As a U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin enjoyed a reputation for confrontation and theatricality. He often donned a cowboy hat on the Senate floor (a no-no for a body that prizes decorum) and strode the hallways of the Capitol bouncing a rubber stress ball. 

During a 2023 Senate hearing, the former mixed martial arts fighter challenged Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to a fistfight, taunting him to “stand your butt up.” In a separate incident last fall, Mullin “joked” about killing journalists. 

Mullin’s confirmation hearing to replace Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security this spring was likewise combative. Sen. Rand Paul—whom Mullin had called a “freaking snake”—challenged his temperament and lack of expertise. “Explain to the American people why they should trust a man with anger issues to set the proper example for ICE and border patrol agents,” Paul said. 

Since ascending to DHS, however, Mullin has submerged his ostentatious persona. Unlike Noem, whose shock-and-awe immigration enforcement tactics sparked widespread public outrage, Mullin has been relatively low-key. No dehumanizing videos, no embarrassing cosplay, no obvious corruption. 

He’s also built a brutally efficient deportation machine that—until last week—was largely escaping protest from an easily distractible public:

• Arrests have surged to 2,000 per day, according to the New York Times, and more than 63,000 people were in ICE custody at the start of July, often in horrific conditions. 
• ICE has especially targeted unaccompanied minors, reports ProPublica, and judges are signing more than 10,000 deportation or removal orders each month. 
• Immigration judges have also sharply reduced the number of immigrants granted asylum, while judges resistant to the administration’s policies have been fired.
• Judges are now also holding mass deportation hearings involving as many as 100 cases at a time, according to NPR, often with little or no notice to the people involved. 
• Deportation flights reached a record high in May, according to the nonprofit Human Rights First, with 288 flights to 38 countries, including St. Kitts, Nevis, Paraguay, Ghana, and Cameroon. 
• DHS has also told employers to fire thousands of legal immigrant workers who are likely to lose their Temporary Protected Status in coming weeks, thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision granting the administration broad discretion over TPS status. 

The fatal shooting of a Houston man by ICE agents earlier this month, along with another killing last week in Maine and the death of yet another man in Florida, have revived some public scrutiny of ICE’s tactics. But the national outcry has so far been relatively muted compared to the protests in Minneapolis, Portland, and other cities earlier this year. These recent shootings have not involved U.S. citizens, unlike the killings in Minneapolis, and ICE has taken pains to avoid the massive shows of force that frightened or inconvenienced ordinary Americans. “It’s by design,” as one anonymous source told Politico. 

Even as outrage is building anew over ICE’s abuses, thousands of people have already been quietly disappeared from their neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. Perhaps you no longer see the family that lived next door, the server at your favorite restaurant, the custodian at your children’s school, or the aide who helped your elderly parents. And perhaps the reasons for their absence are perfectly benign. Many Americans will tell themselves that. 

But it’s exactly that silent complicity that Mullin and his agents have been counting on to carry out their mass deportations. The current furor may yet die down. Don’t look away. 

Don’t miss at the Monthly…

Can Trump really steal the midterms? Trump’s escalating lies about election integrity, including his speech on Thursday, are stoking increasing fears about election interference this fall. Building on Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps’ recent analysis, Executive Editor Digital Matt Cooper sums up what you need to worry about—and what you don’t. He also dissects Trump’s dud of a speech Thursday night, which promised blockbuster revelations but “landed with all the force of a cotton ball.” The bottom line: Be worried, but don’t panic. Read here and here.

“Disaster insurance for all?” Repeated wildfires have left California homes all but uninsurable. State Farm and Allstate have fled the market, leaving homeowners frustrated and unprotected in the case of a catastrophe. Could a disaster insurance equivalent of “Medicare for All” be the answer? Editor Kainoa Lowman explores the pros and cons of this idea, proposed by a leading candidate for state insurance commissioner, Jane Kim. Kainoa concludes that it’s probably too pricey to be practicable but could have the effect of forcing a much-needed debate on solving California’s insurance problem. Read here. 

A sea change in the war against sexual violence. Despite a decade of research, award-winning Deanne Stillman struggled to find a publisher for her investigation of the rape and murder of two girls by a Marine in the town of Twentynine Palms, California. This year, on the 25th anniversary of its publication, Twentynine Palms has been recognized by the Los Angeles Times as a “best book of the year.” What’s changed, Stillman says, is a shift in public attitudes toward sexual violence and its victims. “For decades … women remained in the shadows, lest they face excoriation, threats, and erasure,” she writes. “This is all still happening, but not to the degree that it once was. Indeed, something of an emotional security space has emerged, and the floodgates have opened.” One turning point, she argues, was the case of Frenchwoman Gisele Pelicot, whose wrenching memoir turned her into a global heroine in the fight against sexual violence. Read here. 

Plus…

• The author of Enshittification has a new book on what to think about AI. Anita Jain writes that Cory Doctorow is surprisingly complacent about humanity’s fate. 
• Christoph Irmscher finds that America has always fallen short of its egalitarian ideals. In his review of Kim Phillips-Fein’s Country of Lords, Christoph chronicles the ugly impacts of racism on our pretensions to equality. 
• Contributing writer Jonathan Alter faults PEN America President Dinaw Mengestu for his theatrical—and hypocritical—resignation over an article protesting the silencing of Israeli writers. 
• Stanley Institute researchers E. Fuller Torrey and Wendy Simmons imagine a letter to Trump from the discoverer of Parkinson’s Disease, proposing a renaming. 

Coda (law rules edition…) 

If you read only one thing this week (aside from this newsletter, of course), read federal judge Kathleen Williams’ extraordinary order nullifying Trump’s “settlement” with the IRS after his $10 billion lawsuit against the agency. 

The bottom line: You can’t have a legitimate settlement if the underlying lawsuit is fake. 

In this case, Trump’s control of the IRS meant that Trump was suing (and “settling” with) himself. Trump’s lawsuit, Williams found, was a pretext to gain legitimacy for the outcome—lifetime immunity from audits and a $1.8 billion slush fund (which acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has disavowed): 

“Whether Executive Branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax monies for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this Court. The question is whether the Parties could do so by claiming to be adverse and engaging the legitimacy of a court proceeding. The answer is a resounding ‘no’: the Lead Plaintiff and the Government are one, a fully realized unitary interest. … And because this fact was so obvious and insurmountable, the Court finds that the matter was brought for an improper purpose—to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or in fact.”

Trump will, of course, appeal the ruling, but the law is pretty clear. Trump’s lawyers, meanwhile, are facing sanctions for their abuse of the courts. This includes Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose confirmation hearing to be the permanent Attorney General took place last week. That so many GOP senators have no problem confirming Trump’s personal lawyer to head the Department of Justice is a stain on the institution. 

As always, thanks for reading, and please don’t forget to share, like, and subscribe. Independent media depends on people like you! 

Have a great week!

Anne Kim, Senior Editor

The post ICE Has Only Seemed To Be Quieter appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When President Donald Trump addressed the nation regarding alleged vulnerabilities in the U.S. election system, he proclaimed that “no country can be great without fair and honest elections.” No argument there.

What he said, however, was mostly not new, and what was new was riddled with overstatement and exaggeration. While he promised the truth lay in a document dump to be posted online, the papers, upon examination, do not contain significant new revelations about vulnerabilities in election systems. If his purpose was to undermine the midterm elections, which he desperately needs to win and is almost sure to lose, it was one big nothing burger.

While he did not repeat his canard that he actually won the presidential election he lost in 2020, Jay Clayton, his nominee for Director of National Intelligence, appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee that afternoon, toed the Trump line, absurdly refusing to answer the simple question, “Who won the 2020 election?” So, the fantasy of 2020 election denial is alive and well in Trump’s Washington.

Trump did declassify some highly redacted documents he said showed an influence campaign by China in 2019, a cover-up by U.S. intelligence officials, fraud in Michigan, and voting machine tampering in Venezuela. The unconvincing evidence, however, did not support the claim of vulnerability. But it will certainly form the basis for Trump’s spurious efforts to curtail mail-in voting, add onerous voter ID requirements, and perhaps declare a national emergency so he can station ICE agents or National Guardsmen at key polling places. Trump was laying down an authoritarian marker.

He accused the “fake news” media, ABC and NBC, of refusing to cover his speech “because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it.” He said the networks “and others in the media are part of a plot; they want to continue this fraud for whatever reason.” And he once again called for the revocation of the networks’ government-issued broadcast licenses. Both networks broadcast the speech live on their streaming platforms. Failing to cover a presidential prime-time speech is hardly new. Mainstream media also declined to air primetime addresses by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

A broken election system has been a Trump leitmotif for the past decade. “Great damage has been done to our country,” he said. “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.”

“If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states,” Trump said. “And we are committing to fix it, and we are also committing to work with those states and local jurisdictions to help them fix and patch known technical vulnerabilities before the midterm elections.”

But Trump has spent the first part of his second term dismantling the election protections built up over previous years. The FBI task force on foreign influence was shut down; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sharply cut back a task force that warned against foreign meddling; and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been eviscerated.

