly undefined; neither the framers nor the courts have really said what it means for a state to have one. But I think we can at least say that when legislatures are stripping communities of representation over dissent and disagreement, it doesn’t exist.

What I Wrote

My Tuesday column was, as I mentioned, on the Republican attack on referendums and initiatives, and how the party has committed itself to circumventing the will of the majority wherever it thinks it’s necessary.

There’s still room for innovation, however, and in the past year Republicans have opened new fronts in the war for minority rule. One element in these campaigns, an aggressive battle to limit the reach of the referendum process, stands out in particular. Wherever possible, Republicans hope to raise the threshold for winning a ballot initiative from a majority to a supermajority or — where such a threshold already exists — add other hurdles to passage.

My Friday column was on the drama on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where its chairman, Dick Durbin, asked Chief Justice John Roberts to testify at a hearing on Supreme Court ethics. I wrote that the response from Roberts demonstrates something crucial about the relationship between the court and the American political order.

“Separation of powers,” in Roberts’s view, means the court is outside the system of checks and balances that governs the other branches of government. “Judicial independence,” likewise, means neither he nor any other member of the court has any obligation to speak to Congress about their behavior. The court checks, according to Roberts, but cannot be checked.

And in the latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we discussed the 1995 political comedy “Canadian Bacon.”

On David Brooks

Driftglass does this much better than I do, but I can't not throw my 2¢ in.

Here's David Brooks, doing his usual Above-It-All thing, trying to disconnect Trump from the GOP, and working hard to pretend he had nothing to do with how we got Trump in the first place.

Trump did not remake the Republican party in his image. He's the perfect reflection of what the GOP has been morphing into for at least 50 years, and David Brooks helped engineer it.

I'll take the common cause all day long, but I refuse to see David Brooks as anything but the snake he is.

Joe Biden and the Struggle for America’s Soul

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Joe Biden built his 2020 presidential campaign around the idea that “we’re in a battle for the soul of America.” I thought it was a marvelous slogan because it captured the idea that we’re in the middle of a moral struggle over who we are as a nation. In the video he released this week launching his re-election bid, he doubled down on that idea: We’re still, he said, “in a battle for the soul of America.”

I want to dwell on the little word “soul” in that sentence because I think it illuminates what the 2024 presidential election is all about.

What is a soul? Well, religious people have one answer to that question. But Biden is not using the word in a religious sense, but in a secular one. He is saying that people and nations have a moral essence, a soul.

Whether you believe in God or don’t believe in God is not my department. But I do ask you to believe that every person you meet has this moral essence, this quality of soul.

Because humans have souls, each one is of infinite value and dignity. Because humans have souls, each one is equal to all the others. We are not equal in physical strength or I.Q. or net worth, but we are radically equal at the level of who we essentially are.

The soul is the name we can give to that part of our consciousness where moral life takes place. The soul is the place our moral sentiments flow from, the emotions that make us feel admiration at the sight of generosity and disgust at the sight of cruelty.

It is the place where our moral yearnings come from, too. Most people yearn to lead good lives. When they act with a spirit of cooperation, their souls sing and they are happy. On the other hand, when they feel their lives have no moral purpose, they experience a sickness of the soul — a sense of lostness, pain and self-contempt.

Because we have souls, we are morally responsible for what we do. Hawks and cobras are not morally responsible for their actions; but humans, possessors of souls, are caught in a moral drama, either doing good or doing ill.

Political campaigns are not usually contests over the status of the soul. But Donald Trump, and Trumpism generally, is the embodiment of an ethos that covers up the soul. Or to be more precise, each is an ethos that deadens the soul under the reign of the ego.

Trump, and Trumpism generally, represents a kind of nihilism that you might call amoral realism. This ethos is built around the idea that we live in a dog-eat-dog world. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Might makes right. I’m justified in grabbing all that I can because if I don’t, the other guy will. People are selfish; deal with it.

This ethos — which is central to not only Trump’s approach to life, but also Vladimir Putin’s and Xi Jinping’s — gives people a permission slip to be selfish. In an amoral world, cruelty, dishonesty, vainglory and arrogance are valorized as survival skills.

People who live according to the code of amoral realism tear through codes and customs that have built over the centuries to nurture goodness and foster cooperation. Putin is not restrained by notions of human rights. Trump is not restrained by the normal codes of honesty.

In the mind of an amoral realist, life is not a moral drama; it’s a competition for power and gain, red in tooth and claw. Other people are not possessors of souls, of infinite dignity and worth; they are objects to be utilized.

Biden talks a lot about the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. At its deepest level, that struggle is between systems that put the dignity of individual souls at the center and systems that operate by the logic of dominance and submission.

You may disagree with Biden on many issues. You may think he is too old. But that’s not the primary issue in this election. The presidency, as Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, “is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.”

One of the hardest, soul-wearying parts of living through the Trump presidency was that we had to endure a steady downpour of lies, transgressions and demoralizing behavior. We were all corroded by it. That era was a reminder that the soul of a person and the soul of a nation are always in flux, every day moving a bit in the direction of elevation or a bit in the direction of degradation.

A return to that ethos would bring about a social and moral disintegration that is hard to contemplate. Say what you will about Biden, but he has generally put human dignity at the center of his political vision. He treats people with charity and respect.

The contest between Biden and Trumpism is less Democrat versus Republican or liberal versus conservative than it is between an essentially moral vision and an essentially amoral one, a contest between decency and its opposite

Remember:

• Trump got more votes in the 2016 Republican primaries than any other candidate in the history of the GOP.
• He got 11 million more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016

This is not Trumpism

this is what the Republican party is now.