Free Mahmoud Khalil

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:

• I keep an index of resources
• the moral question is simple:
  Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the history is complicated:
  I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
• the praxis is complicated:
  antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

DHS agents broke into the home of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil and detained him without charges. Khalil holds a Green Card for permanent residency; the Trump Administration is evidently trying to revoke it and deport him.

I have contributed ^$18 to support him and his legal defense. I encourage all people of consicence to make contributions if you can. I encourage making contributions in multiples of ^$18, exercising Jewish custom as a sign of solidarity, even if one is a gentile.

Team Trump are after Khalil because he is a Palestinian involved in organizing anti-Israel protests at Columbia University. They are violating due process in several ways, including that they stonewalled habeas corpus until that got too much attention. I have seen no credible argument that he violated any law.

I am not an Israel hardliner. When I call moves in support of Palestinian liberation antisemitic I extend a lot of grace to people who have just not thought through the implications of what they say. I remind y’all of that to contextualize that Khalil has said things about Israel-Palestine which I find repulsively antisemitic.

That is not a deterrent to my donation to his defense; it is one of the reasons why I consider it important. The Trump administration’s attempt to deport Khalil is a wedge to create openings for arbitrary deportation. To truly stand for liberal democracy — the universality of rights, for due process, for limits to state power — we must fight for them on the behalf of the people we like the least.

More commentaries

Vox has a characteristically thorough explainer; one can expect them to add to it with new developments.

On Truth Social, the President said:

Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, you presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s colleges and Universities to comply. Thank you!

Journalist Jeff Sharlet reads that post closely:

Trump celebrating an illegal detention by name tells us a great deal.

1. This wasn’t overreach; it’s the plan.
2. Fact that Khalil is legal resident w/ no evident Hamas sympathies isn’t a glitch; it’s the point.
3. Gaza protesters are means to an end; real target is higher ed.

I know there are going to be good people who have a hard time with that 3^rd point. But after a few decades on the rightwing beat, I can tell you Gaza protesters are, to fascists, only the latest excuse. Trump not only doesn’t care about fighting antisemitism, real or imagined; he’s stoking it.

Journalist Josh Marshall underlines:

Those who know me know I was highly critical of what I saw as some of the rhetorical excesses of the campus protests. Khalil and I wld probably get into a spat immediately. It’s all the more important for people who believe as I do to say clearly, the protections of the law are for everyone.

This is not only outside of our traditions and values. It’s flatly illegal. This is the first step to others, not just green card holders but citizens getting rounded up in the middle of the night. Green cards can be revoked. But only for specific reasons. And only after a judicial process.

If the government has a real arguemnt, tell it to a judge. Trump wants everyone to feel afraid, foes and friends. Their liberty is at his whim. That’s a King not a president. We’re Americans. We’re not slaves or supplicants. Elected officials serve us. We don’t answer to them. We talk back to them.

Blogger Emptywheel describes in detail that it’s not the shameless executive power grab in plain sight, it’s the attempt to retcon it afterwards:

⋯ it appears that the Trump Administration made a shameless power grab without doing their investigative work first. So what we see going forward may be nothing more than an attempt to retcon it, to change their story after the fact to adjust for new facts

[⋯]

There’s that old adage, which seems inoperative since Nixon, that it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. With Trump and under expansive authorities of Article II, it often looks like it’s not the initial power grab that might create legal problems. It’s the attempt to retcon that power grab after it becomes clear the facts were not what Trump or others believed when the Administration took action.

Over and over, Trump 2.0 has taken aggressive steps based off bullshit, much of it coming from Elon or other far right propagandists. And over and over, Trump’s top people keep creating problems for themselves as they try to adjust the (legal) narrative to match their evolving understanding of the facts.

So as we go forward with discussions about Khalil, don’t necessarily assume that legal justifications that the government could have used were yet the legal justifications they may argue going forward.

John Ganz makes similar points:

The details here are very important: agents of the state without charging a crime or presenting a clear legal basis have detained a legal resident and are threatening him with deportation

[⋯]

The state cannot make it up as it goes along. It can’t seize people in the night and invent flimsy pretexts later. And if it does, then we no longer live under the rule of law, we live in a police state.

NPR reports a chilling interview on 13 March:

Journalist Michel Martin:
Mahmoud Khalil says he acted as a spokesperson for pro-Palestinian demonstrators and as a mediator with Columbia University, where he was a graduate student. As you know, Mr. Edgar, any conduct that can be legally sanctioned must be described. So, what is the specific conduct the government alleges that Mr. Khalil engaged in that merits removal from the United States.

DHS Secretary Troy Edgar:
I think what you saw there is you’ve got somebody that has come into the country on a visa. And as he’s going through the visa process, he is coming in to basically be a student that is not going to be supporting terrorism. So, the issue is he was let into the country on this visa. He has been promoting this antisemitism activity at the university. And at this point, the State Department has revoked his visa for supporting a terrorist type organization. And we’re the enforcing agencies, so we’ve come in to basically arrest him.

Martin:
A White House official told the Free Press that there’s no allegation that he broke any laws. So, again, I have to ask, what specifically constitutes terrorist activity that he was supporting? What exactly do you say he did?

Edgar:
Well, like I said, when you apply for a visa, you go through the process to be able to say that you’re here on a student visa, that doesn’t afford you all the rights of coming in and basically going through this process, agitating and supporting Hamas. So, at this point, yeah, the Secretary of State and the State Department maintains the right to revoke the visa, and that's what they’ve done.

Martin:
How did he support Hamas? Exactly what did he do?

Edgar:
Well, I think you can see it on TV, right? This is somebody that we’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he’s put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity. And at this point, like I said, the Secretary of State can review his visa process at any point and revoke it.

[⋯ more talking in circles ⋯]

Edgar:
I think if he would have declared he's a terrorist, we would have never let him in.

Martin:
And what did he engage in that constitutes terrorist activity?

Edgar:
I mean, Michel, have you watched it on TV? It's pretty clear.

Michel:
No, it isn’t. Well, explain it to those of us who have not or perhaps others have not. What exactly did you do?

Edgar:
Well, I think it’s clear or we wouldn't be talking about it. I mean, the reality is that if you watch and see what he’s done on the university …

Martin:
Do you not know? Are you telling us that you're not aware?

Edgar:
I find it interesting that you’re not aware.

Martin:
I think you could explain it to us. I think others would like to know exactly what the offenses are, what the propaganda was that you allege, what the activity was that you allege. Well, perhaps we can talk again and you can give us more details about this.

The interview ends there, without an answer.

Edgar demonstrates authoritarian sensibilities. They reject rule of law, institutional limits, or any other check on the direct exercise of power; indeed, they find the liberal insistence on clear & explicit rules and adjudication of those rules morally disgusting. They say You Just Know and actively evade naming how, because they value “loyalty” which does not ask.

And “I find it interesting”? That’s a threat.

Ellie Mystal warns that we are asking the wrong questions:

The only relevant question is not “How can the government do this?” It is “How can we who oppose this fascist regime?”

[⋯]

People expect or hope for the law to restrain Trump and his regime’s use of violence. People keep waiting for Trump to clearly and unambiguously “break” the law, as if doing so will trigger some kind of failsafe protocol causing the statue of Abraham Lincoln to self-animate out of its chair like a democracy-defending golem. But (as I have written many, many times) the law simply doesn’t work like that. The law is not an objective set of rules that snap into action when they are violated. Instead, the law is an argument. It can be bent, stretched, or straight-up ignored by the side that wins power.

