ARRIVALS: What kinds of troops came over the walls?

SATURDAY, JULY 5, 2025

Trump and Noem declaim: Speaking live and direct from Des Moines, President Trump decided to issue another one of his "Truths."

He was speaking at his July 3 "Salute to America" rally event, The next day, back in Washington, he was going to sign the mega-bill, which had now been passed by the Senate and the House.

Lee Greenwood sang the president onstage at the Des Moines event. For the record, this is the official way the event was being billed:

America 250
A New Era of American Greatness
July 3 Kick-Off Celebration

Lee Greenwood sang the president onstage at the start of this new era of American greatness. "There ain't no doubt I love this land," he sang as the president watched.

(For C-Span's videotape of the whole event, you can just click here.)

We don't question Greenwood's sincerity—but then, the president started to speak. He spoke for an hour and ten minutes—but quickly, at the nine-minute mark, he voiced an important theme.

He praised the bill he was going to sign the next day. And then, sure enough, he said this:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (7/3/25): I got to tell you—I want to thank Republican congressmen and -women because what they did is incredible last night. And the Senate—the Republican Senate. We got not— 

With all the things we did—with the tax cuts, rebuilding our military—not one Democrat voted for us. And I think we use it in the campaign that’s coming up, the midterms. Because we’ve gotta beat them. 

But all of the things we’ve given, and they wouldn’t vote only because they hate Trump. But I hate them too. You know that?

[Cheers] 

I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them because I really believe they hate our country.

(To view the videotape of these remarks, click here for the report in Mediaite. For C-Span's videotape of the whole event, you can just click this.)

President Trump hates the Democrats! And the reason why he hates the Democrats is because they hate our country!

Who was the president talking about when he made those remarkable statements? 

Was he talking about Democratic senators and representatives—Democratic Party office holders? Or was he speaking of the tens of millions of citizens who are registered as Democrats and who vote for Democratic candidates? 

The president spoke in a sweeping manner. Even as the audience cheered, there was no way to know exactly what he meant.

Lee Greenwood loves the United States—but as we start this era of American greatness, the sitting president may hate roughly half the country's adults. Or so it seemed, this Thursday night, at the Iowa State Fairgrounds on the east side of Des Moines.

In the past week, we've been looking for ways to describe who or what came over the walls when the latest arrival occurred—when Candidate Trump descended the escalator, touching off the ongoing MAGA movement.

One of the things which came over the walls was this free-floating anger and hatred. As we've noted again this week, the same hatred was present at the dawn of the west when the rage-fueled Achaeans came over the walls and took down sacred Troy.

We'd trace that part of the current arrival straight back to the Iliad. For a second part of the current arrival, we'd think instead of the portrait which was comedically presented in the feature film, Men in Black.

Comedically, that film advanced the notion that very strange extraterrestrial beings may be living in secret among us. We remind you of the comical framework as we remind you of Secretary Noem's recent appearance with the Fox News Channel's ludicrous Jesse Watters.

We remind you here of what was said. This too came over the walls as part of the current arrival:

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.

[...]

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.

That too is part of the current arrival. For a fuller report on this strange event, click here for Wednesday's report.

Are very strange beings hiding among us, as Men in Black imagined? In this case, Secretary Noem showed no sign of understanding how improbable this highly improbable story was surely going to seem. 

Last Friday night, she told this story on the second most-watched TV show in American "cable news"—and no one said a word about it! This Tuesday, she repeated the story at a major press event, with President Trump at her side. 

This time, her improbable story was briefly flagged by several major news orgs—and then was completely dropped. In such ways, the strange cognition of people like Noem is wed to the fury of President Trump, but also to the insouciance of Blue America's press corps.

Two days ago, out in the heartland, the sitting president rushed to say that he hates something like half the country. Earlier, the sitting Secretary of Homeland Security didn't seem to realize that her improbable story was going to seem very strange.

It's amazing to see the way our major news orgs have failed to report the president's statement about his sweeping hatred. Such expressions of hatred have been almost completely normalized at this late stage in the game.

The president's declaration of hatred has gone almost wholly unreported. So did Noem's extremely peculiar story, which she told, two separate times, without even blinking an eye.

With this pair of presentations, the Iliad marries Men in Black. Completing the rule of three, we ourselves will hereby join these manifestations to the silence of the lambs—to the silence of the finer people in Blue America's mainstream press.

