Motherhood, it is often said, is the hardest job in the world. I’m not sure that’s true, but I do think parenting in the captivity of an unforgiving society may be one of the most impossible jobs in the world. You’ve heard the usual litany of feminist complaints about mothering in America, from our total lack of mandatory paid leave to our lack of affordable childcare to our lack of affordable housing to our lack of a national healthcare system to our lack of a universal ability to even choose or decline motherhood in the first place. It’s mothers who largely figure out how to close all of these gaps: How to drag themselves back to work while C-section incisions are still healing; how to stretch a paycheck to cover rent; how to cobble together family and neighbors, or sacrifice their own work lives and life-long financial wellbeing, for never-enough childcare.

But it’s not just these obvious things that mothers need. Mothers, perhaps more than anything else, want to keep their children safe and healthy. But in the US, health and safety have been made into individual pursuits shaped by individual circumstance: What you choose to eat, whether you choose to exercise, whether you can afford decent health insurance, whether you an afford to live in the kind of community that has clean and accessible public parks.

But mothers can’t protect their children from the air around them. They can’t entirely protect their children from water contaminated by pollutants, from grass poisoned by pesticides, from potentially toxic chemicals in so much of what we touch — including baby toys and food packaging. They can’t individual-safety their way out of collective problems

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It’s almost Mother’s Day, and this week I’m thinking about maternal worry: How we put the weight of worry on women’s shoulders, expecting mothers to optimize the well-being of their children when, really, much of what threatens children’s health and wellbeing can’t be solved by any mother, or any person, alone. If we want to keep babies and children safe, then we need societies that collectively take on this maternal worry. We need societies that decide that (credit to Mr. Baldwin) the children are always ours, and the children are all of ours — a collective responsibility.

Every mother I know worries endlessly about the safety of her children, beginning before they are even born. What’s safe to eat during pregnancy? Can I have a glass of wine? Can I go skiing? How much coffee is ok? Which prenatal vitamin is best? Is my infant getting enough to eat? Is breast best or is fed best? Is my baby breathing? How do I bathe a fragile baby-bird newborn? How do I hold a squiggly toddler in a bathtub? Is she sleeping on her back? Is he hitting his milestones? Am I spending enough time with her? Are my sockets covered? Is the yard fenced? Can he choke on that? Can I let her out of my sight on the playground for five seconds? Is this too much screen time? Is he getting enough enrichment for a developing brain? Am I being too much of a helicopter parent? Is she able to play independently? Is he securely attached? (And I won’t even get into the terror of the adolescent and teenage years).

As I sit and write this on Thursday morning Hong Kong time, the world’s five most polluted cities — cities where the air quality is at this moment so bad it’s unsafe to be outside — are Delhi, Lahore, Beijing, Kolkata, and Dhaka. These five cities are home to nearly 90 million people, and while I can’t find exact numbers on how many of those people are children, it is safe to say that at this exact moment, tens of millions of children are living in places where they cannot safely breathe the air. More affluent families can live in larger homes with sealed windows and air purifiers. But there is not a single mother in any of these cities — and in any city, town, or community around the world — who can protect her child from the air everyone breathes.

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It’s not just moms in Delhi who need to worry. Ninety-nine percent of the world’s population now lives in areas where the air quality does not meet World Health Organization standards for safety — including one-third of all Americans. Women who breathe polluted air while pregnant, and the fetuses they carry, “are at increased risk of adverse health outcomes such as maternal hypertensive disorders, postpartum depression, placental abruption, low birth weight, preterm birth, infant mortality, and adverse lung and respiratory effects,” according to one recent scientific publication on the impacts of pollution on pregnancy. Babies exposed to polluted air in utero have worse lung function. They are more likely to be born underweight. They have elevated risks of autism, behavior problems, and cognitive difficulties including low IQ. Babies and children growing up breathing polluted air have permanently lower lung function, and they cannot regain it in adulthood. Our air is bad largely because of fossil fuels: The things we burn that then wind up in the air and poison billions.

