Let's Take A Closer Look At The 2WAY Morning Meeting

Yesterday's 2WAY Morning Meeting show is an example of the current media dilemma. Let's start out by recognizing that the three co-hosts are simply unlikely: Mark Halperin is in the middle of a long-march rehabilitation campaign to come back from 2017 sexual harassment allegations:

According to a May 3, 2019 report in The Daily Beast, Halperin worked on repairing his reputation during the first quarter of 2019 with a goal of returning as a pundit on television and radio. According to the article, Halperin enlisted the help of Michael Smerconish, Mika Brzezinski, and Joe Scarborough on an under-the-radar yet calculated professional rehabilitation campaign.

According to the link, more than a dozen women came forward alleging that for a 20-year period, Halperin had groped them and otherwise had unwanted bodily contact, and as a result,

On October 30, 2017, both NBC and MSNBC terminated Halperin's contract with the networks. On January 3, 2018, Showtime replaced Halperin on The Circus with then-CBS News anchor Alex Wagner.

Sean Spicer, as i've already noted, had been a "professional Republican" for years before joining the first Trump administration as Trump's first press secretary. Within six months, Trump had recognized that professional Republicans weren't what he needed, and both Spicer and Reince Priebus were edged out.

Dan Turrentine had been an also-ran professional Democrat who worked for Hillary Clinton and Jared Polis, but he mostly just has an exaggerated permanent nervous-guy grin as he utters standard Democrat talking points, as we see in the example below, which begins at 12:41 in the video embedded at the top of this post:

Halperin: I'd just like one short thought from each of you on whether this is a serious thing that the president will see through and to what extent this is some bullshit 72-hour I'm-for-law-enforcement-against-a-black-run city political ploy. Dan?

Turrentine: You said it better than I could. The latter. Hahahaha!

Halperin: Sean, is this real>

Spicer: It's absolutely real. I mean, this is all stuff that has bothered him since the first term. . .

I don't think any of these guys understands what Trump has in mind with the DC crime-and-homeless issue -- heck, I covered it better here last week. Spicer goes on after the exchange above to display his basic obtuseness at 13:50:

I will say this, in the spirit of looking forward. . . this is the opportunity for Republicans. DC was created in 1789 as a perfect square, 10 miles by 10. It was supposed to be a federal district, so that no state would have a stake in it, part of it from Maryland, part of it from Virginia. In 1846, they gave back the Virginia piece, which is now Alexandria and Arlingnton. The real solve for DC is give back everything but the National Mall from the White House to the Supreme Court, create a new federal district, and give the rest back to Maryland.

The problem is that this is exactly what Trump doesn't have in mind, which is just another indication of why Spicer went back to being just a professional Republican after six unsatisfactory months in the White House. If most of DC is given back to Maryland, that just takes its voter base and gives it to the same Baltimore urban machine that runs the state now, which changes exactly nothing. If you redefine Washington as just a narrow strip of monuments and museums where almost nobody lives, you just redefine the problem out of existence, although you make Maryland even worse.

As I said in last week's post,

But the problem of Washington, which simply can't be ignored, is the overall problem of the 1960s Civil Rights movement writ small. . . . Here we are 50 and 60 years later, and with almost every issue connected to the African-American community, we see the implicit questions: "Emmett Till died for this?" "Martin Luther King Jr marched for this?" It looks like Trump, who is gradually getting to be acknowledged as one of the most consequential presidents, is going to take this problem on[.]

Trump doesn't want to redefine the problem, he wants to fix it at the root. He singled out one of the causes in yesteday's press conference:

Trump announced on Monday that he will be working to revoke no-cash bail in cities across the country, coming as Trump has honed in on cracking down on crime in the nation’s capital.

"This dire public safety crisis stems directly from the abject failures of the city’s local leadership. The radical left city council adopted no cash bail," Trump said, noting cities that have adopted such policies like Chicago and New York City. "Somebody murders somebody, and they’re out on no cash bail before the day is out."

"But we're going to change no cash bail. We're going to change the statute and get rid of some of the other things, and we'll count on the Republicans in Congress and Senate to vote. We have the majority, so we'll vote."

You can't fix Washington unless you fix the urban machines that have created the problems that are also in New York and Chicago. As I notd n last week's post, Trump delegates to highly visible point figures to take on his major agenda items, like Tom Homan with the border or Pete Hegseth with the Defense Department. In the case of Washington and the urban machines generally, it's Jeanine Pirro:

🚨 U.S. Attorney Pirro is absolutely COOKING the DC government, which allows vioIent young thugs to run the streets

“I can't prosecute them. They go to family court. And they get to do yoga and arts and crafts.

“ENOUGH. IT CHANGES TODAY!” 🔥 pic.twitter.com/l1pjivBMm1

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) August 11, 2025

On one hand, Mark Halperin is savvy enough to recognize that the public isn't satisfied with the prepackaged legacy media consensus. On the other, what he offers only pretends to be different. Dan Turrentine at the end of the day is a smug conventional Democrat, offering the same old talking points and cackling with laughter at it. Sean Spicer is a nice guy, I guess, good looking, but he just isn't terribly bright, and he doesn't understand Trump, who is a genius.

So far, after six years of his rehabilitaion tour, Halperin has managed to get himself in with Megyn Kelly, herself a has-been. Anyhow, not much for even Halperin to grope there, if you ask me. She's safe.

