Has anyone seen the sun after it sets? President Trump says he will get the answers, assigning the few remaining scientists in the administration to solve the mystery. Hypotheses will be screened to ensure the answer aligns with the Trump doctrine. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

#trump20 #science #repression

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/02/trump-administration-science-climate-change/686008/

This transfer of power in Virginia matters more than others I’ve seen

For the first time in my life, I watched a new Virginia governor take the oath of office–not only because my schedule was mercifully free and allowed me to camp out on the couch at noon Saturday, but because the stakes for my state’s leadership are much higher now.

Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) begins her term as Virginia’s 75th governor at a much different time for the commonwealth and the nation than the last time a Democrat was sworn in as governor in front of the Capitol designed by Virginia’s second governor, Thomas Jefferson.

Gov. Ralph Northam (D) had to deal with the lies, cruelty, bigotry, and incompetence of Trump 1.0, but Spanberger faces even more of that–compounded by Trump’s newfound enthusiasm for trying to punish particular states he deems disloyal.

At its lightest, this takes the form of clumsy, oafish attempts to yank federal funding, threaten federal investigations or undo federal approvals of projects. In Virginia, we’ve seen such examples as the unsuccessful attempt to intimidate George Mason University president Gregory Washington out of office and the groundless bid to stop construction of the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project that a federal judge turned aside Friday.

At its worst, the entire country has witnessed the murderous thuggishness of ICE agents in Minneapolis who seem to take tactical inspiration from the secret police of Third World dictatorships.

And over the last year, the two elected officials in Virginia best positioned to contest these abuses of power, former Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and former Attorney General Jason Miyares (R), either did nothing or cheered them along. Youngkin in particular appeared to think that his heel turn from maintaining a measured distance from Trump to embracing so much of a MAGA agenda would set him up well in future elections; the choices of Virginia voters in November suggest that is a delusional hope.

Hours into her term, Spanberger put some distance between herself and Youngkin’s smiling mediocrity: One of the first 10 executive orders she signed rescinds the EO of her predecessor that had directed state law-enforcement agencies to divert their time and resources to assist ICE operations.

That is a good start, and I expect more from the first Democratic governor I’ve seen take office with a Democratic majority in both houses of the General Assembly. These elected representatives have a great deal of work ahead, starting with unfinished business from the last four years in Richmond and now including finding ways to repair the damage that Trump has inflicted on our state.

#AbigailSpanberger #GlennYoungkin #GovernorSpanberger #ice #OldDominion #Richmond #Trump20 #Virginia #VirginiaDems #VirginiaGeneralAssembly #VirginiaPolitics

How to Save a Democracy – The Nation

Politics / Authoritarian Watch / January 2, 2026

How to Save a Democracy

Looking at how the Trump administration fits into a pattern of authoritarian governance can empower people to think about how to best resist the country’s slide to autocracy.

By Sasha Abramsky

As year two of Trump 2.0 gets underway, my column will be shifting focus. For the past year, I have been writing on the corrupt and cruel acts being carried out by the US government. I will continue to look at these actions but will now analyze them through the lens of rising authoritarianism.

My column, previously titled “Hiding in Plain Sight,” is now “Authoritarian Watch.” Each week, I will chronicle Trump’s push to reshape the United States as an autocracy. I will be talking with, and writing about, scholars, activists, legal theorists, politicians, elections officials, and others who are charting—and in many cases resisting—the Trumpian assault on democracy.

By looking at how the actions of the Trump administration fit into a pattern of authoritarian governance developed by governments around the world and across the decades of modern history, my aim is to empower readers to think big picture about what this moment means and how to best resist the slide to autocracy.

Trump, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, JD Vance, Elon Musk, and the other horsemen of the authoritarian apocalypse like to paint their political triumph as inevitable. Yet there is nothing God-given in this trajectory. Poll after poll has shown that most Americans oppose the key elements of their agenda. If Trumpism wins, it will not be because of its enduring popularity; it will be because the opposition remains fragmented. If, by contrast, Trumpism as a project is ultimately consigned to the trash can of history, it will be because in 2026 that opposition found its sea legs and successfully pushed back against the new authoritarians. My hope is that “Authoritarian Watch” will help shape this conversation.

When a regime embraces the cult of the strongman and the notion that illegality is not illegal so long as the strongman orders it, it is to that leader that all loyalties must be attached. In such a regime, all politics is personal, and the public good is inevitably sacrificed to the private profit of a political and economic elite. When this happens, the government becomes little more than a mafia state, a place where all concepts of the public good are shredded and where the might of the state is channeled for the private benefit of its leaders. In 2025, that is what we witnessed in the United States.