The documents Trump released to support his claims—and previous assessments from the intelligence community—do not support his hyperbolic statements about election security. Actually, some of the evidence points toward the opposite conclusion. One of the documents posted on the White House website was blunt: “We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.”

Trump embellished facts long known to the public to the point of distortion. He said that China in 2019 had bought, stolen, or hacked tens of millions of voter data files across 18 states. But U.S. intelligence and congressional officials have long known that China obtained voter data—publicly available information often purchased by political campaigns. What’s more, former intelligence officials have said that China gathered the data not to manipulate voting results but to craft influence campaigns better to shape voters’ perceptions. And Trump did not claim that either China or anyone else used registration information to penetrate or manipulate the voting process.

Trump discussed documents related to an investigation into a voter-registration group in Muskegon, Michigan. The investigation itself has long been well known. In newly released documents, former employees of the organization said they were encouraged to provide false information on voter registration forms to meet quotas and get paid. But in October 2020, the election clerk said hundreds of “irregular” applications had been caught, and none of the fake forms had resulted in any ballots being sent out incorrectly. 

As for Venezuela, he said, “It is now working with us to produce millions and millions of barrels of oil.” Notice the prevarication “is now working with us.” The premise of the statement is false. Oil analysts say it will take at least a decade for Venezuela to get from its current production of 800,000 barrels a day to one million, and this would require around $15 to $20 billion in infrastructure investment over the next decade to raise Venezuela’s oil output to 1.5 million barrels.

Trump claimed Venezuela’s election was rigged in 2020 through manipulation of voting machine technology. A CIA analysis last month determined that such technology was capable of committing “large-scale electronic fraud” in Venezuela, but there was no evidence it had done so. Most importantly, it determined that the Venezuelan government could not rig elections outside its own country.

Trump charged a “deep state” conspiracy to suppress the information. Every conspiracy needs a cover-up. True that the documents show an intense debate among intelligence officials about alerting Congress or their superiors. But the fact is that U.S. intelligence and congressional officials have long known that China obtained publicly available voter data. And former intelligence officials have said that China gathered the data not to manipulate voting results but to better craft influence campaigns that shape voters’ perceptions. While the documents disclose a passing interest by China in influence operations, they concede Beijing never endorsed any broad-based effort to subvert Trump’s election.

Trump’s conspiracy theories are Looney Tunes. His supporters alleged that China hacked voting machines through thermostats. They floated the notion that Italian satellites were directed to flip votes. They accused election officials of smuggling in votes for Biden in suitcases. Investigation debunked each of these chimerical claims.

Trump’s claims of a stolen 2020 election were exhaustively investigated, litigated, and found to be without merit. There were dozens of investigations, audits, recounts, and lawsuits at the local, state, and federal levels that examined the 2020 election, which experts said was the most scrutinized election in U.S. history. There were over 60 court cases in which judges, including those appointed by Trump and other Republican presidents, reviewed the evidence and found no widespread fraud. Some were withdrawn by the Trump team before the courts ever ruled. Others were dismissed on procedural grounds. But many were decided on the merits, and after reviewing all the evidence, those courts found that the Trump campaign’s claims were unsupported by the law and the facts. None uncovered the extensive voter fraud that Trump claimed had tilted the outcome of the election.

The Department of Justice and Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, found the claims lacking. Cybersecurity agencies declared the 2020 election the most secure in history. States conducted audits and hand recounts, with none finding what Trump alleged. An official report issued by the intelligence community, declassified in March 2021, concluded that there were “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 U.S. election, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”

The only indication that has surfaced of attempted fraud was an attempt by Trump himself. In one famous episode, he tried to pressure Brad Raffensperger, Republican secretary of state in Georgia, to find enough votes to allow him to win. Among Trump’s claims: that 5,000 dead people “voted”; Raffensperger said the number was closer to two.

Christopher Krebs, who served as the first director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under Trump, faced the president’s wrath because he refused to go along with his false claims.

“One scenario that required our attention was the possibility — even if unlikely — of a direct hack of voting machines,”  Krebs testified before the Senate in 2020. “To be clear, based on my experience and understanding, no adversary has yet developed the ability to manipulate a single vote cast in a U.S. election. Furthermore, even if such a hack were conducted, it would be incredibly difficult to carry out such an operation on a scale that could change the outcome of a national election.”

The conclusion is inescapable that Trump is not trying to secure our election system; he is trying to undermine it by delegitimating the voters and the count.

Senator Mark Warner , the Virginai Democrat, rejected  Trump’s claims that China meddled with the 2020 presidential election, calling the allegations “so completely false” and accusing Trump of trying to undermine confidence in future elections.

No wonder major networks didn’t cover Trump’s speech. It was “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Tragically, it all comes from the most powerful man in the country.

In another context, Shakespeare also wrote, “he speaks too much. Such men are dangerous.”

The post Trump’s Election Integrity Speech Was Even Worse Than You Thought appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Donald Trump’s White House address to the nation about election integrity landed with all the force of a cotton ball. No one who has followed the last three presidential elections would have predicted an honest accounting from the 47th president, who continues to falsely insist that he won the 2020 contest against Joe Biden. The octogenarian’s claims of stolen elections have long since been debunked, rejected at the time by everyone from Mike Pence to Trump-appointed jurists to the rest of the world. But like boomers seeing their favorite band, long shed of most of its original members due to age or addiction, Americans had every reason to expect a respectable version of Free Bird. Instead, we got an incoherent narrative, which doesn’t mean we should be relieved, only reminded that Trump will be more, not less, irascible as the midterms approach. 

As a sheer act of speechcraft, it was a mess. Television famously compresses images, so the gold (naturally) curtains that were feet behind Trump looked like they were inches behind him. Trump, surprisingly wan, surrounded by two flags—one American, one with seal of the president—offered an inchoate collection of charges such as China obtaining voter information to non-Americans registered to vote to Venezuela (before we made it the 51st state) hacking into voting machines to encore classics like the “Deep State” (Light a match!) that never added up to a coherent narrative, just a grab bag of supposed vulnerabilities. And since the address began with Trump’s now familiar braggadocious second-term riff—we were dead, it was transgender for everybody and open borders, now we’re the hottest country—some of the urgency was missing. Is the nation imperiled, or is it “respected like we have never been respected before”?

It was telling that CBS News aired an excellent special report on the election integrity address, which examined the president’s claims and found them wanting. For all the understandable concerns about Larry and David Ellison and their takeover of Paramount, and Bari Weiss and the rest of it, Tony Dokoupil, Major Garrett (a friend and former colleague), Margaret Brennan, and David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation Research and the rest of the CBS News team asked all the right questions about Trump’s dubious claims. 

For instance, on the noncitizens on the voter rolls, Becker noted that the administration 

looked at 68 million records from states using high-quality data and has found only 28,000. That’s 0.04 percent that may be non-citizens. We have followed my organization, my nonprofit, the Center for Election Innovation Research, has followed these claims, and even that is an overstatement because DHS publicly states that their data is incomplete. They don’t have complete citizenship data in the United States, and so they have some false flags. The 250,000 number that’s based on using commercial data that cannot be used. It’s going to create a ton of false positives. I guarantee you that the data includes a ton of people, maybe even a majority, who are absolutely eligible voters.

Likewise, Garrett underscored that much of what Trump claimed were merely theoretical vulnerabilities about election integrity, not actual malfeasance, which is a big deal given all the redundancies and security features, most notably a paper trail, that is a hallmark of American voting. And Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who has long been the ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, noted, “Where would you like me to start on the level of falsehood? You know, just incredible lies. Let’s start with the initial comments about China and 2018-20. All of this took place under Donald Trump’s administration. His current CIA director was the director of national intelligence.”

Even Fox News, perhaps chastened by their millions in legal settlements in the Dominion suit, didn’t exactly embrace Trump’s claims before Hannity segued to Gutfeld! When you’ve lost Murdoch…

Of course, looking for truth in a Trump address on election integrity is like trying to find a $100 bill on the street. It’s possible you could stumble across a Benjamin, but it’s unlikely. 

Trump’s talk had the air of desperation, which doesn’t make it less dangerous, but it does reveal the president’s weakness. He’s unpopular; inflation is down a tad but gasoline prices are more than 40 percent higher than a year ago, and the midterm elections look forbidding for Republicans, even though the capacity of Democrats to blow it à la Graham Platner should never be underestimated.

With his war of choice in Iran a quagmire, Trump is left trying to change the subject and lay the predicate for interfering with the midterms. But as my colleague, Washington Monthly Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps, noted in a recent lengthy piece, stealing the midterms is no easy feat. There are 435 separate House elections and 35 separate Senate elections across 50 states. It requires competence to pull off a heist like this, and the likes of Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel are no Ocean’s Eleven crew. Plus, it requires GOP allies to backstop the president, and they may not be there this time as the president’s popularity sinks.

