Yale professor Evan Morris argues that it’s time to “unyoke the sciences from the humanities,” by which he means that faculties of science should split off from the humanities and form science-only universities to avoid the wrath of Donald Trump.

Scientists at Columbia and Harvard lost grants because Trump falsely accused their administrators of indulging antisemitism on the part of their students.

It was a flimsy pretext to bring the Ivy League to heel, but instead of blaming Trump, Morris incongruously blames humanities professors.

“The humanities are going down and taking the rest of us — grant-funded scientists who focus on medical research or the physical sciences — with them,” he laments.

Morris’ take is shockingly naive.

Trump is at war with all independent sources of knowledge, from unbiased government statisticians to the free press. Any expert who can tell Trump he’s wrong about climate change, vaccines, public health, or sex differences is a direct threat to his power.

Science, therefore, is squarely in his crosshairs.

Let’s review a small part of what Trump has already done.

Trump’s racist crackdown on international students is an existential threat to American science. International grad students do much of the day-to-day work of science in this country. Foreign students are also a major source of revenue for their universities because they pay full tuition. For years, universities have recruited international students to offset dwindling state funding. An all-science university would suffer just as much, if not more than, a regular university from a collapse of international student enrollment because STEM programs draw more students from overseas.

To make matters worse, Trump is trying to cap indirect research funding for the medical and physical sciences. The cap is a direct threat to grant-getting research scientists. This is the money that keeps the lights on in their labs.

It gets worse.

Trump’s handpicked acting US Attorney for Washington, DC, even tried to launch a frivolous criminal prosecution of green energy grantees. He admitted he had no probable cause to show that any of these people had committed crimes, but he still wanted to claw the grant money out of their bank accounts for the crime of working on green energy. The effort fizzled, but this fiasco should serve as a warning. Trump and his allies aren’t done trying to prosecute scientists for inconvenient truths.

Morris wants to ditch the social scientists, but they warned us that populists like Trump demonize intellectuals and experts of all stripes, scientists included.

Any scientist who’s doing work on epidemiology, vaccines, climate, evolution, or sex differences could find themselves in conflict with the White House and its MAGA allies.

And it’s not just scientists in controversial fields who are at risk. International collaboration is the lifeblood of science but congressional Republicans are already trying to label collaborations with Chinese scientists as a national security threat.

What about theoretical mathematicians? Surely that’s apolitical.

There’s still no escape.

If your work has no obvious applications to weapons, artificial intelligence, or crypto, MAGA will label you a decadent parasite and demand that your job be eliminated to pay for tax cuts.

We don’t need to guess how they feel. Vice president JD Vance once gave a talk entitled “The Universities are the Enemy.”

“So much of what we want to do in this movement and in this country, I think, are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities, which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country,” Vance told his audience. “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

Universities are a threat to the MAGA agenda because they produce knowledge that contradicts Donald Trump’s lies.

Splitting science from the arts and humanities will shortchange students without protecting the sciences.

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Jose Pagliery outlined a nightmare scenario for the news site NOTUS. What if the US Supreme Court agrees that Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious 2008 non-prosecution agreement shields Ghislaine Maxwell and all potential co-conspirators? If so, Maxwell could shield Donald Trump and everyone else in the Epstein files by naming them as co-conspirators.

As bad as that would be, it’s unlikely.

The Supreme Court probably won’t hear Maxwell’s appeal.

Maxwell’s lawyers argue she should not have been prosecuted because Epstein struck a deal with then-US Attorney Alex Acosta that neither Epstein nor any of his potential co-conspirators would be prosecuted if Epstein pled guilty to soliciting underage prostitutes in Florida.

The question of whether this non-prosecution agreement (NPA) covers Maxwell is moot because it only applies to crimes Epstein committed between 2001 and 2007. Maxwell was prosecuted for trafficking girls starting in the mid-1990s.

Maxwell’s appeal has exactly one thing going for it. Her lawyers have found a so-called circuit split, which is one of the best “hooks” to get a case before the Supreme Court. In this case, several judicial circuits disagree about whether an ambiguous plea deal struck by one US attorney can bind other US attorneys without their consent.

When federal judicial circuits arrive at conflicting interpretations, only the Supreme Court can lay down the law. That’s why about 70 percent of Supreme Court cases resolve circuit splits. Even so, the Supreme Court ignores two out of three petitions asking it to resolve them.

A variety of factors influence the court’s willingness to weigh in. The court considers how important the issue is, how many people it affects, and how long the split has been going on. One of the most important factors is whether resolving the split would change the outcome of the underlying case. Resolving the NPA conundrum wouldn’t change Maxwell’s fate, because she was convicted for criminal conduct outside the scope of the NPA. So, even if the Supreme Court were to find that the NPA covered Maxwell’s later conduct, it wouldn’t matter because her crime spree started before the period covered by the NPA.

That’s the sober legal analysis. Now let’s look at the crass political calculus.

A common assumption is that the Supreme Court automatically does anything Trump wants. This is a bad heuristic. For example, the high court declined to steal the 2020 election for Trump even though he really wanted them to. The best predictor of whether the Supreme Court will cater to Trump is whether the result would advance the conservative majority’s agenda.

Freeing Ghislaine Maxwell wouldn’t make the president more like a king, hobble the administrative state, or deliver a policy win for the conservative base. It’s therefore unlikely that the Supreme Court would volunteer to absorb the political firestorm that would ensue if they freed Maxwell.

Freeing Maxwell might be convenient for Donald Trump personally, because he wouldn’t have to spend the political capital to pardon her, but it would hurt the GOP’s political prospects overall.

So, why would the Supreme Court go out of its way to free the nation’s most notorious pedophile for a lame duck president? They already gave Trump kinglike power to issue corrupt pardons. The most likely scenario is that the Supreme Court ignores Maxwell’s appeal and makes Trump clean up his own mess by pardoning Maxwell.

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The president has been asked repeatedly how his close friendship with child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein ended. We got an answer Tuesday.

Trump knew Epstein was hunting teenage girls at Mar-a-Lago. So far, the media has been remarkably blasé about his stunning admission.

The White House initially claimed that Epstein was banned from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for “being a creep.” Trump’s assertion in a press conference that he broke up with Epstein, because he was poaching staff from Mar-a-Lago, seemed like a new and contradictory explanation for how they fell out after over a decade of friendship.

But an old item from the New York Post shows that the poaching and the creeping were two sides of the same coin.

On Tuesday, a reporter asked Trump whether any of the poached employees were young women. "People were taken out of the spa, hired by him. In other words, gone,” Trump said on Air Force One.

"And other people would come and complain, 'this guy is taking people from the spa.' I didn't know that," he continued. "And then when I heard about it, I told him, I said, 'Listen, we don't want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa.' I don't want him taking people. And he was fine. And then not too long after that, he did it again and I said, 'out of here.'"

Trump tried to make the falling out sound like a G-rated business dispute, as if Epstein were simply hiring away valued employees with in-demand skills. Trump may have played up the poaching angle to deflect attention from his longstanding knowledge of Epstein’s deviant behavior, as he considers whether to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s highest-ranking and most notorious co-conspirator.

Trump’s story matches a contemporaneous account of Epstein’s exile from Mar-a-Lago reported by Page 6, the New York Post’s gossip column.

“He would use the spa to try to procure girls. But one of them, a masseuse about 18 years old, he tried to get her to do things,” an anonymous source told Page 6 in October 2007. “Her father found out about it and went absolutely ape-[bleep]. Epstein’s not allowed back.”

That source was almost certainly Trump, who was notorious for laundering his version of reality through Page 6, either anonymously or under the pseudonym “John Barron.”

