Hawaiʻi Could See Nation’s Highest Drop In High School Graduates

Hawaiʻi Could See Nation’s Highest Drop In High School Graduates (CB)

Hawaiʻi is expected to see the greatest decline in high school graduates in the nation over the next several years, raising concerns from lawmakers and Department of Education officials about the future of small schools in shrinking communities.

Between 2023 and 2041, Hawaiʻi could see a 33% drop in the number of students graduating from high school, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. The nation as a whole is projected to see a 10% drop in graduates, according to the commission’s most recent report, published at the end of 2024.

Image: Chart: Megan Tagami/Civil BeatSource: Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education

Three Columnists on ICE in Minneapolis

Matthew Rose, an Opinion editorial director, hosted an online conversation with three Opinion columnists.

Matthew Rose: On Saturday, agents from the border patrol in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, an American citizen. We don’t have a full accounting of what happened, but the available video evidence shows he was filming the agents with his phone, as many locals have done since the full weight of federal immigration enforcement descended on the city.

Lydia, you’ve been to Minneapolis recently. Tell us what you saw and give us some context for what just happened.

Lydia Polgreen: I have never been a fan of the conceit of American journalists covering the United States as if it were a backwater foreign nation, but in Minneapolis last week I could not shake the impulse to compare my experiences in a city I know so well (I spent a chunk of my childhood in the Twin Cities, and my father is from Minneapolis) with my experiences covering civil wars in places like Congo, Sudan, Sri Lanka and more. Watching the video of Pretti’s killing, I thought: If this was happening on the streets of any of those places, I would not hesitate to call it an extrajudicial execution by security forces. This is where we are: armed agents of the state killing civilians with an apparent belief in their total impunity.

I left before Pretti was gunned down, apparently in the back while he was on his knees. What I saw was so reminiscent of other conflicts — civilians doing their very best to protect themselves and their neighbors from seemingly random violence meted out by state agents. Those agents, masked and heavily armed, are roaming the streets and picking up and assaulting people for having the wrong skin color or accent, or being engaged in the constitutionally protected acts of filming, observing or protesting their presence. Anyone who knows me knows that I am allergic to hyperbole, but sometimes you need to simply call a spade a spade. This is a lawless operation.

David French: We are witnessing the total breakdown of any meaningful system of accountability for federal officials. The combination of President Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, his ongoing campaign of pardoning friends and allies, his politicized prosecutions and now his administration’s assurances that federal officers have immunity are creating a new legal reality in the United States. The national government is becoming functionally lawless, and the legal system is struggling to contain his corruption.

We’re tasting the bitter fruit of Trump’s dreadful policies, to be sure, but it’s worse than that. He’s exploiting years of legal developments that have helped insulate federal officials from both criminal and civil accountability. It’s as if we engineered a legal system premised on the idea that federal officials are almost always honest, and the citizens who critique them are almost always wrong. We’ve tilted the legal playing field against citizens and in favor of the government.

The Trump administration breaks the law, and also ruthlessly exploits all the immunities it’s granted by law. The situation is unsustainable for a constitutional republic.

Michelle Goldberg: The administration is very consciously reinforcing that sense of impunity. First there was Stephen Miller addressing the security forces after one of them killed Renee Good: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” On Sunday, Greg Bovino, the self-consciously villainous border patrol commander, praised the agents who executed Pretti.

I wish people weren’t allowed to carry guns in public. But they are, and after watching Republicans bring semiautomatic weapons to protest Covid closures and make a hero of Kyle Rittenhouse, it’s wild to hear the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, say, on Fox News, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines, to any sort of protest that you want.” The point here isn’t hypocrisy; it’s them nakedly asserting that constitutional rights are for us, not you.

Rose: David, I wanted to pick up on your description of the federal government as lawless. As you’ve written, we seem to be in the world described by the Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel and what he called “the dual state.” There is one we live in, where we pay taxes and go to work, and life seems to work according to common rules, and the other where the rules no longer apply. Is this what we’re experiencing?

French: We’re living in a version of the dual state. Not to the same extent as the Nazis, of course, but Fraenkel’s framing is still relevant. The Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal. As you say, they went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation. But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power — regardless of the rule of law.

One of the saddest things about the killings of Good and Pretti is that you could tell that neither of them seemed to know the danger until it was too late. They believed they were operating in some version of the normal state (what Fraenkel called the “normative state”) where the police usually respond with discipline and restraint.

Good and Pretti both had calm demeanors. They may have been annoying federal officers, but nothing about their posture indicated the slightest threat. Good even said, “I’m not mad” to the man who would gun her down seconds later. Pretti was filming with his phone in one hand and he had the other hand in the air as he was pepper-sprayed and tackled.

The officers, however, were in that different state, what Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” where the government is a law unto itself. The officers acted violently, with impunity, and the government immediately acted to defend them and slander their victims. As the prerogative state expands, the normative state shrinks, and our lives often change before we can grasp what happened. (...)

Rose: With immigration enforcement in Trump’s second term, we have a quasi-military force, backed by more funding than most countries give their actual militaries, deployed for the most part to enforce civil, not criminal law. Should we instead think about this as spectacle? Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, interviewed by our colleague Ezra Klein, argued that immigration enforcement under Trump is being implemented for maximum visual impact.

Goldberg: That’s increasingly the critique of conservatives who don’t want to break with Trump, but also are having a hard time rationalizing ICE’s violence in Minneapolis. Erick Erickson blames what’s happening in Minnesota on the D.H.S. secretary, Kristi Noem, marginalizing Tom Homan, the border czar, in favor of Greg Bovino from Customs and Border Protection, who clearly relishes street-level confrontation.

And the administration obviously wants to make a spectacle. We don’t know why the guy who shot Renee Good was filming, but it could well have been to feed their insatiable demand for content, which in turn is feeding their recruiting efforts. Did any of you see the clip where one of the agents shooting tear gas at protesters can be heard saying, “It’s like ‘Call of Duty.’ So cool, huh?”

I’m glad that some people on the right have at least concluded that this looks bad for their side, since it could create political pressure on Trump to pull back. At the same time, I don’t think you can divorce the policy from the spectacle. Both are meant to terrorize their enemies.

