Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Wednesday, February 4, 2026 07:04
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Tuesday, February 3, 2026 6:46 PM

OH NOEZ!!!! E'RETHANG OUT TO DESTROY MUH DEMOCRAZY!!!!!

Shut the fuck up, idiot.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, February 4, 2026 6:55 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
OH NOEZ!!!! E'RETHANG OUT TO DESTROY MUH DEMOCRAZY!!!!!

Shut the fuck up, idiot.

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Be Evil. Be a dick.

Is this what you didn't read?

The Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” in February 2017. Some found it pompous, but it reflected a widespread theory about how authoritarianism could come to America. This theory, based on the experience of democratic erosion in nations like Hungary and the work of scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, argued that autocracy wouldn’t be imposed by armed men beating and killing the regime’s opponents.

Authoritarian rule would, instead, be installed through a gradual process of subversion. Key institutions, especially the news media, would be co-opted or deprived of financing. Businesses would knuckle under so as not to be shut out of crony capitalism. Dissenters would be marginalized rather than sent to gulags.

The trajectory of the Post itself shows how that could work. The newspaper that broke the story of Watergate and brought down Richard Nixon has been Bezosified, its editorial independence destroyed and its newsroom increasingly eviscerated. Many other institutions, from other media organizations to some universities to law firms, have also become enablers of the regime. Big business has caved almost completely.

But it turns out that predictions of creeping authoritarianism both underestimated and overestimated MAGA. Almost everyone, myself included, underestimated how far MAGA would go in engaging in open violence and abuse of power against those it considers enemies. On the other hand, we overestimated the movement’s impulse control, its ability to mask its tyrannical goals until its power was fully consolidated.

As Steven Levitsky said in a recent interview, comparing Donald Trump with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban,

Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists. And in Hungary, if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people. That doesn’t happen in Hungary.

The startling extremism of the Trump regime, even compared with other modern wannabe dictatorships, is obvious to the naked eye. But I always find quantification useful. So I was very pleased to see that the estimable John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has risen to the occasion, producing an index of democratic backsliding that lets us compare the trajectory of the United States under Trump with those of other nations we used to view as cautionary tales. (I’ve looked at how the index is constructed, and it’s reasonable.) We’re on a uniquely steep descent, at least for modern times:

It’s a horrifying picture. Yet the flip side of the naked extremism of the MAGA power grab is that it has produced a remarkably strong backlash. The size and determination of civil resistance to ICE has been incredible and inspiring, like nothing we’ve seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Republicans are being punished at the polls: On Saturday a deep-red Texas Senate district that went Trump +17 in 2024 voted in a Democrat with a 15-point margin.

I keep asking two questions as ICE runs wild. First, what is the strategy here? How do Trump, Stephen Miller, etc., think this is going to work for them? Maybe their initial belief was that a display of force would shock and awe their opponents into submission. It’s not happening, yet they just keep ramping up the threats and violence, apparently not knowing how to do anything else.

The obvious answer is that there isn’t any strategy. These people aren’t evil masterminds — evil, yes, but masterminds, no. They’re just thugs too crude and undisciplined to control their own thuggishness. They were caught off guard by the strength of the resistance because the very concept of citizens standing up for their principles is alien to them, and they still can’t believe it’s real.

The second question is, how does this end? Most immediately, what will happen during and after the midterm elections? Everything points to a blue wave in November. Yet many people in MAGA simply can’t accept losing power — among other things, their actions over the past year mean that if they lose power, many of them will go to jail.

Trump is now calling for “nationalizing” the midterms, meaning to put voting and the counting of votes under his administration’s control. He can’t do that, but his demand is a clear sign that he will not accept the public’s verdict in November.

So it’s just being realistic to say that MAGA will try, somehow, to prevent voters from having their say. Will ICE try to prevent blue districts from voting? If that fails, will they reject the results in a midterm version of Jan. 6? Call me an alarmist, but remember: The alarmists have been right, and the people telling us to calm down have been wrong, every step of the way.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/american-democracy-will-not-die-in

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, February 4, 2026 7:04 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Supreme Court’s silence says volumes

Paul Krugman

Feb 04, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/profiles-in-cowardice-tariff-editio
n

Donald Trump loves tariffs. Mainly, I believe, he loves them because they offer so much opportunity for dominance displays, allowing him to threaten other countries with economic ruin — usually via middle-of-the-night Truth Social posts — unless they bend to his whims. Economists may say that most of the damage inflicted by tariffs falls on American consumers and businesses, not foreigners, but Trump’s attachment to tariffs is doubtless strengthened by economists’ disapproval — he wants to show that he’s smarter than the so-called experts.

