Category Archives: History and Politics

Note to a graduate student 150 years in the future

Heather Cox Richardson, transcribing the brutal history of this Nazi adjacent moment:

By rights, tonight’s post should be a picture, but Trump’s behavior today merits a marker because it feels like a dramatic escalation of the themes we’ve seen for years. Please feel free to ignore—as I often say, I am trying to leave notes for a graduate student in 150 years, and you can consider this one for her if you want a break from the recent onslaught of news.

Yesterday, Trump ranted at the press, furious that the American legal system had resulted in two jury decisions that he had defamed and sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll. He was so angry that, with his lawyers standing awkwardly behind him, he told reporters: “I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you.”

Today, Trump held a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, a small city in the center of the state, where he addressed about 7,000 people. A number of us who have been watching him closely have been saying for a while that when voters actually saw him in this campaign, they would be shocked at how he has deteriorated, and that seems to be true: his meandering and self-indulgent speeches have had attendees leaving early, some of them bewildered. In today’s speech, Trump slurred a number of words, referring to Elon Musk as “Leon,” for example, and forgetting the name of North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, who was on his short list for a vice presidential pick.

But today’s speech struck me as different from his past performances, distinguished for what sounded like desperation. Trump has always invented his stories from whole cloth, but there used to be some way to tie them to reality. Today that seemed to be gone. He was in a fantasy world, and his rhetoric was apocalyptic. It was also bloody in ways that raise huge red flags for scholars of fascism.

Trump told the audience that when he took office in 2017, military officers told him the U.S. had given all the military’s ammunition away to allies. Then he went on a rant against our allies, saying that they’re only our allies when they need something and that they would never come to our aid if we needed them. This echoes the talking points put out by Russian operatives and flies in the face of the fact that the one time the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked the mutual defense pact in that agreement was after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in support of the U.S. 

He embraced Project 2025’s promise to eliminate the Department of Education and send education back to the states so that right-wing figures like Wisconsin’s Senator Ron Johnson can run it. He reiterated the MAGA claim that mothers are executing their babies after birth—this is completely bonkers—and again echoed Russian talking points when he said these executions are happening—they are not—but “nobody talks about it.” He went on: “We did a great thing when we got Roe v. Wade out of the federal government.” 

He reiterated the complete fantasy that schools are performing gender-affirming surgery on children. “Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day at school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump’s suggestion that schools are performing surgery on students is bananas. This is simply not a thing that happens. 

And then he went full-blown apocalyptic, attacking immigrants and claiming that crime, which in reality has dropped dramatically since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office after a spike during his own term, has made the U.S. uninhabitable. He said that “If I don’t win Colorado, it will be taken over by migrants and the governor will be sent fleeing.” “Migrants and crime are here in our country at levels never thought possible before…. You’re not safe even sitting here, to be honest with you. I’m the only one that’s going to get it done. Everybody is saying that.” He urged people to protest “because you’re being overrun by criminals.” 

He assured attendees that “If you think you have a nice house, have a migrant enjoy your house, because a migrant will take it over. A migrant will take it over. It will be Venezuela on steroids.” He reiterated his plan to get rid of migrants. “And you know,” he said, “getting them out will be a bloody story.” 

He went on to try to rev up supporters in words very similar to those he used on January 6th, 2021, but focused on this election. “Every citizen who’s sick and tired of the parasitic political class in Washington that sucks our country of its blood and treasure, November fifth will be your liberation day. November fifth, this year, will be the most important day in the history of our country because we’re not going to have a country anymore if we don’t win.” 

He promised: “I will prevent World War III, and I am the only one that can do it. I will prevent World War III. And if I don’t win this election,… Israel is doomed…. Israel will be gone…. I’d better win.” 

“I better win or you’re gonna have problems like we’ve never had. We may have no country left. This may be our last election. You want to know the truth? People have said that. This may be our last election…. It’ll all be over, and you gotta remember…. Trump is always right. I hate to be right. I’m always right.” 

