In the restaurant and bar trade, "86" means "stop taking orders for this item, because we're out of it." It also means "throw the bum out." Comey, like millions of other Americans, wants Donald Trump removed from office. But Blanche knows that credulous Republican rubes -- including Trump himself -- will believe that Comey threatened the president with death.
Republican attacks on their critics are often projection, and this is no exception, because Republicans actually do have a couple of codewords for "kill" that they use regularly. The words are "treason" and "traitor."
Republicans have begun using these words more and more often because of the deliciously bloodthirsty implication: If you're a traitor, Our God Emperor Trump gets to kill you.
In the last month, right-wing media figures have labeled a wide range of people and entities they associate with the Democratic Party — from former President Barack Obama to mainstream media figures and critics of the Iran War — as “traitors,” in some cases explicitly demanding they be tried for treason and put to death....
* Fox host Will Cain said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) criticizing Trump’s “bungled mismanagement” of the Iran war “is nothing short of treasonous." Cain opened the segment by telling viewers, “As we’re in a high-stakes moment overseas, some Democrats sound like they’re not on team America.” He also called Murphy a “traitor” for making a sarcastic social media post about the war: “Chris Murphy responding to a post about Iran's shadow fleet running a blockade. He responded with one word: ‘awesome.’ That post triggered immediate backlash, as it should. Critics calling him, as they should, a traitor.” [Fox News, The Will Cain Show, 4/21/26]
* Newsmax’s Carl Higbie said Murphy “should be expelled from the Senate and charged with treason.” Higbie claimed that “in this case, like we have a U.S. senator ... rooting for the enemy of the country he's supposed to represent.” [Newsmax, Carl Higbie Frontline, 4/22/26]
* Newsmax guest Zuhdi Jasser called Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) a traitor and enemy of the state for opposing war in Iran. Jasser: “To see traitors like Ilhan Omar talk about our troops the way she does and Israel's moral force the way she does, these are enemies of the state. They’re part of the Marxist-jihadist global axis, if you will.” [Newsmax, Sunday Agenda, 3/1/26]
The post continues with nine more examples. Those accused of treason include Barack Obama, Tim Walz, and the news media.
Only one of the commentators mentions death as a punishment for traitors, but there's no need to make this explicit: the audience for this content knows that convicted traitors can be executed, and drools at the thought of Democrats being executed.
And sometimes Republicans, particularly the president, don't even bother to leave the death part implicit:
Literally every time a Republican says that a political opponent committed treason or is a traitor, the real message is this: It appears that the government ought to kill this opponent. In fact, the government might have have a moral obligation to kill this opponent. Every regular consumer of right-wing media knows this, and finds these messages delightful and uplifting. Keep this in mind whenever you hear a Republican using these words. It's a call for (state) violence.
The New York Times has just published the transcript of yet another focus group made up of Trump voters. And while it's nice to see that the participants are unhappy with the president -- the headline is
‘Disappointed,’ ‘Surprised,’ ‘Betrayed’: 12 Trump Voters on What Has Gone Wrong
-- the discussion makes clear that Trump voters "know" a lot of things that just aren't true.
For instance:
Let's unpack some of this.
There was a lot of crime, and he did cut down on a lot of that.
Data from 40 American cities shows a decrease in crime across 11 out of 13 categories of offenses last year compared to 2024, the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) found in a new analysis.... Nine of those offenses, ranging from shoplifting to carjacking to aggravated assault, declined by 10% or more.
The homicide rate fell 21% in 35 cities which provided data for the crime....
But crime in America has been declining for decades, despite an uptick at the height of the COVID pandemic:
And 2024 -- the last full year of Joe Biden's presidency -- also saw a large drop in crime:
Data and analysis from the FBI, Council on Criminal Justice, and Major Cities Chiefs Association all show that, overall, crime went down significantly in 2024, with violent crime largely returning to pre-pandemic levels.... homicide rates in Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis declined even beyond pre-pandemic levels to historically low 2014 rates.
