Pete Hegseth: Kill Everybody

[ed. What the hell are we doing here?]

[ed. Another day, another atrocity (more so if you count Republican spinelessness and knee-jerk support for anything this administration does, including committing war crimes). See also: November 29, 2025 (LFAA); and,  Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all (WaPo):]

***

As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors. (...)

The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.

Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.

***

[ed. Want to guess Hegseth's response to such serious allegations? "As usual, the fake news is delivering more fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory reporting to discredit our incredible warriors fighting to protect the homeland." Um no, Pete. The news is focusing on you, not our "incredible warriors" who are currently - at your command - deploying battleships, drones, missles and more to destroy random fishing boats. At least he was sober enough to make a statement, but then couldn't resist reminding everyone of how a dignified cabinet secretary should respond by posting this on his X account). At least he correctly identifies as a cartoon character. But others haven't been so charitable:

"Perhaps Hegseth thinks that sinking boats on the high seas is funny. Maybe he just wanted to own the libs and all that. Or maybe he thought he could disrupt the gathering war crimes narrative, like the school delinquent pulling a fire alarm during an exam. Or maybe he just has poor judgment and even worse impulse control (which would explain a lot of things about Pete Hegseth). No matter the reason, his choice to trivialize the use of American military force reveals both the shallowness of the man’s character and the depth of his contempt for the military as an institution.

Posting stupid memes after being accused of murder is not the response of a patriot who must answer to the public about the security of the United States and its people in uniform. It is not the response of a secretary of defense who values the advice of the officers who report to him. It is not the response of a human being who comprehends the risks—and the costs—of ordering other people to kill helpless men clinging to the wreck of a boat."

This all prompted me to look at his Wikipedia entry, something I haven't had the stomach to do until now. What a piece of work.]

What Does China Want?

Abstract

The conventional wisdom is that China is a rising hegemon eager to replace the United States, dominate international institutions, and re-create the liberal international order in its own image. Drawing on data from 12,000 articles and hundreds of speeches by Xi Jinping, to discern China's intentions we analyze three terms or phrases from Chinese rhetoric: “struggle” (斗争), “rise of the East, decline of the West” (东升西降), and “no intention to replace the United States” ((无意取代美国). Our findings indicate that China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability and is more inwardly focused than externally oriented. China's aims are unambiguous, enduring, and limited: It cares about its borders, sovereignty, and foreign economic relations. China's main concerns are almost all regional and related to parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Our argument has three main implications. First, China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Thus, a hostile U.S. military posture in the Pacific is unwise and may unnecessarily create tensions. Second, the two countries could cooperate on several overlooked issue areas. Third, the conventional view of China plays down the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address.

There is much about China that is disturbing for the West. China's gross domestic product grew from $1.2 trillion in 2000 to $17 trillion in 2023. Having modernized the People's Liberation Army over the past generation, China is also rapidly increasing its stockpile of nuclear warheads. China spends almost $300 billion annually on defense. Current leader Xi Jinping has consolidated power and appears set to rule the authoritarian Communist country indefinitely. Chinese firms often engage in questionable activities, such as restricting data, inadequately enforcing intellectual property rights, and engaging in cyber theft. The Chinese government violates human rights and restricts numerous personal freedoms for its citizens. In violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), every country in the region, including China, is reclaiming land and militarizing islets in the disputed East and South China Seas. In short, China poses many potential problems to the United States and indeed to the world.

In U.S. academic and policymaking circles, the conventional wisdom is that China wants to dominate the world and expand its territory. For example, Elbridge Colby, deputy assistant secretary of defense during Donald Trump's first term and undersecretary of defense for Trump's second term, writes: “If China could subjugate Taiwan, it could then lift its gaze to targets farther afield … a natural next target for Beijing would be the Philippines … Vietnam, although not a U.S. ally, might also make a good target.” (...) The then–U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in 2022 that “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” Trump's former U.S. trade representative, Robert Lithgizer, claims that “China to me is an existential threat to the United States…. China views itself as number one in the world and wants to be that way.”

These assessments of China's intentions lead mainstream U.S. scholars and policy analysts from both the Left and the Right to policy prescriptions that will take generations to unfold, and that are almost completely focused on war-fighting, deterrence, and decoupling from China. Those who believe in this China threat call for increasing U.S. military expenditures and showing “resolve” toward China. The conventional wisdom also advocates a regional expansion of alliances with any country, democratic or authoritarian, that could join the United States to contain China. As Colby writes, “This is a book about war.” Brands and Beckley argue that the United States should reinforce its efforts to deter China from invading Taiwan: “What is needed is a strategy to deter or perhaps win a conflict in the 2020s … the Pentagon can dramatically raise the costs of a Chinese invasion by turning the international waters of the Taiwan Strait into a death trap for attacking forces.” Doshi argues that the United States should arm countries such as “Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India” with capabilities to contain China.

This leads to a key question: What does China want? To answer this question, this article examines contemporary China's goals and fears in words and deeds. In contrast to the conventional view, the evidence provided in this article leads to one overarching conclusion and three specific observations. Overall, China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability, and it remains more inwardly focused than externally oriented. More specifically: China's aims are unambiguous; China's aims are enduring; and China's aims are limited.

First, China's aims are unambiguous: China cares about its borders, its sovereignty, and its foreign economic relations. China cares about its unresolved borders in the East and South China Seas and with India, respectively. Almost all of its concerns are regional. Second, China deeply cares about its sovereign rights over various parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Third, China has an increasingly clear economic strategy for its relations with both East Asia and the rest of the world that aims to expand trade and economic relations, not reduce them.

It is also clear what China does not want: There is little mention in Chinese discourse of expansive goals or ambitions for global leadership and hegemony. Furthermore, China is not exporting ideology. Significantly, the CCP's emphasis on “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is not a generalized model for the world. In contrast, the United States claims to represent global values and norms. What China also does not want is to invade and conquer other countries; there is no evidence that China poses an existential threat to the countries on its borders or in its region that it does not already claim sovereignty over.

We explore how China views its own position and role in the region and globally. Recognizing that public statements vary in their level of authoritativeness, we examined three main sources: People's Daily, which represents not only the state but also the Central Committee of the CCP; Xi Jinping's and other senior officials' speeches; and Qiushi, a magazine publicizing the CCP's latest policy directions. We used computer-assisted text analysis to systematically assess China's stated goals over time. This method allowed us to more accurately track China's concerns and identify how they have changed. We also show that China's top leaders consistently reiterate that China does not seek regional hegemony or aim to compete with the United States for global supremacy. Instead, China views international relations as multilateral and cooperative.

Second, China's aims are inherited and enduring, not new. There is a “trans-dynastic” Chinese identity: Almost every major issue that the People's Republic of China (PRC) cares about today dates back to at least the nineteenth century during the Qing dynasty. These are not new goals that emerged after the Communist victory in 1949, and none of China's core interests were created by Xi. These are enduring Chinese concerns, even though the political authority governing China has changed dramatically and multiple times over the past two hundred years or more.

Third, what China wants is limited, even though its power has rapidly expanded over the past generation. China's claims and goals are either being resolved or remain static. This reality is in contrast to many of the expectations of U.S. policymakers and to the conventional wisdom of the international relations scholarly literature, which maintains that states' interests will grow as power grows. Rather, the evidence shows that the Chinese leadership is concerned about internal challenges more than external threats or expansion.

We find that China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Consequently, there is no need for a hostile military posture in the Pacific, and indeed the United States may be unnecessarily creating tensions. Just as important, we suggest that there is room for the two countries to cooperate on a number of issues areas that are currently overlooked. Finally, the conventional view of China de-emphasizes the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address. The conventional wisdom about U.S. grand strategy is problematic, and the vision of China that exists in Washington is dangerously wrong.

This article proceeds as follows. First, we discuss the conventional wisdom regarding China's goals as represented by top policymakers in the United States and in the existing scholarly literature. The second section examines Chinese rhetoric and points out nuances in how to read and interpret Chinese rhetoric. The third section uses quantitative methods to more systematically and accurately assess Chinese claims across time as reflected in the most authoritative Chinese pronouncements. The fourth section details how China's main priorities are enduring and trans-dynastic, and the fifth section shows how the most important of these claims are not expanding, even though China's power has grown rapidly over the past generation. We present the implications of our argument for the U.S.-China relationship in the conclusion.

by David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong, Zenobia T. Chan, MIT Press | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. The Roman empire collapsed because it was overextended. China won't make that mistake. They'll just get stronger and more self-reliant - securing their borders, advancing technology, providing security for their citizens. Dominant because they have a strategy for advancing their country's long-term interests, not dominance for its own sake. Most US problems have been self-inflicted - militarily, economically, politically, techologically. We've been distracted and screwing around for decades, empire building and trying to rule the world.]

Trees in Hiroshima a few days after the bombing.

Image: Asahi Shimbun, via Getty Images

[ed. via:]

A House of Dynamite Conversation

At one point in Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite, Captain Olivia Walker (played by Rebecca Ferguson) is overseeing the White House Situation Room as a single nuclear-armed missile streaks toward the American heartland. Amid tense efforts to intercept the missile, Walker finds a toy dinosaur belonging to her young son in her pocket. In that moment, the heartbreak and terror of the less-than-20-minute countdown to impact all but overwhelm Walker—and I suspect many who have watched the film in theaters. Suddenly, the stakes are clear: All the young children, all their parents, all the animals on the planet face extinction. Not as a vague possibility or a theoretical concept debated in policy white papers, not as something that might happen sometime, but as unavoidable reality that is actually happening. Right now.

In the pantheon of movies about nuclear catastrophe, the emotional power of A House of Dynamite is rivalled, to my way of thinking, only by Fail Safe, in which Henry Fonda, as an American president, must drop the bomb on New York City to atone for a mistaken US attack on Moscow and stave off all-out nuclear war. The equally relentless scenario for A House of Dynamite is superficially simple: A lone intercontinental ballistic missile is identified over the western Pacific, heading for somewhere in mid-America. Its launch was not seen by satellite sensors, so it’s unclear what country might have initiated the attack. An effort to shoot down the missile fails, despite the best efforts of an array of earnest military and civilian officials, and it becomes clear that—barring a technological malfunction of the missile’s warhead—Chicago will be obliterated. The United States’ response to the attack could well initiate worldwide nuclear war.

The emotional effectiveness of Bigelow’s film stems partly from its tripartite structure—the story is told three times, from three different points of view, each telling adding to and magnifying the others—partly from solid acting performances by a relatively large ensemble of actors, and not inconsequentially from details like the dinosaur. The film is in one sense a thriller, full of rising tension driven by a terrifying deadline. In a larger sense, it is a tragedy for each of the dedicated public servants trying to stave off the end of the world, and in that sense, it’s a tragedy for all of us to contemplate seriously.

I spoke with Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim, who wrote the screenplay for the film, last week, ahead of its debut on Netflix tomorrow. It opened widely in US theaters earlier in the month, which is why I’ve made no attempt to avoid spoilers in the following interview, which has been edited and condensed for readability. If you don’t already know that A House of Dynamite ends ambiguously, without explicitly showing whether Chicago and the world are or are not destroyed, you do now. (...)

Mecklin

I found the movie very effective, but I was curious about the decision not to have a depiction of nuclear effects on screen. There weren’t bombs blowing up. The movie had what some people say is an ambiguous ending. You don’t really know what followed. Why no explosions?

Bigelow

I felt like the fact that the bomb didn’t go off was an opportunity to start a conversation. With an explosion at the end, it would have been kind of all wrapped up neat, and you could point your finger [and say] “it’s bad that happened.” But it would sort of absolve us, the human race, of responsibility. And in fact, no, we are responsible for having created these weapons, and in a perfect world, getting rid of them.

Mecklin

So, do you have a different answer to that, Noah?

Noah Oppenheim

No, I don’t. I think that is the answer. I think if I were to add anything, it would only be that I do think audiences are numb to depictions of widespread destruction at this point. I mean, we’ve come off of years of comic book movies in which major cities have been reduced to rubble as if it were nothing. I think we just chose to take a different approach to trying to capture what this danger is.

Bigelow

And to stimulate a conversation. With an ambiguous ending, you walk out of the theater thinking, “Well, wait a minute.” It sort of could be interpreted, the film, as a call to action.

Mecklin

Within the expert community, the missile defense part of the movie is being discussed. It isn’t a surprise to them, or me, that missile defense is less than perfect. Some of them worry that this depiction in the movie will impel people to say, “Oh, we need better missile defense. We should build Golden Dome, right?” What do you feel about that? Kathryn first.

Bigelow

I think that’s kind of a misnomer. I think, in fact, if anything, we realize we’re not protected, we’re not safe. There is no magic situation that’s going to save the day. I’m sure you know a lot more about this, and Noah knows a lot more than I do, but from my cursory reading, you could spend $300 billion on a missile defense system, and it’s still not infallible. That is not, in my opinion, a smart course of action.

Mecklin

Noah, obviously you have talked to experts and read a lot about, in general, the nuclear threat, but also missile defense. How did you know to come up with, whatever, 61 percent [effectiveness of US missile interceptors]?

Oppenheim

That came directly from one of the tests that had been done on our current ground-based intercept system. Listen, as long as there are nuclear weapons in the world, it would obviously be better if we had more effective defense systems. But I think that the myth of a perfect missile defense system has given a lot of people false comfort over the years. In many ways, it appears to be an easier solution to chase. Right? How can we possibly eliminate the nuclear problem? So instead, maybe we can build an impenetrable shield that we can all retreat under.

But I think that there’s no such thing as an impenetrable shield at the end of the day, or at least not one that we’ve been able to build thus far. And from all of my conversations with people who work in missile defense—and again, I think we all are aligned and hoping that those systems could be improved—but I think that those folks are the first to acknowledge that it is a really hard physics problem at the end of the day that we may never be able to solve perfectly.

And so we do need to start looking at the other piece of this, which is the size of the nuclear stockpile. And how can we reduce the number of weapons that exist in the world, and how can we reduce the likelihood that they’re ever used?

Mecklin

Before I go on to other things, I wanted to give you the opportunity to name check any particular experts you consulted who helped you with thinking about or writing the movie.

Oppenheim

It’s a long list. I don’t know Kathryn—do you want to talk about Dan Karbler, who worked in missile defense for STRATCOM?

Bigelow

Go for it.

Oppenheim

So, we had a three-star general who came up in the missile defense field and actually has two kids whom he talks about, who also now work in missile defense, as well. We spoke to people who’ve worked in senior roles at the Pentagon, at the CIA, at the White House. We had STRATCOM officers on set almost every day that we were shooting those sequences. And then we relied upon the incredible body of work that folks who work in the nuclear field have been amassing for years. I mean, we talk a lot about the fact that the nuclear threat has fallen out of focus for a long time for the general public. But there is this incredible community of policy experts and journalists who’ve never stopped thinking about it, worrying about it, analyzing it.

And so whether it’s somebody like [the late Princeton researcher and former missileer] Bruce Blair or a journalist like Garrett Graff, who has written about continuity of government protocol, or Fred Kaplan and his book The Bomb—there’s a terrific library of resources that people can turn to.

Mecklin

I have found in my job that nuclear types—nuclear experts, journalists—are very picky. And I’m just curious: Generally with this kind of thing, trying to be a very technically accurate movie, inevitably you get people saying: “Oh, you got this little thing wrong. You got that little thing wrong.” Have you had anything like that that you’d want to talk about?

Bigelow

Actually, on the contrary, just yesterday in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols wrote a piece on the movie, and he said, you would think there might be some discrepancies, you would think there might be some inaccurate details, but according to him, and he’s very steeped in this space, it’s relatively accurate through and through. And it raises the need for a conversation about the fact that there are all these weapons in the world. (...)

Mecklin

I’m going to ask sort of a craft question. The narrative of the movie is telling essentially the same story three times from different points of view. And I’d just like to hear both of you talk about why and the challenges of doing that. Because the second, third time through—hey, maybe people get bored and walk out of the movie.

Bigelow

They don’t seem to.

I was interested in doing this story in real time, but of course, it takes 18, 19, minutes for that missile to impact, which would not be long enough for a feature film. But also, it’s not the same story, because you’re looking at it from different perspectives. You’re looking at it from the missile defense men at Ft. Greely. Then you’re looking at it from the White House Situation Room, where they need to get the information up to the president as quickly and as comprehensively as possible. And then you’re looking at it through STRATCOM, which is the home of the nuclear umbrella. And then, of course, finally, the Secretary of Defense and the president. So each time you’re looking at it through a different set of parameters.

Mecklin

And was that a difficult thing for you, Noah, in terms of writing it? There’s got to be the narrative thing that keeps people watching, right?

Oppenheim

First, as Kathryn mentioned, trying to give the audience a visceral understanding of how short a period of time something like this would unfold in was really important. But during that incredibly short period of time, the number of moving parts within the government and within our military are vast, and so I actually looked at it as an opportunity, right? Because there’s so much going on in various agencies—at Greeley, at STRATCOM, at the Pentagon, the situation in the Situation Room—and so you have the chance to kind of layer the audience’s understanding with each retelling. Because the first time you experience it, I think it’s just overwhelming, just making sense of it all. And then the second and third time, you’re able to appreciate additional nuance and deepen your understanding of the challenge that our policymakers and military officers would face. And I think the weight of that just accumulates over the course of the film, when you realize what we would be confronting if this were to happen.

by John Mecklin, with Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists |  Read more:

Image: Eros Hoagland/Netflix © 2025.

[ed. See also: How to understand the ending of ‘A House of Dynamite’; and, for a realistic scenario of what a nuclear strike might look like: The “House of Dynamite” sequel you didn’t know you needed (BotAS):]

***

If we pick up where A House of Dynamite ends, the story becomes one of devastation and cascading crises. Decades of modeling and simulations based on the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki help us understand the immediate and longer-term effects of a nuclear explosion. But in today’s deeply interconnected world, the effects of a nuclear attack would be far more complex and difficult to predict.

Let us assume that the missile carried a several-hundred-kiloton (kt) nuclear warhead—many times more powerful than the 15-kt bomb the United States used to destroy Hiroshima—and detonated directly above Chicago’s Loop, the dense commercial and financial core of the nation’s third-largest city.

What would ensue in the seconds, minutes, days, and months that follow, and how far would the effects ripple across the region, nation, and beyond?

The first seconds and minutes: detonation

At 9:51 a.m., without warning, the sky flashes white above Chicago. A fireball hotter than the surface of the sun engulfs the Loop, releasing a powerful pulse of heat, light, and x-rays. In less than a heartbeat, everyone within half a square mile—from commuters to children, doctors, and tourists—is vaporized instantly. Every building simply vanishes.

A shockwave expands outward faster than the speed of sound, flattening everything within roughly one mile of ground zero, including the Riverwalk, the Bean, Union Station, most of Chicago’s financial district, and the Jardine Water Purification Plant—which supplies drinking water to more than five million people. People are killed by debris and collapsing buildings. The city’s power, transport, communications, and water systems fail simultaneously. Major hospitals responsible for the city’s emergency and intensive care are destroyed.

Two miles from the epicenter, residential and commercial buildings in the West Loop, South Loop, and River North neighborhoods are heavily damaged or leveled. Debris blocks the streets and fires spread as gas lines rupture and wood and paper burn.

Anybody outside or near windows in at least a four-mile radius suffers third-degree burns from thermal radiation within milliseconds of the detonation. Those “lucky” enough to survive the initial blast absorb a dose of radiation about 800 times higher than the average annual exposure for Americans, causing severe radiation sickness that will likely be fatal within days or weeks.

The blast may have produced a localized electromagnetic pulse, frying electronics and communication technologies in the vicinity of the explosion. If not already physically destroyed, Chicago’s electric grid, telecom networks, and computer systems are knocked offline, complicating response efforts.

In less than 10 minutes, 350,000 people are dead and more than 200,000 are injured. Much of Chicago is destroyed and beyond recognition.

The first hours and days: fallout

Then, there is fallout. The intense heat vaporizes microscopic particles, including dust, soil, concrete, ash, debris, and radioactive materials, and lifts them into the atmosphere, forming the infamous mushroom cloud. As the wind carries these particles, they fall back to the earth, contaminating people, animals, water, and soil.

The direction and speed of the wind over Chicago can vary, making fallout inherently unpredictable. Assuming the region’s prevailing westerly winds push the cloud eastward, fallout descends on Lake Michigan—the largest public drinking water source in the state, serving approximately 6.6 million residents.

At average wind speeds, radiation that travels roughly 40 to 50 miles of the plume is immediately lethal to anyone outdoors. More than a hundred miles downwind, the intensity of exposure inflicts severe radiation sickness. Contamination from longer-lived isotopes would reach even further, poisoning Michigan’s robust agriculture and dairy industry and contaminating milk, meat, and grains.

Back in the city, the destruction of critical infrastructure triggers a chain of systemic failures, paralyzing emergency response. Tens of thousands of survivors suffer from deep burns, requiring urgent care. With only twenty Level I-burn centers in the state and scores of medical personnel among the injured or killed, this capacity amounts to a drop in an ocean of suffering. The city’s health system, among the most advanced in the world, has effectively collapsed. Suburban hospitals are quickly inundated, forced to focus on those most likely to live.

Politicized Stupidity

The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with reflections on the new Trump administration’s pattern of “politicized stupidity”: the willful refusal to understand abuses of power, including the destruction of the White House’s East Wing and the perceived sale of government influence disguised as private donations.

Then Frum speaks with his Atlantic colleague Tom Nichols, an expert on civil-military relations and a longtime scholar of U.S. defense policy, about President Donald Trump’s efforts to turn the military into a personal instrument of power. Nichols explains how the capture of the Justice Department, the firing of Pentagon lawyers, and the use of the National Guard against civilians are eroding the rule of law, and how a president can launch wars without congressional consent.

***

There’s so many outrages in the Trump years, there’s so many abuses that maybe it’s petty to fix on minor irritants, but there is a minor irritant that got caught in my craw, and I just want to ventilate a little bit about it. One of the more annoying and more pointless aspects of the Trump era is what I call politicized stupidity. Politicized stupidity is a kind of aggressive not getting the point by people who are otherwise perfectly well equipped to getting the point. Genuine stupidity is a misfortune and is distributed by God, but the politicized stupidity is chosen, and it’s chosen for reasons.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. So President [Donald] Trump has just demolished the East Wing of the White House. He did this without any form of consultation, as if the White House were his personal property, and in order to build a giant ballroom that there’s no demonstration of need for and that, again, he’s treating as a point of personal property. He’s choosing the design; there’s no process of respect for historical or cultural integrity. And he’s financing this whole project. We have no idea how much it will cost—or President Trump originally said $200 million; now he’s suggesting $300 million. But who knows what the cost will be. There weren’t drawings. There weren’t plans. It’s being done on a kind of ad hoc basis, and the cost could well climb beyond the startling figure of $300 [million] to much more.

And he is proposing to pay for this project—that is chosen entirely by himself with no consultation—by accepting donations from corporations and wealthy individuals. He has people who have business before the government, who seek favors before the government: Some of them have mergers that they’re hoping for approval. Others are in the crypto industry that has received a massive government favor in the form of the GENIUS [Act] and who are hoping for more favors. Others of whom are in business with members of the Trump family. If the country needed a ballroom, then there should have been a review process, a design process, and Congress should pay for it out of public revenues because it’s the People’s House, not Donald Trump’s house.

