If you saw the CNN documentary NAVALNY, you will enjoy this discussion.
NAVALNY won the 2023 Academy Award for documentary film.
Archives for category: Fascism
Alexei Navalny’s mother went to the penal colony in the Arctic to claim her son’s body and was lied to at every turn. The story was reported by Emma Burrows at ABC news.
For the mother of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died at age 47in an Arctic penal colony, the journey to recover her son’s body Saturday was an odyssey with no clear destination.
In the end, she didn’t get what she came for.
Lyudmila Navalnaya, 69, received an official note Saturday stating that the politician had died in prison at 2:17 p.m. local time a day earlier, Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s spokesperson said Saturday.
Together with members of Navalny’s legal team, Lyudmila traveled to the town of Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets region, some 1,900 kilometers (1,200 miles) northeast of Moscow.
It was there that Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service said Friday that Navalny felt unwell after a walk and fell unconscious. When Lyudmila arrived less than 24 hours later, officials said that her son had died from “sudden death syndrome,” said Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. He did not elaborate.
Navalny’s death removed the Russian opposition’s most well-known and inspiring politician less than a month before an election that will give President Vladimir Putin another six years in power.
Prison employees told Navalny’s mother Saturday that they did not have her son’s body. They said it had been taken to the nearby city of Salekhard, a little over an hour’s drive away, as part of a probe into his death.
When Lyudmila arrived in the town with one of Navalny’s lawyers, however, they found that the morgue was closed, Navalny’s team wrote on their Telegram channel. When the lawyer called the morgue, they were told that the politician’s body was not there either.
This time, Lyudmila headed directly to Salekhard’s Investigative Committee office. A small group of journalists watched as Lyudmila walked toward the office, dressed in a thick black coat as temperatures hovered close to minus 25 degrees centigrade (minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit). Occasionally, she took the arm of one of those walking next to her as the group made their way along paths edged with thick piles of snow.
Here, she was told that the cause of her son’s death had, in fact, not yet been established, said Navalny’s spokesperson, Kira Yarmysh. Officials told Lyudmila that the politician’s relatives would not receive his body until they had completed additional examinations.
Initially, it seemed as if Lyudmila might head to another morgue. Instead, she returned to her hotel in the town of Labytnangi, another 30-minute drive. Navalny’s team, meanwhile, said they were still no closer to finding out where the politician’s body was being held.
“It’s obvious that they are lying and doing everything they can to avoid handing over the body,” Yarmysh wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, after Lyudmila’s visit to the Investigative Committee office. The spokesperson also said that Navalny’s team “demand that Alexei Navalny’s body be handed over to his family immediately.”
Navalny, who had been serving a 19-year prison term since January 2021 after being convicted three times for extremism, has spoken several times about whether he might die while in custody.
After the last verdict, which Navalny believed to be politically motivated, he said that he understood he was “serving a life sentence, which is measured by the length of my life or the length of life of this regime.”
This breathtaking film, called “Putin’s Palace: The Story of the World’s Largest Bribe,” documented Vladimir Putin’s corruption. It was made by Alexei Navalny and his team and narrated by Navalny.
It shows Putin’s rise from an obscure KGB agent in Dresden to the most powerful man in Russia and —possibly—the richest man in the world.
Navalny shows that Putin’s success was propelled by corruption.
Anne Applebaum wrote about Navalny and the film in The Atlantic.
Alexei Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021. Right before he boarded the plane, he posted a film titled “Putin’s Palace: The Story of the World’s Largest Bribe” on YouTube. The video, nearly two hours long, was an extraordinary feat of investigative reporting. Using secret plans, drone footage, 3-D visualizations, and the testimony of construction workers, Navalny’s video told the story of a hideous $1.3 billion Black Sea villa containing every luxury that a dictator could imagine: a hookah bar, a hockey rink, a helipad, a vineyard, an oyster farm, a church. The video also described the eye-watering costs and the financial trickery that had gone into the construction of the palace on behalf of its true owner, Vladimir Putin.
The film was viewed, she says, by one of every four Russians.
How could Putin, a vain and bitter little man, let Navalny live after this massive insult?
Leslie Stahl interviewed Alexei Navalny when he was in Germany, having survived an attempt to kill him with a military-grade poison.
You can see why Putin was afraid of him: he was smart and charismatic, handsome and youthful. Left alone, he might have led an uprising against Putin’s dictatorship.
In October 2023, Daria Navalnaya gave a short TED talk about what she learned from her father Alexei Navalny.
She said, “I miss him every single day. I’m scared that my father won’t be able to come to my graduation ceremony or walk me down the aisle at my wedding. But if being my father’s daughter has taught me anything, it is to never succumb to fear and sadness.”
She was right. He won’t be there when she graduates from Stanford University or when she gets married.
If you listen to her 11-minute talk, you will perhaps understand why he believed he had to return to Moscow after he was hospitalized in Berlin and nearly died. He knew he would be arrested, but he couldn’t back down. He was not afraid.
I still wish he had stayed in the West and remained a thorn in Putin’s side. I wish he were alive to warn the world about the corrupt psychopath who controls Russia. But I don’t understand his heroism. I don’t have his courage.
But his daughter understands. His wife too, who spoke through her grief at the Munich Security Conference soon after learning of his death.
As Telegram exploded with the news of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s death, his wife, Yuliya Navalnaya was in Germany — about to attend the annual Munich Security Conference surrounded by world leaders and defense officials, and within view of countless television cameras.
Navalnaya has generally sought to avoid the spotlight, to shield her two children from the fallout of her husband’s political work and to deny his tormentors in the Kremlin, including President Vladimir Putin, the satisfaction of ever seeing her cry. But as she took to the stage and delivered a dramatic, surprise statement, grief and worry were etched across her swollen face, and her eyes were tearful and blotchy.
