Sign in Subscribe

"The individuals seizing power have no right to it"

Inane Clown Posse: Musk, Trump, Cuck, Dupe, Turd

The individuals seizing power have no right to it. A coup is underway, against Americans as possessors of human rights and dignities, and against Americans as citizens of a democratic republic. Each hour this goes unrecognized makes the success of the coup more likely.

Timothy Snyder, “Of Course It’s A Coup,” “Thinking about” Substack blog post, February 5, 2025 

This timely– in fact, urgent–message is from Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s post of four days ago. The below quotations in boldface are from Snyder’s book “On Tyranny,” published in 2017, and currently #1 bestseller in the Amazon category “Democracy”. As George Saunders advises, “Please read this book. So smart, so timely.”

Each page of this concise and compact collection of topics is suffused with cautionary wisdom, and the quotes speak for themselves. They also find reverberation with the below-added commentary and reporting from credentialed observers of our parlous national scene in which democracy itself is threatened. 

Snyder: Because enough people [in Germany, 1932 and Czechoslovakia, 1946) voluntarily extended their new services to the new leaders, Nazis and communists alike realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.

 Jamelle Bouie, "There Is No Going Back," New York Times, February 5: “Musk has seized hold of critical levers of power and authority within the federal government, apparently enabling him to destroy federal agencies at will, barring congressional action or judicial pushback."

 (From various sources:) Upon taking office, Trump with much performative pomp and fatuity signed multiple orders on camera in what has been described as a "shock and awe" campaign that alternately strained and broke the limits of executive authority and led to an abrupt burst of legal challenges. Trump’s takeover moves included executive orders to:

·       Withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization

·       Roll back recognition of gender identity

·       Grant TikTok a 75-day pause before it would be banned[10]

 Anita Chabria, in her February 6 Los Angeles Times column under a headline that asked, “Is it a coup if it’s legal? When you make the rules, it’s hard to break them”  wrote: “ We are in the middle of a purge, one that will almost certainly lead to the crippling of government functions — from the FBI to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which warns us of dangerous weather. Latest up: Musk, the guy whose rockets regularly blow up, is apparently now meddling in air traffic control."

Snyder: Revolutionaries sometimes do intend to destroy institutions all at once. This was the approach of the Russian Bolsheviks. Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were., so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it.

 Catherine Rampell column, The Washington Post, February 4:  (Headline: “Turns out Rubio and Bessent are spineless, too”). Rampell wrote: “The secretaries [Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio] were supposed to be the ‘adults’ in the Trump administration…supposed to be competent. Responsible, even. Yet, two weeks in, they have both turned out to be spineless cowards."

 Snyder: We imagine our own righteous vigilance directed outward, against misguided and hostile others...[but] human nature is such that American democracy must be defended from Americans who would exploit its freedoms to bring about its end. 

Chabria: “In July, Musk ally and now-Vice President JD Vance said on a conservative podcast that if he could give Trump one piece of advice, it would be to 'seize the administrative state for his own purposes.'”

Snyder: The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens.

Bouie: “It is not as if the president of the United States has the authority to unleash an unvetted, unaccountable private citizen onto some of the most sensitive data possessed by the federal government. But that is the situation. A power-mad president possessed of radical theories of executive authority and convinced of his own royal prerogative has given de facto control of most of the federal government to one of the richest men on the planet.”

Snyder: Lawyers were vastly overrepresented among the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the special task forces who carried out the [Nazi-era] murders… 

 Be wary of paramilitaries …armed groups first degrade a political order, and then transform it…Nazi storm troopers began as a security detail clearing the halls of Hitler’s opponents during his rallies…the use of violence in the United States is already highly privatized. What was novel in 2016 was a candidate who ordered private security details  to clear opponents from rallies and encouraged the audience itself to remove people who expressed different opinions…at one campaign rally the candidate said, “There’s a remnant left…get the remnant out.” [then] interjected, “Isn’t this more fun than a regular boring rally? To me it’s fun.”

 Be a patriot…it is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes …to compare one’s search for sexual partners in New York with military service in Vietnam that one has dodged….to say that Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are superior leaders…to call American soldiers “losers” and “suckers”…nor to golf your way through an epidemic in which half a million Americans die.

Chabria: "Political scientist Monty Marshall, who has spent his career studying democracies and their decline, told me that by his index, the U.S. is no longer considerd a functioning democracy, based on the lalst few weks. So really, anything is possible."

Snyder: By 1940…influential Americans such as Charles Lindbergh opposed war with the Nazis under the slogan, "America First."

Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post, February 7,  “King  Donald’s courtiers Struggle To Keep Up”: “The reason Trump forces aides and supporters to say things they know are false is to enforce a regime in which loyalty is paramount, overriding facts, overriding long-held convictions. This might seem like an amusing spectacle, but there is a real cost. In the case of USAID, it will translate into death and despair for millions of the poorest people on the planet.”

Snyder: In Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” …firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television…

In 2017, the American president averaged six lies a day. The next year it was sixteen, the following year twenty-two. In 2020 he told on average about twenty-seven lies a day.

 The Big Lie about elections was also repeated over and over. Followers did not want to believe that they could be deceived on such a scale, and took comfort in the repetition. The Big Lie created its own world, where anyone who pointed to simple truths was the enemy.

Bouie, re: Musk’s sketchy apparatchiks: “No private citizen has the authority to access the sensitive data of American citizens for either information gathering or their own, unknown purpose."

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. A billionaire can pay neither taxes nor debts. Liberating the wealthy from taxes will not increase the national debt. Fighting corruption means selling the presidency for favors.

The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims that president made when he said that, “I alone can solve it” or “I am your retribution.”

 Bouie:  “Musk seems to hold a vendetta against the [U.S.A.I.D] agency. He has called it a “radical-left political psy op,” a “criminal organization” and a “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” On Monday, shortly before 2 a.m., he bragged that he and his allies had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” (Nota bene from “NBC Politics News”: Last year, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee initiated a probe, and USAID’s inspector general was investigating [Musk company] Starlink’s use in Ukraine as part of its own accountability checks.)

 Snyder: As president, he used the word lies to mean facts not to his liking, and called journalists “enemies of the people (as Hitler and the Nazis had done). Where the Nazis said “Lugenpresse,” he said, “Fake news.”   

It is derision that is mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that is edgy and difficult. So try for yourself to wrote a proper article, involving work in the real world: traveling, interviewing, maintaining  relationships with sources… if you find you like doing this, keep a blog. 

 Since in the age of the internet we are all publishers, each of us bears  some private responsibility for the public’s sense of truth…

Russia failed to get the regime it wanted  [in Ukraine] as its neighbor, but did see is preferred candidate Trump in the United  States …He is Putin’s great hope for the rise of a dictatorial world.”

 Bouie: "Together, Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system. They are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government. They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda of austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth. And the longer Congress stands by, the more this is fixed in place."

Snyder: Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole,  but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom...

 If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it.

---------------------------------------

 

 

 

 

Comments ()