Mostly Monday Reads: The Light Brigade

“They’re back…”, John Buss, @repeat1968

Hello, Dear Sky Dancers!

Farewell, Cruel X!  You will not locate Sky Dancing, JJ, or me on that site.  The accounts have been deleted.  We’re shifting to our Blue Sky Accounts. We set them up about a year ago, but it’s more promising now that Jack Dorsey is gone. The CEO is a woman, Jay Graber. It’s also a Public Benefit Corporation. I feel better about it. It’s also open source. There seems to be quite the exodus to that site.  Most of the journos I follow have headed there with the note they will only be posting publications on what I hope will become the Zombie site. We’ve also seen an uptick from our neighbors in the Fediverse.  The blog is there and active.  JJ and I also maintain an active presence there. You have alternatives. Now is a good time to check them out.

Our election sent another “shot heard round the world” and not in a particularly promising way.  This is from CNN. “Eyeing Trump support, Israeli minister pushes for West Bank settlement annexation.”  

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has ordered preparations for the annexation of settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Smotrich, who is in charge of the settlements, said on Monday that he had instructed his department to “prepare the necessary infrastructure for applying sovereignty.”

It is unclear whether his long-standing desire to apply full Israeli law in West Bank settlements has any chance of being implemented soon. His announcement was likely motivated in large part by staking out political ground in Israel’s fractious domestic politics.

Still, his announcement drew swift condemnation from the Palestinian Authority, whose foreign affairs ministry characterized such comments as “a blatantly colonial and racist extension of the ongoing campaign of extermination and forced displacement against the Palestinian people.”

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, the spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority’s presidency, said the comments confirmed “the Israeli government’s intention to finalize its plans for taking control of the West Bank by 2025” and said he held both the “Israeli occupation authorities” and the US administration responsible for allowing Israel to “persist in its crimes, aggression and defiance of international legitimacy and international law.”

Smotrich told the Knesset, or Israeli parliament, that US President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the US election “brings an important opportunity for the State of Israel.”

Young girl, a French Resistance fighter. 20 August 1944. © AP Photo

I am pretty certain that many in the Jewish community here and in Israel itself do not support this.  But, this election is like Pandora’s box.  It will release things we are really not prepared for.  Also, in the news is something we’ve all been dreading. This is also from CNN.  It is reported by Alayna Treene. “Trump expected to announce Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy.”

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to announce in the coming days that Stephen Miller, his top immigration adviser, will serve as White House deputy chief of staff for policy, two sources familiar with the plans told CNN.

Miller, who served as a senior adviser to Trump and was his lead speechwriter during his first administration, has been a leading advocate for a more restrictive immigration policy and is expected to take on an expanded role in the president-elect’s second term. He’s been closely involved in Trump’s transition process and will have a key role in future staffing decisions. During the campaign, he frequently traveled to rallies with Trump on his private plane and was increasingly visible as a speaker at events in recent months.

Miller is also a lead architect of the president-elect’s plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. He has said that a second Trump administration would seek a tenfold increase in the number of deportations to more than 1 million per year. In an interview on Fox News last week, Miller expressed eagerness at the prospect of beginning mass deportations as soon as possible.

“They begin on Inauguration Day, as soon as he takes the oath of office,” he said.

Asked about the expected announcement, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told CNN, “President-elect Trump will begin making decisions on who will serve in his second administration soon. Those decisions will be announced when they are made.”

A longtime hardliner on immigration, Miller was instrumental in setting up immigration restrictions during the first Trump administration, advocating for child separation in migrant detention facilities and a travel ban targeting people from majority-Muslim countries.

After Trump left office, Miller started an advisory group called America First Legal, which went on to contribute to Project 2025, the sweeping conservative blueprint for the next Republican president created by the Heritage Foundation. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, claiming that he had no idea who was behind it, despite its close ties to Miller and other crucial figures in Trump’s orbit.

In an interview with The New York Times last year, Miller said that under a second Trump term, the military would build detention centers to house immigrants who have been arrested and are facing deportation. The new camps would likely be built “on open land in Texas near the border,” he told The Times.

Miller told The Times that Trump’s immigration plans are being designed to avoid having to create new substantial legislation. During Trump’s first term, he relied heavily on executive orders to implement immigration policy. Many of those moves were challenged in the courts, something Miller acknowledged would likely happen again in a second Trump term.

