Apr
7
2026

In Space, No One Can Hear You Ignoring the Problem

Noah Smith succumbs to a temptation we all feel at times: I told you this would end badly.

I hate to say “I told you so” — not because saying “I told you so” is unseemly, but because the fact that I have to say it means I’m probably living in a world where things have gone badly.

I didn’t want to live in a world where gasoline costs over $4 a gallon. I didn’t want to live in a world where America tore up nearly all of its long-standing alliances and threatened to invade and conquer parts of Europe. I didn’t want to live in a world where China is viewed more favorably than the U.S. I didn’t want to live in a world in which the President of the United States posts things like this to his social media account:

Noah posts a couple recent Truth Social Trump rants, and I'll do them from authoritative sources at Twitter:

Yeah, that's awful. We'll see what happens.

Noah's "I told you so" includes the fact that he encouraged people to vote for Kamala back in 2024. I didn't go that far; Kamala would have been awful, just in a different (and probably incommensurable) way.

But I continue to think that we would have been in better shape if Nikki Haley had prevailed over Trump during primary season.

Also of note:

  • So long, Blondie. Er, sorry, "Bondi". Kevin D. Williamson bids farewell to Pam Bondi who delivered Justice, Upside Down. (archive.today link)

    What should a self-respecting republic do with a figure such as Pam Bondi, assuming that horse-whipping is, for whatever strange reason, off the table?

    Bondi, lately the attorney general of these United States, is an exemplary specimen of the sort of people who thrive in Donald Trump’s orbit: She is in a profound moral sense a criminal, but we lack an appropriate law under which to prosecute her.

    Bondi’s 14-month career at the Department of Justice was, as a matter of her official duties, a crime spree. Her legacy is that she used the DOJ to launch a series of pretextual criminal investigations and prosecutions targeting the president’s political enemies, even when there was not the hint of an actual legal case to be made against them. Those targeted by Bondi’s DOJ as a matter of political vendetta include: Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, all of Minnesota; Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey; St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her; Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell; Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook; Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan; Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado; Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire; Reps. Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania; Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona; Sen. Adam Schiff of California; former FBI Director James Comey; former CIA Director John Brennan; Attorney General Letitia James of New York. (The prosecution of former National Security Adviser John Bolton, no less political and pretextual where Bondi was concerned, is more complicated in that it is not solely the work of the Trump administration.)

    That is quite a list—other than printing up a bunch of fake “Epstein files” binders, Bondi seems to have done very little with her time in office other than abuse the awesome powers of the DOJ to abuse, harass, and conduct retribution against the president’s political enemies.

    Pam probably made the next round of Donkey-on-Elephant lawfare inevitable.

  • Who, exactly, are they serving? The Antiplanner, Randal O'Toole, says we are Destroying the Forest Service. (And the Forest Service seems to be taking it out on the trees.)

    In the two decades I spent critiquing the Forest Service on behalf of environmental groups, I learned several things. I learned that the people who run the national forests were good people who truly loved the land and wanted to do the right thing for the American people. I learned that the managers of each of those national forests believed that their forests were particularly special and unique. And I learned that these good people managing unique resources somehow all decided to do exactly the same thing: clearcut as much of the timber as they could get away with each year.

    Randal notes the latest budgetary efforts by the Trump Administration to make things worse.

  • Nearly the entire story is in the headline. Brittany Bernstein's latest "Forgotten Fact Checks" column at National Review says NPR Ran Multiple Stories on the Michigan Synagogue Attack — but Couldn’t Be Bothered to Interview One Victim. But there's one more telling detail:

    The outlet did, however, air a soft feature radio segment in which NPR reporter Hadeel al-Shalchi traveled to the small village in Lebanon where the attacker, Ayman Ghazali, was born.

    I'm not sure who listens to NPR any more, but I can't imagine it's good for anything except confirming the priors of its progressive donors.

Recently on the book blog: