Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 26, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War
How Iran has been studying lessons from the war in Ukraine
[FT Alphaville, via The Big Picture, April 20, 2026]
Military journals provide tantalising glimpses into what Tehran’s military thinks and its priorities, including drones. Tehran’s military journals reveal how closely it’s been watching drone and missile warfare.
How Iran war has triggered soaring cost of medicines
[Aljazeera, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2025]
Aurelien [via Naked Capitalism 04-23-2025]
...But we have become so used to the Liberal internationalist way of thinking, where all problems have a reasonable solution and compromise is only a negotiation away, that we cannot recognise and understand a situation where a negotiated solution cannot actually address the fundamental issues that divide parties from each other. But that is the case here. The obsession of the US and Israel with the destruction of Iran, and the Iranian desire to preserve itself and to come to dominate the region, can simply never be reconciled, even by the most brilliant negotiators in history. This one, I’m afraid, will have to be fought out to a conclusion, whatever that might be.
GOP senators ponder giving Trump official blessing for Iran war
[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 04-22-2025]
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
The Trade: The war produced a market mechanism. Someone knew how it worked before the public did.
[The Omission, via The Big Picture, April 22, 2026]
Every announcement moved markets and every extension of a deadline crashed oil. Then escalation would push it back up and the cycle would repeat. This happened seven times in fifty-two days....
Three instances. March 23, April 7, April 17. A single minute, a few hours, a single minute. $580 million, $950 million, $760 million. Over $2.29 billion in trades positioned in the correct direction before public announcements that moved the world's most traded commodity, and it didn't appear once and disappear. It repeated, and each time it repeated the identities of the traders remained unknown....
The people closest to the decisions that moved markets were financially entangled with the war’s outcomes.
The president’s two oldest sons invested in Powerus Corporation, a drone maker positioning to sell interceptors to Gulf states under attack by Iran and protected by the US military led by their father, and Bloomberg reported a $750 million push into drone warfare with the company targeting $1.1 billion in Pentagon funding allocated to build a US drone manufacturing base. Separately, Unusual Machines, a drone parts company in which Donald Trump Jr. is involved, secured a $620 million Department of Defense loan, the largest in the history of the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, while his investment firm, 1789 Capital, holds a major stake in Anduril Industries, which makes unmanned combat systems and holds government contracts.
Jared Kushner, serving as Special Envoy for Peace and sitting at the Islamabad negotiating table, is simultaneously raising billions for Affinity Partners from the same Gulf governments he’s negotiating with. The fund holds $6.16 billion in assets under management with ninety-nine percent of its funding coming from foreign nationals at sovereign wealth funds operated by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, including $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund alone, and Kushner is reportedly seeking $5 billion more from the same governments whose security depends on the war’s outcome and whose sovereign wealth funds benefit from the oil price volatility the war produces....
Joyce Vance, Apr 23, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
...Here’s the central thesis of the case: The Justice Department wants us to believe that one of the nation’s leading civil rights groups, the people who broke the Klan and continue to expose the white supremacist groups that crop up in its wake, is actually supporting racism and domestic terror, that they’re in fact responsible for whipping up the frenzy. This indictment tells a story, and the story is that SPLC engaged in material support for domestic terrorist groups.
The indictment rises or falls on one faulty premise: that you should look only at one piece of SPLC’s work to infiltrate these dangerous groups, not at their overall efforts to dismantle them. DOJ predicates its wire fraud charges, which we discussed here, on the assumption that people who donated to SPLC would be unhappy that their dollars were used to fund paid informants who obtained inside information about what white supremacists and other groups were up to.
DOJ uses tunnel vision to convince people—because that’s what this indictment is about, convincing the public before the case ever gets to trial—that the Southern Poverty Law Center is responsible for everything from the tragic violence at the Charlottesville “Unite The Right” Rally during Trump’s first term in office to, well, who knows what all. To hear acting AG Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel sell it in a very unusual press conference (that took place in Washington, D.C., without the U.S. Attorney who indicted the case in Montgomery, Alabama, present), SPLC is responsible for the rise of domestic violence in America today....
Rare Survivors of Pacific Boat Strikes Allege U.S. Forces Kidnapped and Tortured Them
Camila Lourdes Galarza, Apr 21, 2026 [Drop Site News]
As airstrikes and reports of torture under Ecuador’s U.S.-backed military regime continue to mount, fishermen tell Drop Site News they were blindfolded and held hostage for eight days.
Global power shift
Liquidating an “Empire”: China’s Strategy to Capitalise on US Hegemonic Strain | by Wu Xinbo
[Sinification, via Naked Capitalism 04-22-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Lebanese journalist bombed and left to die by Israel
[Drop Site Daily: April 23, 2026]
Prominent Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil was killed on Wednesday in southern Lebanon after what appeared to be a targeted Israeli strike, according to her employer Al-Akhbar. Khalil and freelance photojournalist Zeinab Faraj had been reporting on attacks in Bint Jbeil when a nearby vehicle was hit by a drone, killing two people, prompting the two journalists to take shelter in a house that was later bombed. Rescue efforts were obstructed amid continued Israeli fire, with reports that Red Cross teams and vehicles came under attack while attempting to evacuate the wounded. Faraj was eventually rescued with critical injuries, while Khalil’s body was recovered later after access was granted. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the incident, citing “repeated strikes on the same location” and the obstruction of humanitarian access as a serious violation of international law. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun expressed his condolences over Khalil’s death and said in a post on X that Israel’s “deliberate and consistent targeting of journalists” was aimed at “concealing the truth of its aggressive acts against Lebanon” and that such acts constitute “crimes against humanity punishable under international laws and conventions.” Read the full report from Drop Site contributor Jeremy Loffredo here.
