Weekend Open Thread
[guest post by Dana]
Let’s go!
First news item
An interesting look at the disappearance of the WASP, and how no one noticed:
[T]here is no way back to an America run by WASPs, nor should we want there to be. But at its best, the WASP establishment gave us some things that every society needs, including leaders with a sense of ownership over the long-term success of their country and a sense that their privileges go hand-in-hand with a responsibility for those born less lucky.
One way to interpret the chaos into which the country is currently descending is to see it as the result of the void left by the disappearance of that old WASP code. And one way to interpret the culture war that seems to be consuming our politics is to think of it as a battle over what set of norms and customs should be put in the place of the ones that have recently vanished.
It would be naive and ahistorical to wish for an America in which the WASPs are still in charge. But their disappearance is one of the reasons for the chaos in which we now find ourselves. Constructing a meritocratic elite that is better than its WASP predecessors at ruling the country—one that actually manages to earn the assent of most Americans, unlike its more recent incarnations—will by no means be easy.
Second news item
Democrats very unhappy with Chuck Schumer over vote for funding bill:
Privately, House Democrats are so infuriated with Schumer’s decision that some have begun encouraging her to run against Schumer in a primary, according to a Democratic member who directly spoke with Ocasio-Cortez about running at the caucus’ policy retreat. Multiple Democrats in the Congressional Progressive Caucus and others directly encouraged Ocasio-Cortez to run on Thursday night after Schumer’s announcement, this member said.
The member said that Democrats in Leesburg were “so mad” that even centrist Democrats were “ready to write checks for AOC for Senate,” adding that they have “never seen people so mad.”
Asked by CNN about fellow Democrats encouraging her to challenge Schumer, Ocasio-Cortez declined to answer and said she was focused on keeping Democrats from backing the funding bill: “We still have an opportunity to correct course here, and that is my number one priority.”
Third news item
Columbia University informs about expulsions and suspensions:
Columbia University said students who occupied the campus’ Hamilton Hall during pro-Palestinian protests last spring have been expelled, suspended for several years or had their degrees temporarily revoked.
The sanctions were issued by the Columbia University Judicial Board on Thursday, the school said.
“The outcomes issued by the UJB are based on its evaluation of the severity of behaviors at these events and prior disciplinary actions,” the university said in a statement sent to the school community. “These outcomes are the result of following the thorough and rigorous processes laid out in the Rules of University Conduct in our statutes, which include investigations, hearings and deliberations.”
Fourth news item
Weighing in on the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil:
Now we get to the hard and important part—the unshakable appearance, if not the reality, that all of this is being done in retaliation for constitutionally protected speech on Khalil’s part. It seems to me that there are three different places where the First Amendment might show up in the litigation over what’s happened: As a challenge to the constitutionality of each of the two grounds on which I’m speculating the government might claim it can remove him; and as a standalone retaliation claim.
Taking the third possibility first, the problem for Khalil is that the Supreme Court, in general, has made it very difficult to use a First Amendment retaliation claim to successfully defeat an enforcement proceeding otherwise supported by probable cause—and especially in immigration cases. In its 1999 ruling in Reno v. American-Arab Antidiscrimination Committee, for instance, the Court stressed that “As a general matter . . . an alien unlawfully in this country has no constitutional right to assert selective enforcement as a defense against his deportation.” To be sure, Justice Scalia’s majority opinion left open the possibility that there could be “a rare case in which the alleged basis of discrimination is so outrageous” as to bar an otherwise valid removal proceeding. This may well be such a case. And the plaintiffs in AADC were not LPRs—which might put even more force into the argument for First Amendment limits here. But it’s worth starting from the baseline that, for better or worse (and, in my view, for worse), the First Amendment doesn’t generally protect non-citizens against being removed for activity that the First Amendment protects.
