Trump’s Orwellian Propaganda Is Now In Full Bloom, and It Is Delusional

Donald Trump’s takeover and takedown of rules, law and culture are only widening, furthering deep divisions and putting U.S. intelligence capabilities, democratic principles and independence, the supremacy of law and even elections at risk of irrelevance to his unending demand for power.

For those who have feared autocracy and abuse of power, the era has already arrived. For those who see cruelty in this administration’s actions, and elements of “fascism” that parallel other autocracies and Naziism in the 1930s, Trump is delivering on a near-daily basis now — including public acknowledgement that Americans want a dictator, which he says he isn’t, to lower street crime.

The redistricting madness combined with attacks on voting laws, mail-in ballots, and state conduct of elections is not only supposed to be beyond Trump’s authority but attack the republic itself.

Trump’s attacks on businesses, colleges, museums, the constant need to rewrite history, the widening of immigrant deportations and the presence or promise of military in the streets now being honed to stop civil protest all are setting off screams of dissent.

Even Trump fans are starting to react as they recognize ill effects of policies that are cutting public health care benefits while consumer prices rise, and Trump oversteps protected First Amendment rights, extorts ownership positions in private companies and covers up whatever ill information is being hidden in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

If you were writing to a faraway friend, you would be describing a nation caught in constant tension, of fraught effects and feelings as embers of ethnic hate are enflamed and identity populations are turned against one another.  The message: In a time of growing chaos, there is one Dear Leader to heed, and that’s why we should recognize huge Trump portraits being unfurled on the sides of federal buildings and the constant turn to Trump Social posts for daily announcements as signs of growing dictatorship.

Daily Challenges

The daily specifics hardly seem to matter — to Trump and, increasingly to a numbed public. Each bleeds into the next, along with the inevitable court challenges that start strong and get watered down through appeals months later.

Using a public White House meeting with the president of ally South Korea to praise the dictator of North Korea only makes sense in a Trump-ordered world. Declaring flag burning a crime as desecration but putting Trump campaigns on flags would be hypocrisy writ-large outside of this White House.

Of course, Trump crossed the law by firing Lisa Cook from the Fed board; it’s beyond his legal power to do so, even if Trump sees the move as pressuring for lower interest rates. But as with tariffs, immigration orders, federalizing National Guard troops, Trump doesn’t hesitate. Trump simply dares the rest of us to stop him. There are enough justices on the Supreme Court to let him do most whatever he wants in his count.

For sure, putting masked federal agents on the streets of Washington and placing 2,200 armed National Guardsmen and their equipment is a public relations show and not an effective crime stopper. But Trump is telling us what is happening and threatening the licenses or economics of any news organization that says different.

Threats, fear, extortion, pressure are prime tools for Trump. It turns out he needs the world’s most lethal military not because we have actual enemies overseas, but because he wants to aim those weapons at Black mayors and Democratic mayors. In Trump World, optics are everything, and the resulting absurdity of (illegally) renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War makes perfect sense to ensure that his political foes recognize that they are targeted enemies. Unable to win his own Kennedy Center honors for being a reality show figure, he has needed to take over the whole complex and show, pick loyalists as winners, and name himself the host.

Scrambling Aftermath

What we do get from news reports is the sense of scramble among states, agencies, and localities to clean up the aftermath of Trump executive order bombardments that may be based on little relevant information. So we’re smashing FEMA emergency responders and National Weather Service capabilities just as we enter hurricane season in a climate-changing environment. We are canceling wind and solar energy production just as we are hearing of huge gaps coming for electric grids to meet the needs of Artificial Intelligence and Trump’s newly converted love and personal investment in cyber trading. Moving against vaccines as a new Covid outbreak lurks seems nuts.

Trump is so busy telling us about the wars he has settled that he misses the point that almost none of the claimed settlements is working. Worse, he refuses to face down Russia in Europe, or to either force Hamas to release hostages or for the Israeli government to deal with the starvation it is causing in Gaza or the land-grabbing in the West Bank.

Trump may aspire for greatness but only offers solutions that fit on hats. He solves nothing.

Lest the day pass without Trump declarations, he is telling us that slavery is less important and less distressing for our history than our museums tell us, and that it somehow is the job for all Americans to look past job numbers or prices to recognize the bright new day on the horizon.

Trump’s Orwellian propaganda is now in full bloom, and it is delusional.

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The post Trump’s Dictatorship Has Arrived appeared first on DCReport.org.

Reading the news these last few days feels like being in the depths of a fever. RFK Jr. fires CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, who was confirmed by the Senate only a month ago, because she refused to go along with his new COVID vaccine policy. She refuses to leave her job, her lawyer telling Kennedy that only the president can fire her, so Trump steps in last night and slams the door on Monarez, a spokesman saying she is “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” Yes, the capitalized words are in the official statement.

All this after Kennedy moved to limit access to the new COVID vaccine to people over 65 or those who “have other health problems,” according to NPR. Tuesday at Trump’s Praiseworthy cabinet meeting, Kennedy informed his fellow ignoramuses that in September, he will have autism all figured out. This after he announced to the world that the Hepatitis B vaccine should not be given to infants because it is for “prostitutes and promiscuous gay men.”

