Humint Events Online

Friday, January 01, 2100

Blog Overview (Permanent Top Post)

This blog explores politics from a liberal/left perspective but also deals heavily with conspiracy theories and various unusual topics. Although I started this blog to research 9/11, my most pressing issue of concern now is anthropogenic climate change.

If you have doubts about the science of climate change, this website is a very useful resource to get educated.

I'm happy to have people comment and contribute ideas here. I don't censor comments except in rare cases where there is abuse or private information. Google/Blogger does sometimes censor comments for reasons I don't understand and I have no control over. Lately, I am not able to even find comments that Google/Blogger has blocked. Sorry about that.

You can read about the history of this blog here. I post kind of irregularly in recent years but I try to keep this site active. Feel free to use the search engine on the side for older content. For expired links, try using the Wayback Machine.

I rarely ever check my email for this blog (see sidebar for my address). If you need to contact me, the best bet is to leave a comment. If you need to email me, let me know in a comment that you've emailed me.

Thank you for reading.



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Sunday, April 13, 2025

On April 20th, 2025, the United States May Cross the Point of No Return



LINK TO ORIGINAL ARTICLE  
From "Aletheisthenes":

 

It sounds wild. Maybe even crazy. But every step is already in motion. I’d be happy to be wrong. But if this is correct… you’ll be ready. April 20, 2025, the United States may initiate its final steps into authoritarian rule.

That’s the day Donald Trump’s advisory committee is expected to release its findings on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act — a move that would allow him to deploy the military domestically and allow Trump to impose martial law. (San Francisco Chronicle). Given Hegseth and Noem are the main “advisors”, the conclusion is foregone.

And as his two months in office has already shown, he won’t stop at just a legal opinion.

Expect an executive order even that same day or the next, officially declaring the Insurrection Act, restricting freedoms in the name of restoring control of the border and perhaps in blue-state cities, and setting the larger plan in motion.

Of course, this won’t be framed as an attack on democracy. It will be packaged as a necessary response to crisis — as authoritarian takeovers always are.

But once it happens, there’s no going back.

This will be the point of no return.

The roadmap for overthrowing a democratic government isn’t new or theoretical — it’s a well-worn playbook, tested and repeated across history by those who crave power more than liberty. After rejecting it initially, being incredulous, I have realized there is too much evidence suggesting this may be what’s happening now to remain silent.

Telling other people what may be happening, so they can recognize it and maybe together we can stop it, is my entire purpose here.

This is Part 1 of what has turned into a series: Their Coup Playbook: How They Quietly Kill the Constitution in the Coming Weeks and Months

This Is How Democracy Ends: Here’s their Playbook

It won’t all happen in one night.

Instead, the process will unfold in stages, each step making resistance harder.

Free elections, a free press, and the right to protest will disappear one piece at a time, until there’s nothing left to save.

My entire goal here is to make people aware, so you can recognize it, if it really is what’s happening, and maybe together we can help stop it. It’s all I, personally, can do.

Here’s how it will happen, step by step, after Trump invokes the Insurrection Act with an Executive Order:

1. “Resist!” Demonstrations Grow — Just As Planned

  • Left-leaning and even more centrist people will be alarmed. Peaceful protests will be organized nationwide, as they already have been being organized now, with growing numbers of people joining protests each week.
  • The calls to “Resist!” will grow louder, and large-scale demonstrations will begin forming in major cities.
  • This is exactly what Trump wants. He didn’t invoke the Insurrection Act sooner because he needed his opposition to gather first — so he could use them as a tool for his next step.
  • He also waited 90 days, instead of invoking it on Day 1 as Project 2025 recommended, so he would have his people in place, and remove those who would oppose them in the government, military, courts, and civil positions.
  • His cabal is waiting for a strong reaction — they want massive unrest. They need a justification to kick off the next steps in their plan.

2. The False Flag Crisis: Turning Protest into “Terror”

  • The protests will turn violent quickly. Maybe in a day, maybe during the next big protest the following weekend.
  • They will turn violent not because of the protesters, but because they will have been infiltrated by agents provocateurs, from militia groups like The Proud Boys, whose goal is to escalate as quickly as possible and give Trump and his cabal an excuse to trigger the next stage.
  • Expect “terrorist” bombings, targeted assassinations, or high-profile acts of violence, either staged or exploited, to justify the crackdown.
  • There may even be an extremely high profile assassination of a leading right-wing leader that changes everything in a moment… and the “woke radicals” will be blamed, and the country will rally around more extreme measures to bring back order and control.
  • The media will be flooded with images of chaos, pushing the public into a state of fear. Calls for “order” will follow.

