Black Hawk Don

 UPDATE: SUSAN B. GLASSER

...President Trump walked into the White House briefing room late on Thursday morning for a press conference on the previous night’s tragic plane crash over the Potomac, the first deadly accident involving a commercial airliner near Washington, D.C., since 2009. He read prepared remarks calling the country “one family” in the face of tragedy. Then he looked up and discarded the platitudinous talking points to bash his Democratic predecessors, air-traffic controllers themselves, and an amorphous “diversity push,” baselessly suggesting that all were somehow responsible for the crash. He said that Pete Buttigieg, the Biden Administration’s Transportation Secretary, had run the agency “right into the ground with his diversity,” and insisted that both Barack Obama and Joe Biden had rejected his proposed standards to insure that only those air-traffic controllers of the “highest intellect” could be hired. “Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse,” he said.

These were hardly the consoling words needed by a grieving nation. But, in the end, Trump’s performance was, perhaps, the day’s most revealing, with little of the obfuscation that came from his nominees on Capitol Hill. Trump said loud and clear what those surrounding him often try to hide on his behalf: He does not care about facts. He does not care about leading the country. He will seek political advantage in anything, even the death of sixty-seven people in a horrific accident in the second week of his Presidency.

It was hard to turn back to the confirmation hearings after listening to him. The maga-palooza in the Senate, after all, was but a reflection of Trump himself—these are his nominees, his choices, the fights that he has chosen to pick. He overshadowed any of the crazy or outrageous or disturbing things they had to say with his own words. Gabbard, Kennedy, and Patel are not the crisis in America set off by his reëlection, they are the consequences of it. Trump is the crisis—is, was, and will continue to be. Want to know how the next four years are going to go? Rewatch, if you can stand it, that press conference. This is it.

BUT WAIT: THERE’S MORE… 

 

SUNDAY MORNING UPDATE

 

DEFCON-47

 

YALE HISTORIAN DR. TIMOTHY SNYDER

The Logic of Destruction
And how to resist it

What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.

The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.

For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.

The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.

All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow…

From his Substack. Read all of it.

 

JOYCE VANCE WHITE

The Anti-President

I don’t want to be an alarmist—I try to avoid that—but as I’m writing this, it looks like we are in the middle of a five-alarm fire. It’s day 13 of Trump 2.0. From day one, it was clear that Donald Trump was not playing by normal American constitutional rules. Of course, it has long been obvious that he didn’t intend to play by the rules, but any pretense of lawfulness was stripped away when he tried to cancel birthright citizenship with an executive order that ran afoul of the clear language in the Constitution, as confirmed in short order by two federal judges. In the following days, it became more clear that we were not okay, that nothing was right.

During his second week in office, Trump illegally fired 18 inspectors general, the people who ferret out corruption, waste, and fraud in federal agencies. It sounds like, under Trump, there will be no more of that. No independent inspectors general to poke around. Trump has made it clear that personal loyalty to him is more important than principle. Government employees, including those with civil service protections, now serve at his pleasure…

BENJAMIN WALLACE-WELLS

 

On the Wednesday evening of a Washington week defined by a blitzkrieg of executive orders, vituperative confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard, and an effort by the new President to suspend much of the federal budget, an American Airlines jet approaching Washington, D.C., from Wichita collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan National Airport. Everyone on board both aircraft was killed, sixty-seven people in total, some of them young ice-skaters. The next day, President Trump called a press conference. He began by expressing his condolences and described the “icy, icy Potomac—it was a cold, cold night, cold water.” He then said, “We do not know what led to this crash,” but, he added, “we have very strong opinions and ideas, and I think we’ll probably state those opinions now.”

That statement could be a motto for this Administration, but what Trump meant in this case was that diversity initiatives at the Federal Aviation Administration had somehow caused the calamity. It is essential, Trump said, that air-traffic controllers be hired for their “intellect, talent—the word ‘talent,’ ” but, instead, the Democrats “came out with a directive: too white.” (He also complained about Pete Buttigieg—Joe Biden’s Transportation Secretary and an occasional liberal antagonist on Fox News, who is reportedly considering a run for the U.S. Senate in Michigan—claiming, “He’s just got a good line of bullshit.”) Apparently quoting old reports in the New York Post and from Fox News, Trump listed conditions that he implied the F.A.A. had been giving preference to in its hiring practices—including “severe intellectual disability,” “psychiatric disability,” and “dwarfism.”

