FRANK: Paul Krugman made a striking statement!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2026

When he did, a cable star noticed: Should Paul Krugman have said what he recently said?  

We can't necessarily tell you! But for reasons which may be instantly obvious, we were intrigued by the first thing he said in the six-minute video he posted on his Substack site.  

That said, we doubt the accuracy of one part of what the Nobel laureate said.  You can watch the full video on YouTube simply by clicking here. 

Here's the way Krugman starts:   

KRUGMAN (5/31/26): The president of the United States is mentally ill, but everybody knows that. So while we should continue to focus on this degeneration taking place before our eyes, we should also, beyond that, ask what we should do about the powers, the interests, the system that put this horrifying person in a position of power.  

That's the way Krugman started.  We focus on this video because of something he said just a bit later, at the five-minute mark.

That said, is it true? Is it true that the sitting president is mentally ill? Also, is it true that that "everybody knows that?"

As we've repeatedly said, we're inclined to assume that the initial statement is true—but we regard "mental illness" as a conceptually complex term whose parameters are barely understood within this underdeveloped, immature part of our nation's public discourse. 

As we've repeatedly said, we'd like to see (carefully selected) medical specialists asked to discuss that particular claim, but our major journalists have agreed that no such discussion will ever happen.

Beyond that, there's no guarantees that journalists would be able to find medical specialists who were up to the task of producing a clear discussion. There's no guarantee that our journalists would know what questions to ask or would know what tone to adopt in the process of asking their questions.

Meanwhile, how about this. Does everyone know that the president is mentally ill? 

In the most literal sense, the obvious answer is no. If we're talking about "everyone" of a certain professional class, we used to assume that our mainstream journalists believed in the likelihood of some such unfortunate state of affairs, but we have recently come to doubt even that.

Everyone knows he's "mentally ill?" It isn't clear what the claim about the president would even mean, let alone whether the claim is actually accurate. And no:   

Meanwhile, everyone doesn't even believe that the president is mentally ill. For millions of people out in the land, this thought has never occurred.   

That's the way the Krugman tape starts, but that isn't why we're discussing his video statement. We're discussing it because of what he later said—because of the later statement which formed the backbone of the opening segment on last night's Gutfeld! program.   

Greg Gutfeld littered his presentation with the usual insulting / Biden deathwatch / misogyny-adjacent jokes. (Does Sarah Jessica Parker look like a horse? She does on the Gutfeld! program. Greg Gutfeld persistently teaches boys and young men to behave this way toward women.) 

The program's host hides behind several beards, but he's a version of loathing unchained. That said, this is the later statement by Krugman on which Gutfeld's monologue focused at the start of last night's show:  

KRUGMAN: Obviously, we need to de-fang Trump as much as possible, and make sure that neither he, nor anybody that follows in his footsteps, has power after the next two elections. 

But beyond that, we really need to do a thorough purging of the United States. We need a de-MAGAfication, and that is— I am not going over the top by using a word that is very similar to the de-Nazification that we pursued successfully after World War II in Germany.  

And we need something—it's not just the MAGA ideology, it's the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth, that made this horrific moment possible.  

It's not going to be easy, but—and maybe, it's not going to be doable—but we have to try, because this is an absolute—this is a nightmare.  

As you can see by clicking here, Gutfeld's producers played videotape of the first half of that presentation. In his monologue, Gutfeld focused on the allusion to deNazification—an allusion which may have made the nightmare in question worse.  

Should Krugman have said what he said? We wouldn't have said anything like it ourselves—and during the Gutfeld! segment, amid the standard name-calling and the standard ugly jokes, Kat Timpf made an accurate presentation about statements of this general type:  

TIMPF (6/2/26): The way that Trump and Trump-backed candidates have won so many elections is specifically this stuff. This is the kind of stuff that motivates people, by saying that people who voted for him are Nazis. People say, "Well, I'm not a Nazi," and that drives them to further support this point of view.

GUTFELD: Right.

TIMPF: So not only—I would say the kindest way to say it is, it's ridiculous. But also, what is he suggesting? You could say he's implying some things that are a little worse than ridiculous.

But again, he's just getting in his own way. All language like this does is make Trump supporters support Trump more than they did before they heard him say that. 

GUTFELD: Yes, exactly 

AUDIENCE: [Cheers and applause]

TIMPF: See? There you go!

