I Guess I’m A Domestic Terrorist…

Charlie Sykes says if we’re not alarmed, it’s because we aren’t paying attention.

Granted, paying attention to this corrupt and incompetent administration means constant alarm–my own ranges from moderate concern to abject terror–but Sykes was singling out a recent memo issued by the bimbo who is currently cosplaying as US Attorney General, Pam Bondi.

The memo orders the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism.”

And who are these “domestic terrorists”? Apparently, anyone engaged in an activity that “paints legitimate government authority and traditional, conservative viewpoints as ‘fascist.”  Bondi proposes to punish such offenses “to the maximum extent permitted by law.” (If she was a minimally-competent lawyer, she’d recognize that the First Amendment prohibits punishing “activities” that are really just beliefs…)

The memo orders the creation of a massive dragnet that focuses on “Antifa.” As sentient Americans know–but the credulous MAGA base evidently does not–Antifa is simply a word meaning “anti-fascist.” (You. know, like the American soldiers who fought in WWII.) There is no “Antifa” organization, nothing comparable to the communist cells that so terrified patriotic citizens back in the Cold War/McCarthyite days. But Bondi’s use of the term accurately signals her obvious goal, which is focused on ideology, not on terrorism as we have historically defined that word.

As Sykes explains (emphases his):

Although the directive mentions the statutory definition requiring acts dangerous to human life, it directs federal law enforcement to investigate individuals whose “animating principle is adherence” to several viewpoints.

And the“extreme viewpoints” and ideological frameworks the Attorney General instructs federal law enforcement to prioritize include? (These are direct quotes)

• Opposition to law and immigration enforcement…

• Extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders…

• Adherence to radical gender ideology…

• Anti-Americanism…

• Anti-capitalism…

• Anti-Christianity…

• Support for the overthrow of the United States Government…

• Hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality,,,

Sykes accurately describes this as “clowns-with-flamethrowers territory.” and notes that Bondi appears to be quite serious– that she’s providing “heavy hitters  with legal hammers, writing that “The JTTFs [Joint Terrorism Task Forces] shall prioritize the investigation of such conduct.”

Needless to say, an attack that characterizes “antifa” as the cause of domestic terrorism ignores reality and the mountains of data confirming that far-right attacks –especially those from white supremacists–vastly outnumber all other forms of domestic violence. (That documented and fact-based conclusion has now been deleted from the department’s website.)

I am fascinated by Bondi’s list, which certainly establishes that–at least in her opinion–I’m a “domestic terrorist.” I may not own a gun or other weapon (I certainly don’t!) and I may run from anything remotely like a physical confrontation (yes, I’m a big coward), but I am firmly opposed to the current administration’s “immigration enforcement” tactics. I definitely adhere to what MAGA considers “radical gender ideology” (I support same-sex marriage and the right of trans people–including young people–to access appropriate medical interventions). I have a sneaking suspicion that Bondi would consider my strong objections to Trump’s war crimes and pathetic pro-Putin betrayal of Ukraine to be “anti-Americanism.”

I’m equally sure that my disdain for White Christian nationalism and my practice of putting quotation marks around “Christian” to recognize those using the label inappropriately would be sufficient for Bondi to consider me “anti-Christian.”

And I am absolutely hostile to the “traditional views” that have kept women in the kitchen and out of the workforce, LGBTQ+ people in the closet, and dark-skinned folks in servitude. You might call any of these hostilities my “animating principles.”

When I look back at the comments that are routinely posted in response to my daily rants on this site, I have to conclude that most of my readers are “domestic terrorists” too. In fact, if survey research is to be believed, a majority of Americans run afoul of several of the vague descriptions on Bondi’s ridiculous culture-war list.

For that matter, Trump, Bondi and this entire clown car of an administration are the ones guilty of “Anti-Americanism.” Bondi’s list is just additional evidence of that fact.

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Legal Nostalgia

A former student recently needed a copy of the syllabus I’d used in her graduate Law and Policy class back in 2010. When I reviewed it, I was struck by the changes effected by Trump, MAGA, and our current, corrupt Supreme Court majority. I became positively nostalgic for the legal environment of my time in the classrooom–nostalgic for the “black-letter law” and for precedents that were considered settled by my cohort of lawyers and law professors.

