Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 49
March 9, 2025
March 9, 2025
Lately, political writers have called attention to the tendency of billionaire Elon Musk to refer to his political opponents as “NPCs.” This term comes from the gaming world and refers to a nonplayer character, a character that follows a scripted path and cannot think or act on its own, and is there only to populate the world of the game for the actual players. Amanda Marcotte of Salon notes that Musk calls anyone with whom he disagrees an NPC, but that construction comes from the larger environment of the online right wing, whose members refer to anyone who opposes Donald Trump’s agenda as an NPC.
In The Cross Section, Paul Waldman notes that the point of the right wing’s dehumanization of political opponents is to dismiss the pain they are inflicting. If the majority of Americans are not really human, toying with their lives isn’t important—maybe it’s even LOL funny to pretend to take a chainsaw to the programs on which people depend. “We are ants, or even less,” Waldman writes, “bits of programming to be moved around at Elon’s whim. Only he and the people who aspire to be like him are actors, decision-makers, molding the world to conform to their bold interplanetary vision.”
Waldman correctly ties this division of the world into the actors and the supporting cast to the modern-day Republican Party’s longstanding attack on government programs. After World War II, large majorities of both parties believed that the government must work for ordinary Americans by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net like Social Security, promoting infrastructure projects like the interstate highway system, and protecting civil rights that guaranteed all Americans would be treated equally before the law. But a radical faction worked to undermine this “liberal consensus” by claiming that such a system was a form of socialism that would ultimately make the United States a communist state.
By 2012, Republicans were saying, as Representative Paul Ryan did in 2010, that “60 Percent of Americans are ‘takers,’ not ‘makers.’” In 2012, Ryan had been tapped as the Republican vice presidential candidate. As Waldman recalls, in that year, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a group of rich donors that 47% of Americans would vote for a Democrat “no matter what.” They were moochers who “are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”
As Waldman notes, Musk and his team of tech bros at the Department of Government Efficiency are not actually promoting efficiency: if they were, they would have brought auditors and would be working with the inspectors general that Trump fired and the Government Accountability Office that is already in place to streamline government. Rather than looking for efficiency, they are simply working to zero out the government that works for ordinary people, turning it instead to enabling them to consolidate wealth and power.
Today’s attempt to destroy a federal government that promotes stability, equality, and opportunity for all Americans is just the latest iteration of that impulse in the United States.
The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence took a revolutionary stand against monarchy, the idea that some people were better than others and had a right to rule. They asserted as “self-evident” that all people are created equal and that God and the laws of nature have given them certain fundamental rights. Those include—but are not limited to—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The role of government was to make sure people enjoyed these rights, they said, and thus a government is legitimate only if people consent to that government. For all that the founders excluded Indigenous Americans, Black colonists, and all women from their vision of government, the idea that the government should work for ordinary people rather than nobles and kings was revolutionary.
From the beginning, though, there were plenty of Americans who clung to the idea of human hierarchies in which a few superior men should rule the rest. They argued that the Constitution was designed simply to protect property and that as a few men accumulated wealth, they should run things. Permitting those without property to have a say in their government would allow them to demand that the government provide things that might infringe on the rights of property owners.
By the 1850s, elite southerners, whose fortunes rested on the production of raw materials by enslaved Black Americans, worked to take over the government and to get rid of the principles in the Declaration of Independence. As Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina put it: “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson that ‘all men are born equal.’”
“We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “[b]ut we twelve hundred…never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”
Northerners, who had a mixed economy that needed educated workers and thus widely shared economic and political power, opposed the spread of the South’s hierarchical system. When Congress, under extraordinary pressure from the pro-southern administration, passed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that would permit enslavement to spread into the West and from there, working in concert with southern slave states, make enslavement national, northerners of all parties woke up to the looming loss of their democratic government.
A railroad lawyer from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, remembered how northerners were “thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver” to push back against the rising oligarchy. And while they came from different parties, he said, they were “still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.” Across the North, people came together in meetings to protest the Slave Power’s takeover of the government, and marched in parades to support political candidates who would stand against the elite enslavers.
Apologists for enslavement denigrated Black Americans and urged white voters not to see them as human. Lincoln, in contrast, urged Americans to come together to protect the Declaration of Independence. “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop?... If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!”
Northerners put Lincoln into the White House, and once in office, he reached back to the Declaration—written “four score and seven years ago”—and charged Americans to “resolve that…this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The victory of the United States in the Civil War ended the power of enslavers in the government, but new crises in the future would revive the conflict between the idea of equality and a nation in which a few should rule.
In the 1890s the rise of industry led to the concentration of wealth at the top of the economy, and once again, wealthy leaders began to abandon equality for the idea that some people were better than others. Steel baron Andrew Carnegie celebrated the “contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer,” for although industrialization created “castes,” it created “wonderful material development,” and “while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.”
