NO NORMAL PERSON WANTS WHAT CAPITALISTS ARE FORCE-FEEDING US, EVEN IF MARIE GLUESENKAMP PEREZ THINKS WE DO

Republican fascism is on the march, so, naturally, it's time for The New York Times to publish yet another profile of Democrat-bashing, self-mythologizing rural congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. This is the fourth major piece about Gluesenkamp Perez to appear in the Times in less than two years, following a Magazine profile in July 2024, an Annie Karni interview immediately after the 2024 election, and a podcast appearance with Ezra Klein last May. As I noted at the time, even Klein was at times put off by Perez, specifically by her contempt for liberal protestors who were decrying human rights abuses by the Trump administration.

(Her point was that liberals should be focused on issues critical to rural Americans and not get worked up about immigrants being shipped off to an El Salvadoran torture prison without due process. By contrast, she had nothing but nice things to say about Trump supporters who fixated on Hunter Biden.)

The current piece is a typical liberal-media love song to rural Volk, written by ... um, a Vanity Fair writer names James Pogue who somehow thinks he's become one of the Volk because he writes about them and drives his own big-ass truck. Here's the photo Pogue uses on the splash page of his website:

Come and take it, liberal man!

Gluesenkamp Perez is best known as a champion of "right to repair," which she and Pogue present as, somehow, the central economic and cultural issue of our time, one that separates ordinary icky liberals from, you know, normal people.

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez’s signature cause is known as “right to repair.” In its simplest form, it is a call for manufacturers to make smartphones and farm equipment and headlights that can be fixed and tinkered with at home — so it’s possible to truly own them, unlike the disposable products or subscription services that surround us today.

To make this possible at any real scale, you’d have to change the whole value system shaping our increasingly financialized society, which incentivizes the rapid consumption of cheap imported goods and businesses built on the collection of what policy types describe as rents, rather than producing material things of lasting value. That’s what Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez has set out to do.

“We don’t want to be perpetual renters of disposable crap,” she told an interviewer for the website Front Porch Republic. “We want things that last.”

For the past half-century, the promise of affordable mass consumption has been the central justification for a host of changes that reshaped America as we know it, driving inequality, disrupting life in whole regions and contributing to a pervasive feeling that we’ve been reduced to “hapless consumers,” as Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez put it to me, describing what she calls the “high cost of cheap goods.”

To question the value of those goods, though, is to question the judgment of the leaders who sold them to us.

This reckoning has been central to the MAGA movement. The Trump administration’s mass deportations and tariffs are the twin pillars of an attempt to create an economic system governed not by gross domestic product data and consumer spending, but by conservative values and nationalist geostrategic ends. Kids don’t “need 37 dolls,” Mr. Trump has said. They should have “three dolls or four.”

Democrats have avoided a reckoning of their own. Their party remains defined by faith in the power of data and expert knowledge, and this has made it difficult for Democrats to really understand criticisms of a system that has brought many Americans a vast bounty of easily measured material wealth. It’s hard to entertain criticisms of the liberal technocratic order when you’re trying to defend it against a populist insurrection.

There's so much bullshit here it's hard to know where to start. First, does Pogue seriously believe that capitalism as we know it -- even cheap-goods capitalism -- would collapse if consumers are allowed to repair their own washer-dryers? The fat cats would lick their wounds and make money the billion other ways they're allowed to.

And does Pogue seriously believe that President Trump's "37 dolls" remark was seen by MAGA voters as a statement of shared values? Does Pogue literally not understand that MAGA simply pretended that Trump didn't say that, because it's unthinkable that Daddy would be so mean to his children?

But the group libel here is that Democrats -- meaning, presumably, rank-and-file Democrats as well as Democrats in D.C. -- want the uglier aspects of 21st-century capitalism because we're all invested in elitism. Writers like Pogue believe that every Democrat is a froufrou elitist. They're as oblivious to ordinary Democrats -- let's take as an example the late Renee Good, who we know never attended a cocktail party with Jamie Dimon -- as they think we are to rural Americans. Yes, ordinary Democrats sometimes vote for corporatist Democratic candidates, but always against unabashedly corporatist Republicans, because the Democrats are better on other issues and at least hint at support for programs that limit capitalism's cruelty.

Do rank-and-file Democrats want capitalists to lock everyone's consumer products? Of course not. No one wants that except the bastards who profit from it.

