Stephan: As I worked today scanning through academic and general media, with various television news media playing in the background, I thought what can I say to my readers on this Christmas day? I have been publishing SR for 25 years now and that made me think about the changes that have occurred in the world and in the United States over those two and a half decades. By this evening I had thought about this all through the day and I realized that it all basically boiled down to five trends:
Consciousness and the recognition that all life is interconnected and interdependent
Climate change
The preservation of democracy
Gender equality
Racial equality
And where that left me was this: All of these trends are modulated by culture, and culture is created by the aggregate of individual choices; that's why different cultures have different cuisines, follow different sports, treat women differently, practice different religions. You belong to a religion because you share certain beliefs; you root for different sports because it is part of being a member of your society; you cook food and prepare meals as do others of your culture. And those choices that have produced those cultures can be objectively assessed with social outcome data. That assessment has proven that those which make wellbeing at every level their number one priority always are more efficient, more productive, nicer to live under, happier, and operationally much cheaper.
Because this is so, and because culture is the creature of collective intention and choice, as I write on Christmas eve I want to say that I am recommitting to making all my choices be in support of:
Consciousness and the recognition that all life is interconnected and interdependent. This particularly in my academic papers, and book chapters.
Remediation of trends causing climate change, and preparation for what is coming
The preservation of democracy
Gender equality
Racial equality
And I invite you to join me. Make your own list of what you are willing to commit to support that will foster wellbeing. It is your Christmas, holiday, or solstice, whichever you choose, gift to yourself, your family and friends, the culture of which you are a part, Homo Sapiens, and earth's matrix of consciousness.
Laurence H. Tribe, Donald Ayer and Dennis Aftergut, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School | U.S. Attorney in the Reagan administration and Deputy Attorney General in the George H.W. Bush administration | Former Assistant U.S. Attorney. - The New York Times
Stephan: I completely agree with this essay, and consider how Merrick Garland chooses to deal with Donald Trump as one of the defining moments in American history that will characterize what happens to our democracy
Trumper Rally Credit: Mark Peterson/The New York Times
In his nine months in office, Attorney General Merrick Garland has done a great deal to restore integrity and evenhanded enforcement of the law to an agency that was badly misused for political reasons under his predecessor. But his place in history will be assessed against the challenges that confronted him. And the overriding test that he and the rest of the government face is the threat to our democracy from people bent on destroying it.
Mr. Garland’s success depends on ensuring that the rule of law endures. That means dissuading future coup plotters by holding the leaders of the insurrection fully accountable for their attempt to overthrow the government. But he cannot do so without a robust criminal investigation of those at the top, from the people who planned, assisted or funded the attempt to overturn the Electoral College vote to those who organized or encouraged the mob attack on the Capitol. To begin with, he might focus on Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and […]
Stephan: This trend is getting worse. Every month I see more and more in the MAGAt media about guns, resisting government, and the promotion of violence. If one doesn't read the MAGAt propaganda media, and I only do it because I try to pick up trends for my readers, this all seems preposterous almost cartoonish, but in Trump world overthrowing democracy is a major trope, we need to take seriously. Personally, I think this trend is growing because Merrick Garland's DOJ is not holding any major Trumpist orc, including Trump himself, accountable.
Rioters try to break through a police barrier at the Capitol in Washington on 6 January. Credit: John Minchillo/AP
The US is “closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe”, a member of a key CIA advisory panel has said.
At the same time, three retired generals wrote in the Post that they were “increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military”.
Such concerns are growing around jagged political divisions deepened by former president Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election.
Trump’s lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was caused by electoral fraud stoked the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, over which Trump was impeached and acquitted a second time, leaving […]
William G. Gale and Darrell M. West, The Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy Senior Fellow | Vice President and Director - Governance Studies and Senior Fellow - Center for Technology Innovation - Brookings Institute
Stephan: This is another trend that I am seeing being more promoted in MAGAt media. It is a measure of the stupidity of those who promote the idea of state secession that, as in Oregon where several counties want to secede from Oregon and become part of the Idaho, they do not realize MAGAt states all produce inferior social outcomes compared to Democratic governed states. I live in Washington State where we also have MAGAt counties that would like to leave Washington and become counties in Idaho. If that were to happen, Washington State would show increasingly positive social outcome data and Idaho, already inferior to Washington, would get worse. Personally, I would be agreeable on the basis of voting for state boundaries to be realigned, while the states remain the United States. I think we are moving to a time where the Democratically governed states are going to get tired of underwriting the failure of Republican governance. Few Americans seem to realize that all over the country the Blue states pay a dollar into taxes and take less than a dollar back, while Red states put a dollar in and receive more than a dollar back.
One troubling sign of our deteriorating civic mood is the shocking breadth of support for secession in the United States. At a time of widespread polarization—where people are arguing over a supposedly stolen election, vaccine mandates, mask-wearing, and the reality of climate change—a September 2020 Hofstra University poll found that “nearly 40 percent of likely voters would support state secession if their candidate loses.” This was followed by a YouGov and Bright Line Watch survey last June that revealed that 37% of Americans supported a “willingness to secede” when asked: “Would you support or oppose [your state] seceding from the United States to join a new union with [list of states in new union]?” Support for doing this was highest in the South and among Republicans.
But liberals are interested, too. In a July 2021 University of Virginia poll, 41% of Biden supporters (as well as 52% of Trump voters) were at least somewhat in agreement with the idea “that it’s time to split the country, favoring blue/red states seceding from the […]
Stephan: I think it is time to deal with MAGAt media and its lies, and no other MAGAt media entity has been worse than the Fox propaganda operation. In my opinion blatantly lying about a public health issue that results in the death of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children should result in the persecution of the on-camera propagandists as well as Rupert Murdoch and his sons who have financed all this.
Fox MAGAt Propagandists
Screw it.
I’ve shown a good deal of restraint since news broke that I left Fox News.
I haven’t done any TV about it, and I’ve let a lot of nonsense go by without a response.
A major reason I chose to leave with more than a year left on my contract was that I felt conflicted about speaking freely. Fox understandably doesn’t like to pay people who criticize Fox or its talent, and there is something unseemly about it.
So that was one reason why I left.
Another was that I didn’t want to be complicit in so many lies.
That’s the thing. I know that a huge share of the people you saw on TV praising Trump were being dishonest. I don’t merely suspect it, I know it, because they would say one thing to my face or in my presence and another thing when the cameras and microphones were flipped on. And even when I didn’t hear it directly, I was often one degree of separation from it. (“Guess what so-and-so said during the commercial break?”) […]