In any event, someone at Mar-a-Lago knew that Epstein was luring girls from the club to sexually abuse them.

Like Trump on Air Force One, the tipster spoke of an ongoing pattern, namely, that Epstein “would use the spa to try and procure girls.”

Aboard Air Force One, Trump acknowledged that Virginia Giuffre was one of the teens taken from his club.

Giuffre was a 16-year-old towel girl who was recruited at Mar-a-Lago by Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000. Giuffre would go on to become one of his most outspoken victims, until her death by suicide in April.

Ghislaine is now serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison.

According to journalist Michael Wolff, her family leaked the birthday greeting Trump gave Epstein on his 50th birthday as a warning to Trump that she has incriminating evidence on him. Wolff said the No. 2 at the Department of Justice interviewed her to find out more.

Giuffre was lured in 2000, but Epstein wasn’t kicked out of the club until seven years later, after he had been arrested for soliciting underage sex in Florida. (Trump denied that Epstein was a member, but four Miami Herald reporters obtained a registry of members, confirming his membership a decade before his arrest.)

Page 6, Trump’s journalistic North Star, covered Epstein’s prostitution case in great detail, so Trump would have been well aware.

According to Trump, he told Epstein to knock it off after he was warned that people – plural – had been taken from Mar-a-Lago. Then Epstein allegedly did it again. This suggests there were at least three victims: Giuffre, one other girl, and a member’s daughter. In their 2020 book, The Grifter’s Club, the Miami Herald reporters said Epstein was banned after “harassing” the daughter of a member .

Moreover, Trump recalled that Epstein resumed his predatory behavior “not too long after” after being told to stop. A seven-year gap after Giuffre would be quite long after. This is another reason to suspect there was an ongoing pattern of predation that Trump was well aware of – before Epstein went after a member’s daughter and risked a scandal.

Did Trump call the police when he learned that an alleged sex offender had been using his spa as a hunting ground for teenage girls?

Did he ever warn employees about Epstein?

Did he do anything to rein in Ghislaine Maxwell, who approached Giuffre and others? Or did he let her keep prowling the spa for Epstein?

Why did he have teenage masseuses at Mar-a-Lago, anyway?

We can all guess the answers to these questions, but someone should ask the president for the record.

Trump aborted the long-promised release of the FBI’s Epstein files after learning that his name appeared therein. The president has reason to be cagey. He and Epstein were best friends for a decade and their friendship was centered around chasing girls.

The nation has been consumed by speculation about what dark secrets the files might hold about Trump. Trump’s admission that Epstein used Mar-a-Lago as a hunting ground may provide a critical clue.

The good news is that Democrats have found the wedge issue that can shatter the MAGA coalition.

The bad news is that it’s Jeffrey Epstein.

The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell focus-grouped 2024 Trump voters who are disillusioned with Trump over the notorious FBI/Department of Justice memo that effectively closed the Epstein case.

The memo made it clear that they will not be releasing any more documents or pursuing cases against Epstein’s friends. It declared that there was no client list, no jailhouse murder, and no international blackmail ring.

This is all true, but to the QAnon base, it’s akin to the Pope tweeting, “We’ve reviewed the files and Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. Thank you for your attention in this matter.”

There’s no coming back from that.

MAGA’s headed for schism.

Longwell asked the group whether they thought Trump cynically hyped the Epstein story or whether he was in on the conspiracy.

Overwhelmingly, they thought Trump was in on it.

This is a potentially explosive finding.

Normally, it’s impossible to get Trump supporters to believe that Trump has ever made the slightest misstep, but here we have former MAGA's declaring that The Donald’s in league with ultimate evil.

Longwell understands how central Epstein is to the MAGA worldview. The base expects the Epstein files to fulfill prophecies broadcast on rightwing radio in the 1990s and elaborated through Pizzagate and QAnon. It was foretold that Bill and Hillary Clinton and all the Satanic Democrats would one day be exposed for their crimes against God and man.

To reasonable people, the Epstein saga is an outrage, but not a world historical event. To us, he was a degenerate billionaire who raped girls with his rich friends, dodged taxes and loved eugenics. To MAGA, however, Epstein was a leader of the Jewish Cabal that runs the world.

For us, exposing Epstein’s confederates would undercut elite impunity and deliver justice to victims. For them, it would expose the Illuminati.

According to QAnon theology, Trump is on a divine mission to fight the cabal of the deep state. To many, Trump’s willingness to hunt down Epstein’s co-conspirators is a test. If he won’t do it, he’s not the Chosen One. As far as they’re concerned, Trump deserves to be our supreme leader because QAnon says so.

By implying that the globalist Epstein conspiracy isn’t real, Trump is undermining his own authority. Trump ran on exposing the Epstein files as part of his campaign against the deep state. Key members of his government like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino built their careers on it.

The Epstein case is a particularly effective wedge because Trump’s conspiracist base feels humiliated. They were played for suckers and they know it. As historian Richard Hofstadter observed in his famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” status anxiety is an accelerant for conspiratorial thinking. People gravitate towards conspiracy theories when they feel insecure. It’s a special affront, then, to be treated with contempt by the very people who were supposed to salve their egos.

Attorney General Pam Bondi humiliated some of MAGA’s favorite far-right influencers by meeting them at a much-hyped event at the White House and presenting them with binders full of what she implied would be blockbuster secrets. In fact, the binders contained information that had been public for years. Then she left them to explain to their angry fans why there were no secrets in those binders. Bondi stalled by claiming that the Epstein client list was on her desk.

Now even Daddy Trump is yelling at MAGA to stop talking about Epstein. Bongino and Patel allegedly co-wrote the infamous Nothing to See Here memo. It appears these career conspiracists were more than willing to brush the Epstein files under the rug until the backlash hit. The Epstein bait-and-switch is proof that not even the conspiracists’ most ardent and well-compensated champions in Washington care about them.

Some Democrats are hesitant to fan the flames of this scandal because they’re afraid of legitimizing conspiracy theories. That’s a valid concern. This saga has moved QAnon to the very center of our politics – even more than the antics of the QAnon Shaman at the J6 insurrection or Marjorie Taylor Greene’s career.

However, there are also reality-based reasons to be up-in-arms about the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein saga. There’s an opportunity for congressional Democrats to demand meaningful transparency on the Epstein case. The key is to stick to legitimate grievances, namely Trump’s broken promises, lies and conflicts of interest.

The DOJ-FBI memo claims that there are no more releasable documents. The FBI’s Epstein files are probably about 1 percent as interesting as people expect, but the government is lying about what they have. They say that there’s only child porn and material that would expose the identities of victims. However, we know from lawyers who worked on Epstein lawsuits for years that there’s plenty of material that could be safely redacted and released. There’s probably no client list per se, because Epstein wasn’t running a bordello and blackmail is the wrong model to understand what he was up to. The men who came to the island were friends, not customers. Epstein surely collected kompromat on them, but the FBI may not have gotten a hold of much of it. Epstein had years of advance warning that he might be charged and he had IT pros to help him hide it.

Initially, Bondi had agents working around the clock to gather materials from footlockers and hard drives in far-flung FBI field offices. This is material that presumably wasn’t available to the Biden-era DOJ. We were supposed to get huge revelations any day. Then suddenly they put out a memo saying there’s nothing to see. It’s fair to ask what changed.

There’s also a glaring conflict of interest. Depending on how you define the Epstein files, Trump is already all over them. Epstein’s black book, which has been public for years, contains 20 different ways to reach Trump and his household. He rode on Epstein’s plane. In fact, Trump and Epstein were best friends for over a decade. Their friendship was largely based on chasing girls.

