Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 15h 04m 40s of daytime. The moon is full today.
On this day in 1953, Tensing Norgay of Nepal and Edmund Hillary of New Zealand become the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
Recommended for reading in full —
McKay Coppins profiles Trump’s Right-Hand Troll (“Stephen Miller once tormented liberals at Duke. Now the president’s speechwriter and immigration enforcer is deploying the art of provocation from the White House”):
Perched on a high-backed chair, Miller looks as if he’s posing for a cologne ad in a glossy magazine—his slender frame wrapped in an elegantly tailored suit, his arm draped over the backrest, his legs crossed at the knee just so. As President Donald Trump’s top speechwriter and senior policy adviser, the 32-year-old aide has cultivated a severe public image, his narrow features forming a kind of perma-glower when he’s on television. But in person there are glimpses of something else—not charm, exactly, but a charisma-like substance. He can be funny and self-aware one moment, zealous and hostile the next. In conversation, he slides from authentic insight into impish goading and back again. It’s a compelling performance to watch—but after an hour and a half in his office, I realize I’m still straining to locate where the trolling ends and true belief begins.
In the campy TV drama that is Donald Trump’s Washington, Miller has carved out an enigmatic role. He lurks in the background for weeks at a time, only to emerge with crucial cameos in the most explosive episodes. The one where Trump signed a havoc-wreaking travel ban during his first week in office, unleashing global chaos and mass protests? Miller helped draft the executive order. The one where the federal government shut down over a high-stakes immigration standoff on Capitol Hill? Miller was accused of derailing the negotiations. (“As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we’re going nowhere,” Senator Lindsey Graham grumbled.) To watch him in his most memorable scenes—theatrically hurling accusations of “cosmopolitan bias” at a reporter; getting his mic cut in the middle of a belligerent Sunday-show appearance—is to be left mesmerized, wondering, Is this guy serious?
Miller represents a rising generation of conservatives for whom “melting the snowflakes” and “triggering the libs” are first principles.
(Miller’s circumstances are now, of course, different from Duke. Iny any event, those in opposition and resistance are neither snowflakes, nor many of us even liberals. We are, however, patient, and committed to delivering coldly to Miller and his ilk an indelible political retribution.)
William J. Broad and David E. Sanger report North Korea Nuclear Disarmament Could Take 15 Years, Expert Warns:
As the Trump administration races to start talks with North Korea on what it calls “rapid denuclearization,” a top federal government adviser who has repeatedly visited the North’s sprawling atomic complex is warning that the disarmament process could take far longer, up to 15 years.
The adviser, Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, and now a Stanford professor, argues that the best the United States can hope for is a phased denuclearization that goes after the most dangerous parts of the North’s program first.
The disarmament steps and timetable are laid out in a new report, circulated recently in Washington, that Dr. Hecker compiled with two colleagues at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Dr. Hecker has toured that nation’s secretive labyrinth of nuclear plants four times and remains the only American scientist to see its facility for enriching uranium, a bomb fuel. American intelligence agencies had missed the plant’s construction.
Chris Meserole and Alina Polyakova contend that The West is ill-prepared for the wave of “deep fakes” that artificial intelligence could unleash:
Russian disinformation has become a problem for European governments. In the last two years, Kremlin-backed campaigns have spread false stories alleging that French President Emmanuel Macron was backed by the “gay lobby,” fabricated a story of a Russian-German girl raped by Arab migrants, and spread a litany of conspiracy theories about the Catalan independence referendum, among other efforts.
Europe is finally taking action. In January, Germany’s Network Enforcement Act came into effect. Designed to limit hate speech and fake news online, the law prompted both France and Spain to consider counterdisinformation legislation of their own. More important, in April the European Union unveiled a new strategy for tackling online disinformation. The EU plan focuses on several sensible responses: promoting media literacy, funding a third-party fact-checking service, and pushing Facebook and others to highlight news from credible media outlets, among others. Although the plan itself stops short of regulation, EU officials have not been shy about hinting that regulation may be forthcoming. Indeed, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared at an EU hearing this week, lawmakers reminded him of their regulatory power after he appeared to dodge their questions on fake news and extremist content.
The problem is that technology advances far more quickly than government policies.
The recent European actions are important first steps. Ultimately, none of the laws or strategies that have been unveiled so far will be enough. The problem is that technology advances far more quickly than government policies. The EU’s measures are still designed to target the disinformation of yesterday rather than that of tomorrow.
To get ahead of the problem, policymakers in Europe and the United States should focus on the coming wave of disruptive technologies. Fueled by advances in artificial intelligence and decentralized computing, the next generation of disinformation promises to be even more sophisticated and difficult to detect.
Michael Gerson writes Are these evangelicals ready to topple the idol of politics?:
If the stages of a social movement are emergence, coalescence, bureaucratization and decline, the reaction against the Trump evangelicals among other evangelicals is still in the emergence stage. But one significant act of coalescence took place recently at Wheaton College, where a group of 50?ethnically and denominationally diverse evangelical leaders met to discuss the sad state of their movement.
