https://www.justsecurity.org/92714/american-autocracy-threat-tracker/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#post-92714-_y4a3s8vnsqyb

Blech. Really unpleasant reading (and I have given up, at least temporarily), but it’s all here, in one concentrated, smoking lump of evil.

https://youtu.be/QKGbguoildA?si=veq-cz8GKCRpFgR-

https://www.businessinsider.com/job-applications-hiring-ai-bots-spam-resume-cover-letter-2024-3

Hmm, is this our future?

«Troves of internal documents and analyses have over the past decade established that Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating as far back as the 1970s, but forcefully and successfully worked to sow doubt about the climate crisis and stymie action to clamp down on fossil fuel usage. The revelations have inspired litigation against Exxon across the US.»

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures

Yes, and they should pay. BUT. For decades (generations, even) the US has resisted increasingly stringent CAFE* standards. As an electorate. This country, on the whole, has continued to buy gas-guzzling vehicles. This is a collective decision. We have known this for generations and not acted on it. Like. Seriously. It’s not like we didn’t know.

(I own one such vehicle myself, a 2022 Subaru Outback. A premium on the vehicle, plus appropriate taxes to raise the price of gas might have affected my car-purchase decision, but if I had still chosen to pay the premium, that would have been my choice.)

*Look it up.

«classic conservative posture of just, like, a person who is doing okay and is kinda selfish and who thinks that progressive idealists might be bad news.»

https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-we-got-here-ce8

“Kinda selfish.” I like that characterization.

«Yet a sense that Trump’s win was somehow an indictment of Obama for not being sufficiently progressive — rather than an indictment of Romney for being too far-right on retirement programs — has hung like a weird fog of misperception over Democrats’ interpretations of Trump-era politics.»

I wonder how much of that “weird fog” traces back to the miasma of social media.

Yglesias is irritating a lot of the time, but that was a good article.

«Associate Justice Anil Singh, however, lifted a ban on Trump’s ability to obtain loans from a New York bank, which could allow him to access the equity in his assets to back the full bond amount.»

Ok, who’s going to loan him money now?

🍿

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/28/politics/donald-trump-appeals-court-new-york/index.html

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article285729116.html

Don’t know if this is paywalled or not.

Local Democratic activist/politician:

«I’d love to see Satana take on Bishop head-to-head – standing strong as a queer, black, Hamlet, NC, to Princeton to Duke-educated, woman in the face of his stupid bigotry. Further, we need Satana’s fire to be part of our overall slate’s appeal to the Democratic electorate. Simply put, I do not believe we can win North Carolina with the top of the ticket dominated by white moderates.»

https://www.graigmeyer.com/2024/02/my-democratic-primary-endorsements/

(Emphasis his.)

I wouldn’t cry if we nominated Jeff Jackson, instead, though.

«Post-Trump, any hint of a coherent governing philosophy has vanished. There is no Republican agenda, just culture warfare and obstruction. The party’s most defining principle right now is the Big Lie. Practically speaking, it reliably serves only the ultra-rich. It is inflamed with racism and nativism.»

https://presswatchers.org/2021/09/press-watch-mission-statement-political-journalism-needs-a-reset/

This is not a Donald Trump problem. This is what happens when the white majority of this country inexorably slides into minority, like an iceberg drifting away or an ocean liner leaving the dock.

This will not stop when Trump has eaten his last cheeseburger, but will continue for a generation, past the point of the US’s transition to a majority-minority country.

It’s only going to get uglier, imo, until enough of the biggest ethnic fraction of our electorate finally says, “ok, that’s too much,” which is what I think happened last time. (To be more specific: an overload of Holocaust and lynchings and killings sickened enough people that changes were made.)

I just hope we don’t destroy ourselves in the process.

«I prefer journalists who would be in big trouble if there was a fascist takeover.»

— Mark Jacob

https://www.stopthepresses.news/p/is-the-new-york-times-neutral-on

#substack #NewYorkTimes #nyt