Trump offered no evidence that diversity had anything to do with the crash and, at other points, seemed to place the blame for it on the pilot of the Black Hawk. (Helicopters have “the ability to go up or down,” Trump noted.) When a reporter asked him if he had any proof that diversity hiring was responsible for the deaths, the President of the United States pursed his lips and said, “It just could have been.”

As recognizably Trump as these crude ramblings were—in their sheer self-absorption in the midst of a tragedy, and in their reflexive racial insinuations—they matched the spirit of the moment. Throughout the government, new appointees have been touting their reversals of diversity standards—the signal feature of what has been a rapid two-week effort to remake the preëxisting bureaucracy with an America First agenda…

In other instances, there has been a more general anti-idealism: a stop-work order issued by the Administration suspended the pepfar program, which supplies H.I.V. medication, largely in sub-Saharan Africa, and has saved an estimated twenty-six million lives. Foreign aid, the order argues, is “not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.”

The new Administration has been moving fast and operating almost exclusively by executive order—Trump seems largely uninterested in Congress, and his Inaugural Address offered barely any legislative agenda. (Congressional Republicans, of course, remain highly invested in Trump; they held a retreat last week at his golf club in Doral, Florida, where the President’s name had been scorched onto the hamburger buns.) When, on Monday, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget published a memo ordering federal agencies to “identify and review all Federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities” to be sure that they reflected “administration priorities” and not “wokeness,” it fell to the Democrats to point out that a President has no authority to suspend legally authorized congressional spending. Senator Jeff Merkley, of Oregon, called the suspension a “constitutional crisis,” and, if it wasn’t obviously that, it also wasn’t obviously not that…

Was Trump just “weaving” when he used a press conference following a horrific plane crash to rant about diversity initiatives, or was he getting his Administration back on an anti-woke message, after overreaching in withholding federal funds? The smart money is on the latter. For all the glee and the diligence with which its staffers have tried to upend the liberal regime, they haven’t bothered to replace it with anything beyond a sour anti-principle. An agenda that casts doubt even momentarily on a basic social program like Medicaid can’t honestly be said to be either populist or “America First”; and Trump’s vows to install a government based on merit were undermined by his roster of clearly unqualified nominees. The operating credo at the outset of the Trump Administration has a transactional, Tammany Hall logic: there is no rule except power…

It is a crazy time...

 

'eh?

_________

  

In the wake of Inauguration Day 2025...

 

INDEED

…“For American citizens,” Trump said, “January 20, 2025, is Liberation Day.”

 

It was, if not that, Executive Order Day. Papers flowed. At the Resolute desk, an aide handed Trump orders for signing from a tall stack of navy-blue binders. Within a few hours, the United States was pulling out of not only the Paris climate accord but also the World Health Organization, which it had helped to found, in 1948. On immigration, the President reinstated his Remain in Mexico policy, and cancelled interviews for asylum applicants; in a Latino neighborhood in Detroit, ice agents were reportedly going door to door. Federal diversity programs, some dating back to an executive order signed by L.B.J. in 1965, were eliminated. Offshore wind projects were paused, restrictions on drilling lifted. Fifteen hundred people were pardoned for their roles in January 6th, including some of the most violent actors; Politico speculated that many would soon run for office themselves.

…Basic rules were being rewritten. Trump declared that the policy of the United States is that there are only two sexes, male and female: “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” Since the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868, any person born in the United States has been a citizen, but, on Monday, Trump signed a document declaring that this is no longer so—that from now on someone born to parents who are in the country illegally, or even legally but only temporarily, will not be an American. The effect of these executive orders was to convey, much more effectively than in 2017, an open season, in which virtually nothing—from the boundaries of the U.S. and the solidity of jury verdicts to who gets to be an American citizen—is guaranteed.