Franceska continues:
Not all that crime was coming from immigrants.
I'd really like to know what percentage of crime in America Trump voters believe is committed by immigrants. Do they think immigrants commit the majority of crime in America? I think they might.
Many of us (although few if any Trump voters) know that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans, as the National Institute of Justice reported in 2024:
An NIJ-funded study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety estimated the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.
All immigrants, both legal and illegal, are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. The 2024 native-born American incarceration rate of 1,195 per 100,000 natives is the highest of the three groups analyzed. Legal immigrants have the lowest incarceration rate, at 303 per 100,000 legal immigrants in 2024. Illegal immigrants have an incarceration rate of 674 per 100,000 illegal immigrants, higher than legal immigrants but also lower than native-born Americans.
During the Biden presidency, there were approximately 14 million undocumented immigrants in America. The U.S. population is 342 million. So these immigrants make up 4% of the population. They can't possibly be the main source of crime in America.
John says:
And he initiated getting us out of the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement. Two positive things, I guess, if you really look at it on the whole. I mean, that was accounting for a lot of our budget money.
In fiscal year 2025, the federal government spent $7.01 trillion. In 2024-25, U.S. contributions to the World Health Organization were supposed to be $750.9 million. That money, which was withheld by the Trump administration, would have been .01071184% of the federal budget. That's not "a lot of our budget money."
In 2016, President Barack Obama committed $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund under the Paris Agreement. The U.S. had budget expenditures of $3.982 trillion in fiscal year 2017, so that $3 billion (again, withheld by President Trump) would have been .075339025% of the federal budget.
The Times could refute some of the focus group participants' assertions subtly, via linked footnotes or a sidebar. But the Times assembles far more focus groups of Trump voters than Trump skeptics...
... and I assume the paper wouldn't dream of challenging the assertions of these raw, elemental Real Americans. (Yes, I think the Times considers even Black and Hispanic Trump supporters to be genuine Volk whose wisdom must never be challenged, unlike the opinions of icky liberals.)
I'd extend fact-checking to all Times focus groups, even the rare ones that include Democratic voters. But it will never happen.
On the night of the White House Correspondents shooting, it was obvious what the Republican propaganda line would be:
The good thing about Trump obsessing over the "need" for the ballroom is that it steps on the main right-wing propaganda message, which is that the shooting is our fault because we criticize Trump.
Headline of a Byron York column in the Washington Examiner: "Gunman’s Manifesto Is Anti-Trump Social Media Come to Life." And a New York Post editorial describes ordinary political speech as incitement to violence:
... sane, democracy-loving Americans are beginning to wonder: What will it take to get lefty pols and media to quit their sick, dangerous accusations about Trump, which are surely fueling the hostility and deadly violence?
“I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” ranted suspected would-be assassin Cole Allen in his manifesto — with its clear reference to Trump.
Where did Allen get such ideas about Trump and the need to remove him, via murder? Almost certainly from the left, including from Democrats in positions of power.
Barely a day goes by without some Dem calling Trump an autocrat, a king, a dictator, Hitler. They claim he’s ended democracy in America.
Do we remember the New Republic cover where Trump was photoshopped as Adolf Hitler?
When called out, The New Republic doubled down, offering no apologies for its sick messaging.
“Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’”
And so you encourage fellow leftist comrades like Cole Tomas Allen, Ryan Wesley Routh, and Thomas Matthew Crooks to “fight”—to eliminate your Trump-Hitler, allegedly another mass murderer of six million.
The now media-orphaned Joy Reid repeatedly and ad nauseam invoked Trump-Hitler memes: “Then let me know who I got to vote for to keep Hitler out of the White House.” Rachel Maddow sermonized that she was studying Hitler in order to understand Trump.
Those who tried to kill Trump—and murdered Charlie Kirk—likely assumed they would eventually be canonized for ending the “Nazi” threat.
