by liberal japonicus
I had been trying to write an email concerning this Ezra Klein podcast, with Matt Yglesias and Dara Lind, dealing with their discussion of birthright citizenship. I've not been able to pull it together, so I'm just posting my draft here.
Klein and Lind (Yglesias didn't have much to say about it) spent a bit of time wondering about how such a practice could be allowed to take place, with Lind suggesting that there were 'resorts' where people have their children. Here is a chatgpt cleaned up transcript, with some parts emphasized (it's important to note that these aren't the actual quotes, but I think they convey the meaning)
Lind: The birthright citizenship order declares that anyone born after February 19th of this year is not a U.S. citizen by birth if their mother does not have legal status or is on a temporary visa, and their father is neither a U.S. citizen nor a green card holder. The executive order defends a novel legal theory that attempts to change the 14th Amendment's interpretation via executive action.
Klein: The birthright citizenship debate has two parts. One is about children born to people without legal status, which was expected. But they also included children born to people on legal visas like student or H-1B visas, which is surprising. This has been called a "Harris provision," and while it hasn’t been controversial before, it was added here. Matt, what’s your take?
Yglesias: Part of this is about redefining certain groups, like those with Temporary Protected Status or asylum applicants, as "illegal immigrants." While these individuals aren't legally classified as such, the intent seems to be to expand the definition. The order even includes people on routine, non-controversial visas. Trump previously expressed support for the H-1B program, so this broad inclusion is surprising. It signals a deeper hostility toward immigrants from some policymakers.
Klein: Are they including this extreme position so it can be removed later, leaving only the focus on unauthorized immigrants?
Lind: I don’t think so. While there hasn’t been much controversy about student visa holders having children, there has been concern about "birth tourism" — where people travel to the U.S. on a tourist visa to give birth. The practice of getting a tourist visa spending that time at a resort for the purpose having a child during the time has been targeted by the more extreme anti-immigration wing for years.
Klein: Doesn’t birth tourism reveal an overly broad interpretation of birthright citizenship? Even as a pro-immigrant person, I see that as an abuse of the rules.
Lind: It’s surprising this hasn’t been addressed more aggressively. The State Department has the discretion to deny visas and could enforce stricter policies to curb birth tourism without changing the law. This seems more like a policy problem than a constitutional one.
Klein: True, but they aren’t pushing for a narrow fix; they want a broader debate about citizenship itself. This taps into a long-standing shift in Democratic rhetoric. In the past, illegal immigration was treated as a problem to solve, but now unauthorized immigrants are more often seen as a group to protect. This order forces Democrats to clarify their stance on this issue.
Yglesias: Trump has largely won that argument, though Greg Abbott has been key in shifting the debate. Even Biden has acknowledged concerns about unchecked immigration. While this executive order is overly broad, it lets Republicans frame the debate while Democrats push back on the extreme parts. In the end, I think this will lose in court because the constitutional argument is weak.
Klein: Normally, I’d expect cynicism about the courts, but you seem confident here.
Yglesias: This topic has been litigated repeatedly, and the argument that these individuals aren’t "subject to U.S. laws" is legally untenable. Illegal immigrants are subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and the idea that they have some sort of immunity is simply false.
Back when Michele Malkin was a thing, she and her ilk were complaining about Mexican/Central/South Americans pregnant women coming, virtually as they were in labor, to deliver their children in the US and was tied up in the construct of 'anchor babies'. Here is the Politifact discussion when it came up.
Now, three commenters on the liberal side seem to accept the framing that was off in the weeds of right wing fever dreams a few years ago. What happened?
It seems to me that the first thing is that this is intersecting with the first of medical tourism. Wealthy familes want access to the medical technology available in the US. If their kid happens to get a passport out of it, that's great, it gave them more options in a future where you didn't have Trump considering a three front war of Canada, Greenland and Panama.
