Elon Musk wants humans to migrate to the moon & Mars.

For galactic starters. And, he wants YOU—the predominantly uninvited—to foot the bill.

 

SpaceX

 

 

There are a raft of difficult, relevant questions going to the migration of homo sapiens to "Exoplanetary Life."

 

Click

Also of interest,

"EARTH IS NOT WELL. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no doomscrolling—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space businesses are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered... [click cover]"

And let us not foregt Neil de Grasse Tyson.

2026 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 

 

The Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney delivers his most ambitious and epic work in exploring the history of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has amassed so much power, he’s like a character in a Marvel comic book. A short recap of his handiwork: Tesla popularized electric vehicles; Starlink expanded the reach of the internet; Twitter bowed to his takeover; and DOGE radically transformed the US government. Musk has been at the centre of AI development and this past summer, the IPO for SpaceX made him the richest man in the world. His influence arguably touches everyone on the planet. Surely this is worth fresh scrutiny.

After nearly four years of work, Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney delivers his most ambitious and epic documentary, seeking to understand the history and motivations of the ultimate tech bro. When this film was first announced, Musk immediately denounced it on Twitter and refused to participate. But that didn’t impede Gibney, who draws upon countless hours of interviews that Musk has given over the years. Even more revealingly, Gibney conducts new interviews with figures who have known Musk up close and personal, including the mogul’s father, Errol Musk...

I have no idea whether Elon's Mars gambit will be examined. Hope so.
 

PER THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

...Gibney spends the first half of the film coming at Musk for various alleged sins, including stealing credit from original Tesla founder Martin Eberhard; bullying a woman who birthed his child to sign an NDA; pumping his stocks with shaky talk of Mars exploration and full self-driving cars (the latter of which Gibney also alleges are responsible for more than 60 deaths); and turning a light on the monkeys experimented on at Neuralink who advocacy groups say suffered needlessly. Not nearly as adept at all the substantive tasks of running a company as he claims, Elon Musk, Gibney argues, excels mainly at selling tall tales.

Even these multiple levels of alleged villainy, however, seem narrow compared to what the director argues in the second half is the real game: world domination. In Gibney’s telling, to witness Musk convert his satellite internet system Starlink into an unelected policymaker given its crucial role in Ukraine and other war-torn places; to see NASA rely so heavily on SpaceX to perpetuate its space program; to watch Musk seemingly use Twitter to garner business favors from world leaders like Modi and Milei; to look with growing dread as the data collected by DOGE potentially becomes a sleeper cell for campaign research and political retaliation — to observe all of this is to gaze upon a man interested not only in wealth and status but in an oligarchal sway that transcends elections’ fickle seasons. Donald Trump may have spent six years bringing the branches of government to heel. But in Gibney’s accounting Musk is in the process of pulling off something far more menacing: rendering government obsolete altogether... 

UPDATE:

BREAKING, OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM

 

[USA Today] Surprise! Elizabeth Holmes is the subject of a top-secret documentary from A24, which promises to be a "mind-bending" experience.

The studio on Sept. 6 revealed a previously unannounced film featuring the Theranos founder who was convicted of defrauding investors, titled "You Can See Everything." The project was made in secret and is set to be released in theaters in October...

Wow. Not my favorite person (apologies for the link rot).

 

More ASAP...

"Continuous discursive tinnitus"

An excellent New Yorker long-read. Totally timely.

The person who should have been best able to explain how we got here was the great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who illuminated how a feisty, principled public sphere is integral to democracy. But Habermas died in March, at the age of ninety-six, and, although he remained active until his final months, commenting on Ukraine, Gaza, and Eurobonds, he struggled to understand the turn history had taken. As a teen-ager in 1945, he had witnessed American soldiers enter his home town of Gummersbach, near Cologne, carrying messages of freedom and openness. Eight decades later, he watched American voters choose a leader who had advertised his fascistic bent in blood-and-soil rhetoric, fantasies of punitive violence, and a taste for bombastic architectural kitsch. The far right was making inroads across Europe, including in Germany. The print-based media culture that once anchored Habermas’s public sphere had devolved into a digital sludgefest that proved better at circulating racist memes than at fostering morality and dignity. A couple of years before his death, in a conversation with the historian Philipp Felsch, Habermas said that his world was being dismantled “step by step.”...
____ 

