Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Trump only cares about his agenda of deportation, revenge, tariffs and personal profits. He’s fine with Elon doing whatever as long as it doesn’t interfere with his own agenda. The Daily Beast reported in his last term that when pressed about the rising deficit, he would say:

“Yeah, but I won’t be here,” the president bluntly said, according to a source who was in the room when Trump made this comment during discussions on the debt.

The episode illustrates the extent of the president’s ambivalence toward tackling an issue that has previously animated the Republican Party from the days of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of Barack Obama.

But for those who have worked with Trump, it was par for the course. Several people close to the president, both within and outside his administration, confirmed that the national debt has never bothered him in a truly meaningful way, despite his public lip service. “I never once heard him talk about the debt,” one former senior White House official attested.

He never talked about it when he ran for reelection both times either. I have to believe that he’s appeasing his new best friend, the richest man in the world, but he really does not care about the debt because he knows that he’ll be out of office, possibly dead, if all these worst case scenarios come to pass (which they probably won’t.)

The Muskswamy commission is looking to recommend massive, unprecedented cuts to the entire government including the so-called entitlements. Many GOP members of Congress are excited at the prospect of finally getting that done. Whether that happens with that very tight margin in the House is another story. And there are people in his orbit absolutely determined to fire federal government workers (or force them out some other ways) and they may make some headway but it isn’t quite as easy as they think.

The one thing that gives me hope is Trump’s narcissism preventing him from caring enough to put any of his clout behind this stuff. It’s all about him and these are not his issues.

He wants his tax cuts to be extended and expanded because that puts money in his own pockets. He wants to put on a big deportation show although how extensive that will be is up in the air. He wants to use tariffs to bully and intimidate other countries but he’s too stupid to understand that they have power to do the same thing and it’s going to blow up in his face. If he succeeds in doing all these things the economic consequences will be extreme but I have a sneaking suspicion that his undeniable ability to lie and have people believe him will allow him to not go to the extremes on those issues and just say that he did. (“See, promises made promises kept and everything worked out fine!”) Our completely fragmented and ineffectual information ecosystem will allow him to get away with it.

As for his desire to get revenge on his enemies and profit from the presidency, I think he might just get that done, at least to some extent. Nobody cares about the corruption so he can just write himself checks from the US Treasury or steal the White House silver and get away with it. As for the vengeance agenda, I imagine his administration will do many things to make his enemies pay, from IRS audits to lawsuits to criminal investigations, costing his targets dearly. I don’t know if we will ever reach that “at long last sir, have you no decency” moment because I’m not sure our society is really concerned with decency at the moment.

But in the end, I do believe that his own ignorance, laziness and narcissism may be the tool that saves us. He’ll get his pet issues and steal massive sums of money. But I don’t think there is quite enough bandwidth in this rogues gallery of neo fascists, D-list pols and egomaniacs to get their agenda passed as well. I may very well be wrong, though. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The AP reports:

A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Monday to lying about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter that became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.

[…]

Smirnov will get credit for the time he has served since his February arrest on charges that he told his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid President Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015.

Smirnov had been an informant for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, after “expressing bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said.

[…]

No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes as president or in his previous office as vice president.

While Smirnov’s identity wasn’t publicly known before the indictment, his claims played a major part in the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family, and helped spark a House impeachment inquiry into Biden. Before Smirnov’s arrest, Republicans had demanded the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the unverified allegations, though they acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if they were true.

During a September 2023 conversation with investigators, Smirnov also claimed the Russians probably had recordings of Hunter Biden because a hotel in Ukraine’s capital where he had stayed was “wired” and under their control — information he said was passed along to him by four high-level Russian officials.

But Hunter Biden had never traveled to Ukraine, according to Smirnov’s indictment.

Smirnov claimed to have contacts with Russian intelligence-affiliated officials, and told authorities after his arrest this year that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden.

Nobody seems to care that James Comer and the House Oversight Committee spent years pursuing this nonsense. They’ve moved on to haranguing Biden for pardoning Hunter so it’s all water under the bridge.

If you want to know where they get their information,here’s the breakdown:
YouTube 90%
TikTok 63%
Instagram 61%
Snapchat 55%
Facebook 32% (down from 71%)
WhatsApp 23%
X 17% (down from 33%)
Reddit 14%
Threads 6%

I have to wonder about the Youtube use. It could just be music or some other very specific interest there but if they ever get caught up in something and go down the Youtube rabbit hole it’s very dangerous. That site is full of disinformation and it’s very compellingly presented.

