Just a clarification. Hilary Clinton said HALF of Trump supporters were a basket of deplorables. She didn’t say they all were, but that was twisted. (Now they all fit into the basket).
1) In light of the turnout at a multitude of No Kings rallies, is it possible to achieve a critical mass of voters such that no matter how much money the GOP tries to spend on the 2026 elections, they can't win?
2) How do we protect the voting infrastructure nationally?
When I see the amount of money people like Musk are willing to spend on a campaign, this money thing gets to be a problem. On top of that the guardrail meant to counter vote rigging is completely compromised. As if Patel or Bondi are going to investigate any type of election fraud against the GOP. It is strange to wrap my arms around the fact that the DoJ and FBI are now arms of the GOP and the GOP is the state. I'm happy to see the turnout No Kings rallies had but the GOP saw the turnout also. They aren't going to suddenly grow a conscience as much as they are going to redouble their efforts at maintaining power in the face of those rallies. The GOP has seen the face of the enemy and the enemy is us.
Something happens to people when the cross the billionaire threshold. I have puzzled over this for years. Certainly we have "good" billionaires but for a certain subset, the more they get, the worse their own personal moral rot sets in.
I sometimes reflect on the life a billionaire lives because they have enough money to actively divorce themselves from reality. Every minute orchestrated to avoid interaction with us poor serf's. I look at Bezos' and Musk's antipathy towards unions is on a par with the robber barons of the Gilded Age minus the violence (so far).
This administration does not care about anything or anybody any more. It knows it's got the cover of Congress, the Supreme Court, the DOJ and apparently the military now. So barring full scale revolution, America seems fucked right now. We saw mass demonstrations Saturday but they will not care. They are in the process of rigging the elections so they will legally stay in power no matter what.
The oath is to the Constitution. The Bulwark folks are spot on. And, Brian Huba wrote a great article on the "The Hill": "Money talks, protestors walk."
So, whenever feasible, please boycott all those companies, who are kowtowing to the "king".
Brian made a great case that all those corporations do care about where the dollar goes. Too many just folks talk the talk...
This monk also has donated to different legal groups, such as the Brennan Center, that are winning the court battles for the rule of law. There is always hope.
This monk also just did a 24+ hours fast to save money for more donations. We do it for the whole community. Please, no "hatred" for the "other side".
"It’s not just that the president of the United States looks at literally half the country with the purest disdain and hate—"
Half the country. Its more than half the country who do not support him. People don't realize how many Democrats there are. In fact, Texas has 1 million more Democrats registered than Republicans yet Democrats can't win due to redistricting.
And let’s not forget the voters who are registered as independence, and the growing number of Republicans who no longer support Trump. MOST Americans do not support Trump!
We need to be keeping records on what they all are doing for our own Nuremberg trials. We can not let them off Scott free or we will be there sometime in the future from the right or the left. There must be consequences for these actions.
As other thinkers have expressed on The Bulwark, one of the great achievements of the modern era is that nation states negotiate with other nation states, an improvement over the strictly transactional relationships among feudal sovereigns who tried to establish stability in international relations by strategic marriages. President Trump has turned back the clock by centuries by requiring that American international relations are not mediated through professional diplomatic and trade negotiating corps but direct appeals to his limitless personal vanity and greed. Perhaps he's aware that these appeals could be (and probably are) deceitful and superficial, because that's surely how he approaches them himself. Unfortunately for the world, including the United States, Trump also seems to think unpredictability and untrustworthiness as a diplomatic strategy—I like Ukraine/I don't like Ukraine; I like China/I don't like China—promotes a position of strength. This, when every person who's ever dealt with small children knows that the surest way to elicit desired behaviour in them is to say what you mean and mean what you say. Family and caregivers also know that most children outgrow interest in peek-a-boo by about the age of two years, and unfortunately, the President still seems delighted by it.
The same people who have cried for a decade after being referred to as deplorable -- among the weakest insults in any language, only slightly more pejorative than "scruffy" -- love a guy who refers to his opponents as "vermin," "radical left Marxists," "Hamas" and "terrorists."
This story has further affirmed my decision to move from Salesforce to HubSpot CRM for my company this month. It’s a VASTLY superior software platform at a lower cost. Salesforce is a dinosaur software company at this stage. Which may explain, though absolutely not an excuse, why Benioff is going all in on crony capitalism.
