Dave Vandenbout

I've outlived my illusions of myself.

Interests: hdw/sfw/bio/cage-rattling.

[Dave Vandenbout @devbisme]

Maybe every now and then we could stop venting and just turn to each other and say "Whew, we're still here. I'm glad you're with me. Thanks for hanging in there."

[Dave Vandenbout @devbisme]

@Jordan_W_Taylor Because some educators love their political causes more than they love children.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

Over the last two and a half years, the two of us, @shellenberger and @galexybrane, have written and published hundreds of articles and testified before Congress on multiple occasions about the clear violations of the spirit and letter of the Constitution by former President Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders.

We exposed a sweeping effort by former and current officials with the CIA, FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and its intermediary organizations to construct a Censorship Industrial Complex to censor President Donald Trump and millions of his supporters.

We documented that Democrats and Democrat-appointed judges were abusing the justice system in an unconstitutional effort to incarcerate Trump or otherwise prevent him from running for office. And we published extensively on efforts by Democrats, Europeans, and Brazilians to engage in mass surveillance of social media accounts and text messaging apps to search for disfavored speech.

In addition, we have repeatedly defended Trump and the Trump administration from false and malicious claims that they have violated the Constitution or undermined democratic norms any more than Democrats. We showed that Trump and Republican demands for censorship have paled against the totalitarian weaponization by Democrats of the Intelligence Community to spy on the Trump campaign, spread disinformation, interfere in elections, and create a global Censorship Industrial Complex. We repeatedly pointed out that between 2017 and 2021, the Trump administration obeyed court orders, consistent with the clear requirement under the Constitution that it do so.

And we were the first to report on new evidence that President Barack Obama’s CIA Director had ordered the spying on Trump campaign officials to justify surveillance of the Trump campaign, spread disinformation, interfere in the 2016 election, and undermine a duly elected president.

Since Trump’s reelection, we have defended his administration’s justified cuts to USAID, the Department of Education, and other agencies. We have welcomed his use of legal executive authority to make sweeping orders to end “gender-affirming care” for minors and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. We documented and condemned the role of the CIA and USAID in instigating and justifying the impeachment of Trump in 2019, and USAID for contributing to the Russia collusion hoax. We have argued that Democrats and the media’s claims that these actions are unconstitutional are false and politically motivated.

Few formerly Left-wing journalists and commentators have done more to recognize and document the Left’s descent into totalitarianism and irrationality. We have made the case that, given Democrats’ many failures and abuses of power, Trump’s victory was a moral win, not just an electoral one.

Given all of this, we believe it is necessary to speak out against the Trump Administration’s recent violations of the spirit and, and perhaps the letter, of the United States Constitution with regards to free speech, privacy, and the separation of powers.

The Trump administration detained and may deport a Palestinian student activist named Mahmoud Khalil for his involvement in university protests and his alleged support for Hamas. The Trump administration is using AI to review the social media accounts of tens of thousands of foreign students for wrongthink. And the administration, over the weekend, ignored a judge’s order to return planeloads of alleged gang members from Venezuela to the United States and instead sent them to El Salvador, claiming that the 1798 Alien Enemies Act allows for its noncompliance because it is non-justiciable outside of the court’s authority.

These actions do not, either individually or together, approach anything close to the unconstitutional “whole-of-society” censorship and weaponization of government by the Democratic Party, but they may become a pattern that, if left unchecked, threatens to undermine the administration’s moral authority. Given the ongoing assault on free speech and individual rights in Europe, maintaining this authority is sorely needed if civil liberties and Enlightenment values are to be upheld in the West.

The courts may still rule that some of those actions are constitutional. The fact that the Palestinian student activist is not a citizen may make his deportation constitutional. Democrats have been using the National Science Foundation for the last decade to fund universities the development of AI-based censorship tools to give or sell to social media platforms. And the Justice Department has complied with orders by a judge for a sworn declaration, and the court will hold another hearing on Friday.

