Damn already???
Damn already???
As someone whose been watching this man closely for nearly a decade, “a lot of people are saying” is classic trumpspeak for “this is what I think, but I need to make up imaginary people to support this before I can tenably do so”.
I would also contend that a series of amendments is the only path forward if we wish to preserve American democracy in the long term.
This is certainly a test run for military/ICE deployment in major cities, but what evidence is there that it prefigured paramilitary deployment? This is not to say that the latter is not possible, as it very much is, but it is not clear how this is a direct implication.
Mozart’s 25th Piano Concerto is giving me chills… Sertraline is a hell of a drug!
The product is citizenship and the price is whiteness, whatever that may consist of. This word salad is merely a euphemism to avoid the so-called “woke mob” and cure his supporters of the slightest voice in their head telling them that maybe they are a white supremacist.
I think we just send everyone at @saturdaynightlive.bsky.social home now.
Honestly, it baffles me that these high profile democratic leaders even need the assistance of pundits to read the moment. Perhaps I was naive to believe she (or any similar figure for that matter) had any sense of where all of this is going… or maybe she does and that’s why she’s posturing as such.
THIS. I get that the comical mistakes of the earlier models and the industry’s indelible ties with the emergent techno-fascist merit a critical eye here, but most Bluesky academics been entirely incapable of nuance on this issue—many won’t even acknowledge the potential for socioeconomic disruption…
Read the room buddy… these are INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS who are understandably not going to risk their safety for this country. If they choose to do so, that’s certainly commendable, but there is no need to shame those who are most vulnerable right now.
The irony…
Imagine being a grown man in the 21st century and being confident that an evil demon exists and influences American politics 🤡
Send Guillermo my regards!
History will not be kind to Karoline Leavitt
Nuremberg 2.0 will not be kind to KKKaroline Leavitt.
I fear that we’re in for another round of commenters saying that you’re overreacting/fear mongering, and then we’ll return to this post in two-ish months when this exact scenario plays out…
These people are the American Taliban, full stop.
As an ardent atheist, this seams like an absurd thing post with confidence? Help me understand where you’re coming from…
I feel like much of the punditry class is almost like an LLM—just completely insulated from empirical/normative reality. “Ideas” like this are coherent within the context of the think piece sphere, but that means jack when the sphere is a sophistic pseudo-discourse that endlessly regurgitates slop.
I feel like much of the punditry class is almost like an LLM—just completely insulated from empirical/normative reality. “Ideas” like this are coherent within the context of the think piece sphere, but that means jack when the sphere is a sophistic pseudo-discourse that endlessly regurgitates slop.
That’s why things are moving so fast. They know their window of having any semblance of legitimacy is actively closing. They are going all in because it’s either complete institutional usurpation or insurmountable public resistance.
Or the first to AGI competition ends up being a zero-sum game when the institutional hegemony of the modern nation-state collapses upon the attainment of general intelligence. Not necessarily a likely outcome, but far from dismissible.
He knows David Graeber was a leftist-anarchist, right?
I think you’ve entirely missed his point. Chris very well understands the calculated forces at play—his reference to mental illness is merely to put things in perspective, that such a claim would be dismissed as clinical insanity by anyone just six weeks ago.
So the idea is force Canada’s hand with retaliatory tariffs, shock Americans with a major recession, flood the right-wing media apparatus with disinformation in in order to convince the base that Canada is responsible, then ultimately use the ensuing anger as justification for annexation?
Define crazily worse…
The arc of history is too damn long.
"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty." - Hannah Arendt
Mom, come pick me up, they're coming up with the silliest possible version of the Great Man Theory of History
less so the case, but this is not to say that there are not millions of Americans who still think this way but merely police their language (or rationalize their beliefs within the framework of conventional morality). In my view, the only intellectual trait that ought to be called “retarded”…
The word “retarded”—as with all other clinical terms used to describe neurodivergent people and people with intellectual disabilities throughout history—connotes an indisputably normative claim: that cognitive ability is proportionate one’s to worth/value as a human being. Today, this is far…
“The president alludes to monarchical sympathies”
A question for scholars at the intersection of history and international politics: I can’t help but feel like this is one of those “weeks where decades happen” and that the stage is being set for a global conflict. Am I overreacting/falling victim to sensationalism, or is this really happening?
