Quote:4. Strict Vetting
Republicans will use existing Federal Law to keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America. Those who join our Country must love our Country. We will use extreme vetting to ensure that jihadists and jihadist sympathizers are not admitted.

Transcript of Ongoing Coup | Attorney General Kris Mayes I'm Attorney General Kris Mayes. The actions of the Trump administration in the last three weeks can only be described as dictatorial and authoritarian. Every day, nearly every hour, there is some new action or executive order that makes a mockery of the rule of law and the Constitution itself.

This weekend, Vice President JD Vance posted a statement saying that judges aren't allowed to control the executive's "legitimate power." That is a complete affront to the system of checks and balances inherent in our Constitution.

The independent judiciary acts as a check on executive overreach. In the United States, we appeal rulings we disagree with. We don't ignore court orders or threaten judges with impeachment when a ruling goes the way we don't like.

I want to be as direct and clear as I can be: There is an undemocratic administration in power, and they appear hellbent on undoing 250 years of adherence to the rule of law in this nation. It is an incredibly dangerous moment, and it is all the more dangerous if people don't understand what is happening. There is an ongoing coup against the Constitution of the United States happening as we speak.

Congress authorizes the work of federal agencies and allocates funding to them. The elected representatives of the people are supposed to exercise oversight to ensure that these agencies operate within the bounds of the law, serve the public interest, and are held accountable for how they use taxpayer dollars. But today, Congress is nowhere to be found.

Donald Trump has grabbed the power of Congress and handed it to an unelected billionaire and a group of teenage hackers. The richest man in the world is now running roughshod over the authority of federal agencies, in violation of the rule of law and the Constitution.

Republicans hold majorities in the House and the Senate. They could pass the administration's policies through Congress and send Trump legislation to sign. But they know the American people don't support what's happening. They don't support eliminating the Department of Education. They don't support canceling funding for law enforcement and public safety. They don't support canceling healthcare funding.

So instead, Donald Trump has decided the Constitution doesn't matter, and he has handed power to Elon Musk to do whatever he wants without accountability, without oversight, and without the consent of the people.

The way we make change in this country is through the law, either in the courts or in Congress. But when those processes are undermined, when the rule of law is ignored, manipulated, or twisted to serve the whims of an unelected billionaire, it's an assault on the very foundation of our democratic republic.

In every case we have brought against the Trump administration so far, from birthright citizenship to the illegal spending freeze. We have blocked the president's lawless actions. So, I will continue to challenge the illegal actions of the Trump administration in court, and we will continue to win.

But it is time for every American patriot to stand up, speak out, and defend our democratic processes. Because the moment we allow them to be eroded is the moment that we risk losing the freedoms and justice they were built to protect—and that countless Americans have fought and sacrificed to defend.

Quote:Nearly 400 videos that were posted on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s YouTube page have been removed, as the Trump administration continues to pare back the agency, including its team of skilled technologists.

The CFPB YouTube page, which has 15,000 subscribers and was created in 2011, has had every one of its videos removed as of Friday. An archived version of the page shows that as recently as February 8th, it hosted 386 videos. The archived page shows videos with titles like “Five tips for when you can’t pay your bills,” “How do I dispute an error on my credit report?” and “How can I improve my credit scores?”

Quote:Elon Musk’s overhaul of the federal government seems to have hit a snag: His Department of Government Efficiency posted classified information on its website.

Musk’s team posted information about the staff and size of a U.S. intelligence agency on their new website, HuffPost reports. DOGE has been criticized for the level of access into sensitive government departments, including the Treasury Department, but how they got the classified information isn’t clear.

Quote:The White House on Friday announced that it has indefinitely banned The Associated Press (AP) from accessing the Oval Office and Air Force One indefinitely, CNN reported. The news agency was singled out by the White House earlier this week over its use of the words: "Gulf of Mexico."

Quote:“President Trump says USAID is rife with fraud. But Andrew Natsios, a Republican former administrator of USAID, calls that ‘utter nonsense.’ Natsios says USAID is ‘the most accountable aid agency in the world,’” read the 60 Minutes post, which linked to a clip from the show’s interview with Natsios. Natsios has been a prominent defender of USAID as a key national security tool around the world and has publicly refuted Musk’s claim that DOGE needed to shutter the agency to stop widespread fraud and wasteful spending.

Musk replied and wrote, “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election. They deserve a long prison sentence.”

CriticalEngineering Anybody else remember 2009?

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/us/politics/23fox.html

https://www.rcfp.org/white-house-attempted-shut-out-fox-news-reporter/

https://www.npr.org/2009/10/14/113803593/obama-administration-takes-on-fox-news

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/07/16/138168227/new-emails-shed-light-on-2009-fox-white-house-spat

Basically Fox was being awful, the White House decided to block them from a pool interview, and all the other press refused to participate unless Fox was allowed back because of the precedent. They stood up for Steve Doocy, but they’re silent now.

Quote:The second Trump administration may violate basic civil liberties in ways that unambiguously subvert democracy. The president, for example, could order the army to shoot protesters, as he reportedly wanted to do during his first term. He could also fulfill his campaign promise to launch the “largest deportation operation in American history,” targeting millions of people in an abuse-ridden process that would inevitably lead to the mistaken detention of thousands of U.S. citizens.

