FRIDAY: We the people support due process!

FRIDAY, APRIL 4, 2025

According to YouGov survey: For the most part, the survey was conducted before the recent news about the man who got shipped to the gulag through "administrative error."

Respondents didn't know about that. This is one of the questions they were asked:

Would you support or oppose the following?
Deporting immigrants without criminal convictions to El Salvador to be imprisoned, without letting them challenge the deportation in court.

Respondents were given four choices, or they could say they weren't sure. At Mediaite, Alex Griffing reports the basic results:

Americans Oppose Imprisoning Migrants in El Salvador Without Trial By More Than 2-to-1 Margin

A recent YouGov poll found that President Trump’s [policy of] deporting migrants to El Salvador without due process is widely unpopular.

The poll conducted between March 28 and April 1 asked 1095 U.S. adult citizens if they support or oppose the following statement: “Deporting immigrants without criminal convictions to El Salvador to be imprisoned, without letting them challenge the deportation in court.”

Only 15% of respondents said they “strongly support” and 11% said they “somewhat support” for a total of 26% supporting the move by the Trump administration to some degree. On the flip side, 46% said they “strongly oppose” and 15% said they “somewhat oppose”—meaning 61% of respondents are against the deportations and indefinite imprisonments. 13% of respondents were “unsure” how they felt.

Let's lay that out so you can see it. Here's how respondents responded:

Would you support or oppose the following?
Deporting immigrants without criminal convictions to El Salvador to be imprisoned, without letting them challenge the deportation in court.

Strongly support: 15%
Somewhat support: 11%
Somewhat oppose: 15%
Strongly oppose: 46%

Not sure: 13%

Fifteen percent say they strongly support these renditions.  Judging by appearances, most of them are on-air message providers at the Fox News Channel. 

"Oh, am I boring you again?" Jessica Tarlov said.

PERSONS: The person who took the Franks away...

FRIDAY, APRIL 4, 2025

...could be seen on a "cable news" program: This very week, the tariffs arrived. So did the cable news ratings.

With respect to the cable news ratings, we'll let Deadline deliver the mail. We'll perform a bit of editing:

Fox News Tops Q1 And March Ratings As MSNBC And CNN Point To Post-Inauguration Gains

Fox News was up in total viewers and the key demo in the first quarter of 2025 and during the month of March, while its cable news rivals all showed declines from the same period a year ago.

In the first quarter, Fox News averaged 3.01 million total viewers in primetime, up 46% from a year earlier. MSNBC averaged 1.02 million, and CNN posted 558,000. 

[...]

In March, Fox News averaged 3.13 million viewers in primetime, while MSNBC posted 1.18 million, and CNN averaged 591,000. 

[...]

Fox News’ The Five was the top show in the first quarter, averaging 4.55 million, and in March, when it averaged 4.3 million.

The Five is one of the dumbest (and most propagandistic) shows in the history of TV "news." Possibly for that very reason, it continues to rock the world. 

How do other "cable news" programs rank? In this report, Adweek lists the top fifteen shows for the entire first quarter. All but one of the top fifteen airs on the Fox News Channel:

Among Total Viewers (first quarter) 
1) The Five—Fox News (4,300,000)
2) Jesse Watters Primetime—Fox News (4,021,000)
3) Special Report with Bret Baier—Fox News (3,452,000)
4) Gutfeld!—Fox News (3,344,000)
5) Hannity—Fox News (3,338,000) 
6) The Ingraham Angle—Fox News (3,334,000)

[...]

13) The Rachel Maddow Show—MSNBC (2,077,000)
14) Fox News @Night—Fox News (1,784,000)
15) Fox and Friends—Fox News (1,499,000)

The numbers come from Nielsen. They report, we get to decide.

So it goes on "cable news" at the present time. For an example of the squalor to which we've referred, this was part of the "news" as offered at 10:01 Eastern, right away, on last night's Gutfeld! show:

GUTFELD (4/3/25): According to a new book, Obama didn't want Kamala to run for president  and actually worked to undermine her. 

Perhaps he wanted to remain the nation's first black female president.

AUDIENCE: [Mixed reaction]

GUTFELD: I think that was a typo.

President Obama is really a woman; his wife is really a man. These are now persistent themes on this gigantically disordered primetime "cable news" program.

It actually does get worse! That's especially true of the open misogyny and the incel-adjacent raw anger. This is the squalor delivered each night from the soul of a disordered person—a person who's sixty years old! 

That said, a nation staggers into the future with the various persons it has. That includes the vast array of persons in Blue America who have agreed that this moral and intellectual squalor—this primetime descent into incel culture—must never be reported and must never be discussed.

By 10:03 last night, the angry host had started his "issue monologue," but the open misogyny never stops. After playing tape of something President Trump said in releasing those tariffs, he instantly peddled this:

GUTFELD: "Back and forth, back and forth." 

Kind of like how you return a beached whale to the ocean.

[PHOTO of CNN'S Ana Navarro]

On Gutfeld!, anti-Trump women are relentlessly compared to horses, pigs, cows and whales, or more simply to "livestock." 

This sort of thing never stops on this stunningly braindead program. The New York Times and the Washington Post aren't willing to tell you this.