She said she was not certain if the reports of her husband’s death were true. But, her voice trembling with fury, she said: “I want Putin, his entourage, Putin’s friends and his government to know they will pay for what they have done to our country, to our family and my husband. And that day will come very soon.”
She noted that Navalny — who had spoken out forcefully against Russia’s war in Ukraine and called for reparations to be paid from Russia’s oil and gas revenue — would have wanted to be in Munich, were he in her place.
“He would be on this stage,” Navalnaya said, adding, “I want to call the world, everyone who is in this room, people around the world, to together defeat this evil. Defeat this horrible regime in Russia.”
Today is Alexei Navalny Day on this blog. I was deeply upset when I first heard about his death. I had hoped that he would somehow survive and replace Putin. He was charismatic, courageous and through all his travails, had a great sense of humor. He was handsome and had great energy. In other words, he was everything that Putin is not. Putin was never able to break him. He never stopped laughing at Putin. Even in prison, he cracked jokes. Putin had to get rid of him.
The idea that he went for a “walk” in a penal colony in the Arctic, in brutal weather, is laughable. He was in a prison, not a resort. Most of his time was spent in solitary confinement. Please read about him and watch the documentaries. Navalny was a hero and patriot in a time when heroes are rare.
He stood up to a brutal dictator and refused to be afraid. Instead, he laughed. The one thing that a vicious dictator can’t bear is to be laughed at. Putin hated him. Putin was jealous of Navalny. He had to die.
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On September 22, 2022, The Washington Post published the following essay by Alexei Navalny. Navalny was the most prominent opponent of Putin. He died a few days ago in a remote prison in the Arctic. Putin’s agents tried to poison him in 2020, but he survived. He returned to Moscow, where he was immediately arrested and jailed. While he was in prison, Russian courts added more years of imprisonment to his sentence until it became clear that he would never be released. He was a hero and a patriot. Putin murdered him.
Navalny wrote about what Russia should be after Putin was gone.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is serving a nine-year sentence in a maximum-security penal colony. This essay was conveyed to The Post by his legal team. [Navalny’s prison sentence was increased by another 19 years for “extremism” while he was in prison.]
Navalny wrote:
What does a desirable and realistic end to the criminal war unleashed by Vladimir Putin against Ukraine look like?
If we examine the primary things said by Western leaders on this score, the bottom line remains: Russia (Putin) must not win this war. Ukraine must remain an independent democratic state capable of defending itself.
This is correct, but it is a tactic. The strategy should be to ensure that Russia and its government naturally, without coercion, do not want to start wars and do not find them attractive. This is undoubtedly possible. Right now the urge for aggression is coming from a minority in Russian society.
In my opinion, the problem with the West’s current tactics lies not just in the vagueness of their aim, but in the fact that they ignore the question: What does Russia look like after the tactical goals have been achieved? Even if success is achieved, where is the guarantee that the world will not find itself confronting an even more aggressive regime, tormented by resentment and imperial ideas that have little to do with reality? With a sanctions-stricken but still big economy in a state of permanent military mobilization? And with nuclear weapons that guarantee impunity for all manner of international provocations and adventures?
It is easy to predict that even in the case of a painful military defeat, Putin will still declare that he lost not to Ukraine but to the “collective West and NATO,” whose aggression was unleashed to destroy Russia.
And then, resorting to his usual postmodern repertoire of national symbols — from icons to red flags, from Dostoevsky to ballet — he will vow to create an army so strong and weapons of such unprecedented power that the West will rue the day it defied us, and the honor of our great ancestors will be avenged.
And then we will see a fresh cycle of hybrid warfare and provocations, eventually escalating into new wars.
To avoid this, the issue of postwar Russia should become the central issue — and not just one element among others — of those who are striving for peace. No long-term goals can be achieved without a plan to ensure that the source of the problems stops creating them. Russia must cease to be an instigator of aggression and instability. That is possible, and that is what should be seen as a strategic victory in this war.
There are several important things happening to Russia that need to be understood:
First, jealousy of Ukraine and its possible successes is an innate feature of post-Soviet power in Russia; it was also characteristic of the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin. But since the beginning of Putin’s rule, and especially after the Orange Revolution that began in 2004, hatred of Ukraine’s European choice, and the desire to turn it into a failed state, have become a lasting obsession not only for Putin but also for all politicians of his generation.
Control over Ukraine is the most important article of faith for all Russians with imperial views, from officials to ordinary people. In their opinion, Russia combined with a subordinate Ukraine amounts to a “reborn U.S.S.R. and empire.” Without Ukraine, in this view, Russia is just a country with no chance of world domination. Everything that Ukraine acquires is something taken away from Russia.
Second, the view of war not as a catastrophe but as an amazing means of solving all problems is not just a philosophy of Putin’s top brass, but a practice confirmed by life and evolution. Since the Second Chechen War, which made the little-known Putin the country’s most popular politician, through the war in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas and the war in Syria, the Russian elite over the past 23 years has learned rules that have never failed: War is not that expensive, it solves all domestic political problems, it raises public approval sky-high, it does not particularly harm the economy, and — most importantly — winners face no accountability. Sooner or later, one of the constantly changing Western leaders will come to us to negotiate. It does not matter what motives will lead him — the will of the voters or the desire to receive the Nobel Peace Prize — but if you show proper persistence and determination, the West will come to make peace.
Don’t forget that there are many in the United States, Britain and other Western countries in politics who have been defeated and lost ground due to their support for one war or another. In Russia, there is simply no such thing. Here, war is always about profit and success.