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told Landon Thomas, Jr. of New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

In the early 1990s, Trump flew in 28 models for a “beauty contest” where he and Epstein were the only guests. Trump appointed the US attorney who gave Epstein his notorious and illegal federal immunity deal to be his first-term secretary of labor. Epstein died on Trump’s watch. Let’s not forget that Trump is an adjudicated rapist in his own right. Elon Musk’s accusation that Trump is in the Epstein files may have finally given MAGA a permission structure to take this mountain of evidence seriously.

Astonishingly, Trump recently declared on Truth Social that the Epstein files were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration,” which is tantamount to admitting that there are Epstein files with derogatory information about him. Whereupon, the president was ratioed on his own platform for the first time in Truth Social history.

I wouldn’t count on Trump to have a good handle on what’s in the files. He’s lazy and senile, after all. But something seems to have spooked him. Perhaps it’s just that the inexplicable force field that shielded Trump from the consequences of his well-known ties to Epstein is starting to crack and he wants to change the subject before it shatters entirely. Whatever it is, Longwell’s focus-groupers can sense it.

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On June 15th, Donald Trump declared war on blue cities.

”[W]e must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities, [which are] are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens,” Trump posted to Truth Social, riffing on the interlocking conspiracy theories that define his second term.

The next day, at the G7 summit, a reporter asked Trump about the post. Why was he singling out Democratic cities? Trump falsely claimed that Joe Biden let in 21 million migrants of whom “vast numbers” were “murderers, killers, and people from gangs.” Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s mouth fell. His eyes darted back and forth, as if he were scanning the back of the room for a rescue party.

Trump continued. Most of those people are in Democrat-run cities, he claimed, “and they think they’re going to use them to vote. It’s not going to happen.” Before Trump could elaborate, Carney abruptly ended the press conference, but it was too late.

Trump had tied the Big Lie to the Great Replacement on the world stage. He had voiced the astonishing lie that Democrats were deliberately importing illegal migrants to expand their political power through electoral and benefits fraud, and that he was bringing the might of the federal government against Democratic cities to stop it.

Earlier, Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem boasted that the feds were occupying Los Angeles in order “to liberate” it from “socialists.” Noem was not speaking metaphorically, as Trump had already deployed the National Guard and the Marines to LA.

Conspiracy theories have driven policy before. George W. Bush advanced the conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein launched the 9/11 attacks to sell a war of aggression in the Middle East. Red scares have been used to justify deportations and political purges. But Donald Trump’s second term stands out because his entire domestic policy agenda is driven by three interlocking conspiracy theories that form the core of MAGA ideology: The Deep State, the Big Lie, and the Great Replacement. These Big Three conspiracy theories drive Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown, his assault on the welfare state, his purge of the civil service, and more.

In MAGA mythology, the Deep State includes any part of government or civil society that checks Trump’s power: civil servants, Democratic legislators, state and local officials, unions, scientists, judges, George Soros, Hollywood, the FBI, antifa, DEI, and any part of big business Trump happens to be beefing with. Sometimes, the Deep State is said to be communist, globalist, neoliberal, satanic, or Jewish. These players don’t get along, but that’s irrelevant. The Deep State is whatever maga needs it to be. One thing is certain. Whatever goes right is from Donald Trump’s genius and whatever goes wrong is the deep state’s fault.

Trump clings to the Big Lie of a stolen 2020 election and blames the Deep State for his defeat. He also accuses the Deep State of deliberately engineering the recent influx of immigrants. It’s not that the US attracts migrants because it’s a beacon opportunity for people facing poverty, crime, climate catastrophe, or political repression at home. People aren’t coming here because it’s a wonderful place. No, according to MAGA, America is a dystopian hellscape that nobody would immigrate to if the Deep State weren’t bribing migrants with welfare to commit election fraud. It’s not just that borders were “left open,” Elon Musk claimed on X, “There was a massive, concerted campaign to usher in as many illegals as possible on an unprecedented scale in order to achieve permanent one-party rule. Treason.”

On the campaign trail, Trump claimed Times Square had been taken over by migrants with super-weapons and that migrant gangs were poised to overrun the state of Colorado and depose the governor. The media shrugged. In office, he seized extraordinary powers on the false pretext that the Tren de Aragua street gang was an invading arm of the Venezuelan military.

An eccentric castle-dwelling French intellectual named Renaud Camus coined the term Great Replacement in a 2012 book by the same name. Camus argued that treacherous European governments were deliberately replacing their white citizens with Muslim immigrants in what he called a genocide of white people. More explicitly antisemitic variants of the same theory alleged that the Jews were behind white genocide through mass migration.

The concept of the Great Replacement was popularized by mass shooters who name-checked the conspiracy theory in their manifestos. These include the Christchurch mosque shooter, the El Paso Walmart shooter, and the Buffalo supermarket shooter. The Nazis on the streets of Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us,” as they marched by torchlight.

In the last few years, the Great Replacement has jumped from mass murder manifestos podcast rants to mainstream Republican rhetoric. Last month, Elon Musk’s Grok AI bot went nuts on X and tried to shoehorn the concept of white genocide into every conversation, leading many to wonder if the head of DOGE was putting his thumb on the scale to promote the concept. Then Donald Trump ambushed the president of South Africa with baseless allegations of white genocide during an Oval Office visit.

ICE head Tom Homan breezily blamed a conspiracy by the United Nations and NGOs to manipulate Joe Biden into letting in so many migrants. “This was by design. Do I think Joe Biden had the expertise to do it? No, I think someone’s pulling his strings,” Homan told Tucker Carlson.

Trump and Musk are using the Big Lie and the Great Replacement to justify their extremely unpopular attacks on the welfare state. The vast majority of Americans want to see Social Security defended and even expanded. Trump is trying to convince his base to welcome its own impoverishment by painting the benefits they rely on as a Democratic conspiracy to enrich illegal immigrants.

On Fox, Musk smeared Social Security and other entitlements as “a mechanism by which the Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here and then turning them into voters.”

Undocumented immigrants can’t vote or collect Social Security. Migrants who use fake SSNs actually subsidize the program by paying for benefits they never collect. Trump’s immigration crackdown is hurting Social Security by driving those hardworking taxpayers away.

Last month, Trump reversed his prior opposition to Medicaid cuts on the grounds that the Republicans’ plan to strip health insurance from 14 million low-income people will “kick millions of Illegal Aliens off of Medicaid to PROTECT it for those who are the ones in real need.” Meanwhile, 81 percent of Americans oppose Medicaid cuts to fund upperclass tax cuts, according to a 2025 poll by Navigator Research.

Donald Trump’s are so bizarre that they don’t register mainstream media as political arguments. They are often dismissed as bluster or cognitive glitches. However, one can’t understand Trump and his policy priorities until you accept that conspiracy theories dominate his worldview and that all his major initiatives are justified to his base in conspiratorial terms. Donald Trump has used conspiracy theories as a pretext to declare war on Democrats and shore up authoritarian rule.

Terry Moran is out at ABC thanks to a White House pressure campaign. Donald Trump campaigned on free speech, but in office, he persecutes media companies with frivolous lawsuits and threats of punitive regulation. ABC is cowed. The broadcaster announced that they weren’t renewing Moran’s contract, because they felt his deleted tweet about deputy chief of staff Steven Miller being a hater violated their standards of objectivity and professionalism.

“Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater,” Moran tweeted and later deleted, early Sunday. “You can see this just by looking at him, because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.”

“ABC is gonna have to answer for what their so-called journalist put out on Twitter ... we have reached out to ABC,” said Leavitt. “They have said they will be taking action, so we will see what they do ... hopefully this journalist will either be suspended or terminated."