The Strange Patrícia Lélis Bolin Story

Last week, Project Veritas broke a two-part story (here and here) in which a Brazilian woman, Patrícia Lélis Bolin, alleges that "she was pulled into a visa fraud scheme to secure U.S. visas and green cards for wealthy clients". At the first link above,

Lélis further claims former Attorney General William P. Barr knew of the fraud and used burner phones to communicate and conceal the scheme.

. . . Lélis reported the visa fraud scheme to the FBI, which she claims triggered her prosecution while others involved remain uncharged.

Indicted in January 2024, Lélis faces 19 charges, including wire fraud, unlawful monetary transactions, and aggravated identity theft. She is accused of defrauding immigrants by posing as a lawyer and soliciting payments for fraudulent E-2 and EB-5 visa services.

Project Veritas reviewed hundreds of text messages, emails, and documents, confirming a September 2022 text from Attorney Clyde Vanel to Patrícia Lélis. In it, Vanel directs her to finalize the business plan for [a Peter and Vivienne Reis' E-2 visa application] as a “back-up” measure, instructing her to act as his “paralegal” assistant without credentials. Vanel claims the visa scheme is foolproof, stating that former Attorney General William P. Barr bypasses standard government processes to expedite and “automatically approve” visas for their “business partners.”

A January 12, 2024 Justice Department press release confirming the indictment is here. The circumstances it outlines are these:

Patricia De Oliveira Souza Lelis Bolin, 29, a resident of Arlington [Virginia], posed as an immigration lawyer able to help foreign clients obtain E-2 and EB-5 visas to the United States. The EB-5 program provides lawful permanent residency, and possible citizenship, if a foreign national invests substantial funds—typically, a minimum of $1 million—in qualifying job-creating enterprises in the United States.

According to the indictment, on September 22, 2021, Lelis Bolin sent a legal retainer agreement to a victim for help in obtaining EB-5 visas for the victim’s parents. The victim made two initial payments totaling over $135,000 based on Lelis Bolin’s representation that the money was going into a Texas real estate development project that qualified for the EB-5 program. Instead, the victim’s money is alleged to have gone into Lelis Bolin’s personal bank account. Rather than investing the money as promised, Lelis Bolin allegedly used it for a downpayment on her Arlington townhouse, bathroom renovations, and paying other personal expenses, such as credit card debt.

According to the indictment, to cover up the scheme and to obtain more money, Lelis Bolin allegedly provided a victim with a fabricated U.S. District Court pleading with a false case number showing her as the litigating attorney. Lelis Bolin is not a licensed attorney. She is also alleged to have falsified U.S. immigration forms, forged multiple signatures, and created fake receipts from the Texas investment project, all of which she emailed to a victim. Lelis Bolin also allegedly created false personas associated with the Texas investment fund and sent emails from those individuals to try to obtain even more money.

According to the first Project Veritas link,

Lélis alleges she’s being set up as the fall-guy in an ongoing DOJ cover-up to protect the powerful ‘deep state’ individuals involved.

. . . hired in 2021 by Armstrong Williams’ media company, Howard Stirk Holdings, [she] claims she was pulled into a visa fraud scheme to secure U.S. visas and green cards for wealthy clients, including the parents of Superordinary CEO Julian Reis, a former JP Morgan trader and hedge fund founder. Lélis alleges that Williams and his legal counsel, NY Assemblyman Clyde Vanel, instructed her to craft business plans for fake companies, like “Reis Cosmetics,” to obtain E2 Investor Visas, which allow foreign nationals to work in the U.S. by investing in a business.

. . . Lélis further stated, “Bill Barr knows the companies that they launched for the visa was not real companies.” She revealed a suspiciously swift visa approval process, including a mere 10-minute interview in Singapore for Julian Reis’ parents, expedited through Barr’s connections. “After they got their visas, I discovered they do not have any plan to open and operate the company. So, it’s basically like they create a fake company that I helped to create with them,” she said.

Projexct Veritas then alleges that Pam Bondi is trying to cover this up:

Project Veritas sought to present evidence of this visa scheme to U.S. Department of Justice officials, who took no action. An anonymous government source has informed us of an ongoing cover-up within the Department of Justice, including by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

This is hard to believe; I'm simply not in the camp that thinks Bondi and Patel are trying to pull punches or slow-walk investigations. However, the second link above contains allegations that may not be entirely connected to those in the first link:

A whistleblower, currently under indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice and granted political asylum in an undisclosed foreign country, has provided Project Veritas with explosive evidence alleging secret meetings orchestrated by former U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr, media figure Armstrong Williams, and other prominent Washington, D.C., insiders to plan the prosecution of President Donald Trump, his allies, and January 6 defendants.

. . . Project Veritas examined photos dated March 15, 2022, of Armstrong Williams and Bill Barr, alongside Lélis’ corresponding notes from a meeting at Sinclair Broadcast Group. The notes detail discussions revealing Barr was in talks with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and special prosecutor Jack Smith about planning prosecutions in Florida, Georgia, and New York. Lélis recorded that Barr predicted an FBI raid on Trump’s home would occur “soon.” Five months later, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago.