Hanson, to the best of my knowledge, never had a problem with any of this:
They insist we're inspiring violence because we joke about Trump's death. The Post's Miranda Devine harrumphs:
Wishing for Trump’s assassination is not even a fringe phenomenon, with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel thinking it was funny to perform a fake White House Correspondents’ dinner skit last week, fantasizing about the first lady becoming a widow to an appreciative studio audience.
“So beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” Boom boom.
I think that's an age joke, not as assassination joke, but maybe that's just me. Hanson is on somewhat firmer ground when he writes:
So, how many ways have our elite leftists dreamed of beating up or murdering Trump?
Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi, and Robert De Niro all preferred punching him out. The now-infamous Kathy Griffin opted for beheading. So did Marilyn Manson.
The New York actors of Shakespeare in the Park turned Julius Caesar into Trump and staged his mass stabbing.
The late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s choice, predictably, was poisoning.
Of course, MAGA has been talking like this since 2016:
In May, the Secret Service investigated Donald Trump’s butler over a Facebook post saying that President Barack Obama “should be shot as an enemy agent.”
Secret Service agents also interviewed a Trump campaign adviser last month, after he said that Hillary Clinton “should be put in the firing line and shot for treason.”
... Trump only mildly rebuked Al Baldasaro, a New Hampshire state representative and informal campaign adviser, after he said on a radio show last month that Clinton should be shot for treason related to the lethal September 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya. Baldasaro advises Trump on veterans’ issues and has appeared next to Trump at campaign rallies.
After Baldasaro’s statement circulated nationally, Trump’s spokesman Hope Hicks said only that the Trump campaign was “incredibly grateful for his support, but we don’t agree with his comments.” Trump did not sever ties with Baldasaro, whom he called out by name at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday. “Al has been so great,” Trump said. “Where’s Al? Where’s my vet?”
... Calls for violence against Clinton are not hard to detect at Trump events. At an event in Ashburn, Virginia, last week, a pre-teen boy in the press area shouted “take the bitch down!” with his nearby mother’s approval. On Tuesday, a reporter at a Trump rally in North Carolina tweeted that someone had shouted, “Kill her! Kill her!” — a refrain that has been heard at more than one Trump campaign events in recent weeks, along with calls for Clinton’s hanging.
And since then:
Here’s Trump threatening violence, calling for his political enemies’ executions, celebrating the deaths of people he didn’t like, and otherwise casually promoting political violence. There was also the small matter of Jan. 6 and subsequent pardons for violent felons.
I think our side should denounce violence more frequently -- denounce it explicitly and proactively -- so it's clear to Republicans and to the mentally shaky figures who engage in political violence that what we want are political and legal remedies for Trumpism and Republican misrule. It might be enjoyable to joke about Trump's death, but we get no political benefit from it, and the jokes are easily weaponized by the right.
At the same time, we should double down on political speech, even harsh political speech. Questions like this are un-American, and we should say so:
BASH: You and your fellow Democrats have used some heated rhetoric against the president. Do you think twice about that when something like that happens?
RASKIN: What rhetoric do you have in mind?
BASH: That he's terrible for this country and so on and so forth
If we're saying that some political speech is unacceptably "heated," who gets to draw the line? The government? That's not our system. Our system allows criticism, even harsh criticism, of elected officials. If "harshness" isn't allowed, then tear the First Amendment off the parchment and flush it, because free speech is no longer a fundamental right in America.
There was a shooting last night at the White House Correspondents Dinner and the president did a 180 on the subject of White House correspondents, according to The New York Times:
All week long he had been aiming screeds at the news outlets in the room, but now he was praising the reporters before him, complimenting their outfits, using a polite tone of voice and thanking them for their work.
“You’ve been very responsible in your coverage,” he said. “I will say I’ve been seeing what’s been out. You’ve been very responsible.”