I’m a bit more sanguine about the possibility of specific First Amendment challenges to the hypothesized grounds for Khalil’s removal. Among other things, the First Amendment might require the Secretary of State to have substantial support for a personal determination that an LPR’s continued presence “would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest,” support that, in turn, courts could subject to meaningful scrutiny.
Fifth news item
Evidence of Trump’s cognitive decline?:
During a Thursday press availability with reporters in the Oval Office while meeting with the head of NATO, Trump centubled on his argument that Canada must join the United States, insisting that Canada “only works as a state.” Trump said:
“But it comes a point when you just can’t do that. You have to run your own country. And to be honest with you, Canada only works as a state. It doesn’t. We don’t need anything. They have as a state. It would be one of the great states anywhere. This would be the most incredible country visually. If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it between Canada and the U.S. just a straight artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many, many decades ago. And it makes no sense.
It’s so perfect as a great and cherished state. Keeping, ‘Oh, Canada,’ the national anthem, I love it. I think it’s great. Keep it. But it’ll be for the state. One of our greatest states, maybe our greatest state. But why should we subsidize another country for 200 billion, costs us $200 billion a year? And again, we don’t need their lumber. We don’t need their energy.
We have more than they do. We don’t need anything. We don’t need their cars. I’d much rather make the cars here. And there’s not a thing that we need. Now there’ll be a little disruption, but it won’t be very long. But they need us. We really don’t need them. And we have to do this. I’m sorry. We have to do this.“
If not cognitive decline, how does one explain this nonsensical statement?
Sixth news item
The Panama Canal in play:
The White House has directed the U.S. military to draw up options for increasing the American troop presence in Panama to achieve President Trump’s goal of “reclaiming” the Panama Canal, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the planning.
During a joint address to Congress last week, Trump said, “to further enhance our national security, my administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal.” Since then, administration officials have not said what “reclaiming” means.
U.S. Southern Command is developing potential plans that vary from partnering more closely with Panamanian security forces to the less likely option of U.S. troops seizing the Panama Canal by force, the officials said. Whether military force is used, the officials added, depends on how much Panamanian security forces agree to partner with the U.S.
The Trump administration’s goal is to increase the U.S. military presence in Panama to diminish China’s influence there, particularly access to the canal, the officials said.
Seventh news item
Trump repeating Russian propaganda:
We had very good and productive discussions with President Vladimir Putin of Russia yesterday, and there is a very good chance that this horrible, bloody war can finally come to an end — BUT, AT THIS VERY MOMENT, THOUSANDS OF UKRAINIAN TROOPS ARE COMPLETELY SURROUNDED BY THE RUSSIAN MILITARY, AND IN A VERY BAD AND VULNERABLE POSITION. I have strongly requested to President Putin that their lives be spared. This would be a horrible massacre, one not seen since World War II. God bless them all!!!
What Putin said:
On Thursday, Putin had said it is now “impossible” for even small groups of Ukrainian troops to withdraw from Russia’s Kursk region because they had lost control of the area, Russian state news outlet Tass reported, characterizing it as an encirclement.
Russia said the same day that it had recaptured Sudzha, the largest town in Kursk, and other settlements in the area. In the biggest sign of Russian advances in the area, Putin paid a surprise visit to Kursk earlier in the week, wearing military fatigues for the trip.
Ukraine denies Putin and Trump comments:
Ukraine’s military denied U.S. President Donald Trump’s claim that thousands of its troops were surrounded, following similar comments by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
“Reports about the enemy’s alleged ‘encirclement’ of Ukrainian units in the Kursk region are not true and are created by the Russians for political goals and pressure on Ukraine and partners,” the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said in a statement.
“The situation has not changed significantly during the day. Hostilities in the operational zone of the Kursk group of troops continue.”
Two lying thugs in a pod. Where is the outrage that a sitting American president is echoing a vile dictator, hater of freedom, and America’s enemy? Why is this okay with any American?
