All the oligarchs who care about politics are becoming active, but no one is as blatantly trying to turn America into an anocracy as Elon Musk. He recently had Tucker Carlson on X, and I don’t think Carlson said a single thing that was true. Instead, it was one lie after another. Musk is also sabotaging the Ukrainians in their war against Putin. What all this shows is that we have created a fascist oligarch class who are literally becoming a kind of shadow government.
Elon Musk has advocated relying on ‘community notes’ posted by users at X, formerly known as Twitter, to point out when information is false. Credit: Alain Jocard / AFP
Welcoming back potentially misleading political messages at X came less than a week after former president Donald Trump posted there for the first time since January 2021.
Trump posted his police mugshot after his arrest in Georgia, signaling his return to a platform that was his favourite bullhorn during his years in the White House.
It was his first post since several days after the insurrection at the US Capitol that saw an enraged mob of his supporters attempt to block Joe Biden’s certification as president.
The then-Twitter permanently suspended Trump after the January 6 riot, ruling he had violated the platform’s policy on glorifying violence as he pressed his false claims that the election was stolen from him.
Musk, who bought the platform last year, reinstated the former president in November 2022, but Trump stayed away, choosing to reach his followers on his own platform, Truth Social, albeit with a much smaller audience.
I was thinking about writing an essay on how Trump and his orcs have transformed our democracy, and a reader sent me this from FiveThirtyEight. I agree with this assessment. And note that none of this would be under discussion if Gerald Ford had not pardoned Richard Nixon.
Criminal Trump has vowed to continue his campaign despite the now four indictments he’s facing in four different jurisdictions. Credit: Spencer Platt / Getty
On Monday night, Donald Trump was indicted for the fourth time in less than five months by a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, where he and 18 others were charged with participating in an illegal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Prosecutors accused Trump of working with the other defendants to mastermind a “criminal enterprise” to change the outcome of the election.
That means the former president — and leading contender for the 2024 GOP nomination — is heading into the primary season with nearly 100 criminal charges in four different jurisdictions. His three previous indictments include charges of: falsifying business records in an attempt to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election in New York; illegally retaining classified documents and obstructing efforts to get them back in Florida; defrauding the U.S. in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Washington, D.C. […]
Robert Reich in one essay recapitulates what you have been reading in SR for years, and I think putting it together is very useful. The 2024 election is going to determine what the United States becomes. In myt opinion we need to vote every possible Republican out of office at every level of government. I know that sounds very partisan, but it is not in the sense that term is used. I don’t give a damn about Republicans or Democrats as such. What I care about is fostering wellbeing, and one party supports democracy and makes at least some effort to foster wellbeing, and the other does neither of those things based on objectively verifiable social outcome data. If your priority is wellbeing, commongood as Reich styles it, the voting choice is quite straightforward.
Today, in the sixth essay about the loss of America’s sense of common good, I want to summarize where we’ve come by focusing on one of the worst consequences of the loss: The emergence of Trumpism, and of the despair that has led so many Americans to give up on democracy.
Starting next week, in the seventh essay of this series, I’ll talk about what I believe we can and should do to resurrect the common good.
It is easy for many of us to condemn fellow Americans who have succumbed to the lies and thuggery of Donald Trump. It’s convenient for us to assume they’re ignorant, or racist, or gullible fools.
But what if their willingness to believe and support Trump is understandable, given what has happened to them? I’m not suggesting it’s justifiable, only that it may be explicable.
As we have seen, many of the key political and economic institutions of our society have abandoned their commitments to the common good — and along the way, abandoned the bottom half of the adult population, especially those […]
I think this should be taken as big deal. I know something of Presidential libraries, and the people that work at these institutions take being a Presidential Library very seriously. I cannot remember this ever happening before. And I think they are right. Look at the picture of the five men at the head of this report, and realize what criminal Trump has done to the United States as spokesman for White Nationalist christofascism.
The five Presidents before criminal Trump. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite / AP
Presidential Libraries for multiple former U.S. Presidents have written a joint statement for the first time to warn about the state of American democracy.
The statement is co-signed by libraries for past presidents, including Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George & Barbara Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover. The presidential library for Donald J. Trump is notably absent, mainly because it does not yet exist similarly.
It is thought to be their first-ever joint statement on American democracy and includes the ominous phrase “others see our own house in disarray.”
“Americans have a strong interest in supporting democratic movements and respect for human rights around the world because free societies elsewhere contribute to our own security and prosperity here at home,” the statement reads. “But that interest is undermined when others see our own house in disarray.”
“The world will not wait for us to address our problems, so we must both continue to strive toward […]
This is an interesting study showing internet use correlates with less dementia. I am glad for the data, it confirms that heightened mental activity keeps you mentally healthy.
A longitudinal study of a large group of older adults showed that regular internet users had approximately half the risk of dementia compared to their same-age peers who did not use the internet regularly. This difference remained even after controlling for education, ethnicity, sex, generation, and signs of cognitive decline at the start of the study. Participants using the internet between 6 minutes and 2 hours per day had the lowest risk of dementia. The study was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
Public discussions about internet use often revolve around problematic internet use, particularly among children and adolescents. Studies often link large amounts of time spent on the internet with various adverse conditions. However, the internet also forms the backbone of modern economy and entertainment. It provides lots of cognitively engaging contents that is relatively easy to access.
Studies have shown that online engagement can make individuals more resilient against physiological damage to the brain that develops as people age. This can, in turn, help older adults compensate for brain […]
