Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 29,450]

11 minutes ago, Fernando said:

Yes oil coming down and 10 year coming down is just one thing, recession. 

Gold still holding strong but I bet they sell that one fast next week as well. 

gold is a safety valve, a hedge against inflation and economic turmoil

[Fernando 6,534]

8 minutes ago, Vesper said:

gold is a safety valve, a hedge against inflation and economic turmoil

Majority of the time but this is what happens when the major markets are crashing. Traders will get margin calls as they are in world of pain and what they do is close their strongest positions to meet those Margin calls. Hence you get selling of gold. 

Edited Friday at 13:37 by Fernando

[Fulham Broadway 17,092]

1 hour ago, Fernando said:

Majority of the time but this is what happens when the major markets are crashing. Traders will get margin calls as they are in world of pain and what they do is close their strongest positions to meet those Margin calls. Hence you get selling of gold. 

Always know when a recession is coming - all the London and provincial pawnbrokers dust off their signs 'We Want Your Gold' 'Best Prices Paid for Your Gold' 

They're doing that now.....

[Vesper 29,450]

U.S. stock market has wiped out $9.6 trillion since Inauguration Day

https://www.marketwatch.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-s-p-and-nasdaq-set-for-further-losses-after-1-679-point-blue-chip-tumble/card/u-s-stock-market-has-lost-9-6-trillion-in-value-since-inauguration-day-6NL1f3p5I5eUhbOGt2Wy

U.S. stocks have had a rough go of it since President Donald Trump was sworn into office for his second term in January.

Since Jan. 17, the Friday before Inauguration Day, the U.S. stock market has seen $9.6 trillion in value erased, according to data from FactSet and Dow Jones Market Data. Of those losses, $5 trillion has been erased just over the past two days -- the largest two-day loss on record.

Major equity indexes were seeing their losses deepen in early trading on Friday. The Dow was down by more than 1,200 points in recent trading, bringing its losses since the market opened on Thursday to nearly 3,000 points.

The S&P 500 was down by 3.6%, while the Nasdaq Composite was off by 3.8%, leaving it on the cusp of bear-market territory. The Russell 2000 has fallen by another 4.1% since it became the first major U.S. equity index to enter bear-market territory on Thursday.

[Fulham Broadway 17,092]

Just now, Vesper said:

U.S. stock market has wiped out $9.6 trillion since Inauguration Day

https://www.marketwatch.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-s-p-and-nasdaq-set-for-further-losses-after-1-679-point-blue-chip-tumble/card/u-s-stock-market-has-lost-9-6-trillion-in-value-since-inauguration-day-6NL1f3p5I5eUhbOGt2Wy

U.S. stocks have had a rough go of it since President Donald Trump was sworn into office for his second term in January.

Since Jan. 17, the Friday before Inauguration Day, the U.S. stock market has seen $9.6 trillion in value erased, according to data from FactSet and Dow Jones Market Data. Of those losses, $5 trillion has been erased just over the past two days -- the largest two-day loss on record.

Major equity indexes were seeing their losses deepen in early trading on Friday. The Dow was down by more than 1,200 points in recent trading, bringing its losses since the market opened on Thursday to nearly 3,000 points.

The S&P 500 was down by 3.6%, while the Nasdaq Composite was off by 3.8%, leaving it on the cusp of bear-market territory. The Russell 2000 has fallen by another 4.1% since it became the first major U.S. equity index to enter bear-market territory on Thursday.

Making America Gash Again 😅

[Vesper 29,450]

Trump’s Tariff Gamble: Global Chaos or Calculated Concessions?

Paul Mason 4th April 2025

A looming trade war and security threats leave European leaders scrambling to decipher the American president’s true intentions.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/trumps-tariff-gamble-global-chaos-or-calculated-concessions

 

There are two strategic implications that can be drawn from Donald Trump’s decision to declare a tariff war on the rest of the world. One is that he intends to restructure the entire global economy around US interests, destroying the export models of numerous emerging and global south economies and plunging the world into a recession. A second implication is that, under threat of the above, he merely hopes to extract concessions on the domestic economic policies of rival countries that are favourable to the USA and the dollar, but non-catastrophic for the rest.

In geopolitics, we’ve already faced the same kind of dilemma. After Trump sent Pete Hegseth and JD Vance to blow up the Rammstein Group and then the Munich Security Conference, in February, European security chiefs asked themselves: does Trump mean to walk away from collective security altogether? Or is this a ploy to force us to spend more money on defence, take on more of the burden of European security, and support for Ukraine? The fact that, in the parallel worlds of defence and trade, policymakers are facing the same cognitive challenge tells us something significant about the Trump administration. It has decided to achieve things through uncertainty.

Over the past six weeks, I have asked every policymaker I meet who has access to intelligence: do you know what Trump’s endgame is? Most have confessed ignorance. Some speculate that, when it comes to defence, Washington is factionally divided between a group that only wants to reorient toward confronting China and another that – in order to do so – is willing to make a strategic deal with Russia, carving Europe out of the peace talks over Ukraine, out of access to the Arctic, and allowing Putin to menace his next targets in the Baltic, the high North, or the Black Sea.

Even in macroeconomics, a harder science than geopolitics, I have analyst notes on my desk saying there’s a good chance that the tariffs are gestural and may be withdrawn, with all the soaraway consequences for stock markets that would presage. Since Trump came back to power, my watchword with the MAGA crowd has been: focus on what they do, not what they say. Their outpourings of invective, insult, and disinformation are – as far as modern statecraft is concerned – a distraction technique, nothing more.

But we do now have a consistent and observable pattern of action: the Trump administration is prepared to take actions that destabilise their allies, both economically and in security terms, and to use uncertainty and disinformation as weapons to achieve this end.
In response, there is one rational course of action for European liberals, Greens, and social democrats: prepare for American autarky and isolationism and pursue European greatness. It would be irresponsible to do anything less.

The EU, together with the CPTPP countries, South Korea, and Norway, represent 35 percent of global import demand, while America accounts for 15 percent. These countries also wield immense fiscal firepower and institutional strength. But we face a challenge. Whatever first-order measures we take – which could be retaliatory tariffs, industrial strategies that re-shore production, or, in the defence sphere, seeking technological sovereignty – it is the second-order effects of Trump’s actions, our reaction, and the reaction of China that will ultimately shape the mid-21st century.

In 1930, for example, when the Smoot-Hawley Act raised US tariff barriers against the world, neither Britain nor France retaliated. The UK was determined to remain the last free trade power standing. But as its exports to America collapsed by a third in the space of a year and its balance of payments went negative, the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald was forced into an austerity programme which led to a naval mutiny, a back-bench rebellion, and summary collapse. The National Government that replaced Labour was forced to abandon both the Gold Standard and free trade because the second-order effects of Smoot-Hawley – the surge of cheap imports into the unprotected British economy – were unstoppable.

So the facts have changed, and, as John Maynard Keynes put it, we must change our minds. Social democrats in Europe are looking at the combined prospect of having to rearm rapidly and doing so in conditions of rapidly restructured global supply chains. As we address these tasks, it is vital that Europeans do so proactively, asking – as Keynes’ generation did during the Second World War – what does the world look like when we win? The most fatal stance we could adopt is that of the passive victim, mourning the death of the rules-based order, while reacting to other countries’ agency but never using our own.

“Winning” can no longer mean defending the status quo. It means imagining a new status quo to be attained once the Trump experiment has crashed and burned. It means assembling a coalition of countries whose voters still want to live in a world governed by international law and universal concepts of right and justice. And it means an appeal to the working people of the world – whose factories in countries like Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Nicaragua may soon be shuttered – to join us in a new project of free and fair trade, human rights, and labour rights. The global working class is bigger than it has ever been, and its industrial heartlands will now become landscapes of class struggle at an intensity not seen in the era of globalisation.