WASHINGTON D.C. (July 8, 2025) – According to a new national poll, more than 83% of Americans support the REPAIR Act (H.R 1566, S. 1379), which would create a national vehicle right-to-repair law, ensuring consumers’ right to choose how and where they fix their vehicles; 77% support the SMART Act, which would amend patent laws to give consumers more vehicle repair choices....

According to the poll conducted by The Tarrance Group, and commissioned by the CAR Coalition, support for vehicle right to repair is strongly bipartisan, with 84% of Republicans and 82% of Democrats supporting the REPAIR Act....

Other key findings from the survey:

* 98% of respondents said it is important to them to be able to choose where they get their car repaired.
* 89% said car owners should be able to access their own vehicle data.
* 86% of Trump voters and 83% of Harris voters support the REPAIR Act.
* 78% said independent repair shops should have access to vehicle data for repairs.
* 72% said automakers should be barred from restricting data access.

And as it turns out, five states have passed electronics right to repair legislation. Want to guess which ones? New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado -- all blue states.

Gluesenkamp Perez's central idea is massively popular -- but she needs us to believe that she's a pariah in her party for backing it, because being a Democrat-basher is central to her brand. It might get her reelected again. But it's a lie.

YOU CAN'T 25TH TRUMP, BUT YOU COULD DECLARE HIM INSANE

I got into a brief argument with Marcy Wheeler (Emptywheel) this morning. In a post she published on Friday, she accused The New York Times of sanewashing President Trump's words about Greenland in his big Times interview. She quoted the Times:

“Ownership is very important,” Mr. Trump said as he discussed, with a real estate mogul’s eye, the landmass of Greenland — three times the size of Texas but with a population of less than 60,000. He seemed to dismiss the value of having Greenland under the control of a close NATO ally.

When asked why he needed to possess the territory, he said: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”

The conversation made clear that in Mr. Trump’s view, sovereignty and national borders are less important than the singular role the United States plays as the protector of the West.

In her post, Wheeler was right about this:

... after Trump describes contemplating blowing up the alliance that has been the centerpiece of American national security since World War II out of a psychological need to own other people and other countries, nothing more, the NYT describes it to be a comment about Trump’s imagination that he is “the protector of the West.”

You’re both fucking insane! Donald Trump, for contemplating making the US and Europe less safe because of his own psychological inadequacies that drive him to covet big empty spaces on a map, and the NYT for describing it as the exact opposite of what it is, not Donald Trump needing to tend to Donald Trump’s increasing fragile psyche, but instead as something that protects the West rather than destroys the very concept of it.

But I disagree with what she posted on Bluesky this morning:

This is a 25th Amendment confession, contrary to what NYT would have you believe. www.emptywheel.net/2026/01/09/a...

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— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) January 11, 2026 at 7:51 AM

In response to her, I raised my usual objection to invocations of the 25th Amendment: that attempting to use Section 4 of the amendment to remove a president from office ultimately requires a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress to remove, a hurdle we couldn't even jump in one house of Congress when Trump was impeached in 2020 and 2021. We would need significant Republican support in order to remove Trump using either of these methods, and we'll never get it.

Wheeler, however, believes that invoking the 25th could put real pressure on Republicans:

It is ALSO a political tool. It is VERY useful to say to Republicans, "The President has confessed he is nuts, why won't you 25th him to preserve NATO?" Because this is something they know is wrong and this assigns them agency, which they love to disavow.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social) January 11, 2026 at 8:48 AM

I don't buy this at all. I know we're told that many Republicans secretly hate Trump and regard him as mentally unfit. I know that many of them believe in the old global insitutions. But they don't believe in the old global institutions enough to stick their necks out and challenge the head of their party, a man 95% of their voters worship. They don't want to be political pariahs and they don't want their families living with constant death threats from the MAGA faithful.

But maybe there's public opinion value in saying that Trump is mentally unwell. It really might be time to play the "nuts" card.

After all, here's a set of headlines just now:

* Donald Trump 'orders army chiefs to draw up plan to invade Greenland': US President emboldened by success of Maduro capture operation

* Trump Is Briefed on Options for Striking Iran as Protests Continue

* U.S. Launches Major Strikes on Islamic State Targets in Syria

* Trump threatens Cuba: Negotiate "BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE"

That's one day! And that's while the administration is also engaging in a shooting war with domestic political opponents. Trump isn't a strong leader asserting American might -- he's a guy who walks into a bar, orders a beer, smashes off the lower half of the bottle, and challenges everyone in the bar to a fight. He's deranged. He's dangerous.