3. Trump Declares Expanded Martial Law — And Calls for Militia to assist the police and Military

  • Trump has already invoked the Insurrection Act — so now he now declares even more extensive and repressive martial law, and orders troops into major US cities where most oppose him, branding protesters and opponents as “seditionists,” “traitors,” and the “woke mob”.
  • He will call on “good Americans” to grab their guns, like the patriots of 1776, and join the militias forming to “restore order” and “take back control” from the leftist threat. Using militias also gets him around resistance from military leaders who might oppose his orders.
  • The militias already exist — the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and others — and they are not some distant fringe. They were at January 6. The most extreme and radicalized are all released from prison now. They are ready to roll, and to answer Trump’s call, which they were waiting for four years ago.
  • The militia members are your neighbors. The difference between them and you? These neighbors own and have been training with AR-15s. You and your friends? Not so much.
  • This will be framed as “helping the police” and “keeping order.” Law enforcement will quietly welcome them — or, in some cases, will deputize them, with Trump’s support.

4. Mass Arrests of Opposition Leaders

  • Journalists, Democratic officials, and activists will be arrested under charges of sedition, terrorism, or “inciting violence.”
  • Expect Mark Milley, Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger to be arrested quickly and with great press coverage. How long the show trials take is probably a good measure of how much control Trump has established over the courts.
  • Key Democratic governors and attorneys general will be removed first, ensuring no state-level resistance.
  • Law enforcement and military ranks will be purged, with loyalty tests ensuring only Trump-aligned officers remain.

5. Military & National Guard Take Over Major Cities

  • Expect deployments in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Los AngelesPhiladelphia, and other blue-state strongholds.
  • Curfews and lockdowns will be imposed, justified as measures to “restore peace.”
  • Checkpoints and military policing will become the new normal. Expect them in particular along major highways going to Canada or Mexico, and in red states — to identify and detain seditionists, traitors, and people of questionable loyalty.
  • Trump’s building of detainment centers in Guantanamo, and expansion of the 106 other ICE detention centers, was not actually intended for illegal migrants. And just a few days ago, Blackwater founder and Billionaire Erik Prince offered to help Trump “privatize deportation camps” as has been being done with prisons per Trump’s Day 1 Executive Order. So now Trump has an extrajudicial place to store the disloyal and those who resist, in for-profit camps guarded by militias and loyal military. Until he decides what to do with them.

6. Press Censorship & Total Media Control

  • Independent news outlets will face shutdowns or takeovers. Those that resist will see their journalists arrested or harassed.
  • Mainstream media will be forced into compliance. Blackmail, corporate pressure, and legal threats will ensure they toe the line.
  • Social media platforms like X (Twitter) will amplify the official narrative, drowning out opposition.
  • Other social media and lines of communication will be turned off. The Internet will be monitored, people identified from this monitoring for arrest, using Palantir technology. Peter Thiel, who I’ve written about before, is co-founder of Palantir. We will fully enter the surveillance state.

7. Borders Close & Dissidents Are Trapped Inside

  • Passports will be revoked for critics and opponents. If you’re on a list, you’re not leaving. Especially if you’re of Draft age.
  • No-fly lists will expand to include activists and journalists.
  • ICE and DHS will be weaponized — not just against immigrants, but against political enemies.

8. Elections Are “Postponed” Indefinitely

  • The 2026 midterms will be suspended under the excuse of national security concerns.
  • Red-state legislatures will eliminate Democratic-leaning districts, ensuring permanent Republican control.
  • By 2028, Trump (or his handpicked successor) will run unopposed. Elections will be a formality, probably still held. But rigged.

Project 2025 and the Insurrection Act: This Was Always the Plan

This isn’t speculation.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 lays out a detailed strategy for permanent right-wing control.

It openly advocates using the Insurrection Act to crush opposition and dismantle the administrative state.

Trump isn’t improvising — he’s following a script.

