Last week, Fox Business host Stuart Varney reported that one of the president-elect’s aides says that Trump is conducting a hostile takeover on behalf of the American people.
On November 15, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder laid out the conditions under which political cultures collapse, nations collapse. Snyder laid out five indispensable concerns that have to be dealt with in order for nations to thrive — and that crumble when nations are destroyed.
The five are health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.
Snyder wrote, "Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States. How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence."
And he pointed to the threat posed by the earliest nominees to fill cabinet positions and leadership positions within the new administration:
Robert Kennedy Jr. - Health
Matt Gaetz, and now Pam Bondi - Law.
Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy - Administration,
Peter Hegseth - Defense
Tulsi Gabbard - Intelligence
Snyder said this group of nominees — "people who believe that government should exist for the wealthy or not at all" — is setting the table for dismantling American democracy in our 250th year:
From this perspective, Trump's proposed appointments -- Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard -- are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done. These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.
Is this just Donald Trump trolling the Senate and the American people?
I'm not certain I know the answer to that.
I think there are some in the administration — both the Stevens, Miller, and Bannon — who appear to have the frame of mind to mess with the system, and with the people.
And I think that others in the loop do as well; in particular, Musk, Hegseth, Ramaswamy .. and Gaetz, as an outsider — though he’s gone from Member of Congress, to Attorney General nominee, to making Cameo videos in just over a week, so … maybe not.
I don't think there are any of these people that Trump and his supporters wouldn't accept gladly into the administration if they could clear the Senate, or by going around the Senate if they were able to do so.
I think if they thought they could get away with it, they would overturn the whole thing, and not look twice at the consequences.
And if they can't get away with it, then they might say, "We were just kidding."
So, I think we have to put down markers at the very least.
We have to say, "This is fact. This is what we see happening in the economy, in foreign relations, in the military, in the intelligence community, and the law, right now."
I think we have to drive stakes in the ground, to say, "This is the state of play as the Biden administration ends. And this is what the next administration proposes — and/or is doing — to accomplish the ends they have announced."
At the very least, we need to be able to do what the War Department did in 1945 when they distributed to every officer in the military a discussion paper to go through with their troops, simply called Fascism! — outlining how to recognize fascism abroad and at home, because there were a lot of fascists in the United States then too.
Similarly, we need to be able to say, "This is what we see. This is what we think it means."
That doesn’t include overplaying our hand. Robert Kennedy is not a hundred percent wrong, right?
Americans don't eat well. Of course, in the world of false equivalence, in 2009, when Michelle Obama launched a healthy eating initiative, she was called the leader of the Nanny State. But, apparently, it's okay now, as long as our guy is doing it.
Right?
There are some issues that anybody can see need to be cleaned up, but that doesn't mean the bathwater isn't dirty. There are instances in which not being all wrong is not the same as being right. And that certainly extends to not being right for the job.
So we take the good where we find it; and thoroughly reject the bad where we find it.
We do that one day at a time, yes…. But we do not get caught up in just the tick-tock of it all.
There's a bigger picture. And these nominees are part of that.
The outrage machine in all its grift and glory can get so caught up in individual words and actions that we have difficulty seeing which words are important and need to be marked because they are in the context of a whole sentence … and which actions need to be marked because they’re part of a whole series of consequential actions.
They matter to NATO.
They matter to Ukraine.
They matter to Israel and the Palestinian people.
They matter to all who live in climate distress.
The matter to already marginalized citizens and guests in the United States.
They matter to people who work for a living, whose livelihoods can be wiped out by heedless policy decisions motivated by ideology rather than efficacy in the real economy.
All this matters across the board. And doing our best to take it all in requires the best from all of us for the foreseeable future.
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- https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/stuart-varney-trump-hasnt-forgotten-how-deep-state-treated-him
- https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up
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