This post is one of a series, in each of which I have created a compendium of Substack "notes" that I have written this last month that are on the substantial side. All the notes engage the historical moment in which we find ourselves, thus the general theme of authoritarianism and aggression.
Usually, my notes are not free-standing but in reaction to a news item, a Substack post, and so on; you can link to the item to which I am responding by clicking on the sub-heading. I am refraining from adding commentary other than the sub-heading.
I am proceeding reverse chronologically. This post — #1 in the series — starts with February 14 and proceeds to February 21.
It is time for us all to truly become familiar with two definitions as we watch the grotesque mafioso behaviour of Trump, Musk and their morally bankrupt minions towards Ukraine and its President — and the turning of day into night with Trump’s communing with fellow despot Putin.
1: THE BIG LIE
In this stunning Guardian report, read Musk’s repetition of Trump’s and Russia’s shared lie about Zelensky having only 4% support of Ukrainians and then read the attached definition of The Big Lie from the Collins dictionary of American English.
Hitler and Stalin were the most notable developers and users of Big Lie strategy. In sheer volume, Trump long surpassed them.
2: PSYCHOPATH
Read the whole article about how Trump demands 500 billion in Ukraine’s critical minerals be signed over to the US in ‘exchange’ for selling Ukraine down the river with Russia. And then Trump’s lackeys turn this into a tale of grievance for how Trump is being mistreated. Kafka or Orwell could not make this sh*t up. Trump is clearly a psychopath surrounded by enablers many of whom are also clearly within the psychopathic realm (ever so clearly Musk).
See [below] the FBI’s definition of psychopath. The US’ top police agency has profiled their own president.
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Big lies and psychopathic rule are baked into our future.
Not to mince words, it’s time (way past time) to wake the f**k up — Canada, Americans, Europe, the world. What resistance looks like — to Trump alongside the Trump/Putin/Xi axis of collaboration in dividing the world into three major-power spheres with tacit and some explicit deals about the terms of their rivalry, on the one hand, and mutual acquiescence to each other’s military and economic power plays, on the other hand — our political and societal leaders and all of us more generally better soon figure this out.
One way or another, we are entering — already in — a new dark age, a global one.
Read the Guardian account again and again to take in the levels and layers of what is happening at the pace of a Blitzkrieg.
February 20: Note commenting on The Dworkin Report, “Good News For Us That’s Bad News for Trump”
Canadians may want to subscribe to the Dworkin Report if you want to follow the signs that opposition to Trump may be coming out of the shellshocked period of the first three weeks.
Apart from whether the court system will ‘hold’ with respect to the clearly unlawful and unconstitutional actions (I am not making bets), are there signs of the very beginnings of coalescence of anger and resolve into effective citizen and elected-official resistance to the Trump regime?
Two things stand out in this Dworkin Report in that respect.
One is that Trump’s narcissism and style may be starting to reach heights that trigger a fierce reaction in the average American, not just Democrats, with respect to his invocations of God (Trump’s messaging that he is the Almighty’s chosen instrument after two failed assassination attempts) and his paraphrasing of Napoleon (claiming that the ruler who seeks to save their country does not violate any law in doing so). Going back to the foundations of the US in revolution against Britain, the idea of a President who actually thinks he is and tries to act as if he is a “King” does not go down well across a wider swathe of Americans than voted against Trump. Or at least we can hope.
The second is the reference to a self identified MAGA person saying that these three weeks are not what he voted for. He says that he did not vote for (I paraphrase) taking a chainsaw to silk. It is but one anecdote and it comes from someone who list their job due to the chainsaw, so it may be an isolated sentiment. But it may also be a sign.
Fierce resolve in fighting Trump can do with a little optimism now and then!
Missed this in the hurly burly of the last week. From Dan Gardner. A must read. Or don’t read it and continue merrily along in the flow of classic Canadian smugness and complacency.
One of the big dangers of reacting with anger (as we should and we must) to the Trump regime is that we will slip into a pervasive lack of introspection about the choices we and political leaders over generations have made that make us so vulnerable now to becoming everything from a ritually kowtowing supplicant to a satellite state in the Eastern Europe next to USSR sense to actually being annexed or having chunks annexed.
