This story, about a Biden-to-Trump voter in rural Michigan who got fired in the probationary worker purge, caused a bit of controversy on Bluesky. After personalizing Ryleigh Cooper, describing her educational successes and her struggles to conceive a child, the story described how Trump’s empty promise to make IVF free was one of the things (the other being high costs) that led Cooper, after a 15-minute struggle in the voting booth, to vote for Trump instead of Kamala Harrs.
Cooper did not want to think about what happened three months prior but her mind went there anyway. To the voting booth in Baldwin’s town hall, where she filled out every part of the ballot before turning to the box that said “Presidential.” She recalled staring at it for 15 minutes.
She did not want to vote for Trump. Cooper hated what he said about women and hated how he treated them. Her family always said the women who accused the president of sexual assault had either made it up or deserved it. Cooper heard them and kept her own experience a secret, thinking that they might feel the same way about her.
She voted for Joe Biden in 2020, her first time casting a ballot in a presidential election. But life felt more complicated these days. Her mortgage was too expensive, groceries were nearly $400 a month, and one single cycle of IVF could cost more than 10 percent of her annual household income.
Trump, at a campaign stop an hour and a half south of her, had promised to make IVF free. She knew that from a video clip she saw on TikTok. And she had believed him.
A number of lefties argue that Cooper got what she voted for and is due no sympathy.
Even ignoring basic humanity, they’re missing how people decide to vote, and so also how people might choose to fight fascism.
They vote based on what their close families and friends do and say. As the piece notes, people in Baldwin, MI — one of the poorest towns in MI — are predominantly Trump people.
Most people in Baldwin like Trump; more than 62 percent in Lake County, which includes the town, voted for him in November and in 2020. But people don’t talk about it. Politics here, at least until recently, felt removed from everyday worries.
That’s not surprising. Baldwin is at the edge of a large swath of National Forest. I’ve driven through, at least twice; the area is pretty, but I drove through on the way to places on Lake Michigan that are beautiful, and so attract wealthy outsiders like Pete Buttigieg and tourism dollars (Baldwin is about an hour closer to Traverse City than to Grand Rapids). The area is focused on forestry and outdoor activities like hunting and fishing (a lovely bike trail ends in Baldwin). Cycling close to there once, I remember the discomfort of hearing people shooting on property sporting a Confederate flag flying right next to the bike trail.
There are news outlets close, in Big Rapids and Cadillac. But there’s not much substantive news, which may be why the piece describes that people don’t talk about politics. The article describes Cooper accessing two kinds of information: the “news” about Trump’s promise to make IVF free, which she found on TikTok, and Facebook posts from her grandmother and a former teacher parroting right wing lines.
She thought about the Facebook posts she had seen a few days earlier.
“It’s February 3,” her grandmother posted, “and we’re going in the right direction.”
“Any government employee who is afraid of transparency,” wrote the man who taught her AP government class in high school, “is a criminal!”
Cooper knew the people in her life meant well, but she wanted her future to be different from theirs. She had grown up watching her family struggle as her mother lost one job, then another, then another. She was just a few months shy of her graduate degree and close to a promotion that could nearly double her salary. Even $50,000 or $60,000 a year, she thought, could help get her a house a few counties over, with better schools.
Aside from her gender, Cooper is the kind of person who voted for Trump because they consume little real news but instead rely on algorithmic garbage, the kind of person who based her vote on a single TikTok post.
Even still, as a number of people on Bluesky noted, the two topics on which Cooper was misinformed, the veracity of Trump’s promise for free IVF and his claim to have nothing to do with Project 2025, were left unchallenged by a great many purportedly factual news outlets. And unless she got her undergraduate degree at Ferris State in Big Rapids, there’s a decent chance she was away at college when she voted for Biden in 2020 (Michigan State, along with some schools further north and in the UP, offer Forestry programs).
The reason why the United States is so polarized — the reason why Cooper is mostly surrounded by people who support Trump and therefore is statistically likely to rely on Trump voters’ opinion to decide how to vote — is because there’s little circulation between increasingly polarized urban and rural areas. She lives in Baldwin because her family does; she worked in forestry because that’s what the local industry is. Cooper’s isolation is the problem we need to fix, not the person we need to abandon.
And this story, the stories of thousands of people like her, are the quickest way to do that.
After all, I’m betting that her grandmother and AP government teacher didn’t think she’d be targeted by Trump’s cuts. She’s not an arrogant academic, she’s someone who made good by going to college and starting a graduate degree. I’m betting neither thinks she’s a criminal, either.
There’s a quote from Russ Vought that has been cited frequently, especially in the wake of Elon Musk’s five bullet email demand last week. Vought described how he wanted to traumatize people he labeled as “bureaucrats.”
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
“We want to put them in trauma.”
But Vought not only wanted to traumatize people he called bureaucrats, he wanted to turn them into villains.
With regards to the trauma, Vought has undoubtedly succeeded, possibly beyond his wildest dreams. Cooper’s story has already been matched by hundreds and thousands of others reported all over the country. The people who are left in government are waiting for the next blow, struggling to make sense of guidance that changes from minute to minute, paranoid that Musk’s boys are spying on their work emails.
But Vought’s effort to turn government workers into villains has largely backfired.
To be sure, several efforts to villainize workers have succeeded. Complaints about Musk’s disinformation targeting USAID appear throughout court declarations and interviews, such as this one submitted by “Diane Doe” in the AFSA lawsuit.
7. The following days maintained high levels of uncertainty, we tried to focus our team on continuing to analyze our portfolio to align with the America First agenda. It started to slowly become evident that the Administration was targeting USAID. For example, many tweets on X from Elon Musk attack USAID which made it clear that these actions had nothing to do with actually reviewing programs.
8. On Friday, January 31st through media posts many of us learned that the goal was in fact to abolish USAID. The level of chaos and uncertainty has been menacing since then. We thought the entire weekend our Mission Director was going to be recalled without cause. Our website where people could go to learn facts about our work disappeared. The social media attacks against USAID escalated to alleging us to be criminals, comparing us to worms, bragging about putting us through a wood chipper, and publishing false headlines about USAID’s work (the worst of which may be accusing USAID of manufacturing bio weapons including COVID-19). The online campaign against USAID has been unfounded and slanderous
10. Since then, as of February 6th 2025 we have received no official orders or travel authorizations, but have been told to continue to plan our immediate departure. Elon Musk and elected officials continue to misrepresent USAID on social media by sharing false information. I would also like to note that despite media talking points, life saving aid has still not been given a waiver. Our PEPFAR programs are still stalled.
11. I have not slept in days. I am not eating. This insanely rapid upheaval of USAID and its personnel has been appalling and sickening. Our country that we have served honorably has been turned against us. I sit by my phone fearing every email. The entire experience is traumatic and continues to be so. We are being treated unfairly and unjustly despite dedicating our lives to public service.
[snip]
15. The head of Congress in the country I am serving responded to Musk’s tweets by saying that they would be investigating USAID and their staff. This has put our safety and security at risk. Additionally, due to the online attack campaign against USAID and the threatening comments to posts the U.S. does not feel safe to return to.
And the far right has built on years of success villainizing the lead scapegoats for this fascist effort, trans people. Don Moynihan wrote up how the NYT, even after disavowing its past propaganda against trans people, adopted the frame set by Libs of TikTok and Christopher Rufo when they misrepresented NSA chat logs to claim the workers were engaged in wild deviance during work hours.
The bigger issue is that a political activist has a direct pipeline into everything government employees are saying, even platforms that are supposed to include sensitive security messages. Who leaked the information?
The bigger issue is that the DNI fired these employees without even a hint of due process.
The bigger issue is that these employees were targeted and fired because they were trans.
It is simply impossible to believe that a group of White male analysts would have been peremptorily fired for engaging in what their Commander in Chief has deemed “locker room talk.” The political activist being mocked, LibsofTikTok, were known for their anti-trans activism. That is why she was being mocked in the first place.
The political activist who broke the story, Chris Rufo, also mischaracterizes much of the discussion: he presents shared advice about transition surgeries and related medical issues as sexually deviant fetishes, leading to headlines like this in right-wing media:
Pink News analyzed the leaked chats and characterized the discussions as “honest and open accounts of various LGBTQ+ topics and experiences, many of them apparently written by trans employees and offered up as useful advice for colleagues.” People outside the trans community may have different levels of comfort with these discussions, but the context is that Rufo and others have consistently fed a stereotype of trans people as dangerous deviants. You don’t have to condone what the employees did to realize that the accusations of deviance are being used here in a way that would never be the case for other employees.
None of this is about security. Not really. It is about purging certain people and identities from public life. Whatever you think about trans people, you should be disturbed by this. If you are familiar with the Lavender Scare — when gay people were purged from government positions in the 1940s to 1960s — you probably know it as a cautionary tale from an intolerant past. A tale of moral panic and persecutions not to be repeated. But it is being repeated.
[snip]
Time and again Rufo’s harassment campaigns have worked because institutions and the media go along with one story he is telling — that he is battling institutional corruption — while deliberately ignoring another story he is telling about a campaign to purge certain ideas and people from public life.
I in no way want to diminish the effect of years of demonization of trans people, though even there, I hope the contributions trans men and women have made to the military, as Pete Hegseth tries to claim they’re disqualified to work in his DOD, undercuts this campaign. We’re about to hear 4,000 stories about the contributions trans people have made to keeping America safe. Let’s be ready to elevate those stories.
Plus, several things are happening that have dulled the effect of Elon Musk’s normally fine-tuned machine for fascism.
First, Elon and his mob have too many targets, with a focus shifting between lawyers and NGOs organizing the resistance, a wildly mismanaged Jeffrey Epstein disinformation effort yesterday as alleged sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate arrived in the US, judges, not to mention Trump’s old villains from his investigations. You need some modicum of focus — and usually more concerted attention from Trump than he has given so far — to fully demonize a person.
And these campaigns are misfiring. Elon Musk’s targeting of a woman who shares the last name of Norm Eisen, who has launched some of the more aggressive lawsuits against Trump’s abuses, misidentified the person in question.
Elon Musk falsely accused prominent lawyer and CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen of leading a “crime family” after he discovered a woman with the same last name who worked for an organization that accepted funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The only problem? The woman, Tamar Eisen, is no relation to Norm Eisen.