In that syllabus, I explained the course as follows:

___________

This course will examine the response of the American legal system, with its historic commitment to individual liberty and autonomy, to the growth of the administrative state and to an increasingly complex social environment characterized by pluralism and professional differentiation. We will discuss conflicting visions of American government and different approaches to public administration, and consider how those differences have affected the formation and implementation of public policy within our constitutional framework. Throughout, we will consider the constitutional and ethical responsibilities of public service—the origins of those responsibilities and their contemporary application.

While relatively few people will become public officials or public managers, all Americans are citizens, and most citizens will participate in the selection of public officials and will take positions on the policy issues of the day. Accordingly, this course is intended to introduce all students to the constituent documents that constrain public action and frame policy choices in the American system. These explorations will inevitably implicate political (although not necessarily partisan) beliefs about the proper role of the state, the health of civil society, and the operation of the market. To the extent possible, these theoretical and philosophical beliefs will be made explicit and their consequences for policy and public sector behavior examined. The goal is to help students understand why certain policy prescriptions and/or public actions attract or repel certain constituencies, and to recognize the ways in which these deeply held normative differences impact our ability to forge consensus around issues of public concern.

In the course of these inquiries, we will consider the implications of the accelerating pace of social change on issues of governance: globalization, especially as it affects considerations of legal jurisdiction; the increasing interdependence of nations, states, and local governmental units; the blurring of boundaries between government, for-profit and nonprofit organizations, and the effect of that blurring upon constitutional accountability; the role of technology; and the various challenges to law and public management posed by change and diversity, including the  impact and importance of competing value structures to the formation of law and policy.

By the end of the semester, students should be able to recognize legal and constitutional constraints on public service and policy formation, and to identify areas where public policy or administration crosses permissible boundaries. They should be able to recognize and articulate the impact of law and legal premises on culture and value formation, and to understand and describe the complex interrelation that results.

_________

During my years on the faculty teaching law and policy, it never occurred to me that I would live in an America where a President and virtually everyone in his administration would find the foregoing paragraphs incomprehensible–where individuals in positions of authority would reject–indeed, be unfamiliar with– the very concept of Constitutional restraints, let alone the existence and importance of civil society and/or competing arguments about the proper role of government.

I certainly wouldn’t have anticipated that so many of the ambitious politicians serving in the House and Senate–men and women presumably concerned for the national interest– would neuter themselves in slavish submission to a man whose ignorance of government and policy and whose intellectual and moral deficits were impossible to ignore even before the emergence of unmistakable dementia.

I would have rejected as fanciful the notion that a duly constituted United States Supreme Court would substitute partisan ideology and Christian nationalism for the rule of law, upending years of settled precedents and thoughtful, considered jurisprudence, not to mention the Separation of Powers that lies at the very heart of our constitutional architecture.

And yet here we are.

Forgive this somewhat whiney post, but coming across my old syllabus has made me nostalgic for the legal world I once inhabited. It wasn’t perfect, but it was infinitely preferable to our current reality, and we need to recover, reinstate, and improve it.

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The Pro-Death Administration

One of the outcomes of Trump’s “culture war” approach to the pandemic during his first administration was the documented excess death rate of the MAGA partisans who refused to wear masks or get vaccinated. Although I’m unaware of research into the survival rates of the even more hard-core cult members who imbibed bleach and/or Hydroxychloroquine per Trump’s suggestions, I assume those outcomes were similarly unfortunate.

This time around, Trump is doubling down on his “angel of death” approach. 

Thanks to his “Big Beautiful Bill,”  health care costs are poised to go through the roof. As a recent essay in the New York Times put it, health spending in the United States since 1975 “has pushed down wages, fueled inequality and left families drowning in unaffordable medical bills.” The essay’s author, who teaches public health and economics at Yale, says the administration is making it worse, and that  rising health care spending is killing the American dream.

The imminent sharp rise in health insurance premiums has been front page news for several months, but unaffordable costs are just one of the health threats faced by the vast majority of Americans who cannot pay exorbitant costs out of pocket. The installation of Mr. Brain Worm as Secretary of Health and Human Services has turned America’s public health agencies over to cranks who elevate conspiracy theories over vetted medical science.

Lincoln Square recently enumerated the threats. For example, as we’ve just seen, the CDC just voted to end universal Hepatitis B vaccine recommendations for newborns, despite the fact that the mandate has demonstrably saved lives.

Now, under Trump guidance, only infants of mothers who test positive (or whose status is unknown) receive the recommendation. Everyone else? Optional. Delayed. A ‘maybe’ if the parents decide to go that route in two months.

