Category Archives: Random Blogging

Wag The Dog

A new, major disclosure in the slow but inexorable emergence of evidence against Jeffrey Epstein has arguably prompted the madman in the Oval Office to bomb Iran–without bothering to request the required authorization from Congress. 

As Heather Cox Richardson, among others, has reported, it turns out that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) had been running a parallel investigation of Epstein and several other people, not for the sex trafficking that is the subject of the Epstein files, but for drug trafficking, prostitution, and money laundering.

That investigation began under the Obama administration in 2010, and it was still underway in 2015.  It came to light because a heavily redacted document that was found in the files came from the director of the DEA’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF). That document referenced DEA reporting that “the above individuals are involved in illegitimate wire transfers which are tied to illicit drug and/or prostitution activities occurring in the U.S. Virgin Islands and New York City.” 

Senator Ron Wyden has described OCDETF as “a premier task force set up to identify, disrupt and dismantle major organized crime and drug trafficking operations.” According to reports, OCDETF targeted dangerous drug cartels, the Russian mafia and violent gangs moving fentanyl and weapons.

The Trump administration abruptly dismantled OCDETF last year, and required the agency to shut down all operations by September of 2025.

Wyden has been focusing on the finances that facilitated Epstein’s organization–following the money. When he found that JPMorgan Chase had “neglected” to report some $4 billion dollars in suspicious financial transactions that were linked to Epstein, he sought additional records from the Treasury Department.

Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, refused to produce them.

Wyden has now introduced the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act. (The Epstein Files Transparency Act didn’t cover Treasury records.) He is quoted as saying that “following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.”

As Heather Cox Richardson has reported, Wyden has written to the administrator of the DEA, noting that “[t]he fact that Epstein was under investigation by the DOJ’s OCDETF task force suggests that there was ample evidence indicating that Epstein was engaged in heavy drug trafficking and prostitution as part of cross-border criminal conspiracy. This is incredibly disturbing and raises serious questions as to how this investigation by the DEA was handled.”

Epstein and his fourteen co-conspirators were never charged with drug trafficking or financial crimes. It now appears that the DEA and DOJ during Trump’s first administration simply terminated the investigation. Wyden has pointed out that the heavy redactions in the recently uncovered document  go “far beyond anything authorized by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.” For that matter, the document wasn’t classified, so there was “no reason to withhold an unredacted version of this document from the U.S. Congress.”

Wyden has asked the DEA to produce a number of documents by March 13, 2026, including an unredacted copy of the memo in the files, evidence about what had originally triggered the investigation, why no one was charged, and why the names of the fourteen co-conspirators were redacted.

The very next day after these revelations became public, Trump bombed Iran. The New York Times reported that “The United States, joined by Israel, launched an attack on major cities in Iran, as President Trump called on Iranians to overthrow the government.” 

Permit me to point out that Trump ran on promises to keep America out of wars, that one of his most embarrassing self-owns has been his shameless campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize, and that one of his purported reasons for demanding “regime change” in Iran–the regime’s crackdown on dissenters–is, shall we say, inconsistent with his own deployment of ICE thugs in America’s cities.

It’s a real-life re-enactment of a 1997 American political satire–“Wag the Dog,” a black comedy starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, in which a spin doctor and a Hollywood producer fabricate a war in Albania to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. In a real-world example of life imitating art, the film President was caught making advances on an underage girl inside the Oval Office; recent disclosures strongly suggest that–in addition to shutting down investigations of Epstein, and persistently lying about the extent and duration of his “friendship” with Epstein and their connections to Russia –Trump once raped a thirteen-year-old girl.

How many Americans and others will be killed in this real life effort to wag the dog?

Comments

A Wellness It Isn’t

We all experience repeated echoes from our childhoods, and some of those echoes are apt for our time. If my grandmother were still alive, for example, I can picture her reacting to the ongoing damage being done by RNK, Jr. and the rest of Trump’s clown car by shaking her head and saying “a wellness it isn’t.”

