WEDNESDAY: The analysts screamed and tore their hair...

WEDNESDAY, JULY 2, 2025

...when Staphanie Ruhle got it wrong: Last night, at the start of her program's second segment, MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle decided to level with her viewers. She went on to describe the fiscal nightmare which would be created by passage of the GOP megabill.

She started the segment with a reference to the name of a regular segment:

RUHLE (7/1/25): It is time now for "Money Power Politics." And this evening, we are talking about our financial responsibility as a country.

I want a "level set" here. This has been a problem for the United States for many years. Our debt has exploded over the past two decades under the leadership of both parties. But that makes it even more important to take a hard look at what this Republican bill would do to make an already bad situation even worse.

As the New York Times puts it, this is one of the most expensive pieces of legislation in years and would put our country on a more perilous fiscal path.

Ruhle wasn't kidding around! Bringing the note of sadness in, Paul Krugman recently said that current projections describe a situation which is "unsustainable" even before the GOP bill makes future debt larger still.

Krugman has recently said it; for that reason, we believe it. Now, Ruhle was going to "level set" the situation. She was going to lay it right on the line.

At that point, sad! Moments later, she offered this thoroughly bungled statistical portrait of where matters stand:

RUHLE: These numbers are going to impact all of our lives in really important ways. So I want you to keep these three things in mind.

First, the national debt. Right now, it's a whopping $37 trillion. And this bill would add at least three trillion more over the next decade.

The analysts screamed and ran into the yard. Glumly, we slumped back into our beanbag chair.

Sad! Ruhle was right about the size of the national debt at present. But her presentation plainly gave the impression that the GOP bill would cause the debt to ruse to $40 trillion, perhaps a bit more, by the end of the next ten years.

Plainly, her presentation gave that impression. Plainly, that portrait is howlingly wrong.

Sadly, this is the actual state of current projections:

According to current projections, the debt will rise to something like $56 trillion (or more?) over the course of the next decade even if the GOP megabill doesn't pass. According to the CBO, the GOP bill would add something like an additional $3-5 trillion to that current projection:

That is, the debt will stand at something like $60 trillion over the next decade if the megabill passes. We're at $37 trillion now, but we're headed for much bigger things.

As we've noted again and again, our major journos have largely been fumbling this matter all through the past few months. Now, MSNBC's top economics / business anchor has completely misstated this matter

None of this actually matters, of course. It's much too late to expect anything like a competent national discourse, about this or anything else.

That said, the analysts screamed and tore their hair when Ruhle histrionically laid out the facts. The pictures she painted was groaningly wrong.

Again and again, in a million ways, this is the state of Blue leadership.

As an example of what we mean: Once again, here's Andrew Duehren's picture of the situation:

Senate Bill Would Add at Least $3.3 Trillion to Debt, Budget Office Says

[...]

With roughly $29 trillion in debt currently held by the public, the budget office had already expected the government to borrow another $21 trillion over the next decade, meaning the Republican bill would make an already-dire fiscal forecast worse. And the initial estimate of a cost of $3.3 trillion for the Senate bill is an undercount, because it does not include additional borrowing costs which could push the bill’s overall addition to the debt closer to $4 trillion.

For a larger excerpt, see Monday afternoon's report.

Bowing to the endless complexity which dooms all hope of understanding, Duehren is referring to debt "held by the public," a subset of overall national debt. But as you can see, total debt is projected to grow by a mammoth amount even if the GOP megabill doesn't pass.

The megabill would add a few trillion more. Pretty soon, before you know it, you're talking about real money!

ARRIVALS: When Noem told Watters a very strange tale...

WEDNESDAY, JULY 2, 2025

...no one said a word: Arrivals of the type under review have occurred all through human history.

As Professor Knox described, such arrivals sometimes succeed due to a lack of preparation (or will) on the part of the invaded society. So it was in the lesson learned from the violent assault which took down sacred Troy:

The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.

It was a vicious, rage-fueled arrival. Troy's civilization had been more refined—but after ten long years, the sacred city wasn't able to hold off the murderous, rage-filled assault

Last Friday evening, PBS debuted an 83-minute American Masters program which described a different arrival. We refer to the disastrous arrival which swallowed much of Europe starting in the 1930s.

Starting at the 20-minute mark, the program broke one of our current society's major journalistic rules. It directly compared the early years of that arrival to the arrival which is playing out today within our own flailing nation. 

Tomorrow, with Independence Day approaching, we'll show you what American Masters said about the early years of that earlier arrival—and about the way that early arrival seems to resemble our own.

For today, we'll direct you to this:

Many warfighters have come over the walls as our present arrival continues. One such player is Kristi Noem, President Trump's Secretary of Homeland Security.