…Trump’s instincts are transactional, and he has his eye on Greenland (and its mineral deposits) and on the Panama Canal. (“America’s ships are being severely overcharged,” he insisted, during a long riff in his Inaugural Address, and vowed, “We’re taking it back.”) Having spent much of the past decade inveighing against what he saw as Chinese perfidy, and promising a policy of high tariffs, he now indicated that he’ll forget all about that if Beijing will sell fifty per cent of TikTok to U.S. investors. (Shou Zi Chew, the C.E.O. of TikTok, was in the Rotunda, too, seated next to Tulsi Gabbard.) Were these gambits made on behalf of the country, or certain supporters, or Trump himself? The President’s family, at least, got into the action early, issuing a $trump meme coin a few days before the Inauguration, which briefly surged to fifteen billion dollars in market capitalization, before falling to around half that. The day before the Inauguration, they rolled out $melania.

The Trumps are always the Trumps, of course, but what has given the President a second political life is the way much of the country emerged from the pandemic—frustrated with rules, strictures, and instructions of all types, and with the principles behind them. What was once a niche campaign against diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs has metastasized into a general anti-idealism. In pardoning the violent January 6th criminals—and Ross Ulbricht, who created the crypto-enabled online drug bazaar Silk Road—Trump made it clear that accountability is for him to decide. Some billionaires, in particular, seemed to detect a societal shift in Trump’s election: Mark Zuckerberg, not long after cancelling Meta’s fact-checking program, told Joe Rogan that the “culturally neutered” corporate world could use more “masculine energy,” and that it would be good to celebrate “the aggression a bit more.” It took only a few days for the new President to take that sentiment and run with it, right through the rule of law.

Is he going too far for his own good, again? Trump is often self-waylaying (as with, last time around, the Muslim ban and the never-ending boondoggle of the wall), and last week even his supporters in the Fraternal Order of Police condemned the January 6th pardons. Twenty-two Democratic state attorneys general filed suit to block the executive order threatening birthright citizenship—on Thursday, a federal judge blocked it temporarily—and at the National Cathedral Trump had to endure a sermon from Bishop Mariann Budde, urging him to show compassion for “the people who are scared now.” But it is both bewildering and alarming to remember how furious and how widespread the resistance was to Trump’s first Presidential acts, in 2017—the Women’s March, the airport protests over the Muslim ban—and to notice how the response to a much more confrontational agenda has so far been marked mostly by a lone woman’s voice from a pulpit. One working week in, it looks as if Trump is right that he learned a lot from the past eight years—and more than his opponents did. This January, what’s missing is the heat.

_________

  

Yet ANOTHER read underway.

Imagine our surprise

The Trump White House is moving to paralyze a bipartisan and independent watchdog agency that investigates national security activities that can intrude upon individual rights.

The move comes as the new administration is vowing to put its own stamp on federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It also comes ahead of a new conflict over whether or how Congress should renew a warrantless surveillance law that is set to expire in 2026.

Congress established the agency, called the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, as an independent unit in the executive branch after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It has security clearances and subpoena power, and is set up to have five members, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, who serve six-year terms. Some members are picked by the president, and some are selected by congressional leaders of the other party.

It needs at least three members in order to take official actions like starting a new investigative project or issuing a board report with a policy recommendation. Its work has included scrutiny of surveillance and bulk data collection activities, terrorism watch lists and the use of facial recognition and other biometrics at airports... (NY Times)

Recall my prior "Total Information Awareness update" post?

TRUMP EVANGELICALS UPDATE

 

What is psychologically intriguing is how bracing and electrifying a figure Trump is to many evangelicals. It is as if his disinhibitions have become theirs. Parents who disapproved of their children saying “damn” are now enthralled by a man who says “motherfucker.” Those who championed modesty and purity culture celebrate a thrice-married serial adulterer who made hush-money payments to a porn star. Churchgoers who can recite parts of the Sermon on the Mount are inspired by a man who, on the day he announced his candidacy for reelection, promised vengeance against his perceived enemies. Christians who for decades warned about moral relativism are now moral relativists; those who said a decent society has to stand for truth have embraced countless lies and conspiracy theories. People who rage at “woke cancel culture” delight in threats to shut down those with whom they disagree. Men and women who once stood for law and order have given their allegiance to a felon who issues pardons to rioters who have assaulted police officers…

…Many evangelical churches, the pastors who lead them, and the people who comprise them are doing enormously good work. I have witnessed this with my own eyes, and been the recipient of those who are dispensers of grace. Faith, not politics, is their priority, and many of them have tried in good conscience to align their politics with their faith. When it works, as it did with the abolitionist movement, the global AIDS initiative, refugee resettlement, and protecting religious liberty around the world, it has advanced justice and healing.