No doubt the White House is still mad at Moran for exposing Trump’s demented conviction that the labelled symbols M-S-1-3 on a photograph of deported Salvadoran migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia were tattoos.

Miller is, objectively, a hater. The mainstream media says so all the time. “[Miller] is extremely hostile to immigrants. He has always, as far back as high school, rejected the idea that immigration is a net positive for America, and he's been very consistent in that,” Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for The New York Times said on the Daily podcast.

“This is all I care about,” Miller said of his uncontrollable zeal to eject migrants during Trump’s first term. “I don’t have a family. I don’t have anything else. This is my life.” That was before he met his wife Katie on a junket to watch children being separated from their parents at the border. Now, Miller has a partner who bragged that “DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself – to try to make me more compassionate – but it didn’t work.”

Anyone who has watched one of Steve Miller’s twitchy podium-pounding rants knows the truth. Miller repeatedly recommended Camp of the Saints, a polemic about a black giant called Turd Eater whose minions rape a white woman to death.

Trump reportedly said that if Miller had his way, there’d only be 100 million Americans and they’d all look like Steve. It’s hard to think of a human being whose hateration is better documented than Miller’s. It’s a cornerstone of his public image. The MAGA base loves his Peewee German persona.

There is a vast literature documenting Miller’s hatefulness stretching all the way back to elementary school. Moreover, he’s the architect of an immigration policy that sends innocent people to foreign torture prisons and rounds up random brown guys outside Home Depot for looking foreign. He slanders judges who rule against the Trump administration as communists and rails against the enemy within.

ABC claims that Moran showed a lack of objectivity in his blunt and critical assessment of Miller. In fact, Moran’s analysis of character and motive is in line with all the Trump/Musk breakup pieces that dominated straight news coverage for days.

What makes this person tick? What role do they play in the administration? How does their ideology inform their actions?

These are analytical questions that lie at the heart of journalism.

Disallow them and you reduce journalists to stenographers who merely transcribe what powerful people say. Moran erred only in taking the tweet down.

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Donald Trump campaigned against consensual reality and won. Every plank of his platform – from the economy to immigration to abortion – was based on easily provable lies.

Despite Trump’s bombastic assertions to the contrary, inflation is down, growth is up, illegal border crossings are down, crime is down, and vaccines work great. Tariffs are taxes on imports and American companies say they’re planning to raise prices.

None of that mattered at the polls because Trump created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore the facts and focus on hate.

Delusion strongly predicted a vote for Trump. An Ipsos poll in the final weeks of the campaign found that voters who falsely believed that we are living through a record-breaking violent crime wave favored Trump by 26 points, while those who knew the truth broke for Harris by 65 points. Those who knew that the inflation rate is back to the historic average favored Harris by 53 points. Respondents who knew that illegal border crossings are down favored Harris by 59 points.

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Part of the problem is the media. Certainly, the mainstream media is shy about stating the truth and the rightwing media-influencer complex is dedicated to disseminating lies. Social media barons use algorithms to maximize their profits at the expense of our edification.

But the problem goes deeper than that: You also have to look at the conspiracist mindset that says the mainstream media is the enemy of the people, the government is controlled by the Deep State, and scientists are on the take, because it’s what makes people turn away from consensual reality.

CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl once asked Donald Trump why he constantly attacked the press. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” Trump replied.

Trump also discredits the government as a source of information. When the latest statistics showed that crime was down, Trump accused the FBI of making them up. When the jobs report was revised, Trump accused Harris of faking it.

The conspiracist mindset allowed Trump’s followers to reinterpret his 34 felony convictions as evidence of the plot against him, rather than evidence of his terrible behavior.

Once you adopt a conspiracist mindset where you can dismiss any evidence that clashes with your prejudices as part of the conspiracy, you are free to create your own reality. Since it’s a worldview that scapegoats your fellow citizens as diabolical deceivers, that reality is bound to be ugly. Worse still, your willingness to discount mainstream sources of evidence in favor of the outlandish claims of demagogues becomes a badge of ideological purity. You welcome the lies.

This is why social scientists have been warning about the link between conspiracism and totalitarianism for a century. There was never any evidence that the Jews secretly controlled the world – but it didn't matter because lack of evidence was proof that the Jews controlled the press, and the universities, and science and the arts. Jews in pre-war Germany didn't control any of those things – but no evidence to the contrary could penetrate the conspiracy theory. And the complete absence of evidence for their hegemony was just proof of their total domination.

Another reason why conspiracism and totalitarianism are closely connected is that conspiracy theories take away our ability to have good-faith debates. If everything you don't like becomes evidence of your opponent's plot to destroy you, you can't discuss anything rationally. Human-caused climate change is a fact. But conspiracism takes the debate out of the realm of evidence and into the realm of character assassination of scientists and their supporters. It paints us as hoaxers and saboteurs. Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives, but instead of debating their merits based on evidence, anti-vaxers portray their opponents as agents of a nefarious coverup to kill children. And it's completely irrefutable within their conceptual framework. When scientists or the government or journalists come forward with evidence that vaccines save millions of lives and prevent untold suffering, the conspiracist answer is: Well, that's what conspirators to kill our children would say.

There’s a much-needed movement afoot to fix our media ecosystem, but we can’t do that until we address the conspiracist mindset that predisposes people to believe Trump’s lies.

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If Tulsi Gabbard is confirmed as director of national intelligence, she will become the president’s top intelligence advisor and the head of the sprawling US intelligence community. She will be tasked with evaluating and synthesizing intelligence from 18 different agencies. Above all, the job requires discernment. It should therefore alarm us that Gabbard is incapable of differentiating fact from fiction.

Gabbard’s political allegiances shift like quicksilver, but her devotion to conspiracy theories remains constant. Her career arced from Democratic congresswoman to failed presidential hopeful to Trump surrogate. In every era, she has spouted conspiracy theories on topics ranging from Syrian chemical weapons attacks to “Ukrainian biolabs” to antidepressants.

Gabbard rails against an alleged “Great Reset” by a think tank called the World Economic Forum. The Great Reset is the conspiracy theory that the WEF cabal exploited the covid pandemic to usher in what Gabbard calls the “totalitarian dream” of a “cashless society” where people “own nothing” and are subject to constant surveillance.

The WEF is akin to the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, or the Bohemian Grove in the paranoid imagination. These are non-governmental entities with no real power onto which paranoids can project their fears. In consensual reality, the WEF is best known for hosting a swanky annual meeting in Davos. To sensible people, Davos is a byword for self-satisfied CEOs rubbing shoulders with politicians. Not great, but not particularly sinister. To conspiracy theorists, it’s the Illuminati. When the World Economic Forum mildly suggested that insect protein might help avert world hunger in the face of climate change, the conspiracists alleged that the cabal was trying to force us to eat bugs.

Gabbard’s twitter feed offers a glimpse into her deeply conspiratorial mindset. “Just like Biden wasn’t the one calling the shots, Kamala Harris won’t be either. She is the new figurehead for the deep state and the maidservant of Hillary Clinton, queen of the cabal of warmongers,” Gabbard tweeted in July.

Then she upped the ante, accusing “the establishment TV networks” of committing “election interference” as the “propaganda arm of Kamala’s campaign and Deep State.” Gabbard has even dabbled in the Big Lie of election fraud, claiming that Joe Biden was only elected because the “Dems/National Security State/MSM rigged the election by deliberately suppressing Hunter Biden laptop story.”

