Politics

This was too depressing to come up with something pithy.

OK, so that is in the running for clickbait hed of the year, but it's actually apt for the column.

It may seem paradoxical to write this in an opinion piece. But it needs saying: arguments alone have no meaningful effect on people’s beliefs. And the implicit societal acceptance that they do is getting in the way of other, more effective forms of political thinking and doing.

I’m a researcher who studies the intersection of psychology and politics, and my work has increasingly led me to believe that our culture’s understanding of how political persuasion works is wrong. In the age of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the rise of the far right, commentators have endlessly opined on the problems of fake news, polarisation and more. But they’ve mostly been looking in the wrong places – and have focused too much on words.

Take “debates”. They’re a central part of most election campaigns around the world, seen as so influential that they’re often governed by strict rules around media coverage and balance. Yet evidence suggests that watching debates has no impact on opinions whatsoever. In 2019 researchers analysed 56 TV debates in 22 elections in the US, Canada, New Zealand and Europe from 1952 to 2016. The study tracked nearly 100,000 respondents to see whether debates helped undecided or decided voters to make up or change their minds. They found no evidence that they did. In 2012, a reporter ran another analysis about whether debates influenced election outcomes. As he put it: “The effects of debates on eventual votes are likely mild, and, in most cases, effectively nil.”

Not really sure I can add more absurdity to this.

How much more dystopian can it get? Hang onto your hat!

The US Department of Homeland Security is reportedly considering an “out-of-the-box” pitch to participate in a television gameshow that would have immigrants compete to obtain US citizenship.

Department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin described the pitch to the New York Times as a “celebration of being an American” and said the show would include challenges based on American traditions.

In a statement, McLaughlin said: “We need to revive patriotism and civic duty in this country, and we’re happy to review out-of-the-box pitches. This pitch has not received approval or rejection by staff.”

“What I’m really worried about is my generation losing faith in democracy,” he said.

The Democrat describes a generation that played by the rules, only to learn the game was rigged. They pursued higher education, avoided drugs and underage drinking, lowered teen pregnancy rates, voted, often in record numbers, and yet they are saddled with student loan debt, struggling to afford rent, and deeply disillusioned with a political system that has failed to deliver economic fairness or financial security.

“We still find ourselves fucked, frankly,” he said.

Now, Hogg argues, is the moment for the party to act with urgency – and accountability, after leading Democrats brushed aside voter concerns about Joe Biden’s age and ability to run for a second term.

“People felt like we were not honest with them,” he said. “When they told us the president was too old. We said: ‘No, he’s not.’ And then at the last second: ‘Yes, he is.’ And then when they told us prices were too high, we said: ‘No, they aren’t. Look at this graph.’

“It doesn’t matter what the data says if that is not what people feel,” he added. “What you have to respond to is what people feel and explain what you’re doing today.”

This frankly sounds like the sort of guy who should be in a DNC leadership position.

Not even a year ago, though it feels like a decade, the US Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from criminal laws when they act in their official capacity. In other words, presidents don’t have to worry about breaking the law, as they will never be held to account. On Thursday, the Trump administration was back at the court with a related request: Will the justices please allow us to enforce illegal orders against anyone who fails to sue to stop us?

As Trump portrays himself as a king, his lawyer presses for a king’s powers.

The request comes out of litigation over Trump’s illegal executive order denying birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and visa holders. This is so obviously a violation of the citizenship clause of the Constitution, which guarantees birthright citizenship to virtually everyone born in the United States, that the Trump administration does not want the court to tackle that question. Instead, they are asking the court to strip the judiciary of the power to issue nationwide or universal injunctions—orders that halt the implementation of a rule, law, or policy while the courts contemplate a final ruling.

If courts cannot halt the government’s illegal actions until the Supreme Court has decided they are illegal—a process that can take years, if the case ever reaches the nine justices—then the government would be free to do essentially whatever it wanted to anyone unable to sue or possibly join a class action lawsuit. It transforms the justice system from one which stops illegal government activity into one that can only provide whack-a-mole relief to those who can stand up and ask for it.