Critics of the president need to denounce specific policies and acts in a thoughtful, measured way, but maybe it's time for even the more thoughtful critics to tell the likes of Jake Tapper and Kristen Welker that it looks as if the president is out of his goddamn mind -- not with a specific removal process in mind, because Republicans will act as roadblocks to any such process, but in order to shift the ground so a greater and greater number of Americans are asking, "Is the president out of his goddamn mind?"

This is Tim Walz's successful "weird" talking point, but ratcheted up a few notches, because, well, the president isn't just weird right now, he's unhinged. His aides -- Kristi Noem, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller -- also seem as if they're crushing and snorting whatever it is that's making the president this way. They think a policy of unchecked aggression toward everyone who looks at them funny will keep America safe, and that's a very, very dangerous belief, the kind of thing you believe when you pose a clear and present danger to others.

Trump will continue to be this way until his job approval rating slips well below the 42% where it's been parked for the past couple of months.

Calling him a threat to NATO -- even an emotionally needy threat -- won't move the needle. But if ordinarily sober-sounding Democrats start asking whether he's a deranged lunatic? Maybe that could make a difference, especially when his actions are offering so much supporting evidence.

THE TRUMP SUPPORTERS WHO DON'T REALLY SEEM TO SUPPORT TRUMPISM

I keep thinking about a short piece that just appeared in The Wall Street Jornal under the headline "America Watches One Shooting and Comes to Two Different Conclusions" (free to read here).

The headline is misleading: the story is based on a series of person-in-the-street interviews, but they're not just about the murder of Renee Good, and the interviewees' responses don't show the public sorting itself neatly into two ideological camps.

Most of the interviewees are Trump supporters, and they're not entirely at ease with everything the administration has done this year.

To Lori Lutz, a Trump voter in Fort Wayne, Ind., the killing was the consequence of presidential overreach....

Lutz, 56, a former retail pharmacy manager, said she wanted Trump to remove undocumented immigrants who she said were taking factory jobs in her state. But when she saw the video of the Minneapolis shooting, she thought, “Here we are overreaching again. It was an abuse of power...This storm trooper house-by-house stuff—everyone is scared about it.”

And there's this man:

Good’s shooting “was like two days ago, and Venezuela was like two days before that,” said Anthonny Gutierrez, 23, a Trump voter near Sacramento, referring to the capture of Venezuela’s now-former leader by U.S. forces. “We don’t know what’s going to come tomorrow.” ...

Gutierrez said the Minneapolis shooting looked to him as if it was a case of “force that shouldn’t have been used” and that Trump’s approach to immigration enforcement has been too sweeping.

“I do agree with them getting the people that deserve it, who may have criminal records and aren’t cooperating with the law,” said Gutierrez, who works for a roofing company and is of Mexican heritage. “But if people aren’t doing bad to the country or they’re working and doing nothing wrong—those people should have a chance to stay, maybe.”

And this woman:

Michelle Adkisson-Redwine, a three-time Trump voter in Richmond, Ind., said she is largely happy with Trump’s performance in his second term. But the 36-year-old accounting firm owner is conflicted about some aspects of his policies, including the mass deportation effort.

“I’m OK with it, but I’m not OK with it,” she said. While some news coverage of ICE enforcement is overblown, she said, federal agents at times are “overstepping their boundaries.” Her mixed feelings extend to those ICE is arresting. She supports the removal of anyone who commits crimes, but doesn’t think the U.S. should deport someone brought illegally to the country decades ago as a child.

Adkisson-Redwine said she is withholding judgment about Wednesday’s fatal shooting. The video she saw of the encounter left her with more questions than answers: “Why was that person there? Why was ICE there? Like, why were they in that street? What was her intention? Did it require the use of deadly force? I don’t know.”

As for Trump’s muscular exercise of executive power, she said she likes that he is getting things done. But she questions moves such as the military’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

“I don’t like us going into other countries at all, even if they have a dictator and we make the dictator go away. I mean, why aren’t we doing it in North Korea? Then why aren’t we doing it in Russia? Why are we not doing it in China?” she said. Whatever the motivation, she added, “we have to take care of our citizens first.”

