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Here we are, the first Thanksgiving of the Trump regime, and, wow, do we have a lot to not be thankful for. People have died. People have been hurt. People have lost everything, all because there is a white nationalist regime working nonstop to destroy the country with little thought about what comes next.

Project 2025 (Underwear Gnome Edition):

Phase 1. Destroy everything

Phase 2. ????

Phase 3. Everlasting fascist utopia for oligarchs!

There might be a few things they’ve overlooked, but I’m sure it will work out in the end.

Most of us are focused on the regime and ICE and the violence they are bringing to our communities. But the holidays are a time for friends and family, and just like in years past, I am urging you to look at the Trump supporters in your life and make them suffer.

They’ve earned it.

Before we move on to the true villains of the story, I’m going to take a few seconds to be a smug asshole and wallow in a little bit of FAFO for all the other people who brought us to this point. The idiots and dupes who sided with the monsters and are now discovering what a terrible mistake they’ve made.

Last year, just a few weeks after they elected Trump, I called out three very specific groups and made some very specific predictions about how the leopards were going to eat their faces:

Group #1: “The Muslims who think Trump is going to end the war in Gaza because he’s a man of peace.”

Specific prediction: “They signed the death warrants of their friends and family in both Gaza and the West Bank.”

How’s it going a year later? Unleashed from all constraints, Netanyahu has spent most of 2025 trying to murder everyone in the Gaza Strip, which is exactly what we said he would do. When he’s done there, he will almost certainly find “terrorists” in the West Bank and he’ll be “forced” to invade there as well.

Bonus! The regime has used risible accusations of antisemitism against Israel to attack America’s Muslim community, stifle free speech, and undermine American universities.

American Muslims not only fucked their friends and relatives in Gaza, they fucked themselves and the rest of us in the process. Maybe siding with Republicans because you both hate The Gays is a bad strategy because the GOP hates you just as much. How did you forget that after the violence and racism they subjected you to after 9/11?

Group # 2: The Latinos who think Trump’s mass deportations won’t affect them because they’re “the good ones.”

Specific prediction: They’re going to discover that white nationalists don’t distinguish between “good” and “bad” Latinos. They ALL have to go. Hence the WHITE in “white nationalist.”

How’s it going a year later? Badly. Stephen Miller’s white nationalist army is terrorizing entire cities to hunt down anyone with brown skin who speaks Spanish. They drag them out of their homes, their jobs, their cars and assault them. They put them in cages and refuse to feed them or give them water. They send them to foreign countries to be tortured and killed.

The regime waited less than a month before dropping the pretense the purge would only be criminals and “bad people.” They will grab anyone. Children. Grandmothers. The disabled. Legal immigrants. American citizens. No one is safe if they’re Latino. Every week that passes, they become more violent and unhinged, and they’ve barely begun to recruit the white nationalists they’re explicitly looking for to fill out their ranks. Six months from now, mobs of literal Nazis with badges will be roaming the streets, looking for victims.

The real violence hasn’t even started. If only someone had warned them…

Group #3: The REALLY stupid people who think Trump was great for the economy and will cut them a new stimulus check.

Specific prediction: BWHAHAHAHAHAHA! GOOD LUCK WITH THE COMING TARIFFS AND RECESSION YOU FUCKING IDIOTS! There ain’t gonna BE a stimulus check. And if you live in a red state? You ain’t getting an unemployment check, either. Sucks for you, dumbass.

How’s it going a year later? Tariffs have stolen hundreds of billions from the economy and put that money…well, we don’t know where that money went, do we? We do know, though, that everyone in the regime seems to be getting awfully rich at taxpayer expense and openly talking about how if Democrats win back power, they’re all going to jail. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.

Meanwhile, the phenomenal and steady job growth under Biden? That’s gone. Inflation? That’s back. The AI bubble? The largest in history and on the brink of bursting, along with a housing bubble and a new Wall Street derivatives bubble that will make the 2008-2009 crash look like a speed bump.

Red states are going to lose billions in Medicaid and SNAP, pushing tens of millions of Republican voters into deep poverty.

The leopards, on the other hand, will be getting incredibly fat from all the faces they’ll be devouring.

Those are the Trump voters who fell for the bullshit. Who swallowed that delicious legacy media propaganda about “Genocide Joe” and how Biden’s economy was actually on the brink of a recession for four years and how Trump would close the border and catch all the “bad hombres.”

Those people are fucking morons, and now they’re paying the price for their stupidity. We’re all paying along with them but at least most of them have snapped out of their delusions. The electorate’s wild swing back to the left and the public’s fury at Trump’s “broken promises” tell us that these people are not completely hopeless. So that’s good, I guess. I’m not going to waste any tears on them, but I’m not going to beat them up over family dinner.1

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But then there’s the other Trump voter. We all know who that is. The ones who voted for him three times and are eager to illegally vote for him a fourth time.