Today, the New York Times reports a rather strange presentation by Noem. This happens early in a news report in today's print editions:

On Pivotal Day for His Bill, Trump Leaves Washington for ‘Alligator Alcatraz’

While the fate of his entire legislative agenda was being decided on Tuesday, President Trump traveled a thousand miles away from Washington to hang out in a makeshift detention center for migrants that had been thrown together on an old airstrip in the Florida Everglades.

The place had already been nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Republicans, on account of the fact that it’s surrounded by miles of marshland seething with reptiles. Mr. Trump instantly thrilled to the alligator alliteration—as he said on Tuesday, “I looked outside and that’s not a place I want to go hiking anytime soon”—and ordered up a tour.

[...]

Ms. Noem told a story about a recent detainee. “The other day, I was talking to some marshals that have been partnering with ICE,” she said. “They said that they had detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home, and while they had him in his seat, he started to eat himself and they had to get him off and get him medical attention.” (The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions seeking clarity about the episode Ms. Noem described on Tuesday).

“These are the kind of deranged individuals that are on our streets in America,” she said.

The facility is surrounded by gators; also, Noem was there. Along the way, she told what seemed to be a very strange story about one recent detainee.

To its credit, the New York Times reported her very strange story. Also, the Times is seeking comment or clarification from DHS, though we'll guess that the paper will never mention this strange tale again.

With this peculiar tale, we may have moved away from the type of vicious arrival executed by the Achaeans. We may have moved instead to the type of arrival described in the 1997 feature film, Men in Black

Do highly unusual creatures secretly live among us? More to the point, are such creatures the ones who are being detained? Or is it possible, in some cases, that these highly unusual beings are the ones who are locking the detainees up?

Not long ago, Secretary Noem published the story of the time she shot and killed her disobedient puppy. She may have failed to understand the way the story would seem to many of her fellow citizens. 

Yesterday, she repeated a very strange story. It's a story she originally told last Friday night on what may be the most extraterrestrial of all current "cable news" programs.

For videotape from yesterday, we'll direct you to this news report by Mediaite's Zachary Leeman. (Headline: "Kristi Noem Shares Jaw Dropping Story at Trump Presser About Detained Cannibal Migrant Trying To Eat Himself.")

The migrant tried to eat himself! So said this member of the wedding—and her story did sound a bit odd. Indeed, it sounded so odd that Fox News Digital, like the New York Times, says it has asked three federal agencies—DHS, ICE and the U.S. Marshals—to provide further comment. 

(For the Fox News report, click here.)

At any rate, so said the cabinet member, perhaps from somewhere within her own private Everglades. As we try to find better ways to describe the participants in the current arrival, we thought you should see the original way she told the story, speaking to one of the skillful corporate messenger fellows who now drive what's left of our national discourse.

Noem appeared last Friday night on Jesse Watters Primetime, the second highest-rated program in all of "cable news." Inevitably, Watters started talking about the "bad hombres" who are being detained and deported. 

Soon, the cabinet member said this:

SECRETARY NOEM (6/27/25): Listen, Jesse, you calling these guys "bad hombres"—they really are. I was talking to a U.S. Marshall just yesterday, and he was talking about the fact that they were deporting a planeload of illegals and one of them was a cannibal.

And he kind of said it off-handed, and I said to him, 'What do you—what do you mean, it was a cannibal?" And he said, "Well we put him on the plane, put him in his seat, and he started to eat his own arms, he was such a deranged individual."

This is the kind of people that President Trump is getting off of our streets—people who are murderers and rapists and, and are deranged individuals, that we are working to get out of the country as fast as possible.

Apparently involuntarily, Watters briefly raised his hands to his head as her story started. Even Watters seemed to be taken aback by what he initially heard.

The gentleman quickly regained self-control. Soon, with Watters back to playing the fool, Noem's strange story continued:

WATTERS: Secretary, was this bad hombre handcuffed to something, and he was trying to chew his arm off so he could escape? Or was he just hungry?

SECRETARY NOEM: No, what bothered me the most was that this U.S. Marshal just said it like it was normal. These are the kinds of people they have to work with every single day when they're deporting people out of this country.

So they had him—put him on the plane and had him in shackles for the flight because he was such a dangerous individual. When he got back to his seat, and put another individual in the seat close to him, he said he was literally eating his own arms—that, for him, that is what he did. He called himself a cannibal, ate other people, and ate himself that day.

Her jumbled story doesn't quite parse. That's often the case with extemporaneous speech. 

That said, is something wrong with Kristi Noem? As background, we offer this:

At least as a matter of theory, (almost) everything is possible. That said, does it sound like the member's tale actually makes any sense? 

According to Noem, the men and women of her department aren't just working with murderers and rapists—they're also working with cannibals!  That includes the kinds of cannibals who may start eating their own arms! 

In fact, "these are the kind of people they have to work with every single day." So said Kristi Noem, speaking to the ridiculous Watters.