Polgreen: There is no question that spectacle is the goal here. Michelle just mentioned Bovino — he has been swanning about Minnesota in a long, green wool coat that lends him a distinctly fascist look. The way these officers are kitted out is nuts. Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, described it to me as “full battle rattle.” There is also a cartoonish aspect to the whole thing — social media is replete with videos of agents slipping on ice and falling, ass over teakettle, onto the frozen ground. You look at the videos of the shootings and there is an air of incompetence to the whole thing, even amid the horror. It is almost as if you can’t believe how amateurish and unprofessional these guys are.

Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council, told me about one encounter with an agent armed with a Taser. The guy held it sideways, like some kind of gangbanger, menacing Payne and other city officials as they tried to ask questions about why a man at a bus stop was being detained. Payne told me it was something out of a bad movie. No trained law enforcement officer would ever hold a weapon that way. It would be comical if it weren’t so utterly terrifying. (...)

Rose: ... when people ask you what they can do, what’s your advice?

French: This is a crucial moment in American history. I think about it like this: When we learn about our family histories, we often ask what our ancestors were doing. Did they serve in World War II? Did they serve in Vietnam? Where did they stand during the civil rights movement?

This is a moment important enough that our grandchildren and even great-grandchildren might ask: What did you know? What did you do? Think hard about what you want your answer to be. Think hard about what you can do that will stand the test of time — whether it be peacefully protesting (including peaceful civil disobedience), volunteering for a political campaign, providing meals and clothing for immigrant families or anything else that protects the vulnerable and defends human dignity.

One of the worst answers, however, would be to look a curious grandchild in the face and say: Well, I posted a lot on social media.

Polgreen: I read so much about how we live in an atomized society, glued to our phones and social media but untethered from our communities and neighbors. Minnesota is demonstrating how quickly and fearlessly communities can come together in spite of the political and technological forces seeking to keep us divided. They also built on their past experience — many of these networks of support began during the George Floyd protests. Some were groups that wanted to march against the Minneapolis cops, and others wanted to protect neighborhoods from property damage. Now they have been reactivated to work together to help one another. A lot of us formed these kinds of networks during Covid. This would be a great time to reconnect with them. Be prepared to protect the people around you. (...)

French: I’ll be completely honest. It’s a little harder for me to have hope when I know that the core political support for Trump’s aggression is coming from my own community. Without the lock step (and seemingly unconditional) support of so many millions of evangelicals, Trump’s administration would crumble overnight. So I keep looking for signs of softening hearts and opening minds in Trump’s base — among the people who helped raise me, who taught me about faith, and who told me in no uncertain terms that politicians must demonstrate high character before they can earn your support. I feel a pervasive sadness about this moment.

That’s what is so grievous about civil strife. You often find yourself in opposition not to some hated, distant foe, but rather in opposition to people you’ve loved your whole life — whom you still love.

But there is hope. It’s a mistake to believe that the G.O.P. and its Christian supporters have crossed a Rubicon, never to return. And it’s a mistake to believe — even for the most hardhearted — that their aggression is a sign of their strength. They are masking weakness, and courage is their kryptonite.

by Matthew Rose, Lydia Polgreen, David French and Michelle Goldberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Peterson/Redux

The Boring Reason We Don't Have $7 Rideshares

New York, Baltimore, and DC have a rideshare app called Empower that charges 20-40% less than Uber. Drivers like it too because they keep 100% of the fare. Drivers pay a monthly fee instead.

The most common fare I’ve paid on Empower over the last six months is $7.65.

For a recent trip from downtown to the airport, Uber wanted $32. Empower wanted $17.25.

I use it constantly, and so do a lot of car-less people I know. That price difference is a pretty big deal!

For many, it can be the difference between getting to the clinic or skipping an appointment. Between getting a ride after a night shift or walking home alone after buses stop running.

DC is trying to shut Empower down, primarily over liability insurance. DC law requires $1 million in coverage per ride.

The $1 million requirement isn’t sized to typical accidents. When $100,000 is the limit available for an insurance claim, 96% of personal auto claims settle below $100,000.

The high ceiling shifts incentives: plaintiffs' attorneys have reason to pursue cases they'd otherwise drop and push for larger settlements. Fraud rings have emerged to exploit these policies. The American Transit Insurance Company, which focuses on NY rideshare insurance, estimates 60-70 percent of its claims are fraudulent. Uber recently filed racketeering lawsuits against networks of law firms and clinics allegedly staging fake accidents in New York, Florida, and California.

That $1 million requirement traces back to Uber’s early days. When the company was fighting for legality across America, taxi commissions called ridesharing dangerous. To win over skeptical politicians, Uber proposed $1 million in coverage, matching limousine services and interstate charter bus companies, not taxis. It became the national template. Had Uber aimed to match taxi limits, the mandates would be $100,000 to $300,000.

Now Uber is advocating to lower the $1 million mandates. The company (and its drivers) complain that insurance is around 30% of fares, particularly in states like California, New Jersey, and New York which also require additional $1 million uninsured motorist coverage and/or no-fault insurance. Even in DC, with very strong anti-fraud protections, the base $1 million requirement makes up about 5% of every fare—roughly a quarter of Empower’s advertised price advantage. (...)

Empower shows people want options. The app doesn’t let you schedule rides in advance, store multiple cards, or earn airline miles. Drivers don’t always turn off their music. Empower’s not trying to target the same audience as Uber. But the New York Times estimates Empower handles 10% of DC’s ride share market. People are comfortable with the rideshare industry’s scrappy options.

I think the core question is: now that society has accepted rideshare, should we revisit the rules that helped us get there?

Coverage of the potential shutdown rarely focuses on who stands to lose most: price-sensitive riders. Most coverage focuses on Empower’s lack of commercial insurance without explaining that the mandate is three to ten times higher than what taxis carry. Few explore whether or how Empower’s model actually differs: drivers can set their own prices. Drivers fund the platform through monthly fees rather than a cut of each fare. Drivers who get commercial insurance can also use it for private clients.

People now trust and rely on this mode of transportation. Ridesharing has become pseudo-infrastructure for car-less Americans and a tool against drunk driving. In areas of Houston where rideshare first rolled out, drunk driving incidents appear to have dropped 38%.

We should want rideshare to remain affordable, especially as we build the excellent public transit we need.

by Abi Olivera, Positive Sum |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Learn something new every day. I'll certainly look into this new company. The pricing of Uber is getting crazy (I've never used Lyft). Unfortunately, expansion won't be easy. As noted: High mandates also act as a moat. In DC, becoming a licensed rideshare company requires a $5,000 application fee, a $250,000 security fee, and infrastructure for that $1 million coverage. You have to be well-capitalized before you serve your first rider. This is likely why we see few bare-bones apps or local competitors to turn to when Lyft and Uber are surging.]

