Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History at Yale University - The New York Times
Stephan: This is an excellent essay explaining why so many people mindlessly follow Trump, and why a single man, in just four years, destroyed the integrity and honor of one of America's political parties. If we don't learn from his, it is all going to happen again, only the next time the autocrat manipulating it is likely to be more competent. And don't think for a minute we are out of this crisis. Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Marko Rubio, Louie Gohmert, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, and a hundred more Republicans are still in office, and they will have no more integrity tomorrow than they have today, or than they had a week ago.
Insurrectionists at the Capitol. Please note they are overwhelmingly White men. Credit: Ashley Gilbertson/VII/The New York Times
When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done. He never took electoral democracy seriously nor accepted the legitimacy of its American version.
Even when he won, in 2016, he insisted that the election was fraudulent — that millions of false votes were cast for his opponent. In 2020, in the knowledge that he was trailing Joseph R. Biden in the polls, he spent months claiming that the presidential election would be rigged and signaling that he would not accept the results if they did not favor him. He wrongly claimed on Election Day that he had won and then steadily hardened his rhetoric: With time, his victory became a historic landslide and the various conspiracies that denied it ever more sophisticated and implausible.
People believed him, which is not at all surprising. It takes a tremendous amount of work to educate citizens to resist the […]
Stephan: You remember a week ago I ran a story about the poor readiness of Air Force planes. Well here is the Navy's version of that story. The United States spends more on its military than the next seven highest nations in the world combined. And you this is what we get. The military-industrial complex and Eisenhower called it has too much money and too little competence. This is not a problem caused by the soldiers and sailors this is the politicians and the corporations who buy them like cattle.
USS Gerald R. Ford Credit: Seapower Magazine
Aircraft takeoff and landing systems on the USS Gerald R. Ford remain unreliable and break down too often more than three years after the $13.2 billion carrier was delivered, according to the Pentagon’s top tester.
The latest assessment of the costliest warship ever built “remains consistent” with previous years, director of testing Robert Behler said in his new summary of the program obtained by Bloomberg News before its release in an annual report.
“Poor or unknown reliability of new technology systems critical for flight operations,” including its $3.5 billion electromagnetic launch system and advanced arresting gear, could “adversely affect” the carrier’s ability to generate sorties, he said.
The Ford’s new systems — which propel planes off the deck and into the sky and then snag them on landing — are crucial to justifying the expense of what’s now a four-vessel, $57 billion program intended to replace the current Nimitz class of aircraft carriers.
The Ford class is also the backbone of the Navy’s aspirations to expand its fleet from 297 vessels today to 355 and then almost 500 by […]
Stephan: What I don't understand is why Bill Barr has not been disbarred? The problem with the American government is that there is no accountability. When you get to a certain level things that would put ordinary people in jail for decades produce no accountable response.
William Barr the don’s personal consigliere
Call it the last stand of the confederacy: a Republican administration attempting to roll back decades of civil rights protections for American citizens. Before he left office, former Attorney General Bill Barr submitted a regulatory change to the White House that would narrow the department’s enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the provision that strips federal funding away from entities discriminating against people of color and other groups, including women, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ people. The rule change would mean the civil rights division would only enforce the cases where it could prove intentional discrimination, getting rid of the “disparate impact” rule.
That rule is based on the legal doctrine that a policy is discriminatory if it adversely impacts a group based on that group’s race, color, religion, sex, and, more expansively, sexual orientation. It’s been applied in education, housing, transportation, health care—essentially every facet of government policy by previous administrations, but especially expanded under former President Barack Obama. Trump has been chipping away […]
Stephan: One of my main takeaways from the insurrection and, indeed the last four years, is that something must be done about the disinformation and propaganda operations that have taken over the public forum. Facebook has now banned Trump for life, but why wasn't this done years ago? The answer, of course, is that in hours Trump will cease to have the power to harm these corporate interests, whereas previously he could have.
I don't think for a minute that this is the end of Trumper terrorism for the reasons this article lays out. That is one of the reasons that accountability is so imporant.
“If you don’t bother to pause and learn a single thing from it, from your citizens storming your Capitol building, then you’re a fool,” Fox News prime-time star Tucker Carlson said Wednesday night.
While his comments were a typical bad-faith jab at elites, he’s absolutely right. But there’s been no soul-searching on his network after violent insurrectionists tried to prevent the U.S. Congress from confirming President-Elect Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump, no on-air consideration of the role Carlson and his colleagues played in inciting that mob.
The pro-Trump insurrectionists, egged on by the president, invaded the Capitol because they had been lied to. Trump, his congressional allies, and his propagandists at Fox and elsewhere had all spent weeks whipping them up with conspiracy theories about massive election fraud that had “rigged” the election in favor of Biden and stolen it from Trump. They bear responsibility for the horrific, lethal results.
Instead, Fox’s most prominent personalities spent Wednesday […]
Stephan: This Pew Research study I think should be taken very seriously. First, Congress is not reflective of the general populace. Second, a large percentage of the Christian Republicans, and this is an aspect this study mentions but does not address, are really White supremacist christofascists voted into office by Red state voters. Particularly in the Senate this is a lurking problem that is going to make things very difficult for Biden and Harris.
When it comes to religious affiliation, the 117th U.S. Congress looks similar to the previous Congress but quite different from Americans overall.
While about a quarter (26%) of U.S. adults are religiously unaffiliated – describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – just one member of the new Congress (Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.) identifies as religiously unaffiliated (0.2%).
Nearly nine-in-ten members of Congress identify as Christian (88%), compared with two-thirds of the general public (65%). Congress is both more heavily Protestant (55% vs. 43%) and more heavily Catholic (30% vs. 20%) than the U.S. adult population overall.
Members of Congress also are older, on average, than U.S. adults overall. At the start of the 116th Congress, the average representative was 57.6 years old, and the average senator was 62.9 years old.1 Pew Research Center surveys have found that adults in that age range are more likely to be Christian than the general public (74% of Americans ages 50 to 64 are Christian, compared with 65% of all Americans ages 18 and older). Still, Congress is more heavily Christian even than […]