The second thing is tied to that, which is that parents want to give their kids an advantage. As the polifact discussion notes: "Most of the benefits of citizenship accrue over the much longer term. The child will be able to work here legally once he or she is old enough, said Roberto Suro, a communications and journalism professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in Hispanic issues, and when they're ready for college, they'll qualify for in-state tuition at most public colleges. "It is a hell of a lot of deferred gratification at best," he said."
The last thing is that people tend to create relationships and given that the US has housed such a large, and durable, population of undocumented immigrants, all the better to do the scut jobs that need to be done, it is totally unsurprising that some of them choose to have a family.
It baffles me that the liberals here and apparently a lot of others fail to understand a parent's desire to give their children opportunities. And how they have come to thing that urge, rather than being something that is laudable and made the US an envied society, is something that needs to be squashed. God help us.
There is no argument. The language in the 14th Amendment is unambiguous. If you are born here, you are a citizen, unless you engage is Alito-Thomas speak. Trying to carve out exemptions is a fool’s game that should be relegated to the Bari Weiss ‘dark web’ of fascist sympathizers, wanna’bees, and well, you know, actual fascists.
For those who get their panties in a bunch over “illegals” I would take you seriously if ICE was raiding Irish pubs in New York City. And since people all-in to deport our dusky hued interlopers tend to also support extreme gun rights and capital punishment, I say to you: “Random summary executions of employers found to have hired illegals would do a lot to solve this problem. Don’t you agree?”
Let them come.
IIRC, during Trump’s first term, “birth tourism” was a big money maker for him.
He had oligarchs of various nations send their pregnant wives, mistresses, and daughters to stay at Trump Tower long enough to have their kids and get the kids US citizenship.
It feels like the whole “illegal immigrant” excitement has two pieces.
One is the “they’re taking away our jobs” / “they’re driving wages down” piece. Except that, for the most part, the jobs they are doing are either jobs Americans won’t do (think stoop labor agriculture), or jobs where there aren’t enough Americans to do them (medicine, IT, etc.).
The fact is that, given current low unemployment rates, if you aren’t working either
There are also those who say they want to work, but don’t really. If they aren’t drawing unemployment, so they don’t show up in the stastics.
The other is the traditional “they’ll destroy our culture”; or, in the extreme “our civilization” piece. This has been a part of American since at least the Revolution, when some of the Founding Fathers worried about the German-speaking part of the population. The target of the worry shifts, but the substance is pretty constant.
This, too, has no basis in reality; our civilization endures and our culture seems in good health. Throughout our history, immigrants arrive. The new arrivals work hard, often doing jobs nobody else wants. Yeah, their English may by ragged, and they speak their native tongue at home. Their food may be odd. And they may have a different religion than their neighbors (I’m old enough to remember when being Catholic was considered problematic). But that’s about it.
The second generation probably speaks their parents’ native language to their parents. But their English is standard American, they eat the same diet as the rest of us — including going out for food brought by some other group of immigrants. And their religion is considered no more exotic than the Catholics, the Jews, or the Mormons.
The third generation is utterly indistinguishable from the rest of us — not least because a lot of us are them. Including worrying about the latest group of immigrants.
Short story shorter: It’s constantly a worry, but there’s no there there. It’s a problem mostly because some politicians find it useful to carry on about it.
Absent that, the level of xenophobia in the general population just isn’t that high. People may worry about “illegal immigrants”, or sometimes about immigrants generally. But they typically have no problem at all with their neighbors, employees, co-workers, or friends who happen to be immigrants, sometimes illegal ones.
Absent that, the level of xenophobia in the general population just isn’t that high. People may worry about “illegal immigrants”, or sometimes about immigrants generally. But they typically have no problem at all with their neighbors, employees, co-workers, or friends who happen to be immigrants, sometimes illegal ones.
That’s at the core of the ‘problem’ for the culture warriors. The majority knows decent people belonging to the group that is targeted for demonization. They may agree in the abstract about the inherent evil of the group but want to exclude their ‘decent exceptions’. Himmler infamously saw that as a major obstacle for the holocaust (he said as much in his secret Posen speeches).
