Hey, everyone. This week has been a little wonky/distracted for me — I was tending to a sick kid for a couple of days and am trying not to get sick myself, so I didn’t get to spend as much time as I would have liked here at KDO reporting on the coup and what we can do about ...
How to stop Trump’s power grab. “Trump isn’t inevitable. Here’s a plan to keep democracy intact.”
Professor Christina Pagel of University College London has mapped the actions of the Trump administration’s first few weeks into a Venn diagram (above) with “five broad domains that correspond to features of proto-authoritarian states”:
Undermining Democratic Institution...
Really interesting essay about organizing: How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth? “If we cannot organize beyond the bounds of our comfort zones, we will never build movements large enough to combat the forces that would destroy us.”
Jessica Valenti on why there’s no room for compromise or middle ground on abortion rights.
Anyone still holding out hope for a ‘compromise’ on abortion rights needs to give it up. Right now.
Over the past few days, a Louisiana mother was arrested for getting abortion pill...
House GOP has reintroduced the SAVE Act, which would require voters to show a passport or birth cert. when voting as proof of citizenship. But 140M Americans don’t have a passport and 69M women don’t have a birth cert. matching their current last name.
Elie Mystal on Elon Musk’s vision of neo-apartheid. “First and most important, apartheid is a business plan. It’s a system designed to exploit cheap Black labor, without ever letting Black people reap the financial and social gains of hard work.”
Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream is a forthcoming book that’s “an exposé of private equity’s devastating impact on American lives, communities, and the economy”.
Jamelle Bouie has started posting video essays on his YouTube channel about the current US political crisis. His latest one is an adaptation of his NY Times piece, There Is No Going Back.
Now, even if Musk had been elected to office, this would still be one of the worst a...
On a scale of +10 (full democracy) to -10 (full autocracy), the US now scores a 0, its lowest score since the Civil War. “The USA is no longer considered a democracy and lies at the cusp of autocracy.”
RFK Jr. confirmed as secretary of the Health and Human Services Department. There has been a lot of horrible news over the past month but this one is making me feel ill. I’m gonna log off for awhile.
Heather Cox Richardson on the history of the liberal consensus, from Lincoln to Eisenhower, and how the country has been turning back toward “the idea of a small government that serves the needs of a few wealthy people”.
What can I do to fight this coup? “We will succeed because millions of people do a couple things well, not because one person does a million things.”
Speaking of Timothy Snyder, Literary Hub published the first chapter (the one on not obeying in advance) of his 2017 book On Tyranny. It begins:
Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead abo...
You’re Allowed to Feel like Garbage. “If you are a remotely informed left-leaning person in America right now, why wouldn’t you be experiencing depression and anxiety?”
Trump’s Obsession With Immigration Is Really an Obsession With Segregation. His policies are a continuation of the 1790 Naturalization Act (only landowning white men were citizens), the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, etc.
Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba “is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe”.
💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Writing from Ukraine on his way to the front in the country’s war with Russia, Timothy Snyder muses about the differences in life & freedom on the Ukrainian & Russian sides of the war’s front line.
Yet, on this, the Ukrainian side of the line, people lead completely...
Jamelle Bouie: Trump’s War on DEI Is Really a War on Civil Rights. “His attack on DEI isn’t about increasing merit or fighting wrongful discrimination; it is about reimposing hierarchies of race & gender (among other categories) onto American society.”
Tressie McMillan Cottom’s latest is not easily summarized, but is well-worth a read: Look Past Elon Musk’s Chaos. There’s Something More Sinister at Work.
Security expert Bruce Schneier & digital ethicist Davi Ottenheimer: “The U.S. government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history.” And: “This is beyond politics — this is a matter of national security.”
Josh Marshall: “This new EO signed today appears to create DOGE as a shadow government across the entire federal government.” And: “I genuinely don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Elon Musk is functionally in charge of the US government.”
On her newly launched site, Meditations in an Emergency, Rebecca Solnit talks about the importance of coming together with “people who are not exactly like each of us individually” in times of crisis.
In this emergency, I think it likely that we are going to need to pitch a...
A federal judge has ordered the HHS, CDC, and FDA to restore their websites and datasets to how they were on Jan 30th by 11:59pm tonight. Resistance is not futile, but we’ll see how much Trump wants to push/piss off the judiciary.
The Trump administration is defying federal court orders and maintaining the funding freeze on issuing grant funding at the National Institutes of Health.
I loved Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World so I am looking forward to reading his upcoming Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America.
💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
Civil Servants Are Not America’s Enemies. “Washington created the modern civil service to make the government efficient in the first place, ending a patronage system wracked with graft and incompetence.”
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