What Trump has done since taking power – both on the security agenda and on trade – is an expression of pure national self-interest: blowing up the game because America was losing. From now on, European liberalism, centrist conservatism, and social democracy should converge on a project not just to defend their welfare states, the Single Market, and collective security. They should seek the widest cooperation from like-minded democratic countries to extend and solidify their open and progressive systems across continents and oceans.

Europe does not have to be a rule taker from Trump, whether on digital services, abortion rights, hate speech, or chlorinated chicken. And if it chooses to continue making its own rules according to the liberal internationalist values it was founded on, the European Union will need to make the UK an offer it cannot refuse. Sure, there are billionaire-backed pro-Trump media outlets trying to set the UK’s agenda; and there is Musk and X.com; and relentless Russian hybrid operations in British civil society. But none of that is strong enough to force the UK into an act of strategic self-harm – which is what aligning with Trump would constitute. I don’t think even the Conservative Party, which is now full of MAGA fanboys and girls, could stomach seeing the UK become Trump’s economic colony.

Europe has the muscle memory of state direction and, in the Nordic countries, active expertise in state-led industrial strategies. It has strong national and pan-national institutions. It has, above all, a population whose majority is for now resistant to ethno-nationalism and prepared to see the continental project as the greater good. Thus, both on trade and security, it falls to Europe to reorganise the world around its own strategic self-interest, and for the UK to become part of the project, not part of the problem.

I think we will see the economic impacts of Trump’s tariffs happen fast. The financial impacts – as in 2008 – will only be predictable when we see how much risk has been hidden within the global shadow banking system and how exposed it is to trade. What nobody has properly focused on, however, is the class struggles that could ensue. Behind every prediction of a slump in US imports is a factory in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Honduras, or even China that is going to close. And in an information economy, it is unthinkable that the trade war will fail to spill over into the world of brands, social media platforms, intellectual property, and free speech laws.

If Trump really did just press the demolition button on globalisation, then the positive-sum game the world has been playing is over. That means, in the short term, adapting social democracy to a zero-sum world. To create a new positive-sum game between the consumers of Europe and the producers of the global south requires this generation of centre-left politicians to do something they weren’t trained for: to fight and win a systemic conflict – first against Russia in Ukraine, second against America over tariffs, and third against the CCP over democracy.

Absolute clarity in the selection of these goals is what I want to see from those in power in Europe.

This is a joint column with IPS Journal

[Vesper 29,450]

Welcome to the era of Daily Mail socialism

Morgan McSweeney’s relationship with Britain’s most important tabloid is as ideological as it is strategic.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2025/04/welcome-to-the-era-of-daily-mail-socialism

On the staff of the Morning Lark, the fictional tabloid that crops up in a few Martin Amis novels, readers of the paper are known as its “wankers”. Editors ask, “Is this of genuine interest to our wankers?” The political positions of the Lark are weighed up, “out of deference to the deepest personal considerations of our wankers”. Any drop in readership is described as “losing wankers”. The readers aren’t seen simply as a vulgar blob either, but a genuine social stratum. Clint Smoker, one of the Lark’s senior reporters, explains: “The quality broadsheets are aimed at the establishment and the intelligentsia. The downmarket tabloids are aimed at the proletariat.” The Lark – aimed at “the unemployed” – is a second cousin to the Daily Star, dealing in royal news, football news and pornography (ideally all three at once).

Couched between solidarity and contempt, this language would surely not be found in a real newsroom. But the truth in this satire is that newspapers have types. Where Mondeo Man is a psephological fantasy, newspapers have what we might call imagined communities, vast numbers of readers who otherwise know nothing about each other, yet breathe the same cultural snorkel of information, opinion and sudoku. And in an age of low circulations, as newspapers fall back on their core constituencies, these communities are only more pronounced. This makes them a vital subject for political study. Where else can strategists find herds of voters who form one inky silhouette?

You don’t have to turn to satire to find the Sun’s type, at least you didn’t during the 1980s when its readership rallied to the side of Margaret Thatcher. According to Chris Horrie and Peter Chippindale’s history of the paper, Stick It Up Your Punter!, its greatest and most terrible editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, summarised it during an office argument over an article on the legalisation of marijuana: “You don’t understand the readers, do you, eh? He’s the bloke you see in the pub – a right old fascist, wants to send the w*** back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and weirdos and drug dealers. He doesn’t want to hear about that stuff!”

In so far as the Daily Mail imagines its community, Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s chief of staff, very much wants it for his own. “If I could marry a front page, it would be this one,” McSweeney said last year, after the Mail splashed “Starmer: UK nuclear deterrent is safe in my hands”. The quote is from Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s book Get In, and the echo of Thatcher’s declaring the NHS “safe in our hands” to ward off fears of privatisation was unmissable.

If McSweeney did marry that front page, his head might have recently been turned by: “Finally! Patients to be put before NHS bureaucrats” (this represented the Mail ’s enthusiastic response to the abolition of NHS England). Things have been tougher between Labour and the Mail since late March: Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement has been pilloried harder than Prince Harry’s charity shenanigans in its pages. But when the PM contributes a Mail op-ed telling its readers they “are RIGHT to be angry about illegal immigration”, as he did recently, we know who McSweeney’s talking to.

For some of Labour’s modern constituency, the McSweeney turn is viewed as betrayal. The public sector is their people; institutions are there to be preserved, not flattened. And when it comes to Starmer’s welfare reforms and maintenance of the two-child benefit cap – that’s not Labour behaviour. There’s a reason they’re called “Tory cuts”.

But viewed from the bloody crossroads where Fleet Street and Whitehall meet, British political history isn’t that straightforward. Sneering at Michael Foot’s advocacy for the Falklands War in Iron Britannia, Anthony Barnett spoke of “Daily Express socialism”. Linking Foot’s invective against Leopoldo Galtieri to his days on the Express during the Second World War, Barnett’s aside captures a tradition that is vivid in Labour Party history. It is patriotic yet unafraid of class warfare; it’s redistributive, but cheerful about defence spending; and it interprets public opinion instead of trying to patronise it. McSweeney, for instance, is mindful of polling showing the two-child benefit cap, loathed by Labour MPs, is popular among voters.

With the ascendancy of McSweeney’s Labour Party, we are seeing this Labour tradition in its 21st-century form. This is the age of Daily Mail socialism. And its enemies are as easily personified as its Middle England constituents. McSweeney again: “Why should Labour be the party of the judges? Why should we be the party of the BBC?” For the parts of the left that turned Brenda Hale into an anti-Brexit hero, for the public-sector workers who reliably vote Labour, such talk will seem heretical.

This is the most potentially transformative part of what was once called the Starmer project. McSweeney accepts the criticisms of progressives as his premises. The left, he believes, has abandoned “its people”; it no longer speaks the national demotic; it must accept the ambient social conservatism in British culture if it is to achieve its goals. Reorienting Labour around these axioms might be seen as McSweeney’s historic mission – copy of the Mail folded under his arm. But in a Labour Party of declining popularity, the question for its strategist remains (in the unreconstructed language of the Morning Lark) : who are the Labour Party’s true wankers? And can one bunch be so easily exchanged for another?

[See also: Putin’s endgame]

Edited Friday at 15:48 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 17,092]

Latest Israeli airstrikes kill 100 Palestinians -mostly children at school

The attack on the school in the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City has been branded a "heinous massacre"

Israel’s military said the stepped-up offensive is intended to pressure Hamas and eventually expel the militant group, stressing it was a "Hamas command and control centre" in the Gaza Strip. 

 Israel gave the same reason — striking Hamas militants in a "command and control centre" — for attacking a United Nations building used as a shelter on Wednesday, killing at least 17 people.