They’re wearing their Trump 2028 hat. They’re laughing about ICE raids beating up reporters. They’re calling Democrats traitors and insisting “antifa” is a terrorist organization funded by George Soros.

They’re your uncle, who’s much more comfortable these days talking about how “The Jews” are the real problem. They’re your cousin, who’s a huge fan of Nick Fuentes and getting increasingly vocal about it. They’re your grandfather, who thinks maybe we don’t need any more elections if they’re going to be rigged by the “Democrat Party.” They’re your sister who won’t shut the fuck up about poor Charlie Kirk and how you godless shitlibs murdered him.

All of them are excited for Trump. Maybe they wish he would do something about the price of eggs, but, really, it’s worth a little pain at the grocery store to Make America White Great Again. And, sure, maybe Trump is getting a little old but, really, that’s OK because the Department of Justice is finally going after the enemies of America!

They’ll turn a blind eye to the Epstein files, maybe. After all, everyone knows the REAL pedophiles are the Democrats and, besides, they’re all babykillers and banning abortion is soooooo important. It’s part of Trump’s divine mission from God!

We all know these people. We’ve been putting up with their bullshit for the last decade. Or longer.

I’ve asked people to push back or avoid them or simply cut them out of your life because they would the collaborators to a fascist regime and a threat to you and yours.

But these are people who are now seeing their god-emperor falter. Their party/cult is now starting to look beyond Trump and thinking about how they will wash themselves of his sins. That’s bullshit.

The MAGA faithful are monsters and they should never be allowed to forget it.

Now, as much as I would like to carve a big letter “T” or “MAGA” onto their foreheads, I can’t ACTUALLY do that.2 But when the regime falls, the first thing your MAGA relatives are going to do is insist they never be held accountable for anything the regime did. We know this because that’s exactly what they did after eight years of Bush.

Eight years of war and death and torture and corruption and hate, and none of the millions of eager Bush voters took an ounce of responsibility for it. They magically transformed into “The Tea Party” or “constitutional conservatives.” They’re going to do the same exact thing in a few years and you should take every opportunity between now and then to tear them to shreds.

Make them defend masked ICE agents dragging children out of bed, naked, in the middle of the night, and zip-tieing their hands. Make them defend ICE shooting unarmed priests over and over again. Make them defend putting men and women and children in concentration camps and denying them food and water. Make them defend letting women bleed to death in hospital parking lots. Make them defend closing hundreds of rural hospitals and sending thousands of Americans to their death from lack of access to emergency care. Make them defend cutting billions from SNAP and making millions of children go hungry so Elon Musk can get billions in tax cuts.

Call them murderers and liars and fascists. Make them defend it all and be ugly about it. Make them afraid to ever open their fucking mouths about politics again. They’re monsters and they should be ashamed to show their faces in public.

And when the regime falls and your MAGA relative tries to burn their Nazi uniform, never let them forget who they were and the evil they eagerly supported. They don’t get to rebrand themselves as a victim of Trumpism (I’m looking at YOU, Marjorie Taylor Greene!). They don’t get to wipe the slate clean. They have to wear the stain of their evil for the rest of their miserable scumbag lives, just like we have to live with the scars of what they’ve done for the rest of ours.

There is nothing racist white Republicans despise more than accountability, which is why it is vital we make them choke on it at every opportunity. These are bad people who have spent the last decade wishing harm on millions and wallowing in that pain and misery. Let them drown in it, and do not waste a second of pity for them. They made their choice. THREE. FUCKING. TIMES. They are irredeemable. Let them pay the price for being filth.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave is here! No matter what a handful of scumbag Democrats try to do to dissuade us, it cannot be stopped. There are 343 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

The raging trash fire that is the so-called “peace plan” for Ukraine is all the evidence you need that Donald Trump has not only lost the narrative, he’s lost the last clue he ever had about the location of anything even resembling reality.

Trump has been bragging that he will end the war in Ukraine and get the Nobel Peace Prize seemingly since he was in diapers. Ooops. Come to think of it, he is in diapers. He keeps claiming that he has ended seven wars, at least three of which weren’t even wars to begin with. Ukraine, he realizes, is The Big One. We don’t know how often he’s been on the blower with Pal Putin, but a good guess would be weekly. One of their big ideas was to meet in Alaska to discuss the war that Putin could end if he wanted to with a single phone call. That idea fell apart after an entirely embarrassing display of obsequiosity that included greeting a man facing indictment by the Court International Justice with a red carpet that ran between two F-35 fighter jets parked on the tarmac of Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson.

Putin fired rockets and armed drones at the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv the night he and Trump flew back to their respective lairs in Moscow and Washington D.C., so that plan, which never was a plan, utterly fell apart.

