CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What are our politicians and oligarchs up to?”)
❧ In what may be his most blatantly dictatorial action so far, Donald Trump has unilaterally declared a halt to all federal grants and loans. An internal memo from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, which became public Monday, says that all “Federal financial assistance” must be frozen until a “comprehensive analysis” can be performed to determine whether its grant and loan programs were “advancing Administration priorities.” It goes on to list a number of vague and incoherent policy priorities that federal funds must go towards, including “ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again.”
Experts said the memo as written was poised to bring a rapid halt to scores of federal functions, from assistance to homeless shelters to financial aid for college students. Health grants distributed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and state aid for disaster reconstruction, might face delays. Developers expecting federal grants to expand the nation’s energy supply could be disrupted. Questions quickly emerged about whether Medicaid, the health insurance program used by more than 70 million Americans, would see a pause in payments, which are distributed from the federal government to the states.
It should be noted that in addition to stripping funds from programs that millions of Americans depend on, Trump is doing something blatantly illegal. He is attempting to impound—or refuse to spend—funds appropriated by Congress, which was explicitly outlawed back in 1974. There’s a good reason presidents are prohibited from doing this, because it would effectively give them the ability to pick and choose which parts of existing federal law their administration follows. But he is clearly trying to test the limits of what he can get away with here.
For now, a federal judge has blocked Trump’s funding freeze from taking effect until at least February 3. But it remains to be seen what, if any, actions Democrats will take in response. According to Politico, Senate Democrats may attempt to hold up the confirmation of Trump’s budget chief, and New York Attorney General Letitia James has said she plans to go to court “right away on this horror.” Open defiance of the law would seem to warrant more drastic measures, like impeachment articles. But when Republicans have majorities in both houses, options are highly limited.
If someone could just hide his pen, it might stop this nonsense for a while.
❧ [CONTENT WARNING: Transphobia, incarceration, sexual abuse] A transgender prisoner is suing Trump over a policy that would place her in a men’s prison. One of the consequences of Trump’s executive order recognizing only two genders, which he signed as part of his initial flurry of over 100 such orders, is that women’s prisons (at the federal level) are explicitly forbidden from housing transgender women. This means any trans woman currently incarcerated in a gender-appropriate facility, along with any who are convicted of a federal crime during Trump’s term, would be transferred to a men’s prison—where invasive strip-searches by male guards and other forms of sexual harassment and violence are obvious threats. Studies have found that sexual abuse is often “a central part of a transwoman’s sentence,” and one survey from California prisons in 2021 found that 69 percent of trans women prisoners reported being forced to perform sexual acts against their wills.
It’s a horrifying situation, and a trans inmate in Massachusetts named Maria Moe is suing the president to stop it. Backed up by advocacy groups like the National Center for Lesbian Rights, she’s filed a suit arguing that Trump’s order violates Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment, along with the Fifth Amendment right to equal treatment under the law. If the case is successful—and it should be, since Trump’s order is so obviously discriminatory—it may prevent a vast amount of harm. (The Advocate)
❧ Pete Hegseth has been confirmed as the new Secretary of Defense. Every Democratic senator voted against Hegseth, who is a terrible pick for all kinds of obvious reasons—most notably his rampant Islamophobia and the fact that he doesn’t seem to believe in the Geneva conventions, calling them “burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars.” Even three Republicans showed a little sense and voted against him. But that wasn’t enough, and Hegseth squeaked through into power. Now, the world will be a much more dangerous and unstable place because of it. (Associated Press)
CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS
In a new article, Nathan J. Robinson argues that “Pete Hegseth's Worldview Is Even Worse Than His Personal Behavior”:
It is too late for us to stop Pete Hegseth’s appointment, but we can at the very least develop a clear understanding of the kind of danger we are in, which is not just the danger that Hegseth will drink in his office and make unwanted advances on female staff, as unsettling as those possibilities are. It is also the danger that he means what he says and intends to push the administration to pursue his lawless “crusade” against Muslims, leftists, transgender people, and anyone who does not subscribe to his brutal theocratic vision.
❧ Ethnic cleansing is now official U.S. policy in Gaza. It was basically already un-official U.S. policy, since America has been giving Israel unlimited weapons support even as it has waged an openly exterminationist military campaign there. But Donald Trump, in his infinite gift for saying the quiet parts about American imperialism out loud, told reporters on Saturday that he wanted to “clean out” the Gaza Strip, emptying its 1.5 million people from their destroyed enclave and into neighboring Jordan and Egypt. Trump has said this transfer “could be temporary” or “could be long-term.”