I hope and pray that today's No Kings protests are large enough, numerous enough, and given enough widespread media attention to break through the apparent nonchalance of so many of the American people to the extreme danger that Trump and his administration have put us and our democracy in. I hope that it truly is a "wake up call" heard by many who have not really been paying attention, and that it will lead to more momentum and more resistance.
I also hope that there will be no violence, and if there are some sporadic small incidents that they are not blown out of proportion and used by the right-wing media and Trump administration to distort and "poison the well" of the No Kings movement, and institute a large-scale crackdown.
This is a real danger, and the mainstream media needs to be vigilant and forceful in its response if a distorted picture is attempted, as I'm sure the Fox News crowd and MAGA hope for.
Fox is showing 2020 footage without dates to inflame viewers about No Kings protests. No MSM org has called them out on it, and some have showed the same thing.
Give it up. MSM is oligarch owned and operated. They will invent something if nothing happens.
The playbook is open for all to read. If you want to. Which America does not.
The regime is in the process of designating enemies. Its minions have openly stated it intends to use the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, and worst of all the IRS, to "go after" and "defund" groups (and in the process individuals) who "support" supposed anti-regime terrorists. Do not be distracted. The "terrorist" part is the cape to confuse the bull. The "anti-regime" part is the matador's sword.
How will this be done? Here's one approach I think very likely, because it seems we're already starting it, at least in public pronouncements and admissions.
Look back to American history (within my lifetime). Google "Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations" and "Loyalty Boards".
During the McCarthy era, and until Nixon abolished it, the US Attorney General prepared and maintained various lists of "subversive" organizations. Many were in fact communist front groups; there were fellow travellers in lots of the others; a significant number were merely groups working for civil rights, freedom of speech, and legitimate liberal/left political expression. The League of Women Voters, for instance, never quite made the list, but was "investigated" by the FBI and others, and showed up on private lists.
Being caught up in a loyalty board "investigation" was of course a nightmare. People lost their livlihoods. Literally millions of Federal workers and similar numbers in State and local service were scrutinized. Thousands were terminated. But it didn't just affect government employment. People in universities and private industry were also persecuted. Both the famous (Oppenheimer) and the obscure were destroyed.
Yet for all that the full potential of this campaign was not realized, probably because even though the IRS was suborned, and tax information was freely used by the FBI to identify and audit targets, there still was a sense that at some point there needed to be a limit. Somehow there came to be a period during which it seems there was a consensus that the IRS at least should not be involved in political struggle.
That's over. The IRS is going to be one of the most effective tools of intimidation and oppression going forward. Because one of the problems a tyrant has is oppressing ALL his enemies. It's one thing to go after groups and selected targets. But the IRS has the power to afflict EVERY person in America.
Here's my advice to the regime. It can be done formally or informally; generally, the most effective strategy is to go down both paths.
1. Designate opposing groups and target organizations as terrorists and/or supporting terrorsts. Make the list narrow at first but keep adding victims with less and less actual plausibility. Sooner or later -- sooner, probably -- it will include the Ford Foundations of the world ... and the ultimate goal, the Democratic Party. All criminal organizations keep two sets of books; make a formal list and a secret list. Use the formal list for public intimidation, and the private list for one-to-one shakedowns.
2. Identify all the people and groups that fund them. Persecute some. openly and publicly. The system will not defend them -- most will cave immediately, a few will resist and be Jarndice and Jarndiced into oblivion. (Look it up: Bleak House, Dickens). The Supreme Court will not intervene. Rescind 403 statuses as convenient and desired.
Ideally, constitutional provisions agains post facto law notwithstanding, retroactively claw back deductions for disallowed charities. Did you donate to Planned Parenthood? They are in league with terrorists. How about MIT? A professor there subscribed to the Bulwark. Just issue regulations, don't worry about laws -- we already have passed the Rubicon where only Congress is supposed to control taxes.
I think almost everyone has missed the true purpose of Trump's tarriff circus. The point is not tariffs per se; the point is to render a dead letter Congress's constitutional power over taxation. What appears to be insane folly is actually to arrogate to the executive first de facto and eventually de jure power over all taxation. Which has justly been noted the ultimate power to destroy.