There is no way to fully protect yourself or your child from air pollution. For that, we need government action. I live in a city that has pretty decent air quality in the context of a pretty polluted region, but there have been days when I’ve been out walking or hiking and I realize that my lungs and eyes physically hurt, or I see the sky turn green-gray or even orange with pollution, and I glow with rage. Some 87 million people live in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area, and it is not always safe for us to breathe. This is far from unique to Hong Kong. If you live in Bakersfield, California, or south Los Angeles, or the west and south sides of Chicago, or a host of other US cities, your average day is spent breathing air that is many times more polluted than the WHO says is safe. And that is entirely because of political choices. Big corporations too, of course — but mostly politicians, who could rein in big polluters if they chose to.

Under Donald Trump, the official mantra may be “drill baby drill,” but the reality has also been “burn baby burn” — the lungs and lifespans of actual babies be damned. In the Atlantic, Zoë Schlanger writes that “So far, the EPA has announced that it will pursue a suite of rollbacks of environmental rules, among them a Joe Biden–era update to standards for particulate matter that were meant to be fully in force by 2032 and that the Biden EPA projected would, in that year alone, prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 800,000 cases of asthma, reaping up to $46 billion in health benefits. It also plans to reassess a rule limiting the amount of airborne mercury and arsenic that power plants can release.” The Trump administration just suspended air quality monitoring at US national parks. They are taking aim at the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

Air pollution is particular pernicious because we can’t always see it, and it’s hard to quantify individual cause and effect. When your community floods because of rising sea levels or heatwave-fueled wild fires burn down your house, the effects of climate change are obvious. But if you have a heart attack at 55, how much of that do you really attribute to polluted air, versus diet, lifestyle, and genetics? If a loved one’s Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimers progresses quickly, how much of that is bad luck and how much of it is bad air? How do you know if you’re on the path to dying a few years earlier than you would have if your environment had been cleaner? If your child is born small or struggles intellectually, what was encoded in their DNA, what were your actions, and what was your environment? Air is (usually) invisible. And the relationship between our air and our individual health outcomes is nearly as hard to see.

It’s also impossible to avoid. I do a lot of things to protect my health. I exercise every day. I drink a lot of water. I eat lots of vegetables, fruits, and lean proteins, and keep sugar and processed foods to a minimum. I go to the doctor when I’m sick, I get bloodwork done, I brush my teeth, I try to get enough sleep, I have air purifiers in every room of my home.

But I can’t not breathe.

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In her book Matrescence, journalist Lucy Jones writes:

“Pregnant women, or those who want to become pregnant, must protect themselves from air pollution exposure not only for their own health but also for the health of their foetuses,” says Liqiang Zhang at Beijing Normal University, who found a link between exposure to air pollution and miscarriage. But how? By not going outside? I avoided heavily trafficked roads when I could but there was nothing, really, I could do to stop the baby being born pre-polluted. My carbon monoxide levels were read by a midwife via a pump – in case I was lying about not being a smoker, I presume – and were slightly higher than normal because I lived near a railway station. I walked to places through the local park, avoiding the locus of trains. But it stuck in the craw. I saw no sign of genuine urgency or action from governments to reduce air pollution and protect future generations at the most vulnerable period of their lives. I, though, had to avoid soft cheese and too much tea.

I think of this passage often, because it really does illustrate the screwy way we remove the burdens of worry and safety from our political leaders and society more broadly, and place them on women and particularly on mothers, expecting women to pretty radically reshape their lives to keep a fetus healthy and then a baby safe (and, it is worth noting here, criminalizing some who make decisions that prosecutors and politicians say imperil their fetuses). Many women are still told to cut out coffee, or do so out of an abundance of caution, even though the miscarriage risk from drinking as many as four cups of coffee a day seems to be lower than the miscarriage risk of high air pollution exposure. A visibly pregnant woman ordering a triple americano at Starbucks may get a few raised eyebrows, and god forbid a visibly pregnant woman sip a glass of wine in public — the shaming is real. But when was the last time you saw a Republican politician or a fossil fuel executive or a Trump voter shamed for the miscarriages and infant and child deaths their decisions are causing? (And I won’t even ask if you’ve ever seen the great fetus advocates of the “pro-life” movement try to make sure that fetuses don’t get their developing lungs polluted or their early lives lost, because we all know the answer).