She would be so right. Some recent confirmation:

On CBS’ Sunday Morning, the network’s chief medical correspondent had a lengthy interview with David Oshinsky, author of “Polio: An American Story.” He also interviewed violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, who contracted polio as a child. The segment can be found on YouTube, and is worth watching if you missed it. It included heartbreaking pictures of hundreds of children in iron lungs, and showed the long lines of children waiting for shots with their grateful parents when a vaccine became available. While we contemporary folks like to think that polio has been entirely eradicated, it is still crippling people elsewhere on the globe–and experts warn that RNK, Jr.’s anti-vaccine campaign–a campaign that has consumed too many parents in the U.S.– threatens to invite that dread disease back.

The New York Times tells us that Kennedy’s insane war on effective, life-saving vaccines is curtailing research into these vital protections. The consequences of his war on science, medicine and public health expertise are being felt throughout the industry. Investors are described as “hesitant to bet on a field that has fallen out of favor in Washington,” and manufacturers are seeing declining sales. Pfizer’s chief executive has been quoted as saying that the anti-vaccine animus is “almost like a religion.” Asked what needs to change, he said, “the health secretary” characterizing Kennedy’s rhetoric as “anti-science.”

Indeed. As Lincoln Square recently noted, “certainty has sunk its teeth into his brain, like so many brainworms before it.” The article recounted Kennedy’s efforts to support stem cell treatments, which have not been medically vetted, are not FDA-approved and “have been shown to cause really, really adverse effects. Blindness. Death. Chronic pain.” But RFK, Jr. has “done some reading, found that lots of people say it’s great, and has concluded that the lack of FDA approval isn’t based on a dearth of evidence–he’s convinced that it’s part of the FDA’s war on non-traditional medical treatments.

Who needs pesky evidence?

Rolling Stone conducted an investigation into the growing number of ethical breaches at the CDC, including cases in which appointees allied with Kennedy have approved grant proposals that had not gone through a typical review process. And a complaint filed with the World Health Network details numerous violations of CDC guidelines in the agency’s revisions of recommendations for isolation. 

Corruption can take many forms; at HHS, that corruption appears to be an outgrowth of Kennedy’s obsessions–his evident belief that he knows better than doctors and scientists, and his willingness to rely upon “evidence” that confirms his prejudices while ignoring evidence that rebuts them. Trump’s corruption, on the other hand, is entirely transactional and open to bribery.

A recent example: one of Trump’s innumerable Executive Orders will boost domestic production of the weedkiller glyphosate. As the linked article from Reuters reports, the executive order “invoked the Defense Production Act to ensure the domestic supply of phosphorus and glyphosate, a widely used weedkiller at the center of tens of thousands of lawsuits by plaintiffs claiming it causes cancer.” Trump’s order came after Bayer, which acquired Monsanto and is the only U.S. company that produces glyphosate, proposed a $7.25 billion legal settlement to address tens of thousands of lawsuits claiming its glyphosate weedkiller Roundup causes cancer. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” citing evidence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in studies of exposed workers.

The Executive Order also purports to provide “immunity” for makers of the herbicides. That immunity undoubtedly made the folks at Bayer very happy, and we can only wonder what Bayer promised Trump to persuade him to issue the order, which has infuriated the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” movement. (Even RNK,Jr. doesn’t defend Roundup…)

It’s all part of this administration’s corrupt war on science and evidence, and its willingness to sell its laws and regulations to the “highest bidder”–the corporate fat-cats and others willing to “bend the knee” and “comply in advance” with the destruction of democracy and the rule of law.

A wellness it isn’t.

Comments

Hitler And Greenland–Who Knew?

It turns out that Trump isn’t just copying Hitler’s fascism and White Supremacy–there are other parallels. Hitler also believed in tariffs and evidently also wanted Greenland.