Still, Trump’s continued determination to screw with elections should be worrisome even if his power is diminished. Some people will believe the vulnerability canards and stay home, which is bad whether they vote the way you happen to like. He could bring the government to a halt over his stalled, perhaps unconstitutional SAVE Act, the bill that adds all sorts of impediments to voting, which is currently stalled in the Senate under threat of a Democratic filibuster. In other words, a weakened, aging Trump isn’t a tame Trump. He still possesses a kind of feral intelligence that was not on display in his Thursday night address to the nation, but that shouldn’t be underestimated. 

The post Trump’s Election Integrity Dud appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On Thursday night, President Donald Trump is scheduled to address the nation and will reportedly repeat his false claim that the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was stolen. Reports indicate that he’ll focus on, among other things, the Chinese acquisition of (publicly available) voter files and returns from Georgia, a state that Trump narrowly lost but whose results he sought have overturned, despite the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state insisting that voting was entirely above board. 

The address makes a recent piece, “Trump’s Election Subversion? Which ones are most concerning, and how you save democracy,” by Washington Monthly Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps, even more timely. Here are six key takeaways from what Epps calls “the most important midterms since 1862.”

As president, Trump has the power to disrupt the midterms. While Trump’s demand for Congressional passage of the SAVE Act, which would (likely unconstitutionally) impose new barriers to voting, is stymied in the U.S. Senate, he has formidable power over federal law enforcement and has already begun using it to disrupt or distort elections. On June 11, “FBI agents fanned out across Ohio to seize the records of a non-partisan non-profit that supports liberal causes and conducts voter registration drives.” This spring, Epps notes, “when FBI agents seized the 2020 election voting records in Fulton County, Georgia, they were joined by Tulsi Gabbard, then the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI has no role in domestic politics.” His Acting Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, and FBI Director Kash Patel have shown unwavering enthusiasm for pursuing false election claims, with Patel personally overseeing the Bureau’s extensive investigation into Trump’s 2020 accusations and directing more agents to examine voting in Georgia.

But midterms are hard to subvert. “A Trump coup attempt is unlikely to succeed, and there will be one hell of a fight before it happens,” wrote Epps, who makes the point that the diffuse, federalist system of elections makes it hard for even a villainous president to subvert the will of the people in the midterms. Unlike January 6, 2021, when the certification of the Electoral College vote offered a single choke point that Trump-supporting rioters tried to exploit to derail Biden’s election—and might have succeeded but for the unwillingness of then-Vice President Mike Pence to participate in derailing the count—there is no such chokepoint in a midterm election. Trump would somehow have to distort voting in 435 separate House elections and 35 separate Senate elections, which is not easy to accomplish. 

Trumpian incompetence makes a coup less likely. Could this presidential team really steal an election? Epps has his doubts about their competence, despite the presence of savvy operators in the administration such as Stephen Miller, the presidential adviser: “Much of his team, though, has a kind of Keystone Cops quality: JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel, Mullin, Todd Blanche, who have bungled efforts to obtain grand jury indictments, impose lawful tariffs, conduct immigration operations, build a ballroom, or arrange a Fourth of July concert. These are people who literally can’t paint a swimming pool.”

An unpopular Trump can’t count on GOP allies. To pull off a coup, he’d need the cooperation of politicians who may not be on board. “History suggests that when an incompetent underling asks a professional politician to risk their future to help an unpopular leader commit a daylight robbery, the underling hesitates,” Epps notes. “And it might not take much reluctance to derail the Trump express: The New York Times recently reported that Vance and Miller wanted to respond to protests in Minneapolis by invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring martial law—but were stymied by one obscure right-wing White House lawyer who protested against this gross violation of the Constitution.”

Trump has torn up the Justice Department, but civil society groups are ready. Epps notes Trump’s second-term decimation of the Justice Department’s ranks and its losses in court on many key civil liberties cases. He contrasts this with how “powerful forces—civil society groups and state governments—are mobilizing to oppose these schemes in court … These groups have run up an impressive score against this administration in areas including the use of the military in Los Angeles, Portland (Oregon), Minneapolis, and Chicago, as well as attempts to change election laws by fiat. They live for these cases, and they are good at them.”

There is a lot that citizens can do. The piece contains a sidebar by Washington Monthly Editorial Intern Samantha Powers detailing the many actions that citizens can take to promote safer elections—including availing themselves of many groups that will be working to ensure voting is safe, accurate, and fair—and ways you, as a citizen, can sign up to be a volunteer at the polls. For instance, veterans and military family members interested in serving their community this November can join Vet the Vote to be matched with local poll-worker positions.

The post Can Trump Steal the Midterms? Six Takeaways from Our Election Investigation appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This column is not about anything in the news from the Middle East. My current views are well-represented by Rahm Emanuel’s blistering critique of the Israeli government.

I’m concerned with something simple: whether writers should be free to write, whatever their nationality or the conduct of the governments they live under.

Last week, the Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu resigned as president of PEN America, the prestigious writers’ group that helps imprisoned authors abroad and fights book bans and other threats to free expression in the United States.

Mengestu, a MacArthur Fellow recipient and professor at Bard College, is said to be a good novelist and journalist. Before I tell you why I think he represents the moral confusion, hypocrisy, ahistorical thinking, and, yes, anti-Semitism of so many of today’s anti-Zionist intellectuals, let’s quote what Mengestu said in an interview with The New York Times after he assumed the position late last year:

“If we lose awareness of how important our culture of literary and artistic production is, our understanding of free expression goes with it.”

Mengestu thinks “literary and artistic production” is important. So far, so good. And even though I disagreed with the boycott that shut down the 2024 PEN literary festival (a boycott that George Packer rightly called authoritarian in spirit), let’s stipulate Mengestu’s argument that it was “very fair for writers to ask us [PEN] to do more” to speak out on behalf of Palestinian writers.

And his next point always bears repeating:

“Writers are the ones who hold us accountable.”

So let’s hold Mengestu accountable for his “understanding of free expression,” as he put it. Sad to say, he doesn’t understand it at all.

Mengestu resigned because he objected to an article on the PEN website entitled “A Silent Moratorium” that detailed how hard it is nowadays for all Israeli writers and many Jewish writers to get published. Thanks to a boycott, the article said, “the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.”

The article shows how ever since October 7, Israeli and Jewish writers have been disinvited from conferences, harassed on social media, review-bombed on Goodreads, and “subjected to online calls not to be read, platformed, or engaged with if they had ever shown support for Israel or Zionism. Some writers described being ignored by agents, publishers, literary journals, and magazines.”

Mengestu considered the article “unethical” because it discriminated against the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Here’s how he explained his reasoning that it’s BDS—not Jewish writers—now facing “discrimination”:

We have the responsibility to be conscious and aware of how our work can impact and influence those debates, and especially if that means producing work that might actually restrict or limit or suppress what is constitutionally protected speech.

Say, what? Mengestu’s point is incomprehensible and poorly argued because it’s lame. So let me translate: Boycotts are a form of free speech, and opposing them is a form of censorship.

So if an organization dedicated to fighting boycotts of writers decides to, uh, chronicle boycotts of writers, we’re supposed to believe that constitutes “suppressing speech”?

Somewhere, George Orwell is gagging. If you want to know why, read his essential essay, Politics and the English Language.

Speaking of Orwell: He was British at a time when Great Britain wrote the book on what is now called settler colonialism. So by Mengestu’s logic, if anti-imperialists had announced a boycott of British writers, it would be “unethical” to suggest that Orwell should be published in the United States or allowed to attend a conference here.

Would it be “suppressing free speech” to explain why American authors of the 1960s should not be blackballed even though the U.S. government was then killing nearly two million civilians in Southeast Asia?

Let’s bring it into the present and closer to home. As an American novelist whose work has been translated into more than a dozen languages, Mengestu would have good reason to feel aggrieved if foreign publishers suddenly said that, because Donald Trump is a menace, we won’t be publishing any books by you or other American authors.

In a similar vein, Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, father of the mayor of New York City, claims he draws a distinction between the State of Israel and the people of Israel, but he has called for boycotting academic conferences with Israeli attendees. How would he feel if he were disinvited to a conference abroad because he came from the country run by Trump?

Mengestu arrived in the U.S. in 1980 as a two-year-old when his family fled the Ethiopian Red Terror, a period of Marxist-Leninist political repression that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Let’s say he had stayed in Ethiopia. How would he feel if his books were boycotted and he was harassed for being Ethiopian? Would that be anti-Ethiopian racism? Seems so.

I’m still trying to get my head around the idea that the president of PEN can’t tell the difference between boycotting products and boycotting speech. Economic boycotts have a long tradition, even if BDS won’t admit that its own leaders break the boycott by using iPhones that contain Israeli parts. By contrast, boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning speech is just censorship with a trendy name.

It boils down to this: Mengestu is against book bans in red-state schools and for them in blue-state publishing houses.

I get the sense that Mengestu loves and respects writers as long as they aren’t Israeli. It doesn’t matter if they’re highly critical of their government. The fact that they are Israeli (and thus by definition “Zionist”) means that they and anyone else with a Z connection have relinquished their right to be protected by PEN.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Mengestu’s theatrical resignation is a way of saying not only that Israeli and Jewish writers don’t deserve attention, but that they must not be heard, and that this a matter of high constitutional principle.

