Good morning. It is February 27th. It is a cloudy morning in New York City and so unseasonably mild that people seem to be grinding away with outdoor power tools once again. So we're trying a different auditory environment for the moment where there are just intermittent banging noises from the avenue and some more echo than usual it seems. Despite it all, this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Gene Hackman has died at the age of 95, a normal sounding headline that turned much less so by the news from the Santa Fe County, New Mexico Sheriff's Department that he was found dead along with his wife, Betsy Arakawa, age 64, and their dog, but that so far the Sheriff's Office does not suspect foul play. It looks like the temperature in Santa Fe has been swinging from 70 in the daytime to the 30s at night, which would be consistent with a carbon monoxide accident, but we are not doing a true crime podcast here. They could blow out the entire Academy Awards ceremony for a single in memoriam reel. If you consider film actor to be something distinct from movie star, Gene Hackman seems like by far the greatest one of those that America ever produced. I can't really even think of who would be in second place. He was natural, versatile, and compelling. He always filled up the screen without ever getting the least bit bigger than it. A genius and a professional. 

The Trump administration has intervened to convince the government of Romania to allow the accused rapists, child molesters, human traffickers and money launderers, Andrew Tate and Tristan Tate, to travel freely to the United States. In addition to being credibly and extensively accused of sex crimes and financial crimes, Andrew Tate is a celebrated misogynist and far right online influencer. All of those things taken together with his both transactional and ideological support for Donald Trump have made him a hero to the Trump administration and something of an embodiment of everything it stands for. The Guardian notes that Donald Trump Jr. has described their detention as absolute insanity.

Elon Musk, the Guardian adds, responded to a suggestion from Andrew Tate that he would run for prime minister of the UK by saying “he's not wrong.” Well, one of Tate's lawyers, Paul Ingrassia, is the White House liaison official for the U.S. Department of Justice. The U.S. vice president, J.D. Vance, the Guardian ads has appeared on a pro-Tate podcast. 

Donald Trump's Pentagon plans to purge transgender members of the armed forces from service, according to a memo released yesterday. CNN writes, “the department only recognizes two sexes, male and female. The policy memo says, an individual's sex is immutable, unchanging during a person's life. All service members will only serve in accordance with their sex. The exceptions for applicants removal from military service,” CNN writes, are if there is a compelling government interest that directly supports war fighting capabilities and if the individual is willing to adhere to all standards associated with the applicant's sex.

That is, the only way for a trans member of the military to be spared is if they detransition. 

Elsewhere on the administration's agenda of complete subjugation, segregation, and officially sectioned bigotry, The Washington Post reports that the United States Marine Band canceled a concert program originally billed as the Equity Arc Wind Symphony. The performance, the Post writes, “was to be the culmination of a multi-day music intensive with musicians from the ‘The President’s Own,’”— that's the nickname of the Marine Band—“and high school musician fellows selected through auditions organized by the Chicago-based Equity Arc, a nonprofit organization that provides specialized mentoring support for young BIPOC musicians and helps institutions take meaningful steps toward equity and inclusion.” The Equity Arc Group's leadership, the Post writes, “confirmed in a phone interview that the cancellation affects up to 30 young musicians from across the country, who earned their spots through competitive virtual auditions.” Now their chance to perform has been canceled and the Post writes, “on the official president's own Marine Band calendar, the Equity Arc concert has been replaced with a program of unspecified film music titled, May the Fourth Be With You, Marine Band at the Movies.” 

In another story, the Post reports, “the Federal Aviation Administration is close to canceling a $2.4 billion contract to overhaul a communication system that serves as the backbone of the nation's air traffic control system and awarding the work to Elon Musk's Starlink, according to two people briefed on the plans.” The Post continues, “the move to cancel a major contract in favor of a venture led by Musk, who is leading President Donald Trump's disruptive overhaul of the federal government through the US Doge service, would represent a significant test of protections against conflicts of interest in government projects. It would be an especially extraordinary step for the typically cautious FAA, whose systems are vital to the safety of millions of air travelers every day.” News reporting and editing in general does seem to be gradually coming around to getting closer to describing what's happening in the federal government right now. And the story is an excellent and shocking piece of reporting. But the phrase “would represent a significant test of protections against conflicts of interest” really is the old ways dying hard.