We Can’t Wait — The Time to Act Is Now

We can’t sit back and wait for Trump to fire the starting gun — because once he does, it will already be too late.

We need to prepare now.

We need to plan now.

We need to dismantle his plans before they begin.

We have one month.

That’s it.

The Only Way to Stop this Coup is by Exposing It

The only way I can think of to stop this conspiracy, which is in final planning stages, is through exposure.

If people see the playbook in advance, they will be less likely be manipulated when it happens.

They might question the narrative. “Wait. This is what they said would happen. I thought it was crazy. But maybe…”

We need to spread this narrative far and wide so that when the moment comes, no one can claim ignorance.

Maybe we will be proven wrong.

Maybe we will look silly.

Or maybe… we will have derailed the plan, by telling people what to look for, to recognize the playbook steps as (if) they happen.

Here’s what we must do before April 20:

  • Empower the press, law enforcement, military, and elected officials to recognize the game that’s being played. They need to understand what’s happening before they are pressured to go along with it.
  • Share this post, or write your own. Do your own research. Don’t take my word for it. Talk with your friends and family about this crazy conspiracy theory that can’t rally happen… can it? So if and when the steps actually happen, people recognize it for what it is.
  • Prepare the public so they don’t take the bait. Trump and his cabal want protests to explode into chaos. They want violence in the streets to justify their crackdown. We must be ready to outmaneuver them — to refuse to be used as pawns in their game.
  • Stand up to the militias — and stop friends and family from joining them. The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other armed groups will be mobilized as Trump’s shock troops. They will be framed as “restoring order” and “helping the police.” We need to be ready to counter this, to make sure our neighbors, friends, and family don’t get sucked in.
  • Inoculate our fellow citizens against the propaganda. Most Americans are good people — but good people can be misled. They can be scared into compliance. Our job is to make sure they see what’s happening before it’s too late.

The only way to stop this plot is to expose it, reject it, and make it unmistakably clear to every American what is happening. We must stop these malign forces from enacting their will on our country, the world, and each of us and our families.

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Thursday, March 13, 2025

Mad King Donald Threatens War on Canada, Greenland, Panama Canal

 What a motherfucking evil psychopath

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Tuesday, March 04, 2025

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. 
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. 
The gap between the oligarchs’ wealth and everyone else’s will grow. Knowing what they themselves will do and when, they will have bet against the stock market in advance of Trump’s deliberately destructive tariffs, and will be ready to tell everyone to buy the crypto they already own. 
But that is just tomorrow and the day after. 
In general, the economic collapse they plan is more like a reverse flood from the Book of Genesis, in which the righteous will all be submerged while the very worst ride Satan’s ark. 
The self-chosen few will ride out the forty days and forty night. When the waters subside, they will be alone to dominate. 
Trump’s tariffs (which are also likely illegal) are there to make us poor. Trump’s attacks on America’s closest friends, countries such as Canada and Denmark, are there to make enemies of countries where constitutionalism works and people are prosperous. 
As their country is destroyed, Americans must be denied the idea that anything else is possible. Deportations are a spectacle to turn Americans against one another, to make us afraid, and to get us to see pain and camps as normal. They also create busy-work for law enforcement, locating the “criminals” in workplaces across the country, as the crime of the century takes place at the very center of power. 
The best people in American federal law enforcement, national security, and national intelligence are being fired. The reasons given for this are DEI and trumpwashing the past. Of course, if you fire everyone who was concerned in some way with the investigations of January 6th or of Russia, that will be much or even most of the FBI. 
Those are bad reasons, but the reality is worse: the aim is lawlessness: to get the police and the patriots out of the way. 
In the logic of destruction, there is no need to rebuild afterwards. In this chaos, the oligarchs will tell us that there is no choice but to have a strong man in charge. 
It can be a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras, or a conniving Vance who, unlike Trump, has always known the plot. Or someone else. After we are all poor and isolated, the logic goes, we will be consoled by the thought that there is at least a human being to whom we can appeal. 
We will settle for a kind of anthropological minimum, wishful contact with the strong man. As in Russia, pathetic video selfies sent to the Leader will be the extent of politics. 
For the men currently pillaging the federal government, the data from those video selfies is more important than the people who will make them. 
The new world they imagine is not just anti-American but anti-human. The people are just data, means to the end of accumulating wealth. They see themselves as the servants of the freedom of the chosen few, but in fact they are possessed, like millennia of tyrants before them, of fantastic dreams: they will live forever, they will go to Mars. None of that will happen; they will die here on Earth, with the rest of us, their only legacy, if we let it happen, one of ruins. They are god-level brainrotted. 
The attempt by the oligarchs to destroy our government is illegal, unconstitutional, and more than a little mad. 
The people in charge, though, are very intelligent politically, and have a plan. 
I describe it not because it must succeed but because it must be described so that we can make it fail. This will require clarity, and speed, and coalitions. I try to capture the mood in my little book On Tyranny. 
Here are a few ideas. If you voted Republican, and you care about your country, please act rather than rationalize. Unless you cast your ballot so that South African oligarchs could steal your data, your money, your country, and your future, make it known to your elected officials that you wanted something else. And get ready to protest with people with whom you otherwise disagree. Almost everything that has happened during this attempted takeover is illegal. Lawsuits can be filed and courts can order that executive orders be halted. This is crucial work. 
Much of what is happening, though, involves private individuals whose names are not even known, and who have no legal authority, wandering through government offices and issuing orders beyond even the questionable authority of executive orders. Their idea is that they will be immunized by their boldness. This must be proven wrong. 
Some of this will reach the Supreme Court quickly. I am under no illusion that the majority of justices care about the rule of law. They know, however, that our belief in it makes their office something other than the undignified handmaiden of oligarchy. If they legalize the coup, they are irrelevant forever. 
Individual Democrats in the Senate and House have legal and institutional tools to slow down the attempted oligarchical takeover. There should also be legislation. It might take a moment, but even Republican leaders might recognize that the Senate and House will no longer matter in a post-American oligarchy without citizens. 
Trump should obviously be impeached. Either he has lost control, or he is using his power to do obviously illegal things. If Republicans have a sense of where this is going, there could be the votes for an impeachment and prosecution. Those considering impeachment should also include Vance. He is closer to the relevant oligarchs than Trump, and more likely to be aware of the logic of destruction than he. The oligarchs have likely factored in, or perhaps even want, the impeachment and prosecution of Trump. 
Unlike Vance, Trump has charisma and followers, and could theoretically resist them. He won’t; but he poses a hypothetical risk to the oligarchs that Vance does not. 
Democrats who serve in state office as governors have a chance to profile themselves, or more importantly to profile an America that still works. 
Attorneys general in states have a chance to enforce state laws, which will no doubt have been broken. 
The Democratic Party has a talented new chair. Democrats will need instruments of active opposition, such as a People’s Cabinet, in which prominent Democrats take responsibility for following government departments. 
It would be really helpful to have someone who can report to the press and the people what is happening inside Justice, Defense, Transportation, and the Treasury, and all the others, starting this week. 
Federal workers should stay in office, if they can, for as long as they can. This is not political, but existential, for them and for all of us. They will have a better chance of getting jobs afterwards if they are fired. And the logic of their firing is to make the whole government fail. The more this can be slowed down, the longer the rest of us have to get traction. 
And companies? As every CEO knows, the workings of markets depend upon the government creating a fair playing field. The ongoing takeover will make life impossible for all but a few companies. Can American companies responsibly pay taxes to a US Treasury controlled by their private competitors? Tesla paid no federal tax at all in 2024. Should other companies pay taxes that, for all they know, will just enrich Tesla’s owner? 
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. 
As for the rest of us: Make sure you are talking to people and doing something. 
The logic of “move fast and break things,” like the logic of all coups, is to gain quick dramatic successes that deter and demoralize and create the impression of inevitability. 
Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them. 
What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. Sometimes self-government just means elections. And sometimes it means recognizing the deeper dignity and meaning of what it means to be a people. That means speaking up, standing out, and protesting. We can only be free together."
                -- DR. TIMOTHY D. SNYDER, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University
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The President*

 Charles Pierce--

"In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, "And we shall overcome." 
I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. 
I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing 'Amazing Grace' in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. 
These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. 
They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless. 
And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. 
Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House. 
The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. 
We never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt. 
Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. 
Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too. 
Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now." 