Even so, the Trump administration’s actions violate the spirit of the Constitution’s protections for freedom of speech, privacy, and due process. Khalil was indeed involved in negotiations between Columbia University and student protestors, and many foreign students have expressed anti-Israel views, but deporting someone for exercising what appears to be a lawful exercise of free speech and using AI surveillance tools to surveil foreign students’ views on a complex topic, establish a dangerous precedent that will likely have an intended chilling effect on speech for foreign students and citizens alike, particularly around the Israel-Palestine conflict. Such a chilling effect is overreaching, counterproductive, and wrong. Both critics and supporters of Israel alike should reject such broad measures and instead support open discourse and debate on university campuses.

And, given that American presidents have only activated the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 during wars, and since Congress has not approved of any war with Venezuela, it is for the judiciary, not the executive branch, to decide whether the Act is non-justiciable. The Alien Enemies Act has only been invoked previously during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II, and even then, the courts reviewed whether the Act was being appropriately applied.

Trump’s invocation of the statute refers to a “hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States.” The Act, however, specifies that the “invasion or predatory incursion” must be one perpetrated “by any foreign nation or government.” The administration claims that the Venezuelan gang is acting as a “de facto government in the areas in which it is operating,” but this argument is not legally sound. There is also not sufficient evidence to support the DOJ’s claim that the gang is taking directions from the Maduro government.

Reinforcing the perception that the Trump administration is violating the Constitutionally protected separation of powers, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts yesterday condemned calls for the impeachment of the judge overseeing the Alien Enemies Act case. “For more than two centuries,” said Roberts in a public statement, “it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

Roberts’ statement may have been partly motivated by Trump’s statement, made a few hours earlier, about the Alien Enemies Case judge. “This judge,” wrote Trump on Truth Social, “like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”

Roberts’ statement likely reflects the opinion of the majority of Supreme Court justices. It is rare for justices to issue public statements, as they tend to let their rulings speak for themselves. Two weeks ago, Roberts and Trump-appointed justice Amy Coney Barrett joined liberal justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in refusing to overturn a lower court order requiring the Trump administration to pay out USAID grants. Barrett’s other rulings suggest that there are at least five justices who agree with Roberts.

None of the three cases described above are needed for the Trump administration to implement its agenda. If any foreign students are a proven national security threat then they can be deported on that basis and not on their expressions of sympathy with Gazans or even Hamas. Our highest court has repeatedly ruled that Nazis can march through neighborhoods of Holocaust survivors as long as they do not immediately incite violence, and we should defend that high bar for censorship, as difficult as it is sometimes. And the Trump administration could have simply returned the alleged gang members to the United States, kept them in detention, and appealed the court’s order.

Whatever political gains the Trump administration believes it is getting from such actions are significantly outweighed by their moral and political harm. In all three cases, the administration’s actions undermine the ethos in which our founding fathers created the United States of America as a beacon of freedom, privacy, and rule of law protected through the separation of powers. And the Trump administration’s actions undermine one of the central claims upon which Trump was elected, and which drew him support from independents and Democrats, which is that Trump would protect the public from an out-of-control deep state. “They’re not coming after me,” said Trump, famously, “they’re coming after you. I’m just standing in the way.”

A top Democratic pollster recently confirmed that Trump won the popular vote because he persuaded Democrats and Independents to vote for him. While those voters may care more about inflation and immigration than civil liberties, many of them also care about free speech, privacy, and the separation of powers. And many of Trump’s new independent and liberal voters were likely alienated by the Democratic Party’s assault on civil liberties. If Trump signals that he is attacking free speech, violating the separation of powers, and “coming after” independent justices, he will undermine his presidency and destroy his nationalist and populist coalition.

Trump himself must understand deeply the importance of civil liberties and the separation of powers. The IC illegally spied on his campaign and spread disinformation about him. The FBI invaded the sacred privacy of his home in Florida. The government censored his voters. No president in American history has been more victimized by unconstitutional governmental abuses of power than Trump.