Project Veritas also verified a January 19, 2023, text from Williams to Lélis confirming a planned meeting between Bill Barr and Fani Willis. Notes from February 27, 2023, confirm the meeting took place, with Barr advising Willis to pursue RICO charges against Donald Trump. Lelis stated, “Bill Barr was like, we should bring RICO because it's a very difficult type of charge to defend,” noting Barr described the charge as broad and challenging to counter under U.S. law.

. . . Lélis reported Armstrong Williams and Bill Barr to the FBI in June 2023 for their secret meetings and the visa fraud scheme exposed in Project Veritas’ Part 1. Text messages reveal panic from Williams and his associates upon learning of the FBI report. Lélis faced a barrage of threats and demands to return meeting notes and other documents she recorded during her employment, suggesting their authenticity and a frantic effort to conceal these covert meetings.

It’s critical to highlight that Project Veritas was first tipped off to this story by Department of Justice officials troubled by an apparent DOJ cover-up to pin Barr’s actions on Lélis. A Trump DOJ official stated, “Barr has put the entire FBI after this woman to get the documents she has.”

There can be no question that William Barr turned against Trump in the final days of his first administration. He submitted an early resignation effective December 23, 2020, and began a process of distancing himself from Trump. According to Wikipedia,

Barr testified to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack behind closed doors on June 2, 2022. Portions of his videotaped testimony were presented during the committee's public hearings days later. Barr testified that before resigning as attorney general, he had told President Trump that allegations of election fraud were "bullshit." At times during his testimony he could not control his laughter at the absurdity of some fraud allegations. . . . Barr testified Trump never gave "an indication of interest in what the actual facts were," adding the president had "become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff."

Acccording to The Guardian,

Former attorney general William Barr came to the defense of the FBI and the justice department’s (DoJ) judicial request to search Donald Trump’s Florida home and country club compound last month, saying Friday that documents seized in the search appeared to support the department’s claims of a national security risk.

“As more information comes out, the actions of the department look more understandable,” Barr told the New York Times in an interview.

“It seems to me they were driven by concern about highly sensitive information being strewn all over a country club, and it was taking them almost two years to get it back,” he said.

The former attorney general, who resigned in December 2020 as Trump ramped up his claims that the election has been rigged, also dismissed Trump’s call for an independent review of materials confiscated from Mar-a-Lago by a “special master”.

“I think it’s a crock of shit,” Barr said. “I don’t think a special master is called for.”

This blog has never been a friend of William Barr. In 2022, I wrote,

Why is this man not smiling? Based on all the images I find on the web, William P Barr has got to be one of the saddest, angriest men in current public life. . . . The man is rich. He's respected. He's in demand as a talking head. No doubt his mere stroke of the pen will get any candidate into Dalton, Horace Mann, Hackley, whichever, not to mention Columbia. I think it's because of Trump. I think it's because Trump hasn't gone away. Trump is the wrong kind of Republican, not like, say, Jeb Bush. And that has him awfully, awfully angry. Why did he ever agree to become Trump's attorney general? That's a good question, wouldn't you say?

I don't think there's any question that after he left as Trump's Attorney General, Barr went to meetings trying to forestall Trump's return. On the other hand, if the meetings were with the likes of Armstrong Williams, they would have been exercises in fecklessness, not really conspiracy. But then, Lélis Bolin says he also helped plan the Mar-a-Lago raid with Jack Smith, which would be a different matter altogether. Still, he was 70 when he quit the Trump administration, a bitter old man, his law career effectively over no matter how hard he tried to rehabilitate himself with the establishment, so I suspect he can't be taken seriously as an active conspirator.

So this is probably little more than an interesting footnote and mostly for me an indication that he was never especially bright. But I could also be wrong.

ICE Puts A Big Dent In The Los Angeles Economy

This story has been out for months, but Mayor Bass is still working it:

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Wednesday blasted the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, saying the raids have put a huge dent in the city's economy.

Bass said businesses have seen a drastic reduction in immigrant customers. She's concerned some immigrant families whose breadwinners have been rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement may be on the brink of being left destitute.

A piece at Red State gives more background:

When federal immigration agents began raiding Home Depots and other businesses in the Los Angeles area recently, something strange happened:

Foot traffic vanished overnight.

Entire blocks shut down.

Sales plummeted.

And it wasn’t because customers were scared. It was because the workers were. Employees simply stopped showing up. Some owners shuttered their doors. Fear gripped the heart of L.A.’s commercial corridors.

The real story? That fear didn’t expose a broken immigration system — it exposed a network of lawbreaking employers who rely on illegal labor to line their pockets with profits.

A good example of this problem emerged just this past Friday:

Undocumented employees of the Los Angeles Equestrian Center near Burbank have reportedly been fired.

What we know: Employees told FOX11 as many as 40 employees who cared for the horses and stables were let go Friday morning.

Some who board their horses at the center were upset by the mass firing.

The city contracts private company ASM Global to run the facility.

The LA Equestrian Center says of itself,

The Los Angeles Equestrian Center offers complete boarding facilities with access from our property perimeter to over 50 miles of Griffith Park horse trails. We are also proud to host a variety of training programs for all levels of riders through its successful resident trainers.

In other words, its clientele is people who board their horses and participate in horse shows, dressage, and equivalent events. By and large, these are the very wealthy, the same people who hire illegals as domestic servants. They're upset!

Some who board their horses at the center were upset by the mass firing.

"It's terrible," said Susan Becker. "There's a lot of people whose life has been upended."