Every authoritarian ruler throughout history, from Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix to Vladimir Putin, has had an argument for why their actions are “legal.” I can scream till my vocal cords snap that the government’s actions are illegal, but successful dictators make their actions “legal” through iron-fisted control of both the courts and whatever ineffectual legislatures they allow to exist. Trump is no different. He’s got an argument for why he can abduct a man from his apartment in New York and send him to a for-profit concentration camp in Louisiana. He’s got an argument for why he can revoke the green card of an activist for exercising his free speech rights. He’s got an argument for why he can deport people who oppose genocide as long as they’re non-white.

Adam Serwer says Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run:

Trump’s assault on basic First Amendment principles may begin with Khalil, but it will not end with him. Trump’s ultimate target is anyone he finds useful to target. Trump and his advisers simply hope the public is foolish or shortsighted enough to believe that if they are not criminals, or deviants, or terrorists, or foreigners, or traitors, then they have no reason to worry. Eventually no one will have any rights that the state need respect, because the public will have sacrificed them in the name of punishing people it was told did not deserve them.

The Trump administration began its drive for absolute power by ignoring congressional appropriations of foreign aid, which are laws. It calculated that Americans would be callous enough not to care about the catastrophic loss of human life abroad and that the absence of backlash would enable the administration to set a precedent for defying duly passed laws without consequence. Trump began his assault on antidiscrimination law with a vicious campaign against trans people — but has already broadened that campaign into a sweeping attempt at a great resegregation of American life. The detention of Mahmoud Khalil begins a dangerous new phase, in which the Trump administration will attempt to assert an authority to deprive people of due process based on their political views.

[⋯]

It does not matter if you approve of Khalil’s views. It does not matter if you support the Israelis or the Palestinians. It does not matter if you are a liberal or a conservative. It does not even matter if you voted for Trump or Kamala Harris. If the state can deprive an individual of his freedom just because of his politics, which is what appears to have happened here, then no one is safe. You may believe that Khalil does not deserve free speech or due process. But if he does not have them, then neither do you. Neither do I.

Anti-commentary

Over on Bluesky, Judith Shulevitz wrote a thread which showed up shared on my feed as a bad example, and I want to foster some precision about what is wrong with it.

I strongly defend Mahmoud Khalil’s right to have rights, due process, and all the other protections to which his green card entitles him. The way he is being treated is egregious and wrong. But I think we should be clear about what he has done. His actions do not constitute protected speech because even free speech is constrained by rules — time, place, manner, and other legitimate restrictions. He hasn’t been punished by any disciplinary body, but he’s no martyr.

Take the case we’ve all followed closely: the occupation of the Barnard library.

First, he was part of a group that barged onto the campus without permission — the campus is not open. Then he was part of a group that barged into the library, knocking over or manhandling (not clear which) a security guard to the point at which he had to go to the hospital.

Is protest allowed indoors? No. Here’s FIRE: Because of concerns about disruption, noise, and even fire safety, colleges may generally impose more restrictive rules on what students can do inside buildings.

Then Khalil was part of a group shouting through a bullhorn into a library. It is expressly forbidden to do that, because’s it’s a dramatic disruption of the educational process. Call it the hecklers’ veto of studying. Then he was part of a group that handed out leaflets stamped by Hamas, among other things, and put up a poster of Sinwar.

That’s not something that should be prosecuted by the government — it should have First Amendment protection — but private universities don’t have to abide by the First Amendment; they do have to abide by Title VI. The material they distributed celebrated the massacre of Israelis. That is a violation of rules against threatening or harassing a group on the basis of national origin, and maybe on the basis of religion.

And let’s think for a minute about what they were protesting: the expulsion of students who burst into a class taught by an Israeli and shut it down and refused to leave. Meanwhile, they handed out flyers (well, since the students refused to take them, they flung then on the ground) that featured, among other things, a giant jackboot stomping on the Star of David. None of this is protected speech. It’s also effectively heckling — preventing the teacher from speaking.

So Khalil is no hero. It’s just that there is no basis in law, as far as I can tell, for the way the government is mistreating him.

I saw a lot of people responding to the merits of her critique of Khalil. I think:

• Khalil’s Palestinian liberation advocacy serves a vital cause but is pretty darned bad in the particulars
• Shulevitz’ commentary addresses some real questions about his advocacy in ways I sharply disagree with
• Shulevitz’ take on his advocacy efforts is still legitimate
• It is bad to chew on the particulars of his advocacy like this

Yes, Shulevitz bookends her thread with the actually important thing, the lawlessness authoritarianism of the government’s actions.

But.

While I don’t like to rest too much on faulting the tone of commentaries, it does in fact matter how the kicker saying “it’s just that” trivializes the important thing. It does in fact matter how this comment sweeps past the main thing to spend most of its time examining Khalil’s failings.

We have to make the important thing the important thing.

The Dem establishment and trans liberation

This post lines up the forks in a Bluesky discussion —

Reflecting on California governor Gavin Newsom taking a turn against trans liberation over bullshit about trans atheletes, Jamelle Bouie observes:

The thing about chasing what you think is public opinion is that if and when things turn you will have made a bunch of statements and taken a bunch of stances that you’ll have to disavow. probably a better strategy just to say what you actually believe and stand by it. anyway, this guy sucks.

John Rodgers underlines:

Interracial marriage did not cross 50% approval in the US until 1996, when I was 30 years old. Good political messaging drives opinion, it doesn’t follow it.

Newsom understands this better than almost every other major pol. His early, vigorous support for same-sex marriage — breaking with the Democratic Party by having San Francisco issue marriage licenses when he was mayor — bucked the conventional wisdom and moved public opinion practically overnight. It makes him especially culpable for his betrayal.

Sharp-eyed journalist David Forbes replied with sage wisdom:

I think an underrated part of this is the degree to which anti-trans bigotry is an elite phenomenon across political parties. That comes out in everything from the New York Times’ anti-trans crusade to, well, Newsom’s actions here.

The gentry leans conservative (also why Newsom and Kirk can chat like this). Cis gays in marriages? Outside the far-right they can go with that. But trans rights are driven by a working class movement that threatens some core status quos around gender and identity, so they're frantic to crush it.

I asked about reading trans liberation as a “working class” movement, since I tend to take elites as fearing trans liberation as an elite movement resisted by non-elites. Forbes continued:

In U.S. especially, elites always think they’re more salt of the earth than they are. Also: see painting rural gentry as working class.

Trans liberation gets painted otherwise, but overwhelmingly comes from poor / working class. On the ground a lot of “how dare they talk back to me” reaction from liberal pols.

Those elites viewed marriage as the concession (perhaps with some toothless non-discrimination laws too) so after that the “gay rights” box was checked. On the ground I see a fair amount of queerphobia from liberal pols around any continuing activism and about queers outside the elite.

One local pol (wealthy her entire life) exemplifies this. In private, contemptuous of trans organizing as “baristas with weird hair and pronouns” and felt that support for marriage a decade ago and a proclamation for pride each year was “more than enough.” Newsom’s turn ain’t all that surprising.

I suspect that part of the thing with marriage is how the Dem establishment were blindsided by how quickly popular opinion turned once Newsom broke the ice. Since they thought it would never fly, they have to rationalize that it burned up all the political capital. Of course all of that is animated by their own queerphobia which they do not want to admit to themselves.

After the war, the dishes

There’s a little memoir I read on the internet ages ago. I have tried in vain to find it again. I find myself thinking about it more and more.

The narrator describes how in the 1970s he and his colleagues would go to lunch at a little restaurant near their office, run by a sweet, graying immigrant couple. They had family pictures all over the walls, memories of the Old Country. They loved talking with the customers.