Hatred, peculiar cognition, but also insouciance? For better or worse, all three came over the walls as part of the latest storm.

ARRIVALS: PBS portrayed Red America's voters!

FRIDAY, JULY 4, 2025

Is it also a portrait of us? How did our struggling nation's current arrival gain purchase? 

For better or worse, adherents continue to come over the walls. But how did this latest arrival begin—and why did it gain purchase?

We said we'd show you what PBS said, and so we're going to do that. We refer to the venerable PBS program, American Masters, whose newest episode debuted last Friday night:

S39 Ep 5
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny

Premiere: 6/27/2025 | 01:23:45 | TV-PG 

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.

The American Masters program is now in its 39th season. Last Friday, it finally got around to profiling Hannah Arendt. 

Arendt was present in her native Germany to witness a different arrival. As a bit of basic background, her biographer tells us this:

Hannah Arendt 

Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was a German and American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.

Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of wealth, power, fame, and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, tradition, and totalitarianism. 

[...]

In 1933, Arendt was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism. On release, she fled Germany, settling in Paris...When Germany invaded France, she was detained as an alien. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950. With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established, and a series of works followed.

According to that overview, Arendt is best known for her work on an endless array of topics! That said, she was present in her native Germany during the early years of a disastrous arrival—and she literally wrote the book about the way totalitarianism arrives on the scene.

In last Friday's American Masters program, the portrait of that German arrival starts at roughly the 20-minute mark. You can watch the entire program at its official site.

Full disclosure! The program does a remarkably poor job identifying who is providing the background narration at various points along the way as it describes that arrival. That said, we think we can give you an accurate account of that matter.

According to the program's website, "actress Nina Hoss provides the voice of Hannah Arendt as a student in Germany to the 1970s" [sic]. When Hoss provides this part of the narration, she's reading the actual words of Arendt. 

Several scholars also provide the narration as this German arrival is described. 

In our view, also this:

In its account of that German arrival, the program is making a clear comparison to the rise of our own nation's current political movement. 

You can decide if you think that comparison fair. But to our ear, that's plainly the way this program fashions its account of that earlier disastrous arrival.

How did that German arrival gain purchase? As that part of the PBS program begins, Germany is reeling in the aftermath of its defeat in World War I. 

As best we can tell, these are the voices who now seek to explain the early rise of the political movement which would become the insanely murderous Third Reich:

VOICE OF ARENDT: The most efficient fiction of Nazi propaganda was the story of a Jewish world conspiracy. The Nazis acted as though the world were dominated by the Jews and needed a counter-conspiracy to defend itself.

By 1931, I was firmly convinced that the Nazis would take the helm.

So begins the program's account, with Hoss reading Arendt's actual words. Continuing directly, the scholar Roger Berkowitz extends the discussion:

BERKOWITZ: There were federal and regional elections at the time. And if you look at Hitler's speeches during the campaigns, he would say things like, "We are a majority."

He was never a majority! And he would come up with some argument that they won. He was giving them a coherent narrative.

"We are winning. We are going to change Germany. We are going to change the world. And the movement is growing, and it's stronger because of you and your undying loyalty to me."

To our ear, the comparison to our nation's current situation is already emerging. At this point, the voice of Arendt takes over again, and the implied comparison becomes that much more clear:

VOICE OF ARENDT: The Nazis translated the propaganda lies of the movement into a functioning reality. The ideal subject was not the convinced Nazi, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer existed.

A most cherished virtue is loyalty to the leader, who, like a talisman, assures that ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality.

A basic distinction—the ability to distinguish fact from fiction—was being replaced by total loyalty to the movement's leader. Stating the obvious, that's part and parcel of one current portrait of the rise of the MAGA movement—not, we'd say, without reason. 

As it was then, so it is now? At this point, Berkowitz takes over again:

BERKOWITZ: Arendt saw this. She was there. She was living there. And so many of her friends said, "Oh, well, he's just crazy. He's just making things up. And don't worry about him. He can't win. He's just creating fantasies."

But fantasies are sometimes what we want and especially at times of economic, cultural, social, and political despair.

People—they were lonely. They were needy of meaning and belonging, and that's what Hitler was giving people.

People were saying that Hitler couldn't win—that he was just too crazy? That, of course, is what many people were saying about Candidate Trump as of 2015. 

At this point, the broadcast returns to the voice, and to the words, of Arendt herself. Within the current context, we'd score these remarks as unwise—as highly unattractive:

VOICE OF ARENDT: The Nazi movement recruited their members from this mass of indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic, or too stupid, for their attention.