It’s a nightmarish vision of the justice system. Imagine the police identify a serial thief. He’s targeting neighborhoods at night all across the country. Rather than lock him up, the thief simply promises to skip the homes that have called the police to complain and obtained a restraining order. Until a jury convicts him, everyone else keeps getting robbed. That’s what Trump is asking for: the ability to run roughshod over the Constitution and the law—and not just on this question of citizenship, but on any illegal or rights-depriving scheme he can think of—until the case somehow reaches the Supreme Court.

“Your argument seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a ‘catch me if you can’ kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told Solicitor General John Sauer. “I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

“You go back to English common law and the Chancery Court,” Jackson continued, “but they had a different system. The fact that courts back in English Chancery couldn’t enjoin the King, I think, is not analogous or indicative of what courts can do in our system, where the king, quote, unquote, the executive, is supposed to be bound by the law, and the court has the power to say what the law is.”

This is the crux of the issue. The Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority keeps moving the goal posts so that the president increasingly resembles the monarch the colonies declared independence from. As Trump portrays himself as a king on social media, his administration presses for him to possess a king’s powers as well.

In their battle against universal injunctions, the Trump administration has contended that final, nationwide relief from an illegal order would only come if and when the Supreme Court issued a ruling finding it unlawful. And Sauer did pledge the government would follow any such order. But as Justice Elena Kagan drew out in her questioning, there’s no guarantee that the Supreme Court would quickly hear a challenge to an illegal executive order, if ever.

“I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

“Let’s just assume you’re dead wrong,” Kagan began,asking Sauer to concede the citizenship order is illegal to lay out how the administration would argue court review should play out to “get to the result that there is a single rule of citizenship, that is the rule that we’ve historically applied, rather than the rule that the EO would have us do.”

Sauer suggested litigants could get temporary relief througha class action. (Yes, a class action for infants being born constantly joined by parents who might fear deportation as a result of coming forward in court.) But Sauer soon acknowledged that the administration would likely fight class certification.

Next Kagan asked if an individual challenging the executive order won an appeal in a circuit court, which has jurisdiction over several states, would the government agree not to enforce the order in those states? Sauer would not commit to that.

Sauer and some of the GOP-appointed justices seemed content with the idea that through one of those routes—an individual plaintiff or a class action—a challenge to an executive order could quickly reach the Supreme Court, where would be resolved expeditiously. But Kagan quickly pointed out that the government was actually arguing for an extraordinary loophole: The more egregious the violation, the harder it will be for the issue to ever reach the Supreme Court.

The birthright citizenship question is a perfect example, because it is considered to be lawless and baseless by most lawyers. “Let’s assume that you lose in the lower courts pretty uniformly, as you have been losing on this issue,” Kagan pressed. “I noticed that you didn’t take the substantive question to us. You only took the nationwide injunction question to us. I mean, why would you take the substantive question to us? You’re losing a bunch of cases. This guy here, this woman over here, they’ll have to be treated as citizens, but nobody else will. Why would you ever take this case to us?”

In other words, the Trump administration can win by losing. If the losing party, the government, accepts individual losses and never appeals, then it wins by applying the order to everyone without a lawyer—which is most people, especially among immigrant populations fearful of deportation.

After two and a half hours of arguments, it is unclear whether there are five votes among the justices to end universal injunctions outright. Doing so would be a radical departurefrom the law, one that would subject the nation to every illegal fantasy Trump and his braintrust can think up for an indeterminate amount of time. This case clearly showed the contours of thechoice: The justices clearly do not like the pervasive use of universal injunctions, and the GOP appointees certainly don’t like the cascade of injunctions against Trump. But at the same time, the birthright citizenship order is clearly baloney.

Perhaps Justice Clarence Thomas’ questions best illustrate the conundrum. An originalist, Thomas’s questions focused on the history of universal injunctions and its common law ancestors, seemingly to disprove the notion that there is a bygone analogue that would justify its existence.

