Political issues – Into the Woods

Is revolt taking root in the zeitgeist?

“People will suffer,” says Mon Mothma. “That’s the plan,” says Luthen. “You’re not angry at me. I’m just saying out loud what you already know. There will be no rules going forward. If you’re not willing to risk your conscience, then surrender and be done with it.”

Last night I finished re-watching “Andor” season 1 (for the third time). Tonight I will start watching season 2. I have avoided reading reviews, but I’ve seen some of the headlines. It seems season 2 is going to have a lot to say about American fascism, or, as NBC News mildly puts it, “the plot’s relevance to current events.”

The Trump White House will start walking things back when rich people and CEO’s complain about the pain they themselves feel from Trumpian recklessness. But, toward everyone else, as many have pointed out, the cruelty is the point. It was reported that the CEO’s of Walmart, Target, and Home Depot met with Trump this week to warn him that, given the course Trump is on, there will be empty shelves by summer. Trump, of course, doesn’t care a fig for what empty shelves would mean for ordinary people. He would only be able to understand what empty shelves would mean for corporate profits.

The Trump White House can be counted on to double down on cruelty when ordinary people are concerned. As I said to a friend in email this morning, it is as though their fascist sadism gives them so much joy that they are blind to the political calculus of blowback. Or maybe they just assume that they have enough force at their disposal to put down revolt.

You don’t get to work for the Trump administration unless you are corrupt, completely uncaring, sadistic, and willing to do any vile thing that the emperor wants done. Thus they are all blind to the motivations of anyone who isn’t like them. There isn’t any wiring in their brains for that.

I have high hopes that, while the Trump administration merrily and triumphantly provides the motivations for revolt, “Andor 2” will help provide some inspiration.

Riley Moore, a congressman from West Virginia, is one of the Republicans eager to do photo-ops at Trump’s concentration camp in El Salvador. It seems obvious that he can’t comprehend, or just doesn’t care, what a public display of sadism like this means to decent people, or how history will view images like this. He imagines, in his triumphalism, that he will always be on top. But he is just one elite fascist up against the global many, and he can’t comprehend just how precarious his position is. I’m reminded of another quote from a story — Tyrion Lannister’s lines to Cersei after her acts of cruelty: “I will hurt you for this. I don’t know how yet, but give me time. A day will come when you think yourself safe and happy, and suddenly your joy will turn to ashes in your mouth, and you’ll know the debt is paid.”

The fate of quislings after fascists are defeated

Vidkun Quisling, sentenced to death by firing squad for betraying Norway to the Nazis, 1945.

The American people are stunningly stupid and easy to deceive. But even Donald Trump and his machinery of deceit cannot fool all of the people all of the time. The Trump resistance is starting to form. The conservative columnist David Brooks wrote yesterday in the New York Times:

“It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.”

We can only guess what percentage of the American people would happily follow Trump into full-on fascism. My guess would be 20 percent. The rest of us will do whatever it takes to get our democracy back. And we won’t forget who the fascists are and what they did.

In their gloating and triumphalism and sadism, Trumpists haven’t started to imagine what might happen to them once Trump is put down. Since they don’t know much history, maybe we should start reminding them.

I asked ChatGPT’s “deep research” AI for a summary of what has happened to “collaborators” in the past — both as a legal process, after fascists are deposed, and as a grassroots resistance as people rise up against fascist treatment.

Here are two AI reports. They will open as PDF files in your browser:

The historical record shows totalitarian regimes almost universally establish networks of camps, prisons, and forced-labor colonies. 982 words.

Meanwhile, the stories of resistance and eventual justice (from the Nuremberg gallows to the lustration files) serve as enduring reminders that even in the darkest times, there were those who defended freedom and, when light returned, insisted on accountability. 5,282 words.

Open-source surveillance using AI

Keeping an eye on the fascists. Image by ChatGPT 4o. Click here for larger version.

Safety and survival

There would be no thriving, and no survival, without surveillance. When deer in my backyard see me watching them through a window and retreat into the woods, they’re doing surveillance (and I’m surveilling them!). Today we have many types of machine surveillance to help protect us. Our smoke detectors are a form of surveillance. Automatic braking systems on vehicles use radar for surveillance. Governments, obviously, have many ways of doing surveillance. Corporations, too, do surveillance, including snooping on our privacy.