. . . "I'm devastated you know? This is a terrible situation for all these people who, a lot of these people have been working a long time and they've been working really hard," said Becker.

According to Mayor Bass,

"Apparently, I guess ICE asked for whether or not the employees had proper identification and through e-Verify, and that's all I know right now," said Bass. "But what's important to me, though is, is ICE changing their tactics? Are they changing their tactics?"

Just last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a federal judge's Temporary Restraining Order preventing ICE from stopping and questioning people about their immigration status without reasonable suspicion or a warrant.

It does not appear that today's events at the equestrian center violate that order, but still people are upset.

If I were Mayor Bass, I would be upset that a city contractor had been exploiting its workforce, quite possibly in breach of its agreements with the city over paying taxes and social security and such, but that's apparently not what bothers her or the people who board their horses. The liberals at The American Prospect also view the shortage of illegal labor with alarm:

Net immigration, which provides a steady supply of available workers in key fields, is way down this year. Employers are scrambling to find substitute workers and worrying about productivity losses. Remittance payments to Mexico have plummeted, suggesting a decline in these workers’ economic contributions, not only to their relatives, but to industries like home care, agriculture, and construction.

. . . The 2,800 arrests in Los Angeles since June, outside Home Depots and car washes and homeless shelters, massively understate the chilling effect of ICE raids on the largest city in the largest state in the union. A report from the University of California, Merced’s Community and Labor Center released last month found that 3.1 percent of the entire private-sector labor force in California didn’t show up for work between May 11 and June 8, just as ICE activity was ramping up in L.A. These numbers resemble the losses from the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic, and if anything, they’ve grown as raids intensify.

A month ago, Mayor Bass said she was even going to send the illegals gift cards to make up for them not going to work, or something like that:

Bass said a plan is being worked out to provide cash assistance to those affected by the enforcement operations, the Los Angeles Times reported. Cash cards with a "couple hundred" dollars on them will be distributed by immigrants' rights groups in about a week, Bass said.

The money will not come from city coffers, but from philanthropic partners, she said.

This was four weeks ago, but as of today, nothing more has come out about the gift cards. Maybe the people who are upset about the firings at the Equestrian Center could pool together and buy some gift cards, but they'd still need to board their horses, so maybe that wouldn't work. I tried to find out how much it costs to board a horse there, but the Equestrian Center makes you register and wait for someobne to call you to find out. I did see this on reddit:

In terms of facilities, most places in LA will be 12x12 box stall with 15 minute turnout (that you pay for). "Affordable" is going to be relative, most places are $450-$700 [monthly?] for 12x12 box stall, alfalfa, and shavings but prices will skyrocket the moment you look for a larger stall & add grass hay.

The bigger problem is that if the Equestrian Center can no longer exploit illegals, the boarding fee is going to go up to cover market wages and benefits. Heck, I'd be upset, too! Mayor Bass, you go, girl!

On the other hand, I see a problem with the gift cards. How will the illegals qaulify? Will they go down to City Hall and present evidence that they're illegal to get a gift card? Otherwise, anyone could get one, and that wouldn't be good, right? But if they have to do something like that to qualify, what's to keep ICE from waiting outside City Hall to pick them up, or even tracking the cards to people once they're used?

I don't think Mayor Bass has thought this through.

"Under Color Of"

Lately I'm amazed at how much even "independent" journalists waste my time. A good exasmple is the Morning Meeting show on YouTube and 2WAY featuring Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine. Spicer in particular is represented as an expert on Trump -- "Can you take us into Trumpworld on this, Sean?" -- when he left the first Trump administration after only six months in July 2017, apparently because Trump lost patience with both Reince Priebus and his protege Spicer as "professional Repulicans".

Just the other day, Halperin, Spicer, and Turrentine pontificated at length over where Trump and Putin might meet to resolve the Ukraine war -- maybe it would be Geneva. Maybe it would be Iceland or Greenland. Two days later, it turns out to be Alaska. In other words, they could blather on about Trumpworld or Putinworld, know absolutely nothing, and get away with it for days. Why shoud anyone waste time watching them?

The various commentators enumerating the potential charges that might be brought against Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and others in Russiagate, mostly just perjury, are in the same class. I'm having more and more of a feeling that the major cases will have little or nothing to do with perjury, and people like Jonathan Turley will have been clueless.

Two cases that came up yesterday give what I think is a much better idea of which way the Justice Deparment is more likely to go. The first is a Massachusetts county sheriff:

Suffolk County Sheriff Steven Tompkins was arrested Friday after a federal grand jury indicted him for allegedly extorting a cannabis company seeking to open a dispensary in Boston.

Tompkins, 67, is accused of extorting $50,000 from an executive with the unnamed national cannabis retailer by leveraging a key partnership between his office and the dispensary. Federal prosecutors allege Tompkins first pressured the executive into selling him equity interest in the company, then into refunding his buy-in when share prices dipped.

Tompkins was arrested in Florida Friday morning on two counts of extortion under color of official right, U.S. Attorney Leah B. Foley’s office said in a news release.

According to the Justice Department,

[T]he Hobbs Act (18 U.S.C. § 1951) defines extortion in terms of "the obtaining of property from another, with his consent . . . under color of official right." In fact, the under color of official right aspect of the Hobbs Act derives from the common law meaning of extortion.

