A Weekend of Projections

And a lot of emotions

Good Evening:

It’s been a busy weekend. On Saturday afternoon, I gave a speech at a rally in front of the White House:

benjaminwittes

A post shared by @benjaminwittes

Then I finished up my “The Situation” column:

I don’t know about you, but I am not interested in cooperating any more.

I respect the election results. I respect that Donald Trump is president, that JD Vance is vice president, and that the Congress is lawfully controlled by people who refuse to defend their own institutional prerogatives. I also respect that I am bound to follow the laws of our country or face the consequences of refusing to do so. And I reject political violence in all forms.

But I don’t accept that I owe this process of national degradation, humiliation, and sublimation to corrupt and evil foreign and domestic interests more than that. I don’t accept that I owe it any voluntary cooperation.

What does an approach to The Situation based on lawful, non-violent non-cooperation look like?

Then I projected on the base of the Washington Monument:

benjaminwittes

A post shared by @benjaminwittes

Then, today, it was back to the White House. And this evening, a brief projection on the National Gallery—which the police put a stop to—and then on the Hirshhorn, which they didn’t. Between all this, I did a livestream with

Anastasiia Lapatina

, to whose

Yours Ukrainian

Substack you are here by commanded to subscribe. There was some food and sleep in there too.

And I started learning Finnish.

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Friday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Eve Gaumond, the estimable Holly Berkley Fletcher, and I played a rambling game of “what’s on your mind?” We covered podcasting in the executive branch, the UFC and the FBI, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Elon Musk’s Canadian citizenship, and other topics of amusement.

Also, the cactus is back. It kidnapped Holly for enhanced interrogation. Was she subjected to the minotaur?

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Friday On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Caroline Cornett

‘One Voice’ and the Trump Administration’s Conduct of Foreign Affairs

Scott R. Anderson and Elena Chachko break down the implications of a Feb. 12 executive order that asserts a maximalist view of the president’s authority over foreign affairs under the Vesting Clause. Anderson and Chachko also consider the adverse consequences this order will have on the Foreign Service, such as shuttering internal dissent channels:

By asserting broad presidential prerogative over foreign affairs, the “One Voice” order is another facet of the aggressive vision of a unitary executive that has informed much of the second Trump administration’s agenda, and in particular its attacks on the federal bureaucracy. But it adds a twist. The order identifies a separate ground for imposing the president’s will on the civil service by anchoring the assertion of plenary control over the bureaucracy in an equally broad theory of the president’s foreign relations powers. It then uses this legal theory to circumvent the legal protections that Congress has long provided to the foreign service officers and civil servants who work at the Department of State and related agencies, promising institutional and cultural changes intended to make them more blindly beholden to the president’s directives.

The UN Between Decline and Renewal

Richard Gowan evaluates member states' responses to the current period of stagnation in the United Nations despite increased global conflict through the lens of the decline-renewal paradox. Gowan assesses that some states seek to change the UN from the inside through Security Council reform, while others increasingly rely on regional organizations and international institutions such as the International Court of Justice:

There is little doubt that something is wrong at the core of the UN peace and security system, as the veto powers in the Security Council find it increasingly difficult (or undesirable) to cooperate. This inevitably weakens the organization on many fronts. Yet it also creates openings for those who want to strengthen the system—or at least keep it alive—to test out new multilateral options.

Canada's Expulsion From Five Eyes Would Be a Disaster

In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren discusses reports that a White House advisor wants to expel Canada from the Five Eyes, legislation in Sweden that would require encrypted messages to be preserved, continued activity by sanctioned Russian-linked crypto entities, and the Pentagon’s embrace of cyber operations:

The Swedish debate is a nice vignette of the ongoing encryption debate, with arguments on both sides of what we call exceptional or lawful access. Sweden's law enforcement and security agencies support the proposed bill, saying they need lawful access to catch criminals. But the country's own armed forces have recommended their personnel use Signal. They oppose the bill and wrote in a letter to the government that the bill will not be able to be implemented "without introducing vulnerabilities and backdoors that could be exploited by third parties."

How to Win a War Against Reality

Abby Smith Rumsey reviews Steve Benen’s “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past” and Jason Stanley’s “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.” Rumsey highlights Stanley’s argument about fascist regimes’ use of education to shape youth and Benen’s identification of the “brute force rhetorical strategy” utilized by Republicans as particular strengths, but suggests that both authors’ accounts could benefit from providing more backstory:

Stanley and Benen remind us that the truth matters. Facts matter. They point out how easily people in times of great uncertainty can be manipulated by narratives that resolve those uncertainties and promise a better future. We are moving further and faster into an age where alternative facts proliferate, aided and abetted by technologies that increase the ability to create very convincing fakes. In this world, it’s our gullibility that is the real threat to democracy and national security. But to understand why the political divide among Americans runs so deep, we need to look beyond the effectiveness of propaganda. We need to look at the values that Americans hold in common—democracy, equality, and self-determination. Who enjoys these rights? Are there some citizens whose intrinsic worth ranks them higher in a democracy than others? In this time of high partisanship, we are divided by a fundamental disagreement over who is entitled to exercise the full rights that democracy affords. Stanley reminds us that in a democracy, we have equal claim to these. They are not to be measured by our ranking in a “hierarchy of values,” but by our claim to full humanity.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, Tyler McBrien sits down with journalists Rachel Chason and John Lechner to discuss the current state of the Sahel and the many forces that have converged in the region over the past couple of years. They talk about Chason’s recently published profiles of Sahel actors and Lechner’s upcoming book:

Videos

On Feb. 28 at 4 p.m. ET, I spoke to Anna Bower, Chris Mirasola, and Roger Parloff about the status of the civil litigation against President Trump’s executive actions, including the birthright citizenship executive order, detaining immigrants at Guantanamo Bay, and the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, and the firing of probationary employees:

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is a wet bat:

Video Source

In honor of today’s Beast, remember that we all do stupid things sometimes, and it’s ok to need a hand.