It's not a test of those projections. It's a naked violation of those protections. The contract holder is supposed to be Verizon, which the Post writes was “tapped in 2023 to build a system called the FAA Enterprise Network Services Program, or FENS, replacing a system that dates to 2002. The contract had a 15-year lifespan, and the system is intended to connect some 4,600 sites, according to the FAA. The agency, the Post writes, was scheduled to make a final decision on whether to start paying Verizon for the contract next month, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Instead, Musk's team determined the job should go to Starlink, the person said. But the process for unwinding a contract and awarding it to another company is lengthy and has not been followed in this case so far, the person said. Several senior FAA officials have refused to sign paperwork authorizing the switch, according to the person who has been briefed on the internal deliberations and resulting fallout. So Musk's team is now seeking help from the acting administrator of the agency, Chris Rocheleau, and Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy.” 

Yeah, that sounds like just straight up theft. Notably, there's no mention of Mr. Ruthless Cost Savings offering to do the job for less money, so guess it's just a matter of him insisting on applying his impeccable personal and corporate standards for safety systems. 

In other Starlink news, the headline in Wired is, “Musk's Starlink is keeping modern slavery compounds online.” A Wired investigation reveals that criminals who make billions from scam compounds in Myanmar, where tens of thousands of people are enslaved, are using Starlink to get online. That's pretty much what's in the story. Starlink has neither acted on complaints about its keeping these predatory facilities running nor responded to reporters' questions. 

Only now do we turn to the front of this morning's New York Times, where the lead story in the print edition is “TRUMP STRATEGY ENDANGERS SHIFT TO ELECTRIC CARS / TARGETING CALIFORNIA / National Rollback Eyed by Repealing Rules in One State.” It's about how the Trump administration is trying to go after California's long-standing freedom to set and enforce pollution standards more stringent than the federal ones. In addition to being existentially evil their scheme to do it also seems to be illegal. Asking Congress to do something that Congress has specifically been found not to have the power to do.

Next to that, whoo boy, speaking of legacy media institutions belatedly coming around to figuring things out that they should have figured out long ago. The story is “Posting on X, Activists Alter U.S. Rules Fast / Conservatives’ Pipeline to Prod Musk’s Team.” It's a look at how the nastiest far right operatives now have the power to effectively tweet the most bigoted parts of their agenda directly into White House policy by feeding them to Elon Musk. “In multiple instances,” the Times writes “viral posts by Chaya Raichik, who is the creator of the Libs of TikTok account.

and regularly attacks transgender people online. And Christopher Rufo, a writer who has worked to push conservatives for their right on education issues, have prompted quick adjustments to public-facing government documents and even policy.” Sounds bad. It would sound even worse if they more accurately described who these people are. Raichik has shown a remarkable ability to inspire her followers to send bomb threats to institutions that she deems too friendly to LGBTQ causes. Rufo is not just a writer, but has been invested by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis with substantial power in the state's higher education system. But the more pertinent point of reference here, before the Times gets a pat on the back for exposing this problem, is that long before Christopher Rufo was able to make the White House dance like a puppet on his string, he was able to do the same with the New York Times. The Times’s campaigned to remove Claudine Gay as the president of Harvard and to drive out other university presidents was a Rufo campaign from end to end. Rufo has likewise driven the paper's other forays into the culture wars. His open declarations that he is in the business of manipulating news organizations by pushing right-wing propaganda, has before now never introduced the slightest degree of hesitation in the Times about allowing him to act as the paper's assignment editor. 

Next to that is a four-column photo of yesterday's cabinet meeting fiercely lit from above and looking like Dick Tracy's rogue gallery. Donald Trump near the front is somewhat blurred out as the focus pulls toward the back, toward the figure of Elon Musk standing up wearing his stupid black MAGA cap. 

Below that is a story not about the Trump administration, but still another excessively courteous piece of story packaging. The headline is, “F.B.I. Stretched Rules in Scouring Online DNA / Research Led to Arrest
in Idaho Stabbings.” It's about how the FBI caught the suspect in the 2022 University of Idaho stabbings. But the story itself makes clear that the FBI did not stretch the rules. They categorically broke the rules. “Unable to identify the DNA on a knife sheath that had been retrieved from the crime scene,” the Times writes, “FBI investigators then went a step further. According to newly released testimony, comparing the DNA profile from the knife sheath with two databases that law enforcement officials are not supposed to tap, GEDmatch and MyHeritage. It was a decision” the Times writes “that appears to have violated key parameters of a Justice Department policy that calls for investigators to operate only in DNA databases that provide explicit notice to their service users and the public that law enforcement may use their service sites.” And that was, according to the Times, how they found a suspect who had not been on anyone's radar. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca. You, the listeners, keep us going with your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those along if you can. There will be no podcast tomorrow. I encourage everyone who can to likewise get going on their weekend plans and obligations.

It's time to reshape society's expectations around the five-day workweek. But if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.