The Noisy Killer Amongst Us (UPDATED)

 

The Noisy Killer Amongst Us

“I had eleven brothers and sisters, I had about 70 first cousins, and I never saw anybody with diabetes… I never knew anybody with a food allergy. I never knew anybody with autism… And I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like. I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street, and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation. You can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection, and I know that that’s not how our children are supposed to look.”

Robert Kennedy, Jr, speech at the Texas Capitol in Austin on August 27th.

“So we need to look at the priorities of the agency, if there’s really a deeply, deeply embedded, I would say, malaise at the agency… And we need strong leadership that will go in there and that will be able to execute on President Trump’s broad ambitions.” 

RFK, Jr. shortly have he fired CSC head, Susan Monarez.

RFK, Jr must have absorbed his medical degree from the ether. Not only is he completely uneducated and unaware of bona fide medical science, he is quick to project his wildly inaccurate conspiracy theories as truth, generating unwarranted gravitas as Secretary of Health and Human Services. But his distorted utterances have undoubtedly lead to the death of untold numbers of people, particularly children, and the return of diseases to our country – like measles and even possibly polio – that had been eradicated. The same man who dumped a bear carcass in Central Park and bragged about a now-deceased worm had lived in his brain, is an antivaxxer, anti-science nerd, disowned by his own family who has told the world that the explosion of diagnosed cases of autism was driven by our obsession with vaccines, particularly the highly effective mRNA vaccines, responsible for saving tens of millions of people around the world who survived the COVID pandemic … and generating serious fatality rates for those who did not receive that vaccine.

Kennedy is right; there has been a 60-fold increase in autism diagnoses in the past three decades… but not much in the way of “autism” as it was defined 30 years ago. The disease was not particularly well diagnosed 30 years ago, and the definition of “autism” did not originally embrace the mild form of that ailment that is called “Aspergers” syndrome. Most of us know that the ultimate source of medical diseases is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its 5th edition (DSM-5). So, to understand the difference between the number of autism diagnoses and the number of vetted actually determined cases, I turn to a guest New York Times columnist, Dr Allen Frances, a member of the task force that created DSM-4, who wrote (June 23rd):

“The rapid rise in autism cases is not because of vaccines or environmental toxins, but rather is the result of changes in the way that autism is defined and assessed — changes that I helped put into place… In the third edition of the D.S.M., published in 1980, autism was tightly defined and considered extremely rare. Criteria for the diagnosis required a very early onset (before age 3) of severe cognitive, interpersonal, emotional and behavioral problems…

“Based on careful studies, our task force predicted that the addition of Asperger’s syndrome would modestly increase the rate of children given an autism-related diagnosis. Instead, the rate increased more than 16-fold, to one in 150 from an estimated one in 2,500 in the span of a decade. It has been climbing more gradually ever since and is one in 31 today. Our intentions were good, but we underestimated the enormous unintended consequences of adding the new diagnosis.

“The resulting explosion in cases included many instances of overdiagnosis — children were labeled with a serious condition for challenges that would better be viewed as a variation of normal. It also sowed the seeds of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine beliefs as people wondered how to explain the rising cases.

“Many large studies have come to the same conclusion: Vaccines don’t cause autism. The role, if any, of environmental toxins is still to be determined, but there is no known environmental factor that can explain the sudden jump in diagnoses. The changes we made to the diagnosis in the D.S.M.-IV can.

“Why did autism-related diagnoses explode so far beyond what our task force had predicted? Two reasons. First, many school systems provide much more intensive services to children with the diagnosis of autism. While these services are extremely important for many children, whenever having a diagnosis carries a benefit, it will be overused. Second, overdiagnosis can happen whenever there’s a blurry line between normal behavior and disorder, or when symptoms overlap with other conditions. Classic severe autism had so tight a definition it was hard to confuse it with anything else; Asperger’s was easily confused with other mental disorders or with normal social avoidance and eccentricity. (We also, regrettably, named the condition after Hans Asperger, one of the first people to describe it, not realizing until later that he had collaborated with the Nazis.)”

HHS and its subject agencies have had serious management changes, funding cuts and at the CDC, even a bullet-ridden attack on its central facility. Morale is at a new low. There has been a major purge at HHS, especially trained and degreed professionals, advisors and staff, many with decades at HHS, but those with a focus on scientific research, particularly associated with vaccine testing, have been slowly replaced with quacks and conspiracy theorists. One serious and very recent appointment, has been CDC head, Dr. Susan Monarez, who (according to Wikipedia) completed her Ph.D. in veterinary science where her research focused on developing technologies to prevent, diagnose, and treat infectious diseases, particularly those affecting low- and middle-income countries. She continued her studies at Stanford University School of Medicine in John C. Boothroyd's group, further continuing her work in the field of infectious disease research. Her background made her perfectly suited to study zoonotic transmission of diseases (from animal to human).

