2026-01-20 09:49:45
Hi, fellow Americans! Would you like our country to become an authoritarian police state? A nation where federal agents can knock on your door and search your home without a warrant? A nation where everyone has to carry around their proof of citizenship at all times, or risk being arrested by federal agents on the street and thrown into a dungeon? A nation where peaceful protesters are at risk of being maimed or even killed in the street? A nation where the President invokes emergency powers to crush protests with troops?
Those all sound like lurid exaggerations when I type them out — the kind of thing crazy Resistance Libs would rant about on Bluesky. And yet consider the most recent news from America’s immigration crackdown:
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is defending reports that people have been asked by federal agents to prove their citizenship status as Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations continue in cities across America…
On Jan. 3, a Texas detainee died in ICE custody in what a medical examiner is likely to rule a homicide, according to The Washington Post; on Jan. 7, Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good was shot four times by an ICE agent while attempting to drive away from officers, and was soon pronounced dead; on Jan. 9, a 21-year-old anti-ICE protester was permanently blinded and allegedly mocked by agents after he was shot at close range by non-lethal ammunition, according to his aunt; and on Jan. 14, a Venezuelan man was shot in the leg during a struggle with ICE officers.
Footage of agents clashing with protesters, crashing into vehicles and going up to homes in cities like Minneapolis [has] spread through social media, and Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota to squash anti-ICE protests with military force.
The truth is that some Americans probably do like this. There is no freedom gene that courses through the blood of those whose ancestors fought in the Civil War. A deep reverence for liberty does not flow from the water of the Mississippi River. There are some who quietly nod their heads and grin when they see protesters beaten savagely by government thugs, relishing the thought that “the left” is being put in its place. There are those who smile at the notion that an invasion by the anti-White hordes of the Third World is being finally turned back by our valiant Boys in Masks.
But there are fewer of these than before. The furor over the killing of Renee Good and the ICE raids in Minnesota and elsewhere has not died down and vanished into the bottomless pit of the news cycle like almost every other outrage during the long Trump Era A recent poll found that 82% of Americans have seen the video of Good’s killing, and by and large they agree with the obvious interpretation that the killing doesn’t look like self-defense. Many more Americans say the shooting was unjustified than say it was justified:
Those numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. America is getting increasingly fed up with Trump’s immigration policy in general:
ICE’s name is becoming toxic, with a majority of white voters and even 25% of Republicans disapproving of the agency:
Trump’s internal polls appear to show the same. Here’s reporting from Axios:
President Trump's team recently reviewed private GOP polling that showed support for his immigration policies falling. The results, reflected in public surveys, bolstered internal concern about the administration's confrontational enforcement tactics…
The private polling suggested a rupturing of the coalition of independent, moderate and minority voters who were key parts of Trump’s victory in 2024. Such voters will play a big role in determining whether Republicans keep their slim House majority in November’s midterms…
60% of independent voters and 58% of undecided voters said Trump was “too focused” on deporting illegal immigrants, the poll viewed by Trump’s team found.
Joe Rogan, the nation’s most popular talk show host and a prominent Trump supporter in 2024, is among those for whom the stormtrooper tactics of the immigration crackdown have gone too far:
Nor is the ICE storm the only thing that Americans despise about the second Trump presidency. Even most Republicans are opposed to Trump’s threat to seize Greenland from America’s allies:
And Trump’s already-dismal numbers on the economy continue to deteriorate.
To many Democrats and progressives, the news that America is turning against Trump comes as a balm of reassurance amid the otherwise grim drumbeat of headlines. Resistance Liberalism was right about Trump — he was a corrupt, brutal authoritarian at the head of a fundamentally racist movement. Media bullshit can deceive some of the people some of the time, but in the end, being right about things tends to shine through.
Many Dems no doubt hope to ride the wave of dissatisfaction with Trump to victory in November, and perhaps in the 2028 presidential election as well. Polls show that Dems have surged past the GOP in terms of party identification, and that a record-high 28% of Americans label themselves ideologically “liberal”. Gen Z is ideologically more progressive than Millennials on most issues.
Perhaps the American people, bamboozled by right-wing media narratives, simply had to discover the error of their 2024 choice the hard way, and Democrats simply need to sit and wait for the masses to come home.
Look more closely, though, and you can see that neither Trump, nor Trumpism, nor the Republican party is collapsing, the way support for George W. Bush’s presidency collapsed at the end of his second term. The Resistance Libs were completely right about Trump, but they still haven’t managed to come up with a compelling alternative, either ideologically or in terms of a plan for governance. And this is probably putting a ceiling on support for the Democrats.
First let’s look at some numbers, and then let’s talk about some principles and ideas.
2026-01-18 17:50:26
The biblical story called the Judgement of Solomon isn’t just meant to illustrate what a wise king Solomon was. It’s also supposed to demonstrate a central principle of economics, and of society in general — that the world isn’t a fixed lump of resources waiting to be divided up. In the story, two women are arguing over which one is the real mother of a baby; Solomon proposes to cut the baby in half and give half to each woman, causing the baby’s actual mother to be instantly horrified. The lesson is that a baby is much more than the sum of two halves of a baby.
I feel like modern American leaders and intellectuals often forget this important lesson. There are plenty of thinkers and leaders on both the right and the left who think of society’s main task as slicing up and handing out a lump of “resources”. And yet when they make economic policy based on this idea, it keeps failing.
A prime example is Trump’s immigration crackdown. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and his people swore up and down that kicking millions of illegal immigrants out of the country would result in a bonanza of jobs for the native-born. They probably still believe this. But people are now flowing out of the United States on net, and native-born employment rates haven’t risen:
In fact, native-born unemployment has risen, even as immigrant unemployment has fallen slightly:
This isn’t just because immigrant laborers are becoming more scarce, either. In fact, despite Trump’s successful crackdown, the number of jobs held by immigrants actually rose in December, while the number of jobs held by native-born Americans fell:
If the Trump administration had bothered to ask economists, they would have replied that the overwhelming majority of the empirical evidence indicates that immigration — even low-skilled immigration — doesn’t take jobs from Americans. Immigrants also produce goods and services, growing the pie and creating labor demand that helps provide work for native-born workers. But the only economist they seem to have bothered to ask was George Borjas, a man who has spent his life unsuccessfully trying to prove that immigration is bad for America. The new jobs numbers illustrate the failures of Borjas’ zero-sum economics.1
Tariffs are another example. Trump and his people swore that tariffs would bring manufacturing jobs back to America, by reducing foreign competition. But while we do see a few heavily protected industries like steelmaking adding jobs, most manufacturing industries in the U.S. are hemorrhaging workers:
Joe Weisenthal notes how broad the pain in American manufacturing is:
It's not just that total manufacturing employment is shrinking. The number of manufacturing sub-sectors that are adding jobs is rapidly shrinking. Of the 72 different types of manufacturing tracked by the BLS, just 38.2% are still adding jobs. A year ago it was 47.2%.