Those at the top were there because of their “special ability,” Carnegie wrote, and anyone seeking a fairer distribution of wealth was a “Socialist or Anarchist…attacking the foundation upon which civilization rests.” Instead, he said, society worked best when a few wealthy men ran the world, for “wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves.”
As industrialists gathered the power of the government into their own hands, people of all political parties once again came together to reclaim American democracy. Although Democrat Grover Cleveland was the first to complain that “[c]orporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters,” it was Republican Theodore Roosevelt who is now popularly associated with the development of a government that took power back for the people.
Roosevelt complained that the “absence of effective…restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.” Roosevelt ushered in the Progressive Era with government regulation of business to protect the ability of individuals to participate in American society as equals.
The rise of a global economy in the twentieth century repeated this pattern. After socialists took control of Russia in 1917, American men of property insisted that any restrictions on their control of resources or the government were a form of “Bolshevism.” But a worldwide depression in the 1930s brought voters of all parties in the U.S. behind President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal for the American people.”
He and the Democrats created a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure in the 1930s. Then, after Black and Brown veterans coming home from World War II demanded equality, that New Deal government, under Democratic president Harry Truman and then under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, worked to end racial and, later, gender hierarchies in American society.
That is the world that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are dismantling. They are destroying the government that works for all Americans in favor of using the government to concentrate their own wealth and power.
And, once again, Americans are protesting the idea that the role of government is not to protect equality and democracy, but rather to concentrate wealth and power at the top of society. Americans are turning out to demand Republican representatives stop the cuts to the government and, when those representatives refuse to hold town halls, are turning out by the thousands to talk to Democratic representatives.
Thousands of researchers and their supporters turned out across the country in more than 150 Stand Up for Science protests on Friday. On Saturday, International Women’s Day, 300 demonstrations were organized around the country to protest different administration policies. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is drawing crowds across the country with the "Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here” tour, on which he has been joined by Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers.
“Nobody voted for Elon Musk,” protestors chanted at a Tesla dealership in Manhattan yesterday in one of the many protests at the dealerships associated with Musk’s cars. “Oligarchs out, democracy in.”
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-congress-audio-essay.html
https://www.salon.com/2025/02/24/what-elon-musks-on-workers-owes-to-gamergate/
The Cross SectionYou Are the "Inefficiency"Thank you for reading The Cross Section, and if you find my work valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. Thanks…Read more20 days ago · 94 likes · 9 comments · Paul Waldmanhttps://www.huffpost.com/entry/paul-ryan-60-percent-of-a_n_1943073
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/tesla-dealership-attacks-elon-musk-protests-escalate
The Jim Acosta ShowThe Great American Pushback Has BegunJust six days after he retired from his post as director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins issued a plea to Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their minions at the Department of Government Efficiency. Remember the Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm…Read more21 hours ago · 2538 likes · 144 comments · Jim Acostahttps://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/town-hall-lakewood-colorado-federal-budget-cuts/#
https://www.science.org/content/article/thousands-gather-across-u-s-stand-science-events
https://www.wpr.org/news/bernie-sanders-capacity-kenosha-uw-parkside-wisconsin
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/08/us/politics/international-womens-day-protests-trump.html
Lincoln’s speech at Chicago, July 10, 1858, at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln2/1:526, pp. 500–501
George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters (Richmond, Virginia, 1857), 353–354. George Fitzhugh, Sociology For The South Or The Failure of Free Society, (Richmond, Virginia: 1854).
James Henry Hammond, Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow and Company, 1866), 126
https://www.carnegie.org/about/our-history/gospelofwealth/
https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fourth-annual-message-first-term
Bluesky:
elizabeth-warren.bsky.social/post/3ljydtzlrvc2r
March 8, 2025
March 8, 2025
Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made it clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to slash the federal government and to privatize its current services. As the stock market has dropped and economists have warned of a dramatic slowdown in the economy, he told CNBC “There’s going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked, we’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period.”
Bessent’s comments reveal that the White House is beginning to feel the pressure of the unpopularity of its policies. Trump’s rejection of 80 years of U.S. foreign policy in order to prop up Russia’s Vladimir Putin has left many Americans as well as allies aghast. Trump’s claims that Putin wants peace were belied when Russia launched massive strikes at Ukraine as soon as Trump stopped sharing intelligence with Ukrainian forces that enabled them to shoot down incoming fire.
The administration’s dramatic—and likely illegal and unconstitutional—cuts are infuriating Americans who did not expect Trump to reorder the American government so completely. While billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump repeatedly say they are cutting only “waste, fraud, and abuse” from the government, that insistence appears to be rhetorical rather than backed by fact. And yesterday, new cuts appeared to continue the gutting of government services that generally appear to be important to Americans’ health, safety, and economic security.
On Friday night, employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—about 80,000 of them—received an email offering them a buyout of up to $25,000 if they resign and giving them a deadline of March 14 to respond. Also as of Friday, nearly 230 cases of measles have been confirmed in Texas and New Mexico, and two people have died.
The secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is frustrating even allies with his response to the outbreak. Kennedy, who has long been an anti-vaccine activist, said last week that measles outbreaks were “not unusual,” and then on Sunday he posted pictures of himself hiking above Coachella Valley in California. On Monday the top spokesperson at HHS, a former Kennedy ally, quit in protest. As Adam Cancryn of Politico reported, Kennedy has said that the measles vaccine protects children and the community, but has said the decision to vaccinate is personal and that parents should talk to healthcare providers about their options. He has also talked a lot about the benefits of nutritional supplements like cod liver oil, which is high in Vitamin A, in treating measles. In fact, vaccines are the key element in preventing people from contracting the disease..
“It’s a serious role, he’s just a couple of weeks in and measles is not a common occurrence, and it should be all hands on deck,” one former Trump official told Adam Cancryn, Sophie Garder, and Chelsea Cirruzzo of Politico. “When you’re taking a selfie out at Coachella, it’s pretty clear that you’re checked out.”
In another blockbuster story that dropped yesterday, the Social Security Administration announced it will begin to withhold 100% of a person’s Social Security benefits if they are overpaid, even if the overpayment is not their fault. Under President Joe Biden the agency had changed the policy to recover overpayments at 10% of monthly benefits or $10, whichever was greater.
Those who can’t afford that level of repayment can contact Social Security, the notice says, but acting commissioner Leland Dudek has said he plans to cut at least 7,000 jobs—more than 12% of the agency—although its staff is already at a 50-year low. He is also closing field offices, and senior staff with the agency have either left or been fired.
Dudek yesterday retracted an order from the day before that required parents of babies born in Maine to go to a Social Security office to register their baby rather than filling out a form in the hospital. Another on Thursday would also have stopped funeral homes from filing death records electronically.
One new father told Joe Lawlor of the Portland Press Herald that he had filled out the form for his son’s social security number and then his wife got a call saying they would have to go to the Social Security office. But when he tried to call Social Security headquarters to figure out what was going on, the wait time was an estimated two hours. So he called a local office, where no one knew what he was talking about. “They keep talking about efficiency,” he said. “This seemed to be something that worked incredibly efficiently, and they broke it overnight.”
The administration did not explain why it had imposed this rule in Maine. Senator Angus King of Maine, an Independent, said he was glad the administration had changed its mind, but added that “this rapid reversal has raised concerns among Maine people and left many unanswered questions about the Social Security Administration’s motivations.”
Trump has said that Social Security “won’t be touched” as his administration slashes through the federal government.
Trump also said there would not be cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, but on Wednesday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which figures the financial cost of legislation, said that Republicans will have to cut either Medicare, Medicaid, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program in order to meet their goal of cutting at least $880 billion from the funding controlled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Cutting the funding for every other program in the committee’s purview would save a maximum of $135 billion, Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post noted, meaning the committee will have to turn to the biggest ticket items: healthcare programs.
Also yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security said it was getting rid of union protections for the approximately 47,000 employees of the Transportation Security Administration who screen about 2.5 million passengers a day before they can board airplanes. A new agreement in May 2024 raised wages for TSA workers, whose pay has lagged behind that of other government employees. Union leaders say the move is retaliation for its challenges to the actions of the administration toward the 800,000 or so federal workers it represents.
As Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times have reported more detail about the Cabinet meeting Trump convened abruptly on Thursday, we have learned more about Musk’s determination to cut the government. As Musk appeared to take charge of the meeting, he clashed with Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who complained that Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency is trying to lay off air traffic controllers.
Swan and Haberman report that Duffy asked what he was supposed to do. He continued by saying: I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers? Musk said it was a lie that they were laying off air traffic controllers, and also insisted that there were people hired under diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives working as air traffic controllers. When Duffy pushed back, Musk said Duffy should call him with any concerns, an echo of the message he gave to members of Congress. Like them, Cabinet members are constitutionally part of the government. Musk is not.
What Musk is, according to an interview published today by Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson in Public Notice, is a businessman who believes that there is waste wherever you look and that it is always possible to do something more cheaply. Ryan Mac and Kate Conger, who wrote a book about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Character Limit, said that creating confusion is part of the point. Musk creates drama, Conger said, to scare away workers he doesn’t want and attract ones he does.
The pain that he is inflicting on the country is not making him popular, though. Protests at Tesla dealerships that handle his cars are growing, as are instances of vandalism against Tesla dealerships and charging stations, which now number more than a dozen, including attacks with bottles filled with gasoline and set on fire. Pranshu Verma and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post report that Tesla’s stock has dropped more than 35% since Trump took office. Tesla sales have dropped 76% in Germany, 48% in Norway and Denmark, and 45% in France.
On Thursday, another of Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploded, raining debris near south Florida and the Bahamas. The Federal Aviation Administration said 240 flights were disrupted by the debris.