On August 27th, Monarez was fired because she would not sign off on RFK, Jr’s determination that vaccines were vastly more dangerous than the diseases they were intended to prevent, a falsehood she could not put her name to. Dr. Richard Besser, a former CDC acting director, said that when he spoke with Monarez on Wednesday [8/27], she vowed not to do anything that was illegal or that flew in the face of science. She had refused directives from the Department of Health and Human Services to fire her management team. She also would not automatically sign off on any recommendations from a vaccines advisory committee handpicked by Kennedy, according to Besser, now president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which helps support The Associated Press Health and Science Department.” Associated Press, August 28th. Her most senior management team, many with decades of experience at the CDC, resigned immediately. A large sympathy walkout by the CDC staff followed.

This left the CDC in serious disarray, quacks at the helm, and the American public unprotected from easily preventable diseases. RFK, Jr appointed former GOP speech writer Jim O'Neill (with no medical education or experience), his top deputy, to serve as acting director of the CDC, perhaps confirming that the CDC is now just a propaganda machine for RFK, Jr’s dangerous science-by-conspiracy theories mandate. That is precisely how the HHS Secretary defines “science.”

Meanwhile: Vaccine funding was gone, and once eradicated diseases were returning with a vengeance, just as a vaccine has been released that works against the latest COVID strains. mRNA is one of the safest preventative vaccines ever invented, tested on a mass scale during the pandemic, with the ability to target very specific ailments… and nothing else. Without that research a very large number of Americans will die unnecessarily. Stand by a mirror and ask yourself if you just might someday become a victim, killed or seriously harmed by a disease that the CDC could have prevented. Whether it’s you or potentially a large number of Americans, it will happen!

I’m Peter Dekom, and the RFK, Jr team of quacks need to be discharged replaced with vetted and experienced medical professions before the killing accelerates.

Vive La Resistance?! "Soft Secession"

 

Vive La Resistance?! “Soft-Secession”

“I’m not a dictator… but I can do anything I want. I’m the President of the United States.”

Donald Trump, August 26th, on the deployment of federal and federalized troops in cities he cites as crime ridden.

Our constitutional guardrails were specifically designed to prevent a monarch from replacing King George III in the experiment in democracy that began 1776. But those guardrails made several unwarranted assumptions that have plagued our “democracy” ever since, in particular: first, that the men (no women at the beginning) elected to federal office would be of good character, placing their loyalty to the republic and the Constitution above all else, and, second, that the words in the Constitution and the implementing statutes would have common sense, natural meanings. Indeed, every federally elected and appointed official and every member of armed forces takes an oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States. It didn’t work out that way.

There is no legal mechanism in the Constitution or our body of laws that creates any path for any state or other geographical unit of the United States to secede, even with a majority vote of the rest on the nation. That last significant attempt to implement secession was our mid-19th century Civil War, where Southern States (the “Confederacy”) rejected what they felt was impingement on their internal rights, most significantly the federal government’s rejection and ban of slavery. In the war that followed, more American soldiers died than perished in all of our other wars combined. As the South surrendered, many assumed that the lesson of the impossibility of secession was firmly embedded as the bedrock of our nation.

Even if secession were possible, as I have pointed out before, there are so many questions that make such a transition practically undoable absent a full-on, repeat Civil War. How would the military be divided, especially the nuclear and other sophisticated weapons and systems of war? Who would succeed to the massive federal database, the satellites launched, and how would that be determined? Who will be responsible for the national debt, what currency(ies) would be internationally accepted? What happens to all the treaties and alliances we have made? How would vested entitlements, like Social Security and Medicare, be divided or completely abandoned? How is cross border water access determined? How would other nations react to this unraveling, particularly our immediate neighbors?

Make no mistake, unless Congress or the Supreme Court exercise their constitutional obligations, those essential “checks and balances,” which has not happened yet and does not appear likely in the foreseeable future, the steps into a militarized, police state, helmed by a man who believes he is the law, will be cemented into an unyielding, thought controlling autocracy, far worse than the decimation to our Constitutional rights to date. As gerrymandering, permitted by the Supreme Court so far, permanently rigs our elections into what looks more like a banana republic than a representative democracy, people will not even be able to vote against the dictatorship. See also my August 16th Rule of Law vs Rule by Law blog.

But is there an alternative, if somewhat chaotic, part. Passive resistance, ignoring federal intrusion and creating alternative systems of governance at a state level is already on the drawing board of some very frustrated Democrats. Writing for the August 18th The Existential Republic, Chris Armitage explains the notion of “soft secession,” which is embraced by several large-population blue state governors: “Behind closed doors, blue state leaders are planning. They’re war-gaming scenarios where federal agents show up and continue to transgress further and further past what is “legal.” Daily the courts are showing that that something is legal when Trump wants it to happen, and illegal when he doesn’t. How does a government function under these circumstances?

“For many state Attorney Generals and Governors, the legal briefs are already drafted. The strategy sessions have been running since December. “We saw this coming, even though we hoped it wouldn’t,” former Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum told The 19th days after Trump’s inauguration.

