[This is wrong on so many levels.]

99.999% of the time, there’s no monsters in the streets. But not 100% of the time. On Tuesday evening, federal authorities abducted Tufts PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk off the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. A neighbor’s security camera caught it on video, and it’s horrifying.¹ Sickening though it is, I urge you to watch it (with audio), because we should all bear witness to this disgrace.

It’s chilling to witness six people without uniforms descend upon a lone student, pulling masks over their faces as they seize her.² Ozturk must have feared this was a kidnapping rather than an arrest. An unidentified voice certainly does, stating that those involved don’t look like the police and repeatedly asking why they’re hiding their faces. As Ozturk is eventually handcuffed and loaded into an unmarked SUV, she is rightly terrified.

We all should be. This shouldn’t happen anywhere, but it certainly shouldn’t happen on an American street. This atrocity has hit especially close to home for me. I went to college at Tufts University and I’ve lived in Somerville. In fact, I spent a good deal of time in a house no more than 100 feet from the spot where Ozturk was snatched up. Knowing I’ve walked down the very same sidewalk is especially devastating.

A Boston Globe piece (unfortunately paywalled) extensively quotes a neighbor named Joe Ferraro:

“I don’t care what she was doing,” Ferraro continued. “You can’t just nab people off the sidewalk and throw them in a car and take them away, and expect anyone who’s seen it to be alright afterwards.”

The sudden arrest has shattered the sense of calm on the residential street. After seeing the footage of plainclothes ICE agents emerging from their unmarked cars, Ferraro said he is now on edge for anyone loitering in the area.

I share Ferraro’s dismay. As to what Ozturk was doing, thus far, her arrest appears to have been as unwarranted as it was cruel. The government stated that they cancelled her student visa, but they have provided no concrete reasons as to why. When asked about it, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke vaguely and irrelevantly about “lunatics” who “create a ruckus”. That does not apply to Ozturk.

As best as anyone can tell, Ozturk was targeted because she co-authored an op-ed that criticized Tufts University’s response to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Masked and non-uniformed federal agents snatched a doctoral student off the street and tossed her in an unmarked vehicle for something she wrote in a college newspaper a year earlier. That’s a despicable attack on the freedom of speech within America.

Things in this country are bad and they’re getting worse. I’m dismayed by what has happened in recent months and truly frightened about what will follow. But I am also heartened by the groundswell of support for Ozturk, from the aforementioned unidentified voice of resistance to protests thousands strong which quickly sprang up around Boston.

While I don’t know exactly how we can combat this wrong, I am certain that speaking up, and speaking out, is the right move for everyone. Back to Joe Ferraro:

“Part of me is afraid to talk about it,” [Ferraro] said. “But come pluck me off the sidewalk then, if that’s what you get for talking about it.”

Come pluck me off the sidewalk then, too.

Footnotes:

1. That video is archived here. ↩︎

2. These agents work for the same administration that is demanding a ban on mask-wearing by peaceful protestors. ↩︎

The people who hate DEI really hate it when you say they’re racist. They claim their motivations aren’t racist at all — they’re just trying to be fair. They’re concerned that minorities are getting an edge over white people. It’s the same attitude that fueled Reagan’s comments about “welfare queens”: the idea that DEI means minorities are getting a free ride from the government because of their skin color.

It’s a lie. It’s about a visceral, racist revulsion against people who don’t look like them.

We can see the true motivation in action by examining what’s going on in the Department of Defense. They’re busy expunging minorities from the historical record.

The entry for Army Maj. Gen. Charles C. Rogers, the highest-ranking Black servicemember to receive the Medal of Honor, was briefly deleted from the list of Medal of Honor recipient, until the news media noticed. They deleted it in such a clumsy and revealing way, too: they changed the name of Rogers’ page to hide it from their search engine. They stuck a “dei” prefix on the file name.

