Maybe I need to read him more to get that. I read the substack post on the 3 demands that seemed to me to be premised on the idea that there is an audience for this within the Trump administration. I have not been able to watch the interview with Jon Stewart and (mistakenly it sounds like) assumed it covered the same ground.

I think the premise that someone like Cass is working with is that Trump and Musk *aren't* on-board. This isn't a Trump/Musk explainer.

Folks like Rubio have flirted with these non-orthodox ideas (they go broader than simple tariffs) but as Cass says, Politicians are lagging indicators -- they rarely lead the way. Cass mentions a few other folks on the economic side with whom I believe he has a direct line.

So yeah, that's what makes some of the Stewart interview 'funny' to watch, Cass doesn't have a mission to trash Trump... so he just let's Stewart's jokes roll over him... and he's pretty clear that he thinks Trump/Musk are not competently executing whatever plan it is they think they are executing (that's the point of the article). But his audience isn't Trump/Musk/McConnel or any of the Old Republicans or MAGA cultists... he explicitly says the targets are 40-under.

Post-Trump is pretty explicit in his by-line...

Eh maybe...?

I mean admittedly I am not the closest Musk follower but my take on him is that his two big political priorities, construed most charitably, are about institutional and/or economic efficiency and a pseudo libertarian set of social values. These things are both in direct conflict with at least 2 of Cass' 3 big ideas, those being balancing trade with friendlies and coordinated anti-Chinese protectionism across the democratic world.

If you really wanted to give Cass a kind of push you'd say congratulations, you've re-invented the US led liberal world order, just with our allies paying their own freight on defense and being a little less touchy feely on certain questions of values. Maybe also a little more nakedly self interested in our approach to global capitalism. But that's also not really what Trump is doing, by haphazardly threatening tariffs against friend and foe alike and calling into question our ability to lead the kind of alliance Cass says we should. It also doesn't seem to be what motivates Musk.

That's a law enforcement agency arresting, for months or years, people who not only have not committed a crime, but no crime actually existed at all.

They just _mysteriously_ looked at the person and decided they were here illegally.

You don't think that's meaningful?

Come for the Jon Stewart fun, stay for the autistic nerd talking about the new-center-right economic policies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgEQeLR-M0g

To me, Cass is interesting for his Pre-Post-Trump positioning...

I think he fumbled a couple answers ... I don't think he quite gets across his message that NATO doesn't have to be destroyed to become renewed/reordered effectively (it kinda gets tacked on at the end after he meanders a bit); and I think he's too circumspect 'implying' what he pretty much says, which is that the Trump Admin is poorly run and even if you enact some policies that *could* be good, if you do them haphazardly and without a clear outline of what other countries can do to amend behaviors to bring trade into alignment... then you aren't doing good policies at all. Or, per usual, the Trump Admin undermines everything it touches. It's pretty clear that his long-term Post-Trump objective is tied to younger parts of the party... but he doesn't define his future goals as either supporting Trump nor directly taking Trump to task for botching things up.

He addresses this second point directly in this essay (probably written after the interview, I assume) where he critiques the administration for not articulating the point, direction or correction behind tariffs. So, if you were looking for a steelman on the Point/Purpose of Tariffs if handled by a competent administration, this is your article.

https://www.understandingamerica.co/p/americas-three-demands

As a supervillain origin story, he tells how he was the guy tasked by Mitt Romney(!) to look at the China trade policies... and turns out, there was a bit of a gap between theory and reality. This is before (I think) Autor's China Shock came out. So out of the Romney Bain Capital labs ...

Really? That's it? I'm far from his number one fan, but if you can't off the top of your head name several legitimately good policies he's put into place---among many very bad ones!---then you might have drunk too deeply of the neurotoxic waters of Portland.

These reports, as well as others that include accounts of ICE arresting and detaining US citizens, also make me think that ICE is challenging ATF’s reputation as one of the most lawless and unaccountable federal law enforcement agencies.

LOL. Tell me you're a conservative without telling me you're a conservative.