The New York Times editorial board today lamented the instability that Musk is creating, noting that the government is not a business, that “[t]here are already signs the chaos is hurting the economy,” and that “Americans can’t afford for the basic functions of government to fail. If Twitter stops working, people can’t tweet. When government services break down, people can die.”
The editorial board did not let Trump hide behind Musk entirely, noting that he has increased instability not only with DOGE, but also “with his flurry of executive orders purporting to rewrite environmental policy, the meaning of the 14th Amendment and more; his on-again-off-again tariffs; and his inversion of American foreign policy, wooing Vladimir Putin while disdaining longtime allies.”
One of the things that the radical extremists in power hated about the modern American state was that it was a nonpartisan machine that functioned pretty well regardless of which party was in charge. Now Musk, who is acting as if he is not bound by the constitution that set up that machine, is taking a sledgehammer to it.
In the Public Notice interview, Thor Benson asked Ryan Mac: “What’s something about Elon’s huge role in the Trump administration that people perhaps aren’t understanding?” Mac answered that Musk is the manifestation of the nation’s extreme wealth inequality. “What happens,” he asked, “when there is unfettered capitalism that allows people to accumulate this much money and this much power?”
—
Notes:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/07/health/measles-outbreaks-texas-new-mexico/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/03/top-hhs-spokesperson-quits-00207000
https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/releases/2025/#2025-03-07-a
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/28/nx-s1-5296986/trump-worker-cuts-social-security-administration
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/05/gop-budget-medicaid-cuts/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/05/rfk-measles-scrutiny-00214952
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/03/07/justice-department-trump-firings/
https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-cut-social-security-rick-scott-2041069
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/us/politics/trump-musk-doge-power.html
https://substack.com/home/post/p-157321827
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/08/elon-musk-tesla-protest-violence-vandalism/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/08/opinion/elon-musk-doge-government.html
Bluesky:
kathleenromig.bsky.social/post/3ljtgrtqtp22p
March 7, 2025
March 7, 2025
Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s, but the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So in 1963, Black organizers in the Dallas County Voters League launched a drive to get Black voters in Selma registered. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a prominent civil rights organization, joined them.
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, but the measure did not adequately address the problem of voter suppression. In Selma a judge had stopped the voter registration protests by issuing an injunction prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.
To call attention to the crisis in her city, Amelia Boynton, a member of the Dallas County Voters League acting with a group of local activists, traveled to Birmingham to invite Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to the city. King had become a household name after delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.
King and other prominent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived in January to push the voter registration drive. For seven weeks, Black residents tried to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.
Then on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.
Jackson died eight days later, on February 26.
The leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression. Expecting violence, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee voted not to participate, but its chair, John Lewis, asked their permission to go along on his own. They agreed.
On March 7, 1965, sixty years ago today, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured John Lewis’s skull and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.
Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the marchers in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
The marchers remained determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, but Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them. So President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1,900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama State Capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.
On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”
That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: "This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies."
The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down “regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.” He called the right to vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” and pledged that “we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.”
As recently as 2006, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by a bipartisan vote. By 2008 there was very little difference in voter participation between white Americans and Americans of color. In that year, voters elected the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, and they reelected him in 2012. And then, in 2013, the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision struck down the part of the Voting Rights Act that required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get approval from the federal government before changing their voting rules. This requirement was known as “preclearance.”
The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. A 2024 study by the Brennan Center of nearly a billion vote records over 14 years showed that the racial voting gap is growing almost twice as fast in places that used to be covered by the preclearance requirement. Another recent study showed that in Alabama, the gap between white and Black voter turnout in the 2024 election was the highest since at least 2008. If nonwhite voters in Alabama had voted at the same rate as white voters, more than 200,000 additional ballots would have been cast.
Democrats have tried since 2021 to pass a voting rights act but have been stymied by Republicans, who oppose such protections. On March 5, 2025, Representative Terri Sewall (D-AL) reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would help restore the terms of the Voting Rights Act, and make preclearance national.
The measure is named after John Lewis, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis went on from his days in the Civil Rights Movement to serve 17 terms as a representative from Georgia. Until he died in 2020, Lewis bore the scars of March 7, 1965: Bloody Sunday.
—
Notes:
https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/37721510v1p2.pdf
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/selma-montgomery-march
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/25/fight-to-vote-newsletter-voting-rights-act
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-2023-review
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/people-color-are-being-deterred-voting
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47520
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-democrats-keep-bringing-up-voting-rights/
https://campaignlegal.org/update/why-america-needs-john-lewis-voting-rights-advancement-act
March 6, 2025
March 6, 2025
This morning, Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke of Reuters reported that the Trump administration is preparing to deport the 240,000 Ukrainians who fled Russia’s attacks on Ukraine and have temporary legal status in the United States. Foreign affairs journalist Olga Nesterova reminded Americans that “these people had to be completely financially independent, pay tax, pay all fees (around $2K) and have an affidavit from an American person to even come here.”