After the DOD profile on Rogers was taken down, its URL returned a “404 – Page Not Found” message — and as noted by social media users like Brandon Friedman, an Army veteran and former Obama administration official, the page’s URL in the Medal of Honor Monday series was modified to add “dei” to part of its URL: “deimedal-of-honor-monday-army-maj-gen-charles-calvin-rogers.” Attempts to load the original page redirected to that “dei” link instead, with the 404 message.

I guess he was awarded the medal because he was black, not because of his heroic actions.

Hours before dawn on Nov. 1, 1968, a heavy bombardment of mortars, rockets and rocket-propelled grenades hit the 1st Battalion forward fire support base positioned near a North Vietnamese supply route in South Vietnam, the citation states.

Rogers braved North Vietnamese Army fire to direct his men’s howitzers to target the enemy — and despite being knocked off his feet and wounded by an exploding round, he led a counterattack to repel attackers who breached the defensive perimeter, according to his medal citation. Rogers was wounded again, but as more attacks followed, he reinforced defensive positions. He was later seriously wounded after joining a howitzer crew whose members had been hit by mortar fire.

That’s DEI? Give us more DEI, then.

That’s not all, though. They’re erasing mention of the Nisei battalions that fought in WWII. It’s not enough that we threw families of Japanese descent into concentration camps, but also now we’re trying to delete the memory of the Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight for the country that treated them with such contempt.

They also removed the <a href=”https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2025/03/17/navajo-code-talkers-trump-dei-military-websites-wwii>Native American Code Talkers.

Articles about the renowned Native American Code Talkers have disappeared from some military websites, with several broken URLs now labeled “DEI.”
…
The Defense department’s URLs were amended with the letters DEI, suggesting they were removed following President Trump’s executive order ending federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Here’s a photo of a gang of DEI hires coasting through WWII.

The iconic photograph from 1945 by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press of U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, raising the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, sat for years on a Pentagon web page honoring the contributions of Native Americans who served in World War II.

One of the six Marines in the photo was Pfc. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian. The page is now gone, targeted in the Trump purge of DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—which has also removed other pages focused on the contributions of other Native Americans, women, Black Americans, LGBTQ service members and others.

At this point, I think you can have a clear conscience when accusing the anti-DEI warriors (you know who they are) of being fucking racists.

I enjoyed this discussion of AI and the aesthetics of fascism:

Tommy Robinson tweets an image of soldiers walking into the ocean on D-Day. Britain First’s co-leader produces imagery of Muslim men laughing at sad white girls on public transport. An AI-generated song combining kitsch schlager pop with crude racial stereotypes makes it into the German top fifty and becomes number three on Spotify’s global viral chart. Benjamin Netanyahu conjures a vision of an ethnically-cleansed Gaza connected by bullet train to the equally ephemeral Neom. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party posts, then is forced to take down, a video of its policies as embodied by anthropomorphic animals. A few days later, they promised to “mainline AI into the veins” of Britain.

The right loves AI-generated imagery. In a short time, a full half of the political spectrum has collectively fallen for the glossy, disturbing visuals created by generative AI. Despite its proponents having little love, or talent, for any form of artistic expression, right wing visual culture once ranged from memorable election-year posters to ‘terrorwave’. Today it is slop, almost totally. Why? To understand it, we must consider the right’s hatred of working people, its (more than) mutual embrace of the tech industry and, primarily, its profound rejection of Enlightenment humanism. The last might seem like a stretch, but bear with me.

The first point is the most obvious. ‘AI’ – as embodied by large language models like ChatGPT, and largely diffusion-based image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney – promises to make anyone who can write a single-paragraph prompt into a copywriter or graphic designer; jobs generally associated with young, educated, urban, and often left-leaning workers. That even the best AI models are not fit to be used in any professional context is largely irrelevant. The selling point is that their users don’t have to pay (and, more importantly, interact with) a person who is felt to be beneath them, but upon whose technical skills they’d be forced to depend. For relatively small groups like Britain First, hiring a full-time graphic designer to keep up with its insatiable lust for images of crying soldiers and leering foreigners would clearly be an unjustifiable expense. But surely world leaders, capable of marshalling vast state resources, could afford at the very least to get someone from Fiverr? Then again, why would they do even that, when they could simply use AI, and thus signal to their base their utter contempt for labour?

