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

POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
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SECOND

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 5:37 PM

Trump is proof Founding Fathers were 'tragically wrong' about demagogues: conservative

Matthew Rozsa | February 16, 2026 | 05:32PM ET

https://www.alternet.org/trump-founding-fathers-demagogues/

Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote on her Substack on Monday that the Founding Fathers were “laughably, tragically wrong” in trusting voters to not fall for a demagogue. Because President Donald Trump was reelected despite his first term and the January 6th insurrection, Rubin argued modern Americans will need to add legal reforms to rectify their errors.

"'Right-sizing' the presidency and putting in additional guardrails therefore should be top priorities,” Rubin wrote. “No single solution is going to stop malicious figures from an autocratic putsch, but we can make it much harder for such a figure to do real damage to our democracy."

Arguing existing constitutional safeguards — like the Electoral College, impeachment and the 25th Amendment — are ineffective because of partisanship in Congress, on the Supreme Court and throughout the presidential primaries, Rubin proposed a series of alternative reforms. These include making it a crime “to give or receive a foreign emolument of more than $25 in value (or a domestic emolument of any value),” requiring presidents “to sell or put all business operations and investments in a blind trust before taking office — and, no, letting your sons run your company is not a blind trust,” banning major White House renovations without congressional authorization, banning renaming any federal or quasi-federal organization or structure for a sitting president and banning book/movie/rights deals for any incumbent president or spouse.

“There are many legislative fixes to curtail presidential unilateral power (e.g., war powers, emergency powers, rescission),” Rubin wrote. “But allocating the right for lawmakers or others to bring enforcement actions is essential. Likewise, reviving the Bivens Act to allow civil actions for individuals to recoup damages against any executive branch official could put teeth into presidential restraints.”

Rubin also said that the media and political parties “need to rethink the way we evaluate presidential candidates,” asking foundational questions about democracy and values “(e.g., Do immigrants have rights? Are treaties the law of the land?)” along with specific policy questions.

“We still may not get candid answers, but the responses to those sorts of questions (or hypotheticals about pardons, donors, and financial impropriety) would be a whole lot more revealing than asking about a 24-point plan for legislation that is unlikely to pass,” Rubin wrote. “It is frankly harder to disguise one’s deeply held beliefs (or lack thereof) than to toss out unrealistic political promises.”

Rubin has previously drawn attention to the right-wing revolt against Trump. Speaking with fellow columnist Greg Sargent in January, the two pundits pointed out that Republican officials like Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, New Jersey Republican Jose Arango Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott have criticized Trump’s immigration policies.

In September, Rubin also criticized the reports of tantrums emanating from the White House on the ground that “at a moment when Americans who are already financially squeezed face huge cost increases in healthcare, housing and energy, the bratty children at Mar-a-Lago North exist in a world of their own.”

In August, Rubin argued that Trump’s tendency to hire sycophants imperils America’s national security.

"When you have yes-men and yes-women who are completely incompetent in positions of high authority, that leaves us vulnerable,” Rubin said on MSNBC. “You couldn't have done more to destroy our national security infrastructure…. (Trump) is leaving us a sitting duck because he doesn't care about America."

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

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SECOND

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 6:16 PM

Corruption is a germ’s best friend
Paul Krugman
Feb 17, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/how-the-kakistocracy-became-a-quack
istocracy

Childhood vaccination is one of public policy’s greatest success stories. Infectious diseases have now been almost eliminated — or had been almost eliminated, until today’s right-wing anti-vaccine agitators set the stage for their comeback.

In many ways the Trump administration’s hostility to vaccines is similar to its hostility to clean energy, which I wrote about yesterday. https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/turning-our-back-on-clean-energy Both policy swerves will kill Americans. If Trumpists succeed in forcing the U.S. to burn more coal, thousands will die from air pollution. Only a year into the Trump 47 administration, there is already a resurgence in almost conquered diseases due to the anti-vax MAGA crusade. Both these sudden policy serves are economically destructive: A 2024 report from the Centers for Disease Control estimated that each dollar spent on childhood vaccination has saved around $11 in societal costs.

Moreover, the Trumpists aren’t content with just cutting off federal funding — they’re determined to stop anyone else from doing the right thing. The Trump administration has imposed a blockade on privately funded wind and solar projects, while RFK Jr.’s allies are pushing to prevent states from implementing childhood vaccine mandates.

And the damage from the assault on vaccines continues to widen. Last week the Food and Drug Administration refused to review Moderna’s new mRNA-based flu vaccine. They didn’t reject it based on evidence; they wouldn’t even look at it, in line with RFK Jr.’s evidence-free, dogmatic assertion that mRNA technology, which gave us Covid vaccines, is useless and harmful. Pharmaceutical companies, understandably, are retreating from vaccine development.

The motivations behind the crusade against clean energy and the crusade against vaccines are also similar. The conspiracy-theorizing hostility to science and expertise in general that underpins both movements also predisposes people to become right-wing extremists, which means that their movements are now in power. The headline on a 2023 article in The Guardian captured this perfectly: “ ‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie’: Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline.”

Last but by no means least, in both cases it’s crucial to follow the money.

It may seem strange to think of the wellness industry as a corrupt and corrupting force comparable to the fossil-fuel sector. But wellness is big business. McKinsey estimates that U.S. spending on wellness is running at around $500 billion a year, while spending on nutritional supplements alone was close to $70 billion last year.