His spiritual successors do not WANT the secrecy but want to read about their evil deeds in the papers and to claim credit for them.
I can’t believe they’re entertaining the birth tourism sh1t. Does it happen? Probably. Does it happen on a scale that matters one iota? No. And even if people are coming here as birth “tourists” aren’t those people likely relatively well off and thus don’t present the issues that right-winger anti-immigrant douche bags claim to care about – they’re just not white (and in many cases I bet they are).
We’re fncking doomed.
And fnck Klein for this:
Doesn’t birth tourism reveal an overly broad interpretation of birthright citizenship? Even as a pro-immigrant person, I see that as an abuse of the rules.
“The rules”?? It’s the Constitution asshole. You can’t “fix” this by amending the tourist or H1B visas with some proviso purporting to deny citizenship to any child born to a person on such a visa.
@##!$@!@!$#@
@bobbyp:”Random summary executions of employers found to have hired illegals would do a lot to solve this problem. Don’t you agree?”
My proposal, which is mine, to reduce undocumented immigrants is simple and requires close to ZERO government funding:
“Any undocumented worker gets AUTOMATIC CITIZENSHIP by turning in the head of their illegal employer”
One less undocumented worker, one less criminal employer, win-win!
I expect that the market for hiring the undocumented will dry up in a New York Minute after the first batch of heads are delivered.
But the cowardly criminal MAGAts would not even consider such a plan. SHAMEFUL.
Klein’s comment “unauthorized immigrants are seen as a group to protect” by Democrats is disengenuous to the point of being a lie, by implying protect == the dread “open border” that no one even near power supports, despite endless Republican hammering of that lie.
Those 3 liberal commentators accept the Republican framing simply because the Republican party has complete control of the government, so their policy becomes the default starting position for discussion in the game of punditry.
The Constitution and US law uses a few different terms to refer to people.
Citizens are people with a full complement of rights and privileges. Notably, citizens can vote.
US persons is (I think) a term defined in law as opposed to the Constitution, and refers to any lawful resident. So, citizens, but also green card holders, TPS immigrants, etc. If I’m not mistaken it can also extend to corps.
Person means, as far as I can tell, a human being who is physically in the US or some place under its jurisdiction. Again, if I’m not mistaken, it is not limited to citizens or US persons. It just means a person in the normal usage of that word.
Please correct me if I’m missing something or am factually incorrect.
Per the 14th A:
So it strikes me that unauthorized immigrants are not “seen as a group to protect” – that is, they aren’t being singled out as some special class of people to whom due process is owed. They’re people, and therefore are owed due process under law like every other person who finds themselves under the jurisdiction of the US.
There are significant privileges they do not have, but as far as I can tell due process is not one of them.
I could be mistaken in all of this, IANAL let alone a Con lawyer. But basically, no, the feds should not be able to just grab you and send you off to El Salvador without due process. I.e., without establishing that you are not a citizen, are a member of a gang, etc.
Of course we are now living under Trump Calvinball rules, so all of that is kind of moot, unless or until somebody figures out how to make him and his minions comply with the law.
unless or until somebody figures out how to make him and his minions comply with the law.
That’s the critical question, isn’t it? To date, so far as I can tell, while the administration has no problem with
cheerfullygleefully ignoring any law that comes along, they have generally stopped short of defying a court order to cease and desist.**So far. Whether that frail thread continues to hold remains to be seen.
** The one exception I have heard of is the judge’s order that a plane transporting supposedly (no due process was observed) in the US illegally should turn around and return to the US. It continued on to El Salvador.
This, too, has no basis in reality; our civilization endures and our culture seems in good health.
By what definition of “culture”? Unless you mean purely artistically, which I doubt, I would suggest that your culture is in truly parlous health. Approximately half of your population enthusiastically supports a xenophobic, criminal, corrupt regime and laughingly dismisses the obvious threat to your democracy and much-vaunted freedoms, and your institutions are teetering on the edge of the precipice. There is a true sickness at the heart of your culture, and I know I have quoted it before, but I can think of nothing so much as Auden’s The Fall of Rome.