Okay, you get that. But there are people who insist on not getting it. There are people who say, Well, are you against ballrooms? Don’t you think the White House ever needs renovation? Other presidents have renovated the White House in the past. The point is not that you are for or against renovations, of course; the point is you are for or against not treating the White House as a person’s property. But there’s a kind of deliberate refusal to get the point, and you see this in many places in our public media. It’s the same when Donald Trump delivers a pardon to a crypto criminal, a convicted crypto criminal, who has helped to enrich his family.

Now, there have been other doubtful pardons by presidents in the past, and President [Joe] Biden apparently used an autopen to sign some of his pardons, and maybe that’s not ideal. But no one has ever pardoned people because they gave money to his family, his sons, his relatives. No one has ever delivered pardons because he just seems to have a general attitude of being pro-white-collar criminals. No one has ever said, I’m pardoning this convicted fraudster congressman because he always voted for my political party and always supported me, and that is the one and only grounds and basis of my pardoning this figure. But people insist on not getting that point: Biden used an autopen; isn’t that the same? No, it’s not? Well, I refuse to understand why it’s not. (...)

So presidents have done it before, but no one has made it the basis of his policy. And no one has ever said, I’m imposing tariffs on one of America’s closest allies, Canada, because I’m upset that they made a TV ad that implied that Ronald Reagan was a better president than I am. And indeed, Donald Trump is not 1/1,000,000th the president Ronald Reagan that was, and so it, obviously, it cuts to the bone. But again, there are people saying, Well, foreign countries shouldn’t criticize American policy on American TV. They don’t get the point. The stupidity is politicized.

Now, where does this come from? Well, part of the, I think, the reason for not getting the point is because the actual point is too big and too scary. Nobody wants to face what Donald Trump is and what he’s doing to the United States. Even those of us who talk about it all the time, we don’t wanna face it—it haunts our nightmares. But even though the point is big and scary, the point has to be faced and not denied through clever evasions.

Sometimes people don’t get the point because their boss demands they not get the point. If your job depends on writing an editorial saying that the destruction of the East Wing and its replacement by a ballroom financed by favor-seekers is just the same as President [Barack] Obama replacing the wiring and water in the main White House with money appropriated by Congress, if your boss says you have to do that or lose your job, there are people who, unfortunately, will do as told rather than lose their job. (...)

I can be concerned by the things that the universities are doing that are bad without having to come up with some clever, counterfactual, counter-imaginative justification for things that are obviously outrageous. We’re all going to like something, but we have to keep our sense of proportion. We have to understand that the main thing is the main thing. And, as I said, if God inflicted stupidity on you, it’s not your fault, but don’t choose it. That’s just annoying. (...)

[ed. Next up: Tom Nichols]

Frum: So you wrote this very important article for The Atlantic about the coming crisis in civil-military relations. This is a subject you’ve devoted so much of your academic life to. I wanna ask you to sit on the other side of the table for a moment. Imagine yourself—I don’t know that such a thing could ever happen—but imagine yourself a malign and criminally intended president who wanted to remake the U.S. military as a tool of personal power. How would you go about doing it?

Nichols: In this system of government in the United States, the first thing I would do is seize the Justice Department. And by seize, I don’t mean being elected and nominating an attorney general; I mean flushing out all of the people committed to the Constitution, the rule of law—you know, the lawyers. It’s almost a trope now to do the Merchant of Venice line, but you start with getting rid of the lawyers, if you’re going to do these kinds of things, and you replace it with your cronies. You replace it with people that are going to be loyal to you. You basically undo everything that’s been done with the Justice Department over 50 years.

Frum: So the first move at the Pentagon is not at the Pentagon; it’s across the river at the Justice Department.

Nichols: Exactly. Because if you’re a military officer, the people that you’re gonna want an opinion from are lawyers—which is the next step, which is you not only get rid of the lawyers at the Justice Department; you do what Trump’s already done: You get rid of the top lawyers of the Pentagon.

And look, the rule of law requires lawyers and people to interpret the law, and the first people you have to get rid of are anybody who says, My loyalty is to the rule of law, the statutes as written, the Constitution, and not to Donald Trump.

Frum: Because our hypothetical military officers will want advice about what is illegal and what is an illegal order, and—

Nichols: They’re already asking.

Frum: —and who do they turn to? If you have—

Nichols: Yeah, that’s already happening.

Frum: If you’re a three-star or a four-star general and you have a question, Is this a legal or an illegal order?, who do you ask?

Nichols: Well, you would ask the top legal service adviser in your branch, but [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth and Trump have fired them all. So now you’ve got guys—there are people doing that job, but you and I both know from working in government, when your boss has been canned and you’re the acting guy, or you’ve been suddenly elevated because people above you have been fired, that’s not a signal to you to be brave and innovative and daring about standing up for the Constitution. You’re sitting in a desk that somebody else had who tried that and got fired. So you might ask them—I can imagine some of these very senior officers are talking to friends or family attorneys or somebody. Because what’s going on, we’ll be talking about—I guess this is the hand-wave “all this”—but all of this, I think, is not legal.

So you capture the Justice Department, you fire the military lawyers, you insist on loyalty from the top commanders—which Trump thinks he has, apparently, with somebody like [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General] Dan Caine—and then you make sure to neuter the intelligence community so that foreign threats or plots or any other things that could interfere with elections in your favor are left undiscovered or uninvestigated.

Frum: Yeah. So you don’t have to remake the officer corps from top to bottom. You don’t even have to start looking for sympathetic two-star generals to replace the three-stars and sympathetic three-stars to replace the four-stars. You just cut them off from information and rely on natural bureaucratic inertia to make them obey you?

Nichols: And the chain of command. Because remember that officers are required to begin from the presumption of legality with an order. The system is designed to make sure that the chain of command functions effectively so that if you’re a colonel or a one-star or a two-star, you have to assume that if the order has come down from the president to the secretary, the advice of the chairman—the chairman’s not actually in the chain of command, but he gives advice—and by the time it gets to you, the assumption is: Well, this must be legal because all these other guys wouldn’t have ordered me to do it.

Frum: So if you get an order to blow up a fishing boat in the Caribbean or the Pacific, you would start with, Well, somebody must have signed off on this. They must have—

Nichols: Somebody signed off, exactly. And the place it should have stopped, of course, is: The attorney general, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should all be standing in the Oval Office, saying, You can’t do this. This isn’t legal. This is a violation of both American and international law. And if the president says, Well, go ahead, just do it, well, by the time it gets to that lieutenant commander in a helicopter or piloting a drone, he or she’s already saying—well, as you just said, David—Somebody must have signed off on this. (...)

Frum: So I wanna go back: Who has the mission? So the South Carolina or Texas National Guard is called up, sent to a blue state, and is told something like, We think a lot of the people in this lineup in this swing suburb are probably illegal aliens. And we think they should be detained for 12, 14, 16 hours, or ’til whenever the polls close. Your order is to go detain these people we believe are illegal aliens—I mean, they’re Democrats; they might as well be illegal aliens—detain them and hold them until the polls close. Who has the mission to say, That sounds like kind of an illegal order to me?

Nichols: Well, but they’re being much more clever about it than that. The mission to detain those people and to disrupt those operations goes to ICE. And then the president says, This being a federal agency, I’m not using the military to detain any of these people. I’m simply using the military to protect these other federal agencies while they do their job—

Frum: —of detaining everyone in the voting line—

Nichols: Of detaining everybody in line. It’s very clever. They say, We’re not doing domestic policing. We’re simply securing federal installations, protecting federal employees because the state or the local municipality either can’t or won’t do it. (...)

Nichols: I often think that the states and the cities can say, with a show of force, to say, Our police have this. We’re good. We don’t need you here, that our state cops—we’re good. Because I think part of Trump’s project here—and the way they’re just dragooning people into ICE who have no qualifications, really, is another tell and creating this kind of paramilitary goon squad out of ICE. I always thought of myself as an immigration hawk, and I’m kind of reaching the “Defund ICE” level at this point.