Does that story seem to make sense? For example, to the extent that any such people exist, do cannibals actually eat their own arms? Does some such representation seem to make any sense?

Noem seemed to think that her story did make sense. Though startled, Watters engaged in the kind of slippery pseudo-discourse which now forms the basis of much of our "cable news."

Many people have come over the walls in the course of the current arrival. For the record, these people often have legitimate complaints about the frequently ridiculous conduct of our own Blue America. 

But as in Men in Black, so too here, or can it sometimes seems. It can sometimes seem that certain beings are living among us who may dwell in their own private Everglades.

What is the world was Secretary Noem talking about? Yesterday, when she told her story at a major press event, the New York Times and Fox News found her story so peculiar that they sought further comment.

By way of contrast, consider what happened last Friday night.

When Noem told the puzzling story last Friday night, she did so on one of the most-watched TV shows in all of "cable news"—and no one said a word about what she had said! No one reported the weird thing she'd said. No one discussed her strange story, or wondered about what it might meant. 

As we've told you, what happens on the Fox News Channel is allowed to stay within the Fox News Channel. That said, it also spreads all through Red America, fueling the current assault.

Blue America's orgs agree to avert their gaze from that realm. To appearances, no one wants to tangle with Fox. Putting it a different way: 

No civilization can long survive once it loses the power (or the will) to defend itself against an assault.

Tomorrow, we'll turn to American Masters, and to the disastrous arrival which started in the 1930s. For today, is something wrong with Kristi Noem? As part of the ethos of Blue America, no one is permitted to ask.

In closing, also this. Sacred Thoreau said it long ago, right at the start of Walden:

I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

In the comedic Men in Black, visitors from a distant land have already staged an arrival—are already living among us. From what sort of distant land did the secretary's story emerge?

Tomorrow: Why do certain arrivals gain purchase?

TUESDAY: Lock them up, the president says!

TUESDAY, JULY 1, 2025

The defendant would be CNN: We're sorry to see that the megabill has squeezed its way through the Senate.

Almost surely, it was always going to do that. We'll see what happens back in the House. Individual posturing to the side, the megabill will likely struggle through there as well.

Discussions have focused on the way the bill "reforms" Medicaid, but also on the bill's expected effect on future annual deficits and on the rapidly growing national debt. With respect to projected growth in the national debt, we'll only offer this:

Our annual deficits are already remarkably high. A nation experiences an annual deficit when the amount of revenue it brings in falls short of the amount of spending in which it engages.

As present, our revenue shortfall is quite high on an annual basis, and that is expected to continue indefinitely. Paul Krugman has recently said that this pattern moving forward is, in fact, "unsustainable."

What is the GOP's answer to that? Of course! In the face of those very large revenue shortfalls, the GOP went out in search of new ways to bring in even less revenue! Below, you see an excerpt from Andrew Duehren's new analysis piece for the New York Times:

NEWS ANALYSIS
Republican Bill Puts Nation on New, More Perilous Fiscal Path

[...]

[T]he Republican bill goes beyond simply extending existing tax cuts. It also introduces several new ones, including versions of President Trump’s campaign promises to not tax tips or overtime pay. Those policies are slated to last only through 2028, meaning Congress will again have to decide whether to extend expiring tax cuts. Given the popularity of lower taxes, and Democratic support for many of Mr. Trump’s ideas, lawmakers are likely to vote to extend them, effectively raising their [long-term] cost.

“All of a sudden, it’s just this endless daisy chain of expiring tax cuts and temporary tax cuts, on and on, which really ratchets down federal revenue,” said Brendan Duke, senior director for federal fiscal policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank.

Facing an endemic shortfall of revenue, the Republican Congress has found several ways to bring in even less revenue. Meanwhile, who knows? For some radicals within TrumpNation II, this may involve a desired catastrophic effect.

Our colonial nation had its witch trials. Earlier in that same century, the Dutch Republic experienced its tulip craze.

Here within our fractured culture, some retain their true belief in the endless miracle of tax cuts. Meanwhile, possibly due to the flooding of the zone, our major news orgs make less effort than they once did to explain any of this material.

Also this:

In the madness of the era, President Trump has now made the statement reported below. We're linking you to Alex Griffing's report for Mediaite:

Trump and Noem Pledge to Prosecute CNN For Reporting: ‘We’re Gonna Actually Go After Them!’

President Donald Trump and his Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vowed to prosecute CNN over their recent reporting on a controversial ICE-tracking app and the network’s ongoing reporting on the impact of the U.S. strikes on Iran.

Deep inside a private Everglades, Secretary Noem went first. She said she's "working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute" CNN for a recent report on that ICE-tracking app. 

