Category Archives: authoritarianism

Trump 100

Posted on Tuesday 29 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Trump’s 100 days, with charts; Even the conservative Wall Street Journal considers Trump’s a “failed presidency”; Now the administration is looking to jail journalists; How MAGA loves public meltdowns; How Hegseth boasts of axing a program as “woke” that was … Continue reading →

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Tribal Warpaint

Posted on Sunday 27 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

How Trump doesn’t want to govern, and rejects the idea of American government as a collaboration; How the idea of consumer choice led to the idea of being gay; Trump and covid.gov rewrite the history, as authoritarians do; How Trump … Continue reading →

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What Conservatives Mean by the Deep State

Posted on Tuesday 22 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Namely, anything that interferes with their agenda, in effect the entirety of Jonathan Rauch’s “constitution of knowledge,” since MAGA conservatives don’t truly believe in the Constitution or our system of government; Robert Reich on the billionaire class, that doesn’t care … Continue reading →

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The War Against Intelligence

Posted on Tuesday 22 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Trump’s rage against smart people; Defunding Harvard will hobble medical research that would benefit people like us; Historian Lauren Thompson compares the Gilded Age to the Trump Age; Trump and Vance praised b conservatives for lying about abortion; Hegseth purges … Continue reading →

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Perhaps Humanity Has Hit a Conceptual Ceiling

Posted on Sunday 13 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Alternate title: America was supposed to be better than this. Perhaps MAGA is about making America *simpler* again; perhaps what we’re seeing is a rejection of the complexity of the modern world; Why is it Americans love watching crime shows? … Continue reading →

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“An arbitrary, corrupt, mendacious, and utterly incompetent king”

Posted on Saturday 12 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Andrew Sullivan on Trump; How Trump supporters rationalize whatever crazy things he does, from Charlie Warzel and Molly Olmstead; Trying to understand what Trump’s crackdown on science will accomplish; Another item about the Christian right’s war on empathy; have I … Continue reading →

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Is There a Big Picture to Make Sense of All This?

Posted on Tuesday 8 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Adam Lee on our current age of “stupidity” and whether or not the stupid can bring down society; The commentariat: Catherine Rampell on the naked Trump; Robert Reich on Trump’s “national emergencies”; Paul Krugman on Trump’s war on American greatness; … Continue reading →

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This is how these things happen

Posted on Wednesday 2 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

NYT’s M. Gessen on how the police state has arrived; A WaPo reporter goes looking for the “corrosive ideology” Trump thinks is in the Smithsonian; The next Project 2025 goal is to restore the ideal heterosexual family, and diminish everyone … Continue reading →

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“The Wholesale Destruction of the United States Government”

Posted on Friday 21 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Heather Cox Richardson on the dismantling of the US government, on libraries and museums, and on the rule of law; WaPo’s Dana Milbank on Musk’s ignorance of the government he’s dismembering, on what judges do, and on the administration’s bows … Continue reading →

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So Much for Free Speech

Posted on Tuesday 11 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Now the Trump team is arresting people simply for expressing opinions the administration doesn’t like, from Robert Reich and Adam Serwer; That list of forbidden words; Egg prices are because Easter?!; Fox blames stock market plunge on Biden; Heather Cox … Continue reading →

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