It’s tempting to say that you can’t make this stuff up, but then, the policies being implemented by Trump’s entire administration fit that description. In fact, it’s impossible to come up with a list of all the outrages perpetrated by this gaggle of criminally negligent incompetents. The New York Times and the Washington Post are regularly criticized for not keeping up with reporting on the damage being done by Trump and his acolytes.

We have entered a time and space separate from the reality of this earth in the here and now. The closest I can come to describing it is having a high fever, when you drift off into a nether world of being neither awake nor hallucinating. It happened to me in the hospital back in January when I came down with a particularly bad case of the flu. It felt like I couldn’t sleep or stay awake. Until the fever broke, I was in a state of abnormal consciousness.

That is where we are right now. Because what is happening to the world we live in should not be allowed to happen, we cannot get an adequate grasp on ourselves or our surroundings. It seems unreal that a maniacal anti-vaxxer and former drug addict who has been accused of “forcibly groping” a family babysitter and has spent the last decade or more papering the planet with lies about vaccines is running the 80,000 employee Department of Health and Human Services. He is a man who felt compelled to issue a written apology to the woman in question – by text message, naturally. Now this abusive monster is making decisions that will lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, from infants to the elderly, according to every medical and health policy expert anyone has ever interviewed.

You are not hallucinating. This is really happening. People are coming down with pertussis – whooping cough – 35,000 cases last year, the highest number in decades. There have been 6,600 cases of pertussis so far this year, more than four times the number of cases at the same time last year, according to CNN. Unvaccinated children are dying of this disease – six under the age of one year during 2024 alone. Kennedy has said he wants vaccinations to be “voluntary.” They’re trying that in Louisiana, the governor announcing that the state will no longer “promote vaccines.” Two children have died in Louisiana from pertussis. A hundred and ten came down with the terrible disease in the first three months of this year, almost as many as the number of cases for all of last year.

And pertussis is only one disease easily preventable by vaccination.

You must use numbers to catalog the statistics for pertussis, for measles, for COVID. But numbers are not enough. An infant with whooping cough frequently comes down with pneumonia. The baby’s coughing is so severe, it makes putting them on a ventilator more difficult. “They just never stop coughing,” Dr. John Schieffelin, associate professor of pediatrics at Tulane University told CNN. “They’re just coughing so much, they can’t eat, they can’t drink.”

Try to think of that for a moment. He’s talking about a baby less than a year old, a little thing you could hold with one hand. The baby is coughing and coughing so hard that it can’t breathe. The hospital throws every machine they’ve got at the little baby. Nothing works. The baby’s parents are standing in the hall on the other side of a glass window, watching as the baby’s body stops convulsing and dies.

You look at the perpetually angry face of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You are not hallucinating. He went on Fox News after the firing of the CDC director and the resignations yesterday of four top CDC officials in protest. This is what Kennedy told the salivating hosts of Fox News about the CDC this morning. “The agency is in trouble, and we need to fix it. It may be that some people should not be working there anymore.”

According to Kennedy and Donald Trump, it may be that a pill used to treat roundworm in large animals like horses and cows will cure measles and COVID. It may be that changing your diet and eating healthy food and exercising more will cure your infertility, as we learned the Department of Health and Human Services is considering as an alternative to IVF this week. It may be that measles can be cured with cod liver oil and hot compresses on the forehead.

It may be that we are not hallucinating, but what is happening right now in Washington D.C. is causing us to lose our minds. And it may be our minds are not all we will lose.

The patient is running a fever. The patient may live, or the patient may die. We may know “in a matter of two weeks,” as Donald Trump is fond of telling us. Or we may be arrested and spirited off to a cage in a concentration camp somewhere, and no one – not our family, not our friends, not even our lawyer – will know where we are or what is being done to us.

You are not hallucinating. This is real.

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I don’t know exactly where it is, but somewhere in the Bible, there has got to be a verse that says, First God created work; then he created make-work. It took exactly two weeks for the 2,200 National Guard soldiers deployed in Washington D.C. to hit the make-work stage. Today, uniformed National Guard soldiers were seen in the touristy areas of the District in orange and yellow safety vests picking up trash. More soldiers were laboring over near the Tidal Basin raking mulch. The Washington Post reported that 200 employees of the Park Service used to do those jobs, but Elon Musk and DOGE came to town and decimated the Park Service, and now there are only 20.

So, with a couple thousand Army guys standing around doing nothing, the White House said, let’s put them to use. Or maybe nobody had to say anything. That’s the way make-work works. Yesterday, at his three and a half hour Praise Our Lord Trump Fest of a cabinet meeting, Trump announced that he had solved the D.C. crime problem. Someone at the White House clearly noticed that there was starting to be some reporting, complete with pictures and video, showing soldiers standing around D.C. street corners and hanging around the Mall doing nothing. A bureaucratic tendency quickly came to life: What you do with vacuums containing nothing is, well, you fill them, and if you can’t come up with anything to fill the vacuums with, then you fill them with nothing, which is the very definition of make-work.