Who knew? I certainly didn’t.

If I had read about this anywhere but in the Atlantic, I’d have dismissed it out of hand. (And even then, despite my longtime respect for and reliance upon that publication, I did some limited research that confirmed the article.) The article was titled “Hitler’s Greenland Obsession” and the subtitle read “After creating an economic mess with ill-advised tariffs, Hitler looked north in pursuit of resources and national security.”

Tariffs?? I hadn’t known about that similarity, either. Perhaps our mentally-limited President actually can read–I’d previously dismissed the assertion that Trump kept a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand–a charge made by his first wife, Ivana, during their divorce proceedings–because it seemed obvious that even an elementary literacy was beyond him.

According to the article, Greenland was “a lifelong preoccupation of Adolf Hitler’s.” The article cited stenographic notes from a lunchtime conversation in 1942 in which Hitler said that he’d been fascinated by Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian explorer who  led the first team to cross Greenland’s interior. Hitler’s personal copy of History of the Expedition is in the rare-book collection of the Library of Congress, and it bears his personal bookplate—ex libris, eagle, and swastika. When Hitler rose to power, that early interest became strategic; in 1938, he sent Hermann Göring to Greenland, “ostensibly to explore the island’s flora and fauna. However, Hitler’s true intent may have been not scientific, but economic.”

In a drive to move Germany toward economic self-sufficiency, Hitler had imposed draconian tariffs, refused to honor foreign-debt obligations, and sought to wean the nation off Norwegian whale-oil consumption. The problem was that Germany used whale oil not only for margarine, a staple of the German diet, but also in the production of nitroglycerin, a key component for the munitions industry.

It wasn’t only Greenland. In 1939,  Germany dropped weighted steel rods stamped with swastikas and Nazi flags on Antarctica.

Hitler dismissed those who opposed the acquisition of land on the grounds of human rights as “scribblers.” No divine authority dictated how much land a people possessed or occupied, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “National borders are made by men, and they are changed by men.” A country’s claim to territory was based on its ability to impose brute force over another, a principle that dated back, Hitler continued, to days of the “might of a victorious sword,” when Germanic tribes asserted themselves with blood and iron. “Und nur in dieser Kraft allein liegt dann das Recht,” Hitler wrote, a maxim that, distilled into English, translates as “Might makes right.”

After Nazi Germany occupied Denmark, Hitler made moves on Greenland, prompting the U.S. and Henrik Kauffmann, the Danish ambassador in Washington, D.C.–who distanced himself from the German occupiers in Denmark–to sign an “Agreement Between the United States of America and Denmark Respecting the Defense of Greenland.” The preamble of that document warned of “the imminent danger that Greenland “may be converted into a point of aggression against nations of the American continent.” The agreement allowed the United States to “improve and deepen” harbors and to “construct, maintain and operate such landing fields, seaplane facilities and radio and meteorological installations as necessary” in order to protect North America against aggression.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly hailed the agreement the next day. In America, Ambassador Kauffmann, as the defender of “free Denmark,” was proclaimed “king of Greenland”; in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen, he was charged with treason…

When the war was over and the democratically elected government in Denmark was restored, it willingly reaffirmed this American protection in the 1951 Defense of Greenland agreement, which remains in effect today.

The article contains many more details, and those interested in this bit of little-known history will find it fascinating. What I am finding both fascinating and very disconcerting, however, are the constantly emerging similarities between MAGA and Nazism, between the preoccupations of Adolf Hitler and those of Donald Trump.

Historians have pointed out the striking similarities between the slogans increasingly being employed by the Trump administration and those of the Third Reich. The social-media channels of the Trump administration have been turned into “unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery.”  Historians have long noted the extent to which “borrowing” went both ways– Hitler modeled his anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws on America’s Jim Crow. Comparisons of ICE to the Gestapo are growing, and not without reason.

It absolutely can happen here–unless We the People say NO.