But let’s be real here. Re-settling Gaza has long been a dream of Israel’s far-right settler movement, including many members of the current Netanyahu government, and making the Arabs “disappear” is part of that project. And Trump’s son-in-law, real estate developer Jared Kushner, has even implied he may use the cleansed area to get his beak wet—emphasizing that Gaza’s “waterfront property” could be “very valuable”—and said that he “would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” (Wall Street Journal)
Daniella Weiss, one of the featured speakers at the “Preparing to Resettle Gaza” conference attended by many Israeli MKs in October 2024. Does this sound like someone who’d be OK with letting Palestinians leave “temporarily”? (Video: Middle East Eye)
❧ Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah has been arrested and deported from Switzerland, where he was scheduled to give a speech. His news website, the Electronic Intifada, reported that “three plainclothes police officers violently arrested Abunimah on Saturday and forced him into an unmarked vehicle without disclosing where he was being taken.” Abunimah said police accused him of “offending against Swiss law,” but provided no specific charges. He was kept in confinement for three days, where he was questioned by military authorities without the presence of a lawyer or any other contact with the outside world. He was released Monday and placed on a flight out of Zurich.
The ordeal is emblematic of the flagrant suppression faced by Palestinian journalists and activists across the Western world. Last year, U.K. police raided the home of Electronic Intifada’s associate editor Asa Winstanley and seized his electronic devices citing vague “counter-terror” powers, though they did not issue any actual charges against him. “The climate surrounding freedom of speech in Europe is becoming increasingly toxic, and we should all be concerned,” said Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories.
“Journalism is not a crime! Speaking out for Palestine is not a crime!” wrote
Ali Abunimah on X following his release. (Photo: Ali Abunimah)
❧ Trump has also directed organizations to stop distributing HIV medication funded by U.S. foreign aid. The U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS is responsible for most of the financing for HIV treatment worldwide, especially in impoverished nations in sub-Saharan Africa. It is estimated that in just over two decades, PEPFAR has saved over 25 million lives. But as part of a broader 90-day freeze on the distribution of all foreign aid, Trump has said that organizations can no-longer distribute life-saving drugs, even if they are already sitting in clinics. The New York Timesreports that “Appointments are being canceled, and patients are being turned away from clinics, according to people with knowledge of the situation who feared retribution if they spoke publicly. Many people with H.I.V. are facing abrupt interruptions to their treatment.”
PEPFAR’s computer systems have also been taken offline, which suggests that the program may be dismantled permanently. If so, it would accomplish a major goal of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which claims that PEPFAR is being used to “promote abortion, LGBT ideology, and comprehensive sexuality education” and has said that instead of providing treatment for HIV, it should be treated as “primarily a lifestyle disease (like those caused by tobacco) and as such should be suppressed through education, moral suasion, and legal sanctions.”
❧ China built a free, open-source AI that rivals ChatGPT, and Silicon Valley is panicking about it. It’s called DeepSeek, and it’s thrown the U.S. tech industry into a tailspin in a few ways. First, it does essentially everything ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and other AI products can do, but for free and with an open source code that anyone can read and tinker with on GitHub. (So much for OpenAI’s $200 a month subscription model!) And second, it was reportedly developed using methods that allow fewer advanced computer chips to be used for its functions. This both renders the U.S. restrictions against exporting such chips to China largely useless, and it has caused chipmaker Nvidia’s stock price to drop by 17 percent, losing $600 billion of value almost overnight. (And yet Nancy and Paul Pelosi, who have faced insider trading accusations for their investments in Nvidia, conveniently managed to sell around $5 million of their shares just a few weeks before the drop.) (Monthly Review)
AND NOW, LET’S TAKE A MOMENT
TO POINT AND LAUGH
AT THE HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
Apparently the reason was because “China is largely a land of rule-bound rote learners,” which definitely isn’t racist. Not even a little bit. (Headline: Harvard Business Review)
❧ Authorities in Pakistan are cracking down on a YouTuber for owning a pet lion cub. The vlogger’s name is Rajab Butt, and he’s basically a Pakistani version of Jake Paul or Mr. Beast, filming endless videos about his cars, parties, travel, and personal drama on his “Rajab’s Family” channel. But last month, he went too far. Butt was given a lion cub as a wedding gift by a fellow YouTuber, “Umar Dolla,” and the Punjab Wildlife Department stepped in.