And here’s the thing RFK Jr. and the Trump regime aren’t talking about:

Medicare and Medicaid only cover vaccines that are recommended by federal bodies like the CDC. If you cut the recommendation, you cut the coverage. And when you cut the coverage, vaccinations become a commodity. The wealthy will pay out of pocket to protect their kids. The poor will hope and wait – and hope doesn’t prevent liver cancer.

As the article points out, this most recent assault is part of a pattern that has emerged during Trump’s second term. Health protections have been shifted from a public good to a private luxury, and preventative care is being turned into something you buy, not a human right. The wealthy get immunized; the poor get sick.

The Trump administration has raised healthcare costs, reduced Medicaid access, and increased premiums and deductibles. Working individuals can’t keep up with the costs–and fewer Americans are working. 

Americans have now watched 1.1 million jobs vanish in 2025 – the most since 2020 – with Amazon alone cutting as many as 30,000 corporate positions. Not part-time workers, but white-collar analysts, engineers, and project managers who were told they would be insulated from the automation. And rather than sounding the alarms, the Trump regime has been covering for their billionaire buddies. Jobs reports? Non-existent, because the truth is politically inconvenient when corporations are firing workers in droves during the holidays.

And in a country where healthcare is tied to employment – where those who lose work fall back on Medicaid, and Medicaid only covers vaccines recommended by the CDC – the consequences compound quickly. If parents can’t access affordable healthcare, can’t find work, can’t afford fresh food, and can’t protect their children from preventable disease, then the future looks less like a safety net and more like a prison shiv. A slow attrition of the working class. A world where the wealthy live longer, healthier lives while everyone else is riddled with disease, hungry, and desperate.

For much of my adult life, I have marveled at the idiocy of America’s approach to healthcare. We pay far more–and get far less–than other first world countries, countries that long ago recognized that healthcare is a human right, and incidentally, that national coverage offers efficiencies leading to very substantial cost savings.

Trump and his MAGA GOP are rolling back Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act–America’s incremental “baby steps” toward more universal coverage–and substituting magical thinking for medical science. They are also ensuring that only the rich will be able to protect their health and that of their children.

As the linked article asks, “Is this the collateral damage of incompetence, or the blueprint of a ruling class preparing for a future where most of us just aren’t needed?”

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Misinformation As A “Wicked Problem”

I continue to be a “when” person, not an “if” person. What I mean by that is that I become more convinced every day that America will emerge from the disaster that is Trump and MAGA, and that the pertinent questions we will face have to do with how we will repair things when that day comes and we have to repair not just the damage done by the mad would-be king, but the structural flaws that enabled his unfit occupancy in the Oval Office.

Political scientists, sociologists, lawyers, law professors and a wide variety of experts in other fields are already offering their perspectives on how to address the Supreme Court’s corruption, protect Americans’ voting rights, jettison (or at least alter) the filibuster, and neuter the Electoral College– proposals intended to fix the structural weaknesses that have become all too obvious.

In most of these areas, we’ll undoubtedly argue about the approaches and details, but fixes are possible.

There is, however, one truly enormous problem that has no simple answer. As I have repeatedly noted on this platform, we live today in an absolute ocean of mis- and dis-information. There are literally thousands of internet sites created to tell us untruths that we want to believe, technologies that were created to mislead, cable and streaming channels in the business of reinforcing our preferred biases–even psuedo-education organizations that exist solely to propagandize our children. There is no simple remedy, no policy prescription that can “fix” the Wild West of our “information” environment–and virtually any effort to shut down propaganda will run afoul of the First Amendment and its essential Free Speech guarantees.

The widespread availability of misinformation is what academics call a “wicked problem.” Wicked problems have a number of characteristics that make them difficult to manage and– practically speaking– impossible to actually solve. They can’t be fully defined because their components are constantly changing; there’s no one “right” solution– possible solutions aren’t true or false, but rather good or bad, and what’s good for one aspect of the problem might exacerbate another part (in other words, the interconnections mean that solving one part of the problem can easily aggravate other parts); and there’s no clear point at which you can say the problem is solved.

Misinformation is a whole set of wicked problems– on steroids.

As a Brookings Institution publication put it some time back, 

Disinformation and other online problems are not conventional problems that can be solved individually with traditional regulation. Instead, they are a web of interrelated “wicked” problems — problems that are highly complex, interdependent, and unstable — and can only be mitigated, managed, or minimized, not solved.