I don’t know what to do about it exactly. YouTube is extremely valuable. I use it constantly myself. But if you don’t know what you’re looking at it can be disorienting and destructive. I use Tik Tok much less, but I go there enough to see how much fun it is and understand why the kids like it so much. And from what I gather it’s full of disinformation too.

If we weren’t working overtime to destroy the education system we might try something like this:

Being able to identify hoaxes, avoid scams and debunk propaganda is a civic skill required in today's information society. That's why the curriculum of students in Finland includes media literacy lessons, aimed at safeguarding a precious resource: the truth.

Correspondent Chris… pic.twitter.com/wRTLxAW5Hg

— CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 (@CBSSunday) September 29, 2024

Once again, thanks to everyone who has contributed so far to our annual Happy Hollandaise fundraiser. It’s reassuring to know that people value what we do here and want us to continue as we face the next year of difficult challenges. I am so appreciative of your continued encouragement and support.

As I contemplate the next year of covering politics, I can’t help but think about our probable new FBI Director Kash Patel’s famous declaration:

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” — Kash Patel, future FBI Director.

Trump just showed one of those tactics is already working with that ABC settlement of 15 million and a forced apology from Trump nemesis George Stephanopoulos. It’s ugly.

This morning he held a press conference and indicated that he expect to do more of this and it appears he thinks it will work:

Trump says he plans to sue Ann Selzer and the newspaper in Iowa that published her poll showing Trump losing just days before the election pic.twitter.com/ujSmW3GTTM

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 16, 2024

Q: I want to expand on the defamation lawsuits. Could you see moving that to other people with individual platforms, social media influencers–

TRUMP: Or newspapers. Yeah. Oh, I do. I do. I think you have to do it. pic.twitter.com/qQifFRjRNh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 16, 2024

He has sued for defamation before and lost. But he seems to think, perhaps correctly, that he has the media on the run. This ABC capitulation sends a strong message that it’s best to play ball and you can imagine that plenty of corporate media leaders want their people to go easy right now. The zeitgeist seems to be that Trump is a colossus who must be appeased.

I suspect that independent media is going to be more important than ever. We’re looking at a period of tremendous stress on the information ecosystem with massive disinformation and propaganda programs, the right wing media encroaching on all public spheres, big money manufacturing Trump friendly press for its own purposes and the degradation of the kind of traditional media that might have operated outside all of this. The ability to find out the truth and make rational decisions for ourselves and our country as a democracy is very tenuous right now.

We’ll keep fighting the good fight here, spending our time seeking out the truth as we see it. There’s an awful lot to sort through these days but it is possible to do it if you have the time and the experience to cut through the bullshit. Here at Hullabaloo we’ve been at this a while and although we’re hardly perfect, we have pretty well honed BS detectors.

If you think it’s valuable to have independent analysis and a view of our politics from beyond the beltway, I hope you’ll throw a few coins into the Hullabaloo stocking if you can. But even if you don’t, please stop by from time to time. We are here seven days a week trying to make sense of this crazy world.

Keep the faith.

cheers,

digby

This:

Democrats, especially when they’re feeling on the ropes as they surely are now, often get into these games of 20-dimensional chess with themselves about which issues are most important, which people care about, which can be used to gain political traction in a now uncertain and often bewildering political and electoral environment. What we too often forget is that certainty and consistency of belief are messages in themselves. Especially in a cacophonous and cluttered media environment. It’s worth considering the message it sends when a party loses a close and hard-fought election and then spends time debating what it should be for the next time.

Josh puts into words something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since the election. This very public self-autopsy in which Democrats have been flagellating themselves over their failure is another failure. It’s always worth considering what you could have done better. But the idea that the message about democracy and freedom and autonomy was a mistake because nobody cares when the price of eggs is so high is just wrong.

Sure they could have talked more about “kitchen table issues” and pretended that their economic program was an abject failure but publicly rejecting your sincerely held values is an act of self-immolation. No one can respect that. In fact, it makes you appear to have no values and all you’re left with is the price of eggs. Sorry, that’s not a winning issue either.

In May of 2023, the world watched as Charles III was crowned King of England after his mother Queen Elizabeth II passed away at the age of 96. Very few people alive could have remembered her coronation almost 71 years before and most Americans’ only familiarity with that medieval ritual comes from viewing “The Crown.”