But I think part of Trump’s plan is simply to have these military forces during the elections so visible that people just stay home, that they’re just intimidated out of the public square, that you don’t even have to arrest them. You don’t have to have a big display of force. That the goal of all of this political activity, the goal of everything Trump is doing, is to drive people out of the public square, to say, The Wi-Fi is still working. There’s still 150 channels on TV. Beer is cheap. Gas is affordable. I don’t wanna deal with this. I don’t wanna deal with all of this, and it doesn’t really matter. ’Cause the other thing, I think, that’s the undertone of all this is, Look—it doesn’t really matter who’s in office. They’re all bad. Everybody’s corrupt. And so rather than use the military to inflict violence to stop the elections—you know, gerrymandering and voter suppression work in marginal elections, not huge-turnout elections. And so what they’re really trying to avert is a large Democratic turnout in places where they can pull that off.  (...)

Nichols: I was talking with friends who have to teach this stuff at both military and civilian institutions, and it’s like, how do you teach the American national security process now? There isn’t one. It’s whatever Donald Trump—it’s all vibes, right? It’s whatever Donald Trump feels at any given moment. And the problem is that he has—it’s a problem for us; it’s an advantage to him—that he surrounded himself with people who say, I am anticipating that he wants to do this. I will always have a plan ready to say, “You bet, boss. I got a plan for striking Venezuela.”

And I don’t think they’ve thought it through. I don’t think they care about thinking it through, David. I think they wanna be able to say, America’s at war. Anybody who opposes the president is a traitor.

by David Frum and Tom Nichols, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image:Paul Morigi/Getty

Scenario Scrutiny for AI Policy

AI 2027 was a descriptive forecast. Our next big project will be prescriptive: a scenario showing roughly how we think the US government should act during AI takeoff, accompanied by a “policy playbook” arguing for these recommendations.

One reason we’re producing a scenario alongside our playbook at all—as opposed to presenting our policies only as abstract arguments—is to stress-test them. We think many policy proposals for navigating AGI fall apart under scenario scrutiny—that is, if you try to write down a plausible scenario in which that proposal makes the world better, you will find that it runs into difficulties. The corollary is that scenario scrutiny can improve proposals by revealing their weak points.

To illustrate this process and the types of weak points it can expose, we’re about to give several examples of AI policy proposals and ways they could collapse under scenario scrutiny. These examples are necessarily oversimplified, since we don’t have the space in this blog post to articulate more sophisticated versions, much less subject them to serious scrutiny. But hopefully these simple examples illustrate the idea and motivate readers to subject their own proposals to more concrete examination.

With that in mind, here are some policy weaknesses that scenario scrutiny can unearth:

1. Applause lights. The simplest way that a scenario can improve an abstract proposal is by revealing that it is primarily a content-free appeal to unobjectionable values. Suppose that someone calls for the democratic, multinational development of AGI. This sounds good, but what does it look like in practice? The person who says this might not have much of an idea beyond “democracy good.” Having them try to write down a scenario might reveal this fact and allow them to then fill in the details of their actual proposal.

2. Bad analogies. Some AI policy proposals rely on bad analogies. For example, technological automation has historically led to increased prosperity, with displaced workers settling into new types of jobs created by that automation. Applying this argument to AGI straightforwardly leads to “the government should just do what it has done in previous technological transitions, like re-skilling programs.” However, if you look past the labels and write down a concrete scenario in which general, human-level AI automates all knowledge work… what happens next? Perhaps displaced white-collar workers migrate to blue-collar work or to jobs where it matters that it is specifically done by a human. Are there enough such jobs to absorb these workers? How long does it take the automated researchers to solve robotics and automate the blue-collar work too? What are the incentives of the labs that are renting out AI labor? We think reasoning in this way will reveal ways in which AGI is not like previous technologies, such as that it can also do the jobs that humans are supposed to migrate to, making “re-skilling” a bad proposal.

3. Uninterrogated consequences. Abstract arguments can appeal to incompletely explored concepts or goals. For example, a key part of many AI strategies is “beat China in an AGI race.” However, as Gwern asks,

“Then what? […] You get AGI and you show it off publicly, Xi Jinping blows his stack as he realizes how badly he screwed up strategically and declares a national emergency and the CCP starts racing towards its own AGI in a year, and… then what? What do you do in this 1 year period, while you still enjoy AGI supremacy? You have millions of AGIs which can do… ‘stuff’. What is this stuff?

“Are you going to start massive weaponized hacking to subvert CCP AI programs as much as possible short of nuclear war? Lobby the UN to ban rival AGIs and approve US carrier group air strikes on the Chinese mainland? License it to the CCP to buy them off? Just… do nothing and enjoy 10%+ GDP growth for one year before the rival CCP AGIs all start getting deployed? Do you have any idea at all? If you don’t, what is the point of ‘winning the race’?”

A concrete scenario demands concrete answers to these questions, by requiring you to ask “what happens next?” By default, “win the race” does not.

4. Optimistic assumptions and unfollowed incentives. There are many ways for a policy proposal to secretly rest upon optimistic assumptions, but one particularly important way is that, for no apparent reason, a relevant actor doesn’t follow their incentives. For example, upon proposing an international agreement on AI safety, you might forget that the countries—which would be racing to AGI by default—are probably looking for ways to break out of it! A useful frame here is to ask: “Is the world in equilibrium?” That is, has every actor already taken all actions that best serve their interests, given the actions taken by others and the constraints they face? Asking this question can help shine a spotlight on untaken opportunities and ways that actors could subvert policy goals by following their incentives.

Relatedly, a scenario is readily open to “red-teaming” through “what if?” questions, which can reveal optimistic assumptions and their potential impacts if broken. Such questions could be: What if alignment is significantly harder than I expect? What if the CEO secretly wants to be a dictator? What if timelines are longer and China has time to indigenize the compute supply chain?

5. Inconsistencies. Scenario scrutiny can also reveal inconsistencies, either between different parts of your scenario or between your policies and your predictions. For example, when writing our upcoming scenario, we wanted the U.S. and China to agree to a development pause before either reached the superhuman coder milestone. At this point, we realized a problem: a robust agreement would be much more difficult without verification technology, and much of this technology did not exist yet! We then went back and included an “Operation Warp Speed for Verification” earlier in the story. Concretely writing out our plan changed our current policy priorities and made our scenario more internally consistent.

6. Missing what’s important. Finally, a scenario can show you that your proposed policy doesn’t address the important bits of the problem. Take AI liability for example. Imagine the year is 2027, and things are unfolding as AI 2027 depicts. America’s OpenBrain is internally deploying its Agent-4 system to speed up its AI research by 50x, while simultaneously being unsure if Agent-4 is aligned. Meanwhile, Chinese competitor DeepCent is right on OpenBrain’s heels, with internal models that are only two months behind the frontier. What happens next? If OpenBrain pushes forward with Agent-4, it risks losing control to misaligned AI. If OpenBrain instead shuts down Agent-4, it cripples its capabilities research, thereby ceding the lead to DeepCent and the CCP. Where is liability in this picture? Maybe it prevented some risky public deployments earlier on. But, in this scenario, what happens next isn’t “Thankfully, Congress passed a law in 2026 subjecting frontier AI developers to strict liability, and so…

For this last example, you might argue that the scenario under which this policy was scrutinized is not plausible. Maybe your primary threat model is malicious use, in which those who would enforce liability still exist for long enough to make OpenBrain internalize its externalities. Maybe it’s something else. That’s fine! An important part of scenario scrutiny as a practice is that it allows for concrete discussion about which future trajectories are more plausible, in addition to which concrete policies would be best in those futures. However, we worry that many people have a scenario involving race dynamics and misalignment in mind and still suggest things like AI liability.

To this, one might argue that liability isn’t trying to solve race dynamics or misalignment; instead, it solves one chunk of the problem, providing value on the margin as part of a broader policy package. This is also fine! Scenario scrutiny is most useful for “grand plan” proposals. But we still think that marginal policies could benefit from scenario scrutiny.

The general principle is that writing a scenario by asking “what happens next, and is the world in equilibrium?” forces you to be concrete, which can surface various problems that arise from being vague and abstract. If you find you can’t write a scenario in which your proposed policies solve the hard problems, that’s a big red flag.