With a guy like Trump, that’s easy. If you’re an ass-kissing underling eager to make the boss happy – in other words, the entirety of the current Executive Branch – you quickly examine the boss’ obsessions, another thing that’s easy to do, since he comes up with a new one about every three minutes, and harps on his older obsessions during the two minutes in between. Our nation’s capital isn’t beautiful enough for him, so he’s been going on about “beautification.” There is trash on the streets and in the parks. Something is wrong with the “traffic medians” – he doesn’t say exactly what the problem is, but trust me, there is an entire floor of the Executive Office building trying to figure it out, so they can do something to fix “the medians” and make him happy.

The way it works in the Army is the way it’s working in Washington D.C. right now. What you do is, you clean and polish everywhere the boss is likely to walk, drive, or observe from a helicopter. Soldiers are dispatched to pick up trash along the road the commander drives to work every day. On Army posts, the “main drag,” as it’s called, from the post gate to the headquarters building, is groomed to within an inch of its life, the same with the roads taken by lesser commanders to their headquarters – grass cut to a measured height of inches, sidewalk edges trimmed, trash picked up, signs straightened so they’re perfectly vertical, fresh paint on every visible surface.

At the commanders’ headquarters, the nit-picking gets real nitty. Names of commander and staff are stenciled on parking spots; rocks chosen for the perfection of their size and roundness are painted white to line the sidewalks.

In Washington D.C. right now, metaphorically the National Guard is painting rocks. Trump’s obsession with traffic medians doubtlessly comes from the infrequent occasions he is stuffed into the back of his bulletproof SUV appropriately called “The Beast” and driven the few blocks necessary to get him to a location such as the Federal Reserve headquarters, to give a recent example. Traffic medians efficiently move the traffic from lane to lane. Trump’s security convoys create lanes and efficiencies of their own, of course, so medians must appear superfluous to him. Or perhaps they are unsightly. Or maybe he saw a Starbucks cup resting against a median curb one time. Who knows.

But he is the Big Boss now, boys, so we’re going to do what the Boss wants. Pick up that Starbucks cup! Groom that mulch! Move that median! It’s in the President’s way!

There is, believe it or not, an upside to Trump’s egotistical claims like his two-week “solving” of the D.C. crime problem. It has to do with his need for approbation and the worship of underlings. The astounding brevity of his attention span plays a major role as well. No problem is so difficult that it can’t be “solved” by Trumpian genius in the blink of an eye, don’t you know.

No matter what he does, Trump moves along to the next thing. Right now, it’s violent crime. Put some armed soldiers on the streets, and it goes away…at least where it’s visible to him, anyway. In Southeast D.C. on the other side of the Anacostia River, where no National Guard soldier has apparently yet set foot, and where actual crimes are an actual problem – well, it’s not on the route taken by “The Beast,” is it? Of course not, so forget it.

It's all a show, and it’s all for ratings. That’s the way Trump lived every day of his life in New York City. He had to be in the tabloid gossip columns in order to breathe. The way he measured “success” when he was on “The Apprentice” was by his ratings. Ratings and polls still rule his day, his week, his month.

He used to pick up the phone and call the desk at “Page Six” in the New York Post and pretend to be a publicist pitching himself as an item for that day. He dined at this restaurant; he was seen with that starlet; he made a deal; he was on the Forbes list of the richest Americans.

Now he picks up the phone and tells Hegseth to put two thousand National Guard soldiers on the street. Then he complains about the Starbucks cup he saw from the backseat of “The Beast” and 500 of those soldiers are carrying black plastic bags and picking up sandwich wrappers and Starbucks cups and soft drink cans.

Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” got it so right: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” The only thing missing in that genius lyric is “at Donald Trump’s White House.”

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Ogre Note: This is a reprint of an article I wrote for The Banter in 2023 about my autistic son, Jordan. It has been lightly edited and is kind of necessary for the follow-up article I am publishing later this week.

Most parents get to send their kids off to college/trade school/the military/work/etc, when they’re 18 or so. That doesn’t mean their job as parents is done, but it does mean that, if they’ve done it correctly, the bulk of their work is behind them. They can look forward to a well-earned retirement from full-time parenting and the unique stresses involved. They can, hopefully, see their children chart their own path with only the occasional helping hand from the parental units.

When you are the parent of a special needs child, particularly one with significant learning and social disabilities, you don’t get to look forward to the future. You learn to dread it with every fiber of your being.

Jordan is 15. The dread has settled in and grows Every. Fucking. Day.

Who has time for the 5 stages of grief?

I’ve written about this before, but when Jordan was diagnosed with autism, Mrs. Ogre and I skipped the first four stages of grief. Denial? Don’t be ridiculous. Jordan was clearly impacted by something. Anger? Anger at who? For what? We didn’t understand enough about autism to be angry. Bargaining? Neither Mrs. Ogre nor I is religious, so there was no praying to a higher power to make it all not be true. Depression? There was no time for that. The learning curve for autism and the city services involved was steep, and we had work to do.

And work we did. Mrs. Ogre’s skill set came in extremely handy as we had reams of forms and paperwork to go through. While it was all gibberish to me, Mrs. Ogre cut through it like a samurai. My skill set came in handy as we found ourselves essentially abandoned after we told our friends and family about Jordan’s diagnosis. Mrs. Ogre is not good at being alone, and the isolation was taxing. I, on the other hand, can go months without seeing another human besides my immediate family and not blink an eye.