So You Want to Abolish Property Taxes

A lot of people in the Republican party have been talking about abolishing property taxes lately. This is a bad idea with unintended consequences, and they shouldn’t do it.

Doing so would undermine economic growth and housing affordability gains certain red states have recently seen. Worse, we’ve already run this experiment and know where it leads: a California-style de-growth death spiral that slams the door in the faces of young working families.

I begin by explaining why property tax elimination is a bad idea:

1. States will never actually do it

2. The alternatives are worse

3. Blue state experiences serve as a warning

Then, I conclude by showing how to pragmatically reform property taxes in a way that delivers both meaningful tax relief and the sustainable pro-growth, pro-family, results craved by red and blue states alike.

1. States will never actually do it

The first reason eliminating property taxes is bad is that local politicians don’t have the guts to actually pull the trigger. As soon as it’s time for implementation, intra-party fighting overwhelms the legislative process, causing lawmakers to throw up their hands, slap on a band-aid, declare victory, and go home.

Why you can’t eliminate property taxes

In my home state of Texas, Republicans have tried and failed twice in back-to-back legislative sessions to eliminate property taxes. This is despite the fact that Texas has been under complete Republican domination for over twenty years.

First, it’s just too expensive. In 2024, the legislative budget board found that replacing property taxes would cost $81.5 billion dollars, more than the annual state budget of $72 billion. Read here:

“This is not something that you can find $81 billion on a per-year basis and not have a major impact on the remaining sales tax rates, because that is a huge amount of money to be able to replicate,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican and [Lt. Governor Dan] Patrick’s chief lieutenant on property taxes.

Second, replacing all property taxes with sales taxes would require raising the sales tax rate to over 19%, according to the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association. Just in case state leaders don’t think prices on everyday goods have risen high enough yet, they should note that inflation is the number one most important issue1 among Republicans. [...]

Property taxes are less hated than you think

At least according to recent polling, the #1 most hated tax is not the property tax, but the Federal Income tax: [...]

Note the change in the last two decades: a net 20 percentage point swing in most-hated status between property tax and federal income tax. The large drop in housing affordability over that time period has surely contributed towards that change in sentiment...

Also, if property taxes are so desperately hated, why do states keep voting to keep them in place?

Every single state has some form of state or local property tax. Meanwhile, over a quarter of states opt out of at least one of sales, corporate, or income taxes.

In short, while it is often claimed that property taxes are the least popular tax by stated preferences, if we look at revealed preferences, they could actually be the most popular local tax. Perhaps this is why every time a red state tries to abolish property taxes, strident opposition crops up from unexpected places: [video]

But maybe you don’t care. In that case, pick an alternative.

2. The Alternatives are worse

An OECD report ranks different taxes by which are the most harmful to growth:

1. Corporate taxes (worst)

2. Personal income taxes

3. Consumption/sales taxes

4. Property taxes (best)

Overly high corporate taxes cause investment to flow to other states instead, and sufficiently high income taxes are a commonly cited driver of outmigration from blue states to red states. Modest sales taxes are the least distortionary of the three, but they’re still worse for growth overall than a well run property tax.

In conservative states like Texas, raising income and corporate taxes is already dead in the water (if not explicitly banned in the state constitution), which just leaves sales taxes. Since people say they hate property taxes more, shouldn’t we just bite the bullet and go all in on sales taxes?

The problem with this line of thinking is that the polling is based on sales taxes at current rates. The highest sales taxes in the nation cap out at 10%—rates as high as 19% are completely unprecedented. Even worse, the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association found that at those levels you start triggering tax avoidance, so you will inevitably have to raise the rate even higher to compensate, pushing it well past 20%.

We don’t even need to argue about whether this is popular or not because this exact proposal has been proposed twice already in Texas and it’s failed twice. Texans do not want to replace all property taxes with 20% state-imposed inflation on goods and services.

Ironically, reducing property taxes might actually be hardest in red states like Texas, precisely because the state is so anti-tax that there just aren’t many alternatives left. It’s no surprise then that the most famous instances of states that have “succeeded” in undermining property taxes are blue states.

The results have not been good.

3. Blue state experiences serve as a warning

Don’t California my Texas

One anti-property tax measure is not to lower tax rates so much as to completely undermine the entire system of property valuation itself, and there is no example more infamous than California’s Proposition 13. This 70’s-era reform fell far short of abolishing the property tax, settling for simply unleashing one of the most wildly unequal and unfair taxation schemes in the nation instead.

Prop 13 works like this:

• Assessed values are frozen at their 1976 valuations

• The tax rate is limited to 1%

• Increases in assessed values are limited to 2% a year

• New reassessments are allowed only for new construction or when property changes hands

Various propositions in the following decades added yet another privilege: a property’s Prop 13 status may be passed on to children and grandchildren, thereby literally establishing a class of hereditary landed gentry.

The results have been an absolute disaster for both housing affordability and any semblance of basic fairness. Side-by-side houses have wildly unequal property assessments (source):

Again, complete property tax elimination never actually arrives. What arrives instead is special treatment for one class at the expense of everyone else in the state. But that’s not all; on top of the much higher property tax burdens young working families face for the audacious crime of moving in last year, the state has extra treats in store (source):

The state’s top marginal individual income tax rate of 13.3 percent is compounded by a 1.1 percent newly uncapped payroll tax, bringing the all-in top rate to 14.4 percent. Additionally, nonresidents must file income taxes if they work even a single day in the state, and California is one of only four states to still impose an alternative minimum tax.

Don’t forget that California also has among the highest corporate taxes in the nation as well, just in case you were thinking of starting a business, or investing in one.

Honestly, the fact that it’s taken this long for California to start to bleed population really shows you what an incredible natural advantage California has long held over every other location in the United States. Even though the game has always been California’s to lose, if you spend multiple decades repeatedly punching yourself in the face, the crown eventually slips from your head.

NOTE: as much fun as it is to get high huffing California schadenfreude, Republicans would do well to remember that Prop 13 was pushed for in large part by members of their own party.

Unfortunately, California isn’t the only blue state with gorgeous weather and Edenic geography that’s been steadily sending its children into exile.