The lion has now been confiscated and given a home in the Lahore zoo, and Butt has been sentenced to a year of community service, which will reportedly consist of making educational videos about animal rights and welfare. This is exactly how a government should respond when people try to keep wild animals as pets. It would be nice to see a similar crackdown in the U.S., where the exotic pet trade is still putting lots of animals in environments where they’re not properly cared for. (ProPakistani)
Maybe social media was a mistake. (Image: Rajab Butt, via BBC)
❧ Trump got into a standoff with Colombian President Gustavo Petro over the weekend—and although it hasn't been reported that way, Petro got the upper hand.
Initially, Trump threatened to issue tariffs on Colombian imports (like coffee and bananas) if Petro’s government continued to block military planes containing Colombian deportees from landing. This has been the source of a lot of confusion, because the prevailing media narrative has been that Petro wanted to stop the deportations from happening at all—but that's not the case. Colombia has accepted deportations from the U.S. for a long time now, and Joe Biden sent many flights, including of people who weren't even Colombian. What Petro objected to was the way Trump wanted to deport people: like “criminals,” handcuffed and tossed into Air Force C-17 jets. He demanded they instead be treated with “dignity” and flown back “on civilian planes,” and he matched Trump’s ultimatum with one of his own, telling him that “you impose a 50% tariff on the fruits of our human labor to enter the United States, and I do the same.” And Trump backed down. When the immigrantstouched down in Bogota this morning, they were on Colombian military planes Petro had sent for them, and without handcuffs, under what Petro described as “free and dignified” conditions.
This is a useful case study in how the U.S. media misreports major stories and gives them a pro-U.S. ideological slant. In countless headlines—including from CNN, from MSNBC, and from Newsweek—the framing has been that Colombia “backed down” or “capitulated” to Trump. Axios has described the incident as an “early win” for Trump, and Foreign Policyhas even written that the “Colombian president was forced into submission.” But just the opposite is true: Petro got what he wanted! To reiterate, he never wanted to stop the deportations; only to control the way in which they were carried out. By reporting the opposite, the media is handing Trump an undeserved propaganda victory, making him look stronger than he really is. They're also failing in their duty to accurately inform their readers.
This was also an opportunity for Petro to fire off a rant for the ages on Twitter/X, telling Trump—who has threatened to invade multiple Latin American countries—that “You will never rule us.” We highly recommend reading Petro’s response in full, not just because it a stirring rebuke to America’s long history of using and abusing Latin America, but because it’s also pretty funny. At one point, Petro said: “I don't really like travelling to the US, it's a bit boring, but I confess that there are some commendable things… I like Walt Whitman and Paul Simon and Noam Chomsky and Miller.” (It’s not clear who “Miller” refers to—Arthur?Glenn?Mac?Reggie? Miller Lite?) At any rate, it is good to see a real spirit of resistance coming from the Latin American Left.
❧ A week after sieg heil-ing before a crowd of Trump supporters, Elon Musk appeared at a rally for the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany Party and said some more Nazi Stuff. He told the crowd that “It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” while also saying that there is “too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that,” obviously referring to remembrance of the Holocaust. If he was trying to disabuse people of the idea that he has Nazi sympathies, he needs to try harder. (New York Times)
Never has a screenshot been more perfectly timed. (Image: The Guardian)
MEANWHILE, BIG THINGS ARE HAPPENING
ON THE ISLE OF MAN
It must be nice to have a news cycle this dull. Still, the discarded sofa is arguably less “disappointing” than most British politicians. (Image: Manx Radio)
AROUND THE STATES
❧ The Reverend Al Sharpton just led a “buy-cott” at an East Harlem Costco. Sharpton and around 100 of his fellow activists from the National Action Network showed up to the discount store to literally vote with their wallets, with Sharpton himself handing out $25 gift cards to attendees to go shopping. The whole thing was a show of support for Costco’s recent decision to keep its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) program, in contrast to companies like Amazon and Walmart that have abandoned or downsized theirs as the second Trump era kicks off.
If you buy enough cherry pies, social justice happens. Clearly.
