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Donald Trump’s economic masterplan // He is plotting an anti-Nixon shock

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  • Trump's tariffs are part of a deliberate, strategic global economic plan, not impulsive actions, challenging critics who dismiss them as ineffective.
  • Trump perceives the dollar's status as the global reserve currency as an "exorbitant burden," undermining U.S. manufacturing by keeping the dollar overvalued and benefiting foreign exporters.
  • Foreign central banks hoarding dollars suppress their own currencies' value, boosting exports to the U.S. while accumulating U.S. Treasury debt, perpetuating a cycle of trade imbalances.
  • The dollar's hegemony supports U.S. geopolitical power (via military spending and sanctions) but harms American workers, whom Trump aims to prioritize over Wall Street and foreign interests.
  • Trump fears a "tipping point" where global reliance on the dollar outpaces U.S. economic output, leading to a collapse in confidence and economic crisis.
  • His plan seeks an "anti-Nixon Shock" to dismantle the current financial system, using tariffs to pressure foreign central banks into lowering interest rates and weakening their currencies against the dollar.
  • Phase one involves tariffs to shock foreign economies; phase two leverages bilateral negotiations and security threats to force concessions, like currency appreciation and manufacturing shifts to the U.S.
  • Trump envisions a "hub-and-spokes" global order, with the U.S. dictating terms to individual nations to maintain dominance while reducing multilateral engagement.
  • Domestic risks include alienating financiers reliant on foreign capital flows, forcing Trump to choose between his working-class base and economic elites.
  • Internationally, resistance from countries like China could spur alternative systems (e.g., BRICS-led frameworks), undermining Trump’s vision and the dollar’s supremacy.

Faced with President Trump’s economic moves, his centrist critics oscillate between desperation and a touching faith that his tariff frenzy will fizzle out. They assume that Trump will huff and puff until reality exposes the emptiness of his economic rationale. They have not been paying attention: Trump’s tariff fixation is part of a global economic plan that is solid — albeit inherently risky.

Their thinking is hard-wired onto a misconception of how capital, trade and money move around the globe. Like the brewer who gets drunk on his own ale, centrists ended up believing their own propaganda: that we live in a world of competitive markets where money is neutral and prices adjust to balance the demand and the supply of everything. The unsophisticated Trump is, in fact, far more sophisticated than them in that he understands how raw economic power, not marginal productivity, decides who does what to whom — both domestically and internationally.

Though we risk the abyss staring back when we attempt to gaze into Trump’s mind, we do need a grasp of his thinking on three fundamental questions: why does he believe that America is exploited by the rest of the world? What is his vision for a new international order in which America can be “great” again? How does he plan to bring it about? Only then can we produce a sensible critique of Trump’s economic masterplan.

So why does the President believe America has been dealt a bad deal? His chief complaint is that dollar supremacy may confer huge powers on America’s government and ruling class, but, ultimately, foreigners are using it in ways that guarantee US decline. So what most consider to be America’s exorbitant privilege, he sees as its exorbitant burden.

Trump has been lamenting the decline of US manufacturing for decades: “if you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country.” But why blame this on the dollar’s global role? Because, Trump answers, foreign central banks do not let the dollar adjust downwards to the “right” level — at which US exports recover and imports are restrained. It is not that foreign central bankers are conspiring against America. It is just that the dollar is the only safe international reserve they can get their hands on. It is only natural for European and Asian central banks to hoard the dollars that flow to Europe and Asia when Americans import things. By not swapping their stash of dollars for their own currencies, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, the People’s Bank of China and the Bank of England suppress the demand for (and thus the value of) their currencies. This helps their own exporters boost their sales to America and earn even more dollars. In a never-ending circle, these fresh dollars accumulate in the coffers of the foreign central bankers who, to gain interest safely, use them to buy US government debt.

And there’s the rub. According to Trump, America imports too much because it is a good global citizen which feels obliged to provide foreigners with the reserve dollar assets they need. In short, US manufacturing has been in decline because America is a good Samaritan: its workers and middle class suffer so that the rest of the world can grow at its expense.

But the dollar’s hegemonic status also underpins American exceptionalism, as Trump knows and appreciates. Foreign central banks’ purchases of US Treasuries enable the US government to run deficits and pay for an oversized military that would bankrupt any other country. And by being the linchpin of international payments, the hegemonic dollar enables the President to exercise the modern-day equivalent of gunboat diplomacy: to sanction at will any person or government.

This is not enough, in Trump’s eyes, to offset the suffering of American producers who are undercut by foreigners whose central bankers exploit a service (dollar reserves) America provides them for free to keep the dollar overvalued. For Trump, America is undermining itself for the glory of geopolitical power and the opportunity to accumulate other people’s profits. These imported riches benefit Wall Street and realtors but only at the expense of the people who elected him twice: Americans in the heartlands who produce the “manly” goods such as steel and automobiles that a nation needs to remain viable.

And that’s not the worst of Trump’s concerns. His nightmare is that this hegemony will be fleeting. Back in 1988, while promoting his Art of the Deal on Larry King and Oprah Winfrey, he bemoaned: “We are a debtor nation. Something’s going to happen over the next number of years in this country, because you can’t keep on losing $200 billion a year.” Since then, he has become increasingly convinced that a terrible tipping point is approaching: as America’s output diminishes in relative terms, the global demand for the dollar rises faster than US incomes. The dollar then has to appreciate even faster to keep up with the reserve needs of the rest of the world. This can’t go on forever.