...The medieval philosopher al-Farabi, who considered democracy the least imperfect of imperfect governments, is mentioned only in passing. A similar Western bias contributed to one of Habermas’s last, and least effective, public interventions. In November, 2023, after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis and the onset of Israel’s brutal counterstrike on Gaza, Habermas signed a statement that reasserted solidarity between Germany and Israel. After a glancing mention of Palestinian suffering, the authors write, “The standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.” It’s one thing to deny that genocide has taken place in Gaza; it’s another to imply more broadly that the topic is out of bounds. At a crucial moment, Habermas’s cherished pluralism failed him.

“If no dread remains, the monsters return,” Habermas wrote early in his career. They’re back, on several continents. Earlier this year, in Germany, the Sachsen-Anhalt branch of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party released a platform containing such demands as “Think German!,” “Promote patriotism—no state money for anti-German art and culture!,” and “Build more beautifully!” This dumbed-down Goebbels gobbledygook revived talking points that Habermas had tried to quash during the Historikerstreit. Not surprisingly, AfD representatives could barely contain their glee over the philosopher’s death. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, one of the Party’s nastier voices, posted a YouTube video in which he said, “Habermas is dangerous. He is one of the greatest enemies of the German nation.” Tillschneider’s inability to put Habermas into the past tense was somehow reassuring.

An equally obnoxious obituary came from the billionaire pen of Alex Karp, the C.E.O. of Palantir Technologies. Before Karp turned to hawking surveillance systems that have assisted ice in its murderous roundups of immigrants, he studied philosophy under Habermas in Frankfurt. In an article for Politico, Karp recounted how Habermas provided fierce but fair criticism of his papers: “It was his very willingness to be so productively unsparing that reminds me of what we have lost as a culture.” Alas, the losses that Karp has in mind don’t seem to involve learning, rigor, or reason. Waving away Habermas’s cosmopolitan ideals, he says that discourse “must be rooted in a more corporeal and traditional—and indeed national and cultural—source.” This is the language of maga and the AfD, not to mention Heidegger circa 1935. Karp’s ideological atavism is all too typical of the current bent of Silicon Valley...

 

When the A.I. chatbots march in, the “colonization of the lifeworld,” to use another ungainly but apt Habermas phrase, enters a terminal stage. Horkheimer and Adorno had concluded that advanced capitalism, far from being a technocratic monolith, had an inherent tendency toward chaos and madness. A.I. is at once a consummation of technological control and a new level of cultish delirium. The designers themselves are often incapable of explaining what their systems are doing. Habermas’s entire world view was premised on the idea of people learning from one another; A.I. annihilates communicative action in the name of hallucinatory conversations with sycophantic machines. The social effects have proved instantly disastrous: rampant disinformation, mass student cheating, cases of users becoming addicted to A.I. or killing themselves with its help. Meanwhile, to the joy of investors, untold thousands of jobs have vanished. As an added coup, A.I. managed to deliver a personal affront to Habermas a year before his death. In 2024, Google DeepMind unveiled a “Habermas Machine,” which has been described as a “scaffolded pair of LLMs designed to find consensus among people who disagree.” The philosopher had not given Google permission to use his name, and he was horrified when he heard about the scheme...

 

Philosophy is a discipline of abstractions, yet it raises achingly elemental questions. The august Kant asks, “What can I know? What should I do? What can I hope for?” The answers are seldom simple or bright. The seduction of despair can be intense, whether on the personal or the political level. But the fact that most of our hopes remain unrealized should not revoke the reality of our fitful, painful progress.

This was Habermas’s core conviction; he was an incrementalist, though a radical one. On the other hand, in his almost manic drive toward consensus, he blunted the edge of his critical inheritance. If we are to say no to the monstrosities that we have unleashed, we need the uncompromising fury that the Frankfurt School writers invested in their work. We need Adorno to tell us that the confusion of truth and lies “makes it a Sisyphean labor to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge.” In the end, we need both voices: the critical and the reconstructive, the savage and the sage. The dialectic moves between crashing despair and hovering hope.

That's just a tad.