And, FWIW, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we and some other parts of Europe were heading the same way.
And I have told you this to make you grieve.
Apologies.
No apology necessary.
In case it wasn’t clear to all who know me, not to mention those who don’t, I wasn’t implying that the sickness at the heart of US culture is anything to do with immigration (which would of course be absurd in a nation made up of immigrants), it was just a kneejerk response to wj seeming to feel that the culture of the US seems in good health.
GftNC – No apologies needed. The US has been hollowing itself out, politically and economically, since 1980, when the GOP accomplished a Reverse FDR, holding the Presidency for 12 consecutive years.
It has been noted every few years since then (by multiple observers, commentators, and analysts) that the US has been coasting on the previous 100 years of accomplishment, dating more or less since Teddy Roosevelt’s anti-Trust initiatives and FDR’s New Deal. That is: At some point, due to the massive changes Reagan et al. wrought, we would no longer be able to coast on the gains of the past, and would start to consume our future in earnest.
Which we have been doing since 2000, when Bush W gained power via SCOTUS and, as The Onion put it, “our long nightmare of peace and prosperity has come to an end.”
The UK is, as you say, a prime candidate for the same fate, with Thatcherism instead of Reaganism as the first shadow on the MRI presaging a metastasizing disease. Don’t know about the rest of Europe. They have a more recent history of totalitarian government, which may inoculate them. Or not…
Thank you.
And even if no apologies necessary, to make up for extreme doominess, I give you Marina Hyde today on the Hegseth-Atlantic debacle:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/25/pete-hegseth-journalist-group-chat-leak-war-donald-trump
It’s up to her usual standard.
Are there short- or medium-term benefits for the parents? Eg, do they get to live/work in the US and raise their citizen child here? I’m completely ignorant on the topic.
A new informal coalition is forming between ‘illiberal’ democracies/republics, only Poland is currently trying to extricate herself from it.
In to-day’s papers I read that Bibi Netanjahu has invited prominent members of rightwing extremist parties* from several European countries to a conference in Israel on anti-semitism (only the German AfD is excluded). The selection (some of them as actual speakers) is so blatantly bad that several distinguished Jewish scholars have retracted their participation agreement when they heard about it.
I have said it in the past: The US Right never forgave FDR for preventing the US from joining the fashionable fascist club and now sees its chance to try again now that the club has become fashionable again.
Btw, are there any official US statements to what is going on in Turkey right now? Verbally at least His Orangeness called for something similar in the US during the last campaign.
*all of them known to push classic antisemitic tropes on a regular base.
In my continuing quest to lighten my previous doominess, I give you more on Douglas Adams, Marvin the Paranoid Android, etc etc:
Douglas Adams was a genius — and my bathroom-hogging flatmate
A new documentary shows how the author foresaw the future in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (and based Marvin the Paranoid Android on me)
Jon Canter
Monday March 24 2025, 6.00pm, The Times
“Life, don’t talk to me about life,” says Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He was the first robot to say that. But he wasn’t the first person. I was. I said it in a Cambridge Footlights monologue about an angry northerner. Luckily my friend and fellow student Douglas Adams was in the audience. He nicked it, repurposed it for a depressed robot and made it famous. In the history of his world-conquering classic I’m a footnote. How many can say that?
Douglas foresaw AI, the smartphone, e-books, online language translation (the site BabelFish was named after the small leechlike creature in the Guide), and the digital interconnectedness of all human beings. Todd Austin’s excellent new documentary Douglas Adams: The Man Who Imagined Our Future will convince you he was a genius. But to me he was more than that or, to put it another way, less. He was a flatmate. Between 1978 and 1980 I shared a flat with Douglas in Holloway, north London. I shared the agony of his procrastination and the ecstasy of his galactic success. I also shared the bathroom.
