JFC

So it's true, then.

As rumors fly about an affair between Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and adviser Corey Lewandowski, a new report alleges the pair have been traveling together in a luxury jet fitted with a private cabin, ostensibly meant for “high-profile deportations.”

Reports of the pair’s romantic relationship initially took off in the tabloids. Then in a New York magazine exposé published in September, one FEMA official called it the “worst-kept secret in D.C.”

[...]

Noem, 54, and Lewandowski, 52, are both married with children.

The two have denied the rumors, which have hounded them for years.

[...]

Recently, the two have been traveling across the country in a luxury 737 MAX jet, with a private cabin in back, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. Official documents reviewed by the newspaper show that the luxury plane, which staff jokingly call Noem’s “big, beautiful jet,” is earmarked for “high-profile deportations.”

[...]

Noem has had a turbulent history with planes during Trump’s second term.

Last year, she reportedly authorized the purchase of 10 Spirit Airline planes before realizing that the airline didn’t actually own the planes, and they also had no engines. In October, despite the then-ongoing government shutdown, the Trump administration bought two Gulfstream G700 jets for $172 million to be used by Noem and other leaders.

[...]

According to the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal’s report on what it called “constant chaos” within Noem’s department, President Donald Trump and his top advisers have long been uncomfortable with the pair’s relationship. Although Lewandowski wanted to serve as Noem’s chief of staff, Trump said no because of the affair rumors, according to the Journal. Officials told the newspaper that Trump continues to bring up the alleged affair.

  HuffPo

Maybe now is a good time for him to fire Noem for her handling of DHS.

Definitely time to impeach Noem (and Trump).

 

Also, they had to rehire that pilot immediately, because he was the only person available qualified to fly the plane back home.

Christ.

Take it from a historian

 

They'll take what they want

 And do what they want.  Congress won't stop them.  And neither will the Supreme Court.

Witnessing a violent coup

 

This is what domestic terrorism looks like.

Will we meet the moment?

Trump’s grip on power is hardly iron. And we have seen meaningful wins scored in the courts against his abuses. At the same time, we have also seen the judiciary disregarded by an administration determined to seize power. And the Supreme Court has shown little interest in joining the fight being waged by admirable judges from across the political spectrum in other courtrooms across the country. In fact, the nation’s highest court has undermined the capacity of the lower courts to resist Trump’s authoritarian assault.

And now, we have come to the looming showdown in Chicago, a move that has put Texas National Guard soldiers on Illinois streets and that Governor J.B. Pritzker has appropriately termed “an invasion.”

Equally as concerning is the persistent belief that this crisis will somehow dissipate overnight, either when Trump finally makes a politically fatal error or simply exits the stage. This isn’t a fantasy held by uninformed voters waking from decades-long comas. It’s the sort of thing that people like Chuck Schumer entertained even heading into 2024.

In part, this is because authoritarianism can often feel quite normal. I’ve written before about how many things simply continue on, even as the critical things that make us citizens of a truly free and fair society are obliterated. It makes it easier to tell ourselves, as we sit by the dual glows of our television screens and our phones, that things are as they’ve always been. Yet it is happening all the same.

[...]

Trump and MAGA have not decisively won this fight, but we will lose it if we do not recognize just how dark the hour is.

[...]

We want to think that the repeated, widespread abuse of basic rights by DHS; the DOJ actions against former officials like James Comey and John Bolton; the presence of 2020 election deniers across congressional and executive branch leaders; the unconstitutional dismantling of federal agencies; the consolidation of old and new media under leadership favorable to Trump; the use of lawsuits and executive branch power to intimidate and silence critics; and the clear attempts to subvert the 2026 and 2028 elections; and Trump’s constant insinuation that he might seek a third term do not all in fact mean that we have crossed the threshold into a competitive authoritarian environment.

But we have. We have passed through the veil. Whatever becomes of American liberal democracy in the near or distant future, it will be a resurrection and not a continuation.

  Alan Elrod @ Liberal Currents

Authoritarianism 101 - control the media

 

As laid out in the Constitution?

Jesus Christ.

Why not just abolish Congress?

Oh yeah.  Because then Representative (whose? you may well ask) Meuser wouldn't be getting a big fat paycheck on the taxpayer's dime for rubber stamping Trump's mad desires.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Get ready for more chaos in a Trump 2.0 administration

There's a widespread myth out there that dictators know how to "get stuff done," which authoritarians use to persuade people they are a necessary evil. But it is a myth. Mussolini did not make the trains run on time. Hitler wasn't ruthlessly efficient. He instead bankrupted his country with a horrific war that eventually led to much of the nation being bombed into oblivion.

[...]

[T]he Achilles heel of authoritarians is they confuse power and domination, and end up struggling to hold a coalition together. When they were focused on defeating a common enemy — Democrats — Republicans were able to set aside their differences to get Trump over the electoral line. But now that he's won, the fractures are starting to show. Even more importantly, Trump doesn't know how to bring different factions to the table to compromise. Instead, his every instinct is to set people against one another in a never-ending contest to curry his favor. That's great for his ego, but it is not, thankfully, how to get stuff done.

  Salon

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What the actual fuck, people?

Current estimates when all votes are counted is that Trump will receive 77.9 million votes to Harris’s 75.7 million votes with less than 250,000 total votes in 3 swing states flipping the election to Harris. But we keep hearing about a sweeping Trump victory and a wholesale rejection of the Democratic Party and its values.

  Meidas Touch

If the exit polls are roughly accurate, about 19 million people who had voted for Biden in 2020 just stayed home. And, again, if the exits are roughly accurate, nearly all of those who stayed home had said they were voting against Trump when they cast ballots in 2020.

  Michael Podhorzer

Could it be the woman they refused to come out for?

In October 2009, John Roberts said this on C-SPAN (and it’s worth listening to him say it – audio here):

“The most important thing for the public to understand is that we’re not a political branch of government. They do not elect us. If they do not like what we are doing, it’s more or less just too bad.”

[...]

While Trump was almost certainly not the first choice of the FedSoc coalition, his election, along with the incoming Republican Senate, means that Trump will be able to allow Thomas and Alito to strategically retire and install a 6-3 or 7-2 FedSoc majority for decades. And with the opportunity to place 200-plus more judges to the federal bench, we can expect nearly half of the federal judiciary to have been appointed by Trump by the end of his term.

[...]

[If] we think of the billionaires and theocrats behind the capture of the courts and the Republican Party, then we have to recognize that they actually “came to power” about 19 years ago “through democratic elections,” and that “once in power, like Trojan horses, dismantle[d] democratic systems from within so that they [were] able to entrench their powers and eliminate the possibility of being removed through the democratic process.” The Roberts Court has been a dictator from day one.

[...]

Before the FedSoc capture of the Supreme Court and Citizens United, the billionaires were constrained by contribution limits. And while there was already “dark money” and some outside spending, it was nothing like what we saw in 2024.

[...]

[T]his election was legal, but not democratically legitimate – in just the same way that for nearly a century, elections in the South were “legal” under Jim Crow constitutions, but did not legitimately represent the consent of the governed.

[...]

While Trump “won” playing by the rules as they were on Election Day, those weren’t what everyone thought the rules were when he announced his candidacy. Remember that in the last two years:

Every time Trump’s actions have come before a grand jury, he has been indicted;

Every time he has faced a trial jury, he has been convicted;

Every time he has had an important case heard by judges he did not appoint, including those appointed by other Republican presidents, he has lost;

Each time surveys have asked whether he had committed crimes, a majority say he has;

BUT:

Every time he has come before the Supreme Court justices or federal judges he appointed, he has had his way.

The Supreme Court has captured the flag. 