Third, therefore, the hopes that Putin’s replacement by another member of his elite will fundamentally change this view on war, and especially war over the “legacy of the U.S.S.R.,” is naive at the very least. The elites simply know from experience that war works — better than anything else.
Perhaps the best example here would be Dmitry Medvedev, the former president on whom the West pinned so many hopes. Today, this amusing Medvedev, who was once taken on a tour of Twitter’s headquarters, makes statements so aggressive that they look like a caricature of Putin’s.
Fourth, the good news is that the bloodthirsty obsession with Ukraine is not at all widespread outside the power elites, no matter what lies pro-government sociologists might tell.
The war raises Putin’s approval rating by super-mobilizing the imperially minded part of society. The news agenda is fully consumed by the war; internal problems recede into the background: “Hurray, we’re back in the game, we are great, they’re reckoning with us!” Yet the aggressive imperialists do not have absolute dominance. They do not make up a solid majority of voters, and even they still require a steady supply of propaganda to sustain their beliefs.
Otherwise Putin would not have needed to call the war a “special operation” and send those who use the word “war” to jail. (Not long ago, a member of a Moscow district council received seven years in prison for this.) He would not have been afraid to send conscripts to the war and would not have been compelled to look for soldiers in maximum-security prisons, as he is doing now. (Several people were “drafted to the front” directly from the penal colony where I am.)
Yes, propaganda and brainwashing have an effect. Yet we can say with certainty that the majority of residents of major cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as young voters, are critical of the war and imperial hysteria. The horror of the suffering of Ukrainians and the brutal killing of innocents resonate in the souls of these voters.
Thus, we can state the following:
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The war with Ukraine was started and waged, of course, by Putin, trying to solve his domestic political problems. But the real war party is the entire elite and the system of power itself, which is an endlessly self-reproducing Russian authoritarianism of the imperial kind. External aggression in any form, from diplomatic rhetoric to outright warfare, is its preferred mode of operation, and Ukraine is its preferred target. This self-generated imperial authoritarianism is the real curse of Russia and the cause of all its troubles. We cannot get rid of it, despite the opportunities regularly provided by history.
Russia had its last chance of this kind after the end of the U.S.S.R., but both the democratic public inside the country and Western leaders at the time made the monstrous mistake of agreeing to the model — proposed by Boris Yeltsin’s team — of a presidential republic with enormous powers for the leader. Giving plenty of power to a good guy seemed logical at the time.
Yet the inevitable soon happened: The good guy went bad. To begin with, he started a war (the Chechen war) himself, and then, without normal elections and fair procedures, he handed over power to the cynical and corrupt Soviet imperialists led by Putin. They have caused several wars and countless international provocations, and are now tormenting a neighboring nation, committing horrible crimes for which neither many generations of Ukrainians nor our own children will forgive us.
In the 31 years since the collapse of the U.S.S.R., we have witnessed a clear pattern: The countries that chose the parliamentary republic model (the Baltic states) are thriving and have successfully joined Europe. Those that chose the presidential-parliamentary model (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia) have faced persistent instability and made little progress. Those that chose strong presidential power (Russia, Belarus and the Central Asian republics) have succumbed to rigid authoritarianism, most of them permanently engaged in military conflicts with their neighbors, daydreaming about their own little empires.
In short, strategic victory means bringing Russia back to this key historical juncture and letting the Russian people make the right choice.
The future model for Russia is not “strong power” and a “firm hand,” but harmony, agreement and consideration of the interests of the whole society. Russia needs a parliamentary republic. That is the only way to stop the endless cycle of imperial authoritarianism.
One may argue that a parliamentary republic is not a panacea. Who, after all, is to prevent Putin or his successor from winning elections and gaining full control over the parliament?
Of course, even a parliamentary republic does not offer 100 percent guarantees. It could well be that we are witnessing the transition to the authoritarianism of parliamentary India. After the usurpation of power, parliamentary Turkey has been transformed into a presidential one. The core of Putin’s European fan club is paradoxically in parliamentary Hungary.
And the very notion of a “parliamentary republic” is too broad.
Yet I believe this cure offers us crucial advantages: a radical reduction of power in the hands of one person, the formation of a government by a parliamentary majority, an independent judiciary system, a significant increase in the powers of local authorities. Such institutions have never existed in Russia, and we are in desperate need of them.
As for the possible total control of parliament by Putin’s party, the answer is simple: Once the real opposition is allowed to vote, it will be impossible. A large faction? Yes. A coalition majority? Maybe. Total control? Definitely not. Too many people in Russia are interested in normal life now, not in the phantom of territorial gains. And there are more such people every year. They just don’t have anyone to vote for now.
Certainly, changing Putin’s regime in the country and choosing the path of development are not matters for the West, but jobs for the citizens of Russia. Nevertheless, the West, which has imposed sanctions both on Russia as a state as well as on some of its elites, should make its strategic vision of Russia as a parliamentary democracy as clear as possible. By no means should we repeat the mistake of the West’s cynical approach in the 1990s, when the post-Soviet elite was effectively told: “You do what you want there; just watch your nuclear weapons and supply us with oil and gas.” Indeed, even now we hear cynical voices saying similar things: “Let them just pull back the troops and do what they want from there. The war is over, the mission of the West is accomplished.” That mission was already “accomplished” with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the result is a full-fledged war in Europe in 2022.
This is a simple, honest and fair approach: The Russian people are of course free to choose their own path of development. But Western countries are free to choose the format of their relations with Russia, to lift or not to lift sanctions, and to define the criteria for such decisions. The Russian people and the Russian elite do not need to be forced. They need a clear signal and an explanation of why such a choice is better. Crucially, parliamentary democracy is also a rational and desirable choice for many of the political factions around Putin. It gives them an opportunity to maintain influence and fight for power while ensuring that they are not destroyed by a more aggressive group.