There’s just one problem—the “buy-cott” took place as around 18,000 Costco workers are preparing to go on strike on Feb. 1. The workers point out that although the company made record profits last year, it hasn’t translated to increased wages—and in the U.S., it’s well-documented that the lowest-paid retail jobs are disproportionately held by Black people. You might expect a civil rights leader like Sharpton to care about that, and to stand with the workers, just as Dr. Martin Luther King stood with striking sanitation workers in Memphis shortly before his death. Instead, he decided to throw his support behind the company itself, and handed Costco valuable positive headlines in the lead-up to the strike. (New York Post)
❧ A big campus newspaper fight has broken out at the University of Texas at Dallas. This is both a labor dispute and one over freedom of speech and political expression. Last September, the staff of UTD’s official school newspaper, the Mercury, went on strike to protest the abrupt firing of their editor-in-chief, Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez. As NPR affiliate KERA reports, the official story is that Gutierrez ran afoul of the school administration because he was working more than one student job—something UTD’s rules arbitrarily didn’t allow, but which is entirely understandable for a college student who needs the money. (We’ve all been there.)
But the Mercury staff say the firing was retaliation for the paper’s positive coverage of pro-Palestine protests earlier in the school year, and for Gutierrez’s refusal to allow school administrators to review and edit their articles ahead of time. In particular one headline from May, which read “STUDENTS SPEAK, ADMIN SILENCES,” seems to have drawn the administration’s ire:
Now that’s a paper worth reading. (Image: Archive.org)
Rather than admit that the students were right and they were wrong, the university took a dramatic step: it firedall the striking members of the Mercury’s staff in October. In response, the fired journalists started a new, independent publication called the Retrograde, and announced plans to distribute it on campus instead of the Mercury, which has ceased publication. But the administration was having none of that, and it has now removed at least 20 newspaper kiosks from around campus in an apparent attempt to stop the Retrograde’s inaugural print issue from coming out.
Fortunately, you can’t haul the internet away, and you can read the new, fully student-controlled paper online here. And through its censorship efforts, the UTD administration has created a great big Streisand Effect, and drawn plenty of eyeballs—including ours—to the situation who otherwise never would have known about it. Funny how that works. (The Retrograde)
When you’re confiscating newspaper machines with a truck, you’re almost
❧ As the fallout from Southern California’s devastating wildfires continues, one point of scrutiny has been that more than half of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s firetrucks were out of service. Some have pointed to budget cuts as a reason for the lackluster response. But in the Big! Newsletter on Substack, Basel Musharbash points to another possible culprit—private equity raising the costs of firetrucks:
❧ It’s the end of an era for South Carolina’s escaped monkeys. The last of the 43 rhesus monkeys who escaped from the Alpha Genesis research facility in the small town of Yemassee back in November have finally been apprehended. After a nearly three-month hunt, facility employees were able to lure the last four monkeys out of hiding with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But while the monkeys’ freedom was temporary, their daring escape has brought some attention to the dire conditions within the Alpha Genesis facility, which whistleblowers have testified is rife with widespread neglect and abuse of the animals in its care. After multiple complaints from PETA, which provided extensive evidence of mistreatment, the Department of Agriculture has launched an investigation into whether the facility was violating animal welfare laws. (The Guardian)
Monkeys held captive in the Alpha Genesis research facility
A Maryland-based death metal band has a parrot as its lead singer!
Hatebeak is believed to be the first-ever band to have a bird as its lead singer—an African gray parrot named Waldo. Since 2004, Waldo has been the lead vocalist on several singles and one full-length album—his squawks and squeals meshing perfectly with "furious and blasting death metal," in the words of AquariusMagazine.
Hatebeak, thankfully, doesn’t play live because guitarist Mark Sloan and drummer Blake Harrison (the latter of whom sadly passed away last year) believed that hearing all the thrashing guitars and pounding drums at such extreme volume “would be absolute torture for the bird.”
For those about to squawk, we salute you (Photo: Discogs)
When asked about how they melded together Waldo’s guttural noises with the backing track, the band told the San Francisco Chronicle that it is a “trade secret,” though the paper surmised that “it begins with setting up a microphone in the bird room and hoping for the best.”
In 2015, they released an album, The Number of the Beak, compiling many of the singles they’d released over the years—including classic tracks like “Birdseeds of Vengeance,” “Roost in Peace,” “Seven Perches,” and “God of Empty Nest.” It is available for purchase on Bandcamp. They also have another album, that they co-recorded with the band Caninus, whose lead singers were two pitbull terriers.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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