The cable news ratings arrived this week, but so did the tariffs. They blew the talk of the "deportations" and the "arrests" away. 

That said, in a letter to the Washington Post, one reader has now described one of the recent arrests. But he uses a different word:

Letters to the Editor
These jaw-dropping ICE arrests could be from a movie

Regarding the March 28 news article “Calls for Tufts student to be released as Rubio confirms revocation of visa”:

We could have been watching an ugly, inciting incident in a Christopher Nolan movie. A lone young woman walks down an urban street. Suddenly, she’s set upon by six people, four dressed in black, all but one wearing masks to conceal their faces. One rips the cellphone from her hands as two spin her around, remove her backpack and place her in handcuffs. Unfortunately, this is not fiction; it’s a scene from the latest attack on civil liberties under the Trump administration.

The abduction of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk by plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raises serious concerns about the protection of our civil liberties...

[...]

J— F—, Meadville, Pennsylvania

This reader called this arrest an "abduction." Whatever you want to call it, he describes the events of that day in a reasonably accurate fashion.

We're amazed, day after day, by the behaviors of the persons we see on the Fox News Channel. Ten years ago, we wouldn't have known that you could get that many people to perform so many scripted recitations. 

We're persistently amazed by the squalor of the Gutfeld! show, but also by the Fox News Channe's unending displays of dumbness.

That said, many persons in Blue America also have a lot of explaining to do. We think, for example, of the two new books which allege, rightly or wrongly, that major figures within the Democratic Party agreed to hide their knowledge and their concerns about the declining cognitive state of President Biden until he staged his massive meltdown during that fateful debate last June.

(On Fox News Channel programs, the children call it "the Democrat Party." That's how stupid and  childish this is.)

Barack Obama is a woman. Ana Navarro is "a beached whale." 

Rep. Tlaib has a troubling mustache. This is the morally squalid, braindead world inhabited by a figure like Gutfeld, whose backing band includes such figures as Tyrus, the former professional "wrestler," along with Kenndy, the former MTV VJ, who we don't yet know how to describe.

Where in the world do these persons come from? They're plucked from the normal distribution within our struggling species.

Back to that abduction or arrest. In Tuesday's report, we recorded the inanity displayed on The Five with respect to one of the "deportations." 

"It's just a gay barber," the eternally fatuous Jesse Watters said, thereby dismissing a possible innocent victim. "He's not into you," the disordered Gutfeld then said.

With respect to that abduction at Tufts, we'll now report our own reaction. As we watched the videotape of that graduate student being taken away by masked men on the street, we thought of one of the most famous arrests of the frequently brutal past century.

We refer to the famous arrest which lies at the heart of this remarkable, remarkably beautiful book:

HarperCollins Publishers
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
By Francine Prose

“Prose’s book is a stunning achievement. . . . Now Anne Frank stands before us. . . a figure who will live not only in history but also in the literature she aspired to create.”  Minneapolis Star Tribune

In our view, the summary by the publisher fails to capture the scope of Prose's remarkable book. It's hard to fight past the "adorable child" framework to arrive at the deeper places Prose explores.

For ourselves, we're most struck by the place where Prose uses the term "fairy tale" to describe one part of what is now a well-documented event:

We refer to the place where the man who arrested Anne Frank and her family and friends dumped the contents of what would become her world-famous book onto the floor of the annex in which she'd been hiding. He did that so he could use the briefcase in which her voluminous writings were kept so he could carry away a small amount of cash and a handful of costume jewelry—the items he'd chosen to steal. 

In a fairy tale straight from the gods, he discarded one of the most important books of the 20th century in favor of a handful of baubles. It's a type of story from deep in prehistory—a story about the inability to see what's truly of value, even when it's right there before us. 

The name of that person has long been known. The leading authority says it:

Anne Frank

[...]

On the morning of 4 August 1944, the [hidden annex] was stormed by a group of German uniformed police led by SS-Oberscharführer Karl Silberbauer of the Sicherheitsdienst. The Franks, Van Pelses, and Pfeffer were taken to RSHA headquarters, where they were interrogated and held overnight.

On 5 August, they were transferred to the Huis van Bewaring (House of Detention), an overcrowded prison on the Weteringschans. Two days later they were transported to the Westerbork transit camp, through which more than 100,000 Jews, mostly Dutch and German, had passed. Having been arrested in hiding, they were considered criminals and sent to the Punishment Barracks for hard labor.

Years later, Silberhauer was extensively interviewed about the arrests in question. According to the leading authority, "his memories of the arrest were notably vivid."

He strikes us as someone who lacked a certain moral sense. We thought we might have seen him lurking about on a recent Fox News Channel telecast.

The TV show to which we refer is One Nation with Brian Kilmeade. The program aired last Sunday night at 10 p.m. Eastern. 

A person we won't name played the videotape of the Tufts arrest. To our ear, he then almost seemed to display a certain pleasure in watching the young woman in question being taken away by six men.

You can watch that fleeting moment yourself. We wonder if a bit of sound has actually been inserted at the beginning of the brief bit of tape to make that young woman's fear more enjoyable.