One day, the memoirist goes out to lunch there with the usual crew, plus a guy in his 60s who was visiting their offices. The new guy is surprisingly interested in the family photos. When the owners drop by their table to talk, the new guy asks them some questions about the photos.

Four or five questions in, the sweet old couple are angry. How dare you ask that?

The usual lunch gang are still baffled. What has gone wrong?

The new guy asks, “Will you tell them, or do I have to?”

Two minutes later they are leaving the restaurant, the little old lady screaming at them. “You don’t understand! You were not there! You don’t know what the Jews did to us!”

Ukraine, NATO, and Russia

I have seen a resurgence of a false account of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so I have assembled a debunking here. I expect I may add resources over time, if it keeps coming up.

The false thesis goes something like this:

It is wrong for the West (the US & Western Europe) to fault Russia for invading Ukraine. It was a predictable response to Western foolishness & aggessiveness toward Russia.

Given Napoleon in the 19^th century and Hitler in the 20^th, Russians have good reasons to worry about security threats from the West. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have said clearly that they would read expansion of NATO toward Russia as an existential threat, so the West promised back in the 1990s not to rouse that concern.

The West betrayed that promise with aggressive expansion of NATO, toward the end of Western troops right on Russia’s border with Ukraine.

Much as the Soviets created a buffer of client states in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, Russia has seized part of eastern Ukraine as a buffer against the West now. Putin is eager to embrace peace with Ukraine, if they simply allow that ethnically-Russian territory to have an independent, Russia-friendly government, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelens’kyi refuses because he is an instrument of the West’s dangerous betrayal of Russia.

I dug down the rabbit hole of this argument a couple of years ago. It is deceitful Russian propaganda.

False history

The biggest hole in this thesis is how Ukraine has not joined NATO. That should end the argument right there.

But but but, they say, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was triggered by the security threat presented by a pattern of aggressive NATO expansion pointing to Ukraine eventually joining.

This does not hold water.

Russia invaded Ukraine in the 2020s because the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania which share a border with Russia joined NATO … in ’04? Between then and Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the Russians sent weapons and troops into Ukraine starting in 2014 while the only addition to NATO was North Macedonia ’20, which does not share a border with Russia. The timeline makes no sense.

But but but, they say, that still did break the promise the West made to the Russians back in the 1990s.

No. The West made no such promise.

But but but, they say, there has been talk of Ukraine joining NATO!

True. The Ukranian parliament voted to pursue NATO membership at the end of 2014, reversing their prior disinterest.

Aha oho oho, they say, Ukraine changed their tune because in 2014 the West created the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in order to get a friendly government which would support NATO expansion.

That reading compounds several absurdities.

It ignores the Ukrainian motivation that earlier in 2014, Russia sent weapons and troops into eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea on Ukraine’s southern border.

Yes, Maidan did have Western support, but it was an organic popular movement which did not need the help. Ukrainians have obvious reasons to favor building ties to the (rich & democratic) West over ties to Russia, which is impoverished, ruled by a dictator who denies Ukrainian national legitimacy, and genocided millions of Ukrainians in the 20^th century.

Again, how is the West “pushing” for NATO expansion if a decade after Ukraine made these overtures, it still is not a member? For the last decade, NATO has responded to Ukraine, “yeah, okay, we can offer some support and someday maybe we will let you join”, while some NATO member states remain hesitant over the prospect, since it would commit them to potential war with Russia.

And Zelens’kyi? He refuses “peace” because the only “peace” on offer from Russia is seizure of Ukranian territory with zero security guarantees against further Russian aggression. That is not diplomacy, that is a demand of surrender.

Moral absurdity

The claim that the West provoked Russia is not just absurd, it is morally repulsive. NATO is not an aggressive alliance, it is a mutual-defense agreement: an attack on one is an attack on all. Saying that Russia “had to” invade Ukraine to prevent it from joining an alliance which would defend it from invasion is like saying:

“That domestic violence shelter is responsible for provoking Ukraine’s ex-husband to break into her house and beat her again, like he did years ago. They should not have endangered Ukraine by accepting a call to their hotline after he showed up pounding on her door.”

On the US manipulating Ukraine

In a discussion, I had someone offer a variant of the theory above — Ukraine’s Maidan revolution in 2014 was “astroturfed” by the US to produce a “proxy war” to weaken the Russians. They offered Chinese propaganda claiming that all color revolutions are supported by the US, and said that it was naïve to ignore US covert action.

Sure, covert action is a thing

I am an American lefty. I can name countless examples of covert skulduggery by the US intervening in other countries’ politics. The known history is extensive.

It is indeed hard to gauge how effective those efforts have been because the whole idea is that if they work well, one does not see the US’ fingerprints on the results. The history we do have suggests that the US is clumsy more often than not, but even just a moderately attentive amateur like me has seen enough to know that American technique has developed and refined a great deal in the last couple of decades under the logic of “Fourth Generation Warfare” integrating information control (including but not limited to propaganda) and political influence in military thinking. It is plausible that US covert action today is not so clumsy one might imagine given the history we know.

Given all that, despite not seeing any evidence demonstrating US intervention in support of Maidan, I consider it safe to assume that there must have been some covert involvement by the US. But that is far short of the much stronger conclusion they drew.

There is no reason to think Maidan was “astroturfed”

It was an organic Ukrainian popular movement. There were institutional motives: Yanukovych’s corruption and authoritarianism provoked opposition and an appetite to return to the 2004 constitution. There were policy motives: Ukraine has more to gain looking west for alliances rather than east.

Covert US support for Maidan may well have helped the revolution succed, but there is no reason to believe it was the primary force. There were people in the street. Protestors seized government buildings. The police folded under the pressure. Ongoing popular support over the last decade for the political order which resulted demonstrates the organic strength of the political movement.

Believing that Ukrainians could not have had their own revolution reminds me of American leaders during the Cold War who made the catastrophically stupid error of assuming that anticolonial movements were nothing other than a catspaw created by Soviet & PRC intervention. Of course Soviet & PRC support did play an important role in those movements — one cannot understand Cold War anticolonial movements without incorporating that — but colonized people have obvious reasons to fight colonialism, and the refusal to recognize that produced catastrophic failures of American policy. The entire Vietnam War, for instance.

To the degree that one can understand the “color revolutions” since the Arab Spring as a coherent constellation, and count the Maidan revolution among them, sure one can see them benefitting from American methods, tech, intel, and even material resources … but that does not mean that they have been designed and directed by the US. Local movements have their own motivations. Local movements can figure things out. The US is not the only actor on stage.

There is no reason to think that Maidan in 2014 compelled Putin to invade Ukraine in 2022

Putin has a pattern of military interventions in eastern Europe, and a particular obsession with Ukraine as a lost part of the empire with no legitimacy as its own sovereign state. He did not need the Maidan revolution to choose to try to annex (at least part of) Ukraine. He did not need the US to manipulate him into it.

There is no reason to think that the US wants the Russia-Ukraine war as a way to weaken Russia. Everyone has been surprised by the course of the war since 2022; the US could not have planned it. We have seen the US and broader west support Ukraine at arm’s length, trying to thread the needle of preventing Russian expansionism without risking further escalation. I cannot believe that planners in the US were able to titrate the exact right amount of expressed commitment to protecting Ukraine that would provoke rather than deter Putin.

There is no reason to accept a stack of absurdities

Imagining that the US pulled a Thanatos gambit which lured the Russians into a quagmire by controlling the course of politics in Ukraine requires believing six impossible things before breakfast. US intervention in Ukraine was vigorous and effective and had complete control of the results and the US sought Just The Right Amount Of Proxy War and they hit that target by puppeteering Ukraine? Preposterous.