I have a very serious question: does the president of the United States rely on any information about the battlefield situation in Ukraine that doesn’t come from Putin’s conversations with Witkoff? Because there aren’t thousands of helpless Ukrainian troops in full encirclement. And asking Putin for an imaginary favor is quite a way to move the goalpost after Putin refused the unconditional 30-day ceasefire.
Eighth news item
Grifters, quacks, and charlatans leading the way – I’m looking at you, RFK Jr.:
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as America’s secretary of health and human services, neutral observers might have asked themselves: Would it be possible for a lawyer who had questioned the safety of childhood vaccinations for two decades to look at the available data and reconsider his views?
Kennedy’s recent interviews with Fox News, along with an op-ed he published on that outlet’s website, have been enough to make many experts conclude the answer is “no.”
Parsing every claim about the measles vaccine that Kennedy has made would take a long time, so let’s focus on one: that the vaccine causes deaths every year. Researchers say that simply isn’t true, except potentially in a small number of people who are not supposed to receive it — those with compromised immune systems.
“There are adverse events from the vaccine,” Kennedy said in a March 11 interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity. “It does cause deaths every year. It causes — it causes all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, et cetera. And so people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves.”
The Infectious Disease Society of America says there have been “no deaths related to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in healthy individuals.” (Since the 1970s, the measles vaccine has been given in a combination shot with mumps and rubella to minimize the number of injections kids get.)
“The MMR vaccine has never been found to cause a death in an immunocompetent individual,” Daniel Griffin, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Island Infectious Disease Medical in New York said, echoing that conclusion. “If you’ve got someone who has a compromised immune system, and someone doesn’t know any better and gives them an active vaccine, which is what you are not supposed to do, then, you know, that could result in a death.”
Ninth news item
This is just evil. How does Marco Rubio live with himself? He sold his soul, even though he knows better. Or knew better, once upon a time:
Even as President Donald Trump and government-demolition czar Elon Musk appear to actively favor Russia’s interests amid discussions of how to end the Russia-Ukraine war, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has struck a studiously neutral posture. Rubio has suggested that any peaceful resolution must take into account Ukraine’s “interests” and “their ability to prosper as a nation.”
But now Rubio’s State Department may have pulled a behind-the-scenes maneuver that appears tilted toward Russia’s interests and could anger Ukraine and its backers in the United States, leading to more questions about the department’s neutrality in the standoff.
The State Department has quietly terminated a contract that was in the process of transferring evidence of alleged Russian abductions of Ukrainian children—a potential war crime—to law enforcement officials in Europe, two people familiar with the situation tell The New Republic.
The nixed award could make it harder to continue tracking down the kidnapped Ukrainian kids and complicate efforts to seek accountability for the abductions, says one of the sources, who has direct knowledge of the ongoing operation.
. . .
The contract is extremely sensitive, because it involves the tracking of some of these abducted children. With this award, which was initially granted several years ago and renewed in late 2023, the State Department has been underwriting work by the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which has been using highly sophisticated tools, such as satellite imagery and analysis of open-source technology and biometric data, to identify and locate the abducted kids.
The report—which the lab’s executive director, Nathaniel Raymond, presented before the United Nations Security Council—concluded that this may constitute “crimes against humanity under customary international law.” The lab’s work has been shared with the International Criminal Court in connection with its recent charges that Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin, committed war crimes against the kidnapped kids.
The Yale lab had also transferred names and dossiers on the abducted kids it had located to Ukrainian authorities. But the underlying evidence—the hard digital documentation of kids’ movements and locations, compiled with sophisticated technologies—still needs to be transferred to Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement arm, the source with direct knowledge of the operation says.
This transfer to Europol has been interrupted by the Trump-Rubio State Department’s cancellation of the award, according to that source and a Democratic congressional aide with knowledge of the contract. This sort of tracking involves extremely complex and technologically sophisticated work, and the evidence itself—which is essential to proving the abductions—is highly complicated and must be moved via secure channels.
Have a good weekend.
—Dana