The person we won't name played the tape of that arrest. On the tape, you could hear a cry of fear—and then, the fellow said this:

UNNAMED CABLE NEWS STAR (3/31/25): How great is that? A pro-Hamas Tufts University student—PhD student—who's in this country on a visa, detained for co-authoring an op-ed, and other things, in a Tufts student newspaper.

"How great is that?" the fellow said. We'll admit that we thought of Silberhauer when we saw him say that.

For the record, we know of no reason to think that the young woman who was "detained" at Tufts is, in fact, "pro-Hamas."

To appearances, she was, in fact, taken away because of a rather innocuous op-ed in the college newspaper. But we know of no "other things" which lie behind this masked abduction. It seems to us that the TV performer may have been making that up.

We'll admit we thought of Silberhauer when we saw him say what he said. Again, we wonder if that squeal you hear at the start of the tape was spliced in by the Fox News Channel to make this arrest more delicious.

Now for a point of personal privilege:

We're fairly sure that we first learned about Anne Frank when this edition of Life magazine appeared. 

It was August 1958. We were ten years old at the time. At the age of 39, Ted Williams had hit .388 the previous year.

We've always remembered reading some such article at that point in time, all by ourselves, alone in our room. In the past, we'd tried to google the article, but we never had any success. 

This week, we tried again, and the posting to which we've linked appeared. We assume that that's the magazine from which we first learned about these events—about the young person who, as Prose describes, is still revered in various countries around the world.

We thought we heard the voice of Silberhauer during that brief moment on the Fox News Channel. That said, a nation moves into the future with the persons it has, and our nation is full of imperfect persons, Red and Blue persons alike.

Our world is also full of detainees—those who have been abducted. We'll close by suggesting this:

Every innocent victim of some such arrest is, in the end, this person. We hope you'll click that link and look. Enlarge those photos so you can see the face of every victim.

In our view, the Fox News Channel is peopled by some deeply puzzling persons. As long as we Blues keep refusing to speak, we'd have to say this has the look, but also the feel, of the national downfall we've chosen. 

THURSDAY: We all should "tremble for our country"...

THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 2025

...when the fellow keeps saying this: We've log recommended pity for the person—for the tragic loss of human potential. 

That said, it's too late to take away his power. Meanwhile, the person in question simply can't seem to stop saying things like this:

President Trump in the Garden / April 2, 2025 

What a good-looking group of people! Well, we have some very, very good news today and a lot of good things are happening for our country. Please sit down. 

My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day, been waiting for a long time. April 2nd, 2025 will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America's destiny was reclaimed and the day that we began to make America wealthy again. Going to make it wealthy, good and wealthy.

For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike...Our country and its taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years, but it is not going to happen anymore. It's not going to happen. In a few moments, I will sign a historic executive order instituting reciprocal tariffs on countries throughout the world.

[...]

From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation, and the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been. So wealthy in fact that in the 1880s, they established a commission to decide what they were going to do with the vast sums of money they were collecting. We were collecting so much money so fast, we didn't know what to do with it. Isn't that a nice problem to have?...

Then in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government. Then in 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression. And it would've never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy, it would've been a much different story. They tried to bring back tariffs to save our country, but it was gone. It was gone. It was too late. 

For full transcript and tape, click here.

As you can see, he started with his standard paranoia-adjacent claims about the way he himself, and now the nation he rules, have been mistreated and abused by all comers down through the annals of time. 

He attributes the international economic abuse to the way the federal government abandoned the miraculous use of tariffs in 1913. 

(For reasons unknown to mankind!)

Before long, he offered the endlessly-corrected presentation—the presentation he can't seem to quit. We all should tremble for our nation when we see that he's still saying this:

Then in 1913...they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government.

He simply can't stop saying it! We should tremble for our country when we ponder the likelihood that he actually believes this fixed idea—that he actually isn't lying, the explanation we Blues have long preferred.

Sorry, Charlie! When the federal government collects money through tariffs, that money isn't being submitted by citizens or governments of foreign countries. By now, everybody understands that fact—everyone but the potentate of this flailing land.

Is something "wrong" with President Trump? With tremendous resolve matching Trump's own, major Red and Blue elites have agreed on one basic point—that rather obvious possibility must never be discussed.

Madness is crawling across the land; by this point, it's coming in waves, on a virtual hourly basis, As Camus said of the fictional denizens of the fictional Oran, we simply weren't up to the challenge of seeing what lay right there before us.

One final note:

These tariffs may turn public opinion against this president in a major way. We tremble in the face of an obvious possibility:

Depending on how disordered he may have become, at that point he could become more angry and more dangerous.

"Foreign countries" were never "paying the money" with which we ran the federal government! Is something wrong with this struggling man? How about with Brother Musk?

PERSONS: There the person went again!

THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 2025

Could it be the ketamine use? People, there he went again! In this morning's New York Times, Linda Qiu fact-checks his latest claim beneath this dual headline:

Musk Again Misleads on Social Security Fraud
The world’s richest man misstated a statistic from the Social Security Administration to once again overstate fraud in the program.

