MAGAfest Destiny: Are You Ready to Go to War?
While you’re thinking about it, the Trump GOP will be giving rich people a tax break, cutting the social safety net, using social media to distract, and editing the Constitution to meet their needs.
Project 2025, the right’s game plan for the incoming administration, doesn’t mention engaging in military or economic conflicts to facilitate expansion of the United States. Don’t get me wrong, cruelty is a core tenet of the folks who crafted this document and it proposes nastiness throughout for those unfortunates who stand in the way of establishing an authoritarian state.
It’s just that nobody envisioned land grabs as a core foreign policy. Law professor and author Jennifer Taub was first out of the gate with a term for describing these ambitions:
MAGAfest Destiny
At an hour long press conference on Tuesday, incoming President Donald J Trump raised the possibility of military action against Denmark, Greenland, and Panama. He also discussed using a blunt economic club to bring Canada into the United States fold and ensure subservience from Mexico.
How serious is Donald Trump about grabbing Greenland?
Via Wonkette:
Meanwhile in Nuuk, Don Junior, human Adobe pinch tool Charlie Kirk, and incoming director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel/MAGA DJ/Matt Gaetz’s wedding officiant Sergio Gor went to Greenland today to window-shop, get a look at the goods and have a lunch and fake MAGA rally there. Yay, snow!
Junior didn’t meet with anyone in the Greenlandic government, and claimed he was just there for a “quick day-long trip to shoot some fun video content for podcast.” But Daddy himself called into the boys’ get-together! And he got on the speakerphone to tell the assembled handful of dorkbros and curious Greenlanders, “It needs security for itself, and it needs security for the world. We’re going to treat you well.” Security from what, he did not specify, of course.
Coincidentally or not, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Norway are being threatened by billionaire Elon Musk. He’d like them to fall into line with the new world order, using his platform for spreading defamation about British leaders and his clout to support fringe candidates. I guess this is a twenty-first century variation of monarchs using favored noblemen. As long as tribute is paid to Dear Leader, the messy business of administering a political entity could be farmed out.
Via NBC News:
Tech billionaire Elon Musk is getting wide pushback in European capitals as he tries to extend his recent political success to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Leaders in four European countries — France, Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom — denounced his influence in separate statements Monday, warning that Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, should not involve himself in their countries’ politics.
Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and a close ally of President-elect Donald Trump, has been on a social media rampage against various world leaders, posting relentlessly on his social media app, X, and trying to duplicate the influence he had on U.S. politics last year. On numerous occasions, Musk has boosted far-right candidates in various European countries with his social media posts.
The Mar a Lago resident also posted a video of a man from Greenland urging him to purchase the Danish territory. In keeping with the incoming administration’s standards for vetting, Timmy Zeeb, is a convicted drug dealer, violent criminal, and serial offender, according to Danish media outlets DR News and B.T.. And also in keeping with the soon-to-be-president’s ability to hear what he wants to hear, Zeeb insulted Americans, calling them “too fat,” which Trump may have missed due to Zeeb’s accent. When questioned, Zeeb confirmed the comment.
If you’re thinking this all sounds crazy, think again. It’s supposed to sound crazy. Actual implementation of these acquisitions would be impractical at best, with the process itself messy enough to make success a losing adventure. Whether these fantasies of global expansion are really being expressed by the incoming president, they do have value when it comes to further shifting wealth toward the economic top tier.
What all this blathering does in the short run (because taking over countries does require a modicum of planning) is to distract from the damage Project 2025’s proposals will cause. The Trump administration is doing a bang up job of bringing those ordinarily considered defenders of process into line.
The most notable affirmation of this obeying in advance came to light yesterday, as the social media empire known as Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, etc) sent its new minted Republican corporate Vice President onto Fox News to announce the end of the company’s fact checking.
Via Judd Legum at Popular Information:
Meta's investment in fact-checking was very small and, as a result, fact-checks were only conducted on a tiny fraction of the content posted to its platforms. In 2019, for example, Meta had $71 billion in revenue and paid Lead Stories $359,000. Popular Information estimated that, overall, Meta devoted 0.003% of its 2019 revenue to fact-checking.
Zuckerberg's announcement also included a direct attack on the Biden administration, which he accused of "going after us and other American companies" in a "push for censorship."
What is Zuckerberg talking about? He does not provide details, but it appears to reference complaints about the Biden administration that he included in an August 26 letter to Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH). In the letter, Zuckerberg says that the Biden administration "pressured" the company to take down certain misinformation about COVID-19. The only example of "pressure" Zuckerberg describes is that White House staff "expressed a lot of frustration" when Meta did not agree with the White House's position. Zuckerberg admits that it was Meta's decision "whether or not to take content down."
On this basis, Zuckerberg casts the Biden administration as an enemy of free speech. He then celebrates Trump's election, calling it an "opportunity to restore free expression."
Asked at the aforementioned press conference:
Q: Do you think Zuckerberg is responding to the threats you've made to him in the past?
TRUMP: Probably. Yeah. Probably.
It’s not that this change in policy will affect most users –they’ll continue seeing a dribble of information about the lives of people in their silo, along with a predominance of sponsored content tailored by the algorithm. Thus I’ll continue to see profiles of far away islands, based on the fact that I lived in the Virgin Islands at one time.
According to CNN:
Users are now allowed to, for example, refer to “women as household objects or property” or “transgender or non-binary people as ‘it,’” according to a section of the policy prohibiting such speech that was crossed out. A new section of the policy notes Meta will allow “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.”