Oligarchy
Spencer Ackerman, 20 Apr 2026 [forever-wars.com]
Jim Stewartson, Apr 21, 2026 [MindWar]
Palantir’s technofascist manifesto calls for universal draft
[Oligarch Watch, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2025]
The Man Who Cannot Stop Talking About Killing -- On Alex Karp and the "technological republic"
Mike Brock, Apr 20, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
Republicans introduce extreme bill to ban lawsuits against Big Oil forever
[HEATED, via Naked Capitalism 04-24-2025]
How the American Oligarchy Went Hyperscale
Tim Murphy, [Mother Jones, May+June 2026 issue, via Naked Capitalism 04-24-2025]
The AI boom is fueling a literal and metaphorical power grab by tech billionaires—and forcing a reckoning.
What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat
Noah Hawley, April 20, 2026 [The Atlantic]
...The Jeff Bezos of 2018 acted as if he still believed that people’s impression of him mattered, that his financial and social value could be affected by negative publicity. He still believed that his actions had consequences. He had not yet freed himself—the way Daniel Plainview freed himself—from the rules of men.
Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark....
Fink, Zera S., The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Evanston, Northwestern University, 1945), p. 153
A second fundamental thing which makes no less clear [Algernon] Sydney's rejection of monarchy is his remarks on the nature of man. "Man" he wrote, "is of an aspiring nature, and apt to put too high a value on himself. They who are raised above their brethren, though but a little, desire to go farther; and if they gain the name of king, they think themselves wronged and degraded, when they are not suffered to do what they please. In these things they never want masters; and the nearer they come to a power that is not easily restrained by law, the more passionately they desire to abolish all that opposes it.”25 Even when a prince was virtuous and began by desiring nothing more than the power allowed him by law, he was subject to greater temptations to invade the liberty of his subjects than human nature could be expected to withstand. "The strength of his own affections," Sydney declared, "will ever be against him. Wives, children, and servants will always join with those enemies that arise in his own breast to pervert him; if he has any weak side, any lust unsubdued, they will gain the victory. He has not searched into the nature of man, who thinks that anyone can resist when he is thus on all sides assaulted." Monarchy, in short, by the very constitution of human nature, tended always to degenerate into tyranny. It was a defective form of government because in the most important place of all it was lacking in those adequate restraints on the defects of human nature which all the classical republicans saw as an essential of any well-contrived government.
The ‘Empathy Deficit’ of the Powerful
Robert C. Koehler, Apr 26, 2026 [Common Dreams]
...Even when we examine the dark side of power—as in, power corrupts—the examination seems to hover as a warning rather than open up to larger awareness. Consider, for instance, this 2017 article in The Atlantic by Jerry Useem, titled (fasten your seatbelts!) “Power Causes Brain Damage,” which discusses a concept he calls “hubris syndrome.” The essential point the article makes is that people who gain a significant amount of power over others lose the ability to empathize with—or mime, as the article puts it—people in general, the lesser mortals who must follow the boss’ orders....
Felonomics
America’s New Tax Mantra: ‘The IRS Isn’t Going to Catch Me’
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, April 20, 2026]
Gut IRS staffing, watch tax compliance collapse. The battered Internal Revenue Service shed thousands of enforcement employees—and more taxpayers appear eager to cheat. This isn’t a surprise — it’s a choice, and the honest taxpayers pay for the cheaters.
The media blackout of Jared Kushner’s historic, ongoing corruption scandal
[Popular Information, via Naked Capitalism 04-21-2025]
Five Trump Scandals You’ve Probably Missed
Garrett Graff, April 20, 2026 [Doomsday Scenario]
Trump Pardoned a Nursing Home Owner Who Owed Almost $19 Million to a Grieving Family
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 04-21-2025]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
The ‘Annoyance Economy’ Is More Than Just Annoying
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, April 20, 2026]
The death by a thousand fees, subscriptions, and dark patterns is adding up to a real drag on household budgets. The annoyance is the business model. A new estimate puts the cost of dealing with robocalls, hidden fees and customer service chatbots that can’t solve most problems at $165 billion.
[Worse on Purpose, via The Big Picture, April 19, 2026]
Health care crisis
C.D.C. Cancels Publication of Study Showing Benefits of Covid Vaccines
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2025]
Predatory finance
Big Finance Found A New Way To Go After Cannabis: By Policing Speech
[High Times, via Naked Capitalism 04-20-2025]
In Transaction Denied, Rainey Reitman argues that cannabis was never merely underbanked. It was pushed to the margins by a financial system willing to punish businesses, writers and entire communities for getting too close to the plant....
Rainey Reitman’s new book, Transaction Denied: Big Finance’s Power to Punish Speech, has a sharper read on all of it. In her view, what happened to cannabis was not just inconvenience or risk management. It was part of a broader pattern of financial censorship, where banks and payment processors gained the power to punish lawful speech, marginal businesses and politically inconvenient communities without ever having to plainly say that was what they were doing....
Restoring balance to the economy
[Captain Compliance, via Naked Capitalism 04-22-2025]
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
Scientists identify five ages of the human brain over a lifetime
[University of Cambridge, via The Big Picture, April 22, 2026]
Four major turning points around ages nine, 32, 66 and 83 create five broad eras of neural wiring over the average human lifespan.
