Here is my latest post on Substack.
This was written using ChatGPT4o with extensive prompting. Time spent, about one hour.
Worth Your Attention
Here are two links I recommend that you read soon. The first gives an excellent analysis of what drives the MAGA movement. You may even see a path to feeling empathy and compassion for the worldview that fuels the vitriol. But more important, the insights it offers may help you avoid adding fuel to the fire as you defend and assert your own values.
They Warned Us in 1945: Fascism in America Would Look Like Patriotism
How MAGA Became the Psychological Blueprint They Described
The second link is to Timothy Snyder’s free materials. On Tyranny, if you have not read it, is essential for understanding how to meet the threats democracy faces today. The materials offered by Snyder are helpful to both remind us of the basics, and to spread the word.
. . . and something much lighter from Snyder’s brother-in-law:
Attention Fatigue
The antidote for news fatigue may be simply minding what has your attention. “Flood the zone with sh*t” has been the strategy of the GOP in 2025. It has been practiced for many years, but is at a fever pitch since #47 took office and began implementing Project 2025. Doug Muder explains how he thinks it works and suggests what you can do about it in the talk below. The clip is set to play his advice for coping. You may want to listen to the whole talk if the idea that your attention is being captured and manipulated is foreign to you.
“Whatever has your attention, has you.” ~Willis Elliott
Political strategists have long understood that controlling the media’s news cycle was central to manipulating what citizens see and hear about you and your adversaries. The GOP has been far more effective than the democrats, both in terms of developing Fox News and Sinclair as propaganda organs, and in generating outrage, shock, and fear to rapidly grab attention and rapidly shift it successively from one issue to another. The firehose flow of emotionally wrenching information keeps the public off balance and unable to fully grasp what’s real and what’s hype.
It’s not matter of getting the facts right, or interpreting them with critical thinking. It’s about regaining willful control over what has and holds attention. Can we learn to be mindful in the flooded zone?
Teddy was Right
“Here are three of [Robert Reich’s] favorite TR quotes, which I find particularly appropriate today. If you are so moved, you might share them. You might include them in a letter to your local paper. If you have the means, you might even place them in an ad in your local paper or perhaps even on a billboard on a highway near you.” –Robert Reich
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“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
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“To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
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“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”
― Theodore Roosevelt
Look What’s Going Down
Free Press
The administration is attacking the funding of listener-supported non-commercial radio by attacking the long tradition of acknowledging funding provided by businesses. The intent is to put a chill on non-promotional sponsorship announcements. You have heard them; they tell you the name of the business and something about what they do, but there is no call to action or promotional claims. Attacking stations and networks like PBS, NPR, and WHYY has only one purpose: to suppress news and opinions that don’t conform to the alternative facts of the administration’s propaganda machine.
In parallel with this, high journalistic quality news media are being replaced with low quality sources that spread conspiracy theories and the administration’s deceptions.
Will they seek to suppress or disrupt internet communications? Access to the Internet is in the hands of the FCC, now led by a GOP loyalist.
Justice
The purging of the FBI, and the Justice Department of those deemed not loyal to the President is clearly a move intended to tip the scales of justice to serve #47 instead of the people.
Separation of Powers
The Supreme Court has been made partisan; Congress fails in its role of advice and consent by approving nominees whose character, inexperience, and partisan loyalty make them obviously unsuited for elevation to powerful and critical office.
Law
The President is immune from prosecution. If they do his bidding, his cronies are all but assured of pardons. The Inspectors General, our watchdogs, have been dismissed. Agency leadership that follows the law, in defiance of #47 gets furloughed.
It’s already tyranny!
The behavior of Putin’s legislators, no dissent unless #47 gives it the nod, is what we are seeing in the GOP Senate and House.
Read what Timothy Snyder says about all of this. It’s expert opinion, not media hysterics.
On Heroism
” … heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
“It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
“It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
“It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.
“It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.
“Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.
“None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.” ~ Heather Cox Richardson 1/19/25
My granddaughter attends a Catholic parochial school in Key West. She sent us one of her lessons, which we keep on our refrigerator door. It enumerates “the fruit of God’s spirit.”
These are the qualities of true heroes, are the not? Ordinary decency coupled with a willingness to serve the greater good mark the kind of heroism that Richardson describes.
Have you ever heard of acts that manifest these qualities by the man who is being inaugurated as President of the United States this week? Even one?
Flood the Zone
Since the election, I have greatly reduced the time I spend on the media. I rationalize my indifference to political news in various ways, but the effect is to disengage. Advertising-funded media are cowering at the threat of losing subscribers or ratings. They pull their punches or give too much airtime to political theater. I have retreated to reading a few blogs that I have found to be credible: Heather Cox Richardson, Joyce Vance, and Talking Points Memo (TPM).
But I know that I am succumbing to Steve Bannon’s “Flood the Zone With Shit” strategy. If you don’t know what that is and how it affects you, read on. What follows is a ChatGPT generated briefing. Feel free to share it widely.
Inured or Obeying in Advance?
Judd Legum documents the remarkable lack of media interest in the President Elect benefiting handsomely from foreign capital. It doesn’t pass the sniff test and is certainly vastly more corrupt that the support Hillary received for her charitable foundation. We all have become inured to scandalous behavior by GOP luminaries; scarcely a week goes by without something new. Indeed, #45 appears to be intentionally provoking outrage — it devours the media cycle and ultimately has no consequences for him. He benefits because items like this don’t make the headlines. He also benefits because the outrage keeps the nation divided. True MAGA believers don’t care. The rest of us are repulsed. It’s a tactic.
One wonders if our mainstream media, fearing loss of GOP advertisers and subscribers, are now pulling their punches.
Trump v. Clinton: The media double standard on the influence of foreign cash
On Monday, Popular Information reported that Justin Sun, a Chinese national currently being prosecuted for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission, sent President-elect Donald Trump $18 million in cash.
If you don’t already subscribe to “Popular Information,” Legum’s excellent newsletter, you should.
Divisive Acts Shield Trump
Matt Gaetz as Attorney General? Bypass congressional checks and balances with recess appointments?
Even the conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journal is shocked, but Trump’s base sees their leader as striking out with bold actions against the establishment elites they despise. It’s the showmanship of his professional wrestling interest. Please the crowd, keep them inside the bubble of illusion, appeal to base instincts, and distract them from thinking critically.
This tactic may be intuitive for Trump, but it achieves some important strategic objectives for him:
- Keeps the base impressed because it enrages the establishment leadership.
- Keeps the country polarized. (Trump loses if America unifies around shared values. That can’t happen if we are too angry to listen to each other.)
- Distracts attention from reality, and from his mendacity and incompetence.
- It gobbles up time in the news cycle, providing cover for less sensational adverse acts and obscuring rational analysis.
Dominating the news, triggering primal fears and other lizard-brain-level emotions, is a manipulative tactic that his adversaries are loath to use. Encumbered by scruples and unwilling to sacrifice integrity, the resistance fights an asymmetric war.
But Trump’s base is bonded by a web of lies and misinformation. Reality eventually crushes misperception. Therein lies a major vulnerability.
Veterans’ Day
Trump has expressed his intent to purge the military brass of those he deems disloyal. He’s also announced his intention to appoint Fox News host Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. Although Hegseth is a veteran of the National Guard and was awarded a Bronze Star, he’s controversial, opinionated, and likely to be loyal to Trump first, and the US Constitution second if push comes to shove.
Military service is a matter of honoring a sacred oath, and being willing to die for it if necessary. Here’s my Opinion Piece for Veterans’ Day.
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