We Need Better Son-in-Laws

Most of what needs to be said about the Comey indictment has already been said. It’s baseless, and it’s dangerous. Comey did not lie to Congress—and even if he did, he did not knowingly lie about a material fact. The case against him should be dismissed by US District Judge Michael Nachmanoff (a 2021 Joe Biden appointee) as soon as Trump administration lawyers have been given adequate time to make fools of themselves.

With that out of the way, I’d like to return to my regularly scheduled program of “screw James Comey.” This is a man, a Republican appointee, who took it upon himself to help Trump get elected the first time around. His refusal to follow standard procedures regarding public statements about ongoing investigations is a huge reason we’re in this mess to begin with. Comey is part of the institutional rot that set the stage for Trump to come in and destroy the institutions that were too feckless to stop him.

Apparently, so is his son-in-law, Troy A. Edwards Jr. A federal prosecutor in Virginia, Edwards resigned hours after his bosses indicted his father-in-law on these ridiculous charges. He wrote: “To uphold my oath to the Constitution and country, I hereby resign as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in the Department of Justice effective immediately.”

Oh, Troy, now you simply must resign in order to uphold your oath to the country? Not when the Department of Justice started prosecuting immigrants and holding them at concentration camps? Not when the DOJ violated court orders to deport people who had not yet received a full and fair hearing on their status? Not when the DOJ closed the investigation on the Epstein files to protect Trump, who is named in them? But now. Now that the DOJ is coming for someone in your actual family, now you find the backbone to resign.

Spare me this self-serving crap. It’s not patriotism to take a stand only when the government’s horrible policies affect you personally. It’s certainly not integrity. Comey, Edwards, and a whole bunch of people in official Washington care only about covering their own asses. That myopic self-regard is why the institutions have failed.

• Two people died in a terror attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. In response, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo decided to criticize… mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Cuomo said that Mamdani had “yet to condemn” the terror attacks (note: Mamdani condemned the terror attacks), because, as usual, white people expect every Muslim in America to answer for every bad thing that happens anywhere if the perpetrators might also be Muslim. Mamdani’s Twitter statement was immediately flooded with white people accusing Mamdani of supporting the killing of Jews. So I guess I’ll point out that Andrew Cuomo has yet to condemn racist hate messages being sent to Zohran Mamdani.
• This seems like a good time to mention that a year-long study showed that Elon Musk’s X is now the “go-to platform for antisemitic posters.” But, you know, Andrew Cuomo has yet to condemn X too.
• Current New York City Mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the race this week. As a Black person, I guess it is somehow my job to officially condemn Eric Adams for embarrassing Black folks and making white people somehow think that Andrew Cuomo couldn’t be worse.
• West and south of the Hudson, Donald Trump is committing more crimes in plain sight. This time, he’s violating the Hatch Act by using government websites to make political campaign messages. In response, Democrats have (wait for it) written a strongly worded letter.
• A new poll shows that Trump is losing support with the young Black and Latino men who helped carry him to victory in 2024 and don’t feel like they’re getting a “return on their investment” and… sorry, I cannot continue this sentence. The internal screaming I have for these people is about to make me have a stroke. I need to lie down. In the ocean.

• I’ve really tried to stay away from the Mississippi lynching story because, while it looks like a lynching to me, I’m not a criminologist. For those who don’t know (and a shocking number of people don’t know), 21-year-old De’Martravion Reed was found hanging from a fruit tree on the campus of Delta State University in Mississippi. Local authorities are treating it as a suicide. His family is treating it as a lynching. The Nation’s Kali Holloway wades into what we know, what we don’t know, and why Mississippi officials cannot be trusted.
• The Nation’s Jeet Here explains that Trump’s new national security orders are the blueprint for fascism.
• The Wall Street Journal reports that the corporate efforts to get people to return to the office are hitting a wall. I really hope this turns out to be a “can’t put toothpaste back in the tube” moment for corporate America. I get that it makes the managers feel important when all of their charges are lined up in their little cubicles, banging out TPS reports and praying for death inside. But honestly, it’s the 21st century. Very few people need to be in an office every day. Covid proved that. Asking people to pretend that proof doesn’t exist should, in the long run, be an exercise in futility.