In 2019, Gabbard sued Google for $50 million for violating her freedom of speech after her AdSense account went down for a few hours on the night of the 2020 Democratic primary debate. Gabbard’s only “evidence” that she faced censorship rather than poor customer service was her mean tweets about big tech. Google explained that the account was temporarily frozen by an automated security system that detects unusual activity and reinstated after Gabbard complained. The lawsuit was dismissed.

Gabbard trafficks in false-flag allegations worthy of Alex Jones. She claimed that Russian-allied Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was framed for chemical attacks he unleashed against his own people. In fact, the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons has been confirmed by the United Nations, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and countless media outlets. Russian intelligence waged a disinformation campaign to discredit claims that Assad used poison gas on his own people and Gabbard fell for it.

In 2017, Gabbard secretly travelled to Syria and met with Assad. She later claimed she didn’t know she was going to meet with the dictator, but former Republican congressman Charlie Dent told MSNBC that Gabbard told him she was planning to meet with Assad before she left. Gabbard ended up paying for the Syria junket out of her own pocket because the Assad crony who initially footed the bill out of his own pocket falsely claimed that the money came from a mainstream Islamic social services charity.

Russian state media celebrated Gabbard’s 2020 presidential bid. Even though Gabbard was a nuisance candidate who won less than 1 percent of the vote, state media gave her twice as much coverage as front-runners Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Gabbard appeared on the Russian-funded Tenet Media network, which funneled millions of dollars to rightwing influencers in a bid to influence the 2024 election.

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard leapt to Russia’s defense, tweeting that the war could have been avoided if the west had acknowledged Russia’s “legitimate security interests” (aka imperial ambitions) in Ukraine. Russia’s most bizarre pretext for invading Ukraine was the baseless charge that the United States was "filling Ukraine with biolabs” with an eye to “destroying the Russian people at the genetic level." The Kremlin even insinuated that the covid-19 virus was produced in one of these non-existent facilities. Russia’s defense ministry unveiled the official crazy wall, tracing a fantastic biolab narrative that encompassed Hunter Biden and George Soros. It should come as no surprise that Gabbard amplified the biolab lie, tweeting a two-minute video demanding that these imaginary facilities be immediately dismantled.

It has become a parlor game in Washington to speculate about whether Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset. A New York Times investigation found no evidence that Gabbard has ever knowingly collaborated with Russian intelligence. Gabbard dropped her defamation lawsuit against Hillary Clinton for suggesting that Gabbard was being groomed by the Russians before discovery could shed light on the matter one way or the other. However, the question of whether Gabbard is being paid by Russian intelligence is a red herring. The problem is she genuinely loves conspiracy theories and broadcasts them for free to anyone who will listen. It’s hard to imagine a person less suited for a high-level intelligence position.

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Donald Trump campaigned against consensual reality and won. Every plank of his platform – from the economy to immigration to abortion – was based on easily provable lies.

Despite Trump’s bombastic assertions to the contrary, inflation is down, growth is up, illegal border crossings are down, crime is down, and vaccines work great. Tariffs are taxes on imports and American companies say they’re planning to raise prices.

None of that mattered at the polls because Trump created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore the facts and focus on hate.

Delusion strongly predicted a vote for Trump. An Ipsos poll in the final weeks of the campaign found that voters who falsely believed that we are living through a record-breaking violent crime wave favored Trump by 26 points, while those who knew the truth broke for Harris by 65 points. Those who knew that the inflation rate is back to the historic average favored Harris by 53 points. Respondents who knew that illegal border crossings are down favored Harris by 59 points.

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Part of the problem is the media. Certainly, the mainstream media is shy about stating the truth and the rightwing media-influencer complex is dedicated to disseminating lies. Social media barons use algorithms to maximize their profits at the expense of our edification.

But the problem goes deeper than that: You also have to look at the conspiracist mindset that says the mainstream media is the enemy of the people, the government is controlled by the Deep State, and scientists are on the take, because it’s what makes people turn away from consensual reality.

CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl once asked Donald Trump why he constantly attacked the press. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” Trump replied.

Trump also discredits the government as a source of information. When the latest statistics showed that crime was down, Trump accused the FBI of making them up. When the jobs report was revised, Trump accused Harris of faking it.

The conspiracist mindset allowed Trump’s followers to reinterpret his 34 felony convictions as evidence of the plot against him, rather than evidence of his terrible behavior.

Once you adopt a conspiracist mindset where you can dismiss any evidence that clashes with your prejudices as part of the conspiracy, you are free to create your own reality. Since it’s a worldview that scapegoats your fellow citizens as diabolical deceivers, that reality is bound to be ugly. Worse still, your willingness to discount mainstream sources of evidence in favor of the outlandish claims of demagogues becomes a badge of ideological purity. You welcome the lies.

This is why social scientists have been warning about the link between conspiracism and totalitarianism for a century. There was never any evidence that the Jews secretly controlled the world – but it didn't matter because lack of evidence was proof that the Jews controlled the press, and the universities, and science and the arts. Jews in pre-war Germany didn't control any of those things – but no evidence to the contrary could penetrate the conspiracy theory. And the complete absence of evidence for their hegemony was just proof of their total domination.

Another reason why conspiracism and totalitarianism are closely connected is that conspiracy theories take away our ability to have good-faith debates. If everything you don't like becomes evidence of your opponent's plot to destroy you, you can't discuss anything rationally. Human-caused climate change is a fact. But conspiracism takes the debate out of the realm of evidence and into the realm of character assassination of scientists and their supporters. It paints us as hoaxers and saboteurs. Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives, but instead of debating their merits based on evidence, anti-vaxers portray their opponents as agents of a nefarious coverup to kill children. And it's completely irrefutable within their conceptual framework. When scientists or the government or journalists come forward with evidence that vaccines save millions of lives and prevent untold suffering, the conspiracist answer is: Well, that's what conspirators to kill our children would say.

There’s a much-needed movement afoot to fix our media ecosystem, but we can’t do that until we address the conspiracist mindset that predisposes people to believe Trump’s lies.

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You wouldn’t expect a presidential candidate to make a massive middle class tax hike the centerpiece of his economic platform, but that’s exactly what Donald Trump is doing.

Trump has vowed to slap a 20 percent tax on all imports, a 60 percent tax on all Chinese imports and a 2,000 percent tax on imported cars.

These taxes are known as tariffs. Everything from tequila to video game consoles would cost more. Trump’s tariffs would cost the average family nearly $4,000 a year and rising prices would accelerate inflation.

Trump claims that other countries will pay for the tariffs, but consumers paid for nearly all of the tariffs he imposed in his first term through higher prices.

And then we paid billions more to bail out the farmers who were ruined by the tariffs our trading partners imposed in retaliation.

So why is Trump so keen on taxing imports?

Because the Trump tariffs would create the greatest engine of corruption in history, an institutionalized kleptocracy where import-based business lives or dies by Trump’s favor. Elon Musk’s imported parts might be exempted while GM’s are not.

Congress has given the president sweeping powers to impose tariffs, and critically, to waive those tariffs for a favored few. US imports totaled $3.8 trillion in 2023. The thought of a 34-time convicted felon wielding that kind of power is terrifying. Powerful interests at home and abroad want to save money and gain an edge over their competitors by dodging tariffs. Trump is just the man to make that happen, for a price.

Trump’s business empire creates limitless opportunities for would-be tariff dodgers to convert cash into official acts. In all, Trump’s businesses raked in nearly $2 billion in revenue during his first term, including millions from the governments of China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. If emoluments won’t suffice, there’s always bribery. Trump is credibly accused of taking 200 pounds of cash worth $10 million from Egypt in exchange for a friendlier diplomatic posture towards the autocratic regime.