The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene.

Were Hitler's early supporters apathetic, indifferent, stupid? In effect, were they just the deplorables?

We have no idea. But within the context of this emerging presentation, that also seems to function as a portrait of President Trump's ongoing support.

In our view, our own Blue America goes off the rails when our scholars pleasure us—implicitly, when they flatter us—with that unpleasant portrait of Red America's voters. At any rate, the overview by American Masters continues with two scholars commenting in the manner shown:

BARBARA HAHN: I think she came up with these ideas when she was looking at what this mass society would provide people.

It would provide them with the impression that they're not alone any more, and there is a party giving them an idea that they are part of something really big.

MALE COMMENTATOR: All the major German conservative politicians are on record over and over again saying, "We cannot let Adolf Hitler become chancellor."

And, yet, because they wanted to recruit followers of Hitler to their side, they didn't just exclude Hitler when they could, they tried to control him. And he was able to then play them all against each other until they had to make him chancellor.

German conservative politicians thought they could control Hitler! Plainly, that's a very familiar portrait of the way Republican pols perceived Candidate and President Trump in the first years of his arrival.

Today, we know that the German arrival led to a brutal genocide—to one of the most deranged events in all of human history.

In this tenth year of his reign, President Trump has engaged in no such conduct. Beyond that, we know of no reason to believe that he ever will, or that he would. We say that despite his new, explicit statement, made last night in Iowa, about the way he actively hates the others—in this case, the Democrats.

It's our assumption that President Trump is fundamentally disordered—is disordered in way which Blue America's press had agreed not to evaluate or discuss. Still, he hasn't conducted a genocide. 

That said:

In our view, much of what that profile describes is well worth contemplating. As our nation has split into two rival nations, it can be said, and often is, that many voters in Red America have turned into "people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists."

For many voters in Red America, it can be said that "loyalty to the leader" has perhaps replaced the traditional attempt to separate fact from fiction—has led to the ultimate "victory of fiction over truth and reality."

For many voters in Red America, it can perhaps be said that loyalty to President Trump has gifted them with a pleasing set of fictions, in which they're battling a world conspiracy led by a pleasing set of villains. In our view, American Masters was plainly sketching that comparison in last Friday's program. 

In April 2024, it seemed to us that PBS did much the same thing in the portrait of Julius Caesar offered by this underwhelming program:

Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator

The dramatic story of how nearly five centuries of ancient Roman democracy was overthrown in just 16 years…by one man. This is the story of a brazen, ambitious power-grab that saw Julius Caesar consolidate the vast power of Rome in his own hands.

Back then, Trump was said to be Julius Caesar. As of last Friday night, he was you-know-who himself.

In our view, there's substantial merit in American Masters' implied portrait of Red America's pro-Trump voters, who no longer separate fact from fiction in their pursuit of a pleasing tale.

In our view, that's a reasonable critique of many of Red America's voters. The question we will continue to ask about our own Blue America is this:

To what extent, if to any extent, can it be said that this pleasing portrait is also a portrait of us? To what extent has our own tribal blindness lead to the situation our flailing nation is in?

ARRIVALS: Hannah Arendt was on the scene...

THURSDAY, JULY 3, 2025

...when an arrival occurred: How might we most instructively picture the nature of this latest arrival?

Within the House of Representatives, this latest arrival continues this very day. Even as we type, the megabill is about to be approved by the House, extending the political dominance of the current sitting president.

His ongoing political success is supported by tens of million of neighbors and friends—by tens of millions of our fellow citizens. He came down the escalator in 2015. What accounts for the ongoing appeal of this vastly surp arrival?

Those of us in Blue America have a hard time seeing the ways we ourselves helped set the stage for this potent arrival That said, and for better or worse, the forces of MAGA America continue to advance. But what would be the most instructive way for us to picture what has been happening?

For ourselves, we juggle such pictures as these:

When we see the Secretary of Homeland Security speaking, in full sincerity, about the cannibals who may be inclined to eat their own arms, we think of the portrait offered in Men in Black, in which an extremely strange set of alien beings are secretly living among us.

(We refer to the secretary herself, not to the alleged cannibal.)

The scenario offered in Men in Black is comedic. We think of that comedic portrait when we see players like Noem offering highly peculiar assessments.