What might it have seemed that Krugman was suggesting or implying with his call for "a thorough purging of the United States?" However the statement was intended, it could have sounded various ways to various people. 

Did he mean to say that people who support Trump are Nazis? Not necessarily, but a person could easily think that it sounded a bit like that.

What would a thorough purge of the nation be like? During his six-minute video, Krugman made little attempt to explain, leaving us with no real idea.

But it's surely true that statements like this may tend to harden existing tribal support for the president in question. In the process, such presentations may lessen the chance that we'll ever be able to find a path "back out of all this now too much for us," the path the Frost poem once sought.

Has our nation fallen into a place "now too much for us"—a place from which we won't be able to extricate ourselves? That, of course, remains to be seen—but in the book he wrote in the last year of his like, Barney Frank talks about some of the ways the liberal world may be making recovery less likely.  

Frank's book will generate zero interest. Exactly nothing will change after it's published this fall.  But even as the ugly insults and the gonzo behavior continue to flow from vehicles like The Five, what was this celebrated liberal / progressive figure even talking about?  

At this point, the answer isn't entirely clear. Tomorrow, we'll try to say.   

Tomorrow: What he told Jake Tapper

FRANK: Few things can match a show like The Five!

TUESDAY, JUNE 2, 2026

Frank said we Blues have some flaws: Yesterday, we started the week's ruminations with a few simple factual questions:  

Were maggots present in the food served to detainees at the Delaney Hall Detention Center?  Did three congressmen actually see some such thing during an inspection last Wednesday? Did Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) actually see some such thing?    

We ask for the obvious reason:

Major news orgs, including the Associated Press, reported that three congressmen said that they'd seen that very thing. For obvious reasons, this report initially created a bit of a stir.

It created a stir for obvious reasons. But, by now, the claim has essentially gone away. It seems that no one actually cares whether some such claim was ever made and if the claim was accurate.   

No one had more fun with this claim that the gang of baboons who swing from the chandeliers on the Fox News Channel's "cable news" program, The Five. 

Yesterday, the panelists in question discussed the various situations at Delaney Hall on that program's third straight broadcast.   The sheer inanity of these presentations help explain why the planet's most famous top experts have begun referring to our struggling nation as, simply put, a "failed state."  

The Five is our nation's most-watched "cable news" show. The fact that its ludicrous journalistic practices have been normalized within the wider political / journalistic culture suggests that our struggling nation is no longer able to function in any sort of serious way.   

Yesterday, we started to show you what the panelists on The Five said about the report of maggots in the food. We expect to report their fuller comments in the next few days.   

The Five is a gruesome artefact of Red American corporate culture. On balance, we know of nothing as gruesome in Blue America as the nonsense which is routinely performed on that program. 

On the other hand:  

The dimwitted conduct on The Five is often tied to legitimate complaints about Democratic Party governance and Blue American political culture. And then, along came the late Barney Frank, age 86, in the final year of his life, writing a book with this possibly puzzling title:

The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy   

In the headlines which sit above its obituary, the New York Times correctly describes Rep. Frank as someone who was often voted the "brainiest" member of the House of Representatives. 

He was also a liberal stalwart. In her piece for the Times, Katharine Seelye quote Nancy Pelosi giving voice to her view of Frank:

“The quarterback for us is Barney,” Ms. Pelosi told Jeffrey Toobin for a 2009 New Yorker profile of Mr. Frank. “He’s solution-oriented, respectful of different perspectives and brilliant. And it’s brilliance that saves time, because he simplifies the complex for us. He is an enormously valuable intellectual resource for the Congress.”  

He was a "brilliant, enormously valuable intellectual resource." And, no doubt, he was! 

The late Barney Frank was very sharp. He was also extremely witty. But now, Frank has left behind a book saying that we have to "reform the left" if we hope to emerge from our ongoing political and cultural catastrophes—in the parlance of the time, if we hope to "rescue democracy.". 

As a general matter, we agree! In our view, there have been obvious errors within our own Blue America which allowed the sitting president to achieve a second term. 

Those errors have also allowed him to maintain the astoundingly high approval rate he currently enjoys. 

By conventional norms, his approval rate—let's go with something like 38%—is a very poor approval rate. But we'd say it's been our own imperfections which, under the current astonishing circumstances, have kept his approvals that high.   