But what about us ordinary people? Forty years ago, I heard a brilliant managing editor of a Pulitzer-prize newspaper say that newspapers are intelligence agencies for the common man. That was very true then. It’s less true now, because of professional timidity and corporate capture.

Low-information types — the type of people who voted for Trump — are upside down about the need for surveillance. They are gullible to propaganda, easily manipulated, easily persuaded against their own vital interests, pumped full of appealing and easy-to-understand deceptions that serve the purposes of a predatory elite.

We high-information types have been living through terrible times. New technologies such as social media have been optimized for mass deception. The sources of trustable information not only have been weakened, they are under attack. One of the reasons we “doom scroll” is that, perceiving danger, we are desperate for information.

Beyond doom scrolling

Corporations and governments have covert ways of doing surveillance. We ordinary people have no covert sources. Open-source intelligence has been a thing for a long time. It’s more important now than ever, and we instinctively feel that. When we doom scroll, we are doing — or trying to do — open-source intelligence.

Open-source intelligence is not always free. I still subscribe to newspapers, weakened and compromised though they are. I’ve written here before about how Substack has become an important source of information. The first two things I read each morning, before I spend the next hour making my daily rounds though a series of reasonably trustable web sites, are the daily Substack posts of Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman.

I have so many subscriptions these days that it has become a considerable expense. One of those subscriptions is ChatGPT Plus, from OpenAI, at $20 a month.

ChatGPT’s ‘Deep Research’

A couple of months ago, ChatGPT introduced a feature called “Deep Research.” So far it seems remarkably reliable and less prone to hallucination. It cites its sources. If asked a question that it perceives as unfocused or ambiguous, it will ask for clarification before it begins. It takes time and resources. Those at the $20-a-month level get 10 queries per month. A $200-a-month subscription gets 120 queries per month.

Paul Krugman’s Substack post this morning was an interview with Claudia Sahm, an economist who developed “the Sahm rule” for the early detection of recessions. The interview wasn’t exactly clear on what the Sahm rule says at present about whether the United States (probably) is in a recession or not. So I made a deep-research query to ChatGPT 4o.

After about five minutes, ChatGPT responded with a longish discussion, followed by this summary:

Overall, current employment data do not meet the Sahm rule’s recession criterion. The unemployment rate’s modest uptick (on the order of only a few tenths of a percent from its cyclical low) suggests that, by this real-time measure, the economy has not entered a recession. This assessment aligns with other economic evidence: job growth, while slower, remains positive, and GDP has continued to expand in recent quarters. In conclusion, the Sahm rule presently does not flash a recession warning – a sign that the U.S. economy, while perhaps past the very tightest labor market conditions, is not yet in a recessionary decline according to this indicator.

This led me to some questions about the safest instruments for parking money in the current economic conditions. Again, ChatGPT spent about five minutes doing whatever it does and told me that the Schwab money market fund (SWVXX) that I am at present invested in is highly liquid, with low risks. I asked what economic developments might suggest higher risks in the money market, and what instrument I might move to for greater safety. ChatGPT responded at some length, with this summary:

You’re wise to stay in SWVXX while liquidity remains high and credit markets are calm, but be alert to:

• Widening credit spreads
• Repo market dysfunction
• Rising systemic banking stress
• Sharp risk-off sentiment
• Redemption gates in peer funds

If any of these flash red, Treasury-only MMFs and short T-Bills offer the highest liquidity and lowest risk, with yields only modestly lower.

Would you like me to monitor these indicators for you and give you alerts if conditions shift?

It happens that Schwab has a money-market fund invested only in treasury bonds — SNSXX. I will indeed watch for the conditions ChatGPT listed and move money into SNSXX if that seems wise. ChatGPT offered to monitor those indicators, but I’m not yet sure how monitoring works.

I could not detect any errors in ChatGPT’s response. Some of the information was easy to verify on the Schwab web site. ChatGPT’s numbers were both accurate and up to date.