ICE has always been completely lawless, in every possible way, since it was created. It just generally restricted itself to being lawless against brown people.

Now, it feels free to move on to other people too.

It also used to have to turn people over to the courts, and it doesn't have to do that anymore.

But all this has been ICE, for the two decades it has existed. This is how it always has been, it didn't suddenly get worse.

Wait, they're arguing that the prisoners in El Salvador are no longer under US control? That they are not merely holding our prisoners, but we transfer authority to them ? I assumed their defense was the exact opposite, that El Salvador was basically operating as a private prison.

I feel that has very serious legal implications that they have not thought through at all. Specifically, the United Nations Convention Against Torture:

Article 3

1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

*ahem*
https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/el-salvador/

Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; extensive gender-based violence, including domestic and sexual violence, and femicide; substantial barriers to sexual and reproductive health services access; trafficking in persons, including forced labor; and crimes involving violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons.

You see that word torture right there? The 'competent authorities', aka, the US State Department, appear to have made a very clear statement in 2023 about whether people detained by the El Salvador government are in danger of being tortured. It is the Current Official US Foreign Policy Conclusion that there are credible reports that prisoners in El Salvador are tortured. On their own website. (Guys, you might want to take down the 'things that will be used as evidence of crimes against humanity' from your website before 'Black guy that got a medal'. Just saying.)

The US government, in court, just claimed they have violated Article 3 of the UN Convention Against Torture. As a _defense_.(1)

Oopsie-doodle. Bet that's going to play well.

The UN Convention Against Torture, incidentally, was signed by the president and ratified by Congress. It is US law.

Article 3 is a restriction on the government, like a lot of the constitution, and like the constitution, there's no actual stated penalty for the government breaking it, but the courts ABSOLUTELY can force the government to follow it.

1) This is, incidentally, why when the Bush administration ferried prisoners overseas to be tortured, it pretended either it still had authority over them and just allowed them to be 'interrogated' by others, or that it never had authority over them at all. Or, sometimes, that the place did not torture. But the Bush administration actually understood laws existed.

Trump admin admits an “administrative error” made it send an immigrant with protected status back to El Salvador but then added, “welp the card says moops” and we can’t do anything

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/an-administrative-error-sends-a-man-to-a-salvadoran-prison/682254/

You can if you want... although this kind of stuff is the big reason I didn't vote for him.

At some point this will come to a head, but I expect he'll have to lose some popularity before that. Probably also need to lose Congress.

What the next administration will also be very interesting. A lot of lines are going to be crossed, we're going to have a lot of criminal activity done during this administration.

I haven't even seen a "you know, it wasn't *THAT* bad" review yet. The two buckets I've seen so far are "it's as bad as you feared" and "it's worse than you feared".

The left always struggled with anti-Semitism because Jews don't fit into any neat place in their cosmology and also because a lot of the left is anti-Semitic. "Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools" became a saying for a reason. For a lot of the left, anti-Semitism can come across as resistance or even emancipatory because Jews are associated with capitalism and power. Others really don't want to criticize groups they are sympathetic to when they engage in anti-Semitism or want to ignore it if something viewed more important is at stake.

The other big issue is that basically the Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestinian sides are basically occupying completely different factual universes. They can't agree on anything. Most Jews until you get to the extremes edges are going to see the various aliyahs and Zionism as a response to the persecution Jews faced and an attempt at Jewish national liberation. The Prp-Palestinian movement is incapable of understanding why anybody would be sympathetic towards Jews or Israel at all.

Due process is not a cookie you have to earn through your innocence or your charisma. It is a restraint upon the exercise of government and it is the core reason the United States of America exists. If you don't believe me take a read through the Declaration of Independence and see how many of the grievances against King George III had to do with the procedural administration of justice.

Due process includes the right to have a competent lawyer, of your own choosing if you've the means to choose one. Scaring lawyers out of being willing to accept cases by the free agreement between attorneyand client, deterring lawyers from accepting the cause of unpopular litigants, arguing for legally valid positions that are inconvenient to the government -- if you do that, you're opposing the bedrock of America's tradition of law and order. Don't believe me? Ask John Adams, our second President.