For when US deficits exceed some threshold, foreigners will panic. They will sell their dollar-denominated assets and find some other currency to hoard. Americans will be left amid international chaos with a wrecked manufacturing sector, derelict financial markets and an insolvent government. This nightmare scenario has convinced Trump that he is on a mission to save America: that he has a duty to usher in a new international order. And that’s the gist of his plan: to effect in 2025 a decisive anti-Nixon Shock — a global shock that cancels out the work of his predecessor by terminating the Bretton Woods system in 1971 which spearheaded the era of financialisation.

Central to this new global order would be a cheaper dollar that remains the world’s reserve currency — this would lower US long-term borrowing rates even more. Can Trump have his cake (a hegemonic dollar and low-yielding US Treasuries) and eat it (a depreciated dollar)? He knows that the markets will never deliver this of their own accord. Only foreign central banks can do this for him. But to agree to do this, they need to be shocked into action first. And that’s where his tariffs come in.

This is what his critics do not understand. They mistakenly think that he thinks that his tariffs will reduce America’s trade deficit on their own. He knows they will not. Their utility comes from their capacity to shock foreign central bankers into reducing domestic interest rates. Consequently, the euro, the yen and the renminbi will soften relative to the dollar. This will cancel out the price hikes of goods imported into the US, and leave the prices American consumers pay unaffected. The tariffed countries will be in effect paying for Trump’s tariffs.

But tariffs are only the first phase of his masterplan. With high tariffs as the new default, and with foreign money accumulating in the Treasury, Trump can bide his time as friends and foes in Europe and Asia clamour to talk. That’s when the second phase of Trump’s plan kicks in: the grand negotiation.

Unlike his predecessors, from Carter to Biden, Trump disdains multilateral meetings and crowded negotiations. He is a one-on-one man. His ideal world is a hub and spokes model, like a bicycle wheel, in which none of the individual spokes makes much of a difference to the functioning of the wheel. In this view of the world, Trump feels confident that he can deal with each spoke sequentially. With tariffs on the one hand and the threat of removing America’s security shield (or deploying it against them) on the other, he feels he can get most countries to acquiesce.

Acquiesce to what? To appreciating their currency substantially without liquidating their long-term dollar holding. He will not only expect each spoke to cut domestic interest rates, but will demand different things from different interlocutors. From Asian countries that currently hoard the most dollars, he will demand they sell a portion of their short-term dollar assets in exchange for their own (thus appreciating) currency. From a relatively dollar-poor eurozone riddled with internal divisions that increase his negotiating power, Trump may demand three things: that they agree to swap their long-term bonds for ultra-long-term or possibly even perpetual ones; that they allow German manufacturing to migrate to America; and, naturally, that they buy a lot more US-made weapons.

“Trump’s vision of a desirable international economic order may be completely different from mine.”

Can you picture Trump’s smirk at the thought of this second phase of his masterplan? When a foreign government acquiesces to his demands, he will have chalked up another victory. And when some recalcitrant government holds out, the tariffs stay put, yielding his Treasury a steady stream of dollars which he can dispense with any way he deems fit (since Congress controls only tax revenues). Once this second phase of his plan is complete, the world will have been divided into two camps: one camp shielded by American security at the cost of an appreciated currency, the loss of manufacturing plants, and forced purchases of US exports including weapons. The other camp will be strategically closer perhaps to China and Russia, but still connected to the US through reduced trade which still gives the US regular tariff income.

Trump’s vision of a desirable international economic order may be violently different from mine, but that gives none of us a licence to underestimate its solidity and purpose — as most centrists do. Like all well-laid plans, this may, of course, go awry. The depreciation of the dollar may not be sufficient to cancel out the effect of tariffs on prices US consumers pay. Or the sale of dollars may be too great to keep long-term US debt yields low enough. But besides these manageable risks, the masterplan will be tested on two political fronts.

The first political threat to his masterplan is domestic. If the trade deficit begins to shrink as planned, foreign private money will stop flooding Wall Street. Suddenly Trump will have to betray either his own tribe of outraged financiers and realtors or the working class that elected him. Meanwhile, a second front will be opening. Regarding all countries as spokes to his hub, Trump may soon discover that he has manufactured dissent abroad. Beijing may throw caution to the wind and turn the BRICS into a New Bretton Woods system in which the yuan plays the anchoring role that the dollar played in the original Bretton Woods. Perhaps this would be the most astonishing legacy, and comeuppance, of Trump’s otherwise impressive masterplan.

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Nudist politics laid bare // Naked extremism is showing some skin

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  • The "Big Nude Boat" cruise highlights a boomer-centric nudist culture, contrasting sharply with modern political and economic turbulence.
  • Social nudism is declining among younger generations, remaining popular primarily with older, affluent demographics.
  • Nudism's origins trace back to 19th-century movements: British Fabian socialists and German Freikörperkultur, blending progressive ideals with eugenics and nature worship.
  • Early 20th-century nudism in America faced legal and cultural pushback, rooted in Puritan values and Cold War-era suspicion of "subversive" lifestyles.
  • Post-WWII America fused European nudist traditions with 1960s counterculture, emphasizing hedonism, individualism, and anti-establishment ideals.
  • Commercialization transformed nudism from countercultural rebellion into luxury experiences like cruises, epitomized by boomer consumerism.
  • German Romantic nudism influenced both far-left and far-right ideologies, with historical ties to fascist aesthetics and socialist egalitarianism.
  • Modern nudism struggles with social atomization, as younger generations reject communal traditions in favor of digital or hyper-individualized expressions.
  • Emerging trends like "body positivity" and online fitness cultures hint at a potential revival of nudism, albeit fragmented and politically polarized.
  • The article frames nudism as a fading boomer phenomenon, with its legacy caught between commercialization and new, internet-driven extremisms.

