Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Anne Applebaum has written a lengthy piece at The Atlantic titled History Will Judge the Complicit. Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president? No four-paragraph excerpt can do it justice, but perhaps it will whet your appetite for the rest:
[...]To the American reader, references to Vichy France, East Germany, fascists, and Communists may seem over-the-top, even ludicrous. But dig a little deeper, and the analogy makes sense. The point is not to compare Trump to Hitler or Stalin; the point is to compare the experiences of high-ranking members of the American Republican Party, especially those who work most closely with the White House, to the experiences of Frenchmen in 1940, or of East Germans in 1945, or of Czesław Miłosz in 1947. These are experiences of people who are forced to accept an alien ideology or a set of values that are in sharp conflict with their own.
Not even Trump’s supporters can contest this analogy, because the imposition of an alien ideology is precisely what he was calling for all along. Trump’s first statement as president, his inaugural address, was an unprecedented assault on American democracy and American values. Remember: He described America’s capital city, America’s government, America’s congressmen and senators—all democratically elected and chosen by Americans, according to America’s 227-year-old Constitution—as an “establishment” that had profited at the expense of “the people.” “Their victories have not been your victories,” he said. “Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.” Trump was stating, as clearly as he possibly could, that a new set of values was now replacing the old, though of course the nature of those new values was not yet clear.
Almost as soon as he stopped speaking, Trump launched his first assault on fact-based reality, a long-undervalued component of the American political system. We are not a theocracy or a monarchy that accepts the word of the leader or the priesthood as law. We are a democracy that debates facts, seeks to understand problems, and then legislates solutions, all in accordance with a set of rules. Trump’s insistence—against the evidence of photographs, television footage, and the lived experience of thousands of people—that the attendance at his inauguration was higher than at Barack Obama’s first inauguration represented a sharp break with that American political tradition. Like the authoritarian leaders of other times and places,
Trump effectively ordered not just his supporters but also apolitical members of the government bureaucracy to adhere to a blatantly false, manipulated reality. American politicians, like politicians everywhere, have always covered up mistakes, held back information, and made promises they could not keep. But until Trump was president, none of them induced the National Park Service to produce doctored photographs or compelled the White House press secretary to lie about the size of a crowd—or encouraged him to do so in front of a press corps that knew he knew he was lying. [...]
QUOTATION
“Like the story of the steam drill against John Henry, the machine will be victorious because it doesn’t get tired and keeps on going long after a human worker will have dropped dead from exhaustion. The modern-day steam drill is likely to be an AI system, and John Henry is played by the planner, doctor, analyst, stockbroker or accountant who believes that they can process more data and crunch more numbers than the new machine overlords. They can’t.”
~~Sean A. Culey, Transition Point: From Steam to the Singularity (2019)
TWEET(s) OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2018—Grieving mom wants answers regarding the 'agonizingly slow' death of her son in ICE custody:
When it’s a fact that medical and mental health care in immigration detention is “dangerously inadequate” and grievances commonly get ignored, the circumstances around every death must be investigated. There’s perhaps no more tragic example right now than an immigrant from Honduras who, according to former Georgia chief medical examiner Dr. Kris Sperry, “most likely died an agonizingly slow and excruciatingly painful death” while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention last month:
According to previously unreported court documents reviewed by The Daily Beast, the mother of an undocumented immigrant who died of bacterial meningitis is preparing for civil action related to his death. On June 4, Honduran native Martina Blasina Romero petitioned a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas to authorize depositions of the people who were held with her son, Ronal Francisco Romero, and know about the health collapse he experienced in his last days.