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Saturday, February 15, 2025

NATIONAL SECURITY EMERGENCY -- from Malcolm Nance

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Tuesday, February 04, 2025

What the Tech Oligarchs Want-- Complete Libertarian Madness Enabled by Dictator Trump

 Insanity:

DARK GOTHIC MAGA: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America

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Mixed In All the Trump Chaos, A Constitutional Crisis: Trump/Musk Dictatorship

From Brian Beutler:

 

  • To my mind we have four main kinds of provocation raining down on us: headfakes, attacks on liberal pluralism, policy sabotage, and genuine constitutional crises.

  • This schema isn’t perfect. The categories are largely distinct, but sometimes overlapping, and in some cases it isn’t clear what belongs where. For instance, at the moment I sort Donald Trump’s incitement against Canada, Denmark, and Panama into the nonsense or headfake bucket. It isn’t nonsense for the officials in those countries who have to ascertain whether Trump is menacing them for show or a genuine madman. And obviously if he were to use American military and economic power to steal territory from sovereign nations, that would probably necessitate a bucket all its own. But for now I think those of us trying to limit the damage should bracket these things as clownish bluster. Mock Trump for being a fool who can’t even succeed at bullying, but focus real energy on real crises.

  • The most mean-spirited and demoralizing provocations fall into the pluralism bucket. They range from the largely symbolic (the elimination of Black History Month observances, the prohibition on federal worker affinity groups, the blaming of all policy failure on DEI) to the cruel and lawless (discharging transgender service members, the contemplation of a concentration camp for illegal immigrants in Guantanamo Bay).

  • These are almost all bigoted initiatives, because the administration is bigoted to its marrow, but also because Trump wants Democrats and liberals to flock here. They want to catch Democrats advocating to reinstate “DEI” in the government, or to find some flimsy pretext to accuse them of that. They want Democrats to side with “criminal” immigrants, to fixate on where we incarcerate trans prisoners, and which if any barracks they should sleep in. But they aren’t just mining the liberal conscience for attack ads—they know that time is a non-renewable resource, and the more time Democrats spend on these issues, the less they’ll have to spend resisting dictatorship and the dissolution of the liberal order.

  • Republicans also recognize that these are all wedge issues; that when liberals and Democrats like me argue that we shouldn’t make Trump’s gratuitously nasty H.R. policy or bigoted propaganda the epicenter of resistance, it’s upsetting to advocates and others who devote themselves to the causes of immigrant rights, trans rights, workplace diversity, etc. But holidays can be restored, personnel decisions can be reversed, Trump can (and probably will) discredit his institutionalization of cruelty by wrecking the country again.

  • One way to block the wedge is to recognize that resistance around these issues won’t be resolved through public-facing activism. There are things that the Trump administration has the power to do that liberals and progressives simply can’t stop; there are other things (military discharges, violations of due process) that courts will either gum up or reverse.

  • Damage here will not be entirely reversible no matter what happens, though. Trump and his loyalists recognize that changing facts on the ground can alter things irreversibly, even if they’re ultimately forced to revert to the status quo ante. If they drive people out of government through unlawful means, those orders might not survive court challenges, but many if not most of the affected people will have moved on by the time it all gets sorted out. There is, unfortunately, little that can be done about that.

    Policy sabotage refer to things Trump is doing, or intends to do, to upset the applecart domestically and internationally, in ways that are much stickier. Here in the U.S., that’s punishing blue states after natural disasters, angling to kick millions of people off Medicaid, pitting his supporters against the rest of America, further curtailing reproductive freedom etc. Internationally it’s threatening or imposing tariffs on certain allies, rattling his saber at others, undermining NATO. Much of this is improper, irregular, corrupt. But most of it is legal.

  • To illustrate the point about overlap, culture-war provocations can veer into policy sabotage easily. When smearing immigrants becomes the Laken Riley Act, it transforms into a rooted policy booby trap; if the government really does build a concentration camp in Guantanamo, and begins to fill it with people, that’s no longer simply psychological warfare against liberals.

  • Generally, though, this is where Democrats in Congress feel most comfortable. It’s where Trump’s antics show up in grocery prices and service outages and health care access. It’s where Republicans in Congress feel wedged themselves. It’s already the source of real misgivings among marginal Trump voters.

