Dispatches
David Levi Strauss writes brief and immediate responses to the major events that shape presidential elections.
Watching the reentry of the capsule containing the Artemis II team on April 10 was deeply moving, for complicated reasons. Here was an endeavor deploying the best of human scientific and technical expertise carried out with competence and courage.
President Trump has attempted to marry infinite immorality with infinite power. Threatening to completely destroy the country of Iran by illegally bombing civilian power stations and bridges if the leadership doesn’t acquiesce to his demands, Donald Trump went one step further on Tuesday, April 7, when he announced that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Military leaders don’t like the current Secretary of Defense. They consider him a pseudo-masculine poseur and an unqualified loose cannon on deck. Hegseth has fired a lot of military leaders since becoming secretary.
The Federal Reserve reported that, in the last six months, there have been zero new jobs created in the private sector. Two million Americans have lost their health insurance and millions more have seen their insurance rates soar.
The Pentagon has been using an artificial intelligence system called Project Maven, developed by Palantir and incorporating the AI model Claude from Anthropic to speed up the “kill chain” to identify, approve, and strike targets faster. It appears that this system might have been used in the US strike on the girls’ school in Minab that killed 175 on February 28.
On March 14, Trump posted on Truth Social a list under the heading, “President Trump Is Reshaping the Media,” with three sections: GONE, REFORMS, and WINNING.
Marilyn Thompson and Mitchell Black of The Post and Courier newspaper in Charleston, South Carolina have done a lot of old-fashioned investigative reporting on the contents of the 2019 interviews of the woman who claimed that she was sexually assaulted and beaten by Donald Trump in 1984, when she was 13 years old.
Trump has an extraordinary ability to make masses of people believe things that aren’t true. It is part of our terrible fate that the Trump phenomenon is occurring at the precise moment when hard decisions need to be made about our future with Artificial Intelligence.
What has happened to us? How did we get to this point? How has the American dream of human emancipation come to this? Donald Trump’s State of the Union rant showed once again how he has brought much more than bad politics to America. He’s brought a taste for cruelty and meanness. He’s infected our imaginations with malignant thoughts.
William Burroughs wrote about “Control” as an entity that must be engaged and vanquished, or at least contested. Burroughs’ sense of “Control” was as a parasitic system of power that works through the virus of language, mass media, bureaucratic structures, and technology. He was a devotee of Wilhelm Reich, who devised actual techniques for psychologically subverting Control.
Collecting, sorting, and storing massive amounts of data has long been the work of the Information Age, but these activities are now going into a quantum stage that could have a disproportionate, some say catastrophic, impact on the physical plane.
The idea of “America” has been kidnapped by a malevolent force, and at this point, we don’t know how to get her back, or even if she’s still alive. We’re afraid and don’t know where to turn. We await the explanatory ransom note that never comes.
In the final hours of the Republican National Convention in 2024, they broke out the “MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW” signs. Stephen Miller and Tom Homan had orchestrated family separations in the first Trump term, and now they wanted to go to the next level.
Are you going to believe us or your lying eyes? When masked ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good at point blank range on January 7, he had been recording the moments before his shot on his own cellphone, and JD Vance thought that releasing Ross’s own video recording on January 9 would justify Ross’s action for Americans who saw it. It did not do that.
Leah Greenberg, the co-founder of Indivisible, told Michelle Goldberg of the Times that while Trump “has been able to do extraordinary damage that will have generational effects, he has not successfully consolidated power.
When Trump first came down the golden escalator to run for President in 2015, he began his appeal to voters by denigrating immigrants: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. . . .
After months and months of delay by Mike Johnson, Congress finally passed a law—H.R. 4405, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, on November 19—directing Trump’s Justice Department to release all the files they hold by December 19.
The mass deportations carried out by ICE are the actions of a deranged gang of xenophobes who are blaming immigrants for all the ills of modern American society. This is what tyrants have always done, on the way to authoritarianism for all.
In a December 2nd Washington Post column titled “A Sickening Moral Slum of an Administration,” conservative columnist George Will wrote, “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal without a war. An interesting achievement.”
Trump and MAGA hit the ground running in January 2025, and accomplished a tremendous amount in the first nine months of Trump’s second term, in terms of dismantling the government.
From the beginning of the rise of Trump, I have marveled at his support among farmers. This steadfast support is so incongruous that it continues to baffle me. In contrast to farmers’ nature, Trump is arrogant, mean, cruel, insecure, faithless, and narcissistic.
The leaders of the AI boom want you to think this is a wonderful thing for the world, but it’s already looking bad and we haven’t even gotten to the stage where the machines are more intelligent than humans. These AI entrepreneurs all have a quasi-religious belief in AGI and its power to transform the world and solve all our problems. They believe in AI as an Everything Machine.
There has been a lot of speculation about how the presidential bunker under the now-demolished East Wing of the White House is figuring into the plans for Trump’s massive “ballroom.”
Trump is wrecking American democracy and it appears that the legal, educational, and media institutions in the US are, so far, incapable of stopping him.
In Trumpworld, the Culture Wars are seen as a long Cold War period in which the Right lost almost every battle, and they now want to turn it into a hot war.
Tom Nichols, writing in The Atlantic on October 7, reminds us that an authoritarian takeover of a democratic country “must control three sources of power: the intelligence agencies, the justice system, and the military.”
Trump is building an authoritarian regime in the US even more rapidly than Viktor Orban did in Hungary, although Trump and Stephen Miller and Robert Vought are working from the same playbook as Orban.
Trump’s speech is a clear announcement of his intention to use the US military against his political opposition in US cities under Democratic, especially Black, leadership.
When Donald Trump traveled to England this month to avoid questions about the Epstein Files, he was met with images from the Epstein conspiracy projected onto Windsor Castle and unfurled on the great lawn.
We know that Tyler Robinson’s family are all long-time Republicans and that Tyler thought his father became more “diehard MAGA” after Trump was elected the second time.
Trump and his minions have all become unconscious surrealists, using meta messages, subtexts and subterfuge, pretexts and prevarications to subvert the meanings of words and images.
I have a deep-seated abhorrence for the kind of elitism exemplified by the lives of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The features of this elitism came through loud and clear in Todd Blanche’s fawning, disgraceful “proffer” with Maxwell in July.