On X, Musk amplified a post which falsely stated that Tamar, an employee of the nonprofit National Democratic Institute, was the CNN personality’s daughter.
The post took aim at the elder Eisen for being “the mastermind behind a slew of lawsuits” that seek to stifle the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s gutting of USAID.
Tamar Eisen, the post alleged, “was strutting her stuff as a Program Officer for the NDI’s Gender, Women and Democracy team for almost three years.”
Musk wrote in response Thursday afternoon: “The Eisen crime family.”
Yet the two have no familial connection, a source familiar told the Daily Beast.
The guy in a Project Veritas video that Lee Zeldin has used in a corrupt campaign to criminalize green programs has, according to Mark Zaid, no tie to the disbursements Zeldin has targeted.
Meanwhile, the former EPA official in the Project Veritas video, Brent Efron, was contacted last week by the EPA’s inspector general’s office and on Monday by an FBI agent from Washington at the request of Miami federal prosecutor Joshua Paster, deputy chief of an asset forfeiture unit with the southern district of Florida, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Miami office is at least the third U.S. attorney’s office asked to take part in the investigation. It was not clear if Paster would remain on the case, the person said.
Spokespeople for the U.S. attorney’s offices in D.C. and Miami declined to comment.
Efron’s lawyer, Mark Zaid, said in an interview that his client “doesn’t know what this is about, and that he was never involved in the obligation or disbursement of funds from any EPA assistance program, including NCIF and CCIA [held at Citibank]. And he was not involved in any conversations about EPA and Citibank.”
Some of these misfires will just fizzle out as they’re replaced by new chosen villains. But some of them could blow up in spectacular (and useful) fashion, especially if Ed Martin — currently the Acting US Attorney but aspiring to win confirmation for the job by the Senate — judge-shopped until he got a warrant using the video to try to claw back $20 billion in funds.
Meanwhile, as Elon strikes out at everyone who crosses his path (including judges whose actions he seems to barely understand), both the national press like this WaPo story but also the local press continues to tell the stories of the people DOGE has fired. One I’m partial to (in part because I understand how a passion for the Great Lakes unifies the two parties) is this story about how the firings of some Fish and Wildlife personnel stationed a half hour away from Cooper may halt the effort to rid the Great Lakes of nasty lamprey eels (if you don’t know what a lamprey eel looks like, click through for the picture).
Over the weekend, 14 US Fish & Wildlife Service employees who implement the program — most if not all of them based in Ludington and Marquette — were fired in a nationwide purge that some have dubbed “The Valentine’s Day Massacre.”
On top of that, the agency has been forbidden from hiring dozens of seasonal workers needed to dose Great Lakes rivers with lamprey-killing chemicals, prompting officials who oversee the program to question whether it can function at all.
[snip]
The program costs US taxpayers more than $20 million annually, and in return it protects a multibillion-dollar fishery from an eel-like invader that entered the Great Lakes on manmade shipping canals more than a century ago.
A single lamprey can consume 40 pounds of fish annually by attaching to the animals’ skin with razor-sharp teeth, slowly draining their fluids. The Great Lakes ecosystem was in collapse by 1957, when scientists discovered a chemical compound called TMF that kills lamprey while sparing other species.
Today, the fishery commission contracts with the Fish & Wildlife Service to dose hundreds of rivers with TMF each year. As a result, lamprey populations are down about 90% from historical averages. But recent history offers a window into the risk of a lapse in treatments.
The story also focuses on other Forest personnel fired along with Cooper.
“These aren’t … quote-unquote bureaucrats,” Vanderheuel said. “They’re people who get their hands dirty and make sure the trails are cleared so you can ride your ATV. They clean your campgrounds. All the paint on the trees that people see? These are the guys and gals who paint the trees so we can sell timber.”
There are stories like this in every locality. People are saying, “these aren’t … quote-unquote bureaucrats,” in every locality.
The first and second batch of firings has already created a surge in stories portraying people Vought calls bureaucrats as, instead, people’s neighbors, neighbors who perform valuable functions that taxpayers have paid for. These people aren’t villains — they’re the ones protecting us from lamprey eels, cancer, and hurricanes. And by firing them, Elon has made it visible to a lot of people who didn’t know that that is what the federal government is about.
Even the USAID cuts — thought to be among the hardest thing to defend — are eliciting rich profiles of people affected, at least overseas, like this FT profile of both a patient at one of the South African HIV clinics shut down, and the network of people who contributed to its work. In short order, the stories will be a lot more dire, depicting the large number of children that Marco Rubio let die, possibly even examples of potentially violent backlash against America for not paying money owed to local partners.
The US government has, for decades, allowed its work to remain invisible to taxpayers, even as those taxpayers relied on programs to support their lifestyle and even to feed their kids. That invisibility made it easy for goons like Vought, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk to villainize anonymous government workers.
But even as the richest man in the world finds new ways to terrorize people while demanding big tax cuts and $2.4 billion contracts — a villain every bit as ugly as a lamprey eel — he is creating a flood of stories about the people, your neighbors, who provide the services you may not have realized came from the government.
It is, to my mind, an insane waste of time for self-imagined lefties to complain that newspapers are telling the story of Ryleigh Cooper. Not only is the firing spree we’re seeing an unprecedented attack on the American way of life, one that can and almost certainly will disrupt prior patterns of political formation, meaning whatever influence you think her firing will have on her future politicization is without past precedent. But whatever you think about the past choices Ryleigh Cooper made, she is the daughter of a local community that had a wildly distorted understanding of government — even from her AP government teacher! — before Elon’s firings made government visible in a new way. It may be too little or too late, but changing that understanding is a necessary precondition to trying to reverse the damage.
And making Ryleigh Cooper’s story a localized way to portray what government did, before Elon interrupted it, is an irreplaceable way to do that.
More importantly, no lefty should spend their time trying to make Ryleigh Cooper a villain: That’s precisely what the fascists have, explicitly, set out to do.
Update: Fixed my reference to Biden instead of Harris in first paragraph.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Screenshot-2025-02-28-at-1.04.28 PM.png450658emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-02-28 10:11:532025-02-28 12:49:51Russ Vought Got His Trauma — But Not the Villains He Imagined
100replies
Fiendish Thingy says:
Excellent post!
When “real Americans” have to deal with job loss, recession, double digit inflation, delayed tax refunds, lost healthcare, etc. as a result of the incompetent, hamfisted defenestration of the federal government by the Musketeers, no amount of propaganda or social media algorithms can obfuscate the real life consequences.
Let’s hope that painful suffering translates into action in the voting booth in 2026, and let’s hope Democrats can find an effective way to utilize this suffering to maximize their victories in the midterms.
I have suggested before that the Dems campaign slogan for 2026 should simply be “Had Enough Yet?”
I think it is just as likely that Vought knew very well that anyone and everyone will be hurt. The Cooper’s are expendable. It’s a show of strength. The price to be paid to save the nation. Whatever that means.
Baldwin and Lake County’s Appalachian sort of poverty; people living in old campers in the woods, is an archetypal case of economic history with black resorts 100 years ago leading to permanent deflation.
I think it probably varies person to person. I think Elon really is happy to harm poor white people. I’m pretty sure he’s happy to harm the US generally, as is Trump.
But some people in Vought’s neighborhood, and a great number of Republicans, are really stupid enough to believe in trickle down bullshit.
Adding, I actually looked up Vought’s background. His parents are working class. But I would be surprised if he had been around places like Baldwin in a long time. He’s become exactly the kind of DC bureaucrat he demonizes.
Indeed. I note that her belief in IVF being free left out the elephant in the room: what to do with the fertilized ova not used. It’s something that is already biting IVF service in the tush in the ‘fetal personhood’ states.
My beloved still doesn’t fully understand just how pervasive the RWNM (aka the Wurlitzer) is, and how the low information rural (and military bases through the AFRTS) media create voters essentially as knowledgeable as someone from the DPRK.
It was a notorious study done years ago (Al Franken refered to it in one of his books) where a Faux News consumer was less aware of reality than someone who lived under a rock. That has to be addressed, and FWIW this is where the recent retreat from fact-checking by the internet media is so worrisome.
Demonizing “federal employees” as a homogeneous group (Margie herself is also a “federal employee”) and then cutting through the various federal institutions with a blunt instrument (chainsaw being a good metaphor here) is ultimately in service of removing the bureaucratic inertia that is actually an obstacle to Trump/Musk and their evil friends from effectively grabbing executive power unto themselves – i.e. creating the dictatorship that they crave.
Demonizing federal bureaucracies as nests of the “deep state” is simply an excuse. There’s an (unfortunately-paywalled) article in the January issue of The Atlantic by Timothy Ryback detailing what Hitler did in 1933 once he was elected Chancellor. It took only 53 days with a lot of propagandistic maneuvering (and also some sheer luck), to dismantle the weak democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic for Hitler to achieve absolute control over government institutions. Worth a read if you have an Atlantic subscription (they have 30-day free trials).
We’re in day 39 of the Trump administration as of today…
No surprise insulting federal employees who have kept the government running for years. She is a federal employee paid by the people she disrespects. A public servant, serving the public being hateful and cruel. And one has to be taught to hate.
“Any government employee who is afraid of transparency,” wrote the man who taught her AP government class in high school, “is a criminal!”
This is a dangerous mentality, and one also deployed against immigrants who are claimed to be “criminals”. While there might be a law against unauthorized border crossings, there is no law against being “afraid of transparency”. Must be the JV football coach doubling as “teacher”?
Right. In my work investigating human disease case locations for the potential for mosquito borne transmission, I’m a “criminal” for “being afraid of transparency” because I don’t shout from the hilltops who and where these HIPAA protected individuals are located, in the spirit of “transparency”…
Thank you EW. I have followed you for years but never commented. I’m a recently retired Department of Labor lawyer. I know first hand the essential work performed by federal employees protecting American workers’ safety and health, making sure workers are properly paid, enforcing the rules governing retirement and health benefits to make sure employees’ money isn’t squandered or stolen. On and on. The administration’s attack on my hardworking friends and colleagues is heartbreaking. Thank you for your important coverage and ongoing inspiration.