Could humans become “Sun-eaters” in the future?
[Big Think, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2025]
Physical Economy
[Construction Physics, via The Big Picture, April 23, 2026]
Helium is produced as a byproduct of natural gas extraction. It collects in the same underground pockets that natural gas collects in. Qatar is responsible for roughly 1/3rd of the world’s supply of helium, which was formerly transported through the Strait of Hormuz in specialized containers. Thanks to the closure of the strait, helium prices have spiked, suppliers are declaring force majeure, and businesses are scrambling to deal with looming shortages.
Disrupting mainstream economics
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 04-21-2025]
Bank of England independence has been a disaster – and it’s time for it to end
Richard Murphy, April 23, 2026 [Funding the Future]
...This video explains why Bank of England independence was always a neoliberal political experiment that was designed to undermine democracy and the people of this country....
Central bank independence grew directly out of something called Public Choice Theory. Public Choice Theory was created by somebody called Professor James Buchanan, working from the mid-1970s to create this idea, which has been promoted through a global network of far-right think-tanks. It is fundamentally anti-democratic. Buchanan did not believe in democracy, a point that has been highlighted by somebody called Nancy MacLean in her highly readable book, Democracy in Chains....
The entire logic of Public Choice Theory is designed to protect the interests of those with money and power, and one of the mechanisms that they chose to do this was to argue that central banks and monetary policy should be removed from the control of democratically elected governments by the creation of independent central banks. Elected politicians, it was argued, could not be trusted with interest rate decisions. Central banks did therefore have to become independent of them because only in that way, it was said, could we get reliable interest rate policy; reliable in the sense that this would deliver what bankers and the wealthy desire and not what people need....
Disrupting mainstream politics
[Scheerpost, via Naked Capitalism 04-19-2025]
...Mejía, a former leader of the Working Families Alliance and an ally of Sen. Bernie Sanders, framed her campaign as a direct challenge to President Donald Trump’s leadership and the economic power of billionaires. The Associated Press called the race within minutes of polls closing, with Mejía ultimately leading by roughly 20 percentage points—a margin that outpaced recent Democratic performances in the district.
“This is not radical,” Mejía said in her victory speech. “That a worker who toils every day cannot make ends meet… that they deserve higher wages—that is good conscience. That is a good economy.”....
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Exposing a Global Surveillance Empire
[Mother Jones, via Naked Capitalism 04-20-2025]
...The executive, Guenther Rudolph, was seated at a booth at ISS World in Prague, a secretive trade fair for police and intelligence agencies and advanced surveillance technology companies. Rudolph went on to explain how his firm, First Wap, could provide sophisticated phone-tracking software capable of pinpointing any person in the world. The potential buyer? A private mining company, owned by an individual under sanction, who intended to use it to surveil environmental protesters. “I think we’re the only one who can deliver,” Rudolph said....
The road to that conference room in Prague began with the discovery of a vast archive of data by reporter Gabriel Geiger. The archive contained more than a million tracking operations: efforts to grab real-time locations of thousands of people worldwide. What emerged is one of the most complete pictures to date of the modern surveillance industry....
The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on Users’ Emotional State
[NBER; PDF at Stanford, via The Big Picture, April 20, 2026]
Stanford paid 35,000 people to quit Facebook and Instagram for 6 weeks. Depression dropped. Anxiety dropped. Happiness went up. Women under 25 on Instagram saw the biggest gains. Just 6 weeks! Now imagine a full year. Working paper on the effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users’ emotional state.
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 04-19-2025]
The Most Dangerous Extremist Movement in America Has No Ideology
[The Cipher Brief, via Naked Capitalism 04-19-2025]
5 worrisome privacy clauses hidden in smart home devices
[Fox News, via Naked Capitalism 04-19-2025]
How to Teach Kids to Evaluate Information (Before AI Teaches Them Not To)
[Card Catalog, via Naked Capitalism 04-22-2025]
Climate and environmental crises
San Diego Now Has So Much Water That It’s Selling It
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, April 22, 2026]
Pending federal and other approvals, Arizona, Nevada and other Colorado River users could strike water-transfer deals with the San Diego utility. No water is literally shipped; rather, the parties would trade access rights to water sources. States would fund much of the estimated 56,000 acre-feet of water that the desalination plant produces annually in exchange for San Diego’s share of the Colorado River. The agreement could supply enough water for some 500,000 people.So-called water transfers increasingly offset local shortages, and more of these deals are crossing state lines. Water agencies are also creating new supplies for trade, including by recycling sewage water or desalinating ocean water.
Democrats' political malpractice
‘The Truth Is Better Than Continuing to Lose’: Petition Demands DNC Release Autopsy of 2024 Defeat
Brad Reed, April 23, 2026 [CommonDreams]
The Democratic National Committee is still refusing to release its internal “autopsy” report about Democrats’ defeat in the 2024 election, but at least one progressive advocacy group isn’t letting party leaders off the hook.
RootsAction has organized a letter writing campaign encouraging supporters to email the DNC demanding release of its analysis of how Democrats in 2024 lost the presidential election to twice-impeached convicted felon Donald Trump.
[Working Class Stories, via Naked Capitalism 04-22-2025]
...Trump has bewildered so many Americans with his brazen swindles, schemes, and cons. From Trump University to the Stop the Steal donation funnel to NFTs, crypto ventures, and betting markets, it’s hardly controversial to say this administration is running some pretty stunning grifts. To a lot of folks, it feels shocking that he’s allowed to get away with it.