If the US had such immense powers of covert political manipulation, why wouldn’t we just engineer a color revolution in Russia to overthrow Putin?

A satire

I summarized the thesis with an imaginary dialogue in the halls in Langley.

Here’s our plan to handle the threat of Putin. First we manipulate the politics of Ukraine to create a government friendlier to the US.

Love it.

We keep that up for a decade or so.

Uh, isn’t that kind of slow? Putin is already an old man.

Yeah, but the plan really pays off, Sir. Because it compels the Russians to invade Ukraine!

Wait, weren’t we trying to reduce the threat from Russia, here?

It’s just Ukrainians, Sir. They’re used to it.

Tragic, but a sacrifice we are willing to make. So then what happens?

Well then we support the Ukrainians. Not so much that they win, of course; we want a protracted conflict which drains Russian resources.

Brilliant. I assume that we will engage at exactly the right level which will also avoid the Russians escalating further and using nukes.

Exactly, the Russians will have no choice but to stay in the quagmire, thereby weakening them economically and preventing them from destabilizing the geopolitical order by exercising military power.

Exercising military power anywhere else. Brilliant. What are the risks?

None to speak of, Sir. The CIA has ironed out all the kinks in their system. We can be confident in controlling both the Ukrainians & Russians.

You have persuaded me that US national security interests require Russian tanks rolling west. Let’s do it.

My interlocutor concluded that I successfully captured how dumb the realworld “ambien and adderal strategic planing process” is, so if you believe that the US national security apparatus is simultaneously that dumb yet also able to control Ukrainian & Russian politics, there you go.

References

• EU vs Disinfo — a resource with a lot of debunkings, with a lot about the war in Ukraine, including NATO expansion inspiring Russia’s invasion and the US creating Euromaidan in 2014
• Russian Disinformation on NATO Expansion and the War in Ukraine (2023) — from a US Army analyst
• Shut Up About NATO expansion — a videoessay examining the history of (and around) this claim; I am not equipped to judge its entire analysis, but it is consistent with everything I do know
• Exposing the myth of Western betrayal of Russia over NATO’s eastern enlargement (2022) — a succinct analysis from an expert
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was never about NATO expansion (2025) — a short critique of the thesis, with numerous links to supporting resources
• Putin debunks his own propaganda by disarming Russia’s NATO borders (2023) — what it says on the tin
• Russia’s belief in NATO ‘betrayal’ – and why it matters today (2022) — contextualizing the thesis in the historical half-truths it relies upon
• Ex-Nato head says Putin wanted to join alliance early on in his rule (2021) — more on Putin’s frame of mind: “‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’ And [Putin] said: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’”
• Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine (2022) — an interview with the most promiment American proponent of the Russian thesis, in which he cannot answer straightforward questions about his argument
• The American Pundits Who Can’t Resist “Westsplaining” Ukraine (2022) — digging into Mearsheimer and other commentators
• Antisemitism in the Oval Office — historian Timothy Snyder contextualizng at instructive length how the White House meeting emerges from antisemitic Russian propaganda about Zelens’kyi
• Warrant for an Invasion: The Myth of the “American Coups” in Ukraine 2 3 4 — a series breaking down the real history in some detail
• Explainer: Ukraine’s EuroMaidan was not a coup, despite Russian disinfo pushed by Musk (2025) — from the English-language Kyiv Independent; they appear to be pretty credible

Trump and war

Capturing nested threads from Bluesky. These are quotes, not me. But for what it’s worth, I agree with Hilzoy.

Ian Leslie

The Fight: Notes on the Oval Office Debacle, Plus a Rattle Bag

[⋯]

Second, and relatedly, I get the feeling that many politicians and commentators haven’t quite grasped the strength of Trump’s aversion to war. It’s one of the things that makes him a very unusual president. This is something that crystalized for me in my excellent conversation with Jemima Kelly. As we’ve just seen, Trump is frequently belligernet, aggressive, and angry in person, and instinctively we expect a leader’s personality to align with their attitude to military engagement. But inside the red-faced hawk is a dove, with an almost physical horror of violence.

[⋯]

Trump is as close to a pacifist as we’ve seen in the White House, more dovish than any US president since Carter. He does not seem interested in the exercise of American military power at all, and is openly cynical about America’s motivations for entering into previous conflicts like Iraq. He is bent on shrinking America’s defence spending. In short, Trump’s attitude to American military power is almost indistinguishable from that of, say, Jeremy Corbyn. Given everything else about him, this has been understandably hard for the rest of the world to get their heads around.

Jamelle Bouie

Trump was literally president for four years during which he wildly escalated drone warfare, tried to provoke a war with Iran, and got into dangerous saber-rattling with North Korea. Now, he is threatening to take Greenland and the Panama Canal by force. What is this horseshit?

Why do so many people refuse to grapple with the actually existing Donald Trump!?!?

Judah Grunstein

I think it’s important to distinguish Trump I from what we’re seeing now, but also to tease out where and how Trump I diverged from US militarized foreign policy, and where it didn’t, to understand why some people see him as a “peace” president.

I’ve tried previously, so here goes again.

First, the primary case for Trump I being a warmonger is, as Jamelle Bouie notes, the escalation of the drone war but also the air war against ISIS in Mosul. There was also the initial escalation in Afghanistan.

As I’ve argued in the past, though, these both occurred early in his first term.

And they came in response to demand from the Pentagon on both counts. To my mind, that reflects the way the Department Of Defense tends to roll every inexperienced first-term president to get its wish list early.

That it also satisfied Trump’s penchant for chest-thumping doesn’t necessarily change that.

Later in Trump’s first term, in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Syria, he tried to remove US forces from longstanding deployments. In Syria, he was essentially blocked by the Pentagon from doing so on multiple occasions, and in Afghanistan he was (rightly) criticized for making the rush to the exits that Biden consummated.

I disagree that he tried to start a war with Iran, mainly because on two occasions Trump backed away from one: the airstrike he called back en route after the downed US drone and the decision to deescalate despite US casualties in the Iranian riposte to Soleimani’s assassination.

The Soleimani assassination was certainly reckless, but there, too, I suspect it was pushed by Pompeo and channeled the US military’s longstanding grudge against him, dating back at least to the Iraq occupation and probably further.

Finally, with regard to US alliances, Trump’s hostility to them coded as “restraint” and retrenchment in a way that would in theory reduce US exposure to moral hazard and unintended escalation, even if in practice he didn’t really move the needle much on forward basing or commitments.

Why do I think this is important enough to now on multiple occasions take what is a very unpopular side of a debate no one in the anti-Trump camp (of which I am a part) even wants to have?

For two reasons.

First, Trump targeted legacy wars in ways that he can opportunistically use to portray himself as anti-war. And he targeted US security commitments in ways that allow him to claim he achieved changed behavior of US allies that decades of lectures about freeriding by Bush and Obama had not. So politically, it’s important to recognize that, instead of just reflexively claiming he was a warmonger. Because any US president who really wants a war against a non-nuclear state can get it.

Second, and more importantly, to blame the areas where Trump’s first-term record was bellicose lets the interests behind the militarization of US foreign policy, particularly in the Pentagon, off the hook. And that leaves the militarization of US foreign policy in place.

To be very clear, I think Trump is a bully who now wields the most preponderant military power any individual in the human history ever has. That’s not a good or comforting combination.

I don’t think he’s a pacifist or even anti-war, but neither do I think he’s a warmonger.