This was definitely not the message he had planned to deliver to the media tonight. He said he was going to make what he called the “most inappropriate speech ever made,” and sounded a bit disappointed that he had been robbed of that opportunity. So disappointed, in fact, that he vowed the dinner would be rescheduled for some time in the next 30 days.
But then, he would need a rewrite — or at least that is what he said for now.
“I don’t know if I can ever be as rough as I was going to be tonight,” he said. “I think I’m going to be probably very nice. I’ll be very boring the next time, but we’re going to have a great event.”
I have no idea whether Trump really would have delivered the "most inappropriate speech ever made" if the shooting hadn't happened. This could be an empty boast, like his threats to obliterate Iran. But I assume he would have delivered a typical Trump speech -- a rambling but very nasty hour-and-a-half diatribe, probably with an emphasis on the supposed sins of "the fake news." It would have been ugly. It might have had a few new insults that would have seemed unusually harsh even by Trump's standards and would have grabbed all the headlines, while going viral on X and Bluesky.
And then the shooting happened, and Trump was the central figure in the only news story anyone cared about. And all of a sudden, he didn't feel the need to launch mean-spirited attacks at the press, because his narcissistic supply needs were being met. He no longer needed to make news. He was news. Attention was coming to him.
When asked by a reporter, “Why do you think this keeps happening?” Trump responded, “Well, you know, I've studied assassinations, and I must tell you the most impactful people, the people who do the most, take a look at Abraham Lincoln ... the people that make the biggest impact, they're the ones that they go after. They don't go after the ones that don't do much.”
“And when you look at the people where there was an attempt or a successful attempt, they're very impactful people. They're big names," he continued.
(Apparently he doesn't know that Gerald Ford, one of our least consequential presidents, survived two assassination attempts in one month.)
And he gets to demand his beloved ballroom, which I'm beginning to believe he sees as himself in the form of a building.
Am I saying that Trump doesn't really hate the media -- that it's all an act? No. He hates the media and he wants to woo the media. He's known for attacking some of the same journalists he's courting -- Maggie Haberman, for instance. He wants them to write nothing but flattering pieces about him, and he hates them when they don't. But instead of accepting the idea that they sometimes won't feed his ego, he continues to seek their praise and resent them when they don't deliver it. His need for praise is bottomless.
But a shooting silences any criticism of Trump, at least temporarily. And so he gets the coverage he wants
“You’ve been very responsible in your coverage,” he said. “I will say I’ve been seeing what’s been out. You’ve been very responsible.”
Translation: He's the main character, and no one is being mean to him. And the world turns on Trump's need for ego gratification.
If you believe the media, Zohran Mamdani just did a very bad thing.
Last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani highlighted a new proposal, introduced by Governor Kathy Hochul, that would charge a yearly surcharge on pricey second residences in the city that remain largely unoccupied by their wealthy, out-of-town owners.
In a Tax Day–themed video, the mayor touted the proposed pied-Ã -terre levy as a fulfillment of his campaign promise to tax the rich and name-checked one owner in particular: Citadel CEO Ken Griffin. “This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million whose owners do not live full-time in the city. Like for this penthouse, which hedge-fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million,” Mamdani said as he gestured toward 220 Central Park South, which sits along 57th Street’s “Billionaires Row.” In 2019, Griffin purchased a massive 24,000-square-foot penthouse apartment in the building, paying the most for a home or apartment in American history.
I'm quoting a story from New York magazine. It appears under the scoldy headline "Mamdani Has Mightily Pissed Off One of NYC’s Richest People." Gothamist, a local news outlet that is usually better than this, now asks:
Did Mamdani’s 'Tax the Rich' Video Outside a Billionaire's NYC Penthouse Cross a Line?
Oh, please.
Gothamist tells us that the video
is sparking a backlash from members of New York City’s business community who say the mayor went too far in an era of increasing political violence.
Kathy Wylde, a longtime power broker between City Hall and business leaders, said Mamdani’s video outside hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin’s 23,000-square-foot penthouse comes amid genuine safety concerns among executives.