Trump’s hellscape is only in his mind: crime is sharply down in the U.S. since he left office, migrant crossings have plunged, and the economy is the strongest in the world.

Then, tonight, Trump posted on his social media site a rant asserting that he will win the 2024 election but that he expects Democrats to cheat, and “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.” 

Is it the Justice Department indictments that showed Russia is working to get him reelected? Is it the rising popularity of Democratic nominees Kamala Harris and Tim Walz? Is it fury at the new grand jury’s indicting him for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install himself in power? Is it fear of Tuesday’s debate with Harris? Is it a declining ability to grapple with reality?

Whatever has caused it, Trump seems utterly off his pins, embracing wild conspiracy theories and, as his hopes of winning the election appear to be crumbling, threatening vengeance with a dogged fury that he used to be able to hide. 

Grey Lady on left-wing disinformation

Suggestions that there was something suspicious about the way the attempted assassination of Trump went down, including Trump’s striking a heroic fundraising pose with bloody face seconds after shots were fired, the blackout on medical details at the hospital, the miraculous healing of his shot ear, the perfect timing of the shooting for campaign purposes right before the RNC, that it had the smell of yet another Trump-concocted lie, are cited by the New York Times as being conspiracy theories advanced by the left “without proof.”   Hmmmm.   So both sides do it, Grey Lady?  Buried in the article is this:

“There’s just a world of difference between what you’re hearing episodically out of the left and the systemic production of pretty vile and dangerous stuff that we have seen now for years coming out of that right-wing ecosystem,” said Steven Livingston, the founding director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University.

According to the Times article they are suggesting, “without proof”, that their paper is taking a bold stand here in calling out occasional misinformation on the left. Consider the final paragraphs of the story:

Articles debunking left-wing misinformation have faced pushback online from critics and journalism watchdogs, who have claimed that the traditional fact-checking process is not suited to tackling falsehoods from the left. The Associated Press was roundly mocked online for trying to debunk the joke by writing a staid fact check that was soon deleted. The news agency said that the fact check had not gone through its “standard editing process.”

“Since most of what Democrats are saying is provably — or at least arguably — true, fact-checkers have descended to hairsplitting at best and worst,” wrote Dan Froomkin, the founder of Press Watch, a nonprofit website covering political journalism.

Snopes, the fact-checking website, is used to seeing pushback over its frequent debunking of right-wing disinformation. But since the war started between Israel and Gaza — and through this year’s presidential election — the website has also faced scrutiny after running fact-check articles about left-wing falsehoods, according to Doreen Marchionni, the executive and managing editor for the site.

“We kind of get hit by all sides whenever what we report doesn’t conform to certain left or right talking points,” she said.

Read the new indictment of our criminal former president

To win a legal argument a lawyer must wield a blunt instrument, the law, with precision. A prosecutor must prove every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt or there is no conviction. There are many ways for wealthy, politically connected defendants to game the system and gain long delays in trial, conviction and sentencing. Ultrawealthy scofflaws enjoy tremendous advantages in court, as in life, and it is frustrating as hell to watch these litigious fucks run roughshod over law and decency.

Once in a blue moon we have a moment of seeming legal clarity. It is a beautiful thing to see an indictment lay out a case against one of these fucks that allows for no reasonable doubt. You can read that kind of indictment here, the very readable superseding indictment Jack Smith’s office recently brought against serial offender Donald J. Chrump.

The indictment uses plain language to lay out in clear, crisp detail, every element of each of the four crimes the Orange Polyp has been indicted for. The superseding indictment steers clear of the MAGA Supreme Court’s unconstitutional made-for-Trump July ruling that presidents may legally commit crimes, if they do this in the course of carrying out their core “official duties”. (Thought experiment challenge — imagine a criminal act that would be necessary for a noncriminal president to commit in order to carry out his official duties).