I don’t think I’m the only one feeling a little as though we’ve all been through the looking glass, in the era that began with 2016 and has just culminated with the Trumpian Revolution. In that light, I positively got whiplash reading about something that felt as though it had been parachuted in from 2002: a Caribbean cruise for American naturists.

I struggle to imagine anything more boomer than a nudist cruise. It is surely the Platonic form of boomerism. “The Big Nude Boat” set sail last week from Miami, carrying some 2,300 passengers for an 11-day Caribbean cruise. At the time of writing, it’s docked at St Lucia, and its passengers are halfway through (according to the onboard activity guide,) “the Nakation Of A Lifetime!”.

There’s certainly something disorienting about finding a subset of well-off Americans (with, judging by the naked group photo in the activity guide, boomers well-represented) is apparently so oblivious to the prevailing economic and political chaos they’re merrily casting off both the moorings and their underwear. But my double-take wasn’t just for how strange it feels, against the Trump hullaballoo, to read another headline about hedonistic oldies spending the kids’ inheritance on cruise holidays. It’s that it all feels so retro.

This is partly because social nudity — the practice of meeting, socialising, playing sport, or simply sunbathing with nothing on — is very much a boomer thing, having reportedly struggled to recruit younger nudies. But it made me wistful, too. For the style of nudism embodied by these boomers represents a distinct American synthesis of earlier countercultures, that I think we’re going to miss, once they all sail off (possibly naked) into the sunset.

The first modern nudist club was founded in 1891, in British India, by a British imperial bureaucrat named Charles Edward Gordon Crawford: he and two friends would gather, in “nature’s garb”, by the Tulsi Lake in northern Mumbai. But this wasn’t just a handful of eccentrics bored in an overseas posting: the chilly climate of Britain had its share of clothing-optional oddballs too.

These tended to cluster around the progressive and vaguely occult-tinged Fabian circles, where post-Christian spirituality mingled with socialist ideals and eugenicist dreams of “improving” the “race”. Crawford, the Indian colonial naturist, corresponded with the Fabian literary luminary and gay activist Edward Carpenter — who moved in the same bourgeois socialist circles as Havelock Ellis, a progressive intellectual, sexologist, and eugenicist who was also enthusiastic about life in the altogether.

Ellis, in turn, wrote the introduction to Nudism in Modern Life: The New Gymnosophy, published by the American sociologist, criminologist, eugenicist and nudism evangelist Maurice Parmelee in 1923. Imagine an international network of utopian progressives, who espoused every imaginable whacky idea later blamed on the hippies — but with none of the hippie exuberance, just a relentlessly bourgeois, po-faced British bourgeois asceticism.

Across the North Sea, though, the yearning to get back to nature could take an altogether more fiery turn. Whereas Britain had had a good century and a half to get used to being industrialised by the early 20th century, Germany only industrialised in the mid-19th century. Many Germans found the radical changes this forced on the culture and landscape bewildering — and the result was a heartfelt backlash. This produced a flourishing of German Romantic art and poetry, often harking back to pre-Christian Germanic myth; it also also spawned Freikörperkultur — free body culture — which sought to return to nature through practices such as healthy eating, fitness, nude sunbathing, and hiking societies such as the Wandervögel youth groups.

“Naturists have long lamented that their pastime is declining in popularity.”

As with the Fabian fusion of eugenics and nudity, German Romantic naturism also sometimes came with a side-order of unnerving race obsession. The early nudism advocate Heinrich Pudor, for example, wrote several influential Freikörperkultur books such as the 1893 Nacktende Menschen (Naked People) and 1906 Nacktkultur (Naked Culture), in which he extolled the physical and spiritual benefits of vegetarianism, nudism, and racial purity. By the time Leni Riefenstahl made her famous documentary on the Nazi Olympics, the nude or semi-nude body beautiful was widely embraced not just by political eccentrics, but also by an ascendant fascist regime for which athletic nudes signified health, power and “Aryan’  racial purity. Pudor’s later writing was overwhelmingly antisemitic, with titles such as Iron Ring, True German, or Swastika.

As the Fabians showed, though, social nudity isn’t necessarily fascist. Even in Weimar Germany, socialist nudity flourished alongside more fascistic subcultures: these idealists saw themselves as rejecting bourgeois Imperial Germany, and embracing the basic egalitarianism of “nature”: a version of Freikörperkultur that endured in East Germany long after the war. It wasn’t so much that it was either a far-Left or a far-Right thing: nudists just tended to extremes, whichever way they leaned. Meanwhile, if the Norwegian Pearl’s naked American boomers teach us anything, it’s that America’s managed something extraordinary after the war: synthesising these twin European countercultures, via the Sixties counterculture — a synthesis that, now, is fading with the generation that birthed it.

It was Germans who brought nudism to America. Kurt Barthel, a German, founded the American League for Physical Culture in 1929; two other Germans — Katherine and Herman Soshinski — founded the American Gymnosophical Association the following year, with the help of the indefatigable Maurice Parmelee. But the Puritan culture of East Coast America had firm ideas about confining one’s eccentricities to the private sphere. Nudists were persecuted: when, for example, the American League for Physical Culture hired a gymnasium and pool in the New York City for a clothing-optional social event, neighbours called the police.