That would be this Kathryn Wylde, who recently retired after a quarter century as CEO of the Partnership for New York, which represents the interests of the very, very rich:
Wylde, who turns 80 in June, is one of the most connected and influential people in New York. She is in regular contact with financial titans like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, KKR co-founder Henry Kravis, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink — leaders who shape the city’s economic and political landscape behind closed doors.
Wylde joined the Partnership for New York City in 1982 and became CEO in 2000. Founded in 1979 by David Rockefeller, the Partnership brings together top business leaders to work alongside the government to shape the city’s future. Its 350 members span Fortune 500 CEOs, tech founders, and real estate heavyweights whose companies employ about one million people in New York City. Membership is by invitation only, with annual dues ranging from $25,000 to $125,000 depending on a company’s size and industry.
I guess the rich have figured out that they embarrass themselves when they compare tax-increase proposals to Hitler invading Poland, as Blackstone Group founder Steven Schwarzman did in 2011, or compare anti-rich protests to Kristallnacht, as venture capitalist Tom Perkins did in 2014. Wylde has defends the rich by talking about their safety.
Last summer, a gunman killed four people and himself at a Midtown building that housed NFL offices and the investment giant Blackstone. Luigi Mangione is awaiting trial for the alleged assassination of an insurance CEO in Midtown in 2024.
“In the current political environment, you can’t personalize policy issues without negative repercussions, as we saw with the UnitedHealthcare CEO,” said Wylde....
A Blackstone executive was among those killed in that shooting at a Midtown building, but the target was the NFL -- the shooter blamed football for his traumatic brain injury, and spared NFL executives because he took the wrong elevator. And the shooting of United Healthcare's Brian Thompson was inspired by Mangione's dealings with the healthcare system, not by any publicity surrounding his target.
If we argue that it's wrong to criticize anyone who could conceivably be shot by an angry person, that requires us to be silent about every public figure in America.
This jamoke also weighs in:
Kevin O’Leary, the star of the entrepreneurial reality show Shark Tank, said Mamdani needed to do some “soul searching.”
“How would he like it if Ken took a video crew outside his house and say, ‘Mamdani lives here. This is where he lives,’” he said during an interview on the cable channel NewsNation. “Think about what that means for personal safety.”
I guess O'Leary forgot the period during the mayoral race when Andrew Cuomo incessantly attacked Mamdani for living in a rent-stabilized apartment in Queens.
Somewhere last night in New York City, a single mother and her children slept at a homeless shelter because you, assemblyman @ZohranKMamdani are occupying her rent controlled apartment.
Mamdani haters routinely ascribe great wealth to him, even though his father is a college professor and his mother makes art-market films, none of which have made as much money at the box office as the Michael Jackson biopic made yesterday alone.
Ken Griffin, by contrast, has a net worth of more than $50 billion. And it's not as if his many real estate purchases are a secret -- this 2020 CNBC story not only reports on (and gives the address of) Griffin's $238 million apartment in New York, it also provides a photograph and the address for his
16,000-square-foot mansion located near Buckingham Palace in the heart of London. The home, which is the most expensive home sold in London since 2008, is a 19th Century townhouse that previously housed French statesman Charles de Gaulle during World War II. The mansion features an indoor swimming pool and spa, staff quarters and private gardens.
We also get a link to a story about Griffin's 2018 purchase of the most expensive home in Chicago, a four-story condo bought for $58.5 million; the story includes the building's address and a photo of the lobby. (Griffin also has homes in Miami, Aspen, and Hawaii, CNBC tells us.)
So Griffin's properties, like the properties owned by most rich and famous people, aren't shrouded in mystery. It's easy to find out where they are. The rich have to keep themselves safe (and they certainly have the money to do so).
The Gothamist story tells us that Mamdani might cost the city some jobs:
“Attacking one of the city’s largest and most important employers is definitely a strategy, but it’s not a good one,” said Howard Wolfson, who worked as a top aide to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, on X.
