VIDEO OF THE DAY: Barron Trump gets bad legal news in stunning escalation
Rep. Yassamin Ansari sits down with Brian Tyler Cohen to discuss House Democrats’ push for a major investigation into the rapist Tate brothers…and their connections to the Trump family, which includes the as-yet uninvestigated Barron Trump. Baby Trump getting his first subpoena! Daddy must be so proud.

Take Action: Stop Trump from punishing states that didn’t vote for him

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Pete Hegseth’s crisis of masculinity
Nick Turse, The Intercept: “Self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth has a problem with low testosterone. It’s left him suffering from what you might call an acute crisis of masculinity. And I’m pretty sure that he caught it from Teddy Roosevelt. Bear with me. I’ll explain. Last week, the Trump administration’s preening, strutting, wanna-be he-man announced a new mandatory annual screening for troops age 30 and older, including women, for testosterone deficiency. Troops under 30 can volunteer to be screened, and anyone with low hormone levels will have the option to receive testosterone replacement therapy.

‘It’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capability,’ said Hegseth, by ensuring ‘you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight’ on the ‘brutal and unrelenting’ modern battlefield. Like all Hegseth initiatives, he linked it to ‘lethality’ — now the animating feature of his life. He called topping off troops’ testosterone levels a ‘sacred duty.’ Anyone who has observed Hegseth for more than 15 seconds in the last 15 years could tell you the man is riddled with deep insecurities. His quest to fully transition the Defense Department to what he calls ‘The High-T Department of War’ is just the latest manifestation of nagging anxieties about himself and the wheel-spinning, never-winning military he leads.

After 18 months of crackpot policies and puerile posturing at the helm of the War Department, Hegseth’s hysteria has only grown. Like Roosevelt, Hegseth is forever struggling to display his manhood through physical exertion — posting videos of himself engaging in humiliating fitness challenges. Similarly, he’s been propping up America’s long-sagging martial prowess by beating up on the likes of Venezuela, attacking elementary school kids in Iran, blowing up unarmed boats packed with civilians in the Caribbean Sea, and threatening tiny Cuba, where his hero Teddy won fame for a Spanish-American War charge up San Juan Hill.

Hegseth believes you can measure manhood by testing testosterone, the same way he believes you can kill your way to victory on the battlefield. It’s part of a mélange of flaccid fallacies and fantasies that seem to dominate the worldview of a man who paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of raping her, whose former sister-in-law accused him of “abusive” behavior toward his second wife, and whose own mother once called out the fact that he ‘belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.’

All the testosterone in the world isn’t going to win America’s wars, achieve Hegseth’s dream of turning ‘soft men’ hard, or transform ‘Pentagon pussies’ into something more in line with his fantasies, much less cure the crushing insecurities swirling in the brain of America’s fragile war secretary and the deep deficiency that has long plagued him.

Take Action: Tell Congress: Protect the deep ocean from mining!

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Lindsey Graham’s death upends crucial South Carolina Senate race
Dr. Annie Andrews for Senate The abrupt death of Lindsey Graham has completely flipped the script on the race for control of the U.S. Senate. Instead of Dr. Annie Andrews facing down a 23-year-incumbent in Lindsey Graham, she’ll be facing a yet-unknown Republican chosen at the last minute. We need to strike while the iron’s hot and make sure Dr. Annie Andrews’ pro-family, pro-workers, pro-public healthcare message is heard by the people of South Carolina BEFORE dark-money billionaires and Republican Super PACs flood the airwaves with lies and misinformation. Andrews won’t take a dime of corporate PAC money, so she is going to need our help. Will you chip in to help help Annie flip the critical seat blue and take back the Senate for Democrats?

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Donald Trump has stopped caring about the midterms
Brian Karem, Salon: “This entire presidential administration is off its leash. Let’s recap: So-called border czar Tom Homan recently predicted more bloodshed and violence because of ICE operations — unless we all sit down and shut up. The entire Republican Party is on a delusional rant about communism, and Donald Trump spent Wednesday afternoon in Georgia telling us that he has a fat, rich friend who found cheap Ozempic in London. ‘He’s great at making deals and eating,’ Trump said. Future historians, should we survive our current existential crisis, will look back and identify Trump as the most corrupt and dangerous president to ever test the elasticity of our democracy. The devil may have gone down to Georgia looking for a soul to steal, but when he wanted more, he sent Trump to make the deal. Hopefully, the resonance of that Charlie Daniels song will outlast the cancerous Trump regime. Trump’s midterm message is an echo of who he has always been, and who many more people now know him to be.

He denounced his political opponents as communists and socialists, speaking of them with more vitriol than he shows the leaders of Iran. He may be at war with that nation, but also claims its leaders are ‘dying to make a deal,’ while the ‘Dumbocrats’ embrace communism and threaten our way of life. When a reporter asked him on Tuesday whether Iranian actions in the war would impact the midterms, Trump said, ‘Probably. They won’t have any impact on me. I’m just going to do the right thing. I don’t view it as, ‘Gee, we’re having an election.’ I think people are very impressed.’

I’m not sure what exactly we’re supposed to be impressed with, and apparently neither does he. He just wants your worship.”

Take Action: Rein in Big Tech’s data center power grab

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Neoliberal economics was a con from the start
Nick Hanauer, Eric Beinhocker, and Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs: “For most people, economics does not exist as an abstraction. It’s really ‘my job’ and ‘the expenses.’ And unfortunately, for most people, there’s an underlying set of rules defined by the economic system that we broadly accept that kind of frames how the economy unfolds and who it works for. For 50 years or so, we in the West, and particularly in the United States, have adopted a framework of economics that we variously call ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘neoclassical economics’ or ‘trickle-down economics’ that structured the rules in ways that advantage capital above all else and disadvantage everything else. And the theory behind that framework was that if you did that, everyone would benefit. That you would get more economic growth, which would benefit all citizens. That turned out to be wrong or a lie, depending on who was saying it.

The first force that is as old as human civilizations is the broad intent of economically powerful elites to build narratives that advantage them. This is probably something that will never disappear. But I think the other thing that happened that we probably could have avoided was just a mistaken way of understanding economic cause and effect. I think that there were a lot of people who created that framework who didn’t have ill intent. They were just doing their research and attempting to mathematize a framework of thought that probably wasn’t helpful to mathematize. And so you end up with a way of understanding things that was bad for human beings. I’ll give you just one example, which is that the contemporary sort of orthodox understanding of the economy is to conceive of it as an equilibrium system. That is to say, a system within which if one thing goes up, another thing has to come down.

And so if you believe that, then it is effectively true by definition that if you raise the minimum wage, for example, there has to be corresponding job loss. And so if you believe that, if you think that is true, it sort of takes off the table things like raising the minimum wage as a sensible way of governing economic policy. This explains, for example, why the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour today, even though if it had simply tracked productivity gains, it would be close to $25. And so that framework of thought—and we could go on and on and on with examples: the idea that tax cuts for the rich create growth; that any kind of regulation of corporations harms productivity and growth. There were a bunch of ideas embedded in that framework that made it effectively impossible to enact policy that would benefit ordinary people.

And any policy that benefited rich people was viewed to be an unalloyed good. And so for 50 years, policymakers from both parties, Democrat and Republican, enacted policies on that basis, and as a consequence, we have overseen the biggest transfer of income and wealth from the bottom 90 percent to the top 10 percent in the history of the world.”

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Food for thought

The Sunday wrap-up

Hope…

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