For its right wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not a bug, of AI art. Where mechanically-produced art used to draw attention to its artificiality – think the mass-produced modernism of the Bauhaus (which the Nazis repressed and the AfD have condemned), or the music of Kraftwerk – AI art pretends to realism. It can produce art the way right wingers like it: Thomas Kinkade paintings, soulless Dreamworks 3D cartoons, depthless imagery that yields only the reading that its creator intended. And, vitally, it can do so without the need for artists.

Javier Milei, a prodigious user of AI-generated art, wants Argentinians to know that any of them could join the 265,000, mostly young people who have lost jobs as a result of the recession that he induced, to the rapturous praise of economic elites. He wants to signal that anyone can find themselves at the wrong end of his chainsaw, even if doing so means producing laughably bad graphics for the consumption of his 5.9 million deeply uncritical Instagram followers.

This also explains what the hell is going on with Mark Zuckerberg’s fashion choices these days:

On the subject of Instagram, anyone old enough to read this will also be old enough to remember when Mark Zuckerberg, and by extension the rest of Silicon Valley, was broadly perceived as liberal. ‘Zuck’ was even touted as the only presidential candidate who could beat Donald Trump. (It’s worth noting that as Zuckerberg has drifted to the right he has also started dressing badly, a fact which we will return to later.) But even Zuck can’t make AI happen. The weird AI-powered fake profiles that Meta deployed in 2023 were quietly mothballed six months later, and would have disappeared from history completely, had Bluesky users not found some that had escaped deletion. This appears to be the fate of all commercial AI projects: at best, to be ignored but tolerated, when bundled with something that people actually need (cf: Microsoft’s Co-pilot); at worst, to fail entirely because the technology just isn’t there. Companies can’t launch a new AI venture without their customers telling them, clearly, “nobody wants this.”

….

Gender revanchism is one of the main organising principles of the postmodern right, and much everyday AI usage demonstrates a particularly gendered form of cruelty: deepfake nudes, AI ‘girlfriends’ used as a rhetorical cudgel to show real women that they are being replaced, AI ‘art’ of Taylor Swift being sexually assaulted. It’s no coincidence that the internet’s largest directory of deepfakes uses Donald Trump as a mascot. These attitudes are reflected in the upper echelons of the tech and AI industry. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – the man we are being told is a generational talent, a revolutionary, on a par with Steve Jobs or Bill Gates – is also, allegedly, a rapist and paedophile, who considered his own sister his sexual property since she was three years old, and who responded to allegations by lamenting that “caring for a family member who faces mental health challenges is incredibly difficult.” A love of sexual violence is a key part of the identity of the contemporary right, and it is no coincidence that, the further right one goes, the more likely one is to encounter open celebration of rape and, particularly, paedophilia. Altman’s legal trouble will, for many on the right, only confirm that he is one of them. Meanwhile, on the Joe Rogan podcast, Mark Zuckerberg described the tech industry as “culturally neutered” and called for more “masculine energy” and “aggression”.

Let’s return to Zuckerberg’s clothing. It was he that established the ubiquitous ‘grey hoodie’ style for tech CEOs. But recently he has begun to exhibit a new style. Oversized t-shirts emblazoned with ‘It’s either Zuck or Nothing’ in Latin, the unwieldy lines of his Meta AI glasses, a gaudy and unnecessary gold chain. This isn’t taking risks with fashion, like Rick Owens or Vivienne Westwood. It’s just ugly and stupid. Zuckerberg is also significantly more muscular than he used to be, despite doing nothing in his life that would seem to require a bodybuilder physique. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that, as he embraces corporate incelism and AI, he has felt liberated to ignore what does and doesn’t look good, choosing instead to display that he is wealthy and powerful enough to look terrible if he wants. All the emperor has to do, when the child laughs at his nudity, is ignore them. Trump’s haircut, which we all seem to have become inured to, serves the same purpose. It looks like shit and that’s the point. It is a display of power and a small act of cruelty.