But something is amiss. Today the evangelical movement is an essential part of a much larger, and largely destructive, political and cultural movement. Evangelicalism has in many instances become more tribal, unforgiving, and cruel. The world is noticing.

“As a general rule,” the Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor has said, “I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”

Hitching the evangelical wagon to Donald Trump has meant unhitching it from the life and teachings of Jesus. It’s a bad trade.

—Peter Wehner

Recall my prior "Christian Nationalists" posts.

Erratum:

JUST IN (WaPo)

Supreme Court to decide whether states can allow religious public schools

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to consider whether the state of Oklahoma may fund a proposed religious charter school, the first of its kind in the country

Decision not expected anytime soon.

_____

 

ERRATUM

SecDefBro confirmed in the Senate 51-50 (VP tie-breaker).

 

SOME OF MY CURRENT READS

 

 

       

 

Trying to get back on track.

A UNIVERSE FROM NOTHING?

 

Hmmm... How 'bout we Begin Wth The End In Mind?

AFTERWORD
 by Richard Dawkins

Nothing expands the mind like the expanding universe. The music of the spheres is a nursery rhyme, a jingle to set against the majestic chords of the Symphonie Galactica. Changing the metaphor and the dimension, the dusts of centuries, the mists of what we presume to call “ancient” history, are soon blown off by the steady, eroding winds of geological ages. Even the age of the universe, accurate—so Lawrence Krauss assures us—to the fourth significant figure at 13.72 billion years, is dwarfed by the trillennia that are to come.

But Krauss’s vision of the cosmology of the remote future is paradoxical and frightening. Scientific progress is likely to go into reverse. We naturally think that, if there are cosmologists in the year 2 trillion AD, their vision of the universe will be expanded over ours. Not so—and this is one of the many shattering conclusions I take away on closing this book. Give or take a few billion years, ours is a very propitious time to be a cosmologist. Two trillion years hence, the universe will have expanded so far that all galaxies but the cosmologist’s own (whichever one it happens to be) will have receded behind an Einsteinian horizon so absolute, so inviolable, that they are not only invisible but beyond all possibility of leaving a trace, however indirect. They might as well never have existed. Every trace of the Big Bang will most likely have gone, forever and beyond recovery. The cosmologists of the future will be cut off from their past, and from their situation, in a way that we are not.

We know we are situated in the midst of 100 billion galaxies, and we know about the Big Bang because the evidence is all around us: the redshifted radiation from distant galaxies tells us of the Hubble expansion and we extrapolate it backward. We are privileged to see the evidence because we look out on an infant universe, basking in that dawn age when light can still travel from galaxy to galaxy. As Krauss and a colleague wittily put it, “We live at a very special time . . . the only time when we can observationally verify that we live at a very special time!” The cosmologists of the third trillennium will be forced back to the stunted vision of our early twentieth century, locked as we were in a single galaxy which, for all that we knew or could imagine, was synonymous with the universe.

Finally, and inevitably, the flat universe will further flatten into a nothingness that mirrors its beginning. Not only will there be no cosmologists to look out on the universe, there will be nothing for them to see even if they could. Nothing at all. Not even atoms. Nothing.

If you think that’s bleak and cheerless, too bad. Reality doesn’t owe us comfort. When Margaret Fuller remarked, with what I imagine to have been a sigh of satisfaction, “I accept the universe,” Thomas Carlyle’s reply was withering: “Gad, she’d better!” Personally, I think the eternal quietus of an infinitely flat nothingness has a grandeur that is, to say the least, worth facing off with courage.

But if something can flatten into nothing, can nothing spring into action and give birth to something? Or why, to quote a theological chestnut, is there something rather than nothing? Here we come to perhaps the most remarkable lesson that we are left with on closing Lawrence Krauss’s book. Not only does physics tell us how something could have come from nothing, it goes further, by Krauss’s account, and shows us that nothingness is unstable: something was almost bound to spring into existence from it. If I understand Krauss aright, it happens all the time: The principle sounds like a sort of physicist’s version of two wrongs making a right. Particles and antiparticles wink in and out of existence like subatomic fireflies, annihilating each other, and then re-creating themselves by the reverse process, out of nothingness.

