iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

www.indivisiblepeninsulabayarea.org/nokings/

Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

Example 2, from Mark Jacob at www.stopthepresses.news: Jacob, a former newspaperman, observes that most mainstream news media goes out of its way NOT to report the most obvious and important fact of our time. www.stopthepresses.news/p/why-wont-t...

Many Americans are busy with a second job or a sick parent or other obligations, and they encounter the news only by accident. They don't have time to read a half dozen stories, add them up, and come to the conclusion that the president of the United States, aided by the entire Republican Party and billionaire oligarchs, is overthrowing our democracy.

That’s what the news industry should be saying repeatedly, and loudly. Because it’s true, and it’s a huge threat to the future of every American.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

Example 1, from Paul Campos at @lawgunsmoney.bsky.social: Campos, a law professor, points out that SCOTUS is making a mockery of the traditional approach to professing the law. www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/the-...

If you are a law professor and you are teaching your students something other than this, you are teaching nonsense. If you are telling students that the SCOTUS is a legitimate court of law, even if it does sometimes render an unfortunately partisan opinion here and there in some particularly fraught context, you are teaching nonsense, and pernicious nonsense at that. Once upon a time and a very good time it was, something like Bush v. Gore was in some ways a shocking outlier. Now, in the form of the shadow docket in particular, it is the model for contemporary SCOTUS jurisprudence, which can be summarized as, in any really important case, Donald Trump and the Republican party wins, and its opponents lose.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

For years, the whole phenomenon of Donald Trump has flabbergasted me—because, as this great comment at @lawgunsmoney.bsky.social notes, he embodies every villain trope in modern American popular culture. Again and again,I just want to scream: This guy? www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/09/no-m...

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Then there's this—the glib dismissal, by Trump and (implicitly) by @nytimes.com, of the core principle that this kind of change must originate, and be deliberated, in Congress. The road to dictatorship is being paved with dozens of casually accepted assertions of unconstitutional power.

The Department of Defense and the secretary of defense were named through acts of Congress, so it is unclear if Mr. Trump’s order will go into effect immediately.

During his August remarks about the potential renaming, Mr. Trump said he was confident that it would be approved.

“We’re just going to do it,” he said. “I’m sure Congress will go along if we need that. I don’t think we even need that.”

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

How it started (in the coinage of a certain 14-word phrase). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourtee...

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

I don’t have the heart to do it, but a parody of this paragraph—one that channels the voice of a German liberal newspaper as it discusses the early tenure of a certain chancellor in May 1933—almost writes itself.

The building of this coalition should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. On several key issues, his views were closer to public opinion than those of Democrats. Since taking office, he has largely closed the southern border, and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. He has reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support. He has pressured Western Europe to stop billing American taxpayers for its defense. Among these policies are many that we strongly oppose — such as pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, cozying up to Vladimir Putin of Russia and undermining Ukraine — but that a president has the authority to enact. Elections have consequences.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

No good reason not to frame it this way: “Despite lacking a single national leader, the anti-Trump movement has coalesced around a clear message of opposition to Mr. Trump‘s policies and his attacks on constitutional rights.”

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Incisive, useful effort to convert general, angst-ridden despair over [gesticulates manically] *all this* into a review of specific unconstitutional and anti-constitutional steps taken by Trump and his regime.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

Example: If you go to the Google homepage, what you see is an apolitical slop rendition of contemporary's American life. That, I tell myself (Am I oversimplifying?), reflects what the middle deciles of the US population knows—or doesn’t know—about the coming of fascism to these shores.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

Until quite recently, Pfeiffer explains (I'm paraphrasing here), he viewed this moment as normal enough to justify continued use of a traditional, poll-driven messaging framework. But now he sees that something new and ominous is afoot—a pattern of "democracy falling into dictatorship." 2/3

In the months after the election, I pushed for Democrats to focus exclusively on the economy and stop defending broken institutions. That approach no longer sits right with me.

