An Experiment in Coordinated Giving

Let's try something cool

Good Evening:

Today on #DogShirtTV, I argued in my monologue that the slovenliness is the revolution. I am a silly man in a dog t-shirt in a hammock. And that’s the damn point. Deal with it, YouTube commenters.

More substantively, the estimable Alicia Wanless and I welcomed the estimable Lauren Buitta, founder of Girl Security, to talk about women and girls and gender minorities in national security, and going into underserved communities to teach girls about security issues. It’s DEI; it’s verboten these days. And we did it anyway. So there.

And as we talked, Lauren gave me an idea. She talked about how though Girl Security takes no federal money, it is still being affected by the anti-DEI obsessions of the new administration. Why? Because corporate backers are spooked by anything that smacks of the dreaded acronym, so educating girls in STEM—which a few months ago was something lots of people wanted to be part of—is now, well, risky. And people are backing away.

Now, Girl Security is an organization that I’m very proud to be associated with. I have taught for Lauren both in live sessions and in her virtual course. This is important work, and nobody else is doing it. And it seems to me that if we don’t, as a community that has certain values, step in philanthropically for organizations the climate is turning against, we're going to lose a lot of capacity. And this is a very good example of that problem.

Yesterday, I suggested that people join me in supporting Rebirth Ukraine. That suggestion was worth about $1,000 to the group, and I thank everyone who participated and reiterate the plea here for those who missed it. You should support these folks. They’re doing good work:

Today I want to suggest something broader: #DogShirtDaily should form a giving circle to support organizations that need help in the current climate.

EJ Wittes

and I will find such organizations and vet them. We will write up a little blurb about the groups and include a button like the one above. All you have to do is make a mental commitment to yourself to, say, give a dollar a day, or to give $10 each week to the group that moves you most, or to give $100 per month split among five groups. As long as people give in response to these calls, we can make it a regular feature of the dog shirts.

So here’s today’s:

I have asked Lauren to give me a sense of how much my pitch on the show and this button is worth. There are 14,000 of us. Let’s see what we can do.

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Today On Lawfare

A Fork in the Road for Trump’s Domestic Use of the Military

Chris Mirasola explains that the Trump administration’s disregard for established law—including statements supporting a maximalist theory of executive power and the recent detention of migrants at Guantanamo Bay—signals that the administration is dangerously close to deploying the military for immigration enforcement:

Less than a month into the second Trump presidency, there are multiple concerning indicia of legal process that make the most extreme options for using the military for immigration enforcement much more likely. As I noted in Lawfare previously, these options include implausible readings of the Alien Enemies Act and invocations of presidential constitutional authority unheard of in at least a century. They also put squarely in the realm of possibility using the military to strike at Mexican drug cartels in a manner examined (and critiqued) by Ashley Deeks and Matthew Waxman over a year ago. The upcoming weeks will be crucial in determining the course of military participation in immigration enforcement.

Water Wars: Trump, Taiwan, and the Philippines

In the latest installment of Water Wars, Aaron Baum, Ania Zolyniak, and Nikita Salagme analyze recent developments in Indo-Pacific geopolitics. They discuss the Trump administration’s meeting with leaders from Australia, India, and Japan, the president’s rhetoric on the Panama Canal, attacks on Taiwan’s undersea cables and cyber infrastructure, and patrols off the Philippines' coast and in the South China Sea:

New year, new U.S. president, same problems. The first month of 2025 saw continued tumult in the Indo-Pacific on new fronts—such as President Trump’s threat to “take back” the Panama Canal—and old—including confrontation in the South China Sea and Taiwan. As much as the new administration may seek to revise the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategic posture (which, regardless, may not represent the sea change some expect), it will thus quickly encounter the same strategic constraints faced by its predecessor.

Challenger and Incumbent Tools for U.S.-China Tech Competition

Mark Thomas asserts that the United States’s reliance on tools such as financial sanctions, export controls, and investment screening in the technological competition with China assumes a level of U.S. dominance that no longer necessarily exists. Thomas argues that a more diversified toolkit that recognizes China’s technological prowess is better suited to advancing U.S. interests:

The United States’s inchoate economic national security strategy takes American technological primacy for granted, expanding and strengthening tools that shield U.S. technology from Chinese acquisition. This is the approach of a technological incumbent. In the sectors where China is in the lead, however, effective strategy would deploy the tools of a challenger that facilitate the acquisition of Chinese technology by U.S. firms. These tools, employed by China itself in its efforts to catch up with the U.S., range from translating basic research to requiring joint ventures and technology transfer for access to domestic markets.

Systemic Risk Assessments Hold Clues for EU Platform Enforcement

David Sullivan describes the strengths and weaknesses of the risk assessments mandated by the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and suggests that they may provide insight into how the DSA can better moderate illegal and harmful content:

How these reports are received, evaluated, and improved upon matters, not just for regulators and the regulated, but for billions of users of these services in Europe and around the world. Without greater understanding of what a good risk assessment entails, and where shortcomings amount to a breach of the DSA, the EU’s regulatory capabilities will be vulnerable to legal challenge, even as good-faith company efforts to comply remain perpetually at risk of selective or subjective enforcement.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, Chris Miller and Marshall Kosloff join Kevin Frazier and Alan Rozenshtein to discuss AI, supply chains, and the Abundance Agenda:

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the slippery tiger. You might not think that tigers can be slippery, but these tigers are here to prove you wrong:

Video Source

In honor of today’s Beast, take a small child sledding.

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The Slovenliness Is The Revolution

A text exchange with

EJ Wittes

:

the slovenliness is the revolution
it's what you never see on TV
real people, dressed the way they dress
talking the way they talk
the bags under their eyes unashamed 
their make-up done, or not, the way it is for friends
that's the revolution
actual conversation