I wasn’t going to write about what’s-his-name who was shot this week, but the FBI is crowing that they’ve caught the perp. This wasn’t necessarily because of their competent investigating, however. The guy’s family turned him in.

The deceased individual’s body was flown to Arizona for burial in Air Force Two, by the way. As a taxpayer, I don’t recall giving permission for that. At least they aren’t planning a state funeral, I don’t think.

The accused is a 22-year-old male who appears to have acted alone, although I’m sure Kash Patel’s crew is working hard to find a way to link him to some established left-wing organization. But males that age tend to have more testosterone than sense. He did inscribe things on the ammunition, but nothing reported was about trans people. Most of it was a tad flaky. (Update: Most of inscriptions are from a video game.)

There were inscriptions on casings found within the rifle, Cox said. The inscription on the fired casing said: “notices, bulges, OWO, what’s this?”

Three unfired casings also had inscriptions, Cox said.

One read, “Hey fascists! Catch!” with an up arrow, a right arrow and three down arrows.

The second said, “Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao.”

The third, “If you read this, you are gay LMAO.”

I do hope that if there are any more lone wolf would-be political assassins out there, they are noting the reaction and realizing that shooting Whoozits didn’t really help make the world a better place, just a more unstable and dangerous one.

Now, let’s talk about other things.

There’s a piece by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic called The Era of Step-on-a-Rake Capitalism that I really like. There are a few statements by Thompson I have quibbles about, but on the whole it’s spot on. I believe this is the first piece in major media that links Trump’s economic policies to socialism, which is refreshing. Of course, Trump and his culties doesn’t recognize some of Trump’s actions as socialist, but arguably they are.

Some of his initiatives are pure Ronald Reagan, such as his corporate-income tax cuts and deregulation efforts targeted at oil and gas. Some of his interventions would impress a Democratic Socialists of America chapter, such as demanding a public stake in Intel, requesting 15 percent of revenues from Nvidia’s chip sales to China, and securing a “golden share” of U.S. Steel to retain veto power over its decision making. As for the rest of Trump’s economic policy, it is a hodgepodge of 19th-century mercantilism, developing-world authoritarianism, and extremely online weirdness. The U.S. tariff rate stands near a 100-year high. When Trump isn’t firing the statisticians who calculate unemployment, he’s waging war against the independent central bank or posting about the fierce urgency of corporate-logo design.

To put it simply, or at least as simply as one can: Trump’s economic agenda is deeply Reaganite and deeply anti-conservative; somewhat capitalist and frequently socialist; declaratively obsessed with “American greatness” yet constantly sidetracked by online outrages that do nothing for the country.

So, what is Trumponomics?

I’m not sure Thompson entirely understands what the Democratic Socialists are about — I’m not sure all of them do, either — but otherwise this is right. Trump’s administration is knocking down the walls between public and private enterprise and making it all public, which is to say all about Trump. I’ve already written that the staunch free-market groups like the Cato Institute and the crew at Cafe Hayek are not at all on board with Trump. Cato is running a piece that compares Trump to Juan Perón. Which is an interesting thing to read after Thompson’s piece. Perón’s policies often were hard to pigeonhole, combining elements of Right and Left. Likewise Trump’s policies have no ideological consistency. They’re mostly about what Trump feels like doing at any given hour.

But speaking of stepping on a rake, the ICE raid of the Georgia battery plant seems to be a prime example. Startup of the factory is now delayed. The South Koreans who were detained are now back in South Korea and are not eager to return. South Koreans are really angry about this. Good luck getting more South Korean investment in the U.S. But PBS reports that Trump actually delayed the release of the South Koreans because he wanted them to agree to stay and work to open the plant. They must have told him to get bent. Maybe somebody should have thought of that before ICE raided it.

For another good Atlantic article — all gift links — see How Originalism Killed the Constitution by Jill Lepore. A lot of this is about Antonin Scalia and the Amendment process. But I’m on board with anything that badmouths originalism, which artificially keeps the Constitution locked in the 18th century and unable to respond rationally to 21st century issues.

And Jamelle Bouie has a great column at the New York Times, They Don’t Want to Live in Lincoln’s America. He begins with a look at Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln imagined a nation dedicated to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the aims of the founders as he understood them. His critics, from Stephen Douglas to Roger Taney to the leaders of the Confederate rebellion, said no — ours was not a society of equals but one of rigid, permanent hierarchies. Ultimately, this contest of national identity was settled by force of arms. Lincoln’s vision, backed by what was, at the time, one of the largest and mostdiverse armies ever assembled on the North American continent, won the day. And his allies, charged after his martyrdom with the great work of reconstruction, wrote this vision into the Constitution with three amendments that aimed to realize the fullness of the Declaration.

To a great extent, then, we live in Lincoln’s America as much as anyone else’s. Which makes it supremely ironic that the project of Lincoln’s partisan political descendants — the project of the modern Republican Party — is the destruction of his republic of equals in favor of a so-called homeland for a select few.

But of course, today’s Republic Party has been largely taken over by neo-confederates.

Last week, at an annual conference for National Conservativism — the illiberal right’s term of choice for its movement — Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri gave a speech that, in its rejection of the creedal vision of the American republic and in its embrace of an exclusionary racial nationalism, went even further than Vance has in his public statements.

“For decades, the mainstream consensus on the left and the right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an ‘idea’ — a vehicle for global liberalism,” Schmitt said. “We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors.”

I’ve been wondering what Schmitt has been up to. Now I know. Anyway — speaking as the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of two Revolutionary War soldiers and the descendant of a whole mess of pioneers who settled Appalachia and the Ozarks way back when — Schmitt can stuff it. There were African Muslims in Colonial America, and some of them fought in the Revolution, too. Among the ancestors of President Warren Harding and the fabled Vanderbilt family was a character known as Anthony the Turk, credited with being the first free Muslim in North America. Anthony the Turk took up residence in New Netherland, now Manhattan, in the 17th century.

Groups of Sephardic Jews began arriving also as early as 1654. Jews fought in the Revolution. And there was already a substantial Chinese population in California when it became a state in 1850. Before that, of course, a big chunk of California and the southwest was territory of Spain and settled by Spanish. And Native Americans were here first.

This country has always been wildly diverse, however much bigots want to pretend otherwise.  What makes us a nation is indeed a proposition — that common people, equal under the law, can govern themselves. No kings. No dictators. Never forget that.