Source: Paul Krugman
by Paul Krugman

“On Monday I wrote about Donald Trump’s disastrous press conference touting the economy along with Stephen Moore, a former chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. As I noted, Moore is a dishonest partisan hack, which is only to be expected, but also bizarrely incompetent, incapable of ever getting his facts right. To explain the phenomenon, I invoked Hannah Arendt: ‘Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.’ Let me call this Arendt’s Law: Totalitarian and wannabe totalitarian regimes only hire incompetent hacks.” (08/13/25)

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/hackification

Source: The Bulwark
by Adrian Carrasquillo

“Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced an end to age restrictions for employment at ICE. ‘Qualified candidates can now apply with no age limit,’ she said. Before the change, applicants to ICE had to be at least 21 years old, and no older than 37 or 40, depending on the position they were applying for, according to the Associated Press. They can now be as young as 18 or as old as Methuselah. In making this change, Noem invited the possibility of allowing into the ranks people not just of [Dean] Cain’s relatively advanced age — at 59, he’s two decades outside the former upper age limit for applicants — but also gun-toting, masked teenagers with minimal training and experience. The possibility of these people swarming restaurants, shops, factories, churches, and homes looking for immigrants, all with the imprimatur — not to mention the qualified immunity — of federal law enforcement, has never been so real.” (08/13/25)

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/prepare-yourself-for-the-18-year-old-vigilante-ice-agent

Source: TomDispatch
by William deBuys

“The totalitarian ]sic] playbook that Donald Trump seems to follow lacks a chapter. Power-crazed the president may be, but he fails to grasp soft power. Wise military and diplomatic minds understand it well. George C. Marshall, the nation’s top general through World War II and later secretary of state and secretary of defense, lent his name and his energies to the greatest exercise of soft power in American history, the Marshall Plan. … More than six decades later, Jim Mattis, a retired four-star Marine Corps general who served as secretary of defense in the first Trump administration (when experience and professionalism were sometimes entertained in the Oval Office), championed soft power as Marshall had done.” (08/14/25)

https://tomdispatch.com/america-first-is-america-alone/

Source: In These Times
by Yousef Aljamal

“On August 6, at around 3:00 a.m., an Israeli airstrike hit the apartment where my sister Somaiya, 35, her husband Anas, 35, and their daughters Noor, 14, Hoor, 13, and Sham, 9, were staying. The airstrike killed my sister’s family except for Noor, who survived with an arm fracture that required surgery. When Noor was admitted to the hospital on August 8 and rushed to the operating room, she called out to her parents, who were gone forever. Although Noor knew they had been killed in the airstrike, she could not help but call out to them, like a child needing her parents by her side during surgery. Noor is now the only survivor of her family, recalling memories with her parents and siblings, all of whom were killed by Israel. I had read about the term ‘wounded child, no surviving family’ (WCNSF), which was introduced in Gaza, but I never thought that my own family would experience it.” (08/13/25)

https://inthesetimes.com/article/on-grief-and-surviving-alone-in-gaza

Source: Liberal Currents
by Hunter CG

“The First American Republic is dead. We currently are in the Magafascist Period, a new system that is still solidifying, but a period that is just one aspect of a much wider Renaissance of Global Fascism. Yet we must not live in despair, as there are clever and brave souls in equal measure still innovating and trying to prefigure the future of democratic politics within and beyond the bounds of magafascism. So let me walk you through the still growing and solidifying concept of Civic Campaigning Politics in 2025 America and abroad. What is Civic Campaigning Politics? CCP is a method of electoral and non-electoral progressive political action that combines direct mutual aid, direct and decentralized communication, centralized and highly data driven mass volunteer electioneering, and the unifying of political and cultural political spheres.” [editor’s note: The “First American Republic” died in 1787, and we’ve been through several other “American Republics” since – TLK] (08/13/25)

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/civic-campaigning-politics-a-muscular-mass-politics-for-our-time/