It’s not just air pollution. It’s pesticides in places like public parks where children play, which were just banned in New York City a few years ago, and are still used in cities across America. It’s microplastics, the impacts of which we are just beginning to understand, but that we know are particularly harmful to fetuses and infants — exposure in utero can cause illness in adulthood. And microplastics are in everything from baby bottles (and can leach out even more from high-heat sterilization or when warm milk or formula is put into them) to baby toys to baby food containers (and grown-up food containers) to baby lotions. Parents can go to great lengths to avoid plastic exposure, and many do — but it’s nearly impossible to avoid entirely, unless you’re a homesteader who has little contact with the outside world.

You can start to see why so many health-obsessed subcultures — wellness women, crunchy-granola types, trad wives, and so on — are dominated by women, and why so many women who make up these subcultures are mothers. It can be radicalizing to be handed the responsibility of protecting a tiny being, one who did not ask to come into this world and is only here because you made it so. And it is perhaps impossible to accept that you and you alone cannot protect her from pollution in the air she breathes and the water she drinks, or toxins in the grass she touches and the toys, food, and milk she puts in her mouth. That your country won’t take basic steps to protect her — that you know many things the government told you were “safe” for children were found out to be, whoops, not — isn’t just enraging, it foments deep distrust. Who else is there but you? And, well, the internet, and what feels like a small minority of other people who are similarly concerned (this is also, I imagine, crazy-making for mothers who are concerned about, or even know about, these risks: All these hazards around and we’re just setting our kids on pesticide grass and handing them plastic toys to shove in their mouths?). In a culture as individualistic as ours and as wholly negligent when it comes to human health, it is not a long road from these concerns to the land of vaccine conspiracies and fluoride fears and RFK Jr.

These health conspiracies come in part from a very correct sense that the government really is leaving us on our own when it comes to our environment and our wellbeing. They are fueled not by stupid women, but by worried women. (And, well, a few stupid women, because women are people who like all people are sometimes stupid and sometimes believe stupid things).

I could have written a version of this newsletter about any number of environmental concerns, and chose air pollution mostly because it’s the one most impacting my own personal day-to-day right now (and plastics, my god, everything is wrapped in plastic down to apples at the grocery store and I’m moderately losing my mind over it). But it’s far from the only one.

On Mother’s Day — and every day — mothers deserve more than flowers, brunch, and praise. Mothers deserve a society that takes care of all of its members, not one that demands women protect their young and then places those young at impossible, unavoidable risk — or, I should say, risk that can only be truly avoided with government action.

Mothers have lifted cars, run into burning buildings, and literally fought polar bears to save their children. But no amount of maternal strength can pluck out invisible pollutants and toxins from the air, water, grass, food, and so much of what we touch. Do you want to honor mothers? Do you care about the lives of fetuses, infants, and children (and, uh, all of the rest of us)? Take some of the worry off of mothers’ shoulders by acting and voting as if the children were, in fact, always ours and all of ours.

xx Jill

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Prior to President Harry Truman’s 1948 executive order that racially integrated the nation’s armed services, one of the major arguments for keeping the military segregated was the idea that Black soldiers should not be allowed to sleep next to or use the same bathroom facilities as white soldiers. There were other arguments as well. One was that integration would somehow damage “unit cohesion, esprit de corps, and discipline” necessary for a fighting force, and that would negatively affect the combat readiness of the military. Another was the false and racist allegation, expressed in these exact words, that “Blacks can’t fight.”

Listen to this claptrap from Trump’s January 27 executive order banning transgender people from service in our military:

“The Armed Forces have been afflicted with radical gender ideology to appease activists unconcerned with the requirements of military service like physical and mental health, selflessness, and unit cohesion.”

“A gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.”

“Absent extraordinary operational necessity, the Armed Forces shall neither allow males to use or share sleeping, changing, or bathing facilities designated for females, nor allow females to use or share sleeping, changing, or bathing facilities designated for males.”