It was strange to me at the time, and it remains strange today, that the mainstream media and politicians, especially Republicans, had so little to say about the fact that Putin was ordering up a war crime – purposefully killing civilians – at the same time he was holding “peace” talks with Trump. It’s as if what passes for a political class in this country has completely lost the ability to discern what is criminal and immoral in the actions of a dictator like Vladimir Putin. The “analysis,” such as it was, after the Alaska talks focused on the fact that the talks ended earlier than expected and what that meant. Well, it meant the talks had failed spectacularly, which should have been apparent when there was no press conference held by Trump and Putin afterwards. Instead, Trump stood mute as Putin launched into one of his Khrushchev-style lectures on the “root causes” of his war against Ukraine and a gratuitous and deadly boring history lesson about Russia’s former ownership of Alaska.

Trump’s remarks were uncharacteristically brief. He claimed “great progress” had been made in the talks. Incredibly, as he stood next to the man who was responsible, all by himself, for the war, Trump noted that “five, six, seven thousand people a week” are being killed while claiming that Putin wanted to see an end to the killing as much as he did.

All of which is to say, we should have seen this disaster coming. This week’s “peace plan” turned out to be the same Russian demands that Putin has been making all along – recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and Ukraine’s acceptance of being turned into a half-country with a smaller military, no rights to treaties or defense agreements with other countries, a defenestrated defense establishment with no right to own or use offensive missiles…one fantasy demand after another.

That was Russia’s stance way back in August in Alaska, and it hasn’t changed a whit since then.

So, what did Trump do? Well, he took Putin’s Alaska “peace plan,” put his stamp of approval on it, and announced that Ukraine had until this Thursday to agree to it.

But that was before Rubio told a gaggle of Senators that the Russians had written the plan, then he said the plan was ours, and then Trump started to back off and claim that it was just a suggested plan and the deadline wasn’t final.

Yet another example of what you get when you mix utter incompetence with a total lack of any morals at all.

Trump is spazzing. He’s lost his grip on his own party. House and Senate Republicans both stiffed him and passed the bill forcing the release of the Epstein files. Marjorie Taylor Greene is using this moment to put herself in the spotlight as a potential future candidate for something or another by standing up to Trump and trashing him in a YouTube video announcing her resignation from the House. Greene has been something of a joke to Democrats, but she’s got the political instincts of a scorpion, and now she has shown herself willing to sting any creature that gets in her way, including Trump.

The Epstein scandal, combined with Trump’s complete capitulation to Putin, shows his weakness and proves he’s the lamest of lame ducks, even with three years left to serve in the now-desecrated White House. He’s incompetent on foreign affairs, he’s crashing the economy with his tariffs, inflation is sitting out there in the weeds just waiting to pop up and bite him in his copious ass, he has allowed the Republicans to show themselves, once again, to have nothing whatsoever to say about health care and insurance other than the same old “free market” garbage that no one takes seriously, and his poll numbers are headed for the third basement below loser.

Best of all, Trump is looking at the midterm elections knowing Republicans are going to lose the House and might lose the Senate. If that happens, he’s going to face yet another Bill of Impeachment in the House and trial in the Senate. Trump hasn’t got enough gold leaf to paper over his ego if that happens.

Mamdani created a YouTube video of how to handle a blowhard in his meeting last week with Trump. If you stand up to him, Trump doesn’t know how to act. Gavin Newsom should be on a plane to New York to sit down with Mamdani to learn his secrets, including his magic with younger voters and Latinos.

Trump is weak. Strike now.

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The Witkoff-negotiated “peace deal” is now being reported as not a U.S. thing at all. A post on X tonight from Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, appears to be evidence of the Trump administration shifting quickly into reverse after the blowback from Europe and U.S. politicians to the absurd sell-out “deal” Trump was pushing.

From Rounds on X: “@SecRubio did make a phone call to us this afternoon. I think he made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan. It is a proposal that was received. And as an intermediary, we have made arrangements to share it. And we did not release it. It was leaked. It was not released by our members or our representatives... This is an opportunity to receive it and that it has been utilized and delivered to the Ukrainians, and that they will have an opportunity to respond. And in doing so, you now have one side being presented and the opportunity for the other side to respond.”

With his reference to “a phone call to us,” Rounds appears to be referring to a call with Republican senators, since the Trump administration is not exactly known for keeping Democrats in the loop. Rubio’s sudden reversal appears to be an attempt to quiet Republican opposition to the Trump “deal.”

But even that isn’t clear. The situation is changing by the moment. A friend with excellent contacts in both Ukraine and U.S. diplomatic circles just sent me a message saying that Rubio has now tweeted that “the plan was drafted by the US with input from Ukraine and Russia.”

Did Witkoff negotiate it with Dmitriev, or was the plan handed by Russia to the U.S.? Rubio told the senators, the plan was “delivered to the Ukrainians, and that they will have an opportunity to respond.” So, which is it? Does anyone know?

