Sorting The Horrors Into Boxes; Plus
Mayor Adams gets DOGE-walked, plus lots of music
Sorting The Horrors Into Boxes
One of the problems with trying to understand and bear up under the tsunami of awfulness generated by the new regime is that you hardly have time to think about one thing before two more things come along to obscure the first. Another problem is that so much of it is aimed at you personally, or people you know and love, or people you don’t know and never will but who just don’t deserve something so screamingly unjust.
So I’ve been trying to categorize who in the regime is doing what, and why, and trying not to obsess on the shit that could cost me and others I know things like housing and medical care and food (the latter whether through SNAP cuts or just weakening food regulations until produce and other stuff start culling the population at scale) and simply the right to exist unbothered.
One will find plenty of examples of cross-pollination.
Box 1: All your money are belong to us
Musk and the Trumpettes are taking a sledge to the regulatory and administrative state, wrecking every agency standing between them and more money, and setting us all up for what will become the largest transfer of wealth from bottom to top at least since . . . well, I don’t know when. A very long time; maybe since slavery and the genocide of Native Americans, I think.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is gone, and with it the modest protections from predatory finance we enjoyed for a while. Not coincidentally, Musk is preparing to set up his social media site as a payment app for Nazis in partnership with Visa, and every bank issuing a Visa card is going along for the ride.
The regime may accept a judicial order restoring the agency in some modest and ineffectual sense, but it will never recover to where it was a few days ago. The penalties it leveled against financial malefactors were a transfer of wealth in the wrong direction; the regulations it enforced are regarded by the likes of Musk and the tech oligarchs on the one end, and Wall Street and the banks on the other, as illegitimate constraints on their behavior—even when those constraints are aimed at keeping the constrained from ruining themselves and the economy. That’s what federal bailouts are for.
Most regulatory agencies are meant to restrain corporate and individual greed which harms people who have little, if any, power and influence, which is most of us. And most of the regulatory framework all but the very oldest of us have been living under for all of our lives got its start during the New Deal, which is both why FDR got elected four times and why he and his philosophical descendants are despised beyond measure by people like Musk and Trump, along with most Republican politicians and not a few Democrats.
This box holds the CFPB, the EPA, the interior department, Housing & Urban Development, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and every other department that either helps poor and working class people or constrains corporate profits or, most often, both. So, when Musk and his Jugend go after ostensible fraud and corruption, in these big money and regulatory agencies, they’re just talking about claiming that money for themselves and their brothers-in-homicidal-greed.
Box 2: If thine eye offend me
The assault on language, which I’ve talked about in the context of DEI (ID Politics in the Breach, below), is straight-up aimed at the erasure of people who do not please White Supremacists and White Christian Nationalists. This includes people of color, LGBQT+ people (most especially trans people), disabled people, and women of any stripe; essentially, everybody other than reactionary white men, straight or closeted.
So that’s what the lists of banned words are about, and obviously what directives such as the one going to military base schools around the world demanding that librarians remove from the shelves any books that reference the genocide of Native Americans, or slavery or the Civil Rights movement, and that military schools immediately stop recognizing “identity months” such as Black History Month, Pride Month and other similar celebrations are about. From Fort Campbell, Kentucky:
On Feb. 6, DoDEA (the Department of Defense Education Activity) sent to administrators and school employees at 161 schools around the world a letter “to ensure compliance with executive orders and recent DoD guidance.”
The letter, a copy of which was obtained by Clarksville Now, lays out several new directives. Many of them were expected, including that programs designated for girls “may only be accessed by biological females,” and that signage for restrooms and locker rooms must use terms such as “women” and “men” or “girls” and “boys.”
But the document also bans celebration or promotion of “monthly cultural observances.” This includes the immediate cancellation of any celebrations under way. At Fort Campbell Schools, that meant teachers had to remove all bulletin boards that reference Black History Month and Black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, according to a source speaking to Clarksville Now on condition of anonymity. Fort Campbell Schools are also canceling plans for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. There’s no word yet on Women’s History Month, set for March.
Another directive calls for the removal of all books and materials related to “discriminatory equity ideology” during an “operational compliance review.” Librarians are instructed to ensure any such books are “removed from the student section of the information center and placed in the professional collection.”
Not surprisingly, some of the White Nationalist/Christian Nationalist movers and shakers in the administration are openly eugenicist in the Hitlerian mode, including Musk, who says his trans daughter was murdered by the ‘woke mind virus.'
Along with the attempt to erase non-persons from the history shelves, you can add the assault on USAID into this box, where programs helping to combat poverty and disease in the poorest and most non-white areas of the world have now been dismembered; and the education department, which spends a whole lot of money on protecting children and adults who should, according to the very bad people, remain unheard and unseen and preferably dead, at least in effect and, with respect to trans youth, more or less literally.
