Trans athlete Soren Stark-Chessa finished first in the 1600-meter race at a recent track meet in Maine. Republican state representative Laurel Libby complained about Stark-Chessa’s win on a Fox News appearance, saying that trans athletes are “pushing many, many of our young women out of the way in their ascent to the podium”.
Freshman Anelise Feldman finished second to Stark-Chessa in that race and wrote a letter to the newspaper (archive) calling Libby a bully and asserting that she didn’t feel pushed out of first place. Here’s her letter:
Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, recently used my second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run, and that of my teammate in the 800-meter run, to malign Soren Stark-Chessa, the trans-identified athlete who finished first.
One of the reasons I chose to run cross-country and track is the community: Teammates cheering each other on, athletes from different schools coming together, and the fact that personal improvement is valued as much as, if not more than, the place we finish.
Last Friday, I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards. I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points.
We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school. Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are.
At the end of March, I posted some news about three prominent scholars of fascism and authoritarianism who were leaving the United States to live and work in Canada. In this video for the NY Times, We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S., Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley explain their reasons for going. Here’s some of what they had to say:
I’m leaving to the University of Toronto because I want to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words.
The lesson of 1933 is you get out sooner rather than later.
My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, “We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.” And I thought my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship. Our ship can’t sink. And what you know is a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.
I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency.
Toni Morrison warned us: “The descent into a final solution is not a jump. It’s one step. And then another. And then another.” We are seeing those steps accelerated right now.
The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.
This technique is as old as the hills; it was practiced in almost every Greek city, and the moderns have only enlarged its scale.
At a recent Princeton Public Schools’ Board of Education meeting, Teddy, a fourth-grader from one of the district’s schools, got up and delivered a speech about the many reasons that PPS should teach about autism and other disabilities, including “so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future”. Here are Teddy’s full remarks:
Recently, the U.S. Secretary of Health, RFK Jr, made false comments about autism like people with autism are broken, that autism is caused by vaccines, and that people with autism will never have jobs or families. But that’s not true. I have autism and I’m not broken, and I hope that nobody in Princeton Public Schools believes RFK Jr’s lies.
Autism and all disabilities should be taught in the Princeton Public Schools curriculum at all grade levels because it will raise awareness, increase acceptance, and improve the quality of life for kids with disabilities.
But first, here is a quote from a Changing Perspectives article called Disability Inclusion in Education: “A truly inclusive environment does not value one marginalized group over another; instead, it recognizes the unique backgrounds of all members of the community, including but not limited to cultural heritage, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender, disability, or any other differences.”
Princeton Public Schools already recognizes Autism Awareness Month, but not much. There are posters in the cafeteria that say to be kind and inclusive. Students wear blue on April 2nd. But we are never taught about the spectrum of autism. Kids need to be taught more about the different kinds of autism, that autism is a natural variation in the genes that you are born with, not caused by vaccines, and about successful people with autism. The lessons should also be extended to other disabilities like ADHD, cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, dyslexia, apraxia, and more.
This is important because it will teach kids how to accept people with disabilities. Accepting someone means really understanding someone for who they are and not minding their differences. I want everyone to know that people with autism and other disabilities are not tragedies, but just different, like all people. If everyone understood more about autistic people, and about people with other disabilities, they would know more about how to treat them, what their lives are like, and that they don’t need to be fixed or cured. This will help kids with disabilities have a better life.
When people are aware of disabilities and are accepting them, they will have friends and less bullying. Also, the teachers might be more aware because they learned about the disabilities also. Kids and teachers should know more about disabilities so they do not believe RFK Jr is right about autism, and they choose to treat them in a nice way that is good for the kid. By knowing more about it, kids and teachers will be nicer to the kids with disabilities.
This is important to me and Princeton Public Schools because I have a disability, and I noticed that disabilities are not being taught, only a few people mentioning autism. When teaching about culture, we teach many different cultures to accept them better — because that’s what disabilities are like, a culture, a culture of differences. Princeton Public Schools must add this to the curriculum of all grades and students, so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future.
I want to end with the district mission statement: “Our mission is to prepare all of our students to lead lives of joy and purpose as knowledgeable, creative, and compassionate citizens of a global society.” Adding disabilities to kids’ education will make them knowledgeable and compassionate, and help kids with disabilities to lead lives of joy and purpose.
Come on, challenging the district to uphold their own mission statement? That’s an S-tier move right there.
In this video, 98-year-old British WWII veteran Ken Turner demolishes a Tesla with a Sherman tank. Here’s what Turner had to say before getting down to business:
I’m old enough to have seen fascism the first time around; now it’s coming back. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is using his immense power to support the far-right in Europe, and his money comes from Tesla cars. Well, I’ve got this message for Mr Musk. We’ve crushed fascism before and we’ll crush it again.