But when we see people like Watters, Failla and Gowdy assailing a CNN journalist by name—a journalist who reported on an actual DIA assessment;

When we see such people doing that in the immediate aftermath of the murders in Minnesota;

When we see them doing that in support of the sitting president, who said the CNN journalist should be "thrown out like a dog;"

When we see them doing that in support of the president who said that CNN and the New York Times are "scum" because they reported that (actual) DIA assessment;

When we see President Trump, plus Watters, Failla and Gowdy, behaving in such astonishing ways, we toss Men in Black to the side. We think instead of the murderous way the rage-filled Achaeans came over the walls of sacred Troy at the very dawn of the West.

How should we understand the rage which leads people like Trump, Watters, Failla and Gowdy to behave in the dangerous way they did? Which leads a person like Lisa Boothe to put the life of Dr. Fauci at risk through the astonishing attacks she has delivered in several of her appearances on the Fox News Channel?

At this site, we're looking for other arrivals which might help us understand and portray the arrival which is still unfolding here. As we've noted, that leads us back to the portrait of a disastrous arrival—a portrait which was offered by the PBS series, American Masters, this past Friday night.

How did it [ever] get this far? That's what Don Corleone asks at one point in The Godfather. Today, we might ask a similar question about the MAGA movement:

How did this movement ever get stated? What explains its arrival, which continues along today?

Last Friday night, American Masters debuted its latest documentary. The PBS program is now in its 39th year. By clicking here, you can visit the website of its current episode, which you can watch in full:

S39 Ep 5
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny

Premiere: 6/27/2025 | 01:23:45 | TV-PG 

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.

Hannah Arendt was indeed a major figure of the last century. It's portrait of her is TV-PG, the website says—but along the way, this documentary discusses one of the most consequential arrivals in all of human history. 

The program discusses the way the Third Reich first gained purchase in 1930s Germany. Breaking a rule of contemporary journalistic discourse, the program seems to compare the early years of that arrival to the way our own nation's current arrival gained purchase.

On its face, that's a highly unflattering comparison. At this point, it's important to state an obvious point:

The deranged leader of the Third Reich went on to stage "the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims."

President Trump has never done anything like that. Beyond that, we know of no reason to believe that he ever would or will.

Whatever one thinks of President Trump, he hasn't engaged in such conduct. That said, the American Masters profile of Arendt draws an obvious comparison between the arrival of the MAGA movement and the arrival of that other movement in the Germany of the 1930s.

Was the program wise to do such a thing? Given the horror of where the German movement went, is it decent to create and broadcast such a comparison?

Readers can judge that as they wish. For those who want to ponder the history of the current arrival, we think it's worth restating what the PBS program chose to present.

President Trump has done no such thing. But what explains his political appeal at the time of his arrival? Who was drawn to his arrival, and why?

The portrait of that 1930s German arrival starts at roughly the 20-minute mark of the American Masters program. You can click over there to see what the program says.

For the record, that program does a very poor job identifying who is providing the background narration at various points along the way. In spite of that major shortcoming, you'll surely get the gist pf what the program is saying.

Tomorrow, we'll show you what the program says about these two arrivals. The programs tells us what Hannah Arendt, then a young woman, saw in Germany at that time. It also presents some of what she later said about the appeal of that arrival.

According to the program's website, "Actress Nina Hoss provides the voice of Hannah Arendt." When Hoss provides this narration, she is reading the actual words of Arendt.

Several scholars also provide the narration as this German arrival is described. To our ear, the program clearly compares that arrival to the rise of our own nation's current dominant political movement.

For reasons we can't even remember at this point, we were struck by what the American Masters program said. Tomorrow, we'll transcribe its intriguing account, trying to remind you of this:

The foolishness and arrogance of our own Blue America helped set the stage for the rise of the MAGA world. 

Quite frequently, Donald Trump's supporters have legitimate complaints to make. It's the lunacy of the cannibal spottings, married to the inability to rein in the rage, which leads us first to Men in Black, then to the murderous assault on sacred Troy and on those within its walls.

We Blues helped set the stage for this arrival. Why did it take hold?

Tomorrow: "The ideal subject was [the person] for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer existed."

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

SATURDAY: Trump wanted the journo "thrown out like a dog!"

SATURDAY, JUNE 28, 2025

Leavitt then swung into action: Karoline Leavitt, the scolder-in-chief, had finally just about had it with CNN's Natasha Bertrand.

