American authoritarianism update

TNR published a long interview with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the Harvard scholars who were co-authors of the 2018 bestseller How Democracies Die. Here are two small parts of the interview:

Dire Days: What if Trump Does Everything He’s 

Promised and People Don’t Care?

INTERVIEWER: Can we talk for a minute about Project 2025? We have now Russ Vought, who’s going to run the Office of Management and Budget, assuming he’s confirmed by the Senate, and he was a key author of Project 2025. What parts of that should be most concerning to people, Steven?

LEVITSKY: There are many, many, many policies in there that I dislike and fear. But I think the core problem is the Project 2025 initiative reflects a much broader thinking in the Republican Party, and among the right, which is that not only state institutions, but a number of private institutions like universities, have been penetrated by pernicious forces of the left and need to be purged and packed for the good of society. And again, that’s just classic authoritarian thinking, right? There’s no liberal democratic way to respond to this problem. If you believe that the state is packed by your enemies, there’s no liberal democratic way of resolving that. It is a fundamentally authoritarian attitude that you saw, for example, in right-wing militaries in Latin America in the 1970s. The idea was that the left was kind of a cancer, that it pervaded the state and society and needed to be rooted out. This is a less violent variant of that.

ZIBLATT: Project 2025 includes these proposals to essentially circumvent the Senate confirmation process for Cabinet secretaries and to have acting officials and so on. And I think the most worrying thing is that we’re already seeing discussion of this within a week or two of the election victory. So we’ve seen the first steps already being discussed. Also, this idea that the Insurrection Act can be used on day one certainly is also worrying. Equally distressing is the plan to reimpose the Schedule F to allow for the manning of the state with loyalists. What’s worrying overall is that parts of Project 2025 lay out in very concrete steps exactly all the things we’ve been talking about for years.

INTERVIEWER: [Asks about why the election turned out as it did]

LEVITSKY: I think it’s a combination of a couple of things. I don’t think you can ever depend on voters to vote for democracy. ....

ZIBLATT: A second issue, though, is that one can imagine a scenario in which voters might have understood the risk a little bit more. But I don’t blame voters here. I blame elites again—in particular, social elites. I have in mind the relative silence over the past year of too many business leaders, too many religious leaders, and too many important labor unions—in particular, the Teamsters. When discussions were made public of the plans to round up migrants in an undifferentiated way that doesn’t distinguish between legal and illegal migrants, the failure of so many religious leaders, for example, to publicly and loudly condemn this and raise the stakes of what was involved, meant that many voters didn’t fully understand the stakes of these plans.

You can never depend on voters to vote for democracy. That is a very interesting assertion. The 2024 elections is evidence it is mostly true, even though many MAGA voters claim they voted to protect democracy. In one large poll, about one-third of Trump supporters identified democracy as the most important factor in their voting choice. Apparently, their irrational fears mostly centered on illegal immigration and alleged Democratic Party authoritarianism. 

But what about not blaming rank and file voters who didn’t see the risk, and instead blaming elites for failure to warn them? That absolves American adults of all responsibility their failure to see reality and authoritarian threat for what it is. Instead of reality they relied on a dark free speech illusion to vote against democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. I’m not that forgiving. In my assessment, all of the adult American public eligible to vote who did not vote for Harris gets ~45% of the blame, maybe ~50%. They were warned over, and over and over. 

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A lot of other news today is worse than just plain nuts. Well-known crackpot and blithering weirdo Marianne Williamson is making a bid for Democratic National Committee chair. I’m getting palpitations just thinking about it.

MAGA freak Laura Loomer is causing mayhem in MAGAland after insulting and attacking Elon Musk over alleged corruption and supporting more immigration of foreign engineers and scientists. Musk says that Americans are too lazy and too chill. Another MAGA elite joined the worker-bashing fun: Vivek Ramaswamy got criticized after posting a wild rant about how bad American workers suck. 

And then there’s some Christians in a snit: 15,000 people signed a petition accusing DJT of violating Christian values. Quick! Somebody tell Merrick Garland to prosecute DJT for violating Christian values! That will put the fear of God in him! 🤪

We’re is sooo much trouble. Or, are we just having fun?

WTF??

Wheee!

