“Americans seem to be awakening, if only slowly, to the magnitude and nature of the threat they face. President Donald Trump and his allies in power are trying to erect an authoritarian Mafia state like the one Vladimir Putin and his cronies established in Russia. The American opposition talks of ‘undermining democracy’ and ‘constitutional crisis’ — but for the most part, its legislators, activists, and political strategists are pursuing politics as usual. They shouldn’t be. If this sounds alarmist, forgive me for not caring. Exactly 20 years ago, I retired from professional chess to help Russia resist Putin’s budding dictatorship. People were slow to grasp what was happening there too: Putin’s bad, but surely he’ll stop short of — and you can fill in the blank with a dozen things he did to destroy Russia’s fragile democracy and civil society, many of which Trump is doing or attempting to do in America today.” (04/17/25)
“Vice President J.D. Vance is only the latest to indicate he sees due process, as guaranteed in the Constitution, as an unnecessary impediment to the administration’s goals.” (04/17/25)
“One of the authoritarian practices Donald Trump has brought to America is propaganda. Every government lies now and then, but authoritarian regimes go further. They don’t just stretch or hide the truth. They look you in the eye and tell you that what you just saw didn’t happen. This is what President Trump’s advisers did last week when he suspended his ‘reciprocal’ (actually not reciprocal) worldwide tariffs. They reversed their previous statements, invented a new story, and pretended that the president’s plan had never changed. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. The tariff turnabout illustrates what sort of people now populate the upper reaches of the U.S. government. They’re the sort of people you’d find in a regime like North Korea’s, willing to say whatever the great leader wants them to say that day.” (04/17/25)
“Despite branding himself a political outsider, President Donald Trump’s foreign policy reflects a deep continuity with the bipartisan consensus that has defined U.S. interventionism since the Cold War. … The continuity of the American imperium — from Bush to Obama to Trump — makes clear that elections change personalities, not policies. A genuine break from endless war and global overreach requires more than a new president; it demands a total upheaval of the current ruling class.” (04/17/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“With his nationwide immigration crackdown, President Trump is unwittingly providing a tremendous service to the libertarian movement. He is demonstrating perfectly a point that I have been making for the past 35 years here at The Future of Freedom Foundation: that America’s system of immigration controls is incompatible with libertarianism.” (04/17/25)
“Let’s cut to the chase. Most of Donald Trump’s threats against Ivy League colleges are an attempt to divert attention away from an economy heading into crisis. The trade war is producing economic and foreign policy nightmares. Despite the DOGE show, budget deficits are projected to rise further under Republican rule. The stock market is traumatized. Investors are starting to bail out of U.S. Treasury debt. Recession and possibly stagflation are both forecast. Even Trump’s beloved oil drillers are suffering. The stock of the fracking company once run by Energy Secretary Chris Wright has fallen 43% this year. The U.S. already had ‘energy dominance’ under Joe Biden. Now it faces oversupply. And so Trump has chosen a target associated with the elitism that his MAGA base has come to resent. Better that MAGA fume over those Ivy leftists than plans to cut the Medicaid that so much of the base relies on.” (04/17/25)
Source: Racket News
by Greg Collard & James Rushmore
“The protests and lawsuits that led to Trump’s demands, and Harvard’s refusal to accept them as the IRS considers whether to end the school’s tax-exempt status.” (04/17/25)
“Since his ascension to the throne for the second time, I have been trying to understand Donald Trump and what makes him tick. I was never a fan before but with his ignorance about tariffs and his veiled threats on Canadian sovereignty, I took greater notice than I did during his first term. And there is a palpable difference in tenor and approach. The first time around he was a neophyte, still feeling his way around the halls of power. He sought advice. He took counsel. He was still a bombastic narcissist, but moderately under control. And those surrounding him were, to some extent, independent thinkers, conscientious thinkers, not afraid to hold the occasional contrary opinion. … Trump 2.0 is a different animal.” (04/17/25)
“Recently, in an executive order, President Trump directed the removal of ‘improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology’ from the Smithsonian Institution. That order was, in essence, an attempt to rewrite history on race and gender. One-hundred-and-one-year-old Colonel James H. Harvey, one of the last of the famed Tuskegee airmen of World War II, blamed Trump, saying, ‘I’ll tell him to his face. No problem. I’ll tell him, you’re a racist.’ In addition, government websites began scrubbing African-American history, including in the case of the National Park Service eliminating a photo of the famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman and descriptions of the brutal realities of slavery. Black people in America have often led change in this society because our humanity and our liberties were so long suppressed and denied. Black people in my family and community were, of course, descendants of the enslaved.” (04/17/25)
