More Thoughts on Loose Tabs

Unpacking a couple key points from my recent compendium of links and comments.

I've been blogging since 2001. Mostly personal stuff at first, then as Michael Tatum and Robert Christgau and Michaelangelo Matos prodded me to review some records, I decided to share my notes not just on whatever they had space for but on everything else I listened to, even cursorily. I figured that as a critical thinker, my calling was to document my experiences, and as a left-leaning person I should share what I could. While I instantly and utterly opposed Bush's rush to war after 9/11, politics wasn't a major writing interest until Bush opened up his second front in Iraq, which I described as another "day of infamy."

Still, by the 2004 election, all I could muster was a desperate letter I sent to everyone in my address book, urging them to vote against the warmonger. Unfortunately, the Democrats nominated the John Kerry who rushed to "serve" in Vietnam, and who (like all "serious" Democrats who ran in 2004) had endorsed Bush's campaign to invade Iraq, and not the Kerry who later recognized both wars to have been grave mistakes (too late to save his campaign). After that, I started writing more regularly about politics. I was thinking about expanding my letter to a book-length treatise on how and why Republicans were rotten to the core, and I was taking notes as the evidence mounted. I never got the book written, but I did eventually compile my notes (766k words) into a file I called "The Last Days of American Empire" [.odt link]. I kept to that process, with increasing alarm, ever since, with long compilations for the two Obama and first Trump terms. (There isn't a Biden collection yet, but not for lack of material, for which see Speaking of Which, the title I started in June 2021; they come to about 880k words; the total is about 3.65 million words).

I finally admitted failure and pulled the plug after the 2024 election. I've often been disappointed by American voters, but this election gave me shock and horror on an unprecedented scale, as well as exposing my impotence. Best, I thought, to lie back and let go. Besides, I had the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll to occupy my time from November to January, and no desire to idly speculate on how bad Trump might actually be, or what one might to do resist him. Reality would win out soon enough. Still, old habits are hard to break. I found myself with dozens of articles in open tabs that I needed periodically to close, so I started taking notes, and published the first batch on March 20 as Loose Tabs. I haven't had a regular schedule, but the 2-4 week intervals pile up. I posted my tenth on September 14. It covered 28 days, and ran exceptionally long (18934 words).

I usually do a bit of editing and add a few things late, but this week my level of disgust was such that I avoided so much as looking at the file. But after a respite, I thought it might be worthwhile to write up a bit of commentary here, highlighting a few points (especially ones that aren't going away), clarifying a bit, and offering some further thoughts. The file itself has tags for most of the sections, and I'm adding an index to those tags. I could link to specific sections here, but I'm worried about sending email with excessive links.

I started with a short, half-hearted section on "Epsteinmania" — the scandal of Trump's association with the disgraced financier, which mainstream Democrats desperately hope will drive a wedge between Trump and his pedophilia-obsessed base. I wrote much more about this in the previous installment, and have little more to add (although the new articles do add something). But let me sum up here:

1. Trump's base don't care about pedophilia. They only see it as a club to beat their enemies with. Their whole interest in Epstein was based on the expectation that they could entrap elite "lefties" like the Clintons. In this, as always, they are simply being partisans, not hypocrites. It only looks like hypocrisy if you credit them with believing what they say. But the charge of hypocrisy only hurts if one has shame, which Trump and his ilk totally lack. The charge may even backfire by conceding decent values to people who have none.

2. Trump has only wriggled and dissembled enough to allow Democrats to hope they might hook him if they just press on. In doing so, they are neglecting everything else he's doing, much of which would be truly damning if critics gave it any real attention. But Trump throws out so much crazy provocation that it's exhausting sorting out the real from the fanciful — especially when things that previously seemed inconceivable turn tragically real.

3. Even though attacking Trump on issues like this is almost certain to be ineffective, doing so is irresistible, because it testifies to our values, and binds us together. Still, we need to exercise care, both in what we criticize and in how. We risk as coming off as moral elitists (or "virtue signalers," to use a term used to dismiss assertions of ethics by liberals, even though the right does much more of this than we do), inviting blowback. Also confusion: they oppose pedophilia because they're anti-sex, where we're more inclined to see it as abuse by the powerful. (Both sides have conspired to extend childhood, whether to be protected or to be controlled, even beyond adolescence, although my own recollections suggest it's much more complicated than either side allows. But that's a topic for another time.)

The Epstein-Trump story is likely to drag along for months, but has quickly been eclipsed by much more pressing, and frankly much more alarming, stories. Aside from the tweets collected at the end the last big story in the file was the killing of Charlie Kirk and the extraordinary efforts of the Trump machine to depict Kirk as some kind of saint and/or martyr, and to use his killing to attack all manner of real and imagined enemies. I started this off by citing a David Dayen piece, and wrote a fair amount about the situation and the first instances of right-wing vindictiveness. By the time I posted four days after the shooting, I had added two dozen more articles, and so many more were coming that I rather arbitrarily shut down.

One thing I stressed at the time is that I didn't care who the shooter was or what their motives might have been. The only mention I made of the shooter was a link to an Intelligencer update feed, which I scarcely managed to look at, and didn't draw any conclusions from. Jimmy Kimmel should have followed my advice, but speculate he did, and ABC suspended him for saying the wrong thing. More on that next time, but for now I find this deeply disturbing. We've always had taboo subjects and sacred cows, but who knew that in a nominal democracy a political movement as prominent as "MAGA" or an operative as obscure as Charlie Kirk would be one?

