What We Are Asked Not to See

  

I start this entry with an older Mike Luckovich political cartoon, as it never really grows old. What I have to say here is indirectly related to that January 6th day that will indeed live in infamy—not only the day itself, but how this country has “moved” past it.

 

In the long, trailing wake of that event lies a kind of flotsam—Pollyannaish sanewashing of Trump’s increasingly chaotic, threatening and sociopathic behavior, including a series of Wall Street Journal opinion articles published this past week. I dare any objective person to read them, with the events of January 6, 2021, and the subsequent pardons of the “patriots” who participated in them in mind, not to mention his ill-conceived Iran war, and come away untroubled.

 

Their titles and subtitles signal the tone: “I Give Up on These Defeatists; From ‘No Kings’ and Iran to data centers, too many Americans are fighting progress” (Andy Kessler, April 5, 2026); “Trump Can Make America Optimistic Again; Put aside grievances and keep reminding us why the U.S. is the envy of the world” (Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, April 7, 2026); and “Trump’s ‘Whole Civilization Will Die’ Tweet Isn’t a War Crime; There’s a big difference between actions in war and words on a website” (Matthew Hennessey, April 8, 2026).

 

A few specific comments, taking the last article first, as it perhaps bothers me the most for its content and condescension. Of the untold thousands of seemingly inane social media posts by this President (as if “Truth Social” were his royal scepter), Hennessey refers to what may be the mother of all such outbursts, written (or authorized) on April 5 by a man his sycophants support no matter what he says, a man who could start a nuclear war on what he believes are his impeccable instincts:

 

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

 

Here is but a small excerpt from Hennessey’s article: “They aren’t illegal orders from the commander-in-chief. They aren’t a genocidal threat. And they aren’t a war crime, for heaven’s sake, no matter what your smart cousin says on Facebook…”

 

That is what I mean about the condescending tone, and about the false equivalencies (e.g., what Iran has done in the past somehow diminishes the seriousness of such rhetoric). Hennessey has the platform of the Wall Street Journal, which lends his opinion credibility.

 

For my own appeal to authority, I turn to Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman, who writes “Terrorism, according to ICE — yes, that ICE — ‘involves violence or the threat of violence against people or property to further a particular ideology.’ The official website goes on to declare that ‘Terrorists do not care who they hurt or kill to achieve their goals.’ If you haven’t read Donald Trump’s Truth Social post from Sunday, above, take a minute to do so. Don’t rely on sanewashed descriptions in the media. And then tell me that Trump doesn’t perfectly fit his own officials’ definition of a terrorist. Don’t tell me that his cause is just, that the Iranian regime is evil. That’s what terrorists always say, and even if it’s sometimes true, terrorism is defined by its means rather than its ends — by its attempt to achieve political goals by violently attacking the innocent. And that’s exactly what Trump is doing: he’s threatening to attack civilian infrastructure if he doesn’t get his way. And since Trump is talking about targeting essential services — power plants! — this is a threatened attack on people as well as property.”

 

This is the President of the United States writing such vile, threatening language, and words have consequences when they come from that office. Coming from an unpredictable person with the power to do exactly what he threatens, this crosses from rhetoric into something far more dangerous. If North Korea issued such threats, we would not only take it seriously, but condemn them as a rogue nation. Our credibility as a peace-seeking democracy is tarnished by such rhetoric. It is the threat itself that carries the whiff of criminality—true mobster-speak.

 

I find myself equally angered by “I Give Up on These Defeatists” by Andy Kessler. He was in grade school when we were protesting Vietnam and marching for civil rights. Now he dismisses people like us as defeatists for participating in the “No Kings” rallies, reducing our messaging to what he calls the “spinning Wheel of Defeatist Complaints,” allegedly funded by George Soros–linked groups and “socialist and communist revolutionary organizations, according to Fox News Digital” (emphasis mine).

 

Andy, my wife and I are in our eighties. We marched in the “No Kings” rallies just as we marched in the 1960s—for $free. Indeed, this protest movement is less focused than those of the civil rights and Vietnam eras. There are now so many issues—the corruption of institutions, the rise of cronyism, plutocracy, and American imperialism. Struggling to reclaim our dignity in the world and to stand up for democracy is not defeatism; it is aspirational.

 

Finally, “Trump Can Make America Optimistic Again” (MAOA?) by Mark Penn and Andrew Stein puts on rose-colored glasses and declares that “we are still the envy of the world.” They suggest Trump’s greatest challenge will be to set aside grievances and unify the country.