. . . In order to show a violation of the Hobbs Act under this provision, the Supreme Court recently held that "the Government need only show that a public official has obtained a payment to which he was not entitled, knowing that the payment was made in return for official acts."

In the Massachusetts case, according to the first link,

According to court documents, the cannabis company in question sought to open a retail dispensary in Boston in 2019[.]

. . . The state’s Cannabis Control Commission approved the company’s license to operate a dispensary in Boston in March 2021. But while the licensing process was still underway, federal prosecutors allege Tompkins began pressuring the executive to sell him stock before the company went public. According to court documents, Tompkins specifically told the executive he “wanted to get in on the stock so [he] could make some cannabis money.”

When the executive rebuffed Tompkins, the sheriff allegedly upped the ante with a reminder that the company still needed his help for future license renewals. Purportedly fearing Tompkins would use his position to jeopardize the company’s partnership with the sheriff’s office and imperil both the dispensary license and the company’s initial public offering, the executive relented.

. . . When the value of his shares later decreased and his stake dipped below his initial investment, Tompkins allegedly demanded — and received — a full refund of $50,000.

The second, much closer to the lawfare against Trump, is a federal grand jury inmvestigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James:

The US attorney’s office for the Northern District of New York issued two subpoenas seeking information about James’ investigations into the Trump Organization and National Rifle Association, the sources said.

A grand jury investigation into James has also convened in Albany, New York, according to a source familiar. The grand jury probe into James is said to be looking into deprivation of rights, which means violating someone’s constitutional rights, against Trump.

According to the Justice Department,

Section 242 of Title 18 makes it a crime for a person acting under color of any law to willfully deprive a person of a right or privilege protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States. For the purpose of Section 242, acts under "color of law" include acts not only done by federal, state, or local officials within their lawful authority, but also acts done beyond the bounds of that official's lawful authority, if the acts are done while the official is purporting to or pretending to act in the performance of his/her official duties.

Since the grand jury investigation is still under way, we don't know the precise acts Letitia James is alleged to have done to violate Trump's constitutional rights. If there's an indictment, we'll learn more. But it seems reasonable, as only a few people have suggested up to now, that the Mar-a-Lago search could also constitute a deprivation of Trump's Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable search and seizure "under color of authority".

Since this took place under Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, this could make them vulnerable to charges connected with an overall conspiracy to deprive Trump of his civil rights, which would have covered serveillance under the FISA court in 2016-17 as well.

I'm convinced that the Justice Department action in the Russiagate cases will be much wider-ranging than just the perjury charges commentators have envisioned, and if they cover actions during the Biden administration at all, they will have to involve figures like Garland and Wray, who aren't on current lists of the usual suspects. But if the federal grand jury investigating Russiagate is empaneled in Miami, which it appears to be, that means the Mar-a-Lago raid is within its scope and is going to be treated as an act in furtherance of the whole conspiracy.

I think indictments will come faster than the conventional wisdom currently thinks, and they'll involve more people than just Brennan, Clapper, and Comey.

Let's Revisit Edward Feser

We've entered the anniversary period for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945), but there's been little of the usual handwringing this year, at least in what I've seen. Edward Feser, the neo-Thomist philosopher who sometimes posts on how, at least in his view, just war doctrine makes these attacks intrinsically evil, hasn't posted directly on the subject this year. I've done more thinking about this in recent months, and I think this might neveretheless be a good time to revisit the questions he raises.

What may be the most succinct outline of his views, at least as far as I understand them, is at a post on his blog, Happy Consequentialism Day! on August 9, 2010. Although he provides a link to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy's definition of consequentialism, he himself has little to say about it other than it

is, as David Oderberg has put it, “downright false and dangerous, an evil doctrine that should be avoided by all right-thinking people.” And the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, accordingly, as evil as consequentialism is.

Well, we've got that out of the way, huh? But with nothing else to do one recent afternoon, I went looking for a better definition, and I found at Wikipedia on one hand,

Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act (or in some views, the rule under which it falls) will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative. Different consequentialist theories differ in how they define moral goods, with chief candidates including pleasure, the absence of pain, the satisfaction of one's preferences, and broader notions of the "general good".

But on the other, it goes on to say,

The term consequentialism was coined by G. E. M. Anscombe in her essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" in 1958. However, the meaning of the word has changed over the time since Anscombe used it: in the sense she coined it, she had explicitly placed J. S. Mill in the nonconsequentialist and W. D. Ross in the consequentialist camp, whereas, in the contemporary sense of the word, they would be classified the other way round. This is due to changes in the meaning of the word, not due to changes in perceptions of W.D. Ross's and J.S. Mill's views.

So the whole idea of "consequentialism" dates only from 1958, and any effort to place earlier philosophers like Mill in any sort of "consequantialist" school is going to be dodgy. Certainly they never identified themselves as such, or indeed indicated that they in some way opposed it -- they never had any idea it existed. This is only the start of the problem. At the Internet Encyclopedia of Philsophy link Feser supplies above,

There is disagreement about how consequentialism can best be formulated as a precise theory, and so there are various versions of consequentialism.

. . . Consequentialism does not itself say what kinds of consequences are good. Hence people can agree on consequentialism while disagreeing about what kind of outcome is good or bad.