 

The Donroe Doctrine

NY Times article photo

“We live in a world, the real world, Jake [Tapper/CNN], that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning
of time.” —Stephen Miller

...On Tuesday, giddy after the success of a daring weekend raid to capture the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump’s White House put out a statement threatening Denmark, a nato ally, with military action if it did not hand over Greenland—a threat so reminiscent of Vladimir Putin’s bald demands in the run-up to his invasion of Ukraine that it had Russian officials openly cheering. In the days since, Trump has insisted that the United States simply must have the vast, sparsely populated, and resource-rich territory. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is set to meet with Denmark’s leaders next week to present terms. Seven European nations put out a joint statement condemning the threats, leading to yet another Trump statement claiming that it was the Europeans who could not be trusted to defend their fellow alliance members.

What some of Trump’s own senior officials once viewed as the delusional musings of a dilettante have now become a genuine international crisis, one that could lead—or maybe it already has led—to the effective end of nato. After this week, is there anyone who can credibly claim to be sure that the United States, under Trump, would honor the commitment to mutual defense that is the foundation of the alliance?

Greenland, it turns out, is not a punch line but a template that explains much about Trump’s foreign policy: it’s about a power-grabbing President who looks at territory on a map and says he wants to own it. Trump could not articulate a rationale for acquiring Greenland—“from a strategic standpoint, from a locational standpoint, from a geography standpoint, it’s something that we should have,” he told us—any more than he can elaborate on what his plan is for Venezuela now that he’s toppled the country’s leader and seized some of its oil. Asked by reporters from the Times, on Wednesday, why he couldn’t just settle for the terms of the existing 1951 treaty with Denmark, which grants the U.S. military nearly unlimited use of Greenland’s territory, Trump replied, “Ownership is very important.” He added, “because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.” There are no limits to his global powers, Trump said, except one thing: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

In light of all of this stuff (including the ICE agent killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis this week forward one day later by new federal CBP agent shootings in Portland, Oregon), igs it hyperbolically unwarranted at this point to wonder whether Insurrection Act martial law may soon arrive?

 

Susan Glasser concludes. 

Welcome to 2026. Trump’s apologists may be right when they say that the martial bluster is no more than a bargaining tactic. It appears that’s what Maduro thought, too, right up until the moment Trump sent the Delta Force into his bedroom in the middle of the night.

ON DECK

Now running on NetFlix. A film production of the live Broadway play. Could scarcely be more timely. Brilliantly done. George Clooley!

 

From his closing speech:

These instruments can teach, they can illuminate, they can even inspire, but they can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use them to those ends. Otherwise, they're merely wires and lights in a box. 

There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance, indifference. It's a fight for the very soul of this republic.

And so the question is a very simple one. Not what power unchecked can do. We have seen that answer. No. The question is what are you prepared to do?

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Good night and good luck. 

Selected Murrow quotes. 

 

Thinking about Ed Murrow brings to my mind the late CBS newsman Eric Sevareid.

 

Eric and Ed were CBS News colleagues (I'd place a Polymarket bet that the poignant Bari Weiss does not know this). Eric's memoir was published in 1946, the year I was born. I bought the updated 1976 release when it came out. It is one of my treasured hardbounds. Below: one of my website taglines...

 

Word.
 

My late Bell Labs semiconductor R&D technocrat Pop liked to snipe derisively "Jack of all Trades, Master of None."

 

His recurrent admonition to me as I grew up was "find an expert niche and fill it."

 

My eventual Sevareidian reaction echoes Eric.

 

 

And, then, from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” —Heinlein 

Sorry, Pop.

 

One last fav tagline of mine for now.

"Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but it is not merely so." —Sam Harris (props to Tennyson)

One hopes.

 

JANUARY 10TH UPDATE

 

It has been a very bad week, on a number of exigent fronts. Seems like it's always Miller Time of late.

 

 

More to come...

When you need the job done right:

Send in the women.

    

What will become of Ukraine?

Oval Office Monday after Alaska

Prior posts of mine on Russia's aggression against Ukraine. 

Yeah, the internets are alive and well with exasperated multimedia snark.

 CODA 

Aleksandr Dugin

Ambassador Mike Huckabee to Donald Trump:

"It is my honor to serve you!"

Mr President, God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century-maybe ever.

The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else. You have many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice. I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts. No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945. I don't reach out to persuade you. Only to encourage you. I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else's. You sent me to Israel to be your eyes, ears and voice and to make sure our flag flies above our embassy. My job is to be the last one to leave.

