It's time to admit it: America is a failing state

But remember, don't be weak or woke

Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.

I’ve decided that the book and movie club should not be paywalled. If the whole point is to foster conversation and community, why make it less accessible? That’s sort of my issue generally— I want good information to be widely available, so limiting its reach is difficult. The far-right certainly doesn’t make its media inaccessible (it helps to be subsidized by billionaires and Russian operatives).

So, everybody is invited to join us in the new Progress Report Book and Movie Club, and it’d be great if you could register your interest either in the comments of this newsletter or this chat thread. Once we hit a critical mass of interested participants, we’ll get started!

Oh, and if you’re in Wisconsin, there’s a big protest happening at FBI headquarters over the outrageous arrest of Milwaukee Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan.

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A quick scoop:

DO’GE: An epilepsy research grant green-lit by the NIH was canceled automatically by DOGE because it involved mRNA, the building block of the Covid-19 vaccine. A single-stranded messenger molecule that exists in all living cells, mRNA has been vilified by far-right conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxers, who do not seem to understand or care that it is frequently used in a large variety of other treatments.

Elon Musk’s AI software went through NIH grants and eliminated anything that included mRNA, making wild mistakes in the same way that it eliminated valid programs because they included the words “diversity,” “inclusion,” “equity,” or a large number of other conservative bugaboos. Remember, this is the man who wants to put chips in everybody’s brains.

This is a failing state

I’m sitting here with my two-year-old, him watching My Neighbor Totoro, and me increasingly concerned about how he’ll react to getting a haircut this afternoon (who wants a stranger with scissors snipping around their head?). Every new experience is at least sort of scary at that age, and you feel guilty for imposing even the mundane.

When it’s a haircut, at least you can tell them that it’ll be OK. I feel guilty over my own long-term health challenges, so I can’t fathom how I’d react if my toddler was diagnosed with cancer. That said, I have little problem imagining and feeling the incandescent rage of a parent whose young, cancer-stricken child gets deported in a fascistic flex of power by gestapo thugs.

Three children, ages two, four, and seven and all US citizens, were deported by ICE to Honduras after being held captive for days, with “no meaningful process,” according to the Trump-appointed judge overseeing their case. They were kicked out of their country with their mothers, one of whom was pregnant, over the anguished demands of their citizen fathers, who heard their children wail in anguish in the background of phone calls that were ended prematurely by the authorities.

ICE knew that one of those children has a rare form of cancer and made no effort to provide either medication or care. She wasn’t a human to them.

This was not an isolated incident of bad actors and bureaucratic mix-ups, but instead the new official policy of the United States government under President Donald Trump. It’s not even the first time a child with cancer and full US citizenship has been kicked out of the country; a 10-year-old girl with cancer was deported along with her parents to Mexico last month.

American exceptionalism and constant comparison with the most extreme examples from history have seeped so deeply into our subconsciousness that it can be hard to recognize much less admit it, but we are living in a failing democracy. The president is a fascist, insider trading and favor-trading have become rampant, elections are increasingly hard to access and then overturned, universities and scientists are being censored, private businesses have been extorted, the Supreme Court has been rendered inert, innocent people are being disappeared to foreign countries without recourse. The nation is isolated, the military is in revolt, and militias have growing power.

And did I mention that childhood cancer patients with US citizenship are illegally being deported without due process or recourse? You cannot call yourself a free state when the machinery of government is being weaponized against American-born toddlers (or any toddlers, for that matter).

Unless you spend all day and night plugged into the news, which these days is like sticking your mouth around an exhaust pipe, it’s essentially impossible to keep up with all the horrible, extralegal things done by the Trump administration. That’s a big part of their strategy, because you can’t be outraged or even pay attention to more than a few things at once.

It got comparably little attention, but the administration this week also ordered that federal agencies stop enforcing the disparate-impact liability that is at the core of American civil rights and employment law.

Refusing to hire people of color is an example direct discrimination, while disparate-impact discrimination is any policy that appears neutral but actually has a disproportionately negative effect on protected groups when put into practice. It has long been a target of conservatives whose obsession with phony meritocracy has tipped over into the conspiratorial delusion that white people are actually the real victims of racism and discrimination.

Trump’s order instructed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into pending or ongoing cases that rely on disparate-impact theory and wind them down. It is, of course, blatantly illegal, as the president cannot unilaterally neutralize laws, but the clearing out of the Department of Justice will likely mean many of those cases get dropped, anyway.

Thankfully, they’re sloppy idiots, too

And it may just hasten their downfall.

Hard Bargain: A federal judge in Washington placed a preliminary injunction blocking the White House executive order to strip federal employees of their collective bargaining rights. The executive order sought to reclassify workers from most federal agencies as essential to national security, but as Judge Paul L. Friedman noted during the hearing, it was clear that the Trump administration was driven by politics and animosity.

The ruling temporarily restores bargaining and other union rights for the National Treasury Employees Union and covers workers in the departments of Treasury, Health and Human Services, Energy, Justice,, Energy, the OPM, among others. The AFGE, the main union for most federal employees, also has a lawsuit pending over the executive order.

I spoke with the president and general counsel of the AFGE a few weeks ago, conversations that we whittled down to this video:

I’ll have more from those interviews in an upcoming edition of the newsletter.