If the administration had bothered to ask economists, they would have explained that since manufacturing uses a lot of intermediate goods, tariffs hurt American manufacturing more than they help. But the only economist Trump seemed to listen to on the topic was Peter Navarro, who seems to have a lot of gaps in his knowledge about trade.
Zero-sum thinking failed on immigration because the U.S. economy isn’t a lump of labor. It failed on tariffs because the global economy is not a lump of manufacturing.
Now it’s also probably going to fail Trump on geopolitics as well. Trump recently overthrew the leader of Venezuela, and he has made it clear in speeches and statements that one of the reasons he did this was to seize control of the country’s oil. Many of the less thoughtful figures on the right expect this move to deliver a bounty of mineral wealth to the United States:
But whether removing Maduro was the moral thing to do, it’s unlikely to result in significant economic windfalls for the U.S. Oil majors are reluctant to invest, given the ongoing political chaos in Venezuela. In fact, the history of conquering and seizing oil fields for economic gain is not encouraging — witness how the U.S. failed to reap significant benefits from the Iraq War.
Or consider Trump’s desire to conquer Greenland. Simply adding a large chunk of land to America’s map would not mean riches for the U.S. economy. The U.S. already has access to Greenland’s natural resources and shipping routes; conquering the island would simply earn the enmity of both the Europeans and of Greenland’s people themselves. The U.S.’s previous relationship with Greenland was positive-sum and cooperative; switching to zero-sum piracy would not be an improvement.
So far I’ve been talking about the Trump administration. But there are also plenty of people in the progressive movement who think that economic policy should be mainly about redistributing “resources”. For example, many progressives and leftists believe that industrialization happened because European countries stole mineral wealth from other nations; some even think that poor countries are still being kept poor to this day by Europe and the U.S. buying their minerals for artificially low prices.
But as I wrote back in 2023, the former hypothesis is extremely dubious:
Imperialism is very old — the Romans, the Persians, the Mongols, and many other empires all pillaged and plundered plenty of wealth. But despite all of that plunder, no country in the world was getting particularly rich, by modern standards, until the latter half of the 20th century…So the fabulous wealth of the modern day can’t be due to plunder alone…
[I]t’s pretty clear that imperialist extraction was neither necessary nor sufficient for a country to get rich. South Korea, Singapore, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, and a number of other countries have gotten rich without ever having colonial empires, while Germany only had a small one for a very short time. Meanwhile, Spain and Portugal, which had vast and highly extractive colonial empires, were economic underperformers for a long time, and are still poorer than much of Europe.
Here’s a good tweet that makes the argument even more succinctly:
And leftists’ argument that poor countries are poor today because America and Europe refuse to pay sufficiently high prices for rocks — is obvious nonsense:
[N]ow, commodity prices are generally set on the world markets…the price of copper Chilean miners get is going to be about the same as the price American or Australian miners get. Rich countries might use dirty tricks to lower the global price of commodities…but they’d have to be willing to hurt their own miners too…And this would also involve screwing over rich countries like Australia that are primarily commodity exporters. Australia is very obviously not a poor country, so if we’re screwing over Australia through suppression of global commodity prices, we’re not doing it very much…
The idea that commodity exporters chronically undervalue their currencies also doesn’t fit with the recent history of these countries. Commodity-exporting nations are known for overvaluing their own exchange rates, in order to afford more imports.
With a few small exceptions, countries simply don’t get rich from “resources”; they get rich from reshaping resources into useful goods and services using human ingenuity and hard work.
Closer to home, progressives constantly talk about “resources” — a language that clearly invokes a lump of wealth. And yet progressive policies often end up making cities poorer, by taxing productive businesses to send money to useless but politically well-connected nonprofit groups. The California High Speed Rail Authority has not managed to create any high-speed rail whatsoever despite billions of dollars in spending, but brags about how many jobs that spending has created. It’s all redistribution and no production.
Perhaps in a rich country like America, where the pie grows only slowly and there are lots of opportunities for redistribution, it’s natural for people on both the right and the left to start thinking of the world as a lump of “resources” to be divvied up. But in reality, it’s production that maintains our high standard of living, and which creates the wealth necessary for redistribution to occur. A dangerously large number of Americans seem to have forgotten that.
The jobs numbers do not PROVE, by themselves, that immigration is benign for native-born American workers. But the mountain of careful causal research showing that immigration doesn’t displace native-born workers is evidence enough.
2026-01-16 17:43:09
Interest rates have begun to come down. Inflation has mostly subsided, and the real economy is still doing decently well despite Trump’s tariffs. So why are American consumers more pessimistic than they were during the depths of the Great Recession or the inflation of the late 1970s?
It’s possible to spin all sorts of ad hoc hypotheses about why consumer sentiment has diverged from its traditional determinants. Perhaps Americans are upset about social issues and politics, and expressing this as dissatisfaction about the economy. Perhaps they’re mad that Trump seems to be trying to hurt the economy. Perhaps they’re scared that AI will take their jobs. And so on.
Here’s another hypothesis: Maybe Americans are down in the dumps because their perception of the “good life” is being warped by TikTok and Instagram.
I’ve been reading for many years about how social media would make Americans unhappier by prompting them to engage in more frequent social comparisons. In the 2010s, as happiness plummeted among young people, the standard story was that Facebook and Instagram were shoving our friends’ happiest moments in our faces — their smiling babies, their beautiful weddings, their exciting vacations — and instilling a sense of envy and inadequacy.
In fact, plenty of careful research found that using Facebook and Instagram made people at least temporarily unhappier, and there’s some evidence that social comparisons were the reason. Here’s Appel et al. (2016), reviewing the literature up to that point:
Cross-sectional evidence demonstrates a positive correlation between the amount of Facebook use and the frequency of social comparisons on Facebook…A similar pattern emerges for the impression of being inferior…Some of these studies…have documented an association between social comparison or envy and negative affective outcomes…
Causal relationships between Facebook use, social comparison, envy, and depression have also been established experimentally. For example, in a study about women's body image…women instructed to spend ten minutes looking at their Facebook page rated their mood lower than those looking at control websites. Furthermore, participants in the Facebook condition who had a strong tendency to compare their attractiveness to others were less satisfied with their physical appearance…
In summary, available evidence is largely consistent with the notion that Facebook use encourages unfavorable social comparisons and envy, which may in turn lead to depressed mood.
Note that during the 2010s, consumer confidence was high. Even if people were comparing their babies and vacations and boyfriends, this was not yet causing them to seethe with dissatisfaction over their material lifestyles. But social media today is very different than social media in the 2010s. It’s a lot more like television — young people nowadays spend very little time viewing content posted by their friends. Instead, they’re watching an algorithmic feed of strangers.
A lot of those strangers are “influencers” — people who either make a living or gain fame and popularity by posting about their lifestyles. And while some of those lifestyles might be humble and hardscrabble, in general they tend to be rich and leisurely.