On and on. “[…]the people, [our] neighbors, who provide the services [we] may not have realized came from the government.” We want them on that wall. We NEED them on that wall.
What’s most frustrating to me is the folks on our side who vociferously criticize these Republican voters, and lawmakers, for their perceived past sins, when they actually do speak up.
I think if it weren’t for our own side, more Republicans might stand up.
After all, what’s the motivation for, or benefit to, Republicans to stand up for what’s right?
Spoiler alert…there is absolutely none….and that’s why so very few do.
They’re well aware that they’ll face harassment, death threats and doxxing FROM THEIR OWN SIDE and utter disdain, ungratefulness and criticism of every past decision from our side.
Guaranteed, Cooper is seeing both
It costs us NOTHING to say “thank you for standing up and speaking out” without the self righteous claptrap and bitter condemnations.
We’re going to need a certain percentage of Republicans to help us defend democracy.
They’re going to need some motivation, because patriotism and integrity are pretty thin soup when your family’s safety and your own livelihood is on the line.
It seems like a small enough sacrifice for us to make.
You are describing what, back in 2017, I described as the Afternoon Tea of the Long Knives. This ain’t post-Weimar Germany, and very few will be murdered — though some few probably will be.
I do not have an explanation for why Republicans are terrified of being primaried but Democrats are not. but the disparuty is obvious.
Aside from the handful of Republicans who have already chosen constitutional values, the rest are not worth the powder it would take to blow them away. If democracy is saved, they will never have any part in it, because — and in this we are like Weimar Germany — they do not value democracy. They never have.
The motivation for standing up for what’s right is that it is right. Republicans need to be accountable. I am not as interested as you seem to be in helping their perpetual claims to be victims.
I currently live just north of this area in Michigan, but grew up in Minneapolis, which seems like another planet now. The story takes me back to 2016, when I first realized most everyone around me lived in an information bubble that fed a deep desire to blame others for their woes, both real and imaginary woes, and demonized all who would contradict the narrative. I’m skeptical that even hard, close-to-home consequences will break these folks away from their beliefs. It’s just too alluring to be told it’s all someone else’s fault, and there are villains out there screwing you over: foreigners, government employees, minorities, LGBT, libs, etc. They will continue to be blamed, and the media landscape has now been co-opted to support the narrative in spite of the facts.
I hear you about info bubble. You likely know the White Pine trail, which intersects the one that goes to Baldwin (and Evart, in which direction I’ve cycled). Riding that trail, it’s pretty stunning how quickly the mood changes as you cycle north from Grand Rapids.
On an airline flight many years ago, I chatted with an older gentleman who had been a high school teacher and then principal in western Pennsylvania. He shared a pearl of wisdom which he had learned from those roles: “All a person needs to be happy is food, shelter, and someone to blame.”
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The Musk work process of government destruction is emblematic of insufficient broad education. Musk and the immature “techies” have little knowledge beyond programming. General information of history & current events that are common sense are absent because they are self-satisfied with a lack of curiosity for anything outside the tech realm where their “intellectual” superiority has been applauded by people like Musk. Consequently their work process is shoddy, quick & dirty. Any normal quality control is non-existent because it isn’t in Musk’s DOGE brief and they don’t have the knowledge base skills to think as they play with fire. What may also be true is that these techie kids simply want to please their hero-unaware the older boss-man is more acutely deficient than themselves. For example, even Musk admits everyone knows about “ebola”. Apparently, those tech whiz kids didn’t know or care. Musk admits deleting those ebola prevention programs was one of those “sometime” mistakes that will be corrected quickly, although it doesn’t seem to have been corrected yet. Will Musk supervise with greater care now? No. That wouldn’t be any fun.
As I understand the situation, Musk should not be supervising. He is neither an DOGE employee nor any government employee. The current supervisory person is on vacation in Mexico. Musk, at most, should only be able to whisper in Trump’s ear, as an advisor. To be up front about it, though, Trump is just the sock puppet of the ultra right cabal that is really behind his presidency, not the knowledgeable leader who is penning these EOs. He doesn’t (and likely can’t, read them. Good luck, America.
“Cooper’s isolation is the problem we need to fix, not the person we need to abandon.”
Marcy, I would just like to thank you for this sentence in particular. I come from such a place. Not as isolated, but still a small backwater with families that have a hong history at that place, and little understanding of how things are elsewhere.
I would like to see us try to reduce our population concentration, to spread out, which would connect with some of these places. We have the tools. We have internet everywhere, we have the ability to deliver any product to the remotest places in the country, and we could easily pick up goods for shipping elsewhere, too.
But it would take a financial reorganization. We would need universal health care. This would be a big boon to small mom-and-pop businesses, as it would be something they didn’t have to worry about. We could do other things to ensure good internet and good transportation to these places. It wouldn’t benefit the billionaires, though.
In fact the move to more people working remotely, including of course federal employees, was doing just that. Many people would love to live in smaller, less expensive communities in the mountains or rural areas, but the jobs aren’t there. But if they can work remotely, they will move – and then the hospitals and health care and better schools will follow, as the better paid remote workers invest in their community and raise the tax base. This was happening in Virginia – federal workers were moving out of NoVA into SW Virginia. Now they are being forced to return to DC which will only serve to destabilize the places they are leaving.
I think in the long run, decentralization will win. Companies that do it effectively will flourish, and win in the marketplace. It’s going to move slowly, though. And the authoritarian bosses who think ya gotta watch ’em every second, are going to put up a fight. We are in that fight.
What is happening in DC right now is unlike anything I have experienced, and I have been here for quire some time. Almost anyone you speak to knows a federal worker who has lost their job or is afraid that they have will lose their job soon or is going to be relocated (and thus effectively fired) who knows where.
I spoke with someone at DoD a week or so back and her reaction was, “we’re DoD we’ll be fine, they won’t touch us.” That happy talk was not long for Musk & Company’s endeavors.
I also spoke with someone here who voted for Trump (yes, a flesh and blood human being and not an abstract demon) and noted that the local economy would likely crater, and that Trump’s actions might trigger a worldwide recession. This was met by the apologetics that it’s a necessary evil to get to a better place. But this time when things go south, unlike covid, there won’t be a massive influx of money to provide a bridge and keep the economy going.
I suspect it’s going to get really bad here, real soon.
Imho, I think the only thing that would give Trump pause is a real stock market crash. I wish I believed the courts will help us but I don’t.. especially since it seems like Musk/Trump et. al. just ignore rulings. Been reading that USAID money is not flowing partly thanks to CJ Roberts. Shameful.
To Marcy’s point about demonizing his voters who are suffering, I totally agree. Over on Reddit /fednews people are slamming a veteran who lost his job due to this mess… because they believe he voted for Trump. As the very astute Jasmine Crockett has opined, … you can vote for a democrat without becoming one. Something like that.
Thanks Marcy for this excellent post and emphasis on not making victims the villain.
I don’t think that Convict-1 / Krasnov really cares about the stock market. His marketing money isn’t really affected by it and as long as Musk, MBS, et al are financing him (above and under the table) he will not be affected. I think a key point of no return is if crypto initiatives take over for funding the government in any significant amount.
Milei and Trump both launched crypto coins and all of them collapsed in rug-pulling exercises (like the pump and dump in the stock market that led to the Great Depression). Milei is being impeached for doing this.
If the bond buyers retreat, trump will have to react. Its’ s like it-isn’t-the-volts-that-kill-you-it’s-the-amps. It isn’t the stocks that rule, it’s the bonds.
Estragon says:
“I don’t think that Convict-1 / Krasnov really cares about the stock market.”
Gotta disagree with you there. For New Yorkers of a certain age the stock market holds a special talismanic significance. Much like perceived subway crime, it exerts an outsized hold on the psyche of people like Trump, and indeed a lot of finance and finance-adjacent boomer NYers, however imperfect an analogue for real economic activity (as opposed to speculation) it is. Its emotional.
Jim Luther says:
I figure it is about 50/50 that the administration is knowingly engineering an economic collapse as a pretext for either declaring a national emergency or proposing an Enabling Law to der Reichstag, I mean Congress.
The control of the sea lamprey is a great example of the misguided notion that firing Government employees equals savings. Without control, the sea lamprey will devastate the fisheries in the Great Lakes – an approximately $7 billion dollar industry. A pretty good return on that $20 million investment. To control the sea lamprey timing is everything. The controlling chemical, TMF, must be applied before the sea lamprey larvae leave the tributaries and make their way into the open waters of the Great Lakes. Sea lamprey are prodigious breeder. If you miss the window, suddenly you have a billion-dollar problem. If the program is successful, few people are aware of the benefit. The same for the forest service, or food safety or epidemiology or …
The incompetence of this administration is breathtaking. I believe it will ultimately be their undoing, but not before a lot of people suffer.
While much about this woman’s story may be worth some sympathy, she IS a villain and she DOES deserve everything that’s happening to her. Her “struggle” over whether to vote for Harris or Trump (edited; original said “Biden”) didn’t happen in a vacuum. Trump was in the White House once before. Everybody on the planet knows who he is (liar, racist, convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, misogynist, fraud, liar, liar…), and suddenly she’s all leopards-and-faces because he turned out to be the person she and everybody else knew him to be. And we’re ALL suffering the consequences of her bad decision-making.
This post is a natural complement to Rayne’s Bluebeard post a few months back, and I’ll admit I struggle with both in this case even as I appreciate that the perspective is shared. This case is an individual who had cast a vote for Biden in 2020 and observed the years of the Trump presidency and his campaign. Biden had no “among the bushes” press secretary moment. Biden had no “perfect calls” and bi-partisan impeachments. And Biden didn’t identify neo-nazis as “very fine people”. The contrast was stark and clear. She valued IVF for herself more than Trump’s promise that he would bring pain on people that she likely figured either deserved it or were distant enough that it didn’t matter to her. She valued MAYBE having a child one day through those treatments more than Trump’s promise that he would deport children already alive in this country and encourage Israel to bomb children in another one.
And there are thousands like her. Tens of thousands. But she is white, and she is sad, and that is enough for a media that has no problem ignoring the already tenfold suffering inflicted on marginalized populations to devote bandwidth to a leopard-eaten face.