Students and faculty from Columbia University recently held a “25-hour speak-out” in support of academic freedom. Some of the remarks made during the speak-out are published at Rise Up, Columbia: part 1, part 2.
Turkuler Isiksel, political science professor:
Like other scholars in my discipline, political science, I think a lot about how in recent decades, elections have come to be used for authoritarian ends.
Many countries that hold regular elections, where leaders come to power through a competitive struggle for the people’s vote, are nevertheless authoritarian. But how can that be? Aren’t elections the same thing as democracy?
Well, elections in authoritarian regimes are a kind of window-dressing: authoritarian incumbents win elections because they ensure that they cannot lose: by restricting media freedom, manipulating information, intimidating civil society leaders, jailing dissidents, banning opposition parties, outlawing rallies and demonstrations. Once in power, they typically try to conquer 5 key social institutions:
- The press
- The bureaucracy
- The military
- The judiciary
- Universities
Why these institutions?
First, because they answer to a different authority than whoever happens to be in political power. Their activities are guided not by whoever happens to be in power, but by its own professional ethic.
- journalism is guided by a commitment to informing the public,
- the bureaucracy is guided by an ethic of professionalism and public service,
- the military is guided by respect for the chain of command and political neutrality,
- the judiciary is guided by the ethic of impartially applying the law, and
- universities like ours are guided by the search for truth.
In scholarly inquiry, disciplinary standards have priority over other metrics (profits, power, glory, public opinion). Political non-interference is a precondition for our scholarly and teaching mission.
In short, the third law of thermodynamics does not change because the commander-in-chief doesn’t like it. So these institutions present an obstacle to political and social control.
James Schamus, film & media studies professor:
I’ve been asked to speak briefly today as part of a specifically Jewish cohort of Columbia faculty. And the request as always surfaces in me two contradictory immediate reactions. The first reaction is simple: Who cares what Jews think? A genocide is a genocide is a genocide; ethno-state fascism is ethno-state fascism. The false and dangerous conflation of criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism as a cover for Israel’s crimes and the fascist repression of our universities here in the states is obvious now to all: Jews have no privileged perspective from which to add to those obvious facts.
My second reaction is also simple: This genocide in Gaza is being enacted in my name, supposedly on my behalf; the destruction of American universities is being enacted in my name, supposedly on my behalf. So I am indeed called to speak out, to fight back, and to work to create alternative forms of community and identity to counter the false claim that Israel’s depredations and Trump’s destruction of my university are somehow in my interest.
Silenced Science Stories is a collaboration between scientists and artists to tell the stories of scientific experts who have been affected by the Trump regime’s purge of their ranks.
We are organizing an illustrated series of portraits and stories of scientific experts whose work is being affected by federal budget cuts and mass firings.
We have over 30 science artists who are volunteering to create these features to communicate the careers and the important scientific research of federally employed and funded scientists.
If you’d like to get involved, they are looking for both artists and scientists with stories to tell. You can read more about the project in Physics Today. (via jonathan hoefler)
If you have a public platform & spent years calming everyone down, telling us Trump was not a danger, was not racist, & arguing that the best way to deal w/Trump was to laugh at him, berated ppl who used the word fascist, insisted that the two parties are the same, admit YOU WERE WRONG.
We need to fight the [threat] arm-in-arm. But we need leadership w/discernment. If you misdiagnosed this threat, you should not take a front seat in analyzing the current moment or providing the strategy for how we confront what we are facing w/o admitting how badly you misjudged the threat. And LISTEN.
100%. I’m glad more and more people are waking up to the reality of Trump, but if the danger wasn’t plain to you until now, you should definitely let others lead the way from here — listen more, talk less. And for the rest of us, we should be more choosy in deciding who to listen to. For me, the “ope, maybe this is fascism after all” latecomers, particularly the “rational” “centrists” insistent on both-sidesing this whole situation since 2016, are not getting a lot of my attention these days.
On Friday, Heather Cox Richardson spoke at an event marking the 250th anniversary of the lighting of the lanterns at Boston’s Old North Church. The lantern lighting — “one if by land, two if by seas” — was part of years-long effort by some American colonists to resist what they thought of as unjust behavior by a tyrant king, and led to the start of the Revolutionary War. Richardson’s speech is well worth reading.
It was hard for people to fathom that the country had come to such division. Only a dozen years before, at the end of the French and Indian War, Bostonians looked forward to a happy future in the British empire. British authorities had spent time and money protecting the colonies, and colonists saw themselves as valued members of the empire. They expected to prosper as they moved to the rich lands on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains and their ships plied the oceans to expand the colonies’ trade with other countries.
That euphoria faded fast.