The smash-and-grab crew at oppo research had handed the youngster a big stack of claims concerning Bertrand's past work. Also, the sitting president had said that he wanted to see Bertrand fired by CNN—to see her "thrown out like a dog."

It isn't like her party's philosopher king to say such things as that! On that basis, the spokesperson knew that the claims against Bertrand just plain had to be true.

On that basis, Leavitt hurried to the White House briefing room, eager to warn the public. In this report for Mediaite, Zachary Leeman cited some of the things she now said:

‘She Should Be Ashamed of Herself!’ Karoline Leavitt Unleashes on CNN Reporter Trump Wants Network to Fire

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt laid into CNN national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand on Thursday, one day after President Donald Trump demanded the reporter be “thrown out like a dog” over her reporting on the U.S.’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

[...]

At a Thursday White House press briefing, Leavitt called out Bertrand by name and suggested she was being “used” by Washington, D.C. insiders with an anti-Trump agenda to “push a false narrative.” She also claimed only “bits and pieces” of the initial report were leaked.

As Leavitt called out Bertrand from her podium, she listed out other reporting the administration takes issue with, including reporting in 2020 on dozens of intelligence officials chalking up Hunter Biden’s infamously abandoned laptop to Russian disinformation, as well as reports on the origins of Covid-19.

“This is a reporter who has been unfortunately used by people who dislike Donald Trump in this government to push fake and false narratives. She should be ashamed of herself,” Leavitt said.

And so on from there, with tape.

Bertrand should be ashamed of herself, the thoughtful press spokesperson said. Indeed, Bertrand had even been used in the past! As one example, Leavitt cited Bertrand's past reporting for Politico about that infamous "laptop from Hell."

How phony was Bertrand's reporting back then? By clicking here, you can start to see for yourself. 

Below, you see the start of Bertrand's report on the statement made by those intelligence officials. The report was published by Politico on October 19, 2020:

Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say

More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

The letter, signed on Monday, centers around a batch of documents released by the New York Post last week that purport to tie the Democratic nominee to his son Hunter’s business dealings. Under the banner headline “Biden Secret E-mails,” the Post reported it was given a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said he got it from a Mac shop owner in Delaware who also alerted the FBI.

While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.

“If we are right,” they added, “this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”

Nick Shapiro, a former top aide under CIA director John Brennan, provided POLITICO with the letter on Monday. He noted that “the IC leaders who have signed this letter worked for the past four presidents, including Trump. The real power here however is the number of former, working-level IC officers who want the American people to know that once again the Russians are interfering.”

The former Trump administration officials who signed the letter include Russ Travers, who served as National Counterterrorism Center acting director; Glenn Gerstell, the former NSA general counsel; Rick Ledgett, the former deputy NSA director; Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA senior operations officer; and Cynthia Strand, who served as the CIA’s deputy assistant director for global issues. Former CIA directors or acting directors Brennan, Leon Panetta, Gen. Michael Hayden, John McLaughlin and Michael Morell also signed the letter, along with more than three dozen other intelligence veterans. Several of the former officials on the list have endorsed Biden.

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said on Monday that the information on Biden’s laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” though the FBI is reportedly conducting an ongoing investigation into whether Russia was involved.

And so on from there.

Just this once, we'll be honest. We have no idea what's supposed to be wrong with that news report:

A group of major former officials had published a letter about a matter of public interest. Their statement had been made available to Politico, and Bertrand had been assigned to report what the former officials had said. 

The letter "presented no new evidence" about the matter at hand, Bertrand quickly noted. She also noted that several of the former officials had endorsed then-Candidate Biden.

She quoted a denial by President Trump's DNI, though she also said that the FBI was reportedly investigating the matter. This strikes us as straight-ahead, standard news reporting of the most obvious kind.

On Thursday, the scolder-in-chief burst into the briefing room and let the miscreant have it. The president wanted her "thrown out like a dog"—and as Leavitt went on and on, it sounded like she did too.

For the record, Leavitt never ventured into specifics. She never explained what was supposed to be wrong with Bertrand's past or present work. So it frequently tends to go in the wake of a recent arrival.

In yesterday afternoon's report, we wondered about the arrival on the scene of players like Leavitt and Pete Hegseth. What in the world have they come from? we asked. What explains their unusual impulses and characteristics?

In the 2016 film Arrival, a group of "mysterious tentacled beings" had suddenly appeared on the scene. All next week, we'll be trying to develop a language with which to describing the ways of this latest new group.