We’re all less safe with him in office, especially given his imperialist agenda this time around.

But while Trump is a problem, he is not the only problem with regard to US militarization.

Louis Evans

At the risk of over-simplifying, I think the postwar hegemonic consensus in the US was that the US should fight (only) “Good Wars” — justified by principle and necessity rather than avarice or aggrandizement, restrained in conduct, pursuing a peaceful settlement of self-determination.

This consensus held across parties, across civilian-military, and across both elite and mass sectors, although of course it was interpreted differently in each place.

Proponents of wars went to great length to cast their wars as Good. The primary critical posture was that some war was in fact Bad.

The left wing criticism was that the military establishment systematically misrepresented which wars were Good; the radical critique was that wars are axiomatically Bad.

Donald Trump (and his faction) represent a different position.

Donald Trump is against Good Wars, and in favor of Bad Wars.

He views Goodness as suckerdom. He views Badness as savvy. He is opposed to principle or necessity, and in favor of avarice and aggrandizement. He is against good conduct in wars and in favor of war crimes.

Those who found themselves outside the consensus recognized that Trump, too, was outside.

But they (often) lack imagination as to how many positions are outside the Good Wars consensus, and as to their relative strength.

---

“Good” vs. “bad” is a fuzzy, pejorative, polemical, and basilectal choice here, but I do think it actually points to a core element of Trump’s posture. He is, quite self-consciously, a Heel, and he does international relations as a Heel.

Lots of analysis — pro and con! — embed the idea that he is a Face, but he’s not, and he’s not trying to be.

Adding some final thoughts as this reply helped clarify something I’d been struggling to articulate.

The reason Trump can portray himself and be portrayed as “anti-war” is because he opposed the wars the US historically fought and alliances it formed as part of its global role in the liberal order.

So another way of expressing what Louis Evans says here is that Trump rejects the kinds of wars most people associate with the US because he views the global order and the US role in it as a chump’s game.

But he embraced the use of force in cases that transgressed the traditional US role.

Hilzoy

For my part, I think Trump is neither a warmonger nor a pacifist. Those are the wrong axes. He is a person with the emotional maturity of a three year old who has absolutely no idea of what’s at stake in his decisions and is given to temper tantrums.

If you think he’s a warmonger, it’s probably because he likes to threaten people, and does not draw the line at threatening them with military force; and also because he seems to have no clue what that would mean.

If you think he’s a peacemaker, it’s probably because he sometimes says things to that effect, and also because many of the things that we might have responded to with force before are things that simply do not register with him at all.

He does not react to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine not only because he likes Putin and hates Zelensky, but because he just does not see — at all — what’s wrong with what Russia did.

But ‘pro-war’ or ‘pro-peace’ is just not the right way to assess him.

Blue lives matter more

Capturing a 2023 Twitter thread by Katie Sponslor:

I have been taught to yell “stop resisting” and “drop your weapon” after firing a gun, because bystanders will remember you said it and their memory will automatically reverse the order of the events to make it make sense. Their testimony will support yours, because of this.

I have been told to “loosen up and have fun, it’s fun! Why are you so serious?” When doing a shoot / don’t shoot scenario training.

I have been told that deescalation techniques will get me and other officers killed and as a smaller LEO [law enforcement officer], I was justified escalating my use of force faster than my colleagues because I was always in danger so I should use it.

I’ve been told my only job is to go home at night.

I’ve been told all of these things in formal, controlled and regulated Police Academies. I have gone through 3. I have heard some of these things more than once.

When I questioned these things in my third academy, and stated that they were inconsistent with the ethics of policing, I was kicked out of the academy on my last day. I had completed and excelled at all the graded tasks, but was told “you aren’t what we want in our force.”

I loved my job. I gave a lot to do it for 5 years. In that time, I never broke leather on my holster. I never fired my taser. I put my hands on an individual twice, both times a simple arm bar hold that immediately caused both individuals to comply. Neither individual was hurt.

I have been in many sticky situations in that time. Faced several armed individuals. I worked in a National Park, yes, but in a high crime area. Being a park ranger, means working alone most of the time. I could not afford to escalate a situation, and I didn’t.

In 4 words, a police academy commander ended my career. “You [don’t] belong here.” After 16 years of federal service without a single complaint or write up, I lost any chance of working the final 4 years I needed for retirement.

With student loan debt, living in a new city, with a teenager, I lost my job, my insurance, and the ability to use the education and experience I had worked so hard to achieve.

I don’t regret it.

I still believe in resource protection, it matters, but I no longer believe the system of policing we have is the way to achieve it.

During my campaign for the HoD I got lambasted by my Republican opponent for saying, “I know cops, I’ve worked with them, trained with them, and some of them are my friends, some are not, and some of them are murderers.” I know it’s not politically expedient, but…

Some. Of. Them. Are. Murderers.

We cannot reform institutions which do this. We can only replace them.

Artificial superintelligence

A start on an index of useful articles:

Wait But Why — The Artificial Intelligence Revolution 1 & 2

A lively and accessible introduction to the Bostrom-ish argument that artificial superintelligence is plausible, and why the prospect is scarier than it might first appear.

Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

An argument that the Bostrom-ish vision of superintelligence is a seductive mirage.

What motivates the “tech” right?

To support my index of resources about neoreaction and adjacent far right movements which overlap with “tech” culture, I have taken the liberty of capturing commentaries from other people tucked into Xitter, Facebook, et cetera. These are not quite the same as my reading, but both are illuminating in exploring how “tech” executive culture itself understands the shift. Emphasis in quotes are the authors’, not mine.

Aaron Bartley

Twitter thread | 3 February 2025

Why are they doing this? What’s motiving the techno-feudalists (Musk, Thiel, Vance, Andreessen and their minions) to wreck our country and tank the economy?

I’ve subjected myself to hours of YouTube interviews and dozens of screeds by the tech overlords and their high priests. They have made no effort to hide their motivations. This is my attempt at a basic synthesis of how they explain their shift from neo-liberals to Trumpists:

1. The techno-feudalists have billions invested in crypto and without a big push from the government and the removal of all regulations, their money will be lost. Crypto has not mainstreamed in the way they expected, both because of Biden-era regulations on speculative investments and because the public just isn’t into it. They need the state to manage the transition to crypto.
2. Similarly, they’re gravely concerned about the trillions they’ve invested in AI. Any amount of regulation or constraints by the state is seen as a death-knell. They know that AI has prompted a speculative bubble and they need the state to manage the bubble through subsidies and contracts. They also need the state to aggressively shield the US from Chinese AI technology.
3. Both crypto and AI are burning up the earth. The electricity demands of both AI and crypto are enormous. They need a completely deregulated energy industry and rapid shift away from any climate policy. Even the mention of climate change is a threat to their fortunes.
4. China has caught up faster than they expected in all realms of tech. They need an ultra-protectionist/nationalist regime to keep Chinese technology at bay.
5. Lastly, they resent their employees deeply for the political concerns they’ve been raising about climate change and DEI. They blame the “radicalizing” influences of elite institutions and want the government to shut these institutions down or reform them heavily.

(Edited: As Mike Puma and Frits Abell have commented, the over-arching motivation is to make the state a profit center for themselves through privatization, subsidies and contracts, just like the post-Soviet oligarchical takeover in Russia.)

A couple of supporting links from JK:

• Blockchain in 10 minutes — my no-math primer on the tech behind cryptocurrencies
• The Twin Insurgency — my single favorite examination of What Is Going On, addressing that final point about the plutocrats & criminals trying to hollow out and exploit state capacity

What Happened Here

Unpopular Front | John Ganz | 4 February 2025

A small taste of this sophisticated Marxist read:

I think we can all agree the key difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is the alignment of a reactionary fraction of Silicon Valley tech oligarchs with Trump, or rather, the transformation of a significant part of tech capital from an ostensibly progressive, liberal section of capital into a reactionary one.