But to many other Americans, we hardly blink an eye. After all, grifts are what we’ve long been left with. Our bosses, banks, landlords, and even that little kid who knocks on your door selling candy for his basketball tournament are all running a con. I usually shrug and give the kid $5 for a Hershey bar anyway.
Poor and working people are usually the mark of all these scams, and we know it, too. It’s not like we think what’s happening is fair or that we like it, but it is familiar. We’ve long been left to navigate these cons alone, paying “risk mitigation” fees to property owners and overdraft fees to banks. We’ve long been told it’s our problem to figure out. All these cons are perfectly legal, but cons nonetheless....
So, why would someone in a poor or working-class neighborhood support Trump? I wish they wouldn’t, of course, because we will never win against the size and scale of his grift. But I’m not surprised when people try to line themselves up with what they think might be the winning team– when you don’t feel like you have power, it’s not crazy to get in with the bully. A huge percentage of this country has been left to endure systems that skim, squeeze, and extract from us. One way out might be to get in on the hustle, to take your shot at coming out ahead, even when the odds are absurdly long.
If we are going to be outraged by the grift, we need to be outraged by all the grift, not just the spectacle at the top. We need to be outraged at the $60 application fees for apartments that never materialize; the wage theft that goes unpunished; 29.99% APR credit cards and car loans. Let’s get serious about the billionaires scamming our tax system; about Polymarket bets and insider trading; about Congressional stock trading; about the tech and utility monopolies that always stand to win and gain while ordinary people like Al and me and you and, yes, the family with the Trump flag pinned to their fence absorb all the consequences.
Resistance
Heather Cox Richardson, April 23, 2026 [Letters from an American , April 22, 2026]
...In August 2025, when Texas Republicans began this fight by redistricting their state after a brutal contest that drove Democratic legislators to leave the state and take refuge in Illinois and Massachusetts to deny Republicans enough legislators to pass a redistricting law, the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote: “What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.” ....
But with last night’s Democratic partisan gerrymander—one that, unlike the Texas gerrymander, went before the people for a vote—the Editorial Board changed its tune. It called this redistricting plan “a power grab by Democrats.” ....
This pattern—expecting Republicans to behave wildly and cheat to grab power while expecting Democrats to behave according to the rules of normal times—has been going on now for years, and it is a dynamic that reflects the political patterns of the years before the Civil War. Then, Americans expected southern Democrats to bully and bluster and rig the system while northerners tried to jolly them into honoring the laws....
In the South a few very wealthy men controlled government and society, enslaving their neighbors. This system, its apologists asserted, was the highest form of human civilization. They opposed any attempt to restrict its spread. The South was superior to the North, enslavers insisted; it alone was patriotic, honored the Constitution, and understood economic growth. In the interests of union, northerners repeatedly ceded ground to enslavers and left their claim to superiority unchallenged.
Then, on May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death on the Senate floor shortly after a speech in which Sumner had called out those who were forcing enslavement on Kansas and insulted a relative of Brooks. Southern lawmakers and newspapermen alike cheered the violence against an elected representative in the Capitol. Lawmakers refused to expel Brooks, and one newspaper editor wrote: “We trust other gentlemen will follow the example of Mr. Brooks…. If need be, let us have a caning or cowhiding every day.”
But the attack on Sumner was a bridge too far for his colleague, Massachusetts representative Anson Burlingame. On June 21, he stood up in Congress to call out as inferior Brooks and the system of enslavement he defended. Burlingame was sick and tired of buying peace by letting southerners abuse the North. Enough, he said, was enough.
Enslavement was not a superior system, he said; it had dragged the nation backward. Slavery kept workers ignorant and godless while the northern system of freedom lifted workers up with schools and churches. Slavery feared innovation; freedom encouraged workers to try new ideas. Slavery kept the South mired in the past; freedom welcomed the modern world and pushed Americans into a new, thriving economy. And finally, when Sumner had spoken up against the tyranny of slavery, a southerner had clubbed him almost to death on the floor of the Senate.
Was ignorance, economic stagnation, and violence the true American system? For his part, Burlingame preferred to throw his lot with the North, which he said was superior to the South in its morality, education, economy, loyalty to the government, and fidelity to the Constitution. Northerners were willing to defend their system, he said, with guns if necessary.
Burlingame’s “Defense of Massachusetts” speech marked the first time a prominent northerner had offered to fight to defend the northern way of life. Previously, southerners had been the ones threatening war and demanding concessions from the North to preserve the peace. Burlingame explained that he was willing to accept a battle because what was at stake was the future of the nation.
Forgotten now, Burlingame’s speech was once widely considered one of the most important speeches in American history. It marked the moment when northerners shocked southern leaders by calling them out for trying to destroy democracy....
The Case That Could End The Citizens United Era
David Sirota, Apr 22, 2026 [The Lever]
...In 2024, voters from [Maine] overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure placing limits on contributions to super PACs. The initiative was quickly challenged in court by what we at The Lever call the master planners — the conservative groups that have successfully deregulated campaign finance laws over the last 50 years.
In their challenge, conservatives are predictably citing SpeechNow as the reason courts should block implementation of the ballot measure. But in a sign of how scared they are, these plaintiffs complain that the ballot measure’s “proponents designed it to prompt a test case, intended to reach the U.S. Supreme Court” — which is exactly right.
Want to Resist a Data Center? These Organizers Share How They Did It.
