The New Era of Hate
Top Stories of the Year: #1
I’m finishing my countdown of the top stories of 2025 on the final day of my post-Thanksgiving sale.
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Again, the real top stories of 2025 are in my book. The most important of those, and the very first chapter of the book, is Trump’s attempt to take away the central power of Congress: control over spending, the “power of the purse.”
The main instrument for doing this was Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” which was promoted as a crash program to make massive cuts in government spending.
That’s not what it did. Here is how I described it.
[E]veryone familiar with how the federal budget works knew beforehand that it would fail at making significant cuts to the federal budget. And it has failed.
The Treasury regularly releases figures on total federal government spending, and those numbers show spending for 2025 on exactly the same course as spending for the prior two years—only at a slightly higher level. All the claimed savings from DOGE have had no impact whatsoever on actual government spending….
If we observe that a program fails at its stated purpose, we might conclude that it was run incompetently. But if its failure was entirely predictable, and the program continues unabated even as it is manifestly failing, we should conclude that its stated purpose was not its real purpose—and look for what it is actually supposed to accomplish….
The purpose of DOGE, the goal at which it has actually succeeded, is the assertion of direct and arbitrary power over all aspects of the federal government by the chief executive. “Arbitrary” is the key word here. The central purpose of DOGE was to remove institutional, procedural, and constitutional barriers to the whims of whoever wields power. Its purpose was to reach into the mechanisms of every executive agency, grab hold of its two most basic functions—spending and hiring—and concentrate them in the hands of a small cabal outside all government procedures and accountability.
It was never about the size of government, it’s about who controls it.
At the end of the year, we have some perspective on this, because the Trump administration recently announced that DOGE doesn’t exist any more. Partly, this is just because the “DOGE bros” are now dispersed throughout the rest of the government. For example:
Jeremy Lewin, who helped Musk and the Trump administration dismantle the US Agency for International Development, now oversees foreign assistance at the State Department, according to the agency’s website.
So that was the real purpose: to place Trump loyalists throughout the federal bureaucracy. But also notice the part about dismantling USAID. The administration is now doing the same thing with the Department of Education. Say what you will about both agencies, the fact is that they were created by legislation passed by Congress, which mandated their existence and responsibilities. That is the real essence of the Trump administration’s efforts: to override legislation and make the US Congress irrelevant.
And it’s still true that this has had no impact on spending, which has marched merrily along at a level slightly higher than last year, as if there was never any effort at budget-cutting or “government efficiency.” Here’s the graph:
The loss of the power of the purse has been a disaster for Congress, which the Republican leadership has been purposely turning into an irrelevant vestige of the Old Republic. The House of Representatives didn’t even meet for two months before and during the government shutdown.
But this also indicates how Congress can regain its power. In the book, I quote this passage from Property and Freedomby the historian Richard Pipes.
British constitutional history records the advance of Parliament from being a servant of the crown (eleventh to fifteenth century) to being its partner (sixteenth to early seventeenth century) and, finally, its master (1640s on). In this evolution, the distribution of wealth between the crown and its subjects played a decisive role, inasmuch as the decline of royal power accompanied the shrinkage of royal estates and the revenues derived from them….
This impoverishment had momentous political consequences, for customs duties and most taxes required parliamentary sanction. “The Crown became poorer and poorer, and when compelled to resort to Parliament, had to surrender constitutional rights in return for funds.” “The threshold over which the kings repeatedly stumbled was money. They demanded from the people hard cash, the people demanded from them freedoms and reforms. This is the red thread, if there is one, that runs through English parliamentary history.”
This is what the Democrats in Congress should be doing, but haven’t been doing, with the government shutdowns: trading funding for the restoration of constitutional rights and powers.
Again, buy the book.
Now to the biggest of the other stories of 2025.
The New Era of Hate
In my news roundup for 2016, I warned that Donald Trump had caused a breach in the “moral quarantine” of racism. By “moral quarantine,” I meant the attempt, through social ostracism, “to isolate an evil idea, contain it, and prevent it from spreading beyond its last few festering swamps.”
It’s more than the fact that Trump launched his campaign with a slur against the character of all Hispanic immigrants, betraying a vulnerability to ethnic stereotypes that caused the alt-right to hail him as their savior…. Most of all, there is the way Trump and his campaign staff became notorious as a transmission belt for arguments and Internet memes originating from the alt-right.