Democrats are not familiar with using what power they have maximally, so getting them to stick together and force Republicans to actually work for a living was difficult. A number of bad arguments were floated to try to break Democratic ranks. Democrats have resisted these bad arguments and ideas for now, but Republicans seem strangely confident that Democrats will break once the pain of the shutdown spreads throughout the country.

Because of my job, the question I have been asked most often from Democrats perpetually afraid of their own shadow is “What about the courts?” The worry was—and for some, still is—that when the government shut down, the federal courts would shut down, and that would be extremely bad because the courts are our “last defense” against Trump.

That question is based on two faulty premises. The first is that keeping the courts running is actually a good thing, the second is that without federal funds the courts just waft away.

Neither of those premises are correct. As I keep trying to tell people, the courts have been incredibly ineffective at stopping any of Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional policies. Every time a lower court tries to stop Trump, the Supreme Court steps in and clears the way for Trump’s authoritarianism.

And the Supreme Court is not going anywhere. Neither are the other federal judges throughout the system. Judges are constitutional officers, appointed for life. Their jobs and their salaries cannot be reduced while they are alive. Federal judges cannot be furloughed or fired or anything else. We’re stuck with them forever, whether the rest of the federal government is funded or not. No matter what happens, judges will still be there to tell the president that he is wrong, and the Supreme Court will still be there to tell Trump he can do whatever he wants.

Now, depending on how long this shutdown lasts, those judges might have to do more of their own work. While the jobs and salaries of federal judges are constitutionally protected, those of their clerks are not. Their assistants are not. Their security is not. The people who sweep the floors and copy the documents and say “all rise” are not. There will be real pain throughout the federal court system if the shutdown drags on, but it will not be felt by the privileged people in robes. It will be felt by all the regular people who prop judges up but have not been gifted with a lifetime of job security.

That, of course, will be the case across the board. The people hurt by government shutdowns are never the people in government who caused the shutdown. It’ll be everybody else who has to pay for political incompetence.

There’s nothing that the Democrats should do to stop that pain from happening. As I said the day after the election, this country elected Trump, and this country now deserves every horrible thing that is going to happen because of Trump. Democrats are always trying to run around and mitigate the harm caused by Republicans. That has to stop. This country needs to see what they keep voting for.

November 6, 2024, was a choice. We made the wrong one. Now is the time of consequences.

Just to put that purchase price in context, Elon Musk paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter and take it private. George Lucas sold the entire Star Wars franchise to Disney for just $4.05 billion.

If you’re interested in shaping and deforming the culture of young people, I’m not entirely sure Twitter or Star Wars is a bigger get than EA. The company makes the Madden yearly American football games. It makes EAFC (formerly FIFA), a soccer game, which is the most popular sports game in the entire world. It makes Need for Speed, the racing game that trails only MarioKart in worldwide popularity. It makes Battlefield, which is a military-style shooter that used to rival Call of Duty in terms of player base. It makes Apex Legends, the biggest competitor to the record-breaking video game Fortnite. It also has a license from Disney to make Star Wars games.

And it makes The Sims, one of my favorite games, which is a life simulation game that has sold over 200 million units and is enjoyed by 85 million players worldwide. The Sims is one of the most inclusive games and gaming communities on the market. It is a staple of women gamers. And, I mean, I’m talking about a game where you have to proactively go into the settings and muck around with how it functions in order to turn gayness off –characters default to flirting (and “woohooing,” which is the game’s euphemism for sex) with whoever seems interesting, regardless of expressed gender. If you’re too bigoted to handle that, you have to literally force the game to model an only-heterosexual fantasy world.

All of that global cultural cache is now owned by a repressive government and Jared freaking Kushner. Regressive, pro-authoritarian forces already control most of the cultural levers in this world, from social media to news to sports. Now they’ve made their biggest encroachment yet on the video game space.

I can’t yet know how this acquisition will change the games and franchises. EA games are already monetized to the hilt, but I cannot financially afford to imagine how many additional microtransactions will be inserted into these titles as the new owners try to recoup their investment.

I can only hope it ends there. I can only hope that all the Saudis and Kushner want out of this is money. But if they want to further infect our culture with their conservative, antidemocratic, bigoted, and sexist values, EA is a perfect vehicle to help them do it.

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