Current Issue, January 2026 Issue

It is difficult to think of another year in US history so thoroughly besmirched by a sitting president and his henchmen as 2025. In the first year of his second presidency, Trump has governed like a mob boss—ordering his underlings to carry out one illegal or immoral act after another, ensnaring them in a web of actions ranging from the venal to the war criminal that ensures him their loyalty. Trump demands that his ring be kissed and shows his followers the consequences should they eventually refuse to kiss it.

By wielding the presidential pardon, Trump can keep his cronies out of prison and in the halls of power—but he will only do so long as they swear fealty to him. Through his willingness to use the full force of the government—its regulatory agencies, its Justice Department, its security apparatus, its powers of taxation, tariff-imposition, and auditing—against his enemies, Trump has demonstrated the vast costs that people and institutions who are seen to cross him can be made to pay. And in this environment where the honorable people have long since headed for the exits, those who remain in Trump’s circle are the dregs—the opportunistic, the feckless, the most willing to put morality to one side.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, for example, has soldered his fortune to Trump’s by ordering—and publicly glorying in—the assassination of civilians. In embracing the sadism of indiscriminate ICE raids as well as the illegal deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to the supermax CECOT prison in El Salvador, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has similarly tied her future to that of Trump. Attorney General Pam Bondi has also sacrificed her integrity on the altar of the MAGA leader by turning the Justice Department into both a vengeance machine for the president and a protection agency, using its discretion to steer investigations away from Trump—including by censoring the Epstein files. Tom Homan, the scandal-plagued border czar who reputedly accepted a bag full of cash in a sting operation shortly before the 2024 election, knows that the moment he crosses Trump he becomes vulnerable to prosecution. RFK Jr. has so thoroughly demolished large parts of the country’s public health infrastructure that, were it not for Trump’s patronage, he’d have been run out of town months ago. And the list goes on. At every level, Trump has coopted government officials, military leaders, cabinet secretaries, and intelligence analysts to his sordid and vicious agenda.

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For the past year, I have documented this ugly moment. Throughout these long months, Trump has repeatedly sought to punish political rivals. He’s demanded that the DOJ conjure up absurd criminal charges against individuals and has financially penalized cities and states whose leaders don’t do his bidding. He has ritualized humiliation as a modus operandi in his wars against immigrants, transgender Americans, proponents of diversity, academic and legal organizations deemed not sufficiently MAGA, scientists seeking to raise the alarm around climate change, public health officials, and labor organizers.

In 2025, Trump busted through a range of anti-corruption barriers, enacted by Congress over the past century to protect the republic from leaders interested in wielding vast political power to secure equally vast private wealth. He stopped enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and started to solicit “gifts” such as Qatar’s donation of a luxury jet to serve as the next Air Force One and arrange pay-to-play dinners at which investors in Trump meme coins gain private access to the Trumps. It should be no surprise that allegations are now doing the rounds that donors can reputedly pay six-figure sums to lobbyists close to Trump, favored organizations, and Trump-affiliated political action committees to start the ball rolling on individual presidential pardons.

Trump’s actions, against which his cabinet and the GOP leadership in Congress have pushed back not a whit, have made previous episodes—such as the 1920s Teapot Dome Scandal—in which presidents and their cabinet secretaries have traded political favors and protection for cash, look like nickel-and-dime operations.

It’s tempting to think of the Trump’s second term as simply an endless firehose of crude statements, brutal actions, corrupt practices, denigrations of other democracies that have historically been America’s close allies, and endorsements of the wackiest conspiracy theories circulating on the Internet. At times it can come off as little more than a malignant form of chaos.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: How to Save a Democracy | The Nation

2025 in review: doing my small part to document an experiment in national self-harm

I had thought that 2017’s introduction to President Trump’s chaos, corruption and cruelty would be an adequate preparation for the 2025 sequel that American voters ordered up in a vote that I may never be able to understand fully. I was wrong.

That foolish choice has given us “this moral slum of an administration,” to quote noted liberal squish George F. Will: fascism-curious contempt for Constitutional limits on presidential power, trampled human rights at home and abroad for the sake of a racist and isolationist agenda, a pointless ransacking of useful government agencies that among other costs has probably left hundreds of thousands of people dead overseas, economically and scientifically ignorant policies like up-and-down tariffs and ordering obsolete coal power plants to stay online while trying to strangle offshore wind power, the most openly corrupt White House in history, and a cringe-inducing cult of personality that invites comparisons to North Korea.

I also did not expect so many Republicans to hold their political manhood cheap and sign off on even the stupidest ideas of their Dear Leader, which is how we now have a Confederacy-whitewashing, war-crime cheerleader lording over the Department of Defense and a science-denying quack hijacking the Department of Health and Human Services.

