Sorting through madness

And contributing our best

On Wednesday evening, President Trump issued three executive orders:

• Restricting entry into America for people from certain countries;

• Memorializing his views on President Biden’s capacity and ordering an investigation into the Biden White House;

• and Restricting the entry of foreign nationals who wish to study at Harvard.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued six decisions:

Photo by Fine Photographics on Unsplash

• Dismissing a case concerning the rules of civil procedure

• Unanimously rejecting lower courts’ positions on a straight woman’s ability to claim she was subjected to unlawful discrimination

• Unanimously ruling that Mexico cannot sue US gun manufacturers for cartel violence (a case we have discussed with one of Mexico’s attorneys)

• Unanimously overruling Wisconsin’s Supreme Court about a religious exemption to unemployment taxes

• Unanimously determining that US courts have the power to enforce a judgment in an international contracts dispute

• Determining how a procedural rule operates in a case brought by victims of terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas in the early 2000s

This is a full slate of news, and it doesn’t begin to account for all of the movement in federal district courts, administrative agencies, trade talks, Congressional negotiations, wars across the world, and states across the country.

We have a density problem. Too much news of substance is being packed into the volume of a day.

• Some of us try to account for this problem through avoidance:

  • I’m turning it all off; it’s too much.

• Some of us try to deal with it through dismissal:

  • This over here is just an attempt to distract us from the real problem, which is that over there.

• Some of us try to prioritize, but by what?

  • How likely it is that a bill becomes a law?

  • How long an executive order will stay on until a Court, perhaps, invalidates or refines it?

  • How much damage might happen between now and then?

• Some of us focus on the things we have the most control over:

  • I cannot do anything about the tariffs, but I can show up for my local community.

I try all of these techniques several times a day. There is not a single thing wrong with any of them. We are not wired to take all the news of substance on, in detail, along with everything that is part of our ordinary lives. No single person, not even one who covers news professionally, can hold it all.

We can’t change the mass, but we have a little more control over the volume. This is the strategy I’m working on today. I feel the pull of breaking down every single action I listed above immediately. But they will keep. We’ll cover the Supreme Court’s work on More to Say over time. We’ll see how the executive actions play out. We’ll keep paying attention, and we’ll talk when we know more.

Derek Thompson confirmed the wisdom of this approach in an excellent piece for The Atlantic this week:

“A useful one-sentence guide to the second Trump administration might go something like this: A lot happens under Donald Trump, but a lot un-happens, too.”

Fleshing this out just as to trade, Thompson writes about how Trump rolled out his Liberation Day tariffs, only to quickly backtrack, only to double down and then backtrack again. Then the courts got involved, and the tariffs were off, but then on again.

“Now a higher court has the opportunity to do the funniest thing: undo the undoing of the undoing of the tariffs, which have been in a permanent state of being undone ever since they were created. Got all that? No, you most certainly do not, and neither does anybody else.”

We just have to adjust the volume, give it a longer timeline, “wait and see,” as the President himself says often. That is frustrating and unsatisfying. It lacks the calls to action we long for. No one wants to imagine telling their grandchildren, “I worried daily for democracy, and I waited and watched to see how real my worries might become.”

That is what most people, even people part of great, world-changing, bend-the-universe’s-moral-arc-toward justice have spent most of their time doing. Our density problem is not just that the mass is increasing, though it is. It’s that the volume has been simultaneously shrinking because of technology, our attention spans, our relentless drive toward professional and political productivity. I am part of a news influencer culture that shrinks this volume even more: Better have a take before all the takes have been taken! Better give the audience a concrete list of to-dos to combat today’s flavor of fascism!

It’s all madness, and sorting through madness takes time and patience. I want to be part of expanding the volume so that we can, all of us, contribute our best in the most effective ways possible.

In that vein:

Kilmar Ábrego García is not in the headlines as I write these words (at 1:42 a.m. on Thursday, June 5). He was deported on March 15. We know now (we do not worry or suspect; we know) that more than 200 people were deported from the U.S. to a foreign nation without due process of law. We know that these people need legal representation. We know that American courts are moving on these cases, rapidly as American courts go, but that Congress should also be stepping up to counter the administration’s haphazard, lawless approach to deportation. There is a clear call to action on this situation, and that is to write to Congress. The American Civil Liberties Union has suggested language and a petition to sign.

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We are kicking off our 10th Anniversary Celebration this week with our first of 10 throwback episodes that we’ll be airing on Fridays this summer, leading up to our live Birthday Party in Cincinnati on July 19.

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It’s not too late to join us for Reimagining Citizenship, our 30-Day Meditation Series on what it means to love America even (especially) when it feels like America doesn’t love us back.

Reimagining Citizenship Day 2

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Something Nice to Take You Into the Weekend

If you don’t visit our Substack Chat often, please know that we took some space yesterday to process/revel in/observe the Twitter fight between the President of the United States and the Wealthiest Man in the World.

Also, Beth had more to say about her comment on Tuesday’s episode:

When I Say You Are Intimidating

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What We’re Reading and Listening To This Week

• Beth: What the Fastest-Growing Christian Group Reveals About America: Instead of killing off faith, modernity has supercharged some of its most dramatic manifestations. (The Atlantic)

• Alise: How to End A Love Story by Yulin Kuang

• Maggie: “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs” Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination by Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf

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