Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1476
A sweet academia dream, and a very detailed plan for prosecuting the criminals in our government while maintaining rule of law. It involves Johnston Atoll.
Good morning good morning. Just back from dropping Jane off. Mostly went well, gonna take a couple days to get back into the groove of our routine after a week with Mama. Went to the grocery store. Zevia is $4.99 a six-pack, very exciting. The latest edition of that lovely union-supporting grocery newsletter I extolled last week has a segment on Zevia this week. Apparently the author was involved in its launch. I love him even more now. Wait, is it a him? I assume Errol is a man. But who knows. Also, great segment on my local Lowe’s Foods in this week’s edition as well. Not quite the banger as the Trader Joe’s edition, but still very solid.
Had academia dreams last night. Sorta a mix of Wonder Boys, Oppenheimer, Real Genius and the Arizona parts of Watchmen. Lots of grad student drama and sex and star pupils disappearing into government programs and parties with professors and a hidden lab underneath Central Park that was the continuation of the lab of a famous 19th century Oxford professor whose lab assistants kept it running and kept applying for new grants for hundreds of years and no one noticed. The whole dream was awesome, A+, best dream I’ve had in years and I want to go back to bed.
Did a full day of work yesterday and then a pool/storage meeting and then we had an unexpected guest, Ashley visiting from Boston, that was lovely but between jetlag and Jane pickup and the partner meeting I only got an hour to socialize but it was still nice.
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So I have been thinking. Even if you assume, as I do, we are inevitably going to win, we are going to have to give some serious thoughts to the mechanics of taking back the country. What Trump is doing is working for two big reasons:
He had ICE, a ready-made, pro-Trump, fascist organization sitting there ready to go, waiting for his orders, hiding in plain sight within the US government. We knew this, we did nothing about it, it should have been abolished or completely re-worked. It goes without saying at this point that the very first thing a new Democratic president needs to do is fire everyone in ICE even remotely related to all this shit. Ideally jail them, but item number one is get them out of positions of power.
He had a team ready to go to walk into the DOJ and take it over, and knew exactly who in that organization was a fellow-traveler and ready to go.
It is a sad, but undeniable fact that it will be a miserable long journey to get the DOJ back to “politics free,” not that it ever was, not that it maybe ever should be again. But prior to being elected, the Dems have to know exactly how they are going to retake ICE and the DOJ with a minimum of hassle, and it is going to take a fine balancing act: we will need to hire people that know the organizations and have some semblance of trust from within those organizations, but also are utterly unafraid to completely remake them and demand everyone there get on board with it.
Once that is done, we will need to immediately start prosecuting Trump and his cronies. I propose several concrete steps:
1) Get going right away on the pre-Trump 2.0 charges that Garland was too chicken or slow to prosecute: the documents case and the insurrection case. Arrest Trump immediately and indict him on those charges. Refuse bail. Get the ball rolling.
(There may also be a need, early on, to rely on certain states’ law enforcement systems to actually apprehend these people, because it is not clear any part of the current Federal government would actually show up to arrest Trump.)
(But a great thing is that if he leaves the country, we can issue an international arrest warrant and boy will a lot of countries be super eager to fulfill that, so, you know, negates one of his probable post-presidential actions.)
2) While that is happening, prepare dozens, nay, hundreds of additional charges for every single little goddamn thing law that he has broken. This is one of those things I assume someone is doing but honestly, they’re probably not because Dems are dum: we need to be keeping a detailed list of every single crime, and the basic evidence that will be required to indict. Everything. You know how yesterday he said “we cannot give trials to everyone?” Treason indictment. Go big. All of them. All the fucking bribes. All the crypto and securities fraud. We won’t win them all but we will do these trials one by one for years and we will win a lot of them. Because he does crimes. Shit, he brags about doing crimes.
3) The new president needs to declare a new terrorist organization: SICs: Supporters of the Insurrection and Coup. Use the current legal frameworks for these and go to fucking town.
4) Issue an executive order saying there will be no bail and no exemption and direct the entire government that every single crime of the last administration will be prosecuted. Say that you will do this within the constraints of the law, but no crime will be overlooked, no crime will be forgiven.
All your messaging must focus on rule of law. Everything is rule of law, rule of law, rule of law. Due process due process due process.
5) Kill the filibuster dead. This is important because I assume, if there is another election, we will win the presidency and the house. Maaaybe we take the senate, but barely. So we will need that to not stop things. The filibuster is a Republican tool, they need it more than we do, and it is necessary to get rid of it. In some great post-Trump-cleanse compromise, maybe we can discuss bringing it back. But for now, it has to go. Because:
6) Congress passes a law setting up a special tribunal for fast-tracking SIC trials. State that you are doing this to ensure that the defendents get their constitutional rights to speedy trials. This court will have one and only one avenue of appeal: the Supreme Court. They will have rights to jury trials if they want, but they can also waive them. We could even do some showy thing where we do trials in each of the judicial districts so he can’t say we’re using all liberal juries. Because why not. There are a lot of crimes and plenty of obvious ones. We are going to win the vast majority of these.
7) (The order between 6 and 7 is flexible given the politics on the ground but I suspect doing 5 before 6 is the way to go). Reform the Supreme Court according to Elie Mystal’s wisdom. This is absolute. We fucked up majorly not doing this last time and we need to do it this time. Twelve to twenty justices, randomly assigned to cases, fixed terms.