The revamped indictment removes references to losing candidate Trump’s “official acts”, as when he sought to promote an unqualified loyalist, American Eichmann Jefferey Clarke, to Attorney General to give an official stamp to his Stolen Election lie, or when he told officials just to lie and his allies in Congress would do the rest. It is an easy read that leaves the reader in no doubt as to the guilt of the infallible criminal candidate in knowingly spreading a lie about the rigged and stolen 2020 election, using that lie to whip up duped supporters and raise money, arm twist, wheedle and threaten government officials, inviting election officials of a state he lost to the Oval Office to convince them to change the votes in their states, signing on to a fake elector plan, exhorting an angry crowd he’d lied to for over an hour, at a private event, to “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore” and taking no action, for hours, outside of stoking the mob’s anger at Mike Pence, as the peaceful mob of reverent tourists he inspired shut down a joint session of Congress.

In Defendant’s defense, during his hour long, lie-studded harangue of the angry mob at the Ellipse, a private event paid for by private funds (as Smith points out), losing candidate Trump used the word “peaceful” several times. So when he told them to go down to the Capitol to fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore, he meant to fight peacefully, you know, as one does when your country is about to be stolen from you.

The law is a blunt instrument and many serious harms are considered trifles by a system of law, designed for all, that routinely favors the rich and powerful. It is a refreshing thing to see a case laid out as beautifully, as indisputably, as Jack Smith’s office did in the reworked election interference indictment of Trump. We can lament the many delays a spoiled, entitled, unaccountable, law suit wielding, blustering, lying, ultra-wealthy bully like Trump always gets, and that Merrick Garland, a stickler for norms and rules, waited so long to appoint a Special Counsel, but, damn, this indictment is good. Check it out.

Now we just have to make sure very fine American Nazis don’t steal the upcoming election for their criminal figurehead so the trial can go forward, with all deliberate speed, in the several cases of US v. Trump (and his indicted co-conspirators).

That famous NY Times nuance: Tucker and “Holocaust Revisionists”

Because “Holocaust Denier” sounds so unfairly judgmental for this kind of calm reasonable-sounding Hitler-defending “revisionist”:

. . . Cooper proceeded, in a soft-spoken, faux-reasonable way, to lay out an alternative history in which Hitler tried mightily to avoid war with Western Europe, Churchill was a “psychopath” propped up by Zionist interests, and millions of people in concentration camps “ended up dead” because the overwhelmed Nazis didn’t have the resources to care for them. Elon Musk promoted the conversation as “very interesting” on his platform X, though he later deleted the tweet.

From great op-ed by Michelle Goldberg

Got to feel bad for those overwhelmed Nazis, right? They didn’t want the war, did their best to avoid it, then they had to fight everyone and wind up vilified by billionaire Zionists for not protecting their Jews better while under attack…

See, not denial at all, simple revisionism [1], an honest disagreement about allegedly disputed historical facts. The ever fair and dazzlingly nuanced NY Times editorial board rests its case.

I truly don’t get the motives of the New York Times, but the Grey Lady certainly cuts a piss-poor figure representing a free press during the frantic gallop of American fascism.

His shot ear has healed miraculously in a very short time, as this recent photo shows. More proof to faithful Evangelicals of how much God loves this flawed vessel.

[1] In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of a historical account.[1] It usually involves challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) scholarly views or narratives regarding a historical event, timespan, or phenomenon by introducing contrary evidence or reinterpreting the motivations and decisions of the people involved. Revision of the historical record can reflect new discoveries of fact, evidence, and interpretation as they come to light. The process of historical revision is a common, necessary, and usually uncontroversial process which develops and refines the historical record in order to make it more complete and accurate.

One form of historical revisionism involves a reversal of older moral judgments. Revision in this fashion is a more controversial topic, and can include denial or distortion of the historical record yielding an illegitimate form of historical revisionism known as historical negationism (involving, for example, distrust of genuine documents or records or deliberate manipulation of statistical data to draw predetermined conclusions). This type of historical revisionism can present a re-interpretation of the moral meaning of the historical record.[2] 

Negationists use the term revisionism to portray their efforts as legitimate historical inquiry; this is especially the case when revisionism relates to Holocaust denial.