War is a relentless stream of crucial, urgent decisions influenced by constantly shifting factors. Therefore, while I commend European leaders for their ongoing success in supporting Ukraine, I urge them not to lose sight of the fundamental causes of war. The threat to peace and stability in Europe is aggressive imperial authoritarianism, endlessly inflicted by Russia upon itself. Postwar Russia, like post-Putin Russia, will be doomed to become belligerent and Putinist again. This is inevitable as long as the current form of the country’s development is maintained. Only a parliamentary republic can prevent this. It is the first step toward transforming Russia into a good neighbor that helps to solve problems rather than create them.
Heather Cox Richardson writes about the supine behavior of Republicans in the House of Representatives, as they worship at the shrine of Trump. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill to fund Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel: 22 Republican Senators voted for it, openly defying the Orange Menace. But in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson says he won’t allow the bill to come to a vote because it is likely to pass. Johnson is collaborating with Trump who is collaborating with the enemies of freedom (aka Putin).
She writes:
History is watching,” President Joe Biden said this afternoon. He warned “Republicans in Congress who think they can oppose funding for Ukraine and not be held accountable” that “[f]ailure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.”
At about 5:00 this morning, the Senate passed a $95 billion national security supplemental bill, providing funding for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. Most of the money in the measure will stay in the United States, paying defense contractors to restock the matériel the U.S. sends to Ukraine.
The vote was 70–29 and was strongly bipartisan. Twenty-two Republicans joined Democrats in support of the bill, overcoming the opposition of far-right Republicans.
The measure went to the House of Representatives, where House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he will not take it up, even though his far-right supporters acknowledged that a majority of the representatives supported it and that if it did come to the floor, it would pass.
Yesterday, House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner (R-OH)—who had just returned from his third trip to Ukraine, where he told President Volodymyr Zelensky that reinforcements were coming—told Politico’sRachel Bade: “We have to get this done…. This is no longer an issue of, ‘When do we support Ukraine?’ If we do not move, this will be abandoning Ukraine.”
“The speaker will need to bring it to the floor,” Turner said. “You’re either for or against the authoritarian governments invading democratic countries.… You’re either for or against the killing of innocent civilians. You’re either for or against Russia reconstituting the Soviet Union.”
Today, Biden spoke to the press to “call on the Speaker to let the full House speak its mind and not allow a minority of the most extreme voices in the House to block this bill even from being voted on—even from being voted on. This is a critical act for the House to move. It needs to move.”
Bipartisan support for Ukraine “sends a clear message to Ukrainians and to our partners and to our allies around the world: America can be trusted, America can be relied upon, and America stands up for freedom,” he said. “We stand strong for our allies. We never bow down to anyone, and certainly not to Vladimir Putin.”
“Supporting this bill is standing up to Putin. Opposing it is playing into Putin’s hands.”
“The stakes were already high for American security before this bill was passed in the Senate last night,” Biden said. “But in recent days, those stakes have risen. And that’s because the former President has sent a dangerous and shockingly, frankly, un-American signal to the world” Biden said, referring to Trump’s statement on Saturday night that he would “encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—the 75-year-old collective security organization that spans North America and Europe—but are not devoting 2% of the gross domestic product to their militaries.
Trump’s invitation to Putin to invade our NATO allies was “dumb,…shameful,…dangerous, [and] un-American,” Biden said. “When America gives its word, it means something. When we make a commitment, we keep it. And NATO is a sacred commitment.” NATO, Biden said, is “the alliance that protects America and the world.”
“[O]ur adversaries have long sought to create cracks in the Alliance. The greatest hope of all those who wish America harm is for NATO to fall apart. And you can be sure that they all cheered when they heard [what] Donald Trump…said.”
“Our nation stands at…an inflection point in history…where the decisions we make now are going to determine the course of our future for decades to come. This is one of those moments.
And I say to the House members, House Republicans: You’ve got to decide. Are you going to stand up for freedom, or are you going to side with terror and tyranny? Are you going to stand with Ukraine, or are you going to stand with Putin? Will we stand with America or…with Trump?”
“Republicans and Democrats in the Senate came together to send a message of unity to the world. It’s time for the House Republicans to do the same thing: to pass this bill immediately, to stand for decency, stand for democracy, to stand up to a so-called leader hellbent on weakening American security,” Biden said.
“And I mean this sincerely: History is watching. History is watching.”
But instead of taking up the supplemental national security bill tonight, House speaker Johnson took advantage of the fact that Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) has returned to Washington after a stem cell transplant to battle his multiple myeloma and that Judy Chu (D-CA) is absent because she has Covid to make a second attempt to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for “high crimes and misdemeanors” for his oversight of the southern border of the United States.
Republicans voted to impeach Mayorkas by a vote of 214 to 213. The vote catered to far-right Republicans, but impeachment will go nowhere in the Senate.
“History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games,” Biden said in a statement. He called on the House to pass the border security measure Republicans killed last week on Trump’s orders, and to pass the national security supplemental bill.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has said he will use every possible tool to force a vote on the national security supplemental bill. In contrast, as Biden noted, House Republicans are taking their cue from former president Trump, who does not want aid to Ukraine to pass and who last night demonstrated that he is trying to consolidate his power over the party by installing hand-picked loyalists, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who is married to his son Eric, at the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC).
This move is likely due in part to outgoing RNC chair Ronna McDaniel’s having said the RNC could not pay Trump’s legal bills once he declared himself a presidential candidate. After his political action committees dropped $50 million on legal fees last year, he could likely use another pipeline, and even closer loyalists might give him one.