The setting was appropriate. Wheaton (my alma mater) was founded by abolitionist evangelicals in the mid-19th century. Its first president, Jonathan Blanchard, was an antislavery agitator and founder of radical newspapers. The college was a station on the Underground Railroad. Many Northern evangelical Christian leaders of that time were malcontents in the cause of human dignity.
[Dozens of evangelical leaders meet to discuss how Trump era has unleashed ‘grotesque caricature’ of their faith]
(Many others of us, not evangelical but of a more liturgical background, will do our part in toppling.)
Memorial Day is a contemplative time. We have all lost friends, classmates and family in the pursuit of continuing our democracy, and this is the time to honor them. It is also the time to consider to what end we lost them and how, in the future, to minimize fighting wars of choice, wars based on false pretense and wars of distraction. Why we fight wars is a critical question. I note that, in my 70.92 years, we have never fought a war against white people. In my lifetime, we have been in almost continuous war against Asian. Hispanic, or Arabic adversaries. Virtually all of those wars have been without provocation, and waged on bogus assertions. There is an argument to be made that we attacked Afghanistan in retaliation for 9-11, but that ignores the fact that most of that attack came from Saudis, and Afghanistan was not directly involved.
The concept that “others” are inherently evil has spilled over into our political system with disastrous consequences. Donald Trump waged a political campaign focused on the strategic triad of the modern Republican party: Fear of non-whites, loathing of non-whites, and white resentment. He won (with help from Comey and the Russians) on that platform. 85% of the Republican Party backs him, still. That is despite the non-stop lying, the manifest corruption, the unquestioned collusion with the Russians to get “elected”, and the wonton destruction of American norms. 88% of white evangelicals back him, which puts lie to all of the loudly-proclaimed evangelical assertions of piety, and exposes white evangelism just another toxic tribe using religion as a merkin to cover the real basis of their tribalism, which is maintaining racial purity.
Trump has to be ruing the day he decided to do a vanity run based on avenging the insult the uppity black Kenyan popped him with at the White House Correspondents Dinner. That decision has had disastrous consequences for him. He has been exposed as a total fraud, a dedicated criminal in many areas, a willing collaborator with our sworn enemy, and perhaps the most arrogant asshole of all time. His marriage is on the rocks, not surprisingly, his branding empire is in tatters, and his associates are going to jail. This has no possibility of ending happily for Trump, or the country. Too many bells have rung, and un-ringing them is not possible with current technology.
The Republican party has ignored Joe’s immutable First Law of Trump, which is that if you get anywhere near Trump, you have a 100% chance of getting covered in shit. Nobody escapes the Trumpian shit-storm. Dozens of Trump appointees have been fecally-flocked and have left public service in humiliation. The R-Team is in tatters, with the Wisco-Kid riding off into the sunset soon and McConnell sporting an 8% approval rating. The mighty hammer of Thor is going to drop on the R-Team come November, and they have no way to avoid it without turning on their racist base. When that base is 85% of your party, there isn’t really any option other than to go all-in for Trump, Devin Nunes style.
The logical corollary to Joe’s first law is that shit not only radiates from Trump, but also condenses on him. His life will never be the same. Several members of his family are looking at some serious court time, his grifts are all laid out for inspection and Mueller is, at this time, not stoppable. Trump forgot that if you are a shady character, you need to keep stuff in the shade. The sun is shining hard on Trump, and it is not a happy thing for him.
This isn’t going to end well, or perhaps even peacefully. The Republican party still has a few death-rattles and writhes left in them. They are increasingly cornered and guaranteed to lash out with everything they have got. It will be ugly, albeit mesmerizing for a political junkie. I’d happily forgo the drama, if that were possible.
It aint…
Here we are, far enough into a national conflict to see its magnitude, but not so far yet to see past it. Growing up, one knew about a thousand projects of reform needing a beginning, but I know of no one (taken seriously at the time) who thought we would face what we face today. It’s a single-race nationalist party that governs, and aims to establish a herrenvolk government over us. They’ll not relent willingly.
We cannot expect that Trump will see reason, nor expect that his most fanatical followers will do so. He will have to be defeated under law, and thereafter those who share in that victory will have to restore just principles, universally applied, from one part of the country to the other.
We will be compelled to assure a Third Reconstruction in America, guaranteeing equality of the law so much as can be done by any government, and lasting longer than Reconstruction or the Civil Rights eras. There are moral dimensions to any effort of this kind, but the political skeleton on which they will grow seems clear enough: a universal voter registration, an end to political gerrymandering, the reestablishment of unjustifiably-removed civil rights protections in areas of historic patterns of discrimination, new civil rights provisions enacted for all America, new & more secure means of voting, criminal penalties for domestic & necessary retribution for foreign interference with American voting, and likely an end to the Electoral College.
It’s not, truly, a matter of desire. If desire were all that mattered, perhaps there’d be some room for political compromise. We’ve not that choice: Trumpism meets its political ruin or we do.
They will, indeed, ‘lash out with everything they have got.’ So be it: Trump and his kind deserve the political ruin that awaits. Countless millions of our fellow citizens will join together to assure he’s consigned to it.