Keeping an eye on the fascists

My next deep-research query to ChatGPT was this: I would like information on current and very recent activities of right-wing grass roots organizations such as militias, as well as intel from social media where this type of people congregate. Under Trump, are they emboldened? Or, do they feel safer and thus less motivated to cause trouble?

ChatGPT asked for clarification:

To help guide the research effectively, could you please clarify a few points:

1. Are you interested in U.S.-based right-wing grassroots organizations only, or would you like international examples as well?
2. Do you want the research to focus solely on militia-style groups, or also include broader grassroots movements (e.g., anti-government, Second Amendment, anti-immigration, etc.)?
3. Is there a specific timeframe you’re interested in (e.g., only post-2024 election developments, or the past year)?
4. Would you like examples from specific platforms (e.g., Telegram, Gab, Truth Social), or a general overview of social media trends and chatter?

This will help narrow the scope and tailor the findings to your goals.

I replied with: Only U.S., please, only post-2024 election, and chatter from any relevant platform.

After almost ten minutes, ChatGPT came back with a response of several thousand words, too long to include here. I asked for a bulleted executive summary:

Executive Summary: U.S. Right-Wing Militias and Grassroots Movements Post-2024 Election

• Mass Pardons Embolden Militias: President Trump’s extensive pardons of January 6 participants—including key leaders of groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys—have revitalized far-right militias, restoring their leadership structures and morale.
• High-Visibility Demonstrations: Far-right organizations, notably Proud Boys and Patriot Front, have staged highly visible, coordinated marches and rallies across multiple U.S. cities since January 2025, signaling renewed confidence and willingness to publicly assert their presence.
• Integration into Mainstream Conservative Events: Extremists are increasingly blending into broader conservative movements, such as anti-abortion rallies, positioning themselves as accepted, even celebrated, participants rather than fringe outsiders.
• Targeted Harassment and Intimidation: Militias continue aggressive actions aimed at perceived enemies—particularly LGBTQ+ communities, left-wing activists, and immigrants—under a perception of impunity due to a sympathetic administration.
• Militant and Strategic Online Chatter: Social media chatter on platforms like Telegram reveals a tone of victory coupled with strategic planning. Extremists advocate using Trump’s presidency as a window for recruitment, infiltration of institutions, and normalization of radical ideologies.
• Shift from Anti-Government to Pro-Trump Alignment: Militias have transitioned from opposing the federal government to aligning themselves with Trump’s administration, viewing themselves as enforcers or supporters of official policies rather than insurgent actors.
• Cautious Strategic Pause: Despite an emboldened stance, some extremist groups indicate they are currently in a phase of organization and preparation, viewing Trump’s second term as a secure period to rebuild and expand their influence without immediate risk of repression.
• Potential for Future Mobilization: Experts warn that Trump’s open alignment and legitimization of far-right militias create conditions where these groups may readily mobilize or escalate violence if politically encouraged or directed.

Where I am at the moment

Every day, the news is horrifying. For the past week, we have all been mesmerized by the Trumpian drama over tariffs and the turmoil in the stock markets and (much worse) bond markets. Though I haven’t posted in 12 days, I am by no means tuned out. It’s just that there has been little that I can add, and I don’t want to be one of those people who can’t add anything to our understanding of what’s happening other than snark, or merely repeating what so many of us are already thinking and saying.

Just now, it’s all about self-care while keeping an eye on the world — good eats, a slosh of Scotch, a glass of wine, watching a beautiful spring unfold, trying to figure out why I’m seeing more crows nearby and where they’re nesting, reading, re-watching the first five seasons of Game of Thrones, staying in touch with friends, and planning a visit to Scotland in September.

I’m thinking about making a project of befriending crows. There are many articles and YouTube videos on how to do it.

Disclaimer: Nothing here should be taken as investment advice. We’re all in different circumstances and can tolerate different levels of risk. As a retired person, my first priority is protecting what I have.