Comments

The Cult Analogy

Americans who follow politics often refer to the MAGA movement as a cult. (As one wag has put it, the only difference beween Jim Jones and Trump is that Trump would charge for the Kool Aid…). Most of us, however, use the term without recognizing its explanatory power. In a recent essay for Lincoln Square, Kristoffer Ealy did–and it was eye-opening.

The essay is lengthy, but I encourage you to click through and read it all. Its primary focus was on the staying power of the Epstein files, and how–despite Trump’s frantic efforts to distract–the files are still there, undermining his hold on the cult, which had been promised disclosures that would (surely!) hurt those “others.” But it was Ealy’s examination of cult behavior that explained so much that I have found inexplicable.

Calling MAGA a cult isn’t simply an analogy or clever putdown. It IS a cult. And that explains why the true believers continue to support an obvious madman.

As Ealy explains, cult rules aren’t designed to govern–they are loyalty tests.  Followers don’t follow the rules because they’re fair or rational. They follow them “because the act of following becomes proof that they belong.”

Which is why cult rules can be humiliating. Contradictory. Pointless. Even self-destructive. It doesn’t matter. In fact, the more irrational the rule is, the better it works—because nobody makes sacrifices like someone trying to prove they’re still in the inner circle.

This is how you get the classic arrangement where the leader can do the kind of thing that would get a normal person fired, divorced, indicted, or laughed out of town—then turn around and demand strict purity from everyone else. The hypocrisy isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. The point isn’t “rules.” The point is hierarchy. The point is demonstrating there is one set of consequences for the faithful and another set for the sovereign.

In other words, the lack of criticism isn’t because everyone is stupid, or hypnotized. It’s in the nature of cults, which Ealy tells us are “engineered environments where speaking plainly comes with penalties.” Criticism–no matter how mild–can trigger “exile, retaliation, or humiliation.” Even asking the wrong question will bring charges from other followers that one is disloyal, divisive, or working for the enemy. The leader doesn’t need to censor everyone directly.

A cult leader isn’t simply “charismatic.” A cult leader is someone who turns emotional weather into governance. If he can make his approval feel like oxygen and his disapproval feel like exile, he doesn’t need policy. He doesn’t need evidence. He doesn’t even need coherence. He just needs followers tuned to his moods the way sailors stay tuned to the sky.

So everything becomes personal. Every critique is treated as an attack. Every investigation is framed as persecution. Every consequence is recast as betrayal.

But there’s a downside. Cult leaders who are constantly surrounded by people who applaud the indefensible and treat the leader like a religious figure start believing their base is  the whole country.

And here’s the crucial psychological mistake: after living in a loyalty-based world for long enough, the cult leader assumes every other world is loyalty-based too.

So he steps outside the cult and looks at outsiders—critics, journalists, investigators, the opposition—and he can’t process a simple possibility: these people might not be organized around worship the way his followers are. He can’t imagine a political tribe that doesn’t have a sacred figure whose protection overrides all principles. He can’t picture a coalition where people argue with each other openly and survive it. Because in his world, disagreement is disintegration.

And that leads to miscalculation.

For years, Trump promised his followers an Epstein “big reveal.” It was, as Ealy says, “a promise made to people who want the world to be simple enough to fit into a villain plot.” It was a sacred prophecy–thus Trump’s distractions haven’t worked.

In such situations, Ealy says cult leaders reach for “hostage logic,” believing that the “other side” must have an equally sacred figure that it will protect no matter what. So MAGA cult members threaten to investigate Bill Clinton.  “But Democrats are not organized around a single sacred figure in that way. They are a coalition that can barely agree on lunch.”

Trump and his supporters believe the world outside MAGA’s bubble is a cult too. But it isn’t. The response Trump keeps running into is brutally simple: If there’s evidence, bring it. If Clinton is guilty, release the files and prove it. It’s okay with us.