As you can see on Griffing's videotape, President Trump jumped in with this:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (7/1/25): And they may very well be prosecuted also for having given false reports on the attack in Iran. They were giving totally false reports. It was totally obliterated. And our people have to be celebrated, not come home and say, “What do you mean we didn’t hit the target?” We hit the target quickly. 

You know, the pilots came home, they said we hit the target quickly. So they may very well be prosecuted for that. What they did there, we think, is totally illegal.

For the record, no one has ever said that the pilots "didn't hit the target." But so it goes in this revolutionary time.

There is, of course, no way to know if Noem and Trump were serious in these statements. Does President Trump mean what he said, or was he just flooding the zone again?

Either way, the statement by the sitting president is an example of madness. This is part of what came over the walls at the time of the recent arrival. 

ARRIVALS: Kennedy, Watters, Failla and Gowdy...

TUESDAY, JULY 1, 2025

...came over the walls doing this: It must have been the summer heat—the not yet midsummer madness—which led us down this path.

This very morning, at 5 a.m., it was 86 degrees outside; the humidity was high. It must have been a recent attendant madness which led us to think that we could find a way to describe our nation's ongoing decline by searching amid various portraits of various previous arrivals.

Who or what arrived on the American scene when Candidate Trump came down the escalator in June 2015? By whom would Blue America be assailed in the years which followed that date—during the extended, aggressive arrival which continues along today?

We've long favored the Iliad as a portrait of the current fall. That portrait begins with The Rage of Achilles, along with the corresponding rage of Agamemnon himself. 

From the earliest parts of that poem of war, Agamemnon, lord of men, is a highly erratic, rage-fueled commander of the Achaean troops—a man whose command stays on track thanks to the intercession of respected advisers like Nestor, the seasoned charioteer, and Odysseus, the wily tactician.

In that sense, Agamemnon is the first-term President Trump—a ruler subject to constant emotional breakdowns who is persistently saved from himself by the superior judgment of the lieutenants around him.

In this, the gentleman's second term, it has been widely noted that the Nestors are largely gone. The president's fury seems to have built over the course of these ten years, just as the Achaean fury had built during their ten-year siege of Troy. 

(The fury has also built within the sitting's president's supporters, including those at the Fox News Channel. These corporate players have all sorts of legitimate complaints, but they seem to have little ability to regulate their anger.)

Here within our own failing nation, the rage has grown in these past ten years. In his lengthy introduction to Professor Fagles' 1990 translation of the Iliad, Professor Knox offers this portrait of the way the Achaean rage expressed itself when they suddenly came over Troy's towering walls—when, at long last, they arrived:

[T]he death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city. 

The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.

So it went in the aftermath of the Iliad

In their vicious night assault, the Achaeans fought with the weapons of the Late Bronze Age. In our current situation, the fury of Red America's leadership cadres is expressed through the weapons of the Information Age—misinformation, disinformation, distraction, the flooding of the zone.

(Did we mention the fact that these furious players do have real complaints? This cadre does have real complaints, but in their fury, these players often seem to have little ability to regulate their emotions.)

What happened in that night assault hasn't quite happened here. On the other hand, even after the Minnesota murders on June xx, people like Watters, Failla and Gowdy keep attacking CNN's Natasha Bertrand in the most irresponsible and fact-challenged ways. 

Watters, Failla and Gowdy oh my! The basic background is this:

A few days after the June 21 attack on Iran, Bertrand filed an accurate report about a preliminary damage assessment from within the DIA. Please note:

Stating the obvious, this damage assessment didn't come from CNN's Bertrand herself. The assessment which she reported had come from within the intelligence agency of the U.S. Defense Department.

That said, the DIA report had differed from the instant assessment which had been offered by this nation's impetuous president. For that reason, players at the Fox News Channel had to go on the attack.

Let's give a measure of credit to the silly child Jesse Watters! In his ridiculous presentation on the June 25 The Five, he didn't state the name of the reporter in question. 

Elsewhere, the assaults have shown less restraint. This past weekend, D-list comedian Jimmy Failla and former congressman Trey Gowdy went go after Bertrand by name in a pair of inanely fact-challenged Fox News Channel attacks.

The victims in Minnesota were being memorialized even as Failla and Gowdy came over the walls in that remarkably dangerous manner. First though, here was the silly child Watters, on last Wednesday's edition of The Five, teed up by the former VJ who now performs as "Kennedy."

Here's what these (useful) idiots said:

KENNEDY (6/25/25): So Jesse, it almost seems like CNN and the New York Times are using this leaked report, whatever it is, to cheer triumphantly that perhaps the bunker buster bomber strike wasn’t quite as effective as the administration is claiming. 

What do you make of that? And will the president get credit if he did, in fact, dismantle Iran’s nuclear program?

