Hello, this is Michael Moss. Heather Crox-Ritcherson is traveling today, and her travel

arrangements did not allow her time to read today's letter, so I will be reading it in her place.

March 27, 2025. Today, Wired reported that it had found four more Venmo accounts associated with the Trump administration officials who participated in the now infamous signal chat about a planned military attack on the Houthis in Yemen.

A payment on one of them was identified only with an eggplant emoji,

which is commonly used to suggest sexual activity.

The craziness going on around us in the first two months of the second Trump administration

makes a lot more sense if you remember that the goal of those currently in power

was never simply to change the policies or the personnel of the U.S. government. Their goal is to

dismantle the central pillars of the United States of America, government, law, business, education,

culture, and so on. because they believe the very shape

of those institutions serves what they call the left. Their definition of the left includes

all Americans, Republicans and independents as well as Democrats, who believe the government has a role to play

in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure,

and protecting civil rights and those who support the institutional structures Americans have

built since World War II. In place of those structures, today's

mega leaders intend to create their own new institutions, shaped by their own people,

whose ideological purity trumps their abilities. As Vice President J.D. Vance explained in a

2021 interview, he and his ilk believe that American

conservatives have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches

and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they've ever been.

We've lost big business. We've lost finance. We've lost the

culture. We've lost the academy. And if we're going to actually really affect real change in the

...