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Corporate media, “extremely dangerous to our democracy”

Here’s a comment I posted after reading an interesting post entitled The Media Who Cried Wolf on a blog called Tony’s Bologna. Tony urged readers to listen to the news critically and resist knee jerk reactions to biased news reporting based on the color of your political baseball hat. I felt compelled to add this to the mix:

Good piece, but straight up propaganda packaged as news is not as bipartisan as it might seem. That collage of talking heads Rogan showed are all reading a script provided by Sinclair Media, an ultra-right wing outfit. They send scripted stories to many local stations all over the country. Trusted local news reporters read this crap to their trusting local audiences in markets large and small all over the country.

Both major parties are filled with narcissists and other major league assholes, no question about it. They don’t spread baseless propaganda with equal ferocity and message discipline though.

The rightwing has an entire media ecosystem that infects all corporate news coverage. A network or paper can’t cover a story “objectively” without being accused, by the right, of “anti-conservative bias” so we get this misleading “both sides do it” narrative in every case, even when only one side has fake electors, assaults Capitol police, colludes with foreign intelligence services, refuses to allow the peaceful transfer of power, has belief in the Big Lie (2020 election rigged and stolen) as a loyalty test for party membership, etc.

Plus, corporations by their nature (and by Supreme Court ruling) are concerned only with the bottom line. As “persons” they are greedy, psychopathic parasites who will do anything for a little more profit. And thanks to media consolidation, another anti-regulation right wing project, a corporate group like Sinclair, or an individual like Rupert Murdoch, wield tremendous power to influence public opinion.

Keep up the good work, brother. Your overall point is an important one, though the devil, as always (and as you suggest) is in the details.

Trump v. United States SCOTUS ruling

You won’t read this in the New York Times, necessarily, but this is the essence of what the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, in regard to former president Donald J. Trump’s case against the United States claiming absolute immunity from prosecution for any criminal act he committed while in office, or afterwards. It is an obscenely anti-democratic ruling by six members of an extremist, doctrinaire judicial fraternity (The Federalist Society) in service to American oligarchs.

The highest court in the land ruled that a president, present or former, may not be prosecuted for crimes he commits in office, if those crimes were done in the course of his official duties. If he was speaking to another government official about committing a crime — official business. All other crimes he commits while in office, not strictly in furtherance of his core official duties (try to picture why any crime would be necessary to carry out any core presidential responsibility — ah, never mind), carry the presumption that he had a good and legally justified reason to commit the crime. This presumption must be rebutted by a prosecutor before charges can be brought.

Just to ensure maximum protection to the man they protected in this one and done, tailor-made for the felon candidate ruling, evidence of any protected criminal act, or conspiracy to commit a newly protected presidential crime, may not be introduced in any other prosecution of a current or former president, in any criminal case where he is not protected by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Forget logic, the plain text and original meaning of the Constitution Leonard Leo’s appointees pretend great deference toward, common sense, political wisdom, basic fairness, any concern with democracy. This unappealable ruling was made simply to protect the brazen, audacious, ever-cooperative figurehead presidential candidate whose electoral victory is their constituency’s only current chance for holding on to power. The 6-3 Federalist Society supermajority did what loyal, lifelong partisans always do — gave their teammate a uniquely tailored, unappealable assist.

The even more poisonous part of this demented ruling (demented from the point of view of democracy) is the holding that corrupt presidential pardons, even ones he openly sells to felons, his criminal co-conspirators, serial killers with billionaire sponsors, pardons given as the quo of quid pro quo favors done for him or his business, MAY NOT BE CHALLENGED IN A COURT OF LAW. This means a president may hire a hit man to murder a political opponent, or Rosie O’Donnell, and then pardon that hit man as soon as the murder is done — or by preemptive pardon, if needed to seal the deal. As was the clear original intent of the Framers of our experiment in democracy.