Ayn Rand’s world

AI image by GPT-4o. When I asked GPT-4o for an image of a burning Tesla, it said: “I can’t generate or provide images of real-world accidents, injuries, or disasters, including depictions of vehicles like Teslas crashing or catching fire. However, if you’re looking for a fictional or stylized representation for artistic or storytelling purposes — like a sci-fi scene involving a futuristic electric vehicle damaged in some event — I can help with that. Just let me know the context or tone you’re going for!” I replied, “OK, then. Make it fictionalized.” This was the result. It sure looks like a Tesla to me.

The Atlantic has a chilling (though overly long) piece about the legal war over Ayn Rand’s estate: “The curse of Ayn Rand’s heir.” It refers to Rand as “the queen of selfishness.”

Here are a couple of examples of the vile things she said: “If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.” Also: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”

It’s Ayn Rand whom Elon Musk was parroting when he said (on a Joe Rogan podcast), “We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on” … “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

I have not read Ayn Rand’s books, and I never will. But we know that she spent her life developing this primitive, dog-eat-dog philosophy. It became a religion. I wouldn’t hesitate to call it satanic. A cult formed around her. It is easy enough to see what kind of people Rand’s philosophy appeals to: the sociopaths, the narcissists, the brats on the lower end who have nothing but who fantasize about how much they can take, and the predators like Elon Musk on the upper end who use their money and power not only to get more, more, more, but also to try to turn the world into the jungle empire that Ayn Rand and her cult imagine.

True-believing members of this cult, now installed in Washington, are doing everything they can to break the parts of the American government that don’t serve the rich and to use American power to beat the empathy out of American institutions and Western civilization. Even by 2016, they had all too easily succeeded at beating the empathy out of the American “evangelical” church. If you consider everything that Trump and MAGA have done so far and are trying to do, you’ll find that it’s all consistent with Rand’s philosophy.

Who is going to stop them? Some people are optimistic. Their case is that the courts will stand in Trump’s way, and that we will have a free and fair election in 2026 in which Republicans lose control of Congress. I hope they are right.

Maybe, ultimately, American democracy can be saved. But are we prepared for the damage and calamity that are inevitable before we can stop these people from doing what they obviously intend to do?

Our first image of a Trump concentration camp. In the photo, Kristi Noem is wearing a $50,000 Rolex watch. The Trump White House actually staged this photo, as propaganda, and is proud of what it shows. MAGA types cheered. This is what Ayn Rand’s world looks like. To them, it’s beautiful.

First, let’s talk about a sonnet

⬆︎ The newly discovered version of Sonnet 116. I asked Open AI’s 4o engine to modify it for modern spellings. I have typed the text with an IBM Wheelwriter typewriter. Click here for high-resolution version.

The most thrilling news I came across today is that a somewhat different version of Shakepeare’s Sonnet 116 has been discovered in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The New York Times wrote about it here, and an academic paper about the discovery is here.

This is one of Shakespeare’s best-known sonnets. As the New York Times points out, the new version has an almost scolding tone aimed at those who deceive. The words “heretic” and “mountebank” are used, words that do not appear in the version with which we are familiar.

Sonnets were meant to be read aloud. Note that the word “fixèd” is two syllables.

Contempt for lying mountebanks! Now there’s a thought for the day.

⬆︎ The newly discovered version of Sonnet 116, with the text from the copy in the Bodleian Library.

⬆︎ Sonnet 116 as we have long known it. This page was scanned from the A.L. Rowse edition of the sonnets published in 1964.

⬆︎ I made a trip to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s this morning. I wasn’t in the market for eggs, because a neighbor has given me some nice big double-yolk eggs. At Whole Foods the egg shelves were pretty much empty.

⬆︎ Even Whole Foods’ most expensive eggs — $13.99 a dozen — were sold out.

⬆︎ I’m guessing that this truck probably cost at least $60,000. It’s also very likely that parts of it were made in Canada and Mexico. When these fools get what they deserve there will be a great feast of gourmet Schadenfreude. But what’s sad is that things will be much worse for people who don’t drive around rolling coal in $60,000 trucks.