I will not abandon this post. Our flag will NOT come down! You did not seek this moment. This moment sought YOU! It is my honor to serve you!

Mike Huckabee

The foregoing is the full text of a Truth Social post of Mike's (which Trump re-posted). Note he did not say "an honor to serve the American people."

 

THINGS ARE MOVING QUICKLY

 

Congress didn't get The Article I
Declaration of War Memo, one presumes.

 

UPDATE

Trump’s Gilded Gut Instinct

Wall Street analysts recently began joking that the best way to predict the behavior of President Trump — and make money in the process — was by practicing the “TACO trade,” which stands for “Trump always chickens out.” You can always bet on Trump rolling back a reckless tariff.

This mocking of Trump’s inconsistency, which drives him nuts — “Don’t ever say what you said,” he told a reporter who asked him about it — not only is accurate but also deserves to be more widely applied.

One day he is pushing Ukraine away; the next day he is shaking Ukraine down for its minerals; the next day Ukraine is back in the fold. One day Vladimir Putin is Trump’s friend; the next day he’s “crazy.” One day Canada will be the 51st state; the next day it is the target of tariffs. One day he brags that he hires only “the best” people; the next day more than 100 experts at the National Security Council are pushed out just weeks after many were hired. One day the president hosts a gala at his Virginia golf club for the biggest buyers of his memecoin, who spent a combined $148 million for the chance to hear him give a talk standing behind the presidential seal, and the White House spokeswoman suggests it’s not corruption because the president was “attending it in his personal time.”

Trump is governing by unchecked gut impulses, with little or no homework or coordination among agencies. He respects no real lines of authority, has his golfing buddy (Steve Witkoff) act as secretary of state and his secretary of state (Marco Rubio) act as his ambassador to Panama. He compels anyone who wants to stop him to take him to court, while blurring all lines between his legal duties and personal enrichment.

What is this telling us? We are not being governed anymore by a traditional American administration. We are being governed by the Trump Organization Inc…
 [ Thomas Friedman ]

ARTICLE EXCERPT FROM FOREIGN AFFAIRS

...To avoid a total surrender, Khamenei could also keep the fight going. That might include going for a nuclear breakout. Assuming Iran still possesses its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and retains the know-how, the regime could still try to test a nuclear device, hoping that becoming a nuclear state will restore a measure of its lost deterrence. Tehran could also continue to wage war, aiming to either exhaust Israel’s will to fight or increase support for the regime among the Iranian people. The regime may even hope that Israel expands its strikes, or aim to draw in the United States, believing that if more Iranian civilians are killed, Iranian society will become more sympathetic toward the country’s only defenders: the regime. That “rally around the flag” effect is, at this point, the regime’s last remaining hope to get Iranians on its side.

But increased aggression is a very dicey bet and could leave the regime isolated and broke. The longer the war continues, the greater the destruction the country will face, which would reduce the regime’s capacity to simply operate. If there is no rally around the flag effect, or if it eventually passes, the Islamic Republic’s citizens could ultimately turn on the regime. And if the government secures a nuclear weapon in order to safeguard its hold on power, Iran could end up looking quite a lot like North Korea—a scenario no Iranian would want.

Whatever happens, the Iranian regime has doubtless lost its decades-long conflict with Israel. It will either have to give up its foundational political ideology and seek integration with the rest of the region through diplomatic and economic engagement, or it will need to double down on its beliefs, drawing further into itself. Ali Khamenei and the IRGC have lost; the regional status quo they established is finished.


 More to come...

100 days of malignant delusions

Click here.

  

Recall how Trump promised unequivocally to end Russia's war against Urkaine within 24 hours of his inauguration. Hour 2,400 has arrived. Peace between Ukraine and Russia has not as of this posting.

Changing the name of the Gulf in 2025

The way things are now going, by the time this bill were ever to pass into law, the Trump C-note may well be worth 5 bucks. Charitably.