AP Press

 

The UN was set up after WW2 to protect the same people committing genocide now

[Vesper 29,450]

I was a British tourist trying to leave America. Then I was detained, shackled and sent to an immigration detention centre

Graphic artist Rebecca Burke was on the trip of a lifetime. But as she tried to leave the US she was stopped, interrogated and branded an illegal alien by ICE. Now back home, she tells others thinking of going to Trump’s America: don’t do it

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/05/i-was-a-british-tourist-trying-to-leave-america-then-i-was-detained-shackled-and-sent-to-an-immigration-detention-centre

Just before the graphic artist Rebecca Burke left Seattle to travel to Vancouver, Canada, on 26 February, she posted an image of a rough comic to Instagram. “One part of travelling that I love is seeing glimpses of other lives,” read the bubble in the first panel, above sketches of cosy homes: crossword puzzle books, house plants, a lit candle, a steaming kettle on a gas stove. Burke had seen plenty of glimpses of other lives over the six weeks she had been backpacking in the US. She had been travelling on her own, staying on homestays free of charge in exchange for doing household chores, drawing as she went. For Burke, 28, it was absolute freedom.

Within hours of posting that drawing, Burke got to see a much darker side of life in America, and far more than a glimpse. When she tried to cross into Canada, Canadian border officials told her that her living arrangements meant she should be travelling on a work visa, not a tourist one. They sent her back to the US, where American officials classed her as an illegal alien. She was shackled and transported to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centre, where she was locked up for 19 days – even though she had money to pay for a flight home, and was desperate to leave the US.

Burke had arrived in the US during the Biden administration, only to become one of 32,809 people to be arrested by Ice during the first 50 days of Donald Trump’s presidency. Since February, several young foreign nationals have been incarcerated in Ice detention centres for seemingly little reason and held for weeks, including Germans Lucas Sielaff, Fabian Schmidt and Jessica Brösche. (Brösche, 26, spent more than a month in detention, including eight days in solitary confinement.) Unlike these other cases, Burke had been trying to leave the US, rather than enter it, when she was detained for nearly three weeks.

I had been following news of Burke’s trip since she arrived in the US on 7 January. To me and my family, Burke is Becky, our neighbour and, for two and a half years, the person who took care of my kids after school. Her London home was only five doors down from us, but we met online, through a website that matches families with people offering childcare. Becky spent her mornings as a graphic artist and comic-book editor, and her afternoons collecting my son and daughter from primary school and entertaining them back at my place, making them snacks and refereeing their squabbles. Best of all, she drew with them. When my daughter turned seven, she asked if she could have a comic-making party; all her friends went home with little zines Becky had helped them make. We felt so lucky to have her in our lives.

Two years ago, Becky went to San Francisco for two weeks on a Workaway placement, staying in a family home free of charge in exchange for sweeping floors and walking the dog. Last August, she used Workaway again, in Switzerland. The internet was opening up the possibility of another life for her – one where she could see the world on a shoestring. In September, Becky told me she was going to leave London in January to go travelling on her own. We were sad to see her go, but I was full of admiration for her; I wish I had been as bold and free in my 20s. We threw her a farewell party just before Christmas; everyone cried. I kept up with news of her travels on Instagram, and there were regular postcards and WhatsApps: pictures of the tattoo she had got in Portland; a video she filmed of herself on a forest walk. She told me she had seen bald eagles and woodpeckers, deer and seals. And then, on 26 February, everything went silent.

Becky wasn’t someone who liked to be immersed in global news. But, even if she had been, she could never have foreseen what would happen to her. She booked her plane ticket six months ago, while pundits were still predicting a close race for the presidency, or a Kamala Harris victory. Her story gives a glimpse of what America has become since then.

---

I meet up with Becky at her parents’ house, in Monmouthshire, six days after she arrived back in the UK. After so long in detention, she wants to spend as much as possible in the sunshine, so we sit in the garden while their dog – a cocker spaniel named Mr Bojangles – runs circles around us. Becky is much paler than the person my family knew so well. Her eyes are hollower.

She began her trip with a stopover in Iceland, taking in the northern lights, going on to spend three nights in a hostel in New York City. Having already stayed in San Francisco on a Workaway placement, she didn’t feel she had anything to hide when she landed in New York. She would have told the border official her plans in full had he asked about them, she tells me. But he didn’t.

The homestays were a big part of the appeal of her trip. “I really liked becoming part of these other families. You don’t get placed so firmly in the community if you’re going to a hotel that’s sterile and separate.” Her first placement was three weeks with a household just outside Portland. Becky would “destroy dandelions from their lawn” and cook meals; her hosts took her on day trips, including an overnight stay at the seaside. They drove her to her next homestay, which was in Portland itself. Becky’s second host took her on forest hikes. “She knew every single plant, every single bird call. It was like having a personal tour guide,” Becky beams. “It was incredible. I thought, this is going too well, I’m having too much fun here.”

Both her hosts had been worried about how the US was changing under Trump. “I’m hearing so many scary stories about Ice raids and passports being detained,” Becky WhatsApp’d me on 8 February. Her first host had a transgender friend whose passport had been seized after she tried to change the name on it. But Becky felt like a spectator to it all. “I was worried on their behalf – an abstract worry and concern for others – rather than for myself. Because, I thought, I’m getting out of here.”

On 26 February, Becky boarded a Greyhound coach for the three-hour ride from Seattle to Vancouver. She was due to spend two months in the home of a divorced father who wanted help with meal prep and laundry during the one week out of every two that his kids lived with him. Becky had never been to Canada before and was looking forward to this part of her trip. She sat at the back of the coach, listening to a comedy podcast, watching the world flash by.

She wasn’t thinking about the dismal state of US-Canada relations when she handed her passport to the Canadian border official. He asked what she was planning to do in Canada. Travel, she replied. He asked where she was staying. Living with a man and his family, she said. He asked how she knew him. Becky said they had met on Workaway, and that she would be helping out around the house. The official told her they needed to research what Workaway was. He told Becky’s coach driver to leave without her.

Workaway warns users that they “will need the correct visa for any country that you visit”, and that it is the user’s responsibility to get one, but it doesn’t stipulate what the correct visa is for the kind of arrangements it facilitates in any given country. Becky had always travelled with a tourist visa in the past – including to the US in 2022 – without any problems. She checked that work visas were only required for paid work in Canada. She had had months to plan her trip, and would have applied for a work visa if it was necessary, she says.

But the Canadian officials told Becky they’d determined she needed a work visa. She could apply for one from the US and come back, they said. Two officers escorted her to the American side of the border. They talked to the US officials. Becky doesn’t know what was said.

After six hours of waiting – and watching dozens of people being refused entry to the US and made to return to Canada – Becky began to feel frightened. Then she was called into an interrogation room, and questioned about what she had been doing during her seven weeks in the US. Had she been paid? Was there a contract? Would she have lost her accommodation if she could no longer provide services? Becky answered no to everything. She was a tourist, she said.

An hour later, Becky was handed a transcript of her interview to sign. She was alone, with no legal advice. “It was really long, loads of pages.” As she flicked through it, she saw the officer had summarised everything she told him about what she had been doing in the US as just “work in exchange for accommodation”. “I remember thinking, I should ask him to edit that.” But the official was impatient and irritable, she says, and she was exhausted and dizzy – she hadn’t eaten all day. “I just thought, if I sign this, I’ll be free. And I didn’t want to stay there any longer.” So she signed.

Then she was told she had violated her tourist visa by working in the US. They took her fingerprints, seized her phone and bags, cut the laces off her trainers, frisked her, and put her in a cell. “I heard the door lock, and I instantly threw up.”

At 11pm, Becky was allowed to call her family. Her father asked what was going to happen next. “I looked at the officer and he said, ‘We’re going to take you to a facility where you’ll wait for your flight. You’ll be there one or two days – just while we get you on the next flight home.’”

---

Becky was shackled and put into the back of a van. “I had no idea where we were going. It was just bumping around in darkness with handcuffs on.” At 2.30am, she arrived at the Ice facility in Tacoma, Washington. She was made to change into standard-issue underwear, a yellow top and trousers. Officers took away all her personal belongings, measured her height and weight, made her pose for a mugshot, and assigned her an “A” number (short for “alien”). Whenever she asked the people processing her arrival how long she would be detained for, they told her they couldn’t help: they worked for GEO, the private company contracted to run the facility, and not Ice, the government body that would decide her fate.