In the end, Mengestu’s tortured logic grows out of the same exasperation that anti-Zionists feel any time someone brings up October 7 or the Holocaust.

They think that writing about Jewish suffering detracts from outrage over Palestinian suffering and thus must be silenced. And of course they’re certain that even poor Israeli writers scribbling in an attic somewhere are too rich and privileged to be “marginalized.” I guess being shunned everywhere in the world just because you’re born in a pariah state doesn’t rise to the level of marginalization.

There’s a long history of telling Jews to shut up about their misfortune and stop calling out discrimination against them. It’s a familiar feature of anti-Semitism. Dinaw Mengestu might not know that, but he should.

The post When Anti-Zionists Become Censors appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For a long time, I’ve been wondering if the war on women—possibly the world’s oldest siege—would ever come to a halt. Recently, it seems as if there’s been a shift in this matter, with many victims coming forward en masse with horrifying accounts of sex crimes—and being heard in new quarters. For decades, there was no safe zone where this could happen, so women remained in the shadows, lest they face excoriation, threats, and erasure. This is all still happening, but not to the degree that it once was. Indeed, something of an emotional security space has emerged, and the floodgates have opened. For instance, consider the victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking enterprise, in many cases when they were teenagers, including the late Virginia Giuffre, whose testimony years ago about being raped by Prince Andrew of Great Britain’s royal family finally led to his arrest—albeit for another crime.  

The shift to which I refer has happened following the publication of Gisele Pelicot’s astonishing memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides. The French woman’s account of being drugged by her husband and then raped by dozens of men at his behest for years shocked her nation and the world. He had arranged the violations while she was drugged and oblivious. After a four-month trial, he and 51 other men convicted of rape, and Mme Pelicot emerged as an unlikely heroine who never sought the limelight while stepping up gracefully and with great impact. 

In recent years women from all over the globe have come forward with accounts of violence, along with those who have witnessed it. I refer to women in Afghanistan who are stoned to death because they’ve been raped—and thus deemed “unclean,” women in Iran who are arrested and tortured for removing their hijabs and revealing long hair not to mention their eyes and faces, women in Ukraine who were raped while being held as prisoners in Russia, Yazidi women who were sold, raped, and trafficked in Iraq, Israeli women who were raped after being abducted on October 7 and are now telling their stories, Palestinian prisoners in Israel coming forward upon release and now offering accounts of rape as well. The stories that break on an almost daily basis follow high-profile trials of figures such as Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, both widely accused of rape and later tried and convicted for the same, not to mention the #metoo phenomenon, in which a number of women came forward to speak of being assaulted by prominent media figures and others in workplaces across the country.  

Even while I was working on this piece, there came another shocking disclosure on this front: Dolores Huerta, 95 years old and the widely admired co-founder of the United Farm Workers with the revered Cesar Chavez, revealed that Chavez, after whom countless schools, streets, and parks around the country have been named, had assaulted and raped her decades ago, resulting in two pregnancies. She gave the babies away, and it was only recently that she told her family about what happened.  

Having taught writing for a long time, I’ve known about this epidemic of sexual violence almost since the day I started teaching more than two decades ago. Most of my students were women (since they enroll in creative writing programs in numbers greater than men), and at any given time, I’d say that about a third were working on memoirs, often about rape and incest. Sometimes the weight of what they were carrying inside them (along with a few men) was so overwhelming that I could barely bring myself to lead my own workshops. I can think of one occasion where these terrible tales were converging for discussion at the same time—powerful locomotives heading down parallel tracks—and I feared a pile-up and then a classroom meltdown, even consulting friends about my concerns. Indeed, the engines collided in a monumental explosion as one student read a particularly harrowing book excerpt aloud, then burst into tears. So did everyone else, except for one of the guys who said, “It’s a good thing someone in here is emotionally shut down,” prompting the relief of laughter and a group hug. 

As it happened, I had already written a book about sexual violence—and much more, Twentynine Palms published in 2001 and then again in 2008. It is about two girls, Mandi Scott and Rosalie Ortega, killed by a Marine in 1991 in Twentynine Palms, California, east of Los Angeles. It’s now celebrating its 25^th anniversary, and to my good fortune, it was endorsed by the late Hunter S. Thompson and other fine writers as well as being named a Los Angeles Times “best book of the year.” Its focus is the rootless kids who live in the shadows of the world’s largest Marine base. I trace the histories of each murder victim for generations, in one case to the Donner Party and the other to a shack in the Philippines. Poverty and violence are passed down through the generations, from mother to daughter, who make a mighty, although ill-fated, attempt to break free of the generational trauma.  

The Marine who killed the girls had a backstory of committing sexual assault before joining the Corps and while in it. During the 10 years that I worked on my book, I was almost run out of town via inflammatory op-eds in the local paper; see subsequent Los Angeles Times coverage of the controversy following publication of my book. 

You see, the story was perceived as “bad for business” in a place that is home to the world’s largest Marine base and the gateway to Joshua Tree National Park; the Corps and tourism are its primary sources of income. What would happen if my book drove away tourists and resulted in the confinement of Marines to the base?

Some members of the town establishment were asking these questions and made their concerns known to me in a meeting with local realtors who were concerned that news of a double homicide in town could lower property values. I had requested the meeting so we could reach an understanding about the book I was working on and alleviate the threats coming my way. (Incidentally, I had already written travel pieces about the area for The New York Times travel section and elsewhere, and then my book brought more tourists to the area, not because of the double homicide, but as readers told me, because of how I wrote about the desert. Although it was true that my book did cut into commerce to a degree, leading to the end of “dollar drink night” at local bars, a biweekly offering on Marine payday, the night on which the double murder occurred. However, it came to my attention that years later, in a suite at a local inn, there was a sign that said: “Deanne Stillman slept here.”) 

Indeed, the Marine who was convicted of killing Mandi and Rosie, Valentine Underwood, had made the rounds of various pubs in the evening before the murders in 2001, shortly after his return from the Gulf War. I recount those hours in my book, with scenes of desperate hookups unfolding in which some girls were trying to snag a Marine—the rich guys in town—so that they could land a husband and become eligible for health care on the Corps plan. Later, Underwood attended a party for Mandi Scott on the eve of Mandi’s 16^th birthday, thrown by Rosalie Ortega, who was almost 21, at her bungalow.  

Before joining the Corps, Underwood’s history of sexual assault was either ignored—and no incidents were tried in court, as far as I could tell—or buried because he was a college athlete with NBA aspirations, and later a star on the Marine basketball team at Twentynine Palms.  

In fact, it was his basketball connection that led to his arrest for the murders of both girls, each of whom he stabbed 33 times. That was the number on his jersey for the Twentynine Palms town rec league, a connection made by an investigator for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) after the autopsy report was released; he was also on the team and remembered the number and that Underwood admired Patrick Ewing, the New York Knicks star, also #33. The brutal double homicide may not have happened if anyone had listened to 17-year-old Tammy Watson, who was raped by Valentine Underwood six weeks before he killed Mandi and Rosie. By the time I heard her story, it was too late.  

During the decade that I spent writing this book, I had several conversations with Tammy. She had been afraid to come forward for many reasons, most notably that her father was the highest-ranking black non-commissioned officer in the Marine Corps at the time, which would cause problems. Nevertheless, she reluctantly told him.  

Underwood should have been restricted to the base while the investigation unfolded. He may or may not have been, except for the night of the murders, when he was out on the town. The star athlete showed up the following day for a basketball game against the Camp Pendleton team which took place on the Marine base at Camp Pendleton near San Diego. He had what turned out to be a tell-tale cut on his hand. Later, the verdict in his lengthy murder trial in Victorville, California—issued in 1997—was negatively impacted by the O.J. Simpson verdict, according to what jurors later told me—the notorious and oddly parallel case involving a famous football player with a history of sexual battery against his wife. Simpson was acquitted of the double homicide of his wife and a companion in the criminal case, a verdict that some attributed to defense lawyer Johnny Cochran’s epic line, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” referring to a glove found at the murder scene that allegedly belonged to Simpson. The verdict in favor of Simpson had come down around the time of the Underwood trial, and apparently inside the jury room for that case, the pro-prosecution line became “If the shoe fits, you must convict,” referring to a shoe imprint in blood on the floor of the murder scene which matched a loafer that belonged to Underwood. In another—and even Shakespearean—twist to evidence in this case, there was a bloody palm print on the wall of the murder scene; it too was a match for Underwood’s. 

But although Tammy Watson had tried to warn others about Underwood, she soon became a pariah in certain quarters for coming forward against a Marine, the kind of thing that goes against the code of “Semper fi,” even for members of a Marine family. In other words, one is “always faithful” to the Corps, regardless of personal consequences or how something may ricochet elsewhere. In the wake of revealing her story to her father, Tammy became quite sick with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, an affliction of the nervous system. And then one day—amazingly enough, while on a double date with another Marine, and Krisinda Fuselier, the half-sister of murder victim Mandi Scott, and her boyfriend—Tammy picked up the local paper, and  Valentine Underwood’s face was splashed across the front page of the local paper. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “That’s the guy who raped me.”  