An exercise in moral reasoning

Luigi Mangione

After a powerful, inhumane, and heartless health care CEO was shot and killed in New York City (presumably by Luigi Mangione), the pundit class flooded the zone with sanctimonious pieces scolding the masses for making a hero out of Mangione. I tried to work up some sympathy for the CEO. I failed, because I think there are millions of people — powerless people — more deserving of our sympathy. Does that make me a bad person?

First I should mention that Mangione’s lawyers have released a statement from Mangione thanking people for their support. Obviously he has become a hero for a great many people. Mangione’s legal team also have started a web site so that people can follow the case.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I thought that Jonathan Haidt, with his “moral foundations” theory, held a monopoly on studying how the moral values of liberals differ from the moral values of conservatives. Now I know that Haidt has a competitor. That’s Kurt Gray, at the University of North Carolina. As Gray writes on his web site, “If you want to understand the morals of the ‘other side,’ ask yourself a simple question — what harms do they see?”

I learned of Gray’s existence after a friend in Washington (who knows that I think Haidt is a schmuck who claims to be objective while implicitly flattering the moral crudeness of conservatives) sent me a link to a YouTube video. In the video, Gray is interviewed by Michael Shermer, who founded Skeptic magazine. I have seen Skeptic magazine from time to time over the years, and I always found it to be smug and snarky. Thus I was not surprised to find, in the video, that Shermer comes across like a used-car salesman. If you watch the video, I’d recommend discounting and skipping over Shermer’s jabbering. Only what Gray says matters.

In the video, Gray mentions the Mangione case. Liberals see a great deal of harm in people dying, or being bankrupted by, the greed of a health-care CEO. But liberals (I can testify to the truth of it) aren’t as alarmed by harm to a CEO who is responsible for those deaths and bankruptcies. What can be said about that kind of ethics?

Most people would agree that, if one of the 40 plots to assassinate Hitler had succeeded, then something like 50 million lives would have been saved, not to mention that Hitler was just plain evil. It is no great leap of moral reasoning to hold that the world would have been much better off if Hitler had died sooner rather than later. I think it reasonably follows that there are plenty of other people whom the world would be better off without.

Whether assassination is justified is a separate, and much more difficult, question. Reasonable people would always hope that there are humane and legal ways of preventing bad people from doing harm. Bad people have lately been very successful in finding new ways of preventing us from using humane and legal ways of stopping them from doing harm. Reasonable people also will disagree on when humane and legal solutions have failed, and when, if ever, the harm someone does in the world is so great that that person should be dispatched. Those who support capital punishment have already taken a stand on this question, which, as I see it, puts them on a slippery slope toward hypocrisy, especially if they demand the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, as many of them will.

It all boils down to what Kurt Gray is arguing: Different people assess harm in very different ways. It’s hard for me, as a liberal, to believe, but many people worry much more about harm to the harmful and powerful than they worry about harm to the harmless and powerless. Luigi Mangione has become a hero because he took the opposite — and, I would argue, the less morally crude — position.

Anyway, my intention here is only to bring up different ways of looking at these things. I am not arguing that Luigi Mangione was right to kill Brian Thompson. Certainly I would not have done that. But I also refuse to be scolded by the morally crude people who today are strutting and gloating over having the upper hand and new power to do harm in the world, with impunity. After all, remember who it was who said this and whom he was talking about: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

The right-wing propaganda campaign against “wokeness” and diversity, equity, and inclusion is all about the glorification of moral crudeness, because everything they want to do is morally crude. It’s no wonder that they had a fit over Luigi Mangione. Someone actually struck back, and a great many people found it inspiring.

Consider skipping to around 39:00 for what Kurt Gray says about Jonathan Haidt.

Writers who tried to warn us

The zone is completely flooded with you know what. From liberal sources and liberal friends I am hearing two categories of responses. The first boils down to red alert, Defcon 1, all hands on deck. The second is more restrained, and cautions us against wasting our efforts and our mental health on feints, distractions, and smokescreens. This second group points out that many of the outrages of the past two weeks have quickly fallen flat, and that Trump is not as powerful as he wants us to think he is. As someone wrote on Facebook, “Be careful, folks…. Is the constant freak-out to wear us down? … Keep your powder dry till you see the whites of their eyes.”