Jeffrey Sachs Roaring Ukraine Speech At EU Parliament; Blasts U.S., Says 'Not Putin's Puppet'

Professor Jeffrey Sachs recently addressed European Parliament on February 19, 2025, with a stark warning: being a friend to the United States can be "fatal." Speaking at "The Geopolitics of Peace" event, hosted by Michael von der Schulenburg, Sachs emphasized the need for Europe to adopt a truly independent foreign policy. Sachs' statement was a call to action, urging Europe to develop a foreign policy that's grounded in reality.  Sachs' words echo his previous criticisms of US foreign policy, particularly regarding the Ukraine conflict. He has argued that the US has recklessly expanded NATO's reach, ignoring Russia's concerns and fueling the devastating war.
  

An hour & 40 minutes of bracing contrarianism.

ERRATUM

 

Yeah, right, problem solved.

UPDATE

 

PUTIN'S RASPUTIN

 

From The New Yorker

A long-read. Worth every minute.

 

MORE ON JEFFREY SACHS

 

In this sobering analysis of American foreign policy under Trump, the award-winning economist calls for a new approach to international engagement.
 
The American Century began in 1941 and ended in 2017, on the day of President Trump’s inauguration. The subsequent turn toward nationalism and “America first” unilateralism did not made America great. It announced the abdication of our responsibilities in the face of environmental crises, political upheaval, mass migration, and other global challenges. As a result, America no longer dominates geopolitics or the world economy as it once did.

In this incisive and passionate book, Jeffrey D. Sachs provides the blueprint for a new foreign policy that embraces global cooperation, international law, and aspirations for worldwide prosperity. He argues that America’s approach to the world must shift from military might and wars of choice to a commitment to shared objectives of sustainable development.
 
A New Foreign Policy explores both the danger of the “America first” mindset and the possibilities for a new way forward, proposing timely and achievable plans to foster global economic growth, reconfigure the United Nations for the twenty-first century, and build a multipolar world that is prosperous, peaceful, fair, and resilient.

TRUMP ADDRESSES CONGRESS

ON DECK

Stay tuned... 

_________

  

One of these leaders has spent more than 3 years surviving unrelenting military assaults by Putin's Russia.

The other is loudmouth bully & draft dodger Donald Trump.

 

Of the many bizarre and uncomfortable moments during today’s Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky—during which Trump finally shattered the American alliance with Ukraine—one was particularly revealing: What, a reporter asked, would happen if the cease-fire Trump is trying to negotiate were to be violated by Russia? “What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?” Trump spat back, as if Russia violating a neighbor’s sovereignty were the wildest and most unlikely possibility, rather than a frequently recurring event… - Jonathan Chait

I could scarcely be more appalled today.

It Was an Ambush
Today marked one of the grimmest days in the history of American diplomacy.
By Tom Nichols

Leave aside, if only for a moment, the utter boorishness with which President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House today. Also leave aside the spectacle of American leaders publicly pummeling a friend as if he were an enemy. All of the ghastliness inflicted on Zelensky today should not obscure the geopolitical reality of what just happened: The president of the United States ambushed a loyal ally, presumably so that he can soon make a deal with the dictator of Russia to sell out a European nation fighting for its very existence.

Trump’s advisers have already declared the meeting a win for “putting America first,” and his apologists will likely spin and rationalize this shameful moment as just a heated conversation—the kind of thing that in Washington-speak used to be called a “frank and candid exchange.” But this meeting reeked of a planned attack, with Trump unloading Russian talking points on Zelensky (such as blaming Ukraine for risking global war), all of it designed to humiliate the Ukrainian leader on national television and give Trump the pretext to do what he has indicated repeatedly he wants to do: side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and bring the war to an end on Russia’s terms. Trump is now reportedly considering the immediate end of all military aid to Ukraine because of Zelensky’s supposed intransigence during the meeting…

Trump convenes his first second-term cabinet "meeting."

After an hour of random self-aggrandizing Acting Celebrity Apprentice POTUS babble, CNN cut away.

   

Somenone, please buy Elon Musk a dress shirt and tie. And, please, dude take that MAGA hat off.

 

 

Seriously?

 

Back to some real world. Katherine Stewart's timely new book is out.

 

 

 

A quick cite from the Preface, then onto some relevant current events.