The whole thing sounds like a typical Trump cobbled-together total clusterfuck at this point. Stay tuned. By midnight, they might be pushing the line that Little Green Men threw the thing down from a hovering UFO.

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The “peace deal” isn’t a ceasefire. It isn’t an armistice. It is a complete capitulation to every fever-dream demand Vladimir Putin has made whenever ending his war has ever been discussed. As written, it is worse than whatever “deal” he and Trump allegedly discussed at their meeting in Alaska, which apparently disturbed Trump enough that he ended the meeting before it was scheduled to close.

Ukraine wasn’t even consulted. The proposed deal as reported by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, “was negotiated by Steve Witkoff, a real-estate developer with no historical, geographical, or cultural knowledge of Russia or Ukraine, and Kirill Dmitriev, who heads Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund and spends most of his time making business deals.” That would be Trump’s real estate buddy, with whom he has other deals involving crypto, including the $2 billion investment by Dubai in what is referred to as the “Trump-Witkoff stablecoin,” which for those who haven’t been paying close attention to the topsy-turvy-but-generally-Ponzi world of crypto is neither a “coin” nor “stable.” Putin’s “negotiator,” like anyone associated with him in Russia at this time, can best be described as a killer.

So, a Trump buddy and a killer for Putin. That sounds fair.

The deal would allow Putin to keep all the land in Ukraine he has taken waging war by murdering civilians and burying them in mass-graves, sending rockets and armed drones into Ukrainian population centers almost nightly. Russian air attacks have killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians and destroyed hospitals, schools, churches, apartment buildings, shopping malls, streets, businesses, factories and other civilian infrastructure – all of which amounts to war crimes for which Putin has been charged, and for which, under terms of the deal, he will not face prosecution at the International Court of Justice.

The deal would require Ukraine to cede to Russia the 12 percent of the Donbas – the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk – that Russia has been fighting for, but has not captured. These lands unoccupied by Russia are rich in coal, iron, and the kinds of precious metals necessary for advanced batteries and microchip production.

So, that would reward Russia with land it has not even seized, and from which it would be free to build up militarily for some future attack to seize the rest of Ukraine and launch a war on Europe.

According to the New York Times, the deal was “drafted with no input from the Ukrainians, the European allies or the Congress.” So, one might ask, just who had input in negotiating the deal? Well, Trump’s gofer and Putin’s killer, that’s who.

Under terms of the deal, Ukraine would be required to rewrite its constitution to include a clause forbidding the country from ever joining NATO. Ukraine must agree to limit its military to 600,000 troops, a reduction from its current level of 900,000; it would be forbidden to possess any long range missiles capable of striking Russia. Since to strike Russia, all Ukraine would have to do is fire a missile a few miles over the border, that would seem to include such short-range missiles as the HIMARS missiles that have been supplied by the United States, and other defensive missiles that European nations have provided. Ukraine would also be compelled to hold elections within 100 days of the deal’s signing. This demand, negotiated by Capitulator in Chief Witkoff, has been made by a country in which Putin has outlawed competitor political parties, jailed and killed his political opponents, and not held a legitimate and free election for more than 20 years.

Applebaum reports that “Awkward wording, evident throughout the document, suggests that at least some of it was originally written in Russian.” Oh, boy, couldn’t have guessed that, huh?

Here is where we get our hint of what the real deal is behind the “peace deal” Trump wants to foist on Ukraine. The U.S. would be required to help “reintegrate” Russia into the world economy. What does that mean? Well, the U.S. would be required to lift all economic sanctions on Russia and agree to Russia’s readmission to the G8. The $100 billion in frozen Russian assets, most of which is held by European banks, would be returned to Russia, supposedly under the control of the United States, which would “invest” this money in Ukraine. In return, the U.S. would get “50 percent of the profits from this venture.” What would the Europeans get, who have been supplying weapons and other aid to Ukraine for three long years? The “peace deal” requires European nations, unnamed but presumably including those in the European Union, to “invest” $100 billion in the reconstruction of Ukraine. Under whose supervision would that reconstruction take place? That isn’t specified, but in the more than one-fifth of Ukraine occupied by Russia, which the rest of the world would be required to recognize as Russian territory, I would just bet that Russia would be in control of all those hundreds of billions that would be devoted to “reconstruction.”

And what would Russia be required to do in return? Nada. Zip. Zero. Nothing.

According to Applebaum in The Atlantic, Trump’s gofer Witkoff did his duty in making certain that Donald Trump profited from his “peace deal.” According to the wording of the deal, the U.S. and Russia would “enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centers, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.”

What are the details of these agreements that would clearly benefit Donald Trump and whichever business-buddies he chooses to include in the flood of profits? There are no details. As Applebaum reports, “the business negotiations carried out by Witkoff and Dmitriev remain secret.”