Thank you for the article. As difficult as it can feel at times watching things come to pass that people far less analytical than you also managed to scream from the rooftops in advance, you are correct about the worth of a misled soul. Mercy matters most when it’s difficult.
The maddening thing that can’t be just a coincidence, is how Trump will say one thing and then seconds/minutes later the exact opposite. It allows him to have it both ways, and reporters rarely challenge him on those or any nonsensical statements. He hedged to Hell and back on abortion. Cooper heard exactly what she wanted to hear and ignored the rest, because that’s what she wanted to hear.
And what exactly are you seeking to wreak by scapegoating the softest of soft targets?
Plenty of Democratic voters and public opinion shapers were groomed within an information bubble to persuade themselves that snarling vituperation toward Merrick Garland is appropriate because of imagined sins.
Are you attempting to equate ignorant unhappiness with an appointed position where much of the material was either classified or required analysis such that only work such as this blog could tease out (and we know that because of Dr. Wheeler’s frequent references to other authors, even good authors, who missed the mark) with voting for a President that openly mocked vulnerable populations such as the disabled and minorities (not to mention POWs, an alleged R favorite) while openly stating his intent to pursue ghastly policies home and abroad?
The leopard has eaten faces. Mercy is in order. But mercy and repentance are side-by-side ideals.
SteveBev says:
CaptainCondorcet
February 28, 2025 at 3:59 pm
An 84 word question? Was it rhetorical?
Your badly reasoned sophistry doesn’t save either you or Grain.
Nor justify your preference for revenge and humiliation.
Poor show.
CaptainCondorcet says:
SteveBev
February 28, 2025 at 4:27 pm
First you attack another commenter who posted wanting confirmation this was genuine and not selfish regret easily switched back with a rehire. Then you call me an intellectual liar for pointing out both that you intentionally shifted action (vote vs complaint) and scope (Garland vs Trump).
The archives will show many more comments where I’ve agreed with you and vice versa than any interactions I’ve had with Grain, but today I am disappointed. And done. Eviscerate me as you will.
Gacyclist says:
But we all saw four years of trump. What more does anyone need to know in that he tried to illegally, unconstitutionally and violently overturn an election in which he was soundly defeated. The maga movement ended 240+ years peaceful transfer of power for us.
Has anyone mentioned that RFK jr. of all people on Feb 14th was reported to have halted the probationary firings at the Indian Health Service?
2/27 Judge rules OPM illegally ordered agencies to fire all non-essential probationary employees
2/27 NOAA/NWS starts firing 500 and then another 800 probationary employees.
Competency is not a requirement in loyalty cults but a few court orders and the cult may come around to the legal way of doing a reduction in force.
Keep in mind that that would disproportionately affect the constituents of John Thune and Lisa Murkowski, which is likely why it was reversed. Trump can’t afford to piss off either.
I note that other exceptions have been (quietly) carved out for red states, so how does that square with the ‘equal protection of the laws’ part of the Constitution? Animal Farm by Orwell also applies.
Whether Murkowski and Thune should feel untouchable is doubtful, especially when confronted with the prospect of being primaried by someone with billionaire backing. We’ll know when the budget reaches the Senate and (I expect) they roll over.
On February 18th, the top criminal prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Washington, DC also quit, apparently also over a directive from Mr Bove, this time to freeze spending authorised under Mr Biden. Dispensing with such lawyers is vital to Mr Trump’s project. In remarks revealed by the investigative news outlet ProPublica, Russell Vought, Mr Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, once lamented how, when he served in the same role during Mr Trump’s first term, government lawyers would say “you can’t do that” because it was against the law. “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral,” Mr Vought said.
I have been communicating with a close friend who is a long-time MD/PhD at the NIH (epidemiology, public health) who was detailed to DoD late last summer and sent to Uganda to deal with HIV. Her recent com (2/14) says, “I am ok for now — in Kampala. Not so much the patients.”
Like many with an assignment overseas, she uprooted from DC, rented her place to a NIH colleague (who may be, herself, up the creek) and is now suspended between someplace and nowhere else.
Luckily, Trump (per abc) will soon sign a decretal establishing English as the official US language. (Which is chiefly what Rick Lazio ran against Hillary on, twenty five years ago.)
Yes, I know “decretal” refers to RC canonical dictum…but there you are.
My liberal grandparents built their retirement home, which my sisters and I now own, in the “beautiful” part of northwestern Michigan. I’ve spent a lot of time there, and traveling between there and points east, in the sixty years since. The inland poverty–away from what has become a tourist-haven “Gold Coast”–is impossible to ignore for those who maintain property, which means hiring carpenters, roofers, and other local talent. We’ve gotten to know and be friends with many like Ms. Cooper, not all Republicans. But the harder life gets, the less time (and money) folks have to keep up with legacy media.
Passing judgment on people without getting to know them, and how they arrived at their voting decisions, will get us nowhere–aside from that brief burst of self-righteous superiority. These are the exact people who might switch parties next time…and might actually VOTE, unlike all those Dems who stayed home in 2024. For one thing, these are not for the most part the targets of GOP voter suppression efforts. We need them.
“All those Dems who stayed home in 2024” carries a LOT of speculation behind it in a country that recently hovers around 40% independent. In states where it mattered, once voter suppression efforts were accounted for, that number might be smaller than you’d think. It might be small enough to be near inconsequential in the face of a re-invigorated group of “safe white Dem male > tyrant > black woman” independent and weak-leaning Republican voters.
Back in the early ’90’s, the public high school where I taught had a dial-up internet connection. I maintained a small network in my classroom and the Chinese exchange teacher we had would use it a couple of times a week to connect to her family. These were the days when we believed that people living in places like Ryleigh Cooper would have a wider world opened for them, with opportunities far beyond her small rural hometown. Instead, we have an enshittified mass communication system where lies and half-truths prevail.
Public K-12 educators are more than familiar with Chris Rufo and Moms for Liberty and their methods. They practiced on us, gearing up for their shining moment with Musk and Vought, calling us lazy, incompetent, unpatriotic, socialist, communist, parasitical groomers. Charter schools and voucher schemes have been endorsed by both Democrats and Republicans, so our support was thin. Public education is a cornerstone of democracy and sadly it’s unsurprising to see our democratic system become so wobbly.
I hear you, but in 2016 I was surprised when my Mormon cousins — all the ones who had done foreign missions — suddenly realized that trump was serious about his hatred of foreigners and immigrants, and they began frantically (and hopelessly) organizing against him in Utah and Idaho.
Thank you for this framing of Ms Cooper. The nasty “she deserves it” takes really ignore how much MSM did her wrong, even if she cites TikTok . Trump lies all the time and it really takes some life experience and perspective to tell how to predict his actual actions in the future. And she’s got her family, friends and (shudders) her AP Government teacher providing a perspective.
The thing that strikes me is that she was reluctant to share with the women in her family her sexual assault trauma for fear of being branded a skank, and now the whole NYT world knows about it. I can only hope her mother, grandmother and other family members will compassionately share their Me Too stories and chip away at least a tiny bit at that “she asked for it” framing.
Olga Lautman, whose area of expertise is as an analyst and researcher on Russian disinformation, has a daily Trump Tyranny Tracker. It’s a simple format of what happened, why it matters and a link to the source. From today’s post:
FBI Director Kash Patel Proposes UFC Training for Agents
What Happened: Kash Patel suggested partnering with UFC to improve FBI agents’ fitness. This comes amid mass reassignments and threats to agents involved in January 6 cases.
Why It Matters: Patel is prioritizing a Trump ally’s business while purging FBI ranks, highlighting political favoritism over law enforcement duties.
On the topic of Russian misinformation, disinformation,and imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I highly recommend the book Putin’s Kleptocracy by Karen Dawisha. Whether Trump knows it or not (and I would bet some of his advisors know it quite well), the roadmap she lays out there about Putin’s path to where he is in many ways exactly what Trump is trying in his actions mentioned in this “Tyranny Tracker”.
UFC fighters aren’t more fit than FBI agents. They’re used to ring fighting with a set of rules. FBI doesn’t normally need that stuff – and when there’s a fight, it probably involves firearms. Patel needs FBI training.
I suspect it will show the difference between looking tough and being tough, even before allowing for various kayfabe rules. Convict-1 / Krasnov has always been about looking tough and when called on to actually be tough he either whines for help (i.e. SCOTUS) or slinks away.
UFC fighters are entertainers. Many are exceptionally fit, but their work, for which they need an equity card, is carefully choreographed. Obviously not the environment FBI field agents deal with. Ka$h Patel is just trying to double dip, and use one gig to enhance the value of another. Very Trumpian.
BTW, over about half a century in the FBI and its predecessor agency, J. Edgar Hoover never fired his weapon on duty.
UFC is a combat sport. There’s definitely a big entertainment aspect, including choreographed entrances, but the fighting is not choreographed.
That said, it’s a very different job from law enforcement.
earlofhuntingdon says:
My mistake. My description applies more to WWE than to UFC, though the two have merged, which heightens the emphasis on entertainment.
As you say, though, there’s no obvious or necessary connection between UFC and law enforcement work, let alone the FBI, which already has access to specialist training resources.
Greg Hunter says:
The US Forest Service was the best Agency I have ever had the pleasure of providing services to and while this effort kept me poor monetarily, the educational enrichment was priceless. Due to the diverse nature of the environments across the country, each USFS operation provided insights on why local knowledge and science matters. I can remember reading an assessment of USFS children at one District Office having “mottled teeth” due to high naturally occurring fluoride in the groundwater they were drinking. In another study it was found that the Lindane showing up in the drinking water in the 1980s was a direct result of spraying German POWs for lice with the material inside a shower house that was tied to the septic drainage field. It took about 35 years for the Lindane to impact the onsite drinking water.
Timber marking is another fascinating rabbit hole and one I can opine on at length as prior to Ryleigh Cooper arriving in that program area, many miscarriages were tied to the use of toxins used to formulate these tracer paints. These tracer paints have morphed over time with less toxic versions being replaced again with more toxic ones but I am unsure if the proper worker evaluations were completed as OSHA has no mechanism to fine USFS operations. The other legacy that the USFS gets foisted with are the toxic castoffs from the DOD as I for one would not be drinking ground water generated anywhere near the old Wurtsmith Air Force Base.