  • For this reason, I’m least vexed by these crises, even though they threaten to be disruptive, impoverishing, even deadly. Democrats don’t really fear engaging on these issues, and are poised to capitalize on them. Part of me thinks they should do less to resist Trump here and simply get out of his way. In too many realms over too many years, our system and the liberal-minded people in it have insulated too many Trump voters from the consequences of their decisions, and it’s hard to defeat MAGA as a movement if MAGA is mostly bluster mixed with the economic stability Trump inherits from his predecessors.

  • Again, that isn’t to suggest anyone should be indifferent about anything. It certainly isn’t to say Democrats shouldn’t try to stop Republicans from gutting Medicaid, for instance. The potential for damage in this realm is tremendous. It includes economic crisis, the dissolution of NATO, and legislation that rolls back safety-net policies that help people be truly free, among many other things. Stopping that stuff will be important, more important than letting Trump and the GOP own the consequences of their catastrophes. Alliances can’t easily be rebuilt; major legislative reforms are hard to enact. But questions like “how should the U.S. government serve its citizens?” and “what is America’s proper place in the world?” are also at the heart of “normal” politics. Trump may not care about policy or have “normal” reasons for doing what he does. He certainly lied about his agenda in order to obtain power. But even major changes to social and foreign policy are survivable. Unless, of course, they’re imposed dictatorially.

  • That’s why I’m most fixated on that final category: constitutional crises. 

     

I have no doubt that Trump/Musk are going to try to take complete dictatorial control of the US and tear down all our good, decent democratic institutions.

We must all do what we can to stop this.

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Sunday, February 02, 2025

Two Weeks into Trump Two and It's a Massive Racist Shitshow of Epic Proportions Plus a Coup Over The American Treasury

So much shit but first the Coup.

 Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat (via newsletter):

It seems like the plot of a political thriller. We are living through a new kind of coup in which Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has taken over the payment and other administration systems that allow the American government to function, and has locked out federal employees from computer systems. Many of Musk’s collaborators in this endeavor previously worked for his private companies and/or helped him take over Twitter.

Musk is subject to no Congressional or other oversight because he seems to have no real official function other than as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a plunder operation that was named after the cryptocurrency DOGE.

When I wrote my 2017 CNN essay, “Trump and Bannon’s Coup in the Making,” that described Donald Trump’s intent to give power to “a small group of loyal insiders, who take orders directly from the leader’s inner circle and…bypass those of the existing federal government and party bureaucracies,” Musk was not on my radar. Today, Musk would replace Steve Bannon in the title.

What is happening now builds on classic authoritarian dynamics as I described them in Strongmen and in many essays for Lucid. There is always an “inner sanctum” that really runs the show, with its mix of family members and cronies, some with histories of working with or for foreign powers. And there is almost always a purge of the federal bureaucracy. That is now being carried out on a mass scale.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, and others have analyzed these processes and the interrelated factions that are implementing what I have called a Fascist-style counterrevolution: the MAGA loyalists inside and outside of the GOP, the Project 2025/Heritage Foundation crew (roughly two-thirds of the executive orders Trump has issued conform to Project 2025 plans), and the technocrats around Musk and Peter Thiel.

Vice President J.D. Vance shows the overlap among the categories. Vance is a MAGA loyalist; he wrote the forward to Heritage CEO Kevin Robert’s book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America; and he is the surrogate of Thiel, who bankrolled not only Vance’s Senate race but also his private business ventures.

All of these individuals and groups want to rearrange government around an extremist ideological project of Christian nationalism and White supremacy, and most of them want to enact neoliberal deregulation and privatization meaures to “free” America from “corruption” and “drain the swamp.” This is part of the “revolution” Roberts has long talked about, and it has a history that runs through right-wing dictatorships across a century.

The speed of its implementation makes Trump’s takeover stand out within an authoritarian framework. The more corrupt and criminal the autocrat, the more he is obsessed with punishing enemies and feeling safe. Cue the immediate execution of the revenge and retribution part of this plan, with anyone who was involved in attempts to bring Trump and his collaborators to justice for the Jan. 6 insurrection or anything else, FBI employees included, is now a target.

Only with coups –or crackdowns initiated in response to coup attempts, such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s post-July 2016 purges—do you see such a rush to punish and expel non-loyalists from the government.