At 5.30am, she was taken to the dorm that she was to share with 103 other women: a massive room filled with metal tables, benches and bunk beds, some cells around the perimeter, and a row of payphones, “like a hospital mixed with a canteen”. It was bathed in bright halogen light that Becky would come to learn would always be on, albeit slightly dimmed between 11.30pm and 5.30am. Becky’s bunk was on a mezzanine level.

 

Burke’s sketch of her bunk in the detention centre. Illustration: RE Burke

All Becky wanted to do was sleep, but instead she headed to the payphones to make the one free call she had been told she was entitled to, to tell her family how to put money into her inmate account. “In my head, this was a thing I had to do immediately, otherwise I’d be stuck without a way to communicate with the outside world.” She gave her parents her A number, and they tried to reassure her. It’s just one or two days, they repeated to her. A horrible experience. But over soon.

As soon as the call ended, Becky went on one of the detention centre iPads, which had apps allowing inmates to send messages to Ice and check the balance on their inmate account. “I sent a message to Ice straight away saying: ‘I am a tourist. I was just backpacking. I have not outstayed my visa. I’ve only been in America one month and two weeks. I don’t know why I’m here. I want to go home. Please can you help?’” She frantically refreshed the app to see if her account had been credited. (It took longer than expected, because funds can only be transferred into accounts for “illegal aliens” from within the US. Becky’s father, Paul, discovered he could only do it through an American friend.) “I was seeing no money arrive, and I was getting really upset thinking I told them the wrong A number.”

As she sobbed holding the iPad, Becky found herself surrounded by other inmates who wanted to comfort her. A woman called Lucy offered to let Becky use her phone credit if money hadn’t appeared in the account within a few hours. Rosa, a Mexican woman who spoke barely any English and had already been detained for 11 months, offered Becky a Pot Noodle she had been able to buy from the commissary, the shop where they could purchase luxuries. At 8am, Becky finally curled up in her bed to sleep, with Rosa praying in Spanish in the bunk below.

Becky quickly learned the monotonous rhythms of the detention centre. Wake-up time was 5.30am. Breakfast – which for Becky was cold potato and a sachet of peanut butter, the only vegan option – was at 6am. Lunch – black beans and more cold potato – was anytime between 11.30am and 2pm. Four times a day, inmates had to sit on their bunks for an hour so they could be counted by staff. Dinner frequently arrived after 8pm. They were often ravenous between meals, which was why the commissary was so vital. It was also the only place they could access shampoo, deodorant, nail clippers and anti-shank toothbrushes.

On her first day in the facility, Becky asked for a scrap of paper and a pen, and began to draw the inmates on the table next to her. She was immediately inundated with portrait requests. A Mexican woman called Lopez, who had a photo of her children stored on one of the iPads, told Becky she would buy her some paper and colouring pencils from the commissary if Becky drew her kids. She soon became the dorm’s unofficial artist-in-residence, with women huddling around the dirty mirrors to make themselves look presentable before they sat for her. They would decorate their cells with Becky’s drawings, or send them to their families. Lopez declared herself Becky’s manager. “She kept saying, ‘Becky, you need to ask for stuff in exchange. Ask for popcorn.’ And I’d be like, ‘Lopez, I don’t need anything.’ I thought, I’m here briefly, you’re stuck here a long time. I’m not going to take your food away from you.”

The majority of the women were from Latin American countries, but some were from India, China, Iran, Afghanistan and Gaza. “Most of them were asylum seekers, but there was this handful of new people who had come in recently who did not know why they were here.” Lewelyn joined the dorm a few days after Becky. She had just returned from visiting her family in the Philippines; she had been living in the US since 1976, working as a lab technician at the University of Washington hospital’s cancer centre. “She’d had a visa issue that had been resolved many years ago, but now it was flagging on the system again.” Kseniia, a Russian woman who had been working for two years in a California nail salon, had permission to work in the US but was handcuffed while waiting for her husband to come out of an Ice interview. “She was so confused. She kept saying to me, ‘I’ve got a work permit.’”

Burke’s sketches of some of her fellow detainees. Illustration: RE Burke

 

There were other tourists, too. Bana, from Romania, was on holiday in Canada and visited Peace Arch park, on the international boundary between the US and Canada. She told Becky she had been taking selfies with her husband when a US border official told her they had strayed into American territory without the right visa and took her into custody.

Becky had arrived in the detention centre on a Thursday. She soon realised she would not be out of it before the end of the weekend. No one ever replied to the message she sent to Ice on the iPad; she found out the Ice officer assigned to her case had gone on annual leave. The following Monday, Paul contacted the Foreign Office in London, and the British consulate in San Francisco. “They were doing the diplomatic bit,” he tells me. “But, after seven days, I could see it wasn’t really working. My perception is the British consulate couldn’t get Ice people to respond to them. There was no end in sight.”

---

After Becky had been incarcerated for more than 10 days, Paul decided to go to the media. A quiet, unassuming man, he found himself live on Newsnight, Sky News and Good Morning Britain. Becky made it to every national newspaper in the UK, and had coverage in US press, too. Hours after her story broke, she was visited by an Ice officer who told her she was now “at the top of the pile” to be processed. Four days later, on a Thursday, another Ice officer came to the facility to tell Becky her flight had been booked for the following Monday.

Becky’s face began to appear in the newspapers they received at the facility. At one point, her face flashed up on one of the three TV screens they had in her dorm. “Everyone clapped. After that, a few people came up to me and said, ‘Can you put me on TV, too?’” She feels very guilty that she was able to leave. “I was aware that it was from a major position of privilege that the press listened to this story. I was a British tourist, I had these images of my trip on Instagram, and I had contacts with journalists, so I was very lucky. And I wanted the same thing that Ice wanted, which was for me to go home.”

At lunchtime on 17 March, officers came into the dorm, barked Becky’s name and told her to get ready to go. She had hidden some of her drawings among her official paperwork – her signed transcript and the document declaring her an illegal alien – in the hope she could smuggle them out. She wasn’t allowed to tell her family she was on her way home, but one of the women offered to ring her parents to notify them. Becky was shackled at the ankles, wrists and waist, and then made to shuffle out into a van.

“When I got close to the airport, I felt really relieved and also overwhelmed, watching people with their suitcases, people going on holiday. It was a bit like whiplash – reality whiplash. Did that just happen?”

But her ordeal was not over. She was taken to the basement of Seattle-Tacoma international airport for a security check. While every item in her bag was swabbed and dismantled, she was subjected to a full body search. “I was in this very loud, weird, industrial space with pipes and conveyor belts and lights and sirens, being told to open my legs. I was silently crying, watching all my stuff being torn apart as someone else was searching every crevice of me.” She boarded the plane before any of the other passengers. “I found my seat, threw my bags on it, and went into the toilet and sobbed in the cubicle, with the British Airways classical music surrounding me.”

---

Six days after she landed at Heathrow, Becky still sleeps with her lamp on. She is enjoying home-cooked food and long showers, but feels guilty for resting in comfort when she knows her friends are still incarcerated. “I’m thinking of them every day,” she tells me. She is working on a comic that will tell the story of what happened to her, and the women she shared 19 days with, based on the drawings, notes and official documents she managed to take out of the detention centre.

Becky still doesn’t know why she was incarcerated for so long. She suspects it might be because Ice is simply overwhelmed. “Maybe border security have been pressured to prove they’re stepping up.” She shrugs. “It did feel like they wanted to get me from the moment I was walked to the American side.” On 4 March, the White House issued a statement  celebrating how “Ice arrests of illegal immigrants have surged 627%” during Trump’s first month in office.

Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian woman who was detained by Ice for two weeks, says while the private companies who own the facilities are run for profit, there’s no incentive to get people out quickly. But in the era of Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency (Doge), it seems counterintuitive for public money to be deliberately wasted on detaining illegal aliens with the will and means to return home.