Aloha ‘Oe

The state with the lowest property taxes in the nation, at an effective tax rate of 0.27%, is Hawaii. Incidentally, Hawaii has the second highest top income tax rate at 11%. It also has the third highest net domestic outmigration rate of all US states between 2020-2024.

Even worse, the overall population “natural change” (births minus deaths) is steadily shrinking:

What’s not shrinking is the size of billionaire landholdings. Just 37 billionaires own more than 218,000 acres of Hawaii, roughly 5.3% of all land in the state, a figure equal to 11.1% of all privately held land.

Just one of those billionaires owns more than 1.27% of the entire state—Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who owns 98% of the entire island of Lānaʻi.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan have seen their landholdings in Kaua’i more than triple, from 700+ acres in 2014 to over 2,300 acres today over the last ten years. Oprah Winfrey now owns over 1,000 acres on Maui after a recent purchase, the same island on which Jeff Bezos owns 14 acres. But what Jeff lacks in quantity, he makes up for in quality: he paid $78M for his land in La Perouse Bay, a full $13M more than Zuck paid for his 1,000-acre Kawai’i purchase in 2025.

As a quick aside, this underscores another problem with rock-bottom property taxes: it turns real estate into the perfect speculative financial asset in which to park money. When so little cost to hold it, real estate becomes an attractive passive investment, and over time tends to take up an ever-increasing share of bank loans, as expertly illustrated in the paper The Great Mortgaging, by Jordà, Schularick, and Taylor. This has a double-whammy effect on the economy: real estate sucks up all the loans, bidding up its price, while leaving all other sectors (like actually providing productive jobs) with less investment...

Making real estate the perfect speculative asset for the ultra-rich is never a good idea, but Hawaii faces other problems too: the top reasons cited for leaving the state include high cost of living, limited economic opportunities, housing challenges, quality of life concerns, and education. That last one is exacerbated by chronically underfunded public schools.

Hawaii’s high income taxes and low property taxes have done little to curb the island state’s steady transformation into a paradise for the rich, but a port of exile for the young working families its future depends on.

Five thousand miles away, on the cold and distant far shore of the mainland, another blue state grapples with a similar challenge. [ed. hint: New York]:

In any case, whether it’s Texas, Florida, Hawaii, California, New York, or any of the other forty-five of these great United States, there’s a solution out there that meets everybody’s needs.

It delivers meaningful property tax relief to the median homeowner, without excluding renters and businesses or pitting seniors against young working families, all while driving overall economic efficiency and setting the state up for a pro-growth flywheel that keeps the budget balanced and taxes competitive.

That policy is Universal Building Exemption.

3. Universal Building Exemption is better

There is a problem with property taxes: it’s a good tax combined with a bad tax. The bad part of the tax is the portion of the tax that falls on buildings and improvements. We’re in a housing crisis, so why are we taxing houses? We’re in an age of rising unemployment, so why are we taxing workplaces? We want more construction, not less.

A universal building exemption fixes this by shifting the tax off of buildings and onto the unimproved value of land. Crucially, it’s revenue-neutral: it raises the same amount of property tax dollars as before, so it doesn’t break the budget.

Here’s why it’s the solution to the property tax debate:

Economists and key conservative thinkers support it

1. It balances the budget

2. It’s pro-growth and pro-natal

3. It’s better than the homestead exemption

4. It’s politically viable 

[specific details...]

Okay, but am I just talking my own book here, coming up with a tax shift that will just personally benefit me, a middle class Texas homeowner and father of three?

No, because the beauty of universal building exemption is that the biggest losers are the ones holding the most valuable downtown urban land out of use, and the chief beneficiaries are everybody else.

Who are the losers? The big losers are surface parking lots and vacant land, particularly those situated downtown next to skyscrapers. This shifts the tax burden off of locations people actually live in, to massively valuable locations where nobody lives.

This isn’t just a handout to homeowners, developers, and landlords, either—it’s a carrot and a stick. The carrot of building exemption rewards everybody who actually contributes more of what contributes to growth in our society—namely, homes, neighborhoods, and jobs—a category which includes the best kinds of property managers and builders. The stick of a higher effective tax rate on land pokes everyone in the butt who is sitting on the most valuable locations—which includes the worst kinds of slumlords and land-banking “developers”— to either build something already, or sell it to someone who will.

Lars Doucet, Progress and Poverty |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/Gallup/James Medlock

[ed. Agree 100%. There should be some kind of penalty for developers holding dead land and letting it appreciate through scarcity and the sacrifice of their more productive neighbors. Also, the California Prop 13 issue is insane. Didn't know that's how it all played out. For a new way of taxing property (and easing the tax burden on productive businesses), see this video (and transcript) of LVT (land value taxes) that encourage more building and less vacant land speculation here.]

The Great Replacement

“What if you knew her and/ Found her dead on the ground/ How can you run when you know” — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

I am neither a forensic expert nor a jury member, but it sure looks to me like an ICE agent shot and killed a woman who wasn’t threatening his life. We have video of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7th, and the Washington Post has a detailed blow-by-blow analysis of the video: [...]

The Vice President’s claim that the shots were fired from the front of the car is pretty clearly false. He also repeatedly talked about ICE agents “going door to door” to deport illegal immigrants — pretty clearly ignoring the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures”.

Vance’s reception on social media — even from the kind of “tech right” types that are usually his fans — was largely negative.

 
Two days is probably far too early for the killing of Good to have shifted national opinion radically. The negative drift in views toward ICE is probably due to their consistent record of brutality, aggression, dubious legality, and unprofessionalism in Trump’s second term.

Here’s a video of ICE agents in Arkansas beating up an unarmed U.S. citizen. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. Here’s a story about a similar arrest. Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting a man for yelling at them from his own front porch. Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. Here’s a story about another ICE killing, this one in Maryland, under dubious circumstances. Here’s a video of ICE agents savagely beating and arresting a legal immigrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents storming a private home without a warrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents pulling a disabled woman out of a car when she’s just trying to get to the doctor.

These are all things I noticed on X within just the last two days. There has been a pretty constant stream of these for months. Here’s a roundup of some others, by Jeremiah Johnson:

For the past year, ICE has been involved in a series of escalating incidents that rarely result in repercussions for anyone involved. ICE agents have recklessly caused traffic accidents and then, in one incident, arrested the person whose car they hit. They’ve tear-gassed a veteran, arrested him, and denied him access to medical care and an attorney. They have attacked protesters merely for filming them in public. They’ve pepper-sprayed a fleeing onlooker in the eyes from a foot away. They’ve pointed guns at a 6-year-old. They’ve knelt on top of a pregnant woman while they arrested her. They have arrested another pregnant woman, then kept her separated from her newborn while she languished in custody. They have repeatedly arrested American citizens, and they’ve even reportedly deported a citizen, directly contradicting court orders.