The spontaneous genesis of something out of nothing happened in a big way at the beginning of space and time, in the singularity known as the Big Bang followed by the inflationary period, when the universe, and everything in it, took a fraction of a second to grow through twenty-eight orders of magnitude (that’s a 1 with twenty-eight zeroes after it—think about it).

What a bizarre, ridiculous notion! Really, these scientists! They’re as bad as medieval Schoolmen counting angels on pinheads or debating the “mystery” of the transubstantiation.

No, not so, not so with a vengeance and in spades. There is much that science still doesn’t know (and it is working on it with rolled-up sleeves). But some of what we do know, we know not just approximately (the universe is not mere thousands but billions of years old): we know it with confidence and with stupefying accuracy. I’ve already mentioned that the age of the universe is measured to four significant figures. That’s impressive enough, but it is nothing compared to the accuracy of some of the predictions with which Lawrence Krauss and his colleagues can amaze us. Krauss’s hero Richard Feynman pointed out that some of the predictions of quantum theory—again based on assumptions that seem more bizarre than anything dreamed up by even the most obscurantist of theologians—have been verified with such accuracy that they are equivalent to predicting the distance between New York and Los Angeles to within one hairsbreadth.

Theologians may speculate about angels on pinheads or whatever is the current equivalent. Physicists might seem to have their own angels and their own pinheads: quanta and quarks, “charm,” “strangeness,” and “spin.” But physicists can count their angels and can get it right to the nearest angel in a total of 10 billion: not an angel more, not an angel less. Science may be weird and incomprehensible—more weird and less comprehensible than any theology—but science works. It gets results. It can fly you to Saturn, slingshotting you around Venus and Jupiter on the way. We may not understand quantum theory (heaven knows, I don’t), but a theory that predicts the real world to ten decimal places cannot in any straightforward sense be wrong. Theology not only lacks decimal places: it lacks even the smallest hint of a connection with the real world. As Thomas Jefferson said, when founding his University of Virginia, “A professorship of Theology should have no place in our institution.”

If you ask religious believers why they believe, you may find a few “sophisticated” theologians who will talk about God as the “Ground of all Isness,” or as “a metaphor for interpersonal fellowship” or some such evasion. But the majority of believers leap, more honestly and vulnerably, to a version of the argument from design or the argument from first cause. Philosophers of the caliber of David Hume didn’t need to rise from their armchairs to demonstrate the fatal weakness of all such arguments: they beg the question of the Creator’s origin. But it took Charles Darwin, out in the real world on HMS Beagle, to discover the brilliantly simple—and non-question-begging—alternative to design. In the field of biology, that is. Biology was always the favorite hunting ground for natural theologians until Darwin—not deliberately, for he was the kindest and gentlest of men—chased them off. They fled to the rarefied pastures of physics and the origins of the universe, only to find Lawrence Krauss and his predecessors waiting for them.

Do the laws and constants of physics look like a finely tuned put-up job, designed to bring us into existence? Do you think some agent must have caused everything to start? Read Victor Stenger if you can’t see what’s wrong with arguments like that. Read Steven Weinberg, Peter Atkins, Martin Rees, Stephen Hawking. And now we can read Lawrence Krauss for what looks to me like the knockout blow. Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If On the Origin of Species was biology’s deadliest blow to supernaturalism, we may come to see A Universe from Nothing as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is devastating.

Krauss, Lawrence. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (pp. 187-192). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Yeah.

 

Ended up going down this path owing to som prior relevant reading.

 

More to come...

_________

  

In the wake of Jan 20th, 2025, a huge uptick in bifurcational clarity.

There are [1] those protected by the law but not bound by it, and, [2] those bound by the law but not protected by it.

 

 Pretty clear to me where I sit. Below: Also dispositively clear where Mr. Trump thinks he sits.

ERRATUM

 

UPDATE: TRUMP APPEARS REMOTELY AT DAVOS

 

The Victimhood. WATB.

 

RECOMMENDATION FROM MARK CUBAN ON BLUE.SKY

 

Mark thinks these cats are profoundly funny and incisive. Ahhh... we are where we are, I guess. Bro' stuff. At 79. I predate Bro'-istan.
_________

"The inauguration of US?"