Something feels off about focusing on the price of eggs when American democracy is under its greatest assault in history. I find it hard to imagine that the best way to defeat an authoritarian is to run the same campaign Democrats ran against Mitt Romney twelve years ago.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

In fact, the Trump regime has replaced the US Constitution with Wilhoit’s Law. It’s a simple as that.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Fighting against Trump’s dictatorial ambitions and fighting to keep his hands off matters of material interest to Americans (Social Security, the global trade system) are two great political tastes that go great together.

The most important thing for everyone in America to know right now is that Trump is causing immense damage to the U.S. and the world in a completely heedless way, and Democrats want to stop him. Period. People in Michigan and Maine need to blame Trump for this disaster much more than they need to be convinced that Democrats have struck the perfect goldilocks balance between free trade and strategic protectionism. And they need to see Trump’s conduct as fundamentally illegitimate—anathema to the American tenet that our leaders serve us, not the other way around.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Maybe we should call it “smart-washing” (def.: the act of describing abjectly stupid behavior as though it were the result of a rational thought process). www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/04/the-...

The sanewashing around Trump’s “risky tariff policy” assumes that there’s something that rises to the level of a policy, that involves some sort of rational risk calculation. This is false.

It’s like trying to discuss the costs and benefits of “open heart surgery” after observing someone stabbing somebody else 23 times in the chest. Stabbing someone in the chest 23 times is not open heart surgery, and Trump’s insane destruction of the world’s international trade structure is not a “tariff policy.”

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

As @digby56.bsky.social succinctly puts it, “Life is just going on in the midst of the most serious political crisis of any of our lifetimes and the cognitive dissonance of that is making us feel a little bit crazy.”

And yet, most of us are still living our lives in more or less normal fashion. Yes, many immigrants, even those in the country legally, are now living in a state of abject terror. And vast numbers of workers have abruptly lost their jobs, with many more to come. But the vast majority of Americans are still going to work, taking the kids to school, hanging out with their friends, pursuing their hobbies. Life is just going on in the midst of the most serious political crisis of any of our lifetimes and the cognitive dissonance of that is making us feel a little bit crazy.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

However horrific a “crisis” may be, we can see it and we basically know how to respond to it. What’s happening now is something that we can feel but can’t quite see. By evoking the idea of erasure, @tribelaw.bsky.social adds vital clarity to a discussion that’s getting harder and harder to avoid.

But searching for evidence of a “constitutional crisis” in the rapidly escalating clashes of the executive branch with the judicial branch misses the larger cataclysm taking place across the US. This president, abetted by the supine acquiescence of the Republican Congress and licensed by a US supreme court partly of his own making, is not just temporarily deconstructing the institutions that comprise our democracy. He and his circle are making a bid to reshape the US altogether by systematically erasing and distorting the historical underpinnings of our 235-year-old experiment in self-government under law.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

I'm struck by the all-too-timely wisdom offered by @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social in an item embedded in a @thebulwark.bsky.social newsletter today. Mordantly titled "Lucky Us," the piece evokes the way that having it good ill-equips us for things going bad. 1/4 www.thebulwark.com/p/back-work-...

We tend to forget that history is full of instances in which demagogues, bullies, opportunists, sycophants, and liars rule the roost.

Or to put it otherwise: In the big sweep of human history, something like today’s Trump administration is the norm. Decency, humanity, legality, sobriety, responsibility—those are the exceptions.

I offer these melancholy observations not because they’re particularly original or insightful. They’re not. They’re commonplace and common sense.

But I offer them because I’m struck by how difficult it is for us to escape the wishful thinking that follows from our experience of good fortune.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

This take by @vermontgmg.bsky.social on the “constitutional crisis” question is perfectly, painfully on target. A crisis something that should seem *loud.* What’s alarming about this moment is how quiet everything, and everyone, seem to be. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/america-s-...