These are anecdotes, but there have also been careful, systematic reports about ICE arrests and mistreatment of U.S. citizens and poor conditions in ICE detention centers.

The Wall Street Journal also reviewed some other videos and other records of ICE shootings, and found a similar pattern to the Renee Good killing:

The Wall Street Journal has identified 13 instances of agents firing at or into civilian vehicles since July, leaving at least eight people shot with two confirmed dead…The Journal reviewed public records—court documents, agency press releases and gun-violence databases—of vehicle shootings involving immigration agents, though video is only publicly available for four of them…The Minneapolis shooting shares characteristics with others the Journal reviewed: Agents box in a vehicle, try to remove an individual, block attempts to flee, then fire.

Instead of causing ICE agents to pause in consternation, the killing of Renee Good appears to have made many even more aggressive. Here’s a video of an ICE agent in Minnesota telling a protester “Have y’all not learned from the past coupla days?”. Here’s a video of an ICE agent kicking over candles at a memorial for Renee Good.

Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the ultra-low standards for recruitment and training of ICE agents under Trump:

A deadly shooting in Minneapolis at the hands of a federal immigration officer comes weeks after a bombshell report on President Donald Trump’s desperate drive to rush 10,000 deportation officers onto the payroll by the end of 2025.

The explosive Daily Mail report found that the administration's $50,000 signing bonus attracted droves of unqualified recruits — high school grads who can "barely read or write," overweight candidates with doctor's notes saying they're unfit, and even applicants with pending criminal charges…[O]ne Department of Homeland Security official [said]: "We have people failing open-book tests and we have folks that can barely read or write English."

Jeremiah Johnson has more:

Reporting shows that ICE is filled with substandard agents. Its aggressive push to hire more agents uses charged rhetoric that appeals to far-right groups, but the agency has run into problems with recruits unable to pass background checks or meet minimum standards for academic background, personal fitness, or drug usage. One career ICE agent called new recruits “pathetic,” according to The Atlantic, and a current Department of Homeland Security official told NBC News that “There is absolutely concern that some people are slipping through the cracks,” and being inadvertently hired.

It’s worth noting, though, that Jonathan Ross himself is well-trained, with plenty of experience in law enforcement and military combat operations. So it’s not always a matter of poor training.

A number of Republican politicians have defended ICE’s actions with rhetoric that sounds downright authoritarian. Texas Representative Wesley Hunt said: “The bottom line is this: when a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.” Florida Representative Randy Fine said: “If you get in the way of the government repelling a foreign invasion, you’re going to end up just like that lady did.”

Is this America now? A country where unaccountable and poorly trained government agents go door to door, arresting and beating people on pure suspicion, and shooting people who don’t obey their every order or who try to get away? “When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life” is a perfect description of an authoritarian police state. None of this is Constitutional, every bit of it is deeply antithetical to the American values we grew up taking for granted.

This tweet really seems to sum it up:

Why is this happening? Part of it is because of the mistakes of the Biden administration. For the first three years of his presidency, Biden allowed a massive, disorderly flood of border-hopping asylum seekers and quasi-legal migrants of all types to pour into the country, and as a result, Americans got really, really mad. That made immigration into a major issue in the 2024 election, helped Trump get elected, and provided political cover for a dramatic expansion of deportations. Now, probably thanks to ICE’s brutality and the administration’s lawlessness, support for immigrants and disapproval of Trump’s immigration policies are rising again. But the administration still has what it considers a mandate to act with impunity.

The deeper reason, though, is the ideology of the MAGA movement. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that most Trump supporters view immigration as a literal invasion of the United States — not a figurative “invasion”, but a literal attempted conquest of America by foreigners.

And a substantial percentage of these folks believe that the purpose of this “invasion” is to “replace” the existing American population. This is from a PRRI poll from late 2024:

One-third of Americans (33%) agree with the “Great Replacement Theory,” or the idea that immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background. The majority of Americans (62%) disagree with this theory. Agreement with this theory has decreased by 3 percentage points from 36% in 2019…Six in ten Republicans (60%) agree with the “Great Replacement Theory,” compared with 30% of independents and 14% of Democrats. Among Republicans, those who hold a favorable view of Trump are more likely than those who hold an unfavorable view to agree that immigrants are invading our country (68% vs. 32%).

Perhaps some think that this “Great Replacement” is only cultural or partisan/political — the DHS recruits agents with a call to “Defend your culture!” — but many clearly think it’s racial in nature. The DHS recently posted this image:

100 million is far more than the total number of immigrants in the United States (which is estimated at around 52 million). Instead, it’s close to the total number of nonwhite people in the country. So the idea of “100 million deportations” clearly goes well beyond the idea of deporting illegal immigrants, and well beyond the idea of deporting all immigrants, into the territory of ethnic cleansing.

The DHS is posting these memes as a recruitment tactic, and polls about the “Great Replacement” show that there’s a large pool of potential recruits to whom this rhetoric is likely to appeal. In other words, many of the ICE agents now going around kicking in doors, beating up and threatening protesters, arresting citizens on pure suspicion, and occasionally shooting people believe that they are engaged in a race war. [...]

To be fair, the Great Replacement ideology didn’t arise out of nowhere. It’s an irrational and panicky overreaction that will lead America down the road to disaster — it’s full of hate and lies, it’s inherently divisive, it’s associated with some of history’s most horrible regimes, and it’s being promoted by some very bad actors. But it has also been egged on by a progressive movement that has made anti-white discrimination in hiring a pillar of its approach to racial equity, and has normalized anti-white rhetoric in the public sphere. This was an unforced error by the left — one of many over the past decade.

But whoever started America’s stupid race war, the real question is who will stand up and end it. The GOP, and the MAGA movement specifically, was offered a golden off-ramp from this dark path. In 2020 and 2024, Hispanic Americans, along with some Asian and Black Americans, shifted strongly toward Trump and the GOP. This was a perfect opportunity for the GOP to make itself, in the words of Marco Rubio, a “multiracial working-class” party. This would have been similar to how Nixon and Reagan expanded the GOP coalition to include “white ethnics” that the GOP had spurned in the early 20th century. But instead, MAGA took the victory handed to them by nonwhite voters and used it to act like exactly the kind of white-nationalist race warriors that liberals had always insisted they were. [...]