Almost as soon as the French and Indian War was over, to prevent colonists from stirring up another expensive struggle with Indigenous Americans, King George III prohibited the colonists from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. Then, to pay for the war just past, the king’s ministers pushed through Parliament a number of revenue laws.
In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, requiring the payment of a tax on all printed material—from newspapers and legal documents to playing cards. It would hit virtually everyone in the North American colonies. Knowing that local juries would acquit their fellow colonists who violated the revenue acts, Parliament took away the right to civil trials and declared that suspects would be tried before admiralty courts overseen by British military officers. Then Parliament required colonials to pay the expenses for the room and board of British troops who would be stationed in the colonies, a law known as the Quartering Act.
But what Parliament saw as a way to raise money to pay for an expensive war—one that had benefited the colonists, after all—colonial leaders saw as an abuse of power. The British government had regulated trade in the empire for more than a century. But now, for the first time, the British government had placed a direct tax on the colonists without their consent. Then it had taken away the right to a trial by jury, and now it was forcing colonists to pay for a military to police them.
You can also watch Richardson give her speech at the Old North Church (she begins at the ~1:18:30 mark):
You can also listen to her read it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. (thx, meg)
For the past 11 years, the Breakthrough Prize awards have “celebrated outstanding scientific achievements, honoring scientists driving remarkable discoveries in gene editing, human diseases, the search for the fundamental laws of the Universe and pure mathematics”. At this year’s awards, Edward Norton & Seth Rogen presented a prize in fundamental physics and Rogen took the opportunity to remind the audience — including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman — that the Trump regime is actively destroying the ability for people to pursue science in America.
And it’s amazing that others [who have been] in this room underwrote electing a man who, in the last week, single-handedly destroyed all of American science. It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320 million and RFK Jr, very fast.
Rogen’s remarks were heard during the live presentation but have been scrubbed from the video on YouTube. I haven’t seen the uncensored video anywhere…drop me a line if you run across it?
The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.
It is terrifying in its wickedness, yes. But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line.
Our opponents know full well that we are entering an age of emergency, but have responded by embracing lethal yet self-serving delusions. Having bought into various apartheid fantasies of bunkered safety, they are choosing to let the Earth burn. Our task is to build a wide and deep movement, as spiritual as it is political, strong enough to stop these unhinged traitors. A movement rooted in a steadfast commitment to one another, across our many differences and divides, and to this miraculous, singular planet.
And (emphasis mine):
If policing the boundaries of the bunkered nation is end times fascism’s job one, equally important is job two: for the US government to lay claim to whatever resources its protected citizens might need to get through the tough times ahead. Maybe it’s Panama’s canal. Or Greenland’s fast-melting shipping routes. Or Ukraine’s critical minerals. Or Canada’s fresh water. We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state. Gone are the old colonial fig leaves of spreading democracy or God’s word – when Trump covetously scans the globe, he is stockpiling for civilizational collapse.
But:
In this moment, when end times fascism is waging war on every front, new alliances are essential. But instead of asking: “Do we all share the same worldview?” Adrienne urges us to ask: “Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.”
Harvard President Alan Garber, in a letter to the Harvard community Monday, said the demands violated the university’s First Amendment rights and “exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI,” which prohibits discrimination against students based on their race, color or national origin.
“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote, adding that the university had taken extensive reforms to address antisemitism.
“These ends will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate,” he wrote. “The work of addressing our shortcomings, fulfilling our commitments, and embodying our values is ours to define and undertake as a community.”
I recently attended a virtual talk and Q&A with Timothy Snyder and when he was asked about Columbia and other schools capitulating to Trump’s demands and what needs to happen in order to stop it, he replied something along the lines of: “Some big school is gonna have to stick their neck out and take the hit. Say ‘no’ unequivocally to Trump and get their funding pulled. Lead by example and others will follow. Solidarity is the only way out of this.” Good on Harvard1 for helping to lead the way on this…hopefully more schools will find their backbone after this.
But bad on Harvard for the Claudine Gay fiasco. And they are hardly the only ones pushing back on Trump, but they are one of the 5 or 6 schools in the nation that people pay close attention to.↩
Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.
They are 100% going to try to do this with citizens:
Make no mistake: as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson recently warned, if the administration can take noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country, and then claim it is helpless to correct the error either because the person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing to citizens.
Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating is still well above 40% (and is even higher if you don’t factor in the economy/tariffs). 🤷♂️
So from my uniquely weird perspective after living in the UK through Brexit, being in India during Modi’s demonetization, and living in Brazil when the real tanked during the Bolsonaro administration, I can confidently say that Americans do not and can not understand how bad this is going to be.
To sort of broadly describe what is about to happen if the Trump admin doesn’t reverse course, we are quickly racing towards a world where not only does our money just not work correctly anymore day to day, but the background radiation of a crumbling economy will become impossible to ignore.