Nor did I predict that we would see so many tech CEOs not only nod politely but grovel for favor before this administration.

(To judge from the beatings that Republican candidates have received in elections this year–in particular, in the state of my birth and in the state of my choice–many Trump voters also didn’t expect this state of affairs and can no longer endorse it.)

My own lot this year seems strikingly easy: I haven’t had to learn what tear gas smells or tastes like, had my job DOGEd out of existence, or seen friends or family members thrown into a foreign gulag. Nor have I had a single client ask me to go easy on this administration in a story or edit my copy to ensure that I would.

I have had the usual struggles of freelancing, both in the sense of managing my time and in terms of managing my client relationships (I did much better at selling to Fast Company but once again dropped the ball with AARP). But I learned a lot, found purpose in sharing what I learned even when it was bad news, and had some fun along the way–including rides on such interesting modes of transportation as a Zoox robotaxi, Arc and Candela battery-electric sport boats, and the USPS’s duckface Next Generation Delivery Vehicle.

Out of the hundreds of stories I wrote this year, these 10 stand out to me as I look back at my own 2025.

• In February, I returned to a topic that I’ve been covering since 2018 in a post for PCMag documenting 8K TV’s embarrassing lack of appeal to consumers who smartly value price above resolution specifications.
• After years of meaning to tee off on Venmo’s horrible privacy settings, I finally wrote that piece in April for Fast Company–in the process, learning that even privacy professionals can miss some of that payments app’s data-leaking defaults.
• In June, I made my first appearance in the Virginia Mercury to write about Richmond’s overdue recognition that ceding online tax prep to Intuit and its ilk in 2010 was a dismal failure. It feels great when you see a gap in news coverage of where you live, then fill it yourself.
• In a July post for PCMag, I broke down how the GOP’s fossil-fuel fetishists were killing off the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for clean-energy purchases–and how many states still had not put in place their own mechanisms to claim some of these expiring incentives.
• I wrote a great many posts about Trump announcements, and each time I tried to provide useful context to help readers judge them independently. Among all those, I particularly like the unpacking of Trump’s “AI Action Plan” that I did in a post later in July for PCMag.
• Sitting down to talk to some managers of the Black Hat cybersecurity conference’s network for PCMag yielded a small lesson about the need for a little empathy in information security.
• In September, I returned to Berlin’s Stasi Museum for the first time since my 2018 introduction to it and had to point out to PCMag readers how I now saw uncomfortable parallels with certain aspects of American politics today.
• Reporting a story for Worth magazine published online in September about the energy use of AI data centers opened my eyes to how certain AI providers don’t want to talk about where they get the electricity for these sprawling facilities or how they plan to avoid stiffing existing ratepayers in the process.
• I spent more time than I expected finding people willing to talk about how the Trump administration’s indifferent and sometimes inept approach to cybersecurity is weakening the nation’s defenses, but that piece finally ran in Fast Company in October.
• Also in October, Fast Co. ran my longest story there yet about how Amtrak’s NextGen Acela remains stuck on previous-generation infrastructure–and how high-speed rail projects throughout the U.S. have been held back by an unwillingness to steal the best practices of other countries.

AI figured in much of my coverage and played an even larger role in my side hustle of moderating panels at conferences. That technology may be eating away at the underpinnings of my industry, but in the short term it has been a boost to my traveling on other people’s money.

This year, those trips and the ones I bankrolled myself introduced me to four new airports and one country, also taking me farther east from home than I’d ever traveled before. I liked seeing new places, making new connections there, and running into old friends along the way, but as ever I especially liked coming home after each of these often-tiring adventures.

(You can see a map of those flights after the jump; just looking at that may make you feel tired.)

I created the map below at the Great Circle Mapper site, following the instructions Tiffany Funk first shared in 2016 at the One Mile At A Time blog. The predominant shade of blue represents flights on United Airlines and codeshare and same-itinerary flights on Azul, GOL and Lufthansa; other colors, some of which may be difficult to differentiate, represent Alaska Airlines and Lufthansa (other hues of blue); American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Swiss International Air Lines, and Turkish Airlines (various shades of red); Qatar Airways (burgundy); and TAP Air Portugal (green).

#2025InReview #abuseOfPower #AI #businessDevelopment #businessTravel #conferences #freelance #freelancing #Trump #Trump20 #yearInReview

Trumpismo por escrito

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://arainfo.org/trumpismo-por-escrito/

Yet More of a Lapsed Catholic’s Bible Study

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/11/09/yet-more-of-a-lapsed-catholics-bible-study/