Anand Giridharadus nails it.

   

…Is this vulgar peddler of coins and sneakers and steaks and educations and Bibles so, yes, outrageous to us that we cannot see that this, too, is us — a country of get-rich-quick schemes and big-smiling salesmen, of trusted media voices who sell gold and supplements on the side, a country where now you must have a personal brand to be a painter, a writer, even a professor or a schoolteacher crowdfunding for pencils, where religious leaders are multimillionaires, where former presidents build corporate empires, where you cannot get news of public affairs without being sold to?

Is Trump’s famously short attention span all that alien to our scrolling, swiping ones?

Is his success as a self-styled billionaire savior, uniquely capable of fixing it, because he milked the system he now heads, because he broke the rules he now proposes to reform — is this profoundly American figure not an emanation of our own strange relationship with the rich superhero? A relationship you don’t find in many other places. A tendency to put these people on magazine covers, to treat them as social visionaries, to take their money for good causes and sell them reputational detergent, to think that they are in possession of special brains that know how to run society?

Is this man who has been so deeply moulded by the activity of Not Reading all that alien from a country that reads less and less?

Is the allure of the 24/7 show this once-banished, now-returned, riveting felon puts on so inexplicable in a country whose preferred forms of entertainment are conflict-saturated fictions called “reality TV” and crime procedurals and superhero reboots?

Is Trump’s stoking of tribalism unconnected to the filter bubbles and civic fatalism and contempt we let creep into our hearts?

Is his insecure masculinity not the insecure masculinity that has been allowed to fester in millions of Americans? Left to fester in part because of a belief that to help those who once enjoyed certain privileges is to compound the old oppressions.

Is Trump’s certitude not the certitude we have let attack our own curiosity? Is his knowing before thinking not familiar? Is his being a person only of answers, never of questions — do you not recognize this at all?

Is his consequentialist view of truth — that the only truths worth hearing are those that benefit him — not also ours? Whether about an aging president or a war in Gaza, how interested, how open, are we to truths unhelpful to our causes and our teams?

I would never in a million years argue that today, at high noon, we are getting what we deserve. No one deserves all that may be coming. But America is getting a playback of what we have allowed ourselves to become…

… Today, after all, is both Donald Trump’s re-inauguration day and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s federal holiday. We are both.

We are the country of book bans, and we are the country that has published many of the books that have driven much of the world’s conversation for many decades.

We are a country in the grips of a backlash, and we are a country that has in recent decades changed more in the status of millions of people who once lived on the margins of society than our forebears in many previous centuries combined.

So, yes, today, painfully, we are witnessing the inauguration of us. It is not the triumph of some Americans over other Americans so much as the triumph of the small-hearted tendency in American life over the generous one, the cruel impulse over the humane one, the vengeful drive over the magnanimous one, the safety of the smaller “we” over the dream of the bigger one.

And, again and again in history, the generous tendency, the humane impulse, the magnanimous drive, the bigger “we” has ailed and then returned stronger than ever.

Will it again? I trust in my bones it will. But its revival will not be a function of the clock. Time may heal wounds, but it doesn’t on its own resolve the battle for your soul.

What begins today isn’t who we are, and it is. What should give us some hope is that who we are is still a matter of our choosing.

From his Substack yesterday.

I've reviewed some of his books in prior posts.

 

Quite the writer and thinker.

ALSO, KLAAS IS BACK IN SESSION

He’s back. How should we deal with it? And how can we respond to the return of Donald Trump with more personal resilience and smarter political resistance?

The Banality of Corruption

Exactly eight years ago, in January 2017, my life developed a strange rhythm: Trump tweeted—and a few minutes later, my phone started buzzing. With every bizarre half-baked post, whether it was about “General E. Watch,” the infamous middle-of-the-night “covfefe,” or his various threats against the press and his political opponents, his fingers furiously raced across his iPhone and moments later, the BBC or other news outlets would ask me for a rapid response interview as part of its breaking news coverage.

This caught me off guard; I had unintentionally developed a depressingly relevant area of expertise for the rise of Trumpism. On the one hand, I had worked in US campaign politics—I helped manage a winning campaign for governor of Minnesota—so I understood some of the complex contours of American politics.