“That’s the guy who killed my sister,” her friend Krisinda said. Underwood had recently been charged with the crime. 

From then on, Tammy blamed herself for the murders.  

Soon after I met her, she told me the story of her rape and the aftermath. It was during the course of my research that I also learned that Underwood had raped other women before joining the Corps, incidents ignored as well by authorities. A few years ago, my book helped cops make a 20-year-old cold rape case against him while he was already serving a mandatory life sentence for the two murders. This involved a woman who was repeatedly knifed and then raped at the side of a highway in New Hampshire—an attack similar to the one against Mandi and Rosie. 

For far too long, talk of such things has been confined to writing classes and police reports gathering dust, not followed up on because the victims, sometimes paralyzed by fear, decide not to come forward. And until recently, no one wanted to hear these stories. My book was rejected many times until it wasn’t. “Who cares about these girls?” was something I often heard from publishers, a reference to the fact that they came from working-class families; their fathers were often enlisted men, frequently deployed or when back in Twentynine Palms, in trouble or just gone, and their mothers worked at service jobs at local bowling alleys, bars, or as maids at hotels that catered to high-end tourists from Los Angeles who frequented Joshua Tree National Park. This publishers’s dismissal of the girls was no different from bar denizens describing them as “just some trash in town” (in the same way Ghislaine Maxwell has spoken of her marks). “All it takes is one person to say yes,” my agent said at the time. The editor who said yes was Rachel Klayman at William Morrow, who later acquired Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father. If anything, the story I told is largely about America’s dirty little secret—class. 

When Scott and Ortega were described to me as discardable, I knew there was more to the story. In fact, as I learned over time, they looked after Marines, cooked for them, babysat their children when they were deployed, partied with them, sent them off to war, greeted them when they came home, and all the while, took care of each other because their own parents were unavailable. To me, Mandi and Rosie were unsung American patriots. Their bodies had been left on the field in a sexual war zone on the home front. I vowed to tell their stories and retrieve the girls from the national dustbin. Nowadays, many things have changed since I wrote Twentynine Palms, including a certain degree of gentrification in town; in fact, it’s been celebrated in Vogue and Town and Country.  

It’s heartening to see that a number of Epstein’s victims have come forward to claim their stories and that Gisele Pelicot has been welcomed around the world with a warm embrace. Clearly, she has come through her ordeal with a great deal of dignity and style. There has indeed been a reassignment of shame, to paraphrase the subtitle of Mme Pelicot’s memoir, but not entirely, and why more people don’t feel shame in general these days is a riddle for the ages. And as it stands now, the war against women continues.  

We see it day after day and in the split reality televised earlier this year at the State of the Union, where Epstein victims were the guests of Democrats. Republicans shunned them (although some have since broken ranks, after initially blocking an investigation at Trump’s behest until he relented), in effect telling them to remain hidden in metaphorical hijabs—unless unmasked in files for all to see while the names of those who should be ashamed of themselves remain redacted. It will take a monumental shift for this war against women to resolve fully, involving a reconciliation of other endless assaults against the land, the sea, all creatures great and small—and I believe that we are heading in that direction, even as the forces arrayed against it hold on ever more fiercely.

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To: President Donald J. Trump
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500 

From: James Parkinson, M.D.
One York Place
Hoxton, London, England 

Dear President Trump, 

In 1817, I published a short book, An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, containing the first clear clinical description of the disease that would eventually bear my name. I hoped it would spur others to investigate this mysterious illness. My description of what I called a “tedious and most distressing malady” proved remarkably accurate and enduring. After my death, Jean-Martin Charcot, the French neurologist, popularized the name Parkinson’s Disease. From my vantage point in the hereafter, I have watched with alarm as diagnoses of the “shaking palsy” have risen steadily—and, in recent decades, precipitously. 

I am writing because your administration has embarked on a systematic effort to prolong and expand the burning of coal. Unlike the Operation Warp Speed in your first term, which sped the development of a vaccine to battle COVID-19, this is, decidedly, a step backward for public health.  

In February, the Environmental Protection Agency repealed stricter limits on mercury and other toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants. In April, it proposed weakening federal rules governing the disposal of coal ash. Then, in June, the Department of Energy announced up to $350 million for projects to modernize, restart, and potentially construct coal-fired plants. You are repeating a mistake Great Britain made two centuries ago, when it embraced coal before comprehending the damage coal smoke could inflict on the first cases of “the shaking palsy.” As the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, we observed its terrible medical consequences without understanding their causes. We no longer have that excuse. 

Your own government identifies power plants as the nation’s largest source of airborne mercury emissions. Championing coal is therefore ill-advised: mercury is a potent neurotoxin with a particular capacity to damage the brain and nervous system. Researchers have found evidence connecting mercury exposure to Parkinson’s disease, although its precise contribution remains under investigation. That uncertainty is an argument for caution—not for allowing more mercury into the air. 

So, Mr. President, by promoting coal-fired power plants while loosening safeguards against their toxic emissions and waste, you are repeating a mistake we made 200 years ago. Britain learned this lesson during my own lifetime. As the Industrial Revolution accelerated, coal consumption rose from a few million tons annually to tens of millions. The air darkened, disease became increasingly visible, and physicians struggled to understand the consequences. We had the excuse of ignorance. You do not. What you call “beautiful coal” has an ugly human cost. 

Finally, Mr. Trump, I have a proposal. Since you are fond of attaching your name to things, I would be happy to surrender mine. Call it Trump’s Disease. I would rather be remembered as a geologist and a founding member of the Geological Society of London than for the neurological illness whose risks your policies so casually disregard. The name is all yours if you want it. 

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In 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested $80 billion to fix the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The agency produced a 200-page modernization plan, promising a major overhaul of the agency’s processes and technology; and it introduced features like Direct File, a new free filing service that won high marks from government auditors. 

All of this progress ended with President Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” under the direction of billionaire Elon Musk, canceled the funding appropriated by Congress, fired thousands of workers, and tossed out the agency’s modernization plan. The Inspector General for Tax Administration reports that the IRS lost 31,000 workers between January 2025 and January 2026. 

The result, says former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, is an IRS that’s badly diminished in capacity. “There’s not an industrialized nation in the world that can exist and flourish if the tax system is chaotic,” he said. “It’s like an engine part under the hood. You don’t have to celebrate it, but it needs to work.”

Werfel was the nation’s 50th Commissioner of the IRS, serving from 2023 to 2025 under President Joe Biden. He is the executive in residence at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Government and Policy and a Distinguished Fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes. 

***

Anne Kim: When you accepted the job as IRS commissioner, what were your goals as far as what the public thought about the IRS and its performance? How important was it to you that people had good feelings about their dealings with your agency?

Danny Werfel: I didn’t want to have unrealistic expectations in terms of how people view the IRS. When I was going through my Senate confirmation process, I was sitting down with Senator [Tom] Tillis, and he asked me a similar question. 

For whatever reason, he has a lot of footballs in his office instead of books on the bookshelves, so that gave me an idea. I said, “You know, Senator, the IRS is like an NFL referee.” And he perked up because now we’re talking football. He said, “Well, what do you mean by that?” I said, “What I mean by that is when the IRS gets the call wrong, 60,000 people will stand up and boo. But when the IRS gets the call right, 60,000 people will stand up and boo.”

As an IRS employee, you have to embrace that. Without you, there’s no Super Bowl, there’s no game, but nobody goes up to the ref and says, “Are you going to Disney World?” or “When’s the parade?” But the refs don’t complain about that either because they know that’s part of the job. 

The reality for the IRS is that they’re always going to be the ref. My goal was not about popularity. It was about demonstrating to the public that we had a true north of enforcing and administering the tax code fairly and equitably. And that given resources, we could modernize an organization that was absolutely in need of modernization.

Anne Kim: Right. So I want to talk a little bit more about what you did to be a better referee, including efforts like Direct File, which was a signature initiative under your leadership. But I want to talk about first about what the current administration has done to the IRS. Continuing the sports metaphor, what’s the condition of the stadium? How fair is the game now? 

Danny Werfel: Everything was abruptly stopped, canceled, shifted, and downsized as soon as DOGE arrived and as soon as the second Trump administration began. 

Taking a quick step back, the Inflation Reduction Act had infused tens of billions of dollars of new funds to the IRS to turn it around from a performance standpoint. The filing season before I arrived was one of the worst tax filing seasons in the history of the IRS: record low customer service, record high paper backlogs, anemic audit rates at every level, stagnant technology. It was a low point. 

The purpose of the Inflation Reduction Act investments was to say, “No more. We have to turn this around.” And we were able to do that almost immediately. 