And well into the postwar period, a penchant for nude sunbathing could still bite its advocates on the tender parts. Having returned to the public sector in 1938, taking up a string of government jobs, Maurice Parmelee eventually found himself an early victim of cancel culture, in 1952, at the hands of Congressman Martin Dies. Dies accused Parmelee of “subversion”, for his views on socialism and nudism, and forced him to resign from the Railroad Retirement Board.

Meanwhile, though, a more vitalist form of nudism — less Puritan restraint, more Germanic nature-worship — was heading West, in search of open spaces to express itself. Its foremost exponent was, of course, another German: a man named Wilhelm Pester, the so-called “Hermit of Palm Springs”, who fled his native land in 1906 to escape the military draft. Pester lived in the Californian desert, largely naked save his long beard or a wrap, making his own sandals and foraging for raw fruit and vegetables.

Like many other nudists, Pester lamented our modern disconnect from nature, declaring that “All man’s troubles, sickness, anxieties, and discontent, come from a departure from nature”. He advised a lifestyle centred on fresh fruit and vegetables, sunbathing, and avoiding stimulants. But out in the relatively wild of the West, the naturism he trailblazed began to fuse the egalitarian and vitalistic strands that had characterised it in Europe, aided by that most characteristic of American values: bare, naked individual freedom.

When the Sixties counterculture erupted, the Pester look — bearded, near-naked, sandal-wearing — was suddenly everywhere, especially in sunny California. Hippies danced naked in Golden Gate Park; nudist and “clothing-optional” communes and resorts mushroomed. And this Californian iteration of returning to “Nature”, half life-loving, nature-worshipping German Romanticism and half Puritan liberty, represented less and ascetic pursuit of “gymnosophy”, or ethnonationalist triumph of the will, than an absolute commitment to (even hedonistic) self-expression, as an absolute moral right. For example when Berkeley tried to ban public nudity in 1998, attendees at the naked protest held signs with messages such as “Our Bodies Are Freedom of Speech”.

And this is surely the iteration of public nakedness that, in turn, found its way to The Big Nude Cruise: a bare-all individualism that sees constraints as obstacles to fulfilment. For this fusion, of German vitalism and English Puritan freedom, became the keystone sensibility of the postwar counterculture: a belief that we need only shed our constraints and embrace our Nature, and all will be well. But of course once embraced, all such natures were instantly commercialised: hedonic freedom swiftly came to mean not reconnecting with nature but buying stuff. Richard Branson, is perhaps the paradigmatic example of this in practice: a boomer who began with yeah-man hippie values, and ended up very, very rich.

Branson has a whole Caribbean island to be naked on, if he so desires. But for those boomers who didn’t do quite so well, yet still enjoy hedonic self-expression with their cocktail, there’s always the Big Nude Cruise.  In a sense it’s the perfect countercultural retirement option: an orderly, gatekept, crime-free and tightly rule-bound fortnight of comfortable, utterly conventional convention-smashing, aboard a luxury floating fortress with multiple dining rooms (but put some underpants on first).

But this style of nudism is also fading along with its boomer enthusiasts. Naturists have long lamented that their pastime is declining in popularity; even the socialist German ones tend to be over 50. One British nudist recently theorised that this could be downstream of the social atomisation that has attended our increasingly self-expressive, individualistic postwar culture — which would make Sixties-style hedonic nudism, ironically, another casualty of a counterculture that turned out to rely on the conventions it was busy destroying. California began cracking down on public nudity around the turn of the millennium.

And yet, if nudism always expressed a Romantic yearning for nature, it’s hardly though the 21st century is less high-tech than the world of Heinrich Pudor. So as the Summer of Love iteration of nudist subculture approaches heat-death in cruise-holiday form, we may be seeing its older forms stirring awake. Whether in socialist-coded “body positivity” imagery or online anons who “post fizeek” and advocate sunning your balls to boost testosterone, the political horseshoe is back — just, seemingly all online, at least for now. The consumer-boomer synthesis has had its day; we face a future of naked extremism.

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Anti-Trump judges sparked a legal crisis // The new administration has the Founders on its side

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  • JD Vance sparked controversy by arguing that judges overstepping into executive decisions violates separation of powers, citing judicial injunctions against Trump policies.
  • Lower-court judges have issued nationwide injunctions to block policies like freezing grants to nonprofits and birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants.
  • Legal scholars like Adrian Vermeule argue judicial interference in executive functions undermines constitutional co-equality of government branches.
  • Constitutional concerns arise over whether lower courts, with limited jurisdiction, can impose nationwide injunctions affecting all citizens.
  • Article III’s vesting clause highlights Congress’s authority to create (or abolish) lower courts, suggesting their power is secondary to the Supreme Court.
  • Scholars like Will Baude and Jonathan Mitchell assert judicial injunctions traditionally bind only named parties, not the entire population.
  • Justice Clarence Thomas opposes nationwide injunctions, emphasizing historic equitable remedies applied only to specific case parties.
  • Historical precedents (Jefferson, Hamilton, Jackson, Lincoln) reject judicial supremacy, prioritizing executive and legislative constitutional interpretation.
  • Lincoln notably limited Supreme Court rulings to specific litigants, warning against letting judicial decisions dictate national policy universally.
  • The debate centers on legitimacy of nationwide injunctions, with Vance echoing founders’ skepticism of judicial overreach and urging rebalancing of branch authority.