They can’t even come up with new words with which to express their prejudice. Substitute “Black” or “Negro” or “African American” for “gender identity” or “gender ideology” or “male” and “female” in the above statement, and what do you get? Flat out bigotry unadorned by anything even pretending to reason, because prejudice has no rationality.

The Supreme Court yesterday ruled in an order of less than a page that the Trump administration can continue to remove transgender members of the military from their service to this country and ban the service of transgender Americans who volunteer to serve while lawsuits seeking to overturn Trump’s executive order continue to make their way through the courts. This means that in the future, even if the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of service by people who are transgender, those who have been discharged would have to reapply for admission to their previous ranks and positions in the military. They would have lost the intervening time they would have served, been denied time in service leading to retirement benefits, and in cases where service members reside in military housing, they would be ordered to vacate the places where they live.

How the Supreme Court could not read the plain language of Trump’s pathetic excuse for an executive order and see the prejudice dripping from its every syllable is yet another disgrace with which this country must contend. What about patriotism? Are we to read Trump’s executive order and the Supreme Court’s upholding of it, even if it turns out to be only temporary, as denying to people who are transgender the right to be patriotic and act upon it by serving their country in uniform?

Trump’s other executive order that there are “only two genders, male and female” denies the right of Americans to live openly as who they are. The order smacks of the time of segregation, when Black people were denied the right to live full lives, including in many states, the right to marry people of a different race from their own.

They always start somewhere. Today, it is transgender Americans. And tomorrow? Are we to return to a time of Americans being compelled to live half-lives? If transgender people can be denied the right to serve openly in the military, how long until they will be denied the right to be hired for a job in civilian life because of their gender identity? Will banks be allowed to “red-line” loans to transgender people, or even deny them bank accounts and credit cards because they are transgender?

Will transgender people be denied drivers’ licenses unless they reflect the name and gender on their birth certificates? What about the right to vote? Will registering to vote be denied to people who have changed their names and the sex on their drivers’ licenses?

What Trump’s transgender executive orders do is to subtract a group of people from citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution. Are we to have a future which mirrors our past, when Black people, because of the color of their skin, did not have the equal protection of our laws, including the right to vote, the right to attend schools of their choice, the right to employment, the right to eat at a restaurant or to check into a hotel or motel for the night? Will these rights be stripped from people because of their gender identity? If being transgender is effectively made to be illegal, how long before being gay or lesbian or bisexual is illegal?

It's not just patriotism that has no gender. It is citizenship. It is humanity. There isn’t liberal blood and conservative blood, or Republican blood and Democratic blood, or gay blood or trans blood and straight blood, or Black blood and white blood, or male blood and female blood. Cut us, and we all bleed red.

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💩EAT SHIT, YOU REPUBLICAN SCUMBAG!💩

Once upon a time, in the distant past of 2016 and for a few years after, there was a surge of right-wing populism. Country after country swung sharply to the right and inflicted grievous wounds on itself. The UK voted for Brexit. The Philippines elected a lunatic mass killer. Austria and France almost elected Nazis. The United States elected Donald Trump.

Russia, which covertly funded much of this far-right insurgency, was having a great time. The rest of us? Not so much.

And then the crowning jewel: The United States elected Donald Trump again. This time, unleashing an open fascist attack on the rule of law in an attempt to topple the world’s oldest democracy.

You would think this would embolden far-right “populism” across the globe the way it did in 2016. Back then, fascists all around the world took Trump’s win as a cue to rise up and swing for the fences while the legacy press breathlessly reported that the tide of far-right populism seemed unstoppable.

A funny thing appears to be happening this time, though. Instead of a far-right insurgency, a strong backlash to authoritarians appears to be playing out.

In December, the right-wing president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, tried to stage an autocoup. He was tired, you see, of all these pesky laws and barriers keeping him from ruling as he saw fit. How fucking DARE the opposition party have power and, worse, USE it?! Yeol declared martial law on the flimsiest of pretenses and ordered the opposition party to be disbanded.