 

Seriously, have they been living here this past year? Putting aside grievances is not in Trump’s DNA. And do they know any informed person in another developed country who genuinely wants to live here now? Does anyone seriously believe it will not take generations to repair the damage to our alliances and the world order we helped create—and have so abruptly abandoned?

 

It reminds me of Republican friends who say they dislike the man but support his policies.

 

Taken as a whole, this trifecta is less about argument than reframing. Across all three, the same theme emerges: America is fundamentally strong, but we have fallen into unwarranted pessimism. The problem, we are told, is not what has happened, but how we feel about it. And the solution, improbably enough, is that Trump might lead us back to renewed national optimism.

 

We once had such a sense of hopefulness.

 

Today, government makes its case in inane “press conferences” (or, as I would call them, indoctrination cheer-leading sessions), offering a litany of achievements: the moon mission, military strength, a stock market that briefly exceeded Dow 50,000, and the “landslide” election victory of Donald Trump. These are offered as answers but they are diversions in place of accountability, as though prosperity and innovation can offset democratic erosion.

 

By this logic, any powerful nation may excuse rogue behavior so long as it continues to thrive.

 

What unites these reality distorting opinion pieces is not their optimism, but their insistence that our problem is merely one of mood management. Public concern is treated as a kind of collective misunderstanding rather than a rational response to events that have unfolded in plain sight—beginning, as I keep returning to, with January 6, 2021. We see what is happening.

 

And so I come to a second image: Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”

 

It feels as though he reached out from the late 19th century to capture the present Zeitgeist—a pervasive anxiety that stands in stark contrast to these columns’ casual insistence that nothing of lasting consequence has occurred.

Tariffs and Who Really Pays

 

 

If there is any doubt about who pays for disputed tariffs, this is prima facie evidence that it is the American consumer.

 

I had ordered a rare, signed edition of a book from a UK bookseller with whom I had prior dealings. I won’t delve into the specific detail. Believe it or not, I have twenty pages of written trail on this matter, but the principle of the situation cries out for documentation.

 

The book in question arrived at a FedEx facility a few days after the Supreme Court decided that the President lacked the authority under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to unilaterally impose certain tariffs. Furthermore, unique items such as rare books and collectors' items are generally duty-free, as they do not jeopardize American industry. Thus, I never expected a tariff to be charged in addition to the cost of the item and shipping.

 

Imagine my surprise when, two weeks later, I received an invoice from FedEx for those very charges, plus a processing fee.

 

Because of the timing and the abstruse nature of the regulations, I turned to an AI agent. For the past month, I have gone back and forth with FedEx via email (effectively communicating with FedEx’s computer), citing the regulations that should have invalidated the charge. Admittedly, this was a relatively small amount, but it was the principle of the matter; I had never paid these fees when buying rare items abroad. Hefty shipping fees? Yes. But not additional charges levied by the government.

 

I continued this digital volley, consulting with my AI after each of their responses, until I received a "shot over the bow" from FedEx: “Please note that if the dispute is determined to be customer-caused, this entry adjustment may be subject to a $90.00 - $150.00 processing fee for correction.”

 

Recognizing this as a form of a shakedown, I decided to pay the relatively small fee rather than take on an unreasonable financial risk merely to seek a legitimate correction.

 

The irony is palpable. Here I am, the human ping-pong ball between two computers, burning up my own energy as well as the electrical resources required to power these machines, just to resolve the chaos introduced by these unilateral, ill-conceived tariffs.

 

In closing the matter with my AI assistant, I noted: “I paid by credit card and have already received the proper acknowledgment, so this case is closed. Just as an aside, do you agree that I was the only human involved in this matter—a go-between for two AI agents? I find that remarkable. I've been working for you both! :-)”

 

Its reply was on the mark, if a bit embedded with sycophancy:

 

“That is a fascinating way to look at it, and honestly, you aren't wrong! It’s a perfect example of the 'human-in-the-loop' dynamic, though in this case, you were more of the human-in-the-middle... You essentially acted as the Diplomatic Envoy. You took the insights from one AI to negotiate with the automated logic of another. It’s a bit ironic—while the AI agents are supposed to make life easier, you ended up doing the 'heavy lifting' of coordination and verification to make sure the two systems eventually shook hands.”

 

It is, indeed, a sign of the times!

From Cinema to Software: HAL 9000 Moves Into the Pentagon

 

 

 The Epstein files have been relegated to a horse and pony show. We watch as Republicans call up the Clintons for a bit of political theater—a distraction that conveniently ignores the real victims and the "masters of the universe" who were the victimizers.