We don’t know — can’t know at this point — what they actually will be able to do.

But we do know what they want to do, and we do know what they are trying to do. What they are trying to do is to make a reality out of everything that science fiction and fantasy writers have been warning us about for many years.

I have zero patience for centrist chumps who keep telling us that we must “reach out” to them and “try to understand them.” We do understand them. We have understood them for a very long time. There is a huge body of literature, some of it fiction, some of it history and social science, telling us what they are.

Things that have happened before obviously are not impossible and can happen again. We already had a civil war in this country, and historians such as Heather Cox Richardson have made it quite clear that what is happening now comes from the same roots as what happened then. We already had a war on this planet against fascism. No one today is talking about ovens and genocide, but they are talking about ethnic cleansing with forced displacement, offshore prisons, and what would amount to concentration camps. They are cutting off food and medicine to millions of the planet’s poor. People will die. Even if Trump floats an idea and subsequently has to walk it back, they’re telling us what they want, and they will do as much of it as they can get away with.

What they are trying to do is a petrifying mix of pretty much everything that writers of dystopian fiction have tried for many years to warn us about. I’ll try to list some of them.

The Hunger Games: This is where oligarchy leads. It’s about the ugliness and ridiculousness of those who want to rule us. It’s what happens when there is no democracy, when oligarchs have all the power and the little people have none. It exposes the sadism that we can see quite clearly in MAGA, in Trump, and in Trump operatives like Stephen Miller. Hunger Games actually was very popular with the deplorables, who seem to lack the imagination to apprehend who they themselves are in the story.

The Handmaid’s Tale: This is where Christian Nationalism and Project 2025 want to take us. And let’s remember that it’s not just women who pay the price. In this story, African-Americans are forcibly relocated, and it’s implied that there was a total genocide against Native Americans. There are always scapegoats. The rest of us are just natural resources to exploit.

Fahrenheit 451: This is about the importance of ignorance. It’s about censorship and what happens to those who resist the lies that totalitarianism always requires. It’s about not forgetting the things that we once learned at great cost.

Nineteen Eighty-Four: This is about the tools that totalitarian regimes use to install and preserve themselves — surveillance, the suppression of dissent, and, as in Fahrenheit 415, the lie-enforcing systems that totalitarianism always requires. It’s about what happens to us when they flood the zone.

Star Wars: This is about the close connections between autocracy and empire. It’s about how rebellion is inevitable. It’s also about the difficulty of rebellion, when autocracy and empire are entrenched and vastly rich. It’s about the corruptibility of formerly democratic governing bodies. It’s about our need for heroes, for hope, for bravery, for perseverance. It’s about how oligarchs and empires hate diversity, equity, and inclusion; and it’s about how rebellions depend on it.

The Children of Men, The Road, Lucifer’s Hammer: In a dystopia, survival is Priority 1. Oligarchy and totalitarianism have an inherent tendency to lead to uncontrolled pandemic, environmental disaster, famine, and violence. They don’t care about us. To resist, first you must survive.

Wool: This is about mass deception, its consequences, and the difficult process of slowly figuring things out.

The Lord of the Rings: This is about the power of evil, the ugliness of evil, the strange sameness of evils wherever they appear, and the importance of alliances in resisting evils. It’s about how having kings and armies in the resistance is a great help, but also about how the little people can, and must, stand up for themselves.

The Lord of the Flies: This is about how people who are not fully developed human beings — that is, the deplorables — can so easily regress into primitive and inhuman behavior, if someone or something winds them up in a certain way. It’s about the Stanford Prison Experiment. It’s about how power and authority can lead people who are cognitively and morally stunted not just to illiberal ideology but all the way to cruelty and violence.