But the people of South Korea lost their collective shit and stormed the National Assembly (their version of Capitol Hill). The Assembly (their Congress) broke into the building, voted to lift martial law, and the military, after wavering for a bit, gave in to the rule of law.

There would be no coup. President Yeol was impeached and removed from office. Whether he ends up in jail remains to be seen, but do not be surprised. The criminal trial is currently ongoing.

Canada, on the other hand, did not have a coup. They seemed set and ready to elect a right-wing government, though. Our northern neighbor would have been run by a ass-kissing Trump toady. Wouldn’t that have been fun? No. No, it would not.

But then Trump wouldn’t shut the fuck up about how much he hated Canada. They’re gonna be the 51st state, he said. We’re going to crush them economically, he said. Something something fentanyl over the border which everyone knew was absolute bullshit.

And we KNEW it was bullshit when Kevin Hassett, a little turd from the White house, vomited this out:

After Hassett raised concerns about fentanyl reaching American soil through the northern border, [ABC’s Jonathan] Karl reminded his guest, “I don’t think that’s happening. I mean, 1% of fentanyl is being smuggled across the border, 1%. I mean, Canada is not a major source at all of fentanyl in the United States, are they?” Hassett replied:

“Well, yes they are a major source. And I can tell you that in the Situation Room, I’ve seen photographs of fentanyl labs in Canada that the law enforcement folks were leaving alone. Canada’s got a big drug problem.”

As always, whenever someone from the Trump regime is speaking, assume they are lying. I believe the amount of Fentanyl seized at the northern border last year was twenty-something pounds? Truly, a tsunami of drugs flows from the Great White North.

Trump’s tariffs were the final straw. Canada’s Conservative Party went from a VERY comfortable 27-point lead in December, much to the delight of the far-right:

…to getting stomped into the ground so badly, the leader of the party lost his seat:

Womp-womp.

Every political observer understands very clearly that Canadians were furious at Trump and took it out on anyone who seemed aligned with him. That meant the right-wing Poilievre and his Conservative Party, who ran a populist campaign complaining of Canada’s lost glory days and immigration and blablabla “We want to be just like MAGA.”

If Trump has kept his fucking mouth shut, he would have had a bootlicking worm to feed his ego and boost his credibility. But he couldn’t do that because he’s Trump. So now he has a hostile nation on his border who will wage economic war if Trump continues to fuck with them. Lovely. Just what we needed.

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

The Ogre likes Canada, eh?

Then there’s Australia. Trump didn’t go out of his way to attack Australia but the results were the same. The country took a sharp and unexpected swing to the left.

Now, the right-wing party in Australia, curiously called the Liberal Party, was not expected to win the election. But they WERE expected to pick up a lot of seats and significantly increase their power in the government. The left-wing party, the Labor Party, had been struggling in the polls but was still ahead, if not by a lot.

Instead of picking up seats, though, the Liberal Party (remember, right wing) was crushed and, just like in the UK, the party leader, Peter Dutton, lost his seat.

Dutton also ran a nasty Trumpian campaign filled with racism and “populism,” and he paid the price for it.

The UK didn’t follow this trend as the “populist” Reform Party had a great election night last week. But the UK is a slow-motion car crash after Brexit, with its economy shriveling like a slug in a tub of salt. It’s so bad that the center-left party, Labour, has tacked to the right, attacking immigrants and cutting public spending in an attempt to woo back voters.

It didn’t work. Perhaps that should be a lesson to certain Democrats who have recently taken to kicking the trans community in a bid to appeal to voters? Adopting fascist framing on social issues will not win you votes.

With no actual left to vote for as their economy continues its decade-long implosion, the people of the UK went with the loudest, angriest voice. There’s a reason fascists love economic downturns. It’s why the Trump regime is engineering one as we speak. Desperate people listen to loud, angry voices.

But aside from the UK, the trend is unmistakable. Complacent people across the globe saw the United States put a literal fascist in power. They’re watching the most powerful country in the world, once the gold standard of democracy and freedom try very VERY hard to remodel itself into an authoritarian Nazi shithole complete with concentration camps and a gestapo.