The quaint and old-fashioned phrase in that passage is “alt-right” to describe the rising racist faction. We don’t use that phrase anymore because the racists are no longer an alternative to the mainstream of the right. They are now within the mainstream.
I’ve been meaning to write a big overview on this, but it’s one of those stories that is so big it becomes overwhelming. I kept setting aside a report that I thought was so outrageous it would serve as a hook for an exploration of the rising influence of racism on the right. But each one was quickly displaced by another, equally outrageous story, and I could never keep up.
So what I am going to do here is simply to give you a brief catalogue of those stories. Any one of them could have been the anchor for an article on the resurgence of racism into the mainstream of American culture. Taken all together, they do something more important: raise the alarm at just how serious this issue is and how far out of control it has gotten.
The one that first set me off was the story of an 11-year-old girl in Texas who committed suicide.
Jocelynn Rojo Carranza took her life after experiencing months of relentless bullying from her sixth grade classmates over her family’s immigration status, with some students even threatening to contact US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)….
Staff members at Gainesville Intermediate School were aware Carranza was being bullied, with some students even mocking her about being left alone when her parents got deported. Faculty also knew it had gotten aggressive that Carranza was meeting with a school counselor one to two times a week. The girl’s family, however, was never notified.
Kids being bullied by their classmates is, unfortunately, nothing new. Being bullied essentially just for being Hispanic is—well, that’s not new, either. But the fact that the bullies could appeal to the prospect of ICE taking the girl’s mother away? This shows that the bullies now feel the authorities are on their side, from the president all the way down.
Or consider this story from the University of Florida, newly rendered non-woke by conservative governor Ron DeSantis. So what is being taught there now? Here’s an example.
Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.
In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.”
Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”
At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades….
That left some students and faculty members at the law school, considered Florida’s most prestigious, to wonder, and to worry: What merit could the judge have seen in it?
A couple of the legal scholars I follow were blistering in their assessments. Anthony Michael Kreis said, “It’s just Dred Scott repackaged. No new historical research. No innovative argument. It isn’t poorly written but that’s about the only thing I can say about it—certainly could not have been the best paper in the class.” Evan Bernick concludes, “no paper that argued for the KKK’s interpretation of the Constitution should have received a passing grade, let alone an award.”
The judge who gave the award was nominated to the bench by Donald Trump, of course. Oh, and after the University of Florida defended the award on the grounds of “free speech” and avoiding “viewpoint discrimination,” this happened.
It was then, in February, that Mr. Damsky opened an account on X and began posting racist and antisemitic messages. After he wrote in late March that Jews must be “abolished by any means necessary,” the university suspended him, barred him from campus, and stepped up police patrols around the law school. He is now challenging the punishment, which could result in his expulsion.
Ah, but I just saw that news that Damsky has been reinstated. Because I guess it would be terrible if Nazis were subject to discrimination for their viewpoint that the Jews should be “abolished.”
But surely, this is just a crazy thing happening on a college campus and not going out into the rest of the world. Then again, consider the recently published leaks from a private chat groups for the Young Republicans. And if you think this means we’re talking about teenagers, to be a “Young” Republican means that you are under 40.
Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.
They referred to black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery….
The 2,900 pages of chats, shared among a dozen millennial and Gen Z Republicans between early January and mid-August, chronicle their campaign to seize control of the national Young Republican organization on a hardline pro-Donald Trump platform. Many of the chat members already work inside government or party politics, and one serves as a state senator.
Together, the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely—and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders.
Paul Ingrassia, a 30-year-old lawyer, was rejected earlier this year for a prominent Justice Department position after a leak of his own racist group chats, but don’t worry, the Trump administration has found another job for him.
Oh, and an aide to a Republican congressman Dave Taylor was caught on a Zoom call displaying “an American flag altered to include a swastika.” Representative Taylor’s response is a masterclass in evasion.
“Numerous Republican offices have confirmed that they were targeted by an unidentified group or individual who distributed American flags bearing a similar symbol, which were initially indistinguishable from an ordinary American flag to the naked eye,” the statement reads. “My office was among those that were subjected to this ruse. After a full-scale internal investigation, I am confident that no employee of this office would knowingly display such a despicable image, and the flag in question was taken down immediately upon the discovery of the obscured symbol it bore.”