And sellers of nutritional supplements, unlike companies selling pharmaceuticals, are effectively allowed to make false, outlandish claims about what their products do. Here’s how the National Institutes of Health summarized the law:

Dietary supplement labels may include certain types of health-related claims. Manufacturers are permitted to say, for example, that a supplement promotes health or supports a body part or function (like heart health or the immune system). These claims must be followed by the words, “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”

In other words, it’s OK to peddle snake oil with false medical claims as long as you mumble some content-free boilerplate.

And where do the snake-oil salesmen peddle their wares? Largely on right-wing media. After all, that’s where they can find customers who have the right mix of anti-intellectualism and disdain for experts. And the snake-oil purveyors are, in turn, a key part of the extreme right’s financial ecosystem.

I wrote about this almost five years ago. The relationship between quack medicine and right-wing extremism has a long history. As the historian Rick Perlstein has documented, extremists have been marketing

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6IXSTRINGJACK

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 9:00 PM

In actuality, you are the machine gun, Second.

The Democratic Party, Hollywood and the Legacy Media are the monkey with the gun.


Look at you proudly showing off that article last night all over the boards about some white college "educated" lesbian liberal showing off her guns and telling everyone else to get armed. (She's actually not special. There are dozens if not hundreds of her on Tik Tok making those very same videos as we speak).

A lifetime of screaming for gun control and taking away people's guns just cast right off to the side without thought because this is what you want now. This makes you extremely happy. You want more of this. You want to see more of this every single day because you feed off of it and use it to continue justifying the dark path you went down and will likely never be able to find your way back out of.

But you are too much of a coward to do anything about it. Most of the time that is displayed in your own writing. Rarely have you ever gotten angry enough to say that you, specifically, were going to do something. You speak your assassination threats in hypotheticals, or you insist that other people should carry them out and even get angry when they don't do it for you. I've got about half a dozen archives of you being actively hostile to Joe Biden* and members of your party for being cowards and not executing our President for you.

All you want to do is be angry and miserable every single day for the rest of your life, and it has become your life's mission to make sure you can pull others down with you and be just as miserable and awful as you are.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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SECOND

Wednesday, February 18, 2026 12:14 AM

Americans under 30 swung to the right in 2024, but they’re not getting what they voted for.

By Sarah Longwell | February 16, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/gen-z-trump-red-wave/686006/

I run focus groups with voters every week, and what I’ve heard from this age group is simple: Trump is not doing the things that he told Americans he would do to fix prices and the economy. In the focus groups, young people who voted for Trump have said that they believed him during the campaign when he promised to “build the greatest economy in the history of the world.” Now they say they feel duped and let down.

“?There are things that are very disappointing and very rough right now,” Kim, a Generation Z Trump voter from Virginia, said during a focus group last month.

“Overall, I think the job market is really hard right now,” Allison, from New York, said.

“I think things are pretty chaotic lately, honestly,” said Lizabel, from Florida. “You just see all this stuff on the news, and you see a lot of people are struggling to find jobs. A lot of people are feeling kind of pessimistic about what things are going on.”

For these young people to have placed their faith in a con man like Trump might seem naive. But most members of Generation Z were still children when Trump came down the escalator. They don’t remember a lot of the chaos and dysfunction of Trump’s first run for president, or even his first term. They don’t view Trump as sui generis or beyond the pale, because he’s been the dominant force in our politics for as long as they’ve been politically aware.

Now, though, they’re young adults entering the workforce. Many of them have student loans, and they’re at a particularly cost-sensitive point in their lives. They notice when a politician like Trump promises to lower prices, and then doesn’t deliver.

In 2024, Trump overperformed with young voters to a historic degree. Harris beat him by 19 points among 18-to-29-year-olds—which sounds good until you realize that, in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the same cohort by 30 points. And in 2020, Joe Biden won them by 26 points.

Compared with 2020, in 2024 young voters swung to Trump in every key battleground state except Georgia. That includes a 24-point swing in Michigan, an 18-point swing in Pennsylvania, and a 15-point swing in Wisconsin. About 56 percent of young men voted for Trump in 2024, the same share that voted for Biden in 2020. Trump’s overall youth support jumped 10 points relative to his performance in 2020.

That shift was observable in real time over the course of the campaign, particularly in red-pilled corners of the internet, the right-leaning spaces where young people get more and more of their political news. Trump popped up on bro podcasts with Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Adin Ross, and Lex Fridman, as well as on shows such as Full Send and All-In. He threw an unhinged Madison Square Garden rally just days before his election, in which one of his supporters called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” The red-Solo-cup energy that sustains MAGA was in full effect, and America’s youngest voters—especially young men—were drawn in.

“For our generation right now, it’s a lot more acceptable for a guy to just be outright Republican and love Trump,” Gabrielle, in Florida, said in a recent focus group. “When you went on social media the day after the election, every single guy was able to just put on their story pictures of Trump winning the election, and like excitement, and all this stuff.”

During the Biden years, young people felt burned by the administration’s messaging on the economy. Ethan, from North Carolina, said in a February 2025 focus group that there was a constant stream of “Oh, the economy is getting better” sentiment from the Biden administration. “Meanwhile everyone knows that McDonald’s now costs $20 for a meal,” he said.

Young people like these were receptive when Trump said he would bring down prices and tame inflation, fix America’s broken health-care system, make housing affordabl