A lot of this shock has to do with the fact that foreign media are reporting on what’s happening here accurately. They’re not whitewashing it and downplaying the ongoing coup the way the legacy press is. The horror of watching America fight against encroaching fascism scared enough people to ask the question: “If it can happen there, it can happen here, too, right?” And they are acting accordingly.

Likewise, our own elections have veered sharply to the left, not that you would know it from the dearth of coverage by the legacy press. Sure, they made a big deal out of that one election in Wisconsin but they just kind of gloss over all the OTHER elections where the electorate has shifted sharply to the left.

Did you know the GOP had a very bad night in Texas on Saturday? Probably not. The legacy press hasn’t bothered to talk about it. But the Lone Star Left newsletter did:

Last night, voters across Texas sent a message loud enough to rattle the far-right out of their echo chambers: we’re done with your culture wars, your book bans, and your crusade against public schools. Voters chose community over chaos, educators over agitators, and progress over extremism.

The local elections weren’t just a series of wins but a sweep. MAGA-backed candidates got absolutely trounced across the state. This was the result of deep organizing, years of work by local Democrats, and voters who are fed up with the far-right hijacking of school boards and city councils to push their agenda.

Texas isn’t turning blue overnight, but make no mistake: the MAGA movement had a very bad night, and the momentum is shifting.

Thank god for independent journalism. Otherwise, I would have never known about this and neither would you.

But this has been the case all over the country. Special elections have been disastrous for Republicans. Even when they win, their margin of victory is far smaller than it was just six months ago and we haven’t even gotten to the REAL effects of Trump’s recession. And wait until the regime ramps up with its terrorism tactics against dissent. That’s REALLY going to max out their popularity! For sure!

So, yeah, Trumpism is killing right-wing populism. Nothing sours the public on fascism like seeing it in practice, and after years of populists across the globe patterning themselves after Trump and his brand of racism and misogyny and hate? It’s going to be really hard to distance themselves and convince people they won’t be anything like the man they’ve based their entire political identity on.

Everything Donald Trump touches dies. Let’s hope that holds true for the movement he inspired.

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The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 181 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Donald Trump apparently thinks the Constitution is optional, useful only when it supports what he wants to do.

In an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Trump said that moving speedily to carry out mass deportations may take precedence over giving immigrants the right to due process under the Constitution, as required by courts.

“I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,” Trump replied to a question about statements by Secretary of State Mario Rubio who had said, “Yes, of course,” to whether every person in the United States is entitled to due process. “We’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” Trump said. “We have thousands of people that are — some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth. I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it.”

The interview covered a lot of topics, and drew Trump ire for asking questions he thought were bent on showing tariffs having a depressing effect on growth and the economy, as reflected in any set of economic measures not authored by Trump. Most news outlets nevertheless found the doubt about the protection of the Constitution the most noteworthy event, except on Fox, Breitbart and Newsmax, which ignored the comment altogether.

While Trump said he would follow court rulings, it was clear that a promise to implement the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history may require deportations without allowing a hearing even to show that they are convicted of crimes, members of targeted gangs, or in violation of some other standard adopted by the Trump administration. Already, those deportations have involved U.S. children of undocumented migrants, graduate students outspoken against the war in the Middle East, people with tattoos or hats associated with gang membership. Already, we’re way beyond undocumented people with criminal records.

As lawsuits challenging such deportations are working their way towards the Supreme Court — which has ruled 9-0 that due process indeed is a basic Constitutional value — Trump wants to decide what the law is, and well as who is breaking it. Any chance his comments will become part of every court challenge about deportations going forward?

Why did we bother with an inauguration in which Donald Trump swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and to promote the laws of the land? What meaning did putting his hand on a Bible have — though keen observers of the Jan. 20 proceedings have showed that he never did put his hand on the Bible? What America is he protecting exactly when he thinks the Constitution is optional?

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Over the weekend, Donald Trump posted a photo of himself as the pope to his personal social media accounts and to the White House’s. On Monday, he told reporters, “I had nothing to do with it.” He continued,“Somebody made up a picture of me dressed like the pope, and they put it out on the internet. That’s not me that did it, I have no idea where it came from — maybe it was A.I. But I have no idea where it came from.”