When I asked a social media-obsessed Millennial I know to give me an example of a rich influencer, she immediately mentioned Rebecca Ma, better known by her online nickname Becca Bloom. Here’s Becca’s spectacular wedding:
And here’s a video of her and her husband letting Microsoft Copilot decide where to fly their private jet:
Most of Becca’s Instagram account is pictures of her taking trips to gorgeous, scenic locations and showing off fancy clothes and other possessions. Another example I heard was Alix Earle, whose posts mix dance performances with exotic vacations.
To be very clear, I am not criticizing, decrying, or denouncing social media influencers like this. Becca Bloom looks like a nice person that I might go to a party with — and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a beautiful wedding, hanging out on the beach, or visiting cities in Europe. But how many Americans can afford to live that lifestyle? Becca Bloom comes from a super-rich Hong Kong family, a successful entrepreneur who sold her technology company in 2018. She’s top 0.01% for sure.
There were rich people like that in 1920, or 1960, or 1990. But you almost never saw them. Maybe you could read about them in People magazine or watch a TV show about them. But most people simply didn’t have contact with the super-rich. Now, thanks to social media, they do. And even if people don’t go hunting for “RichTok” videos, the algorithmic feed may occasionally throw some into their field of view. On a day-to-day basis, we are more aware of the Becca Blooms of this world than we were thirty years ago, or probably even ten years ago.
But even more subtle might be the influencers who are merely upper class rather than spectacularly rich. Since I don’t follow any lifestyle influencers, I asked AI for a few examples, and here are a few it mentioned:
These people aren’t living the lifestyle of a Becca Bloom, yet most of what you’re seeing in these photos and videos is economically out of reach for the average American. Most Americans can’t afford a big fancy house like Merritt Beck’s or Carly Riordan’s, a gorgeous European vacation like Jacey Duprie’s, or fancy dinner parties like Kate Arends’.
And yet these are not obviously rich people, either — they’re more like the 5% or the 1% than the 0.01%. Their lifestyles are out of reach for most, but not obviously out of reach. Looking at any of these videos, you might unconsciously wonder “Why don’t I live like that?”.
Americans were always shown examples of aspirational lifestyles. The house in the Brady Bunch and the apartments in Friends were more spacious and well-appointed than the average American residences at the time, and you’d see the same exaggerations in advertisements. Yet on some level, Americans might have realized that that was fiction; when you see a lifestyle influencer on TikTok or Instagram, you feel like you’re seeing simple, bare-bones reality. (And often, though not always, you are.)
I was talking to my friend David Marx about this, and he pointed out that the rise of social media influencers has scrambled our social reference points.
Humans have always compared ourselves to others, but before social media, we compared ourselves to the people around us — our coworkers, friends, family, and neighbors. “Keeping up with the Joneses” has always been a well-known concept, and many economists have documented the effect in real life. For example, here’s Card et al. (2012) on salary comparisons:
We study the effect of disclosing information on peers' salaries on workers' job satisfaction…Workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satisfaction and a significant increase in the likelihood of looking for a new job. Above-median earners are unaffected. Differences in pay rank matter more than differences in pay levels.
And here’s Luttmer (2005), finding that having richer neighbors makes you less happy:
This paper investigates whether individuals feel worse off when others around them earn more. In other words, do people care about relative position, and does “lagging behind the Joneses” diminish well-being?…I find that, controlling for an individual's own income, higher earnings of neighbors are associated with lower levels of self-reported happiness…There is suggestive evidence that the negative effect of increases in neighbors' earnings on own well-being is most likely caused by interpersonal preferences, that is, people having utility functions that depend on relative consumption in addition to absolute consumption.
But comparing yourself to neighbors, coworkers, family, and friends was different than comparing yourself to social media influencers, in at least a couple of important ways.
First, all of those classic reference points tended to be people who were roughly similar to us in income — maybe a little higher, maybe a little lower, but usually not hugely different, and certainly not Becca Bloom types. Housing markets, job markets, and all kinds of other forces tend to sort us into relatively homogeneous social classes. The rich and the poor were always fairly removed from the middle class, both geographically and socially.
But perhaps even more importantly — and this was a point that David Marx especially emphasized — we were able to explain the differences we saw. In 1995, if you knew a rich guy who owned a car dealership, you knew how he made his money. If you envied his big house and his nice car, you could tell yourself that he had those things because of hard work, natural ability, willingness to accept risk, and maybe luck. The “luck” part would rankle, but it was only one factor among many. And you knew that if you, too, opened a successful car dealership, you could have all of those same things.
But now consider looking at an upper-class social media influencer like the ones I cited above. It’s not immediately obvious what they do for work, or how they could afford all those nice things. Some of them have jobs or run businesses, but you don’t know what those are. Some might have inherited their wealth. Some of them make money only by showing off their lifestyles on social media!
Not only can you not explain the wealth you’re seeing on social media, but you probably don’t even think about explaining it. It’s just floating there, delocalized, in front of you — something that other people have that you don’t. Perhaps you make it your reference point by default, unconsciously and automatically, as if you’re looking at your sister’s house or your neighbor’s car.
I’m hardly the first person to think of this idea. Other writers are starting to use terms like “money dysmorphia” and “financial dysmorphia” to describe the vague sense of inadequacy that comes from being bombarded with deracinated free-floating images of wealth and comfort. A lot of people have taken note of a recent survey by the financial services company Empower, in which Gen Z reported a much higher threshold for considering themselves financially successful:
$588,000 is an absurd requirement for financial success. It’s in the top 1% of individual incomes. It’s thirteen times the median personal income in the United States, and more than five times the median family income.
Now, with surveys like this, you always have to worry about wording. It’s possible that terminology has changed, so that the phrase “financially successful” connotes “rich” to Gen Z, while it means “upper middle class” to older generations. But it’s also possible that Gen Z folks really do think they’re losers if they don’t make $588k. And this impression might come from TikTok and Instagram — many of the influencers I listed above look like they probably make in the ballpark of that amount.1
If social media comparison is really making middle-class Americans feel like financial losers, what do we do about it? It’s physically impossible to give every American an income anywhere near $588k, at least in the near future. We can redistribute more wealth and income, but taxing the top 5% down to a humble middle-class standard of living just to make social media consumers less grumpy is probably a political non-starter. We could have a communist revolution, but history shows that this is a bad idea.
And if social comparisons are getting Americans down, the Abundance agenda is likely to be less powerful than we might hope. Economic theory and common sense both tell us that even if people’s satisfaction depends on other people’s wealth, getting richer still makes them happier. But social comparisons can put a lid on how happy we can feasibly make people.
So neither redistribution nor growth nor any combination of the two will give regular folks the kind of lifestyle they see on TikTok and Instagram. Hopefully over time people will learn that influencer lifestyles aren’t a good barometer of reality — that fancy Europe trips and cavernous mansions are as rare now as having a giant apartment in Manhattan was in the 1990s.