After the Brexit referendum, everything in London just got slightly worse. A year or two in, you could feel it. But that’s because it took five years for the country to actually leave the EU. We’re speedrunning that. In Brazil, prices would change overnight, stores just wouldn’t have stuff.
The broad selloff in U.S. stocks and bonds, and the continuing decline in the dollar, represents a “simultaneous collapse in the price of all U.S. assets,” analysts at Deutsche Bank said Wednesday. They warned that “unchartered territory” lies ahead.
- Markets are dedollarizing, they said, citing the lack of evidence that investors are hoarding dollar liquidity— a dynamic that in previous market routs fueled Treasury and U.S. dollar rallies but this time is leading to declines in the prices of both.
- The administration is encouraging the Treasury selloff, they said, in a bid to bring down U.S. asset valuations—a decision they said now is exposing the fact that “reducing bilateral trade imbalances is functionally equivalent to lowering demand for U.S. assets as well.”
- A financial war with China could lie ahead, they conclude, contending that “there is little room now left for an escalation on the trade front” and that “there can be no winner to such a war.”
I’ve been saying since his election that Trump was going to drive the economy into the ditch. This is more like driving it off a cliff.
This is a dire moment in the US. It’s a moment where there’s an opportunity for people with a lot of money to rip apart all of the guidelines enacted by the Roosevelt administration, way back in the day, to guard against the brutality of unfettered capitalism. Capitalists like to have all the power that they want, whenever they want it. They’re not much interested in democracy either, it turns out. Nor, apparently, the rule of law. The government is not the solution — it’s the problem. And now a vengeful president who just wanted a get-out-of-jail-free card is going to punish his enemies and show us all how to destroy the American administrative state by using the big stick of Elon Musk’s chequebook.
Here are a few of the films and their trailers — you can check out the article for the rest.
I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2016):
Election (Alexander Payne, 1999):
White Noise (Daniel Lombroso, 2020) {Note: this is not the DeLillo adaptation}:
American Factory (Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, 2019):
Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom — which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025 — puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.
Oh, and the corruption:
The Hungarian businessman and a Hungarian economist I spoke with — both of whom insisted on anonymity, for fear of retaliation — had separately calculated that NERistan amounts to about 20 percent of the Hungarian economy. That means, as the economist explained to me, that 20 percent of Hungary’s companies operate “not on market principles, not on merit-based principles, but basically on loyalty.” These companies don’t have normal hiring practices or use real business models, because they are designed not for efficiency and profit but for kleptocracy—passing money from the state to their owners.
On Saturday, millions of Americans flooded the streets of cities, small towns, and every other sized municipality in the nation to protest the illegal and damaging actions of the Trump regime. These photos published by a number of media outlets show the scale, enthusiasm, and creativity of these peaceful protests, in the US and around the world.
This is a nationwide mobilization to stop the most brazen power grab in modern history. Trump, Musk, and their billionaire cronies are orchestrating an all-out assault on our government, our economy, and our basic rights — enabled by Congress every step of the way.
They want to strip America for parts — shuttering Social Security offices, firing essential workers, eliminating consumer protections, and gutting Medicaid — all to bankroll their billionaire tax scam. They’re handing over our tax dollars, our public services, and our democracy to the ultra-rich.
If we don’t fight now, there won’t be anything left to save.
Number two: defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of our institutions unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about — a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union — and take its side.
Snyder himself made a series of 20 videos a few years ago in which he reads each lesson and then provides more context on what it means. Here’s the first episode on anticipatory obedience (he starts reading after a short intro, at about the 2:40 mark):
Lesson number one is: do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
So, this is the first lesson because it’s about the basic choice we make when we confront difficulty. It’s about the choice of all choices: are we going to go with the new flow or are we going to stand — if only a little bit, only hesitantly — as long as we can against the current?
I think the most likely scenario is a kind of careening between pretty dysfunctional democracy and an unconsolidated authoritarianism. A kind of back and forth in which the relative good guys win once in a while, they don’t perform well, they don’t last long and the bad guys win power occasionally and also don’t perform well and don’t last long.
But also (emphasis mine):
I think it’s possible the flurry of abuses and attacks, first of all, and secondly, the incredibly weak response by civil society, suggests that the Trump administration can get away with much more than I think almost any of us anticipated. I would have thought it highly unlikely that the Trump administration could really seriously tilt the playing field in terms of media access and resource access, given the wealth and the diversity of the private sector in this country. A Hungary-like tilting of the playing field seemed really unlikely. Now, I think it’s possible.