The problem right now isn’t that we’re in a moment of great tension for our constitutional system, with members of Congress poised to act if the presidential defiance of the courts continues. Nor have we stumbled into some strange ambiguity where we’re wrestling with the right path forward. The problem is that in effectively a single blink of the historical eye, we’ve seen our entire constitutional system simply … stop. We aren’t just outside the bounds of normal constitutional operations; we’re several standard deviations outside anything America has ever experienced before. We can clearly see what’s happening is wrong—illegal and unconstitutional—and the actors who can do something about that just … aren’t.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

Bookmark: A hallmark of autocratic societies is the coexistence of normality and depravity. This key article describes the two-tier justice system in Nazi Germany, and how the Trump regime is already putting a similar system in place. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Building a dual state need not end in genocide: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore have followed the same model of the dual state that Fraenkel described, though neither has undertaken a mass-killing operation as the Nazis did. Their deepest similarity, rather, is that both are intolerant of political dissent and leave the overwhelming majority of citizens alone. The peril of the dual state lies precisely in this capacity for targeted suppression.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

What, indeed, if the top Dem funder/power-broker had a family story that even partly resembled Musk's story? www.vanityfair.com/style/story/...

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

But I cry foul on the embedded assumption (not just here, but everywhere in US politics) that Dems—but never Repubs—need to anguish over past mistakes, and need to regain voters' trust. Repubs nominated a felon who tried to steal a presidential election—and its Dems who must pass a "litmus test"?

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Here, @danpfeiffer.bsky.social offers sweet and simple messaging tips. Worth clipping and saving.

Persuade Your Friends and Family

How do we discuss the issue with friends and family, on social media, and in group chats? Take this bit of guidance:

Keep It Big Picture: Talk about gutting public education or shutting down the Department of Education instead of talking about reduced funding;
Be Specific About the Cuts: Abolishing the Department of Education means teacher layoffs, larger classroom sizes, more dilapidated schools, and cuts to special education; and
Explain Why the Cuts Are Happening: Donald Trump and the Republicans are gutting public education to pay for tax cuts for billionaires like Elon Musk.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Here's a sample. Claude Malhuret cuts through layers of obscurantism and equivocation, and simply observes that Trump and Putin share a "spheres of influence" worldview that turns the global order inside-out and throws us back to the dark, amoral politics of a premodern era. 2/2

What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations.

Greenland, Panama, and Canada are mine. Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe are yours. Taiwan and the South China Sea are his.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Here's the gut-punch data, which @jvl.bsky.social draws from an article by John Burn-Murdoch at @financialtimes.com. Sobering but not surprising. Slender silver lining: At least the US right remains an outlier among right-leaning factions in Western advanced democracies.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 09/03/2025

Scott Besant is this guy: i.pinimg.com/originals/ba... From this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pal...

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

Can we summon the Spirit of 1776? As we approach the 250th anniversary of the nation’s birth, can we muster a commitment to declare and oppose the long train of abuses and usurpations by a mad would-be king?

This is my very first recommendation for what I think all Senate and House Dems need to do now. There needs to be a clear statement from half the Congress that they believe that what Trump is doing is unconstitutional, illegal, wrong and an extraordinary betrayal of our Constitutional order and all of us. This “letter to America” can become the rallying cry for all of our work together. It can become the amicus brief in every court challenge to Trump. It can become a clear statement to the world that American patriots are fighting this historical betrayal of our democracy but also of freedom loving people throughout the world. The people of America and the world need to hear from Democrats and other leaders of this pro-democracy movement that they understand the stakes of the fight we are in and are willing to leave it all on the line for the most important force for freedom humanity has ever seen. The absence of this clear, simple statement from our Congressional leaders is unacceptable and dangerous, and it is why I believe this “letter to America” remains our very first ask of all of Congressional representatives.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

As @ryanenos.bsky.social and Levitzky note, major institutions across American society have been “stunningly passive“ in the face of the Trump regime’s Cultural Revolution-style assault on our way of life. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Democracy’s demise is not inevitable. Authoritarians can be stopped — think of South Koreans’ successful mobilization against martial law last year. But they can only be stopped when societies react. And so far, U.S. civil society — including media, business, unions, churches, and universities — has been stunningly passive.