Trump politicized tariff waivers in his first term.

The Brookings Institution found that “a bewildering array of politically favored importers won tariff relief” during that time. Bibles from China got a waiver because the religious right insisted, but textbooks are still taxed. Now the Trump Bible is made in China, too. Salmon and cod got waivers because powerful Republican senators threw their weight around. Chinese tiki torches got the nod for reasons that remain as murky as a bad fish farm. Governments including China, Russia and Argentina are suspected of granting Trump and his family trademarks worth millions of dollars in the hopes of securing more favorable trade relations.

Technically, the Commerce Department grants the waivers. These concessions are supposed to be based on the national interest, but the process is notoriously opaque and politicized at the best of times.

In a second Trump term, it would become completely corrupt. In the name of fighting an imaginary “Deep State,” Trump plans to purge career civil servants and replace them with maga hacks who will do his bidding. The Heritage Foundation, home of Project 2025, is already flooding federal agencies with Freedom of Information Requests to find out which civil servants aren’t Trumpy enough. Heritage shelled out $100,000 for Project Sovereignty 2025 to draw up a McCarthyite list of civil servants that Heritage President Kevin Roberts considers to be a “deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats.”

If you wondered why JD Vance called on Trump to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” there’s your answer. It’s the mid-level bureaucrats in every federal agency that stand in the way of turning the federal government into a Trump protection racket.

Trump’s tariff plan would give him discretion to play favorites over trillions of dollars of trade. We know he’d follow through because he played favorites with tariffs in his first term. The second time around, he will vastly increase the amount of goods subject to tariffs and purge the civil service of anyone who might oppose his bid to reward his friends and punish his enemies.

Republicans have conjured a conspiracy to justify their self-righteous anger and their plans for revenge.

Merrick Garland is a reasonable man in unreasonable times.

Predictably, Republicans responded to Donald Trump’s 34 state felony convictions by loudly proclaiming the outlandish conspiracy theory that president Joe Biden engineered Trump’s conviction.

Rather than grapple with the unanimous verdict of 12 jurors who heard the evidence, Republicans have conjured a conspiracy to justify their self-righteous anger and their plans for revenge.

Conspiratorial thinking is essential to this project because it allows maga Republicans to cast themselves as martyrs rather than accomplices.

On Tuesday, the attorney general had uncharacteristically blunt remarks for the House Judiciary Committee, which is dominated by some of Trump’s most zealous partisans.

For Garland, it was time to state the obvious.

"We do not control the Manhattan district attorney, the Manhattan district attorney does not report to us," Garland testified. “It comes alongside false claims that a jury verdict in a state trial, brought by a local district attorney, was somehow controlled by the Justice Department,”

“That conspiracy theory is an attack on the judicial process itself,” he added. He’s absolutely right. Maga has used a conspiracy theory to justify their wholesale rejection of the rule of law.

It’s not a conspiracy theory to think Trump is innocent of paying off a porn star to win an election, or that every day should be The Purge for fascist billionaires. One of those opinions is stupid and the other is despicable – but they're not inherently conspiratorial. Whereas, any version of “Biden engineered Trump's prosecution and fixed the outcome of his trial” is a conspiracy theory and it’s the Republican Party line.

Rather than blaming Trump for falsifying business records to win an election – or themselves for nominating a candidate facing dozens of felony charges – a group of far-right Republican senators accused the White House of “making a mockery of the rule of law” and altering our politics in “unAmerican ways.” In retaliation for this wholly imaginary injustice, they pledged to oppose Biden’s legislative agenda. They were already doing that, but it’s the paranoid thought that counts.

“An incoherent response to a case brought by the Manhattan DA in state court in front of a state judge. What do Democratic senators have to do with it?” tweeted noted muckraker Judd Legum.

In fact, the Republican response is perfectly coherent if you fill in the blanks with a conspiracy theory, as the maga faithful do instinctively.

Some, like Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, falsely alleged that Biden schemed to have the Department of Justice assassinate Trump during the search of Mar-a-Lago.

One advantage of avenging imaginary crimes is that you can adjust the size of the transgression to justify your preferred punishment.

Magas are vying to outdo each other with the bloodthirstiness of the punishments they want to inflict on the Democrats, the legal system and the left.

Former Justice Department official turned J6 co-conspirator Jeff Clark urged Trump to sue Bragg under a convoluted theory that reminded everyone that Clark’s expertise was environmental law.

Trump strategist Steve Bannon, threatened to throw New York prosecutor Bragg in prison if Trump is reelected.

“Not just jail, they should get the death penalty,” said Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and associate of Donald Trump.

Conspiracism is the dominant discourse of the Republican Party. Every item in their agenda has a conspiracist spin.

The Great Replacement theory was once relegated to the fringe, but today it is front-and-center in GOP immigration rhetoric.

Elected Republicans routinely call for the defunding of the FBI, the DOJ, and other mechanisms of accountability on the grounds that they’ve been “weaponized” by the “deep state.”

This kind of talk was relegated to Infowars a decade ago, but now you hear it on “Meet the Press.” The House GOP conference has squandered its time in the majority investigating conspiracy theories ranging from a US government cover-up of alien visitations to lab leak theories to advanced topics in Hunter Biden.

You have to wonder if the magas believe their own outlandish rhetoric. There are some true believers, but for most, this embrace of frothing conspiracism is an excuse to justify the authoritarian measures they’ve long wanted to implement.

“To say that Joe Biden brought this case is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard,” former Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina said during a TV appearance. “We know that’s not the case, and even Trump’s lawyers know that’s not the case.”

Judging by her 100,000-follower X account, Danielle Johnson was a typical astrology influencer. She chided Cancers to stop being chaotic and Tauruses to lay off the carbs. She burned candles, cast spells and peddled energy healing sessions.

It was your standard sunny apolitical pseudo-spiritual shtick, but her tone darkened abruptly in the days leading up to the solar eclipse.

Jones started sharing antisemitic conspiracy theories and QAnon verbiage. She retweeted far-right conspiracy mogul Alex Jones, antivax loon Naomi Wolf and a Jew-hating flat-earther.

As an astrologer, Johnson was primed to believe that celestial bodies influence daily life, but this was different. She seemed to believe something terrible was coming and that real-life action was needed.

She begged her fellow spiritual healers to keep their people safe. On April 5, she tweeted, “WAKE UP WAKE UP THE APOCALYPSE IS HERE.” The coming eclipse, she said, was the epitome of spiritual warfare. It was time to pick a side.

In the early morning hours of eclipse day, Johnson plunged a knife into the heart of her boyfriend, threw her children from a speeding car, and plowed into a tree at a hundred miles an hour. Johnson is dead, as is her boyfriend and her infant daughter. We are left with grief and questions.

In light of her social media and the tarot cards strewn around the crime scene, investigators initially suspected that the apocalyptic anxiety may have been a factor in the killings, but now they say we’ll never know. Johnson and her boyfriend are dead and it’s hard to explain what went wrong. Neither Johnson nor her partner had a record of domestic violence. Johnson’s mother confirmed that her daughter had a history of postpartum depression.

Johnson’s case isn’t as clear-cut as that of Taylon Celestine who announced that God had commanded her to start shooting people because of the eclipse before she opened fire on I-10 in Florida, hitting two drivers.

Extreme apocalyptic rhetoric is everywhere. Most of us shrug it off and get on with our lives, minding our carbs and keeping the chaos in check, but some people are vulnerable. Maybe they’ve been spiritually or politically radicalized, maybe they’re suffering from mental illness.

Politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, operatives like Steve Bannon and Alex Jones, and clerics like demoted bishop Joseph Strickland flooded the zone with eclipse-related bulls—t. They spoke of martial law, demonic portals and the urgent need to repent before the judgment of God. Donald Trump routinely tells his followers that he is their retribution and promises to lead them in the Battle of Armageddon. This kind of talk has become so normalized it’s hard to draw causal connections between rhetoric and violence. That’s the point.

These far right eclipse influencers probably didn’t mean to incite violence — this time. The eclipse was just more low-effort content. They keep themselves rich and powerful by keeping their audience in a constant state of terror and rage. They’ll exploit whatever’s in the news to do it. Stoking this turmoil is useful because these people can be activated, like when the faithful were called to the Capitol on January 6 for “spiritual warfare” against the seat of American democracy.

Terrified true believers are a fertile field for stochastic terrorism. That’s when a demagogue with a huge platform demonizes an enemy knowing that in a country with any number of disturbed people and who knows how many guns, something terrible could easily happen.

The gym chain Planet Fitness has received bomb threats at 38 locations across the country after the anti-trans Twitter account LibsofTikTok (LoTT) put the establishment on blast for canceling the membership of a patron who photographed another guest in the women’s locker room and shared on to social media, accusing the person of being a man. Schools and hospitals have also been hit with bomb threats after negative attention from LoTT.

If someone follows through on one of these bomb threats, it will probably be impossible to prove that LoTT is to blame. That’s the nature of stochastic terrorism. It creates a climate of fear where people and businesses may not speak out for fear of being targeted.

It’s too late to help Danielle Johnson, or even to fully understand what drove her crime spree. But it’s not too late to repudiate the apocalyptic clout-chasing that she was tapped into.

A snarky aside from a Republican special counsel, lackluster presidential poll numbers and a pass on a Super Bowl interview have plunged certain pundits into full-blown, sweaty-palmed panic.

Ezra Klein of the Times, Damon Linker of The Atlantic, and Substacker Nate Silver say president Joe Biden should refuse to seek a second term despite his outstanding record in office because … he seems kind of old.

Klein and Linker propose instead that Biden release the delegates he wins in the primary to choose the Democratic nominee at the party’s convention in late August. This proposal is madness. If punditry had standards, it would be malpractice.

A new poll released Friday by Emerson College showed Biden trailing Trump by one point with 11 percent of voters still undecided. The same poll had Trump beating vice president Kamala Harris by three points, California Governor Gavin Newsom by 10 points, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer by 12 points. This is in line with the rest of the polling. All of the most bruited alternative candidates poll worse than Biden in a head-to-head with Trump. So why are we having this discussion?

A convention fight is a pure pundit’s fantasy. First off, it’s predicated on Biden voluntarily stepping aside, which is not going to happen. Although Linker’s not above a little light blackmail to try to force the issue:

“For starters, every major figure in the party prevailing on Biden to drop out. That can be done behind the scenes at first, out of respect for the president. But if he refuses to budge, then it will be time for embarrassing leaks to the press. I would like to think that Biden will see the only way to preserve his reputation, record, and self-respect is by announcing, somewhat as Lyndon B. Johnson did in March 1968, that he’s withdrawing from the race.”

Moreover, a brokered convention is a unicorn, a beguiling chimera that gets conjured by nerds every cycle but never materializes in the modern world because its existence is incompatible with real life.

Klein breezes past the fact that the last contested Democratic convention was a disaster of epic proportions. In 1968, the deeply unpopular incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, dropped out and threw his support behind his vice president, Hubert Humphrey. The convention became a flashpoint for intraparty conflict so fierce that newsman Dan Rather was beaten by police on the convention floor. Humphrey prevailed, but Democrats were in disarray for real. Richard Nixon won the general election.

In 2024, a contested convention would become an arena to settle every score from Gaza to Medicare for All. A free-for-all would shatter the fragile Democratic coalition that Joe Biden so carefully knit together. If Kamala Harris won, people would complain that Joe Biden put his thumb on the scale, even if he didn’t. If Harris didn’t win, an equal and opposite faction would be furious that she was passed over. We have no idea who would win this hypothetical battle royale. We don’t even know who might enter. Virtually any Democrat over 35 could throw their hat in the ring. Klein rattled off a list of fourteen potential contenders. A chaotic and crowded race would increase the odds that someone completely unvetted got the top spot.

By then it would be late August and the Democratic party would have about two months to refocus on beating Trump with whatever nominee came out on top.

But given that party elites picked the nominee, there’d be no guarantee that the rank-and-file would accept their choice. The pundits are asking a couple thousand Biden delegates to pick the future leader of the free world. They’re also asking Biden to disregard the will of the Democratic primary voters who pulled the lever for him. This is profoundly undemocratic and unlikely to play well in a party where there are still people fuming about the superdelegates of 2016.

Klein and Linker are well aware that a contested convention would be risky.

“Could it go badly? Sure. But that doesn’t mean it will go badly,” Klein writes, “It could make the Democrats into the most exciting political show on earth.”

The absolute last thing the Democratic Party needs is to be the greatest show on earth.

Joe Biden’s polling isn’t where it needs to be. That should scare everyone who enjoys living in a democracy.

That anxiety is eating at us all, but pundits should not be dangling the false hope that some mystery candidate will solve Joe Biden’s electoral problems. This is a binary choice between Joseph R. Biden and Donald J. Trump. Period. One is rated by historians as the 14th-best president of all time, the other is a proven rapist and fraudster with 91 indictments and a failed coup under his belt.

It’s time to shelve the childish fantasies and focus on the task at hand: Supporting Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump. He’s done it before. He can do it again, but he needs our help.

The attorney general of Nevada announced that six fake electors, including the chair and vice chair of the Nevada GOP, have been indicted for their bid to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump.

The state will have a significant advantage. The intellectual architect of the fake electors scheme, Ken Chesebro, has agreed to travel to Nevada and neighboring Arizona to assist prosecutors.

Of all the members of Trump’s legal team, Chesebro is the most enigmatic. The sixty-something was a mild-mannered liberal until he made several million dollars trading cryptocurrency, split from his wife of 20 years, and married a woman in her early twenties. Whereupon, he reinvented himself as a far-right Republican.

The Harvard-educated Chesebro pled guilty in October to a single felony count of conspiring to file false documents in Georgia. This was a generous plea deal given that Chesebro conceived the massive fake electors’ scheme and micromanaged its execution. Moreover, he signed his name to everything. A smart lawyer and a dumb criminal, Chesebro sent detailed written instructions to state-level Republican operatives on where and how to cast their fake votes. At times, he was astonishingly candid about how outrageous his plan was.

“[Two Republicans officials] are concerned it could appear treasonous for the AZ electors to vote on Monday if there is no pending court proceeding that might, eventually, lead to the electors being ratified as the legitimate ones,” Chesebro wrote to Rudy Giuliani, bolding the word “treasonous” for emphasis.

“Which is a valid point…” he conceded, before explaining why they were going to do it anyway. There was, in fact, no pending litigation in Arizona that could have declared Trump the lawful winner of the state’s electoral votes.

It should be noted these concerned Republican officials participated in a standoff with armed federal law enforcement at the Bundy Ranch in 2014. When they’re concerned about the treason optics, the situation is truly dire. Chesebro described Nevada as “an extremely problematic state” for the coup plotters, because, he observed, the secretary of state had to preside over the casting of the electoral votes and the votes could only go to the winner of Nevada’s popular vote. Neither of those provisos applied to Chesebros’ handpicked fake electors and he knew it.