A little over two months after Trump returned to power, it seems undeniable that even critical observers underestimated the speed and scope of the Trumpist assault and overestimated democratic resilience in both the political system as well as civil society. In mere weeks, Trumpists have managed to push America into that space somewhere between (no longer) democracy and full-scale autocracy. That means we must recalibrate our expectations. “They are not going to go *that* far” has been proved wrong over and over again. The idea that “they won’t be able to do this” seems similarly unfounded. Let’s finally discard whatever notion of “it cannot happen here” that is still floating around.
God, the “it cannot happen here” argument was so stupid even back in 2016 when people were debating whether Trump was a fascist. If nothing else, it was clarifying to be able to stick anyone who was chastising others for worrying too much into the “I’m highly skeptical of anything you write now” box.
I have one kid entering college this fall and one a few years away, so I’ve been thinking (with fury and sadness) about the effect that Trump’s authoritarian regime is having on American colleges and universities. They’re pulling funding from schools; schools are cancelling programs, freezing hiring, and cutting back on admissions; and NIH and NSF funding is being curtailed and withdrawn. College students are being snatched off the streets by ICE & DHS and schools either can’t or won’t do anything to stop it. If these actions persist, US colleges & universities could look quite different in a year or two.
In a piece called The End of College Life, Ian Bogost calls the potential effect of these changes a “calamity” and says “the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends”.
Any one of the Trump administration’s attacks on research universities, let alone all of them together, could upend the college experience for millions of Americans. What’s at stake is far from trivial: Forget the frisbees on the quad; think of what it means to go to college in this country. Think of the middle-class ideal that has persisted for most of a century: earning a degree and starting a career, yes, but also moving away from home, testing limits, joining new communities, becoming an adult.
This might all be changing for fancy private schools and giant public universities alike. If you, or your son, or your daughter, are in college now, or are planning to enroll in the years ahead, you should be worried.
I am curious to hear from parents of high school and college students, from college faculty & administrators, and from students themselves: how have the actions of the Trump regime changed your thinking about college? What plans are you making or changing? Let me know in the comments. (If you don’t have a membership but would like to leave a comment, just email me your thoughts and I’ll post it for you.)
Lies can serve a number of functions. People lie to deflect, to avoid embarrassment or evade punishment by creating doubt, to escape confrontation or lighten the blow, to make themselves appear better, to get others to do or give something, and even to entertain.
However unskilled a person may be at lying, they usually hope that the lie will be convincing. Executives want shareholders to think that they have devised a foolproof path to profits. Defendants want juries to believe that there is a chance that someone else committed the crime.
People in relationships want their partners to think that they have never even considered cheating. Guests want the host to think that they like their fish overcooked. These lies can be annoying or amusing, but they are surmountable. They collapse in the face of facts.
The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it while denying that he took it. There is no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show I can say what I want, when I want to.
The power lie conjures a different reality that demands that you choose between your experience and the bully’s demands. Are you going to insist that you’re wet from the rain or give in and say that the sun is shining?
I believe the bully lie fits into the same general category as fascists seeing hypocrisy as a virtue — it only really makes sense when you think about it in terms of domination or power. (thx, caroline)
It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.
It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination.
It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect.
It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point.
For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue — the greatest.
Yeah, this is basically why I don’t waste time anymore railing against the many hypocrisies of conservatives — they’re not gotchas that you’re catching them in, they’re part of the domination.
There’s a letter at the end of this post that’s very much worth the read, but I have to explain some context first because otherwise it won’t make any sense. So:
The Trump regime has been targeting law firms “whose lawyers have provided legal work that Trump disagrees with” with executive orders that take away their security clearances and terminate their federal contracts. Yesterday, Trump rescinded his order against the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in exchange for a bribe in the form of the firm providing “$40m in free legal services to support his administration’s goals”. The settlement also includes an apparent agreement by Paul Weiss “to disavow the use of diversity, equity and inclusion considerations in its hiring and promotion decisions”.
On March 11, 2025, we filed a legal action in response to a recent Executive Order that unlawfully targets Perkins Coie. The order violates core constitutional rights, including the rights to free speech and due process. At the heart of the order is an unlawful attack on the freedom of all Americans to select counsel of their choice without fear of retribution or punishment from the government. We were compelled to take this action to protect our firm and our clients.
In response to the Paul Weiss settlement news, Rachel Cohen, an associate at another law firm, Skadden Arps, sent a company-wide email to her colleagues last night with her “conditional” resignation notice, outlining her frustration with her firm’s unwillingness to support Perkins Coie’s lawsuit and related matters. She posted the letter to LinkedIn in image form — here’s the whole thing as text (boldface mine):
With gratitude and urgency.
Jeremy and colleagues,
Many deals I work on have concepts of conditional notice. This is mine.