For our money, the choices of language are perhaps a bit soggy there. That said, here Qiu's basic treatment of the statement to which she refers:

WHAT WAS SAID
“One interesting statistic was that 40 percent of the calls into Social Security were fraudulent, meaning that it was someone trying to get a Social Security payment that was going to a senior instead to go to a fraud ring.”
— during a campaign event in Wisconsin on Sunday

This is misleading. Mr. Musk appears to have misunderstood a statistic from the Social Security Administration. The agency recently estimated that 40 percent of direct deposit fraud, one specific type of fraud, occurred via calls to the agency. That is not the same thing as 40 percent of all telephone calls being fraudulent.

"That is not the same thing as 40 percent of all telephone calls being fraudulent?" 

Duh! Stating the obvious, the person in question's interpretation of that "interesting statistic" made exactly zero sense. All in all, there this person had somehow managed to go again!

For the record, an identical statement had been made during Friday's Potemkin interview session on the Fox News Channel. Thanks to the invaluable Rev, you can read the transcript and watch the tape, simply by clicking here.

With Bret Baier in the role of potted plant, this is what was said:

ARAM MOGHADDASSI (3/28/25): At Social Security, one of the first things we learned is that they get phone calls every day of people trying to change direct deposit information. So when you want to change your bank account, you can call Social Security. We learned 40 percent of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters.

BAIER: 40 percent!

MOGHADDASSI: That's right. Almost half.

MUSK: Yes. And they steal people's Social Security is what happens...This is happening all day every day, and then somebody doesn't receive their Social Security.

With the addition of one major twist, we tend to agree. With persons like Baier playing potted plant, such claims are "happening all day every day," especially on the Fox News Channel!

Qiu's fact check continues along from where our excerpt leaves off. The bungled logic of the statement in question is rather straightforward, quite plain.

All in all, the greatest industrialist in the world had managed to do it again! This latest error might be added to the endless gong-show assertions about the Social Security recipients who are 150 years old, or about the simple 10-question survey for which the feds paid a billion dollars. 

In fairness, Musk isn't the person who started the talk about the way the Haitian migrants were eating the cats and the dogs. He isn't the person who has now slapped unforgiving tariffs on islands where nobody lives.

That said, it's as we showed you yesterday. Bret Stephens said this in the New York Times way back in 2018:

Elon Musk, the Donald of Silicon Valley

He is prone to unhinged Twitter eruptions. He can’t handle criticism. He scolds the news media for its purported dishonesty and threatens to create a Soviet-like apparatus to keep tabs on it. He suckers people to fork over cash in exchange for promises he hasn’t kept. He’s a billionaire whose business flirts with bankruptcy. He’s sold himself as an establishment-crushing iconoclast when he’s really little more than an unusually accomplished B.S. artist. His legions of devotees are fanatics and, let’s face it, a bit stupid.

I speak of Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, the Donald Trump of Silicon Valley.  

We offer that critique for entertainment purposes only. That said, as Qiu has noted, there he has gone again!

He's bungled the claim about condoms in Gaza. He's bungled the claims (and the insinuations) about the world's oldest non-living recipients of Social Security checks.

He seems to have bungled the claim about the billion-dollar survey which should have cost ten grand. With this latest bonehead error, he has managed to bungle again. 

Is something "wrong" with the person in question? How can such an accomplished person make so many weird remarks? 

Alas! Given the way other persons perform, such questions never quite get off the ground within the larger public discourse. 

Why does this famous person make so many weird misstatements? There's always the possibility of simple dishonesty, of course. But within the past twenty months, three major news orgs—two of them Blue, one of them Red—have floated a different possibility.

These orgs have offered reports about this person's acknowledged (and alleged) use of various kinds of drugs. The acknowledged drug was mentioned in all three reports. 

We'll offer links to the three reports, though paywalls exist in all cases:

The New Yorker. August 21, 2023
Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule
How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.

The Wall Street Journal. January 6, 2024
Elon Musk Has Used Illegal Drugs, Worrying Leaders at Tesla and SpaceX
Some executives and board members fear the billionaire’s use of drugs—including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine—could harm his companies.

The Atlantic. March 5, 2025
What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain
Excessive use of the drug can make anyone feel like they rule the world.

For the record, we don't have the slightest idea if any of these ruminations have any bearing on this important person's erratic behavior and peculiar claims. 

That said, Musk himself has long acknowledged his use of ketamine. As we noted last week, Shayla Love's report for The Atlantic starts with this overview:

What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain

Last month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started posting about ketamine.

Musk has said he uses ketamine regularly, so for the past couple of years, public speculation has persisted about how much he takes, whether he’s currently high, or how it might affect his behavior. Last year, Musk told CNN’s Don Lemon that he has a ketamine prescription and uses the drug roughly every other week to help with depression symptoms. When Lemon asked if Musk ever abused ketamine, Musk replied, “I don’t think so. If you use too much ketamine you can’t really get work done,” then said that investors in his companies should want him to keep up his drug regimen. Not everyone is convinced. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Musk also takes the drug recreationally, and in 2023, Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker that Musk’s “associates” worried that ketamine, “alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions.”

We don't have the slightest idea if ketamine—or if this person's alleged use of purely recreational drugs—has played any role in his frequently peculiar public behavior. 

Also, as a matter of theory, the cause of this person's peculiar claims shouldn't really matter. The steady production of ludicrous claims should, by now, have been the trigger for a great deal of public discussion. 