In the meantime, I suppose we can strive to make society more equal in other ways, so that lifestyle differences matter less. We can provide more public goods — nice parks, walkable streets, good transit, beautiful free public beaches. We might even be able to cultivate a culture like Japan’s, where most rich people are embarrassed to display too much wealth in public. And we can continue prodding young people to watch less TikTok and Instagram.
All of those solutions are, of course, predicated on social comparison actually being a major reason behind low economic satisfaction. It might not be. But it’s an important hypothesis we should consider.
There are some more modest middle-class influencers out there, like Emily Mariko, but the upper class seems to dominate — probably because people like looking at fancy expensive stuff.
2026-01-14 18:22:04
It’s a new year, so I’ve decided to change how I name these roundup posts. I’m retiring the name “At least five interesting things”, which is cumbersome and felt a little repetitive. Instead I’ll just call it “roundup”. I’m keeping the numbers for now, so people who want to link back to a specific roundup post can differentiate them.
Anyway, I’ve got a couple of fun podcasts for you, both about AI! The first is me and Liron Shapira on his podcast Doom Debates, talking about AI safety, and referencing my post on that topic from a few weeks ago:
The second podcast is with Jeff Schechtman, in which I make my case for techno-optimism and complain that Americans are too fearful of the future:
Anyway, on to this week’s roundup! Consistent with the theme of “Checking in on the bad guys”, let’s start with some items about the New Axis powers:
Everyone’s eyes are fixed on Iran’s protests and the regime’s brutal response to them, waiting to see if the Islamic Republic falls or manages to shoot its way out of this crisis. But it’s also interesting to take a look at the material roots of the unrest. Zineb Riboua has an article in The National Interest detailing some of the regime’s failures on the economic front. One key issue that relatively few outsiders seem to know about is the country’s water crisis:
Crucially, the regime’s failures are starkly visible in Iran’s accelerating water crisis, which has evolved from an environmental strain into a political fault line. A country of more than 90 million people is confronting its worst drought in over half a century, with collapsing aquifers, dried rivers, and water rationing spreading across cities and provinces. Instead of addressing decades of reckless dam construction and unsustainable agricultural policy, the regime has increasingly shifted blame outward. Iranian officials and state-aligned media have accused neighboring countries such as Turkey, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia of diverting rain clouds, and more recently have alleged that the United States and Israel are manipulating the weather.
Moreover, Iran’s water crisis directly contributes to prolonged power cuts that further intensify unrest. Power generation in Iran depends heavily on water-intensive infrastructure, leaving the grid vulnerable as reservoirs shrink. Chronic blackouts now disrupt daily life, turning infrastructure failure into immediate political anger and, alongside water shortages, accelerating mass unrest.
U.S. sanctions have also made a big impact. Iran has been forced into all kinds of alternative financing arrangements, and now sells most of its oil to China. This makes it a lot harder for Iran to pay for its military:
These constraints combined have produced a profoundly distorted budgetary structure. Iran’s national budget is effectively bifurcated between rial-denominated and crude-oil-denominated allocations. Because Iran cannot sell its oil through conventional financial channels, it increasingly uses oil as a substitute for cash, primarily to fund the security sector. The Ministry of Defense, for example, receives both rials and oil shipments, which it must then sell independently to finance weapons, operations, and support for proxy forces.
Sanctions have also forced Iran into a fairly classic currency crisis, with inflation spiraling out of control and causing all of the usual disruptions:
[I]nflation has reached crisis levels, with official data showing a rate of 42.2 percent in December 2025, up 1.8 percent from November, while food prices surged 72 percent and health and medical goods rose 50 percent year on year. Combined with a mismanaged water crisis, these pressures sharply raise the cost of basic necessities…[T]he erosion of pensions and savings forces households to abandon long-term planning and shift into survival mode…
Jared Malsin also has a good article in the WSJ about how the current economic unrest was triggered by a recent financial crisis:
Late last year, Ayandeh Bank, run by regime cronies and saddled with nearly $5 billion in losses on a pile of bad loans, went bust. The government folded the carcass into a state bank and printed a massive amount of money to try to paper over all the red ink…[T]he failure became both a symbol and an accelerant of an economic unraveling that ultimately triggered the protests…The country’s beleaguered currency, the rial, tipped into a new downward spiral the country had little ability to stop.
Both articles have plenty more interesting details.
In addition to a fascinating look into the anatomy of an emerging-market resource-exporter’s economic collapse, I think there are two big takeaways here. The first is that protracted sanctions on a country — especially a resource exporter — can succeed, but only after many years and a whole lot of pain and suffering. This has lessons for our sanctions on Russia — don’t expect quick results, and expect ordinary Russians to feel a lot of pain before it’s all over.
The second lesson is that broad-based unrest tends to require economic hardship. Students and urban middle classes may march in the streets for freedom and individual rights and democracy and such, but truly regime-threatening unrest, of the type we’re now seeing erupt all over Iran, typically requires the business class and the working class to both suffer hardship.
Last March I wrote about China’s attempts to kneecap Indian manufacturing. I linked to this Kyle Chan post:
India represents the most striking case of Beijing’s effort to shape the international behavior of Chinese firms…[A]cross a number of industries, Beijing seems to be discouraging Chinese firms making future plans to invest in India while also limiting the flow of workers and equipment…Beijing appears to be limiting Apple’s manufacturing partner Foxconn from bringing Chinese equipment and Chinese workers to India. Some of Foxconn’s Chinese workers in India were even told to return to China. This informal Chinese ban extends to other electronics firms working in India…Beijing has told Chinese automakers specifically not to invest in India…China has been reportedly blocking the export of Chinese solar equipment to India…[Tunnel boring machines] made in China by Germany’s Herrenknecht for export to India have been reportedly held up by Chinese customs.
In recent months, China has increasingly been using export controls — mostly on rare earth and battery technologies — to achieve its geopolitical and economic goals. Now it’s using these controls to try to prevent India from developing a battery industry:
Reliance Industries Ltd. has paused plans to make lithium-ion battery cells in India after failing to secure Chinese technology…The Mukesh Ambani-led oil-to-telecoms conglomerate, which had aimed to begin cell manufacturing this year, had been in discussions with a Chinese lithium iron phosphate supplier Xiamen Hithium Energy Storage Technology Co. to license cell technology…Those talks stalled after the Chinese company withdrew from the proposed partnership amid Beijing’s curbs on overseas technology transfers in key sectors…China has stepped up scrutiny of clean-energy technology deals as it seeks to protect strategic advantages in sectors.
This demonstrates, yet again, how batteries are an incredibly crucial strategic industry that much of the world has neglected. And it’s another example of how export controls are emerging as one of the most powerful tools of geoeconomics.
It also shows that despite all the BRICS talk, China views India as a strategic rival. China’s leaders are worried about India’s rise as a great power, given its huge size and its proximity to China. And since they view manufacturing as the font of all power — or at least, as their own key advantage — the idea that India could emerge as a rival manufacturing superpower keeps them up at night.