Please consider this email my two week notice, revocable if the firm comes up with a satisfactory response to the current moment, which should include at minimum i) signing on to the firm amicus brief in support of Perkins Coie in its litigation fighting the Trump administration’s executive order against it, ii) committing to broad future representation, regardless of whether powerful people view it as adverse to them, iii) refusal to cooperate with the EEOC’s request for personal information of our colleagues clearly targeted at intimidating non-white employees, (iv) public refusal to fire or otherwise force out employees at the Trump administration’s directive or implied directive and (v) public commitment to maintenance of affinity groups and related initiatives.
This is not what I saw for my career or for my evening, but Paul Weiss’ decision to cave to the Trump administration on DEl, representation and staffing has forced my hand. We do not have time. It is now or it is never, and if it is never, I will not continue to work here.
When I went to law school and to Skadden, I did so in pursuit of agency. I was driven by a desire to be in rooms where decision-makers were, to get to play a role in things that mattered, because things felt so needlessly terrible. It never occurred to me that the people in those rooms might feel that they were powerless. I am forced to hope that our lack of response to the Trump administration’s attacks on our peers, both those at other large firms and the many people in this country with far fewer resources, is rooted in feelings of fear and powerlessness, as opposed to tacit agreement or desire to maximize profit. I still hope that is true. But it has not yet been borne out.
It feels mortifying to say “I suspect you know who I am,” but I suspect you know who I am. Over the last few weeks, I have devoted an inordinate amount of time trying to leverage various relationships and privileges to get our firm and broader industry to admit that we are in the throes of early-stage authoritarianism and that we are uniquely positioned to halt it. There is an open letter (now signed by over 600 other AmLaw 200 associates, many of them at this firm), mainstream media coverage and an oped explaining why I feel this way.
To anyone who feels sympathetic to the views I’ve espoused but wonders why I have taken the path I have: on Thursday, March 6, after the issuance of the Perkins Executive Order, I sent emails to multiple trusted partners in management asking to help with whatever response we coordinated.
One of them replied offering to talk and then failed to reply to my email asking for a time until a week later, significantly after I had begun speaking publicly. Know that I attended internal meetings about this topic, sent emails to decision makers, avoided commenting on the EEOC investigation publicly or airing any internal firm discourse publicly.
I did all of these things out of hope that we would do the right thing if given time and opportunity.
The firm has been given time and opportunity to do the right thing. Thus far, we have not. This is a moment that demands urgency. Whether we are failing to meet it because we are unprepared or because we don’t wish to is irrelevant to me — and to the world — where the outcome is the same. If we were going to resist, we would have done so already. If we were not going to respond to the EEOC (a refusal that would be fully legal), the firm would have already told us.
This is the first firmwide email that has been sent on this topic. What. Are. We. Doing.
Colleagues, if you question if it is as bad as you think it is, it is ten times worse. Whether what we measure is the cowardice in face of lost profits, or the proximity to authoritarianism, or the trauma inflicted on our colleagues who are nonwhite, or the disappointment that I feel in this moment, take what you suspect and multiply it by a factor of ten. Act accordingly.
I recognize not everyone is positioned as I am, and cannot act the same way. But do not recruit for this firm if they cannot protect their employees. Do not pretend that what is happening is normal or excusable. It isn’t.
To the many superiors, support staff and friends that I know I disappoint by making this announcement firmwide instead of talking to you first, I sincerely apologize. There are so many thank yous that I have for so many people at this firm. Please know that if you suspect that you have helped me or taught me or cared for me, that I agree and am eternally grateful. In the coming days, I will make every effort to reach out to you separately, but there is urgency here that makes it impossible to go to each of you first. I will do everything in my power to mitigate difficulties caused by my unexpected departure.
Like any self-important adolescent, I spent most of my high school history classes wondering what I would do in the moments before true horror or chaos or where my values were tested and demanded great sacrifice. I do not wonder anymore. I know who I am. I thought I knew who we all were.
Thank you for the opportunity. My personal email is cc’d. I wish each of you the best, and that you use the privileges you hold to work for the best for others.
Rachel
Cohen offered an update shortly after publishing her letter:
As an update, I no longer have access to my firm email, so I guess it’s just notice.
They owe me a payout for 24 accrued vacation days. Thank you and good night.
In this video for Wired, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who studies fascism & authoritarianism, answers questions from the internet about dictators.
Why do people support dictators? How do dictators come to power? What’s the difference between a dictatorship, an autocracy, and authoritarianism? What are the most common personality traits found in tyrants and dictators? Is Xi Jinping a dictator? How do dictators amass wealth?