Thus, Mrs. Ogre was perfectly suited to getting Jordan the services he needed, and I was perfectly suited to taking care of a special needs child as a stay-at-home parent with a nonexistent support structure.

That doesn’t mean the grief didn’t catch up to us eventually. Every now and then, Mrs. Ogre would break down crying over the unfairness of it. We would take turns cursing autism. We swore bloody murder if we ever discovered some corporation knew what was causing it and had buried the information the way Big Tobacco had done with cigarettes and cancer.

You’d think that as time went by, it would get easier. You would be wrong. Unlike losing a loved one, the pain doesn’t fade. Every day we see Jordan, and every day is a reminder of what was taken from him, and from us, by autism. He’s 15. Jordan should be on the phone with his friends, playing video games or sports, or asking me for $20 to go get a smoothie with a girl he likes. He doesn’t do any of that and he never will.

When Jordan was maybe 10, it really sunk in that he was never going to be able to take care of himself. I knew it intellectually, but it caught up to me emotionally while I was talking to Lila’s mom, Claudia (Lila being our surrogate daughter and Claudia being our best friend). Claudia, a product of her environment, is emotionally constipated, but she resisted the urge to run away screaming from “feelings.” She managed to stand there as I fell apart and literally let me cry on her shoulder. She must have wanted to die, but I felt better afterwards.

But the dread never went away. It had settled in and continued to grow. I am far from the only parent of a special needs child to experience this unique horror.

The future of Jordan

My wife and I talk about this. A lot. The immediate future is pretty straightforward. Jordan will be in school until he is 21. After that, the city of Arlington will help find him a job that fits his temperament and capabilities. There are numerous adult services here, and Jordan will almost certainly qualify for those.

By this point, we’ll have gone to court to take legal guardianship of him as an adult. That’s a thing you have to do for special needs adults who are incapable of making their own legal and medical decisions. Otherwise, if Jordan were to get sick or be in an accident after the age of 18, we wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing about it.

Jordan will also be on Medicaid, we hope. That’s the program that covers special needs adults who cannot take care of themselves. This was not entirely welcome news since Medicaid supersedes Mrs. Ogre’s much better insurance. We were kind of hoping it would be the other way around, but we have to apply for the Medicaid waiver now. It takes years for a waiver to process, and we can’t risk Jordan not having coverage if Mrs. Ogre and I fall down an open manhole.

And then…that will be Jordan’s life for a while. We could look into a group home for adults with special needs but the idea of sending Jordan in his early 20s to live somewhere? Well, that’s not happening. When Jordan is 21, his mother will be 59 and I’ll be 56. When Mrs. Ogre retires at or around 62, Jordan will only be 24. He’ll have long been an adult biologically but mentally? If we’re very lucky, he may be in his mid-teens.

Here’s the thing about Jordan: while his progress has been painfully slow, he is still progressing. He can speak, write, read, and use a computer, all at a stunted level but effectively. And more so than a few years ago. He is starting to ask “Why” questions, something that has been notoriously difficult for him, much like the concept of time used to be. Jordan still can’t tell you how long five minutes is but he knows how many days of school he has left in a week and if you tell him something is happening on a certain day, he understands that now. Progress.

But progress today is not a guarantee of progress tomorrow. Jordan could continue to grow until he’s the functional equivalent of the teenager he currently is as opposed to a very tall 10 or 11-year-old. The one who looks at pictures of women in bathrobes and K-pop idols online because he hasn’t discovered porn yet (and probably won’t any time soon, if ever). Or Jordan could hit a wall and this is who he will be for the rest of his life. What does that look like?

I already know, and it haunts me every minute of every day.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

Yay, autism. 🤬🤬🤬

“Daddy! My stomach hurts!”

Once, when I was an assistant manager at the Green Acres Mall Gamestop back in the late 90s, long before we had kids, or even talked about it, I was on break. I had picked up some McDonald’s and had set up to chill in the stockroom to read a book and eat. But first, I went to use the bathroom. When I came back, a middle-aged man was standing there, drinking my soda. I didn’t know who he was and he clearly didn’t belong there. He didn’t look homeless and he wasn’t stealing anything (other than my soda), but something was off about the way he was standing and drinking, so I didn’t immediately start cursing at him at the top of my lungs.

I did say something, however, since A. He didn’t belong in my stockroom and B. He was drinking my soda. He, a man in his 40s or possibly 50s, started to call for his daddy and crying that he had a stomachache. Like most people, I had (at the time), very limited interactions with special needs kids, much less adults. I didn’t really know what to do, but it was obvious (to me at least) I was dealing with a child in an adult body. I tried to calm him down and ask where his daddy was, but that got me exactly nowhere. I backed out of the stockroom and called for Steve, my manager at the time.

Before we got any further, his caretaker found us. The man drinking my soda had slipped away from his group, and they had been frantically searching for him. He was led away and that was that. I always thought about how sad it was to be an adult with the mind of a child, crying out for a parent who was probably no longer there or, at the very least, no longer able to care for them.

This is the future of Jordan. Do you understand now the dread?