That said, also this—and this is very important:

(Clinical) depression is a deeply painful affliction. Stating the obvious, people afflicted with clinical depression deserve all the (competent medical) help they can possibly get.

That said, the person in question keeps making wild statements and making implausible, very dumb errors. As he spoke with Baier last Friday, he was surrounded by seven associates, some of whom sanded the edges off his previous weird remarks, while seeming to do all they could to keep misdirection alive.

Simple dishonesty could always be a part of this apparent phenomenon. Also, "true belief" can spread like wildfire at highly fraught times such as these.

That said, it seemed to us that Love's essay for The Atlantic included some intriguing observations about the acknowledged drug use in question. 

How the heck does ketamine work? What kinds of problems might be involved (or not)?  Continuing directly from above, Love offered this:

Ketamine is called a dissociative drug because during a high, which lasts about an hour, people might feel detached from their body, their emotions, or the passage of time. Frequent, heavy recreational use—say, several times a week—has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance. You can see why people might wonder about ketamine use from a man who is trying to usher in multi-planetary human life, who has barged into global politics and is attempting to reengineer the U.S. government. With Musk’s new political power, his cognitive and psychological health is of concern not only to shareholders of his companies’ stocks but to all Americans. His late-night posts on X, mass emails to federal employees, and non sequiturs uttered on television have prompted even more questions about his drug use.

Oof! Delusional thinking? A sense of specialness and importance?

In Love's assessment, "You can see why people might wonder about ketamine use from a man who is trying to usher in multi-planetary human life, who has barged into global politics and is attempting to reengineer the U.S. government." Eventually, she added such possible points of concern as these:

Research has not yet established the side effects of long-term ketamine therapy, but older studies of recreational users offer some insight on heavy, extended dosing. Celia Morgan, now a psychopharmacology professor at the University of Exeter, in England, led a 2010 study that followed 120 recreational ketamine users for a year. Even infrequent users—those who used, on average, roughly three times a month—scored higher on a delusional-thought scale than ex–ketamine users, people who took other drugs, and people who didn’t use drugs at all. Those who averaged 20 uses a month scored even higher. People believed that they were the sole recipients of secret messages, or that society and people around them were especially attuned to them...

Psychedelic enthusiasts have for decades cautioned about the dangers of prolonged ketamine use...John Lilly, a neurophysiologist and psychedelic researcher who once used LSD to investigate dolphin communication, famously abused ketamine until he believed that he was contacted by an extraterrestrial entity who removed his penis. “For anyone who is using a very significant amount of ketamine on a regular basis over a long period of time, I think there’s good reason to suspect that they could have different kinds of cognitive and psychological forms of impairment,” David Mathai, a psychiatrist who offers ketamine therapy to some of his patients in Miami, told me.

Such theoretical impairments would be concerning in any context—but especially when contemplating a person who has achieved enough power to be unironically described as co-president of the United States. To be sure, ketamine may have nothing to do with his actions. He may be simply acting in accordance with his far-right political ideology. Musk also famously brags that he rarely sleeps—never a good strategy for measured speech or actions.

"To be sure, ketamine may have nothing to do with [this person's] actions," Love quite sensibly states. In our view, that's a very important disclaimer.

On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal report quoted an array of this person's (unnamed) business associates who said they were concerned about his erratic behavior. They speculated that his conduct might be affected by the alleged use of recreational drugs, as well as by the acknowledged use of ketamine.

Is it possible that the person in question is in the grip of delusional thinking—can be found somewhere high up "on a delusional-thought scale?" Can some such "cognitive [or] psychological form of impairment" be involved in the ongoing lunacy at hand? 

Everything is always possible, though most things turn out to be false. Importantly, Love doesn't claim to know if ketamine is part of the current public dysfunction. 

We also have no way of knowing any such thing! Also, our own assessment of this situation involves the behavior of many persons aside from the person at hand:

For better or worse, the three reports to which we've linked have produced exactly zero wider discussion within the mainstream press corps. The same is true of various assertions by medical specialists who have said that President Trump's unusual behaviors may be linked to significant issues involving his mental health.

Yesterday, the president was at it again, imposing tariffs on various jurisdictions where no people live. Meanwhile, there was the person in question, on stage in Wisconsin last Sunday night.

As reported by Qiu, there he went again. The cheesehead he wore didn't help!

For better or worse, persons within the mainstream press agree that topics like these cannot be the basis of reporting or discussion. In our own view, that's an extremely good journalistic rule—until such time as it isn't.

If historians still exist in the future, such persons may "be telling this [story] with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence." As of today, this is a challenging situation involving various groups of persons. 

Persons like the person in question have been making peculiar claims for a very long time now. Persons within our mainstream press corps seem to feel that there's little or nothing to look at when such weird claims get advanced.

Like the citizens whose emperor had no clothes, those persons seem to be reluctant to discuss what's right there before them. For better or worse, they continue to abide by the traditional journalistic rules which forbid certain types of discussion.

Last Friday, Bret Baier posed as a potted plant even as the person in question—with the help of one associate—instantly bruited the ten-question survey which cost a billion dollars. A garbled version of the "ancient recipients" claim followed not long after that.