In his comments last year, Miller was up-front about his belief that Trump would not hesitate to implement harsh immigration measures in a second term.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller said at the time.

French refugees living in the quarries, 26 July 1944. © AP Photo

I’m glad I’m teaching from home these days because I would hate to work for some place where this happens. “Trump ‘border czar’ says administration will conduct workplace immigration raids.”   It’s written at The Hill by Rafael Bernal.

Incoming “border czar” Tom Homan said Monday that President-elect Trump’s administration will crank up workplace raids as part of its broader immigration crackdown.

Speaking on “Fox & Friends,” the former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said workplace raids would address labor and sex trafficking.

“Where do we find most victims of sex trafficking and forced labor trafficking? At worksites,” Homan told Steve Doocy.

But advocates say that approach is unlikely to help combat trafficking.

“He’s conflating the traffickers with the people being trafficked,” said Heidi Altman, director of federal advocacy at the National Immigration Law Center.

“Tom Homan is skilled at using public safety rhetoric to justify vicious tactics that tear families apart.”

Homan, an early proponent of the “zero tolerance” policy that separated more than 4,000 children from their parents in the first Trump administration, said he will prioritize “public safety threats and national security threats” for deportation as border czar.

But Homan said foreign nationals with orders of deportation “became a fugitive,” suggesting immigrants without criminal records but with final orders of deportation would be high on the list of deportation priorities.

There’s more information about this piece of shit human being at CBS. “What to know about Tom Homan, Trump’s new “border czar”.”

Between 1940 and 1944, 6,700 women were deported from occupied France, the vast majority of them Resistance members ,

None of this will not be pretty.  The Guardian has more details on the plans for the Justice Department. It also has other appalling bits and pieces come out of all the secret machinations going on in Southern Florida updating live as they become available

Conservative attorney Mark Paoletta, who is helping plan Donald Trump’s transition, warned lawyers at the justice department that those who refuse to work on advancing Trump’s agenda should resign or risk being fired.

Paoletta, in a post on X responding to a Politico story on widespread fear among the DoJ, wrote:

“Once the decision is made to move forward, career employees are required to implement the President’s plan.”

Lawrence Tribe–speaking to Ali Velshi on MSNBC–has this to say. 

Unlike the sudden slide into authoritarianism seen in other countries, the United States benefits from a decentralized government that can serve as a strong counterweight to Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. It’s within this space — the system of checks and balances — that the resistance will emerge, argues Harvard’s Professor Laurence Tribe, one of the foremost constitutional law experts in the country. The Constitution is not just a “remarkable piece of prose,” says Tribe, and he underscores the prominent role that state legislatures will play in resisting Trump. Civil society, like journalists and educators, will also play a crucial role in creating a cultural-political resistance to any attempts to erase democratic norms. “It’s not over,” says Tribe. “We are about to see all of the institutions activated in a way that we haven’t had to see before.” The law is “an area where reality bites,” says Tribe.

The thing that worries me most is what happens when anything hits the Roberts court. Pema Levy–writing for Mother Jones–has this to say.  “How John Roberts Brought Back Donald Trump. The Supreme Court empowered billionaires, blocked voters, and ran interference.”

There will be endless ink spilled over the 2024 election, trying to sort out the overlapping reasons why the world’s oldest democracy placed its fate in the hands of a would-be strongman who promises to dismantle democratic norms. There are many culprits—rising costs, raw white supremacy—but among them, let’s not forget the role of Chief Justice John Roberts and the US Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court has become a major force in American politics in recent years. Increasingly, it has stepped in not just to decide questions of legal importance, but to resolve heated partisan disputes. From abortion and gun rights to gerrymandering and voting rights, the justices have become the arbiters of our toughest political questions. This wasn’t a sudden change, though it has accelerated in the last four years, leaving Americans as the proverbial frog in the pot. The water is now boiling.

Why Americans chose a demagogue to helm their democracy may be partially explained by the fact that, in many ways, the United States isn’t a democracy any longer—and in many ways, that’s thanks to the Roberts court. Our system was never perfect; on a basic level, the US only became a democracy in 1965 when it finally gave all Black people the right to vote.

But for nearly two decades, Roberts and his colleagues have done immense damage to the underpinnings of the democracy Americans painstakingly built. They have reallocated political power from ordinary citizens to billionaires, worsened congressional paralysis, and transformed many elections into meaningless exercises. If you are looking to explain why America picked Trump, you could do worse than look to these five Roberts-era Supreme Court cases that weakened our democracy and faith in government. After all, voters seem to have decided that when there’s so little to protect, there’s much less to lose.