Trump’s border tsar, Tom Homan, promised “shock and awe” from day one of his administration. Perhaps Becky’s incarceration was political theatre – or performative cruelty. Whatever the reason, in Trump’s America, a tourist who makes a mistake can be locked up, seemingly indefinitely.

The deportation paper Becky signed bans her from the US for the next 10 years. Paul tells me they are going to try to appeal it, but Becky says America isn’t the country she thought it was. Her advice to anyone planning to travel to the US is simply not to go. “First, because of the danger of what could happen to you. And, secondly, do you really want to give your money to this country right now?”

She has emerged from the experience with new eyes. “I was naive to think that what was going on in the world, or at the border, wouldn’t affect me,” she tells me, her arms folded across her chest. She had believed if she was honest and acted in good faith she would be insulated from harm, but now thinks that might have been naive, too. “If I’d lied, I’d be on holiday in Canada right now.”

[Vesper 29,450]

Gaza Death Revisionists Are The New Holocaust Deniers

There are considerable similarities in the arguments used by the two groups.

https://www.readthemaple.com/gaza-death-revisionists-are-the-new-holocaust-deniers/

In January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) released an order effectively stating that some of Israel’s actions in Gaza may amount to genocide. Many others, including Amnesty International, The Lemkin Institute and a United Nations Special Committee, have already concluded that Israel has committed genocide. 

These findings have not been accepted by Israel or its supporters. Instead, they’ve engaged in genocide denial. In doing so, they’ve replicated many of the sorts of arguments used by Holocaust deniers, and for similar reasons.

I won’t bother addressing cruder examples of Gaza genocide denial here, such as that Gazans allegedly look too well fed or happy, or that Israel could have killed all Gazans if it wanted to. Instead, I’ll focus on the sort of denial that has entered mainstream Canadian media, presented as serious news and analysis.

---

It’s been impossible for all but the most deranged of Israel’s supporters to claim no Palestinian civilians are being killed in Gaza. As such, they’ve sought to distort/downplay what has happened, which if done when discussing the Holocaust is considered a form of genocide denial punishable by up to two years of prison in Canada.

Mainstream sources on Holocaust denial, including the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), state that disputing the fact that around six million Jewish people were killed is a form of Holocaust denial. This method of denial also happens to be how mainstream deniers generally try to dispute findings of genocide in Gaza.

They do so in three main ways: attacking the source of the most commonly cited death count, arguing certain types of deaths should not be counted and using incomplete data to try to cast doubt on the total number of fatalities.

The Source

Some outlets explicitly claim that Gaza’s Ministry of Health’s death count is intentionally misleading because Hamas is the government. They point to Hamas’s ideology and status as a designated terrorist entity in Canada to say anything coming from it is suspicious. In doing so, they try to take advantage of polls finding widespread Canadian disapproval of Hamas. Other outlets that attempt to be more subtle effectively do the same by adding some version of ‘Hamas-run health ministry’ when mentioning the source of the death count in order to signal to readers that it’s supposedly politicized and untrustworthy. This practice is never seen elsewhere. And it’s not justified here either given that the ministry is made up of a wide-range of Palestinian medical professionals, who deny their findings are dictated by Hamas.

Holocaust deniers have historically done the same thing by claiming that the overall death count and particular cases of mass slaughter or death camps were inflated or even staged by the Allies. 

In both cases, the deniers also claim that the party/parties behind death counts want to make the perpetrators look bad, and that therefore their numbers are intentionally inflated. In the case of Gaza, they’ll point to Hamas’s adversarial relationship with Israel. With regard to the Holocaust, the Museum of Tolerance states, “Holocaust deniers argue that Nazi Germany was the victim of a conspiracy, contrived by the Allies to brand Nazi Germany the villain of World War II. They maintain that the U.S. and Great Britain concocted wild atrocity stories about the Nazis to cover up their own war crimes.”

This line of attack effectively argues that the only victims and opponents of genocide that can be trusted are those who do not have an adversarial relationship with the party responsible for the killing. In practice, this means no victims or opponents of genocide can be trusted. 

Regardless, the numbers in both cases have been found to be trustworthy by third-party sources.

Many independent organizations have long track records of working with Gaza’s health ministry to monitor mortalities, and have consistently found its numbers to be trustworthy. In October 2024, Le Monde reported, “Like most humanitarian organizations, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights considers the government source to be reliable. ‘We have been working with the Palestinian Ministry of Health for many years, particularly during previous conflicts. Our assessments are very close to theirs, and in some cases, we even had higher figures,’ its spokesperson assured Le Monde. The assessments carried out by the UN over the last 15 years are more or less similar to the ministry’s figures.”

Academic journals have concluded that there is no evidence of inflated mortality counts. And as the UN commissioner’s spokesperson noted, some have estimated mortality counts far higher than what the ministry has reported. For example, a January 2025 study from The Lancet estimated that the ministry actually under-reported deaths by about 41 per cent from October 2023 to June 2024.

The Nature Of Deaths

Some outlets have alleged that many of Gaza’s dead weren’t killed by Israeli violence, but succumbed to other causes such as starvation, disease and existing medical conditions, and that therefore their deaths shouldn’t be counted. 

Holocaust deniers have done the same thing, pointing to the spread of diseases in concentration camps to claim that even whatever false number of Jewish dead they put forward can’t be attributed solely or even primarily to the Nazis.

If this logic were to be accepted in the case of the Holocaust, it would mean that the official death count would drop significantly as the Holocaust Encyclopedia states that between 800,000 to one million Jewish people “were murdered through deliberate privation, disease, brutal treatment, and arbitrary acts of violence.” It would also mean that perhaps the most well-known victim of the Holocaust, Anne Frank, would not be counted as such.

Of course, this logic should not be and is not accepted, with reputable organizations correctly pointing out that the Nazis were responsible for creating the conditions that led to the spread of these diseases and their enhanced lethality. 

The same is true in Gaza, given that even in relatively normal periods it has been described as an open-air prison occupied and controlled by Israel, which deliberately inflicts conditions to reduce the quality of life for its inhabitants. Of course, things have gotten exponentially worse since Oct. 7, 2023.

A wide-range of international organizations place the blame on Israel for these conditions. For example, Amnesty International concluded, “Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death.” 

Incomplete Data

Some of those attempting to undermine the Gaza death toll will argue that the Ministry of Health has not yet provided fully complete data. For example, as of September 2024 it had provided the name, age, gender and ID numbers of 34,344 dead Gazans, and not the entire 41,957 in its official count at the time. 

Holocaust deniers have done the same thing by pointing to the fact that not all victims have been identified or that some of those that were named were named in error. 

Again, no reputable source accepts the claim that the Holocaust death toll should be lowered from where it stands because not every single person that was killed has been identified by name. This is for good reason. And the same should be true in Gaza, which becomes especially evident when examining why the ministry has had trouble collecting some data at this point.

In the aforementioned study from The Lancet, the authors write, “The escalation of Israeli military ground operations and attacks on health-care facilities severely disrupted the latter’s ability to record deaths electronically. These challenges compelled the [Ministry of Health] to rely on less structured data collection modalities, particularly when hospitals were under siege or experiencing telecommunication blockades. This might have led to incomplete and geographically biased reporting, as seen in other conflict zones where prolonged warfare complicates casualty tracking.” 

The study notes that these deficiencies mean the reported number of deaths is actually lower, not higher, than what the real one will be.

---

The similarities between Gaza genocide and Holocaust deniers extend to their motivations for denial and the reasoning for their belief that victims are lying. 

The Museum of Tolerance states, “Most Holocaust deniers want to wash away the stain of Nazism in an attempt to make Nazism an acceptable political alternative today.” Those who deny the Holocaust are not third-party observers concerned about historical accuracy, but rather have an ideological motivation to distort or deny the truth.