So when you see something that targets Black people or trans people or gay people or disabled people or Native people or poor people or anybody other than straight (or closeted) reactionary white men, that stuff goes in this box and sometimes also in Box 1.
Box 3: All of your law are belong to us
Pretty much the first thing the new regime did out of the gate was demonstrate their contempt for the law as it is commonly understood through the lens of the separation of powers. Everybody knows we have at best a two-tiered ‘justice’ framework, in which the full weight of the law generally lands only on people and entities unable to buy their way out of whatever trouble they’re in—that’s why we’re so shocked and entertained when a truly wealthy person or corporation gets more or less what the laws say they deserve.
The other bifurcation in justice arises from the capacity of the wealthy and the corporate to actually write laws (and federal/state/local regulations) that either outright benefit them or at least sand the painful edges off. You and I generally cannot do that.
In any event, the seizure of funds appropriated by Congress and designated for various agencies to spend as directed was an early practical demonstration of what the regime thinks about the separation of powers and the laws that the constitutional concept has spawned. They hate both and they don’t intend to abide by either, and they have routinely ignored or only partially complied with court orders to stop seizing funds and breaking agencies.
I’ve talked about that as well, in the context of Andrew Jackson, the gist being that the law relies on everybody agreeing to abide by it, and when the party controlling the means of enforcing the law decides that the law doesn’t apply to it, well, you have a conundrum.
There’s a whole body of thought behind pushing the envelope of presidential power, including pushing it past the point of any constraint. Nixon’s “if the president does it, then it’s not illegal,” is representative of that, as is the Bush II regime’s mantra of “we’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop.”
If the Musk-Trump regime’s adherence to that political philosophy wasn’t made clear to everybody on Day 1, Trump’s recent Roberts court-assisted Napoleon-adjacent declaration that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law” should round up any stragglers.
This is not to say that the regime espouses a lawless society; only that the law is a weapon to be aimed by them, never at them, as witness the abandonment of the post-Nixon understanding of the justice department and its subsidiaries, including the FBI, as largely independent of the presidency.
Box 3 is the biggest box, including as it does most of the actions undertaken in Boxes 1 and 2, but for my purposes it’s just meant for assaults on the law undertaken to establish that the law is a one-way avenue leading away from the White House. We won’t truly know how serious about this the regime are until they run up against a supreme court ruling denying them legal backing to do something they really want to do, should that ever happen.
Of course you can’t talk about laws without reference to the body that generally makes them, outside of your activist courts, but the congressional majority are entirely awol on the matter to this point, and showing no real signs of bestirring themselves any time soon. Which brings us to
Box 4: All your democracy are belong to us
This box is where all the stuff aimed explicitly at transitioning to a Potemkin democracy in service to a fascist regime goes. Look for new laws and regulations ensuring that non-persons—everybody now getting erased from our lexicons—can’t impact elections in ways that don’t suit the regime. Much of what they’re doing is the runup to this, but supporting the various states in suppressing the vote, both by effectively killing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights divisions in the justice department and by federally legislating more onerous voter ID requirements, count toward that.
There: Don’t we feel better now?
I kinda do; I find that just tossing a day’s bullshit in a box helps me to avoid obssessing about it. I can always take a look at it later and freak out then.
Mayor Adams Gets DOGE-walked
I don’t know why I was so viscerally shocked by this clip of the regime’s Brownshirt commandant Tom Homan going completely racist—while blatantly advertising a quid pro quo—on New York City Mayor Eric Adams. It’s not that I have any respect for Adams, but holy shit.
Music to writhe by
Writhe, write, whatever. I’ve been trying to write this edition of the newsletter for a week, so there’s been a lot of listening.
Automatic, Signal, “Too Much Money”;
Black Pumas, Live on KEXP
The Delgados, Hate, “All You Need Is Hate;”
The Coup, Pick a Bigger Weapon, “We Are The Ones”
Jim Jones Revue, Jim Jones Revue, “512” live;
Jona Lewie, On The Other Hand There’s A Fist, “Police Trap;”
The Lovely Eggs, Eggsistentialism, “My Mood Wave;”
Martina Topley-Bird, Quixotic, “Lying;”
Nick Lowe & Los Straitjackets, Indoor Safari, “Went to a Party.”
If you like my stuff please let me know, and share it hither and yon; if you really like it and you’ve not already, please
Free is fine, paid is better for you and for me, because you’ll keep me in fine local avocados and imagine the satisfaction you’ll get from that.
Take care; be well.
Hard times, Betty; really hard times!