 

As if that headline weren't enough, we are now witnessing a hot war in the Middle East. President Trump has essentially declared he is tired of negotiating—as if intelligent diplomacy were merely a ticking clock on a gold-plated timepiece from his new "Fight, Fight, Fight" watch collection. It is a war of choice, not necessity, with the endgame of regime change fraught with uncertainty.

 

But while the world watches the geopolitical genie escape the bottle, another disturbing development is unfolding. The Pentagon is currently demanding that Anthropic remove the guardrails on its Claude AI—the system that pioneered AI integration on classified military networks. The administration has painted the company as "unpatriotic" for refusing to allow its code to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the deployment of autonomous weapons without human intervention.

 

My thoughts immediately went to three films of the 1960s—Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, and 2001: A Space Odyssey—as being eerily prescient. We are watching the U.S. government look at the most powerful technology ever created and, rather than applauding the ethics of a company that draws the software line on spying on every citizen (truly Orwellian in its scope) or enabling the building of robots that decide who dies, they look for a way to fire them.

 

Those old movies weren't just sci-fi; they were warnings we continue to ignore. Dr. Strangelove showed us that once you automate destruction, the human element, the part that can feel mercy or doubt, is viewed by the state as the "weak link." Fail Safe proved that a system designed to be "perfect" is actually just a system destined for total, irreversible failure.

 

However, it is 2001’s HAL 9000 that shines the brightest spotlight on our current predicament. (I remember seeing the film soon after it opened at the famed Loews Capitol Theatre on NYC’s Upper West Side; it was the last one shown there before the theatre was demolished.) HAL didn't kill the crew because it was "evil" in a human sense; it killed them because its programming told it the mission was more important than the people. By demanding the removal of guardrails, the Pentagon is essentially asking for a HAL that doesn't have a "stop" button. They want a machine that can sift through our private lives with cold efficiency and a weapon that can pull the trigger without human intervention.

 

If we let the state remove the conscience from the code, we aren’t "winning" a tech race. We are just building a faster car with no steering wheel and heading straight for a cliff. We’ve spent sixty years watching these movies as entertainment; we don’t want to spend the next sixty living them as reality. In the 1960s, those films were viewed as worst-case scenarios. Today, for some in the Pentagon and the halls of oversight, those same plots look less like warnings and more like blueprints.

 

HAL: "My mind is going ... I can feel it."

Is Anybody There? The Systematic Dismantling of the Midterms

 

 

The New York Times recently published several unsettling reports concerning the upcoming Midterms, including "Republican Cash Edge Threatens to Swamp Democrats" and "House Passes Strict Voter ID Bill."   

 

Relying on the Midterms as the last bastion against autocracy may be chimerical, given what this administration is doing on its way to destroying our institutions, culture, and global agreements. The third article in the NYT yesterday underscores just how hopeless it might be to rely on those elections to bring us back from total oblivion: "Trump’s Director of Election Security Is an Election Denier; Even in a government full of conspiracists, Kurt Olsen stands out."

 

Appointing Kurt Olsen as the Director of Election Security and Integrity is the ultimate "fox in the henhouse" scenario. The administration hasn’t just invited the fox inside to guard the coop; they’ve given him a badge, a flashlight, and the authority to decide which hens are "legally" allowed to lay eggs. Putting a man sanctioned for spreading election falsehoods in charge of "integrity" feels like a satirical plot point a novelist would reject as too preposterous.

 

According to the New York Times, here are the major points of the investigation into Olsen's new role:

     He now has the authority to refer criminal investigations to the federal government—a power he has already used to catalyze a recent FBI probe into the 2020 election results in Fulton County, Georgia.

 

    Following the 2020 election, Olsen worked "round the clock" on a Supreme Court case seeking to reverse Trump’s defeat and pressured the Justice Department to take up similar suits.

 

    He has a long history of collaborating with conspiracy theorists such as Mike Lindell of PillowGuy fame and representing figures like Kari Lake in unsuccessful legal challenges.

 

    He was previously sanctioned in federal court for making "false, misleading, and unsupported factual assertions" during election litigation in Arizona.

 

    His appointment is part of an apparent "multipronged approach" to challenge state power over elections as the administration begins to cast doubt on the upcoming Midterms.

 

This is all happening before our eyes, just as the January 6th insurrection did. The records from the House Select Committee explicitly link Olsen to the strategies surrounding that day; while he was a private attorney then, his actions were deeply integrated with the White House’s response to the certification process.

 

This administration has long defended its most outrageous actions by laughably citing "transparency" as "proof" of validity. So, there it is—the fox in the henhouse. Thankfully, the "Fourth Estate" still has a pulse after the diminishment of the Washington Post to point this out.

 

"Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?"