Fuckmuppet 😭
the “make america healthy again” agenda appears to be an elaborate op conjured up by sentient strains of listeria and salmonella www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/u...
Chat are we cooked?
When they instrumentalized idiocy to gain power, surely they didn’t imagine that they would have to propitiate said idiots by giving them real power. What a timeline…
The United States is joining an international fascist network before our very eyes.
It’s all just self adulation that has the dual motive (at least to his handlers) of desensitizing Americans to authoritarian rhetoric.
Congratulations on becoming leader of the illiberal left 😭 by definition that would mean that you’re anticapitalist, which he surely understands is not the case. Sounds to me he was trying to use a buzzword he doesn’t understand.
taking black kids away from their parents and putting them on farms seems really familiar to me! what could it be?
I was merely pointing out that the tweet is fabricated, there is no evidence that it was actually posted. I’m all for calling Trump out, but creating fake posts only dilutes those efforts
Let’s not go around posting misinformation
A star burns the brightest rIght before it dies.
The postwar order that outlasted the arms race, half a century of bipolarity, and another half century of untested hegemony in the face of global terrorism, is collapsing right in front of our eyes. It would be an understatement to say that I am struggling to process this.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. Given the comical mistakes of early models and the technology’s indelible association with the emergent techno-fascist class, academics have generally been dismissive about the near term socioeconomic disruption of AI. This needs to change, and fast.
So you'd rather acquiesce to living under de facto martial law? Give me a break. Force his hand, make him declare it, and let him and his goons suffer the political consequences of doing so.
I need someone to write a comprehensive psychoanalytic piece on the roots of “owning the libs”—it seriously baffles me that this playground bully impulse is so contagious and effective as a political exploit.
Our military will soon be asked to make a very stark choice. There will be mass unrest in this country as these disastrous changes take effect. Trump will invoke the insurrection act at some point. You will be ordered to inflict violence on your fellow citizens. Think through this before it happens.
seems like it is a big deal that the unifying ideology of the doge team is neo nazism
If the US blocks access to HRT, ADHD drugs, and SSRIs, I cannot begin to describe to you how much all of the tech sector will screech to a halt. The internet is built and maintained by trans people, people with chronic depression, and the neurodivergent. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
History buffs will know that every authoritarian leader eventually converges on some version of: "I *am* the state. I can not break the law, I am the law, the law is instantiated in me." Our march to authoritarianism so far has been excruciatingly by-the-book. Hitting every beat. No surprises.
Two possible reactions: 1) Continue on the trajectory that got us here in the first place by discarding this as “just Trump being Trump” 2) Grapple in earnest with the fact that Trump asserts dictatorial power as the providential leader tasked with saving the nation. This is acutely dangerous.
open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p... Tim’s latest substack is well worth a read—it puts the last few days of foreign affairs into historical perspective.
Vance refuses to meet the German chancellor Scholz, but meets with the head of the AfD and CDU. Vance claims that German parties need to work with the fascists and claims democracy in Europe is declining, threatened by enemies from within. The international Right is forming, out in the open.
JD Vance is one scary motherfucker. A Yale educated lawyer, it’s highly likely he went from dispirited liberal to nihilistic fascist upon realizing that we are accelerating into the abyss. He went from warning that Trump was America’s Hitler to aspiring that role for himself in less than a decade…
The messiah complex that this clown has is utterly terrifying. The very phrase “undermining civilization” directly implies that civilization DEPENDS on his sole intervention to survive. He genuinely believes that the implementation of his will is the only thing preventing civilization from collapse.
And that's how JD Vance discovered that the Munich Security Conference folks don't enjoy amoral condescending pricks talking at them like they're stupid children.