Young Maquisade South of France Getty Images

Levy looks at the major decisions recently that did this to it and it’s worth look into the detail of decisions like Citizens’ United, Shelby County, Rucho v. Common Cause, Biden v. Nebraska, and Trump v. United States in particular.  Read about these decisions in the link above.  More horrid appointments are coming.  “Trump chooses Rep. Elise Stefanik to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Stefanik, a staunch defender of Israel, is the president-elect’s first Cabinet pick for his second term.”  All of this makes me wonder what some of his voters were thinking about.  This comes from NBC news.   I have to mention that I cannot watch anything on tv with moving pictures and sound.  It’s all too nightmarish.

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped House Republican Conference chair and longtime ally Rep. Elise Stefanik, of New York, to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, a Trump transition official confirmed to NBC News on Monday.

Stefanik is Trump’s first Cabinet pick for his second term in the White House.

“I am honored to nominate Chairwoman Elise Stefanik to serve in my Cabinet as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Elise is an incredibly strong, tough, and smart America First fighter,” Trump said in a statement.

The news was first reported by CNN. NBC News has reached out to Stefanik’s office for comment.

Stefanik, 40, has been a staunch defender of Israel in its response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks and has been outspoken over the last year about antisemitism on college campuses. A day before last week’s election, Stefanik reiterated her call for the defunding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East because she alleges it has been infiltrated by Hamas.

Israel has accused staff members of the organization of participating in the Oct. 7 terror attacks, prompting it to fire at least 10 people. Israel’s parliament voted in late October to ban the organization’s operations.

French Resistance fighter Simone Segouin; women of the Maquis; Greek partisans.

I’m just waiting for them all to don brownshirt uniforms in solidarity with the historical NAZIs.  HuffPo has this reaction from Ruth Ben-Giat, an expert on facism. “Authoritarianism Expert Shatters A Trump ‘Illusion’: ‘One Of The Biggest Scams Of All’. Ruth Ben-Ghiat said this reason for voting for Trump would have “very sad” consequences.” This is reported by Lee Moran.

Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat spoke on MSNBC’s “The Weekend” about one particular appeal that President-elect Donald Trump had for some voters that resulted in his decisive 2024 election victory ― and how the “illusion of competency” is “one of the biggest scams of all” of authoritarian leaders.

Many people “would like to be relieved of the burden of choice” when it comes to voting in elections, and that is what Trump promised during the campaign to evangelical Christians, Ben-Ghiat noted.

“They are not afraid of being relieved of that burden of choice and letting somebody else make the decisions,” she explained. “And so, in fact, often authoritarian personalities who are like the big boss at home or in the workplace, the bullies, they are the ones who are glad in the political ground to give up their agency and voice to somebody else.”

Trump promised voters that “I alone can fix it,” Ben-Ghiat recalled.

“This is reassuring to some people,” she continued, calling it “very sad” because, throughout history, people have all eventually discovered “that this brought disaster upon the country.”

“The illusion of competency is very important,” she added. “That’s why they’re going to put their trust in him to solve their problems because they think he’s competent. And that’s one of the biggest scams of all.”

Great Lady Of The Resistance: Yvette Lundy
Codename: Possum. Yvette Lundy was a French schoolteacher and resistance fighter who saved Jewish families and survived two Nazi concentration camps.

This analysis from Richard Seymor at The Guardian reminds us that the US isn’t the only country looking towards its hard right. “Far-right leaders are winning across the globe. Blaming ‘the economy’ or ‘the left-behinds’ won’t cut it. The economy matters, but the likes of Trump succeed by offering voters revenge for problems both real and imagined”  I always felt there was something else.

Donald Trump, for the first time, won a majority of the popular vote. He took the US presidency with huge swings in his favour, increasing his share of first-time voters, young voters, black voters and Latino voters. And he gained among voters earning under $100,000, while wealthier voters preferred Harris – a reversal of the class alignments in 2020. Current voting tallies suggest the swing to the Republicans was largely caused by mass abstention among Democrat voters. This result echoes global trends. Trump and his new coalition will now head a loose alliance of far-right governments from India to Hungary, Italy, the Philippines, Argentina, the Netherlands and Israel.