On the other hand, I had just completed a PhD studying authoritarian regimes and the breakdown of democracy across the globe, a visceral firsthand experience of understanding how autocratic populist demagogues can devastate a country, forever changing its political dynamics in the most toxic ways imaginable. The surge in Trumpian politics was sadly merging my professional life, past and present.

Over time, the tweets numbed us, the exhausting normalization of the routine abnormal. As the Trump years ground on, my phone buzzed less for the bizarre and more for the scandalous; exposés, tax frauds, impeachments, blatant racism, incitements to violence, revelations of grotesque corruption, underhanded payoffs, the hidden machinations of a narcissistic strongman.

We steadily succumbed to what I call “the banality of crazy,” in which the routine bombardment of unacceptable, disgusting, and frankly unhinged behavior simply became an accepted feature of the political landscape. By the end, the tweets were barely covered, the lunatic speeches ignored…

From his Substack.

_____

"I don’t think there’s any way to read yesterday except as President Trump deciding that with the Republican party fully subservient to him, he can subjugate the other remaining power centers in American life.

He can finally be a wartime president. It’s just that he’s going to war against America."
  

     —Jonathan V. Last

RICK WILSON

We're In Our Oligarch Era
And other observations from Day 1 of Trump's Second Reign of Misrule

A Day at the Circus. It was one for the books, folks. 

Peer behind the bright lights and limp ceremony—both manipulated to accommodate Chicken Donny’s pathological fear of a winter breeze—and you get a sneak preview of this unholy presidential term: peril, drama, calamity, chaos, plague, and maybe the entire Book of Revelation tossed in for fun.

If the day was any indication, we might want to buckle up for the Return of the Seven Plagues and watch the sky for raining frogs while we're at it.

Three Speeches, One National Nightmare

First, trifurcate the three speeches. Ah, trifurcate—God, I love that word. The day sliced itself into three big moments, each more unhinged than the last.

First up: the official swearing-in, a visual carnival that also served as a grad-level seminar in modern Kremlinology. 

In the Rotunda, America’s titans of tech occupied front-row seats like they were on the deck of the latest superyacht.

Zuck, his perm aglow, was ogling the spectacular store-boughts and Agent Provocateur lingerie peeking from Jeff Bezos’s newly acquired paramour’s decollatage. 

Elon looked like the Ketamine was reaching its peak. Tim Cook looked like he’d do anything to be teleported to a supply closet, and Sundar Pichai of Google had the fixed smile of a a man thinking only of his 10Q.

Meanwhile, the newly minted Cabinet picks hovered behind them like a second-string JV squad. The message was unsubtle: the real power is with those who can help Donny and his nearest and dearest. 

They get the joke now: corruption is a business model, and they’re going all-in. Hell, if they play their cards right, some might hit the big T—a trilly—by the end of the term. 

Welcome to our oligarch era. No one else matters, least of all Trump’s base.

As for the Cabinet? Errand boys sent by grocery clerks. Congress? A rubber stamp. And have you accepted Our Donald as your personal savior? If not, repent now.

Somewhere between the forced smiles of George W. Bush and Barack Obama—who both looked like they were trying not to snort-laugh—and the U.S. Senators glancing around to see who stopped clapping first, we witnessed the reading of a speech the new POTUS can never quite make look genuine. 

His teleprompter game is shockingly weak for a reality TV dude; his words fall flat when some geek writes for history and posterity. Let’s face it: Donald only comes alive when he’s bragging about himself or whining about some imagined harm…

More shortly...

_________

  

Washington DC, January 20th, 2025

We need more "Masculine Energy?"

Is it too early to start drinking?

Seriously?

Props to Jamelle Bouie of the NY Times. He's on BlueSky. I am remiss for not having been following him. Now rectified.

 

jamellebouie.net

ERRATUM

 

Jan 17th, Trump launched a crypto "meme coin." His latest grift. The "Terms of Service" and "Privacy Policy" pages on the website run just shy of 10,000 pages. I'm going through them this afternoon, but here's all you need to know.

Yeah. Sure. Pure grift.

 

INAUGURATION DAY NOTICE

 

_________

  

OK, I'm on

As we hit less then 5 days to Trumpocalypse 2025. Ugh.