A lawless President, a felon, a man who has his entire life shown no respect for nor understanding of the law whatsoever, is hardly behaving out of character by assaulting the rule of law itself. What is disheartening is how many people are going along with it.

I think you give the game away when you ask if I know what ‘important rights’ are, so much so that everything in your comment before and after is best interpreted as a kind of nihilism, not a real attempt to grapple with the rights or principles in play, on the merits.

No, actually, I was just being sarcastic, about the incredibly limited imaginations of privileged people who cannot conceive of actual right violations, so instead they glom on to 'Someone said something and other people got angry'.

Being invited to speaking at a university is not a right at all. No one has a right to be platformed by the government. At all. Ever. It's a privilege.

Now, the government is indeed also forbidden from discriminating based on viewpoints in how it hands out privileges (Something to remember when we're talking about visa.), but if we are going to judge _this_ sort of viewpoint judgement on government platforms as a right violation, we need to understand that this happens near continuously, in literally every context that the government platforms a speaker.

In fact, 'guest speaker at a college' is one of the few circumstances where content of their speech is not the determining factor to their platform in the first place! Usually the government explicitly platforms someone because they knew exactly what that person would say.

There is something very suspicious this specific form of platforming is the violation of someone's right. Surely the fact that a person _invited to give the commencement speech_ is going to talk only on topics the school wants and is picked because of of holding that position is even more discriminatory based on viewpoint!

Surely we should be complaining about that! I'm not sure how to make it fair, there are practical time limitations, but perhaps everyone who wants could enter their name and we randomly select half a dozen speakers to do five minutes. (You may notice that something like this is how it works in the very few places that the government does, without restriction, platform people, like city council meetings.)

See how dumb this is? There is no free speech access to a government platform.

You can make coherent arguments that colleges should platform people with various political positions as part of academic freedom and exposing students to ideas. But you cannot make that argument they have a _right_ to be platformed on any coherent first amendment grounds.

My 17yo daughter went to see Snow White last weekend... when she got back I asked, 'So, was it woke?'

'Worse,' she said, 'It was boring.'

I suppose that's what they mean by underperforming as word of mouth gets out.

Oh, yeah. For what it's worth, the stuff they dug up about Ward Churchill *WAS* worth firing him over.

Plagiarism! I mean, now we know that it's complicated but back in the day it was an actual sin! And he was so egregious that it embarrassed the institution which, I've already said, is the only unforgivable.

Which turns the discussion into "would they have brought out the fine-tooth combs if Churchill hasn't embarrassed the institution?" and the answer to that is "of course not".

But, at that point, you've got yourself a pickle anyway.

The Gibson's Bakery thing is the one that gets me to say that academia has no idea how much good will they've lost and the sheer number of grads who are screaming for debt relief are making that relationship even worse.

The grey tribe is going to learn what it hates about the red tribe good and hard again, but when it comes to academia?

I'm not sure that the red tribe will do a whole lot of harm to the red/grey alliance based on the academia thing.

Academia is part of why the greys left.

Jews are the monkey in the middle as the Right and Left play a game of "No, you're the anti-Semite " between them. There have been many Jews listing our problems with anti-Semitism on the Right and the Left for years since 9/11 but nobody really listens to us on this issue.

"Hashem, please grant me the confidence of a non-Jew explaining to me what is and isn’t antisemitic" has become something of a thing among Jews recently.

Last week I wrote about the 26 year old Kat Abughazaleh the primary challenger to 80 year Jan Schkowsky for Illinois' 9th District and how this might be a big political mismatch since the Illinois 9th District is a very Jewish district and Abughazaleh has taken a very hotile to Israel stance. In more evidence of this mistmatch, Kat has apparently confused AIPAC and J-Street and is going after Representive Jan Schkowsky for getting money from J-Street, which is generally much less hawkish and much more friendly towards the Palestinians than AIPAC.

https://x.com/TrackAIPAC/status/1904229724731351530