Effective January 20 at noon in 2025, all of that work not only stopped, but it reversed. The people that we hired, especially the new employees, were all terminated or laid off. All the funding was essentially repealed. The modernization plan that I had put in place was dismissed and no longer in place. Direct File, as you mentioned, was terminated. Staffing went down quickly and aggressively. 

Here’s what we know today. First of all, there’s no plan from the IRS in terms of a modernization roadmap. When I joined the IRS in the Biden era, I got sworn in on March 13, 2023, and we produced our modernization plan on April 8, 2023. It was 200 pages of work streams and indicators and milestones. I called it my public to-do list. 

The irony is that the criticism I got from Republicans on the Hill was that this plan was not detailed enough. I’m always game for feedback because I never believe I know it all or have the monopoly on the right answer. I went back to my team and said we need to add more detail. Let’s add an appendix. Let’s respond in letters to the Hill. 

Here we are now in the summer of 2026, a little past a year and a half into this administration, and there’s no modernization plan whatsoever from the IRS. 

I try not to criticize the IRS in terms of whether they’re doing a bad job or a good job. What I try to say is, show us the plan. Show us what you’re holding yourself accountable for. What are the next updates to the website? What are the performance metrics you plan to achieve? I really just want the IRS to be held to the same standard that I and my predecessors were held to, which is a public scorecard of what they intend to achieve and accountability for whether they achieve it.

Anne Kim: It turns out that the last filing season was not so great post-DOGE. I have in front of me the mid-year report of the National Taxpayer Advocate, and it says that the IRS performed “better than expected”—I guess the bar was kind of low—but that “for millions of taxpayers, the filing season was frustrating, confusing, and financially disruptive.” It seems a lot of your work was demolished by DOGE and Elon Musk’s chainsaw.

Danny Werfel: When you underinvest in customer service, when you deplete call-in centers, when you deplete walk-in centers, and when you don’t provide the right technology tools for taxpayers, where you do harm is with the taxpayers that need the IRS for whatever reason.

If you are fortunate enough to be a taxpayer who submitted your tax return, and it didn’t get flagged, and you did it electronically, it’s going go through the system on a fully automated basis. You’re not going to notice a difference if the IRS is underfunded or not. 

There are 180 million filers a year, so a lot of them don’t need the IRS, but you also have millions of people who are impacted by sitting on the phone for way too long, who are unable to make an appointment at a walk-in center because it’s shuttered, or who are not able to find what they need technology-wise on the website. And one thing about the IRS and taxes is that when you’re waiting for your issue to be resolved, it’s stressful.

Those are the people who bear the burden of a smaller IRS. One of the things that’s going on right now that’s concerning is the paper backlog. There are a lot of people who still file on paper—I wish they didn’t—but there are also a lot of functions at the IRS that are still paper-based. What the Inspector General has indicated is that because of the state of the IRS right now, the paper backlog is growing rapidly and is on path by the end of this year to be worse than it was during COVID, which was historically bad.

So it’s important to understand why we want to invest in an IRS or a healthy set of referees—not so that you can toast how great the IRS is or say, I love paying my taxes (although I do).

This is just about being a healthy country. There’s not an industrialized nation in the world that can exist and flourish if the tax system is chaotic. It’s like an engine part under the hood. You don’t have to celebrate it, but it needs to work.

Anne Kim: Just to put a number on the scale and scope of the diminishing of the IRS’s capacity, the Inspector General for Tax Administration says that the agency lost an estimated 31,000 total workers between January 2025 and January 2026. That’s more than a quarter of the workforce. That’s a lot.

Danny Werfel: When I engaged with my international counterparts, people would marvel at how small the IRS was. For the size of our country, for the number of filers, for the complexity of our tax system, we actually have, by international comparison, a relatively small agency. When I got there, we had about 82,000 employees, and through the hiring surge, it was about 102,000 employees when I left. 

It’s important for people to understand that the size of the IRS is not bloat. This is something I wish DOGE would have understood. 

I like to tell the story of Saturday, April 13, 2024, which was the last Saturday before April 15. We had the funds and the ability to open about 70 walk-in centers around the country for last minute tax help. 

In all locations around the country, we had over a thousand people show up by 5 a.m. If you run the full day as well as possible, you can only serve about 300 people, which means you’re turning away 700 people who need help hours before the doors even open.

And we had to do that. And I have to tell you, there was civil unrest at several locations. The police had to come because people were so upset that they couldn’t get in to see the IRS. This might be an indictment of the complexity of our tax system, but it shouldn’t be an indictment of the IRS. What it is, in my mind, is an example of how calling the IRS oversized and bloated is just not the reality of what we need to run the tax system effectively and get taxpayers the help they need.

Anne Kim: You’ve written that DOGE made three big mistakes in its approach. Number one, it confused speed with progress. Number two, that it assumed it could just lift what works in a private sector straight into government. And three—this is critical—you said it believed that a “traumatized” workforce was the right way to get buy in. Can you talk a little bit more about DOGE’s errors?

Danny Werfel: First of all, it would be a mistake to go back to the way it was on January 19, 2024. The government should always be looking to improve, and there are major areas where there’s a gap between what the government should be delivering and what it is delivering.

One of the things that DOGE was able to prove is that the government can move more quickly. It doesn’t have to abide by bureaucracy at every turn. But what you want to do is do it in a way that better ensures success. For all of the disruption that DOGE achieved in terms of obliterating government functions and firing people and canceling contracts, the government actually spent more money at the end of DOGE than it did before. 

We spent a lot more, but we don’t have USAID, and we don’t have the same functioning Department of Education, and we don’t have as many people in the IRS call center, or the Social Security call center. So it’s harder to get through to these agencies when you need them. You might say, well, we did it in the interest of budget cuts, but the budget didn’t get cut. In fact, spending went up. And so at its highest level, something went wrong.

I am not against the idea of reform, bold reform, ambitious reform, telling taxpayers we’re tired of the way the government’s been doing it and that we’re going to do it differently. Great. I’m all aboard on that. But you have to be strategic, and you have to calibrate that when you’re moving more quickly, you are going to bump into risks that can set you backwards. 

I think the Reflecting Pool is a great story—an unfortunate story—of what happens when you promise speed and deliver speed but end up maybe having to do the job twice. All of these mistakes and sloppiness in the interest of showing speed and showing the chainsaw—I think history will say it wasn’t worth it.

Anne Kim: I want to ask about another risk to the reputation of the IRS as an agency, and that’s what’s happened as far as the IRS becoming an accomplice of immigration authorities. According to another Inspector General report I came across, the IRS has so far provided about 47,000 addresses to ICE. Granted, ICE asked for more than a million records, so it could be a lot worse, but I have to think that this has got to be both a reputational and operational risk for the IRS to be involved in this way.

Danny Werfel: What’s interesting about the IRS is that the IRS is agnostic on policy. Congress enacts policy through the tax code, and our role is to implement it as effectively, judiciously, and fairly as possible. 

You could ask me if there should be a policy of the IRS sharing taxpayer information with ICE for the purpose of immigration enforcement, and that would be a separate conversation. My concern, though, is twofold. One is that the tax code didn’t change. There is no legal specific basis in the law to share people’s taxpayer information with ICE. 

If you want to share people’s private taxpayer information with another government agency, you can. But you have to go to Congress and get permission. There’s a section of the code—Section 6103—that delineates when you can share taxpayer information in which situations.

What they’re pointing to is broad language that says you can share taxpayer information for the purpose of criminal enforcement. Okay. But the way that’s always been interpreted is if they’re investigating Al Capone, some child trafficker, or some terrorist who’s doing business in the US.

In that situation, as part of an individual criminal investigation, you can share information with the [Department of] Justice to carry out that investigation. It’s never been interpreted to say we can just create a mass program where there’s an undefined criminal investigation for tens of thousands of people. 

And then you have to be really cautious and have a very buttoned-up process in terms of how you’re sharing that information. What was alarming about the Inspector General report was there were just a lot of foot faults, to go back to a sports analogy. When you’re dealing with taxpayer information, you don’t want any foot faults. You want to be as precise and deliberate as you possibly can. 

Sometimes that can take longer, but that is, in my opinion, worth the price of our constitutional republic and our checks and balances. 

Anne Kim: So if we can imagine a future when the IRS is being rebuilt—and hopefully that will be soon—how would you go about doing that? You’ve written that you’re a “proud technocrat” who espouses “relentless incrementalism.” How would you apply that in this context when there seems to be so much that’s broken right now with the IRS?

Danny Werfel:  I’d start with people. Every organization—even the most sophisticated AI companies in the world—will say they need the right talent on the team to achieve the ambitions of the organization. My first step [would be] to rebuild a core team and a broader team of leaders and tacticians who understand how to move bureaucracies quickly and understand the tax system. 

I would not hire these people with a remit of returning us back in time. What did DOGE and this Trump administration teach us? It taught us that speed is possible. And there are ways in which to fast track and streamline processes in a way where the sky doesn’t fall.

I am by nature an incremental leader, but that doesn’t mean I’m not an ambitious one. I would set an ambitious vision that all taxpayers should interact with the IRS digitally or virtually if they choose. 