Oh, boy, we couldn’t have guessed that.

So, who is left out of the mega-exploitation of Ukraine’s resources and all the deals cut by Trump and Russia? Well, that would be every single country in Europe that has been helping Ukraine fight the Russians for three years. They get nothing from Trump and Putin.

In fact, all Europe gets is a strengthened Russia that upon the signing of the “peace deal,” would be free to rearm and start moving even more troops and materiel into the Ukrainian lands it has occupied in preparation for whatever conquest Vladimir Putin wants to order next.

When the U.S. defeated the Nazis in World War II, Germany was disarmed and forbidden from building a new military force that would threaten Europe and the rest of the world. Under the Trump-Putin “peace deal,” Ukraine would be hindered from rearming to defend the rest of its territory, but Russia would be rewarded for its aggression and murder by being permitted to do anything it wants militarily with all the money and resources that are freed-up by the lifting of sanctions and the involvement of Russia in brand new deals with Trump-picked cronies to develop resources and build new AI plants, factories to extract and use rare earth metals, and all the U.S. oil technology necessary to drill for oil in Russia’s deep North, where the lack of that technology has hampered Russian oil exploration for decades.

It is not known what Zelenskyy will agree to between now and the Thanksgiving deadline Trump has set for the deal to be agreed to by Ukraine – there being no question that Russia will agree to the terms of the deal, since it appears that Putin’s killer negotiator was the one who wrote the fucking thing.

Trump was asked by reporters yesterday what would happen if Ukraine did not agree to the terms of his “peace deal.” Here is his response: “He’ll have to like it and if he doesn’t like it then, you know, they should just keep fighting.” Trump was also asked if the U.S. would continue to support Ukraine if Zelenskyy doesn’t agree to the “peace deal.”

“At some point, he’s going to have to accept something,” Trump replied.

Trump has his nose shoved so far up Putin’s ass, it’s amazing he can see enough to play golf. The question is, why? This week, we got at least part of our answer: Trump’s “peace deal” will make him and his family and his gang of American oligarchs much, much more wealthy. That’s why he ran for the presidency, after all, to enrich himself and his family and his friends. That he will be enriching himself at the cost of Ukrainian lives doesn’t matter to him. What matters to Donald Trump is money, and there is plenty of it to be had if he can force Zelenskyy to sign a “peace deal” that will not guarantee him and Ukraine any peace at all.

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What you have to understand about the military is that it functions as a nearly absolute autocracy within the democracy that governs the rest of the country. There are many rights that you simply don’t have if you are in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, or Coast Guard. You don’t have the right to go to bed when you please. If your commander says “lights out” at 11 p.m., that means lights in the barracks are turned off. If your commander says no personal electronic devices like cell phones while on duty, then you can’t look at or even carry a cell phone while you’re working.

Most famously, if a commander says reveille is at 5 a.m., that’s when the bugle blows and your feet must hit the floor. You don’t get to sleep in if you had a long night and you’re tired. Orders are orders. Get up and get moving, soldier!

In war, the window of a soldier’s rights narrows considerably. If you are ordered by a platoon leader to dig a hole and get in it and defend the perimeter of the unit’s position, you must get your entrenching tool – a small shovel – dig your hole, use it for cover, and engage the enemy if your platoon’s position is attacked. If you’re ordered to charge a position held by the enemy and shoot to kill, you are obligated under the UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, to follow an order that may cause you to take the life of another human being.

The UCMJ is a code of laws that governs the behavior of members of the military while they are on active duty, defining behavior that is allowable and what is not permitted and outlining punishments for violating military regulations and the laws of the UCMJ itself.

The UCMJ cuts both ways, however. Included in the military code of justice is the law that says members of the military have a duty to obey all lawful orders, but they also have a duty not to obey orders that are illegal, unconstitutional, or otherwise criminal in nature. A common example of an illegal order that soldiers have a duty not to follow is being ordered to mistreat or kill a prisoner of war. Being ordered to mistreat or hurt or haze or kill another soldier would be similarly illegal, and service members would be obligated not to follow such an order.

The reason this issue has arisen is because six members of Congress who are either military veterans or served in national security positions such as the CIA released a video on Tuesday urging service members on active duty, in the reserve, or the National Guard not to follow illegal orders. The members of Congress did not specify which illegal orders that military members must refuse to obey. Instead, they made the point that the Trump administration is pitting the military against the American public on the streets of this country with its military deployments to cities, in violation of the Constitution, according to some recent court decisions.