If any of these people are sincerely troubled, I don't know who speaks for them, or who could. I'm not here to play Ezra Klein and say that the Democratic Party needs right-centrists who'll advocate a kinder, gentler Trumpism -- but I wonder what the country would be like if there were room for someone who reflected that point of view. Would it be a bridge away from smashmouth Republicanism for people who can't quite bring themselves to align with even moderate Democrats?

I've occasionally had the thought that America doesn't need a third party -- it needs a third party and a fourth party. It could use two new parties, each of which would be to the left of one of the current major parties. (Establishment voices would say that the current Democratic Party is too left-leaning and might benefit from a right-leaning sister party, but that's nonsense.) The moderate Republican party might address the low-level anxiety about Trump and remind his softer supporters that America's government doesn't have to be arbitrary, terrifying, and brutal, and it isn't supposed to be that way.

But this couldn't happen -- even squeamish members of the current GOP would never leave, because it's safer to be inside the tent supporting trump's reign of terror than it would be proposing a more thoughtful approach to conservatism. And, of course, the way the current GOP runs is extremely effective. The reason the GOP incessantly focuses on demonization and culture wars is that it ensures a reliable vote for the party -- and that keeps the party in position to decrease taxes and regulations on rich donors. The plutocrats perhaps didn't realize that "culture war" would eventually mean "tanks in the streets in multiple cities" -- but it's still working for the them at a tax and regulatory level, so they're cool with it.

I don't know how my four-party system would work in practice, but I'm taken by the idea that no party would ever win an absoulte majority in Congress again, so negotations would be necessary before every congressional session just to put leaders in place, just as in actually civilized countries with parliamentary systems. It would be especially good if the existence of four parties led to the creation of even more parties. That would break the "duopoly."

Of course, ideally, I'd rather have a progressive government, and a Fox/Trump GOP weakened and brought low by general societal revulsion. But I know how unlikely that is to happen. It might have been possible once, but Democrats have allowed the GOP to demonize them so thoroughly over the past several decades that I think it will be a struggle for them to regain a truly dominant position in American politics.

I expect Democrats to eke out wins in 2026 and possibly 2028, but I don't see a shift away from this permanent culture war. Maybe it could happen in a country where the smashmouth/culture-war party represented only a quarter or a third of America. But it still represents the people quoted in this article, even if they;re squeamish about it.

THEY ALWAYS HATED WHITE LIBERALS, TOO

Yesterday, Asawin Suebsaeng posted this:

the government is telling you not even unarmed nice white lady moms surrounded by stuffed animals are off limits, and I’m sorry but: that is an extremely terrifying.

— Asawin Suebsaeng (@swin24.bsky.social) January 8, 2026 at 2:32 PM

And Michelle Goldberg wrote this (emphasis added):

Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, told me that since ICE ramped up its operations in Minneapolis, it’s felt “like we are being inundated with a hostile paramilitary group that is mistreating, insulting, terrorizing our neighbors.” And the residents of Minneapolis have responded: “People have got their whistles, and they’ve got their little alert system to tell people ICE is in the neighborhood. They’ve been protesting. They’ve been out there trying to protect their neighbors.”

Many of these people probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a [white] mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption.

There's a fairly widespread belief that Trumpism is racism and it's no more complicated than that. According to this view, Trumpism is a backlash specifically against Barack Obama: America elected a Black president and Republicans (or white America) went crazy.

But the right has always hated white liberals, white leftists, and white countercultures. The right hated anti-war protesters and hippie longhairs in the 1960s and early 1970s. The right has always hated feminist whites and LGBTQ whites. When Boomer counterculturalists entered the political mainstream, the right treated Bill and Hillary Clinton as history's greatest monsters, at least when they held power or seemed to be on the verge of returning to power.

The right hated John Kerry and tried to destroy his good name. They hated (and still hate) Nancy Pelosi and cheered when her husband was beaten with a hammer. They hated Joe Biden. They hate Tim Walz right now.

Some of this hatred, obviously, is deeply linked to racism. Bill Clinton was a politician from what was briefly seen as the New South, a region where the dust had supposedly settled on desgregation and a political coalition could be built combining people of color and liberal and moderate whites. Tim Walz is hated for continuing to insist that Somalis are humans.