The administration was also forced to backtrack on its draconian — and of course, illegal — rescission of visas from international students whose political views and social media posts it did not appreciate. The State Department used AI to identify and try to expel more than 1500 students at universities and colleges all across the country.

Undercover CIA Agent Poses As Working Class

One of the many reasons that the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was not a mere political “distraction,” to quote California Gov. Gavin Newsom, is that beyond its own immorality, the White House’s conduct throughout this saga has served as both a test and a harbinger of things to come.

The same can be said of the Laken Riley Act, which authorized the government to deport a foreign national before any criminal conviction and had the support of 58 Democrats in the House and Senate.

Ditto the SAVE Act, which severely limits voting rights and garnered votes from four Democratic members of Congress.

It also didn’t take much foresight to see that supporting the crackdowns on peaceful college protestors would precipitate Trump’s efforts to seize control of higher education.

From the moment he won the election in November, there was never any flicker of a chance that Donald Trump would be anything short of a lawless tyrant upon his return to the White House. Yet he’s been given purchase almost every step of the way by certain Democrats who have sought to emulate his politics while trashing their own coalition. I wrote about this earlier in the week, but the internal battle has since intensified in ways worth addressing.

This week, it was Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s turn to put herself forward as the centrist working class whisperer, a role she seized by “leaking” portions of an upcoming speech to Politico.

Her grand political vision dripped with contempt for progressives and disrespect for the working class voters she clearly sees as uneducated yokels: Democrats should stop being “weak and woke,” Slotkin says, and instead of the term “oligarchs,” which she insists nobody understands, they should use the word “kings.” Democrats should also act patriotic, Slotkin adds, the implication being that they’ve until now acted like a bunch of American-haters.

It’s all warmed over consultant drivel — the hundreds of thousands of people turning out for Bernie Sanders and AOC’s “Fight Oligarchy” tour suggest that Slotkin is either underestimating the intelligence of Americans or just doesn’t like the idea of fighting oligarchy — and even more grievously, it’s being delivered about three months too late.

The country has been plunged into deep economic turmoil, national attention is on the administration’s increasingly violent and authoritarian dictums, and Trump’s approval ratings are spiraling, even on the issues that Democratic leaders have desperately tried to avoid.

Only 31% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the Garcia kidnapping, which means that even some of his hardcore supporters think he’s gone too far. This is the direct result of efforts to bring attention to the case and rescue Garcia, which went against perceived poll numbers at this time last week.

It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that in addition to being attempts to boost some fledgling presidential ambitions, admonishments like these are part of an effort to maintain control of the Democratic Party at a moment of deep dissatisfaction with leadership and a growing demand for change.

That hunch is further bolstered by the response to DNC vice chair David Hogg’s promise to raise and spend $20 million dollars on primary challenges to ineffective and outmoded Democratic lawmakers.

After an uproar from mostly anonymous Democrats and donors, new DNC chair Ken Martin moved to rein in his upstart underling with a piece in Time Magazine. The DNC, he wrote, would remain neutral in primaries, as would its leaders.

Do I have a point of view? Of course. But as DNC Chair, at the helm of the institution that calls the balls and strikes, that’s not up to me to decide. You can’t be both the player and the referee. Our job is clear cut: let voters vote, and once they’ve made their choice, to fight like hell to get that Democrat elected to office.

This isn’t a personal stand, it’s a principled stand for something greater than any one of us: the integrity of our party’s democratic process. Our role is to serve as stewards of a fair, open, and trusted process—not to tilt the scales.

Martin really had no other choice, given the remit of his unenviable new job, and I actually personally agree that the official party apparatus should not privilege some candidates over others. The problem is that the DNC has never been functionally neutral and nothing short of a structural revolution will change that.

Let the Right Ones In

There are quite a few ways to influence an election without ever issuing an endorsement or cutting a direct check. The primary job of the DNC chair is to raise money for the party, and how they go about it helps to determine who has power within the Democratic Party.

For example: Martin and Kamala Harris are scheduled to host a DNC fundraiser next week in New York, with tickets starting at $25K a seat and go up to $44K. Who will be paying those prices? Nobody who is neutral when it comes to Democratic primaries, that's for sure. The event will be teeming with Wall Street and real estate power brokers, and they’re not going to there for the photo op and pasta dinner. They want face time with Democratic leaders and lawmakers, many of whom they also back individually.

Similarly, Hakeem Jeffries held a huge fundraiser in LA last month, with tickets starting at $10K and going up to $100K for a couple. Money went to Jeffries's PAC and the DCCC, and it’s highly improbable that most of the attendees were young, aggressive, and class-conscious.

These people fuel the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party is obliged to listen to give them time, consideration, and top service when they purchase the corporate suites and skyboxes at the party’s national convention. Anti-genocide lawmakers and protestors couldn’t even get a minute on stage at any point of those four days.

Those donors are often also the same ones who pour millions into political action committees like AIPAC and the crypto colossus Fair Shake, which over the past few election cycles have fundamentally reshaped dozens of House and Senate primary contests, all in favor of pro-war, scam-captured, centrist candidates. Hakeem Jeffries and other Democratic leaders barely said a word, even when the PACs went after their incumbents, who they generally spend millions to defend in primaries.

I understand that Hogg’s plan is bad optics from a DNC official and puts the chair in a very awkward position. But if Martin really wants to create a neutral DNC, it’s going to take a whole lot more than the personal pledge he proposes in his essay.

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