What kinds of reforms does Frank recommend in the book in question? Because the book hasn't been published yet, there's no perfect way to tell.    

We regard the lunacy of programs like The Five as the ultimate fail in our current journalistic discourse. But how have Blue imperfections of various kinds helped keep the president's approvals that high?

In our view, Rep. Frank was on target in some respects in some of his last few interviews. There may have been a few other examples of imperfect Blue American wisdom which he failed to cite in those sessions.   

Members of tribal groups an find it hard to see their own group's imperfections. Frank was saying that we Blues have some flaws. Could he possibly have gotten that right?

Tomorrow: Back to a normal schedule. One change in format may loom.

BREAKING: We won't be posting until this afternoon!

 TUESDAY, JUNE 2, 2026

Olsen on gerrymanders: You're right! It actually has been quite a while. 

That said, we won't be posting until this afternoon, due to an intervening mission of unmistakable national import.

Meanwhile, what the heck, we leave you to ponder this. It's part of an essay by the Washington Post's Henry Olsen about some possible better ways to form congressional districts:  

How to escape the gerrymandering trap

[...]

A good gerrymander—good not in a moral sense but in the way it works as designed by the gerrymanderers—gives the line-drawing party more seats than it would be entitled to based on its share of the vote. Perform that task well enough, and massive majorities can be forged out of slim vote margins.

That’s what the Republicans’ recent gerrymanders have done. No one doubts that popular majorities in states such as Texas and Florida would select a majority of Republican representatives under a fair map. Democrats should, however, be able to elect some 40 to 45 percent of those members, since that’s their usual share of the statewide vote. But Florida’s new map has 24 districts—86 percent—that would have been won by Donald Trump in 2024, while four would have been won by Kamala Harris.

Democrats practice these dark arts, too. Trump got 38 percent of Californians’ votes in 2024. The state has 52 House seats, so with fair districts, Republicans should elect about 20 members. But Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Newsomander—so dubbed by Republicans—created just four seats the GOP can reasonably be expected to win, plus a couple more where they have a fair shot.

Olsen, a conservative, is being fair-minded here. That said, his basic premise, as expressed below, is built on sand:

Democrats [in Texas and Florida] should be able to elect some 40 to 45 percent of those members, since that’s their usual share of the statewide vote.

Simply put, it's impossible to get people to stop offering this presumption. That said:

There's no political tradition or legal requirement which means that a party which receives (let's say) 40 percent of the congressional vote in some particular state should end up with 40 percent of that state's congressional seats. 

Indeed, depending on the distribution of the vote in some particular state, it may be that gerrymanders aren't necessary to produce a vastly disproportionate outcome.  It may be that disproportionate outcomes will occur even "under a fair map."

It may even be impossible to gerrymander your way out of some such disproportionate outcome. Massachusetts has been offered as an example of that, as we'll note at some future time.

It seems like common sense and simple fairness to say that congressional representation should turn out to be "proportionate" to some state's statewide vote on a two-party basis. 

We agree—that does seem fair! But in no way is the matter that simple, and there's no tradition or law pushing us toward such outcomes.

Oksen is dreaming of a fairer system; there's no reason why he shouldn't. That said, people often start discussions of gerrymandering with the presumption he states.

It's a very common presumption. But if we're trying to understand how this thing works, the presumption may not be helpful.

With regard to gerrymanders, the current "race to the bottom" really is a race to the bottom. But there's no easy or obvious answer to this question:

How might it be addressed?

MONDAY: How horribly bad are Cali's schools?

MONDAY, JUNE 1, 2026

Let's take a look at the record: Are California's public schools some sort of uniquely bad? A person might have received that impression from what this unnamed gentleman said:   

...[NAME WITHHELD] Fawns Over ‘Authentic’ Spencer Pratt in Podcast Appearance 

[...] 

During one especially warm moment, [NAME WITHHELD] expressed his frustration over education in California, assigning blame to teachers’ unions, before asking Pratt for his answer to the problem.   

“We spend a lot more trying to educate a kid in this state and do worse than places that spend way less. And part of that is because the teachers’ union is so strong,” he said. 

“Are you–there’s a great question for you, Mr. Candidate. Are you strong enough to buck the unions?”  

All in all, it sounded like Cali was really struggling. Skillfully, we ordered the analysts to go take a look at the record.