In addition, Trump probably recognizes that he might well lose the protective legal bulwark of the Trump Organization when Judge Arthur Engoron hands down his verdict in Trump’s $370 million civil fraud trial. New York attorney general Letitia James is seeking not only monetary penalties but also a ban on Trump’s ability to conduct business in the New York real estate industry. In that event, the RNC could become a base of operations for Trump if he succeeds in taking it over entirely.
But it is not clear that all Republican lawmakers will follow him into that takeover, as his demands from the party not only put it out of step with the majority of the American people but also now clearly threaten to blow up global security. “Our base cannot possibly know what’s at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what’s at stake if Putin wins,” Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told his colleagues as he urged them to vote for the national security supplemental bill.
Politicians should recognize that Trump’s determination to win doesn’t help them much: it is all about him and does not extend to any down-ballot races.
Indeed, the attempt of a Republican minority to impose its will on the majority of Americans appears to be sparking a backlash. In today’s election in New York’s Third Congressional District to replace indicted serial liar George Santos, a loyal Trump Republican, voters chose Democrat Tom Suozzi by about 8 points. CNN’s Dana Bash tonight said voters had told her they voted against the Republican candidate because Republicans, on Trump’s orders, killed the bipartisan border deal. The shift both cuts down the Republican majority in the House and suggests that going into 2024, suburban swing voters are breaking for Democrats.
As Trump tries to complete his takeover of the formerly grand old Republican Party, its members have to decide whether to capitulate.
History is watching.
Thom Hartmann writes a description of the first few months of the second Trump administration, based on statements by Trump or his pals. It’s frightening.
He writes:
[Every incident mentioned in this article is based on an actual statement or action by Donald Trump, the people closely surrounding him, or something Trump has praised about his role model Victor Orbàn.]
It was a hell of a year, 2025: the first year of the First Reich (as those formerly called Democrats referred to it) or The New America as the GOP now refers to our nation. One people, one nation, one leader: America, President-for-life Trump tells us, is now “truly great.”
It started with the election of November 2024, when the No Labels candidacy of Larry Hogan and Joe Manchin pulled enough electoral votes away from Biden — who was more than 10 million popular votes ahead of Trump — that none of the three tickets hit the necessary 270 Electoral College votes to win the White House.
It was a scenario similar to 1824 when John Quincy Adams lost the popular vote to Andrew Jackson but, because William Crawford and Henry Clay were also running for president, neither Adams or Jackson hit the threshold with the Electoral College and the vote went to the House of Representatives, which made Adams president in a series of backroom deals known to historians as the “Corrupt Bargain.”
In a similar way, the election of 2024 was thrown into the House of Representatives, per the 12th Amendment, with each state having one single vote. Since 26 states had Republican-controlled congressional delegations and only 23 had Democratic-controlled delegations (Pennsylvania is evenly split), the House voted 26-24 for Donald Trump to become the next president. He didn’t even need to threaten his vice president or invoke a mob.
At his swearing-in, Trump announced that he was going to fulfill his “dictator for a day” promise and pardoned himself, all Republicans who were in Congress in January 2021 and helped organize or support the attack on the Capitol, and all the January 6th seditionists.
He then announced that the 24 Democrats leading their congressional delegations who’d voted against him in the House were “guilty of sedition against the United States.” As he spoke, each was arrested and taken into custody.
The arrests, particularly of Democratic members of the House and a handful of Democratic Senators from Red states, gave the GOP a majority in both houses, even though Democrats had won both in the 2024 election. Jim Jordan was named the new Speaker of the House, and Rick Scott took Mitch McConnell’s job in the Senate.
The next day, January 21st, Trump signed a new version of his Schedule F change to the Civil Service law, firing en masse roughly 50,000 federal employees in the top and upper management positions across the federal government, including the Department of Defense.
A group of billionaire-friendly candidates had been preselected by a billionaire-funded think tank and all were installed within hours. Those that required the “advice and consent of the Senate” were placed in “acting” positions, as Trump had done in 2020.
Within a week, another series of political arrests took place, as Joe and Hunter Biden, Liz Cheney, Merrick Garland, Jack Smith, Brad Raffensperger, Letitia James, and multiple other federal and state judges and prosecutors were arrested for conspiracy and alleged RICO violations.
“America will never again tolerate lawlessness by its elected and appointed officials,” Trump announced in a prime-time message to the country. Republican politicians and the media rushed to his defense, pointing out previous presidents (Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln) who, they said, did “even worse.”
The Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 ruling declaring hate crimes unconstitutional, calling them “thought crimes,” with Justice Sam Alito asserting:
“We will never allow America to become the dystopian nanny state characterized in the writings of Orwell or Lewis and craved by Democrats. Americans are free to have any thoughts or intentions they want: we only punish actual behavior, and that punishment is the same for all.”
Within hours of their announcement, over 200 people — most queer or Black — lay dead across the United States. Trump went on TV to calm the nation, again asserting “There are very fine people on both sides.”
That weekend, hundreds of thousands of Americans poured into the streets to protest. Trump called another press conference and declared a state of emergency, provoked by what he calls “a nationwide insurrection against law and order and our great nation.”
Tens of thousands of Army troops met the crowds in the streets, and in 11 cities and a half-dozen rural areas used live ammunition to kill several dozen protestors.
Joy Reid began her Monday MSNBC show with the song Four Dead In Ohio and was arrested on-air for “inciting further insurrection.” Trump then referred the network, its executives, and several of its hosts to his FCC for investigation, as he promised in 2023.
CNN threw in with Trump, joining Fox and the Big Three national networks in helping explain to America how Trump’s “changes” are actually far less draconian than things previous presidents (particularly Lincoln, “who even suspended habeas corpus!”) have done.
Trump again invoked the PATRIOT Act to continue to hold the hundreds of elected and appointed Democratic officials, “thugs,” and “sedition ringleaders” in secret detention centers without access to lawyers or other due process.