But Trump is an old man, and the younger generation was raised not on mid-20th-century nationalist rhetoric but on right-wing social media and memes. When Trump is gone, the MAGA movement will cease to be defined by his personal charisma, and will start being defined by the ideology of the Great Replacement — the same ideology that is now motivating many of the ICE agents acting like thugs in the streets of America.

And it’s increasingly clear that JD Vance, understanding that he lacks Trump’s cult of personality, has decided to make himself the leader, voice, and avatar of the “Great Replacement” movement — even if this arouses the disgust of many traditional conservatives and some figures in the tech right. With the disarray of the Democrats and the weakness of other GOP factions, Vance’s move may be a smart political bet, even if it comes at the expense of American freedom and stability.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Images: X/DHS

[ed. Oh for simpler times when a political break-in was considered the height of lawless government. Never thought I'd say this, but these days, and with this government, I'd vote for Nixon in a heartbeat:]

***

He covertly aided Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 and ended American combat involvement in Vietnam in 1973, and the military draft the same year. His visit to China in 1972 led to diplomatic relations between the two nations, and he finalized the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union. During the course of his first term, he enacted many progressive environmental policy shifts, such as creating the Environmental Protection Agency and passing laws, including the Endangered Species and Clean Air Acts. In addition to implementing the Twenty-sixth Amendment that lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, he ended the direct international convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold in 1971, effectively taking the United States off the gold standard. He also imposed wage and price controls for 90 days, launched the Wars on Cancer and Drugs, passed the Controlled Substances Act, and presided over the end of the Space Race by overseeing the Apollo 11 Moon landing. ~ Wikipedia

Fascism in America

Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”

On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”

“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”

Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”

Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”

Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:

First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”

Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”

Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”

It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”

The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.

“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”

by US Army/War Department/Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

Image: US Army

[ed. Dictators are gonna dictate, it's what they do. The real blame lies with supporters who give them their power, willingly. The people who think their personal fortunes or the country's will be enhanced by standing in the shadow of a strongman. And others: tuned out and oblivious, who "just aren't into politics" or rely on "talking points" to tell them what to think. It's all here. Now. See also: January 10, 2026:]

***

Yesterday, in an apparent attempt to regain control of the national narrative surrounding the deadly shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Vice President J.D. Vance led the administration in pushing a video of the shooting captured by the shooter himself, Jonathan Ross, on his cell phone. (...)

What is truly astonishing is that the administration thought this video would exonerate Ross and support the administration’s insistence that he was under attack from a domestic terrorist trying to ram him with her car. The video was leaked to a right-wing news site, and Vance reposted it with the caption: “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security reposted Vance’s post.

As senior editor of Lawfare Media Eric Columbus commented: “Do Vance and DHS think we can’t actually watch the video?” Multiple social media users noted that Good’s last words to Ross were “That’s fine. I’m not mad at you,” while his to her, after he shot her in the face, were “F*cking b*tch!”

In the case of the murder of Renee Good, the shooter and his protectors are clearly so isolated in their own authoritarian bubble they cannot see how regular Americans would react to the video of a woman smiling at a masked agent and saying: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” only to have him shoot her in the face and then spit out “F*cking b*tch” after he killed her. (...) [ed. Probably the same way they reacted to the storming of Capitol Building...] 

Although ICE currently employs more than 20,000 people, it is looking to hire over 10,000 more with the help of the money Republicans put in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act of July. That law tripled ICE’s budget for enforcement and deportation to about $30 billion.

On December 31, Drew Harwell and Joyce Sohyun Lee of the Washington Post reported that ICE was investing $100 million on what it called a “wartime recruitment” strategy to hire thousands of new officers. It planned to target gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts as well as those who listen to right-wing radi0 shows, directing ads to people who have gone to Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fights or shopped for guns and tactical gear. It planned to send ads to the phone web browsers and social media feeds of people near military bases, NASCAR races, gun and trade shows, or college campuses, apparently not considering them the hotbeds of left-wing indoctrination right-wing politicians claim. (...)

When Kaitlan Collins of CNN asked Trump yesterday if he thought the FBI should be sharing information about the shooting of Renee Good with state officials, as is normally the case, Trump responded: “Well, normally, I would, but they’re crooked officials. I mean, Minneapolis and Minnesota, what a beautiful place, but it’s being destroyed. It’s got an incompetent governor fool. I mean, he’s a stupid person, and, uh, it looks like the number could be $19 billion stolen from a lot of people, but largely people from Somalia. They buy their vote, they vote in a group, they buy their vote. They sell more Mercedes-Benzes in that area than almost—can you imagine? You come over with no money and then shortly thereafter you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz. The whole thing is ridiculous. They’re very corrupt people. It’s a very corrupt state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times. Nobody’s won it for since Richard Nixon won it many, many years ago. I won it all three times, in my opinion, and it’s a corrupt state, a corrupt voting state, and the Republicans ought to get smart and demand on voter ID. They ought to demand, maybe same-day voting and all of the other things that you have to have to safe election. But I won Minnesota three times that I didn’t get credit for. I did so well in that state, every time. The people were, they were crying. Every time after. That’s a crooked state. California’s a crooked state. Many crooked states. We have a very, very dishonest voting system.”

Trump lost Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Floreat Britannia (in the Era of AI)

Reflections on 2025: The Compute Theory of Everything, grading the homework of a minor deity, and the acoustic preferences of Atlantic salmon.

***

May Britain flourish. I mean this unironically.

To say this in late 2025, however, is to mark oneself out as a dangerous contrarian, or perhaps just someone whose internet service provider has been down since the Platinum Jubilee. I say this with the stubborn affection of a developer trying to run Doom on a smart fridge: the hardware is eccentric, the display is glitchy, but deep down, I believe the architecture is solid. (...)

Britain is not currently flourishing. It is a country that has suffered catastrophic forgetting of its “Industrial Strategy” while overfitting deeply on “Artisanal Sourdough” and “Risk Assessment.” I will now establish this through the standard literary method of listing increasingly dispiriting statistics until the reader either agrees or leaves.

