It’s ‘Finding Out Time’ for the American People - Part One

Expect Trump to Defy the Courts

Samuel L Jackson played Uncle Sam as the narrator in Kendrick Lamar’s Superbowl halftime show, which drove MAGAts crazy.

Back in the days of Trump v1.0 we had designated weeks where stuff was supposed to happen. Who could forget “infrastructure week,” which seemingly had more lives than the fable about cats' longevity?

This time around, the regime has an actual plan (Project 2025, amended) and a desired goal: replacing the framework supporting a representative democracy with algorithmic governance controlled by an individual cast in the mold of corporate CEO.

This aspect of what Elon Musk’s DOGE dogs are undertaking involves creating the infrastructure for techno-solutionic processes. The constraining influences of society will be repurposed to serve the needs of our new masters, which necessitates quashing whatever is left of individual privacy.

No longer will policies aimed at influencing constituencies be generalized; they will be individualized, much like what most of the internet does today.

Late last year, in preparation for a vacation involving a lot of walking, I did some online research about what should be comfortable shoes.

Ads for various companies selling products along the lines of Sketcher shoes still dominate virtually every internet site I visit. (I double checked this morning. Apparently I’m still shopping for shoes. I did one search looking at clogs back then, which apparently aren’t manly enough these days, so now I’m getting the added bonus of women’s footwear.)

On the one hand, the government (this predates Trump) has ventured into purchasing commercially available data covering millions of Americans. Asking for someone’s phone records requires a warrant; buying easily sortable “anonymized” allows law enforcement to “identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records.”

How do I know this? The government told us so. Avril Haines, the former director of national intelligence, declassified a report in 2023 prepared by an advisory panel, detailing the size and scope of the government’s effort to accumulate data.

Via Wired:

• The report notes: “The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits. Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation.”

• The government must appreciate that all of this unfettered access can quickly increase its own power “to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations,” the advisers say, even if it can't blind itself to the fact that all this information exists and is readily sold for a buck.

Although DOGE’s intrusions in computer systems at most federal agencies (labor excepted, due to a improperly prepared legal brief) are supposedly paused by court rulings, the size and scope of what has already been gathered boggles the mind. Here are a sampling of examples:

• Data about millions of Americans and government employees, including Social Security numbers, medical records, financial data, and detailed personal histories

• Information about law enforcement and intelligence services personnel, intelligence operations, defense strategies, and critical infrastructure.

• Treasury systems with extensive financial records of individuals, businesses, and governmental entities, including tax records, banking transactions, and detailed financial histories. Those systems play a key role in enforcing economic sanctions, tracking illicit financial flows, and supporting intelligence operations related to counterterrorism and anti-money laundering.

• The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) IT systems data, with healthcare information for over 100 million Americans enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. This data includes personally identifiable information such as Social Security numbers, medical histories, treatment records, billing information, prescription drug use, and even genetic data in some cases.

• Data from the Education Department including personally identifiable information for people who manage grants, student loans, as well as sensitive internal financial data.

Here’s the deal. Not only are they stealing all information, they’re feeding it into as yet unknown AI systems, using unsecured software, on computers of unknown origin. And there isn’t an expert who's looked at this process without mentioning the probability of creating a ‘backdoor,’ allowing unmonitored future access.

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As important as the data DOGE is acquiring, is the information being deleted from the government’s vast storehouse of knowledge. Trump fired the director of the National Archive, not because she aided the investigation into purloined classified documents (happened before she arrived), but because he could. And because rewriting history will be a big part of consolidating and maintaining power in the near future.

This wiping the records is already having consequences. Employees at the Betsy DeVos-run Department of Education (Trump’s first term) who attended certain seminars addressing now forbidden issues have been suspended without cause.

The National Security Agency, the nation’s ear on the world, is having “delete day” , with 27 words, no matter what the context, being deleted on public, secured, and ultra secret mission reports.

If Russian President Putin was captured in audio saying forces fighting in Ukraine are “inclusive” of North Korean soldiers, that recording would qualify for erasure.

From Popular Information:

• The NSA is trying to identify mission-related sites before the "Big Delete" is executed but appears to lack the personnel to do so. The NSA's internal network has existed since the 1990s, and a manual review of the content is impractical. Instead, the NSA is working with "Data Science Development Program interns" to "understand the false-positive use cases" and "help generate query options that can better minimize false-positives." Nevertheless, the NSA is anticipating "unintended downtime" of "mission-related" websites.