In all candor, I am shocked Ryleigh got the position as many college graduates interested in Land Management are shut out of those jobs by less qualified DOD applicants with the 5 point preference. In another unprecedented move they picked a Chief from outside the USFS.
As I checked the local Big Rapids and Cadillac news to see what they were reporting on, the latter was focused on PFAS contaminants, which has been an issues since well before I left.
One of my HS classmates went into forestry – he got a scholarship to Berkeley! and worked in stuff like phytoremediation. My brother met him on one project, decades later, and they talked about the old days, as we all lived in a small cul-de-sac.
It’s futile to hope that the mainstream media will take up a bunch of stories like Cooper’s. While they enjoy a human-interest story from time to time, they’re much more focused on horse-race political news. Besides, a now pretty vast swath of the population doesn’t read the NYT or watch CBS news. They watch Fox News or get their news from social media. Most of their waking hours are either working or watching television. And that’s where we need to find them.
Democrats need to dip deep into their war chest NOW, not just before the midterms. And use that money to fund a shit load of advertising that does nothing but tell these stories, of people doing important work here and abroad, who are getting summarily fired by a billionaire who has no knowledge of, let alone respect for, what they do. And most viewers don’t either. Time to open their eyes.
Do you think Hitler would have lasted long if scenes from the death camps were played during theater intermissions?
How would someone have gotten scenes from the death camps to theaters?
And even though the world knew, very few countries helped until…
Compare to the fact that each of Trump’s impeachments was broadcast live and in living color and reported on live or almost live to the US and the world, as were the J6 insurrection, the J6 insurrection Committee hearings; every word of his trials was tweeted out live and reported on live or almost live.
Yet half the people in the US did not and do not believe their ears and eyes.
I don’t know if seeing what’s happening around them is going to change their minds when Fox, their families and their friends say it’s necessary.
But I hope I am wrong.
It was pathetic. Zelensky held his own but was lectured by Lecturer-In-Chief Vance like he was a 1950s dad lecturing his disrespectful kids. And of course the vaunted “rare earth deal” was not signed, the press conference for that cancelled and Zelensky’s team was kicked out of the Oval Office immediately afterwards. Pure bully-ism on display here, the opposite of diplomacy.
“Ok Zelenskyy, this is what’s gonna happen. My pal Vlad the Invader here broke into your house and destroyed half of it. He’s gonna destroy the rest of your house if you don’t give me half your jewelry from the safe. Now, get on your knees and thank me for such a generous offer or I set Vlad loose again.”
Give that man a Nobel Peace Prize!
MsJennyMD says:
Marco Rubio 11:19 AM, 2/28/2025
Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before. Thank you for putting America First. America is with you!
Every time I see that quote from Russell Vought about wanting to traumatize “federal bureaucrats”, I see red. Why would anyone in a position of responsibility in government want to traumatize an employee who was hired to do a job and is doing that job?
I’ve long suspected JD Vance and Musk of regarding employees as nothing more than widgets that subtract from profit. Getting rid of widgets means you don’t have to think about the human misery you are causing.
But actually wanting to traumatize is a whole different level of sociopathy.
I am not sure that analogies to Hitler and the SS are valid anymore. I see people like Vought and think about the “bread and circuses” Roman emperors used to distract from bread and butter issues. The “circuses” weren’t clown shows. They were displays of brutality, often involving Christians being offered up to wild beasts. Federal workers and immigrants are the new Christians.
And, yes, people who voted for Trump and are now the victims of his cruelty deserve compassion and our mercy.
Why would anyone in a position of responsibility in government want to traumatize an employee who was hired to do a job and is doing that job?
Because their aim is eliminate and/or “hollow out” any and all obstructive bureaucracies that get in the way of their claiming total control of all political institutions, thereby ushering in the “golden age” of their new dictatorship.
Federal employees are just collateral damage in their scheme. I wish people would stop pretending that any of these people have a conscience. They do not. They are ruthlesslty purusing their goals, that’s all.
They learned well the lessons from Japan, even if they will never admit it. As long as the bureaucratic state’s primary purpose happens to line up with getting aid to enough of the right people to support you and does almost nothing else to impede your efforts, and as long as it is a bit more challenging for your opponents to vote than your supporters, you can proudly claim fair and free elections while having decades of one-party rule. And the LDP wasn’t half as willing to skirt (or outright break) their laws as this bunch are. We have been fortunate at how stupid the current round of EOs have been compared to what they could have been given 3 months to draft them.
I’m sure they spent the years 2021-24 recruiting and building their team of narcissists and sycophants. It’s not an immediate transition, but it can happen pretty quickly.
Germany took 53 days before the dictatorship was cemented after HItler became chancellor in 1933. We’re on day 39 here.
I don’t know how long it took Orban in Hungary when he was re-elected in 2010, but he gained control over Hungarian media fairly quickly.
Bugboy321 says:
MTG said something about federal employees and how they don’t generate revenue. I’m sure you know the rest. That’s 180 proof “free marketer” juice right there, that conveniently ignores the fact that there’s plenty of revenue-negative positions in the private sector. “Government should be run like a business” clap trap, and all that.
I’m a whole lot less sympathetic to Dr. Wheeler’s point after the “performance” in the WH today. I have run out of fucks to give about these people.
I’m currently reading Chris Bohjalian’s “The Sandcastle Girls”, much of which is set in Turkey during the Armenian Genocide of 1915. One small story line concerns two men who photograph some results of the atrocities and attempt to get those records out for the world to see. I guess that the information dissemination problem is, technically, solved now, seeing as so much information from all sides is available to all. But we seem to keep running up against the age old problem of which you speak.
At times this site has left me challenged to communicate. As an artist, I speak a different language. At times that gets me excoriated and demeaned, here and other places.
While I used to get flummoxed by the disconnect, I’ve come to accept it as part of the human condition. Your post begins to bridge that gap and offers an example of empathy and kindness to a stranger. It is a primer in human communication as opposed to legal descriptions of social constructs. IMHO they are very different. Even as one dominates most everything, they are not the same. Part of our collective challenge? Maybe one among others.
Again, thank you Marcy. From one artist to another.
Perhaps Trump keeps mentioning a third term so as to delay his working class supporters whose faces haven’t yet been eaten by leopards from realizing that Trump no longer needs them; that his agenda is now almost entirely money-making ventures, culture wars and oligarchy interests.
Russell Vought has about the same level of self-awareness as Andrew Card, George W. Bush’s first chief of staff and longtime auto industry lobbyist.
They both complain, while working for the government, that gubmint bureaucrats are lowlier than dirt; that only work in the private sector is important, satisfying and worth doing; and that gubmint bureaucrats are as evil as revenuers, out to tax or destroy your still in the holler, and deprive you of the only money you can make during a great depression. It’s all theater, but it’s all a lot of people get for news.
Thank you for hot linking; i completely forgot in my earlier comment that acknowledged you. And thanks for putting down your prescience in words for us
That’s not surprising. Baldwin is at the edge of a large swath of National Forest. I’ve driven through, at least twice; the area is pretty, but I drove through on the way to places on Lake Michigan that are beautiful, and so attract wealthy outsiders like Pete Buttigieg and tourism dollars (Baldwin is about an hour closer to Traverse City than to Grand Rapids). The area is focused on forestry and outdoor activities like hunting and fishing (a lovely bike trail ends in Baldwin). Cycling close to there once, I remember the discomfort of hearing people shooting on property sporting a Confederate flag flying right next to the bike trail.
Excellent post!
When “real Americans” have to deal with job loss, recession, double digit inflation, delayed tax refunds, lost healthcare, etc. as a result of the incompetent, hamfisted defenestration of the federal government by the Musketeers, no amount of propaganda or social media algorithms can obfuscate the real life consequences.
Let’s hope that painful suffering translates into action in the voting booth in 2026, and let’s hope Democrats can find an effective way to utilize this suffering to maximize their victories in the midterms.
I have suggested before that the Dems campaign slogan for 2026 should simply be “Had Enough Yet?”
I think it is just as likely that Vought knew very well that anyone and everyone will be hurt. The Cooper’s are expendable. It’s a show of strength. The price to be paid to save the nation. Whatever that means.
Baldwin and Lake County’s Appalachian sort of poverty; people living in old campers in the woods, is an archetypal case of economic history with black resorts 100 years ago leading to permanent deflation.
I think it probably varies person to person. I think Elon really is happy to harm poor white people. I’m pretty sure he’s happy to harm the US generally, as is Trump.
But some people in Vought’s neighborhood, and a great number of Republicans, are really stupid enough to believe in trickle down bullshit.
Adding, I actually looked up Vought’s background. His parents are working class. But I would be surprised if he had been around places like Baldwin in a long time. He’s become exactly the kind of DC bureaucrat he demonizes.
Indeed. I note that her belief in IVF being free left out the elephant in the room: what to do with the fertilized ova not used. It’s something that is already biting IVF service in the tush in the ‘fetal personhood’ states.
My beloved still doesn’t fully understand just how pervasive the RWNM (aka the Wurlitzer) is, and how the low information rural (and military bases through the AFRTS) media create voters essentially as knowledgeable as someone from the DPRK.
It was a notorious study done years ago (Al Franken refered to it in one of his books) where a Faux News consumer was less aware of reality than someone who lived under a rock. That has to be addressed, and FWIW this is where the recent retreat from fact-checking by the internet media is so worrisome.
Marge Greene in congress said that federal employees weren’t real workers and didn’t deserve the paychecks they get.
Demonizing “federal employees” as a homogeneous group (Margie herself is also a “federal employee”) and then cutting through the various federal institutions with a blunt instrument (chainsaw being a good metaphor here) is ultimately in service of removing the bureaucratic inertia that is actually an obstacle to Trump/Musk and their evil friends from effectively grabbing executive power unto themselves – i.e. creating the dictatorship that they crave.
Demonizing federal bureaucracies as nests of the “deep state” is simply an excuse. There’s an (unfortunately-paywalled) article in the January issue of The Atlantic by Timothy Ryback detailing what Hitler did in 1933 once he was elected Chancellor. It took only 53 days with a lot of propagandistic maneuvering (and also some sheer luck), to dismantle the weak democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic for Hitler to achieve absolute control over government institutions. Worth a read if you have an Atlantic subscription (they have 30-day free trials).