The same is true of those who deny the Gaza genocide. Supporters of Israel recognize that the state being found guilty of genocide would do irreparable harm to its image and further isolate it internationally. In fact, even the ongoing events at the ICJ have done considerable damage. As such, they have a vested interest in denying genocide claims regardless of the facts. This is made especially clear when examining claims from Zionists that not only is the state not guilty of genocide, but it has actually waged a typical or even particularly humane military campaign.

There are also remarkable similarities in why those who deny the Gaza genocide and the Holocaust believe victims are lying.

The Anti-Defamation League states, “Many deniers, drawing on tropes about Jews being greedy and deceitful, claim that Jews invented the Holocaust ‘story’ in order to manipulate global powers and gain support for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.” 

Some of those who deny the Gaza genocide have done the same, arguing that Palestinians are lying or at least exaggerating in order to help gain international support to realize their dream of an independent state and/or to destroy the Israeli one. This view should be treated with the same derision as its Holocaust-denial counterpart, and yet it is instead accepted by some outlets as a serious talking point.

Unlike the Holocaust or any other genocide, the Gaza genocide has been live streamed for an international audience every day since it began, making it impossible to claim the widespread slaughter is not occurring. It’s particularly disturbing, then, that with all of the real-time proof, and decades of careful debunking of Holocaust denial, the mainstream press has entertained these arguments in a new form.

[Vesper 29,450]

South Africa's white Afrikaner separatists want Trump's help to become state

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-africas-white-afrikaner-separatists-want-trumps-help-become-state-2025-04-03/

• Summary

• White Afrikaner separatists want to create breakaway state
• Orania leaders visited US to try to drum up Republican support
• Trump has offered Afrikaners asylum in the United States

ORANIA, South Africa, April 3 (Reuters) - A group of white Afrikaners was so opposed to majority Black rule when apartheid ended some three decades ago that they carved out a separatist enclave, the only town in South Africa where all residents, including menial workers, are white.

 

Now, the residents of Orania - population, 3,000 - in the semi-arid Karoo region want U.S. President Donald Trump to help them become a state.

 

Last week, community leaders from Orania visited the United States seeking recognition as an autonomous entity. South African authorities acknowledge it as a town that can raise local taxes and deliver services.

 

"We wanted to... gain recognition, with the American focus on South Africa now," Orania Movement leader Joost Strydom told Reuters, on a hill strewn with bronzes of past Afrikaner leaders, including from the era of racist white minority rule that was ended by internal resistance and international outrage.

 

The 8,000-hectare settlement is riding an unprecedented wave of support from right-wing Americans for Afrikaner nationalists, who irrevocably lost power when apartheid ended in 1994 and Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first Black president.

 

In New York and Washington the Orania leaders met influencers, think-tanks and low-ranking Republican politicians.

 

"We told them South Africa is such a ... diverse country that it's not a good idea to try and manage it centrally," said Strydom.

 

Three senior Orania officials interviewed by Reuters were vague about the help they sought in the U.S. They said they were not seeking handouts but wanted investment to build houses to keep up with its 15% population growth, infrastructure and energy independence that it has almost half-achieved with solar.

 

Strydom declined to say whether his delegation had contact with the Trump administration. The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

 

South African foreign ministry spokesperson Chrispin Phiri told Reuters: "(Orania's) not... a country. They are subject to the laws of South Africa and ... our constitution."

 

Other Afrikaner nationalist groups have also visited the U.S. to build alliances with overwhelmingly white, Republican audiences, prompting accusations back home that such trips stoke racial tensions.

 

The leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) last week accused Orania's leaders of "destroying the unity of this country", a charge they reject.

'START OF SOMETHING'

Afrikaners are descendants of Dutch settlers who began arriving in the 1600s. They resisted the British Empire in South Africa, but once in charge of the country, they hardened racial segregation using discriminatory laws.

 

 

Orania town sign in front of local shopping centre is pictured in whites-only town of Orania, South Africa, April 1, 2025. REUTERS/Sisipho Skweyiya

 

"There were 17,000 laws on land alone," foreign ministry spokesperson Phiri said. "We had... to reconstruct South Africa into a country that represents all those who live in it."

 

In 1991, as the end of apartheid neared, a group of about 300 Afrikaners acquired Orania, previously an abandoned water project on the muddy Orange River, to create a homeland exclusively for white Afrikaners.

 

"It's the start of something," former Orania Movement leader Carel Boshoff, said of his community, comparing its desire for independence - Orania even uses its own informal currency - to that of Israel, established after World War Two despite stiff resistance from Arabs living in that territory.

 

Boshoff, whose father founded the town and whose grandfather, Hendrick Verwoerd, is widely viewed as the architect of apartheid, dreams of a territory stretching to the west coast nearly 1,000 miles away.

 

Orania's activities are funded through local taxes and donations from supporters and residents.

 

Its leaders were dismayed to find the only solution that anyone in the United States was interested in discussing was U.S. residency, after Trump offered in February to resettle white South African farmers and their families as refugees.

 

"We can't be exporting our people," Boshoff told Reuters beside a framed photo of his late grandfather. "We told them ... 'help us here'," he said.

 

Some U.S. right-wingers have sought to make common cause with Afrikaners in their opposition to diversity policies that aim to empower historically unjustly-treated non-white groups. South Africa's Black empowerment laws have been ridiculed by Trump's South African-born adviser, Elon Musk.

 

Those laws were the reason Hanlie Pieters moved to Orania eight months ago, after 25 years of living in Johannesburg, to become head of marketing for the town's technical college.

 

"Our children ... what opportunities will they have?" Pieters said, bemoaning quotas for Black workers, while trainee plumbers and electricians honed their skills in a shed nearby.

 

A third of all South Africans are out of work, most of them poor Blacks.

 

One such unemployed man, 49-year-old Bongani Zitha, said he thought "people in Orania... are doing very well" compared to many South Africans. "So many people looking for opportunities. It's a struggle," he sighed.

 

Zitha, who has lived in a corrugated shanty town in Soweto with no piped water or sewage since 1995, said at least the people of Orania have "rights to health, education, everything".

 

And unlike himself under white minority rule, he added, Orania residents are free to live wherever they want.

[Fernando 6,534]

Remember project 2025? 

The whole agenda that Trump was following. 

Well it seems like they no longer agree with trump ideas on tariff. 

Like I said people follow Trump for the conservative value but many are turning against him when you touch the economy.

Economy is the most important thing for most people weather liberal or conservative. 

 

[Vesper 29,450]

20 minutes ago, Fernando said:

people follow Trump for the conservative value

he is not a 'conservative'

he is a race-baiting, ultra grifting psychopathic narcissist with a god complex

he is the least intellectually curious President the US has ever had, he hates deep, deliberative thought and knowledge

he is staggering lazy, staggeringly short attention-spanned

he is 100 per cent transactional (as long as he thinks the transaction will benefit him) in a carnival barker sort of way

he has no core political philosophy, 'conservative' or otherwise, other than TRUMP FIRST, TRUMP LAST, TRUMP ALWAYS, and has chosen hate, division, pain, retribution, perpetual victimhood, grievance, and chaos as his chief tools of conduct

[Vesper 29,450]

Russell Brand's rape charges expose the devil's bargain between MAGA and "Christian" celebrities

There's no depravity the religious right won't overlook — as long as a famous person validates their politics

https://www.salon.com/2025/04/05/russell-brands-rape-charges-expose-the-devils-bargain-between-maga-and-christian-celebrities/

On Friday, just shy of a year since Russell Brand was showily baptized in the River Thames, the UK's Metropolitian Police charged the British comedian-turned-MAGA-influencer with one count of rape, one count of oral rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent exposure.

At the time of his 2024 conversion, Brand declared that he had repented of his past and that he would "acknowledge that I am in a battle against myself." A few days before this week's charges, he told Sean Hannity of Fox News that he had "surrendered to a higher purpose." So, for people outside the MAGA bubble, it's a little strange to hear Brand react to the charges by rejecting accountability, instead denying the charges with conspiracy theories so outlandish it's hard to buy that he believes any of it.