This is what American federalism looks like in 2025: Democratic governors holding emergency sessions on encrypted apps, attorneys general filing lawsuits within hours of executive orders, and state legislatures quietly passing laws that amount to nullification of federal mandates. Oregon is stockpiling abortion medication in secret warehouses. Illinois is exploring digital sovereignty. California has $76 billion in reserves and is deciding how to deploy it. Three sources on those daily Zoom calls between Democratic AGs say the same phrase keeps coming up, though nobody wants to say it publicly: soft secession… Not the violent rupture of 1861, but something else entirely. Blue states building parallel systems, withholding cooperation, and creating facts on the ground that render federal authority meaningless within their borders.

“The infrastructure for this resistance already exists. Twenty-three Democratic attorneys general now gather on near-daily Zoom calls at 8 AM Pacific, which means the East Coast officials are already on their third coffee. They divide responsibilities and share templates for lawsuits they’ve been drafting since last spring.

“California Governor Gavin Newsom called state lawmakers into a special session later this year to protect the state’s progressive policies, while Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker launched Governors Safeguarding Democracy, seeking to unify state-based opposition to Trump’s agenda. Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, describes preparations so thorough that challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship order required only to “cross the T’s, dot the I’s, press print, and file.”

“Currently, Massachusetts sends $4,846 more per capita to the federal government than it gets back. New Jersey and Washington are in the same position, bleeding thousands per person annually. Over five years, New York alone contributed $142.6 billion more than it received. Meanwhile, red states pocket $1.24 for every dollar they send to Washington. Blue states are essentially paying red states to undermine democracy.

“This economic reality gives blue states leverage they’ve only begun to explore. California has accumulated $76 billion in reserves. The Bank of North Dakota, profitable every year since 1919, offers a model for state banking that could reduce federal dependence. When Trump threatened to cut funding from Maine over transgender sports policies, Governor Janet Mills had 22 other Democratic governors ready to stand with her, collectively representing the majority of America’s economic output.”

Would the surviving dictator, likely Donald Trump or his anointed successor attempt to federalize National Guardsmen with a large supplement of the nation’s active military simply to shut down the relevant blue state governors and legislatures? It is and will continue to happen, but it is a dangerous tightrope walk that could result in that ultra-violent shooting war, amplified by the over 340 million guns in civilian hands… did we really learn the lessons of 1861 America? As long as we outsource decisions, in an admittedly complex world, to egotistical biased leaders, the risk of dictatorship always rises.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I sincerely hope that Americans wake up to the risks at hand and figure out how to invigorate a failing democracy.

Terrible Totalitarian Tariff Tyrant Teetering?

 

Terrible Totalitarian Tariff Tyrant Teetering?

“Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” is one of the more famous questions in American history. Elizabeth Powel asked this of Benjamin Franklin on September 17, 1787, the last day of the Constitutional Convention. He replied, “A republic . . . if you can keep it.”

Until John Roberts’ reconfigured Supreme Court, the process of amending the US Constitution, outlined in Article V, has been very difficult and has only been used to add 27 amendments to the Constitution. It took 203 years to pass that last amendment, in 1992. The Article V process makes our Constitution the most difficult foundational document to amend among the world’s democracies. At least until the Roberts’ court set about repealing, embellishing or limiting the basic constitutional system of checks and balances by redefining the relationship among the three branches of government: legislative (Article I), Executive (Article II) and Judicial (Article III). The result: increasing Presidential powers and severely limiting congressional and judicial powers, even to the extent of exempting the President from prosecutable responsibility for criminal acts somehow associated with his official acts.

Slowly, the Supreme Court has given the President unilateral power to override past congressionally approved statutes, creating and funding federal agencies, and to usurp constitutionally allocated roles and responsibilities. That court has severely limited any federal judicial review of his edicts as well. We’ve been in a constitutional crisis almost from the beginning of Trump 2.0 with the President’s attempt to legislate by executive order. That crisis has just exploded exponentially.

One of Trump’s most important cornerstone executive orders began his unilateral imposition of an entire litany of tariffs for virtually the entire rest of the world. He declared the aggregate trade imbalance with all those nations to be a national emergency as if that were a sudden phenomenon. In fact, in 1971, the United States experienced its first balance-of-trade deficit since 1888, importing $2.26 billion more in goods and services than it exported, a reality that has since been with us for over half a century. Hardly an “emergency” by any definition.

On August 29th, a full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a lower court’s finding in May that the vast majority of Trump-imposed tariffs “exceed any authority granted” by a decades-old law that gives the president sweeping economic powers during a national emergency. That 1977 law, known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, had been invoked by the White House to justify most of those import taxes (aka “tariffs”). That statute, which does not mention the word “tariffs” at all, in fact allows the President the right to issue sanctions against a foreign threat against the United States in a time of “emergency.” The appellate court put a stay on its ruling (until October) to allow the Trump administration time to appeal to our highest court.