WATTERS: [Silly initial patter]

Now, the woman is the same reporter who said the laptop was Russian, and now she says our bombs don’t work. You’d think she would have been fired for getting hoodwinked by the deep state couple of years ago, but she actually got promoted. She got promoted for being wrong! She got a raise for being wrong! 

Now she’s on CNN getting hoodwinked all over again, because that’s the point. She’s not there to be right. She’s just there to hurt Donald Trump. 

[...]

The Israeli intelligence team, Petraeus, Rubio, the CIA, the IAEA. Everybody says, "Direct hit, years to come back from it." And then there’s CNN, alone in the corner in last place, spewing enemy propaganda. I don’t think they can come back from it.

KENNEDY: Do you think they’re getting it from some sort of nefarious Iranian sources and it’s wishful thinking?

WATTERS: A hater in the Pentagon leaked an early report that had no confidence and just relied on some camera up in the sky. That’s it...

For Alex Griffing's report at Mediaite, you can just click here.

Kennedy seemed to have no idea where the damage assessment had come from. Presumably, she was playing dumb, a task these stars are paid to perform.

Kennedy was casting herself as clueless with respect to the leaked assessment. In his response, the silliest child said that CNN had been "spewing enemy propaganda" in the report by the hoodwinked woman who was "just there to hurt Donald Trump."

According to Watters, CNN had been "spewing enemy propaganda" by issuing an accurate reports about an initial assessment from within the Defense Department's intelligence agency. But then, this is the way the garbage flows on this nation's most-watched "news channel."

In that exchange, Kenndy was playing the fool, as was the silly Watters. In truth, Watters' on-air comic persona is a highly sophisticated blend of the sacred and the profane—is part of the ongoing use of comedy stylings on the Fox News Channel to help make the propaganda go down.

According to Watters, CNN had been spewing the views of the enemy! As for the unnamed woman herself, she had somehow said "that our bombs don't work."

That was stupidity beyond the reach of the stupid. Such porridge is dished on this channel all day and all night, with the finer people at the New York Times and the Washington Post—but also at CNN and MSNBC—agreeing that this conduct must never be reported or discussed.

This manufactured stupidity is part of the warfare of the Information Age. So was the conduct of the president—the conduct which Kennedy and Watters were working to reinforce.

On the previous day, the furious president had repeatedly referred to CNN as "scum." Early on that same June 25, he had attacked Bertrand by name, saying that she should b fired by CNN—should be "thrown out like a dog."

(So raged Agamemnon, long ago. So rages this man today.)

The players on the set of The Five were working to help that conduct along. Minnesota had happened just one week before, but they took no warning from that murderous conduct. Instead, they told some crackpot somewhere that the CNN reporter in question has been spewing enemy propaganda in her latest attempt to hurt Trump.

How stupid does it get on this corporate "cable news" channel? The silly boy Watters inanely said that Bernard had said that our bombs don't work! He also claimed that she'd once said that "the laptop was Russian."

That claim was breathtakingly bogus too. In fact, fifty major intelligence figures had signed a letter describing that as a possibly. She had simply reported what those public figures had said.

Yes, it actually does get that stupid on this corporate messaging service. Four nights later, here was a certain D-list comedian spreading this (dangerous) messaging to whoever might be unbalanced enough to decide to act upon it:

FAILLA (6/28/25): Long story short, CNN quoted anonymous sources to cast doubt on the attacks. And they did it using a reporter named Natasha Bertrand, who is actually the one responsible for starting the false claim that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation, OK? 

Like all reporters, Natasha would like to win a Pulitzer Prize one day, but (insert stupid commentary here about former President Biden falling off his bike).

It doesn't get dumber than that—and it doesn.t get more irresponsible.

Two weeks after Minnesota, the flyweight Failla was spreading the hate to the next potential assassin. Astoundingly, former Rep. Gowdy did the same thing the following night, savaging Bertrand by name while employing the helpful term, "aiding and abetting." 

You can watch his presentation here. We return to the arrival which occurred when the rage-filled Achaeans were finally able to come over the walls at Troy.

The Achaeans expressed their fury through the tools of Bronze Age war. Today, people like "Kennedy," Watters, Failla and Gowdy express the fury of the past ten years through these more modern means.

In the immediate aftermath of the murders in Minnesota, they were willing to go on TV and behave in such dangerous ways as these. Meanwhile their own Agamemnon was crying "scum" and asking that the reporter in question be "thrown out like a dog."

Our view? The rage and the fury are the are the same emotions portrayed from the Iliad's first verses forward. In fairness, today's players have perfectly valid complaints about various aspects of Blue America's conduct. But even at this dangerous time, their ability to regulate their fury barely seems to exist.

We've long been drawn to Professor Knox's portrait of that "night assault"—of that ancient arrival. It starts to give us a way to understand the arrival which is now sweeping Blue America to the side. 