"We are very fortunate, in a way, to live in a time when there's so little trust in the British government," Brand asserted in a response video on X. "We know the law has become a kind of weapon to be used against people, institutions and sometimes entire nations that will not accept and tolerate levels of corruption that are unprecedented." Even while he insisted that he now lives in "the light of the Lord," Brand insinuated that he's the victim of a corrupt conspiracy to frame him.

Christianity emphasizes redemption, making it an attractive framework for a celebrity needing to rehab a bad image.

The likelier explanation for the charges is that there's just a lot of evidence against Brand. A collaboration between The Times, The Sunday Times, and Channel 4, conducted over years, produced exhaustively documented allegations of rape and other sexual abuses. They spoke with hundreds of sources, including four accusers. They collected medical records, texts, emails, and internal documents from employers, all showing a pattern of alleged sexual abuse that is often frightening in its violence. The report came out in September 2023. Shortly thereafter, Brand was kicked off YouTube. He then swiftly joined the MAGA-affiliated Rumble network. In the next few months, he moved to the U.S. and got baptized, fully rebranding himself as a right-wing Christian influencer. 

This timeline doesn't seem to have given Brand's new MAGA audience a single moment's doubt that he might have ulterior motives. On the contrary, his fans encouraged the conspiracy theory that paints him as a political prisoner and the charges as "a political prosecution," as Charlie Kirk complained. 

"We know you’re innocent, Russell and this is clearly all politically motivated," insisted one fan. "They're willing to sacrifice Russell though because it will make others stay silent," said another. My favorite, though, might be the guy who replied, " It wasn't until you decided to clean up your life and find faith and peace that they decided you must be removed."

This, of course, gets the timeline backwards. The accusations have been surfacing since 2006, when Australian singer Dannii Minogue first spoke out about Brand being a "vile predator." The big Times exposé came out in late 2023, but Brand didn't "find faith" until the spring of 2024. Not like any of the other excuses for Brand make sense. The MAGA followers talk a lot about how "they" are doing this to Brand, but it's forever unclear who "they" are. The journalists? Police? Four alleged victims? Hundreds of witnesses? Crown prosecutors? But MAGA would rather believe that hundreds of "they" are conspiring to take down a has-been comedian than accept the likelier explanation: Brand found Jesus just in time to get a new income stream and source of attention and validation, one he would have never settled for when he still had access to mainstream audiences. 

Religion professor Bradley Onishi, host of the "Spirit and Power" podcast, pointed out to Salon that there is "a long history of the evangelical subculture and the conservative Christian subcultures wanting to find mainstream legitimacy" by grabbing onto any celebrities they can claim are one of them. In the 90s and early 2000s, Onishi noted, evangelicals hyped everyone from U2 and Creed to Jessica Simpson and Katy Perry as "crossover Christian figures" who could sell the larger world on the idea that Christianity is hip and cool. 

Brand, however, represents a disturbing twist to this saga: the willingness, in the era of Donald Trump, of right-wing Christians to scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel to get this validation.

Not that many of them will engage with the actual allegations against Brand, lest their view of him as a godly man get disturbed, but frankly, the details are shocking even in the #MeToo era. One alleged victim said she was 16 when she first had a sexual relationship with the 31-year-old Brand. She says he orally raped her so violently that she started to choke, only escaping by punching him the stomach. Others report that Brand threatened them if they spoke out, a likelier explanation for the delayed reporting than a shadowy conspiracy by the all-powerful "they" against Brand.

Brand belongs to a long line of celebrities who, because of scandal or simply falling out of fashion, have discovered the cash and ego-fluffing benefits of converting to the Church of MAGA. Roseanne Barr's TV comeback got derailed because of racist online ranting, so nowadays she spends her time on Tucker Carlson's show talking about her "conversation going with God." Carlson himself was a MAGA figurehead in good standing, but since losing his Fox News gig, he's taken to talking about demon possession and other topics that perform well in the social media feeds of the Christian right. Tattoo superstar Kat Von D got her Sephora makeup line canceled after anti-vaccination statements and marrying a dude with a swastika tattoo. Now she gets glowing write-ups in right-wing media about her conversion to Christianity. Mark Wahlberg got a whole lot louder about being a devout Catholic shortly after stories about his arrests for hate crimes resurfaced. 

Christianity emphasizes redemption, making it an attractive framework for a celebrity needing to rehab a bad image. In theory, however, there is supposed to be repentance before redemption. But this is the era of Trumpian Christianity, so skipping the part where you say you're sorry is optional. After all, Trump is treated not just as a fellow Christian, but something closer to a savior figure by the religious right. He has never said he's sorry to the victims of his fraud, or to the people he's lied about, or to E. Jean Carroll, who a civil jury found him liable for sexually assaulting. On the contrary, Trump's response to people he's harmed is to escalate the abuse if they speak out against him, which is why Carroll won a second defamation suit against him. Being a bully is admired in the MAGA movement. In MAGA Christianity, actual repentance would be dismissed as "woke." No wonder it was the perfect landing spot for Russell Brand. 

[Vesper 29,450]

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There Are No Adults in the Room

A brief note on the inherent media problem with covering galactically stupid policies.

https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/there-are-no-adults-in-the-room

On Thursday, as the stock market nosedived from the Trump administration’s stupid, unthinking, destructive, error-ridden tariff policies, a respected reporter from a well-known media outlet pinged me for an interview. The journalist was interested in the roles that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick might have played in the formulation of Trump’s foreign economic policy.

As we started talking, I realized that the reporter and I were starting from rather different premises. The reporter was thinking about the story as how one would cover a significant policy pronouncement in a normal administration: Who is the president listening to on policy? What are the possible faultlines within the administration? Who are the key power brokers? What was their decision-making process?

And I was thinking: there was no process. There are no power brokers. On questions of trade, there’s Donald Trump’s whims, his collection of clown car enablers, and maybe an intern who plugs some things into ChatGPT. That’s pretty much it.

I know why both of us were thinking the way we were. For reporters, looking for power brokers makes sense even when even when the policies themselves seem inexplicable. Bad policy outcomes can nonetheless be explained by rational actors pursuing their interests. Maybe it’s the result of powerful interest groups pushing their narrow interests. On occasion, bureaucratic politics are responsible. Sometimes bad policies are the result of powerful ideas that percolate within particular groups — you know, ideas like “risk assessment is bad” or “democracy is overrated.” This is slightly more unusual but it’s certainly conceivable.

These narrative are familiar to any journalist, or anyone who has taken Political Science 101. And in their own way they are cognitively comforting. They suggest that even when the government enacts strange or counterproductive policies, there is an underlying logic and structure to what is going on. Furthermore, causal stories like interest group pressure or groupthink also suggest how bad decisions might get corrected. If, say, financial markets start to nosedive, then policymakers will react to such negative feedback with policy corrections.

So I get where the reporter is coming from. It is soothing in its rationality.

As someone who has studied Donald Trump’s decision-making style at great length, however, I come at questions about Trump’s second-term advisors from a different perspective. The key to understanding Trump’s second term is to understand three basic premises:

1. Trump has eliminated all executive branch guardrails;

2. Trump has appointed only sycophants to serve him this time around;

3. Trump’s policy instincts are the most immature, retrograde opinions out there.

Think this is an exaggeration? Let’s take a gander at Natalie Allison, Jeff Stein, Cat Zakrzewski and Michael Birnbaum’s Washington Post story, “Inside President Trump’s whirlwind decision to blow up global trade.” It’s pretty damning:

The president’s decision to impose tariffs on trillions of dollars of goods reflects two key factors animating his second term in office: His resolve to follow his own instincts even if it means bucking long-standing checks on the U.S. presidency, and his choice of a senior team that enables his defiance of those checks….

Inside and outside the White House, advisers say Trump is unbowed even as the world reels from the biggest increase in trade hostilities in a century. They say Trump is unperturbed by negative headlines or criticism from foreign leaders. He is determined to listen to a single voice — his own — to secure what he views as his political legacy.