However, if you can write out a plausible scenario in which your policy is good, this isn’t enough for the policy to be good overall. But it’s a bar that we think proposals should meet.

As an analogy: just because a firm bidding for a construction contract submitted a blueprint of their proposed building, along with a breakdown of the estimated costs and calculations of structural integrity, doesn’t mean you should award them the contract! But it’s reasonable to make this part of the submission requirements, precisely because it allows you to more easily separate the wheat from the chaff and identify unrealistic plans. Given that plans for the future of AI are—to put it mildly—more important than plans for individual buildings, we think that scenario scrutiny is a reasonable standard to meet.

While we think that scenario scrutiny is underrated in policy, there are a few costs to consider:

by Joshua Turner and Daniel Kokotajlo, AI Futures Project |  Read more:

Image: via

Ice Fishing

[ed. Now this cracked me up : )]

A photograph of two Peshmerga fighters from Twana’s Box: The Photographic life of Twana Abdullah, Kurdistan Region of Iraq. 1974-1992, by Rawsht Twana, which was published last year by Fraglich Publishing. Courtesy Rawsht Twana and Fraglich Publishing.

via:

The '3.5% Rule'

 How a small minority can change the world.

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.

In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands. While in 2019, the presidents of Sudan and Algeria both announced they would step aside after decades in office, thanks to peaceful campaigns of resistance.

In each case, civil resistance by ordinary members of the public trumped the political elite to achieve radical change.

There are, of course, many ethical reasons to use nonviolent strategies. But compelling research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, confirms that civil disobedience is not only the moral choice; it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics – by a long way.

Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change. (...)

Working with Maria Stephan, a researcher at the ICNC, Chenoweth performed an extensive review of the literature on civil resistance and social movements from 1900 to 2006 – a data set then corroborated with other experts in the field. They primarily considered attempts to bring about regime change. A movement was considered a success if it fully achieved its goals both within a year of its peak engagement and as a direct result of its activities. A regime change resulting from foreign military intervention would not be considered a success, for instance. A campaign was considered violent, meanwhile, if it involved bombings, kidnappings, the destruction of infrastructure – or any other physical harm to people or property.

“We were trying to apply a pretty hard test to nonviolent resistance as a strategy,” Chenoweth says. (The criteria were so strict that India’s independence movement was not considered as evidence in favour of nonviolent protest in Chenoweth and Stephan’s analysis – since Britain’s dwindling military resources were considered to have been a deciding factor, even if the protests themselves were also a huge influence.)

By the end of this process, they had collected data from 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns. And their results – which were published in their book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict – were striking.

Strength in numbers

Overall, nonviolent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent campaigns: they led to political change 53% of the time compared to 26% for the violent protests.

This was partly the result of strength in numbers. Chenoweth argues that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed because they can recruit many more participants from a much broader demographic, which can cause severe disruption that paralyses normal urban life and the functioning of society.

In fact, of the 25 largest campaigns that they studied, 20 were nonviolent, and 14 of these were outright successes. Overall, the nonviolent campaigns attracted around four times as many participants (200,000) as the average violent campaign (50,000).

The People Power campaign against the Marcos regime in the Philippines, for instance, attracted two million participants at its height, while the Brazilian uprising in 1984 and 1985 attracted one million, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989 attracted 500,000 participants.

“Numbers really matter for building power in ways that can really pose a serious challenge or threat to entrenched authorities or occupations,” Chenoweth says – and nonviolent protest seems to be the best way to get that widespread support.

Once around 3.5% of the whole population has begun to participate actively, success appears to be inevitable. (...)

Chenoweth admits that she was initially surprised by her results. But she now cites many reasons that nonviolent protests can garner such high levels of support. Perhaps most obviously, violent protests necessarily exclude people who abhor and fear bloodshed, whereas peaceful protesters maintain the moral high ground. (...)

“There are more options for engaging and nonviolent resistance that don’t place people in as much physical danger, particularly as the numbers grow, compared to armed activity,” Chenoweth says. “And the techniques of nonviolent resistance are often more visible, so that it's easier for people to find out how to participate directly, and how to coordinate their activities for maximum disruption.”

by David Robson, BBC |  Read more:

Images: Getty Images

[ed. I'll be at the No Kings 2.0 rally tomorrow. As a rule, I tend to avoid these things since they mostly seem performative in nature (goofy costumes, dumb signs, mugging for the media, etc.), or devolve into violence if a few bad actors aren't immediately reigned in. But in this case, the issues threatening our constitution and democracy seem so great that merely voting every few years and writing letters isn't enough. I doubt it'll change anything this administration does or has planned, but maybe some other institutions (eg. Congress) might actually be scared or emboldened enough to grow a spine. I only wish they'd named it something other than No Kings (many countries actually support constitutional monarchies - Britain, Netherlands, Sweden, Japan, Norway, Spain, etc. It's the absolute ones - now and throughout history - that give the term a bad name: think Saudi Arabia, Oman, North Korea, etc.). I'm especially concerned that we may never see an uncontested national election again if one party refuses to accept results (or reality).]

Mission Impossible

After the midair collision in January over the Potomac River between an Army helicopter and a regional jet packed with young figure skaters and their parents flying out of Wichita, Kansas, and considering the ongoing travails of the Boeing Company, which saw at least five of its airplanes crash last year, I was so concerned about the state of U.S. aviation that, when called on by this magazine to attend President Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington, on June 14, 2025, I decided to drive all the way from my home in Austin, Texas, even though it cost me two days behind the wheel and a gas bill as expensive as a plane ticket.

I was no less concerned about the prospect of standing on the National Mall on the day of the parade, a celebration of the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Army, which happened to coincide with Trump’s seventy-ninth birthday. The forecast predicted appropriately foul weather for the occasion, and there would be a number of helicopters, of both modern and Vietnam-era vintage, flying over the parade grounds. The Army’s recent track record didn’t bode well for those positioned under the flight path. In the past two years, there had been at least twenty-four serious accidents involving helicopters and nineteen fatalities, culminating with the collision over the Potomac, the deadliest incident in American commercial aviation since 2001.

A crash was not the only thing that I worried about. Acts of low-level domestic terrorism and random shootings take place routinely in this country, and although security at the parade would be tight, I wondered what the chance was of some sort of attack on the parade-goers, or even another attempt on Trump’s life. The probability seemed low, but considering the number of veterans who would be in attendance, I had occasion to recall a 2023 study that found that military service is the single strongest predictor of whether an American will commit a mass killing. (...)

Then there were the politics of the parade, the first procession of military forces past the White House since the end of the Gulf War. For weeks, opinion columnists and television pundits had been sounding the alarm over the controversial festivities, which they saw as another sign of America’s downward slide into authoritarianism, into fascism. Comparisons abounded to Mussolini’s Italy, Pinochet’s Chile, and Hitler’s Germany. A coalition of opposition groups had organized a day of protests under the slogan “No Kings,” and that morning, in thousands of cities across the United States, millions of demonstrators were assembling, waving signs that said things like stop fascism, resist fascism, and no to trump’s fascist military parade.

I was no more thrilled than they were about the idea of tanks and armored vehicles rolling down Constitution Avenue. Trump’s accelerationist instincts, the zeal of his fan base, and the complicity, cowardice, and inaction of the Democratic Party in the face of the governing Republican trifecta made the possibility of a military dictatorship in the United States seem borderline plausible. But in a reminder that Trump is not wildly popular with the electorate so much as unopposed by any effective political counterweight, groups of foreign tourists predominated among the parade’s early arrivals.

The first people I met in the surprisingly short line to pass through the security checkpoint were an affable pair of fun-loving Europeans. Jelena, a Slovenian, had come in hopes of meeting a husband. “If someone’s going to marry me,” she explained with a laugh, “it will be a Republican man.” Liberals were too elitist for her: “Democrats will ask what school I went to.” Her high-spirited wingman, a Bulgarian named Slavko, was drinking beer out of a plastic cup at eleven o’clock in the morning. He had come “to get fucking drunk and high all day long,” he told me, “and just hang out.”