Douglas was a generous and warm-hearted flatmate, but the way he kept his heart warm was by spending hours in the bath. What was he doing in there? Was he thinking? Was it his beauty regimen? He certainly never came out of there holding a wet typewriter. In retrospect I think he was depressed. There was certainly a Marvin-like aspect to Douglas Adams — The Man Who Inhabited Our Bathroom. But we didn’t talk about such things. We didn’t, to coin a phrase, talk about life.
Let’s move now from the bathroom to the kitchen, no great distance in our squalid, small and fetid flat. The kitchen was where the culinary magic happened. No one could heat up or wolf down a supermarket steak pie like Douglas and me. His great friend and co-writer John Lloyd, later the multiple Bafta-winning producer of Spitting Image and Blackadder, characterised our eating style as “Desperate Dan”, while our friend Claire said, “You’ll never get girlfriends if you eat like that.”
In our flatmate years I was an advertising copywriter. Do you remember MFI Furniture Centres? If you do, it’s partly thanks to me. Perhaps you recall the headline I wrote for their 1977 Silver Jubilee Sale: These prices are unbe-Jubilee-vable (I thang you). Douglas, meanwhile, wuthered away in the attic of the flat. I say wuthered because he wrote the first Hitchhiker’s book to the tune of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. If I had £1 for every time he played it, I’d have 200 quid, but I’d give that all away if it meant I never had to hear it again. The smell of Silk Cut and our Kate wailing “lemme inna your window”: those are the things that make me think of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, not the number 42, imbued as it is with mystical force by true Douglas believers.
The Beatles, Paul Simon, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, the Band, Bach, Procol Harum: Douglas couldn’t live without music. In the summer of 1978 we went to the Odeon, Holloway, to see The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s film of the Band’s farewell concert. So much did we love it that we went back and saw it on five successive nights. How else could we enjoy repeat viewings in those pre-VHS times? We walked there and we bought tickets. How low-tech and un-Douglas can you get?
The first Hitchhiker’s book came out in 1979. That was the year I quit advertising and became a BBC Radio 4 contract writer. And the year Douglas began his journey to become a millionaire. That had consequences for his humble thousandaire flatmate. Douglas bought a flat in nearby Highbury and invited me to move in with him. Our lifestyle was transformed. The kitchen was bigger, the bath looked bigger, and Douglas’s new speakers were humongous. I can recall the precise moment when Douglas realised he was rich. He disappeared to the off-licence to buy some Coca-Cola. But when he came back he didn’t have “some” Coca-Cola. He had loads. He stood in the kitchen, all 6ft 5in of him, holding a crate of 24 cans — I know, I know, that’s 42 backwards — and confessed that he’d bought that many “just because I could”.
Our Highbury life was nicer than our Holloway life. But there were unsettling aspects to living with wealth and fame. One day I answered the phone and a voice said: “This is Douglas Adams’s shoemaker.” You what? A shoemaker? Was I living in a fairytale? Yes. It was just that the fairytale was Douglas’s, not mine. Another time, another voice said he was a film producer with an idea for a movie he’d like Douglas to write. I told him Douglas was out, but could I take a message? I expected him to give me his number, but no. Reader, he pitched. Did he not know the first rule of showbiz: never pitch to the flatmate? The flatmate isn’t a muse, a lover, a mentor or a manager. He’s basically just a bloke waiting to use the bathroom.
It couldn’t last, and it didn’t. Douglas moved to an even bigger flat, then a house, then ultimately to California, where he died. I moved to the house of a friend, then the house of another friend, then I found a woman I liked so much I started eating with my mouth shut and moved in with her.
I still miss his gigantic hugs, his left-handed guitar playing, his anecdotes polished by multiple repetitions and the giraffelike way he’d lean down into a conversation, having missed most of it because his mind was elsewhere. But there’s a postscript. John Lloyd co-wrote The Meaning of Liff with Douglas. It’s a dictionary of “things there should be words for”, using real place names from all over the world, recycled. I wrote a sequel with John, called Afterliff, which came out in 2013. And there it is:
Beaucroissant n.