When we are in our late 60s, maybe our early 70s, Jordan will barely be in his 30s. We could be sprightly, energetic 70-year-olds, still able to care for Jordan. But we could be dead by then, too. Anastasia will be just barely 30 and almost certainly in no position to care for Jordan at home. She’ll have a career, maybe kids. And while Jordan is relatively low-maintenance, he cannot be left home alone for an extended period of time. He simply does not understand how to remove himself from a dangerous situation, like a fire. Or how to call 911 if he’s injured.

So we have a choice. We can keep Jordan home with us as long as possible and risk a sudden decline in our health (or an accident), making it difficult for us to care for him. Or, we can keep him with us until his late 20s and then find him an assisted living home.

Neither option is appealing in the slightest.

Keeping Jordan with us until we can’t care for him anymore means a sudden and unplanned transition. Jordan wouldn’t understand and we wouldn’t have the time to ease him into it. Would he feel abandoned? I don’t know. It breaks my heart to think about it.

It would also mean Anastasia would have to be involved with little to no preparation. She is aware that she will be Jordan’s guardian and advocate for the rest of his life, long after we’re gone. Anastasia has never complained about this, even when we explained that it means she would always have to live close by to wherever Jordan eventually ends up. That if she were to move to another state, she would have to take Jordan with her, a significant complication. Anastasia loves her brother and is, even at the tender at of 13, determined to do right by him.

That doesn’t mean we want to dump it all in her lap at once. We plan (hope) to ease her into her responsibilities over time. Here’s this bit of paperwork. These are the people you’ll be dealing with. Here’s how the state laws affect his medical care. By the time we reach our sunset years, Anastasia should be taking care of Jordan with us as backup, training wheels if you will.

This option, while the more realistic and less traumatic option, is still soul-crushing. While it’s possible that we will find a place that Jordan loves so much that he wants to live there, it’s far more likely that he will never be truly happy not living at home with mommy and daddy.

It’s true that Jordan is extremely adaptable. He doesn’t have meltdowns, or even get particularly bent out of shape, when there is a major disruption in his life. Every time we’ve moved to a new apartment, he has settled down within days. New school? Within a few weeks. His autism expresses itself in a lot of difficult ways, but inflexibility is not one of them, thank god.

But losing mommy and daddy? That might be a bridge too far. Every time I think about visiting him at his new home, all I can think of is what it will be like when he asks to come home. It’s over a decade in the future, and it’s like a dagger in my soul.

If that was as far as my imagination went, that would be horrible enough. But I can’t stop looking forward 40, 50, 60 years from now. What happens when Jordan inevitably gets sick or injured? He won’t understand what’s happening to him and 40 years from now, even if his mother is still alive (god knows I won’t be), she won’t be capable of helping. The idea of Jordan lying in a hospital room, alone, crying for his mommy who can’t come keeps me up at night.

What will it be like for him when he’s old and his time comes? What if Anastasia is gone? What if she never had children to take up the mantle of caretaker for their uncle? Who will be there for him at the end? Death is terrifying for us all but for someone who can’t process it and is desperate for mommy to come and make it better? The sheer cruelty is enough that I had to stop writing these last three paragraphs multiple times so I could quietly cry and hug my kids.

The guilt parents like me carry is incomprehensible to those outside of our cohort. Normal parents fret about their kids going out into the world and failing to thrive or doing something stupid and hurting themselves. We parents of special needs children/adults feel a daily terror of the future when we are no longer there to protect our children from a world that sees them as a burden. The stories of abuse in the kinds of homes Jordan will have to live in someday are rampant and enough to freeze the blood in your veins and the marrow in your bones.

Anastasia will burn the world to ashes to keep him safe, but she can’t be there 24/7. It’s not possible, which means Jordan will always be at risk because we won’t be there for him. It’s an unending nightmare that runs constantly in the back of my mind, and it’s still over a decade away. Even if we, as a nation, suddenly poured immense resources into caring for our most vulnerable (which we goddamn won’t), that would only alleviate a small fraction of the anxiety.

This is what it means to be a special needs parent. It doesn’t matter how hard we work or what we do. In the end, we won’t be there for Jordan, and nothing can take away the pain of knowing that he won’t understand why. Fuck you, autism.

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🖕FUCK YOU, AUTISM!🖕

Trump’s attempt to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the board of the Federal Reserve, is an outrage.

So is Trump using the FBI to harass one of his least favorite people, John Bolton, by exercising a search warrant on his home and office.

And it is an outrage that Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, has appointed a so-called “special attorney” to investigate New York Attorney General Letitia James and California Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff for phony, made up, alleged mortgage fraud.

It's a very, very big deal that Trump has ordered his Secretary of Defense to establish what amounts to Trump’s own private military police force of National Guard soldiers to put down domestic disturbances and social unrest, which are legitimate First Amendment demonstrations against his rule.

It’s yet another outrage against justice, logic, and the rule of law that Trump’s DOJ is going after former Special Counsel Jack Smith for allegedly violating the Hatch Act by prosecuting Trump for stealing and mishandling classified information and for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. The first Trump administration laughed every time they were accused of violating the Hatch Act for political actions that Trump took right at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, so the charge against Smith is especially ironic. No, it’s not ironic. It’s just plain loathsome.

After deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a torture prison in El Salvador without affording him due process and being forced by court order to return him, the Trump administration is now trying to deport him again, this time to the African nation of Uganda, to which Garcia has no ties whatsoever. Trump’s ICE Nazis are rounding up and detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants, amounting to thousands of violations of due process daily.

First RFK Jr. cancelled practically every NIH grant to every university doing original scientific and health research. Then he fired the entire board that oversees vaccination policy. Now he has found a way to take COVID vaccines off the list covered by health insurance, making it more likely that people will die of the disease.

At Trump’s behest, Congress cancelled all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and public radio and television. Lee Zeldin cancelled the EPA Environmental and Climate Justice Blocks Program, which provided funds to help marginalized communities harmed by toxic waste and the positioning of highly polluting industries in underprivileged and poor counties and towns. Then Zeldin cancelled the EPA office of scientific research, not only putting hundreds out of work, but damaging our understanding of how pollutants affect our health and the wellbeing of the planet.

It's getting harder and harder to keep up with the flood of outrages Trump is perpetrating across the government every day. He’s got appointees burrowed into every corner of his administration with the sole purpose of undoing the very purpose of government: to dedicate a joint effort of expertise, funding, and talent to solving problems that effect the citizenry of the country in ways that private enterprise, seeking profits, is often unmotivated to do.

We need to unify our effort to deal with Trump’s across the board assault on our government and ultimately, on our democracy. Everything liberals and Democrats do ends up being scattershot. We hit targets, but we hit them one by one. It’s like fielding an army without a strategy, just giving everyone a gun and telling them to go out and find an enemy and shoot them.

I saw in a story today that Lisa Cook is suing to protect her position on the Fed board of governors. Representing her is the esteemed Washington attorney Abbe Lowell, who recently left a major law firm to form his own smaller Lowell & Associates. He was joined in the new venture by two lawyers who resigned their positions at Skadden & Arps in protest against Skadden’s caving into Trump’s blackmail of major law firms. Lowell is also representing Letitia James, who is under fire from Trump.

A recent story in the New York Times listed many of the outfits opposing Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the government. A new non-profit, the Pro Bono Litigation Corps has joined larger liberal outfits like Project Democracy, Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Democracy Defenders Fund, and the A.C.L.U. in fighting legal battles against the Trump administration.

Why isn’t there an umbrella liberal organization for all the disparate legal nonprofits involved in fighting everything the Trump administration is doing? One story I read said that more than 200 different lawsuits have been filed against DOGE moves to defund government departments and fire employees and cancel grant programs. Some university presidents and chairs of boards of governors have gotten together to fight Trump’s attack on research and academic freedom. The Wall Street Journal described the effort as coming from “about 10 schools, including Ivies and leading private research universities, mostly in blue states.” But then you read that Columbia caved, that Trump is demanding $500 million from Harvard, that Dartmouth declined to sign a letter from other university presidents to “avoid the president’s wrath.”

Democrats and liberals are famously pro-union. Labor unions are collective efforts on the part of workers to fight against the collective power of corporations. It’s clear from how many universities have signed up for Trump’s protection racket that letter writing campaigns and a bunch of Ivy League presidents talking on the phone to each other isn’t working to protect universities and their academic freedom from Donald Trump. There should already be a union of universities. There should be a union of law firms and non-profits, a one-stop shop dedicated to defending clients who are under fire from a vindictive Trump.

Why is it every man and woman for themselves against the enormous fascist power of Trump’s federal government? Shouldn’t there be a 1-800 number you can call if the FBI shows up at your door with a search warrant, or a gang of masked ICE Nazis grabs one of your family members off the street?

This is a war. Trump has fielded his army on the streets of Washington D.C., and he has plans to put soldiers on the streets of blue cities all over the country. We need our own army of outrage that is organized to channel the efforts of the many law firms and liberal non-profits that already exist and are engaged in the fight against Trump’s dictatorship. There is power in numbers, but there is even more power when those numbers are added up and organized into a single fighting force.

We’ve got the numbers, and we’ve got the talent, but we’re fighting with one hand tied behind our backs. It’s the hand you raise in the air and motion forward calling out, follow me.

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Mariam Dagga, a visual journalist for the AP who was killed in Gaza on Monday

On Monday, an Israeli strike killed five journalists at a hospital in southern Gaza, including freelancers for Reuters and the AP, along with civilians and health workers. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, nearly 200 journalists have been killed in the Israel-Gaza war so far. The overwhelming majority have been Palestinian, and their deaths have fueled the propaganda wars between Israel and Hamas and various other factions around the world. The Israeli government and its supporters tend to claim that most of these people aren’t journalists at all, but Hamas propagandists. Vocal supporters of Palestine often argue that these journalists are heroic truth-tellers intentionally assassinated by Israel in an effort to hide war crimes and atrocities from the public.