Chesebro reached for a historical precedent to justify the fake electors scheme. In 1960, Richard Nixon carried the state of Hawaii by a mere 140 votes. A recount ensued. The Democrats selected alternate electors just in case the recount went their way. The Democrats did, in fact, prevail on the recount and the governor certified their slate as the genuine article. There was no evidence that the Democrats intended to deceive anyone, let alone to push their claim in the face of a failed recount. Indeed, there would have been no point, given that John F. Kennedy had already secured enough electoral votes to win the election. The Hawaii Dems of 1960 were simply using their alternate slate as a placeholder. Only two slates of fake electors, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, stipulated that their votes should only be counted if their side prevailed in litigation, the rest, including Nevada and Arizona, simply falsely asserted that they were the real electors from their states.

Chesebro has already obtained a proffer in Nevada, which guarantees that he won’t be prosecuted under the laws of that state if he testifies against the fake electors. Such leniency to the Cheese may seem unfair to Nevada’s fake electors, given that they were merely running Chesebro’s playbook. But that’s how plea deals work. The sooner you flip, the sweeter the deal.

Last week, X CEO Elon Musk endorsed a tweet accusing Jews of pushing “dialectical hatred against whites” and supporting “hordes of minorities … flooding their country.”

“You have said the actual truth,” Musk replied.

In parroting the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and giving antisemites free rein on his site, Musk is emulating Henry Ford, a car mogul who bought a media platform to spread antisemitic libels.

The Great Replacement is the delusional belief that someone is trying to replace white people by championing liberal immigration policies and racial justice. As is typical, Musk cast the Jews in the role of racial puppet masters.

When fascists in Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us,” they were referencing the myth of the Great Replacement. The following year, Robert Bowers accused the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HAIS) of perpetrating white genocide before his shooting spree at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh:

“HIAS likes to bring invaders that kill our people,” Bowers said. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

In 2019, a gunman killed 52 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. His manifesto was entitled “The Great Replacement.” The same year, a shooter cited the Great Replacement to explain why he took 23 lives at an El Paso Walmart. The Buffalo supermarket shooter was also a believer.

Jewish philanthropist George Soros is routinely cast in conspiracy theories for his foundation’s support of liberal causes, such as criminal justice reform and the Black Lives Matter movement.

During the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, American Jews played a prominent role in founding and funding major civil rights organizations. Many of the white student Freedom Riders were Jewish and 17 rabbis were arrested alongside Martin Luther King in St. Augustine in 1964. Segregationists spread their own conspiracy theories about Jews teaming up with Blacks to destroy the white way of life.

In fact, the image of the liberal Jew goes back at least as far as the French Revolution. In the prevailing spirit of liberalism, the revolutionary government became the first in Europe to grant citizenship to Jews in 1791. In keeping with this liberalizing ethos, various European countries emancipated their Jewish residents. This wave of emancipation vastly expanded opportunities for Jews in terms of where they could live, what jobs they could do, and how they could participate in politics, business and the arts. Not surprisingly, many Jews embraced liberal ideologies because liberal tolerance improved their lives.

It was during the 19th century that Europe’s longstanding Jew-hatred curdled into modern antisemitism. It was during this time that the myth of the international Jewish conspiracy was fully fleshed out.

Some scholars argue that conspiracy theories are the defining characteristic of antisemitism. It’s wrong to hate someone for their religion, but the animosity is rooted in a real difference of opinion: Jews aren’t Christians, and some Christians have had a problem with that for centuries. Whereas, antisemitism is based on pure racial and political fantasy.

Modern antisemitism construes Jews as both the racial other and as agents of malignant modernity. Jews are identified with both communism and capitalism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the most successful antisemitic tract of all time, was forged by agents of the Russian secret police in the late 19th century. It purports to reveal the secret deliberations of a group of rabbis gathered in Prague to take over the world. By some estimates, the Protocols have been republished more than any other book except the Bible.

In 1920, Henry Ford began publishing the Protocols under the header of “The International Jew” in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. At the time, the Independent had a greater national reach and more influence than the Times. Hitler praised Ford by name in Mein Kampfas the “single great man” of the “American Union” standing against “the Jews.”

The Protocols were debunked as a crude forgery in 1920 and Ford was eventually forced to retract them and apologize after being sued for libel by an American Jewish lawyer whom Ford accused of furthering the conspiracy by founding farm cooperatives.

In endorsing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, Musk is partaking in an ancient and ugly tradition of twisting one of Judaism's proudest traditions – a commitment to social justice.

Two of Donald Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election theft case plead guilty last week and a third followed suit on Tuesday.

Former Trump lawyers Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro and Jenna Ellis have agreed to testify against the former president and the remaining co-defendants. Assuming they successfully complete their probation, none of these newly minted convicts will face prison time.

The remaining defendants, including Trump, are being prosecuted under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute, a law that was originally designed to fight organized crime, but which is now being applied to various illegal networks.

Powell’s decision to plead guilty on the eve of her trial came as a shock to the Trump camp. “[Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her team] managed to break the woman who was never supposed to be breakable,” a deluded person told Rolling Stone. Powell will go to her grave believing conspiracy theories, but her loyalty to Donald Trump is not inexhaustible. Trump threw Powell under the bus publicly, ridiculed her privately, and cut off all contact.

Chesebro pled guilty to a single felony count of conspiracy to file false documents in connection with his role in the fake electors scam. Powell didn’t even have to concede that much. She was allowed to plead to six misdemeanors. She’ll be free to file more frivolous lawsuits someday. But before you start complaining about our rigged justice system, consider how much these two have to offer as witnesses.

Why did the lawyers get such generous plea deals? Because they can testify against defendants who are even guiltier than they are. Mid-level conspirators are particularly useful if they can testify to both the orders of the ringleaders and the operational details of the scheme. Snitching will get you everywhere.

The lawyers worked directly with Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Donald Trump himself. Powell met with Trump in the Oval Office and presented him with a blueprint for declaring martial law and seizing voting machines. Her proposal was not acted upon, but the mere fact that she had that kind of access speaks volumes.

Critically, the lawyers can testify that the flurry of illegal activity to overturn the election was a conspiracy. That may sound obvious, but proving the existence of an illicit network to a legal certainty can be a big hurdle for a RICO case. The more insiders who can explain how the pieces fit together, the more likely Willis is to secure RICO convictions.

Powell has something else going for her as a cooperating witness. She has now pled guilty to orchestrating the theft of voter data from Coffee County. A bail bondsman named Scott Hall has already pled guilty to his role in the theft. Critically, the indictment asserts that Hall was working on behalf of Donald Trump. If Hall and Powell can link the Coffee County heist to Trump, that would be a boon to the prosecution’s case against the highest-value defendant of all.

The lawyers also had the advantage of being among the first to plead guilty. Prosecutors want to leverage the prisoner’s dilemma to create a sense of urgency: If nobody talks, everybody walks; but the person who talks first gets the best deal. Powell and Chesebro were the first nationally known defendants to plead guilty. Rest assured that the remaining co-defendants are watching carefully. Now that the united front is beginning to crumble, others may fold as well.

It’s not sunshine and rainbows, though. Powell’s cachet as a witness might be tarnished by her long history of spouting outlandish conspiracy theories starring Hugo Chavez, George Soros and other fan faves from the QAnon cinematic universe. Trump’s lawyers will try to undermine her credibility. They must tread carefully, however.

The more they paint Powell as crazy, the harder it’s going to be to justify Trump’s decision to rely on her advice. Trump’s defense will likely hinge on his sincere belief that the election was stolen. And yet there’s already testimony from the J6 Committee that Trump dismissed Powell’s conspiracy theories as crazy.

The defections of three well-placed co-defendants in the Georgia RICO case is a huge blow to Trump and his top lieutenants.