Very simply put, here’s what I believe happened: In the process of accumulating enormous wealth, the tech-oligarchs created the conditions for their loss of social power and, when they realized this, they got a big dose of class consciousness and turned furiously reactionary.

[⋯]

Musk’s total idiocy is structural: it goes back to the very origin of the Greek term idiotes, a person who cannot understand the shared political life of the city. These people cannot understand that their wealth and power are not their sovereign creations but the shared product of the wider state and society that supports and sustains them. Cryptocurrency is the perfect embodiment of this structural misrecognition: its advocates say it represents wealth outside of the state and society, but its notional value is wholly determined by its price in fiat money, created and sustained by the state. (It also functions a lot like “race” and “IQ:” as a repository of social value that provides a haven from degradation, but I’ll address that another time.) Here’s the thing: They can only see corruption around them because they are wholly corrupt.

Where did the tech right come from?

Jasmine Sun | 30 January 2025

Here’s a 4-part grand theory of the tech right.

“Tech disposition”

First, there is a unique “tech disposition”. David E. Broockman and Neil Malhotra surveyed 700 founders:

1. they’re more liberal than most Dems on social issues + taxes, but very conservative on regulation + labor (even outside of tech)
2. pro-market values trace to adolescence & cannot be explained by demographics or economics
3. these beliefs do not resemble other economic elites

First, technology entrepreneurs are far from monolithically conservative; rather, they overwhelmingly support Democrats. This is not an artifact of our survey sample: campaign contributions from technology industry employees and ultra-wealthy technology entrepreneurs to Democrats have long exceeded those to Republicans. Although it is not surprising that individual wealthy Democrats exist, we show that the wealthy in an entire industry support the party pushing for higher taxes, deviating from the norm among the wealthy at large.

However, our findings are not so simple as that most technology entrepreneurs are liberals. Our second group of findings is that most technology entrepreneurs share a particular set of views across policy domains; that this set is conservative on many issues; and that this set is distinctive to technology entrepreneurs, being rare among other wealthy individuals, other Democrats, and other wealthy Democrats. In particular, on issues related to economic redistribution, globalization, and social issues, technology entrepreneurs are typically as or more liberal than Democratic citizens, Democratic wealthy individuals, and Democratic donors; they are also more liberal on all these issues than millionaires in the mass public. For example, 82% of technology entrepreneurs indicate support for universal healthcare even if it means raising taxes. However, technology entrepreneurs are very skeptical of government regulation. Indeed, technology entrepreneurs’ views on regulation closely resemble those of Republican donors, and are more conservative from those of other millionaires in the mass public, Democratic citizens, and wealthy Democrats. For example, 82% of technology entrepreneurs also think the government should make it easier to fire workers. These large differences persist even between technology entrepreneurs who identify as Democrats and other Democratic constituencies.

This finding is surprising in light of popular accounts that describe technology entrepreneurs as falling within categories familiar in American politics: as typically liberal, typically conservative, or typically libertarian. However, we show that most technology entrepreneurs have a pattern of views that does not fit in any of these categories, has not been seen elsewhere, and is not predicted by prior work: a majority of technology entrepreneurs explicitly describe their views as supporting redistribution of wealth but opposing regulation of business, approximately double the share as in any other group of citizens, donors, or wealthy individuals we surveyed.

Our third set of findings concerns suggestive evidence for the theoretical mechanisms we posit for why technology entrepreneurs have this unique pattern of views. Our theoretical argument, elaborated below, is that the wealthy from a particular industry may have a unique set of political views because of the distinctive set of political predispositions of the individuals who select into each industry, and further, the experiences they will tend to have working in it. Consistent with this argument, we show that technology entrepreneurs share a distinct pattern of values and predispositions that correspond with their views in related policy domains. For example, with a series of pre-registered comparisons and survey experiments, we show that it appears technology entrepreneurs’ opposition to government regulation can be traced to positive predispositions towards markets and entrepreneurship. We also cast doubt on alternative explanations for their views related to demographics, geography, and pure self-interest.

[ Sun’s thread includes screencaps from what appears to be a slightly different version of the linked paper; I have quoted the corresponding section of the paper I have access to — JK ]

Mark Andreessen’s recent [New York Times] interview with Ross Douhat is very illuminating. Andreessen describes this exact disposition: “pay taxes, support gay rights, get praised” was the implicit deal of the Clinton-Gore era:

As a result of that, the most natural thing in the world for somebody like me was, “Oh, of course, I’m a normie Democrat. I’ll be a normie Democrat forever.”

Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood: You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins.

Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you’re a Democrat, you’re pro–gay rights, you’re pro-abortion, you’re pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.

Then, of course, everybody knows Republicans are just knuckle-dragging racists. It was taken as given that there was going to be this great relationship. And of course, it worked so well for the Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore sailed to a re-election in ’96. And the Valley was locked in for 100 years to come to be straight-up conventional blue Democrat.

Yes, 100 percent. I would say even more than that. We all voluntarily live in California. We not only have the federal dimension of what you’re saying; we also live in these very high-tax cities — San Francisco, Palo Alto. And I think by paying higher taxes and not objecting to them, you prove you’re a good person. For that generation of enlightened centrist liberals, it was: Of course you pay higher taxes, because we’re the Democratic Party. As an agent of positive social change, of course you want to have a bigger safety net. Of course you want to fund all these programs, and you want to fund all these activist campaigns. Of course you want that.

The term “Camelot” was never used, but there was a Camelot feeling to it at the time that people must have felt in the early ’60s in the same way. Like, wow, yes, it’s all happening, and it’s all going to happen, and it’s going to be great. Yeah, they’re going to tax us, but it’s going to pay off. That was like a full-fledged part of the Deal.

Look, quite honestly, I am trying in none of this to claim moral high ground or moral sheen or anything, just to kind of take the edge off that, if that’s what I’ve come across.

Quite honestly, the tax rates didn’t really matter because when an internet company worked, it grew so fast and got so valuable that if you worked another three years, say, you’d make another 10X. Another 5 percent higher tax rate washed out in the numbers. So we weren’t forced to really think that hard about it. It just seemed like this was the formula that would result in everything working.

Social justice

Second, social justice fused with labor, nonprofits, & the state — fueling a wave of employee activism and speech / DEI / climate requirements. Structural issues demanded process solutions. Tech’s hatred of bureaucracy trumped their support for social justice.

See again the Douhat interview with Andreessen:

Andreessen

By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”

Douthat

But they’re working for you. These are people who are working for you.

Andreessen

Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won’t name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, “I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us.”

They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. “Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don’t you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we’re not emitting any carbon.”

See comments from Paul Graham:

For the press there was money in wokeness. But they weren’t the only ones. That was one of the biggest differences between the two waves of political correctness: the first was driven almost entirely by amateurs, but the second was often driven by professionals. For some it was their whole job. By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren't directly in the flow of the organization’s work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it. These new administrators could often be recognized by the word “inclusion” in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an “inclusive language guide.”

This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they’re going to find it, because otherwise there’s no justification for their existence. But these bureaucrats also represented a second and possibly even greater danger. Many were involved in hiring, and when possible they tried to ensure their employers hired only people who shared their political beliefs. The most egregious cases were the new “DEI statements” that some universities started to require from faculty candidates, proving their commitment to wokeness. Some universities used these statements as the initial filter and only even considered candidates who scored high enough on them. You’re not hiring Einstein that way; imagine what you get instead.