[Now if you say you want that within three months,] I can’t achieve that without websites crashing, without data being more subject to cybersecurity risk and other types of risk. But every time you come back to the IRS website, you’d see new and expanded functionality because we would be relentless in how we are building out that functionality.

But to do it, you need the right people with the skill sets to understand how to bring the IRS forward quickly but responsibly. 

Anne Kim:  I want to finish up by asking about Direct File, since it’s come up a couple of times in our conversation. How does Direct File represent the apotheosis of what a well-functioning, trusted agency can deliver to citizens? Why were you an advocate of it?

Danny Werfel: If you benchmark us against what are considered the highest performing tax authorities in the world, they’re already well advanced of Direct File. They’re presenting taxpayers with a completed return for you to thumbs up or thumbs down. As the taxpayer, you still have control. You can tell the tax authority, “No, I don’t like what you’ve done there,” or you can just hit a button on your phone, and you’re done.

There are a lot of reasons why the U.S. would not go in that direction culturally, and it would take a lot of resources. But a middle ground is providing the taxpayer with more options for how to file.

Option one is to get out a pen and paper, download the forms and submit them. I hope you don’t do that because it’s going to take a long time, and it’s inefficient. Option two might be to pay a commercial software provider to navigate you through your taxes, and you can pay whatever they’re charging—$150, $200, $300. That’s your right and your choice. The third option, and this is mostly for middle- and low-income filers, is to work with software providers’ free options. 

The issue we had was that a material number of citizens out there were saying, “I’m not having a positive experience with the free program. It’s hard to find the free version of the solution. And once I do find it, there are a lot of pop-ups like, ‘Spend ten dollars here and twenty dollars there.’” It was so confusing that they ended up paying because of the confusion. 

I spoke to taxpayers who made it through the free solution, but it was like walking a tightrope. They got through, but it was not easy to navigate. 

So the idea was to create one more option on the menu. This time it’s free, but you don’t have to work with a software provider if you don’t want—you can work with the IRS. And the way it was painted in this very political environment was, “This is the IRS forcing you to use their solution.” Nothing’s further from the truth. If you don’t like the show, change the channel. You don’t have to use Direct File if you don’t want to. 

Or that it was the IRS doing your taxes for you, and that’s not it either. You still have to submit the information. You don’t transmit until you’re ready to transmit. I took a lot of heat when we were doing Direct File, that the IRS was judge and executioner. And I was like, “No, no, that’s not what’s going on here.”

And then [critics said] it was redundant because the private sector already has a viable solution. My feedback was that there are enough citizens out there who want an alternative. And despite the conclusions reached by the current administration that Direct File is super expensive, that’s actually not the case. It was far more reasonably priced than we thought it would be.

So for all those reasons, I think it’s a step backwards not to have Direct File. I wrote an op-ed about this, and what I said was, look, when I was doing Direct File, I took a lot of headwind resistance and flak from the private sector, which said this is unnecessary. The private sector can handle Free File. We don’t need the IRS to do it. My answer to the private sector now is, okay, you got what you wanted. It’s game time. Let’s see how good you can make your free file solutions. If you make them really, really good, you might not ever need another Direct File. 

I also said that there should be new entrants out there, and I hope we see a market emerge in the absence of Direct File. But I think it was a really important initiative. I’m still proud of it. 

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Less than four years after ChatGPT’s debut, we are nowhere near understanding the role AI will play in our lives. Will it be as transformative as the internet? Will it cause mass unemployment? Will the next generation forfeit its capacity to think to AI models? Will we all soon be using AI agents to book our hotels and flights?  

How to scythe through the bramble? Cory Doctorow, a science fiction novelist and one of our keenest observers of technology, is out with The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It’s Too Late, a companionable guide to the subject. Doctorow does offer some answers to the questions above. No, there will be no mass unemployment, he says. No, human cognition and creativity will remain critical. No, AI agents are unlikely to become as widespread as the hype would have us believe, in part because companies are too paranoid to give third parties free rein to index their pricing information. As for whether AI will be transformative, Doctorow believes it is useful and will continue to make our lives easier; if you consider that transformative, then yes. 

Notoriously prolific, Doctorow published his AI book only nine months after his previous one, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. More original and revelatory, Enshittification presents a fully developed theoretical framework for understanding how Big Tech platforms came to dominate our economy and society so thoroughly in just two decades. The Reverse Centaur’s Guide is like Herman Melville following Moby-Dick with the 50-page novella Bartleby, the Scrivener, about a bafflingly impudent clerk: a worthwhile read, but not a seminal work. 

Doctorow grounds his perspective on AI in the shaky economics underpinning the industry’s boom. Seven technology giants, all heavily invested in AI—Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Tesla, and Amazon—account for 35 percent of the stock market, meaning that a great deal is riding on AI’s success. Because none of the AI models have produced profits on their own, the corporations behind them have resorted to circular financing and accounting gimmicks. Consider Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in which Microsoft holds a 26 percent stake. Microsoft gives OpenAI $10 billion worth of tokens to access its data centers, which OpenAI records as investment revenue at face value. OpenAI then redeems those tokens with Microsoft to power ChatGPT. It is not hard to guess what happens next: Microsoft claims to have generated $10 billion in AI-related revenue for its cloud-computing division. 

Such legerdemain is ubiquitous in AI. A report released in May by the Open Markets Institute, where I work, described how tech corporations such as Meta and Oracle use special-purpose vehicles to finance the construction of expensive and unpopular AI data centers, keeping the investments—and accompanying debt—off their balance sheets. 

Another dubious aspect of AI is its “dogshit unit economics,” a term coined by the tech critic Ed Zitron. Unlike the internet and other technologies that were costly when first introduced but became cheaper over time, AI continues to grow more expensive. Doctorow explains that to reduce “hallucinations,” or errors, AI companies break a prompt into multiple pieces and repeatedly query a model about each one, incurring additional costs every time. As a result, each successive generation of AI models becomes more expensive to train and operate than the last. 

Why, then, is Big Tech going so hard on AI? Because it allows investors to view these firms as growth stocks rather than mature companies. Google, which earned $132 billion in profits last year, is a mature company with two established monopolies in search and digital advertising. Being seen as a growth stock, however, allows it to use its shares to acquire other companies and compensate employees. And it is not just Google. “Keeping the growth story alive isn’t about one company or one sector. The entire U.S. economy hangs in the balance,” Doctorow ominously forecasts. 

Investors, not the rest of us, are the audience for this growth story and its inflated numbers. Doctorow breaks down how a reputable bank like Morgan Stanley can claim that AI will be worth $16 trillion. Multiply the number of radiologists in the United States, 32,000, by their average salary, $360,000, and then multiply that figure by 80 percent—the amount their bosses might be willing to pay AI systems to do the same work—and you get $9.2 billion. Repeat that exercise across every industry, and you can see where the $16 trillion figure came from—and how absurd its underlying assumptions are. “AI companies are selling the replacement of workers with chatbots, but chatbots just can’t do workers’ jobs,” Doctorow writes. “They can help some workers, some of the time, but no one wants that—at least, no one in a position to buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of AI products wants that.” 

Doctorow agrees with other AI skeptics that a financial reckoning is coming. What he adds to the “whither AI” conversation is his deep knowledge of technology, his experience writing science fiction, and his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation advocating for the rights of technology users and workers. In exploring whether AI-generated art is any good, Doctorow notes that he makes millions of minute artistic decisions while composing a novel, most of them unconsciously. Novels, paintings, and other works of art emerge from these choices, all made in service of conveying “that big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling.” What, then, of AI image generators or chatbots used for writing? “The generative AI doesn’t know anything about the big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling in the artist’s head,” he writes. “All it can do is add vaporous filler to the meaning that is contained in a human user’s prompts.”  

When Doctorow addresses the often-raised questions of whether AI is, or will become, conscious and whether it might eventually destroy humanity, he is similarly authoritative and, to me, settles the matter in two pithy sentences. “A conscious being isn’t a word-guessing app that knows more words and has more computing power to guess with,” he writes. “Throwing GPUs and training data at AI isn’t going to make a superintelligence.” 

Doctorow introduces terminology from automation theory, in which centaurs are humans assisted by machines, while reverse centaurs are humans conscripted to serve as assistants to machines. He sees the distinction between the two as central to the AI debate. A driver using a system that warns them when their car drifts into another lane is a centaur. Workers who drive Amazon vans are reverse centaurs. These workers, classified as contractors so that Amazon need not pay them minimum wage or provide benefits, must use nine apps that score their performance according to metrics such as braking and swerving. As reverse centaurs, the drivers have jobs only because the van can neither drive itself nor carry a package to a customer’s door. 

Doctorow wants us to be centaurs. In his own life, he has found many handy uses for AI, including first using open-source models to download and transcribe dozens of hours of podcasts, and then turning the transcripts into a searchable database. He does us a solid by deflating the rhetoric surrounding AI and placing the technology in a more realistic light. As the closest thing we have to a tech prophet, he also reminds us that “the most important fact about a technology isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for, and who it does it to.”  