It is disrespectful to the civil libertarians and constitutionalists in the Republican coalition for the Trump administration to behave in ways that run contrary to their values. Many independents, Democrats, and liberals were reassured by Trump’s alliance with former liberal Democrats Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who are lifelong advocates for freedom of speech and privacy. The Transportation Security Administration apparently spied on Gabbard through its “Quiet Skies” program because of her foreign policy views. And the Biden Administration demanded and achieved censorship of Kennedy for his constitutionally protected speech.

Trump’s former campaign manager and current chief of staff, Susie Wiles, understands the importance of building a big tent, including one that includes civil libertarians; it was at the heart of her successful strategy to win a majority of the popular vote in the 2024 election. Vice President JD Vance received his law degree from Yale Law School and has spoken out eloquently against European censorship. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio has made clear that he wants to put free speech at the center of America’s foreign policy diplomacy.

Why, then, is the Trump administration engaged in such self-destructive behavior? Why has it been ignoring the multiple warnings it has been given, including from its own supporters and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?

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[Dave Vandenbout @devbisme]

@StarshipAlves First, he'll have to get out of the cell they're going to put him in next to Tommy Robinson.

[Dave Vandenbout @devbisme]

@jasoncrawford @grok rewrite the story of Cassandra but make the real lesson of her curse is that if you’re handed alpha by the gods you should act on it instead of trying to convince others.

I wonder if this will work?

[Dave Vandenbout @devbisme]

Kinda makes you wonder if these people ever really respected science. Or even knew what it was...

[Tom Elliott @tomselliott]

MSNBC hosts relish SpaceX rocket exploding, start laughing & singing:

Steele: “For Elon, his his response to all of this was ‘rockets are hard.’ And Mr. Musk, if they’re so hard, why don’t you go back to your day job and work that out and leave those of us who do government to do government, because you can’t do both.”

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

Don’t be smart, be curious.

[Dylan O'Sullivan @DylanoA4]

Kierkegaard said the function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays, and the same is true of hope, dreams, so many things. The fruits are internal

[Hamel Husain @HamelHusain]

My thesis is LLMs significantly boost your motivation to work on something. Getting a shitty prototype fast is immensely motivating

Code and time are often not the bottleneck, motivation is the bottleneck.

[Dave Vandenbout @devbisme]

@alexandrosM There's a persistence-of-vision effect of politicians where the shell of their principles is seen long after their internals have been hollowed out.

[Scott Jennings @ScottJenningsKY]

Line of the night.

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

“Everyone is going to make their own apps with AI”

My friend you don’t even make your own food. You’ll still pay a few bucks to use an app.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

In 2006, a group of students at Xavier High School in New York City wrote to their favourite authors to request a visit to their school. Kurt Vonnegut was the only author to reply. His reply letter to them was absolutely beautiful.

[Dave Vandenbout @devbisme]

@honx @itsolelehmann So is it virtual? Or is there a physical component to it?

[Dave Vandenbout @devbisme]

@l1tness @redaction Grok says it's from here: https://t.co/ZfCDw1m63z

[Curt Mills @CurtMills]

Hard to tabulate what a sea change it is to have a president who has the pragmatic, correct view on the origins of the world’s most dangerous war— rather than the fatuous, elite cut that has brought only slaughter

[Dave Vandenbout @devbisme]

@td_hopkins It's like @BasedJeffBezos manifested himself into real life.

[Dave Vandenbout @devbisme]

@PalmerLuckey @kaematt1 Probably an easy book to write when you can use yourself as a source...

[Jason Crawford @jasoncrawford]

This won't be that hard to solve, if we choose to. Train AI to find and cite reliable sources, especially primary sources.

Citing unreliable sources is already a problem with humans. And it was worse in the past! When Adam Smith wrote about the pin factory, he had read about it in the encyclopedia.

AI will make research and fact-checking so cheap that we will be able to do a lot more of it, and epistemics have the potential to greatly improve. But again, it won't happen automatically—we need to actively work towards this.

[Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos]

I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:

I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.

I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.

I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment — I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction.

I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.

Jeff