The UK Parliament prepared a detailed briefing on the history and protocol of coronations and it’s quite fascinating. Much of the ceremony is symbolic these days, but the intent is clear. It is designed to make it clear that the new king is the legitimate monarch, ordained by God. Back in the day this required that all the peers would pledge their fealty to the king one by one and it was apparently a long and tedious process. But since they abolished most of the hereditary peerage back in 1999, they shortened the process this time, with the Archbishop of Canterbury pledging to be “faithful and true” and Prince William kneeling before his father and saying, “I pledge my loyalty to you and faith and truth I will bear unto you, as your liege man of life and limb. So help me God.”

Then they called upon the people to pay homage and everyone in the Abbey said together:

God save King Charles.
Long live King Charles.
May The King live forever

Back in medieval times this would all be followed by a huge banquet and it was a given that to remain in the King’s favor nobles and vassals would need to offer the king a monetary tribute.

I couldn’t but think of all this as I read about all the billionaires and foreign leaders making the pilgrimage to Donald Trump’s golden palace down in Mar-a-Lago. The coronation (or what we used to call the inauguration) hasn’t happened yet, but he’s already being feted like a medieval king. And unlike the British monarchy, which has eliminated the paying of tribute to the king, here in America, where we supposedly cast off such practices in our revolution, our new president is busily collecting payments and demanding fealty from his liege lords and foreign allies. And he’s making it very clear that he will not be happy if they don’t come across with plenty of lucre to fill his royal coffers.

We have, of course, observed every Republican who can get his or her hands on some formal wear rushing down to pledge their undying loyalty. And we saw the unpleasant spectacle of the Canadian Prime Minister being treated like a vassal by Trump who declared that if Canada doesn’t like his tariffs they can become a state and he could be a Governor, as if that would be a much greater privilege. He also met with his fellow far right autocrats Argentine President Javier Milei and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and has reportedly invited several foreign leaders to the inaugural, including Chinese premiere Xi Jinping (who has declined the invitation.) No head of state has ever attended the inauguration according to State Department historical records because the United States used to pride itself on its peaceful transfer of power not being like a coronation in which foreign leaders paid tribute to the president. That’s a very quaint idea today.

But nothing compares to the media moguls and corporations who are racing to outdo each other to get into Trump’s good favor or spare themselves from becoming the object of his anger. We all know that the man who never leaves his side these days is Elon Musk, who spent over a quarter of a billion dollars to help Trump get elected. He has a great deal of business with the US Government and an apparent burning desire to turn the country into the same grotesque shadow of its former self as he’s done to his social media company, X. Trump is clearly thrilled to have the richest man in the world acting as his major domo.

It’s possible that Musk’s closeness to Trump has inspired other billionaires to try to get in on the action. The Wall St Journal reported on this embarrassing phenomenon last week under the apt headline: “The Week CEOs Bent the Knee to Trump.” It describes the scene as Trump went to Wall St to celebrate his Person of the Year Time Magazine cover:

Gathered behind red velvet ropes were senior executives at Visa, Meta Platforms, Goldman Sachs, Charles Schwab and Citadel, according to people who were present. Real-estate and aerospace magnate Robert Bigelow was spotted in the crowd, as was investor Bill Ackman…

Titans of the business world are rushing to make inroads with the president-elect, gambling that personal relationships with the next occupant of the Oval Office will help their bottom lines and spare them from Trump’s wrath.

As the Journal reports, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, both billionaires who own media companies made ostentatious trips to pay tribute to the new president after having been on his enemies list in the first term. They each pledged a million dollars to Trump inaugural (which is basically a personal slush fund with virtually no ethics requirements) as has OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

In fact, media owners and corporations are making many grand gestures to curry favor with the new president. The owner of the LA Times effectively took over its editorial board insisting that it be more Trump friendly. And in one of the most egregious examples to date, over the weekend, ABC settled a defamation lawsuit with Trump in which he had sued them and anchor George Stephanopoulos. Legal observers say there was no chance in hell that Trump would have prevailed on the merits and, in fact, has failed spectacularly in similar lawsuits. They agreed to pay 15 million dollars to his (as yet non-existent) library fund and forced Stephanopoulos to apologize.

Day after day, Trump holds banquets at his Florida palace where wealthy, powerful people come from all over to pledge themselves to him. They clearly believe that it is not in their interest to oppose him in any way, instead they are giving him huge gifts and throwing themselves at his feet in what is surely a vain hope that he will return their loyalty. But they don’t really understand the dynamic. They are there to serve the king not the other way around. If it pleases him to dispense his favor then he may do it. But it’s all about him, not them.