So people can agree on consequentialism while disagreeing on what it is, except that as David Oderberg has helpfully observed, it's downright false and dangerous, an evil doctrine. I think this can be parsed as, "if you disagree with Edward Feser on the intrinsic evil of the atomic bombings, you're a consequentialist, case closed." But nobody can really define a consequentialist outside of that. If you say X, you agree with J S Mill, and you're a consequentialist, but nobody knows if Mill is a consequentialist or not.

But there are other problems. Feser mentions "natural law theory" four times in his post, but he never enumerates what it is. On the other hand, the Catechism of the Catholic Church does codify it in paragraph 2309:

The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the “just war” doctrine.

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

Let's look at the language this statement uses. It prefaces the conditions with a reference to "the gravity of such a decision", viz, to go to war. This is an implicit recognition that, as General Sherman put it, "war is hell". It isn't just soldiers who suffer in any war; their families lose their fathers, brothers, husbands, and breadwinners. Civilian populations in the path of armies have suffered catastrophic depredations in all wars throughout history.

This is implicit before the Catechism even lists conditions. It assumes that "those who have responsibility for the common good" recognize that this is going to happen if they go to war at all. But the third and fourth conditions introduce a need to balance the factors: there must be serious prospects of success, and especially the evil to be eliminated must be greater than the evils that will inevitably result from going to war at all.

The catechism specifially calls for the "evaluation of these conditions". Isn't this a form of consequentialism? Feser says,

[I]t is never, never permissible to do what is intrinsically evil that good may come – not even if you’d feel much happier if you did it, not even if you’ve got some deeply ingrained tendency to want to do it, not even if it will shorten a war and save thousands of lives. Never.

It may be intrinsically evil deliberately to kill innocent civilians. The problem is "deliberate". For millennia, "those who have responsibility for the common good" must have recognized what happens to civilians in the path of an advancing army, even when there were no aircraft to drop bombs on cities. The scriptural accounts of sieges make it absolutely plain that when they end, women, children, and animals are slaughtered. Natural law theory in CCC 2309 is simply saying that civil and military authorities must factor this into their deliberations, and this is within their prudential judgment.

So, what is prudential judgment? The Catholic Answers site quotes the Catechism:

Prudence is the virtue that disposes practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it. . . . With the help of this virtue we apply moral principles to particular cases without error and overcome doubts about the good to achieve and the evil to avoid (1806).

The site goes on,

Because prudence is concerned with choosing the good, a prudential judgment does not reflect a merely subjective preference. So we can be held morally accountable for the judgments we make in these matters.

But unlike principles of doctrine and morality, the Church has not definitively taught which specific answers the faithful should embrace when it comes to implementing moral principles—like justice or care for the poor—in the public sphere.

So for starters, the Catechism has presumably left the choice to use nuclear weapons to the US civil and military authorities, which is to say Truman, Marshall, King, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Oppenheimer, and others. In the words of CCC 2309, they had "responsibility for the common good". Wait a momwnt. Isn't this impllicitly saying that Truman, Marshall, King, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Oppenheimer, and others were tasked with providing a better outcome than the alternatives? The alternatives they saw in mid-1945 would have been:

• The likelihood that the Japanese would continue genocidal policies in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia for as long as the war would continue
• The recognition by the military authorities that continuation of the war past 1945, with expected high casualties in an invasion of Japan, would seriously reduce public support
• The likelihood that the Japanese would use suicide tactics and enlist elderly men and civilian women and children to sacrifice themselves to resist an invasion
• The Allied war aim was "unconditional surrender", which implied there would be no negotiations that might allow Japan to retain territories in China and Southeast Asia that it had invaded.

Aren't these the specific factors that the US civil and military authorites were tasked with balancing, whether the use of nuclear weapons would "produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated"? These were non-trivial decisions, made with the full underatanding of wartime exigencies. But let's go back to the Wikipedia definition of consequentialism:

Consequentialists hold in general that an act is right if and only if the act (or in some views, the rule under which it falls) will produce, will probably produce, or is intended to produce, a greater balance of good over evil than any available alternative.

Isn't this implicit in CCC 2309, which tasks the civil and military authorities with making the prudential judgment of whether the evils of, say, continuing the war after 1945 outweigh the evils of one or more nuclear attacks? I would go as far as saying that CCC 2309 is consequentialist!

I started out some years ago admiring Feser's arguments generally, but especially on the morality of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, I've begun to see a sloppiness and lack of rigor that have troubled me about US academics since my days in graduate school. He refers to "natural law" or "just war theory", but he never ties himself to a specific definition of either. Nor does he define "consequentialism", a neologism that seems to resist any specific definition in any case. In fact, I would call it a hypostatization, an attempt to give a concrete existence to an abstraction. I've been there before in graduate-level classrooms, and I'm afraid I've come to think Feser is nothing special.

This also reminds me a little of Robert E Lee, who certainly in his lifetime heard many critiques of his generalship at Gettysburg. When one individual came up to him and said, "General, here's what you should have done," Lee answered, "Why didn't you tell me that before the battle?"

Home Rule For DC!

Just this past week, it looks like Trump has put another project on the front burner: he's going to reverse "home rule" for the District of Columbia. This was a major civil rights agenda item when I lived in Bethesda, just across the border in Maryland, with my family in the 1960s. The photo above speaks volumes: the only visible white figure marching with Dr King is Paul Moore Jr, Episcopal Suffragan Bishop of Washington, scion of one of the country's wealthiest families, later unmasked as a serial sexual predator. What on earth is going on here?