“This has nothing to do with strategic necessity or geopolitics,” Russia specialist Tom Nichols posted. “This is just cruelty to show [Russian president Vladimir] Putin he has a new American ally.”
The Trump administration’s turn away from traditional European alliances and toward Russia will have profound effects on U.S. standing in the world. Edward Wong and Mark Mazzetti reported in the New York Times today that senior officials in the State Department are making plans to close a dozen consulates, mostly in Western Europe, including consulates in Florence, Italy; Strasbourg, France; Hamburg, Germany; and Ponta Delgada, Portugal, as well as a consulate in Brazil and another in Turkey.
In late February, Nahal Toosi reported in Politico that President Donald Trump wants to “radically shrink” the State Department and to change its mission from diplomacy and soft power initiatives that advance democracy and human rights to focusing on transactional agreements with other governments and promoting foreign investment in the U.S.
Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” have taken on the process of cutting the State Department budget by as much as 20%, and cutting at least some of the department’s 80,000 employees. As part of that project, DOGE’s Edward Coristine, known publicly as “Big Balls,” is embedded at the State Department.
As the U.S. retreats from its engagement with the world, China has been working to forge greater ties. China now has more global diplomatic posts than the U.S. and plays a stronger role in international organizations. Already in 2025, about 700 employees, including 450 career diplomats, have resigned from the State Department, a number that normally would reflect a year’s resignations.
Shutting embassies will hamper not just the process of fostering goodwill, but also U.S. intelligence, as embassies house officers who monitor terrorism, infectious disease, trade, commerce, militaries, and government, including those from the intelligence community. U.S. intelligence has always been formidable, but the administration appears to be weakening it.
As predicted, Trump’s turn of the U.S. toward Russia also means that allies are concerned he or members of his administration will share classified intelligence with Russia, thus exposing the identities of their operatives. They are considering new protocols for sharing information with the United States. The Five Eyes alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the U.S. has been formidable since World War II and has been key to countering first the Soviet Union and then Russia. Allied governments are now considering withholding information about sources or analyses from the U.S.
Their concern is likely heightened by the return to Trump’s personal possession of the boxes of documents containing classified information the FBI recovered in August 2022 from Mar-a-Lago. Trump took those boxes back from the Department of Justice and flew them back to Mar-a-Lago on February 28.
A CBS News/YouGov poll from February 26–28 showed that only 4% of the American people sided with Russia in its ongoing war with Ukraine.
The unpopularity of the new administration's policies is starting to show. National Republican Congressional Committee chair Richard Hudson (R-NC) told House Republicans on Tuesday to stop holding town halls after several such events have turned raucous as attendees complained about the course of the Trump administration. Trump has blamed paid “troublemakers” for the agitation, and claimed the disruptions are part of the Democrats’ “game.” “[B]ut just like our big LANDSLIDE ELECTION,” he posted on social media, “it’s not going to work for them!”
More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him.
Even aside from the angry protests, DOGE is running into trouble. In his speech before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Trump referred to DOGE and said it “is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.” In a filing in a lawsuit against DOGE and Musk, the White House declared that Musk is neither in charge of DOGE nor an employee of it. When pressed, the White House claimed on February 26 that the acting administrator of DOGE is staffer Amy Gleason. Immediately after Trump’s statement, the plaintiffs in that case asked permission to add Trump’s statement to their lawsuit.
Musk has claimed to have found billions of dollars of waste or fraud in the government, and Trump and the White House have touted those statements. But their claims to have found massive savings have been full of errors, and most of their claims have been disproved. DOGE has already had to retract five of its seven biggest claims. As for “savings,” the government spent about $710 billion in the first month of Trump’s term, compared with about $630 billion during the same timeframe last year.
Instead of showing great savings, DOGE’s claims reveal just how poorly Musk and his team understand the work of the federal government. After forcing employees out of their positions, they have had to hire back individuals who are, in fact, crucial to the nation, including the people guarding the U.S. nuclear stockpile. In his Tuesday speech, Trump claimed that the DOGE team had found “$8 million for making mice transgender,” and added: “This is real.”
Except it’s not. The mice in question were not “transgender”; they were “transgenic,” which means they are genetically altered for use in scientific experiments to learn more about human health. For comparison, S.V. Date noted in HuffPost that in just his first month in office, Trump spent about $10.7 million in taxpayer money playing golf.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out today that people reporting on the individual cuts to U.S. scientific and health-related grants are missing the larger picture: “DOGE and Donald Trump are trying to shut down advanced medical research, especially cancer research, in the United States…. They’re shutting down medicine/disease research in the federal government and the government-run and funded ecosystem of funding for most research throughout the United States. It’s not hyperbole. That’s happening.”