We’re in day 39 of the Trump administration as of today…
Now that’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black if ever I saw one.
I would certainly agree with her in one case–that of Marjorie Taylor Greene. She doesn’t deserve a damned dime.
No surprise insulting federal employees who have kept the government running for years. She is a federal employee paid by the people she disrespects. A public servant, serving the public being hateful and cruel. And one has to be taught to hate.
yeah Marge Breene, a federal worker herself
“Any government employee who is afraid of transparency,” wrote the man who taught her AP government class in high school, “is a criminal!”
This is a dangerous mentality, and one also deployed against immigrants who are claimed to be “criminals”. While there might be a law against unauthorized border crossings, there is no law against being “afraid of transparency”. Must be the JV football coach doubling as “teacher”?
Lots of smart people fall for Elon Musk’s propaganda. Kara Swisher did it for years.
It’s “confirmation bias” all the way down. See also: propaganda works…
They may be smart, but are they intelligent?
I kind of think of it the opposite way: (book/school) intelligent, but not (street/common-sense) smart. But YMMV.
Some things don’t need to be “transparent”. More things should be *visible*, which is not “transparent”.
Right. In my work investigating human disease case locations for the potential for mosquito borne transmission, I’m a “criminal” for “being afraid of transparency” because I don’t shout from the hilltops who and where these HIPAA protected individuals are located, in the spirit of “transparency”…
Thank you EW. I have followed you for years but never commented. I’m a recently retired Department of Labor lawyer. I know first hand the essential work performed by federal employees protecting American workers’ safety and health, making sure workers are properly paid, enforcing the rules governing retirement and health benefits to make sure employees’ money isn’t squandered or stolen. On and on. The administration’s attack on my hardworking friends and colleagues is heartbreaking. Thank you for your important coverage and ongoing inspiration.
On and on. “[…]the people, [our] neighbors, who provide the services [we] may not have realized came from the government.” We want them on that wall. We NEED them on that wall.
What’s most frustrating to me is the folks on our side who vociferously criticize these Republican voters, and lawmakers, for their perceived past sins, when they actually do speak up.
I think if it weren’t for our own side, more Republicans might stand up.
After all, what’s the motivation for, or benefit to, Republicans to stand up for what’s right?
Spoiler alert…there is absolutely none….and that’s why so very few do.
They’re well aware that they’ll face harassment, death threats and doxxing FROM THEIR OWN SIDE and utter disdain, ungratefulness and criticism of every past decision from our side.
Guaranteed, Cooper is seeing both
It costs us NOTHING to say “thank you for standing up and speaking out” without the self righteous claptrap and bitter condemnations.
We’re going to need a certain percentage of Republicans to help us defend democracy.
They’re going to need some motivation, because patriotism and integrity are pretty thin soup when your family’s safety and your own livelihood is on the line.
It seems like a small enough sacrifice for us to make.
You are describing what, back in 2017, I described as the Afternoon Tea of the Long Knives. This ain’t post-Weimar Germany, and very few will be murdered — though some few probably will be.
I do not have an explanation for why Republicans are terrified of being primaried but Democrats are not. but the disparuty is obvious.
Aside from the handful of Republicans who have already chosen constitutional values, the rest are not worth the powder it would take to blow them away. If democracy is saved, they will never have any part in it, because — and in this we are like Weimar Germany — they do not value democracy. They never have.
The motivation for standing up for what’s right is that it is right. Republicans need to be accountable. I am not as interested as you seem to be in helping their perpetual claims to be victims.
I currently live just north of this area in Michigan, but grew up in Minneapolis, which seems like another planet now. The story takes me back to 2016, when I first realized most everyone around me lived in an information bubble that fed a deep desire to blame others for their woes, both real and imaginary woes, and demonized all who would contradict the narrative. I’m skeptical that even hard, close-to-home consequences will break these folks away from their beliefs. It’s just too alluring to be told it’s all someone else’s fault, and there are villains out there screwing you over: foreigners, government employees, minorities, LGBT, libs, etc. They will continue to be blamed, and the media landscape has now been co-opted to support the narrative in spite of the facts.
I hear you about info bubble. You likely know the White Pine trail, which intersects the one that goes to Baldwin (and Evart, in which direction I’ve cycled). Riding that trail, it’s pretty stunning how quickly the mood changes as you cycle north from Grand Rapids.
On an airline flight many years ago, I chatted with an older gentleman who had been a high school teacher and then principal in western Pennsylvania. He shared a pearl of wisdom which he had learned from those roles: “All a person needs to be happy is food, shelter, and someone to blame.”
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The Musk work process of government destruction is emblematic of insufficient broad education. Musk and the immature “techies” have little knowledge beyond programming. General information of history & current events that are common sense are absent because they are self-satisfied with a lack of curiosity for anything outside the tech realm where their “intellectual” superiority has been applauded by people like Musk. Consequently their work process is shoddy, quick & dirty. Any normal quality control is non-existent because it isn’t in Musk’s DOGE brief and they don’t have the knowledge base skills to think as they play with fire. What may also be true is that these techie kids simply want to please their hero-unaware the older boss-man is more acutely deficient than themselves. For example, even Musk admits everyone knows about “ebola”. Apparently, those tech whiz kids didn’t know or care. Musk admits deleting those ebola prevention programs was one of those “sometime” mistakes that will be corrected quickly, although it doesn’t seem to have been corrected yet. Will Musk supervise with greater care now? No. That wouldn’t be any fun.
As I understand the situation, Musk should not be supervising. He is neither an DOGE employee nor any government employee. The current supervisory person is on vacation in Mexico. Musk, at most, should only be able to whisper in Trump’s ear, as an advisor. To be up front about it, though, Trump is just the sock puppet of the ultra right cabal that is really behind his presidency, not the knowledgeable leader who is penning these EOs. He doesn’t (and likely can’t, read them. Good luck, America.
In your opening paragraph, should that be “Trump instead of Harris?”
Thank you.
“Cooper’s isolation is the problem we need to fix, not the person we need to abandon.”
Marcy, I would just like to thank you for this sentence in particular. I come from such a place. Not as isolated, but still a small backwater with families that have a hong history at that place, and little understanding of how things are elsewhere.
I would like to see us try to reduce our population concentration, to spread out, which would connect with some of these places. We have the tools. We have internet everywhere, we have the ability to deliver any product to the remotest places in the country, and we could easily pick up goods for shipping elsewhere, too.
But it would take a financial reorganization. We would need universal health care. This would be a big boon to small mom-and-pop businesses, as it would be something they didn’t have to worry about. We could do other things to ensure good internet and good transportation to these places. It wouldn’t benefit the billionaires, though.
In fact the move to more people working remotely, including of course federal employees, was doing just that. Many people would love to live in smaller, less expensive communities in the mountains or rural areas, but the jobs aren’t there. But if they can work remotely, they will move – and then the hospitals and health care and better schools will follow, as the better paid remote workers invest in their community and raise the tax base. This was happening in Virginia – federal workers were moving out of NoVA into SW Virginia. Now they are being forced to return to DC which will only serve to destabilize the places they are leaving.
I hadn’t grasped that fully, but it makes sense.
I think in the long run, decentralization will win. Companies that do it effectively will flourish, and win in the marketplace. It’s going to move slowly, though. And the authoritarian bosses who think ya gotta watch ’em every second, are going to put up a fight. We are in that fight.
What is happening in DC right now is unlike anything I have experienced, and I have been here for quire some time. Almost anyone you speak to knows a federal worker who has lost their job or is afraid that they have will lose their job soon or is going to be relocated (and thus effectively fired) who knows where.
I spoke with someone at DoD a week or so back and her reaction was, “we’re DoD we’ll be fine, they won’t touch us.” That happy talk was not long for Musk & Company’s endeavors.
I also spoke with someone here who voted for Trump (yes, a flesh and blood human being and not an abstract demon) and noted that the local economy would likely crater, and that Trump’s actions might trigger a worldwide recession. This was met by the apologetics that it’s a necessary evil to get to a better place. But this time when things go south, unlike covid, there won’t be a massive influx of money to provide a bridge and keep the economy going.
I suspect it’s going to get really bad here, real soon.
Imho, I think the only thing that would give Trump pause is a real stock market crash. I wish I believed the courts will help us but I don’t.. especially since it seems like Musk/Trump et. al. just ignore rulings. Been reading that USAID money is not flowing partly thanks to CJ Roberts. Shameful.
To Marcy’s point about demonizing his voters who are suffering, I totally agree. Over on Reddit /fednews people are slamming a veteran who lost his job due to this mess… because they believe he voted for Trump. As the very astute Jasmine Crockett has opined, … you can vote for a democrat without becoming one. Something like that.
Thanks Marcy for this excellent post and emphasis on not making victims the villain.
Atlanta Fed is now estimating first quarter GDP will be negative 1.5 percent as opposed to previously predicted positive 2.3 percent.
https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow
I don’t think that Convict-1 / Krasnov really cares about the stock market. His marketing money isn’t really affected by it and as long as Musk, MBS, et al are financing him (above and under the table) he will not be affected. I think a key point of no return is if crypto initiatives take over for funding the government in any significant amount.
Milei and Trump both launched crypto coins and all of them collapsed in rug-pulling exercises (like the pump and dump in the stock market that led to the Great Depression). Milei is being impeached for doing this.
If the bond buyers retreat, trump will have to react. Its’ s like it-isn’t-the-volts-that-kill-you-it’s-the-amps. It isn’t the stocks that rule, it’s the bonds.
“I don’t think that Convict-1 / Krasnov really cares about the stock market.”
Gotta disagree with you there. For New Yorkers of a certain age the stock market holds a special talismanic significance. Much like perceived subway crime, it exerts an outsized hold on the psyche of people like Trump, and indeed a lot of finance and finance-adjacent boomer NYers, however imperfect an analogue for real economic activity (as opposed to speculation) it is. Its emotional.
I figure it is about 50/50 that the administration is knowingly engineering an economic collapse as a pretext for either declaring a national emergency or proposing an Enabling Law to der Reichstag, I mean Congress.
