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Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of January 20
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.
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America completes its descent into fascism, as of about 1 hour ago at time of writing. I'm starting a full write-up on all the various obvious fascist signals from his inauguration speech, but in short it was a disgusting display of nationalism and call to violence.
I am ashamed and fear for the future of our country and the world.
Edit: Here you are Tildes. My first blog post.
It's definitely not great, but honestly things are moving so fast now I haven't got time to do better. (@DefinitelyNotAFae and @Zorind if edits trigger pings)
Elon Musk doing what looked pretty much exactly like a nazi salute was like, 5 seconds and all I could bear to see today, so I'm also looking forward to reading your writeup.
@Vord - they do
I am both looking forward to your write up, and horrified what it will contain (based on the approximate 5 minutes of the speech I listened to).
@Vord - edits do ping. Thanks, great write up. I did end up reading the transcript, but I appreciate your blog post & what you explicitly call out in it.
The last part is bad.
Oh I very much agree. I should definitely rewrite the entire last section. Honestly I lost the thread partway through, and at this point it's not even that important anymore.
I do want to revisit his more casual droning that happened afterward though.
No dude, I meant bad as in a horrifying dystopian future, lmao, sorry.
This part:
Here's the todo list as sold, in no particular order
From the point of view as a post, it's actually pretty good. It's the results that are bad.
Putting everything together as a list like this is actually a brutal capstone to the whole piece. I would leave it.
The descent's not complete. It's only just started. Wait for the thugs on the streets and the political enemies in prison.
Vivek is out at DOGE, going to run for Ohio Governor
Egos collided? Racism? Idk but he lasted 0 Scaramuccis so I don't know how to count it.
I'm convinced it's racism and ego based on the publicly cited reasons of disagreements with other staff. I've been repeatedly disappointed by many of my Indian colleagues falling for Trump and Republicans because of illegal immigration. I really wish the green card country caps were revised...
Philosophical differences, allegedly (WaPo gift article)
Well, this is actually worse then.
Looks like Elon has more leverage with Trump and won out. But their mandate has been narrowed
This tracks with Musk's obsession with questionable approaches. He's very very stubborn and has overruled his own experts on simple things like adding a rain sensor to Teslas ("humans only need eyes" etc).
Divide by 0 NaN error?
Yeah it really breaks the whole scale.
This is five years old now, but it's sadly relevant again.
Could American Evangelicals Spot the Antichrist? Here Are the Biblical Predictions:
Trump Withdraws U.S. from World Health Organization (New York Times)
I'll be honest. This might be the worst thing Trump has done today. The US is voluntarily giving up huge amounts of soft power and international influence. The WHO's missions really do benefit humanity, and I'm sad to see the Republicans have radically changed since the days of George W. Bush funding foreign AIDS treatment...
It's about the one positive thing I remember here in the Netherlands so... yeah. Don't forget the bird flu going around too. I'm really afraid of the global effects this Trump administration will have.
Paul Krugman in leaving the NYT
He felt the editing was increasingly heavy handed and biased towards a more "both sides" narrative, which ruined his experience as he had to rewrite the rewrites. They also wanted to cut his newsletter or give it back "occasionally" but cut his columns to once a week.
I don't think the response from the NYT really contradicts that but you can read for yourself!
I'm subscribed to his substack, and it's really been great - he's actually free to write what he wants, and I think his columns are better than before.
Yeah I don't quite have a handle on how to use the substack app, and I'm not sure I want to, but I added him to my list
I don't actually use the app - just the website - I signed up for his newsletter, and I get an email when he posts something new to it.
Unfortunately my email is such that it's usually hard for me to keep up with. My personal email is broadly non-functional and I'm planning to switch but also... it's momentum. we'll get there, maybe.
Apparently Meta is now having some accounts auto-follow Trump’s pages:
https://timfullerton.substack.com/p/something-weird-is-going-on-with
It seems to be that if someone was following POTUS before the election, they're still following them despite the change in administration.
Possibly!
There also appear to be some issues with tags on instagram. I can also see a world where this mixup is the result of some aggressive reporting abuses by trolls, but the effect of chilling the left wing’s ability to communicate is the same either way.
https://www.latintimes.com/instagram-hides-democrats-search-results-hours-after-zuckerberg-attends-trump-inauguration-572884
Washington National Cathedral Bishop Calls Out Trump to His Face
And Trump called her nasty and said that she should apologize because the service is boring. And another Republican said she should be deported. So we've already gotten to the threatening our enemies with deportation stage.
But I heard it and it was very well done. Standing in a church asking somebody to show mercy is pretty much classic Christian leadership.
How Donald Trump's Executive Orders Compare to Project 2025 (Newsweek)
The TL;DR seems to be that Trump is not actually following the Heritage Foundation playbook, their evil just happens to overlap a lot.
Well obviously the buffoon didn't read 900 pages! He probably flipped through the first 20 pages and looked at the pictures. Then he gave it to his sons to read, and this is how it went.
Since it's impossible to get 60 senators to agree on anything, this is apparently how US politics works now. Whenever there's a new administration, the first thing they do is rescind all the previous president's executive orders, before signing dozens of their own, turning policy 180 degrees around on a wide array of topics.