The Brookings paper recommended development of what it called “an architecture” that would “promote collaboration and build trust among stakeholders.” It noted the availability of several models that currently promote collaboration among a number of  stakeholders, including the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) and the Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs). These and similar successful organizations have learned how to adapt and innovate, and have focused on trust-building and information-sharing.

Any effective effort to counter misinformation and propaganda will need to go beyond the creation of other, similar organizations. If and when we re-institute a rational government and are gifted with a working Congress, there will be a role for (hopefully thoughtful) regulation. And of course, long term, the most effective mechanism must be education. Students need to be taught to recognize the difference between credible and non-credible sources, shown how to spot the markers of conspiracy theories and propaganda, and given tools to distinguish between deep fakes and actual photography.

The crux of the problem, of course, is that all-too-human desire to justify one’s particular beliefs and biases–the allure of “information” that confirms what that individual wants to believe. We all share that impulse, and its existence is what makes the manipulation of data and the creation of “alternative” facts so attractive. It’s also what feeds “othering,” bigotries and self-righteousness.

The persistence of that very human desire is what makes misinformation–also known as propaganda–such a wicked problem.

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About That MRI…

I know it is dangerous to get one’s “news” from Facebook and/or other social media platforms, but I was sufficiently intrigued by a post I came across to do some due diligence–to research its accuracy and check it out. The post in question noted that a drug named Leqembi is used to treat early symptoms of Alzheimers, that it is administered via infusion (often through the back of the hand), and that its use requires monitoring via regular MRIs.

The post ends with “why am I mentioning this? No reason,” a tongue in cheek disavowal of the obvious purpose of sharing the information. As most readers of this post will immediately recognize, the information–if accurate–is a likely explanation of the bruises on the back of Trump’s hand and the recent MRI he has been unable to explain. It is certainly consistent with the mental deterioration everyone outside the MAGA cult has observed.

The results of my (admittedly unscientific) research suggest that the post accurately describes the nature and purpose of Leqembi–  generic name lecanemab. It is described as a drug that “targets amyloid-beta (a protein) in the brain,” and it was developed because medical experts believe that amyloid-beta plaques (otherwise known as clumps in the brain) play a key role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

Leqembi binds to these proteins and helps to clear them, slowing the progression of the disease. It isn’t a cure; rather, it’s
considered a “disease-modifying” therapy.

The Alzheimer’s Association describes it as follows: 

Lecanemab (Leqembi®) is an antibody intravenous (IV) infusion therapy that targets and removes beta-amyloid from the brain. It has received traditional approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat early Alzheimer’s disease, including people living with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or mild dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease who have confirmation of elevated beta-amyloid in the brain. Leqembi lowers beta-amyloid in the brain and reduces cognitive and functional decline in people living with early Alzheimer’s.

Leqembi is administered by intravenous (IV) infusion every two weeks, and regular MRI scans are required.

Before starting treatment, there’s a baseline brain MRI, and during treatment, regular MRIs monitor for abnormal changes in the brain like swelling or bleeding, something that can occur when amyloid is being cleared. The manufacturer advises that additional MRIs be given before the 5th, 7th, and 14th infusions, and additional MRIs may be required if certain symptoms arise–symptoms that include confusion, visual changes, dizziness, edema, and gait problems.

There’s a reason doctors and psychiatrists consider it unethical to diagnose from a distance–absent an actual, in-person medical or psychological examination, there is no way to explain behaviors or symptoms with any certainty. In Trump’s case, his refusal to disclose accurate medical information (or for that matter, accurate financial information, i.e. tax returns) understandably gives rise to speculation that may or may not prove accurate. We should acknowledge that, but it is also obvious that the description of Leqembi–the reasons for prescribing it, the method of its administration, the need for MRIs, and the enumeration of the side effects–are consistent with what anyone looking at this walking (limping?) disaster of an egomaniac can see.

In a sane world, a situation where doctors are treating a president for a condition that clearly and negatively affects decision-making would immediately trigger invocation of the 25th Amendment. In our world, where a delusional president and would-be King surrounded by sycophants, grifters and assorted incompetents, a diagnosis of Alzheimers is just one more reason to dissemble, to cover up, to pretend that “Dear Leader” is hale and hearty.

The King isn’t naked, he’s wearing beautiful clothes.

This is unlikely to end well….

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