The media pointed out that this is nothing unusual: Bush and Cheney did the same thing hundreds of times, and some of their victims are even still in Gitmo without ever having had a legitimate day in court. Nobody, they said, of any “real stature” objected.
Given the large number of people coming under detention as protests spread across the country, Trump signed an executive order transferring billions out of the military budget for Halliburton and two private prison contractors to build “detention centers” where “bad people” can be “concentrated in one place.” The media refuses to call them concentration camps because of the “prejudicial” connotations associated with the phrase.
Trump then ordered the Pentagon to withdraw all forms of assistance from Ukraine, including military and diplomatic support. “Putin is merely liberating Ukraine from the Nazis that took it over when they stole the election from Yanukovych,” Trump said, echoing Putin. “They never should have turned their back on their Slavic partner, the nation that birthed them.” He ended the speech with his famous 2024 election slogan, “Blood and soil!”
In an executive order titled “No More Shithole Countries,” he outlawed all immigration, and banned all tourist visas, from Muslim and majority-Black countries except for those from a handful of oil-rich Middle Eastern nations that started building a $5 billion Trump Tower in Oman in July, 2023.
Republicans in the House and Senate passed emergency legislation ending all US gun restrictions with a single exception: anybody who’s been arrested or “credibly accused of sedition” and not pardoned can no longer own a weapon of any sort.
Attorney General Jeffrey Clark then declared that anybody who’s ever joined the Democratic Party or voted for a Democrat in any election in the previous decade is now considered “credibly accused of sedition.”
Congress followed that up with billions to hire at least a million new local and state police, as Trump announced he’s integrating the Proud Boys into the federal military, calling them the “Stormfront,” a shoutout to Qanon.
February 2025
In the first week of the month, the Supreme Court handed down its 6-3 decision in Loper Bright, gutting every federal protective regulatory agency. Trump immediately fired most of the employees of the EPA and Department of the Interior, promising to sell of all federally owned public lands.
“Our public lands are rich in minerals and fossil fuel, and our parks should be run by smart entrepreneurs,” Trump declared, echoing sentiments attributed to Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt.
Disney and Comcast then both submitted bids to buy and manage Yellowstone.
Congress then declared “the Medicare experiment is over” because “more than half of seniors have voted with their feet” and ended the program, mandating all people over 65 must buy an “Advantage” plan from one of a handful of approved insurance giants. Following on that, Congress rolled out “Social Security Advantage,” a program that will, over the next decade, privatize all Social Security accounts via JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America.
Proclaiming “America will no longer use her tax dollars to support Blue state communists,” and keeping a 2023 campaign promise, Trump ordered all military bases closed in any state with a seditionist (Democratic) governor or seditionist-controlled legislature. He gave states 60 days to change the composition of their governments to qualify to keep their military bases; all who didn’t comply are now seeing their facilities (and jobs) moved to Red states.
Congress then passed legislation closely resembling Putin’s laws in Russia and Orbán’s in Hungary declaring homosexuality and transsexuality “deviant behaviors” subject to federal penalties, fulfilling his 2022 promise to pass “Two Genders legislation.”
The “fake news media” is a major crisis, Trump told the nation from a press scrum near his helicopter: the solution, he said, would be straightforward. Congress voted later that day to rewrite the nation’s libel laws, as Orbán did in Hungary and Putin did in Russia, so any journalist or commentator who “sullies the reputation” if any elected official can be subject to both civil and criminal penalties.
Within three weeks of the legislation being signed into law at the end of February, hundreds of writers and TV commentators had been either arrested or bankrupted (depending on the severity of their criticism of Trump) as newsrooms across the nation purged themselves of “anti-American” (anti-Trump) voices.
Now licensed by six Republicans on the Supreme Court and their integration into the military, Proud Boy groups began organized attacks on Black neighborhoods, gay bars, and libraries. Dozens of people died, touching off riots in several cities — particularly Portland and Seattle — that were covered breathlessly by Fox “News.”
Trump pointed to the unrest and announced a second round of billion-dollar contracts for Halliburton to build camps where “bad people,” including those guilty of libel, violating gender conformity laws, or “poisoning the blood of America” through biracial marriages or giving shelter to illegal immigrants, could be “concentrated.”
In a major law and order speech, Trump declared homelessness a federal crime and work camps were set up inside the new concentration camps for homeless people to learn skills so “work can make them free.” Volunteer Proud Boys units were dispatched to help police departments round up those who insisted on living on the streets.
Based on the Comstock Act — which is still law but hasn’t been enforced since the 1950s — the Republicans on the Supreme Court outlawed mifepristone and all hormonal birth control, along with IUDs and condoms. Republicans passed legislation declaring that “life begins at conception,” and US attorneys have started charging women who got abortions in Blue states over the past year with murder. The Attorney General announced that all miscarriages must be reported to local police for investigation.
In the last week of February, Russia launched a “final assault” on Ukraine, with the aid of their new “Freedom Block” allies: China, Iran, and North Korea. Ukraine fell, and Trump hailed “a new era of world peace.”
March 2025
Keeping his campaign promise, Trump dissolved the Department of Education and killed all federal aid to education, higher and primary. The next day, the Supreme Court struck down FDR’s child labor laws; within a week every Red state in the country followed suit with their own state laws allowing anybody older than 12 to work (including in the brothels Trump decriminalized).
Republicans passed the “Free the Job Creators Act,” which ended all taxation of capital gains. Billionaires will never again pay any income taxes at all.
Internationally, the world order was changing rapidly. In a coordinated move, Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons; China encircled and cut off all shipping and fuel to Taiwan; Russia, Belarus, and Hungary collectively invaded Poland; and NATO dithered as Trump threatened to intervene on Russia’s side.