Republicans are starting to express some concern about Musk and DOGE. As soon as Trump took office, Musk and his DOGE team took over the Office of Personnel Management, and by February 14 they had begun a massive purge of federal workers. As protests of the cuts began, Trump urged Musk on February 22 to be “more aggressive” in cutting the government, prompting Musk to demand that all federal employees explain what they had accomplished in the past week under threat of firing. That request sparked a struggle in the executive branch as cabinet officers told the employees in their departments to ignore Musk. Then, on February 27, U.S. District Judge William Alsup found that the firings were likely illegal and temporarily halted them.
On Tuesday, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) weighed in on the conflict when he told CNN that the power to hire and fire employees properly belongs to Cabinet secretaries.
Yesterday, Musk met with Republican— but no Democratic— members of Congress. Senators reportedly asked Musk—an unelected bureaucrat whose actions are likely illegal—to tell them more about what’s going on. According to Liz Goodwin, Marianna Sotomayor, and Theodoric Meyer of the Washington Post, Musk gave some of the senators his phone number and said he wanted to set up a direct line for them when they have questions, allowing them to get a near-instant response to their concerns.” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters that Musk told the senators he would “create a system where members of Congress can call some central group” to get cuts they dislike reversed.
This whole exchange is bonkers. The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to make appropriations and pass the laws that decide how money is spent. Josh Marshall asks: “How on earth are we in this position where members of Congress, the ones who write the budget, appropriate and assign the money, now have to go hat in hand to beg for changes or even information from the guy who actually seems to be running the government?”
Later, Musk met with House Republicans and offered to set up a similar way for the members of the House Oversight DOGE Subcommittee to reach him. When representatives complained about the random cuts that were so upsetting constituents. Musk defended DOGE’s mistakes by saying that he “can’t bat a thousand all the time.”
This morning, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. ruled in favor of a group of state attorneys general from 22 Democratic states and the District of Columbia, saying that Trump does not have the authority to freeze funding appropriated by Congress. McConnell wrote that the spending freeze "fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government." As Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, McConnell issued a preliminary injunction that will stay in place until the case, called New York v. Trump, works its way through the courts. The injunction applies only in the states that sued, though, leaving Republican-dominated states out in the cold.
Today, Trump convened his cabinet and, with Musk present, told the secretaries that they, and not Musk, are in charge of their departments. Dasha Burns and Kyle Cheney of Politico reported that Trump told the secretaries that Musk only has the power to make recommendations, not to make staffing or policy decisions.
Trump is also apparently feeling pressure over his tariffs of 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% on imports from China that went into effect on Tuesday, which economists warned would create inflation and cut economic growth. Today, Trump first said he would exempt car and truck parts from the tariffs, then expanded exemptions to include goods covered by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA) Trump signed in his first term. Administration officials say other tariffs will go into effect at different times in the future.
The stock market has dropped dramatically over the past three days owing to both the tariffs and the uncertainty over their implementation. But Trump denied his abrupt change had anything to do with the stock market.
“I’m not even looking at the market,” Trump said, “because long term, the United States will be very strong with what’s happening.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-elon-musk-government-workforce-cuts-opinion-poll-2025-03-02/ (despite the title, this is the Ukraine-Russia poll.)
https://apnews.com/article/trump-speech-congress-transcript-751b5891a3265ff1e5c1409c391fef7c
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/18/g-s1-49450/elon-musk-doge-leader
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/25/politics/amy-gleason-doge-acting-administrator/index.html
https://www.newsweek.com/doge-plaintiffs-trump-elon-musk-congress-speech-2040150
Paul KrugmanAmerica is Trapped in a Burning TeslaJust two days ago Steven Rattner published an article in the New York Times describing the mood among big-business leaders, which I would summarize as smug complacency. Donald Trump, they appeared to believe, was basically their guy, someone who would cut their taxes and remove those pesky environmental and financial regulations. He might be saying some…Read more2 days ago · 3608 likes · 274 comments · Paul Krugmanhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK231336/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-golf-doge_n_67b50fbfe4b0319f377e6c6a
Megan Lebowitz and Julie Tsirkin “Trump and Sen. Marshall baselessly claim angry constituents are paid 'troublemakers,’” NBC News, March 4?, 2025. (I did this article this way because it’s one of those awful “live” streams that make it impossible to find anything.)