Reports noted that some National Guard soldiers deployed to cities such as Washington D.C. and Memphis are armed, raising the possibility that soldiers may at some point be ordered to shoot protesters or others. Some reports included the fact that the military has been engaged in rocketing and sinking boats that are alleged by the Trump administration to be smuggling drugs to the United States. Some experts in military and international law have held that the attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean are illegal under the laws of the sea and international laws regarding armed conflicts. The Pentagon responded to this criticism with a legal opinion that the attacks on alleged “drug boats” are legal in that President Trump has declared them to be “narco-terrorists” engaged in an attack on the U.S. by shipping deadly drugs to our shores.

Trump flew into a nearly incoherent rage on Thursday calling the members of Congress in the video “traitors” who are engaging in “sedition” and “should be put to death” or “hanged.”

I’ll just note here for the record that what the members of Congress said in the video was a distillation of what is written in the UCMJ about the duty of soldiers and other members of the military to refuse illegal orders. So, Donald Trump was calling for members of Congress to be put to death for not only following the law but insisting on the obligation of members of the military to follow the law, as well.

The part of the UCMJ that obligates members of the military to refuse illegal orders is their Bill of Rights. Soldiers don’t have a right to refuse orders that are stupid, such as being ordered to pick up trash in the hot sun of a summer day and make their beds to a certain and seemingly irrational standard or face punishment. But members of the military have not only the right, but the duty, to refuse to follow illegal orders such as those I have already discussed. Among them might be what Trump asked of the Pentagon Chief of Staff, General Mark Milley, about protesters outside the White House in the summer of 2020: “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?”

Shooting unarmed protesters exercising their First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances is illegal, so if Trump had framed his idea as an order rather than a question, that order would have been illegal. Framed as a suggestion, advocating shooting unarmed protesters could be seen as committing assault, a felony under civilian law, and I am certain is illegal under the UCMJ as well.

Donald Trump is the person committing illegal acts by suggesting that protesters be shot, or that members of Congress should be put to death. By declaring that presidential acts are perforce legal, the Supreme Court, in Trump v. United States, insulated Donald Trump and future presidents from prosecution for making statements or giving orders that would break laws that others, including the military, are compelled to follow.

Members of the military are given orders every day that verge on or are actually illegal. Superior commanders regularly tell subordinate commanders to punish individuals for doing things that are not illegal, or that are illegal but for which there is no evidence or due process of law. Subordinate commanders must then decide how willing they are to fight their superior officer over the illegal order by refusing to carry it out, knowing that the superior can easily torpedo their careers with a bad personnel report or a lie to their own superior officer about the disloyalty of the subordinate.

It is generally not a good idea, career-wise, to refuse illegal orders. It’s a better idea to find a way around them, which soldiers are often compelled to become expert at doing. But sometimes you don’t have a choice. An example from my own, very brief, Army career is when a superior officer told me to stop signing up members of my platoon who had families for food stamps. It was legal for soldiers to receive food stamps. They qualified because of their very low pay, which put many of them below the federal poverty line. I refused that order and continued to sign up my soldiers who needed food stamps to feed their families. This did not sit well with my commanding officer, who proceeded to give me a score of 69 out of a possible 100 on my “Officer Efficiency Report,” the measure by which promotions were decided. I was not promoted to First Lieutenant. Knowing there was no way for me to “win” the Catch 22 over the decision not to follow illegal orders, and under charges for other “crimes” I faced, I chose not to fight when administrative discharge proceedings were brought against me.

A lot of very bad water has passed under a lot of creaking, dangerous bridges since those days. Two wars, Vietnam and Iraq, were ordered illegally based on lies. The war in Afghanistan was ordered legitimately but fought in frequently illegitimate ways for 20 very long years.

And now we have a president who never served in the military, who avoided serving by lying about “bone spurs” to get out of the draft, signing executive orders that are often illegal and ordering the illegal firing of those who question his orders.

This country has seen worse, but not for a very, very long time: The Civil War began 165 years ago, and we survived that national disaster. We will survive this one, too, but not without casualties on battlefields at home and abroad. The way you beat a tyrant is standing up to his tyranny. Six members of Congress gave us an example of exactly that on Tuesday. Each of them is under special guard by Capitol Police because of threats to their lives by MAGA followers of Donald Trump.

We will stand with them and fight against tyranny with them, and there is a lot of fighting we must do with our votes and our bodies.

No Kings Forever!

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I am the proud product of excellent K-12 public education. I am a liberal who wants to pay teachers more, who supporters teachers’ unions, who will always vote to raise my own taxes to give more money to public schools, who opposes efforts to redirect public funds to private religious academies, who thinks education has to be broader than just multiplication tables and spelling tests.

And I’m stunned at just how badly people who share my politics have screwed up public education for American kids — and how urgent it is to reckon with the bad outcomes of our good intentions, and quickly change course.