Several things seem to be true. There have been a great many professional, heroic, truth-telling journalists working in Gaza, basically all of them Palestinian, and they have been the eyes and ears on the ground in this conflict. There are also a great many Palestinian journalists on the ground in Gaza who are not particularly professional, who are Hamas supporters, who do not operate under the code of journalistic ethics that is expected of reporters for major newspapers; the long list of journalists killed in Gaza includes those who have published in extremely skewed publications or just on their own social media platforms, who might be called “opinion journalists” or even “propagandists” but are not doing the kind of fair-minded news reporting we’d expect to see in, say, the New York Times or on CNN.

It doesn’t matter.

Countries don’t get to target or kill even biased journalists in war. As long as those journalists and media workers aren’t picking up guns, they are not legitimate targets — even if they ideologically support your enemy force, even if you believe they are repeating that enemy’s propaganda.

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“Israel deeply regrets the tragic mishap that occurred today at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement after Monday’s attack. “Israel values the work of journalists, medical staff, and all civilians. The military authorities are conducting a thorough investigation. Our war is with Hamas terrorists. Our just goals are defeating Hamas and bringing our hostages home.”

The problem, though, is that Israel does not value the work of journalists — if it did, it would let international journalists into Gaza to work. It should go without saying that Hamas does not value the work of journalists either, but let’s say it anyway — journalists who challenge Hamas’s narratives and certainly their power quickly find targets put on their backs. Gaza is one of the most difficult places to work as a journalist right now. The vast majority cannot enter. Those who are there are not just reporters, they’re among the population under siege; they are hungry, displaced, fearful for their lives, fearful for their families’ lives.

Over the past decade or so, a simplistic narrative about journalism generally and foreign correspondence specifically has emerged on the left, which is that publications should be hiring people from the communities being covered to do the coverage — Appalachian reporters covering Appalachia, Nigerian reporters covering Nigeria, trans people covering trans issues, and so on. And there is a good argument that insiders are going to have both better access to sources and a deeper and more nuanced understanding of their in-group than someone who parachutes in for a single story, or even for just a few years. It is good and important to have insiders on the stories that impact their communities.

But, depending on the story, it’s often not sufficient. Insiders have great access and deep understanding of their in-groups, but they also tend to share those same groups’ biases and assumptions. They may also have a harder time translating what they’re seeing to people outside of the group. For example: A Japanese reporter covering the White House is probably going to be better at seeing stories that interest Japanese readers, and at translating the particularities and peculiarities of American politics to a Japanese reader, than your average American White House correspondent. That foreign correspondence is skewed in such a way that it’s mostly Western journalists working in less-familiar nations is not an indictment of foreign correspondence but of global inequality; the solution is not fewer foreign correspondents, but more of them from the global south and less-developed nations also covering northern and more-developed ones.

It is admirable that so many Palestinian journalists in Gaza are covering this conflict with great heroism. But it is not sufficient. Not because Palestinian journalists are lacking in skill, but because the current war is one of the biggest and most important stories in the world, and foreign journalists should be allowed in to cover it. In any conflict, if the only reporters on the ground are those who are members of either the group waging war or the group upon whom war is being waged, readers and viewers will get important components of the story, but they aren’t going to get the whole thing. Either side can use the journalist’s in-group status to discount and discredit them. And in-group status really can make attempts at objectivity nearly impossible.

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These accusations of propaganda and counter-accusations of the same is part of what has fueled the continued debate over starvation in Gaza. Viral photos of painfully skinny Palestinian children have been on newspaper front pages, and some pro-Israel activists and writers have pushed back, arguing that many of these children had pre-existing health conditions that either made their health worse or made their appearance more shocking, and that their photos are not representative of the condition of the general population and are being used as a propaganda effort to claim mass starvation where there is merely mass hunger. Of course in any famine — in just about any story about anything — photojournalists are going to focus on the most eye-grabbing subject. In any famine, children and the already-ill get the sickest first; that children with pre-existing health conditions are in the visibly worst shape is not an argument against famine but evidence of it. And in any famine, you generally see photos of children on the front pages, because the smallest and most vulnerable are the first to become dangerously emaciated. The idea that pre-existing health conditions explain away starvation is truly “Anne Frank died of typhus” levels of denial.

But it is also true that if the subject of a photo has pre-existing conditions that contribute to their shocking appearance, those should be disclosed to the reader, and in the case of the Gaza famine photos, they generally were not. Publications including the New York Times ran editors’ notes adding that context, as they should have, and were promptly screamed at by people on both sides of the conflict — pro-Israel advocates who claimed the Times had published Hamas propaganda, and pro-Palestine advocates who claimed that with the editors’ note, the Times had implied it was ok for sick children to starve.

