NYT: Falsehoods Fuel the Right-Wing Crusade Against U.S.A.I.D. -- As the Trump administration works to dismantle the aid agency, right-wing influencers have flooded the internet with falsehoods about its work. The video falsely claiming that the United States Agency for International Development paid Ben Stiller, Angelina Jolie and other actors millions of dollars to travel to Ukraine appeared to be a clip from E!News, though it never appeared on the entertainment channel. In fact, the video first surfaced on X in a post from an account that researchers have said spreads Russian disinformation. Within hours it drew the attention of Elon Musk, who reposted it. So did President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr.
Unfortunately and frighteningly, this is normal for American MAGA politics.
Times of India: Russia welcomes USAID cuts, calls body 'machine for interfering' in global affairs
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NYT: In revoking Biden’s security clearance, Trump makes clear his motivation is payback -- President Trump said he was revoking Biden’s security clearances on Friday as retribution for Mr. Biden having rescinded his four years ago in response to what Mr. Biden called Mr. Trump’s “erratic behavior” around the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. DJT made no effort to disguise his reasoning. He did not accuse Mr. Biden of any security breaches. Instead, he wrote on social media that there was “no need” for Mr. Biden to continue having access to classified information, exactly parroting the justification Mr. Biden offered in 2021 for denying briefings to Mr. Trump. “Joe, you’re fired. Make America Great Again!” Mr. Trump wrote in his signature all-caps style.
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In 1978, my parents went to Poland, the first foreign trip in each of their lives. When they returned to our home in Moscow, my mother couldn’t stop talking about what they’d seen — not a place but a movie, Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret.” One scene in particular stayed with her. Three friends are returning from a weekend trip. Sleep-deprived, hung over and preoccupied with their sexual and romantic entanglements, they pull over at a roadside cafe. There, a teenager wearing a Hitler Youth uniform starts singing. He is both earnest and, in his brown pants tucked into white knee-high socks, puerile. But after a minute, other young people in uniform join in, and soon all but one customer are standing and singing. The protagonists duck out. They have been pushing Nazism out of their minds, but at this moment they realize that they are in the minority, that life as they’ve been living it is over. The song everyone around them is singing is “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”
I was 11 when my mother couldn’t stop talking about “Cabaret,” and I was confused. I thought my parents had gone to an actual cabaret and somehow gained an insight into the nature of the Soviet regime. A few years later, after I’d seen the movie myself, I realized my mother was right: That scene is the single most vivid portrayal of what it feels like to live in a society that is falling in line before a totalitarian leader. I experienced this in real life as an adult, when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia and my world suddenly felt like a chessboard from which an invisible hand was picking off pieces faster than I had thought was possible.
Now, in Donald Trump’s America, I am living through something similar, and it is moving at a faster rate still. For me, it began before the election, when the owners of The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post decided to pull their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris for president.*** It continued with Mark Zuckerberg remaking Meta to reflect what he called the “cultural tipping point” that was the presidential election; with ABC News handing over millions of dollars in response to one of Trump’s frivolous lawsuits and CBS considering doing the same; and most recently, with the great erasure: of records of trans care for minors provided by hospitals and of diversity-and-inclusion policies at many universities and corporations. Now some universities are quietly retooling their programming in hopes of conforming with expectations that have not yet been clearly laid out.
*** For me, it began in August or Sept. of 2016 if I recall right. Gessen also saw it early and said so publicly in the New York Review on Nov. 10, 2016. So, what she really means is that we're once more living through the rise of a corrupt, cruel, bigoted dictatorship and other forms of corrupt authoritarianism. I never saw an end of the rotting process since 2016. Biden was a flicker of hope for a while, but it was clear to me early on that he was probably going to fail.
I am talking not about deletions of pages from government websites, such as those of the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presumably mandated by newly installed officials; I am talking about actions that individual people or private institutions took pre-emptively, with some measure of free will.
The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called this “anticipatory obedience.” In his 2017 book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” lesson No. 1 was “Do not obey in advance.” Those who anticipate the demands of a repressive government and submit to these demands before they are made, Snyder wrote, are “teaching power what it can do.”
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Next comes the pragmatic argument. Rational people do not stand on principle for the sake of principle. They pick their battles. Or so this argument goes. Perhaps this was the logic that led the country’s largest private funder of biomedical research to halt a $60 million diversity program, Target to scrap its D.E.I. goals or ABC News to settle Trump’s libel suit. As cynical as this argument sounds, it too is rooted in values and obligations to others — shareholders, business partners, clients.
Last, we have the zeitgeist argument. “We are in a new era now,” Zuckerberg observed when he announced that Meta would end its fact-checking program. Companies should have more “masculine energy” and have “a culture that celebrates the aggression” more, he added a few days later, speaking on the Joe Rogan podcast. This kind of argument is the very definition of rational. Societies define sanity as conforming to dominant beliefs and culture. In totalitarian societies, cultural and intellectual rebels are often confined to psychiatric institutions. In the Soviet Union, dissidents were often diagnosed as insane — and by the standards of that society, they were.
Gessen goes on at length. Having had first hand experience and a reasonably rational mind, she really understands corrupt tyrants.
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NYT: Trump’s New Line of Attack Against the Media Gains Momentum -- First Amendment experts say Mr. Trump’s lawsuits, based on an unproven legal theory, lack merit. Media lawyers scoffed last year when President Trump sued two news organizations for producing journalism that, he claimed, violated laws meant to protect consumers from things like deceptive advertising. They’re not laughing anymore. First Amendment experts still believe that Mr. Trump’s cases, against CBS News and The Des Moines Register, lack legal merit. But they now also realize that the lawsuits are proving effective at harassing the press — and that more of them are probably on the way.
It amazes me that many people far for intelligent and informed than me are so astoundingly slow to see what is obvious right in front of them. That includes most professional journalists and commentators. It's not stupidity. It's the human condition needing to see comforting reality to avoid an overload of cognitive dissonance. To this day, the most of MSM still usually refers to DJT, MAGA elites and Project 2025 as conservative and conservatism, not as bigoted, kleptocratic authoritarian. Un-fracking-believable!
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Bigotry, eh?