Fugue in Ursa Major: Here I must apologize for promoting not my own self-published books, but rather my ideas. The number of sales of my novels is next to nothing compared with the above. But I believe that, ten years ago in 2014, I correctly called a great deal of the chaos of today. It’s that it’s the billionaires who finance the engines that overpower the arc of justice. It’s that, ultimately, the billionaires and oligarchs want all the power. Being that rich is deeply corrupting and corrosive, and wealth at that level provides the ability to buy the power to do what they want to do. They finance the so-called think tanks that develop the propaganda, they own the machinery that retails the propaganda, they corrupt our elections and our governing bodies with money, and they have led us to a situation in which the richest man on the planet actually has his hands on the infrastructure of our government. Just months ago, that would have seemed too crazy even for fiction. But here we are. My novel also is about the importance of knowledge and the intelligentsia. JD Vance was entirely right when he said that (from his dark perspective) the universities are the enemy. If corruption and autocracy depend on lies, then the enemy of corruption and autocracy is knowledge and truth. A Frodo may lack the knowledge of a Gandalf, but a Frodo can know enough to do what needs to be done, as long as he can distinguish between who is lying to him and who is not.

We know what we’re up against. We know who they are. We know what they want. We know what they’ll use against us. We know what we have to do to try to stop them. I never guessed that they would get this far this time around. I thought the institutions would hold. I thought we’d learned our lessons about these people. We all got the memo. But 77,284,118 of us were too foolish to read it.

Not a single red cap

Click here for a high-resolution version and check out our new government..

The deplorables are very slow to figure things out, so I doubt that they have yet begun to understand that Trump has no further use for them. It was last July, after all, that Trump told a bunch of Christians at a rally that, if they voted for him in November, then they wouldn’t have to vote again. That went over their heads.

Lots of chumps in red caps came to Washington to participate in the glory. But they were left out in the cold. (And, being what they are, they left miles of rubbish outside the Capitol.) The deplorables still have to be managed, of course. But that’s what Fox News is for — the branch of government charged with profitably managing the deplorables.

Trump loves a pageant and understands the importance of visuals, but obviously he wanted the inauguration to be Mar-a-Lago elegant. Still, it is surprising that he threw no bones to the little people, to keep them convinced that he cares about them. Fox News will need some footage on that, though. So surely it will be arranged, once the weather is better and the price of eggs has come down.

What’s up with these visuals?

Was Elon Musk’s sieg heil intentional, right in front of the presidential seal? The American media, naturally, are playing it as though it’s a both-sides thing, that we can’t be sure what Musk meant. Maybe. But the video has gone viral, and we’ll soon know whether others are inspired to imitate him.

And what about Trump not putting his hand on the Bible while taking the oath of office? Was that intentional? That image, too, has gone viral. Can you imagine the uproar it would cause in MAGA world if a Democrat did that? I have no idea what Trump meant by it. But I hope the deplorables are exerting themselves to figure it out.

Mussolini

At the Contrarian yesterday, Jennifer Rubin interviewed Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. Most of us know more about Hitler than we do about Mussolini. The interview sheds much light on how Trump is following the fascist playbook. Most of us do know, I think, how it all ended for Mussolini. Italians back then, like our deplorables now, were slow to figure out who Mussolini really was. But once they figured it out, they put a stop to it. There are pictures of Mussolini’s end at Wikimedia Commons, for those who haven’t seen the visuals.

Benito Mussolini and you-know-who.

The inability to judge character

Four depraved human beings: Tammy Faye Bakker, Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Matt Gaetz. There are many more.

Regular readers here know that I do not subscribe to the notion that we need to “reach out” to the deplorables and “understand” them, as though they have something to teach us. I do understand them. I have been around them all my life. If they can teach us anything, it’s how not to be.

Back in the 1980s, when televangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker had a television show called “The PTL Club,” I noticed that I, and other morally sane people, could watch the Bakkers and perceive in about a second that the Bakkers were crooks who were scamming their audience. I marveled at how so many people, for some strange reason, were unable to see that. The show lasted for something like 15 years.

In 1987, Bakker was indicted by a federal grand jury and charged with scamming people out of $185 million in donations. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Thousands, maybe millions, of people had not only been unable to see through the Bakkers’ act, they had sent millions of dollars to the Bakkers. Those people saw Jim and Tammy Bakker as the godliest of people. Some people continued to send money to the Bakkers even after Jim Bakker was in prison.

Why does this inability to judge character correlate so closely with religiosity and with whatever it is that leads people to vote for Trump?