“The ruling applies to a series of April executive orders that imposed 10% baseline tariffs on virtually every country and higher ‘reciprocal’ tariffs on dozens of trading partners. It also applies to a separate set of tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China to pressure those three countries to crack down on fentanyl trafficking and unauthorized immigration… Mr. Trump lashed out against the 7-4 ruling in a Truth Social post on Friday [8/29], calling the appeals court ‘Highly Partisan’ and noting that the tariffs are still in effect… ‘If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America,’ he wrote.” CBS News, August 30th.

As of this writing, the United States Treasury has generated a massive $159 billion in tariff receipts since those Trump-imposed tariffs were imposed, one of his revenue solutions to compensate for his massive budget deficit created mostly by the huge tax cuts for the rich under his very badly named “Big Beautiful Bill.” The United States might be required to refund wrongfully collected tariffs, bolstering the argument Trump’s tattering of one more provision of the Constitution is so huge that it must remain, along with the right to keep those wrongful tariffs in place. Basically, “if I screw up big enough, you cannot stop me!”

Indeed, under normal times, the almost unanimous conclusion of non-partisan constitutional scholars that Trump tariffs truly represent a serious overreach against those constitutional checks and balances would dictate Supreme Court affirmation of that U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s ruling. The Constitution is unambiguous, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act is obvious in its intent and scope, and the reversal of Trump’s tariff orders is beyond clear. But Chief Justice John Roberts has repeatedly led his conservative court to look the other way as Trump’s executive orders have so frequently defied the plain reading of the Constitution. Effectively, John Roberts has found a way to amend the Constitution by completely ignoring the only mechanisms for such amendments as set forth, with no ambiguity, in Article V of the Constitution.

This ability to play fast and loose with the Constitution, even with the most basic tenets that define representational democracy, has horrific consequences for the entire nation. A leader who has a national polling consistency of uniform disapproval, over each and every basic platform of his governance to date, now knows his lackeys in Congress are extremely unlikely to continue to control both houses of Congress if the upcoming elections are free, full and fair. His response: gerrymander the result so Democrats are quite literally pushed entirely out of the national political decision-making process. Forget “free, full and fair”!

I’m Peter Dekom, and the United States’ being a nation “of laws” has become a nation governed “by laws”… that just happen to be generated solely by an ego-starved autocrat increasingly identified as America’s dictator.

America vs the World (and Itself?) – Now What?

America vs the World (and Itself?) – Now What?

“It sort of saddens me. I think one of our superpowers as a country is our relentless optimism…

It is the fuel for entrepreneurship and other exceptional achievements.”

Neale Mahoney, a Stanford University economics professor, reacting to polling showing Americans no longer positive about their future.

So, what’s going on? Here’s a very long, run-in sentence about who we are: We are at each other’s throats, marching unambiguously into autocracy, federalized National Guardsmen and active-duty US military troops are marching into blue cities (with falling crime rates and African American mayors) purportedly to combat “rising crime” and protect ICE agents, HHS is demonizing the medical/scientific profession and vaccines that have worked well for years as preventable diseases soar, immigration policies that were to focus on undocumented criminals have been reduced to indiscriminate quota detentions that are playing hob with small businesses and farmers, prices are rising and ordinary federal benefits are falling to cater to huge, deficit busting tax cuts for the rich, our cultural institutions have a rightwing political mandate, America is now perceived as an unfriendly and cruel place to visit as our higher-educational institutions are under attack and our public school performance levels continue to plunge.

It’s not that blue cities don’t want to have an effective working relationship with professional federal policing agencies (like the ATF, FBI, etc.) to fight real crime, from drug trafficking to gang violence, but spurious politically motivated actions that destroy local businesses are nothing on their “to do” list. Taxpayers should not be funding a police state, backed by military, invading cities and towns that do not need that profoundly negative reality. We also do not need federal policies that close hospitals and nursing homes and throw millions of Americans out of medical care. Those tariffs have not brought back reshored manufacturing jobs, and layoffs have reached recent record levels. We are increasingly willing to demonize vulnerable demographics, rig elections through gerrymandering, and, in polls conducted by scholar Matthew MacWilliams, the percentage of Americans who prefer law and order autocracy has risen from an unacceptable 34% in 2016 to an even more unacceptable 38% today.

And those tariffs, intended to cover part of the federal budget shortfall from the tax cut for the rich… well… Even as Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs have been ruled an illegal usurpation of Congress’ Constitutional prerogative to set tariffs and taxes (Article I) – some tariffs generated under specific statutes remain, however – the President has alienated allies and neutral trading partners alike by his bullying tactics to set these tariffs. The tariff ban ruling is on appeal. Still, many of these tariffs have been levied for purely political reasons. Like assessing a 50% tariff on Brazil unless it stopped the prosecution of a corruption trial against former President Jair Bolsonaro, well identified as a Trump-like leader and ally. The tariff increase to 50% against India, punishment for buying Russian oil, instantly backfired as that US ally (and most populous nation on Earth) turned to China (India’s perpetual enemy). India’s PM, Narendra Modi, with exceptionally strong local support, refused to budge on what he felt were US efforts to control India’s internal policies. Modi instead joined a bevy of non-aligned and PRC bloc nations in an early September PRC event. Indeed, China is the big winner from Trump’s bully policies.