PREFACE
…The big story of our time is the rise of an antidemocratic political movement in the United States. Like any such movement, this one is diverse and complicated. It brings together a collection of people and ideas that in ordinary circumstances would not dream of sharing a bed. It is united in its profound rejection of the Enlightenment ideals on which the American republic was founded, and it represents the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War…

Abraham Lincoln had it right when he said that the United States is dedicated to a proposition. The American idea, as he saw it, is the familiar one articulated in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It says that all people are created equal; that a free people in a pluralistic society may govern themselves; that they do so through laws deliberated in public, grounded in appeals to reason, and applied equally to all; and that they establish these laws through democratic representation in government. In the centuries after 1776, in its better moments, the United States exported this revolutionary creed and inspired people around the world to embrace their freedom.

But in recent years a political movement has emerged that fundamentally does not believe in the American idea. It claims that America is dedicated not to a proposition but to a particular religion and culture. It asserts that an insidious and alien elite has betrayed and abandoned the nation’s sacred heritage. It proposes to “redeem” America, and it acts on the extreme conviction that any means are justified in such a momentous project. It takes for granted that certain kinds of Americans have a right to rule, and that the rest have a duty to obey. No longer casting the United States as a beacon of freedom, it exports this counterrevolutionary creed through alliances with leaders and activists who are themselves hostile to democracy. This movement has captured one of the nation’s two major political parties, and some of its leading thinkers explicitly model their ambitions on corrupt and illiberal regimes abroad that render education, the media, and the corporate sector subservient to a one-party authoritarian state.

Stewart, Katherine. Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (pp. 2-3). Kindle Edition.

Ch 11: Exporting the Counterrevolution
In the decades immediately following the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the new American republic became the modern world’s first great exporter of democratic revolution. As America’s founders watched the strategic alliances between priests and kings tumble before the advance of ideas of human equality, individual rights, and representative government in France, Haiti, Greece, the Spanish colonies, and eventually much of Europe, they were exultant. “From that bright spark which first illumed these lands / See Europe kindling, as the blaze expands,” wrote Philip Freneau, the so-called poet of the American Revolution. His friend Thomas Jefferson was equally pleased. “This ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe, at least the enlightened part of it, for light and liberty go together,” he wrote. “It is our glory that we first put it into motion.”

Today, however, sectors of the American right have become exporters of the antidemocratic counterrevolution. Not satisfied with their efforts to roll back individual rights in the United States and replace democratic pluralism with sectarianism and authoritarian forms of governance, America’s Christian nationalists have pushed their ideas and agendas out to other countries around the world. Joining them in the effort are a host of “antiwoke” culture warriors from the New Right along with the white supremacists, men’s rights activists, New Traditionalists, and others they inspire. Some groups in those other countries have proved receptive to the new ideologies. A global antidemocratic reaction has emerged that in turn contributes to the counterrevolutionary process in America.

The axis around which a sector of the global antidemocratic reaction now turns is an extraordinary alliance between a dominant wing of the Republican Party in the U.S. and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Only twenty years ago, the same Republican Party was willing to go to war to overthrow a dictatorship in Iraq and (supposedly) promote democracy. Yet the faction of the Republican Party that has mortgaged itself to Donald Trump balked at providing relatively small-scale aid to Ukraine as that country attempted to fend off a brutal and unprovoked Russian invasion. And even while Vladimir Putin continues to crush democracy in his home country and abroad, with assassinations of journalists and political opponents, widespread imprisonment, and kleptocratic arrangements, to say nothing of the suspiciously convenient “suicides” and “accidents” of Russian business, political, and military leaders, the right wing of the Republican Party hails him as a hero and a strong leader. To be sure, after months of pressure from the White House, House Speaker Mike Johnson managed to squeak out approval for aid to Ukraine in April 2024, bypassing opposition of a number of Republicans. And yet out on the far right, among the kind of people who contribute to Claremont Institute publications and who now form the “brain trust” for Donald Trump and other Republican leaders, one can hear Ukraine’s resistance to Russia described as a “woke war.” It is important to note that Russia and other hostile foreign powers have avidly targeted sectors of the American left in order to intensify and exploit divisions in U.S. society. This activity and its consequences are grossly underappreciated… (pp. 213-214). 

Just for starters.

 

See some prior posts of mine apropos of "Christian Nationalism."

 

Also, the word "Evangelical." And, Matthew D. Taylor's fine book on the topic. Hmmm... one more for now: "Claremont College," anyone?

 

"A Republic. If we can keep it?"

 

More shortly...

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