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,” said a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f---. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”….

The president’s team mounted remarkably little dissent to a sweeping overhaul of trade policy, according to interviews with more than a dozen people inside and outside the administration, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private talks….

“In their recruiting process, they made sure it would only be people who were totally Trumpers, because in the first administration there was a lot of trouble with people quitting, writing bad books, things like that,” said Wilbur Ross, who served as commerce secretary during Trump’s first term. “The people now have been confirmed as true Trumpers.”

Trump seems to believe that a more loyal White House team is ultimately a more effective one. But as the now-unrestrained president's ideas on trade wreak havoc on the global economy, even some of his allies have expressed deepening confusion and alarm. Two days after the momentous rollout, financial markets continue to reel.

The very existence of this story is due to some staffers covering their ass to reporters. But make no mistake, it is solid evidence of U.S. foreign economic policy being executed by presidential whim without any functional policymaking process.

Paul Krugman explains why the stupidity matters:

You might be tempted to dismiss complaints about the policy process as elitist snobbery. But credibility is a crucial part of policymaking. Businesses can’t plan if they have no idea what to expect next. Foreign governments won’t make policies that help America if they don’t expect us to respond rationally.

So what do we know about how the Trumpists arrived at their tariff plan? Trump claimed that the tariff rates imposed on different countries reflected their policies, but James Surowiecki soon noted that the tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess….

The key point is that Trump isn’t really trying to accomplish economic goals. This should all be seen as a dominance display, intended to shock and awe people and make them grovel, rather than policy in the normal sense.

Again, I’m not being snobbish here. When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this?

….I’d like to imagine that Trump will admit that he messed up, cancel the whole thing, and start over. But he won’t, because that would spoil the dominance display. Ignorant irresponsibility is part of the message.

Does this mean Trump will not listen to anyone? No it does not. But he is listening to the Laura Loomers of the world far more than the Scott Bessents.

Media rumors are now percolating that Bessent wants out, “because in the last few days he’s really hurting his own credibility and history in the markets.” The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World disagrees: Bessent hurt his own credibility by believing, against all evidence to the contrary, that he would have been able to guide Trump towards less counterproductive policy positions. This further confirms something that Drezner’s World has been articulating for quite some time: Wall Street types do not understand politics and can rationalize with the best of them.

For those readers not on Wall Street, let me summarize the current state of affairs as best as possible. Donald Trump is president. There are no adults in the room to constrain him. We therefore live in uncertain times that will remain uncertain for an extended period of time.

[Vesper 29,450]

 

 

Video Shows Aid Workers Killed in Gaza Under Gunfire Barrage, With Ambulance Lights On

The U.N. has said Israel killed the workers. The video appears to contradict Israel’s version of events, which said the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency signals.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-israel-aid-workers-deaths-video.html

A video, discovered on the cellphone of a paramedic who was found along with 14 other aid workers in a mass grave in Gaza in late March, shows that the ambulances and fire truck that they were traveling in were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.

Officials from the Palestine Red Crescent Society said in a news conference on Friday at the United Nations moderated by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies that they had presented the nearly seven-minute recording, which was obtained by The New York Times, to the U.N. Security Council.

An Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said earlier this week that Israeli forces did not “randomly attack” an ambulance, but that several vehicles “were identified advancing suspiciously” without headlights or emergency signals toward Israeli troops, prompting them to shoot. Colonel Shoshani said earlier in the week that nine of those killed were Palestinian militants.

Israel did not respond to a request for comment on the video in time for the first publication of this article, but on Saturday, it issued a statement to The Times saying that the episode was “under thorough examination.”

“All claims, including the documentation circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation,” it said.

The Times obtained the video from a senior diplomat at the United Nations who asked not to be identified to be able to share sensitive information.

The Times verified the location and timing of the video, which was taken in the southern city of Rafah early on March 23. Filmed from what appears to be the front interior of a moving vehicle, it shows a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck, clearly marked, with headlights and flashing lights turned on, driving south on a road to the north of Rafah in the early morning. The first rays of sun can be seen, and birds are chirping.

The convoy stops when it encounters a vehicle that had veered onto the side of the road — one ambulance had been sent earlier to aid wounded civilians and had come under attack. The new rescue vehicles detour to the side of the road.

Rescue workers, at least two of whom can be seen wearing uniforms, are seen exiting a fire truck and an ambulance marked with the emblem of the Red Crescent and approaching the ambulance derailed to the side.

Then, sounds of intense gunfire break out.

A barrage of gunshots is seen and heard in the video hitting the convoy.

The camera shakes, the video goes dark. But the audio continues for five minutes, and the rat-a-tat of gunfire does not stop. A man says in Arabic that there are Israelis present.

The paramedic filming is heard on the video reciting, over and over, the “shahada,” or a Muslim declaration of faith, which people recite when facing death. “There is no God but God, Muhammad is his messenger,” the paramedic is heard saying. He asks God for forgiveness and says he knows he is going to die.

“Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose — to help people,” he said. “Allahu akbar,” God is great, he says.

In the backdrop, a commotion of voices from distraught aid workers and soldiers shouting commands in Hebrew can be heard. It is not clear what they are saying.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society spokeswoman, Nebal Farsakh, said in an interview from the West Bank city of Ramallah that the paramedic who filmed the video was later found with a bullet in his head in the mass grave. His name has not been disclosed yet because he has relatives living in Gaza concerned about Israeli retaliation, the U.N. diplomat said.

At the news conference, held at the U.N. headquarters, the president of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Dr. Younis Al-Khatib, and his deputy, Marwan Jilani, told reporters that the evidence the society has collected — including the video and audio from the episode, and forensic examination of the bodies — contradicted Israel’s version of events.

The deaths of the aid workers, who went missing on March 23, has drawn international scrutiny and condemnation in recent days. The U.N. and the Palestine Red Crescent said the aid workers were not carrying weapons and posed no threat.

“Their bodies have been targeted from a very close range,” said Dr. Khatib, adding that Israel did not provide information on the missing medics’ whereabouts for days. “They knew exactly where they were because they killed them,” he said. “Their colleagues were in agony, their families were in agony. They kept us for eight days in the dark.”

It took five days after the rescue vehicles came under attack and fell silent for the United Nations and Red Crescent to negotiate with the Israeli military for safe passage to search for the missing people. On Sunday, rescue teams found 15 bodies, most in a shallow mass grave along with their crushed ambulances and a vehicle marked with the U.N. logo.

The area where the convoy stops in the video was captured in a satellite image a few hours later and analyzed by The Times. At that point, the five ambulances and the fire truck had been moved off the road and clustered together.

Two days later, a new satellite image of the area showed the vehicles were apparently buried. Next to disturbed earth are three Israeli military bulldozers and an excavator. Additionally, bulldozers erected earthen barriers on the road in both directions from the mass grave.

One member of the Palestinian Red Crescent is still missing, and Israel has not said whether he is detained or has been killed, Dr. Khatib said.

Dr. Ahmad Dhair, a forensic doctor who examined some of the bodies in Gaza’s Nasser hospital, said four out of the five aid workers he examined were killed by multiple gunshots, including wounds to the head, torso and joints. One paramedic employee of the Red Crescent in the convoy was detained and then released by the Israeli military and provided a witness account of Israeli military shooting at the ambulances, the U.N. and Red Crescent Society said.

Dylan Winder, the representative of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to the U.N., called the incident an outrage and said it represented the single deadliest attack on Red Cross and Red Crescent Society workers anywhere in the world since 2017.

Volker Türk, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the council that an independent investigation must be conducted, and that the episode raises “further concerns over the commission of war crimes by the Israeli military.”

Edited Saturday at 22:13 by Vesper

[Vesper 29,450]

What a fucking idiot.

https://bsky.app/profile/joncooper-us.bsky.social/post/3lm632voxfc2k