I have no doubt that Facebook won’t be adding user pushback on the kinds of provably false conspiracy theories voiced by Donald Trump at the press conference, such as the claim that the FBI instigated the attack on the Capitol four years ago or that insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed as she climbed through a broken window into a room from which members of Congress were being evacuated, was actually trying to “hold back the crowd.”
The topper in terms of pure bullshit was his claim that Hezbollah had a role in the January 6 riot: “We have to find out about Hezbollah. We have to find out who, exactly, was in that whole thing.”
So there’s two things to consider when thinking about the incoming administration.
First, via Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:
We’re seeing a lot unfold all at once today. A lot of it seems overwhelming and it’s meant to seem overwhelming. That’s the central point – not just a side effect of a lot of things happening at once. I think of it like being in an iMax theater. Maybe even one of those more immersive ones where there’s percussive sound and the seats shake. One of those movies where you’re on a roller coaster or maybe hang gliding. You know you are sitting in a theater, not in motion at all. But the visual stimulus is so overwhelming you cannot help gripping the arm rests like you’re a thousand feet in the air or in free fall.
Of course it’s not exactly the same. This isn’t just a movie. Something real is happening. A lot of real things are happening. We’re not just sitting in a theater. But the point of all of this is to create the apparently overwhelming and unchallengeable feeling that Trump is all-powerful, that his team is all-knowing and have everything figured out and that nothing can stop him.
That’s simply not true. So don’t forget that entirely by design you're being overwhelmed with sensory stimulus. It’s not real.
Secondly, remember that every challenge also has opportunity within. You just have to look into where to find it, as Dan Pfieffer at The Message Box has done.
The axis of politics is no longer Left/Right; it’s inside/outside. Trump is misreading the electoral results and surrounding himself with elite institutions and individuals who he ran against. In addition to buddying up with Zuckerberg and Bezos, Trump appointed 13 different billionaires to serve in his administration. If Trump wants to be pro-corporation and pro-billionaire, Democrats can — and must — position themselves as the opposite. The public is still very angry about the state of affairs. These corporations are in league with Trump, and we need to explain why.
Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Donald Trump are giving Democrats an opportunity to get on the right side of public opinion.
I have a right to be here by Lyz at Men Yell at Me
Vehicles are more dangerous than they used to be. The looming front bumpers and wide, unwieldy metal expanses of trucks and SUVs are a major factor in why pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. have been climbing steadily, in 2022 reaching their highest level in more than 40 years. And according to NPR, “The number of pedestrian deaths is growing faster than traffic fatalities overall, jumping more than 80% since 2009.”
After the tragic death of Laken Riley, a young woman murdered by an immigrant while she was out on a run, lawmakers have focused on punishing other immigrants. The reality remains that a woman is far more likely to be murdered by her male partner than a stranger. The reality remains that the greatest danger is inside our own homes. But the cultural narrative wants us to believe our freedom to be unhindered bodies in space is the threat. It urges us inside. It urges others inside, back into hiding, back across borders.
It feels important to keep walking and running in these streets. I don’t want to retreat. I don’t want to cede my freedom. I want to keep being a body in public, writing a narrative on the streets with my feet, that declares, I am here. I have a right to be here.
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Lifeboat Capitalism By Hamilton Nolan at How Things Work
Either you allow a few people to get very rich and let them hire their own private protection and build their mansions on hills or on stilts or behind big walls, and buy themselves estates in New Zealand to escape to, and rockets to blast off in if necessary—or, or, you take the other path. You say, "all humans are together on this planet and we are all equal and we will face this collectively and we will take care of the most vulnerable first and we will demand the most sacrifice from those who have the most to give.” It is a stunning thing that the first choice has somehow become the default, the legal and most likely path for the world’s richest nation, and the second choice has become an object of mockery, something to be dismissed as utopian. This is a good time to stop and pause for a moment and take in how absurd the American movie has gotten. The con man incoming president vowing to Drill Baby Drill as smirking politicians laugh and cheer and California’s grandest city burns. Don’t worry, the tax cut is coming! It will be enough to build a new mansion! And hire armed guards to protect it! The American dream, a lovely thing to behold.
There is the all-encompassing question of evolving our entire world to try to head off the progress of climate change, but we do not need to solve the entire crisis in every conversation. At this moment, it is enough to say, “we need to make some reasonable rules about how we are going to get everyone through the disasters, because we are all in this together.” This low bar, I promise, is too much to expect from the federal government that is set to come to power. We will watch them hand out oil drilling permits and pass bills to protect gas stoves and swagger around in big trucks and pose in campaign ads with guns and banners that say “Come and Take It” and go on hunting trips with lobbyists from the American Petroleum Institute. These are the villains. There they are. They will help your house burn down and send cops to crack your head if you get angry about it and then ask you to vote for them. They have a lifeboat. You can’t get on. They’re sure they will get away with it.
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The Brave Little Toaster by Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic (A short story)
The fire department took away the melted toaster and used their axes to knock huge, vindictive holes in Mister Toussaint's walls. "Just looking for embers," they claimed. But he knew that they were pissed off because there was simply no good excuse for sticking a pouch of independently powered computation and sensors and transmitters into an antique toaster and pushing down the lever until oily, toxic smoke filled the whole 104th floor.
Mister Toussaint's neighbors weren't happy about it either.
But Mister Toussaint didn't mind. It had all been worth it, just to hear LOONY GOONY beg and weep for its life as its edges curled up and blackened.
He argued mightily, but the firefighters refused to let him keep the toaster.