There is also the danger —into which I fall too regularly, I will admit — of a focus almost solely on the appalling immorality and idiocy of the man presiding over the country south of us, as if the only issue is fighting him off until he goes away — versus seeing what the US has become over the last half century and what it will have become by the time he departs the scene. We must take off our rose-coloured glasses and recognize the need to transform our country away from our deeply complacent and often craven, even hypocritical, dependence on the US towards a kind of assuredness in our own capacities, fearlessness in being internationalist in a way that does not most of the time ape the US, and overall resiliency. And we have to do this in way that, far from abandoning, deepens our core values and principles (such as found in the Pledge for Canada) so that they both sustain us and are sustained by us — a sustaining that will never happen if we now fall victim to the thinking that deepening integration with and thus reliance on the US (the first instinct of most in the business community and many on the right) is the way forward.
And keep reading Gardner — i.e. subscribe to him —if you want to create a disciplining mechanism that helps ensure that the Canadian complacency gene that you share (if you agree you do share it with the rest of us) does not rule the day in your own thinking.
This kind of political interference by the number 2 at Justice, Bove, is not just political corruption of the highest order and the arbitrary exercise of political power parading as law. It is both of those but it is also akin to how the Fuehrer principle worked in Nazi Germany.
Most assume that principle meant that Hitler could order anything — including anything contrary to duly legislated law — and his orders had to be obeyed. Yes, as far as it goes, his supreme authority and the duty to obey him and him alone were the core of the FP. But in a vast and complex state apparatus he only specifically ordered a limited range of things. In stepped another key aspect of the Fuehrer principle, which was all about how every agent of the state — from those just under Hitler to those way down the hierarchy and from the bureaucracy to the judiciary — was expected to imagine and replicate his will as law. They were to exercise judgment in areas of delegation and discretion, or where no orders were known on an issue, so as to act as they imagined Hitler as informed by (their understanding of Hitler’s understanding of) Nazi doctrine would wish them to act. Divine my (divine) will to fill in the blanks, basically. This is the world of ‘you know my general will and what I generally want, so act like a good Nazi by replicating the imagined me in your acts — you don’t need direct orders and you don’t need specific guidance when it clear what I want without ever ordering it .’ BUT be alert:’Be attuned to the shifts in my will by extrapolating from my latest pronouncements made public.’ Sound familiar?
So, back to Bove, yes, he is a hatchet man of the crudest kind but also he is executing the most general of marching orders where he knows that the biggest guidance for his discretion is a) rewarding or buying loyalty to Trump and b) the distinction between friends and enemies of Trump — as these are two of the fundamental imperatives of this Fuehrer’s will. ….
At the same time, not to forget that the core dimensions of the Fuehrer Principle have also been in play in these first three weeks under Trump.
What Trump believes and what his minions, including the ever-craven vice president of the US, are parroting — sometimes only after getting over the initial shock of realizing Trump really is going as far as he is — reeks of ‘I am the Leader and thus am the Law.’
Legislation? I can gut every program in the US by simply ending the executive end of payments or program delivery. The executive has no service function that requires a rule of law implementation of Congressional will as expressed in legislation. That functional executive is subordinate to the political executive — me.
Judicial authority? They can judge all they want and even do so on the basis of the interpretation of the constitution, but if I declare I am acting legally, this is not only the truth but a sufficient basis for me to ignore judicial rulings that are…just wrong.
The executive is not only unified under me and I am not only supreme within it, but the executive and therefore me are ultimately supreme when it comes to whose account of the law prevails. If you all protest that we are co equal branches, then that does not get you anywhere because what gives the right of one branch to tell the other what to do? In the end, the only basis for deciding who wins in a struggle amongst powers equal in status is for real power to prevail — and I got the military, I got the police, I got ICE, I got the nuclear football. You know, I got The People too.
All this kind of thinking from a fevered brain then gets fleshed out by current incarnations of authoritarian and fascist philosophers like Carl Schmitt or by sycophants like JD Vance who fly the flag of having graduated from a great law school (Yale) only to spout nonsense that amounts to courts not having any more authority than the Leader to say what the law is.
What is developing south of the border is an existential threat not just to the US but to the world as Trump’s toxins spread.