The real question is why these vastly wealthy people are so eager to be subjects? You would think with all their money they could afford to have some pride and integrity. But maybe that’s really the one thing that money can’t buy.

Salon

Bullies and bluster and threats. Oh my!

From his first cabinet picks, Donald Trump demonstrated a bully’s intent both to stick a stubby finger in the world’s eye and a need to surround himself with a thick posse of wingmen to do his fighting for him. It’s working. He’s already succeeded in getting ABC News to capitulate to him for daring to use the R-word.

The most litigious president in U.S. history is just getting warmed up (New York Times):

The legal threats have arrived in various forms. One aired on CNN. Another came over the phone. More arrived in letters or emails.

All of them appeared aimed at intimidating news outlets and others who have criticized or questioned President-elect Donald J. Trump and his nominees to run the Pentagon and F.B.I.

The small flurry of threatened defamation lawsuits is the latest sign that the incoming Trump administration appears poised to do what it can to crack down on unfavorable media coverage. Before and after the election, Mr. Trump and his allies have discussed subpoenaing news organizations, prosecuting journalists and their sources, revoking networks’ broadcast licenses and eliminating funding for public radio and television.

Or maybe he’ll just order troops to shoot news executives in the legs. At the very least, Trump transition copiers must be eating up reams of paper printing NDAs with non-disparagement clauses. And that’s just for Trump’s “friends.”

A bad precedent

Litigation, or the threat of it, is among Trump’s weapons of choice. The $15 million ABC settlement sets a bad precedent and whets Trump’s appetite for more. The grifter will see it as another profit center. If he can’t void the First Amendment by royal fiat, he’ll threaten enough legal action that the fourth estate self-censors. Or else make money suing them.

Media lawyer Elizabeth McNamara expects more of the same in the current political environment:

“There’s been a pattern and practice for the past couple of years of using defamation litigation as a tactic to harass or test the boundary of case law,” said Ms. McNamara, who represented ABC News and Mr. Stephanopoulos but was speaking in general. (Her law firm, Davis Wright Tremaine, has also represented The New York Times.)

Over the past several weeks, lawyers for Mr. Trump and two of his most high-profile nominees — Pete Hegseth, the potential defense secretary, and Kash Patel, whom Mr. Trump has picked to run the F.B.I. — warned journalists and others of defamation lawsuits for what they had said or written.

Freedom was a theme (and a theme song) for the Harris campaign. But freedom of speech, like loyalty, only works one way in authoritarian cults.

And if lawsuits don’t work to “cancel” the libs, there are always flying MAGAs.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

A miracle, like his hair

From a guy named Anthony Citrano, September 7, 2020:

It’s almost impossible to believe he exists. It’s as if we took everything that was bad about America, scraped it up off the floor, wrapped it all up in an old hot dog skin, and then taught it to make noises with its face.

I mean in its own way it’s a miracle. Sure, it’s the most tragic kind of miracle and it may very well cause the death of the American experiment. But still, if you step back and behold it with cosmic indifference you cannot help but be almost awestruck.

It’s like the inverse feeling of standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. In both cases you’re struck numb. “How can this thing be‽ It is incalculable.” But rather than a soaring sense of awe, you feel an equally powerful well of dark gravity, your soul being eaten by despair.

We survived the four years since the thread above first hit the Net. We’re only a few days from the longest, darkest day of the year. Don’t despair. Things get brighter from there.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Don’t say they weren’t warned. Honolulu Civil Beat reports:

A former member of a secretive Hawaiʻi religious sect is warning members of Congress about the potential dangers of confirming Tulsi Gabbard as President-elect Donald Trump’s next director of national intelligence.

Anita van Duyn says she spent 15 years inside the Science of Identity Foundation, a fringe offshoot of Hare Krishna that was formed in the 1970s and has been described by defectors as a cult.

She has sent the letters only to Democrats so far, so I don’t know how effective that will be. And as the article acknowledges, Senators are loathe to criticize anyone for their religious beliefs(well, unless the person is a Democrat in which all bets are off.) Most DC types seem to think they should really go near this issue.