The youngsters examined the data. They returned with these average scores in reading and math from the most recent NAEP:

Average scores, Grade 8 Reading: 2024 Naep
California / United States
White kids: 269.15 / 265.85
Black kids: 246.97 / 242.58
Hispanic kids: 242.50 / 244.52
Asian kids: 281.70 / 279.62
Two or more races: 267.29 / 261.42

Average scores, Grade 8 Math: 2024 Naep
California / United States
White kids: 287.22 / 284.46
Black  kids: 252.43 / 250.83
Hispanic kids: 253.47 / 257.39
Asian kids: 307.22 / 304.64
Two or more races: 288.51 / 276.61

For all Naep data, just click here. From there, you're on your own!

The differences here aren't enormous. By a very rough rules of thumb, ten points on the Naep scale is often said to correspond (very roughly) to one academic year.

The differences aren't huge. But California's white, Black and Asian kids slightly outperformed their counterparts nationwide. California's Hispanic kids slightly underperformed their nationwide peers.  

Regarding spending, the World Population Review has California ranked 14th highest among the fifty states in per pupil spending. Now for the rest of the story:

Cali ranks only 33rd highest among the fifty states in per pupil spending as a percentage of taxpayer income. 

Plenty of money is almost surely being imperfectly spent, in California and elsewhere. That said, are some other states doing much better while spending much less?   

Given the history of such competitions, we're very, very, very slow to sign on to "miracle" stories. (Over the course of the past fifty years, the experts have tended to be the last ones to know.)

That said, Cali's kids are scoring roughly like the nation's kids overall. The statewide per pupil spending lags far behind that of big spenders like New York, Vermont, New Jersey, Connecticut.  

Everyone knows all about public schools. It has ever been thus!

The Bureau clears its throat: For a Census Bureau rundown for 2024, you can just click this. 

For whatever reason, the Bureau listed the five biggest- and smallest-spending states, failed to list anyone else.

FRANK: Gutfeld and Watters were at it again!

MONDAY, JUNE 1, 2026

But also, Barney Frank: Are maggots frequently found in the food at the Delaney Hall Detention Center, right there on the outskirts of Newark? 

Are they found in the food there at all? At this site, we can't necessarily tell you. That said:

Last Thursday, CBS News seemed to report that three United States congressmen had said that's what they saw:

Protests over inhumane conditions at ICE facility Delaney Hall in Newark become violent

[...]

A congressional delegation from New York and New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker visited Delaney Hall earlier Wednesday. They said they observed dire conditions, including a pregnant women not getting the proper medical care.

"This is a moral stain on who we hope to be and profess to be. It is a complete indictment of the president who lied to us about how he was going to conduct his immigration policies," Booker said.

Advocates say detainees inside have been on a hunger strike for almost a week. The Department of Homeland Security denies a strike is happening inside.

Maggots in the food?

Congressmen Adriano Espaillat, Dan Goldman, and Jerry Nadler say they observed a lack of medical treatment and small portions of food that very often contained maggots.

And so on from there.

According to CBS, three congressmen said they'd seen maggots in the food.  In fairness, none of the three was directly quoted. But that's what it seemed they had said.

The congressional reps had inspected the detention center on Wednesday. The following day, on The Five, Greg Gutfeld said he doesn't care if maggots are found in the food.

"Who cares if there are maggots?" the gentleman thoughtfully said. "Who cares if [detainees] don't like the food?" Jesse Watters soon added.

Citizens, can we talk?

Presumably, some people do care if there are maggots in the food. Also, it seems that some others don't. 

For now, let's stick to the factual question:

Are there maggots in the food at the Delaney Hall facility? And did the three congressmen actually say that that's what they actually saw?

Are there maggots in the food? And what was the source of that claim? In its own report about this matter, the Associated Press offered this:

Congress members say conditions dire at NJ detention center facing protests, reported hunger strike

Democratic members of Congress on Wednesday said they observed dire conditions within a federal immigration detention center in New Jersey where protesters have been demonstrating for days and asserting that detainees are on a hunger strike.

U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, a Manhattan Democrat, said detainees at Delaney Hall in Newark are being given small portions of food that “very often” contain maggots and that the only medication they receive is Tylenol.

One woman, he said, had a lump in her breast but was still waiting on a mammogram more than a month into her detention. Another detainee was suffering from colon cancer but wasn’t receiving any treatment.

