Political Stuff

I just finished listening to this podcast with Thomas Zimmer and can’t recommend it enough (start at 37:00). The video was posted Feb 17, 2025, but I didn’t come across it until yesterday. It was interesting to hear some of his predictions that soon passed (I’m looking at you Chuck Schumer.)

I highly recommend readers listen to this conversation. If not, here is a brief excerpt of the transcript:

I don’t even know if this is still a constitutional crisis. Ten days ago, I would have said we’re in the midst of a constitutional crisis, but I define a constitutional crisis as a situation in which the constitutional order is under threat. Maybe it is under threat of being subverted, but if this regime can just completely ignore the separation of powers, can completely ignore the power of Congress, can completely ignore just abolish agencies that had been established by laws passed by Congress—if that is actually where we are and they can get away with that, then we’re not in a constitutional crisis anymore. The constitutional order has then already been suspended. So, then we’ve already passed the constitutional crisis, and we are in a situation in which the constitutional order has been suspended.

That is kind of where I see us: either still in the midst of a constitutional crisis or already beyond that. What factors do you see shaping that in the immediate sense? People frequently talk about how, once a certain Rubicon’s passed, you can’t pull it back. Is there a way where it could be pulled back to the level of a constitutional crisis where there still is constitutional order?

Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest question right now, the one remaining red line, is: are they, meaning the Trumpist regime, going to completely ignore court orders and judicial injunctions, or are they going to respect them to some extent? At least, that is where we are right now. If the constitutional order functioned the way it is supposed to function, then it would be up to Congress to actually rein this in and put up a fight against this unprecedented assertion of power from the president. But that’s not happening, and we all know it’s not happening because Republicans hold both houses of Congress, and so Congress isn’t doing anything right now.

So, as of right now, in terms of actually putting up a fight, I hope we’ll have sort of a broader mobilization of civil society. Also, but that hasn’t really happened yet—at least not in terms of mass protests. What has happened is that the federal judiciary has tried to step in. We’ve seen several court orders now declaring some of the initiatives of the Trump regime as just illegal or unconstitutional, putting a halt on some of the things they’ve been trying to do, and suspending some of the presidential executive orders. So that has come from several federal judges across the country.

That’s the big question now. I’m skeptical because, first of all, it’s good that this is happening, right? So it’s better this happens than it doesn’t happen. The first one is obvious. I mean, this is now going to ultimately go up to the Supreme Court, and then we’ll see what happens there. I don’t think the Supreme Court will necessarily just greenlight absolutely everything they’re trying to do, but it will probably greenlight a lot. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is the way the courts act. This is necessarily reactive; they are reacting to what the Trumpist regime is doing. That means the Trumpists are creating facts on the ground; they’re creating sort of a different reality on the ground while all the court stuff is happening. And then the third reason is that I think we’ve seen, specifically over the past 24 to 48 hours, leading voices on the Trumpist right very clearly saying we’re not going to respect court orders. We don’t think we have to because what they’re basically saying is we represent the will of the people, like the quote-unquote true people, and the courts have no right to stand in the way of the will of the people.

What JD Vance came out and flat out said is: we do not think we are constrained by laws and the Constitution because we represent the will of the people. If that is the case, if they go through with that, well then, that is a big, fat, glowing red line into something just very, very different and fundamentally no longer a constitutional government or democratic self-government; that is all out the window if that’s where they’re going.

Yeah, and the fact that, as you said, we’re on the cusp of the regime most likely beginning to defy court orders—there’s already the judge that says that they’ve already defied a court order. I’m wondering what it looks like for people to understand what happens once they are overtly defying the orders. What position does that put the regime in that they’re not yet in now or that they’re not completely in now?

So, this is a tricky question because I think the answer is that, for most people, everyday life doesn’t change. For most people, everyday life just continues. This is something that’s frustrating because I think most people don’t quite understand how much it matters to have certain checks on power and certain rights that are just constitutional.

You can follow his substack at https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/.

In other news…then there is this:

The. whole. fucking. thing. is. crazy. But here’s an excerpt from 20:37:

…Except, you know, they’re talking about blowing people up. It’s… yeah, I mean, this would be the end of any normal presidential administration.

Because this thread, as you say, is itself an unbelievable scandal. But it is a clear indication that this is happening up and down the government. The entire situation isn’t like they’re governing normally. That’s the thing; it isn’t that they’re running a fairly normal government but just happen to be going off the books in their communications. They are assaulting the federal government, attempting to dismantle it brick by brick, and they’re trying to not leave a trail.

Okay, the last video I want to share is the ending of this one: (starting at 53:38)

Again, here’s a brief transcript:

You also think we’ve seen the death of liberalism and the idea of the liberal individual. What does that have to do with Cloud Capital? The whole point of liberalism is a celebration of the individual as a source of legitimacy. A country or political system is legitimate in the liberal mind to the extent that it represents the autonomous will of individuals. Remember Thatcher’s assertion that there is no such thing as society; it’s only individuals, families, and individuals.

But if the individual has a relationship with Cloud Capital, with Amazon’s Alexa, whereby the individual trains Alexa to train the individual to trade, Alexa trains the individual to put into their mind what they want, where is this autonomy? The greatest guru of Thatcher used to celebrate the market as a mechanism that not only finds the right prices to equilibrate demand and supply but also allows us to develop our own character. He used to say that he would go into a shop and come out with something he didn’t even know he wanted. So, in this sense, the marketplace shapes me as a person, as an autonomous liberal individual on whom the whole liberal project is based.

However, if it’s not the market but a centrally planned system that the Soviet Union would have loved to have because that’s what Amazon.com is—a centrally planned machine that belongs to one person, who could be Jeff Bezos or Joseph Stalin—then where is the liberal individual in this? Gone in a puff of smoke.

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