• While Trump's executive order claims to target "illegal and immoral discrimination programs," the NSA's banned-word list demonstrates that the implementation is far broader. The Trump administration is attempting to prohibit any acknowledgment that racism, stereotypes, and bias exist. The ban is so sweeping that "confirmation bias" — the tendency of people "to accept or notice information if it appears to support what they already believe or expect" — is included, even though it has nothing to do with race or gender.

Congress member Sarah Jacobs is alerting constituents that Health and Human Services has scrubbed information on HIPAA protections for reproductive rights on its website.

• Look – we don’t know for sure why they’re doing this. But we can certainly make an educated guess:

• The only reasonable explanation for this information being removed is that the Trump Administration plans to roll back medical privacy protections for reproductive health data – a move clearly designed to make it easier for law enforcement to access women’s abortion records.

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This will be the week where the Trump administration starts ignoring court orders, showing the world that the United States is a place where the rule of law with no ability to enforce it is no rule at all.

• But Vice President JD Vance is already floating the idea that the administration should simply ignore those lawful court rulings. Over on X, Vance declared yesterday that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” He also reposted tradcath conservative Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule’s complaint that a ruling barring the DOGE rampage through Treasury’s payment systems was “judicial interference with legitimate acts of state” and a violation of the separation of powers.

• Sen. Tom Cotton, meanwhile, called for the Obama appointee who issued that ruling, Judge Paul Engelmeyer, to be “forbidden by higher courts from ever hearing another case against the Trump admin.”

• The administration's stance appears to literally be that federal laws are irrelevant in the face of Trump’s wishes and the courts can’t stop him. If Congress and the judiciary no longer check or balance the executive branch, no separation of powers is left. That’s a complete rewiring of America. That’s tearing democracy down to the studs and rebuilding something entirely different and much worse in its place.

There’s much more coming this week, especially with the implementation of tariffs on steel and aluminum, but I think I’ll stop here today.

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I want to give a shout out to all the patriotic Americans who protested the Trump administration’s immigration policies, twice in downtown on Sunday and San Marcos on Friday. And to Kendrick Lamar, whose complex and well executed halftime show is one for the record books. (Plus it made MAGA keyboard warriors go ballistic) His genre isn’t a big part of my personal stylebook, but ya gotta respect brilliance, wherever it comes from.

The Square One Fallacy by Jonathan Jarry at mcgill.ca

• When I criticized one of the biggest podcasts in recent memory, The Telepathy Tapes, I was contacted by a number of well-meaning parents of nonverbal autistic children who asked me a very simple question. Shouldn’t we study this? Why are scientists afraid of doing research into this? Why has this been ignored for so long?

• RFK Jr. himself has invoked this argument when he has testified to his desire to move money away from research into infectious diseases and into chronic diseases, as if scientists had never thought to look into diabetes and heart disease.

• The square one fallacy is arguing that we have no data to illuminate a particular question, that we’re starting from scratch, when there is an actual body of evidence that we are ignoring, either deliberately or cluelessly. It’s contending that we need to study something that has already been studied, sometimes to death.

• It is related to (and might be a subset of) what we call “just asking questions” or “JAQing off,” when someone pretends to want to know more but ignores the answers to keep on badgering an expert with the same question, over and over. A person “just asking questions” doesn’t want to be pinned down to a specific position; they’re simply playing Devil’s advocate ad nauseum without contending with the answers provided.

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Trump May Wish to Abolish the Past. We Historians Will Not. by David W. Blight, Beth English, James Grossman at New Republic

• Could many of our most prominent history centers and museums be scrutinized for their devotion to “accurate, honest,” and “unifying” history as narrowly defined by the order? Will this administration revisit the National Park Service’s thoughtful and informed approaches to American history? Will it shut down the more than 20 Civil War battlefield sites, visited by thousands, since those visitors may learn something about how slavery destroyed the republic and ushered in a brutal, divisive memory embedded in how Americans have sought to reconcile that war?

• Historians differ in our understandings of the past. We do not differ in our commitment to evidence or the integrity of our discipline. We urge our colleagues and all citizens committed to democracy to speak out against those who truly seek indoctrination, to advocate for good history. Our society has never needed us quite as much as now.

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Trump to pause enforcement of law banning bribery of foreign officials by Eamon Havers at CNBC

• President Donald Trump is set Monday to sign an executive order directing the Department of Justice to pause enforcing a nearly half-century-old law that prohibits American companies and foreign firms from bribing officials of foreign governments to obtain or retain business.

• The pause in criminal prosecutions will be implemented to avoid putting U.S. businesses at an economic disadvantage to foreign competitors.

• The Bloomberg news service first reported the planned executive order related to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Bloomberg reported that Trump will tell Attorney General Pam Bondi to pause FCPA actions, and to review current and past actions related to the law, while preparing new guidelines for enforcement.