FRIDAY: In Arrival, it was a race of tentacled beings!

FRIDAY, JUNE 27, 2025

Today, it's Hegseth and Leavitt: How strange has American culture become in the years since their arrival?

We're speaking of the type of arrival which formed the basis for a major feature film back in 2016.

In this brand-new survey,  the New York Times has created a list of this century's hundred best films. The film in question got voted at #29—as the 29th best so far:

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, in a career-best role, 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.

We ourselves weren't blown away by the Oscar-nominated film, though we probably should have seen it in an actual movie theater. 

That said, the arrival of the present day's new group of beings has now produced a cultural result as monumentally stupid as this:

Trump Threatens to Sue The NY Times and CNN Over ‘Unpatriotic’ Reporting On U.S. Military Intel

The New York Times struck a defiant tone in a Thursday letter in response to a personal lawyer for President Donald Trump demanding the paper “retract and apologize” or be sued over a report on the state of Iranian nuclear sites following Trump’s bombings.

The Times reported on the letter sent by Alejandro Brito, which threatened to sue the paper and CNN for publishing reports on a leaked Pentagon assessment that said Trump’s bombings only set Iran’s nuclear program back a few months. The assessment was labeled as an initial intelligence finding, but contradicted Trump’s public claims that Iran’s nuclear sites had been totally “obliterated.” Trump’s lawyer called the article “false,” “defamatory,” and “unpatriotic” while demanding it be retracted.

David McCraw, the Times’s deputy general counsel, replied to Brito, saying, “No retraction is needed. No apology will be forthcoming. We told the truth to the best of our ability. We will continue to do so.”

Trump has publicly raged against both the Times and CNN in recent days. On Thursday, he took to his Truth Social platform and wrote, “FAKE NEWS REPORTERS FROM CNN & THE NEW YORK TIMES SHOULD BE FIRED, IMMEDIATELY!!! BAD PEOPLE WITH EVIL INTENTIONS!!!”

And so on from there, Mediaite reporting. The stupidity has gone on and on, and then it's gone on and on some more. Existing news orgs on the planet don't seem to know how to discuss it—or they may be too frightened to try.

How peculiar has our political culture become in the years since this arrival? The fury of yesterday's press event with Pete Hegseth would be one obvious case in point.

A few hours after that serial meltdown, Karoline Leavitt went off. Is her endless ridiculous conduct really "a cancer on the discourse?" Again, we'll let Mediaite report, and then you can decide:

‘She Should Be Ashamed of Herself!’ Karoline Leavitt Unleashes on CNN Reporter Trump Wants Network to Fire

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt laid into CNN national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand on Thursday, one day after President Donald Trump demanded the reporter be “thrown out like a dog” over her reporting on the U.S.’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Trump took aim at Bertrand over her reporting on a leaked intelligence assessment that concluded strikes against the Iranian sites likely only set their nuclear programs back by months, rather than years as the president and other officials claimed. Trump has called the report “fake news” and lashed out at The New York Times and others for reporting on the assessment."

[...] 

At a Thursday White House press briefing, Leavitt called out Bertrand by name and suggested she was being “used” by Washington, D.C. insiders with an anti-Trump agenda to “push a false narrative.” She also claimed only “bits and pieces” of the initial report were leaked.

As Leavitt called out Bertrand from her podium, she listed out other reporting the administration takes issue with, including reporting in 2020 on dozens of intelligence officials chalking up Hunter Biden’s infamously abandoned laptop to Russian disinformation, as well as reports on the origins of Covid-19.

How dumb was Leavitt yesterday? So dumb that her claims were foolish even by her own standards! Tomorrow, we'll show you the kinds of past reporting by Bertrand which had Leavitt, our latest very strange arrival, calling for the CNN journalist's head.

In the 29th best film of this century, a linguist played by Amy Adams is recruited to try to speak to a bunch of tentacled beings. Where are some such linguists now with respect to these latest arrivals?

Tomorrow, we'll look at Leavitt's pathetic attack on Bertrand. Next week, we'll conduct a type of search—a search for some sort of way to describe this new group of arrivals.

As for the film Arrival, it wasn't about an "invasion," the New York Times has said. We're not sure we'd say the same thing about the arrival of furious, deeply entitled beings like the aforementioned Leavitt and Hegseth.

They're deeply entitled and deeply aggrieved. We Blues set the stage for their arrival, but where did their looming craft come from?