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 04-20-2025]
Coalition Collapse: Four Frameworks on How to End Authoritarian Regimes -- A primer for understanding regime durability, how these regimes actually fall, and what we can do about it starting immediately.
Christopher Armitage, Apr 25, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Monopoly Round-Up: Some Surprising Setbacks for Trump-Aligned Corporate America
Matt Stoller, April 20, 2026 [BIG]
...For the first year of the Trump administration, Wall Street was a nonstop party. “I feel liberated,” a top banker told the Financial Times in early 2025. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.” And sure enough, corporate profits are at record highs, so are mergers, and so are Wall Street bonuses.
There were a few bumps, notably tariffs in April and the war in Iran, but the stock market is now at a record. And the Democratic Party is comically feckless, despised by its own supporters and obviously uninterested in doing anything to change the national direction.
It has been forty years of rising plutocratic power in America, and the opening of this administration was the most extreme form of the trend. Trump himself aligned with the oligarchs, using his regulatory authority to cut deals with a host of dominant firms, from Nvidia on chip exports to CBS in getting Stephen Colbert fired. Palantir has deals with the IRS, Elon Musk is now worth $600 billion, and Trump secured trillions of data center investment in the U.S. Perhaps the most important goal was to reorient the media. Here’s what he put on Truth Social....
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Joyce Vance and Rights & Insights, Apr 15, 2026 [Rights & Insights]
On Monday, ProPublica released a massive new investigation breaking down how Donald Trump has dismantled federal guardrails that stopped him from overturning his 2020 election loss.
The 4,700+ word investigation, based on interviews with about 30 current and former executive branch officials, provides an unprecedented and detailed account of how thoroughly critical election security guardrails have been gutted within the federal government ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Key Findings from ProPublica’s Investigation:
We read the entire piece (twice) to make sure you’re aware of the findings.
- Career officials who protected elections are gone – election deniers have taken over. ProPublica found that at least 75 career officials across several agencies who played key roles in safeguarding the 2020 election have been fired, resigned, or reassigned. They have been replaced by roughly two dozen political appointees Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Many are election deniers and ten actively worked to reverse Trump’s 2020 loss.
- Federal programs designed to safeguard elections have been dismantled....
Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections
Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield, April 13, 2026 [ProPublica]
Safeguards Destroyed: In advance of this year’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump has systematically demolished federal guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 election....
In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.
They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.
Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden.
With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat.
Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?
ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering.
The Neo-Nazi Enforcer Who Helped Build Peter Thiel’s Online Influence Empire
[Byline Times, via The Big Picture, April 19, 2026]
A reported investigation into the uglier corners of the Thiel-funded tech-political ecosystem. Pair it with anything else you are reading about the billionaire class. New Epstein-linked revelations show how neo-Nazi operative Andrew Auernheimer became a crucial link between Peter Thiel and the online far-right subcultures waging ‘memetic warfare’ against their enemies.
Mike Brock, April 22, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
The reactionaries got what they wanted. This is worth stating plainly, because a certain kind of liberal commentary keeps treating the current moment as a disaster that has befallen the country — a catastrophe that surprised everyone including its authors. It is not that. It is the successful execution of a political program whose authors told us, for years, in plain language, exactly what they were going to do. They have done it. The dismantling of the administrative state is what they wanted. The capture of the judiciary is what they wanted. The war with Iran is what they wanted. The ICE camps and the deportations are what they wanted. The assault on universities and the neutering of the adversarial press is what they wanted. The concentration of executive power beyond any constitutional check is what they wanted. The consolidation of tech-billionaire authority inside the machinery of the state is what they wanted. The attacks on trans people and on reproductive rights and on every marginalized population the productive system designated as surplus — all of this is what they wanted. They got it. The project has been, on its own terms, a success.
What the project reveals, now that it is visible at full scale, is what the project always was. It is not a positive vision of human flourishing that happens to require some losses along the way. It is a vision whose content is the losses. They want a smaller country. Fewer people in it. Fewer institutions mediating between power and the population. Fewer rights inconvenient to capital. Fewer norms constraining what the powerful can do to the weak. Fewer cultures complicating the monoculture they imagine as natural. Fewer voices in the press. Fewer judges who might rule against them. Fewer professors teaching things that embarrass them. Fewer immigrants reminding them that the American experiment has always been plural. The losses are the point. Once you see this, the current moment stops being confusing. The administration is not failing to produce prosperity. It is producing the losses, which is what its base wanted, and the pain — falling on the people being removed — is not a bug but the feature they came for.
The people who authored this project, the people who fund it, the people who staff it, and the people who cheer for it are who they have always been. The current moment is not a change in their character. It is a disclosure of their character. For years they operated under constraints that forced them into a public register compatible with the constitutional order — gesturing at democratic norms they did not believe in, mouthing the vocabulary of pluralism they privately held in contempt, framing their projects as reforms within the existing system rather than as attacks on the system itself. Those constraints are gone. The public register has caught up with the private disposition. What you see now is what they always were. The mask is no longer necessary.
Look at what they say, out loud, in public, to their own audiences. The technology executive who fantasizes on investor calls about killing his competitors and drone-striking rivals. The venture capitalist who writes that democracy and freedom are incompatible. The political operatives who speak of their opponents as vermin, as parasites, as enemies within. The immigration enforcers who celebrate the suffering of families torn apart as a feature of a correctly functioning policy. The senators who joke about their colleagues being executed, and the journalists who laugh along. The influencers who promote the eliminationist rhetoric of regimes the previous generation of conservatives would have refused to name in polite company. The billionaires who speak of taxpayers as hosts and themselves as the productive class being farmed, and who have begun to act on the implications of that framing. None of this is an accident of rhetoric. It is what they have always believed, now said out loud, because nothing stops them from saying it out loud, because they have won and they know they have won and they no longer need the mask.