But Gabbard hasn’t been nominated to be the head of Housing and Urban Development she’s been tapped to be the head of all the Intelligence Agencies and she’s a lifelong member of a cult! And it’s a real one:

The van Duyn letters outline what she says are Butler’s long-standing political ambitions and the ways he groomed and supported his disciples, Gabbard included, in their pursuit of public office while promoting his own ideologies, which include a long history of espousing anti-gay rhetoric.[…]

Throughout her public life, Gabbard has been dogged by her ties to the Science of Identify Foundation and Butler, in particular, who has openly described Gabbard as a star pupil.

“Everybody is thinking her allegiance is to Trump, but in reality her allegiance was already given away to her guru,” van Duyn said in an interview with Civil Beat. “You can’t just go in and out of that. That’s a lifetime commitment.”

Gabbard has been vague about her own experiences in the group and in 2017 told a reporter for The New Yorker magazine she’d never heard Butler say anything mean or hateful about anyone. “I can speak to my own personal experience and, frankly, my gratitude to him, for the gift of this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me, and to so many people,” she said.

Both her former and current husbands are lifelong members of the cult and remain involved as do her parents. So is she:

Throughout her political career, Gabbard has maintained ties with Butler and his followers, whether hiring them to staff her congressional office or work on her 2020 presidential campaign. Her husband, Abraham Williams, has deep roots in the organization.

Science of Identity members have donated to her campaigns, sign-waved on her behalf and even staffed her most ambitious political endeavors, most prominently her run for president. In some cases, these followers were simply volunteering their time and efforts. In others, they were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Gabbard has always been very weird. And this is likely the source of most of it. She’s a member of a strange religious cult and she is following the agenda of its leader. That’s not an acceptable thing for someone going into the position for which she’s been nominated.

I realize that may seem odd considering the fact that Trump himself is the leader of a massive cult that has distinctly religious overtones. But at least we know what we’re dealing with with him and can fashion some kind of resistance. We don’t have a clue what Tulsi and her guru are all about and there is no way that she should be anywhere near a national security job.

Having said that, I suspect she’ll be confirmed. Trump wants her and the GOP wants what he wants. Let’s just hope that if there is indeed a “deep State” that they can exercise some of their apparent magical powers to thwart anything nefarious.

And the mainstream press could be paying more attention to this too. Whether they will, I don’t know. The big bosses seem intent upon gifting Dear Leader with whatever he wants these days so who knows?

Update — A little more info from Business Insider:

…In 1977, Butler splintered from the Hare Krishna movement to start the Science of Identity Foundation. He began to further deemphasize traditional Hindu texts and practices, and began to expound his own controversial views.

Butler taught that homosexuality is evil, using virulent homophobic rhetoric, and that public schools and the outside world were not to be trusted. Children of followers were homeschooled, and some — including Gabbard — were later sent to schools the SIF created in the Philippines.

The SIF amassed a tightly-knit community of around a thousand followers in Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia. Among them were Mike and Carol Gabbard, who would name one of their daughters after “tulasi,” the Sanskrit word for the holy-basil herb that appears in the Bhagavad Gita as an offering to the Lord.

Tulsi Gabbard and her siblings were raised as Hindus and vegetarians, she told the Indo American News before her first run for Congress. She grew up largely among fellow disciples, singing or chanting sacred Hindu songs on the beach, the New Yorker reported. 

Gabbard met both her first husband and her current spouse, freelance cinematographer Abraham Williams, in SIF, according to New York Magazine.

While Gabbard has described her experience growing up in the group as one that was seemingly positive, some other ex-members have described themselves as survivors of a cult.

“I was raised to believe Chris Butler was God’s voice on earth, and if you questioned him or offended him in any way, you were effectively offending God,” someone who identifies as a former member of the SIF wrote in a 2017 Medium post. “Questioning the leader was spiritual suicide, which was seen as worse than death.”

Another former member told New York Magazine that Butler was vulgar and vindictive, excoriating people for small slip-ups like driving poorly or failing to clean water cups properly.

Butler has denied these claims, and Gabbard told the New Yorker that these experiences didn’t chalk up to her own: “I’ve never heard him say anything hateful, or say anything mean about anybody,” Gabbard said. “I can speak to my own personal experience and, frankly, my gratitude to him, for the gift of this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me, and to so many people.”

Both Butler and Gabbard also said the foundation is a resource, not a religious organization, though Butler acknowledged that he does have “disciples” as “Jagad Guru,” or “teacher of the world,” the New Yorker reported.

Gabbard has often downplayed the influence of Butler, telling the New Yorker that she has “had many different spiritual teachers, and continue[s] to.” But she acknowledged that he had shaped her Hindu identity, referring to him as her “guru dev,” or spiritual guide. Gabbard also told the New York Times in 2019 that Butler and his work still guide her.

