Opinion

Ever since the lights went out following the most disappointing and terrifying election in my lifetime, I have been looking for answers in all the dark places.

What could possibly lead so many people to vote for an overtly racist criminal and blubbering idiot, who poured Lysol on a raging pandemic, before spearheading an attempted coup, instead of the incredibly accomplished woman, who has actually spent the bulk of her professional life standing up for the rule of law and protecting our country instead of attacking it?

— The fossil fuel industry is apparently paying off Republicans — in a practice legalized by Republicans on the Supreme Court — to make sure Congress never passes legislation to hold them accountable for all the death and destruction they’ve caused by lying about climate change for the past 50 years. Here, for example, are the biggest recipients of their largesse, according to OpenSecrets: Romney, Mitt (R-UT) $8,291,262; Cornyn, John (R-TX) $4,678,062; Cruz, Ted (R-TX) $4,138,421; McConnell, Mitch (R-KY) $2,852,107; McCarthy, Kevin (R-CA) $2,581,832; Hutchison, Kay Bailey (R-TX) $2,332,021; Inhofe, James M (R-OK) $2,320,139; Pearce, Steve (R-NM) $2,236,714; Barton, Joe (R-TX) $2,211,987; Brady, Kevin (R-TX) $2,087,396; Scalise, Steve (R-LA) $1,847,013; Murkowski, Lisa (R-AK) $1,792,602. If you haven’t yet noticed the trend, just check out the party affiliation of each…

— Convicted Felon Trump now has the “Scarlet F”: Our first felon President. There was a time that many of us remember when America — for all our faults, history, and stupid international meddling — was seen around the world as a beacon of morality and the staunchest defender of democratic values. Now, we’re the laughingstock — or the terror — of the developed world, since a grifting adjudicated sexual abuser, Putin lackey, and chronic liar is about to become president again. Alexander Hamilton warned us, but our media was far too busy fluffing Trump’s ego and sanewashing his BS to remind us that our first Secretary of the Treasury and the main author of the Federalist Papers wrote, in 1792:

The Associated Press reported Monday that the former first lady will not attend Donald Trump’s inauguration next week. Her husband will be there, however. So will the other former presidents and their spouses. So will the current president and the current first lady.

Michelle Obama didn’t attend Jimmy Carter’s funeral, so her decision to skip Trump’s swearing-in can be interpreted as less pointed than it seems. However, I’m not buying speculation about her health. She has said on more than one occasion that Trump’s white-power rhetoric (not her words) literally puts her life and her loved one’s lives at risk.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization,it expects what never was and never will be.”

—Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Colonel Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816

Donald Trump was sentenced for his 34-count conviction on business fraud and other New York state felonies in connection with silencing a porn actress about their affair before the 2016 election. But despite his crimes, he received no punishment.

It would be hard for a novelist to imagine a more telling scene in the larger story of our moment in which a privileged old man can’t say enough to be racist, can’t break enough laws to be incarcerated, can’t fail enough to be a failure and can’t be stupid enough to be stupid.

On a per capita basis, California’s gross domestic product is greater than the economies of the US, China, Germany, and Japan. Setting aside per capita comparisons and measuring productivity in hard dollars, California’s state economy ranks fifth in the world, just behind the national economies of those four countries.

Home to 39 million people, California is also the most populous state in the US. Given these facts, California’s fire devastation will ripple through the entire nation, and may be the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history.

Trump’s ethos of expansion came into view this week when his ‘jokes’ about invading Greenland and Panama morphed into serious threats.

Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark, a founding member of NATO, and long-term US ally. Panama has controlled the Panama Canal for decades under the terms of a 1979 treaty. Speaking to reporters, Trump said he would not rule out the use of military force against either of them. “The Panama Canal is vital to our country,” he announced, and “We need Greenland for national security purposes.”

Donald Trump is in the habit of accusing his enemies of pretty much anything, even eating dogs and cats, in order to draw attention away from his scam. In response, liberals and Democrats have developed a habit of their own. Don’t get distracted, they usually tell us. He’s just playing politics: Keep your eyes peeled on what’s really going on.

However, I think it’s worth it to focus on the accusations themselves. For one thing, they are evidence for drawing conclusions about him. For another, we are setting ourselves up for failure by ignoring them. We take the high road. Trump takes the low road. Guess who wins?

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg (wearing a $900,000 watch) announced yesterday morning that across their over-7-billion-user-strong social media empire — Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp — they’ll be dialing back on fact-checking. They’re also preparing to promote more “political” content (among other changes that support those two moves, like no longer filtering out trash-talking women, queer people, or immigrants, and moving what’s left of their Trust & Safety team from liberal California to conservative Texas).

Here’s the problem: Republican politicians rely on lies, distortions, and falsehoods to sell most of their policies and candidates.

Donald Trump isn’t yet in office, but some critics are acting like he’s already done himself in. They point to Tuesday’s press conference, in which he said absolutely insane things. He plans to rename the Gulf of Mexico. He might annex Canada by “economic force.” Just crazy.

Critics suggest behavior like this will lead to his demise.

To get the public to go along with the kind of radical social change that strips people of rights and privileges — and, eventually, their wealth — requires a shock to the political system which can then be exploited by a cynical political leader, his party, and their media allies.

In the second month of his reign, for example, Hitler had his Reichstag Fire, which pushed the German Parliament to pass “emergency” laws expanding his executive power and limiting the reach of parliament and the rights of average people. It ended the rights of assembly, freedom of speech and the press, protections against unlawful search and seizure, and gave him the power to designate persons and organizations as terrorists by decree.