Dem pivot

Third, Dems started to pivot away from key Clintonite ideas:

1. neoliberal economics would be good for america
2. digital tech would spread good liberal values

Henry Farrell calls this the collapse of both the “neoliberal” and “Palo Alto consensus”:

If that has changed, it is not simply because progressives have moved away from Silicon Valley. It is because both the neoliberal consensus and the Palo Alto consensus have collapsed, leading the political economies of Washington DC and Silicon Valley to move in very different directions.

A lot of attention has been paid to the intellectual and political collapse of neoliberalism. This really got going thanks to Trump, but it transformed the organizing ideas of the Democratic coalition too. During the Trump era, card-carrying Clintonites like Jake Sullivan became convinced that old ideas about minimally regulated markets and trade didn’t make much sense any more. Domestically, they believed that the “China shock” had hollowed out America’s industrial heartland, opening the way for Trump style populism. Reviving U.S. manufacturing and construction might be facilitated through a “Green New Deal” that would both allow the U.S. to respond effectively to climate change, and revive the physical economy. Internationally, they believed that China was a direct threat to U.S. national security, as it caught up with the U.S. on technology, industrial capacity and ability to project military force. Finally, they believed that U.S. elites had become much too supine about economic power, allowing the U.S. economy to become dominated by powerful monopolies. New approaches to antitrust were needed to restrain platform companies which had gotten out of control. Unions would be Democrats’ most crucial ally in bringing back the working class.

Now they don’t. Authoritarian governments have turned out to be quite adept for the time being, not just at suppressing dissidence but at using these technologies for their own purposes. Platforms like Facebook have been used to mobilize ethnic violence around the world, with minimal pushback from the platform’s moderation systems, which were built on the cheap and not designed to deal with a complex world where people could do horrible things in hundreds of languages. And there are now a lot of people who think that Silicon Valley platforms are bad for stability in places like the U.S. and Western Europe where democracy was supposed to be consolidated.

My surmise is that this shift in beliefs has undermined the core ideas that held the Silicon Valley coalition together. Specifically, it has broken the previously ‘obvious’ intimate relationship between innovation and liberalism.

I don’t see anyone arguing that Silicon Valley innovation is the best way of spreading liberal democratic awesome around the world any more, or for keeping it up and running at home. Instead, I see a variety of arguments for the unbridled benefits of innovation, regardless of its benefits for democratic liberalism. I see a lot of arguments that AI innovation in particular is about to propel us into an incredible new world of human possibilities, provided that it isn’t restrained by DEI, ESG and other such nonsense. Others (or the same people) argue that we need to innovate, innovate, innovate because we are caught in a technological arms race with China, and if we lose, we’re toast. Others (sotto or brutto voce; again, sometimes the same people) - contend innovation isn’t really possible in a world of democratic restraint, and we need new forms of corporate authoritarianism with a side helping of exit, to allow the kinds of advances we really need to transform the world.

The Biden admin was far more pro-unions, tech regulation & antitrust. Dems probably needed to adjust (neoliberalism isn’t popular), but this broke the tech / liberal coalition — they were seen as abandoning business to back the activist class.

Douhat

So what, in concrete terms, does that mean? What are the policies that shocked or surprised you about the Biden administration?

Andreessen

They came for business in a very broad-based way. Everything that I’m going to describe also, it turns out, I found out later, it happened in the energy industry. And I think it happened in a bunch of other industries, but the C.E.O.s felt like they couldn’t talk about it.

The problem is the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation. It was increasing insertion into basic staffing. Government-mandated enforcement of D.E.I. in very destructive ways. Some of these agencies have their own in-house courts, which is bananas. Also just straight-up threats and bullying.

Mark Zuckerberg just talked about this on “Rogan.” Direct phone calls from senior members of the administration. Screaming executives ordering them to do things. Just full-on “[Expletive] you. We own you. We control you. You’re going to do what we want or we’re going to destroy you.”

Then they just came after crypto. Absolutely tried to kill us.

Trump

Fourth, tech found a home in Trump’s less ideological, more deal-friendly Republican party. Traditional conservatives were a poor fit, but Trump runs the country as a cult of personality — institutions be damned. and isn’t that what “founder mode” is? From Pirate Wires:

As President Trump begins his second term, he has the support of many business leaders, especially the entrepreneurs and founders who make up the ascendant ‘tech right.’ Why did this faction emerge and rally behind the president? Some point to policy issues such as regulation, taxation, government contracting, and antitrust. Others note that self-interest and perhaps self-preservation motivate its members as much as principle or policy.

But sincere converts to the tech right share at least one thing in common: a belief in founders — change agents capable of upending stale industries — taking on Goliaths, and reaching into the future to unite it to the present. The tech right sees founders, and the qualities they embody and inspire in others, as the key to company success. Conversely, founder-less institutions don’t work, like a body without a head — or perhaps, without a soul.

With its support of Trump, the tech right is just applying this model to politics, the ultimate stale industry, and Washington, D.C., the ultimate Goliath. In Donald Trump, the tech right and the American people see a leader. More to the point, we see a founder.

Other factors

There were other contributing factors: post-2016 techlash, defense money, mean journalists, COVID, plain old opportunism in the new Trump admin. Vocal Trump support from Andreessen, Sacks, Musk ignited a preference cascade.

But I maintain that SV elites’ deepest commitment is not right or left, but to unfettered innovation (& the wealth / growth that results). It’s the spirit of “get out of my way & let me cook” — they’ll align with whichever party makes that possible.

My overall thought on the sort of cultural versus material debate is like, the left liberal camp still underrates the cultural stuff. I think you're right that considering the counterfactual, would Zuckerberg be being like, “Meta is too feminine now” if Kamala won — obviously no. At the same time, when I read PG’s essay, I was like, oh, this is a complaint about bureaucracy as much as it’s a complaint about politics.

It's this cultural thing of builders in, prigs out. There are all these memes like “high agency” or “founder mode” or “live players” or “you can just do things.” My friend Clara, who edits Asterisk Magazine, was telling me about some conference where someone called it “Robert Moses libertarianism.” What does that even mean? And I think this is incoherent, except for that Moses was really going founder mode. He was a high agency guy. He’s very effective, right? And there is some disposition where tech, because it is the industry of innovators and disruptors, is just like: Anybody who’s super effective and hacks the system, whether it's from the inside or the outside, whether it's in tech or in politics, they get that respect.

That relates to why I see progress as like the primary coalition rather than like left or right. Or as Lonsdale calls it, the “builder class.” There is economic self-interest, obviously, but it’s also an aesthetic preference.

Another consequence is that this is causing real rifts between maga right and tech right — most notably over H1-B, but IMO that’s a sign of more fights to come.

The more traditional conservatives — not Hanania, that is — go on to express skepticism about the “Tech Right”’s lack of a moral compass (of the Christian sort); its willingness to endure short-term social harms for long-term economic gains; and its overall bias toward disruption — whatever chaos may come. They’re suspicious of tech’s talk about “human capital” and its flirtations with fascism. The essays read like a warning to fellow reactionaries: Can the tech titans be trusted to preserve American values? Or are they riding the Trump train on the way to a robot-ruled transhumanist utopia? Take slogans like Accelerate or die! — there’s nothing “conservative” about it.

GURPS Lux

My friend Zed Lopez has bravely attempted to create a clarified introduction to Steve Jackson’s tabletop roleplaying game GURPS — “the generic universal roleplaying system”. (Cue joke based on Voltaire’s famous snarky comment about the Holy Roman Empire.)