The United States, Japan, Korea, and Europe should see it as a core interest to make sure that India develops world-class manufacturing industries as soon as possible. Anything that keeps China’s leaders up at night is something that we probably want more of. Indians, of course, deserve the higher incomes and greater security that a world-class manufacturing sector would bring them.
Russia’s economy temporarily recovered from the initial dip it took at the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, and even grew at impressive rates of over 4% in 2023 and 2024. This prompted a lot of people to think that Russia’s economy had some sort of secret sauce — perhaps some combination of Elvira Nabiullina’s wise macroeconomic management and the mighty efforts of a nation pulling together to boost war production. It also prompted a widespread narrative that America and Europe’s sanctions on Russia were ineffectual.
But perhaps there was less to Russia’s resilience than meets the eye. A recent report by PeaceRep alleges that Russia has been understating its official inflation figures by quite a lot. The authors argue that more realistic inflation numbers show that Russia’s economy has been shrinking, rather than growing, since the start of the war:
[O]fficial [Russian] statistics show an increase in GDP and the real i.e. inflation-adjusted incomes of the working population. According to official data, in 2021–2024, Russia’s GDP grew by +7.1%, and real household income grew by an unprecedented +24.8%. These figures are however based on questionable official estimates of inflation at between 7.4% and 11.9% per annum in 2022–2024. The very tight monetary policy of the Central Bank of Russia and the growth of the monetary supply imply this official rate is underestimated…The likelihood that the inflation rate is higher than publicly reported is further suggested by sources such as the analytical agency ROMIR, which until September 2024 monitored consumer inflation in Russia, estimated inflation in 2022 at 33%, compared to the official rate of 11%…For the present report an alternative estimate for the inflation rate in 2022–2024 was developed…The results showed that in this period Russia’s GDP fell by 1.5%, while real household incomes declined by 5.3%. [emphasis mine]
And here are two key charts:
Remember, the easiest way to overstate your country’s economic growth is to understate its inflation.
And remember that this data ends in 2024. In 2025, the Russian economy came under increasing strain, as oil prices continued to fall:
Ukraine, meanwhile, has been destroying many of Russia’s oil refineries with long-range drone strikes, and is now going after the tankers that let Russia sell crude oil to China. And as Martin Sandbu writes, all the natural strains of a wartime economy are beginning to add up — labor shortages, fiscal deficits, and so on.
Things will get increasingly tough for Russia’s economy if the war continues much longer. Whether that’s enough to get Russia to stop its campaign of conquest is anybody’s guess.
John Johnson has a cool post about American domestic migration. Americans don’t move around much these days compared to the past, but there are some pretty clear patterns regarding where they’re moving away from and where they’re moving to:
Most notably, Americans are moving away from three regions:
California
The Mississippi Delta
The western Great Plains
It probably doesn’t take a genius to figure out why Americans are moving away from (2) and (3) here. The Mississippi Delta (technically the Mississippi Embayment) is America’s poorest region, and thus not a great place to live. The western Great Plains are devoid of thriving big cities, so there aren’t so many jobs, and people who want to live interesting urban lives tend to move elsewhere.
California is the real puzzler here — and the real tragedy. The conventional wisdom is that people are moving out of California because of high housing costs. Indeed, the state stands out on a map of house prices relative to income:
This pretty closely mirrors how much rent costs in each state.
What’s interesting is that New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, where housing is almost as expensive, aren’t seeing big outflows right now. Maybe that’s because people already moved away in earlier decades, while Californians hung on for a while because of the nice weather.
Another possibility, though, is that something is going deeply wrong with California’s economy. Since the pandemic, the state has been bleeding tech jobs:
This could be due to high housing costs driving people out of the state, or it could be due to the rise of remote work. Or it could be due to the tech industry’s clustering effect weakening, as clustering effects once weakened in manufacturing. In any case, it’s something California’s leaders ought to be very concerned about. The days when California could just bomb its residents with high housing costs and high taxes, and depend on sunny weather and clustering effects to keep everyone in the state, might be ending.
Jed Kolko has an interesting thread about hiring. Employment rates are still high, but hiring rates have fallen off a cliff:
Jed argues that this is not due to either Trump or to AI:
It's not Trump policies, and it's not AI…Hiring has been very low since 2024, and has flattened out. If it were AI, the hiring slowdown would have accelerated in 2025, rather than plunging earlier. If it were Trump policy, the slowdown would have started in 2025.
I’m not sure either of those conclusions is warranted. It’s possible that companies could see how good AI was getting back in 2024, and held off on hiring out of caution about how much better it might get. This is just standard-looking forward expectations. On the other hand, it’s also possible that hiring would have rebounded in 2025 if not for Trump’s tariffs and immigrant deportations.
But anyway, Jed’s theory is that companies over-hired during the latter part of the pandemic — the bubble of 2021:
The pandemic broke the relationship between hires and unemployment. Pre-pandemic, low hiring = high unemployment. No longer. In pandemic recovery, there was lots of hiring, followed by a steep drop as some firms overhired…We are still feeling the effects of the pandemic.
That’s a plausible explanation, but as I said, I wouldn’t rule out either AI or Trump.
I’ve written a lot about Indian development, but I rarely talk about what this means for the people of India themselves, in human terms. But it’s really pretty incredible and transformative. Ravi and Penumarty have a new paper summarizing the changes in durable goods ownership in India from 2012 to 2024, which gives a fascinating peek into how economic growth is changing the life of regular Indians. Here’s an infographic based on their data:
Even relatively low-income people in India now tend to own a fridge, a motorbike (or car), a mobile phone, and a TV. That was not true a decade ago.
Remember, as much as certain smug intellectuals like to sneer at and dismiss the idea of economic growth and of GDP, for people in poor countries, GDP is everything, and growth is the utterly transformative. India has been doing a good job of transforming its people’s lives, and it deserves our praise, encouragement, and support.
I’ve often written about how nuclear power will be a niche power source in the future — not useless, but not the way we produce most of our electricity. It’s also worth mentioning that I think wind power will also be niche. A recent post by X user Cremieux sums up a bullet-pointed list of reasons why wind will probably be marginal in our final energy mix. Key excerpts:
The bad:
- Generation is…stochastic…not deterministic [like] solar which comes and goes at predictable intervals
- Decay half life is too long for short-term storage (batteries, most pumped hydro)
- Decentralization without robustness…depending on geographical circumstances very fragmented grid topology may ensue
- Very low power density, amassing too much wind power in a small area considerably lowers total harvest (see North Sea)
- Very high intensity in rare earth minerals…
- Rather mediocre synergy with nuclear (unlike PV)
- High transport requirements
Basically, you don’t know when the wind will blow, but you do know more or less when the sun will shine. You also can’t cluster windmills too close together, or you use up all the wind. Those are really the key factors that make wind problematic as a power source. To this I’d add that A) the scaling curve for wind is much shallower than the one for solar, meaning that solar will keep getting better and better relative to wind over time, and B) the total land use requirements for wind farms are huge, which makes siting and permitting difficult, even though you can use the land between the wind turbines for other stuff.