There is a reason behind this inertia: Weaponized states create a difficult collective action problem for civil society.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

These musings are inspired partly by a post today from @jvl.bsky.social, who says that "Normalists" (great term btw!) exhibit a failure of imagination in their focus on prospects for Trumpian legislation. Basic idea: "We don't need no stinking legislation." 11/12 www.thebulwark.com/p/against-no...

Now what has Trump done since assuming office? Has he even pretended to move a single piece of legislation?

No.

He has focused on radically expanding executive power by:

Attempting to override congressionally mandated spending directives.
Remaking executive branch agencies without congressional approval.
Unilaterally rewriting the Constitution on a key question of citizenship.
Usurping authority from the judiciary by consciously breaking laws and defying court orders.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

The most important, and most challenging, point: This ain't your grandfather's GOP attack on Social Security. The 2005 playbook isn't going to work this time. The attack will come not in Congress but from within the Soc Sec Admin. Dems need to start aggressively fighting the "fraud" fraud now.

Defending Social Security today will thus require Democrats to make a political issue out of Trump’s constant lying—one of the forms of opposition Democrats have convinced themselves is ineffective. They will have to think creatively about how to convince people that Trump told wild, incendiary lies about Social Security—that he knew they were lies, but chose to tell them anyhow in order to mislead the public, including his own supporters.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

Forensically, the Slotkin response speech was quite well done. Strategically, it was an unwitting cry for help. www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/03/slot...

This kind of thing isn’t important in and of itself, but it is important as a symbolic marker of where the Democrats are right now. And where they are right now, at least in terms of the party leadership that approved this message, is a long way away from where they need to be.

There’s basically nothing in this speech that discusses the fact that Donald Trump and his minions are carrying out a coup against the American political system. It features one short sentence about Trump’s countless illegal acts since retaking office. It doesn’t mention Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government after he lost the previous presidential election, or the Supreme Court immunizing him from all criminal laws

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

I saw @chrislhayes.bsky.social make the same point about Social Security last night. It’s an important observation, and I dearly hope that Dems are preparing a massive counter-attack.

Trump made a great show of promising not to cut Social Security and Medicare in all of his campaigns, so there's a reason why he spent so much time degrading the system in this speech and it isn't good. The way he described it sounded very much like the way he described the supposed cheating in the 2020 election, which indicates they are working up a narrative to excuse the attack on the system that's already underway with massive personnel cuts and the closing of offices. They're coming for Social Security. Trump made a great show of promising not to cut Social Security and Medicare in all of his campaigns, so there's a reason why he spent so much time degrading the system in this speech and it isn't good. The way he described it sounded very much like the way he described the supposed cheating in the 2020 election, which indicates they are working up a narrative to excuse the attack on the system that's already underway with massive personnel cuts and the closing of offices. They're coming for Social Security.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

It’s very telling that when a Dem congresswoman raised a sign at Trump‘s speech that said “This is not normal,” a Repub colleague ripped it from her hands. It’s not the cleverest message, but it goes straight to the heart of Trump/MAGA vulnerability. People didn’t vote for chaos and disruption. 1/2

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

What Repubs are good at, and what Dems need to become good at, is deciding on a master narrative (“Crooked Hillary,“Sleepy Joe“) and then working every new attack line into that narrative. “Trump is obsessed with revenge“ is a good msg bldg block. It matches what voters already think about Trump.

This fact of Trump’s indifference to most Americans — if not his outright hostility toward them, considering his assault on virtually every government function that helps ordinary people — suggests another dimension to his revenge tour. It is almost as if he wants to inflict pain not just on a specific set of individuals but on the entire nation.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

Great historically grounded insight from @davidkurtz.bsky.social in Morning Memo today. Yes, Trump needed to engineer a pretext for the Ukraine betrayal. Not all GOPers like his policy here. But he knows the have to side with him on act of “lese majesty.” talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...