As this article points out, modern elections have been a see-saw of presidential preference by party.  The conclusion is that people are simply fed up that our system isn't working for them.  This has been the case for a long time now, and we had the chance to either change the system so that it does work for us, or keep affixed to the dysfunctional system and end up with an authoritarian government instead of a democracy.  Looks like we chose the latter.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Experts wanted?

Who's listening?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Dystopian? Fascist? Authoritarian?

This kind of talk would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

[U.S. Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL)], who came to the forefront of the political conversation following her heavily-mocked response to President Joe Biden's 2024 State of the Union address, announced the More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed (MOMS) Act. The bill would create a registry of pregnant women, who would then be steered to support services that include "crisis pregnancy centers" — usually faith-based groups designed to shame or trick women seeking abortions into keeping their pregnancies anyway.

  Raw Story

That's not the worst that could happen by putting women on a government registry. Jesus Christ.

Happy Mother's Day.

By the way, she opposes putting gun owners into a government database.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Authoritarian promises

And this is exactly what Trump has been saying he'll do if you elect him.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Because they can't win if they don't cheat

Ohio voters voted to enact a Constitutional amendment in the State that guarantees the right to an abortion.  Republicans didn't like it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

MAGA

In an unprecedented raid Friday, local law enforcement seized computers, cellphones and reporting materials from the Marion County Record office, the newspaper’s reporters, and the publisher [Eric Meyer]’s home.

Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”

  Kansas Reflector

What's the matter with Kansas?

“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer said, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”

[...]

The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.

The raid followed news stories about [Marion restaurant owner Kari Newell] who kicked reporters out of a [public] meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner [whose staff was apologetic], and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.

[...]

The criminal record could jeopardize her efforts to obtain a liquor license for her catering business.

[...]

The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead.

Is impeachment in order?

“An attack on a newspaper office through an illegal search is not just an infringement on the rights of journalists but an assault on the very foundation of democracy and the public’s right to know,” [Emily Bradbury, executive director of the Kansas Press Association,] said. “This cannot be allowed to stand.”

And it probably won't. But it's still able to have its chilling effect. There should be some very serious penalties when this is all over.

As a journalism professor in Illinois, Meyer said, he had graduate students from Egypt who talked about how people would come into the newspaper office and seize everything so they couldn’t publish. Those students presented a scholarly paper at a conference in Toronto about what it has done to journalism there.

“That’s basically what they’re trying to do here,” Meyer said. “The intervention is just like that repressive government of Egypt. I didn’t think it could happen in America.”

Seriously?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 08/14/2023:

Meanwhile in Israel

Mass protests are rocking Israel, and the country’s largest labor union announced a major strike Monday in opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s months-long attempt to push through widely-derided judicial reforms that opponents say will pull the country toward an autocracy.

[...]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration proposed a series of widely contested government reforms.

[...]

The planned overhaul would significantly weaken the country’s judiciary and make it harder to remove Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, from power.

  

Just what Trump and the GOP would do in a second Trump administration. Unless, of course, the already rigged Supreme Court took up every case appealed to them by MAGA world, making it unnecessary.

Netanyahu fired his defense minister who opposed the motion, triggering renewed protests across the country.

[...]

Histadrut — which at 800,000 members represents the majority of Israel’s trade unionists — declared a “historic” general strike to “stop this judicial revolution, this craziness,” Bar-David said.

[...]

Flights out of Israel’s Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv have been suspended, as airport workers go on strike, and laborers at Haifa and Ashdod ports — the two largest ports in Israel — have also stopped working. McDonald’s Israel says it has closed branches as part of the strike action.

[...]

“600,000 demonstrating is an extraordinary figure. It means approx 6.5% of Israel’s population is out protesting tonight, many having literally woken up from their beds when they heard Bibi fired Gallant,” Monica Marks, a Middle East politics professor at NYU Abu Dhabi, wrote on Twitter.

[...]

A deeply divided Israel has held five snap elections since April 2019.

[...]