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5175061-house-republicans-town-halls-protests/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/act-now
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/05/musk-congress-anger-doge/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/new-wapo-piece-on-post-constitutional-america
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/28/politics/trump-seized-boxes-returned-air-force-one/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/06/us/politics/embassies-consulates-closures.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/27/trump-state-department-cuts-l00206494
https://www.wcpo.com/transgender-mice-fact-check-trump-2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/us/politics/musk-federal-bureaucracy-takeover.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/upshot/doge-spending-cuts-changed.html
https://www.axios.com/2025/02/28/trump-federal-employees-firing-court-judge
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance Courts to Trump: NoThis morning in New York v. Trump, a case brought by a group of state attorneys general working together, U.S. District Judge John McConnell, the chief judge for the District of Rhode Island, ruled against the Trump administration in a significant way. The attorneys general…Read more13 hours ago · 1812 likes · 188 comments · Joyce Vancehttps://www.npr.org/2025/03/06/nx-s1-5312069/trump-federal-funding-freeze-court-order
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69585994/161/state-of-new-york-v-trump/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-in-massive-backtrack-on-tariffs-after-stock-market-plunge/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/06/trump-cabinet-musk-025093
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y03qleevvo
X:
radiofreetom/status/1897682676590551081
onestpress/status/1897611749597020461
Bluesky:
meidastouch.com/post/3lisr5cfd2k2m
March 5, 2025
March 5, 2025
In the gym of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, former and future prime minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill rose to deliver a speech. Formally titled “Sinews of Peace,” the talk called for the United States and Britain to stand together against the growing menace of Soviet communism. Less than a year after the end of the war, the U.S. and its allies were concerned about the Soviets’ increasing control over the countries of eastern Europe and their apparent intent to continue spreading communism throughout the world.
“Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies,” Churchill said. He expressed “strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin,” but he urged Europe and the U.S. to work together to stand against “dictators or…compact oligarchies operating through a privileged party and a political police” to control an all-powerful state.
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” Churchill declared, and his warning that Europe had been divided in two by an iron curtain defined the coming era.
President Harry Truman had urged Churchill to come and had conferred with him about the Iron Curtain speech, lending his support to Churchill’s argument. In Fulton, Truman introduced Churchill. The growing distrust between the Soviet bloc and the western allies led to the Soviet blockade in 1948 of the parts of Berlin under western control—a blockade broken by the Berlin airlift in which the U.S. and the U.K. delivered food and fuel to West Berlin by airplane—and the creation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a security agreement to resist Soviet expansion.
The so-called Cold War between the two superpowers dominated much of geopolitics for the next several decades. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan warned that the U.S. was engaged in a titanic struggle between “right and wrong and good and evil.” The Soviet Union was the “evil empire,” preaching “the supremacy of the state” and “its omnipotence over individual man.”
When the Cold War ended with the crumbling of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, those Americans who had come to define the world as a fight between the dark forces of communism and the good forces of capitalism believed their ideology of radical individualism had triumphed. In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukayama famously concluded that the victory of liberal democracy over communism meant “the end of history” as all nations gravitated toward the liberal democracy that time had proven was fundamentally a better system of government than any other.
Forty-five years after Churchill warned that the world was splitting in two, it appeared that democracies, led by the United States of America, had won. In that triumphant mood, American leaders set out to spread capitalism into formerly communist countries, believing that democracy would follow since capitalism and democracy went hand in hand.
But history, in fact, was not over. Oligarchs in the former Soviet republics quickly began to consolidate formerly public property into their own hands. They did so through the use of what scholar Andrew Wilson called “virtual politics,” a system that came out of the techniques of state propaganda to become what he called “performance art.” By the early 2000s, the Russian state, under the control of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, had a monopoly on “political technology,” which spread like wildfire as the internet became increasingly available.
Russian “political technologists” used modern media to pervert democracy. They blackmailed opponents, abused state power to help favored candidates, sponsored “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to split their voters and thus open the way for their own candidates, created false parties to create opposition, and created false narratives around elections or other events that enabled them to control public debate.
This system enabled leaders to avoid the censorship from which voters would recoil by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. Essentially, this system replaced the concept of voters choosing their leaders with the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In 2004, Putin tried to extend his power over neighboring Ukraine by backing candidate Viktor Yanukovych for the presidency there. Yanukovych appeared to have won, but the election was full of irregularities, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe. The U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results, and the Ukrainian government voided the election.
To resurrect his political career, Yanukovych turned to an American political consultant, Paul Manafort, who had worked for both Nixon and Reagan and who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. In 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power and he fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs. Manafort owed Deripaska about $17 million but had no way to repay it until his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone, who was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, turned to him for help. Manafort did not take a salary from the campaign but immediately let Deripaska know about his new position.
Russian operatives told Manafort that in exchange for a promise to turn U.S. policy toward Russia, they would work to get Trump elected. They wanted Trump to look the other way as Putin took control of eastern Ukraine through a “peace” plan that would end the war in Crimea, weaken NATO, and remove U.S. sanctions from Russian entities.
According to a 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, “the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.”
That effort was “part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society…a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood…the latest installment in an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States.” It was “a sustained campaign of information warfare against the United States aimed at influencing how this nation’s citizens think about themselves, their government, and their fellow Americans.”
In other words, they used “political technology,” manipulating media to undermine democracy by creating a false narrative that enabled them to control public debate.