The control of the sea lamprey is a great example of the misguided notion that firing Government employees equals savings. Without control, the sea lamprey will devastate the fisheries in the Great Lakes – an approximately $7 billion dollar industry. A pretty good return on that $20 million investment. To control the sea lamprey timing is everything. The controlling chemical, TMF, must be applied before the sea lamprey larvae leave the tributaries and make their way into the open waters of the Great Lakes. Sea lamprey are prodigious breeder. If you miss the window, suddenly you have a billion-dollar problem. If the program is successful, few people are aware of the benefit. The same for the forest service, or food safety or epidemiology or …
The incompetence of this administration is breathtaking. I believe it will ultimately be their undoing, but not before a lot of people suffer.
Screwworm is an even better example.
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/livestock-poultry-disease/cattle/ticks/screwworm
While much about this woman’s story may be worth some sympathy, she IS a villain and she DOES deserve everything that’s happening to her. Her “struggle” over whether to vote for Harris or Trump (edited; original said “Biden”) didn’t happen in a vacuum. Trump was in the White House once before. Everybody on the planet knows who he is (liar, racist, convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, misogynist, fraud, liar, liar…), and suddenly she’s all leopards-and-faces because he turned out to be the person she and everybody else knew him to be. And we’re ALL suffering the consequences of her bad decision-making.
This post is a natural complement to Rayne’s Bluebeard post a few months back, and I’ll admit I struggle with both in this case even as I appreciate that the perspective is shared. This case is an individual who had cast a vote for Biden in 2020 and observed the years of the Trump presidency and his campaign. Biden had no “among the bushes” press secretary moment. Biden had no “perfect calls” and bi-partisan impeachments. And Biden didn’t identify neo-nazis as “very fine people”. The contrast was stark and clear. She valued IVF for herself more than Trump’s promise that he would bring pain on people that she likely figured either deserved it or were distant enough that it didn’t matter to her. She valued MAYBE having a child one day through those treatments more than Trump’s promise that he would deport children already alive in this country and encourage Israel to bomb children in another one.
And there are thousands like her. Tens of thousands. But she is white, and she is sad, and that is enough for a media that has no problem ignoring the already tenfold suffering inflicted on marginalized populations to devote bandwidth to a leopard-eaten face.
There was a great profile today of a Black guy in Kansas City who lost his IRS job. I’ve seen others.
To my mind every one of these is worthwhile.
Thank you for the article. As difficult as it can feel at times watching things come to pass that people far less analytical than you also managed to scream from the rooftops in advance, you are correct about the worth of a misled soul. Mercy matters most when it’s difficult.
The maddening thing that can’t be just a coincidence, is how Trump will say one thing and then seconds/minutes later the exact opposite. It allows him to have it both ways, and reporters rarely challenge him on those or any nonsensical statements. He hedged to Hell and back on abortion. Cooper heard exactly what she wanted to hear and ignored the rest, because that’s what she wanted to hear.
I particularly appreciate this post, thank you.
As frustrating as it can be, we have to give people space to change their minds.
Not before they answer my question: What have you wrought?
And what exactly are you seeking to wreak by scapegoating the softest of soft targets?
Plenty of Democratic voters and public opinion shapers were groomed within an information bubble to persuade themselves that snarling vituperation toward Merrick Garland is appropriate because of imagined sins.
Were you one such?
Are you attempting to equate ignorant unhappiness with an appointed position where much of the material was either classified or required analysis such that only work such as this blog could tease out (and we know that because of Dr. Wheeler’s frequent references to other authors, even good authors, who missed the mark) with voting for a President that openly mocked vulnerable populations such as the disabled and minorities (not to mention POWs, an alleged R favorite) while openly stating his intent to pursue ghastly policies home and abroad?
The leopard has eaten faces. Mercy is in order. But mercy and repentance are side-by-side ideals.
CaptainCondorcet
February 28, 2025 at 3:59 pm
An 84 word question? Was it rhetorical?
Your badly reasoned sophistry doesn’t save either you or Grain.
Nor justify your preference for revenge and humiliation.
Poor show.
SteveBev
February 28, 2025 at 4:27 pm
First you attack another commenter who posted wanting confirmation this was genuine and not selfish regret easily switched back with a rehire. Then you call me an intellectual liar for pointing out both that you intentionally shifted action (vote vs complaint) and scope (Garland vs Trump).
The archives will show many more comments where I’ve agreed with you and vice versa than any interactions I’ve had with Grain, but today I am disappointed. And done. Eviscerate me as you will.
But we all saw four years of trump. What more does anyone need to know in that he tried to illegally, unconstitutionally and violently overturn an election in which he was soundly defeated. The maga movement ended 240+ years peaceful transfer of power for us.
My question… what does it mean “get to a better place”?
Has anyone mentioned that RFK jr. of all people on Feb 14th was reported to have halted the probationary firings at the Indian Health Service?
2/27 Judge rules OPM illegally ordered agencies to fire all non-essential probationary employees
2/27 NOAA/NWS starts firing 500 and then another 800 probationary employees.
Competency is not a requirement in loyalty cults but a few court orders and the cult may come around to the legal way of doing a reduction in force.
Keep in mind that that would disproportionately affect the constituents of John Thune and Lisa Murkowski, which is likely why it was reversed. Trump can’t afford to piss off either.
I note that other exceptions have been (quietly) carved out for red states, so how does that square with the ‘equal protection of the laws’ part of the Constitution? Animal Farm by Orwell also applies.
Whether Murkowski and Thune should feel untouchable is doubtful, especially when confronted with the prospect of being primaried by someone with billionaire backing. We’ll know when the budget reaches the Senate and (I expect) they roll over.
Your last sentence nails it. So damn true. They want to divide us, spin us into incoherent rants, and scapegoat the vulnerable. “Squirrel!”
Gift link below
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/02/20/for-donald-trump-the-resignations-are-the-point?giftId=13e72d19-8348-4ba5-b145-fb6eb94fd65c&utm_campaign=gifted_article
I have been communicating with a close friend who is a long-time MD/PhD at the NIH (epidemiology, public health) who was detailed to DoD late last summer and sent to Uganda to deal with HIV. Her recent com (2/14) says, “I am ok for now — in Kampala. Not so much the patients.”
Like many with an assignment overseas, she uprooted from DC, rented her place to a NIH colleague (who may be, herself, up the creek) and is now suspended between someplace and nowhere else.
Luckily, Trump (per abc) will soon sign a decretal establishing English as the official US language. (Which is chiefly what Rick Lazio ran against Hillary on, twenty five years ago.)
Yes, I know “decretal” refers to RC canonical dictum…but there you are.
My liberal grandparents built their retirement home, which my sisters and I now own, in the “beautiful” part of northwestern Michigan. I’ve spent a lot of time there, and traveling between there and points east, in the sixty years since. The inland poverty–away from what has become a tourist-haven “Gold Coast”–is impossible to ignore for those who maintain property, which means hiring carpenters, roofers, and other local talent. We’ve gotten to know and be friends with many like Ms. Cooper, not all Republicans. But the harder life gets, the less time (and money) folks have to keep up with legacy media.
Passing judgment on people without getting to know them, and how they arrived at their voting decisions, will get us nowhere–aside from that brief burst of self-righteous superiority. These are the exact people who might switch parties next time…and might actually VOTE, unlike all those Dems who stayed home in 2024. For one thing, these are not for the most part the targets of GOP voter suppression efforts. We need them.
“All those Dems who stayed home in 2024” carries a LOT of speculation behind it in a country that recently hovers around 40% independent. In states where it mattered, once voter suppression efforts were accounted for, that number might be smaller than you’d think. It might be small enough to be near inconsequential in the face of a re-invigorated group of “safe white Dem male > tyrant > black woman” independent and weak-leaning Republican voters.
My personal suspicion is that they felt that Harris had it wrapped up, and that *their* votes weren’t needed…until it was too late.
Vote every time, so it’s a solid habit.
Back in the early ’90’s, the public high school where I taught had a dial-up internet connection. I maintained a small network in my classroom and the Chinese exchange teacher we had would use it a couple of times a week to connect to her family. These were the days when we believed that people living in places like Ryleigh Cooper would have a wider world opened for them, with opportunities far beyond her small rural hometown. Instead, we have an enshittified mass communication system where lies and half-truths prevail.
Public K-12 educators are more than familiar with Chris Rufo and Moms for Liberty and their methods. They practiced on us, gearing up for their shining moment with Musk and Vought, calling us lazy, incompetent, unpatriotic, socialist, communist, parasitical groomers. Charter schools and voucher schemes have been endorsed by both Democrats and Republicans, so our support was thin. Public education is a cornerstone of democracy and sadly it’s unsurprising to see our democratic system become so wobbly.
I hear you, but in 2016 I was surprised when my Mormon cousins — all the ones who had done foreign missions — suddenly realized that trump was serious about his hatred of foreigners and immigrants, and they began frantically (and hopelessly) organizing against him in Utah and Idaho.
Thank you for this framing of Ms Cooper. The nasty “she deserves it” takes really ignore how much MSM did her wrong, even if she cites TikTok . Trump lies all the time and it really takes some life experience and perspective to tell how to predict his actual actions in the future. And she’s got her family, friends and (shudders) her AP Government teacher providing a perspective.
The thing that strikes me is that she was reluctant to share with the women in her family her sexual assault trauma for fear of being branded a skank, and now the whole NYT world knows about it. I can only hope her mother, grandmother and other family members will compassionately share their Me Too stories and chip away at least a tiny bit at that “she asked for it” framing.
Olga Lautman, whose area of expertise is as an analyst and researcher on Russian disinformation, has a daily Trump Tyranny Tracker. It’s a simple format of what happened, why it matters and a link to the source. From today’s post:
https://trumptyrannytracker.substack.com/
On the topic of Russian misinformation, disinformation,and imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I highly recommend the book Putin’s Kleptocracy by Karen Dawisha. Whether Trump knows it or not (and I would bet some of his advisors know it quite well), the roadmap she lays out there about Putin’s path to where he is in many ways exactly what Trump is trying in his actions mentioned in this “Tyranny Tracker”.
I’m actually looking forward to some of the agents teaching the UFC types a lesson or two in actual toughness.
UFC fighters aren’t more fit than FBI agents. They’re used to ring fighting with a set of rules. FBI doesn’t normally need that stuff – and when there’s a fight, it probably involves firearms. Patel needs FBI training.