“We’ve never been closer to falling apart,” Israel’s former Prime Minister Yair Lapid told lawmakers on Monday.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

JFC

Maybe when Ukrainians finish defending their own freedom, they can come give us a hand here.

UPDATE:  It's still worse...

America's inexorable march toward authoritarianism

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Make America Russia in the 40s

This is some scary shit, people.  

Meanwhile in America

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Tuesday signed legislation mandating public colleges and universities survey students and faculty about their beliefs in an effort to promote intellectual diversity on campuses.

“We obviously want our universities to be focused on critical thinking, academic rigor,” DeSantis said during a news conference Tuesday, according to the Naples Daily News.

“We do not want them as basically hotbeds for stale ideology,” he said.

[...]

Under House Bill 233, surveys would be conducted annually on campuses to assess viewpoint diversity and intellectual freedom, and determine “the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented,” and whether students and faculty “feel free to express beliefs and viewpoints on campus and in the classroom.”

The bill does not specifically say what will be done with survey results, but DeSantis suggested budget cuts could be imminent if universities and colleges are found to be “indoctrinating” students.

[...]

The legislation, which goes into effect July 1, also aims to ensure students are being shown ideas that they “may disagree with or find uncomfortable.”

  The Hill

Which is what was happening that triggered this bullshit. I presume it will be challenged in court.

Other measures included an expansion of civics education for K-12 schools, including instruction about the perils of communist and totalitarian governments.

Well that's rich.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's Sunday

[A]fter the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory helped to motivate the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, with many participants touting their Christian faith — and as evangelical pastors throughout the country ache over the spread of the conspiracy theory among their flocks, and its very real human toll — it’s worth asking whether the time has come for a new wave of outreach to religious communities, this time aimed at evangelical Christians.

“I personally feel a great burden, since I came from these communities, to try to figure out how to help the leaders,” says Elizabeth Neumann, a former top official at the Department of Homeland Security who resigned from Trump administration in April 2020. The challenge in part is that, in this “particular case, I don’t know if the government is a credible voice at all,” she says.

[...]

Neumann, who was raised in the evangelical tradition, is a devout Christian. Her knowledge of that world, and her expertise on issues of violent extremism, gives her a unique insight into the ways QAnon is driving some Christians to extremism and violence.

She sees QAnon’s popularity among certain segments of Christendom not as an aberration, but as the troubling-but-natural outgrowth of a strain of American Christianity. In this tradition, one’s belief is based less on scripture than on conservative culture, some political disagreements are seen as having nigh-apocalyptic stakes and “a strong authoritarian streak” runs through the faith.

[...]

Christian nationalism is “a huge theme throughout evangelical Christendom,” Neumann says, referring to teachings that posit America as God’s chosen nation. Christians who subscribe to those teachings believe the United States has a covenant with God, and that if it is broken, the nation risks literal destruction — analogous to the siege of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible. In the eyes of these believers, that covenant is threatened by cultural changes like taking prayer out of public schools and legalizing abortion and gay marriage.

[...]

"This is the moment, and God’s going to judge us,” she says. “When you paint it in existential terms like that, a lot of people feel justified to carry out acts of violence in the name of their faith.”

[Neumann:] In 2019, QAnon was more of the “huh, that’s new, but not really of concern” category.

[...]

QAnon was this fringe thing, it was concerning. Then, in 2020, it went on steroids.

In March, even before the shutdowns, I had my staff look at the research we use for developing behavioral indicators of individuals who might mobilize to violence. If we go down this path of having to all stay home, does that increase stress factors? Does it increase risk factors known to be common in people who carry out attacks? The answer was yes.

[...]

With the pandemic, you had what was perceived to be government overreach; you had social isolation, which is a known risk factor [for extremism]; you had some people with a lot more time on their hands because they were not commuting, not taking kids to ballgames and not going to happy hour after work; you had economic stress — another known risk factor — as people lost jobs or moved to part-time status; you had people who lost loved ones. There was this great sense that people had lost control; our lives as we knew them had been upended.