The new administration also builds on the idea of “power verticals” such as that created by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who allied with oligarchs and billionaires to expand control of the media and other sectors and allow him to consolidate his personal power. Those personalist dynamics characterize current autocracies in Turkey, Hungary, and India, and the support Trump receives from media tycoons such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are an American equivalent.

And here is where the U.S. 2025 situation starts to look different. The point of personalist rule is to reinforce the strongman. There is only room for one authoritarian leader at the top of the power vertical. Here there are two.

Elon Musk and Donald Trump watch the launch of a SpaceX Starship rocket test flight, Nov. 19, 2024, Brownsville, TX. Brandon Bell/Getty Images.

Musk’s Autocratic Capture

Musk already had dangerous amounts of power in America due to his defense and other government contracts that make our national security partly dependent on his products. His takeover of Twitter, a platform widely used by governments and politicians around the world, gave him even more leverage. What he lacked was the key to the castle, a way to get control of government from within. The $250 million he spent to help Trump get elected helped to unlock the door. And so DOGE was created as a vehicle for his infiltration.

The press reported on Musk’s unusual and constant presence at Mar-a-Lago, and the input he had on the presidential transition process, but did not highlight the likely aim behind it: to insert his private businesses into the governance equation. Employees from SpaceX and other Musk entities interviewed potential appointees for the Trump administration.

Now Musk and his surrogates have physically occupied the Office of Personnel Management, setting up beds to have a 24/7 presence. They have also infiltrated the General Services Administration, which manages technology in government buildings. Thomas Shedd, a former software engineer at Tesla, is now director of Technology Transformation Services within the GSA.

That means that random individuals, whose credentials seem to lie mainly in their loyalty to Musk, now have enormous power over America’s purse strings and access to a treasure trove of sensitive personal data. They locked out the federal employees to prevent any obstructions to this access.

This is what militaries do during coups: you capture the major targets, with government buildings high on the list, and you take over communications and other systems.

Yet Musk did not need to deploy a private army to stage his coup. He was given permission to stage this operation by Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager. Acting Deputy Treasury Secretary David Lebryk, a career civil servant, resisted when Musk allies demanded access to the payments system. Lebryk was then placed on administrative leave, at Bessent’s suggestion.

According to a person interviewed by Politico, Musk’s team gained entry on Bessent’s assumption that the DOGE team’s access would be “read-only.” But Musk’s social media posts indicate an intention to cut off funds of people and organizations designated as enemies.

When extremist and proponent of Evangelical Christian holy war Gen. Michael Flynn claimed on X that Lutheran Family Services charity and aid work was a cover for a “money laundering operation” that profits from federal funding, Musk responded: “The @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”

Musk and his minions are not working alone to destroy America. The GOP, Heritage, and many American actors are embedded in foreign autocratic and right-wing populist networks, while billionaires Musk and Thiel (and their muse, Curtis Yarvin, who tells his followers that “democracy is done”) have ambitions on a global scale that hinge on destroying open societies.

Through his various investments and companies, Musk is a business partner of China, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and other autocracies, and has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose dream is to see America implode from within. Even if Musk were removed tomorrow, he is part of a larger design to wreck America as a functioning democratic society and a global power. It is now America’s turn to be a laboratory of autocratic innovation.

Links:

World's richest man's takeover of U.S. Treasury is a coup


'Hair-on-fire moment': Critics react with horror to Elon Musk's latest scheme 






Trump's public health gag order is causing doctors to panic


CDC Data Are Disappearing; The agency has already removed scientific data from public view. More could follow.


Trump's 'Grotesque' Plane Crash Comments Leave Democrats Gobsmacked; "What a horrible, pathetic, little man," one said of the president blaming DEI efforts for the deadly crash.


Justice Department official orders firing some of some prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases


JD Vance reignites GOP’s feud with the Catholic Church over immigration


The Dumbest Trade War in History; Trump will impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for no good reason.


US refuses to back down on Panama Canal claim: Rubio’s threats and Panama’s rejectionThe ongoing dispute between the US and Panama over control of the Panama Canal intensifies as Secretary of State Marco Rubio warns of potential US measures against Panama’s sovereignty.


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IN SUMMARY, they are incredibly goddamn fucking evil assholes.
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