In the face of a rising tide of anti–South Asian hatred on the American right, a number of commentators have pointed out the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" quality to xenophobic racism.
On the one hand, after all, the right accuses immigrants and racial out-groups of refusing to "assimilate," of living in Balkanized impoverished enclaves, of causing urban blight and bringing into the country various disruptive anti-social behaviors.
An appeals court in Texas yesterday issued what appears to have been an utterly baffling and cruel decision. The trial court had reopened a capital murder conviction involving a woman accused of killing her daughter. The judge in the lower court found that the prosecutor's office had withheld exculpatory evidence, and that the woman was actually innocent.
Yet, the appellate judges reversed him.
Earlier this summer, the Trump administration decided that the word "harm" in the Endangered Species Act doesn't include destroying endangered animals' habitats so as to render their conditions of life untenable.
We know this, apparently, thanks to a handy canon of statutory interpretation, "noscitur a sociis," which tells us that "harm" must mean something like the words that surround it in the statute, such as "take," "capture," "kill," etc.
The bill for Congress's attack on the welfare state is slowly coming due. Millions of people have already lost food assistance over the last year due to new SNAP "work requirements" enacted under Trump's reconciliation bill. Next week, on October 1, the federal government will cut its contribution to the administrative costs of the program, shifting more of the responsibility to states—changes that many observers fear could force still more people off the benefit rolls.
At the start of next year, new "work requirements" also go into effect for Medicaid. Congress already allowed expanded ACA subsidies to lapse. J.D. Vance—a man who embodies the Straussian dictum that a lie repeated often enough will be perceived as true—brags that he just eliminated 750,000 cases from the ACA rolls for reasons of "fraud" (read the room, bro—do you think taking more people off health benefits is anyone's idea of a top priority right now?)
Just when I was starting to legitimately like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's campaign in Michigan (his response to J.D. Vance's attacks was masterful), he's let me down by once again failing to distance himself from a rather unsavory admirer.
As the New York Times reported earlier this week, just days after a number of Jewish leaders in Michigan had said they would endorse El-Sayed in spite of certain misgivings, Tucker Carlson has come out as an improbable (or perhaps not so improbable) defender of the Democratic candidate.
For months, critics of Trump have been accusing him of despoiling Venezuela.
Yesterday, he got up in front of the assembled nations of the world and said that that is exactly what he's done. He boasted openly that he was seizing Venezuela's natural resources.
"To the victor belong the spoils," he crowed, in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly.
Our ruling class has been sneering for months at the local data center backlash that has been springing up across the country. Tech companies ask impatiently who they have to "bribe" to get their centers built in small towns across America.
As Jasmine Sun says of tech executives in a recent interview: "when I talk to them about the build-out, I’m not hearing any sort of personal moral reckoning with slowing A.I. down. I’m hearing: How do I make the bribes bigger? How big do they need to be?"