They want to subdue the people their project is harming. If subduing is not enough, they are comfortable with killing. This is not a metaphor and it is not a rhetorical excess. It is the observable disposition of the project toward the populations it has designated as obstacles. The ICE detention deaths are not administrative errors. The Palestinian civilians dying under American munitions are not regrettable collateral. The trans kids driven to suicide by the legal and cultural apparatus constructed against them are not unintended consequences. The women dying from denied reproductive care are not tragic anomalies. These are the project’s outputs, produced by design, defended by their authors, celebrated by the base that elected them....
Those of us who were paying attention were not suffering from any kind of delusion. We were not trapped in partisan hysteria. We were not failing to see the legitimate concerns the reactionaries raised about genuine problems in American life. We saw those concerns. We took them seriously. We disagreed with the prescription — not because we were committed to the status quo, but because we could read what the reactionaries actually said and extrapolate what they actually intended to do. The extrapolation was not complicated. It required taking them at their word. Most of the mainstream commentary refused to do this because taking them at their word sounded alarmist, and alarm was coded as a failure of professional composure....
...The liberal tradition, read carefully, contains the conceptual resources for understanding what reactionary movements are, what they do when they come to power, and why the specific institutions of constitutional republicanism exist to constrain them. The tradition predicted the current moment because the tradition was built in response to earlier versions of the current moment. The people who read the tradition correctly were able to predict accurately. The people who dismissed the tradition as outdated — who thought the end-of-history thesis of the 1990s meant the older liberal warnings about concentrated power and reactionary movements were no longer relevant — were the ones who failed to predict....
Named for Mamdani, GOP Bill Would Strip Citizenship From People Who Advocate for Socialism
Thom Hartmann, Apr 21, 2026 [Common Dreams]
Texas Congressman Chip Roy is preparing to introduce legislation he’s calling the “MAMDANI Act,” named after Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, that would let the federal government bar entry to, deport, and strip naturalized citizenship from any person who advocates for or is “affiliated with” what Roy calls “totalitarian” movements. The list includes, from Rep. Roy’s webpage:
“[A] socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”The bill targets people who “write, distribute, circulate, print, display, possess, or publish” material supporting socialism or any of those other ideas.
“Possess?” That single word means that owning a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital, or a pamphlet from a Palestinian solidarity group, or a battered paperback of Howard Zinn — or maybe even one of my books on the New Deal — would be enough to make a green-card holder or a naturalized citizen “inadmissible or deportable.”
“Affiliated with?” That would prevent anybody who’s ever affiliated themselves with the Democratic Socialist Party in New York that Mamdami ran on behalf of....
another dangerous overreach on the GOP’s part in this legislation: Roy’s bill explicitly forbids judicial review of any inadmissibility, deportation, or denaturalization decision made under it.
In other words, if this law passes then no court can stop or second-guess the government: no habeas corpus, no meaningful appeals; just an order from the Attorney General or some twit at ICE or Homeland Security and you’re on a plane or stuck in a hellhole “detention facility,” possibly for the rest of your life....
Mike Brock, Apr 25, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
Ben Shapiro went on Sam Harris’ podcast this week and gave the most clarifying interview I have read in a year. Not clarifying about Donald Trump, who has been clarified for some time. Clarifying about Ben Shapiro, and about the specific kind of figure that has been keeping the Republican coalition welded together while it converts itself into something its own apologists will not name....
The man who agrees Trump tried to steal the 2020 election is now arguing that the real threat to American democracy is people who worry Trump might try to steal the next one. The hysteria, in his framework, lies not with the man who attempted to overturn an American election but with the citizens who notice that he attempted it and might attempt it again. The proper civic posture, in Shapiro’s view, is to vote for the wannabe usurper, trust the guardrails, and treat the people warning about the usurper as the dangerous extremists corroding democratic legitimacy....
The implication, which Shapiro does not quite state but which is the only honest reading of his position, is this: there is no Republican who could be disqualified by character or conduct, because the alternative is always a Democrat, and the Democrat is always worse on policy. The category of disqualifying has been emptied. There is nothing a Republican president can do that would cause Ben Shapiro to vote against him, because the only available alternative would be a Democrat, and Shapiro has decided in advance that no Democrat can ever be acceptable.
This is not a political philosophy. This is a one-way ratchet. And the ratchet has a name. It is what authoritarian movements have always required from their apologist class, in every country where they have come to power: a class of articulate people who concede every factual point about the authoritarian, who acknowledge his crimes, who profess discomfort with his methods, and who continue to vote for him anyway because the alternative is the left. The apologists do not have to believe in the project. They only have to provide cover for the people who do, and to refuse, when asked directly, to ever pull the lever the other way....
Letters from an American, April 21, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Apr 22, 2026
Zachary Roth of Democracy Docket noted that Trump ally Steve Bannon warned on his podcast Monday that “Democrats are demonic” and said that if allowed to have power, they will impeach Trump. “Not just, are they going to take power and use these four seats to impeach Trump?” he said, “But they’re going to use this as a template for the rest of the country. It’s coming.”