Real wages grew by 33% per decade from 1970 to 2007. Since 2007 they have grown by approximately nothing, representing the longest wage stagnation since the Napoleonic Wars, though in fairness to the current era, Napoleon was eventually defeated and exiled to St Helena, whereas the causes of British wage stagnation remain at large and are frequently invited to speak on panels. (...)

Our industrial electricity prices are the highest in Europe. Hinkley Point C will cost £46 billion, making it the most expensive power station ever built, with a price tag suggesting that the reactor core is being hand-carved by Jony Ive. We’re SotA on cost. South Korea builds equivalent reactors for one-quarter the cost. The Fingleton Report analyses why, citing capital structures and safety frameworks across 162 pages of sober text. But the detail that reached my heart this year, concerns the fish.

Hinkley’s fish protection measures will cost approximately £700 million. This includes an acoustic fish deterrent system referred to, apparently without irony, as the “fish disco”. Based on the developer’s own modelling, this nightclub for aquatic life is expected to save 0.083 Atlantic salmon per year. At £700 million amortised over the system’s life, this values a single salmon at roughly £140 million. This is approximately 700 times the fish’s weight in cocaine.

The stagnation of British growth is a sunk cost. We cannot unstagnate the 2010s. But what I want, as a citizen, is a system going forward where the primary constraint on energy is not the acoustic preferences of 0.083 salmon.

by Samuel Albanie, Substack |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Pretty funny 2025 summary. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about Britain, its economy, or AI "compute" issues at cocktail parties, but this little factoid caught my attention.]

Blame and Claim

A public adjuster on insuring a burning world

Just off a hiking trail, not far from where Sunset Boulevard meets the sea, a fuel and an oxidant combine and combust. The underbrush is dry and dusty, and within an hour flames engulf your home. Smoke fills your kitchen and your garage. Flecks of wallpaper from your children’s bedroom float down onto a nearby parking lot. Your wedding photos melt, as does your car battery. The glass windows of your dining room shatter and temperatures reach a thousand degrees. The root cause might have been a mountaineer who burned his toilet paper at dawn, a spark at a faulty transmission line in the foothills, a discarded cigarette fanned by the Santa Anas, or, simply, arson.

But it is too early to assign blame. Your attention is elsewhere. You are not home and you cannot get there, as the fire department has evacuated your neighborhood, the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. Your mind races, and you reach for your phone to ensure your family is safe even if you have already heard from them. Maybe you call the police, even though you hear the sirens throughout your neighborhood and see the caravans of emergency vehicles filling the streets.

When you do manage to get home, you stand on the sidewalk watching your rafters collapse and, covering your mouth with a shirtsleeve, you make your next call, to your insurance company to file a claim. You don’t know what this process entails. You have never filed a homeowner’s or business insurance claim, you have never read your policy, and you do not know if your policy covers what has happened, since you do not know what has happened or what caused it.

You are unaware that the insurance industry has been, in recent years, denying more claims and more coverage, exiting major markets, and raising premiums. As governments and corporations continue to enable fossil fuels, throttle renewable-energy sources, and deny long-established climate science, the related catastrophes (fires, floods, droughts, storms) and social effects (mass migration, war over natural resources, economic and demographic stratification) are increasingly commonplace and metastasizing. This new world order transfers the risk and harm of the disaster business by way of the insurance industry onto you, the consumer. On an episode of the climate science podcast A Matter of Degrees, Dave Jones, a former California insurance commissioner who is now the director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley, said, “For many Americans, the single biggest financial asset you have is your home. If you don’t have insurance or you can’t afford enough insurance and that home is destroyed, then you’re left with basically nothing. Insurance is the climate crisis canary in the coal mine, and the canary is just about dead.”

Days later, as embers still burn and you begin to accept that not one object will be recovered or salvaged from your home, your insurance company sends one of its employees or contractors, called an adjuster, to assess the damage, value what is or was, and (hopefully) make an offer of payment. While insurance companies defend their adjusters as necessary agents who help them evaluate claims, critics label them as conflicted loyalists who will undervalue losses, delay settlements, and pressure policy holders to settle quickly.

But as you stand there, a man in business-casual attire emerges from the smoke and approaches you apprehensively. He introduces himself as someone who can help. His title, too, is adjuster, but if you are able to focus enough on his pitch, he tells you he is not an employee of your insurance company or of a roofing company or a general contractor. If you would like help navigating the ashes of your new life, he will help you rebuild: independently value your losses, handle communications and negotiations with your insurer, draft paperwork, and take care of the settlement of the claims. He is part private detective, part lawyer, part psychologist. All of this sounds reasonable, so you take his card and tell him you’ll be in touch.

That evening, as you make plans for your family to sleep at a nearby friend’s house or in a hotel, some quick internet research teaches you this “public” adjuster is indeed part of a legitimate industry (although sometimes public adjusters, you discover, are known as “private” adjusters). Staff adjusters, you learn, are the ones that work for insurance companies, and independent adjusters are contracted for certain projects by insurance companies.

This ecosystem of adjusters is baffling, but you decide to retain the public adjuster. As you sign his contract, he informs you that he will take a significant cut of any claim settlement he negotiates. Your calculation is that outsourcing the administration of the recovery of your life is worth the cost—so long as the insurance company agrees to write a check.

I recently spoke with the president of a large public adjuster firm in California that represented victims of the Palisades and Eaton fires that broke out in early 2025 and destroyed about sixteen thousand buildings on nearly forty thousand acres, causing tens of billions of dollars in damages. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

***

Tyler Maroney: How many claims does the average public adjuster typically handle in a year?

Adjuster: It depends on the size of the claim, but some will do a hundred claims a year, mostly smaller—$10,000 claims or $50,000 claims. But if you’re talking about somebody who’s handling complicated claims, I’d say an average load for an adjuster is somewhere between twenty and fifty a year.

TM: And you handle more than just massive disasters, right?

Adjuster: We respond to disasters every day, 365 days a year. Some of them are disasters that affect a hundred people or a thousand people. Those are big events. But there are buildings that burn down every single day. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Minnesota or if you’re in New York, there’s water damage, there’s flooding, there are fires, there are robberies. It doesn’t require a hurricane or a wildfire for there to be a need for our service.

TM: I’ve read that clients don’t really know that public adjusters exist until they are desperate. Is part of your job getting the word out that this is an industry?

Adjuster: We’re luckier now in today’s world of technology because people can search for things online. I’ve been doing this thirty-three or thirty-four years, when there was no internet to search. If you had an insurance claim, you only had the connections you had, but today people can type into Google, “Can I get any help with my insurance claim?”