Trump’s Tonkin Gulf Incident
President Trump is now using his Oval Office ambush of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky as a pretext for cutting off military aid to the embattled U.S. ally, a move he had long wanted to make anyway.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

I agree almost entirely with this bit.

The reality of rule by performers is profoundly disconcerting to American intellectuals’ self-conception of their government’s dignity. This is the message of the Kennedy Center’s takeover that the D.C. political elite has been so slow to register. If you think it’s a joke to have RFK Jr. in office, that’s the point. Jokes gather attention. Attention creates exposure. Exposure drives power. The greatest asset for any politician today is a bottomless narcissism that requires unremitting attention to satisfy.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

I agree somewhat with this bit.

It is a new kind of cultural revolution. Unlike the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, which imposed ideology on their populaces by means of culture and entertainment, America’s current reality is the overturning of the political order by the country’s entertainers. The American culture industry has overwhelmed politics: Washington today can be understood only as a product of show business, not of law or policy.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

As others have noted, the most bewildering thing about this unprecedented exercise in disaster capitalism is that there is no disaster. It’s shock-doctrine politics without any exogenous shock.

It’s as though the current administration is running Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days in reverse: Instead of rebuilding institutions and public trust at a moment of national peril, it seems to be trying to unravel both — and is creating a moment of national peril.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

A post in @thebulwark.bsky.social by Lauren Egan observes the growing discontent in the Dem base with leaders who fiddle with book tours while democracy burns. www.thebulwark.com/p/democrats-...

Last week, protesters showed up at Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s Brooklyn office calling on him to be more aggressive with Trump. They’ve been bird dogging Jeffries for some time, as he holds events around the country promoting his children’s book. (Yes, Jeffries has been on a post-election promo tour for an illustrated children’s book, The ABCs of Democracy). Having spent the better part of the last two years warning that Trump posed an existential threat to American democracy, they seem unsatisfied with the occasional press conference skewering Trump or milquetoast critiques of Musk delivered during evening MSNBC.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

In her weekly column today, @sbg1.bsky.social sites the Carville piece and risky plays the weakness of a policy of passive non-resistance. www.newyorker.com/news/letter-...

Carville’s case for doing nothing, incidentally, is not merely some provocative outlier. I’ve heard many Democrats make versions of it privately since Trump’s victory in November. One friend joked that they should treat Trump’s attack on Washington like Napoleon’s march on Moscow, drawing the President and his party into an unwinnable fight. (Though, to be fair, the Russians had to burn down their own ancient capital before defeating the French invaders.)

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

The Trump regime keeps taking steps that are darker—more nihilistic, more evil—than I, in my gloomiest state, had ever imagined. www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/02/dona...

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Ultimately, everything that’s wrong with our politics derives from everything that’s wrong with our information environment. As @danpfeiffer.bsky.social helpfully notes, traditional/corporate media lead us only to a dead end. 1/2 www.messageboxnews.com/p/jeff-bezos...

The media landscape is changing so rapidly. The future is unknown, but it is clear that the era of corporate media is over. Journalism is not profitable enough for these massive corporations to take on any water due to their media endeavors.

Voters don’t trust corporations, and they should be skeptical of corporate media — even when the reporting is really good.

The future of media is independent. That means smaller entities, but they will also be free of corporate influence. That doesn’t mean they will be unbiased. Everyone has biases – even the New York Times, but those biases — ideological or otherwise — will be more transparent.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

In any case, Rauch is very much correct in arguing that corruption is the core operational and political weakness of Trump’s form of rule.

