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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An Autocracy of Dunces
How stone-faced generals, Wall Street pushback, and a government shutdown may save America’s quickly declining democracy
By Paul Krugman | Oct 02, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/an-autocracy-of-dunces
If America still had a fully functioning democracy, Donald Trump’s speech Tuesday to the assembled generals would have ended his presidency. Trump treated the event like a political rally and was clearly taken aback by the refusal of the audience to applaud or laugh at his jokes. Delivering a nakedly partisan speech to a mandated assembly of military officers was a gross violation of the Hatch Act. The content —telling the officers to be ready to use force against U.S. citizens — was clearly an impeachable offense. In an earlier era, Trump’s incoherent ranting would have paved the way for his immediate removal from office under the 25th Amendment.
But how did this happen?
It’s clear that the decision to summon top officers from around the world to receive a lecture about “warrior ethos” from a man who installed a makeup studio at the Pentagon was made by Pete Hegseth. It confirmed publicly what is being whispered within the military, and presumably among our allies and enemies: that Hegseth is an abject incompetent who isn’t remotely up to the job. And this toe-curling performance is a reflection of his underlying panic.
It’s yet another example of Trump being undone by his even more chaotic minions – RFK Jr. and vaccines, Peter Navarro and his “Liberation Day” tariffs, Bill Pulte’s scurrilous use of private mortgage information (which implicated his own family) and Brendan Carr’s own-goal from going after Jimmy Kimmel. I could go on, but I think the point is made.
Back in August I wrote about “hackification,” invoking what I dubbed Arendt’s Law. As I noted, Hannah Arendt argued that authoritarian regimes don’t want competent people, who might sometimes take a stand on principle. They prefer crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
My case in point in that post was E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, who Trump was trying to install as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing the previous Commissioner because he didn’t like the numbers the agency was reporting.
While there are many competent conservative economists, Antoni isn’t one of them. He is, instead, stunningly, Stephen-Moore-level incompetent, with a toxic history on social media. Trump’s choice of Antoni proved Arendt’s dictum: crackpots and fools are likely to be more loyal than people who actually know something.
The same logic surely explains the appointment of the hapless Hegseth.
Hackification is also an important factor in the government shutdown. Democrats have made their willingness to supply the extra votes needed to keep the government open contingent on an extension of the Biden-era expansion of health insurance subsidies, which will expire at the end of this year.
It’s good ground for them, politically: More than 24 million Americans get health coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, almost all of them subsidized. And if the subsidies are allowed to expire, many families will face a disastrous financial hit:
Source: KFF
The political puzzle is why Republicans didn’t see this coming. The One Big Beautiful Bill carefully and cynically delays big cuts to Medicaid until after the midterms. Why didn’t it include a similarly cynical delay to the looming premium apocalypse?
Well, Chuck Schumer, who met with Trump Monday, said that the president appeared to be “not aware” of the impact of expiring subsidies. I just had a conversation with Jonathan Cohn, which will be posted on Saturday, and we agreed that many Republicans, like Trump, simply weren’t a
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Pope Leo rebukes climate skeptics after Trump calls warming a ‘con job’
The Illinois native’s comments come a week after the U.S. president derided the fight against climate change.
By Louise Guillot | October 1, 2025 7:10 pm CET
https://www.politico.eu/article/pope-leo-rebukes-climate-skeptics-afte
r-us-donal-trump-calls-warming-con-job/
Pope Leo XIV denounced people who deny climate change on Wednesday, arguing that they are contributing to the destruction of God's creation.
"Some have chosen to deride the increasingly evident science of climate change, to ridicule those who speak of global warming and even to blame the poor for the very thing that affects them the most," Leo said.
The pope's comments come just a week after U.S. President Donald Trump, in a speech at the United Nations, called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” On Tuesday, Leo made a direct foray into U.S. politics, defending the Chicago Archdiocese’s decision to honor Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who supports abortion rights.
“I think it’s important to look at the overall work that a senator has done,” said the pope, a Chicago-area native.
"Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion,’ but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life," he added. "Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
The pope was speaking on Wednesday at a conference commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Laudato Si, a 2015 formal doctrinal letter issued by his predecessor, Pope Francis, that called for the protection of the planet, including the fight against climate change.
"We cannot love God whom we cannot see while despising his creatures, nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded," Leo said.
Following in the footsteps of Francis, Leo called on "everyone in society ... to put pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls" to fight climate change and protect the environment.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Is Steadily Pushing the Republic Toward the Edge of Oblivion
The administration has entered its most anti-Constitutional phase yet. We must call a regime that’s a danger to our way of life what it is.