The rhythm of far-right successes began with Viktor Orbán’s landslide in Hungary’s 2010 parliamentary election. Since Narendra Modi’s victory in the 2014 Indian general election, it has scarcely paused: Trump’s first ascent to the White House, the Brexit vote and Rodrigo Duterte’s success in the Philippines all took place in 2016. Two years later, Jair Bolsonaro scored an upset in Brazil. Since the pandemic, the Brothers of Italy won the Italian general election in 2022 and Javier Milei took the Argentinian presidency in 2023. For most of this period, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud has ruled Israel in coalition with far-right parties. Even where it is not in power, the far right is gaining, as in France and Germany. In the long view, the defeat of Trump in 2020 and Bolsonaro in 2022 were predictable oscillations in a general pattern of ascent.

Why does the far right keep winning? Is it “the economy, stupid”, as James Carville put it during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run? The idea that far-right voting reflects a protest by the economically “left behind” is quite popular.

There is a kernel of truth to this: the state of the economy was the single biggest motive for Trump voters in 2024. Liberals, snarking about the “vibecession” – the mistaken belief by the public that the economy is in recession – say GDP is growing and inflation is modest at 2.4%. But headline figures don’t reflect how most people experience the economy. Prices are 20% higher than before the pandemic and, more importantly, prices for essentials such as food are up 28%. Household debt was a major stress factor. Biden also cut a raft of popular benefits established during the pandemic. Unsurprisingly, most people don’t believe the headline figures.

Yet this narrative barely scratches the surface. First, the evidence suggests that people don’t always vote with their wallets: studies from the 20th century up to the present show that simple measures of economic self-interest aren’t a very good predictor of voting behaviour. The economy matters, of course, but not as a simple metric of aggregate wellbeing. It is a space in which people judge their personal standing relative to how they perceive the state of society. Personal setbacks are generally only politicised when they are perceived as part of a wider crisis. Second, while the far right can’t win without gaining some working-class support, in the US, Brazil, India and the Philippines, it relies on a bedrock of middle-class support. Besides, millions regularly have their economic lives wrecked without going far right: the poorest in most societies generally aren’t very susceptible to their message. Third, in strictly material terms the economic offer of today’s far right is paltry, yet incumbency has been incredibly forgiving for nationalist governments.

In India, after average consumer expenditure fell, Modi was re-elected in 2019 with a 6% swing. In the Philippines, as the number of “poor” Filipinos surged, Duterte’s successor Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr won 58% of the vote in 2022 – an increase of almost 20 points. Even in defeat, they do surprisingly well. Average incomes rose more slowly under Trump than his predecessor, yet he added 10 million voters to his base in 2020. And if people voted with their wallets, why would many working-class Americans back a candidate committed to cutting taxes for the rich?

The political effects of economic misery are more indirect than “It’s the economy, stupid” implies. Economic shocks are mediated by the existing emotional currents in society. The middle-class and more affluent workers can identify with the rich and resent the poor, migrants and “spongers” who threaten their lifestyle. Mostly resentment results in impotent complaint. Hit by shocks, most people are ill-placed to confront their causes and tend to withdraw from politics.

Today’s far right offers a different answer – what the political theorist William Connolly calls a “politics of existential revenge”. It replaces real disasters with imaginary disasters. Trump warns of “communist” takeover and amplifies the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. His supporters rail against “white genocide” and satanic child-molesting elites. Instead of opposing injustice, they vilify those who threaten social hierarchies like class, race and gender. Instead of confronting systems, they give you enemies you can kill. This is disaster nationalism.

It runs deeper than elections. Rising from the cauldrons of cyberfascism, “lone wolf” murders have increased since 2010. Pogroms have erupted in Delhi and the West Bank. In the US, vigilantes attacked Black Lives Matter protesters. Britain and Ireland have been shaken by racist riots. And in recent years, there have been bungled “insurrections” such as the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters in January 2021 and the trucker blockades intended to block Lula’s accession to power in Brazil.

This is a global social contagion. And far from being discredited by outbursts of collective violence, the new far right is galvanised by it. Modi’s rise to power began with an anti-Muslim pogrom in his home state of Gujarat. Trump’s 2020 campaign was electrified by vigilante violence. Bolsonaro came from nearly 20 points behind to almost winning after a summer of deadly violence.

There’s more at the link.

So, that’s about all I can take today. I’ve been hibernating like a bear these last few days.  I can’t decide if I like the reality of my dreams better than waking up to the reality in this reality or not.  We are not alone.

We need to do what we can to ensure this will not stand.