My Sunday roundup of useful articles and ideas from the past week—re-upping content that might help us figure out how to get through it all.
Less than three weeks into Trump 2.0 and three things are already obvious:
- Trump brings instability
- Trump makes us less safe
- Trump serves only the rich
Whatever Trump or Elon or the DOGE/Project 2025 thugs are doing at any given moment, I think we should all at a minimum do what we can to remind everyday MAGA voters—whether in the real world or on social media—how every new outrage is actually making their lives worse too.
Because whatever the headline, (1) and/or (2) and/or (3) will apply.
"The Destruction Is The Point"
"The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government... are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation," professor Timothy D. Synder writes in his February 2 Substack post entitled The Logic of Destruction, which he also released on audio (links below):
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.
Think of the federal government as a car. You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them...
... Commentators should please stop using words such as “digital” and “progress” and “efficiency” and “vision” when describing this coup attempt. The plotting oligarchs have legacy money from an earlier era of software, which they are now seeking to leverage, using destructive political techniques, to destroy human institutions. That’s it. They are offering no future beyond acting out their midlife crises on the rest of us. It is demeaning to pretend that they represent something besides a logic of destruction.
Snyder explains what people at every level of society can and should be doing to counter the attempts to demoralize us into thinking that fascism is "inevitable."
"We can only be free together," he concludes.
The Logic of Destruction
And how to resist it
Timothy Snyder
The Logic of Destruction (audio)
And how to resist it
Timothy Snyder
How Trump Saved Elon: The USAIDStarlink Probe Cover Up
Writing for The Alt Media. Adam Parkhomenko explains how:
Donald Trump’s dramatic and vile dismantling of USAID came as USAID’s (now-fired) inspector general was conducting an investigation involving Musk’s company, Starlink. In three steps, Trump’s administration killed the investigation that was sure to embarrass Elon’s company.
As a good friend once told me, there are no coincidences in politics.
Full story:
How Trump Saved Elon: The USAID Starlink Probe Cover Up
Trump’s gutting of USAID came amid USAID IG’s investigation involving Musk’s company
Adam Parkhomenko
Musk Massacre: World's Richest Man Puts Millions of Lives at Risk in Gaza and Sub-Saharan Africa
While Musk, Trump and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt all spread the lie that $50 million was being spent on condoms in Gaza, the reality is that Elon Musk's efforts to shut down USAID could have a major impact on desperately needed food and medical aid in Gaza, reports ABC News:
"I think one of the facets of this that people are not necessarily connecting is that the humanitarian access to Gaza – which is underpinned by USAID, State Department funds – was a central feature of the bargain that underpins ceasefire," said Jesse Marks, of the humanitarian organization Refugees International. "So, if you remove aid to Gaza, whether directly or as a second-order effect of the aid freeze, this raises the risk of a broader ceasefire collapse."
In sub-Saharan Africa, Musk is putting even more lives at risk. There are 25.6 million people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. USAID, through programs like PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), has been a major contributor to HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention in the region. Now Sudan and other nations fear a "humanitarian catastrophe."
The shutdown of USAID would also affect other health programs in Africa, including those combating malaria and tuberculosis.
And, according to the New York Times, "the stop-work order on U.S.A.I.D.-funded research has left thousands of people with experimental drugs and devices in their bodies, with no access to monitoring or care."
In summary, thanks to the actions of the world's richest man, tens of millions of people in Gaza and sub-Saharan Africa can expect to experience increased rates of disease, malnutrition, poverty—and death.
Understanding the "Nerd Reich"
A video by Joanna Richards based on Gil Duran's reporting on tech extremist politics went viral this week, bringing new attention to his work.
The interest in Duran's work ramped up further when historian Heather Cox Richardson mentioned the Nerd Reich in her popular newsletter, Letters from an American.
Add your name to his subscriber list today!
A sudden surge of interest
The Nerd Reich goes national - and international
Gil Duran
Trump to US cattle: EAT SHIT AND DIE.
If you weren't worried about the bird flu before now, there's a new strain in US cows that, reports The Telegraph:
May have been transmitted through a type of cattle feed called “poultry litter” – a mix of poultry excreta, spilled feed, feathers, and other waste scraped from the floors of industrial chicken and turkey production plants.
It's not happening across the pond, because:
In the UK and EU, feeding cows proteins from other animals has been tightly regulated since the outbreak of BSE – or ‘mad cow disease’ – 30 years ago.
Under Trump, there were concerns that we would be "flying blind" when it comes to bird flu and other infectious diseases thanks to his executive order to remove the U.S. from the WHO, which plays a crucial role in sharing data and information about global pandemics, combined with his muzzling of CDC publications. As a consequence of that, the release of three studies about bird flu have been delayed for weeks.
But it looks like someone reminded Trump of his disastrous handling of regular flu in 2017. Because this week, reports CBS News, Trump selected Gerald Parker, a veterinarian and former top-ranking federal health official, to head the White House's pandemic office.
That seems like a small bit of good news.
But even if we survive the Trump Bird Flu, we'll still have Trump Ebola to worry about because:
Other challenges loom on the immediate horizon, including the U.S. response to a new outbreak of an Ebola virus in Uganda that has faced delays due to the Trump administration's sweeping pauses on foreign aid and shutdown of U.S. Agency for International Development missions.
Every day these things are true: Trump brings instability. Trump makes us less safe. Trump serves only the rich.
Democracy Happens In Public
If you understand the jeopardy we're in at this moment and want a democratic future for the country... Here's one more thing to read / watch this week, via Jason Sattler (LOLGOP) and Andrea Pitzer:
We must stand up *in public*—before it gets any harder to do that
Andrea Pitzer has studied authoritarians around the globe. She says now is the time for us to assert our power outside. When I spoke to Andrea Pitzer the week before the election, I told her we would need to do a project together if things went wrong. And things went
Jason Sattler
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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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