“[Celebrating WWII ‘Victory Day’ event, showcasing some of China's newest and most advanced weapons, PRC President Xi Jinping] burnished his credentials as a geopolitical powerbroker at a regional security summit in Tianjin, northern China, that ended on Monday [9/1]. He hosted more than 20 world leaders there, including Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi... ‘We should uphold fairness and justice,’ Xi declared at the gathering of the Shanghai Corporation Organization, seemingly trying to claim moral high ground amid the upheaval and strained relationships caused by Mr. Trump's global trade war and isolationist policies. ‘We must oppose the Cold War mentality, block confrontation and bullying practices.’

“Without mentioning the U.S. or its president by name, Xi told the assembled leaders of non-Western countries: ‘We must continue to take a clear stand against hegemonism and power politics.’” CBS News, September 2nd. Also in attendance was Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of NATO member Turkey. The message was clear: China was now a stable and reliable partner, with a military second only to the US but growing, a clear alternative to the “unstable, chaotic bully tactics” of the United States. While no Western US allies were in attendance, European nations were already well into trade negotiations with the People’s Republic. China holds itself out as a non-punishing global bully, offering trade advantages compared with the US.

Will placing our military troops in US cities – Chicago is next – become our future? San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer just found that the Trump administration violated a law known as the Posse Comitatus Act with its June deployment of 4,000 National Guard and 700 active-duty U.S. Marines to Los Angeles. The law sharply limits the use of federal troops for domestic enforcement. The order was stayed until September 12th to allow an appeal.

As the above quote suggests, Americans are also losing hope for their future. “A new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds that the share of people who say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to 25%, a record low in surveys dating to 1987. More than three-quarters said they lack confidence that life for the next generation will be better than their own, the poll found… Nearly 70% of people said they believe the American dream—that if you work hard, you will get ahead—no longer holds true or never did, the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys… The discontent reaches across demographic lines. By large majorities, both women and men held a pessimistic view in the combined questions. So did both younger and older adults, those with and without a college degree and respondents with more than $100,000 in household income, as well as those with less.” Lindsay Ellis and Aaron Zitner writing for the September 1st Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, from government influence and massive conflicted self-dealing, the Trump family has almost tripled its net worth since the Donald first became President. The latest grift: “The Trump family’s paper wealth after its flagship crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, opened trading of a new digital currency, WLFI, on Monday [9/1]. The launch is akin to an initial public offering, in which WLFI can now be bought and sold on the open market like a listed company’s shares. World Liberty says founders and team members’ tokens remain ‘locked,’ meaning they still can’t sell them. But the trading launch now puts a real-world valuation on their holdings, which previously were valued based on private sales.” Wall Street Journal, September 2nd.

As Trump bends over backwards to reward his perceived “winners” (read: the mega-rich) and does not give a rat’s derriere for the losers (everyone else, including his MAGA base), Trump is pushing the latter’s piece of the American pie almost entirely off the table. Accurate government statistics and independent financial oversight are Trump’s enemies. If anyone truly thinks pursuing a government-enforced vision of “correct thought” and monied-priorities has made this a better country destined to grow, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn they should think about buying.

I’m Peter Dekom, and this “vision for and of America” isn’t really good for anyone not already a multimillionaire or better… and we should return to being an “America” without blue or red coloration.

­­It’s Almost Funny, Almost… When You Think About it

 

It’s Almost Funny, Almost… When You Think About it

“There were some people who were talking about what their agencies were doing… But generally, what you heard was a competition for who could tell President Trump that he had saved the country more and they started trying to one-up each other.” 

Journalist Maggie Haberman acknowledged.

“I am not a crook.” 

President Nixon said in 1973.

“I’m not a dictator.” 

President Trump said on August 25th

They gathered to pay homage to the Dear Leader, showering him with compliments. Each governmental official was in serious competition for who could heap the greatest praise, offer the greatest token of appreciation, and provide the clearest description as to why Dear Leader was among the greatest of all time. It was a 3 hour and 17 minute marathon White House cabinet meeting on August 26th, not a North Korean Kim-Jong-Il worship session. It followed a litany of fearful corporate and national leaders bearing gifts for Trump, highly placed members of Congress suggesting the Kennedy Center be renamed for the First Lady and even suggesting that Trump’s face should be added to Mt Rushmore (which would look as pictured above). All this at time when Trump’s disapproval level, in virtually all of his policy decisions, was well above his approval level in all relevant polls. Most Americans sensed Trump’s efforts to be a dictator.