There were a number of Trump voters in line, but they seemed muted, even reasonable, in their political views, far from the legions of MAGA faithful I had expected to encounter. David and Sandra Clark, a middle-aged couple from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, were divided in their opinions of the president. Sandra was not a fan, she said, and David described himself as a “marginal” Trump supporter. They had come to observe the Army’s semiquincentennial, a “momentous occasion,” he said. The day before, Israel had bombed Iran, opening yet another front in the apartheid state’s war against its Muslim neighbors, and the Clarks were concerned about the situation. “It seems like it could get out of hand,” he said. “I’m here to see the protesters,” Sandra put in. “I may join them.”

A few of the attendees trickling in had on red hats that said trump 2028 or make iran great again, but these slogans somehow lacked their intended provocative effect. I looked out over the Mall, where the second-rate exhibits that the Army had set up made a mockery of the parade’s $30 million price tag. Was this supposed to be a show of American military might? (...)

By midday, the heat was ungodly. Not a drop of the predicted rain fell, and not a breeze blew. Near a much-needed water station was an exhibit of military first-aid kits manned by a delegation from Fort Bragg’s 44th Medical Brigade, which recently saw three of its current or former soldiers convicted of federal drug-trafficking charges related to a racket smuggling ketamine out of Cameroon. After hydrating, I watched the 3rd Infantry Regiment, a ceremonial unit known as the Old Guard, spin and toss their rifles and bayonets to a smattering of languorous applause from a small crowd of South Asian tourists, aging veterans, and subdued MAGA fans.

What kind of fascism was this? Rather than the authoritarian spectacle that liberals had anticipated, the festivities seemed to be more a demonstration of political fatigue and civic apathy. And if Trump intended the parade to be an advertisement of America’s military strength, it would instead prove to be an inadvertent display of the armed forces’ creeping decrepitude, low morale, shrinking size, obsolescence, and dysfunction. (...)

During the speech, Trump touted his proposed trillion-dollar defense budget, taunted the reporters in attendance, warned of hordes of immigrants coming from “the Congo in Africa,” denounced the protesters in Los Angeles as “animals,” ridiculed transgender people, and promised the troops a pay raise, even as he repeatedly strayed from his prepared remarks to praise the good looks of handsome service members who caught his eye. “For two and a half centuries, our soldiers have marched into the raging fires of battle and obliterated America’s enemies,” Trump told the crowd. “Our Army has smashed foreign empires, humbled kings, toppled tyrants, and hunted terrorist savages through the very gates of hell,” he said. “They all fear us. And we have the greatest force anywhere on earth.” (...)

In point of fact, the modern American military is a much weaker and more debilitated force than Trump’s braggadocio, and the Defense Department’s gargantuan spending habits, might suggest. The United States has either failed to achieve its stated aims in, or outright lost, every major war it has waged since 1945—with the arguable exception of the Gulf War—and it only seems to be getting less effective as defense expenditures continue to rise. You don’t need to look back to U.S. defeats in Iraq or Afghanistan, much less Vietnam, to illustrate this point. Just one month before Trump’s parade, in May, our armed forces suffered a humiliating loss against a tiny but fearless adversary in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world.

The Houthi rebels, also known as Ansar Allah, have been defying the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel ever since they first emerged as a military force in 2004 protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the quisling Yemeni regime’s collaboration with the Bush Administration. After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the Houthis, who had endured nearly a decade of starvation under a U.S.-backed Saudi blockade of their ports, tried to force Israel and its allies to lift the siege of Gaza by using their scrappy speedboat navy and homemade arsenal of cheaply manufactured missiles, drones, and unmanned underwater vehicles to choke off maritime traffic in the Red Sea. In response, the Biden Administration, invoking the threat posed by the Houthis to freedom of navigation, launched a wave of air strikes on Yemen and dispatched a naval fleet to reopen the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The campaign did not go well. A pair of Navy SEALs drowned while attempting to board a Houthi dhow, and the crew of the USS Gettysburg accidentally shot down an F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet after it took off from the USS Harry S. Truman, one of America’s premier aircraft carriers, which a short time later collided with an Egyptian merchant ship.

In January of this year, Trump declared the Houthis a terrorist organization and doubled down on Biden’s war. The administration replaced the commander of the Gettysburg and augmented U.S. assets in the region with another aircraft-carrier strike group, which costs $6.5 million a day to operate; B-2 bombers, which cost $90,000 per flight hour; and antimissile interceptors, which can cost $2.7 million apiece. In the span of a few weeks in March and April, the United States launched hundreds of air strikes on Yemen. The tough, ingenious (and dirt-poor) Houthis, protected by Yemen’s mountainous interior, fought back with the tenacity of drug-resistant microbes. They downed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Reaper drones; nearly managed to shoot several F-16s and an F-35 out of the sky; and evaded air defenses to strike Israel with long-range drones, all the while continuing to harass commercial shipping in the Red Sea, which plummeted by 60 percent.

On April 28, American warplanes struck a migrant detention center in the northern Yemeni city of Sadah, then dropped more bombs on emergency workers who arrived in the aftermath. Sixty-eight people were killed. In retaliation, the Houthis launched a fusillade of ballistic missiles at the Truman, which turned tail and steamed away, causing another Super Hornet to slide off the deck into the ocean.

The loss of a second $67 million fighter jet was evidently a turning point for President Trump. In one month, the United States had used up much of its stockpile of guided missiles and lost a number of aircraft but failed to establish air superiority over a country with a per capita GDP one sixth the size of Haiti’s. To avoid further embarrassment, Trump officials declared Operation Rough Rider a success and ordered U.S. Central Command to “pause” operations, effectively capitulating to the Houthis. “We hit them very hard and they had a great ability to withstand punishment,” Trump conceded. “You could say there was a lot of bravery there.” The very same day, yet another $67 million Super Hornet slipped off the deck of the Truman and sank to the bottom of the sea. (...)

At last it was time for the parade. The thin crowd, which hadn’t thickened much over the course of the day, filtered through a secondary security checkpoint and took up positions along Constitution Avenue, angling for spots in the shade. I saw a woman changing a baby’s diaper at the base of a tree, and a shirtless old man in a cavalry hat standing atop an overflowing garbage can. With the sun still high in the sky at six o’clock, the heat had barely relented. Smoke from a wildfire in New Jersey had turned the overcast sky a dirty brown.

On the north side of the street, in front of the White House, a covered stage had been set up for the reviewing party, protected by bulletproof glass and flanked by tanks below. First to take his seat was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, a “serial entrepreneur and investor,” according to his Air Force biography. The secretary of defense, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, came out shortly after, wearing a blue suit and camouflage tie, followed by Vice President J. D. Vance, who garnered scattered claps and whistles from the crowd. More-enthusiastic applause greeted President Trump’s appearance onstage, accompanied by a jarring blast of trumpets, but the cheering was still rather sedate. First Lady Melania Trump stood beside him, looking down at the crowd with cold contempt. The whole perverse regime was onstage, including Kristi Noem and Marco Rubio. Seeing them seated there in such close proximity, I found myself wondering how long-range those Houthi drones really are.

Throughout the day, I had spoken to various Trump voters and tried to sound out their opinions on Trump’s brand of militarism and his foreign policy. Rather than any ethos or ideology that could support the renewal of National Socialism in the United States, I found them to be motivated mostly by tired cultural grudges, xenophobic resentment, social-media memes, and civic illiteracy. Few were enthusiastic about defending Trump’s complete capitulation to Israel and the neocons.