“The bottom line is, if you are human, if you are American, you cannot support what is going on here,” said U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman, another Manhattan Democrat who toured the facility Wednesday. “They’re living in jail conditions, and none of these people are criminals.”

In this AP report, Rep. Nadler was cited as the lone source of the specific claim. And as with CBS, so too here:

Nadler wasn't directly quoted. Was he reporting his own observation, or had he merely been told? The AP didn't report the source of the congressman's claim.

What did congressmen actually see when they were inside the center? Gutfeld said he doesn't care if there are maggots in the food, but as of this morning, five days later, it isn't clear that major mainstream news orgs care about this either.

Using Google as well as the paper's search engine, we find no sign that the New York Times has ever reported this claim. In fact, we find no sign that the Times or the Wall Street Journal has ever reported last Wednesday's congressional visit at all.

Are there maggots in the food? Did one (or three) congressmen say as much? Did they observe this with their own eyes, or had they merely been told?   

We start with this question today because of what we saw on The Five when the godforsaken ersatz news program pretended to discuss the maggots on two successive programs.   

First on Thursday, then on Friday, the corporate buffoons who people this program offered their reactions to the report in question. Not long ago, the sheer stupidity put on display on Friday's program would have been hard to picture within the American news firmament.

In the next few days, we'll show you what Gutfeld and Watters said on Thursday, the again the next day. A key point:

According to the world's major experts, a nation which accepts such brain death as part of news culture has already become a failed state.   

The garbage can sold by the Fox News Channel rarely fails to amaze. It's an artefact of Red American corporate messaging culture—and The Five, as you well know, boasts an audience which almost triples the size of the typical MS NOW prime time audience.   

For a person who wants to leave a published record on How It Happened for the generations to follow, it's hard to avert one's gaze from the undermining of the culture which takes place on the Fox News Channel. 

That said, there's also this:

On May 20, just twelve days ago, the New York Times reported the death of Barney Frank. We're going to show you the dual headline, plus part of the way the lengthy report began:

Barney Frank, Gay Pioneer and Liberal Stalwart in Congress, Dies at 86
Often voted the “brainiest,” “funniest” and “most eloquent” member of the House, he was also the first to come out voluntarily and helped normalize being openly gay in public office.

Barney Frank, the brassy, lightning-quick former Massachusetts representative who for decades was the most prominent gay politician in the country and who was an author of the most significant overhaul of the nation’s financial regulations since the Great Depression, died on Tuesday at his home in Ogunquit, Maine. He was 86.

His friend James Segel confirmed the death. Mr. Frank said last month that he had entered hospice care with congestive heart failure.

Mr. Frank, a liberal Democrat who represented a diverse suburban Boston district for 32 years, starting in 1981, was the first gay member of the House to come out voluntarily; others had been outed in scandals. His public declaration of his sexual orientation in 1987—spurred by a fear of being outed, by the death of a closeted colleague and by his own determination to show that homosexuality was nothing to be ashamed of—helped normalize being openly gay in public life.

He was "an author of the most significant overhaul of the nation’s financial regulations since the Great Depression." He was also the first gay member of the House to come out.

(One commenter comments here: "He saved many lives of gay young people because of his honesty. It took courage and it saved lives.so rare these days.")

No one ever doubted that Rep. Frank was extremely sharp. The Times obit went on at great length. As it ended, it offered this recent point:

As Mr. Frank was entering hospice care in late April, he had just finished writing a book, “The Hard Path to Unity.” Its premise was that the political left, of which he was a member in good standing, had sometimes gone too far in pushing divisive causes...

Slow down, he advised, and find common ground. Rather than focusing on cultural flash points, build support with something practical; instead of demanding Medicare for all, for example, start by reducing the age of Medicare eligibility.

Too frail to travel, he nevertheless happily spoke with interviewers about what he had written, and said he was pleased that the book’s message was having some resonance.

“Frankly,” he told The Times, “if I weren’t dying, people wouldn’t be paying as much attention.”

That's what he'd recently said.

The inanity of Red American corporate messaging was on display again last week. Quite recently, Frank had been saying that we Blues have sometimes made extremely large mistakes.

He said we Blues have made large mistakes! What could this very important figure possibly have meant by that? 

Tomorrow: Watters, equipped with the menus