As Republican House members were getting trashed in townhall meetings, it was increasingly apparent that in a free and fair election, even with incumbent advantages, that the GOP was very likely to lose both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterms. Trump immediately set about ensuring that there would never again be a free and fair election, by demanding that red states gerrymander the Democratic Party into oblivion (and several red state governors immediate set that effort in motion, as some governors of blue states suggested a counter), Trump ordered a new census (always a once in a decade event, with next constitutionally scheduled census set for 2030) and pledged to eliminate the very popular vote-by-mail system (based on a recommendation from Vladimir Putin to Trump). Gerrymandering? The Supreme Court smiled and feigned helplessness to stop it.

I think Jackie Calmes, LA Times Columnist, said very well on August 28th: “When a president has to say ‘I’m not a dictator,’ we’re in trouble… It took months more for Nixon’s crimes to force him to resign in 1974 ahead of his all-but-certain removal by Congress. But a half-century later, Trump is unabashedly showing every day that he really does aspire to be a dictator. Unlike Nixon, he doesn’t have to fear a supposedly coequal Congress: It’s run by slavish fellow Republicans who’ve forfeited their constitutional powers over spending, tariffs, appointments and more. Lower courts have checked Trump’s lawlessness, but a too-deferential Supreme Court gets the last word and empowers him more than not.

“Americans are indeed in proverbial uncharted waters. Four months ago, conservative columnist David Brooks of the New York Times wrote — uncharacteristically for a self-described ‘mild’ guy — ‘It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising.’ It’s now past time.

“Perhaps more troubling than Trump’s ‘not a dictator’ comment was a related one that he made on Monday [8/25] and reiterated on Tuesday [8/26] during a three-hour televised Cabinet praise meeting (don’t these folks have jobs?). ‘A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator,’ he said. Alas, for once Trump isn’t wrong. MAGA Republicans are loyal to the man, not the party, and give Trump the sort of support no president in memory has enjoyed.

“A poll from the independent Public Religion Research Institute earlier this year showed that a majority of Americans — 52% — agreed that Trump is a ‘dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.’ Those who disagreed were overwhelmingly Republicans, 81% of whom said Trump ‘should be given the power he needs.’ Americans’ split on this fundamental question shows the extent to which Trump has cleaved a country founded and long-flourishing on checks and balances and the rule of law, not men.

“That Trump would explicitly address the dictator issue this week reflects just how head-spinningly fast his dictatorial actions have been coming at us… The militarization of the nation’s capital continues, reinforced with National Guard units from six red states, on trumped-up claims of a crime emergency. Trump served notice in recent days that the thousands of troops and federal agents will remain on Washington’s streets indefinitely despite a federal law setting a 30-day limit — ‘We’re not playing games,’ he told troops on Friday [8/22] — and that Chicago, Baltimore, New York and perhaps San Francisco are next.”

And yet nothing seems to deter Donald Trump’s quest for subservience and total control. Is it complacency, apathy or that a stunned public simply does not know what to do? This explanation seems consistent with the election of every modern dictator on earth, from Hitler to Orbán. Usually, those that might have been legitimately elected do not destroy elections until far later in their terms of office, but Trump is not certain he will be able to run again, so he wants an election process where only he, his party and his designee can win. And if the American public does react, he just might get his wish.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as factionalized bickering hamstrings the Democrats, the Trump dictator train is accelerating to the targeted victory, a permanent change in how the United States will be governed hereafter.

Doing What America Does Best – Lying

Doing What America Does Best – Lying

Waiting in Line and Doing It Right

“They’re trying their best. They’re waiting in line…But when you have a system that was essentially designed to fail from the beginning, it’s difficult to have faith in that system.” 

 Immigration attorney John Manley addressing the impossible path to citizenship for people from countries like Mexico

Take a good look at the above map. It is what is today continental US territory looked like when we declared our independence from King George III’s Brittain. That vast swath labeled “Spanish Territory” – much of which would wind up in the United States by military victory or purchase – defined the underlying heritage of a rather large section of American history and culture. We had no issue displacing (killing) indigenous people and pushing the white Spanish rulers of old out. Soon, immigrants from Caucasian Europe moved in as if no one lived in those lands. Andrew Jackson made it clear that America was a land for those white immigrants, not the people who lived there for centuries, if not millennia.

Whenever I hear someone say, “make American white again,” I wonder where the “again” is really coming from. Racism has become legitimized to a level not seen since the era of slavery and the Jim Crow time that seems to be what the MAGA evangelical horde has in mind. But it has been the white Europeans who were the “invaders,” not the indigenous people (now mostly mixed blood) who lost their land to the real invaders. As the focus on Donald Trump’s recruitment of thousands of new ICE agents seems to use repelling “invaders” (very much including those from those former Spanish holdings) as a patriotic cause, those who understand the genuine dynamic understand that Trump is recruiting an army loyal only to him above anyone or anything (including the Constitution) else.