But we shouldn't underestimate how much hatred is in GOP base voters' hearts. They also hate LGBTQ people (trans people most of all), and they also hate Walz because his state's bill mandating the availability of menstrual products in school bathrooms is deliberately non-specific about the gender of those bathrooms. Some menstruating people don't identify as women. Walz accepts that, so the right mocks him as "Tampon Tim."

Tampon Tim is hands down the best political nickname ever. It’s so… savagely effective. In one word tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about Tim Walz’s dangerous radicalism. He put tampons in men’s bathrooms! He’ll trans kids. He took away parental rights. He’s woke & creepy.

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) August 7, 2024

The Republican base is as racist as you imagine. But the racism of the right is part of a larger belief system in which people with certain attributes -- white, right-wing, heterosexual, Christian, anti-feminist, pro-gun, and pro-fossil fuel -- are seen as better than everyone else in the world and deserving of a homeland in which no other people exist, or at least none have power, including mere voting power.

I don't think many of the anti-ICE protesters expected to be immune to ICE violence -- less susceptible, clearly, but certainly vulnerable. These people hate everyone who disagrees with them to at least some extent. Their core hatred might be racial, but they have plenty of rage to go around.

THE DEATH OF RENEE GOOD AND THE MEDIA'S DECADES-LONG OBLIVIOUSNESS PROBLEM

A phalanx of heavily armed immigration goons approached Renee Good's vehicle yesterday in Minneapolis, then one of them fatally shot her as she tried to drive away. Two narratives of the incident emerged: one in which Good's worst offense was to disobey law enforcement -- not a death-penalty crime, and one that, according to ICE's own policies, doesn't justify shooting into a moving vehicle -- although there have been nine such shootings since September -- and one in which Good weaponized the vehicle and attempted to do bodily harm to ICE officers. It should be obvious from the video evidence which narrative is accurate and which is a series of falsehoods put forth by in support of a president who's a known pathological liar, in the interests of preserving not only his dominance but that of his party, which routinely distorts the facts in order to maintain a grasp on power:

On the one hand multiple videos from various angles and multiple eyewitnesses, on the other hand self-interested statements from Administration officials, who’s to say where the truth lies.

— Missing The Point (@missingthept.bsky.social) January 8, 2026 at 6:41 AM

And yet the media keeps struggling to present this as anything other than a "they-said/they-said" story. Here's AP:

While President Donald Trump’s administration described the killing of a 37-year-old mother as an act of self-defense amid his latest immigration crackdown, Minneapolis officials have disputed that narrative.

CNN:

State and local officials disputed claims that the shooting was done in self-defense. Multiple videos of the shooting reviewed by CNN show nuance.

To its credit, The New York Times has posted a video story titled "Videos Contradict Trump Administration Account of ICE Shooting in Minneapolis."

An analysis of footage from three camera angles shows that the motorist was driving away from — not toward — a federal officer when he opened fire.

It's a solid, thorough analysis, and it unambiguously concludes that Good wasn't trying to ram an ICE agent. But prior to that, the paper treated the administration's claims as potentially credible:

Federal immigration officials said that an ICE agent shot and killed Ms. Good in self-defense. They said her vehicle was driving toward the agent and she had refused to cooperate when ordered to stop.

That explanation was sharply dismissed by many people in Minneapolis, a liberal-leaning city where suspicion of Mr. Trump and his immigration crackdown is fierce.

Yeah, the locals said the administration was lying, though keep in mind that they're a bunch of liberal malcontents.

What's frustrating about this is that the administration isn't just offering a "nuanced" reading of the video evidence -- it's attempting to build up a level of outrage against the victim and her supporters using a narrative that's glaringly at odds with the facts, but consistent with right-wing conspiracy theories.

This started early, with Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin insisting on Twitter that "rioters" were "blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle."

The narrative advanced by President Trump on Truth Social was wildly at odds with reality:

I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.

I know we've all just decided that Gramps tells a few stretchers now and again and that's no reason to conclude that everything his administration says is self-serving culture-war disinformation. But the "professional agitator" slander (with "paid by George Soros" left unstated) has been echoed by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem:

Noem: "People need to stop using their vehicles as weapons ... it's clear that it's being coordinated. People are being trained"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 7, 2026 at 6:34 PM

We know that these people lie brazenly. We know that Trump told 30,573 lies in a first term that was restrained by comparison with this one. So why start from the premise that the administration is, or even might be, speaking in good faith, and should be assumed to be doing so until proven otherwise? Why aren't their words under a cloud of suspicion at all times?