JD Vance caused a firestorm on Sunday when he posted on X, formerly Twitter: “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

The vice president’s remarks came in response to the growing list of lower-court judges who have attempted to halt the new administration’s agenda with a slew of injunctions. They have directed Team Trump to release federal grants to nonprofits that the administration has frozen for auditing, for example, and blocked the administration from applying its interpretation of the 14th Amendment, according to which children born to illegal immigrants aren’t automatically entitled to US citizenship.

Vance hit back at the judges for trying to restrict the president in his own sphere and overriding his decisions as to how best to carry out the law (the execute in the “executive branch”). As the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule put it an X post, reshared by Vance, “judicial interference with legitimate acts of state, especially the internal functioning of a co-equal branch, is a violation of the separation of powers”.

But the judges’ actions raise another vexing constitutional question: can a lower court with narrow local jurisdiction render so-called nationwide injunctions that purport to bind every American citizen? By seemingly refusing to comply, the Trump administration is effectively answering: no. In doing so, according to The New York Times, the Trumpians have triggered an unprecedented “constitutional crisis”. In recent years, as legal progressives have sought to limit presidential power when it’s held by the other side, it’s become a sort of truism that a lower court in Hawaii or, say, New Hampshire can put a stop to a federal policy covering the whole nation.

In fact, the argument isn’t obvious at all, and there is good reason to believe that America’s Founding Fathers would have been baffled by such gross assertions of judicial hegemony.

Start with the constitutional text. The first clause of Article III of the Constitution reads: “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Read that carefully once more. This so-called vesting clause has at least two notable elements.

First, the only court that shall be established is the US Supreme Court. All other lower courts exist solely at the discretion of Congress, as they have since the Judiciary Act of 1789 — one of the first statutes the First Congress passed. But something created by statute can be taken away by statute. The Federalist’s Sean Davis might have appeared to be trolling when he noted on X that “Congress would be well within its right to just eliminate” any lower courts. In fact, Davis was restating a basic fact about America’s constitutional structure. That precarious state of the lower courts should already tell us something about their authority to neuter executive-branch policy for the whole country.

Second, and more relevant, is what the “judicial Power” means as it is used in Article III of the Constitution. As the University of Chicago Law School professor Will Baude argued in a highly influential 2008 law-review article, “the judicial power is the power to issue binding judgments and to settle legal disputes within the court’s jurisdiction”.

The deepest question raised by this is the following: what is a federal court’s legitimate jurisdiction when it comes to issuing injunctions — a form of “equitable remedy” in legalese, meaning the court tells one party to perform some act (rather than award damages). In this case, for example, it’s courts ordering the executive branch that it has to automatically grant US citizenship to children born to unlawful migrants.

The answer is simple: when it comes to this kind of remedy, only the named parties to a particular lawsuit are bound by the judgment. So to follow our example: a lower court can only order the federal government to treat as an automatic citizen a specific infant born on US soil to an illegal mother from Honduras. Call him Baby Doe. But a lower court lacks the authority to force the executive branch to grant automatic citizenship to Baby Doe and all other similarly situated children nationwide.

“Nationwide injunctions applying to all people across a vast continental nation have no basis in the Anglo-American legal tradition.”

As then-Stanford law professor Jonathan Mitchell argued in a 2018 law-review article, an “injunction is nothing more than a judicially imposed non-enforcement policy” that “forbids the named defendants to enforce the statute” — or executive order — “while the court’s order remains in place.” There is no broader “writ of erasure” that permits a lower court to simply “strike down” a statute or an executive order.

Nationwide injunctions applying to all people across a vast continental nation have no basis in the Anglo-American legal tradition. Rather, the proper scope of a federal court’s power to issue such remedies is restricted to “the defendant’s conduct only with respect to the plaintiff”, as Samuel L. Bray, the Notre Dame legal scholar, argued in a 2017 law-review article

Sceptics of nationwide injunctions aren’t limited to the legal academy. They include Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court. As Thomas explained in his 2018 concurring opinion in the landmark Trump v. Hawaii case, historically, “American courts of equity did not provide relief beyond the parties to the case”, because “for most of our history, courts understood judicial power as fundamentally the power to render judgments in individual cases”. Presciently, Thomas concluded his opinion by warning: “If federal courts continue to issue them, this Court is dutybound to adjudicate their authority to do so”.

That day has not yet come, but it might soon enough, as the clash between the second Trump administration and legal progressives reaches a crescendo.

Meanwhile, talk of the administration ushering tyranny by defying nationwide injunctions is overblown, to put it generously. Throughout US history, presidents have contested the scope and the binding nature of the “judicial Power”. As the Yale scholar professor Keith Whittington laid out in his 2009 book, Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy, the debate over who exactly has the last word when it comes to interpreting and enforcing the Constitution goes back to the beginnings of the republic.

Thomas Jefferson, in a 1804 letter to Abigail Adams, asserted that to give “to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional, and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the legislature and executive also, in their spheres, would make the judiciary a despotic branch”.

Jefferson’s ideological arch-rival, Alexander Hamilton, agreed with him on this count. It was Hamilton, after all, who famously argued in The Federalist No. 78 that the judiciary is the “least dangerous” branch because it has “neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments”.

President Andrew Jackson took that Hamiltonian sentiment to its logical conclusion when, in 1832, he responded defiantly to Chief Justice John Marshall’s ruling in an Indian-removal case: “The decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that it cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” (Jackson is widely quoted as saying, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it”, but his actual precise quip was similar enough.)

Yet no figure in the American tradition embodied the rejection of judicial supremacy quite like Abraham Lincoln. His 1858 Senate debates with Stephen Douglas focused, more than anything else, on the scope of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which the high court held that black people weren’t citizens under the federal Constitution. Lincoln argued that the decision should be respected when it came to the named litigants to the suit, the slave Dred Scott and his “owners”, but that it shouldn’t be extended a millimetre further.