3. The ultimate step: require all taxpayers to declare on their tax returns all donations to groups on some Attorney General's list. Not limited to those claiming deductions. The point will be to create a situation where failure to do so becomes a tax fraud, and compliance puts you on target for retribution.
And ideally you'd also impose a tax on all financial support for "terrorist" groups. How about a 50% excise on the amounts donated to Democratic candidates? Or 100%? At present this would be a bit difficult, since we still (for now) pretend to the fiction that Congress would need to write this into law. But as we have seen, this is a temporary impediment. If all goes according to plan, this will become the sole prerogative of the executive.
The beauty of this is that IRS procedures execute bureaucratically. The IRS doesn't have to go to court, obtain warrants, or send out masked thugs to break kneecaps; it can simply issue a demand letter and seize assets at will. It doesn't even really need human beings to do it; procedures can be automated.
Sure, victims can appeal. Good luck with that! The more taxpayers afflicted, the more appeals, the more choked up the appeal procedure becomes, and pretty soon everyone knows that if the IRS takes your property, it will be years before your appeal comes up for review... and guess who reviews it? The purged and loyalty-vetted tax courts. And the victims won't have jobs or property any more anyway.
4. Eventually we get to the point where, as in the Soviet Union, the charge becomes not even actual "support for terrorists", but "suspicion of support". Show me the victim you want to target, and whatever organizations that person supports -- his gym membership, or local musical society -- becomes a suspected terrorist group.
Thank you for so clearly outlining this terrible danger. I know most Americans do not want to believe that this will happen, but it absolutely will unless we push back hard NOW! We have very little time left.
Craig, excellent analysis. I wish it was paranoia but it’s not. MEANTIME, I SAY TO EVERYONE, GET OUT TO A “NO KINGS” RALLY TODAY! I will in Austin, TX.
Thank you for your well thought out and fact based coverage of our current state of disarray in the United States of America
I guess Levitt doesn’t know how to search the Internet to get ideas for a poster board?? Has she ever heard of Pinterest? Etsy? You just make up lies🙃
Just a clarification. Hilary Clinton said HALF of Trump supporters were a basket of deplorables. She didn’t say they all were, but that was twisted. (Now they all fit into the basket).
That shadow seems to be running his life, even as he may unconsciously be running away from it.
I have two opposing but related questions.
1) In light of the turnout at a multitude of No Kings rallies, is it possible to achieve a critical mass of voters such that no matter how much money the GOP tries to spend on the 2026 elections, they can't win?
2) How do we protect the voting infrastructure nationally?
When I see the amount of money people like Musk are willing to spend on a campaign, this money thing gets to be a problem. On top of that the guardrail meant to counter vote rigging is completely compromised. As if Patel or Bondi are going to investigate any type of election fraud against the GOP. It is strange to wrap my arms around the fact that the DoJ and FBI are now arms of the GOP and the GOP is the state. I'm happy to see the turnout No Kings rallies had but the GOP saw the turnout also. They aren't going to suddenly grow a conscience as much as they are going to redouble their efforts at maintaining power in the face of those rallies. The GOP has seen the face of the enemy and the enemy is us.
Something happens to people when the cross the billionaire threshold. I have puzzled over this for years. Certainly we have "good" billionaires but for a certain subset, the more they get, the worse their own personal moral rot sets in.
I sometimes reflect on the life a billionaire lives because they have enough money to actively divorce themselves from reality. Every minute orchestrated to avoid interaction with us poor serf's. I look at Bezos' and Musk's antipathy towards unions is on a par with the robber barons of the Gilded Age minus the violence (so far).
This administration does not care about anything or anybody any more. It knows it's got the cover of Congress, the Supreme Court, the DOJ and apparently the military now. So barring full scale revolution, America seems fucked right now. We saw mass demonstrations Saturday but they will not care. They are in the process of rigging the elections so they will legally stay in power no matter what.
On this No Kings Day 2.0:
The oath is to the Constitution. The Bulwark folks are spot on. And, Brian Huba wrote a great article on the "The Hill": "Money talks, protestors walk."
So, whenever feasible, please boycott all those companies, who are kowtowing to the "king".
Brian made a great case that all those corporations do care about where the dollar goes. Too many just folks talk the talk...
This monk also has donated to different legal groups, such as the Brennan Center, that are winning the court battles for the rule of law. There is always hope.