Trump refused to help Israel, and the Iranians who now control the country brought Netanyahu, who had helped fund Hamas for so many years, out of prison and back into office as a puppet Prime Minister. Trump called a press conference and said this is what is prophesied in the Bible and Jews better begin converting to Christianity if they want to survive.
Hours later, Trump issued an executive order declaring America a Christian country; states began to shut down synagogues, mosques, and Buddhist and Hindu temples within the week.
April 2025
Like in Russia and Hungary, Republicans passed laws asserting that voting is a privilege, not a right, and, backstopped by SCOTUS, Red States purged over 30 million people from the voter rolls in the first week. Speaker Jordan proclaimed, “There will never again be a ‘so-called purple’ state.”
The new law requires that a person must be employed to vote; being married to an employed person is not enough. Women, unemployed men, and students protested and hundreds were shot in the streets or sent to the work camps.
With a dramatic flourish and to redirect attention away from domestic protests, Trump declared war on Mexico for “refusing to do anything about their drugs and gangs, which have already declared war on the United States.”
He seized several northern Mexican states after a few short battles and strategic bombing of the presidential palace and Capitol building in Mexico City. Control of those formerly northern Mexican states was given to Greg Abbott, who Trump named “Administrator” of “American Mexico” just like L. Paul Bremmer was in Iraq.
May 2025
An insurgency against American occupation arose in Mexico, drawing us into a hot war with that country. Trump ordered all Americans of more than 3/5ths Mexican ancestry arrested and moved into detention camps or deported. Protests broke out across the country, but were quickly put down by the military.
The wars in Europe and Asia are winding down now, as Trump declared a “New Alliance” between the US, China, Russia, North Korea, Hungary, and Iran. Argentina applied for membership, as did dozens of other rightwing governments from Central and South America to Africa and Asia. Australia has made peace with China, naming a Murdoch heir as the new leader of that English-speaking country.
The Democratic Party is now officially banned as “insurrectionist” and the Supreme Court extended Article 3 of the 14th Amendment (which prevents insurrectionists from holding public office) to include all governmental positions in the country: only Republicans, Libertarians, and No Labels politicians need apply.
People have started to fight back in random places, so Congress codified the earlier ruling by Attorney General Clark that any former member of, or voter for, Democrats may not own a gun or other “weapon of war”: regional “insurrections” continue to break out but the military and their Proud Boy units quickly put them down.
The largest uprising was in Los Angeles: Trump had about 40 square blocks seized, locked down, and surrounded with razor wire. He then put that state, Oregon, and Washington under federal control, citing laws and acts taken by President Lincoln.
And that’s just the first five months. From there, things began to get really bad for Americans…
Thom Hartmann is at his best in this column. He writes about the current GOP obsession with a “Christian America” and compares it to what the Founding Fathers wrote about the role of religion in their new nation. Added to the current pandering is the fact that we now have a Supreme Court majority of six-three that elevates “religious freedom” above the Constitutional prohibition of “establishment” of religion. That means trouble for those of us who do not want to live in a theocracy.
He writes:
Monday, in addition to being Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, was National Religious Freedom Day. But what does that mean, and for whom? What would the “Christian America” that Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are calling for look like?
When I was a kid, my parents and our pastor taught me that Jesus specifically, and religion more generally, was all about peace, love, and people caring for each other. That’s what’s explicitly at the core of Jesus’ most famous and clear teachings at the Sermon On The Mount and in the Parable of the Goats and Sheep.
But the Republican Party, thirsting for more voters in the 1980 Reagan vs Carter election, realized that Southern Baptists had helped give the White House to Carter in 1976 (he’s a Southern Baptist). If they could just peel those voters away from Carter and the Democratic Party, they believed they could win big.
The issue the Reagan campaign decided to use to bring religious voters to Republicans in that election was abortion, a topic Jesus never discussed.
Up until that election, both former Governor Reagan and former CIA Director Bush had been open supporters of a woman’s right to choose; in the run-up to the primaries Reagan became an unabashed foe of abortion, and George H.W. Bush changed his position on the issue when he joined the ticket in 1980.The legacy of those decisions has brought us Trump, Qanon, and badly damaged large parts of what’s left of Christianity in America (church attendance is collapsing). It’s turned both religion and politics into armed camps. At the founding of our Republic, if there was any one topic that the Framers of the Constitution were mostly in agreement about, it was the importance of keeping religion separate from government.
More recently, even uber-Catholic Antonin Scalia wrote, in the 1990 Employment v Smith case rejecting Native Americans’ petition to overrule federal regulations and legally use peyote (an outlawed substance) for religious purposes:
“The rule respondents favor would open the prospect of constitutionally required religious exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind ranging from compulsory military service to the payment of taxes; to health and safety regulation such as manslaughter and child neglect laws, compulsory vaccination laws, drug laws, and traffic laws; to social welfare legislation such as minimum wage laws, child labor laws, animal cruelty laws, environmental protection laws, and laws providing for equality of opportunity for the races. The First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty does not require this. …
“To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”
Don’t tell today’s Republicans that’s a bad thing, though: Scalia’s list is a good summary of many of the realms they’re currently targeting. The six Catholic extremist Republicans on the Court appear anxious to overturn any final semblance of secular primacy in law, using religion as their excuse.
It’s gotten so absurd and frankly obscene that a reporter recently spoke with a woman at a Trump rally sporting a crucifix and a tee-shirt that said “Hang Joe Biden For Treason”; she was essentially arguing that Jesus would be all in favor of watching Biden’s execution.
