Unfucking is Harder than Fucking

The title comes from a friend’s favorite saying, when he observed newly minted CEOs of stupid mergers pillaging through the new company, but it’s a general-purpose aphorism. There’s nothing easier than coming into a functioning organization and just fucking the place up, especially if you don’t really care about the outcome. Fixing the mess that’s left — the unfucking — is a long, tedious and usually only partially successful process.

With that in mind, I’ve been keeping some tabs open with pieces about fucking that’s going to be hard to unfuck:

• Mahmoud Khalil and all the other deportees who are being thrown out of the country for wrongthink and wrongspeak may be saved by the courts, but it’s clear that we’re going to push a bunch of green card holders and other legitimate immigrants out of the country. The State Department is talking about using AI to revoke visas of pro-Hamas demonstrators. I’m sure that will work great. Not only is that going to deprive us of a pool of smart people who we’ll need to fix the country after King Elon and vassal Trump ruin it, but we’re also going to have to do something to show potential new immigrants that things have changed here.

• The Khalil case is the worst form of ICE overreach, but cases like Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian influencer who had a water company that used Delta-9 THC (which is legal everywhere), who was not only denied entry to the US but also thrown in a detention cell with a mat and a space blanket for 2.5 days, will fuck up our relationship with Canada. That country is making almost-permanent changes that will deny us commerce, tourism and (probably) defense exports. The unwind on this, if it can happen, will take years, and the relationship will never be the same again.

• Similarly, Portugal just cancelled plans to buy F-35 fighters. This is probably the start of a trend where countries won’t trust planes built in the US, or US avionics, or US engines, because the US can assert export controls on those. In Europe, this will mean that the French and possibly Swedes will get more military contracts, or countries like Canada will build up their military industries. It’s not clear that this can ever be unfucked.

• Our military and security alliances with countries who were allies less than two months ago will be broken in days, weeks or months, if they aren’t already. Patching that up is the work of years.

• Our universities are taking a pounding, and if you want to find a group of people less able to resist than university administration, I don’t know where to tell you to look. They’re just craven. This piece outlines how Columbia’s decision to negotiate with the Musk/Trump terrorists has put them in a place where the terrorists just made more demands, including exactly how Columbia will discipline students. Columbia’s thirst to comply has led them to issuing expulsions, degree revocations and suspensions for students who protested in 2024, but that’s not enough for the DOGErs. I don’t know if Columbia, in particular, will ever recover from this. The rest of our colleges and universities will have to re-trench and recover in an unfuck unlike anything we’ve seen in our history, save perhaps Reconstruction (which we didn’t quite get right, did we?)

There are dozens of other examples (the NIH for instance), but my goal here isn’t just to list a parade of horribles. A consensus is building that the dividing line in Democratic politics for the next few years won’t be on ideological — the fact is that the only ideology that one needs to accept to undergird all the unfucking listed above is a set of principles that have broad acceptance across the entire Democratic Party, and even with the never-Trumpers.

The real dividing line is between those who will fight, and those who won’t. I think anyone who’s politically engaged and to the left of the little Himmlers in charge knows that, at least instinctively. That’s the genesis of the immense anger bubbling up at the events of this week in the Senate. I believe that elections will happen, and that Democrats will win, but the sense that current Democratic leadership can’t execute with the speed, force or passion that will be required for the massive post-Trump cleanup is going to force a reckoning unlike anything we’ve seen in modern politics. Because if we don’t get fighters in place, with a clear plan of how the fight can be successful given all the obstacles that the Trump/Musk terrorists will leave behind, all the activism and money in the world won’t even begin to unfuck this mess.