‘Welfare for billionaire tax cheats’: Trump’s IRS ditches effort to close major loophole
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Another Brave Sir Robin moment for the Trumpy administration
No paywall version
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Gosh! I wonder what happened last time he was in power.
Golly!
Surely not!
As much as it pains me to post things from this URL… here’s um this:
When was this term first in use?
Oh.
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And Paddy O’Connell is, hmm … shall we say, not the best interviewer Newsnight has?
Watching him on Newsnight is sometimes painful.
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The Administration is showing that it will blink every time when pushed hard enough. People need to start pushing back harder. Especially Congressional Democrats. Sen. Van Hollen showed that they have more power than just their floor vote.
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I sure they consider his every breath to be traitorous already.
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I’ve been wondering for a long time now about parallels with Hungary, so this is helpful. Especially since Reich effectively shows that the parallels aren’t all that strong.
John believes Trump is emulating Orbán’s playbook. (Steve Bannon once declared that “Orbán was Trump before there was Trump.”)
Orbân’s playbook has 10 parts, according to John:
One: Take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using political threats and intimidation to stamp out all party dissent.
Two: Build your base by appealing to fear and hate, branding immigrants and cultural minorities as dangers to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.
Three: Use disinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.
Four: Use your election victory to claim a sweeping mandate — especially if you don’t win a majority.
Five: Centralize your power by destroying the civil service.
Six: Redefine the rule of law as rule by executive decree. Weaponize the state against all democratic opponents. Demonize anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.”
Seven: Eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. Target opponents with regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties such as denials of accreditation, political penalties like harassment investigations, physical penalties like withdrawing police protection, and criminal penalties like prosecution.
Eight: Rely on your oligarchs — hugely wealthy business and financial leaders — to supervise the economy and reward them with special access to state resources, tax cuts, and subsidies.
Nine: Ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.
Ten: Get the public to believe that all this is necessary, and that resistance is futile.
John noted that Orbán’s influence now reaches across Europe.
the rest
In Austria, a political party founded by former Nazis will be part of a new coalition government this year headed by a leader who has close ties to Russia and opposes European support for Ukraine. A similar nationalist far-right government has taken over next door in Slovakia.
Europe’s three biggest countries, Italy, France and Germany, have all swung toward the far-right, but so far they remain democracies.
Italy has a nationalist government headed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who’s followed parts of the Orbán playbook but has been pushed toward the center and has softened her position on immigration and Ukraine.
In France, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen won last year’s parliamentary elections, but a coalition of opposition parties, prodded by Emmanuel Macron, united to deny her party a parliamentary majority. Their resistance will be tested by new elections in June.
In Germany, the center-left government headed by Olaf Scholz fell at the end of last year. In late February, parliamentary elections took place that determined whether the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would become part of a new government. Viktor Orbán, Elon Musk, and JD Vance all endorsed the AfD before the elections, but it came in second with just under 20 percent of the vote, and polls show that 71 percent of Germans believe that the AfD is a threat to democracy because of its overt connections to the Nazi past.
Poland, the biggest new democracy in Eastern Europe, at first adopted but is now resisting the Orbán model. A far-right government elected in 2015 almost destroyed the independence of the Polish judiciary, but opposition parties united to defend the courts and defeated the government in 2023, replacing it with a centrist regime headed by Donald Tusk, with a strong commitment to restore Polish democracy.
What lessons can be drawn from all this?
John believes that the best way to respond to Orbán’s right-wing populism is by building coalitions for economic populism based on health care, education, taxes, and public spending.
He points to historical examples of this, like the American Farmer-Labor coalition that brought together urban workers, white farmers, and Black sharecroppers and led to the Progressive Movement and the New Deal in the 20th century. Today there’s an urgent need for a new populist movement to attack economic inequality.
John says that defending democracy should itself be a populist cause. In the Orbán playbook, the national flag was hijacked by the authoritarian leader. John believes that the flag of American democracy must be reclaimed as a symbol of the rule of law, a society built on human rights and freedoms, and international alliances and humanitarian values.
When these soft-power democratic assets are destroyed, a huge void opens up — to be filled by authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who are the ultimate political models for Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump.
John urges that we pro-democracy anti-Trumpers move quickly with protests, lawsuits, and loud resistance. He says that those who believe Democrats should just play dead and wait for the 2026 midterm elections are profoundly wrong. Speed is essential.
I was struck by John’s optimism. He believes that the U.S. is better situated than Hungary to resist authoritarianism. We are 30 times bigger and infinitely more diverse, and our diversity is the source of our economic and cultural strength. The U.S. has an enormous and active civil society, a judiciary that remains mostly independent, a free and open if partially captured and manipulated media, and a constitution that guarantees the rights of the people to challenge and change their government.
Trump won less than 50 percent of the vote in last fall’s election, and his approval rating is well below that in recent polls.
National polls show that 70 percent of Americans today see democracy as a core American value. Resistance to the assault on democracy is not only possible, John says, but it’s essential — and it can work, as shown by the growing number of successful lawsuits that have been brought against Trump’s flood of executive decrees and the rising tide of grassroots mobilization by civil society groups across the country who are organizing demonstrations and lobbying legislators to stand up for democracy.
For two and a half centuries, Americans have fought to expand the right to vote, to achieve equal protection, to oppose intolerance and political violence, to gain freedom of speech and religion, to guarantee due process of law.
These goals may now seem to be blocked by Trump, but the U.S. is not Germany in the 1930s nor Hungary in 2025. Americans across the country are beginning to resist. John believes American democracy will emerge stronger for our efforts.
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They need to learn from Harvard’s response and go even stronger, with a collective letter signed by all hour and that received the letter along with as many other journals they can get to sign on, and tell Trump and the DOJ to fuck off.
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As soon as these “competing viewpoints” can pass peer review, I’m sure the journals will get right on it.
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Just look at this completely convincing photoshop:
(I realize others have already posted about this, but I felt some might appreciate the closeup look.)
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Also, just look at his banana tie.
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It’s the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing…
Some reminders about the influences on McVeigh… warning for discussion of the Turner Diaries…
I had not seen this analysis before, but I’m watching now…
I show the Thoughtslime video in my class, but might switch to this one for the fall…
[ETA]
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I was curious to see how some right-wing media was reacting to that obviously altered photo, and whether they were actually reporting claiming that it was real. The Washington Examiner is now reporting that the “M S 1 3” characters are just a legend that was added to the photo to explain the hidden meaning of the finger tattoos. They’re saying that there’s a code there: “Smiley Face” means “S,” “Marijuana” means “M”, the cross means “1” for some reason and the skull means “3” because of course a skull means 3 why are you even questioning that??
Truly incredible the mental gymnastics that Trump’s supporters will go through in an attempt to sane-wash his obvious nonsense and lies.
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