This has not overall been a good few weeks for civil liberties.
Our Secretary of Defense has openly called for a major cable news outlet to be acquired by one of Trump's billionaire cronies so that it will cover Trump's war more deferentially.
Trump's chief goon over at the FCC has openly threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of disobedient news outlets that refuse to toe the government line on the war.
Given that Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made no secret of his distaste for Trump's illegal Iran war—many Britons are rightly wondering why U.S. bombers are nonetheless still taking off from U.K. airfields, heading for the Middle East.
"For many Britons, the air traffic has brought back memories of the ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003, when R.A.F. Fairford was also used for U.S. operations and became the site of long-running antiwar protests," the New York Times reported yesterday.
In his family history of the Byrons and Trevanions, A.L. Rowse at one point asserts that Lord Byron (the famous one) was "no real radical," in spite of his apparent lifelong devotion to the people's cause. The evidence for this claim? Byron displayed pride in ancestry, Rowse says. He used "feudal" terms like "vassals" in many of his poems. And, most important of all—according to Rowse—he had "unquestioning admiration" for Napoleon.
"Byron was," in all these regards, "at the opposite pole to his friend Shelley," Rowse insists, with strange confidence.
In throwing out the federal indictment against Fed Chair Jerome Powell yesterday, Judge Boasberg wrote that "the government has offered no evidence whatsoever that Powell committed any crime other than displeasing the president."
But of course, under this Justice Department, "displeasing the president" is the one and only crime worth charging. It is the only substance of the government's accusations against Lisa Cook, James Comey, Letitia James, and many others.
Well, I have to hand it to Anthropic. Despite being a profit-making entity, they were actually willing to take one on the chin this past week in their conflict with the Pentagon—and all for a point of principle.
Of course, I can't applaud them for wanting to work with the Pentagon in the first place. But they did have a certain moral line they refused to cross.
The United States used it in Fallujah in 2004. Israel reportedly deployed it in Lebanon in 2023. And now, according to Human Rights Watch, it's back again. In the second front in the current spiraling Middle East conflict that has opened in Lebanon—HRW reports—Israel has reportedly used white phosphorus munitions once again over populated areas.
This was not the first time I had read about this chemical—a deadly incendiary often used for illuminating areas, but which causes gruesome burns if it touches human skin—in the past week. The New York Times reported a few days ago that one of the motives behind Trump's executive order to protect the chemical glyphosate is due to its role in producing WP—a major source of profit for U.S. arms makers.
In yet another exercise in pointless cruelty, Trump revived this month one of his various mean-spirited policies from his first term aimed at punishing and deterring asylum-seekers: namely, the work permit rule.
Initially, of course, Trump simply wanted to destroy asylum entirely. On day one of his current term, he issued executive orders purporting to basically declare people ineligible for humanitarian protection wholesale.