This defect in moral perception has two sides, equally ugly. The same people who can’t see through a Tammy Bakker or a Donald Trump easily believe that the people they have been taught to hate and blame — liberals — are the kind of people who hate America, who are out to destroy America, and who traffic children in the basement of a pizza parlor. They believe that it’s poor brown-skinned immigrants, rather than an ill-regulated oligarchy of billionaires with a propaganda machine and the courts in their pockets, that are eating their lunch.

A constantly churning pageant of lies is required to keep the scam going. But those who have this defect can’t see through the lies any more than they can see through the people who are lying to them.

Jim and Tammy Bakker were petty thieves compared with the extravagantly rich global-tier con men who will come to power at noon tomorrow in Washington.

A recent poll found that Republicans believe that Trump will bring inflation down more or less to zero and will bring back cheap eggs. In the real world, chickens are dying from bird flu in record numbers. The real-world reason for egg prices is getting worse, not better. Wild birds spread the virus, and now cows are getting it, too. But that’s just one problem, and there are many more.

Republicans (this blows my mind) feel safer now. But the rest of us can see that no good can possibly come from an alliance of oligarchs and con men taking over Washington, with a crew actually selected for their corruptibility. When things go wrong, liberals will be blamed. Millions of people will believe it.

Part of why this moment is so terrifying is that none of us can predict what will happen during the next four years. It can’t be good. But if eggs suddenly become cheap again and the inflation rate falls to zero in a booming economy that lifts all boats, then I will happily eat my words.

Many people seem to have bought into the oligarch political theory — that democracy has run its course and is obsolete, and that only the swaggering masters of the universe are fit to run the world, the meaner the better.

I thought the world had already learned, always the hard way, how that political theory works out. But here we go again.

Real journalists start to fight back

Jennifer Rubin and Norman Eisen, at Substack

Yesterday, Jennifer Rubin resigned from the Washington Post and announced a new venture, based on Substack, called The Contrarian. Rubin and Norman Eisen have assembled a list of stellar contributors who are named in one of their first posts, On Meeting the Autocratic Moment.

Rubin and Eisen write:

Democracy faces an unprecedented threat from an authoritarian movement built on lies and contempt for the rule of law. The first and most critical defense of democracy—a robust, independent free press—has been missing in action. Corporate and billionaire media owners have shied away from confrontation, engaged in false equivalence, and sought to curry favor with Donald Trump. It is hardly surprising that readers and viewers are fleeing from these outlets. Americans need an alternative.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have long been a voice in the wilderness critical of a mainstream media that dropped the ball years and years ago. It started in 1996, with Fox News. Journalists at that time believed that it somehow violated their principles to plainly call a lie a lie. Instead, the new — and extremely dangerous — ethic of journalists was to write as though there were two sides to things. At a critical time in history when new technologies started putting newspapers out of business and made dispensing disinformation on social media incredibly cheap, it has taken about twenty-five years for authoritarians to hijack the American democracy. They did this by getting 77 million Americans to believe their lies.

Though it is extremely encouraging to see more and more journalists breaking away from publications owned by billionaires (such as the Washington Post), the truth is that journalists get much of the blame for where we are today. They could have decided years ago that truth was their highest principle. Instead, they bought into, and even doubled down on, the belief that their job was “balance,” to report “both sides,” thus becoming amplifiers of malignant right-wing and Republican narratives whose obvious goal was oligarchy. Journalists, most of them members of a blind herd, were unable to see what will happen when lies are treated as though they can be taken seriously.

What we are seeing now is anticipatory obedience, a horrifying new stage of failure. The previous ethic of “both sides” has now crumbled into at last taking sides — not with the truth, but with authoritarians. We know very well what this looks like. It is a form of corruption that has happened everywhere when authoritarians come to power.

At this point I have no idea how to reach the millions of Americans who can no longer distinguish truth from lies and who actually have come to love — and advocate for, and vote for, and troll for — what to the rest of us are obvious lies with obvious intentions.

There are not two sides to the story of where we are today. There never has been. Acknowledging that is not going to magically save us from those who are preparing to turn us into Russia. But it’s a start.