Don’t perform outrage. Don’t go to your opponents’ districts and give town halls. Don’t go to ICE facilities and get arrested.
Identify those amongst your colleagues in the Republican Party who are doing things that they feel are wrong. Talk to them, and find out what you can do to make it possible for them to do what they feel is right (security for their families? Anonymous voting?) Then do that.
6-3 decision revokes the ability of a lower court to stay executive orders nationwide, thereby putting the authority of a lower court judge below that of the President. Since the selection of cases decided by the Supreme Court is at their discretion, and won’t even reach them if no appeal is made, seems to me this means that if the King decides tomorrow that, due to his bad bowel movement this morning, all women whose name begins with “M” should be arrested and shot, no one in the land other than the Supreme Court can suspend the order until its legality is determined.
Or: WA state court declares my son’s citizenship valid by birth, but NJ declares it is following the rules when he flies into Newark and ICE confiscates his passport and arrests him; this is legal unless and until the Supreme Court issues an injunction.
And, by dint of a prior ruling that absolves the King of any legal responsibility in the execution of “official business”, the King is never held accountable for his act and retires comfortable in the knowledge that no M-named shrews or their grieving loved ones will ever see justice.
There has been a rash of articles lately about how tyranny and fascism in the 21st century doesn't look like that of in the 20th. No grinning thugs standing on balconies yelling at cheering crowds, no brownshirts in the streets beating on communists and Jews, no militaristic rallies. It's all "competitive authoritarianism", legitimate elections and soft coercion of institutions now, we are told.
This last week in California we see: Marines and national guard deployed against civilians in California. A senator assaulted by Federal security and handcuffed when trying to ask a question of the administration's PR person. The biggest military parade in US history.
Tell me again how fascism in the 21st century is so different.
Three immediate thoughts re Roger’s article https://quillette.com/2025/06/10/classical-liberalism-without-strong-gods-open-society-popper/:
1. I remembered reading “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Appiah, 2006) years ago. A unifying moral liberal secular idea of how societies might function. I remember recommending it to many friends. Quite bracing, I should re-read.
1. There are moral lessons to be drawn from established religion. The importance of an institutional mechanism for forgiveness in society. Egalitarianism. Charity. Many of society’s best ideas are distilled into religious tenets in admittedly simplistic but comprehensible forms. Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.
1. https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Moral_Particulars_in_Literature.php Happened to read this in the same feed session, some coincidence, huh?
The media have spent a week of frenzied reporting on the high-school-level breakup of Trump and Musk. It’s reality-tv level nonsense, and the Donald knows how to make that work for him. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the two of them orchestrated the whole thing as part of the ongoing don’t-look-behind-the-curtain autocratic capture. It was always going to be the case that the transactional president would dispense with any one of his sidekicks when they were no longer useful to him.
There is a Musk story. Weeks of sustained grass-roots protest at Tesla dealerships has led to plummeting sales and sinking share values as the brand has become toxic. Tesla owners are shamed for associating with the brand, and turn away. Feeling the pressure from shareholders and board members, the CEO withdraws from activities that are damaging his brand and returns to the work of managing the businesses. A success for bottom-up non-violent citizen protest.
I haven’t seen any punditry drawing these connections, however.
Wow. Pbs NewsHour, of all people, chose to interview, as an economic expert, a reality TV show personality. What qualifies him as an expert? The fact that he sits on a show, "shark tank", and tells people that he will or will not invest money in their idea. I thought we'd had enough of reality show fakes when the con man who was just playing a CEO on TV got elected president… Bad form, PBS
I’m listening to Ezra Klein talking with his compatriots about where we are on the autocratic timeline, and what we should be looking for, and is this competitive autocracy or failing tyranny or Orban or Duterte or what (actually, doesn’t the monomaniacal nature of tyranny mean that every one is different, tuned to the differences in the Dear Leaders?), and does the robustness of the resistance mean that he’s lost, and …
Coincidentally, I just read a good article in the Times about the hurricane in North Carolina, and how different individuals, their families and the emergency response system fared. Never happened there before, that creek has never gotten this high but this house is fine, it’s never flooded, sure hurricanes happen on the coast but they don’t do that here, they need that level of preparedness out there but not here, then BOOM landslides, mass destruction, death.
Amazing resonance.
https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/piercylowroad.html
It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say _We
_and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.
In the meantime, the world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the worild’s poorest children.
Frm NYT may 8, "The $200 Billion Gamble: Bill Gates’s Plan to Wind Down His Foundation", in a discussion of Elon Musk's involvement in shutting down PEPFAR, which is predicted to result on an increase in the deaths in the millions worldwide.
A succinct and devastating summary.