Male flatmate who spends all his time in the bathroom.
Douglas Adams: The Man Who Imagined Our Future is on Sky Arts, Freeview and Now, Mar 27 at 8pm; Jon Canter’s latest play, Oedipus Next, opens in Cambridge in October
Michael Cain, the short and (I think) basically accurate answer to your question is “no, not really”. The immigration status of parents of a “birthright citizen” child is not changed as a result of the birth.
The child can presumably stay in or return to the US at whatever point that is practical for them. Upon turning 21, the child may petition to allow their parents to come here.
So, a small advantage to the parents after 21 years, but otherwise no.
“Birthright tourism” is actually a thing. Estimates on how many birthright tourist kids are born in the US per year range from about 20K up to about 33K. If my math checks out, 33K is about one one-hundredth of one percent of the US population.
Trump actually has offered birthright citizenship tourism packages at his hotels, apparently it was popular with Russian oligarchs.
There is also a much larger cohort of children born here to non-citizen parents who didn’t come here on a tourist visa specifically to get their kid US citizenship. Estimates of how many such children are born each year range up to about 250K in recent years.
The Annie E Casey Foundation website seems to have pretty reliable numbers. They estimate their are about 18 million children in immigrant families (including naturalized and legal resident immigrants), and for about 35% of those, both parents are undocumented. About 90% of children of immigrants were born here and therefore are citizens.
Net/net, there are something like 6 million kids in the US who are citizens by birthright, but who are the children of undocumented parents.
Net/net, there are something like 6 million kids in the US who are citizens by birthright, but who are the children of undocumented parents.
I have taught several of them over the years. Most of them were pretty brilliant and hard working. Most of them were also very dedicated to public service.
it was just a kneejerk response to wj seeming to feel that the culture of the US seems in good health.
What I was failing to communicate is that immigrants have been coming here since the country started, angst about the resulting threat to our culture has been a constant, and yet the culture has survived.
No question that the reaction against this putative threat has generated a real threat. But I wonder how deep the rot really goes. Have an appallingly large number of voters shown themselves willfully ignorant of the stated intentions of those they have voted for? Yes. But do they generally support those goals when they see the concrete reality? Not generally, I don’t think.
Getting them to realize that they don’t want what they are getting seems to be happening already. Getting them to admit, at least to themselves, that they are getting what they voted for? That will be a heavier lift. But “I didn’t think they meant it!” is a step in that direction.
Cynical me: No citizenship without birth certificate, therefore any place that issues those has to have ICE agents on site to instantly arrest any applicants without valid papers. If the intended victims smell the trap and sent a citizen forward in their place, said citizen is to be arrested for criminal conspiracy, human trafficking, support of enemies of the United States, espionage or whatever else creative minds can come up with. Due process is of course to be absent.
They now published some unredacted bits of the Yemen airstrike chat:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/signal-group-chat-attack-plans-hegseth-goldberg/682176/
The ineptness is one thing, but this also gives us an example of how indiscriminate airstrikes can be and the macho swagger and dehumanising attitude they can be accompanied by. Apparently 53 people died.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/26/houthis-say-17-air-strikes-hit-yemen-as-rebels-attack-us-israeli-targets
Bit of a challenge for those who go for home birth. For them, a birth certificate isn’t actually created at birth.
I believe there is a process for getting one later. But that doesn’t provide certainty that the child was actually born in the US. Or even that the “mother” coming in to get the certificate is actually the woman who gave birth.
For that matter, how do we determine whether the father listed on the certificate is actually the father. (Whatever the parents believe to be the case.). Maybe we make getting a birth certificate contingent on a DNA test for all concerned. Won’t that be fun!**
** Especially for some holier-than-thou types on the far right.
In the UK one goes to the register office. I don’t recall there being any checks – a woman and a man, with ID and a newborn baby, are likely to be believed.