MAGA, the rebranded Republican party, the truckling followers of reality-definer Trump (in service to reactionary billionaire polluters and blasphemously false Christian leaders) strenuously opposes an enforceable ethics code for the Supreme Court, the one branch of government they are majority stakeholders in. These über-entitled motherfuckers always get what they pay for. NO ETHICS FOR OUR PARTISAN IDEOLOGUES! So ordered.

If you want to call these swine Nazis, you are currently within your rights as an American citizen to do so. At least until use of the term “Nazi” is recognized, when applied to those who behave like actual, historical Nazis, as verboten, strictly forbidden, illegal and grounds for immediate imprisonment, reeducation and worse, at the sole discretion of the infallible Führer.

Free speech for fucking bullies

Anyone who has ever been bullied either comes to hate and oppose bullies or becomes a bully himself. The first reaction takes a certain amount of integrity and a sense of self-worth, the second, only a reflex to appear tough and hurt others before they can hurt you.

Free speech protected in the United States includes verbal bullying, lying, divulging private details about others on-line, making many kinds of threats, claiming imaginary outrages are real (Biden is a pedophile who drinks the blood of his victims, etc.) and all sorts of disgusting speech. The truth does not always prevail over such speech. Here’s today’s bit from Trump v. United States and Common Decency, part 7,582.

This is 42 year-old Huyen “Steven” Cheung, MAGA loyalist and current Trump spokesman. Here are two quotes to give you the context of his general credibility, from his Wikipedia page:

Cheung was named the spokesman of the Trump 2024 presidential campaign. After Trump was criticized in October 2023 for his statement that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing language of white supremacists and Adolf Hitler, Cheung responded:

That’s a normal phrase that is used in everyday life – in books, television, movies, and in news articles. For anyone to think that is racist or xenophobic is living in an alternate reality consumed with non-sensical outrage.[40]

After Trump was criticized in November 2023 for using language of fascist dictators by referring to his political opponents as “vermin”, Cheung said:

Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.[41]

Mr. Cheung was right that the phrase “poisoning the blood” is common in books, movies, television shows and news articles … about Adolf Hitler. Fuck that fucking puto.

Here’s Heather Cox Richardson, reporting on the recent stink Trump, Cheung and others made at a recent transgressive campaign photo op at Arlington National Cemetery that involved at least one member of Trump’s entourage shoving a female employee of Arlington National Cemetery who politely tried to prevent the forbidden campaign photo op. An Army spokesperson defended the professionalism of the employee, who although abruptly pushed aside avoided further disruption.

Spoiler, Trump spokesman Huyen Cheung graciously claimed that the Arlington National Cemetery employee shoved aside “was clearly suffering from a mental health episode”.

Heather:

A statement from the Arlington National Cemetery reiterated: “Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign. Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants. We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed.”

Republican vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio first said there was a “little disagreement” at the cemetery, but in Erie, Pennsylvania, today he tried to turn the incident into an attack on Harris. “She wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up?” Vance said. “She can go to hell.” Harris has not, in fact, commented on the controversy. 

VoteVets, a progressive organization that works to elect veterans to office, called the Arlington episode “sickening.”

In an interview with television personality Dr. Phil that aired last night, Trump suggested that Democrats in California each got seven ballots and that he would win in the state if Jesus Christ counted the votes. As Philip Bump of the Washington Post pointed out today, Trump has always said he could not lose elections unless there was fraud; last night he suggested repeatedly that God wants him to win the 2024 election.  

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Heather, in a follow-up posted early this morning:

And now the U.S. Army has weighed in on the scandal surrounding Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery for a campaign photo op, after which his team shared a campaign video it had filmed. The Army said that the cemetery hosts almost 3,000 public wreath-laying ceremonies a year without incident and that Trump and his staff “were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and [Department of Defense] policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds.” 

It went on to say that a cemetery employee “who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside…. This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the… employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked. [Arlington National Cemetery] is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve.” 

“I don’t think I can adequately explain what a massive deal it is for the Army to make a statement like this,” political writer and veteran Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote, noted. “The Pentagon avoids statements like this at all costs. But a draft dodging traitor decided to lie about our armed forces staff, so they went to paper.”