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In New York magazine, Andrew Rice has a must-read piece looking at his own town of Montclair, NJ, which has one of the best-funded public school systems in the nation and yet has seen steep downturns in student outcomes, especially for Black students. In The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch writes about the stunning decline in math abilities among college students, many of whom — even at competitive colleges — cannot complete problems suited for eighth graders. In The New York Times, psychology professor Jean Twenge writes about plummeting standardized test scores and identifies the ubiquitous in-class laptop as a culprit. On Twitter, organizational psychologist Adam Grant shared a new study finding that, per Grant’s summary, “students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It’s not just because they’re less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images.”

There is no single cause of the educational backsliding we’ve seen over the past decade. And Covid school closures certainly accelerated existing negative trends. But Covid also contributed to polarization in even agreeing that there’s a problem to be solved. It is clear, in hindsight, that closing schools was disastrous for students; but it was not clear, in the moment, that the potential learning losses for students were more of a risk than the potential loss of life and health for the masses, including sick and elderly family members living with young children. The Covid divides, though, have poisoned the education conversation. At this point, there is nothing we can do about the fact that many schools closed and many students suffered from it — and some people’s lives were also probably saved. It would be far more useful to look at the whole picture of what went wrong — what was going wrong before Covid, and which terrible ideas Covid made widespread — so that we can learn from our mistakes and improve the situation for American kids.

Liberals really have been America’s strongest advocates for public education, and America’s public education system really is an incredible achievement. But if we want to keep it strong — if we want to make it stronger — then we need to see where we’ve gone wrong, and work quickly to right it.

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Step one: Get screens, including laptops, out of the classroom.

This doesn’t mean “no computers ever.” But as Grant points out, when students take notes on laptops instead of with pen and paper, they don’t retain nearly as much information. It’s also the case that we don’t retain nearly as much information when we read it on a screen versus on paper (sorry to all of you, I wish I could mail you a printed version of this newsletter). If we want young people to retain what they’re being taught, one of the best things we can do is get them back on paper for most of their day.

Getting students off of screens is also necessary if we want them to even hear what’s being taught. I am currently sitting in a cafe writing this newsletter, which is both my job and something I enjoy and have chosen to do, and I have clicked away to scroll through Twitter, check my email, WhatsApp a friend, read the front page of various websites, and otherwise distract myself approximately 5,693 times. And I am an adult with a fully-developed frontal cortex. Ask yourself: When was the last time you sat with a computer in front of you and only focused on your single task at hand? Is that your normal way of working? If adults can’t do this, how in the world do we expect kids to do it — and why are we plunking distraction machines in front of them all day long? With a laptop in front of their faces in the classroom, students scroll through social media and watch YouTube; in one study, a quarter of teens said they’d used their class laptops to watch porn. College students may be more mature, but they aren’t much better: Twenge cites a study finding that they spend roughly 40% of their in-class time screwing around on the internet instead of focusing on the material at hand. The obvious ensues: “The more time college students spent doing something else on their laptops during class, the lower their exam scores, even after accounting for academic ability,” Twenge writes.

This is a Covid holdover. The pandemic pushed students to learn at home, online, and through screens. That was disastrous. And yet for some reason, while we’ve grasped that we have to get kids back in the classroom, we’ve kept the screens in front of their faces.

Laptops are also now substituting for school-issued textbooks, which means that kids are bringing these distraction devices home and can, under the guise of doing homework, enjoy virtually unlimited screen time. Papers written on them are increasingly penned by ChatGPT.

The school-issued Chromebook may have seemed like a good idea, a way to equalize internet and computer access for public school kids, including those whose parents don’t have the resources to buy them a computer. But a funny thing has happened: Educated, affluent parents are increasingly forcing their kids off of screens, delaying screen access as long as possible, enrolling young kids in screen-free schools, organizing to delay giving kids their first smartphones, and limiting screen time for older children. Poorer families are more screen-dependent. Poorer kids spend more time on screens.

This is not to say that children should never see a computer. There are reasonable ways to teach crucial modern-world skills — typing, online research — without moving the whole of education online. Giving students time to type out papers, for example, on school computers disconnected from the internet supports learning and skill-building rather than diminishing it. Screens are a part of life. But in school, they should be a part of it — not dominating it.

Who wins here? Not kids or parents or teachers, but the tech companies who supply not only the laptops, but the millions upon millions of dollars of software that public schools now depend on. Laptops in the classroom have not increased “equity.” They’ve contributed to widening racial achievement gaps.

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Step two: Raise expectations.

I am a woman of childbearing age, and so I see tons of social media content about raising children. As far as I can tell, American parents are very concerned about raising kids who are (1) resilient and (2) not entitled. But our educational system has increasingly treated kids with, well, kid gloves, and demanded that educators cater to their desires. It’s good that schools are considering students’ feelings and wellbeing. But in trying to keep kids from being discouraged in school and in trying to decrease racial and socioeconomic inequalities among students, we may have instead sent the message that we don’t expect students to work hard — that we don’t trust that they can do well. We don’t teach them to experience setbacks and persevere through them.