Three years later, in his First Inaugural Address as president, Lincoln warned that “the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers”.

JD Vance, in short, is in good company, with Jefferson, Hamilton, and Lincoln on his side. There is no such thing as a legitimate “nationwide injunction”. And the notion that the judiciary is the sole legitimate final arbiter of constitutional questions, including those having to do with the separation of powers, is also belied by US history. Perhaps the Trump administration will follow through on Vance’s sentiment — the birthright citizenship litigation seems as good an example as any. Or perhaps the lower-court #Resistance will first stand down or get put in its place by the Supreme Court.

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Bop House will make you a porn star // TikTok is normalising sex work

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  • Bop House Overview: A TikTok collective of OnlyFans creators gaining 33M+ followers by blending provocative content with relatable "teen-like" personas.
  • Monetization Strategy: Uses playful, age-ambiguous TikTok videos to funnel viewers to paid OnlyFans accounts, generating millions monthly (e.g., $10M in December).
  • Youthful Aesthetic: Members, like 20-year-old Sophie Rain, emphasize childlike appearances, capitalizing on innocence and virginal personas for profit.
  • Audience Duality: Attracts both male viewers seeking explicit content and young female fans who idolize their lifestyle, normalizing transactional relationships.
  • Reality TV Dynamics: Mimics voyeuristic reality shows, with staged drama and power imbalances (e.g., mock hostage scenarios) to engage viewers.
  • Cultural Critique: Highlights how pornography infiltrates mainstream media, dissolving boundaries between everyday content and sexualized material.
  • Liberal Feminism Backlash: Criticizes "girlboss" feminism for framing sex work as empowering while ignoring exploitation and reinforcing male-dominated consumption.
  • Vulnerability of Creators: Despite high earnings for top models, most OnlyFans creators face loss of privacy, identity commodification, and safety risks (e.g., stalkers).
  • Broader Social Impact: Normalizes transactional control over women’s bodies, distorting real-life relationships and societal expectations of intimacy.
  • Call to Action: Urges reclaiming autonomy by rejecting digital commodification and prioritizing dignity over online validation.

Six young women in clinging tops and Pokemon slippers line up outside a Florida mansion. A cutesy song plays; they jump in tandem, turning to show off their jiggling bodies from every angle. Welcome to Bop House, a TikTok page and digital meat market of age-ambiguous OnlyFans models with a collective following of more than 33 million. These girls have formed a sorority of sorts, creating content day in, day out and chasing algorithm-friendly trends: on Sunday, they flew to the Super Bowl on a private jet; last month, they filmed a dystopian review of viral cookie brand Crumbl, in every way seeming like a gang of teenaged friends at a sleepover.

“Bop” is Gen Z slang for “baddies on point”, but has developed the spittle-flecked cadence of “slut”; these young women dance, pose, joke and tease millions of TikTok viewers as an extended advertisement for their individual OnlyFans porn accounts. Every now and then, a young edgelord will copy and paste what has become the stock snarky response to OnlyFans content: “Wonderful! Honourable! Optimistic! Radiant! Excellent!” Calling these influencers “whores” savagely scratches an understandable itch: acknowledging the true nature of these videos, supposedly innocuous clips which act as shopfronts for wank material.

The fact is that these influencers have carved out a role in mainstream social media, with the grim nature of their trade couched in cosy euphemism: they make “spicy content”, we are told, probably to remove the shame factor of slinging a teenager a fiver a month to see her boobs. (Shame, after all, is bad for business.) Not only have many of the eight Bop House “creators” neglected to make their ages public, but they have specifically styled themselves to look incredibly young. Twenty-year-old Sophie Rain, the best known of the group, is set to make $60 million this year from her childlike looks and the lure of her self-described virginity. For the babes of the Bop House, this tactic has worked: it made $10 million in December alone.

Their fans are not just slobbering men, but girlypop supporters who crowd out their comment sections with club-bathroom-style compliments (“Camilla’s outfit eats”; “cute!!!”). For these fawning young women, the videos are more than adverts for virtual sex work; they are insights into favourite celebrities — to whom their boyfriends happen to pay a monthly subscription. These girls interpret the Bops’ playfulness not as seduction but as relatability, and they almost never express horror or concern at the reason why their favourite influencers are in that house at all. The Bops’ elision of social-media cults and pornography has achieved the unthinkable: normalising the latter so completely that there is no longer any shock, or compunction, at the fundamental transaction of their work. For many teen girls, these are aspirational figures who seem to be their own age; if it works for them, why not for me?

“For many teen girls, these are aspirational figures; if it works for them, why not for me?”

Part of the pull of the Bop House is its power dynamic of spectator and object, which is also inherent in traditional pornography itself. These girls are monitored at every point of their day; one mini-series sees a girl burst into rooms with a mock gun, whose trigger presents a lollipop. She marauds the house shoving it in her Bopmates’ faces, prompting looks of disdain, frustration and then occasionally seductive playing-along. These girls do not know or particularly like each other, but are forced to put up with each other in the name of content. That we are party to this hostage-like situation is part of its appeal. They are there for us. Each Bop develops her own character as the series progresses, much like traditional reality TV: the model and podcaster Camilla Araújo returned as a wildcard this month to stir up controversy amid an ongoing lawsuit, bringing her 7.6 million TikTok followers and talent for viral soundbites with her. This sex-work sorority is so profitable because it crosses the boundaries of ubiquitous, predictable OnlyFans content: its iconoclastic appeal is that it has conquered the mainstream.

