1/10. Whatever happened to protecting monuments and federal property, which seemed so important to our government this summer and fall?
2/10. The idea of protecting property was used to beat people protesting for the right of African Americans to stay alive.
3/10. The idea of protecting monuments was used to justify surveilling any American who might be inclined to protest.
4/10. Yet fascists can casually invade our most important federal property, the Capitol.
5/10. Fascists can casually profane our monument to democracy, the Capitol.
6/10. Are the fascists right that the Capitol is "their house"? That depends on us.
7/10. Senators and representatives who call black people voting "fraud" are telling the fascists that the Capitol is their house.
8/10. The eight senators and 139 representatives who voted against democracy were telling a big lie about this election, and about American history.
9/10. The eight senators and 139 representatives who voted against democracy are saying that some Americans have the right to violently overthrow our system, and others don't even have the right to vote.
10/10. The eight senators and 139 representatives who voted to overturn democracy own this attempted coup, forever. Led by Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, they are the fascist faction of the Republican Party.
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1/7. We Americans have a hard time seeing ourselves in the world, and so even when we want to criticize our fascist oligarchs we fail to see the international networks of which they are nodes. politico.com/newsletters/po…
3/7. Trump emerged into international far right networks that backed him, funded him, ran social media campaigns for him, and supplied him with role models.
1/5. I want to try to amplify this point — Vance does not believe that morality is an autonomous sphere of life at all; only fools think that, in his world.
2/5. What he means by the word "morality" is propaganda from some religious institution that justifies the world the way it is, including his own personal power and corruption.
3/5. The whole point of Vance’s notion of God is to justify fascist oligarchy — consider his grotesque invocation of God just the other day in Budapest as a reason why Hungarians must vote for Orbán.
1/5. Orbán pioneered a model whereby oligarchs trade the fascist memes and electoral tricks they use to stay in power. He made Budapest a node between Moscow and Washington of the international far right.
2/5. He is central to Trumpism, more important than almost any American in the movement.
3/5. For Trump and Vance, Orbán must win, because there must only be one inevitable path of history, towards right-wing oligarchy and the end of democracy.
With this settlement the US is worse off in every way than it was before the war; Iran is strengthened by the huge new tolls in the Straits of Hormuz, paid by the whole world. (1/14)
I will lay out the strategic defeat but I want to make clear that it is a symptom of the basic problem of injustice and inequality. (2/14)
Consider — where are those new tolls going? To Iran’s murderous regime. Is it too much to wonder, though, whether a portion reaches the pockets of US negotiators or other Americans? (3/14)
Given Trump’s Easter threats to carry out new war crimes in Iran, we should think one or two steps ahead about a coup attempt connected to the war. And then deter it. (1/17)
Why is Trump so enthusiastic about destroying Iranian civilian infrastructure? It won’t win the war. It is likely for another reason: to provoke an Iranian response that Trump can use for his own purposes. (2/17)
Provocation is not a complex form of politics. Let’s not imagine Trump is not smart enough to have thought of this. He is. And exploiting a wartime incident to try to seize total power is normal tyrannical behavior. It’s on us not to dodge that historical fact. (3/17)