MAGA intent and policies coming into focus: Kleptocracy rising; Strange tales from Fantasylandia

In the coming months, the things that MAGA wants to do regardless of public opinion will become clear. One can reasonably think that MAGA elites will try to do their best to limit news reporting and propagandize MAGA goals and policies that most Americans oppose.  

Among the things that MAGA hates are transparency in government and taxes on elites and big corporations. Among the things that MAGA loves are opacity in government and huge amounts of corruption. A key target is the IRS. By gutting funding to the IRS, congressional MAGA elites enable wealthy tax cheats to commit their crimes with impunity. One source writes:

Republican lawmakers have now clawed back half the investment the Biden administration made in the IRS tax agency. Congress revoked an additional $20 billion from the Internal Revenue Service last week when lawmakers averted a government shutdown, a cut that may undo many of President Joe Biden’s efforts to improve customer service at the tax agency and train fresh scrutiny on wealthy tax cheats.

Biden and congressional Democrats gave the IRS $80 billion in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, but Congress rescinded $20 billion as part of a 2023 budget deal. Shortly afterward, Republicans vowed they’d be back for more IRS cuts. When Congress approved a stopgap funding bill, called a continuing resolution, all the existing policy from the previous fiscal year was carried forward unless new text was specifically added to the bill to change it. There was no language in the bill to undo last year’s cut, so it repeated in the new law.

Critics of the IRS were pleased.  

Biden administration officials said the additional cuts would add $140 billion to the national debt over the next decade by hamstringing the agency’s ability to audit wealthy individuals and large corporations.

Prominent critics of the IRS are authoritarian, government-hating MAGA ideologues and wealthy tax cheats in the form of rich, powerful human beings and huge, powerful human legal entities called corporations. Once in power, MAGA elites plan to fire independent federal Inspector General positions and replace them with corrupt political loyalists. That opens the entire executive branch to true, full-blown kleptocracy. As it sands now, tax cheats already illegally withhold about $428 billion/year from the IRS by one estimate and according to the IRS (which in my opinion is not trustworthy on this data point). My personal estimate is that the annual festival of tax "theft" amounts to at least ~$1 trillion/year. Whatever the true number is, tax cheating is probably going to experience a "healthy" increase thanks to MAGA's kleptocratic hate of taxes, collecting taxes and enforcing tax laws.

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Self-reliant pulling up before 

boostraps were invented

Nutty politics doesn't get much more human than this:

After backing Trump, low-income voters 

hope he doesn’t slash their benefits

NEW CASTLE, Pennsylvania — Lori Mosura goes to the grocery store on a bicycle because she can’t afford to fix her Ford F-150 truck.

The single mother and her 17-year-old son live in an apartment that is so small she sleeps in the dining room. They receive $1,200 each month in food stamps and Social Security benefits but still come up short. Mosura said she often finds herself deciding between buying milk or toilet paper.

It was all that penny-pinching that drove the part-time tax consultant to abandon the Democratic Party this fall and vote for Donald Trump.

“He is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich,” Mosura, 55, said on a recent afternoon. “I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.” (and there's the fantasy)

Trump carried the Pennsylvania city of New Castle by about 400 votes, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to win here in nearly 70 years. More than 1 in 4 residents live in poverty, and the median income in this former steel and railroad hub ranks as one of the lowest in Pennsylvania.

New Castle’s poorest residents weren’t alone in putting their faith in Trump. Network exit polls suggest he erased the advantage Democrats had with low-income voters across the country.

Now, low-income Americans who voted for Trump say they are counting on him to keep their benefits intact even while his Cabinet picks and Republican lawmakers call on him to reduce federal spending.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — whom Trump has chosen to lead a new nongovernmental advisory panel, the “Department of Government Efficiency” — have said they want to trim $2 trillion from the government’s annual budget, a cut that some experts say could be accomplished only by slashing entitlement programs.

What can one say in the face of that kind of irrational false belief? It was well-known before the election that (i) DJT and MAGA hate most government domestic spending and they plan to seriously gut social safety net programs, and (ii) DJT's proposed tariffs would very likely significantly increase inflation. Those low-income voters are probably in for a huge, rude surprise. DJT and MAGA could not care less about them. DJT holds them in open contempt. They are probably gonna need to do a bunch of bootstrap pulling in the next couple of years.

MAGA logic

(compassionate conservatism)

MAGA intent and policies coming into focus; Etc.