Even at the time, Moore fit the type of the Northern philanthropist "helping" Southern blacks depicted in Ralph Ellison's 1947 Invisible Man. What was in it for that rich white guy? We've come to understand this only very slowly, but it looks like Trump has had insight into this, among many other things.

President Donald Trump threatened Tuesday to have the federal government take control of Washington, D.C., after an assault on a well-known original staffer for the Department of Government Efficiency in the nation's capital over the weekend.

Edward Coristine, also known by his online name, “Big Balls,” and a woman characterized in a police report as his significant other were the victims of an unarmed attempted carjacking early Sunday.

. . . “Local ‘youths’ and gang members, some only 14, 15, and 16-years-old, are randomly attacking, mugging, maiming, and shooting innocent Citizens, at the same time knowing that they will be almost immediately released,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, saying minors as young as 14 should be tried as adults.

. . . “If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore,” he added.

At the time, Congressional oversight of the District of Columbia, often exercised via segregationist senior Southern Democrats, was thought to be a major civil rights injustice, which the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973 was intended to remedy. It instituted a mayor and city council equivalent to other major cities, but with restrictions. Among other things, the municipal judges continued to be appointed by the president, but this seems to have done nothing to restrict the revolving-door justice system that's enabled the juvenile crime problem Trump mentions.

But the problem of Washington, which simply can't be ignored, is the overall problem of the 1960s Civil Rights movement writ small. It was a key issue for Dr King, who's in the march at the far right in the photo above. Here we are 50 and 60 years later, and with almost every issue connected to the African-American community, we see the implicit questions: "Emmett Till died for this?" "Martin Luther King Jr marched for this?" It looks like Trump, who is gradually getting to be acknowledged as one of the most consequential presidents, is going to take this problem on:

End home rule and re-federalize D.C. immediately. It is long overdue, as D.C. is clearly incapable of governing itself. The days of D.C. holding the government and the country hostage need to be over. https://t.co/549EsUoebF

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 5, 2025

Trump continued to telegraph his intentions yesterday:

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he may mobilize the National Guard in Washington, D.C., if the city is unable to crack down on violent crime.

The commander in chief, who deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles earlier this year in response to anti-ICE riots, made the comment at the White House after a reporter asked if he was considering taking over the police in D.C.

“We’re considering it, yeah, because the crime is ridiculous,” Trump said, adding later that his plan may include “bringing in the National Guard, maybe, very quickly, too.”

But Trump also delegates these priorities, and it looks like Jeanine Pirro will be the face of remaking the District:

Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox News co-host who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Saturday as the U.S. attorney for D.C., told "The Ingraham Angle" on Wednesday that she wants to help enact President Donald Trump’s vision of making the federal district "safe" and "beautiful."

"Youth violence is on the rise — not just in D.C., but across the country. And if you think that these kids need to be coddled and they need to be hugged — they need to have consequences, they need to understand that enough is enough, that we're going to put them in jail or some kind of youth rehabilitation detention facility and not allow the D.C. Council — one of whom I just recently indicted — to take cover for these kids," Pirro said.

"It's time to end it. That's what the president wants, that's what we're going to do."

I would just point out that the image of the wealthy plutocrat Paul Moore Jr marching with Dr King, on one hand a concrete illustration of Ralph Ellison's view of the world in Invisible Man, is also a manifestation of the populist Ferdinand Lundberg's understanding of the social order in America's Sixty Families and The Rich and the Super-Rich. His grandfather, William Henry Moore,

organized and promoted or sat as a director for several steel companies that were merged with among others the Carnegie Steel Company to create United States Steel. He and his brother James Hobart Moore helped create the Diamond Match Company, National Biscuit Company, First National Bank, the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, the American Can Company, the Lehigh Valley Railroad, the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, the Continental Fire Insurance Company, the Western Union Telegraph Company, the American Cotton Oil Company, and Bankers Trust.

The people who ran the country from the post-Civil War era through the Bushes and Obama were the people who were all in favor of the Washington, DC we see today, and a great deal else. What on earth is going on here?

Losing The Plot?

There's a segment of MAGA that thinks much of the Trump administration is just same old-same old, for instance at Conservative Treehouse:

Unfortunately, we have a long and painful history with the Trump-era Main Justice system, intentionally leaking information to satiate the MAGA base and tamp-down demands for reform and accountability. For seven years various Trump officials have claimed to be working to bring accountability. None has been delivered.

Also unfortunately, the pattern of bread and circuses is repeating. The Dept of Justice leaked a letter to The Federalist, in order to affirm their performance.

. . . The DOJ providing this letter directly to The Federalist, indicates the purpose of Pam Bondi’s DOJ action is performative; not substantive. If the DOJ does not want to compromise their grand jury case, then why are they leaking their letters? Simply, think about it.

. . . It’s likely the DOJ knows the challenge of the [Russiagate] case is a very high bar and they are unlikely to clear it. So, what they are doing is appeasing the ‘Russiagate’ crowd, with the performance of the investigation itself.