Amen. 

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In June, a huge, eight-sided cage went up on the South Lawn of the White House, obscuring the façade of the storied building President Donald Trump has treated as his personal mansion. Intended for an Ultimate Fighting Championship series of mixed martial arts matches held on the president’s 80^th birthday, the structure was Trump’s gift to himself, capping a months-long binge of relentlessly gaudifying America’s highest office. Naysayers were reminded that the event was, of course, also a celebration of the nation’s 250^th birthday. The invite-only spectacle, with a price tag of over $60 million, had around 4,000 guests, with thousands more watching on big screens in the White House Ellipse. In a TikTok video, Trump compared his arena to the Eiffel Tower and mused that it might never come down.

No better time, then, to remind ourselves that it was in June, 250 years ago, that Thomas Jefferson, in the sweltering heat of an early Philadelphia summer, was drafting the Declaration of Independence. The three truths Jefferson considered “self-evident”—“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—seem not so assured anymore. Maybe they never really were, suggests Kim Phillips-Fein, the liberal historian, in Country of Lords, her sweeping new study of the fate of the first of Jefferson’s hallowed truths: equality, or, as she defines it, “egalitarianism.”

Even as Jefferson was imagining, in Lincoln’s wonderful phrase, the “electric cord” of equality binding together his new nation, some of his contemporaries were severing it. Fellow founder John Adams called attempts to erase the natural differences between the rich and the poor a “glaring … imposition.” He was not alone in his concerns: The majority of states initially tied the right to vote to property ownership. A crucial test case for arguments in favor of equality was, of course, chattel slavery. Jefferson had already failed it, holding on to his slaves even as he proclaimed his gospel of egalitarianism. As Phillips-Fein mentions, he had some ugly things to say about Black people in his Notes on the State of Virginia: “In reason much inferior” to Whites, he wrote, they would never understand “the investigations of Euclid.”

As Phillips-Fein demonstrates, such observations set the stage for later defenses. Slavery was unavoidable, “too universal not to be necessary to nature,” intoned George Fitzhugh, the social theorist and Virginia planter, in 1854. If everyone kept their place in society, the overall result would be “peace and good will.” And here the opposition to the equality doctrine began to take on a different, more sinister hue. Having the protection of a master, apologists for slavery insisted, was preferable to being left to one’s own devices in the North, where, nominally free, you’d struggle to survive. Put differently, inequality is good for you—an argument Phillips-Fein also traces in subsequent refutations of egalitarianism offered by industrialists Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford. An unsettling photograph included in Phillips-Fein’s book, taken on July 30, 1938, Ford’s 75^th birthday, shows German diplomats pinning the Grand Cross of the German Eagle—the highest Nazi honor given to non-Germans—on the lapel of the rabidly antisemitic, anti-union millionaire.

Historians often emphasize the centrality of racial prejudice to anti-egalitarian thinking. Phillips-Fein, by contrast, is more interested in the latter’s antidemocratic core. But racism and rejection of democracy are one and the same. Consider one of the main perpetrators of racialist theory, not mentioned in Phillip-Fein’s book, the Harvard professor Louis Agassiz. An immigrant fresh from the mountains of Switzerland, Agassiz established the first seaside laboratory in America, founded the first scientifically organized natural history museum, and inaugurated the first genuine graduate school at an American university. A fervent anti-evolutionist, Agassiz also believed that the human races were biologically distinct, and he endeavored to provide evidence of that in around 200 photographs he collected in 1865 of mixed-race, indigenous, and Black people in Manaus, Brazil, where he traveled at the end of the Civil War. Agassiz served as an expert witness for Lincoln’s Freedmen Inquiry Commission, advising its members to leave newly freed Black people toiling in the South, where, well-adapted to the climate, they were also safely removed from the possibility of mating with white Americans and thus impoverishing the nation’s white genetic stock. “He thinks there were several Adams and Eves,” sighed the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his journal after attending a lecture by Agassiz on “The Races of Men.”

One depressing takeaway from Phillips-Fein’s book is how many Americans recognized the absurdity of anti-egalitarianism yet did little to stop it in practice. As in a game of whack-a-mole, the ugly specter of white supremacy pops up again and again in American history just when one thinks it has been destroyed. In March 1929, W.E.B. Du Bois agreed to a public debate with the professional racist Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, one of the least appealing figures in a book brimming with them. Du Bois and Stoddard were to answer the question: “Shall the negro be encouraged to seek cultural equality?” (Du Bois: “Yes.” Stoddard: “No.”) Before 5,000 spectators at the Chicago Coliseum, Du Bois mopped the floor with Stoddard, whose incoherent protestations were drowned out by the crowd’s laughter.

Stoddard certainly looked the part. The poster for the event, reprinted in Phillips-Fein’s book, features him with slicked-back hair and a sculpted mustache that appears pasted on, making him seem like a blend of Douglas Fairbanks and Count Dracula. Mounting opposition to eugenics sounded the death knell for his ideas. Later advocates of inequality presented a more benign face to the world: The economist Milton Friedman, for example, the epitome of everyone’s favorite uncle (his smiling portrait in the book, at least for a moment, lifts the reader’s spirits), believed that if we’d just let the free market do its thing, everything would work out. “I am not in favor of egalitarianism, in the sense of equal results,” he told his hosts in South Africa in 1976 (in a speech not cited by Phillips-Fein). “I see no merit in cutting down a tree in a forest that grows higher than the others in order to make them all equal.” Leave the big trees intact, Friedman implied, and they will deliver shade to the smaller ones. Which, in the case of South Africa, also meant, of course, that the way to end apartheid, which Friedman did not endorse, was through capitalism, not reform.

For the psychologist Richard Herrnstein and the political scientist Charles Murray, social equality was a genetic impossibility and could not be rectified by public programs. In The Bell Curve (1994), one of the decade’s bestselling books, Herrnstein and Murray claimed that differences in people’s inherited IQs produced different economic outcomes, which just happened to correlate with familiar racial divisions. Their handling of the data they used has been widely challenged. True, everyone can find their place in the world, they wrote, even “if you aren’t very smart.” The problem was that, as “women of low average intelligence” would continue to spawn hordes of unintelligent children, that fatal IQ gap was only going to widen, heightening the risk that a significant part of the population would end up as “wards of the state.” Herrnstein and Murray’s recommendation: cut the welfare programs.

Any remaining doubts about the sinister effects of anti-egalitarianism are dispelled in Phillips-Fein’s apocalyptic last chapter. Ostensibly about Trump enabler and JD Vance patron Peter Thiel, it demonstrates how the techno-reactionaries of Silicon Valley have been dreaming up a nation of AI-enhanced drones, compliant servants of a market that is itself a mega-machine. At least three of the self-made kings atop the new tyranny of tech—Thiel, Elon Musk, and David Sachs, Trump’s chief science advisor—were shaped by their upbringing in apartheid South Africa. For them, democracy, as a tool for resolving human conflicts, has no appeal. They prefer meritocracy, the rule of the nimble over the daft. The Meritocracy Fellowships, inaugurated by Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, attempt to siphon top talent from American universities, the “college industrial complex,” as Karp dismisses it, that dulls young people into believing they are all the same.

Country of Lords is an important, courageous book. That said, I wish that Phillips-Fein had given more thought to how we might slow down our descent into mindless capitulation to authoritarianism. In her conclusion, she praises the antidote to the unthinking acceptance of inequality: “the ideas that inspired Abraham Lincoln, Eugene V. Debs, Clara Lemlich, John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr.” Those ideas still carry, she believes, the promise “that we may yet, one day, create a world that lives up, in whatever way it can, to the radical demand that we are all created equal.” (Note the many syntactic interruptions here, reminding us that it’s just that—a promise). I would propose that the best way to make egalitarianism more than a shaky promise has been, and continues to be, through college, where students are regularly exposed to the ideas Philipp-Fein mentions. Bashing American higher education—especially the humanities—has become a recreational activity across the political spectrum these days. Yet no one has come up with a better way of teaching young people how to “govern themselves,” as John Dewey once put it.

It was, as it happens, in Karp’s “college industrial complex” that I first read the novel that now helps me make sense of that awful cage on the White House lawn, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner’s protagonist, the planter Thomas Sutpen, builds a mansion in the middle of nowhere, a tawdry symbol of his power. At night, he holds “raree shows” in his barn: brutal fights in which he pits his slaves, like “game cocks,” against each other, entering, for the grand finale, the ring himself, “naked, panting, and bloody.” Trump is no Thomas Sutpen. But he is driven by the same visceral need to assure himself of his own place as the nation’s Cock-of-the-Rock. Last month, at the President’s birthday party on taxpayer grass, any semblance of the promise of egalitarianism on which this nation was founded had vanished. Instead, uniformity reigned. The fighters wore specially designed outfits in red, white, and blue that, according to The New York Times, made it seem they were all on the same team. Trump, the self-described “perfect specimen,” sat in the front row.

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