But does Thomas believe, as Sauer stated on Thursday, that the citizenship clause was merely intended to cover the children of formerly enslaved people? Two years ago, Thomas wrote that Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which includes the citizenship clause and the equal protection clause, were bound up together in one universal rule of equality for all. “The addition of a citizenship guarantee thus evidenced an intent to broaden the provision, extending beyond recently freed blacks and incorporating a more general view of equality for all Americans,” Thomas wrote in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, using the amendment to justify ending affirmative action by stressing its application to white people as well. As forthe amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, Thomas called it “a new birth of freedom.”

But that’s not worth the paper its written on if the courts can’t protect it.

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I wrote the book Copaganda based on my years of being a civil rights lawyer and public defender representing the most vulnerable people in our society. I watched as the police and the news media distorted how we think about our collective safety. Copaganda makes us afraid of the most powerless people, helps us ignore far greater harms committed by people with money and power, and always pushes on us the idea that our fears can be solved by more money for police, prosecution, and prisons. Based on the evidence, this idea of more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer is like climate science denial.

This excerpt is adapted from an important part of the book on how by selectively choosing which stories to tell, and then telling those stories in high volume, the news can induce people into fear-based panics that have no connection to what is happening in the world. It's how public polling can show people thinking crime is up when it is down year after year, and how so many well-meaning people are led to falsely believe that marginalized people themselves want more money on surveillance and punishment as the primary solutions to make their lives better.

Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities.

In the Opinion video above, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.

Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said.

Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States.

“I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to leave.

Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy.

The past week has presented an upsetting montage of what happens when an authoritarian executive, motivated by naked racism and nativism, activates a highly militarized “unitary executive police force” across the country to storm into apartments and restaurants, throw kids onto the ground, and whisk people away with their kids still in the car.

Why would local police support ICE operations that appear violent and unjustified?

ICE and the immigrant criminalization system, to a large extent, do not operate the way most local criminal legal systems do. Warrants don’t require the same scrutiny to be actionable. The burden of proof is different. There is no real “statute of limitations” – you can be deported for something that happened decades ago or deported before you are convicted. People facing deportation and detention are not guaranteed defense attorneys. And, as we now have seen so clearly, ICE is not required to say who they have detained or why (although they are supposed to post who is being held in ICE detention). Thus, we have an immigrant criminalization system that is perfectly designed to disappear people in a horrific way, that leaves loved ones in confusion and dismay, that criminalizes people for movement.

Democrat John Ewing unseated Republican Mayor Jean Stothert in Tuesday's officially nonpartisan election to lead Omaha, a victory that ends the GOP's 12-year hold on Nebraska's largest city.

Stothert conceded the race after 9 PM local time with Ewing ahead 54-46, though more votes remained to be counted.

Ewing, who will be Omaha's first Black mayor, overcame a large fundraising disadvantage in his campaign to deny Stothert what would have been an unprecedented fourth term.

But Ewing, who serves as Douglas County treasurer, benefited from voters' unhappiness with the incumbent. The challenger argued Stothert had failed to solve the city's transportation problems and strengthen the police force during her long tenure.

Ewing also sought to tie the mayor to Donald Trump, whom Stothert has tried to avoid associating with during her time leading this Democratic-leaning city. Ewing additionally enjoyed the support of former state Sen. Mike McDonnell, a Democrat-turned-Republican who came in third during the first round of voting.

Stars of Trump’s Make America great again (Maga) firmament are speaking out in unambiguous terms against the plan for him to be donated a jet described as a “palace in the sky” and convert it into Air Force One. They are damning the idea in Trump’s own language – telling him this is not “draining the swamp” as he promised to do during his first presidency, and nor does it conform to the theme of his second Oval Office term: “America First.”

Ben Shapiro, the prominent rightwing commentator, led the charge on his daily podcast. “President Trump promised to drain the swamp – this is not, in fact, draining the swamp,” he said.

Linking Qatar to the militant Palestinian group Hamas and Al Jazeera, the media network that is widely detested on the right and is partly funded by the Qatari government, he added: “Taking sacks of goodies from people who support Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, Al Jazeera, all the rest, that’s not America First … If you want President Trump to succeed this kind of skeezy stuff would be stopped.”