Even past Republican presidents from states with strong Hispanic roots, like Ronald Reagan (formerly governor of California) and George W Bush (Texas governor) have embraced legal immigration for those from south of the border, as the Republican Party slowly collapsed any legitimate efforts at “earned” immigration status for such migrants. Reagan presided over the last serious effort at immigration reform (1986), as most Republicans have since supported keeping immigration from Mexico and points south chaotic as a political rallying point against Democrats. It worked. Conspiracy theories, led by Donald Trump, labeled such potential immigrants as rapists, murderers and criminals, even though statistics showed otherwise. In a survey by the National Institute of Justice, looking at the period between 2012 and 2018, “The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.”

When senior administration officials admonish those undocumented workers to self-deport so as to preserve the right to apply for a legitimate path to US citizenship – words uttered by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem or immigration czar Tom Homan – they know that will never happen. Writing for the July 28th Los Angeles Times, Rachel Uranga crushes that mythology… hard: “John Manley is sick of people telling immigrants to ‘stand in line’ and ‘do it the right way.’

“An immigration attorney for almost three decades in Los Angeles, he said what most don’t understand is that trying to legally come into the United States is nearly impossible for people from certain nations such as Mexico… ‘People are dying in line,’ he said. In some cases, ‘it’s literally a 150-year wait.’… Manley said one of his clients, a U.S. citizen originally from Mexico who petitioned his two brothers to become legal residents, waited more than 15 years and wound up burying them instead of giving them the good news…

“Immigration laws have not seen a wholesale reform in nearly 40 years, but as the Trump administration cracks down on unauthorized migrants, politicians are seeing a window of opportunity. Economists, immigration attorneys and scholars say that without another relief valve, it is not just the immigrants who will suffer but people in a wide swath of the economy.

“Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) [introduced] legislation that could provide a path to citizenship to 11 million immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for at least seven years. With a Republican-led House and Senate, the legislation, which died last year, is unlikely to pass, but Padilla said he wanted to reintroduce the bill because he sensed a ‘mood shift’ in Congress and across the country… He’s not the only one. This month in the House, Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) and Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) dusted off their legislation, the Dignity Act, which would give qualified unauthorized immigrants living here before 2021 up to seven years of legal status with work authorization.

“For decades, Republicans and Democrats have tried and failed to bring reforms to what is widely viewed as an outdated system, which in the last fiscal year approved 3% of the 34.7 million pending green card applications, according to David Bier, a researcher at the Cato Institute… ‘Given the extreme overreach of the Trump administration, I believe now’s the time,’ Padilla said. ‘You talk to colleagues on both sides of the aisle about farmworkers, agricultural workers. They say that farmworkers deserve better, but the political will hasn’t been there for many, many years.’

“But the imagery of Trump’s enforcement actions against noncriminals — videos of mothers wailing as they’re separated from children and arrests of workers and vendors outside Home Depots — have seeped into the national consciousness and drawn criticism across political lines… A Gallup poll released this month showed record-high support for immigration. When asked whether immigration is generally a good thing or bad thing for the country, 79% of U.S. adults called it a good thing. And a record-low 17% viewed it as a bad thing…

“Carl Shusterman, an immigration lawyer who has been practicing since the 1970s, says he sees it every day near his home on the Westside and in his practice… ‘Go into any restaurant and look at who’s cooking the food, or you see who’s building the buildings in the fancy, fancy neighborhoods, or who’s mowing the lawns or taking care of the kids, or just pick almost any industry, and you’ll see that ... there’s no way for these people to get legalized status.’” Yet as our economy is reeling from the loss of these productive, low-cost workers, hardliner-racists like Senior Whitehouse Advisor Stephen Miller scream for more deportation, claiming efforts are removing mostly criminals from the country. In truth, 70% of those deportees have no criminal records.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while most Americans are not hypocrites or cruel, those in charge of our immigration policies are… and worse.

Déjà Vu All Over Again

Déjà Vu All Over Again

First and foremost, we are being relegated to a cult of autocratic personalities, each with eggshell egos, who are determining the future of the United States and most of the rest of the world based on their distorted perceptions and personal needs that have little or nothing to do with the betterment of their people. On our side of the equation is a clear autocrat, absolutely enabled by a captive Congress and a Supreme Court more anxious to placate the President than protect free and fail elections or the Constitution itself. Foreign countries have learned that the way to get favors from Donald Trump is to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump has been taking credit for ceasefires where he doesn’t even know the names of the individual leaders, who actually implemented the end of those local hostilities. Trump is as likely to receive that accolade as would Attila the Hun, where he alive today. Arming military forces to invade and subjugate cities run by his political opponents, blue cities like Los Angeles, Washington, DC and, next he promises, Chicago, Trump’s signature move these days… hardly the stuff a Nobel prize represents.

