Words From Sane People About What Happened on January 20, 2025

Come, meet some of those seeking to keep us informed.

Background credit: ACLU

After Day One’s ‘shock and awe,’ two conversations are going on in America. The curated media (Faux, etc) are all agog about Trump’s rule, namely the dawn of the “golden age” via the pile of executive orders.

The rest of the legacy media is crying crocodile tears over the end of the ‘rule of law,’ referring to the pardons and commutations for fifteen hundred or so wannabe Brownshirts.

The plethora of proclamations on immigration, which amount to a purge of non-cis male thinking and populations, will end up being the Hot Topic sooner than later.

Via Reliable Sources:

• "The media will now rely on its time-tested tactic of showing only one side of the immigration issue," Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham predicted. The message, as always, is to just trust Trump and his favorite media sources.

While interpreting the impact of reversing many of ex-President Biden’s executive orders (which are also being removed from the internet) will take time, there are other seemingly unrelated goings on that will have the effect of narrowing the stream of information available to the American public.

I urge readers to take a deep breath on the many performative gestures and unlikely promises to assess where the privileged aim to do actual harm to the oppressed and underprivileged. Don’t get distracted by boasts.

I’ll venture two predictions, which I can guarantee are not based on an allegedly majoritarian viewpoint, and not endorsed by many progressives and even fewer centrists.

• One, using a class lens when responding to MAGA initiatives will win over more people.

• Two, what are considered ‘far-left’ organizations by present standards will see notable growth. (I would argue that the programs offered by many are an example of ‘magical thinking ’ in politics.)

Keeping the flow of information available to the American people is a must have for the coming years. While there are local news organizations not necessarily in the MAGA court, much of the framing for politics will come through legacy and social media compliant with the wishes of their billionaire owners.

Today, I want to introduce readers to a small slice of what’s available on Substack, a bookstore-like venue allowing individuals and groups to publish unfettered, own the rights to their content and mailing lists, and keep 90% of revenues IF (not required) they take donations or charge for subscriptions.

It is home to both Words & Deeds and The Jumping Off Place, sites where local progressives find room for expression.

Compared to other platforms, it’s like walking into a farmstand after having shopped at a convenience store all your life. Some essays are less perfect than others, but those on Substack who commit to regularly posting are steadily increasing in quality and refining their perspectives. (It’s also true that there are a few rotting items in the back, and that’s where we like to keep them.)

Trying to keep up with all the content is a daunting task. Each new story can lead you to others if you’re so inclined. It’s an info-system where big name reporters, scientists, and academics have migrated as their original home bases have deteriorated.

You’ll see a small sample of what I saw in the early hours of Trump 2.0. Some are serious, some are cynical, and some contain satire. Many of these authors offer free content, emailed to your inbox as they go to publish. And, if you’re so inclined, a few bucks a month to your favorite authors keeps the good works coming.

I’ll share a link to the essays, another to author bios and a few words about what to expect. I selected way more authors than could fit in this space, so look for a future topic-centered piece giving up links and quotes.

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My Letter for America by Olga Lautman

• The fight will be exhausting, and you will feel overwhelmed. That’s okay. Take a break when you need to, but don’t stay away too long. Build a network of people you trust—friends, neighbors, and community members—and lean on them when the burden feels heavy.

• I still believe in this country, even as we stand on the brink of losing democracy. America has a history of resilience. In our darkest moments, the generations before us have risen to the challenge. I believe we will do it again. It will take time, but I truly believe we will correct the course. But we cannot afford to give in.

• Stay united. Stay informed. Stay in the fight. Democracy isn’t something we inherit—it’s something we earn, over and over again. I’m here for that fight. I hope you are too!

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Twenty Lessons On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder at Thinking About…

• These lessons are the openings of the twenty chapters of my little 2017 book On Tyranny, which has just been lightly edited since in successive printings to account for the Big Lie, the coup attempt, the war in Ukraine, and the risks we face in 2024. The lessons remain the same. On Tyranny has also been published in a beautiful graphic edition, illustrated by Nora Krug. For my positive ideas about liberty, see my new book, On Freedom.

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TikTok Refugees and Citizen Diplomacy by Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo

• Hordes of young displaced U.S. TikTok users, hoping to find a new home for their content and longing for their old feeds, created user accounts on a Chinese app called RedNote (小红书). Some estimate between 700,000 to 2,000,000 new users flocked to the app.

• This caught everyone off guard, including the Chinese authorities. Why would U.S. users migrate over to a Chinese language app and even start learning Mandarin? What kind of eye-opening interactions would happen?

• It turns out, there were plenty. Young Chinese users learned in real time about life for young adults in the U.S., and many were shocked to hear that some of the worst of it (school shooting drills, medical bankruptcy) weren’t just CCP propaganda.

• Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of U.S. users learned that their peers in China were, well, a lot like them.