Corruption is patrimonialism’s Achilles’ heel because the public understands it and doesn’t like it. It is not an abstraction like “democracy” or “Constitution” or “rule of law.” It conveys that the government is being run for them, not for you. The most dire threat that Putin faced was Alexei Navalny’s “ceaseless crusade” against corruption, which might have brought down the regime had Putin not arranged for Navalny’s death in prison. In Poland, the liberal opposition booted the patrimonialist Law and Justice Party from power in 2023 with an anti-corruption narrative.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Patrimonialism: That’s the word (courtesy of Max Weber) that fundamentally describes the Trump regime, per @jonrauch.bsky.social. The coy headline is annoying but accurate. The hallmark of Trump’s politics is the conviction that all power is personal … www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

It’s less about planning for the 2028 election (or lack thereof) than about taking the scope of Trump‘s autocratic ambitions seriously. Connecting the dots let’s us see that the Trump regime is acting *as if* Trump will rule forever.

Personal control over the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, and the Pentagon, along with a pliable right-wing Supreme Court majority, will enable Trump to do many things. They’re all bad, but it’s having the lackeys in charge of the Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs that are the blaring sirens here. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote on her Substack, Letters From an American, over the weekend, “Observers point out how the purging of an independent, rules-based military in favor of a military loyal to a single leader is a crystal clear step toward authoritarianism.” That can mean a lot of things, but what it most definitely means is that there’s no one around to stop Trump from declaring martial law and suspending the Constitution or even an election.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

Highly thought-provoking piece by @jvl.bsky.social about the scary implications of Musk et al.'s effort to apply the Silicon Valley economic model to politics. www.thebulwark.com/p/winner-tak...

Because the key insight is this: The tech sector operates as a winner-take-all economy. But our political economy is based on perpetual competition.

The tech oligarchs want American politics to stop being competitive and to settle into the type of monopoly control that they created in Silicon Valley.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

Nice roundup piece that helpfully puts fake DOGE savings in the context of Trump’s and Musk’s personal corruption. newrepublic.com/article/1916...

So the only way that DOGE could be “finding levels of fraud and waste and abuse like … nobody ever thought possible,” as the president claimed on Tuesday, is if the agency were investigating Trump and Musk themselves—because the two greatest culprits of graft in government are actually the ones guarding the bank.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

Here's a key passage on how MAGA myths effectively transcend conventional fact-checking, rational discourse, etc. Bottom line: Myths are about collective POWER, and not about empirical truth. Liberals and MSM journos make a category mistake in how they handle the vast bulk of MAGA discourse.

Liberals often refer to right-wing lies, misinformation, disinformation, or conspiracy theories, but what they are identifying are myths in the Sorelian sense. For example, “stop the steal” was not the literal, empirical belief that votes had been stolen, it reflected a total conception of the world, a belief that the “true citizens” were disenfranchised and the system was corrupt.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 24/02/2025

"[S]o breathtaking it is difficult to comprehend": That phrase describes so much of what the Trump gang is doing, but nowhere is it more applicable than in the radical shift in US policy toward Ukraine and Russia. This piece well captures the horror of it all. newrepublic.com/article/1917...

What Trump is asking for—from a nation that the United States was, until recently, pledged to defend—is so breathtaking it is difficult to comprehend. Ukraine not only would cede a great deal of its sovereign territory to Russia, it would also effectively cede much of its economy to the U.S.—all to “pay it back” for its support in a war that Trump is now attempting to force it to surrender.

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Thaddeus @democracywork.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Kudos to the boys and girls in the back of the writers’ room for this eye-popping plot twist: Trump isn’t Hitler. *He’s Hindenburg.* shrewd and scary observations from @jvl.bsky.social … open.substack.com/pub/thebulwa...

Elon Musk is the only person in Trump’s orbit who is completely unaffected in his behavior. At best, Musk treats Trump like an equal. At worst, he acts as though Trump is a doddering old man who must, for the moment, be humored.

And he does it while wearing the black hat which proclaims, I am not another foot soldier in the red-hat army. I am the commander of my own forces.

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