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American hero, to millions…

From the great Heather Cox Richardson

And then, this evening, Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman of NPR explained the story behind the surprising photos of Trump on Monday giving a thumbs-up over a grave in Arlington National Cemetery. The reporters wrote that “[t]wo members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official” at the cemetery, where “[f]ederal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities.” When a cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering the section where the grave was located, “campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside.” A Trump campaign spokesperson said the official who tried to prevent the staff from holding a political event in the cemetery was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.” 

The elephant in the room these days is that most Republicans, along with many pundits, are pretending that Trump is a normal presidential candidate. They are ignoring his mental lapses, calls for authoritarianism, grifting, lack of grasp on any sort of policy, and criminality, even as he has hollowed out the once grand Republican Party and threatens American democracy itself.

It’s hard to look away from the reality that the Republican senators could have stopped this catastrophe at many points in Trump’s term, at the very least by voting to convict Trump at his first impeachment trial. At the time, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said, “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one.” Republican senators nonetheless stood behind Trump. “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” then–majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues. “It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”

When the Framers wrote the Constitution, they did not foresee senators abandoning the principles of the country in order to support a president they thought would enhance their own careers. Assuming that lawmakers would jealously guard their own power, the Framers gave to the members of the House of Representatives the power to impeach a president. To the members of the Senate they gave the sole power to try impeachments. They assumed that lawmakers, who had just fought a war to break free of a monarch, would understand that their own interests would always require stopping the rise of an authoritarian leader. 

But the Framers did not foresee the rise of political partisanship. 

In the modern era, extreme partisanship has led to voter suppression to keep Republicans in power, the weaponization of the filibuster to stop Democratic legislation, and gerrymandering to enable Republicans to take far more legislative seats than they have earned. The demands of this extreme partisanship also mean that members of one of the nation’s major political parties have lined up behind a man whom, were he running this sort of a campaign even ten years ago, they would have dismissed with derision. 

Finally, devastatingly, the partisanship that made senators keep Trump in office enabled him to name to the Supreme Court three justices. Those three justices were key to making up the majority that overturned the nation’s fundamental principle that all people must be equal before the law. In July 2024 they ruled that unlike anyone else, a president is above it.  

In May 2016, South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham famously observed: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”

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Free Speech, Nazi style

Free speech is crucial to informed debate in a democracy. Without the right to freely exchange ideas, to speak and write freely without government prosecution, we’re pretty much done as a democracy.

Totally free speech is a double edged sword, of course, since Nazis and Klansmen are as free as anyone else to speak publicly as they see fit. Our First Amendment prevents the government from making any law infringing our right to say or write pretty much anything we want (unless we are actively causing violence). It reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

They do this in a manner that is much clearer and more unmistakable than, say, in the Second Amendment which reads:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Aside from the use of the passive voice, and the context of a well regulated militia (conveniently omitted by most gun lovers), the gun amendment is much more squishy and subject to interpretation as to regulation than the freedom of religion, speech, the press and our right to peacefully assemble amendment.

Tech giant Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who famously told his executives that “you go to the mat” if the government tries to regulate Facebook in any way, spoke out recently (in a letter to pugnacious dickhead Jim Jordan, no less) against pressure he claims to have received from the Biden administration to monitor and flag pernicious lies that spread virally on Facebook.  Zuckerberg’s position is the same as virtually any working billionaire’s — you do whatever is necessary to prevent any government action that can lessen your profits, even by a penny.

Note the elegance of that Fox headline: Zuckerberg “admits” Biden is persecuting him and trying to force him to censor Americans.

Biden responded that he was asking all social media giants to behave as responsible citizens by flagging harmful lies that kill people. Facebook was among tech giants that allowed, among other things, countless viral videos touting the alleged harmfulness of the Covid vaccine that Trump fast-tracked with Operation Warp Speed. Biden pointed out that the deadly Covid pandemic is now only killing the unvaccinated. How much money would it cost Zuckerberg to post warnings on deadly lies embraced by millions because they show up over and over in a social media feed?

