the imbroglio 2.0

McSweeny’s nails it:

America will soon be the Cybertruck of countries—uglier than you could have imagined, built for rich chuds, borderline inoperable, and on fire. 

Josh Marshall had a great piece this week about what the Resistance to the Magats so badly needs right now: Leadership that will send a clear message like Churchill did when he became British Prime Minister in 1940. 

Churchill had a clear message: 1) We’re never going to give up. Literally, never. 2) We’re going to battle back with these tools. And 3) Finally, we’re going to win.

Yes! A thousand times, YES. Where are the Democrats? WTactualF are they doing? It seems like nothing. Literally nothing. 

Sure, we’re all demoralized. That is one of the goals of the “shock and awe” attack on our country happening from inside our country. But that is just the starting point. We can feel that, and then we can stand up and get started doing something to stop and change the things that are demoralizing us, right? And we need to never give up. Literally, never. 

Maybe it helps to understand, as David Frum explains, why this is very different than it was in 2017 for four main reasons:

1. Trump is not alone this time. He brought a gang of idealogues wth him who are getting straight to work.
2. We, the opposition, feel beaten in a way we didn’t in 2016. 
3. Democratic mistakes have given Trump early successes — Democratic policies have veered left of mainstream. (Not sure how much I agree w/this, but…)
4. The new “information space” is perfect for chaos monkeys — no one pays attention to the “mainstream media” and that media isn’t doing a good job of covering what’s happening, anyway. 

I won’t go into my quibbles with Frum’s analysis; suffice to say I agree that fighting the Magats is going to be far harder this time around, for the reasons he cites and more. But the fact that it’s harder  only makes the work of fighting back more important. It’s do or die time, much like it was for Churchill and Britain. Please, democratic leadership, let’s learn from history. It’s time to stand up and freaking fight!

Online, Jason Kottke announced that he’s going to continue covering the ongoing coup almost exclusively (I hope not 100% exclusively?), and I am one of many who are glad. I’ve found his links helpful and I agree that anyone with a megaphone right now needs to be shouting from the rooftops about what’s happening so that we can all understand and try to do something about it. Kottke perfectly described this moment: 

Witnessing the events of this past weekend, I felt very much like I did back in March 2020, before things shut down here in the US — you could see this huge tidal wave coming and everyone was still out on the beach sunbathing because the media and our elected officials weren’t meeting the moment. I believe that if this coup is allowed to continue and succeed, it will completely alter the course of American history — so I feel like I have no choice but to talk about it.

Sunbathing time is over. 

If you aren’t familiar with Timothy Snyder, now is the time to get to know him. He is a history professor at Yale but  probably most famous as the author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and On Freedom (which astoundingly, does not seem to have a Wikipedia entry!?).  The first of the 20 lessons in On Tyranny is “Do not obey in advance,” which we can see the oligarchs and  companies are already violating by giving millions to the Trump “inauguration” fund. As John Gruber noted on Daring Fireball, most of these companies either gave much less or nothing at all to Biden’s inauguration 4 years ago.

Back to Snyder, who is one of (if not the) most brilliant and incisive of the public intellectuals in the “resistance” we are going to need if the U.S. is going to make it through the next four years. For evidence, look no further than his recent proposal that the Democrats form an official “shadow cabinet” to stand in public and ongoing opposition to all of the madness that’s about to descend upon us. I won’t try to explain what he means by this; you should read it yourself, as well as his followup post digging a little deeper into how the “shadow” or “people’s” cabinet might work. It’s not just a brilliant idea, it may be the best idea I’ve heard since the election on how the opposition should move forward. 

I’ve cut way back on my news and politics consumption since the election in November and I’m far happier not to be following every development second-by-second as I was before then. Again, Gruber has explained this better than I ever could:

 My take on Trump post-election has been to stop paying attention, as best I can, to anything he says. I’m only paying attention to what he does. With any other national leader, there’s a correlation between their words and their eventual actions that makes paying attention to what they say worthwhile. With Trump, there’s almost no correlation, and his endless stream of outrageous proclamations amounts to nothing but a distraction.

For me, this applies not just to Trump, but to all of the Trump-related sycophants and psychos filling just about every media channel with lies and fantasies, or “flooding the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon so famously put it.  My wife says this is what Rachel Maddow has been saying for a long time, too — ignore what they say; pay attention to what they do. It may not be an original or surprising idea, but it’s one that has been helping me stay sane, nonetheless. 

Still, Timothy Snyder is someone who cuts through the bullshit and to whom it’s always worth paying attention. His analysis of Trump’s cabinet picks as basically a decaptitation strike on the U.S. government seems terrifyingly correct, and his arguments that what we’re facing is a Musk-Trump, or Mump, regime also seems spot on.  

Snyder writes on Substack and I would recommend you follow him, except Substack sucks and I don’t think anyone should give it a penny. It’s really a shame that Snyder puts his work there because Substack is the sort of enshittified coporate platform that is the antithesis of what he otherwise writes about — open, democratic systems where all voices are welcome acknowledged, safe, and equal. As to why Substack sucks, you could start with “Don’t call it a Substack” by Anil Dash, as well as one of the general critiques of its apparent support for nazis.

Nobody’s perfect and I understand how Substack provides a busy person with little or no technical expertise — someone like Snyder, maybe — a push-button way to start a blog/newsletter and reach an audience. Still, there are plenty of alternatives and I bet if Snyder asked, he would immediately have hundreds of highly qualified readers ready to help him move to one of them for free. (I’m certianly not qualified, sorry.) 

Instead of subscribing to Snyder’s blog via Substack, just subscribe to its RSS feed in your favorite RSS reader. I like Reeder Classic, but there are many others.