As we noted yesterday, CBS News published a fact check concerning the billion-dollar survey. Everyone else looked away! Nothing to look at! Move on!

People struggling with (clinical) depression deserve all the (competent medical) help they can get. On the other hand, how about this?

If you see something, say something! 

For persons within our Blue elites, this very basic modern bromide doesn't seem to have taken effect. 

Tomorrow: A world-famous "arrest"

WEDNESDAY: We thought M. Gessen made a nice choice...

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 2025

...with respect to that one key word: We thought M. Gessen made a good observation with respect to a small bit of language. 

The passage comes from a new column in the New York Times. Gessen describes the "arrest" of a student at Tufts. A bit of advice is implied:

Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.

[...]

Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”

It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something—asks something—struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.

It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment.

These mass transports are not "deportations," Gessen says, in the way we normally think of such actions. As Gessen goes on to describe the difference, a key point is being made.

We denizens of Blue America should think with great care about the language we use. Describing these actions as "deportations" (full stop) helps normalize the actions in question—helps make them seem more routine, more understandable, than they actually are.

We should all be careful about "using our words"—about avoiding the transmission of misleading impressions. We were also struck by a choice of words made by Adam Serwer in the (not-failing) Atlantic:

Trump’s Salvadoran Gulag

One thing that could be said about many—and possibly all—of the more than 100 men removed from the United States by the Trump administration under the archaic Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is that Donald Trump has been convicted of more crimes than they have.

Trump, after all, was convicted of 34 felony counts by a jury of his peers in New York City for faking business records in order to cover up his hush-money payment to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels in 2016. His administration has acknowledged in court that many of the men deported to a gulag in El Salvador “do not have criminal records in the United States.” Many appear to not have criminal records elsewhere either. 

A certain word appears in the headline, then in the second paragraph. Serwer uses that word four more times, referring on three of those occasions to "an overseas gulag."

Serwer also uses a kinder/gentler term, one which is much more conventional. But when he does, the word arrives suitably wrapped: 

ICE rounded these men up in early March, and then put them on a plane to the Central American nation, alleging that they were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. The men were then imprisoned in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a prison infamous for reported human-rights violations including, allegedly, torture. 

[...]

So far, the Trump administration has provided only weak evidence that any of the men condemned to a foreign prison notorious for human-rights violations were guilty of anything. 

You may not want to say gulag gulag gulag gulag all through some discussion of these unusual events. But if you find yourself saying "prison," it's important to make it clear that, as with these "deportations," we're speaking here about a "prison" of a strikingly different kind.

In our view, Serwer made another excellent choice: 

Despite the absence of evidence, the administration continues to refer to these men publicly as “gang members” and “terrorists,” and they have become fodder for Trumpist propaganda. Last week, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem filmed a depraved video with the prison as her background, advertising the Trump administration’s willingness to deport people overseas to be tortured by the bureaucracy of a strongman whose own government the American authorities have said is affiliated with organized crime...

You might want to be careful with the word in question. That said, we're not inclined to disagree with Serwer's choice. We refer to this key word: 

Depraved.

Full disclosure: This post was typed while President Trump was making his oration about his tariffs. (No one has ever heard anything like it!)

In our view, something is plainly "wrong" with this man. We regard that as a tragic loss of human potential, but we badly need to find the words with which to convey that point of concern.

We expect to explore that topic nest week. We Blues do need to improve our skills when it comes to using our words.

PERSONS: When "Elon" made his latest claims...

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 2025

...few persons seemed to care: It may be time for Chainsaw Charley to stop payment on those checks!

We refer, of course, to Elon Musk—to the million-dollar checks he handed out in Wisconsin over the weekend. 

Along the way, he transitioned from Chainsaw to Cheesehead Charley. His peculiar behavior is fully visible—has been for a long time. 

Is something "wrong" with this influential person? It's time for us to ask. Also, it's time for us to start using our words to describe him as he actually is—but that's a topic for another time, perhaps for next week's reports.

For today, the stumblebum took a defeat in last night's Wisconsin election. His odd behaviors didn't seem to sell among Badger State voters. Then too, there's what this visibly strange person said to Bret Baier last Friday evening.

From the start, Baier referred to his interview subject as "Elon." We showed you the words of that guest in Monday's report. 

Musk was sitting for an imitation of an interview with seven alleged associates. Four minutes into the session, this exchange occurred:

BAIER (3/28/25): For you, what's the most astonishing thing you've found out in this process?

MUSK: The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing. It’s mind-blowing. Just—we routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more. Casually.

You know, for example, like the simple survey that was—literally, a ten-question survey. You could do it with SurveyMonkey—it would cost about $10,000. The government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that.

BAIER: For just a survey.

MUSK: A billion dollars for a simple online survey, "Do you like the National Park?" And then, there appeared to be no feedback loop for what would be done with that survey. So the survey would just go into nothing. It was like insane.

Thanks to the invaluable Rev, you can see the transcript and the videotape of the Fox News session simply by clicking here.

At any rate, sad! In the exchange we've posted, the richest person in D.C. had lobbed a silly softball at the planet's richest person. Just this once, we'll let you ask us to perform a translation: 

Translation, Softball to English:
BAIER: What's the most astonishing thing you've found out in this process?
ENGLISH: Please say whatever you want our millions of viewers to hear.