Monday was Religious Freedom Day because it commemorated the publication of Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. That early publication (he was 33) not only asserted that all citizens should be free to practice whatever religion they wanted but, more importantly, that nobody should be persecuted for holding either a religious belief or no religious belief.
Jefferson thought it was more important than his having been a two-term president: when he wrote his own epitaph, he only included his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, his founding America’s first free university (University of Virginia), and his Statute for Religious Freedom.
Jefferson and Madison had a philosophical debate over which would be more dangerous: a religious individual who wants to bring religion into government like Christian nationalist Mike Johnson, or the government endorsing or subsidizing any particular religious group or belief like Trump is promising.
Jefferson (a Deist) was worried about religious leaders (a letter of his is *footnoted below) corrupting government; Madison (a Christian) was more worried about government corrupting his beloved religion.
For example, on February 21, 1811, President Madison vetoed a bill passed by Congress that authorized government payments to a church in Washington, DC to help the poor. Faith-based initiatives were a clear violation, Madison believed, of the doctrine of separation of church and state, and could lead to a dangerous transfer of both money and political power to religious leaders.
In Madison’s mind, caring for the poor was a public and civic duty — a function of government — and must not be allowed to become a hole through which churches could reach and seize political power or the taxpayer’s purse.
Funding a church to provide for the poor would establish a “legal agency” — a legal precedent — that would break down the walls of separation the Founders had put between church and state to protect Americans from religious zealots gaining political power.
Thus, Madison said in his veto message to Congress, he was striking down the proposed law:
“Because the bill vests and said incorporated church an also authority to provide for the support of the poor, and the education of poor children of the same;…” which, Madison said, “would be a precedent for giving to religious societies, as such, a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”
James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, flatly rejected government supporting religion in any way whatsoever, noting in a July 10, 1822 letter to Edward Livingston:
“We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: the Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government.”
He added in that same letter:
“I have no doubt that every new example will succeed, as every past one has done, in showing that religion and Government will both exist in greater purity the less they are mixed together.”
Now we see that both were right, although Madison probably had the edge: when the GOP offered evangelicals political power and big money in 1980, it so corrupted many conservative Christian churches that they’ve today put Trump above Jesus.
It’s gotten so bad that fully a third of evangelicals polled said they supported violence to advance political goals, which is quite literally the opposite of Jesus’ telling the Pharisees:
“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
Not to mention his extensive preaching about nonviolence. He was MLK’s role model, for G-d’s sake.
Instead, Trump’s followers are busily sharing memes of him as their savior, while Speaker Johnson and his fellow travelers on the Supreme Court are working as hard as they can to open the doors (and money) of government to religious leaders.
Religion has a lot to offer people and often fulfills a basic need to stand in awe of creation, to feel at one with everything and everyone. Every culture all the way back to the Neanderthals have engaged in religious rituals, particularly around funerals: no tribe or group has ever been found that entirely lacked what could be described as religious rituals.
But, as our founders pointed out, religion should be separated from government as far as possible. Jefferson’s Virginia Statute says it explicitly:
“No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
Instead, Republicans are exploiting that religious urge built into us humans to cynically pander for the votes of those people who’ve put religion at the center of their lives.
They’re reinventing America as a country where religion dictates women’s healthcare, specifies who can marry whom, and destroys the lives of people who weren’t born heterosexual.
They’re promoting movies/vids portraying Trump as the incarnation of Jesus, a bizarre sort of Second Coming worthy of North Korean propaganda.
They’re using religion as an excuse for bigotry, a rationale for government tax subsidies of churches that promote Republicans from the pulpit, and a weapon to wield against those they condemn as being insufficiently pious.
In the process, they’re harming both religion and our government.
Regular readers of this blog may have noticed (or not) that I never mention artificial intelligence. I think it’s ominous. I don’t like simulations of real people. I don’t like technology that can write even better than most humans. I prefer to deal directly with humans, not fakes.
Artifial intelligence may be deployed as a deceptive weapon in the upcoming elections.
2024 is a crucial year in our politics. On the ballot in the primaries and in the general election will be candidates who are offering theocracy, dictatorship, or democracy. They will use AI to woo and confuse voters.
New Hampshire blogger and former state senator Jeanne Dietsch has posted a warning about deep fake videos. The video she posts is titled “This Is Not Morgan Freeman.” The face is Morgan Freeman, the voice is Morgan Freeman. But it is not Morgan Freeman.
She also offers a warning about the three factions that are competing in New Hampshire.
She writes:
Elected officials no longer act as individuals. They vote as teams. In NH we have three types of teams:
- “LIBERTY” CANDIDATES who do not believe in majority rule or public services. They want to privatize education, public lands and government services. They believe the only behaviors that should be illegal are theft and bodily harm. People may make fentanyl, pollute the water supply, sell body parts, or do anything else on their private property. That includes corporations that want to buy up state forests to lumber or entire swaths of housing to rent.
- FASCIST & THEOCRATIC CANDIDATES also want to replace democracy with minority rule. Unlike liberty candidates, they want stricter laws set by a dictator or by religious leaders. Their goal is to control society, as in Putin’s Russia or a Christian version of Iran.
- PRO-DEMOCRACY CANDIDATES may disagree on how large government should be and many other issues. However, they will stand up against those who support lawlessness or dictatorship. They will ensure we regularly hold fair elections. They believe in the rule of law.
Political parties no longer define the teams in this state. Undeclared voters outnumber either party by a third. In 2020, the “liberty” team temporarily took over the NH House Republican Caucus. Even though they were a minority of the 400 House members, they controlled the agenda. Pro-democracy legislators in both parties were powerless.
The story in DC is similar. The functions of the American republic are being held hostage by a small minority.
Will we fall for the deep fakes? Will we be deceived by AI? Or will we protect our democracy?
Diane Ravitch's blog 