It Was Just Another Factory

• Independent journalist Marisa Kabas has a good follow-up on the story of the ICE kidnappers who seized a mother and three children in Sackets Harbor, New York, and trafficked them to a detention center in Texas: “ICE disappeared a mother and 3 children. Neighbors of Trump’s Border Czar said hell no.”

The small upstate town is home to Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar.” It’s the town where Homan’s mother and father failed to raise a decent son. It’s the town where all of the priests and teachers at St. James Catholic Church, where Homan’s family attended Mass every Sunday, failed to make him understand the gospel. It’s the town where he became the monstrous, miserable failure of a human being he is today.

• From Psychology Today, “Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too.”

The problem isn’t addiction, it’s “PPMI”:

Pornography Problems due to Moral Incongruence (PPMI) appear to be the driving force in many of the people who report dysregulated, uncontrollable, or problematic pornography use. Even though many people who grew up in religious, sexually conservative households have strong negative feelings about pornography, many of those same people continue to use pornography. And then they feel guilty and ashamed of their behavior, and angry at themselves and their desire to watch more.

It’s Dimmesdale Syndrome.

Regarding PPMI and the everlasting, all-consuming white evangelical “struggle” with masturbation, see earlier:

• I read Spy magazine back in the 1990s, yet somehow I’d never learned about Trump’s grandfather’s time in Canada: “The Time Justin Trudeau Gifted Trump a Picture of His Grandpa’s Brothel.”

The Arctic Restaurant was open around the clock with “private boxes for ladies and parties,” according to an advertisement in the Dec. 9, 1899 edition of the Bennett Sun newspaper. The boxes typically included a bed and scale for weighing gold dust used to pay for “services,” according to a three-generational biography by Gwenda Blair, who traced the origins of the Trump family’s wealth. Of course, in the rough-and-tumble frontier towns of that era, the Arctic’s business model built on food, booze and sex was common.

• “An estimated 94,000 veterans do not have U.S. citizenship, leaving them vulnerable to detention and deportation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not report the veteran status of people who have been deported, so the exact number of deported veterans is almost impossible to know. Some organizations have reported there have been hundreds of cases of deported veterans—and this is likely a gross underestimate.”

“My name is Alex Murillo, and I am one of those deported veterans.”

• ProPublica’s in-depth investigative journalism is always impressive, but it’s also sometimes daunting, if not downright depressing. But here’s a years-later follow-up on one character from an earlier investigation that’s surprising and hopeful: “A Lawyer Who Helped the Kushners Crack Down on Poor Tenants Now Helps Renters Fight Big Landlords.”

It’s not quite the redemption arc you might be expecting. The lawyer in question, Adam Rabinowitz, didn’t have a conversion experience as much as he kind of stumbled into a new line of work that he found he enjoys a lot more than what he used to do on the other side. He didn’t revolutionize his morality and then switch sides, he switched sides and, consequently, began to develop a different moral outlook. That’s how it works sometimes, you know, for people headed in either direction.

Rabinowitz told me that it was poor housing conditions like the ones the woman was dealing with that were his ultimate goad these days. “That’s what motivates me,” he said. “I want people to have clean housing like mine.” Why had those conditions not registered so much with him back when he was on the other side? “I guess that stuff didn’t really get to me,” he said.

I was struck again by Rabinowitz’s reluctance to judge his earlier self. But there was no obscuring one effect of his new role. “I sleep well,” he said.

• The title from this post comes from the Kinks’ “Working at the Factory,” which has been in my head recently due to the GOP’s decision to destroy global trade and the American economy under the pretext of “bringing back factory jobs.”

And also because Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has taken to talking about these tariff-fueled factory jobs like a Maoist cheering on the Cultural Revolution, suggesting that all the cancer researchers and forest rangers and agricultural scientists purged from the government by DOGE will be re-educated to work in the new factories that will be springing up in the months ahead: “On one side, the president is reordering trade. On the other side, we are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings. And then on the other side of that, we will have the labor we need for new manufacturing.”