By Katherine Stewart | October 2, 2025
https://newrepublic.com/article/201058/trump-dangerous-autocracy-crack
down-rights
It is well past time to connect the dots. The Trump administration’s assault on democracy has entered a new and dangerous phase. Trump is doing exactly what he said he would do, and what many of us warned was coming. He is at the head of a political movement that has long aimed to demolish American democracy, and he and his inner circle of supporters are now backed into a corner where they have few options but to double down. In the next phase of this corrupt takeover of America’s governing institutions, the Trump administration is certain to expand on its already substantial control of both the system of justice and the corporate media, and it will use this control to suppress dissent and spread still more disinformation. Whether the GOP’s plan to destroy American democracy for good will succeed can’t be known. What those who still believe in the promise of America should do is clear.
Dot number one is the conversion of federal law enforcement and the system of justice into an instrument for punishing enemies of the regime and its leader. The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, just days after President Trump said that Attorney Pam Bondi should prosecute him along with other political adversaries, takes us a giant step toward this objective. This radical action is not surprising for a man who appointed many of his own personal defense attorneys to top positions within the Department of Justice. It really doesn’t matter that the case against Comey is unlikely to result in a conviction. Trump’s adversaries will have already gotten the message that federal law enforcement is now a thoroughly political instrument of the leader and the ruling party. That is how corrupt autocracies work.
Dot number two: the executive order declaring “Antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization.” As an article published on the website of the libertarian Cato Institute pointed out, “antifa” is not a formal organization but rather “an idea”—the way Taoism or Crossfit or “going keto” are ideas—and it declared the move “idiotic on multiple levels.” The point of the order is to follow through on the hateful rhetoric with which Trump and many of his followers responded to the horrendous murder of Charlie Kirk. The administration intends to use the coercive power of federal law enforcement to attack all those who disagree with its political views on the pretext that to disagree with the ruler is to invite “terrorism.” With the administration’s attack on the Soros-funded Open Society Foundation, this weaponization of the DOJ and FBI is already well underway.
Dot number three is the deployment of the U.S. military against (so-called) domestic enemies. This began with the deployment of the National Guard and now includes various orders and declarations that make clear that Trump expects to use the military to apply coercive pressure against large sectors of the American population. The transformation of ICE into a federal police force largely outside of traditional law enforcement is a connected part of this project.
Dot number four is the conversion of mainstream media into regime-compliant propaganda and disinformation providers. The big story last week wasn’t the cancellation and (partial) return of Jimmy Kimmel. It was the clear declaration, long foretold, that antitrust regulators now work not for the American public but rather for the advance of Trump administration interests, which include the consolidation of America’s mainstream media industry into the hands of a small number of Trump-boosting billionaires. The sale of TikTok (with a Trump-loving billionaire in charge), the ongoing elevation of Fox News into the semiofficial party-state broadcast network, and other data points—including th
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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It wasn't enough that you idiots turned half the swing states Red and lost all of them, but you're going to lose New Jersey too.
https://www.nj.com/politics/2025/10/is-nj-having-a-political-identity-
crisis-trump-now-has-higher-approval-rating-than-murphy.html
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Hegseth’s Hatred of Americans Makes Him Unfit for Office but a Perfect Fit for Trump
The secretary of war is a Christian nationalist who wants to eliminate those who don’t agree with his totalitarian vision
By Cathy Young | Oct 01, 2025
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/hegseths-hatred-of-americans-makes
The image of Hegseth that emerges from his authorship of The War on Warriors (2024), Battle for the American Mind (2022), and American Crusade (2020), is of a militant Christian extremist who is obsessed with the Crusades and whose highest aspiration is redesigning the U.S. military into his ideological mold.
The central idea of American Crusade is that the survival of the United States as a “free” country requires a “holy war” to achieve “a single paramount objective: the categorical defeat of the Left.” Hegseth accuses the left—by which he doesn’t just mean an extremist fringe but the Democratic Party and its supporters in general—of seeking the “utter annihilation” of true patriots. “We are two Americas; a house divided,” he declares, and the other half is full of people whose “ignorance and ideologies threaten America’s very survival.” Hegseth writes: “Only the categorical defeat of the Left will secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. We must reelect Donald Trump in 2020 and continue the cultural counterattack until Leftists are no longer electorally viable.” The implication is clear: liberty requires one-party rule. This is far from an unrepresentative line. In The War on Warriors, complaining that “the Left has never fought fair,” Hegseth lists “electing Obama” among its dirty tricks, despite the fact that Obama won a greater share of both the popular and the electoral vote in 2008 and 2012 than Trump did in 2016 and 2024.