Come on. This can’t happen.

Once again, many, many thanks to those of you who’ve contributed this year. I am so grateful, There are so many options out there for people to subscribe to good writing and great analysis so it really warms my heart to see that some of you are choosing to support the work we do here. I’ll never have a paywall — I want people who have limited ability to pay to be able to read us too — and I don’t want to go back to featuring ads, so I really appreciate those of you who have the means and the desire to donate.

I don’t know how many of us have the stomach to be dissidents. I certainly don’t know what I will do if I’m forced to ask myself that question. But it’s probably something we should all think about at least a little bit ahead of time. With people like Tom Hohman saying they plan to arrest people who “harbor” undocumented workers and Trump and his henchmen threatening to jail everyone in sight, it’s not completely out of the question that we might be confronted with some unpleasant choices before too long.

The Atlantic features an interesting article this week on that question and I wanted to offer a gift link for you. Here’s a short excerpt:

In the 1970s, the writer Andrei Amalrik characterized the secret power of his fellow dissidents in the Soviet Union: “They did something simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”

Recent examples of people acting out of this same humble presumption—and being slapped down for it—are abundant. In just the past few weeks, a 75-year-old Algerian novelist was detained for expressing opinions that were thought to be “endangering the nation”; a Thai human-rights lawyer had two years added to his existing 14-year prison term for writing a letter to the king that apparently violated the country’s “royal defamation law”; the police in Belarus, ahead of the presidential election in January, held 100 relatives of political prisoners out of fear that they might speak. And we haven’t even gotten to Iran, Russia, or North Korea.

These contemporary dissidents share a mindset, what Václav Havel once called an “existential attitude.” They did not wake up one day and decide to take on the regimes of their countries. They just allowed themselves to be guided by their own individuality—an Iranian woman who decides to no longer wear a hijab, a Uyghur teacher who tries to share his people’s history—and collided with societies that demanded conformity and obedience. Dissidents are born out of this choice: either assert their authentic selves or accept the authoritarian’s mafioso bargain, safety and protection in exchange for keeping one’s head down. Those rare few who just can’t make that bargain—they transform into dissidents.

The equation is simple: The more authoritarianism in the world, the more dissidents. And we are undeniably in an authoritarian moment. According to a report last year by the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, when it comes to global freedom, we have returned to a level last seen in 1986. About 5.7 billion people—72 percent of the world’s population—now live under authoritarian rule. Even the United States, vaunted beacon of democracy, is about to inaugurate a president who openly boasts of wanting to be a “dictator on day one,” who regularly threatens to jail his opponents and sic the military on the “enemy within,” and who jokes about his election being the country’s last.

You don’t need to believe that Donald Trump is planning Gulags to see why those who resisted the repressive regimes of the 20th century, as well as those who fight all over the world today, might be worth paying attention to. When Havel talked about an existential attitude, he was describing a fervent sense that certain fundamental principles matter, and that even if a society begins to degrade and devalue those ideals, abandoning them, for these people, is not an option. Many Americans understand today what political exhaustion and complacency look and feel like. But the dissident is the one who hopes against hope.

I’m certainly not convinced that we’re there but I do see the possibility. And it’s not the first time. I’ve written a lot about the parallels between this time and the red scares, particularly in the 1950s, and even more recently in the wake of 9/11. I’m sure I don’t have to even mention the century of Jim Crow as an example of repressive government. But there is something different now in that the democracy itself is under threat in a way that I don’t think we’ve experienced. The authoritarians are turning on the rule of law in a much more explicit way.

I think there will be plenty of people who come into the crosshairs of this new regime. If Trump has his way it will be in the millions as they launch their raids on immigrant communities. And it might not stop there. Once they get a taste for it, these types tend to want to keep going. So we’ll see. But it pays to stay alert, think things through and be prepared for anything.

We’ll try to keep you informed as best we can about the various goings on over the next few years. Obviously, we can’t catch everything but we’ll do our best to synthesize the news in ways that are useful to you. And if we can keep a little bit of humor (gallows?) we’ll do that too. So I hope you’ll continue to stop by, even if you are generally avoiding the Great Cacophony in service of your sanity. We’ll do our best to keep it real.

If you would like to put a little something in the old Hullabaloo stocking to help us keep it going, I’d be so grateful. We’re all in this together.

cheers,

digby