This isn't unique to Trump. Republicans and the right have been lying shamelessly for decades, all for partisan advantage, yet the media persists in assuming that they make every argument in good faith. Really? After Saddam's WMDs and "We don't torture" and the besmirching of John Kerry, after ACORN and the Ground Zero mosque, after birtherism, after decades of lies about "voter fraud" going back to at least the Bush administration, and on and on into Trump's election trutherism and January 6, and now the lies about January 6.... When will the media wake up to the fact that these people lie as a first recourse, because it works?

TRUMPERS AREN'T JUST DOING AUTHORITARIANISM FOR THE LIKES

At Bad Faith Times on Monday, Denny Carter published an essay on the Venezuela invasion called "They Did It for the Content."

I think I know why the regime committed a variety of international crimes in kidnapping Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and his wife over the weekend.

They did it for the online engagement: For the excitement, for the videos of American aircraft bombing Caracas (and killing 80-some civilians) and the pictures of a blindfolded Maduro being frog-walked out of a government plane in New York and the president presiding over the capture from his make-believe bunker in Mar-a-lago, haggard and tieless and working hard for the average American Joe, who wanted nothing more than for the American government to abduct a head of state from a country he could not identify on a map. It’s why Hegseth and Miller and others in the Mar-a-lago bunker were closely monitoring the X platform during the illegal operation.

They are posters at heart, and they are addicted to the thrill of their content going viral. I say this as someone who understands the sensation. And this – yes, this – was little more than content creation dressed up as serious foreign policy.

At The Atlantic last night, Charlie Warzel made a similar assertion:

It is no secret that the Trump administration is social media–addled. Over the past year, most of the government’s major online accounts—especially on X—have become megaphones for cruel and racist shitposting, not unlike what one might see from a garden-variety troll on 4chan. These accounts have shared deportation ASMR; an AI-generated, Studio Ghiblified version of a real photo of a crying woman being arrested by ICE; a post comparing immigrants to the alien vermin in the Halo video-game series; and Nazi-coded “Defend the fatherland” memes. And who could forget the AI-slop video of Trump in a fighter jet dropping what appeared to be human feces on protesters in Times Square. These official government communications are a key part of how the Trump administration does its job. It is governance through content creation.

Carter sees this as a sign that the Trump administration is less authoritarian than it could be:

The same people who wanted to create content of Maduro’s kidnapping have also created content of the president’s secret police kicking in the doors of their opponents, National Guard troops marching into opposition strongholds for entirely invented reasons, and immigrants dressed in chains shuffling their way to a plane that would take them to a faraway concentration camp. This sort of online content satiates the burning fascist need for the pain and torment of their enemies, both real and perceived....

Almost none of it is real though. In a true authoritarian onslaught, National Guard troops would have stormed into Democrat-run cities and committed acts of unspeakable violence against anyone who dared to protest. They would have arrested and killed every opposition leader in those states and they would have done it quickly and without pretense. Their cameras would certainly not be on for any of this....

In a true authoritarian onslaught, the regime's thugs would not have even entertained the idea of standing before a judge, explaining their attacks on immigrant communities and coming up with faulty legal justifications for their ethnic cleansing campaign. They would have simply arrested or killed the judge, as leading American monarchist and JD Vance adviser Curtis Yarvin has advocated, and carried on with their ethnic cleansing business.

Instead, Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino took glamour shots of himself dressed as an SS officer outside a Chicago courthouse. Because, you see, content is king. Content is the whole point. It always has been.

And Warzel thinks all the content creation is ... nihilistic.

By the time I saw the news of the raid, a photo Trump had posted showing a blindfolded Maduro in a Nike sweatsuit had already become a meme. Just a few minutes later, that meme had mixed with a dozen others....

The result is essentially insane and postliterate. But it is also pretty much legible for those steeped in online culture. It is coherent incoherence, everything reacting to everything else, all at once. The same thing happened after [Charlie] Kirk was shot. The memes, commentary, and speculation became a culture unto itself, a loop of ironic posting, information warring, and commentary on commentary—all before his shooter was identified or Kirk was even pronounced dead. This process is nihilistic....