I don’t know exactly what happened with the making and publication of this particular photo. I don’t know if the photojournalist in question, who I believe is fairly young and fairly new to the field, knew that the child he was photographing had preexisting health issues and didn’t disclose that to his editor, or if he did disclose it and his editor didn’t put it in the story, or if he just didn’t know but should have asked. If he knew and didn’t disclose (which I suspect is the case), I don’t know if that’s because he was trying to hide information, or because he genuinely didn’t think it was relevant. What is relevant here is that a staff photographer for a place like the New York Times likely would have understood her professional obligation to disclose that information. It doesn’t mean that the photo wouldn’t have run (it likely would have), and it doesn’t mean that all criticism would have been avoided. But it would have been more difficult to weaponize the child’s condition and claim that a news outlet was publishing Hamas-approved propaganda when really, they were publishing the same kinds of photos of starving children that are routinely run, and that I would hope shock the world’s conscience. That isn’t to say that an American journalist for the Times is “better” than a Palestinian journalist. It is to say that in a conflict like this one, characterized by both propaganda claims and propaganda efforts, Israel’s decision to bar foreign journalists doesn’t just mean that the world doesn’t see the full picture of the siege, it gives Israel the ability to claim that whatever we are seeing is untrustworthy. And I am guessing publications with strict ethical rules are having a really hard time finding reliable freelancers in Gaza, in part because a lot of journalists have been killed by Israel, in part because the best freelancers are being over-worked at the same time as they are living through famine and war, and in part because a not-insignificant number of journalists have published in extremely biased outlets, publicly supported Hamas, or cheered on Oct. 7, and so will not be hired by more reputable outlets.

But I’ll repeat: Publishing in a biased outlet, publicly supporting Hamas, or cheering on October 7th are not offenses that should be punishable by death. One can do all these things and still be a journalist entitled to all of the protections journalists are entitled to.

You can argue — and many supporters of Israel do — that some significant number of the nearly 200 media workers killed in Gaza weren’t “real” journalists, that they had ideological commitments that made them very biased or that they didn’t publish in “real” outlets. But here’s the thing: There is no perfect way to draw tight lines around “journalist” or “media worker” that will not immediately allow bad actors to define out anyone whose coverage they don’t like. Conservatives in the US argue reporters for places like the Times and the Washington Post are biased liberals; liberals think (correctly) that outlets like One America News Network and Fox are pro-regime propaganda purveyors, not places where one finds much in the way of real journalism. It doesn’t matter. Not everyone who claims to be a journalist is entitled to your trust or a seat in the White House briefing room, but as long as reporters put on their press flak jackets and do not pick up weapons, even if they ideologically support one side of a conflict, they must be treated as press and not targeted by the military. This doesn’t make every conflict journalist a good or ethical or trustworthy journalist. But the general rule that you don’t kill journalists, and that we define “journalist” pretty broadly, is the only workable one. Otherwise you get a scenario in which, say, Russia says it’s justified in killing or arresting New York Times reporters because Russia sees them as running propaganda for Ukraine.

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Back in 2019, far-right provocateur Andy Ngo was attacked by self-styled anarchists in Portland, Oregon. I think it’s fair to say that Ngo is not a real journalist; he is not taken seriously and no reputable publication would publish him. He is a far-right propagandist. And still, at the time, I found it profoundly disturbing that so many progressive people cheered on his assault. He was working in his capacity as a media professional, even if he’s an incredibly biased one. He should be discredited and ignored. He should not have been physically attacked. Had he been targeted by an agent of the state it would have been far, far worse — even though I think his ideas are dangerous and frankly a threat to the nation.

One of the journalists killed on Monday was Mariam Dagga, a freelance visual journalist for the AP and other publications. You can see some of her searing and deeply emotional work here. Another was Hussam al-Masri, a cameraman for Reuters, who continued to work even while his family lost their home and went hungry. Another was Mohammad Salama, an Al Jazeera cameraman who also worked with Middle East Eye; another was freelancer Moaz Abu Taha; another was Ahmed Abu Aziz, who also worked with Middle East Eye.

According to the New York Times, “Mr. Abu Aziz praised the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel in social media posts shortly after the event.” This is ugly. It would probably have been disqualifying for Abu Aziz to work for the Times or a similar publication. It was not disqualifying for him to work for Middle East Eye, a highly ideological publication I would not put in the “reputable” column, even if they do sometimes publish good work and some accurate material. A reputable publication would not knowingly employ someone who celebrated a terrorist attack to cover the war resulting from that terrorist attack, to which the terrorist group is a party. It is totally fair game to criticize those editorial decisions and even to write off the work resulting from them. But there are many many thousands of miles between that and justifying the killing of journalists on the grounds that a person picking up a camera and not a gun isn’t a “real” journalist.

If Israel values the work of journalists and wants the truth told, then they should let journalists cover this conflict. They should take great pains to avoid harming journalists in the field. They claim, against much evidence, to do the latter. They don’t even pretend to do the former. I suspect Israel’s right-wing government believes this helps them control the narrative. I think it only implicates them, and that the public is all the worse off for it.

My views on this war are, for the record, that at this point it is less a “war” than a total laying-waste to a civilian population in the name of defeating a largely-defeated enemy, that Israel has committed many war crimes for which it should be held to account, that Israel is staving Gaza, that Hamas is an evil entity happy to sacrifice endless Palestinian lives but also an entity with very little power left, that neither Hamas nor Israeli leadership cares at all about the remaining Israeli hostages except insofar as they are bargaining chips, that a ceasefire should have happened long ago, that there is no justifying sending another cent to Israel until it stops these atrocities, and that the case has never been stronger for an independent Palestinian state alongside a secure Israeli one. Whatever your views on this war, we should all want journalists to be able to do their jobs without being targeted or killed. We should all want the kind of maximally fair and accurate information that can only come when journalists are allowed to work freely.

xx Jill

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