I’ve been thinking deeply about this idea recently — how much do I really need to know? I by no means think that I (or anyone) should be exempt from keeping up with the political and social going-ons of the world. Certainly, it’s invaluable to remember that one’s personal life is not reflective of the lives of everyone else. But I have recognized an impulse in myself to keep intaking information, as though it were a moral imperative to know every meticulous detail of all Earthly horrors. And, as much as I would like to think that it does, I don’t think that this impulse comes from duty. I think it comes from guilt. If I couldn’t directly help, the least I could do was witness. The least I could do was watch, feeling increasingly helpless, feeling increasingly numb.
Ultimately, I realized that this impulse actually resulted in me feeling less about the things I purported to care about. All the information swelled to a terrifying, dizzying checked-out-ed-ness, where I would make my way through a timeline that showed me children missing limbs in Palestine to an influencer’s makeup tutorial to details about Trump’s incoming cabinet to a house tour in the Hamptons. The bizarre, violent juxtaposition of it all started to turn my brain off. It was simply too much information.
I read this essay a few days after it was published and have been thinking about it (and relatedarticles) more or less constantly ever since, not only in terms of what media & information I am consuming, but also in terms of what I’m sharing here.
Every damn day over the past month an a half, the Trump administration has dropped some new horror in their attempt to speed-run the fascist takeover of American democracy.1 All of it is relevant and all of it matters. Just two days ago, Palestinian student Mahmoud Khalil, who is legally residing in the United States with a green card, was detained and imprisoned by DHS agents on some Trumped up nonsense about “[leading] activities aligned to Hamas” (he was one of the leaders of Columbia University’s Gaza solidarity encampment). This is right out of the fascist playbook; Adam Serwer:
The way it works is that you strip fundamental rights from targets with less political support that people will turn their consciences off to justify persecuting and then eventually the state can do it to anyone, that’s always been the plan. Immigrants, trans people, palestinian rights activists, eventually it’s going to be your turn when the regime decides you are an enemy.
Here’s Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as reported by the New Republic:
You are shredding the Constitution of the United States to go after political enemies. Seizing a person without reason or warrant and denying them access to their lawyer is un-American and tyrannical,” she continued. “Anyone celebrating this should be ashamed.”
“If the federal government can disappear a legal US permanent resident without reason or warrant, then they can disappear US citizens too,” she wrote in a separate post. “Anyone - left, right, or center - who has highlighted the importance of constitutional rights + free speech should be sounding the alarm now.
Trump said he was going to deport his enemies (i.e. people who oppose him) and you’ve read the fucking poem, so I hope that somehow this can be stopped long before it reaches 50-something, white, male bloggers who live in rural Vermont, not at all for my personal sake but for every preceding person they try this shit on, up to and including Mahmoud Khalil.
And but so anyway, the point is that there’s so much important stuff going on! Fundamental human rights are under fresh attack daily! This is not a drill! But at the same time, the fundamental situation has not materially changed in a few weeks. There was a coup. It was successful. It is ongoing and escalating. Elon Musk retains more or less total control over a huge amount of the federal government’s apparatus and its spending. Protests are building. Congress largely hasn’t reacted. The Democratic Party shows few signs of behaving like an opposition party. Some of the purges are being walked back, piecemeal. The judiciary is weighing in, slowly. There’s talk of cracks in the conservative coalition. We’re in a weird sort of stasis where each day’s events are both extremely significant and also just more of the same.
So, the question I’ve constantly been asking myself is: How should I be covering all this? What is the best use of your attention and my time, platform, and abilities? For the first couple of weeks, getting good information and analysis out about what was going on seemed most important, along with expert contextualization of events, providing actionable information, focusing on the stakes not the odds, and emphasizing the human stories and costs of the coup.
I believe all those things are still important to highlight. And writing about this still feels like something I have to do. However it feels increasingly unproductive for me to keep up with the “day to day” (even when that means something as consequential as the disappearing of legal residents for political reasons) on KDO. Other people and outlets are better equipped to keep you informed about such events. I do not want to contribute to folks feeling helpless or numb from information overwhelm — that won’t do any of us, or our future prospects for democracy, any good.
So yeah, that’s where I am right now — between the opposite poles of too much and not enough — if that makes any sense at all. I don’t know what the answer is just yet, if there even is one, but I suppose I will figure it out.
(I’m gonna open comments on this because I want to hear what you have to say about How Much You Need to Know or What You Want to Hear From Me, but I’m gonna strongly suggest that your personal opinion on our current political situation is better addressed elsewhere. Thanks.)