But that's not what happened after Charlie Kirk was shot. America didn't just enter a multiverse in which your remix of Kirk memes competed with everyone else's for likes. Many people lost their jobs because they engaged in constitutionally protected (and factually accurate) speech about Kirk that our Republican overlords didn't like, as the vice president of the United States led calls for a purge:

In the wake of Mr. Kirk’s death, Vice President JD Vance urged people to call the bosses of those who celebrated the assassination. “Call them out, and hell, call their employer,” he said.

Carter is right: the Trump administration could have gone fascist much more rapidly and brutally, and hasn't hit all the benchmarks yet. But I'm reminded of domestic abusers who prefer gaslighting and coercion to physical violence: they are trying to create an information sphere in which their worldview seems like the only sensible path, and all contrary views must be rejected. Fox has been building a closed information system like this for years, and now the siloing of social media sites plus the paywalling of old-fashioned news means that millions of people never have to encounter a fact that runs counter to their worldview on the way to the memes.

I spend time at Reddit's Forwards from Grandma, which posts right-wing memes and cartoons. In this environment, it's assumed that Democrats are actually pro-Maduro:

Content like this is what your right-wing grandparents on Facebook regard as their "newsfeed" -- and the administration wants to be the top content creator, in ways that substitute image and spectacle for facts.

In America in 2026, this is the news -- memes plus podcasts plus short-form videos. The content the Trumpers are creating is meant to be part of this stream. Warzel writes:

These days, one doesn’t experience the news on these platforms before seeing the memes and reactions—the reaction and the news are, in essence, one thing now.

Right -- so shaping the message in the most viral way is everything, regardless of the facts.

NOT ONE DIME IN VENEZUELAN OIL SUBSIDIES

This should be an easy one for Democrats:

President Donald Trump said he believes the U.S. oil industry could get expanded operations in Venezuela "up and running" in fewer than 18 months.

"I think we can do it in less time than that, but it’ll be a lot of money," Trump told NBC News in an interview Monday.

"A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent, and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue," he said.

When Trump says the oil companies will "get reimbursed by us," he means your tax dollars subsidizing their oil drilling.

The entire Democratic Party should (but probably won't) unite around a simple message: not one dime in subsidies.

Yeah, I know that Democrats are trying to win a Senate race in Texas. So the message there could be that we thought the Republicans believed in domestic energy production. Or is Venezuela now the 51st state?

Trump knows absolutlely nothing about this subject except what he learns from Fox News, which tells him that more oil is better than less oil because oil is manly and all non-fossil fuels are effeminate. But the people who are actually in the oil business approach the question of Venezuela based on actual knowledge of the country, its oil, and the global market:

... industry sources tell CNN that American oil executives are unlikely to dive headfirst into Venezuela for multiple reasons: The situation on the ground remains very uncertain, Venezuela’s oil industry is in shambles and Caracas has a history of seizing US oil assets.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that oil prices are too low today to justify spending the gobs of money – possibly tens of billions of dollars – that would be required to revive Venezuela’s decaying oil industry.

“The appetite for jumping into Venezuela right now is pretty low. We have no idea what the government there will look like,” one well-placed industry source told CNN on Monday. “The president’s desire is different than the industry’s. And the White House would have known that if they had communicated with the industry prior to the operation on Saturday.”

... Just to keep Venezuela’s oil production flat at 1.1 million barrels per day – roughly equal to what North Dakota currently produces – would require about $53 billion of investment over the next 15 years, according to estimates published Monday by consulting firm Rystad Energy.

However, to return Venezuela to its glory days of 3 million barrels per day from the late 1990s, total oil and gas capital spending would need to reach a staggering $183 billion through 2040, according to Rystad’s analysis.

That huge figure reflects not only Venezuela’s aging infrastructure but the fact that most of its oil is considered “heavy,” a blend of crude that is harder and more expensive to refine and process than the lighter oil found in the Permian Basin of West Texas.

Democrats shouldn't worry about appearing "anti-business" -- much of the country holds the oil and gas industry in fairly low regard. (According to a Gallup survey conducted last summer, 35% of Americans have a positive view of the industry, and 49% have a negative view. Dallas went off the air a long time ago.)

I'm naive to iamgine that Democrats will go on offense now, but a guy can dream, can't he?