My Sunday roundup of articles and ideas from the past week—re-upping content that might help us figure out what's going on, what comes next, and how to get through it all.
"Authoritarian movements are cults of madness working in concert with brazen seizures of power," wrote Jared Yates Sexton this week.
Musk's personal madness was on full display at CPAC as he appeared in sunglasses to accept—and wave around—a chainsaw gifted him by Javier Milei, a President and crypto-scammer Musk appears to love even more than Trump
In the first days of the new regime, Musk used his wealth-derived political power to terrorize the world's most vulnerable people. Now he wants to you to clap as he takes a chainsaw to every corner of government and "save money" by "eliminating waste" in areas such as finding cures for pediatric cancer and Alzheimer's.
Meanwhile, Trump himself committed an act of "wartime sadism," wrote Timothy Snyder, treating Ukraine like "a vulnerable colonial territory that can be carved up, as in the redivision of a plot of property in a real estate transaction."
While The Mump Regime presented a fake "wall of receipts" showing $55 billion in alleged savings, Americans began to realize that the real waste, fraud and abuse was in how Elon Musk and his DOGE operation was wasting our time, committing the biggest data fraud in history, and abusing our intelligence.
Musk was "so entertained." Americans, not so much.
They were, increasingly, outraged.
This week, Trump's—and Musk's—approval ratings plunged.
Fears of a Trump recession deepened and more and more alarms began to be sounded that the next Trump crash might happen sooner not later.
Protests erupted nationwide. And disillusioned MAGA voters started publicly expressing their Trump Regrets.
More below.
Sound and Fury: Authoritarian Madness and Authoritarian Action
Excerpt:
In America, the MAGA cult has been dismissed by some because of its absurdity. These people have watched Trump dance and spout the most ridiculous and ludicrous speeches in modern history and decided it couldn’t possibly be that dangerous. But that madness is infectious.... Trump and his followers interact in a continuously worsening feedback loop. The worse he gets the worse they get and back and forth. Soon, the cult has solidified with a host of watchwords and identifying signals.... Musk’s behavior at CPAC is jarring. This is obviously a man who is overcompensating and is in the grips of a personal crisis. His strange answers and diatribes, his clothes, his wielding of the chainsaw, are all performative nonsense. If you were to run across someone acting like this in public, you would get as far away from them as humanly possible. At CPAC, he was repeatedly interrupted by adoring fans shouting “We love you!”
Full article:
Sound and Fury: Authoritarian Madness and Authoritarian Action
Musk’s act is nauseating and telling. MAGA and the oligarchs are performing at their worst, and with it comes the planting of the seeds of actual resistance.
Jared Yates Sexton
"Recoup the costs"
by Timothy Snyder:
Excerpt:
It is morally grotesque, during this war, to put imagined American grievances first. The American taxpayer has helped Ukraine tremendously, and has every reason to be proud. A very modest amount of aid has changed the history of the world. Americans have every right to be proud of the humanitarian aid that has allowed Ukrainians to live to and to rebuild, and to be proud of the performance of their weapons systems and of the significant difference that they have made in this war. Ukrainians are grateful, and their officials always make public acknowledgements of the value of U.S. assistance; in Ukraine itself civilians applaud when they catch sight of what they think is a US system. But the costs of this for Americans has been only financial, and that cost has been recouped already a thousand times in economic stability and national security. The costs of the war to Ukrainians, however, are of a completely different nature. They have lost tens of thousands of children, kidnapped by Russia. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have been injured. Tens of thousands have been killed. People under occupation suffer mass torture. Cities have been totally destroyed. And yet, at the same time, Ukrainians rebuild. And they fight, as best they can, against odds thought to be impossible. Ukrainians rebuild, as I have seen for myself in five trips to the country since the full-scale invade began. They take responsibility during an impossible situation. For this they deserve our respect and our support.
Full article:
“Recoup the costs”
The sadism of American policy to war-torn Ukraine
Timothy Snyder
"Biggest mistake of my life"
“It turns out the American people don’t love watching Donald Trump and Elon Musk take an absolute wrecking ball to the federal government,” Jen Psaki told MSNBC viewers on her Monday February 17 show after a wave of "Not My President's Day" protests swept the nation.
“People are pissed, and it is not hard to see why,” said Psaki.
On Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow highlighted an article from The Wall Street Journal in which some of the swing voters who voted for Trump verbalized exactly how pissed they were.
“Emily Anderson from Duluth, Minnesota, categorizes her vote for Trump this year as the ‘biggest mistake of my life,'” said Maddow.
Watch the full segment here:
Citizens will have another chance to show how pissed they are on a planned "Feb 28 Economic Blackout."
Reports CBS News:
"Some postings for the event created by online supporters have suggested a targeted boycott of retailers like Ford, McDonald's, Meta, Target and Walmart that have ended their DEI programs to comply with an executive order signed by President Trump in January. However, official messaging from The People's Union suggests a boycott of all major retailers, with the goal of enacting broader economic change."
"While the impact of a one-day boycott may be limited," Kevin Thompson, founder and CEO of 9i Capital Group, told Newsweek, "its true power lies in mobilizing a like-minded community. If this initiative sparks a larger movement, its long-term influence could extend far beyond February 28."
The movement gets its next chance to expand its influence from March 7-14 when The People's Union USA, the grassroots group organizing the Feb 28 blackout, will encourage Americans to halt all spending on Amazon.
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P.S. This really is the time to get off X once and for all. Please find me on Bluesky and these other places.
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