And maybe there’s not much time left for our what is left of our fading democracy, rule of law, and civil liberties. That will depend on how the midterm elections come out. If the MAGA party retains a significant degree of control of the House or the Senate, it’s probably (more likely than not) game over for us by the Nov. 2028 elections.
By significant I mean (1) enough MAGA votes in the Senate to filibuster everything the Dems want to do, and to be unable to override Trump’s promised tidal wave of vetoes, and (2) enough MAGA votes in the House to constantly sabotage Dem bills. In the House, a slim majority won’t cut it. As we all know, the Dems will almost certainly be fatally fragmented and unable to get their shit together. All the MAGA politicians have to do is stick together, something they are very good at doing.
The main point this OP is arguing is pretty simple. By not winning overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate, the Dems will be stymied. There will be another 2 years of congressional failure, gridlock, and believe it or not, further drift into tyranny and kleptocracy. When government is corrupted and broken, as it now is, time weighs heavily against democracy, the rule of law and our precious civil liberties. When government is broken and corrupted, the more time that passes, the weaker our defenses become. It’s siege warfare. We are stranded and our defenses are constantly weakening.
A person paying attention to MAGA politics, tactics and policy related to democracy, the rule of law, and civil liberties since Jan. 2017 when Trump was sworn into office the first time can easily see how close we are to degenerating into a true, cruel, bigoted kleptocratic tyranny. We’re close to that end.
An example of the slow but constant advance of MAGA’s siege against our defenses
An article The Nation published, The Fall of Scientific American, is a great example of how MAGA wears down and neuters our democracy and its defending institutions. Recently the owner of SciAm, Springer Nature, decided to sell SciAm to LabX. Springer is a publisher of serious, high quality science journals including the top science publication in the world, Nature. LabX publishes sensational stuff for clickbait purposes. Springer said to sold SciAm so it could concentrate on academic research and scientific publishing. The thing is though, SciAm is focused on academic research and scientific publishing.
So why sell a high quality science publication like SciAm to a crappy publisher? Money. With MAGA and corrupt capitalism, it always involves money and the power to move it where the elites in power want it to move.
What triggered the SciAm sale to a crappy business was a May 2025 editorial, Science Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a Dictatorship. It’s no surprise that Trump and MAGA elites were super pissed off with that. Tyrants and kleptocrats vehemently hate criticism accompanied by inconvenient facts, truths, and reasoning. Reality make them look bad because they are bad.
MAGA’s political pressure threatened the parent company’s business. Springer Nature faced the potential loss of as much as $25 million in federal contracts after Trump canceled subscriptions to its scientific publications. Internal recordings show executives feared that SciAm’s criticism of Trump endangered their much larger academic-publishing business.
Corporate intervention changed editorial decisions. The Nation’s article documents management’s insistence on softening an opinion piece about government intimidation of scientific journals. After the May 2025 column, management suspended the opinion department’s publishing. Its editors were reassigned. Editor in chief David Ewalt acknowledged temporarily discouraging “Trump” in headlines because the word attracted corporate scrutiny. Ewalt wanted less “editorializing” and more factual reporting, arguing that rigorous news coverage could challenge the administration without jeopardizing the magazine.
Well, as we all know by now, rigorous MSM news coverage catastrophically failed to challenge Trump and rising MAGA tyranny and corruption. Ever since 2017 when it became clear who and what Trump and MAGA were, a few of us have been incessantly warning elites in the MSM (and the Dem Party) of the threat. Not surprisingly, those fine (arrogant, clueless and/or complicit) elites have been equally constantly ignoring the warnings. They acted and still act as if everything was/is more or less normal. Maybe a bit nastier than usual, but still mostly normal.
Anyway, SciAm staff who had not been fired or coerced into retirement wanted to form a labor union to protect SciAm’s editorial independence. What did Springer do? Springer announced the SciAm sale to LabX on June 23, 2026. That was three days before union votes were scheduled to be counted. The union alleged that the restructuring and sale were intended to defeat organizing; the article reports that the related NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) case remained open. But as we all know by now, Trump and MAGA elites have neutered the NLRB (another link), so those employees can go pound sand. Federal law is absolutely not going to protect them — MAGA policy has made damned sure of that worker complaints will be ignored or outright rejected by deeply corrupt MAGAfied government.
Power and wealth flows from protected workers (and consumers) to elite owners. That is MAGA’s core economic agenda and it always has been.
Q1: If the Dems do not win overwhelming control of the House and Senate, which they probably won’t, will we probably will lose having a meaningful democracy, rule of law and civil liberties by Nov. 2028, because as long as Trump and MAGA elites have sufficient power they will continue to wear down our defenses?
Q2: Is science inseparable from politics and social conditions, and thus SciAm commenting on the connections between science, and politics and society important for the public to be aware of?
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