Last night, President Donald Trump illustrated the power of virtual politics when he talked for an hour and forty minutes to a joint session of Congress. He lied repeatedly, starting with the lie that he had a historic mandate—in fact, more people voted for someone else than voted for him—and moving on to the idea his first month was “the most successful in the history of our nation,” saying that the first president, George Washington, came in second. He went on to portray himself as the best at everything, as well as the greatest victim in the world.
Trump’s speech was valuable not as a picture of the country as it is, but rather as a narrative that offered supporters a shared worldview that reinforced their allegiance to the MAGA movement. As Dan Keating, Nick Mourtoupalas, and Hannah Dormido of the Washington Post pointed out, the speech contained highly polarizing words never before heard in a similar address to Congress: “left-wing,” “weaponized,” “lunatics,” “ideologues,” and “deepfake.” Right-wing media reinforces that virtual reality: Today on the Fox News Channel, Trump advisor Peter Navarro nonsensically claimed that “Canada has been taken over by Mexican cartels.”
Russian leaders created a false narrative to get voters to put them in power, where they could privatize public enterprises and monopolize the country’s wealth. Today, billionaire Elon Musk, who Trump said last night is in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency” despite what the administration has told courts, told a technology conference that the government should privatize “as much as possible” and suggested that two of the top candidates for privatization are Amtrak and the United States Postal Service. Cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of the National Weather Service, also appear to be a prelude to privatization.
The Trump administration today announced plans to cut 80,000 employees from the Department of Veterans Affairs in what Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) calls a plan to gut the agency and “then push to privatize the Department so they can fund tax cuts for billionaires.”
Jess Piper of The View From Rural Missouri notes that what seems to be a deliberate attempt to crash what was, when Trump took office, a booming U.S. economy, is a feature of the administration’s plan, not a bug. It creates “curated failure” that enables oligarchs to buy up the assets of the state and of desperate individuals for “rock-bottom prices.”
In mid-February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the defense secretaries of European allies that the U.S. could no longer focus on European security. Days later, on February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance sided with Russia when he attacked European values and warned that Europe’s true threat was “the threat from within.” Two weeks later, on February 28, Trump and Vance ambushed Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office in a transparent attempt to create a pretext for abandoning Ukraine and siding with Russia.
Today, United States officials said they were ceasing to share with Ukraine the intelligence that enables Ukraine to target Russian positions.
In a nationally televised speech today, France president Emmanuel Macron warned that Europe must prepare to stand against the Russian threat by itself, without the partnership of the United States. “The Russian threat is here and is affecting European countries, affecting us,” Macron said. “I want to believe that the U.S. will stay by our side, but we have to be ready if they don’t.” Yesterday, politicians in the United Kingdom angrily interpreted Vice President Vance’s dismissal of “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” as a dig at the U.K. after its suggestion that it would be willing to be part of a Ukraine peacekeeping force. They pointed out that the U.K. has stood alongside the U.S. repeatedly since World War II.
“We were at war with a dictator,” said French center-right politician Claude Malhuret of Europe’s stand against Putin. “[N]ow we are at war with a dictator backed by a traitor.”
—
Notes:
https://www.wcmo.edu/about/history/iron-curtain-speech.html
https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1946-1963-elder-statesman/the-sinews-of-peace/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51553732
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25090/donald-segretti-ratfking-100413/
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/virtual-politics-and-the-corruption-post-soviet-democracy
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/gleb-pavlovsky/
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2025/03/politics/transcript-speech-trump-congress-annotated-dg/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/05/trump-speech-words-compared-state-of-the-union/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/weather/national-weather-serivce-cuts-trump-impact.html
https://apnews.com/article/veterans-affairs-cuts-doge-musk-trump-f587a6bc3db6a460e9c357592e165712
https://apnews.com/united-states-government-d51bc6f09e0940aeac2775e57d5f9793
https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/et/et_v12n4/et_v12n4_003.pdf
The View from Rural Missouri by Jess PiperI Know Exactly What They Are DoingRead more18 hours ago · 1490 likes · 262 comments · Jess Piperhttps://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/05/us-ukraine-intelligence-sharing-00213100
https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-france-russia-europe-defense-crisis-spending/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/europe/jd-vance-munich-speech-europe-voters-intl/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/trump-speech-congress-transcript-751b5891a3265ff1e5c1409c391fef7c
The Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate on Russian Active Measures, Campaigns, and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 2: Russia’s Use of Social Media, pp. 3–12.
Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest 16(Summer 1989): 3–18.
Bluesky:
dann1960.bsky.social/post/3ljn7mw3tak24
duckworth.senate.gov/post/3ljnzjk6d4c2n
March 4, 2025
March 4, 2025
We’ve been traveling and between that and the fact that the news has come faster and faster, the letters have crept later and later. Let’s take the night off and regroup tomorrow.
Here’s a picture of the Pacific Ocean for a change, with thanks to our California friends who have a knack for landing us in the right place at the right time to watch spectacular sunsets.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
Heather Cox Richardson's Blog
- Heather Cox Richardson's profile
- 1332 followers