Trump voters know just as well as the rest of us that the terror wars were a mistake. We all know that they were based on lies. We are all well aware that our side lost, and that the defeats were costly, and indeed ruinous. We are going to keep starting new wars anyway, and losing them too. As President Biden said last year of his administration’s air strikes on Yemen: “Are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”

This isn’t a sign of ascendant fascism so much as the nadir of late-stage capitalism, which depends on forever wars to juice corporate profits at a time of falling rates of return on investment. In its doddering senescence, the capitalist war machine is no less murderous than fascism was—witness the millions of Muslims killed by the United States and Israel since 2001—but it has considerably lower production values. In this soft dystopia, our military forces will not be destroyed in a cataclysmic confrontation with the armies of Communism, as befell Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. Instead, the defense oligarchs who own Congress will go on pocketing the money allocated to the military, just as they have been for the past forty years, until nothing is left but a hollow shell, a shrinking and sclerotic military so debilitated by graft, suicides, overdoses, and violent crime that it’s incapable of fulfilling its mission, and suitable only for use in theatrical deployments at home beating up protesters and rounding up migrants and the homeless.

Mustering the last of my morale, I trudged back to Constitution Avenue and took my place among the remaining parade-goers. One of the last formations to march past was an Army weapons-testing platoon accompanied by a number of small quadcopter drones. Quadcopters like these have proved pivotal in Ukraine, but the United States hardly makes any. China can churn out an estimated hundred cheap, disposable drones for every one produced in America. In an effort to close the gap, Pete Hegseth has announced new initiatives to boost domestic manufacturing of the devices, but early results have not been promising. A recent report in the New York Times described an exercise in Alaska in which defense contractors and soldiers tested prototypes of U.S.-built “one-way” kamikaze drones with results so dismal they were almost comical. None of the tests described were successful. The drones failed to launch or missed their targets. One crashed into a mountain.

The quadcopters hovering over the testing platoon at the rear of the parade were the X10D model made by Skydio, the largest U.S. drone manufacturer. Not long ago, Skydio transitioned its business from consumer to military and police drones, targeting markets in Ukraine, Israel, and elsewhere. After Skydio sold drones to Taiwan, Beijing retaliated last year by cutting off the company’s access to Chinese batteries, prompting the company to ration them to only one per drone. I noticed that one of the Skydio quadcopters hovering over the parade had dropped out of view. I couldn’t see where it had gone. Then one of the soldiers in the testing platoon marched past, holding it up over his head, make-believing that it was still aloft.

by Seth Harp, Harper's |  Read more:

Images: uncredited 

A Slow Moving and Viral Civil War

The Trump occupation arrived in Chicago and Portland in full force this weekend. And with prominent Republicans like Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller salivating on X about civil war, it seems likely that what we’re seeing in these two cities will soon be deployed to more blue states across the country. In fact, you could argue that a new kind of slow moving and very viral civil war has already started.

The plan was to federalize National Guard members already in Portland, but that was blocked by a Trump-appointed judge. So the Trump administration decided to get around the block by sending troops from other states to the city. According to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Trump administration is sending 400 Texas National Guard members and 300 California National Guard members to Portland and Chicago. “We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion,” Pritzker wrote on X. “America is on the brink of martial law,” Newsom wrote.

For those of you scratching your heads as to why sleepy Portland, Oregon, was chosen for the next stop on President Donald Trump’s occupation tour, it seems almost undeniable that it was picked for any reason other than it was a hotbed for Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Trumpism punishes anyone or anything that can steal its viral spotlight. And the White House has now activated every part of the MAGA ecosystem to make sure they control the attention economy as they storm Democratic cities.

And, right on cue, right-wing influencer Nick Sortor quickly made himself into the main character of the Portland occupation. On Friday, Sortor was arrested for disorderly conduct while making content at a protest in front of a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Now the Department of Justice says they’re investigating the arrest, and there was some chatter among right-wing influencers on X that there was even a briefly considered plan for ICE officers to personally yank Sortor out of jail.

As for what Sortor is actually filming, it’s exactly what you would expect. It’s the same kind of content-based aggression made popular by Charlie Kirk. Videos of left-wing protests chasing Sortor down the street while he screeches about how unhinged they are. And he has, obviously, made the rounds on Fox News.

A very dark lesson that right-wing influencers like Sortor have seemingly learned from Kirk’s death is that the more violent the situation they provoke, the harder the White House will respond. “Hey Antifa — just FYI: the more times you assauIt me, the higher the chances you have active duty Marines deployed to the streets of Portland by the end of the week,” Sortor wrote on X, offering himself up to the MAGA meat grinder. Anything to get those views, I guess!

The more malicious parts of the MAGA movement also know that these clashes, between citizens and the military, filmed by influencers, are a perfect venue for more explicitly violent intervention...

The Trump administration is not just occupying cities with soldiers and ICE officers, but creating flashpoints for propaganda. Every eventual showdown on the streets of a Democratic city is first teased by hysterical X posts from Trump administration members, Trump supporters and militias face off against local protesters, and then the chaos is livestreamed and clipped by right-wing influencers that just so happen to have the budgets to fly from city to city following the circus. And, of course, Fox News scoops up the best bits and packages them for viewers at home. Finally, the official X account for the Department of Homeland Security does a victory lap, collecting the best footage for a stupid music video about how they’re keeping us all safe. It’s the exact same playbook that was used for Trump’s endless rallies during his first term. The Trump hurricane comes to town and viral content and political violence follows in its wake. The key innovation of his second term is figuring out how to both scale the localized MAGA frenzy beyond just him and, also, most importantly, figure out a way to force it on blue states.

by Ryan Broderick, 404 Media |  Read more:

Image: X

[ed. An ecosystem of disinformation. See also: How Right-Wing Influencers Are Shaping the Guard Fight in Portland (NYT):]

***

To some extent, the right’s assertions of chaos in Oregon have been self-fulfilling. The administration’s close ties to a small but well-followed group of influencers and conspiracy theorists has amplified their voices, and they in turn have encouraged administration efforts to crack down on demonstrators. (...)

Pro-Trump provocateurs have gotten more open about their efforts as the stakes in the battle over how to police protests grow. Ms. Noem has threatened to quadruple the number of federal law enforcement agents in Portland if she is not satisfied with the city’s crowd-control efforts. Troops from the Oregon and California National Guards are awaiting deployment. Another group of guardsmen from Texas could be summoned at the president’s request.

Meantime, influencers are seeking to raise the tension. Matt Tardio, a right-wing streamer who was broadcasting to an online audience of 10,000 or so from the ICE building in Portland on Wednesday night, conceded that other streamers were trying to stir up trouble so they could capture it on video.

“They were handing out flags and trying to get antifa folks to burn them, and then claimed that they were going to do physical harm to them if they burned the American flag,” he said. All the while, a videographer was capturing the action...

“BREAKING,” Bo Loudon, a 19-year-old influencer and friend of Mr. Trump’s youngest son, Barron, wrote on social media. Ms. Noem “just stared down violently Antifa rioters on the roof of a Portland ICE facility,” he wrote.

The video attached showed Ms. Noem on the roof of the building looking down at a small clutch of protesters far away, one of them in a chicken suit.

The man in the chicken suit, Jack Dickinson, 26, who had been coming to the ICE building to protest federal immigration policies for months, said he was struck by the disconnect. Mr. Dickinson said he watched one of the pro-Trump influencers, Nick Sortor, film outside the ICE building, then heard the narration.

“He was talking about this looking like a third-world country,” Mr. Dickinson said as he surveyed a riverfront neighborhood of apartment buildings, coffee shops and an Italian restaurant popular for holiday meals and graduation parties. “It’s just clearly not.” (...)

Mr. Sortor was initially charged with second-degree disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor in Oregon, after he took a burning American flag from a left-wing demonstrator and a fight ensued. The response from Washington, D.C., was intense and immediate. Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded an investigation into the Portland Police Bureau, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Mr. Sortor had been “ambushed by antifa.”

For his efforts, Mr. Sortor found himself at the White House on Wednesday, as the president praised the actions of right-wing activists and pledged to dismantle antifa, a loose-knit group of anarchists whose presence in Portland has long angered Mr. Trump.

Mr. Sortor had been “assaulted in Portland by a flag-burning mob,” the president declared.

Mr. Sortor responded, “The Portland politicians literally are willing to sacrifice their own citizens just to appease these antifa terrorists.”