Who gives a fuck?

Free speech isn’t free, of course. It has to be fought for, against a formidable enemy — the brutal, incendiary, viral lie — as powerful as free speech itself.

When the government attempts to curb lies, powerful liars are outraged. They cite their right to say whatever they please, as guaranteed by the First Amendment. Unfettered free speech, particularly when it goes viral, is supremely useful for climbing to power. Once in power, Nazi free speech is famously whatever the fucking Fuhrer, and his handlers, say it is.

In late April [2022], the Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board, whose mission would be recommending best practices to counter disinformation related to homeland security. The head of this board, Nina Jankowicz [1], was cyberbullied until she resigned. Operations of the board were promptly “suspended”. As far as I’m aware, the cyberbullies prevailed.

Biden subsequently opened an office, the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse, to combat the pernicious threat of vicious “social media” and specifically to police cyberbullies who make gender-based attacks. Not much has been reported about the task force since it was launched with some fanfare in June of 2022.

Now Zuckerberg is bitching again about his right to be the number one richest man in history, which, weighed against the health of our Nazi besieged democracy, is the only thing that counts to a billionaire who, by definition, can never have enough.

I’ll leave you with an example of free speech from the New York Times. See if you can spot the difference in these two paragraphs, the lead paragraph in a recent article about “MAGA jurisprudence” (an oxymoron if there ever was one).

As for freedom of the press, so necessary to protect democracy that the founders chose to protect the press in the First Amendment, they have a right to publish any opinion they choose, even in news articles. I’ve tweaked one sentence in this New York Times first paragraph to make it more accurate. See if you can spot the sentence I fixed:

The Supreme Court term that ended this summer delivered a number of big wins for traditional conservative causes. The court made it easier to challenge federal regulations. It made it harder to prosecute former presidents who commit crimes while in office. And it delivered another decision that expanded the rights of gun enthusiasts.

The original:

The Supreme Court term that ended this summer delivered a number of big wins for traditional conservative causes. The court made it easier to challenge federal regulations. It made it harder to prosecute former presidents. And it delivered another decision that expanded the rights of gun enthusiasts. 

Let’s leave aside that the editorial frame of “traditional conservative causes” is a poor description of these truly radical, reactionary decisions.

“It made it harder to prosecute former presidents” is a true statement, as far as it goes. A more accurate statement, one that better informs and underscores the revolutionary nature of the Supreme Court’s radical rightwing decision in Trump v. United States is: “It made it harder to prosecute former presidents who commit crimes in office.”

Freedom of fucking speech, sisters and brothers, mind that shit carefully.

[1] She gives examples of free speech she was treated to while heading the Disinformation Governing Board:

And then beyond that, there were calls to create deepfake pornography of me and then the violent threats, which were numerous. And I was reporting at least one a day to the department for the three weeks that this campaign was going on before I resigned – things like, go hang yourself, you leftist, C-word. You’re the new Goebbels; will you meet the same end? Of course, Goebbels killed himself. One person said, this is a hill to die on; get ready – we will not tolerate this. And this, to me, seems to have come directly from a tweet that Representative Lauren Boebert sent out saying that this was Stalinist or Mao level, and this was a hill to die on, so directly echoing her language and the threat. People saying, you will regret this. Kill yourself, you subhuman sack of S-word. You and your F-ing family should be sent to Russia to be killed. Hey – I don’t know how to describe this word, a pejorative for a woman – quit And then beyond that, there were calls to create deepfake pornography of me and then the violent threats, which were numerous. And I was reporting at least one a day to the department for the three weeks that this campaign was going on before I resigned – things like, go hang yourself, you leftist, C-word. You’re the new Goebbels; will you meet the same end? Of course, Goebbels killed himself. One person said, this is a hill to die on; get ready – we will not tolerate this. And this, to me, seems to have come directly from a tweet that Representative Lauren Boebert sent out saying that this was Stalinist or Mao level, and this was a hill to die on, so directly echoing her language and the threat. People saying, you will regret this. Kill yourself, you subhuman sack of S-word. You and your F-ing family should be sent to Russia to be killed. Hey – I don’t know how to describe this word, a pejorative for a woman – quit your job before we destroy your life. Everything you’ve ever cared about will be taken from you. And you’re nothing but a freaking liar. And you’re going to pay for it with a heavy price, you stupid B-word, before we destroy your life. Everything you’ve ever cared about will be taken from you. And you’re nothing but a freaking liar. And you’re going to pay for it with a heavy price, you stupid B-word. That’s just a few of them. (source)