We watched Kimmel, Colbert, and/or Seth Myers for nearly all of the first Trump term, and stuck with them through a Biden term that now feels more like a Trump interregnum, and I took a great deal of comfort from those shows: not just that some prominent people were willing to stand up to Trump's insanity, but that they were able to draw audiences that cheered them on. This gave me the sense that despite serious setbacks Americans still possessed some fundamental sense of decency. I stopped watching those shows after the 2024 election, because nothing felt funny after that. And also because I started to wonder whether the ridiculing and belittling of Trump didn't just feed his ego, making him meaner and stronger. (Perhaps in the back of my mind, I remembered blaming Doonesbury's depiction of GWH Bush as a waffle as a taunt that helped push him to launch his wars against Panama and Iraq.) So I don't know how they carried on, but evidently they did, because they've gotten so deep into Trump's thin skin that he's sought to drive them off the air. What's new isn't Trump's temperament or instincts, but that this time he has soldiers willing not just to follow his orders but to pro-actively satisfy his whims.

By the way, I knew the name but very little about Kirk before the shooting. The most interesting links are not the ones about the horrible things he's said and his status as a right-wing ideologue (which seems about par for the course; like Trump he seems to be a sponge for whatever his feeds are pushing, and exceptional only in how far he's willing to push convention), but his evident success as a ground game organizer. Clearly, someone in the Trump machine is very good at getting people with anger issues but little information or logic to come out and vote Republican. He seems to have been one such someone.

I don't have space here to go through the stories one-by-one. Two stories that personally interested me are: Trump's edict to rewrite history, especially through restaging museums; and his Department of War declaration. But these are just instances of his broader focus on controlling every facet of free speech. But the more ominous story was the murderous drone attack on a boat in the Caribbean, claimed to be running drugs from Venezuela. Trump claims the right to kill anyone anywhere, only needing to file the paper work declaring his targets to be terrorists. Where do you suppose he got such an idea? Israel, of course. They tested their luck sinking a US ship in the Mediterranean in 1967. Once they got away with that, they realized they could do whatever they wanted.

The big story of the week, the month, the year, the decade, remains Israel. They've held the lead in my posts since Oct. 2023, when they escalated their siege of Gaza to what must be called genocide, if the word and the legal concept are to have any meaning whatsoever. Through the 2024 election, I worked hard to document what they were doing, and how the world was reacting to it. Since starting Loose Tabs I've been much more lax. It's not just that the new stories are so much like the old ones and that repeated exposure just desensitizes us to the horrors. It's also that the election of Trump has ended any chance of persuading the US government to try to rein in Israel. It's not just that Trump is even more captive to the Israel lobby than Biden was. It's that Trump is impervious to concerns about human rights and international law, and indeed is contemptuous of both. With Harris, one could at least imagine talking about why the US should press Israel to dial back its aggression.

With Trump, the sentiment is just "finish the job." He's not just profiting from the war, he likes the hard line; he likes the cruelty; he likes the will to power that Netanyahu and his far-right regime exhibit; and he cares not one whit for whoever falls victim. And the thing to understand here — what makes the destruction and systematic degradation of living conditions in Gaza more than just a distant tragedy is that the far right in America see Israel as a laboratory and model for America. They want to be able to do to the whole world what Israel is free and willing to do in its little neighborhood.

And here's the kicker: under Trump they're following Israel's lead, and not just in the sense that they're aping Israel in bombing Yemen and Iran. They're adapting Israeli tactics to war against all imagined enemies. They're blowing up boats in the Caribbean. They're trying to intimidate not just Venezuela but Mexico and Brazil. And they're systematically testing the limits of what they can get away with domestically — after all, to the right, with their fundamental belief in class hierarchies, real enemies are always domestic. And, thanks to sympathizers in the courts, the media, the corporations, and even non-profits like universities, it turns out that they can get away with quite a lot.

Their first serious attacks on free speech were aimed at suppressing dissent over Israel. This was relatively easy, as many Democrats who would otherwise defend free speech were pressed by the Israel lobby to treat any criticism of Israel as antisemitism — even objections by Jews on religious grounds, as well as by leftists and liberals who never generalize about Jews, but apply their secular human rights concerns to all people equally; meanwhile, traditional antisemites are nearly all supporters of Israel's right-wing phase). Charlie Kirk's killing gave them another opportunity to dictate what public figures are and are not allowed to say. And the more they get away with, the more brazen they become — and more than a few Democrats fell for that too.

Most Republicans seem perfectly happy following Trump around the bend and into the abyss of oligarchic autocracy (or, as we on the left recognize it, fascism). Those who are not happy, who recognize the treat of unlimited Republican power, need to bury their differences and join together, but that can only be done on the basis of shared principles. Foremost is the recognition that justice is only possible where all people are treated with respect and fairness, which is to say with equal rights. A rigid ethnic caste system, which Israel has built since 1948 — based on the one the UK established during the Mandate period — cannot possibly be just. As Americans, we have a great deal of experience with caste systems, and have done much (although maybe not enough) to move beyond such evils. Most Democrats believe in civil rights, free speech, and other fundamental freedoms, for our own citizens, but many have been seduced by double standards that work to deny the justice we expect to other people. Support for Israel is not the only instance of this, but it is by far the most egregious, because Israeli dominance and oppression is the future of Trumpist rule.

Until Democrats understand that "justice for all" means exactly what it says, they will be futile and leave us defenseless. Playing games like Epsteinmania, praying that some "gotcha" moment will tilt things back their way, won't work. Republican control of the courts and most moneyed institutions is far too deep to be easily reversed. Even if Democrats manage to win an election, a middling centrist won't be enough to counteract their power — as Biden has proven. They need to be exposed, and to do that, they need to be opposed.

As I said, there is much more in this Loose Tabs I could expand on. Feel free to ask me a question, either through my form or in a comment here. One section I added a bit to is on Ukraine, where all sides seem to have lost sight of the ball and are just kicking air. (Look for red change bars.) But unless something surprises me and jumps the line, my next letter here will be about something completely different.