Then again, there's the arrival which was recalled last Friday night by this new PBS program:

S39 Ep 5
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny

Discover Hannah Arendt, one of the most fearless political thinkers of the 20th century, who transformed her time as a political prisoner and refugee during World War II into daring insights about totalitarianism which continue to resonate today.

So reads the synopsis from the American Masters program itself.  The program discussed a catastrophic arrival which took place in the Germany of the 1930s.

Should American Masters have done such a thing? Tomorrow, we'll show you what the program said.

Tomorrow: To be perfectly clear, President Trump has never done anything like that


MONDAY: A certain bill keeps chugging along!

MONDAY, JUNE 30, 2025

But what the heck is in it? The bill was given a silly name—The One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The obvious purpose of the name is to assist in the content-free branding of this massive piece of legislation. 

That said, what's included this sprawling bill, which has yet to reach final form? As we sit here typing today, this is the overview provided by the leading authority:

One Big Beautiful Bill Act

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, also referred to as the Big Beautiful Bill, OBBBA, OBBB, BBB or OB3, is a proposed budget reconciliation bill in the 119th United States Congress. OBBBA passed the House of Representatives on May 22, 2025, in a largely party-line vote of 215–214–1.

The House-passed OBBBA would extend the major provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which are set to expire at the end of 2025. It would reduce non-military government spending and would significantly cut spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid through stricter eligibility requirements. It would also allocate an additional $150 billion for defense spending; scale back many of the Inflation Reduction Act's clean-energy tax credits; extend the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap, which is also scheduled to expire in 2025; and increase the SALT deduction cap from $10,000 to $40,000. It contains a number of other provisions, including a ten-year ban on all state-level AI regulations.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that OBBBA would add $2.4 trillion to the national debt of the United States by 2034 and would cause 10.9 million Americans to lose health insurance coverage. This number has been disputed by multiple GOP members, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump. The CBO later raised the estimated increase in the budget deficit to $2.8 trillion.

Following the House passage of OBBBA, the bill moved to the Senate for consideration. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has set a goal of passing the Senate's version of OBBBA by July 4, 2025.

That's what the authority says at present. The bill is so big that it has four (4) acronyms, along with its silly name.

(As a point of fairness, we note the reference to the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act, which was given that name despite the fact that it had nothing to do with inflation reduction. So it goes as the American discourse about such matters disappears into chaos and incomprehension, possibly never to find its way back to its previous miserable state.)

The current bill is in a state of flux. Depending on where you go for your "news," you've heard vastly different things about its vast array of provisions.

On the front page of this morning's New York Times, Andrew Duehren offered a bit of an update:

Senate Bill Would Add at Least $3.3 Trillion to Debt, Budget Office Says

The sprawling tax and health care bill that Senate Republicans are trying to pass would add at least $3.3 trillion to the already-bulging national debt over a decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Sunday, putting a far higher price tag on the measure than some of the party’s fiscal hawks had indicated they could stomach.

The cost of the Senate bill, which Republicans rolled out overnight on Friday and were still shaping on Sunday, far exceeds the $2.4 trillion cost of the version passed in the House, where lawmakers had insisted that the overall price of the bill not substantially change. But Senate Republicans still moved forward with a number of costly changes to the bill, including making prized tax breaks for business a permanent feature of the tax code.

With roughly $29 trillion in debt currently held by the public, the budget office had already expected the government to borrow another $21 trillion over the next decade, meaning the Republican bill would make an already-dire fiscal forecast worse. And the initial estimate of a cost of $3.3 trillion for the Senate bill is an undercount, because it does not include additional borrowing costs which could push the bill’s overall addition to the debt closer to $4 trillion.

[...]

The main component driving the cost of the Republican legislative effort is the extension of a series of tax cuts from 2017. Many of those tax cuts are set to expire this year, and extending them into the future represents a roughly $3.8 trillion hit to the budget. Republicans have also piled some additional tax cuts on top, including versions of President Trump’s promises to not tax tips and overtime, bringing the overall size of the Senate tax cut to roughly $4.5 trillion.

(In this report, the Times returns to providing the figures concerning debt held by the public.)

That figure currently stands at roughly $29 trillion. Under current arrangements, that figures stands to rise to something like $50 trillion by the end of the next decade. That's before the GOP steps in to address the problem of national debt, concerning which its various spokespersons still express great concern.

How has the GOP decided to tackle this problem? Facing an expansion of debt which Duehren describes as "dire" (Paul Krugman has called it "unsustainable"), the GOP has decided to address the problem by creating "additional tax cuts"—by finding ways to bring in even less revenue over the next ten years.

According to the CBO, the OBBBA as it currently stands would therefore take the national debt from its current $29 trillion to something more like $54 trillion—unless you listen to Republican solons, in which case 1) you will hear that explosive economic growth will destroy this gloomy scenario, or 2) you'll will see the solon quickly start to talk about something else. 