This monk also just did a 24+ hours fast to save money for more donations. We do it for the whole community. Please, no "hatred" for the "other side".
"It’s not just that the president of the United States looks at literally half the country with the purest disdain and hate—"
Half the country. Its more than half the country who do not support him. People don't realize how many Democrats there are. In fact, Texas has 1 million more Democrats registered than Republicans yet Democrats can't win due to redistricting.
And let’s not forget the voters who are registered as independence, and the growing number of Republicans who no longer support Trump. MOST Americans do not support Trump!
It's not that complicated: nothing is off limits to obtain some fleeting semblance of machismo and the resulting boner.
We need to be keeping records on what they all are doing for our own Nuremberg trials. We can not let them off Scott free or we will be there sometime in the future from the right or the left. There must be consequences for these actions.
As other thinkers have expressed on The Bulwark, one of the great achievements of the modern era is that nation states negotiate with other nation states, an improvement over the strictly transactional relationships among feudal sovereigns who tried to establish stability in international relations by strategic marriages. President Trump has turned back the clock by centuries by requiring that American international relations are not mediated through professional diplomatic and trade negotiating corps but direct appeals to his limitless personal vanity and greed. Perhaps he's aware that these appeals could be (and probably are) deceitful and superficial, because that's surely how he approaches them himself. Unfortunately for the world, including the United States, Trump also seems to think unpredictability and untrustworthiness as a diplomatic strategy—I like Ukraine/I don't like Ukraine; I like China/I don't like China—promotes a position of strength. This, when every person who's ever dealt with small children knows that the surest way to elicit desired behaviour in them is to say what you mean and mean what you say. Family and caregivers also know that most children outgrow interest in peek-a-boo by about the age of two years, and unfortunately, the President still seems delighted by it.
All those Turkish individuals on the Pentagon news corps...were they referred hy Eric Adams, NYC mayor?
The same people who have cried for a decade after being referred to as deplorable -- among the weakest insults in any language, only slightly more pejorative than "scruffy" -- love a guy who refers to his opponents as "vermin," "radical left Marxists," "Hamas" and "terrorists."
This story has further affirmed my decision to move from Salesforce to HubSpot CRM for my company this month. It’s a VASTLY superior software platform at a lower cost. Salesforce is a dinosaur software company at this stage. Which may explain, though absolutely not an excuse, why Benioff is going all in on crony capitalism.
I hope and pray that today's No Kings protests are large enough, numerous enough, and given enough widespread media attention to break through the apparent nonchalance of so many of the American people to the extreme danger that Trump and his administration have put us and our democracy in. I hope that it truly is a "wake up call" heard by many who have not really been paying attention, and that it will lead to more momentum and more resistance.
I also hope that there will be no violence, and if there are some sporadic small incidents that they are not blown out of proportion and used by the right-wing media and Trump administration to distort and "poison the well" of the No Kings movement, and institute a large-scale crackdown.
This is a real danger, and the mainstream media needs to be vigilant and forceful in its response if a distorted picture is attempted, as I'm sure the Fox News crowd and MAGA hope for.
Fox is showing 2020 footage without dates to inflame viewers about No Kings protests. No MSM org has called them out on it, and some have showed the same thing.
Give it up. MSM is oligarch owned and operated. They will invent something if nothing happens.
Stay safe!
The playbook is open for all to read. If you want to. Which America does not.
The regime is in the process of designating enemies. Its minions have openly stated it intends to use the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, and worst of all the IRS, to "go after" and "defund" groups (and in the process individuals) who "support" supposed anti-regime terrorists. Do not be distracted. The "terrorist" part is the cape to confuse the bull. The "anti-regime" part is the matador's sword.
How will this be done? Here's one approach I think very likely, because it seems we're already starting it, at least in public pronouncements and admissions.
Look back to American history (within my lifetime). Google "Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations" and "Loyalty Boards".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney_General%27s_List_of_Subversive_Organizations
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1947/12/05/104387532.html?pageNumber=17
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9835
During the McCarthy era, and until Nixon abolished it, the US Attorney General prepared and maintained various lists of "subversive" organizations. Many were in fact communist front groups; there were fellow travellers in lots of the others; a significant number were merely groups working for civil rights, freedom of speech, and legitimate liberal/left political expression. The League of Women Voters, for instance, never quite made the list, but was "investigated" by the FBI and others, and showed up on private lists.