Project 2025 = Gleichschaltung

Wikipedia:

The Nazi term Gleichschaltung (German pronunciation: [ˈɡlaɪçʃaltʊŋ] ⓘ) or “coordination” was the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler — leader of the Nazi Party in Germany — successively established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society “from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education”.[1] 

Although the Weimar Constitution remained nominally in effect until Germany’s surrender following World War II, near total Nazification had been secured by the 1935 resolutions approved during the Nuremberg Rally, when the symbols of the Nazi Party and the state were fused (see Flag of Nazi Germany) and German Jews were deprived of their citizenship (see Nuremberg Laws). The tenets of Gleichschaltung also applied to territories occupied by the Nazis. . .

. . .  Another measure of Nazi Gleichschaltung was the enactment of the “Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service” (7 April 1933), which mandated the “co-ordination” of the civil service – which in Germany included not only bureaucrats, but also schoolteachers and professors, judges, prosecutors, and other professionals – at the federal, state and municipal level, and authorized the removal of Jews and Communists from these positions, with limited exceptions for those who had fought in the First World War or had lost a father or son in combat.[19] . . .

. . . With Reich President von Hindenburg fatally ill, the Reich government enacted the “Law Concerning the Head of State of the German Reich” (1 August 1934). This law was signed by the entire Reich cabinet. It combined the office of Reich President with that of Reich Chancellor under the title of “Führer and Reich Chancellor,” and was drawn up to become effective on the death of the Reich President, which occurred the next day. Again, this flagrantly violated Article 2 of the Enabling Act, which forbade any actions interfering with the office of the Reich President. With this law, Hitler became not only Germany’s head of state, but also the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.[32] 

It also removed the last remedy by which Hitler could be legally removed from office, and with it all checks on his power.

source

And of course:

One of the most critical steps towards Gleichschaltung of German society was the introduction of the “Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda” under Joseph Goebbels in March 1933 and the subsequent steps taken by the Propaganda Ministry to assume complete control of the press and all means of social communication. This included oversight of newspapers, magazines, films, books, public meetings and ceremonies, foreign press relations, theater, art and music, radio, and television.[37] To this end, Goebbels said:

[T]he secret of propaganda [is to] permeate the person it aims to grasp, without his even noticing that he is being permeated. Of course propaganda has a purpose, but the purpose must be concealed with such cleverness and virtuosity that the person on whom this purpose is to be carried out doesn’t notice it at all.[38]

This was also the purpose of “co-ordination”: to ensure that every aspect of the lives of German citizens was permeated with the ideas and prejudices of the Nazis. From March to July 1933 and continuing afterward, the Nazi Party systematically eliminated or co-opted non-Nazi organizations that could potentially influence people. Those critical of Hitler and the Nazis were suppressed, intimidated, or murdered.[10]

Every national voluntary association, and every local club, was brought under Nazi control, from industrial and agricultural pressure groups to sports associations, football clubs, male voice choirs, women’s organizations—in short, the whole fabric of associational life was Nazified. Rival, politically oriented clubs or societies were merged into a single Nazi body. Existing leaders of voluntary associations were either unceremoniously ousted, or knuckled under of their own accord. Many organizations expelled leftish or liberal members and declared their allegiance to the new state and its institutions. The whole process … went on all over Germany. … By the end, virtually the only non-Nazi associations left were the army and the Churches with their lay organizations.[39]

same source