8) I have given a lot of thought to this. The very tempting thing to do is to send them all to a prison in El Salvador for holding and for their sentences, but I think that is the wrong move, as viscerally satisfying as it would be. I don’t think Bukele would play ball in a reliable way. It would undermine our moral legitimacy. It would be a hassle. But at the same time, these SIC fucks (see how good that is?) should not be held in our normal prison system, and they should not have access to the media in an easy way. But we do have to maintain legality, that is the defining difference between us and them. So, after considering Guantanamo Bay (tempting but needs to be closed and still has a whiff of Republican extrajudicialness), I started focusing on our territories. Agrihan was tempting, as was Wake Island (maybe Peacock Point), Utirik Atol, Midway Island, Palyra Atoll… All of them have their merits and I think Midway could work, since it already has a decent military infrastructure. Palyra has a poetic justice to it but it is too remote, no defense, and you gotta deal with the Nature Conservancy fuck those guys.
So in the end, I think the best move is to send em all to Johnston Atoll. There is a runway. There is a strong, concrete command structure. It isn’t too far from Hawaii and thus can be patrolled and supplied. It is in the US so we are not going extrajudicial. And we were going to sell it anyway:
The atoll was placed up for auction via the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) in 2005 before it was withdrawn. The stripped Johnston Island was briefly offered for sale with several deed restrictions in 2005 as a "residence or vacation getaway," with potential usage for "eco-tourism" by the GSA's Office of Real Property Utilization and Disposal. The proposed sale included the unique postal zip code 96558, formerly assigned to the Armed Forces in the Pacific. The proposed sale did not include running water, electricity, or activation of the closed runway. The details of the offering were outlined on GSA's website and in a newsletter of the Center for Land Use Interpretation as unusual real estate listing # 6384, Johnston Island.[73][74]
(I spent like three hours figuring out exactly the right island for this, without using ChatGPT. Thank you very much.)
There is, of course, precedent for this, with the prison for the Nazi leadership, Spandau Prison, after the Nuremburg trials (which can also serve as precedent for the special tribunals).
We will build them, at great expense, a super nice prison. With bungalos and a spa and pools and shit. It will be very posh and people will vociferously complain we are treating them too well and that will be just fine.
But it won’t have internet access, they will get visitors but they will have to come by military boat. Some other things we’ll take from Spandau: no diaries or memoirs, visits only once every two months, phone calls limited to fifteen minutes, one a week.
But we’ll let them all talk to each other cuz why not. That part will be hilarious.
Now, look. I don’t need a Democratic Nominee to run on this stuff. All they need to say during the campaign is something like “Look a lot of what Trump did was probably legal, or quasi-legal. I don’t blame him for trying to see what he could get away with. But where laws were broken, we will prosecute, and that includes Trump. We believe in due process and rule of law, and if he didn’t break any laws he has nothing to fear.”
And then I expect some Democratic Think Tank to have a document ready to go that is along the lines of what we’re outlining here.
This will, of course, apply to everyone else in his orbit who committed crimes. Hegseth will be prosecuted (with due process) for his Signal jerkery, Pam Boni for the El Salvador shit and criminal contempt, everyone for their Russian intel sharing, etc etc. Hey I don’t know I am not going to make it up! Juries will prosecute!
Elon will be prosecuted for his data crimes, and we will take Tesla and SpaceX away from him. We will do all this according to the law it will be hilarious and great.
And we will take both companies and put them into the new “Sovereign Wealth Fund” Trump set up and turn that fund into a nice little beginnings of socialism.
We’ll sell his Tesla stake on the open markets and take the proceeds and give them to the assorted victims of Trump’s governmental abuses as settlements. SpaceX we’ll just keep cuz why not.
We’ll use every stupid-ass presidential power law to its fullest, declaring emergencies and the War Powers Act and whatever-the-fuck else, and every time we use them we’ll just say “yeah these laws are dumb you should totally take this power away from me, congress has that power. Remove it. But while I have it, I’m gonna use it. Trump did!”
Ideally, that would actually happen? The new congress would take away all the emergency-declaration powers from the president that Trump has abused. We will fully support that! But we will use them in the meantime.
I know it sounds like fantasty fiction, and perhaps it is, but also… how the fuck else are we going to get back to being a normal country? Is anybody in charge even thinking about this?? Biden and his stupid fucking ‘oh he’ll just disappear’ bullshit. And Trump could die soon and I don’t think that anyone in the Republican party has the wherewithal to keep his criminal syndicate together, save maybe Elon, but we thought that last time.
Are you a libertarian or “centrist” who thinks this is vindictive? Well, I would ask you what is vindictive about jury trials. And luxury resorts! Also I would encourage you to check out Tecoluca or Guantanmo Bay cuz boy did Trump get a lot of special treatment compared to those guys.
Also, even if you are a milquetoast Biden type who thinks we should just forgive and forget, they are going to assume this is what’s going to happen, and they are going to cling to power and use everything they have to stay another term either way. You will not be able to calm and reassure them into having a free election. So you may as well just fucking go for it. What else is there.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. And when they come to take me away, just remember the whole thing kept saying “rule of law rule of law due process due process.”
Got a shoegaze playlist for you today. Man shoegaze rules. So many good shoegaze bands. I am so psyched I learned about, like, five good new shoegaze bands from KSUA in Fairbanks. Makes me proud.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.