For a long time, America was a country where you were allowed to leave your past behind when you came here. Sort of the French Foreign Legion of nations. There were some good aspects to that — part of me is always amazed by some of the Balkan situations, where people are still angry over something your ancestors did to my ancestors 900 years ago. There is some bad residue from that — a knee-jerk reaction against any sort of required national ID, no matter how many problems that’s the obvious answer to.
Atlantic gift piece with unredacted messages (except CIA guy identity), after calling the government’s bluff about no classified operational info:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/signal-group-chat-attack-plans-hegseth-goldberg/682176/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCYBD2glPUnJ-Nij2vNf4LB4&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
The committee’s top Democrat, Jim Himes, asked Gabbard why she had told senators the day before that no details of timing, targets or weapons had been shared.
“My answer yesterday was based on my recollection, or the lack thereof, on the details that were posted there,” Gabbard replied.
“What was shared today reflects the fact that I was not directly involved with that part of the Signal chat and replied at the end, reflecting the effects, the very brief effects that the national security adviser had shared.”
Ratcliffe, meanwhile, said: “I used an appropriate channel to communicate sensitive information. It was permissible to do so. I didn’t transfer any classified information.”
Last week, NPR reported that the Pentagon warned its staff specifically against the use of Signal because of its security vulnerabilities. In a Pentagon “OPSEC special bulletin” sent on 18 March, it warned that Russian hacking groups could aim to exploit the vulnerability.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/26/trump-signal-leak-new-messages
Off topic:
https://apnews.com/article/pennsylvania-democratic-party-donald-trump-election-094e907bd9af0d55a3ac76bb5e22d17c
The headline from the NYT states that tRump won the district by 15 points. A sliver of hope?
Someone I was reading posted this, Ken Taub (I have no idea who he is) reposting a letter from Marc Elias to Elon Musk:
THIS. And this again. And this a thousand times.
Elon Musk attacked democracy defender and superstar court lawyer Marc Elias as “undermining civilization,” taunting him by asking if he suffered “generational trauma.”
Elias’s response was brilliant and worth amplifying:
Mr. Musk,
You recently criticized me and another prominent lawyer fighting for the rule of law and democracy in the United States. I am used to being attacked for my work, particularly on the platform you own and dominate.
I used to be a regular on Twitter, where I amassed over 900,000 followers — all organic except for the right-wing bots who seemed to grow in number. Like many others, I stopped regularly posting on the site because, under your stewardship, it became a hellscape of hate and misinformation.
I also used to buy your cars — first a Model X and then a Model S — back when you spoke optimistically about solving the climate crisis. My family no longer owns any of your cars and never will.
But this is not the reason I am writing. You don’t know me. You have no idea whether I have suffered trauma and if I have, how it has manifested. And it’s none of your business.
However, I will address your last point about generational trauma. I am Jewish, though many on your site simply call me “a jew.” Honestly, it’s often worse than that, but I’m sure you get the point. There was a time when Twitter would remove antisemitic posts, but under your leadership, tolerating the world’s oldest hatred now seems to be a permissible part of your “free speech” agenda.
Like many Jewish families, mine came to America because of trauma. They were fleeing persecution in the Pale of Settlement — the only area in the Russian Empire where Jews were legally allowed to reside. Even there, life was difficult — often traumatic. My family, like others, lived in a shtetl and was poor. Worse, pogroms were common — violent riots in which Jews were beaten, killed and expelled from their villages.
By the time my family fled, life in the Pale had become all but impossible for Jews. Tsar Nicholas II’s government spread anti-Jewish propaganda that encouraged Russians to attack and steal from Jews in their communities. My great-grandfather was fortunate to leave when he did. Those who stayed faced even worse circumstances when Hitler’s army later invaded.
That is the generational trauma I carry. The trauma of being treated as “other” by countrymen you once thought were your friends. The trauma of being scapegoated by authoritarian leaders. The trauma of fleeing while millions of others were systematically murdered. The trauma of watching powerful men treat it all as a joke — or worse.