“Ken’s company is a major employer in NYC of very high paying jobs which drive a considerable amount of our tax base,” said Bill Ackman, a fellow billionaire and critic of the mayor. “We wouldn’t want him to move even more employees to Miami.”
The thin-skinned Griffin moved his company's Chicago operations to Miami in response to a referendum that, if passed, would have raised rich people's income taxes; he did this while spending $50 million in a successful campaign to defeat the referendum.
Would Griffin do the same thing to New York? Maybe. But his company, Citadel is not really "one of the city’s largest and most important employers." It employs 1,346 people in the city, far fewer people than the six-figure head counts of companies such as Ernst & Young and JPMorgan Chase. And even many ordinary right-wing voters understand now that the rich aren't paying enough in taxes. Economic populism might eventually come for Ken Griffin no matter where he is.
Griffin is highly unlikely to be killed because of Mamdani's video -- and besides, how risky is it to show his New York apartment building if he doesn't actually live there? And wouldn't people be less angry at Griffin if they thought he was willingly paying his fair share of taxes?
... the SPLC was not paying members of [racist] groups to provide material support to their activities or out of ideological sympathy. They were cultivating informants who could provide damaging (or even basic) information about extremist groups, their members, and their operations, thereby furthering the SPLC’s goals of “dismantling” those groups. Sunlight, as Justice Louis Brandeis once said, is a potent disinfectant.
Donors knew this. News accounts informed the public about it:
In a 1996 New York Times article that was published on the eve of the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, for example, the newspaper reported that the SPLC had “spies” at a white nationalist convention at Lake Tahoe the preceding weekend.
The government worked with the SPLC to monitor hate groups. None of this was a secret. None of this was intended to help or enrich hate groups -- just the opposite.
But as is so often the case, Republicans know that the overwhelming majority of Americans know nothing about the SPLC one way or the other. So they've all agreed on the same lie, because if it were true, it would be really bad, and they assume most Americans will never bother to learn whether it is true:
In recent decades, mainstream conservatives have often criticized the SPLC for categorizing anti-LGBTQ organizations as “hate groups,” arguing that the label unfairly treats them as akin to the Klan. Kristen Waggoner, who runs the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, claimed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2025, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, that the SPLC’s labeling of Talking Points USA and her own organization “encourages violence.” ...
The Trump administration had already taken steps to break ties with the SPLC even before the indictments, citing its research into far-right traditionalist Catholic groups. “The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on Twitter last year.
They don't like the fact that the SPLC considers anti-LGBTQ hate to be hate, or anti-Muslim hate to be hate. (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim who has positioned herself as the thinking person's Muslim-basher, crows about the indictment in a piece for Bari Weiss's Free Press.)
But the message that's going out to rank-and-file Republicans in meme form is the lie they love to tell themselves: that the modern Democratic Party is exactly as racist as the party was when it aligned itself with segregation and the Klan. The memes are already multiplying:
The people who delight in these memes are the same folks who are furious if a Confederate general's statue is taken down or a military base is renamed so it doesn't honor a hero of the Confederacy. But they also tell themselves that they're the real anti-racists. And they seem to have had no trouble sustaining this doublethink for a few decades.
I don't think the GOP messaging will resonate with the general public, but it will motivate base voters who might be wavering these days. Hurting the libs is what they wanted Trump to do.
I found myself thinking about gerrymandering when I was reading this New York Times roundtable featuring Nadja Spiegelman, the opinion section's culture editor, and two fellow lefty thirtysomethings, streamer Hasan Piker and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. Their subject: shoplifing and other crimes against capitalists, up to and including CEO murder.
Nadja Spiegelman: ... Would you share your Netflix password?
Jia Tolentino: I do. With anyone.
Hasan Piker: I also do....
Spiegelman: Would you get around a paywall on an article you’re trying to read?