It is fair to say that a lot of what MAGA wants, most average people wouldn't if they were aware of it. Some examples are related to the temporary spending bill to keep the government funded until March. The final Musk/Trump bill was changed to retain the practice of “spread pricing” in Medicaid plans. That is where PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers, middlemen in the medicine business) charge a health plan more for a drug than what they pay to the pharmacies that dispense it. The PBMs pocket the difference. Its pure corrupt special interest sleaze, which is why PBMs fight tooth and claw to keep it. The original, pre-Musk/Trump plan required PBMs to pass along all rebates and fees that are based on a percentage of a drug price to their health plan clients. The idea was to eliminate incentives to promote expensive drugs over cheaper ones. And, after all, we would not want patients to harvest some of the cash the PBMs milk out of the system, would we? Course not.

Another example of Musk/Trump MAGA policy priorities relates to protecting hidden junk fees. The original pre-Musk/Trump version included two bipartisan bills that aimed to crack down on junk fees by requiring ticket sellers and hotels to disclose any service charges and other add-ons up front to customers, rather than waiting until the end of the checkout process. Got 'cha! 

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A leading US government agency that tracks foreign disinformation has terminated its operations, the State Department said Tuesday, after Congress failed to extend its funding following years of Republican criticism. The Global Engagement Center, a State Department unit established in 2016, shuttered on Monday at a time when officials and experts tracking propaganda have been warning of the risk of disinformation campaigns from US adversaries such as Russia and China.  The GEC has long faced scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who accused it of censoring and surveilling Americans. It also came under fire from Elon Musk, who accused the GEC in 2023 of being the "worst offender in US government censorship [and] media manipulation" and called the agency a "threat to our democracy." The GEC's leaders have pushed back on those views, calling their work crucial to combating foreign propaganda campaigns.

Welp, if MAGA elites like Musk attack it for censorship, then the GEC is very likely doing a good job at fighting dark free speech. As we all know, dark free speech is absolutely crucial to the rise and establishment of MAGA's kleptocratic authoritarian plans for American society, government and commerce.

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Texas Republican Proposes Public Executions of Undocumented Immigrants

A patriotic Republican in Texas

showing us how to do it

At Trump’s inauguration, reports of a pay-to-pray -- According to a report, you can pray with Trump and Melania. It'll only cost you $100,000. President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is reportedly planning an interfaith prayer service the day before his inauguration, where participants can worship alongside the businessman and his wife, Melania. But those who want to join need to weigh the price of prayer: Tickets to the service will be awarded only to those who donate at least $100,000 to Trump’s inaugural ceremonies, or who raise $200,000.

Biden signs 50 bills into law on Christmas Eve -- President Biden signed 50 bills into law on Christmas Eve, as the year and his time in office draw to a close. The bills Mr. Biden signed include socialite and activist Paris Hilton's bill to protect teenagers living in residential treatment facilities, a bill setting anti-hazing standards on college campuses, and a bill preventing members of Congress from collecting pensions if convicted of certain crimes. He also made the bald eagle the national bird. 

Hm, no mention of any laws that try to protect democracy from kleptocratic MAGA authoritarianism. Biden is apparently out to pasture. Bummer.

The great tea bag escapade; Feisty MAGA politics; Regarding free speech and MAGA

Researchers at UAB (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain) checked out tea bags. They found the bags release lots of microplastics bits into the tea. The UAB newsroom writes:  

The tea bags used for the research were made from the polymers nylon-6, polypropylene and cellulose. The study shows that, when brewing tea, polypropylene releases approximately 1.2 billion particles per milliliter, with an average size of 136.7 nanometers; cellulose releases about 135 million particles per milliliter, with an average size of 244 nanometers; while nylon-6 releases 8.18 million particles per milliliter, with an average size of 138.4 nanometers.

MNPLs = micro/nanoplastics

Caco-2, HT29, HT29-MTX = human gut 

cell lines in vitro

The particles were stained and exposed for the first time to different types of human intestinal cells to assess their interaction and possible cellular internalization. The biological interaction experiments showed that mucus-producing intestinal cells had the highest uptake of micro and nanoplastics, with the particles even entering the cell nucleus that houses the genetic material. The result suggests a key role for intestinal mucus in the uptake of these pollutant particles and underscores the need for further research into the effects that chronic exposure can have on human health.