This is a tutorial for GURPS 4^th edition. If you have basic familiarity with tabletop RPGs but are new to GURPS, this is for you. I hope it will provide the basic GURPS literacy [⋯] to convey GURPS’ concepts, but ultimately won’t present a playable game. [⋯]

We’ll begin with an extremely barebone set of rules and then add things a few at a time. In service of simplicity, I’ll say a few things I’ll take back or qualify later. A lot of things I’ll qualify later, but I’ll keep to a minimum the things I take back altogether.

Lengthy, carefully-considered, and headings are nicely witty where opportunity presents.

Chidi

Over on Bluesky, my internet friendquaintance Dr. Damien P. Williams snarked a reference to the TV series The Good Place:

Current position on the Chidi Anagonye Anxiety Brain Scale:

“The Sound that a Fork Makes in the Garbage Disposal”

It inspired me to make a silly meme image:

I am proud of my little creation. Assembling it and seeing the two ends of the scale gave me an unnervingly useful realization.

If you don’t know the show, it is one of the best TV series ever made.

An invitation to Buffy

It is hard for me to speak to what it may be like to come to Buffy The Vampire Slayer for the first time now. Both its themes and its craft were breakthroughs in its time, but may seem less inspired now that so many later works have learned from it. I recommend it anyway.

Thematically, Buffy successfully realizes immense ambitions: a meditation on adolescence and feminist understandings of culture, intentionally crafted to create a cultural phenomenon among teenagers. The feminism is awkward in places — it was addressing a different moment, could not learn from its own flaws and failings, and has some conceptual problems — but is legit. Even at its weakest, it is pretty darned good, and at its best it can be breathtaking.

The craft has several strengths, many of which were breakthroughs at the time which may be hard to see given so many later works which learned from its moves. It very directly draws from a broad range of genre sources — mostly horror and fantasy — to explore allegorical questions. To make that work without feeling forced, it artfully mixes tones of humor, horror, action, drama, and melodrama. And it was the first series on broadcast television to exercise the format to at once tell self-contained episodic stories and use the big canvas of the season arc to tell a more sophisticated story and use the huge canvas of the whole series to explore its big themes.

So when David Simon cheekily says that Buffy ranks above his masterpiece The Wire, I believe he is largely talking about its place in the history of TV. I am not sure that I can agree with him that it is the best TV series ever made, but I cannot think of another series which advanced the art so dramatically.

I have been through the whole series a few times — it is comfort viewing for me — and every time I watch an episode I see new things.

If you don’t mind mild spoilers and want to try before you buy, watch these episodes:

• S04E10 “Hush” — a nifty formal experiment (it is almost a silent movie) and one of the scariest things ever put on broadcast televison
• S03E06 “Band Candy” — a mostly-comedic personal favorite
• S02E07 “Lie To Me” — a perfect “basic” episode of the show, with a poignant ending which gives me an allergy attack every time
• S04E04 “Fear Itself” — a showcase for the show’s mix-of-tones trick

Feminist propaganda to men

A friend of mine, a cis woman I admire, posted this meme image.

With all due respect, its caption is a crock of shit.

Forgive me for sounding harsh. But … c’mon.

Men are rewarded, not punished, for violating gendered behavior norms? Really?

All men could do what a handsome movie star with professional-grade dance training & talent did? Really?

I live my life joyfully violating “traditional” masculinity in numerous ways. I strongly advocate other fellas doing the same, both for the world’s sake and their own. But that has had costs. I have experienced how belief in dogma is far from the only thing holding men back. I have experienced how that dogma itself is far from fragile.

My friend knows she lacks direct lived experience of how people assigned male at birth experience The Patriarchy, but I know for a fact that she has significant indirect experience of how vigorously The Patriarchy enforces gendered norms on us. I think that if she had reflected for a moment, she would have realized that the meme was saying something absurd. But feminist-informed social justice advocacy culture is irresponsibly sloppy in the way we talk about this stuff.

(I say “we” because I myself am guilty of this all too often.)

When we say these kinds of things to men, all too often this discredits our entire movements. Consider how commentary like that meme lands for the very men we should most try to address, fellas chafing against the masculine norms projected by The Patriarchy without language to describe their frustrations. Not only don’t we know what the heck we are talking about, our misunderstanding is so perversely wrong that we implicitly cast blame on individual men for responding to the pressures of The Patriarchy. We assert that men are delusional about those pressures!

It is doubly galling for women to make these claims about mens’ experiences and conditions. Feminist women should know better than to make that mistake.

We must keep in mind that men bear moral responsibility to overthrow The Patriarchy without women having to lift a finger. But pragmatically, we know that men need help. Too often feminist culture does the opposite. Fergawdsake let’s stop shooting ourselves in the foot.

And let’s not deny Mr. Holland credit for doing something gutsy and difficult.

American fascist strongman style

This isn’t me; it’s a capture of most of a snarky but instructive 2020 Twitter thread from Elizabeth “Neoreaction: A Basilisk” Sandifer

I have heard it suggested that Tom Cotton might be the next charismatic Republican leader, and I think y’all have some serious misunderstandings about the aesthetics of fascism.

It’s gonna be Josh Hawley. He always looks like he’s about to bust out into a chorus of “Tomorrow Belongs To Me.”

Guys no.

The fascist aesthetic is not “interchangeable scrawny white guy in a suit.” Where’s the perversity in your appeal?

Do I have to spell out the aesthetic? The fash strongman has to embody masculinity, but not in a way that offers an unobtainable ideal. So: not too pretty/athletic. Maybe once in his prime, but if so, definitely gone to pasture a bit. Can’t quite be a dweeb, which is why Carlson had to put on weight before he could play the part and why Ted Cruz needs to lose that ridiculous Roger Delgado beard. You want manly, but not actually attractive. Slightly unkempt is good for this.

Again, what’s important is a perverse appeal. Fugly, as the kids used to say. A charisma that stubbornly defies observable reality.

This [Dan Crenshaw] is a damn fascist strongman.

Tucker [Carlson] absolutely has the it. You’d have crowds of angry screaming men wearing bowties. Matt Smith would be the new Pepe. Genuinely nightmarish.

Women have a hard time with the fash aesthetic, which is too misogynistic for them to thrive at the top. [Sarah] Palin came closest because, again, perversity.

Dan Bongino is probably the one figure that i’d be most alarmed to hear was mounting an exploratory committee.

Dark horse, but … Yeah, that’s the look.

Re: Trump Jr, nah. Can’t make lightning strike twice.

Peter Theil or Elon Musk?

Good lord no.

the Hillbilly Elegy guy [JD Vance]

Maaaaybe. But I doubt it. Too much “it’s ok, sometimes puberty is just really late” energy. (As distinct from Carlson, which is “look, puberty doesn’t work out for everyone and that’s OK.” Which works. Fascist masculinity is a subtle beast.)

Oh Well, no Carl of Swindon candidate on the cards then. What about The Rock though? He’s known as a republican right? I couldn’t see him as fash himself but maybe as an easy backdoor useful idiot for a fash establishment?

This overcorrects into “too attractive.” Men need to idolize but also plausibly aspire to.

The “completely made up set of medals” thing is 💯💯💯 — [Sheriff David] Clarke has the exact right fragile masculinity for fascism, which is to say one that is utterly oblivious to its fragility.

Someone said Matt Walsh, and guys, you cannot simply beard your way out of dweebhood.

Ben Sasse … I see where you’re going but I don’t think you’re quite there.

Weev demonstrates that there is such a thing as overdoing it.