So, by the latest news accounts, Trump's meme coin turned out to be exactly the pyramid scheme it looked like. According to the New York Times yesterday, Trump's crypto business followed the classic life cycle of most such financial scams.
The token first skyrocketed in value—leading on many innocent people to risk their savings on an investment in the coin. By now, however, it has apparently lost between 80 to 97% of its peak value.
So I guess now the Trump administration is blatantly blocking the Venezuelan opposition leader's efforts to return to her own country in order to help with earthquake relief—presumably because we find it more convenient to have the country's current authoritarian leader govern without elections indefinitely, so long as she remains in effect a U.S. puppet.
In case anyone was still wondering whether that commando raid on Maduro was really about "supporting Venezuelan democracy"—here's your answer. The same government that kidnapped Maduro is now so wedded to his successor regime that we won't even help the country's democratic opposition set foot in her homeland in the midst of a catastrophic earthquake.
Bret Stephens wrote the other week that Donald Trump is a man "whose very essence is betrayal of everyone and everything." I don't always agree with Stephens—particularly not on the wisdom of going to war with Iran—but I agree with him here.
Trump betrayed the people of Venezuela by first disingenuously claiming to want to "free" them from Maduro—and then partnering up with his no less authoritarian successor regime, sidelining the Venezuelan democratic opposition, deporting Venezuelan asylum-seekers to torture prisons, and canceling Temporary Protected Status for the country.
Last week, an arch-conservative federal judge in Texas handed down a combined total of prison sentences stretching into centuries for the Prairieland defendants—many of whom had done nothing worse than wear black while attending a protest, or otherwise engage in what ought to be plainly First Amendment–protected activities.
At the shortest end of the spectrum, one of the defendants received a sentence of 30 years in prison for transporting a box of anarchist zines. Prosecutors used this as evidence of a motive to "obstruct" the investigation. But the box contained material that ought to be shielded by the First Amendment anyway. Surely there's nothing criminal about possessing or reading anarchist literature. So how could hiding it be evidence of any criminal conspiracy?
J.D. Vance made headlines this week by comparing his own administration to Nixon's. In making this historical analogy, the Vice President perhaps "builded better than he knew."
Let's see, we have an unpopular foreign war that the United States has basically already lost but can't get out of...
We have a corrupt president who has effectively weaponized the Justice Department and turned into a tool to advance his personal vendettas against political foes and the media...
There is a certain gap in socialist thinking, and I've never understood—despite a lifetime of reading leftist authors and identifying personally with the left—exactly how it is supposed to be bridged. Simply put, it's the familiar problem of "incentives."
Historically, most socialist governments have arisen in underdeveloped countries that want to industrialize. Elected socialists have not been willing to accept an equality of poverty and call it socialism.
All week long I've been complaining on this blog about leftists who strangely feel the need to make excuses for Putin—even though the Russian autocrat does not himself identify in any visible way with the Left, and even though the global far-right (viz. Tucker, e.g.) have meanwhile embraced Putin's regime as one of their own.
And lo, as soon as I was ranting about this phenomenon, it was back in the headlines yesterday. The victory of Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York's House Democratic primaries has drawn attention to some of her old controversial Tweets. One of them, which was still raising eyebrows this week, came from the start of the 2022 Ukraine war.