Certainly the Democrats and legacy media are claiming the Russiagate case is unlikely to clear a high legal bar, but the opinion isn't unanimous -- I've already linked to Jonathan Turley, who's said,

“It does appear a couple of these figures may have committed perjury. I think the most vulnerable may be Brennan, who is, like, a 30-point buck in the open,” Turley said. “This stuff goes directly to information that he gave to Congress and seems to be in contradiction, and so there are real questions here.”

In other words, there's substance here, at minimum with clear-cut perjury. Paul Sperry, who writes for Real Clear Investigations, reported a month ago,

Explosive new evidence suggests that some of the highest-ranking officials in the Obama-era CIA and FBI perjured themselves regarding their claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin helped Donald Trump secure his victory in 2016.

A newly released CIA review challenges their sworn denials to Congress that the Steele dossier – a discredited set of allegations about Trump funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign – was used as the basis for the years-long Russiagate probe that hamstrung President Trump’s first term.

. . . The CIA’s “lessons-learned” report contradicts Obama administration officials’ claims – most of which were made under oath – that they did not use the since-debunked dossier.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, for one, insisted in his sworn May 2017 testimony before Congress that the Steele dossier was not “in any way” used as a basis for the so-called ICA completed in late December 2016.

. . . Likewise, then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper said in an official January 2017 statement that “we did not rely upon [the dossier] in any way for our conclusions.” Several months later, he assured Congress the dossier was “not a formal part of the Intelligence Community Assessment.”

More recently, Clapper also swore, "We didn't use [the dossier] in our Intelligence Community Assessment" and "We didn't use it for the Intelligence Community Assessment, we didn't draw on it." [Emphasis added.]

. . . While testifying in a December 2017 deposition, moreover, former deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe asserted that although a written summary of the dossier was appended to the classified version of the ICA, it was never referred to “in the main body” of the intel report.

. . . McCabe’s boss, former FBI Director James B. Comey, swore the same thing during a September 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: “It was significant enough and consistent enough with other intelligence that it ought to be included, but it wasn’t sufficiently corroborated to be in the body of the Intelligence Community Assessment.”

The CIA review shows that the unverified and now-debunked dossier was used as support for the intelligence analysis, not just as a sidebar as Obama officials have maintained.

Sperry has also posted that other inquiries are in process:

NEW: The DOJ-FBI Strike Force investigating the Russiagate conspiracy of corruption is dusting off "a dozen" criminal referrals sent several yrs ago by the House Intelligence Committee to investigate Obama officials who potentially perjured themselves during closed-door hearings.

— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) July 30, 2025

With the grand jury apparently empaneled in Miami, this would be an indication that the Mar-a-Lago raid will be used as an action in furtherance of an overall conspiracy:

The Mar-a-lago raid by the Biden (Obama) Administration was part of the ongoing Russiagate conspiracy.

This could open the door for a grand jury in Florida and not in the safety of DC.

Oops!pic.twitter.com/eVZucbwq2Z

— C3 (@C_3C_3) August 4, 2025

On top of that are the puzzling developments surrounding Ghislaine Maxwell's meeting with now-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Trump in his 2024 criminal trial in New York City. Although Trump appears to keep his distance from any day-to-day developments in this and other cases, we may assume that this matter has a high priority with both Trump and the Justice Department.

Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell handed authorities documentation alleging that at least “100 different people” were within the late pedophile’s orbit, a bombshell disclosure that comes after two meetings with a top official from the U.S. Justice Department.

. . . By offering up the evidence, Maxwell has laid all her cards on the table, making good on a promise to deliver new information to the DOJ in exchange for consideration around a reduced sentence.

Within days of this meeting, she

was moved to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas, prison officials said Friday.

Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in recruiting and trafficking minors for sex, was being held at a low-security facility in Tallahassee, Florida, that housed men and women.

The camp in Bryan, Texas, houses only women. A majority of its inmates are serving time for nonviolent offenses and white-collar crimes.

. . . Sex offenders must be in at least a low-level security prison like FCI Tallahassee, unless she received a waiver.

Only the administrator of [the Bureau of Prisons'] Designation and Sentence Computation Center can make that decision, according to the waiver policy.

Also subsequently,

The Trump administration is considering publicly releasing the transcript of a Justice Department official's two-day interview with Ghislaine Maxwell last month, a source familiar with the matter told NBC News on Tuesday.

“We’re leaning toward transparency,” the source said.

In what doesn't seem coincidental,

The House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas Tuesday to a slew of former attorneys general and FBI directors, as well as former President Bill Clinton, for testimony about the case involving convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The subpoenas seeking depositions from the former Justice Department officials were issued after Republicans and Democrats on a House Oversight subcommittee approved measures to authorize the demands last month as part of efforts by Congress to obtain more information about Epstein.

. . . The committee is seeking testimony from Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as from officials spanning the past four presidential administrations: former Attorneys General Merrick Garland, Bill Barr, Alberto Gonzales, Jeff Sessions, Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder, and former FBI Directors James Comey and Robert Mueller. Sessions and Barr led the Justice Department during President Trump's first term. Lawmakers are seeking information from the Clintons because of the former president's past ties to Epstein and Maxwell in the early 2000s.

None of this strikes me as "performative". Instead, it looks like consistent progress toward a goal, moving at fairly high speed. In response to the Epstein controversy last month, Trump repeatedly said he thought Attorney General Bondi was doing a good job, and just looking at the evidence that's been coming out, I've got to conclude that she, Blanche, and Patel are doing exactly what's expected.