In addition to treating a broadly defined “Left” as the enemy, American Crusade also heaps scorn on ostensibly patriotic but overly complacent “fifty-fifty Americans.” The term comes from Theodore Roosevelt, who is quoted in the epigraph to the first part of the book: “There is not room in the country for any fifty-fifty American, nor can there be but one loyalty—to the Stars and Stripes.” The quote appears to be a garbled amalgam of several passages in Roosevelt’s speeches and writings, all of them from a very specific context: divided loyalties among some German-Americans during World War I. Hegseth’s “fifty-fifty American,” by contrast, refers to a well-meaning non-combatant in the culture war: a “squish” who disapproves of the perceived excesses of the progressive left but shrugs them off in the hope that “common sense will prevail,” or who doesn’t want to be “overly political,” or who thinks his or her local public school is great. For all his talk of reverence for America’s founding ideals, Hegseth’s version of Americanism sounds at times more like proto-totalitarian French Jacobinism, whose ideologues asserted that not only “traitors” but the “indifferent” and the “passive” must be punished.
Besides Hegseth’s quasi-totalitarian demands for complete fealty to the right and intensely held animus toward the left in the culture war, there is also the troubling question of just how literally he takes the “war” part. American Crusade, after all, explicitly invokes the medieval Crusades as a model for the fight against “the Left.” Although Hegseth acknowledges that the history of the Crusades is “complicated” and that it includes nasty episodes, such as horrific violence toward Jews, he sees in them a model for civilizational conservation against an existential threat. He even justifies them based on a bizarre alternative history in which they served the cause of peace: “After centuries of fighting … Christianity in Europe was saved, Jerusalem was liberated, and Christians did not seek further war with Muslims.” In fact, Jerusalem was captured by Christian forces in the First Crusade in 1099 but recaptured by Muslims in 1187; seven subsequent Crusades over the next century were unsuccessful, and Jerusalem
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Shut up faggots.
Go move to a different country if you don't like it here. You won't be missed.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:I've come across an article that strongly suggests murdering Trump will solve all of America's problems, bringing peace and prosperity.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut up faggots.
Go move to a different country if you don't like it here. You won't be missed.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
Hundreds of societies have been in crises like ours. An expert explains how they got out.
An analysis of historical crises over the past 2,000 years offers lessons for avoiding the end times.
By Peter Turchin | Oct 2, 2025, 5:00 AM CDT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin
. . . the US is now experiencing its highest level of social turbulence and political conflict in the last 100 years. What lies ahead? How do we navigate our societies through the turbulent waters without sliding into a bloody civil war?
Our current predicament is not unprecedented. We can learn from how past societies survived through, and ended, their crisis periods.
The “wealth pump”
The collapse of ancient empires, the revolutions that convulsed early modern Europe, or the tensions tearing apart today’s democracies are often treated as products of unique historical circumstances. But my analysis of more than a hundred past crises spanning the last two millennia shows that these outbreaks of societal instability are driven by a mechanism that operates with surprising regularity across different historical eras and places: the wealth pump. The term describes a set of conditions — economic and political — that transfer wealth from the broad base of the population to the elite, a small proportion of people who concentrate power in their hands.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/703238/end-times-by-peter-tur
chin/
Free download from https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Peter+Turchin
The wealth pump consists of various means by which the fruits of economic growth are, instead of being shared equitably, siphoned upward the social ladder. In the past, this was from peasants to landlords; today, from workers to business owners and corporate executives. First, economic inequality rises. Then political inequality follows, as the wealthy convert their riches into influence. This development erodes democratic institutions, making it harder for the non-elite majority to defend their interests through formal politics. Eventually, systemic stability is threatened.
Undermining society
The wealth pump undermines the stability of societies in three ways.
1) It causes growing popular discontent.
The obvious effect of the wealth pump is that it enriches the upper strata and increases their numbers via upward economic mobility — for example, enabling CEOs of large companies to enter the ranks of uber-wealthy. However, this happens at the expense of the majority. To understand this, consider the relative wage, defined as the wage earned by typical workers (technically, the median wage) relative to the GDP per capita. When the relative wage declines, non-elite workers receive less and less of the fruits of economic growth. This decline in relative wages means that while wages stagnate, the costs of housing, education, and healthcare soar.
In the United States, for example, the relative wage began falling from the 1970s onward. Even as the economy grew, most Americans fell behind. This results in anger and increased mass-mobilization potential.
https://peterturchin.com/population-immiseration-in-america/
2) The wealth pump creates too many wealthy elites — more than there are high-power positions.
This is most clear when we consider that some top wealth holders are interested in translating their economic power into political office (think Trump, but also Michael Bloomberg, Steve Forbes, and so on). There are 10 times as many decamillionaires today (and the number of billionaires has increased even more), but still the same number of p
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I've come across an article that strongly suggests murdering Trump will solve all of America's problems, bringing peace and prosperity.
Archived.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:Archive this, you little Nazi: Trump has doubled his wealth in the last 8 months to about $10 billion, and he can double it again and again, endlessly. America is in trouble because of guys like Trump stealing all the wealth, but he cannot keep doubling if he is dead.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I've come across an article that strongly suggests murdering Trump will solve all of America's problems, bringing peace and prosperity.
Archived.
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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+wealth+double
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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