Quote:For one, Trump has revived his first-term effort to weaken the civil service by reinstating Schedule F, an executive order that allows the president to exempt tens of thousands of government employees from civil service protections in jobs deemed to be “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” If implemented, the decree will transform tens of thousands of civil servants into “at will” employees who can easily be replaced with political allies. The number of partisan appointees, already higher in the U.S. government than in most established democracies, could increase more than tenfold. The Heritage Foundation and other right-wing groups have spent millions of dollars recruiting and vetting an army of up to 54,000 loyalists to fill government positions. These changes could have a broader chilling effect across the government, discouraging public officials from questioning the president. Finally, Trump’s declaration that he would fire the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, and the director of the IRS, Danny Werfel, before the end of their terms led both to resign, paving the way for their replacement by loyalists with little experience in their respective agencies.

Once key agencies such as the Justice Department, the FBI, and the IRS have been packed with loyalists, governments can harness them for three antidemocratic ends: investigating and prosecuting rivals, co-opting civil society, and shielding allies from prosecution.

Quote:Trump has repeatedly declared his intention to prosecute his rivals, including former Republican Representative Liz Cheney and other lawmakers who served on the House committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In December 2024, House Republicans called for an FBI investigation into Cheney. The first Trump administration’s efforts to weaponize the Justice Department were largely thwarted from within, so this time, Trump sought appointees who shared his goal of pursuing perceived enemies. His nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, has declared that Trump’s “prosecutors will be prosecuted,” and his choice for FBI director, Kash Patel, has repeatedly called for the prosecution of Trump’s rivals. In 2023, Patel even published a book featuring an “enemies list” of public officials to be targeted.

Quote:A similar pattern is emerging in the media sector. Nearly all major U.S. media outlets—ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, The Washington Post—are owned and operated by larger parent corporations. Although Trump cannot carry out his threat to withhold licenses from national television networks because they are not licensed nationally, he can pressure media outlets by pressuring their corporate owners. The Washington Post, for instance, is controlled by Jeff Bezos, whose largest company, Amazon, competes for major federal contracts. Likewise, the owner of The Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, sells medical products subject to review by the Food and Drug Administration. Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, both men overruled their papers’ planned endorsements of Kamala Harris.

Quote:The United States experienced a marked rise in far-right violence during the first Trump administration. Threats against members of Congress increased more than tenfold. These threats had consequences: according to Republican Senator Mitt Romney, fear of Trump supporters’ violence dissuaded some Republican senators from voting for Trump’s impeachment after the January 6, 2021, attack.

By most measures, political violence subsided after January 2021, in part because hundreds of participants in the January 6 attack were convicted and imprisoned. But Trump’s pardon of nearly all the January 6 insurrectionists on returning to office has sent a message that violent or antidemocratic actors will be protected under his administration. Such signals encourage violent extremism, which means that during Trump’s second term, critics of the government and independent journalists will almost certainly face more frequent threats and even outright attacks.

Quote:This process of self-sidelining may not attract much public attention, but it can be highly consequential. Facing looming investigations, promising politicians—Republicans and Democrats alike—leave public life. CEOs seeking government contracts, tariff waivers, or favorable antitrust rulings stop contributing to Democratic candidates, funding civil rights or democracy initiatives, and investing in independent media. News outlets whose owners worry about lawsuits or government harassment rein in their investigative teams and their most aggressive reporters. Editors engage in self-censorship, softening headlines and opting not to run stories critical of the government. And university leaders fearing government investigations, funding cuts, or punitive endowment taxes crack down on campus protest, remove or demote outspoken professors, and remain silent in the face of growing authoritarianism.

Quote:The depletion of societal opposition may be worse than it appears. We can observe when key players sideline themselves—when politicians retire, university presidents resign, or media outlets change their programming and personnel. But it is harder to see the opposition that might have materialized in a less threatening environment but never did—the young lawyers who decide not to run for office; the aspiring young writers who decide not to become journalists; the potential whistleblowers who decide not to speak out; the countless citizens who decide not to join a protest or volunteer for a campaign.

(Feb 17 2025, 12:45 AM)drdee First social media and control of information - I think we all need a better understanding of Foucault's analysis of power (I wish I could share a paper I gave about this years ago!) to appreciate how much our actions depend on the 'information environment' we live in, and that we don't need to see outright control of others' actions to guide people to behave in ways that seem perfectly sensible given the information available to them.

(Feb 17 2025, 10:13 AM)Elsacat The obvious answer is "Democrats should learn from Republicans and copy those strategies, be more like them" but the obvious answer isn't always a good answer. Just ask any woman who discovered that certain behaviors in the workplace don't go over well when women do them, because the women will get slammed as abrasive, overly competitive or ambitious, unlikeable, not a team player, etc. while the men thrive. "Learn and copy" doesn't translate when there's some base expectation that only one group of people gets to act like that.

(Feb 18 2025, 1:52 AM)drdee Foucault points out that there’s a whole other way to exercise power which doesn’t involve directly engaging with the person/people whose actions you want to control. If you shape their ‘information environment’ – control what comes into their senses and minds – then you indirectly control their actions. If all the news and fictional media they see portray ‘young Black males’ as subhuman criminals, you don’t need to tell white women to keep their children from playing with Black boys, or police to shoot a Black boy when they’d have taken a little more time to investigate a situation involving a white boy. If you control the ‘messages’ in news and media, and social media, you don’t have to worry about controlling people’s behaviour. Normal people typically act perfectly rationally and sensibly according to what they know and understand - so if you control what they know and understand you can just step away and let everything play its course without having to force any behaviour on anyone. And the bonus is that your power is completely invisible to the people you’re controlling – no police or guards or guns, or even visible leaders giving orders.

(Feb 18 2025, 1:52 AM)drdee If you shape their ‘information environment’ – control what comes into their senses and minds – then you indirectly control their actions. Normal people typically act perfectly rationally and sensibly according to what they know and understand - so if you control what they know and understand you can just step away and let everything play its course without having to force any behaviour on anyone.