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How to know if you’re living in a dictatorship by Mark Jacob at Stop The Presses

• Elections as meaningless exercises

• Many dictatorships have elections just to keep up appearances. But will future American elections be anywhere close to fair? Will the media spread the dictator’s lies and disappear his opponent’s truths? Already the Republican Party is working hard to dilute Black political power and draw unfair maps to seize outsized power. Already Elon Musk is allowed to spend $277 million to sway an election. At what point do we stop being a democracy and start being Kabuki theater?

• History’s gold standard for rigged elections came in 1927 when Charles D.B. King was re-elected president of Liberia with 240,000 votes – in a country with only 15,000 eligible voters. At some point, if we don’t get tougher in fighting the MAGA fascists, we’ll be voting in 1927 Liberia too.

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Of, For, and By the Billionaires by Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian

• Musk may be better at blowing up things (budget deals, rockets) than any presidential puppet master to date. However, his most destructive ambition may be to destroy the conceit that “we the people” hold power and that the government is accountable to them. Social scientist and author Bob Putnam has pointed out that the Gilded Age ended only when a spirit of progressive reform “began in ordinary small towns in the middle of America and then spread from there.” Simply put, we cannot wait for someone else to bring Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, and their ilk to heel. Putnam reminded us: “What we learned from [the Gilded Age] is that history is not determined by something outside. We think that the critical factor is really citizen agency—that the choices that individual people make will, in fact, determine whether we end up on one path or another.” He urged: “Don’t be cynical. Don’t think that this is all determined by somebody else. Working with others, you can make a difference because people exactly like you, people of the same age as you, changed things the last time.”

• Our task to recapture democracy begins in earnest today.

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A Guide to Surviving the Trump Presidency by Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box

• The most important piece of advice I can give you is not to give up hope. I know things seem especially dark right now. I was around back in 2004 when Democrats lost a winnable election to a woefully underqualified candidate with little regard for people’s civil rights. Like Trump, George W. Bush made gains with core Democratic constituencies. Like now, pundits were talking about an emerging Republican majority that could dominate politics for decades on end. And just like in this moment, the Democratic Party seemed to enfeebled to mount the necessary comeback. But two years after that devastating election, Democrats retook the House and Senate. Four years afterward, Barack Obama won a huge landslide victory.

• Such an outcome is not a foregone conclusion. It will take real work and hard decisions. But none it will be possible, if we give up hope. As always when it comes to hope, I turn to my old boss. This quote from his 2008 Iowa Caucus victory speech speaks to the moment in which we find ourselves.

• Hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it.

• Let’s go fight for it

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The Lies of the Powerful Are Still Lies by Paul Krugman at Krugman Wonks Out

• The point is this: Trump ran a campaign based entirely on lies, and his victory doesn’t make those lies true. No, the price of bacon didn’t quadruple or quintuple. No, America isn’t experiencing a vast wave of crime driven by immigrants.

• Many people and institutions should and I hope will engage in soul-searching over why those lies succeeded — Democratic strategists, of course, but also news organizations and for that matter anyone trying to inform the public, myself included.

• But you should resist the temptation to engage in truthwashing, a close cousin to the sanewashing that may not have been decisive but certainly helped Trump win.

• I see that temptation all around — commentators who want to seem relevant starting to say “Well, maybe Trump has a point about migrant crime/seizing Greenland/annexing Canada/whatever.” Before going there, look at yourself in the mirror.

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Trump's honeymoon won't last by Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice

• Democrats feel like Trump is the voice of the people, and they want to be more like Trump in hopes of maybe poaching his voters. Voters, for their part, like to feel optimistic at the start of a presidential term, and tell themselves that maybe this guy will be better this time, even when it’s obvious he won’t. And none of this is helped by the widespread recognition that Trump may use the federal government to personally target anyone who defies him.

• Trump’s mandate wasn’t especially clear or impressive. But whenever a president wins, people tend to think he’s got some magical ability to channel the will of the voters. The fact that Trump as a candidate was so obviously unfit — he was convicted of 34 felonies just months before the election — only intensifies his aura of invulnerability.

• But honeymoons don’t last, and we have a lot of experience with Trump indicating that his, in particular, won’t. Trump entered his first term with slightly positive approval ratings, but a month in he was already six points underwater, and things only got worse for him from there.

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A-Eye, A-Eye, Captain! By Nina Burleigh at American Freakshow

• If you want to really understand how deeply banal and unfit these men are to run American government and policy, I suggest listening to a podcast called All In with David Sacks. I occasionally check in and have been enlightened to the mediocrity of, for example, AI magnate Sam Altman, talking about how he hopes he can make an AI that fits into his phone so that he can have the most efficient executive assistant ever right in his pocket at all times. Th All In bros preen and prattle on in sometimes incomprehensible MBA-speak lingo.