So it can go with the persons who people the (so-called) Fox News Channel. And so it can go when a person like Musk replies.

Musk seemed to be making a rather remarkable claim. Everything is always possible, of course—but this is what he had now said:

According to Musk, "the government" had paid "a billion dollars" (originally, almost a billion dollars) for a simple bit of product which should have cost ten grand. Moments later, one of fellow's alleged associates made the claim more specific:

BAIER: But you're finding the money. I mean, it's big numbers, right?

STEVE DAVIS: Yeah. Like Elon said, the minimum impulse bit is often a billion dollars. 

For example, the $830 million, which was the online survey, that's an enormous amount of money that wouldn't have been found if the DOGE team wasn't working with, in that case, the Department of Interior. 

But then, taking it one step further, DOGE then publishes these things on our website for maximum transparency. It would have been impossible for the general public to have seen that. Now, anyone can just log into DOGE.gov anytime and see these payments as— They're not yet in real time. They're close, but they'll probably be in real time within the next few weeks.

With that, the facts had been nailed own. Or was it just a set of claims?

We were now less than five minutes into this "interview session. Baier seemed to have cast himself in the role of potted plant. 

The initial billion-dollar claim had been nailed down. Now, a very unusual bit of conduct occurred. Within the halls of CBS News, some persons now published a fact-check!

Why do we call that conduct unusual? Simple! Given the kinds of person who now people our mainstream news orgs, it seems to occur to very few people that a claim like that, broadcast to millions, should be subject to public review.

On its face, Elon's clam was startling. Plainly, it had been intended to seem that way.

That said, was the claim in question accurate? Was the startling claim really true? From within the halls of CBS News, an initially typo-riddled fact-check piece started exactly like this:

Musk makes false claim about billion-dollar National Park survey

Elon Musk claimed in a Fox News interview Thursday night that the Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, frequently uncovers "billions" in government waste, citing a supposed $1 billion survey about National Parks as an example. 

CBS News found no evidence that the Department of the Interior spent or planned to spend that much on a survey or on any single contract. 

[...]

Later in the Fox News interview, Steve Davis, who works closely with Musk at DOGE, said that the online survey was part of an $830 million contract by the Department of the Interior that DOGE stopped. 

Do the fact-check began. 

By now, the initial typos have been corrected. Having said that, Say what? 

CBS News "found no evidence" that this jaw-dropping claim was true? Eventually, the fact-check added this:

CBS News has reached out repeatedly to the White House for more information. The Department of the Interior declined to comment. 

No $830 million contract is visible on DOGE's online "wall of receipts," the list of contracts the group said it has terminated. According to data published on the site, only five canceled contracts have a total estimated value of over $800 million, and none are from the Department of the Interior. 

In the interview Davis also said "[DOGE] publishes these things on our web site for maximum transparency. So, now, the general public—it would have been impossible for the general public to have seen that. Now, anyone can just log into doge.gov anytime and see these payments as they are not yet in real time." 

But CBS News and other news organizations have been reporting for weeks on the errors and overstatements of savings that have been posted there.

Oof! As you can see right in its headline, CBS News seemed to be saying that the DOGEmaster's startling claim has been false! CBS also seemed to slap aside Davis' claim about transparency.

Continuing directly, CBS even said this:

DOGE recently re-formatted their website making it more difficult for the general public to confirm savings and cancellations. Anyone accessing the "wall of receipts" page needs to manually navigate through 711 webpages to see the entire list of contracts, 923 webpages for grants and another 68 pages for cancelled or expired leases. 

Available federal contracting data does not show any individual contract valued at over $800 million awarded by the Department of the Interior over the last 17 years. The DOGE "wall of receipts" currently lists 366 cancelled contracts for the Department of the Interior; 199 of those are listed as $0 in savings. The total savings DOGE claims for the remainder adds up to only $144 million. 

The three largest alleged savings for canceled contracts associated with the Department of the Interior on the "wall of receipts" are for $37 million, $23.5 million and $10.75 million. The latter two appear to be mislabeled and are actually USAID contracts. 

So said CBS News. But are those claims really true?

Let's go ahead and use our words. CBS News seemed to be describing stumblebum conduct on the part of these masters of the known world.

We're showing you what CBS wrote. We can't tell you, with ultimate certainty, what is actually true—but we can tell you this:

By now, the fellow in question seems to have has been involved in endless misstatements of truth. In one example, his stumblebum conduct had led the commander to make this famous oration:

THE PRESIDENT (3/4/25): We’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors and that our seniors and people that we love rely on.  Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.

It lists 3.6 million people from ages 110 to 119.  I don’t know any of them.  I know some people that are rather elderly, but not quite that elderly.  

(LAUGHTER) 

3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129. 

3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139.

3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149.

And money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now. 

In fact, Pam [Bondi], good luck.  Good luck.  You’re going to find it.

But a lot of money is paid out to people because it just keeps getting paid and paid, and nobody does—and it really hurts Social Security and hurts our country.

1.3 million people from ages 150 to 159.  And over 130,000 people, according to the Social Security databases, are age over 160 years old.  

We have a healthier country than I thought, Bobby [Kennedy Jr.]. 