Ramez Naam, my favorite futurist, and the man who predicted the age of solar far in advance, agrees with Cremieux’s points, but argues convincingly that wind will retain an important niche role in our future energy mix:
The US has tremendously better wind resources on land than Germany or most of Europe…
Wind doesn't pair nearly as well as solar with short duration (hours) of storage. It does pair very well with natural gas, though, and ends up saving a lot in fuel costs…
As we electrify heat, the electricity system on almost every continent will move to having a peak of demand in winter as opposed to summer today (due to AC) for the US. That is a challenge for solar. Wind and solar and complementary over the scale of seasons. Wind is lowest in summer when solar is strongest. Wind is stronger in fall and winter, and at its strongest in spring.
So wind, like nuclear, will still have its uses.
Over the past decade, there has been a lot of work devoted to “metascience” — the idea that in order to re-accelerate scientific progress and make it cheaper, we ought to change the outdated way that we fund scientific research. The Institute for Progress has been at the forefront of documenting and pushing forward that intellectual enterprise.
Now, IFP’s Caleb Watney reports on a big initiative to turn some of those ideas into reality. The NSF is shifting some of its funding outside academia:
A new [National Science Foundation] initiative called Tech Labs will invest up to $1 billion over the next five years in large-scale long-term funding to teams of scientists working outside traditional university structures…
For most of the postwar era, federally funded science has been built around a simple model…small, project-based federal grants mostly to individual scientists…But the science that shapes our world, from particle physics to protein design to advanced materials, increasingly requires massive data sets, large integrated teams and sustained institutional support…
The current structure is built for discrete projects rather than missions. When research requires long-term continuity, interdisciplinary collaboration or substantial shared infrastructure, it’s often difficult for it to fit into this structure…Rather than funding isolated projects, the [Tech Labs funding structure] would provide flexible, multiyear institutional grants in the range of $10 million to $50 million a year to coordinated research organizations that operate outside the constraints of university bureaucracy. These could include university-adjacent entities such as the Arc Institute or fully independent teams with focused missions.
This is really promising, and I’m excited to see how it plays out.
But I’m also wondering if the rise of AI science will open up another parallel avenue for rapid innovation by lone scientists or small teams working outside the academy — such as when some people used AI to solve some difficult outstanding math problems this past week. Maybe the NSF should also try giving some people grants to see how far they can push ultra-fast small-scale independent research, too.
In any case, I’m just glad to see our institutions taking metascience seriously, and trying new things.
2026-01-13 17:40:38
“Damn it feels good to be a gangsta/ Gettin' voted into the White House” — Geto Boys
I recently listened to an audiobook about the Napoleonic Wars. Overall, the book wasn’t very good, but there was one interesting part where it described Napoleon’s ruling style as being mafia-like. His insistence that other European countries buy French exports, his attempts to shut Britain out of European trade, and a bunch of his other economic policies were fundamentally gangster-ish — they were ad hoc impositions of personal power, often with an eye toward taking revenge on personal enemies and entrenching his own authority.
I immediately recognized this as Donald Trump’s style of governance. Like Napoleon, Trump’s top priority isn’t creating durable institutions that will outlive him — indeed, he regards any such institutions as threats to his own personal power. Many observers have labeled this approach “personalism” or “patrimonialism”, but it’s really just gangsterism. Trump treats America like a mafia organization, and himself as the godfather.
That’s what I thought about when I watched this remarkable video from Fed Chair Jerome Powell:
Powell reveals that Trump’s Justice Department has been investigating the Fed, with an eye to pressuring the Fed to cut interest rates:
On Friday, the Department of Justice [threatened] a criminal indictment related to…a multi-year project to renovate historic Federal Reserve office buildings.
I have deep respect for the rule of law and for accountability in our democracy. No one—certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve—is above the law. But…This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings…The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.
This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.
This is remarkable and unprecedented. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the Federal Reserve. Powell is a consummate professional, who cares only about doing his job, and would only make a statement like this under extreme duress.
If a guy like Powell is accusing Trump of threatening lawsuits over interest rate policy, you know he’s not just going on a hunch or spinning a conspiracy theory — there must have been some very explicit backchannel communications from the White House indicating that the Fed could avoid a DOJ lawsuit by lowering interest rates.
This fulfills my pre-election prediction that Trump would spend much of his second term feuding with the nation’s institutions, and that the Fed would be a prime target. The shape of Trump’s strategy against the institutions is now clear. His two main weapons are A) executive orders, and B) DOJ lawsuits. He obeys the courts when they rule against him, but follows none of the traditional norms of the executive branch, using the DOJ and other administrative agencies as arms of his personal political machine. Trump has used this approach against law firms and media organizations that have challenged him, and now he’s running the same playbook against the Fed. It’s all very Napoleonic — which is a nice way of saying it’s gangster-ish.
The more interesting question is what Trump hopes to accomplish by forcing the Fed to cut rates. The conventional wisdom is that Trump is worried about a recession, possibly caused by his own tariffs, and wants rate cuts in order to boost the economy and employment. According to this theory, Trump is basically what I call a “macro-progressive” — he fears unemployment, and he doesn’t worry too much that low rates will cause inflation.
That’s consistent with Trump’s massive binge of deficit spending. Like the progressives at think tanks like the Roosevelt Institute, Trump may believe that inflation is best controlled with administrative measures, supply expansions, and price controls, rather than by the more traditional tools of high interest rates and fiscal austerity.
But I’m beginning to think there’s also something else going on here. Trump’s populist instincts are still strong. He knows that affordability, not jobs, is the American public’s main economic concern right now. For example, here’s a Gallup poll from last month:
General concern over “the economy” takes the top spot as usual, but worries about inflation and the cost of living top worries about unemployment, by a lot. In fact, inflation is the thing that voters seem to be most upset at Trump about, specifically:
Whether he’s concerned about the midterms, worried about his legacy, or intends to try for a third term, Trump knows that the best thing for his popularity would be to bring living costs down.
He also must know that this is easier said than done. Usually, reducing the cost of living means holding down the rate of inflation, so that wages outpace prices over time. But there’s evidence showing that many Americans expect the government to actually drive prices down, rather than just curbing the rate at which they go up:
Driving prices down is normally very hard to do without causing a recession. But a few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how there are actually some prices that the government could feasibly bring down:
I’m starting to think Trump read my post!1 The prices I mentioned are exactly the prices that Trump has targeted with a recent spate of highly unorthodox measures. The attacks on the Fed might be part of this strategy, because one of the items I mentioned is the price of credit.
In his own gangster-ish way, Trump may be trying to bring Americans the affordability they demand. The problem is that the gangster approach can have grave long-term costs in terms of economic stability and efficiency. Like Napoleon, Trump may be headed for a series of boondoggles and quagmires.