Furthermore, tariffs give him power without checks and balances. He can impose huge taxes on imports without having to go through annoying stuff like getting legislation through Congress.

Or can he? By any reasonable standard, most of Trump’s tariffs are plainly illegal. Two lower courts have ruled against them. The Trump administration appealed those decisions, and in early November the Supreme Court heard arguments on the case. Many businesses that have found it impossible to make long-term plans with the fate of the Trump tariffs in limbo eagerly awaited the Court’s ruling.

They’re still waiting. And I can’t see any plausible explanation for the delay other than Supreme cowardice.

Background: Most of Trump’s tariffs have been imposed by invoking a 1977 piece of legislation called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which the Congressional Research Service describes as giving the president “broad authority to regulate a variety of economic transactions following a declaration of national emergency.”

But we aren’t in an emergency. Trump himself keeps saying that everything is great — the economy is hot, there’s no inflation, we’re respected around the world. It’s not true, but that’s what he says. And he has been using IEEPA to impose or threaten to impose tariffs for many purposes that have nothing to do with economic policy. He imposed a 50 percent tariff on imports from Brazil to punish Brazil for pressing charges against Jair Bolsonaro, the Trump-like former president who tried to overturn an election loss. He threatened tariffs against European nations who stationed troops in Greenland as a precaution against a possible Trumpian attempt to seize the island from Denmark.

In the latter case Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, pressed on the nature of the emergency that would justify tariff threats, declared that “the national emergency is avoiding a national emergency.” Uh-huh.

I’m not a lawyer, but I talk to lawyers, and this isn’t a difficult case on the merits. Trump is clearly wrong on both the letter and the spirit of the law. And when the Supreme Court held its hearing, the tenor of the questions, even from conservative justices, suggested that they recognized that the administration had no case.

So why have we had three months of silence? Well, this isn’t a difficult case on the merits, but it puts the six right-wing members of the Court between a rock and hard place, not intellectually, but personally.

For a right-wing justice, ruling in the Trump administration’s favor in such an open-and-shut case would amount to admitting that you’re a pure partisan hack. And even the right-wing faction on the court is trying to maintain the fiction that it’s still a deliberative body, not a MAGA rubber stamp.

But to rule against the administration would be to hand Trump a humiliating defeat on one of his signature policy issues. It might also be very expensive. Tariffs aren’t the revenue gusher Trump and his minions like to claim: Even after the Trump hikes in tariff rates, customs receipts are small compared with other sources of revenue and have made only a modest dent in the U.S. budget deficit. But losing that revenue and, worse, having to give it back would be a financial embarrassment.

And it’s hard to see how, if the Supreme Court rules against Trump, the government can avoid paying back the money it has collected to companies like Costco, which has sued for a refund. If the Court rules that the tariffs weren’t legal, can the administration say, “No backsies” and refuse to refund money it collected illegally?

Right-wing justices don’t want to humiliate Trump, and they’re surely afraid of what will happen if they do. So they’re damned if they do the right thing, damned if they don’t.

When I’ve made this point in the past, some readers have asked why Supreme Court justices would be afraid of crossing Trump. After all, he can’t fire them, can he?

But to suggest that Supreme Court justices are insulated from pressure merely because they have job security is to misunderstand how power and influence work, especially within the modern right-wing movement.

Prominent figures on the right — and the Republican Six on the Supreme Court surely qualify for that definition — aren’t just members of a movement. They’re also part of a social scene — a scene shaped by the wealth and power of billionaires. They share in the privilege and glitter of that scene even if they aren’t outright corrupt — even if they aren’t all like Clarence Thomas, who, as ProPublica revealed, has taken multiple lavish vacations paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow.

To vote against Donald Trump’s beloved tariffs, delivering him both a policy and a political blow, would be to risk being ostracized and exiled from that milieu. If you don’t think that would matter a lot, you don’t understand human nature.

And more than social estrangement might be at stake. Violent threats against judges and other public officials, especially those denounced by Trump and other MAGA figures, have soared. Are you sure that a judge perceived as having betrayed Trump — and his or her family — would be safe? More to the point, are judges themselves sure?

So the right-wing majority on the Court is surely afraid to rule on tariffs — afraid to rule for Trump, because that would destroy what’s left of their credibility, afraid to rule against, because that would anger both the MAGA elite and the MAGA base.

So they’re procrastinating, even though the longer the tariffs stay in place, the more Trump is emboldened to tweet out bizarre, destructive and illegal policies and the more economic damage is done by uncertainty.

Their paralysis is understandable. But it’s also utterly shameful.

Source: HBS Pricing Lab https://www.pricinglab.org/tariff-tracker/?utm_source=substack&utm
_medium=email

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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