Being caught up in a loyalty board "investigation" was of course a nightmare. People lost their livlihoods. Literally millions of Federal workers and similar numbers in State and local service were scrutinized. Thousands were terminated. But it didn't just affect government employment. People in universities and private industry were also persecuted. Both the famous (Oppenheimer) and the obscure were destroyed.
Yet for all that the full potential of this campaign was not realized, probably because even though the IRS was suborned, and tax information was freely used by the FBI to identify and audit targets, there still was a sense that at some point there needed to be a limit. Somehow there came to be a period during which it seems there was a consensus that the IRS at least should not be involved in political struggle.
That's over. The IRS is going to be one of the most effective tools of intimidation and oppression going forward. Because one of the problems a tyrant has is oppressing ALL his enemies. It's one thing to go after groups and selected targets. But the IRS has the power to afflict EVERY person in America.
Here's my advice to the regime. It can be done formally or informally; generally, the most effective strategy is to go down both paths.
1. Designate opposing groups and target organizations as terrorists and/or supporting terrorsts. Make the list narrow at first but keep adding victims with less and less actual plausibility. Sooner or later -- sooner, probably -- it will include the Ford Foundations of the world ... and the ultimate goal, the Democratic Party. All criminal organizations keep two sets of books; make a formal list and a secret list. Use the formal list for public intimidation, and the private list for one-to-one shakedowns.
2. Identify all the people and groups that fund them. Persecute some. openly and publicly. The system will not defend them -- most will cave immediately, a few will resist and be Jarndice and Jarndiced into oblivion. (Look it up: Bleak House, Dickens). The Supreme Court will not intervene. Rescind 403 statuses as convenient and desired.
Ideally, constitutional provisions agains post facto law notwithstanding, retroactively claw back deductions for disallowed charities. Did you donate to Planned Parenthood? They are in league with terrorists. How about MIT? A professor there subscribed to the Bulwark. Just issue regulations, don't worry about laws -- we already have passed the Rubicon where only Congress is supposed to control taxes.
I think almost everyone has missed the true purpose of Trump's tarriff circus. The point is not tariffs per se; the point is to render a dead letter Congress's constitutional power over taxation. What appears to be insane folly is actually to arrogate to the executive first de facto and eventually de jure power over all taxation. Which has justly been noted the ultimate power to destroy.
3. The ultimate step: require all taxpayers to declare on their tax returns all donations to groups on some Attorney General's list. Not limited to those claiming deductions. The point will be to create a situation where failure to do so becomes a tax fraud, and compliance puts you on target for retribution.
And ideally you'd also impose a tax on all financial support for "terrorist" groups. How about a 50% excise on the amounts donated to Democratic candidates? Or 100%? At present this would be a bit difficult, since we still (for now) pretend to the fiction that Congress would need to write this into law. But as we have seen, this is a temporary impediment. If all goes according to plan, this will become the sole prerogative of the executive.
The beauty of this is that IRS procedures execute bureaucratically. The IRS doesn't have to go to court, obtain warrants, or send out masked thugs to break kneecaps; it can simply issue a demand letter and seize assets at will. It doesn't even really need human beings to do it; procedures can be automated.
Sure, victims can appeal. Good luck with that! The more taxpayers afflicted, the more appeals, the more choked up the appeal procedure becomes, and pretty soon everyone knows that if the IRS takes your property, it will be years before your appeal comes up for review... and guess who reviews it? The purged and loyalty-vetted tax courts. And the victims won't have jobs or property any more anyway.
4. Eventually we get to the point where, as in the Soviet Union, the charge becomes not even actual "support for terrorists", but "suspicion of support". Show me the victim you want to target, and whatever organizations that person supports -- his gym membership, or local musical society -- becomes a suspected terrorist group.
Thank you for so clearly outlining this terrible danger. I know most Americans do not want to believe that this will happen, but it absolutely will unless we push back hard NOW! We have very little time left.
Craig, excellent analysis. I wish it was paranoia but it’s not. MEANTIME, I SAY TO EVERYONE, GET OUT TO A “NO KINGS” RALLY TODAY! I will in Austin, TX.