2026-01-11 10:27:39
“What if you knew her and/ Found her dead on the ground/ How can you run when you know” — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
I am neither a forensic expert nor a jury member, but it sure looks to me like an ICE agent shot and killed a woman who wasn’t threatening his life. We have video of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7th, and the Washington Post has a detailed blow-by-blow analysis of the video:
In the aftermath [of the killing], Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said [Renee Good] had committed an act of “domestic terrorism,” first disobeying officers’ commands and then weaponizing her SUV by attempting to “run a law enforcement officer over.” President Donald Trump said the woman “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer.”
A frame-by-frame analysis of video footage, however, raises questions about those accounts. The SUV did move toward the ICE agent as he stood in front of it. But the agent was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the vehicle as it veered past him…
The agent…can be seen standing behind Good’s SUV…The agent then walks around the passenger side…[T]wo additional agents…approach Good…A voice can be heard saying to “get out” of the car at least two times. One of the agents puts a hand on the opening of the driver’s side window and with his other hand tugs twice quickly on the door handle, but the driver’s door does not open…[T]he SUV begins to back up…
The agent who was first seen behind Good’s SUV reemerges in front of the vehicle…The SUV quickly pulls forward, and then veers to the right, in the correct direction of traffic on the one-way street…As the vehicle moves forward, video shows, the agent moves out of the way and at nearly the same time fires his first shot. The footage shows that his other two shots were fired from the side of the vehicle.
For more details surrounding the incident, and for the full video, check out the Washington Post article. Here’s a frame-by-frame analysis by Bellingcat:
Here’s another link where you can see videos of the incident from three different angles. Here’s a good post analyzing the videos in detail. Here’s an assessment by a 25-year ICE veteran whose job was to evaluate shootings by the agency.
It’s not clear whether Good meant to hit the ICE agent with her car, or meant to threaten to hit him, when she briefly pulled forward before driving away. Nor is it clear why Good was interacting with the agents in the first place. What does seem clear is that when the agent fired his second and third shots at Good, he was standing to the side of her car, and thus was not directly threatened by the car. Cars cannot drive sideways.
Again, I’m not a jury member, but my understanding of the law is that if you’re not defending yourself from a threat, you’re not allowed to kill someone. It’s possible that the agent — now identified as Jonathan Ross — fired those second and third shots at Good in retaliation for a threat on his life that had already passed. (The first shot was fired from diagonally in front of the car, where it might have been possible for Good to hit Ross.)
That’s just about the most charitable interpretation possible. But if someone threatens you and then runs away, you’re not allowed to shoot them in the back as they run. That’s not self defense.
And of course, there are more uncharitable interpretations here. It’s possible Ross shot Good on a pretext of self defense, because he was simply angry at her for refusing his demands to open the car door, or because she was trying to film him. One of the ICE officers can be heard yelling a vulgar insult at Good.1
Under normal circumstances, I suppose Ross might be prosecuted for manslaughter or something like that. But ICE has been heavily politicized, and so the Trump administration leapt doggedly to Ross’ defense. Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security called Good a “terrorist”, and Trump, lying as usual, said that Good had “run over the ICE officer”. But it’s Vice President JD Vance who has been the most dogged and vociferous in his defense of Ross and vilification of Renee Good:
The Vice President’s claim that the shots were fired from the front of the car is pretty clearly false. He also repeatedly talked about ICE agents “going door to door” to deport illegal immigrants — pretty clearly ignoring the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures”.
Vance’s reception on social media — even from the kind of “tech right” types that are usually his fans — was largely negative. Here’s a fairly representative tweet:
That mirrors the overall mood in the country. Here’s Axios, two days after the killing in Minnesota:
Americans now disapprove of ICE and support protests against the agency, according to a new poll conducted the same day a federal officer fatally shot a 37-year-old mother in Minneapolis…A YouGov poll of over 2,600 U.S. adults on Jan. 7, found people don’t like the way ICE operates…About 52% either somewhat or strongly disapproved of how ICE was handling its job, compared to 39% who somewhat or strongly approved…Just 27% said the agency’s tactics were “about right” compared to 51% who called them “too forceful”. Another 10% said they were “not forceful enough.”…A 44% plurality of adults approved of recent ICE protests, while 42% disapproved…ICE had a +16 net approval rating last February at the start of Trump’s second term, according to YouGov…That rating cratered over the year to -14[.]
Two days is probably far too early for the killing of Good to have shifted national opinion radically. The negative drift in views toward ICE is probably due to their consistent record of brutality, aggression, dubious legality, and unprofessionalism in Trump’s second term.
Here’s a video of ICE agents in Arkansas beating up an unarmed U.S. citizen. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. Here’s a story about a similar arrest. Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting a man for yelling at them from his own front porch. Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. Here’s a story about another ICE killing, this one in Maryland, under dubious circumstances. Here’s a video of ICE agents savagely beating and arresting a legal immigrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents storming a private home without a warrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents pulling a disabled woman out of a car when she’s just trying to get to the doctor.
These are all things I noticed on X within just the last two days. There has been a pretty constant stream of these for months. Here’s a roundup of some others, by Jeremiah Johnson:
For the past year, ICE has been involved in a series of escalating incidents that rarely result in repercussions for anyone involved. ICE agents have recklessly caused traffic accidents and then, in one incident, arrested the person whose car they hit. They’ve tear-gassed a veteran, arrested him, and denied him access to medical care and an attorney. They have attacked protesters merely for filming them in public. They’ve pepper-sprayed a fleeing onlooker in the eyes from a foot away. They’ve pointed guns at a 6-year-old. They’ve knelt on top of a pregnant woman while they arrested her. They have arrested another pregnant woman, then kept her separated from her newborn while she languished in custody. They have repeatedly arrested American citizens, and they’ve even reportedly deported a citizen, directly contradicting court orders.
These are anecdotes, but there have also been careful, systematic reports about ICE arrests and mistreatment of U.S. citizens and poor conditions in ICE detention centers.
The Wall Street Journal also reviewed some other videos and other records of ICE shootings, and found a similar pattern to the Renee Good killing:
The Wall Street Journal has identified 13 instances of agents firing at or into civilian vehicles since July, leaving at least eight people shot with two confirmed dead…The Journal reviewed public records—court documents, agency press releases and gun-violence databases—of vehicle shootings involving immigration agents, though video is only publicly available for four of them…The Minneapolis shooting shares characteristics with others the Journal reviewed: Agents box in a vehicle, try to remove an individual, block attempts to flee, then fire.
Instead of causing ICE agents to pause in consternation, the killing of Renee Good appears to have made many even more aggressive. Here’s a video of an ICE agent in Minnesota telling a protester “Have y’all not learned from the past coupla days?”. Here’s a video of an ICE agent kicking over candles at a memorial for Renee Good.
Perhaps this is unsurprising, given the ultra-low standards for recruitment and training of ICE agents under Trump:
A deadly shooting in Minneapolis at the hands of a federal immigration officer comes weeks after a bombshell report on President Donald Trump’s desperate drive to rush 10,000 deportation officers onto the payroll by the end of 2025.