Congress Pulls The Trigger On Big Oil’s Shot At Immunity
Emily Sanders, Apr 24, 2026 [The Lever]
As fossil fuel giants face mounting lawsuits for allegedly deceiving the public about the environmental harm of their products, Republican lawmakers just borrowed a tactic from gun lobbyists’ playbook, proposing sweeping federal immunity for oil and gas companies and limiting compensation for communities struggling with the local costs of climate disasters.
The effort could also block all state-level regulations of greenhouse gases, a sweeping deregulatory effort that some legal experts said was unconstitutional.
The GOP lawmakers behind the plan together received more than $9.5 million from the oil and gas industry over their careers. Their legislation would deliver one of the fossil fuel lobby’s top policy priorities and kill climate lawsuits before they can reach trial.
The new bill, the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026, introduced last week by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.), would shield some of the world’s largest oil companies from laws and lawsuits that could make them pay billions of dollars in climate damages, nearly half a century after Exxon scientists first predicted the dangers of burning fossil fuels....
[TW: This is a brazen violation of the Constitutional mandate to promote Justice. But the conservative / libertarian ideology is clear that all harms caused by capitalism must be immune to the dictates of justice in order to preserve "the system" of capitalism. And it's not even capitalism -- it's kleptocratic rentierism and oligopoly.]
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
The Chief Justice and His Wife Took $20 Million From Firms He Rules On. I'm Filing for His Disbarment Today.
And you can too.
Christopher Armitage, Apr 22, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Over sixteen years of federal financial disclosure forms, Chief Justice John Roberts mischaracterized more than twenty million dollars in household income from law firms appearing before the Supreme Court. He concealed his wife’s equity stake in her employer for three consecutive years. He failed to recuse from more than five hundred cases argued at the Supreme Court by law firms that had paid his household millions in commissions. He architected the Court’s first ethics code and designed it to be unenforceable. This is a course of conduct stretching across two decades, connected by a single through-line: the belief that the rules that apply to every other federal judge do not apply to him.
The governing standard is 28 U.S.C. § 455, which applies to every federal judge including Supreme Court justices. Three of its subsections matter here, and a judge only needs one of them to trigger the recusal obligation. Roberts triggers all three.
Subsection (a) says a judge “shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” This is the appearance standard, and it does not require actual bias. It requires only that a reasonable person knowing the facts would question the judge’s impartiality.
That’s the lowest bar, and it’s the easiest to satisfy. The next two are more specific and even more difficult to evade.
Subsection (b)(4) says a judge shall disqualify himself where “he or his spouse, or a minor child residing in his household, has a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome.” The language is broad on purpose. Congress wanted the net to catch exactly the kind of arrangement at issue here.
Subsection (b)(5)(iii) adds that a judge shall disqualify where a spouse “is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” That subsection covers situations where the financial interest runs through the spouse rather than through the judge directly....
A Republican Judge Just Voided 2.3 Million Virginia Ballots
Mike Brock, April 22, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
A Virginia state trial judge named Jack Hurley Jr., sitting in Tazewell County Circuit Court — a deep-red Southwest Virginia jurisdiction more than two hundred miles from Richmond — ruled yesterday that the constitutional amendment 2.3 million Virginians had just approved is void from the start. He ordered the Commonwealth of Virginia not to certify the results of Tuesday’s referendum. He declared the entire process unconstitutional.
This is the third time Hurley has ruled against this amendment. The Virginia Supreme Court has reversed him the previous two times, unanimously... Hurley ran for the Virginia House of Delegates as a Republican in 1999. The Republican National Committee has court-shopped this case into his courtroom three separate times, past a Virginia statute the Democratic-controlled legislature passed specifically to require cases like this to be filed in Richmond. Hurley, each time, has agreed that Tazewell is a proper venue. Each time, he has ruled for the RNC. Each time, the Virginia Supreme Court has told him he was wrong.
So he has done it again. He will probably lose again. Attorney General Jay Jones has already announced the appeal....
The ruling is an input to a political machine. The legal reversal does not remove it from circulation. The political work it does happens upstream of the appeal.
Last December, the United States Supreme Court, in one of its many shadow docket drive-by rulings, reversed a three-judge panel led by a Trump-appointed federal district judge named Jeffrey Brown.
Brown had run a nine-day evidentiary hearing and written a 160-page opinion finding Texas’s 2025 map a likely racial gerrymander — a finding three justices (Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson) thought was supported by substantial evidence. Alito, writing for the six Republican appointees, waved it away. Texas’s motivation, he held, was pure and simple partisan advantage, and Rucho v. Common Cause had rendered that unreviewable. Map blessed. Five Republican seats into the 2026 count....
Virginia, April 2026: the Democratic-controlled state legislature passed, in two successive sessions as Virginia’s constitution requires, an amendment permitting mid-decade redistricting only in response to other states’ mid-decade redistricting. The amendment was ratified by statewide popular vote. More procedural legitimacy than Texas, not less. A Republican-aligned state trial judge in a remote county, court-shopped past a venue statute, declared it void.
Both of these cannot be correctly decided under any coherent theory of constitutional law....
The institutions that are not doing their jobs are the ones that were supposed to constrain exactly this kind of operation. The federal judiciary has been captured at the top. The professional norms of the legal academy have dissolved. The conservative legal movement’s claimed jurisprudential commitments have revealed themselves as deployable rhetoric. A judge like Hurley who produces three rulings, loses all three on appeal, and faces no professional consequence is not a bug in the system. He is the system’s intended use, from the perspective of the faction that has figured out how to use it.