Piker: I do it every day on my stream.
Tolentino: I support it when people do it for my own work. I say, go off, use the Wayback Machine.
Spiegelman: Would you pirate music from an indie band?
Tolentino: Is it 2005 and I’m using LimeWire? Because yes.
Spiegelman: I feel like every millennial has at some point.
Tolentino: I mean, I feel like, fundamentally, Spotify is kind of deleterious to the musician livelihood, and I use that, but then I go to the shows....
Spiegelman: Would you dine and dash from your local diner?
Tolentino: Never. Never! Tip 35 percent. Come on.
Piker: No, I wouldn’t do that. If I saw somebody doing that, I’d probably pay for their meal.
Spiegelman: Yeah. Would you steal a book from the library?
Tolentino: Never.
Piker: No.
Spiegelman: Would you steal from the Louvre?
... Piker: I think it’s cool. We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature. I feel like that’s way cooler than the 7,000th new cryptocurrency scheme that people are engaging in.
They agree that the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was wrong, but that stealing from a Whole Foods is okay -- though as Tolentino says about the latter,
The ideal world is not one in which this continues and this increases to somehow even it out, right? The ideal world is one in which the theft from above is broken by regulatory means and/or bottom-up means, like unionization.
And as for Thompson's murder, Tolentino says:
I felt enormously frustrated in the weeks following that. I don’t know why I thought that Democrats would immediately take this up as pushing a unified message toward universal health care. I don’t know why I expected that. I don’t know why I was disappointed that it didn’t happen.
It's bizarre reading some of this in the Times, but I don't want to focus on the fact that well-remunerated media figures are boasting about stealing lemons from Whole Foods, as Tolentino does early in the conversation.
What seems significant to me is that the panel is discussing these options because actual justice seems unattainable. Neither Thompson's murder nor any other healthcare outrage has gotten us closer to universal health coverage in America, and, in fact, the Republican trifecta in Washington has taken health insurance away from many people and closed many rural hospitals. Tolentino thinks unionizing a Whole Foods is preferable to shoplifiting from one, but, as she says about the retail theft,
As an atomized individual action, it’s useless. It’s much harder to get a job and accept $17.50 an hour and then to organize your colleagues, a process that takes years and is often unsuccessful.
We might be on the verge of electing a Democratic Congress, and maybe a Democratic president after that. But will real change come from that? While discussing Thompson's murder, Piker makes a familiar argument:
Democrats are failing. Are they feckless because they’re just bad at politics, or is it something more indecent? And that their fecklessness is simply cover for their ulterior motives, which is participating in this grand design. They’re funded by the same corporate lobbyists that Republicans are funded by, especially when it comes to private health care providers, and they have a vested interest in the continuation of private health care. There is consensus in American politics, when it comes to the continuation of the private health care system, that the system must be private.
By disempowering Republicans, we might prevent terrible things from happening -- the utter elimination of the social safety net, a total war on undocumented immigrants, and so on -- but it seems as if the best we can do is prevent the arc of history from bending toward injustice as much as it does under Republican rule.
And that's what I'm thinking about as I think about Democrats' success in responding to GOP gerrymandering with gerrymandering of their own. It's not justice -- it's our injustice in response to their injustice. It's stealing from Whole Foods because Jeff Bezos is sickeningly rich in an era when we can't tax Bezos and his fellow multi-billionaires at anything close to an appropriate level, or compel him to treat his workers decently, even though we know he can easily afford to.
On voting, this is admirable:
This is expert trolling from Jamie Raskin. If Republicans are suddenly angry about losing in the gerrymandering wars, then they're welcome to join him and Dems in passing bans on gerrymandering in the next Congress, he tells me:
newrepublic.com/article/2093...
But will this ever happen? And if it does, how much will we further discredit American democracy -- something we care about even if Republicans don't -- before we reach an anti-gerrymandering truce?
But I don't see an alternative, because we're so far from bending that arc toward justice right now.