The explosive Daily Mail report found that the administration's $50,000 signing bonus attracted droves of unqualified recruits — high school grads who can "barely read or write," overweight candidates with doctor's notes saying they're unfit, and even applicants with pending criminal charges…[O]ne Department of Homeland Security official [said]: "We have people failing open-book tests and we have folks that can barely read or write English."
Jeremiah Johnson has more:
Reporting shows that ICE is filled with substandard agents. Its aggressive push to hire more agents uses charged rhetoric that appeals to far-right groups, but the agency has run into problems with recruits unable to pass background checks or meet minimum standards for academic background, personal fitness, or drug usage. One career ICE agent called new recruits “pathetic,” according to The Atlantic, and a current Department of Homeland Security official told NBC News that “There is absolutely concern that some people are slipping through the cracks,” and being inadvertently hired.
It’s worth noting, though, that Jonathan Ross himself is well-trained, with plenty of experience in law enforcement and military combat operations. So it’s not always a matter of poor training.
A number of Republican politicians have defended ICE’s actions with rhetoric that sounds downright authoritarian. Texas Representative Wesley Hunt said: “The bottom line is this: when a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life.” Florida Representative Randy Fine said: “If you get in the way of the government repelling a foreign invasion, you’re going to end up just like that lady did.”
Is this America now? A country where unaccountable and poorly trained government agents go door to door, arresting and beating people on pure suspicion, and shooting people who don’t obey their every order or who try to get away? “When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and then you get to keep your life” is a perfect description of an authoritarian police state. None of this is Constitutional, every bit of it is deeply antithetical to the American values we grew up taking for granted.
This tweet really seems to sum it up:
Why is this happening? Part of it is because of the mistakes of the Biden administration. For the first three years of his presidency, Biden allowed a massive, disorderly flood of border-hopping asylum seekers and quasi-legal migrants of all types to pour into the country, and as a result, Americans got really, really mad. That made immigration into a major issue in the 2024 election, helped Trump get elected, and provided political cover for a dramatic expansion of deportations. Now, probably thanks to ICE’s brutality and the administration’s lawlessness, support for immigrants and disapproval of Trump’s immigration policies are rising again. But the administration still has what it considers a mandate to act with impunity.
The deeper reason, though, is the ideology of the MAGA movement. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that most Trump supporters view immigration as a literal invasion of the United States — not a figurative “invasion”, but a literal attempted conquest of America by foreigners. This is from an Ipsos poll in early 2025:
And a substantial percentage of these folks believe that the purpose of this “invasion” is to “replace” the existing American population. This is from a PRRI poll from late 2024:
One-third of Americans (33%) agree with the “Great Replacement Theory,” or the idea that immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background. The majority of Americans (62%) disagree with this theory. Agreement with this theory has decreased by 3 percentage points from 36% in 2019…Six in ten Republicans (60%) agree with the “Great Replacement Theory,” compared with 30% of independents and 14% of Democrats. Among Republicans, those who hold a favorable view of Trump are more likely than those who hold an unfavorable view to agree that immigrants are invading our country (68% vs. 32%).
Perhaps some think that this “Great Replacement” is only cultural or partisan/political — the DHS recruits agents with a call to “Defend your culture!” — but many clearly think it’s racial in nature. The DHS recently posted this image:
100 million is far more than the total number of immigrants in the United States (which is estimated at around 52 million). Instead, it’s close to the total number of nonwhite people in the country. So the idea of “100 million deportations” clearly goes well beyond the idea of deporting illegal immigrants, and well beyond the idea of deporting all immigrants, into the territory of ethnic cleansing.
The DHS is posting these memes as a recruitment tactic, and polls about the “Great Replacement” show that there’s a large pool of potential recruits to whom this rhetoric is likely to appeal. In other words, many of the ICE agents now going around kicking in doors, beating up and threatening protesters, arresting citizens on pure suspicion, and occasionally shooting people believe that they are engaged in a race war. Many of them probably agree with Elon Musk’s assessment that White people have to maintain demographic dominance in order to avoid becoming an oppressed minority:
Musk is obviously thinking of his native South Africa. But this kind of politics is now commonplace in the United States as well. Observers of right-wing politics in America have noted the rise of sentiments like this. This hatred is likely fueling the brutality that ICE is displaying in the streets.
To be fair, the Great Replacement ideology didn’t arise out of nowhere. It’s an irrational and panicky overreaction that will lead America down the road to disaster — it’s full of hate and lies, it’s inherently divisive, it’s associated with some of history’s most horrible regimes, and it’s being promoted by some very bad actors. But it has also been egged on by a progressive movement that has made anti-white discrimination in hiring a pillar of its approach to racial equity, and has normalized anti-white rhetoric in the public sphere. This was an unforced error by the left — one of many over the past decade.
But whoever started America’s stupid race war, the real question is who will stand up and end it. The GOP, and the MAGA movement specifically, was offered a golden off-ramp from this dark path. In 2020 and 2024, Hispanic Americans, along with some Asian and Black Americans, shifted strongly toward Trump and the GOP. This was a perfect opportunity for the GOP to make itself, in the words of Marco Rubio, a “multiracial working-class” party. This would have been similar to how Nixon and Reagan expanded the GOP coalition to include “white ethnics” that the GOP had spurned in the early 20th century. But instead, MAGA took the victory handed to them by nonwhite voters and used it to act like exactly the kind of white-nationalist race warriors that liberals had always insisted they were.
I doubt that Donald Trump himself thinks of his administration as prosecuting a race war. He is certainly a nativist — he disdains immigrants from countries like Somalia, and believes that they’re “poisoning the blood of our country” — but at the same time he accepts America’s basic status as a multiracial nation. He has targeted many of his appeals toward Black and Hispanic voters, arguing that they, too, are threatened by waves of illegal immigrants and refugees from poor countries.
But Trump is an old man, and the younger generation was raised not on mid-20th-century nationalist rhetoric but on right-wing social media and memes. When Trump is gone, the MAGA movement will cease to be defined by his personal charisma, and will start being defined by the ideology of the Great Replacement — the same ideology that is now motivating many of the ICE agents acting like thugs in the streets of America.
And it’s increasingly clear that JD Vance, understanding that he lacks Trump’s cult of personality, has decided to make himself the leader, voice, and avatar of the “Great Replacement” movement — even if this arouses the disgust of many traditional conservatives and some figures in the tech right. With the disarray of the Democrats and the weakness of other GOP factions, Vance’s move may be a smart political bet, even if it comes at the expense of American freedom and stability.
The only thing left for America to do now is to fight against this ideology. There is no future for a country that declares a third of its people to be illegitimate, and which deploys authoritarian force to intimidate and expel as many of them as possible. Instead, Americans have to insist that the Trump administration stop these abuses, and they have to vote against any politician who embraces the ideology that led to them. Otherwise, events like the killing of Renee Good are likely to become a normal occurrence.
As she drove away, Good said to the officer: “It’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you.” Those would prove to be her last words.