So, it sounds like one might want to use tea bags made out of cellulose, which is found naturally in all kinds of human foods. Plants make cellulose naturally. Cellulose is generally safe to eat in moderation. It occurs naturally in plant-based diets and is used as an additive, apparently in most processed foods.

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Our feisty president-elect is being feisty at the LGBQT concept and community:

Donald Trump made sweeping promises at a far-right event this weekend to end trans rights in several areas, including education, health care, and military service.

Speaking at an event organized by Turning Point USA, Trump also promised to end transgender rights across the board on his first day in office, saying that it will be official policy that “there are only two genders, male and female.” He also said he would sign an executive order to “end child sexual mutilation.”

Trump’s promise to keep “transgender… out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools” likely refers to school curricula, which Republican state lawmakers have been legislating against for several years. Questions about curriculum are usually handled by state and municipal bodies, not the president.

“Child sexual mutilation” is an inflammatory way of referring to surgery associated with gender-affirming care, something that is almost never performed on minors in the U.S. It is not clear what power a president has to ban medical procedures through executive order.

“Child sexual mutilation” is not only inflammatory, it is deeply insulting to (i) the LGBQT concept and community, and (ii) other people who dislike overt displays of bigoted theocratic authoritarianism. But what the heck, MAGA doesn't respect the dignity or rights of people MAGA chooses to hate, attack and oppress.

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NewsGuard is under attack by MAGA because it rates the credibility of some news sources that includes some MAGA sites. Some of the ratings for some MAGA sites are low. MAGA is calling that censorship and threatening to attack. 

When veteran newsmen L. Gordon Crovitz and Steven Brill started their news site rating company, they were prepared for the inevitable cries of bias from both sides.

What they didn’t anticipate was that NewsGuard, their company of some 50 employees, would become the target of congressional investigations and accusations from federal regulators that it was at the vanguard of a vast conspiracy to censor conservative views.

Since 2018, NewsGuard has built a business offering advertisers nonpartisan assessments of online publishers — backed by a team of journalists who assess which sites are reputable and which can’t be trusted. It uses a slate of nine standard criteria, such as whether a site corrects errors or discloses its ownership and financing, to produce a zero to 100 percent rating.

Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a Republican, and Brill, a left-tending independent who founded Court TV and the American Lawyer magazine, engaged with publishers wanting to understand subpar ratings, sometimes wrangling for hours by phone over the details of a site’s correction policy.

But conservatives now question the company’s premise. Brendan Carr, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, accused the company of facilitating a “censorship cartel,” in a November letter to leading tech platforms. Noting that key legal protections depend on tech executives operating “in good faith,” Carr continued: “It is in this context that I am writing to obtain information about your work with one specific organization — the Orwellian named NewsGuard.”

NewsGuard, backed by legal experts, argues that Carr’s letter may violate the First Amendment by threatening the speech rights of private companies.

“The only attempt to censor going on here is by Brendan Carr,” Crovitz said in an interview.

Despite the battering, tech giants didn’t particularly want to play truth police on their platforms. Crovitz and Brill offered them a solution: Pay NewsGuard to sift the real news sites from the propaganda peddlers.

“We’re going to apply common sense to a problem the algorithms haven’t been able to solve,” Brill told “CBS Mornings” that year. “It’s going to be very simple … telling the difference between the Denver Post and the Denver Guardian, which is a hoax site.”

A “censorship cartel”?  “Child sexual mutilation”? One has to admire the toxic, deceptive, divisive rhetoric that America's radical right authoritarians constantly come up with. The MAGA wealth and power movement is 2nd to none when it comes to dark free speech expertise.

And FWIW, there's this: U.S. is ‘becoming a kleptocracy, oligarchy’: Sen. Murphy slams billionaires picked for Trump admin. It isn't often to hear the word kleptocracy used in politics, despite it being a gigantic issue, along with oligarchy and American authoritarianism generally. A peanut grumbled: Trump's inauguration is gonna be an all-you-can-pocket-tax-payer-money buffet. His whole term too!

I love it, a tax money buffet. That's a great way to describe kleptocracy!

And this too: DOJ officially decides not to charge Matt Gaetz in sex-trafficking probe -- The Justice Department has informed lawyers for Rep. Matt Gaetz and multiple witnesses that it will not bring charges against the Florida Republican after a yearslong federal sex-trafficking investigation. -- What a non-surprise. With Merrick Garland in charge, no elite gets whacked.