As I finish this post, let me see if I can squeeze this in. I’ve never been all that interested in sports, of any kind. I do watch the Olympics, to see performances of skill and beauty, but I don’t actually care about who wins. Sports is a zero-sum game. Professional sports picks teams that don’t actually represent the cities they supposedly represent; they’re arbitrary. Sports is a sublimation of warfare, and if sports keeps cultures from actual warfare, that’s fine. If it attracts the attention of millions or billions of people around the world who might otherwise direct their aggressive instincts elsewhere… that’s fine.
Yet there’s another angle, that goes to zero-sum games and non-zero-sum games. Sports are the first type. One team wins, the other has to lose. Humanity hasn’t advanced that way. Humanity has advanced via non-zero-sum games in which both, or all, sides win.
I’d be more interested in competence vs. competition. Wouldn’t it be interesting if people from around the world competed for competence? Not just in academic subjects, but maybe even in athletic performances. It wouldn’t be about who *wins*, it’s about how many people can demonstrate some superior level of achievement. How many people today can match the standards of four years ago?
I’d extend that to academic achievements. How many people actually understand the basics of civics? Of technology? (Let alone physics, biology, math.) Of how the world works?
That’s sorta what academics is about. Competence. Competition is more primal.
(I’ll polish this tomorrow.)
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Medium-length items today. No long pieces, but several pieces worth a bit of quoting and comment.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 23 Feb 2026: DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin’s replacement is even worse, subtitled “Kristi Noem isn’t shaking up DHS, she’s doubling down on violence and propaganda”
Even in an administration of shameless liars, Tricia McLaughlin is a standout. The Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, who announced on Feb. 17 that she would be stepping down, has a gift for being able to issue preposterous falsehoods with a straight face on an hourly basis — usually in defense of Secretary Kristi Noem‘s deportation agenda. McLaughlin’s skill is chilling. She treats the English language the way Hannibal Lecter regards a murder victim he’s about to dissect and consume.
And so on. Then:
As it turns out, progressives don’t need to worry about losing this particular villain — because there is another. Lauren Bis, the woman reported to be McLaughlin’s replacement, may be an even more dishonest character. As McLaughlin’s deputy, Bis has been responsible for “fact-checking” videos in which she lies with a self-righteous smugness that would make JD Vance jealous. Her response to Good’s killing is especially hard to watch. Bis characterizes the people who are simply standing around as “rioters,” claims that Good tried to run over the ICE officer with her car and insists that ICE agents tried to assist Good, when multiple witnesses said they blocked medical care. (The video also had a prominent typo, with “assaults” misspelled as “assults.” It’s unclear if this was an accident made by hastily throwing the video together, or if it was a deliberate attempt to bait liberals into looking sanctimonious by correcting the spelling.)
My take-away from this is not to note yet again that the Trump administration is filled with liars and grifters… It’s to wonder how many people like those in the Trump administration there are. Is the world full of liars and grifters, those who shamelessly would support an administration prone to tearing down American society and supporting a would-be king?
I’m going to guess there are not actually all that many people. I think that the Trump administration is just good at finding them.
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We’ve met, i.e. read, Zack Beauchamp before, with his book THE REACTIONARY SPIRIT (reviewed here).
Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 23 Feb 2026: How to stop a dictator, subtitled “I spent months studying how authoritarians like Trump lose. The answer is shockingly simple.”
A key point here is that most Americans don’t actually care about principles, like those of Democracy. They care about household matters.
What has motivated so many Americans to act? According to Erica Chenoweth, the Harvard political scientist whose team compiled the data, “the top three claims expressed during the protests are concerns about the presidency, democracy, and immigration. These themes dominate the protest landscape.” America, in their view, now has “a growing, durable, and disciplined pro-democracy movement.”
The conventional wisdom says this shouldn’t be happening. Most experts will tell you democracy is a political loser: too abstract to motivate ordinary citizens. Many believe Kamala Harris lost partly because she talked about democracy too much, missing swing voters who wanted to hear about “normal” issues like the cost of living or corruption.
The essay is in a sense a summary of that book. I’ll quote Vox’s Key Takeaways box.
- Democratic survival in the face of threats like Trump is determined in large part by how obvious the threat to democracy is. The more people recognize that an elected leader is trying to destroy democracy from within, the less likely it is that said leader will succeed.
- Evidence from Brazil, South Korea, and Poland — all democracies that defeated a would-be authoritarian government — show that the legibility of threat to key segments of society was critical in mobilizing the pushback that decided democracy’s survival.
- This has important implications for the United States going forward. Instead of sidelining the issue of democracy, as some political pollsters suggest, those concerned about the issue should foreground it — working hard to illustrate how Trump’s behaviors threaten core freedoms people cherish.
As usual with many such pieces, the headline promises more than the article delivers. There are never any easy, simple, solutions, or they already would have been done.
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From Tom Nichols.
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 23 Feb 2026: The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem, subtitled “How did the GOP become a haven for slogans and ideas straight out of the Third Reich?”
Opening:
Over the past few months, during his agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has worn an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. It looks like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.
By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Vice President J. D. Vance shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party. (In December, at Turning Point USA’s conference, Vance said, “I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform.”)
Well, because the Nazis and modern Republicans have similar motivations. They are driven by similar base human nature. I’ve belabored this endlessly on this blog.
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A few quick takes.
- JMG, from Florida Politics: Florida Republicans Move To Speed Up Book Bans
- My take: the people who would ban books are never the good guys.
- CNN, 20 Feb 26: Hegseth invited pastor who calls for Christian theocracy to lead Pentagon prayer service
- This guy supports repealing women’s right to vote and believes homosexuality should be a crime
- JMG, 22 Feb 26: Cawthorn Calls For “Hanging People In The Streets”
- More conservatives itching for violence.
- Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 22 Feb 2026: Conservatives cried voter fraud long before Trump, subtitled “Claims of stolen elections and tainted ballots have often been aimed at curbing Black political power”
- More generally, claims of voter fraud by conservatives are always about trying to prevent people they don’t like from voting.