Vladimir Putin clearly has no serious intention to alter his longstanding belief that Ukraine must both submit to his leadership (ceding territory along the way, even lands he has not yet occupied) and devoid of any meaningful security guarantees. Even as Trump posted on a social media post on August 18th that he had spoken to Putin and set in motion arrangements for a summit at a location to be decided, “Russia’s top diplomat said Friday [8/22] there are no plans for a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss their three-year war, days after President Trump said he had begun arrangements for them to sit down together… ‘There is no meeting planned’ between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a taped interview for NBC’s” Meet the Press with Kristen Welker. AP, August 23rd. As European leaders met earlier to discuss how security for Ukraine might work, Moscow’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, called this effort “a path to nowhere.”

Given how Trump quickly abandoned his most fervent anti-Putin demand for an immediate ceasefire or else there would be “serious consequences,” Putin knew instantly that without the kinds of sanctions and ramped up military aid only the US could provide, ending the war against Ukraine was no longer a priority. That solicitor of the Nobel Peace Prize sabotaged that peace effort. Further, as Trump made any criticism of Israel or any statements of support for Palestinian statehood clear evidence of an individual’s disloyalty to America, support of terrorism, his denial of visas and cancellation of student visas of anyone making such statements is predicated on his statement that constitutional protections do not apply to non-citizens. This expressly contradicts the Supreme Court’s decisions in Bridges v. Wixon (1945, regarding speech that opposed the then current administration) and Boumediene v. Bush (2008 holding that the writ of habeas corpus even applied to prisoners in US custody at the Guantanamo base in Cuba).

As Trump’s unpopularity soared, he pressed red states to resort to gerrymandered districts to give Republicans a 100-seat margin of victory in the House, knowing that the Supreme Court ruled that it could not stop partisan gerrymandering (2019, Rucho v. Common Cause). Democrats have responded with a parallel effort to gerrymander in reverse. The net impact is the potential of a fully and legally rigged 2026 midterm and a 2028 presidential election, one that cannot represent the will of the American people. But if distortions work in Trump’s favor, they have become routine. For example, “Economists expressed alarm at President Donald Trump's moves to undermine the independence of the Federal Reserve and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“The U.S. economy has long enjoyed a reputation as the safest place in the world to invest or build a business, which has given the country a nearly incalculable advantage, but economists compared Trump's efforts to stack the central bank with loyalists to cancer – but arguably worse, reported the New York Times… ‘It’s like throwing sand in the gears,’ said Glenn Hubbard, who led the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush. ‘It just makes the economy less efficient.’” Travis Gettys in Raw Story, August 22nd, citing mostly conservative economists. Gettys also interviewed a Trump 1.0 administrator: “A former White House official sounded the alarm on a ‘secret blacklist’ compiled by President Donald Trump's team that tracks the loyalty of more than 550 companies and trade associations.

“Miles Taylor, who wrote the anonymous ‘resistance’ New York Times op-ed while serving in Trump's first administration, called out the loyalty scorecard first reported by Axios as ‘another totally unprecedented (and quasi-authoritarian) development out of the White House’ on his ‘Treason’ Substack page… ‘The goal is apparently to reward public displays of allegiance to the administration and freeze out companies deemed unsupportive of the president’s agenda,’ Taylor wrote. ‘Among other things, the ratings are said to take into account: social media posts, press releases and public endorsements, video testimonials and paid ads, attendance at White House events, and presumably any other gestures of loyalty the administration can log.’”

And even after the UN has officially declared a major famine in central Gaza, impacting half a million people, Israeli autocrat, Benjamin Netanyahu, denies the obvious as he begins his all-out assault on Gaza, with many additional Palestinian casualties expected. I will end today’s blog with an observation from The Economist’s Digital Editor, Adam Robert (August 23rd), noting how collusion between and among autocrats today, reinforces the disappearance of freedom and the rule of law: “Did Churchill ever break into applause at the sight of Stalin, or JFK give a little ovation for Khrushchev? I suspect not. So it was striking to see Donald Trump’s thrilled reaction as Vladimir Putin approached him in Alaska last week. Some online cynics joked that it was natural that the American leader clapped: it’s not every day you get to meet your hero. Too strong? Perhaps. But Mr Trump has shown an abiding affection for the Russian autocrat. As our Lexington columnist notes, the American first praised Russia’s leader on television back in 2007 and has been a steady admirer since. Lexington unpacks the real collusion between the two men.

“My hunch about their relationship: Mr Trump is drawn to anyone who exudes an aura of strength. Talk of morality, rules, duty or strategy bores him. He yearns, instead, to strike bold and quick deals with tough guys and to win prizes and adoration as a result. That makes for an unstable world.” As a rule of thumb, as Trump tends to support the purported strongman in any conflict, regardless of any immoral stance, he heaps criticism and opprobrium on the vulnerable weaker party.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as Trump is now using armed troops against regions of the United States that openly oppose him, ask yourself it this represents your view of democracy and freedom in this country.