[...]

The question then is that if you know that’s going to be a challenge, what can the government do to help individuals understand why it is issuing stay-at-home orders, why it’s necessary, why it’s legal and constitutional? If the government had done a better job at that, we would have seen slightly less anger, slightly less of that victim-persecution complex.

[...]

That’s what we saw in 2020. We saw any number of people spending more time online looking for answers. You had increases in militia movements. The Moonshot CVE Group, which studies radicalization, said that in states with stay-at-home orders that lasted 10 days or longer, [online] searches for white-supremacist content increased by 21 percent. In states where there either weren’t stay-at-home orders or they lasted nine days or fewer, that increase was only 1 percent.

[...]

The combination of that on top of a pandemic, on top of a campaign where the president was sowing his own conspiracy theories and laying the groundwork for what eventually became [the lie] that the election had been stolen — well, some would say he started laying the groundwork four years ago. For people who studied disinformation, it became clear that the call was coming from inside the house. That kind of primordial soup makes conditions ripe for vulnerable individuals to move into this space. QAnon is not designed to be logical; it’s designed to meet these emotional and psychological needs.

[...]

There is, in more conservative Christian movements, a strong authoritarian streak.

[...]

It creates people who are not critical thinkers. They’re not necessarily reading scripture for themselves. Or if they are, they’re reading it through the lens of one pastor, and they’re not necessarily open to hearing outside perspectives on what the text might say. It creates groupthink.

Another factor is Christian nationalism. That’s a huge theme throughout evangelical Christendom.

[...]

There was this whole movement in the ’90s and 2000s among conservatives to explain how amazing [America’s] founding was: Our founding was inspired by God, and there’s no explanation for how we won the Revolutionary War except God, and, by the way, did you know that the founders made this covenant with God? It’s American exceptionalism but goes beyond that. It says that we are the next version of Israel from the Old Testament, that we are God’s chosen nation, and that is a special covenant — a two-way agreement with God. We can’t break it, and if we do, what happened to Israel will happen to us: We will be overrun by whatever the next Babylon is, taken into captivity, and He will remove His blessing from us.

What [threatens] that covenant? The moment we started taking prayer out of [public] schools and allowing various changes in our culture — [the legalization of] abortion is one of those moments; gay marriage is another. They see it in cataclysmic terms: This is the moment, and God’s going to judge us.

[...]

The elections in 2016 and 2020 were a fight in existential terms for believers of this teaching — meaning, if we allow Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden to be president, they are going to put the nail in the coffin [of the covenant], and the next thing we’re going to see is that Christianity is going to be outlawed, pastors will not be able to teach the Bible and Christians will become persecuted.

  Politico

I grew up in an evangelical household. I was around 10 years old when JFK ran for president, and I remember clearly hearing that he couldn't be allowed to win, because if he did, we'd lose our religious freedom, and we'd all be forced to come under the rule of the Pope. I wouldn't be surprised if Biden's Catholicism was a factor in evangelical votes for Trump in 2020 (just as Hillary Clinton's femaleness would have been in 2016 - women are not considered capable - or worthy - of leading roles in evangelical religions).

But it’s a very hard thing for people to [address], because it requires acknowledging that how you were raised or the people that you trusted either intentionally lied to you or were just wrong. It’s hard. It takes humility to go there. It’s a hard thing for people to recognize and escape from. But sadly, it’s a security issue that we have to address, because it has led to this.

[...]

It takes a long time for somebody to disengage. It’s usually not a light switch — although for QAnon, January 20 may historically be looked at as a light-switch moment. [QAnon lore has long held that on January 20th, Joe Biden would not be inaugurated, Donald Trump would remain president, declare martial law and many prominent political leaders would be arrested.] You’ve seen many people go, “Oh, I was conned,” and they’re out. But for others, it may be a longer journey.

[...]

The disinformation problem is not going away. We can build more resilience. We can put more guardrails in place. But it’s going to be a problem for us for a long time.