As an immigrant yourself, you can no doubt sympathize with what it means to leave behind your country, extended family, friends and neighbors to come to the United States. Of course, you probably had more than 86 rubles in your pocket. You probably didn’t ride for nine days in the bottom of a ship or have your surname changed by immigration officials. Here is the ship manifest showing that my family did. Aron, age three, was my grandfather.
As new immigrants, life wasn’t easy. My family lived in cramped housing without hot water. They worked menial jobs — the kind immigrants still perform today.
Some may look down on those immigrants — the ones without fancy degrees — but my family was proud to work and grateful that the United States took them in. They found support within their Jewish community and a political home in the Democratic Party.
I became a lawyer to give back to the country that gave my family a chance. I specialize in representing Democratic campaigns because I believe in the party. I litigate voting rights cases because the right to vote is the bedrock of our democracy. I speak out about free and fair elections because they are under threat.
Now let me address the real crux of your post.
You are very rich and very powerful. You have thrown in with Donald Trump. Whether it is because you think you can control him or because you share his authoritarian vision, I do not know. I do not care.
Together, you and he are dismantling our government, undermining the rule of law and harming the most vulnerable in our society. I am just a lawyer. I do not have your wealth or your platform. I do not control the vast power of the federal government, nor do I have millions of adherents at my disposal to harass and intimidate my opponents. I may even carry generational trauma.
But you need to know this about me. I am the great-grandson of a man who led his family out of the shtetl to a strange land in search of a better life. I am the grandson of the three-year-old boy on that journey. As you know, my English name is Marc, but my Hebrew name is Elhanan (אֶלְחָנָן) — after the great warrior in David’s army who slew a powerful giant.
I will use every tool at my disposal to protect this country from Trump. I will litigate to defend voting rights until there are no cases left to bring. I will speak out against authoritarianism until my last breath.
I will not back down. I will not bow or scrape. I will never obey.
Defiantly,
Marc Elias
There is a true sickness at the heart of your culture
This is something I think about pretty often. The most striking recent occasion was reading, in one of Timothy Snyder’s books – either Bloodlands or Black Earth, I forget which – of Hitler looking to the US as the model for how to run a successful fascist regime. Genocide for the native Americans, enslavement for the blacks, grab all the land you can – that’s the way to do it!
And his Nazi companions found our “one drop” rule for racial classification too harsh.
We were arguably the first successful modern constitutional republic, a model which has been adopted widely, to great benefit to the world IMO. That’s a very good thing, and we should be proud of it. It is, in fact, better than absolute “divine right of kings” monarchy, or feuding warlods, or any number of other political forms that have come and gone. In my opinion.
And yet we still struggle with the question of who gets to be a human, in full, in the eyes of our society. And who deserves a share of the remarkable wealth we generate. And a lot of people still suffer for being on the losing side of those debates.
I recently did kind of a study of the word “sin” as its used in the Bible. The Greek word is hamartia, which literally means “missing the mark”. Which sounds kind of, not harmless exactly, but of minor consequence.
“Oops, you missed the mark”.
But the broader usage, dating back to the classical period, has the idea of a tragic flaw – a besetting flaw of character, more or less bred in the bone. It’s the driving force in Greek tragedy – the tragic hero’s harmatia is the blind spot, the unacknowledged stumbling block, that is the engine of the tragic plot.
And I think this country will never be fully free of ours. The very best we can do is to recognize it, acknowledge it, account for it. And not let it drive our choices as a nation.
Right now we are knee deep in a “Make America Great Again” fantasy, which to my eye amounts more or less to “ignore our deepest and most entrenched flaws”. Celebrate them, in fact.
And I think it has to play out. And it is playing out, and will continue to.
In the immortal words of Aimee Mann, it’s not gonna stop until we wise up. Most likely we never will completely. Those flaws, and our back and forth struggles to not be ruled by them, seem to kind of be who we are.