Regarding the spending cuts on health care programs mentioned by the leading authority, Duehren offers this today as he continues directly:

...Republicans have also piled some additional tax cuts on top, including versions of President Trump’s promises to not tax tips and overtime, bringing the overall size of the Senate tax cut to roughly $4.5 trillion.

To offset some of that cost, Republicans have also proposed deep cuts to the country’s social safety net, particularly Medicaid. According to the C.B.O., the Senate version of the legislation would mean 11.8 million Americans lose their health insurance by 2034 as federal spending on Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare is reduced by roughly $1.1 trillion over that period.

In newspapers directed at Blue America, you'll be told that spending cuts will cause many people to lose their health insurance. From citizens serviced by Red America, phone calls like this were being fielded, over the weekend, by C-Span's Washington Journal.

At 7:22 on Sunday morning, Kelly from North Carolina was on the phone, reassuring the previous caller:

MODERATOR (6/29/25): That was Jerry in Tennessee. Kelly, in Clemmons, North Carolina, on the line for Republicans. Good morning, Kelly!

KELLY IN NORTH CAROLINA: Hi, Tammy! Well, I want to tell that man right there that his prayers have already been answered because they're not cutting Social Security, they're not cutting Medicare, and they're not cutting Medicaid. 

They are reforming Medicaid, and the way the cuts would be are not real "cuts." They are no more illegals being able to use them. That's where the cuts are coming from, OK? All you people who are American citizens, you will still be getting everything you were getting...

I just want you all to know there's nothing to worry about. You are listening to propaganda, and it's all propaganda from the left. Stop listening to it, you're hurting yourselves. They are trying to make you in fear. Have faith, not fear, and God Bless you all.

MODERATOR: That was Kelly in North Carolina.

We have no doubt that the caller was sincere. Within Red America, that messaging has been widespread concerning the adjustments to the Medicaid program and the dollar savings which will result.

We're living in various countries now. There's no way to run a modern nation in such a state of peak Babel.

ARRIVALS: How should we describe the current arrival?

MONDAY, JUNE 30, 2025

PBS shatters a rule: We didn't say so last Friday afternoon. But when the Achaeans came over the walls, it was a type of arrival.

This takes us all the way back to the very dawn of the West. That arrival was described by Professor Knox in his lengthy introduction to the Robert Fagles translation of the Iliad.

The lengthy essay by Professor Knox was published in 1990. Within it, he described an arrival.

That ancient arrival was characterized by fury and extreme violence. When the Achaeans came over the walls, this is what occurred:

[T]he death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city. 

The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.

If you can't defend your civilization, your civilization will fall! At any rate, when the Achaeans came over the walls, it was a type of arrival—but it was also a stunningly violent assault:

King Priam, a thoroughly dignified ruler, was butchered at the altar. His wife was dragged off into slavery. Their daughter Cassandra was raped.

His noble son's infant boy was thrown to his death from the city's high walls. Is this, in some far-fetched way, the type of arrival with which Blue America is currently struggling? Are we struggling to turn back, even to describe, an arrival of this general type?

As we noted in Friday afternoon's report, Hollywood has often portrayed other types of arrival. In 2016, Denis Villeneuve pictured a different kind of arrival in an Oscar-nominated film of that very name:

Arrival 

Denis Villeneuve’s lyrical alien film, based on a short story by Ted Chiang, is sci-fi at its most emotionally devastating. When a mysterious, looming extraterrestrial craft lands on Earth, a linguist played by Amy Adams...is recruited to try to speak to the tentacled beings known as heptapods. Less a saga about invasion than it is about communication, “Arrival” is intoxicatingly mysterious until it wallops you with its time-turning gut punch of an ending.

In this film, a linguist attempts to communicate with the newly arrived—with a group of tentacled beings! To what extent can our nation's current (and ongoing) struggle be compared to something like that?

Hollywood has offered many films in which the arrival involves a type of "alien" which differs from the "illegal [undocumented / unauthorized] aliens" who play a key role in our current societal drama. In 1997, a bit of whimsy was present:

Men in Black

Men in Black is a 1997 American alien/UFO science fiction action comedy film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith as "men in black," secret agents who monitor and police extraterrestrials...In the film, Agent K (Jones) and Agent J (Smith) investigate a series of seemingly unrelated criminal incidents related to the extraterrestrials who live in secret on Earth.

[...]

Plot

In 1961, the Men in Black (MiB) organization is founded after secretly making first contact with extraterrestrials. Ever since, they established Earth as a politically neutral zone for alien refugees who live in secret among humanity...

In this, as in so many films, the arrival involved a species of extraterrestrials—beings who aren't like us. In Men in Black, they've been (secretly) living among for well over thirty years!