TM: I presume you go out into the field to attract clients?

Adjuster: Yes, part of the job is to be out there when an event happens or shortly after an event is over, to let people know that we exist.

TM: When a large fire like in the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles breaks out, you go as quickly as possible to the scene?

Adjuster: Yes. When you show up at somebody’s house and the family is in the front yard crying and trying to save things that aren’t savable, it’s sad. Sometimes it’s total loss, and you find people sifting through the rubble, lining up bits of pottery.

TM: And when you approach these suffering people, how do they respond?

Adjuster: You get a wide range of emotional responses, from “Get the fuck off my property, you ambulance-chasing vulture” to “Oh my God, we’re so lost. We don’t know what to do. Thank you so much for being here. Can you help us?”

TM: That must be a difficult emotional minefield to wade into.

Adjuster: Yes, and when you’re walking up to meet these people, most of the time they’ve never heard of a public adjuster. They have no idea who we are or what we do or that it’s a licensed profession. It can look like we’re trying to prey on people when they’re at this vulnerable point. The reality is that’s when they need help the most, because often they do whatever the insurance company tells them to do. That puts them in the worst spot they could be in.

TM: Worst spot?

Adjuster: So, say someone calls us six months after a fire. They have been arguing with their insurance company about the value of a claim and then, out of nowhere, they get a $65,000 bill from the restoration company [a third-party, for-profit vendor] and they want us to deal with that too. We have to say: You already agreed in writing and signed for them to do that work. That money’s gone, you spent it. We can’t take that back because it was an agreement you made before we were involved.

Most people just know they have an insurance agent that sold them some insurance, and they do what they’re told. Often that results in mistakes.

TM: What kinds of mistakes?

Adjuster: I’ll give you the easiest one. There is a fire in your house, but it burns only part of your house down. There’s still stuff in it. It’s not like a wildfire where it burns all the way to the ground. So the insurance company comes out, and they bring a restoration contractor. He’s going to help you get your stuff out of the house, store it, and get it cleaned up. Seems like an incredibly important service. He says it’s going to get worse if we don’t get your stuff out of the environment. Just sign here.

TM: Okay.

Adjuster: If the owner asks, “Who pays for this?,” the automatic response is “Oh, don’t worry about it, the insurance company pays for it, it’s part of your policy.” It makes perfect sense at the time. What they don’t share is that it erodes your contents limit [which means it reduces how much money the insurance company is likely to pay out]. You have given them carte blanche, and they can bill the insurance company directly. They charge not only for clean-up but for storage. And there’s no language that protects the homeowner if they’re not happy with the service.

TM: The homeowner is vulnerable at this point.

Adjuster: What they don’t understand is that six months from now, their stuff has all been cleaned, and the restoration company charged maybe a thousand dollars to clean something that was worth four hundred dollars and they don’t even want anymore. They could have just said, “Oh, a thousand dollars to clean that item? I don’t care about that anymore. Give me the thousand dollars.”

TM: And what can you do as an adjuster to prevent this?

Adjuster: You can say to the insurance company that our client wants to select items that have intrinsic value or that we believe are valuable enough to save and restore. We can advise that often the cost to clean something is more than its value or that it’s too damaged to properly restore it. Otherwise, a homeowner will find out that the restoration company has charged $65,000 when they have $300,000 of coverage for their contents, and that $65,000 is coming right off the top, and the cleaning costs reduces the amount of insurance they have for the things that they’ve completely lost.

TM: Back to the field, is the pitch as simple as “Hi, this might be awkward, but my name is x and I’m a public adjuster, which means I help people like you”?

Adjuster: Yeah. Often it’s “Your insurance company’s going to come out here, they’re going to assign an adjuster. That adjuster works for the insurance company. They don’t work for you. You have the opportunity and you have the right to hire your own public adjusting team that counterbalances the insurance company’s team so that you have an advocate who’s a true advocate for you to level the playing field.” That’s the pitch.

TM: Do you have a sense for what percentage of people who’ve been victimized by a catastrophe are able to engage public adjusters? I assume that most people, when they’ve gone through something like that, call their insurance company, right?

Adjuster: That’s traditionally what happens, yes. They either call their agent, if their insurance agent is somebody who they’re close with, or they call the insurance company and give notice that they have a claim. And some agents will refer clients to us in a secretive way. Some brokers [who work for policy holders, not insurance companies] think that if the carriers see that they’re recommending a public adjuster, that will be bad for their reputation with the insurance carriers. Some brokers don’t care.

TM: So how does that work?

Adjuster: Some brokers say, “Hey, don’t tell anybody I told you this, but you should talk to x public adjuster.” Or sometimes it’s more open, like, “Hey, [this public adjuster company] helped a lot of my clients, so you might want to talk to them.”

TM: So how do the brokers respond to you?

Adjuster: There are insurance brokers who haven’t worked with us or don’t know us. Or they feel threatened because they were hired to do this job, and by bringing or inviting you in as a public adjuster, they’re admitting that they don’t know what they’re doing. If you’re a salesperson and you’re selling insurance policies and you’re a credible person, you want to believe that what you’re selling is the best product available. You want to hold your head up high and say, “I represent x insurance company and they’re great insurance.” So for some insurance brokers, saying “Maybe you need help getting money” is saying something negative about the insurance company. For some insurance agents, that doesn’t feel right.

TM: Do you feel you are adversarial to insurance companies?

Adjuster: We are advocating for the policy holder, not the insurance company. The insurance companies like to say, “Why do you need a public adjuster? We’re going to pay you all the money you’re owed anyway.” But if that was true, then why would they care? Why would they even have that discussion if they’re going to pay the same benefits regardless of whether somebody has somebody helping them put it together? The reality is that they’re going to pay as little as they can. So are we adversarial, or are we just taking the workload off the policy holder? It’s an arduous process. Imagine a family where everything is gone, disappeared into the smoke, and you have the burden of sharing with the insurance company everything that you lost. Where would you start?

by Tyler Maroney, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Andrew Norman Wilson.

[ed. Public service post. Reminds me that I need to do an annual homeowner's insurance review. Been wondering how premiums and coverage have changed in the wake of increasingly common climate-related disasters. Unfortunately, no detail is provided on what these services are likely to cost (other than a "significant cut" of any negotiated claim settlement).]