Read the whole thing.
Comments

Fringe Groups And Collective Action

Why is it that so-called “fringe groups” are able to drive political discourse and elect people who are clearly non-representative? What accounts for the successes of MAGA, for example, when all credible research confirms that the movement represents a minority of Americans? (Granted, it’s a depressingly larger percentage than I would have guessed, but still a minority.) 

It’s a phenomenon I’ve encountered in other situations.

Back in 2007, a bipartisan group of Indiana leaders–the Kernan-Shepard Commission–was formed to study the structure of Indiana government. Among the recommendations issued by the Commission, led by former Governor Joe Kernan and Chief Justice Randall Shepard, was one that mirrored a proposal issued by former Governor Paul McNutt—in 1936.  (Never let it be said that Hoosiers rush into anything–the Hoosier legislature is finally considering consolidation of Indiana’s 1008 townships into a more workable number– this year.) 

The Kernan-Shepard proposal was supported by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, the Central Indiana Corporate Community Council, the Indiana Realtors, and the Professional Firefighters Union. All of those organizations agreed that Indiana’s inefficient and bloated governing structure was strangling us, driving up property taxes while starving service delivery. As the campaign for reducing the number of townships pointed out at the time, Indiana citizens pay for, and are governed by, more than 10,300 local officials. The state “boasts” 3,086 separate governing bodies, hundreds of which have taxing authority. 

This bloated superstructure (much of which remains) made it nearly impossible to follow through on the perennial promise of political candidates of both parties to root out waste–much of that waste is a result of overlapping and outmoded units of government. It’s certainly not in service delivery. As I wrote at the time, in Indiana, we don’t put tax revenues to work enhancing our quality of life. Instead, we use a significant portion of them to pay for 1008 Township Trustees and other officeholders we no longer need.

Despite polling that showed a large majority of Hoosiers in support, that 2007 campaign to consolidate failed. It was my introduction to a longstanding axiom of political science: small, highly concentrated interest groups are more politically effective than larger but diffuse groups. 

The reason is salience– the importance we attach to a particular issue. 

In 2007, townships were an artifact of the days when travel to the county seat (by horseback) took half a day. Their responsibilities had steadily shrunk; they did little but run (some) fire departments and administer (with documented inefficiency) poor relief. Poll after poll confirmed that most Indiana voters agreed with the Commission that those duties should move to the county level. Convincing the legislature to consolidate them should have been a no-brainer.

But it didn’t happen.

Although majorities of voters agreed that townships should go–that they wasted money better used elsewhere–it was a rare individual for whom this was a burning issue. For the Township Trustees and members of their Advisory Boards, however, it was issue #1. Eliminating townships would eliminate the livelihoods of the Trustees (and the relatives many of them employed). It would eliminate the inflated fees paid to Advisory Board members for attending three or four meetings a year. The individuals for whom townships were issue #1 focused like lasers on lawmakers, marshalling their forces, bringing in people to testify, hiring lobbyists and calling in political favors. For them, the issue was salient. And we still have 1008 townships.

Before there was MAGA, there was the Tea Party.. Both movements were more politically effective than their numbers would have predicted, because the grievances that members shared were so salient to them. It reminded me of a famous quote from Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Unfortunately, it is also true that committed small groups that aren’t so thoughtful can also change the world, and not for the better.

There is no honest way to ignore the shared White Christian nationalism and deep-seated hatreds of MAGA adherents. Their war on DEI and “woke-ism,” their attacks on “elitists,” science, and expertise of all sorts are evidence of the salience of their resentments and hatreds–a salience that has allowed them to marshall their forces and “punch above their weight.”

MAGA’s cult-like behavior, and Trump’s buffoonery and incompetence, has had one arguably encouraging effect. It has vastly increased  the salience of constitutional and democratic principles to the “diffuse” majority of Americans. The Resistance is coming out in force.

And this year, Indiana may actually consolidate some townships, although I’m not holding my breath…

Comments