The hostage dynamic has become part of the lexicon of internet virality. Last year, MrBeast locked two people in a room for 90 days with the prize of $500,000, tempting them with exorbitantly expensive “treats” such as beds and a dimmer switch for the room’s fluorescent lighting. In the end, both completed the challenge — only shelling out $20,000 on a collection of Harry Potter books and a coffee machine. The video has 341-million views. Another iteration is Fishtank Live, which sees contestants stuck in a house with no phones for six weeks — a homespun iteration of Big Brother. Divorced from the stringent regulations of established broadcasting networks, Fishtank has a viewer-interaction element which means we can pay to torment contestants, understandably framed as a morbid rerun of the Stanford prison experiment. For $300, a producer will empty a bin on the kitchen floor. For $600, they will remove a bed. Rather than being edited, Fishtank is streamed live 24/7 — the toilets are, disturbingly, available behind a paywall. All this plays into our desire for control over Sim-like subjects, and our need to inflict pain and pleasure on them, without them knowing who we are.

This is also the promise of OnlyFans, and we should see the “sellers” in that dynamic as just as strange, vulnerable and desperate as those contestants in MrBeast’s prison cell. Yes, some of the Bop House girls earn more money than I or any reader could ever hope to — but the vast majority of OnlyFans “models” do not, and leave the industry having lost priceless assets: agency, privacy and identity beyond a blur of oiled body parts. In its way, OnlyFans is its own reality show — and the Bop House in particular must truly feel like a fishtank, a panopticon, and one in which you are required not only to be constantly sexy but also constantly entertaining and likeable, given your dual role as porn star and influencer.

The boundaries of subject and viewer are collapsing, and this is affecting how real men see real women. As the Venn diagram of social media and pornography grinds towards a perfect circle, we are left with the subliminal impression that everything around us is a form of softcore pornography. Jostling with makeup tutorials, prank videos and recipes, the Bop House crucially targets everyone’s feeds; porn is fast becoming just another genre.

This was never the intention of liberal feminism; fourth-wavers would be horrified to realise that their girlboss, secure-the-bag mantra, which has casualised prostitution as a fun and consequence-free shortcut to empowerment, has landed them in servitude to the men who most despise them. But it is a product of their naivety, and of a culture of kindness which promotes tolerance at all costs — and which means that those of us who are critical of the spectre of the digital bordello are intolerant and so must be incorrect. The sacrality of tolerance is contingent on an unspoken contract of discretion, which holds that furries, hentai freaks and porn addicts have an inviolable right to arousal, as long they keep their side of the bargain by both dutifully buying our feet pics and not being complete horndogs in public life.

Yet the licensing of digital pornography, and the way it was given the green light by feminists at the dawn of OnlyFans in 2016, and seized upon as a way for young women to better themselves, has of course had unintended consequences. Ten years ago, it might have been impossible to imagine a mainstream website where young women — including my own peers — would sell homemade, bespoke pornography; now, it is difficult to imagine a world without it. This irrevocable shift came about because of aggressive marketing, with OnlyFans girls becoming their own pimps and flooding social media with adverts, something which has at points made X almost unbearable to use. Now, gooner content (look it up, or don’t) is everywhere, having bled into the mainstream so utterly that it is no longer particularly surprising to hear of a house of barely legal autopornographers hawking masturbation videos from a rented house in Florida, nor that we can expect teasers for those videos to be seen by children.

By styling themselves as teenage girls, the Bops intend to outrage viewers — and to profit from their notoriety. Liberal feminism lends “sex workers” a curious exceptionalism in that they are rarely held responsible for the grim tastes they cater to, such as teen porn. It focuses so evangelically on individual choice and identity that it has blinkered itself to uncomfortable truths — in this case, that there is another individual on the other end of this transaction, a priapic man who likes very young girls. For a movement so obsessed with individuality, it is ironic that the OnlyFans girl — the Frankenstein’s monster of fourth-wave feminism — is not allotted individual responsibility for the twisted sexualities she promotes.

For the Bops, the existence of their weird fans only becomes frighteningly apparent when, as Sophie Rain tells MailOnline, the girls are “woken up to people knocking at the door at night”. One of the problems with digital prostitution is that it has a veneer of secure remoteness which inevitably proves permeable to “fans” who already believe that access to your body is a matter of mere negotiation.

The elision of OnlyFans with conventional social media has turned all Gen Z women into porn stars-in-waiting. In a world where everything is content, the sorts of boys who grow up calling Bop House girls “whores” in TikTok comment sections will find it difficult to handle real-life crushes, which cannot be satisfied by paying for a “spicy video”. The message of OnlyFans is the same as that of Fishtank: you, a powerful viewer, can pay to control me, a desired but despicable subject, and in that way to temporarily own my body. And while we can no longer hope to regulate internet porn nor protect its stars, we can and must wake up to the value of our own dignity and privacy. Fourth-wave feminism has let vulnerable women down. The best we can do is to insist on our autonomy: take yourself offline, jump out of the tank.

