Little Marco Goes Global

Plus: Trump island, AI regulations you've never heard of, Gaza death count, and more...

Trump administration taking shape: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio will most likely be picked as secretary of state; former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Republican who ran for governor against Kathy Hochul and lost, will helm the Environmental Protection Agency; Florida Rep. Mike Waltz will serve as national security adviser; and Rep. Elise Stefanik, who represents New York in the House, has been picked by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as ambassador to the United Nations.

Rubio is, unfortunately for libertarians, quite hawkish. He seems most interested in China affairs, taking a hard-line stance on curbing human rights abuses via government pressure, and he advocates shifting manufacturing back to America as a means of reducing reliance on Chinese imports. He has long supported Venezuelan sanctions, and he is a staunch supporter of Israel, calling Hamas "100 percent to blame" in response to a question about civilian deaths in Gaza.

Trump often deviated from the views of his top advisers.

And I know @DonaldJTrumpJr and others are doing what he said below.

But Trump's last 3 appointees - Elise Stefanik, Mike Weltz, and Rubio - are war hawks fully aligned with the worst prongs of bipartisan DC consensus. pic.twitter.com/LLW0YuDu85

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 12, 2024

"Despite speaking in hard-line terms about Russia in the past, Mr. Rubio would likely go along with Mr. Trump's expected plans to press Ukraine to find a way to come to a settlement with Russia and remain outside of NATO," reports The New York Times. "It is unclear whether the leaders of Ukraine or Russia would be prepared to enter into talks at Mr. Trump's urging."

Zeldin is probably a better pick for his post, at least in terms of libertarian priorities, than Rubio. "As president, Biden paused export permits for liquified natural gas, scrapped or stalled new oil and gas pipelines and attempted to bar new permits for drilling on federal land," reports the New York Post. Zeldin is expected to roll back most of those policies and be broadly focused on deregulation.

Zeldin "will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet," said President-elect Donald Trump in a statement.

La Leche League founder resigns: The nonprofit organization devoted to breastfeeding training and support, which has been around since the 1950s, is being dealt a sharp rebuke from one of its original founders (and current board members). Marian Tompson, now 94, writes that the "organization that has become a travesty of my original intent" and that its "focus has subtly shifted to include men who, for whatever reason, want to have the experience of breastfeeding despite no careful long-term research on male lactation and how that may affect the baby."

Tompson is probably referring to a series of changes the organization has made over the last decade that let transgender people and other so-called "chestfeeders" in, detailed here by Bethany Mandel for The Free Press. The issue first cropped up in 2012, when trans-identifying Trevor McDonald—who was born a woman but identified as a man following giving birth, and had an elective mastectomy as a result—was successful in getting the organization to bend its rules for the sake of inclusion.

To some, the erosion of La Leche League's boundaries may seem like no big deal, or even like progress. But to women who care about maintaining some access to female-only spaces for the sake of learning how to best nurture their children, it feels like a betrayal of the organization's longstanding and quite sacred purpose.

---

Scenes from New York: The case isn't looking great for Daniel Penny, the 26-year-old Long Islander who is on trial for manslaughter for his role in the subway killing of erratic homeless man Jordan Neely, 30.

On Thursday, the defense asked the judge to rule it a mistrial, claiming that the prosecution was permitted to portray Penny as a "white vigilante" and that they were wrongly allowed a homeless witness, Johnny Grima, to call Penny a "murderer" from the witness stand (when that is not something for which Penny stands legally accused). Judge Maxwell Wiley denied the request but told Penny's lawyers, "I see what you're getting at."

---

QUICK HITS

• Today, Zach Weissmueller and I are interviewing Lee Fang for our show, Just Asking Questions, which has its own channel now. We are just over 1,000 subscribers, which I attribute to the goodness of you, dear readers and X followers and all the others I've lovingly harassed for the last few days. If you HAVE NOT YET SUBSCRIBED and want to EARN MY UNDYING AFFECTION, well, you know what to do.
• "Without a single law passed by Congress, without a dollar of federal funding appropriated, a sweeping regulatory regime for AI is being quietly assembled, going as far as to create from scratch a quasi-regulator for both the development and use of AI," writes Dean Ball for Pirate Wires.
• "Trump has vowed to ease the regulatory burden on crypto and create a reserve to hold the nation's bitcoin supply. Congress will soon be full of lawmakers—young and old—who believe cryptocurrency is a unique asset class that shouldn't be regulated like stocks and bonds," reports the Wall Street Journal.
• Stunning:

Fun fact: "la sombrita" and starship took about the same amount of time. https://t.co/7zaJcGYxLS pic.twitter.com/L1Slrf1Dv5

— Sam D'Amico (@sdamico) November 11, 2024

• The United Nations has thrown its weight behind Hamas' claim that 70 percent of the dead in Gaza are women and children, not militants. "The high number was largely due to Israel's use of weapons with wide-area effects in densely populated areas, although some deaths may have been the result of errant projectiles by Palestinian armed groups," reports the BBC. The U.N. report claims the Israeli military has "an apparent indifference to the death of civilians and the impact of the means and methods of warfare." But many claim the U.N. and their boosters are not telling the truth, and that there are issues with their methodology and analysis.

For anyone worried about misinformation and social media, here is the BBC giving themsleves 14.5 million views on what we call A LIE.

Let's start with the 70% being from a sample of 8,000, 1/5th of the (widely inflated) number that even Hxmxs uses. More details below. https://t.co/B3eXDbQLwc

— Yael Bar tur ????️ (@yaelbt) November 11, 2024

• The more you know, Niihau edition:

My favorite part of Niihau's electoral history: "In 2004 President George W. Bush received all but one of the 40 votes cast on the island. The remaining vote was cast for Green Party nominee David Cobb." https://t.co/8WYSxexwho https://t.co/qITHqkFPrP

— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) November 11, 2024

• People are angrily tweeting at me for this, but I maintain that it's an interesting question. How exactly you would build a "Rogan, but for the left"? Who would it be, how would they get big? Does such irreverence, such looseness, even exist among any lefty dude-whisperer?

What are the left-coded dude hobbies and obsessions? I can think of a million right-coded ones––weed and DMT and UFC and weightlifting and comedy and nutrition and weird supplements and paranormal shit––but what are the equivalents on the left? https://t.co/0ch1aglWIR

— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) November 12, 2024