If this is, in fact, the “direct and unambiguous” stance of the current administration, then the prospects for NATO (and the contingent postwar order) are incredibly bleak.
The sun is (rapidly) setting on the republic, and few outside of academia seem to really get it.
And so it begins…
every single republican in office is a fucking oathbreaker who is selling out the constitution and our democratic birthright
It’s either going to indelibly shape the United States of the 21st century and be propagandized as an irrefutable triumph over “tyranny”, or it will be etched in the history books of whatever polity succeeds our Republic. I truly hope I’m wrong, but it’s difficult to see any alternatives right now.
New cover of TIME muskwatch.com/subscribe
It’s almost like Sinclair Lewis warned us about this or something…
Please send this to EVERYONE you know. Tim is one of worlds leading contemporary scholars of the history of fascism. His concise piece conveys the nature and gravity of Musk’s actions in a manner accessible to all.
There’s a non-zero chance that this fucking meme goes down as one of history’s most infamous symbol, and I can’t even begin to articulate how terrified that makes me…
Let me revise that for him: “A lot of Americans don’t view Trump as an existential threat—in part, because they’re historically illiterate and think American exceptionalism is an ontological truth that confers the unconditional immunity of the republic.”
Who says you can’t be both?
they do not believe that anyone who isn't them has a mind or agency part ∞
This Elon shit is going to be in the history books. With any luck, they will be our own…
Every time I see a reputable source use the term doge I physically cringe.
Wishing I went to Wesleyan right now…
Trump and his party have mastered the art of the guilt-absolving euphemism. All it takes is a little clever word play to make America white, male, and ableist again without conferring any of those pejorative connotations. The guise of meritocracy insulates them from any critical self reflection.
Why did I read this as dictatorship 😭
this is the February 2020 of fascism
It’s almost like it was never about the cost of living for most of his voters…
It bothers me that analysis and contextualization register as apologetics to so many online denizens. We need to just cut straight to the appropriate denunciation, which is immediately knowable, and then the political work is done.
This pretty much sums up my disposition as of late…
it is so important to remember that IN THE MOMENT there was no one who thought jan. 6 was some innocent protest gone awry. everyone recognized it for what it was.
as Deleuze and Guattari once wrote, a propos of capitalism: "No one has ever died of contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way."
Agreed, and it has taken a near-complete subversion of the mass media model that was still nascent during FDR’s term for capital to con working people into believing that a social safety net is actually against their interests. Also, very rich of Yarvin to use the word monarchist…
This seems like a red alarm for fascism if there ever was one. There’s no reason this should have been settle beyond a genuine fear of retribution.
I agree, but I do think there is one nuance that underlies the “audiobooks don’t count” crowd. Reading—both visually and tactically via braille—is an active process, while listening is passive. There’s just something about the cognitive effort of literal reading that seems to benefit comprehension.
She has that unmistakable look of disappointment
Didn’t @timothysnyder.bsky.social famously warn about obeying in advance? President-elect immunity may not exist, but their fear of retaliation certainly does…
As an undergrad, I’ve always been staunchly against using AI for writing. So much of the value in writing is wrestling with thoughts and weighing ideas—what ends up on paper is merely a physical manifestation of your intellectual growth. The PROCESS is essential, and this is lost entirely with AI.
We’ve always been boiling… it’s only now in our age of social media—where engagement-based algorithms give the village idiots a platform—that we are indeed cooked. Burnt, even.
Someone really needs to do a Baudrillardian analysis of the concurrent rise of MAGA and algorithmic short-form media. We’ve already seen the total fragmentation of social reality, but if Trump’s broligarch’s have their way with AI, they’ll use it to obfuscate informed online discourse into oblivion.
Agreed, yet the pejoration and obfuscation of the word ‘woke’ has made such attitudes permissible again. The flagrant white supremacy of these people and their supporters is disguised (to themselves and others) as a rational response to ‘wokeism’—the term’s ambiguity deflecting any accusations.