They do not need to win the cases. They need to keep producing the rulings. Every reversal generates a fresh news cycle. Every new ruling produces the appearance of a principled legal fight. The cost of operating is low. The returns are cumulative. The system was built for this....
Civic republicanism
When Does Breaking the Law Become Moral Courage? What Separates Courage from Fanaticism
Culture Explorer, Apr 21, 2026, via Naked Capitalism 04-22-2025]
... When she is brought before Creon, she does not come in like a swaggering rebel. She stands with her head lowered toward the ground, as if her body is still turned toward the dead even while she faces the throne. Then Creon questions her, and she answers with astonishing directness. Yes, she did it and she knew the decree. Yes, she broke it. But she refuses to grant his order final authority. Zeus did not make the order Creon had decreed. Justice did not write it. No king, in her view, can cancel duties that bind the living to the dead. In that moment the clash sharpens into its full shape. Creon speaks for the city as he understands it: rule, obedience, enemies, order. Antigone speaks for a law that is above all manmade laws, much older than Creon.
Creon hears danger in every word because he understands what is at stake. If Antigone stands, then his command meets a limit, and he is not master in the way he imagines. That is why he hardens. The decree becomes a test of his authority.
Haemon sees this before his father does. He tries persuasion first. The city, he says, is murmuring against this judgment. Antigone has done what many think honorable. Then he gives Creon the truth that rulers hate most when pride has taken hold of them: the city does not belong to one man. Creon cannot hear it. By then, the law has become personal.
That is what gives the story its force. Sophocles begins with a broken family, a corpse denied burial, a sister who cannot bear the sight of that dishonor, and a ruler who mistakes command for justice.
A secure ruler could have punished, relented, or found a way to preserve order without turning a burial into a contest of wills. Creon chooses the harsher path because he has started to hear disagreement as humiliation. He speaks as though the city were his possession, and Haemon answers him with the truth that should have broken the spell at once: no city belongs to one man. That line lands because it names the disease exactly. Creon still talks in the language of law, but pride has already colonized it....
Patrick Lawrence [The Floutist, via Naked Capitalism 04-21-2025]
...Jefferson and Franklin were right to caution those who would follow them, as history makes perfectly plain. A little corruption here, a small favor there, a corner cut here and another there, bribes from lobbyists, nepotistic appointments, misuses of office—all of this ever more routinely until Washington comes to resemble a circus of jobbery and unscrupulousness....
America’s political history is replete with these kinds of stories, narratives of misconduct, such that it is a question, at least in my mind, whether the United States was actually what we call in shorthand “a greedfest” from the start.
It is a profoundly unsettling question, but at this point it must be asked. Was the republic the Founding Fathers established ever any more, at its true core, than a veneer of democratic ideals and law super-imposed atop a festival of greed and self-interest in which, as they say, all rules are made to be broken?
I don’t see a need to dwell on this point, as there is a good way to summarize it. What America has lost over the decades and centuries is the principle of disinterest, which is essential, surely, to any kind of successful republicanism. To clarify, as even most Americans fail to understand this term: To be “disinterested,” as distinct from “uninterested,” means to act for the commonweal without reference to one’s personal interest in any given matter.
Maybe my implication here is already plain: When we speak of America as a failing or, indeed, a failed republic, we speak first of a psychological condition. The fate of democracy, whether it endures or disappears, is decided in the minds and hearts of its citizens before it is decided in legislatures, in elections, in courts, or in any of the other institutions on which a republic rests....
When the regime of George W. Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003, Americans took to the streets in protest quite as they had during the Vietnam war days. My understanding is that demonstrators could be counted in the millions. And then what happened was that nothing happened. The Bush II regime went ahead with America’s latest war with supreme indifference to the citizenry. As Cara Marianna has explained to me—I having missed this point—it was then Americans began to assume they were impotent in the face of a new kind of power—sequestered power, unanswerable power.
Over the decades since we have seen the steady erosion of Americans’ constitutional rights and the ever more evident wall behind which power operates in America. The Trump regime did not set the American republic on this path, but it has radically quickened the pace of the decay I describe. Free speech is under constant attack, along with academic freedom, the right to assembly, and so on. Reflecting Trump’s autocratic tendencies, power is now exercised with indifference not only to the citizenry but to law itself: We now have, and I want to stress this phrase, lawlessness in the name of law.
A little while ago The New York Times conducted a lengthy interview with Trump, during which the newspaper asked him if there were any limits on his exercise of power. “There is one thing,” Trump replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He went on to express his indifference to law—specifically to international law, but the record indicates he meant any law, all law....
Machiavelli, just prior to the collapse of the Florentine Republic, urged the formation of citizen militias to defend against the threat of Medici power. After the Republic fell in 1512 and it was too late for such a defense, he famously advocated rule by a prince capable of restoring republican order. He wrote The Prince a year later. Machiavelli’s prince was preoccupied with power, as is well-enough known, but this power was to be exercised, I would say, according to the principle of disinterest I mentioned earlier—not for his own power but for the Republic’s. The Discourses, written four years later, make this clear.
That was five centuries ago. Parenthetically, given the rampant lawlessness of our purported leaders I confess to finding a certain appeal in the thought of citizen militias or some 21st century version of the philosopher king, but that is for another conversation.
What about us, now? What are we to do in the face of the condition I named earlier as lawlessness in the name of law? Any useful answer must involve one or another form of disobedience, each of us to determine his or her own kind. And the paradox of our time is that our disobedience must begin by declaring our obedience to law while those charged with upholding it breach it....