We also see education as a consumer product, and parents are among the worst offenders there, routinely complaining to deans if their adult children — college students — don’t get the As to which their parents believe they are entitled. And that of course starts well before university, with parents “advocating” for their kids to get higher grades as early as elementary school. Teachers, of course, don’t want to feel like they’re depriving students of future opportunities. They also aren’t paid enough to fend off invective from angry and entitled parents.

As a result, students are learning less but getting pushed forward anyway. As actual student abilities have gone down, graduation rates have gone up. So have grades. Some 60 percent of grades awarded at Harvard are now As, according to a grade inflation report from the university; twenty years ago, it was 25 percent.

“I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm, so anxious about the papers, and because I know it’s so harshly graded,” one Harvard student told the student newspaper. “If that standard is raised even more, it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.”

One key to managing anxiety is not avoiding it; it’s learning, through practice and failure and eventual success, that you actually can do hard things and that disappointment is a normal part of life. The answer to pervasive mental health issues among young people is not to confirm their fears that they can’t do what’s being asked of them or that perfection is the only acceptable outcome; it’s to show them that they can face their fears head-on, and that they’re resourceful enough to succeed — if they put in the effort and have the necessary support systems. Learning, frankly, is not always enjoyable. It shouldn’t be miserable either, but wiring your brain in new and better ways can be painful and difficult. That’s part of what makes it so good.

Raising expectations also means offering more-academically-inclined students opportunities to be challenged in the classroom. I know this makes me a big outlier among progressives, but gifted and talented programs are actually good, as are AP and other advanced classes. It is really hard for teachers to effectively teach to students who are several grade levels apart in skill, and the obvious outcome is that the lowest-performing students are left behind while the highest-performing ones are bored. We should probably re-name them (“gifted and talented” is… a lot). We should absolutely take steps to change the status quo in which a child from an affluent family is twice as likely to be funneled into a gifted and talented program as an identically-performing child from a poorer one. But if in pursuing “equity” we’re actually simply imposing universal mediocrity, that’s bad.

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Step three: Evaluate well and fill in resources where most needed.

A lot of the current politically moderate critics of America’s educational demise point to the end of No Child Left Behind and its testing requirements as the moment things started to turn bad. I think it’s definitely more complicated than that, and No Child Left Behind had more than its fair share of problems. But we do need a more comprehensive way to assess student learning, and a thoughtful system to dedicate additional resources where they are most needed. That doesn’t need to look like over-testing, teaching to the tests, and punishing schools that do badly. It does mean giving ourselves the tools to identify problems, and the resources to help solve them.

It also means resisting the urge to forgo data collection because you might not like what you find. In the heady period in 2020 when so many Americans and American institutions were grappling yet again with our country’s racism and pervasive inequality, several elite colleges and universities decided to drop SAT scores from their application requirements. The idea was that SAT scores are pretty unequal, with affluent white students typically doing the best, and they don’t necessarily measure any individual student’s potential (they do, in fact, tend to be pretty good at predicting how well a student will do in college and if they’ll graduate). But with pervasive grade inflation, it’s awfully hard for colleges to really compare apples to apples when looking at SAT-free student applications. And the SAT can perhaps perversely be a real benefit for students from challenging backgrounds. They may not be able to afford the fancy test prep that richer kids get, but buying an SAT practice book is a lot more accessible. By contrast, the ability of a17-year-old to write an essay that intrigues and persuades a panel of university administrators that you deserve admission is a more sophisticated endeavor, one that cannot be studied for — it often involves pretty sophisticated parents, school counselors who are practiced at getting students into elite institutions, often private essay tutors and editors. A policy meant to help even the playing field seems to have only skewed it further.

We shouldn’t make a similar mistake with kids in the public K-12 education by sidestepping testing. Nor should we assume testing is the end-all be-all to education. It should be one diagnostic, not the whole plan.

To be clear, the conservative assault on public education is also a big part of this story. They have undermined public trust in the education system and undermined public education itself by fighting to push Christianity in schools and opposing teaching students things like widely agreed-upon scientific consensus. They have successfully taken public funds for secular education and channeled them into religious schools which have to meet virtually no standards at all. They have created a homeschooling scheme that broadly enables child abuse and neglect. As I write this, the Heritage Foundation’s Russell Vogt is and other extremists in the Trump administration are dismantling the Department of Education. American conservatives today are, in many ways, an anti-Enlightenment bunch. They have been the driving factor in America’s education problems.

But conservatives generally aren’t the ones reading this newsletter; liberals are. So if you’ve gotten this far, I want to hear from you. What here sounds right? What have I missed? What do American schools need, and what can turn things around for our kids?

xx Jill

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