Which was well underway before Trump even came along. We’re in the “suddenly” part of our “gradually, then suddenly” political bankruptcy.↩
Disney has uploaded the firstthreeepisodes of season one of Andor to YouTube:
No idea how long they will be up or if they’re visible outside of the US. I started an Andor rewatch last week and I am finding it more enjoyable and interesting than I did the first time around. The writers obviously did their research on how fascism, dictatorships, and rebellions work — in almost every scene, you observe characters reacting and interacting with the constraints of bureaucratic totalitarianism. Very interesting to watch in this political moment. (via @rebeccablood.bsky.social)
One immediate response to all of this is to say that Trump is operating according to some higher-level political and ideological perspective. And there is a cottage industry of observers who have given themselves the unenviable task of transmuting the president’s tics and utterances into something like a calculated strategy — an intellectually defensible set of doctrines rather than the thoughtless patter of an outer-borough confidence man.
But this has always strained credulity. To ask anyone, for instance, to treat the president’s display of childish pique opposite Zelensky in the Oval Office as some return to Teddy Rooseveltian great-power realism — as opposed to the embarrassing tantrum of a grade-school bully — is to demand that readers administer a self-lobotomy.
2. His desire for revenge:
If this is his psychological state, then it stands to reason that Trump would want revenge against the public that denied him a second term as much as he wants revenge against the officials who have tried to make him answer for his illegal actions.
It is hard to describe Trump’s first month and a half in office as something other than a retribution campaign against the American people.
As I wrote a few days ago about Trump’s Oval Office ambush of Zelenskyy:
It occurs to me after reading about the meeting that Trump’s actions here are partially motivated by a desire for personal retribution against Zelenskyy for not helping him smear Biden in 2019. Zelenskyy told Trump no and Trump wants revenge — and he’s gonna turn his back on Ukraine and Europe to get it.
I agree with every word of it. One of the points he makes is that media outlets like Techdirt (and Wired and 404 Media, etc) and reporters like Masnick that cover tech and the law are uniquely positioned to understand what has been going on, particularly w/r/t to Musk’s seizure of the government’s computer systems:
This is the kind of thing tech and law reporters spot immediately, because we’ve seen this all play out before. When someone talks about “free speech” while actively working to control speech, that’s not a contradiction or a mistake — it’s the point. It’s about consolidating power while wrapping it in the language of freedom as a shield to fool the gullible and the lazy.
This is why it’s been the tech and legal press that have been putting in the work, getting the scoops, and highlighting what’s actually going on, rather than just regurgitation of administration propaganda without context or analysis (which hasn’t stopped the administration from punishing them).
I’m not a legal expert or a reporter, but I have been covering & writing about technology for almost 30 years and when I saw what Musk was doing (in conjunction with Trump’s EOs and what Project 2025 promised), I recognized exactly what was going on and started to cover it almost exclusively:
I keep hearing people saying this is a five-alarm fire but I feel like it’s a 500-alarm fire…we need metaphorical fire trucks coming from thousands of miles away to fight this blaze.
Masnick’s other main point is even closer to my heart:
When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.
We’ve always covered the intersection of technology, innovation, and policy (27+ years and counting). Sometimes that meant writing about patents or copyright, sometimes about content moderation, sometimes about privacy. But what happens when the fundamental systems that make all of those conversations possible start breaking down? When the people dismantling those systems aren’t even pretending to replace them with something better?
This x 10000. Like Masnick, I’ve gotten lots of feedback about my pivot to covering the coup, the overwhelming majority of it supportive — even the people who have told me they need to tap out from reading (I totally get it!) are generally approving. But there have been a few disapprovals as well, in the vein of “shut up and dribble” or “keep politics out of it” — which I also understand. To an extent. They want the Other Stuff back, the art and beauty and laughter and distraction, and for me to cool it with the politics.
But echoing Masnick, I believe that covering the rapid disassembly of American democracy is not some separate thing from the Other Stuff and never has been. The reason I have been able to write freely about those things for the last 27 years is because the US has had a relatively stable democracy1 under which people feel free to innovate, create art, take risks, and be themselves. Those things become much more difficult under fascist and autocratic rule. In a recent piece, Masha Gessen describes how autocracy stifles creativity:
Life under autocracy can be terrifying, as it already is in the United States for immigrants and trans people. But those of us with experience can tell you that most of the time, for most people, it’s not frightening. It is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.
I’m covering politics in this particular moment *because* the actions of the Trump administration are threatening all of that Other Stuff, because I want to be able to go back to covering design & photography & movies & science & food & travel & cities & all the cool things humans can do, and because I want my kids and everyone else’s kids to live in a stable, free society where they can make art, pursue scientific truth, be freely gay or trans, have health care, be able to have families, have a place to live, and, if they want to, write about frivolities on their websites. All of that becomes much more difficult if Trump/Musk get their way, and if I can help push back on their efforts in some small way with this platform that I have, I’m gonna do it. ✊✌️
I realize the phrase “relatively stable democracy” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. American democracy has never been as inclusive as it could be and a lot of people have been (and are still being) left out of participating fully in our society.↩
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