TOO MUCH GOING ON

The horrific continuing SoCal wildfires catastrophe. The bizarre Trump cabinet nominees,

The bizarre Trump Day One Executive Orders threats. The intractable Gaza-Hamas atrocity.

 

The creeping theocratic threat posed by U.S.  Evangelical Christian Nationalists ...

 

to wit,

Money, Lies, and God: A Conversation with Author Katherine Stewart about the Movement to Destroy American Democracy

INTERVIEW EXCERPT:

We have underestimated the importance of fact-based discourse on a functioning democracy. And we have failed to appreciate the many institutions and mechanisms that our society has developed over time to make this kind of reasonable democratic discourse possible. I know we all like to complain about the media, about “the academy,” about public schools, about the judicial system and all the rest. But these institutions and their practices have played, and must continue to play, a crucial role in making it possible for our society to deliberate on matters of public concern on the basis of fact and evidence, and not superstition or fantasy or brute power.

All of that apparatus of reasonable discourse stands in the way of would-be demagogues, or those who seek to protect unreasonable power and oligarchy. So the anti-democratic reaction has set about trying to destroy it, and tragically they are having some success.

Alongside the institutional changes there has also been a very damaging cultural shift away from truth. The New Right is in some ways reaping the harvest that the post-modern, deconstructionist left sowed over the past half-century. Maybe it felt good at the time to say that all claims to knowledge are just an expression of power, or that reason is a partisan project. Except now it is the New Right who seem to be saying that truth is in the hands of he who wins power, and reason is just a woke plot. People like Christopher Rufo appear to have taken up with gusto the deconstructionist idea that all truth is relative, and if you repeat a lie often enough it will count as truth.

Donald Trump managed to come back into power thanks to the Christian nationalists and their funders, operatives and enablers: Religious nationalist countries, you write, are often “theocratic in a certain fake sense – that is, they are regimes that endorse a particular religion and attempt to impose that religion and its homophobic and patriarchal values on society. But they are more often best described as cronyistic kleptocracies with strong militaristic features and absolute suppression of free speech and political opposition.” Is that about to be us/the US?

If MAGA gets their way, then yes, and we have a role model in Russia, which is a good Christian country by its own reckoning, but is a corrupt, kleptocratic oligarchy with a sad economy. That’s the direction in which the Trump/Musk administration appears to be taking us. Whether we go there depends on whether we have a collective will to fight for a better future.

Given that Trump and his allies are about to take power, how do you think understanding the alliance that brought them to power can help us resist this powerful authoritarian movement? Can we take advantage of the internal contradictions to slow or stop our descent into fascism?

We can’t fight something unless we recognize it for what it is. We need to understand how it works, and details matter. So that’s a crucial first step -- a clear-eyed assessment of the strengths and the weaknesses of this movement that brought us to this point. And yes, this movement is full of contradictions and divisions, and we need to expose and exploit them. I do think it’s important here to not overestimate the movement’s strengths. Yes, Trump won an election, but he did so by a very narrow margin. He won primarily not because the country “turned MAGA,” but because of clever and sustained voter turnout operations on their side, coupled with a lack of enthusiasm among the political opposition. Those of us who wish to preserve our democracy wouldn’t wish to emulate MAGA’s most craven tactics, but we would do well to learn from their strategic resolve...

You would seriously do well to read the entire interview carefully. Her new book comes out on Feb. 18th.

 

 

They gave me a pre-pub galley to review (thanks!). I am embargoed, however, from quoting excerpts directly prior to release date.

I've been onto this militant "Christian Nationalism" topic for a long time. Relatedly. "Project 2025," anyone? Acciding to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, the foundational constitutional prerogative of "Pursuit of Happiness" is only properly construed as the "Pursuit of" ("Christian") Scriptural "Blessedness."

 

I'm not making that up,

FRIDAY NIGHT UPDATE

He now says he'll "fire every FDA nutritional scientist on day one, if confirmed. Thay're ALL corrupt."

I have to suppress my candid reaction.

 

AND THEN THERE'S THIS

 

 Groan...

 

Much more shortly.

One week

until we become a very different USA.

 

MONDAY UPDATE

PDF Link to the report.