Back then, an alien invasion of this type could still be seen as humorous. It was different in 1956, when the arrival featured a darkly ominous tone:

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

[...] 

The film's storyline concerns an extraterrestrial invasion that begins in the fictional California town of Santa Mira. Alien plant spores have fallen from space and grown into large seed pods, each one capable of producing a visually identical copy of a human. As each pod reaches full development, it assimilates the physical traits, memories, and personalities of each sleeping person placed near it until only the replacement is left; these duplicates, however, are devoid of all human emotion. Little by little, a local doctor uncovers this "quiet" invasion and attempts to stop it.

To our ear, the portrait of "duplicates devoid of all human emotion" can almost start to ring a bell as we try to find the way to describe, and to understand, the nature of the current situation. 

Hollywood continues to offer portraits of unexpected arrivals. In 2022, Jordan Peele's Nope stuck to the concept of the extraterrestrial source of the arrival. 

On the other hand, you could almost say that Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (2019) describes the arrival of an alien force of apparently human type. This thumbnail comes from the new survey by the New York Times, in which Once Upon a Time joins Arrival among this century's hundred best:

Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood

Like Martin Scorsese’s New York or Federico Fellini’s Rome, Quentin Tarantino’s Los Angeles is a thing to behold: The director’s fevered love letter to his hometown circa 1969 is a gonzo-maximalist dream, encompassing a fictional fading TV star (Leonardo DiCaprio), his laconic stuntman-sidekick (Brad Pitt), a passel of Manson family freaks and the very real starlet Sharon Tate (played as pure blond sunshine by Margot Robbie). From there, the script breaks with established history, building to one of the most bravura and far-out finales in film history.

A tragic arrival is underway in that film, involving "a passel of Manson family" types. (Does it also involve the fatuous Hollywood players on whom those types will feed?)

Do any of those portraits help us understand and describe the arrival which got its start when then-Candidate Donald J. Trump came down the escalator in June 2015?  Completing the record for today, PBS has now added a portrait of a deeply horrific arrival in the latest offering from its American Masters series. 

This portrait of a disastrous arrival debuted last Friday evening. Along the way, PBS broke one of the most widely-stated rules in the book. To watch the whole program, click here:

S39 Ep 5
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny

Discover Hannah Arendt, one of the most fearless political thinkers of the 20th century, who transformed her time as a political prisoner and refugee during World War II into daring insights about totalitarianism which continue to resonate today.

So reads the official thumbnail from the PBS program itself. 

For what it's worth, this 83-minute PBS program explicitly compares the rapid arrival of the Third Reich to the events now gripping our own struggling American nation. Whether justified or not, the comparison is completely undisguised as of the program's 20-minute mark, as chronicled by Jackie Calmes in this overview of the PBS program for the Los Angeles Times.

When the Achaeans came over the walls, it was a violent arrival. In part for reasons of our own making, those of us in Blue America have had a hard time describing the type of arrival we ourselves currently face.

Blue America's journalistic elites have established or played by certain rules—rules which regulate the types of things which can be said about this arrival:

Our journalists have observed explicit rules forbidding medical talk—forbidding discussions of mental health and mental disorder. They seem to be playing by rules which won't let them report or discuss the astonishing conduct which takes place, all day and all night, on the powerful Fox News Channel.

We lack an established journalistic language which lets us discuss the sheer stupidity which suffuses the American public discourse. Also, we have a rule which says that we mustn't discuss what happened in Germany, and then throughout Europe, not so long ago.

Like the fictional citizens of Camus' Oran, we simply haven't been up the challenge of describing—possibly, even of recognizing—what's happening in our midst. For what it's worth, our own view would be that the current arrival has almost surely already passed the point of no return—will not now be turned back. 

For the record, also this:

As we've noted many times, it was our own Blue America's foolishness, down through the years, which set the stage for this arrival—which triggered the anger of those who arrived. And as in sacred Troy, so too here:

It's an anger which many of the newly arrived can't seem to control, regulate or contain.

In truth, arrivals like these have taken place all through the course of human history. In the current instance, many of the newly arrived are well intentioned. Presumably, quite a few others are not.

 In our view, we Blues, like the citizens of Oran, simply haven't been up to task of dealing with this arrival. In The Plague, Camus described the mindset of Oran's denizens when their challenge arrived:

Our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions. 

Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences. 

 As with American Masters, so too here! Camus was speaking about what happened in Germany too.

All week long, we'll try to develop the language with which sensible people might be able to describe the current (ongoing) arrival. Once again, we'll say, up front, that we think the battle has already been lost.

We'll try to establish ways to describe the nature of this arrival. Sadly, we'll borrow from Lincoln in making this point:

We Blues have been part of this too.

Tomorrow: The view from American Masters