Click the link to see the “obscured symbol,” which of course is not obscured at all but is extremely obvious on even a cursory glance with the “naked eye” without the aid of a microscope.
You can call some of this “edgy humor” or kids just making jokes—but we’re ten years into this now, and surely the novelty has worn off. As an expert quoted in the article about the group chat notes, “You say it once or twice, it’s a joke, but you say it 251 times, it’s no longer a joke.” Popehat’s Rule of Goats is more concise.
Meanwhile, some of this is already becoming policy, particularly under Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense.
The case that caught the news last month was the removal of a plaque at World War II cemetery in the Netherlands honoring the service of black soldiers after a complaint filed by the Heritage Foundation.
The panels were reportedly rotated out in early March, one month after President Donald Trump’s executive order terminated diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives across the federal government.
The same month the panels were removed, The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, contacted the ABMC for its supposed failure to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI initiatives.
This is part of a wider “DEI purge” at the Pentagon that includes removing any acknowledgement of the military service or heroism of, well, anyone other than white men. I mean, they removed a web page about former Marine Bea Arthur, for crying out loud.
This also includes removing subversive books from the US Naval Academy library.
Thus far, the review of Nimitz Library’s holdings has identified 900 books that may run afoul of the defense secretary’s verbal order. According to a second defense official, they include “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.,” “Einstein on Race and Racism,” and a biography on Jackie Robinson.
A page honoring a black Army general who received the Congressional Medal of Honor was removed from the Department of Defense website, but only after its web address was altered to read “DEI medal,” because the honor could not possibly have been earned. Navajo Code Talkers got a similar treatment. So did a Native American who helped raise the American flag at Iwo Jima.
To make it all official, the Pentagon also removed several websites celebrating the racial integration of the armed forces, because I guess they’re not in favor of that any more.
This is what opposition to “DEI” has become—not a mere rejection of racial preference or of heavy-handed workplace training, but a rejection of any acknowledgement or welcome of non-white people. At Harvard, for example, it means “shuttering a more than 50-year-old initiative to encourage minority high school students to apply.” Because even encouraging black kids to come to Harvard is wrong.
There’s something else to notice about this pattern. While the administration was scrubbing the Pentagon website of any mention of black soldiers, they made sure to reinstall a portrait of Robert E. Lee at West Point.
Similarly, while US citizens are being racially “profiled” and detained by ICE for not being white, the administration is rolling out the red carpet for one group of immigrants: white Afrikaners. This is part of a wider immigration policy favoring white immigrants.
There’s a lot more, and I can’t present it all, so I’ll end with the most flamboyant example. Elon Musk announced in July that he was going to adjust ex-Twitter’s in-house chatbot, Grok, to make it less “woke.” The immediate result was a wave of antisemitic posts by Grok, which went on to describe itself as “MechaHitler.” Remember that Grok is not actually describing itself as anything. Its posts are not the product of an independent consciousness—but they are products and reflections of the human minds that designed it.
More recently, the same biases have been reflected in “Grokipedia,” Musk’s AI-generated anti-woke answer to Wikipedia. It seems to have been created mostly by stealing content from Wikipedia, but with a twist: frequent citations to Stormfront and other neo-Nazi sources—which is to say, exactly the sort of people Musk boosts on his social media site.
Put this together with what I wrote recently on the Heritage Foundation providing cover and support for white nationalists, and the pattern is too big to miss.
We have entered a new era of hate.
We have had eras of hate before. See a well-known liberal activist’s interesting post on the long historical pattern in which American tends to take two bold steps forward against racism—then takes a big step back. The Civil War and Reconstruction tried to erase slavery, but Jim Crow reasserted its legacy. The Civil Rights movement overturned Jim Crow, but now we’re at the tail end of a long push to take us backward to an era when racism and discrimination were overtly tolerated in government and in the culture/s
We are reaching a high point for this racist reaction. At least, I hope it will be a high point, because the new tide of bigotry will not recede on its own. It will only be beaten back if we clearly identify it and regard this as a moral crisis—one that is as important as the crisis of rising authoritarianism and intimately connected to it.
They will rise or fall together—and so will we.
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