These are truly the worst people.

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Krugman gets at the heart of why Elon feels the need to arbitrarily strip the most needy of their Social Security benefits, and obviously the deficit has nothing to do with it:

We often think of Social Security as a retirement program, which it is; most Social Security beneficiaries achieve that status simply by reaching retirement age. But the program also helps Americans with disabilities that prevent them from working or limit their ability to work, and for millions of people these benefits are a crucial lifeline.

Now the Social Security Administration, following orders from Elon Musk’s DOGE, appears set to subject disabled Americans to immense hardship. And everything we know indicates that this act of cruelty is mainly motivated by a combination of ego and spite.

The story so far: On March 12 the Washington Post reported that the Social Security Administration was considering ending phone service for Americans filing retirement or disability claims. The SSA quickly backed off that idea — sort of. The day after the Post report, however, the agency circulated an internal memo — acquired by the newsletter Popular Information — laying out a plan that would be almost equally destructive.

Under this plan, beneficiaries would still be able to call the SSA. But they would have to verify their identity either over the internet or through in-person visits to field offices.

Bear in mind that we’re talking about older and/or disabled Americans, many of whom are unable to access the internet and physically unable to visit SSA offices — which would in any case be overwhelmed by the increased traffic, given that the agency is already facing large staffing cuts. So this would be a move of almost cartoonish cruelty, and a nightmare for millions of Americans.

Why do this? The alleged justification is to combat fraud. But ProPublica has acquired audio of a closed meeting held with Leland Dudek, the Social Security Administration’s acting administrator, in which he acknowledged that fraudulent benefit claims are not, in fact, a serious problem.

So what the Musk is going on here? This plan would save some money, not by eliminating fraud, but by effectively cutting off aid to Americans who are legally entitled to that aid, and specifically those who need it most. But I don’t think the savings are the point.

My guess, instead, is that it’s an ego thing, that Social Security has become to Musk what Canada has become to Donald Trump. Both men at one point said something stupid, something that would have turned them into laughingstocks if there weren’t so much fear in the air. But both men have been unable to let go, doubling down in what amounts to an attempt to redeem their initial foolishness.

In case you’ve forgotten, back in December, when Justin Trudeau visited Mar-a-Lago, Trump taunted him by suggesting that Canada become a U.S. state, calling him “Governor Trudeau.” Some people suggested that it was meant as a joke, but it would be more accurate to call it a dominance display.

But once Trump realized how ridiculous the performance made him look, he refused to let go. Instead, annexing Canada seems to have become a fundamental plank of Trump’s foreign policy, with his demands getting ever more insistent the more obvious it becomes that Canadians loathe the idea.

Musk’s big blooper was his claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. This claim probably reflected the failure of young Musk staffers — what Dudek called the “DOGE kids” — to understand how the SSA’s databases work, combined with a complete lack of common sense. I mean, if there really were huge numbers of dead people receiving Social Security payments, don’t you think someone else would have noticed?

In a normal political environment, getting something that big that wrong would have destroyed Musk’s credibility and led to his permanent exile from any role in setting policy. But this is America in 2025, so Trump amplified the already-refuted claim when addressing Congress, and Musk seems more powerful than ever.

Furthermore, Musk refuses to give up his Social Security smears, making the completely implausible claim that fraudulent use of Social Security numbers accounts for 10 percent of federal spending. And I’d argue that that the plan to effectively cut off many disabled Americans is best seen as part of a desperate effort to find or pretend to find Social Security fraud, retroactively justifying Musk’s big mistake.

Still, does the plan have to be this cruel to the most vulnerable Americans? As I see it, the cruelty is a feature, not a bug.

“The cruelty is the point” remains a phrase that provides an extraordinary amount of explanatory leverage when applied to MAGA, and Elon embodies it every bit as much as Trump.

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