(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)

Including, to finish, 1,039 people between the ages of 220 and 229; one person between the age of 240 and 249; and one person is listed at 360 years of age—

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Joe Biden!  

(LAUGHTER)

THE PRESIDENT: —more than 100 years older than our country. 

But we’re going to find out where that money is going, and it’s not going to be pretty. 

By slashing all of the fraud, waste, and theft we can find, we will defeat inflation, bring down mortgage rates, lower car payments and grocery prices, protect our seniors, and put more money in the pockets of American families. 

 (APPLAUSE) 

Are we still supposed to believe that those insinuations and claims were true? Later in the session with Baier, another associate made a very murky reference to those dramatic claims.

The earlier, dramatic claims had been rendered quite hard to parse. Baier never mentioned the earlier clams, or the apparent problems.

How do persons behave on the Fox News Channel? Baier's laconic semi-interview gave us one example.

That said, how do persons behave in the major journalistic and academic realms of our own Blue America? 

All in all, many persons in those realms behave as if they don't much care about such apparent gong-shows. Presentations like these tend to come and go, with little front-page reporting or assessment.

In the face of this widespread disinterest, persons like the commander and his lieutenant are thus free to indulge in such conduct.

In a very unusual bit if behavior, CBS News ran a fact-check! This fact-check has been cited nowhere. Simply put, elite persons who "went to the finest schools" don't much seem to care.

What is the truth about the Musk/Davis claim? In part because of Blue America's lazy elites, we can't necessarily tell you. 

For amusement purposes only, we can offer this early clip from this week's Conversation between Collins and Stephens.

The column appeared in yesterday's New York Times. At one point, the persons say this:

Nothing Ever Goes Wrong in Trump’s White House

[...]

Gail: We’re seeing trillions of reports from town hall meetings held by members of Congress where their outraged constituents complain about programs that were frozen at the behest of Elon Musk.

Musk, of course, is frequently rated the richest man in the world. More and more Americans are beginning to wonder about trusting their financial future to a guy who thinks 20 million dead people are collecting Social Security.

You’ve always been a let’s-spend-less conservative, right? Any hope you can offer up on this one?

Bret: I suspect historians will one day remember the Department of Government Efficiency the way we now remember lobotomies. It seemed, to some at the time, like a good idea.

Oof! The center-left Collins mocked the startling claims about Social Security claim; in his reply, the center-right Stephens unloosed an L-bomb. As the colloquy continued, Stephens stated an obvious point, then made an intriguing reference: 

Bret: The problem isn’t that we shouldn’t pare down spending or rethink the org chart of the federal bureaucracy or get rid of agencies or departments that may be doing more harm than good....

The problem is that competence and execution matter; that public input matters; that the federal government is not a tech company where you can afford to move fast and break things; and that you can’t afford to take a hammer to a problem that requires a scalpel without grievously injuring your patient. As for Musk, I’ve been calling him “the Donald of Silicon Valley” for years. 

Say what? The Donald of Silicon Valley? Luckily, Stephens provided a link to a column from 2018. Headline included, here's the way that column started:

Elon Musk, the Donald of Silicon Valley

He is prone to unhinged Twitter eruptions. He can’t handle criticism. He scolds the news media for its purported dishonesty and threatens to create a Soviet-like apparatus to keep tabs on it. He suckers people to fork over cash in exchange for promises he hasn’t kept. He’s a billionaire whose business flirts with bankruptcy. He’s sold himself as an establishment-crushing iconoclast when he’s really little more than an unusually accomplished B.S. artist. His legions of devotees are fanatics and, let’s face it, a bit stupid.

I speak of Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, the Donald Trump of Silicon Valley.

[...]

[Tesla] has rarely turned a profit in its nearly 15-year existence. Senior executives are fleeing like it’s an exploding Pinto, and the company is in an ugly fight with the National Transportation Safety Board. It burns through cash at a rate of $7,430 a minute, according to Bloomberg. It has failed to meet production targets for its $35,000 Model 3, for which more than 400,000 people have already put down $1,000 deposits, and on which the company’s fortunes largely rest.

Also, the car is a lemon. Like the old borscht belt joke, the food is lousy and the portions are so small.

Rightly or wrongly, Stephens had Musk pegged as a major BS-artist even in 2018. The column continued from there. 

For the record, we don't know if Stephens' mockery of the quality of the Tesla was accurate back then. We don't know if his portrait has held up over time. 

We were intrigued to see that the Stephens had been mocking this display rack for cheeseheads and 3-year-old kids even way back then. 

We'll summarize today's findings, then leave you with a question:

Persons on the Fox News Channel often say the darndest things. They may also stage Potemkin interviews with the world's richest apparent human.

Also, persons within Blue America's elites may not much seem to care. 

CBS News conducted a substantial fact-check of the latest remarkable claim. Other big orgs didn't. Nor did the CBS effort produce a bit of discussion. Over here in Blue America, our own persons don't seem to care!

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but these are some of the persons shaping our D-minus discourse. That said, could something be "wrong' with Elon Musk?

If so, that would be a tragic loss of human potential. Tomorrow, the ketamine files.

Tomorrow: Three major news orgs published reports. Can you guess what happened next?