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Анекдот дня по итогам голосования за 06 февраля 2025

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Скажите, кто-нибудь, Трампу, что Сектор Газа просто так называется!
Никакого газа там нет!!!
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Американца посадили за то, что он 36 лет выдавал себя за своего знакомого по имени Уильям Вудс. Настоящий Уильям Вудс попал в тюрьму и психиатрическую больницу, пытаясь доказать, что он — это он

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В 2019 году американец по имени Уильям Вудс пришел в банк в Лос-Анджелесе и заявил, что кто-то брал кредиты на его имя и накопил большой долг. Вудс хотел узнать номера своих счетов и закрыть их. Сотрудник банка попросил его удостоверение личности и номер социального страхования. Все личные данные сошлись. Но когда он стал задавать Вудсу проверочные вопросы, тот не смог на них ответить.

Сотрудник банка позвонил по номеру, привязанному к счетам. Голос в трубке ответил, что это он мистер Вудс и что ни у кого в Калифорнии не может быть доступа к его счетам. Голос в трубке правильно ответил на контрольные вопросы. Сотрудник банка вызвал полицейских. Те поговорили по телефону с человеком, называвшим себя владельцем счетов, и попросили его отправить по факсу копии его документов. Он все прислал. В итоге Вудса задержали по подозрению в краже личных данных и попытке получить доступ к чужим считам.  

Окружной прокурор предъявил Вудсу обвинение, назвав его Мэтью Кирансом. В суде Вудс настаивал, что он не Киранс, а еще иногда говорил бессмыслицу. Судья постановил отправить его в психиатрическую больницу. Это было в феврале 2020 года, но из-за нехватки мест и пандемии коронавируса Вудс был госпитализирован восемь месяцев спустя. В марте 2021 года его приговорили к двум годам тюрьмы, но зачли уже отбытый срок — 428 дней ареста в тюрьме и 147 дней в психиатрической больнице — и отпустили.

Ему запретили использовать имя Уильям Вудс. Он признал вину и согласился со всеми условиями, чтобы поскорее выйти на свободу. При этом даже при вынесении приговора он продолжил говорить, что его фамилия Вудс. Когда секретарь обратил на это внимание судьи, ответ был таким: «Потому что он сумасшедший» (эти слова остались в стенограмме судебного заседания). 

Бывший коллега Вудса использовал его личность 36 лет

Эта афера началась в 1988 году в Альбукерке, штат Нью-Мексико. Уильям Вудс работал в киоске по продаже хот-догов, и у него появился новый коллега — Мэтью Кейранс. Они особенно не общались, пока однажды Вудс не обнаружил, что у него пропал кошелек. Он заподозрил, что его взял Кейранс. Когда тот вернул кошелек, Вудс проверил документы, и они были на месте. Он быстро забыл про этот случай. 

Кейранс после 1988 года больше не использовал свое настоящее имя, дату рождения и номер социального страхования. В 1990 году он получил удостоверение личности на имя Уильяма Вудса. В 1994 году женился как Вудс и дал эту фамилию своему сыну. Он платил налоги как Вудс, покупал страховки как Вудс, оформлял водительские права как Вудс и брал кредиты (на 200 тысяч долларов) как Вудс. Он жил в штате Висконсин и удаленно работал системным администратором в клинике Университета Айовы, тоже как Вудс. 

Кейранс выглядел респектабельным представителем среднего класса, в то время как Вудс перебивался случайными заработками, время от времени жил на улице и говорил вещи, казавшиеся странными, — например, что он пытался предупредить ФБР о терактах 11 сентября 2001 года. Очевидно, у полицейских, судей и банковских клерков Кейранс вызывал больше доверия. Тем более что у него на руках были все нужные документы. 

Вудсу удалось вернуть свою личность благодаря тесту ДНК

Кейранс старался поддерживать свою легенду. В 2012 году он даже нашел родственников Вудса на Ancestry.com и использовал информацию о них, чтобы получить свидетельство о рождении на его имя. Оно помогло ему убедить полицию Лос-Анджелеса, что он и есть настоящий Вудс. Ему поверила и полиция Висконсина, к которой Вудс обратился в августе 2021 года, через несколько месяцев после освобождения в Калифорнии.

Но в 2023 году Вудсу повезло. Он познакомился с детективом Иэном Мэллори из полицейского управления Университета Айовы, где работал Кейранс. Мэллори заказал тест ДНК, используя генетический материал Вудса и его отца, личность которого вопросов не вызывала. Тест доказал их родство. После этого Мэллори вызвал на допрос Кейранса. Тот называл Вудса «сумасшедшим», но неправильно ответил на вопрос об имени своего отца. Тогда детектив показал ему результаты теста ДНК, и Кейранс признался. 

Кейранс получил 12 лет тюрьмы

Эрик Килмер из Альбукерке, у которого Вудс продавал хот-доги в 1980-х, описал его как «самого простодушного парня, которого вы можете встретить». Кейранс, согласно заключению суда, обманул Вудса, чтобы избежать ответственности за подростковые правонарушения: он сбежал из дома, угнал машину и не появился в суде после задержания. Но все последующие годы он был законопослушным и надежным человеком, уверяла его жена, прося судью не назначать ее мужу слишком суровый приговор. 

Свою вину Кейранс признал еще в прошлом году. Его поступок наделал немало шума, поэтому 56-летнего Вудса завалили письмами журналисты и киносценаристы. Тем не менее его жизнь не слишком изменилась. Какое-то время он прибирался в парихмахерской в Альбукерке и жил прямо там же, но потом нашел квартиру и работу, которая ему по душе. Сейчас он общается с юристами, надеясь засудить власти Калифорнии за ошибочный приговор. А на прошлой неделе Вудс ездил в Айову на вынесение приговора 58-летнему Кейрансу. Его бывший коллега по киоску с хот-догами получил 12 лет тюрьмы. 

Что еще «Медуза» писала о кражах личности

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