The planned gift of the 13-year-old, Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet, which Trump would inherit personally after he leaves the White House, has achieved the seemingly impossible: it has united the president’s most fervent fans with his most ardent opponents. Laura Loomer, the far-right Maga activist, warned that the proposed gift would put “such a stain on the administration”.

Well, yeah. This is such a terrible idea that even staunch supporters are like "no, a free flying espionage palace that you get to personally use after leaving office is too much."

Progressive streamer Hasan Piker’s recent detention by CBP at the Chicago airport has generated widespread outrage — and rightfully so. No US citizen should be interrogated about their political beliefs when re-entering their own country. But while CBP’s behavior was egregious, Piker’s response was potentially even more dangerous: he chose to engage in a two-hour conversation with federal agents without a lawyer present, streaming about it afterward as if this were just more content for his millions of followers.

For many years, we’ve called out this kind of bullshit interrogation technique of citizens at the border (it didn’t start with Trump, though it’s almost certainly gotten worse with him in power).

Rather than following the basic rule of only showing his passport, answering the most basic travel-related questions and requesting a lawyer if they asked further questions, Piker chose to engage in an extended dialogue with CBP officials about his political views, beliefs about Hamas, and even past Twitch bans. He turned what should have just been a clear story of an unfortunately common constitutional violation into potential legal ammunition against himself. As Taylor Lorenz reported:

He was detained in Chicago and questioned for two hours about protected journalistic activities like who he’s interviewed and his political beliefs. He was asked whether or not he’d interviewed Hamas, Houthis, or Hezbollah members. He was questioned about his opinions on Trump and Israel and asked about his history of bans on Twitch. His phone and laptop were not confiscated.

“They straight up tried to get something out of me that I think they could use to basically detain me permanently,” Piker said on stream following the incident. “… [the agent] kept saying stuff like, do you like Hamas? Do you support Hamas? Do you think Hamas is a terror group or a resistance group?”

“I kept repeating the same statement over and over again,” Piker said. “I kept saying… I’m on the side of civilians. I want the endless bloodshed to end. I am a pacifist. I want wars to end… which is insane because up until this moment. If you were to say as an American citizen, you stand 10 toes down with Hamas, or you stand 10 toes down with the Houthis, they can’t deny you entry into the country for that shit.”

His post-detention stream reveals just how badly he misunderstands the danger he put himself in. Despite claiming he “kept repeating the same statement,” he eagerly recounts engaging in detailed discussions about his past statements on 9/11 and getting excited when a CBP official supposedly “agreed with the blowback sentiment.” This isn’t protecting your rights — it’s giving federal agents hours of statements that could be twisted, misquoted, or used to trap you in inconsistencies later. Even a single misremembered detail could become grounds for a false statements charge.

Throughout his stream, Piker frames this as a battle of wills — bragging about being a “stubborn piece of shit” who wouldn’t be intimidated. But he fundamentally misunderstands the game being played. While intimidation may be a useful side effect for CBP, their primary goal in these extended interviews isn’t to scare you — it’s to get you talking. The more you talk, the more likely you are to say something they can use. And here’s the crucial part that Piker missed: they don’t need you to admit to a crime. They just need you to say something — anything — that they can later claim was false. Just ask Martha Stewart, who went to prison not for insider trading, but for lying about a stock sale to investigators.

Piker’s response to viewers questioning his judgment reveals just how deeply his influencer mindset clouds his legal judgment:

I know that under normal circumstances, I’m supposed to say I want a lawyer. I don’t want to talk to you, but this… nothing I’m doing is illegal.

And I also wanted to see what would happen. Do you understand? I wanted to see what would happen. I wanted to actually see this experience, which is why instead of immediately fucking lawyering up, I was like, “No, I’m going to I’m going to entertain this. I’m going to see what they actually are trying to get out of this.”

And I’m glad I did this because the reality of the matter is one, I’m profoundly privileged. Okay, remember I’m a public person and also I have enough money to to be able to fight back against this sort of thing and they know who the fuck I am. So obviously the reason for why they’re doing that is I think to try to create an an environment of fear to try to get people like myself or at least like others that would be in my shoes that don’t have that same level of security to shut the fuck up. And for me, I’m going to use the privilege that I have in that moment to try and see what the fuck they’re doing. Okay?

This response perfectly encapsulates the dangerous intersection of influencer culture and law enforcement encounters. Piker treats this like content creation — an opportunity to “see what would happen” and generate an interesting story. But federal agents aren’t content collaborators. They’re trained investigators who excel at getting people to inadvertently incriminate themselves through casual conversation. His “privilege” of being a public figure with money doesn’t protect him — it makes him a more valuable target.

He totally misunderstands the shit he’s in here. Yes, part of this is intimidation and trying to get him to shut up when talking publicly, but while they have detained him they want him to talk away because that’s how he fucks himself. You are bound to say something at some point that can be used against you. Even if you’re positive you haven’t.

If you think this sounds paranoid, just watch this essential lecture by law professor James Duane explaining why you should never talk to law enforcement without a lawyer present. The lecture is followed by 20 minutes of a police officer basically confirming everything Duane says and emphasizing that you should never, ever talk to law enforcement without a lawyer, and explaining how he (and other cops) are great at convincing you to talk against your best interest:

There’s a lot in there, but he explains why you should never talk to law enforcement without a lawyer even if you’re innocent, you only tell the truth, don’t reveal anything incriminating, and the entire interview is taped. Because even then what you say can be used against you in ways you don’t expect. And, as he notes, what you say can never be used in your favor in such circumstances.

Or, to put it in shorter, more direct terms, listen to the late great pioneering civil rights lawyer Bill Goodman and his longtime law partner Denise Heberle in the PSA they put together four or five years ago for the National Lawyers Guild telling people to shut up when talking to law enforcement.

Also, if you’re re-entering the country, make sure you know what your actual rights are.

Piker and his supporters have offered up multiple defenses of his decision to talk, each more dangerous than the last:

First, they insist it “worked” because CBP eventually let him go. This fundamentally misunderstands how these encounters work. They were always going to let him in — he’s a US citizen. Requesting a lawyer would have “worked” too. He would still have been let in. The risk isn’t in the moment, it’s in how those two hours of statements might be used against him later. He might have told a little white lie that will come back to haunt him. He may have made a slight exaggeration. He might have said something that could be twisted and misrepresented in court. There are many reasons that he has put himself in totally unnecessary risk.

Second, they argue he got more attention for the incident by engaging. But he could have generated the same outrage by simply describing CBP’s unconstitutional detention and questioning after asserting his rights. The story isn’t improved by putting himself at legal risk.

Third, his supporters argue that since “CBP doesn’t care about due process anyway,” asserting your rights is pointless. This is exactly backwards. When facing authorities who might violate your rights, you don’t voluntarily surrender them — you assert them clearly and create a record of doing so. Voluntarily waiving your rights because they “might not respect them anyway” is handing them the win for no goddam reason.

Finally, there’s the “journalist generating content” defense — perhaps the most dangerous rationalization of all. This perfectly captures how influencer-brain can lead people to catastrophically misread serious situations. When being questioned by federal agents, you’re not a journalist gathering material. You’re not creating content. You’re potential prey facing trained predators whose entire job is getting you to say something — anything — they can use against you later.

Perhaps most disturbing is watching his supporters argue that he’s “experienced at this” because he handles hostile Twitch chat trolls daily. This dangerous false equivalence perfectly illustrates how influencer culture can lead people to fatally misunderstand encounters with state power. Managing online trolls requires an entirely different skillset from protecting your rights during law enforcement questioning. One is about engagement; the other is about knowing when to stay silent.

This matters far beyond Piker’s individual case. With his massive platform, he’s teaching millions of followers exactly the wrong lesson about dealing with law enforcement — that if you’re clever enough, privileged enough, or “experienced” enough at handling conflict, you can somehow talk your way through it. This is exactly the kind of thinking that leads people to waive their rights and incriminate themselves.

Yes, CBP’s treatment of Piker was shameful and unconstitutional. It deserves fierce condemnation. But by turning a serious civil rights violation into influencer content, Piker didn’t just put himself at risk — he helped normalize the very kind of police overreach he claims to oppose.