I suspect it will show the difference between looking tough and being tough, even before allowing for various kayfabe rules. Convict-1 / Krasnov has always been about looking tough and when called on to actually be tough he either whines for help (i.e. SCOTUS) or slinks away.
UFC fighters are entertainers. Many are exceptionally fit, but their work, for which they need an equity card, is carefully choreographed. Obviously not the environment FBI field agents deal with. Ka$h Patel is just trying to double dip, and use one gig to enhance the value of another. Very Trumpian.
BTW, over about half a century in the FBI and its predecessor agency, J. Edgar Hoover never fired his weapon on duty.
UFC is a combat sport. There’s definitely a big entertainment aspect, including choreographed entrances, but the fighting is not choreographed.
That said, it’s a very different job from law enforcement.
My mistake. My description applies more to WWE than to UFC, though the two have merged, which heightens the emphasis on entertainment.
As you say, though, there’s no obvious or necessary connection between UFC and law enforcement work, let alone the FBI, which already has access to specialist training resources.
The US Forest Service was the best Agency I have ever had the pleasure of providing services to and while this effort kept me poor monetarily, the educational enrichment was priceless. Due to the diverse nature of the environments across the country, each USFS operation provided insights on why local knowledge and science matters. I can remember reading an assessment of USFS children at one District Office having “mottled teeth” due to high naturally occurring fluoride in the groundwater they were drinking. In another study it was found that the Lindane showing up in the drinking water in the 1980s was a direct result of spraying German POWs for lice with the material inside a shower house that was tied to the septic drainage field. It took about 35 years for the Lindane to impact the onsite drinking water.
Timber marking is another fascinating rabbit hole and one I can opine on at length as prior to Ryleigh Cooper arriving in that program area, many miscarriages were tied to the use of toxins used to formulate these tracer paints. These tracer paints have morphed over time with less toxic versions being replaced again with more toxic ones but I am unsure if the proper worker evaluations were completed as OSHA has no mechanism to fine USFS operations. The other legacy that the USFS gets foisted with are the toxic castoffs from the DOD as I for one would not be drinking ground water generated anywhere near the old Wurtsmith Air Force Base.
In all candor, I am shocked Ryleigh got the position as many college graduates interested in Land Management are shut out of those jobs by less qualified DOD applicants with the 5 point preference. In another unprecedented move they picked a Chief from outside the USFS.
https://forestpolicypub.com/2025/02/28/outsider-vs-career-appointee-for-chief/
As I checked the local Big Rapids and Cadillac news to see what they were reporting on, the latter was focused on PFAS contaminants, which has been an issues since well before I left.
One of my HS classmates went into forestry – he got a scholarship to Berkeley! and worked in stuff like phytoremediation. My brother met him on one project, decades later, and they talked about the old days, as we all lived in a small cul-de-sac.
It’s futile to hope that the mainstream media will take up a bunch of stories like Cooper’s. While they enjoy a human-interest story from time to time, they’re much more focused on horse-race political news. Besides, a now pretty vast swath of the population doesn’t read the NYT or watch CBS news. They watch Fox News or get their news from social media. Most of their waking hours are either working or watching television. And that’s where we need to find them.
Democrats need to dip deep into their war chest NOW, not just before the midterms. And use that money to fund a shit load of advertising that does nothing but tell these stories, of people doing important work here and abroad, who are getting summarily fired by a billionaire who has no knowledge of, let alone respect for, what they do. And most viewers don’t either. Time to open their eyes.
Do you think Hitler would have lasted long if scenes from the death camps were played during theater intermissions?
Yes, and the media needs to stop reporting executive orders as if a decree.
How would someone have gotten scenes from the death camps to theaters?
And even though the world knew, very few countries helped until…
Compare to the fact that each of Trump’s impeachments was broadcast live and in living color and reported on live or almost live to the US and the world, as were the J6 insurrection, the J6 insurrection Committee hearings; every word of his trials was tweeted out live and reported on live or almost live.
Yet half the people in the US did not and do not believe their ears and eyes.
I don’t know if seeing what’s happening around them is going to change their minds when Fox, their families and their friends say it’s necessary.
But I hope I am wrong.
OT aaaahhh, Trump and Vance with Zelenskyy.
As with the USAid and other cutbacks, Trump and Vance don’t care that lives are at stake.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-zelensky-meeting-devolves-shouting-174825841.html
Zelenskyy probably told them they weren’t going to get what they wanted.
One picture I saw showed someone who looked like Hegseth enjoying the show. Was SecDef there? It would make sense given the background of the meeting.
Shameful how Trump and Couch Fucker treated Zelenskyy. Of course Repubs are having a mass orgasm over how “tough” Trump was.
And Bleach Blond Bad Built Butch Body’s Beestung Boyfriend should work on his own wardrobe before criticizing Zelenskyy’s.
It was pathetic. Zelensky held his own but was lectured by Lecturer-In-Chief Vance like he was a 1950s dad lecturing his disrespectful kids. And of course the vaunted “rare earth deal” was not signed, the press conference for that cancelled and Zelensky’s team was kicked out of the Oval Office immediately afterwards. Pure bully-ism on display here, the opposite of diplomacy.
Embarrassing to watch President Zelensky being bullied and disrespected by two bullies, Trump and Vance.
“Ok Zelenskyy, this is what’s gonna happen. My pal Vlad the Invader here broke into your house and destroyed half of it. He’s gonna destroy the rest of your house if you don’t give me half your jewelry from the safe. Now, get on your knees and thank me for such a generous offer or I set Vlad loose again.”
Give that man a Nobel Peace Prize!
Marco Rubio 11:19 AM, 2/28/2025
Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before. Thank you for putting America First. America is with you!
Every time I see that quote from Russell Vought about wanting to traumatize “federal bureaucrats”, I see red. Why would anyone in a position of responsibility in government want to traumatize an employee who was hired to do a job and is doing that job?
I’ve long suspected JD Vance and Musk of regarding employees as nothing more than widgets that subtract from profit. Getting rid of widgets means you don’t have to think about the human misery you are causing.
But actually wanting to traumatize is a whole different level of sociopathy.
I am not sure that analogies to Hitler and the SS are valid anymore. I see people like Vought and think about the “bread and circuses” Roman emperors used to distract from bread and butter issues. The “circuses” weren’t clown shows. They were displays of brutality, often involving Christians being offered up to wild beasts. Federal workers and immigrants are the new Christians.
And, yes, people who voted for Trump and are now the victims of his cruelty deserve compassion and our mercy.
Why would anyone in a position of responsibility in government want to traumatize an employee who was hired to do a job and is doing that job?
Because their aim is eliminate and/or “hollow out” any and all obstructive bureaucracies that get in the way of their claiming total control of all political institutions, thereby ushering in the “golden age” of their new dictatorship.
Federal employees are just collateral damage in their scheme. I wish people would stop pretending that any of these people have a conscience. They do not. They are ruthlesslty purusing their goals, that’s all.
They learned well the lessons from Japan, even if they will never admit it. As long as the bureaucratic state’s primary purpose happens to line up with getting aid to enough of the right people to support you and does almost nothing else to impede your efforts, and as long as it is a bit more challenging for your opponents to vote than your supporters, you can proudly claim fair and free elections while having decades of one-party rule. And the LDP wasn’t half as willing to skirt (or outright break) their laws as this bunch are. We have been fortunate at how stupid the current round of EOs have been compared to what they could have been given 3 months to draft them.
I suppose if the object is to go from democracy to vicious dictatorship immediately, you need people with a lump of coal instead of a heart.
I’m sure they spent the years 2021-24 recruiting and building their team of narcissists and sycophants. It’s not an immediate transition, but it can happen pretty quickly.
Germany took 53 days before the dictatorship was cemented after HItler became chancellor in 1933. We’re on day 39 here.
I don’t know how long it took Orban in Hungary when he was re-elected in 2010, but he gained control over Hungarian media fairly quickly.
MTG said something about federal employees and how they don’t generate revenue. I’m sure you know the rest. That’s 180 proof “free marketer” juice right there, that conveniently ignores the fact that there’s plenty of revenue-negative positions in the private sector. “Government should be run like a business” clap trap, and all that.
I’m a whole lot less sympathetic to Dr. Wheeler’s point after the “performance” in the WH today. I have run out of fucks to give about these people.
I’m currently reading Chris Bohjalian’s “The Sandcastle Girls”, much of which is set in Turkey during the Armenian Genocide of 1915. One small story line concerns two men who photograph some results of the atrocities and attempt to get those records out for the world to see. I guess that the information dissemination problem is, technically, solved now, seeing as so much information from all sides is available to all. But we seem to keep running up against the age old problem of which you speak.
Thank you Marcy.
At times this site has left me challenged to communicate. As an artist, I speak a different language. At times that gets me excoriated and demeaned, here and other places.
While I used to get flummoxed by the disconnect, I’ve come to accept it as part of the human condition. Your post begins to bridge that gap and offers an example of empathy and kindness to a stranger. It is a primer in human communication as opposed to legal descriptions of social constructs. IMHO they are very different. Even as one dominates most everything, they are not the same. Part of our collective challenge? Maybe one among others.
Again, thank you Marcy. From one artist to another.
Perhaps Trump keeps mentioning a third term so as to delay his working class supporters whose faces haven’t yet been eaten by leopards from realizing that Trump no longer needs them; that his agenda is now almost entirely money-making ventures, culture wars and oligarchy interests.
Russell Vought has about the same level of self-awareness as Andrew Card, George W. Bush’s first chief of staff and longtime auto industry lobbyist.
They both complain, while working for the government, that gubmint bureaucrats are lowlier than dirt; that only work in the private sector is important, satisfying and worth doing; and that gubmint bureaucrats are as evil as revenuers, out to tax or destroy your still in the holler, and deprive you of the only money you can make during a great depression. It’s all theater, but it’s all a lot of people get for news.
Bluebeard’s latest wife, now holding the bloody key of knowledge in her hand, crying for rescue.
She won’t be rescued unless by us, and we won’t be rescued unless we rescue her as well.
Thank you for hot linking; i completely forgot in my earlier comment that acknowledged you. And thanks for putting down your prescience in words for us