He may have no idea where the image came from. But he certainly had something to do with posting it.

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As for Catholics who were offended by the image, “They can’t take a joke,” Trump said, then quickly clarified: “You don’t mean the Catholics; you mean the fake news media. The Catholics loved it.”

Some far-right MAGA Catholics no doubt loved it. But many Catholics did not, and many prominent Catholic groups and leaders said so publicly. That, though, is beside the point. Trump seems to be in full mad king mode, surrounded by people who only tell him what he wants to hear, and convinced that the false reality he’s built around himself might just be real. And in this false reality, whatever Trump says must be accepted — no matter how contradictory to his previous statements, or how contradictory to observable reality. Late last month, for example, Trump refused to concede that a photo he shared on social media of an alleged MS-13 tattoo on the hand of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man the administration mistakenly and illegally deported to an El Salvador prison for terrorists, was digitally altered. The digital alteration doesn’t even appear to be a serious attempt at photoshop; it looks more like the kind of label law enforcement might put on evidence. This is the photo:

If you think that looks like an actual tattoo that says “MS 13,” I know a Nigerian prince who has some money he would love to deposit into your bank account, if you can just send him your details.

“Donald Trump lies” is hardly news. But his lies have gotten more brazen. What’s stunning about these lies is that they aren’t denials of some past misdeed or even false or misleading claims about a fact-checkable statistic or data point. They are things the public can see with their own eyes, that Trump is telling them isn’t true. The image of Trump as pope — it’s right there on his Truth Social account. The clearly photoshopped MS-13 tattoo — it’s obviously not a tattoo. And yet Trump seems to genuinely believe that anyone he’s speaking with, including the broader American public, will simply go along with what he’s saying. That’s scary, coming as it does from the most powerful man on earth.

It also seems to be correct. For Trump’s second term, he is surrounded entirely by sycophants, many of whom seem to think it’s their job to root out the disloyal — the end result is a White House full of people falling all over themselves to be the most obsequious. No one saying, “uh, that’s a bad idea” or “that doesn’t make sense” or “that’s demonstrably false.” No one seems to be saying, “Sir, the public is just not believing that claim.”

And there isn’t much in the way of reality-based living happening in MAGA world more broadly. The conservative public turns to conservative influencers, who see their influence drop if they contradict the president. MAGA conservatives largely reject mainstream publications that have safeguards including fact-checking and standards teams. Many social media companies have removed their fact-checking functions, leaving users to correct each other. This is consistent with the general American retreat from expertise or excellence: What do professional journalists know that the average anon on Twitter doesn’t?

To be honest, I found some of the earlier fact-checking obsession to be tedious and, on occasion, genuinely skewed. Reality does, as the saying goes, has a well-known liberal bias. But on some fact-checking sites there was a kind of pedantry that could be eye-rolling; sometimes, social media statements were flagged for what really did feel more like political reasons than factual ones. There was certainly room for correction.

Instead, we’ve gotten a wholesale chucking-out of any claim that the truth matters.

Politicians have always lied. But getting caught in lies — especially really obvious ones — used to be a political problem. There were social penalties for lying: Newspapers and TV channels would run negative stories; clarifications or sheepish apologies would be issued; voters might lose trust and punish you at the polls. Being a liar was stigmatized, in the political realm and the personal. This was a good thing. I don’t know how a society survives if we don’t agree that when someone knowingly and obviously lies to your face, that person should lose your trust and esteem.

This is not just a Trump problem. This is a society-functioning problem. If we don’t figure out a way to fix it — a way to impose social costs on people who lie obviously and on purpose — we aren’t going to have a functional society left.

xx Jill

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Well, that didn’t take long. An enterprising hacker has already penetrated whatever security that supposedly protected the third-party communications app used by Mike Waltz to send text messages on Signal to the Secretary of State, the Vice President and the Director of National Intelligence during the White House cabinet meeting last week. The hack was reported earlier today by 404 Media, the new journalism website covering cybersecurity, the intelligence and surveillance business, and other topics involving the rapidly changing terrain of the tech industry.