• They recently praised a new generation of Chinese robots that can run faster than any human, which one of them suggested would be useful to police the perimeter of his “ranch.” These tech cowboys, desperate for “masculine energy,” clearly believe they are among the highest possible iteration of the tool-making human, with a direct lineage to Prometheus, or whoever shaped the first club or arrowhead. Our era’s toolmaking apes, scornful toward the humanities, with little use for anything or anyone that seeks to teach community or encourage morality and social skills.

• On the contrary, such knowledge is derided by men like [Monarchist] Curtis Yarvin as a relic of the “longhouse” - scornful code for the supposedly indigenous maternal living spaces where clusters of gossiping useless women spy on each other, so inferior to the frontier lone gun, the oligarch on his “ranch,” home, home on the range with a robot, rocking to the Village People at Mar a Lago, the unapologetic MAGA-fied techie Man in Full.

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January 17, 2025 by Heather Cox Richardson at Letters From An American

• As Biden administration officials leave, the incoming Trump administration is vowing to unleash “shock and awe” in the first days of Trump’s presidency as the new president issues what Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) called a “blizzard of executive orders” to reshape the country according to his policies. In The Bulwark today, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general Mark Hertling, former Commanding General of United States Army Europe and the Seventh Army, explained that the concept of shock and awe calls for gaining an advantage over an enemy with overwhelming firepower followed by brilliant execution. The plan anticipates paralyzing the enemy with “such overwhelming force that resistance is futile.”

• For his part, Hertling seems unimpressed, noting that “[i]f your plan calls for your side being all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect in execution, and immune to surprise—when you’re working with human beings and you presume your enemy is stupid, weak, and all but inanimate—the plan probably isn’t worth all that much.”

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It’s Day One--Of a New Phase of the Fight to Save Our Democracy by Ruth Ben-Ghiat at Lucid

• Trump & Co. have encouraged Americans to internalize their propaganda, starting with “Day One” as the advent of an all-powerful government to be opposed at your peril. Let’s flip the script.

• So, it is Day One to take back our country from those who want to destroy it for the benefit of their autocratic allies abroad. Regardless of your political party, and whether you have voted or not in your lifetime, if you care about the future of democracy and rights in America you can be part of this effort.

• And it is Day One of what might be a different understanding of politics for many: as something you practice every day, while starting conversations with people in your community who may have opposite political views, or while writing to courageous local and state leaders who will be resisting the administration’s repression, to tell them: “I see you and I support you.”

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Billionaire Asshat Blames Everyone Except Himself For His Reactionary Asshattery by Gary Legum at Wonkette (Purveyors of Satire & Cynicism)

• We wrote last week about Peter Thiel and his deranged opinion piece that managed to sound like HAL the computer writing the Cliffs Notes for A Tale of Two Cities. This week’s charmless billionaire broligarch on some sort of twisted publicity tour is Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist mostly notable for both helping develop the Netscape browser that has not been in widespread use for a solid 25 years or so, as well as his unfortunate resemblance to Beldar Conehead, right up to his opinions sounding like Beldar consuming mass quantities of his own farts.

• To put it more substantively, Andreessen gave interviews this week to both Bari Weiss and Ross Douthat about his expectations for governance in the Age of Broligarchs, his thoughts on government funding and waste, all the ways in which non-billionaires have been very mean and unfair to the geniuses of Silicon Valley like Marc Andreessen, how elite schools such as Harvard turn kids into full-blown communists demanding the implementation of all sorts of Stalinist dogma like diversity in the workplace, what he imagines average, everyday taxpayers really think and want, the awesome and wide-ranging genius of Elon Musk, and whatever other topics are rattling around in that entitled and quite oblong head of his.

• To put it yet another way, if by the end of an interview even such a cloistered and obtuse mediocrity like Ross Douthat has become incredulous at your absence of anything resembling empathy towards voters or understanding of all the ways they rely on a functioning federal government in their day-to-day lives, well, you really need to step back and re-evaluate all of your assumptions.

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DRAFT NOTES on "Grab 'Em by the Pussy" for January 20, 2025 by Brad DeLong at Grasping Reality

• FT Reporters: “Is corporate America going Maga?”: ‘Some Wall Streeters also feel able to embrace making money openly, without nodding to any broader social goals. “Most of us don’t have to kiss ass because, like Trump, we love America and capitalism,” one said… <https://www.ft.com/content/cf876b19-8c69-498b-95f5-d018618d99ec>

• Presumably the idea is that now assholes can think they can vice-signal, and so recognize each other, and so band together in a group to… what? Young men who imitate this “top banker” are, I think, much more likely to get themselves into long-run trouble. Having everyone with an SIQ > 50 think you are an asshole greatly limits your alliances and the number of people who will have your back when you need it guarded. And if the only thing you care about is cash-nexus transactions with profit the only way to keep score, the only game you will ever win is The Money Game and your only relationships will be cash-nexus ones.

• And you will probably not win The Money Game as well.