The hacker apparently read the coverage of the loose use of the Signal app and its cousin TeleMessage, which sells its app to government agencies and corporations which require the archiving of messages sent via communications apps such as Signal, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Telegram. The TeleMessage app is supposed to piggy-back on the other communications apps to provide secure storage of the messages on the other communications platforms, several of which can be set to delete messages after a set period of time.

The hacker, whose identity is not known to 404 Media, sent the tech website screen captures and data that “includes apparent message contents; the names and contact information for government officials; usernames and passwords for TeleMessage’s backend panel; and indications of what agencies and companies might be TeleMessage customers. One screenshot of the hacker’s access to a TeleMessage panel lists the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of CBP officials.” “CBP” refers to Customs and Border Protection, one of the agencies in charge of protecting, among other borders, our border with Mexico, which according to the Trump administration, has been regularly breached by human traffickers and drug cartels shipping the dangerous drug Fentanyl into this country where it is sold on the street and has been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths of addicts.

Apparently, the hacker set out to penetrate the TeleMessage security just to see if it could be done. “I would say the whole process took about 15-20 minutes,” the hacker told 404 Media. “It wasn’t much effort at all.”

So, what we have here, folks, is a random computer hacker, whose identity and location is not known, meaning he or she could be living in a foreign country and working for its intelligence agency or tech firm in Russia or China, casually surfing into the communications channel Signal that the Trump administration itself admits is permitted to be installed on government-issued computers and cell phones used by high level administration officials even at cabinet meetings inside the White House.

What does this mean? It means that security throughout the U.S. government, including in the Departments of State and Defense and Homeland Security, as well as the intelligence agencies overseen by the Director of National Intelligence, has been so wide open that an apparent independent civilian hacker was able to download names, phone numbers, and email addresses of government officials as well as some of the contents of text messages, including links to tweets containing video and sound clips.

The data accessed by the hacker also included information relating to crypto firms such as Coinbase and Galaxy, meaning that communications within those firms and perhaps between the firms and their clients, who have invested real dollars in the firms’ stores and trading systems of cryptocurrencies, has been breached.

Based on the reporting of information provided by the hacker to 404 Media, communications within and between U.S. government agencies, as well as members of Congress and offices and officers within the White House, should be assumed to be compromised. Trump came into office promising to use Elon Musk and his cybernauts to save taxpayer dollars as well as modernize and increase the security of U.S. government data systems. Based on this reporting, it’s going to cost at least as much as Musk claims to have saved from so-called “waste and abuse” to take back and wipe clean every government computer, data storage facility, and cell phone that has been in use since January 20.

We have known since Trump’s first administration that he refused to use an official secure government cell phone and instead through his first term in office and this term so far has used his private cell phone to communicate with everyone from golfing buddies to foreign leaders. He has been compromised for years.

Now we know that everyone who works for him has been compromised due to their use of highly insecure communications apps. The 404 Media story even identifies the Northern Virginia location of the servers and storage facilities, owned by Amazon, through which and into which TeleMessage has sent data accumulated through its piggy-backing on communications apps such as Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram. In the intelligence business, this sort of information is known as “gold.” The hacker “was able to login to the TeleMessage backend panel using the usernames and passwords” found during the penetration of the communications systems.

When you start to see words like “usernames” and “passwords” and “login” in a story about the official communications of the United States government, you know we’re in trouble.

And the trouble we’re in is rooted in the two north-stars of everything Donald Trump has ever done in his life: a complete absence of consequences and the overwhelming presence of arrogance. That combination is the yellow brick road foreign adversaries look for when they are trying to penetrate U.S. information stores, intentions, and methods of tactical and intelligence operations.

One independent hacker, in what he or she admitted was “15 to 20 minutes,” has stripped the façade from the Trump administration’s pretense of governing and put all our military services, including 1.4 million men and women and trillions of dollars’ worth of military equipment and facilities at risk. It’s going to cost lives.

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