Yale University History Professor Timothy #Snyder joins# MSNBC’s Jonathan #Capehart to discuss why pro-#Putin propaganda is so prevalent in the #Republican Party.
.. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is intimately connected to a possible Chinese war of aggression against Taiwan. As Taiwanese leaders continually and urgently remind us, Ukrainian resistance deters Chinese aggression. ..
The Supreme Court Case Designed To Legalize Bribery
In the case of 🔸Snyder v United States,🔸 which the Supreme Court will hear on April 15th, James E. #Snyder is claiming that when a public official accepts a “#gift” from a person or corporation who has benefited from that public official’s actions, that should not be legally considered a #bribe.
Think of it instead as a “#tip,” like you’d leave for good service in a restaurant.🤔
Snyder is the former mayor of Portage, Indiana, who, federal prosecutors successfully argued in court, rigged a city bidding process for $1.125 million worth of new dump trucks to help out a friend who sold such trucks.
After the contract was awarded to his buddy, his friend’s company gave a “tip” to Snyder of $13,000.
Snyder is appealing his bribery conviction before the Supreme Court next month, and his main argument is that the federal #definition of #bribery must include an explicit advance agreement, a spoken or written #QuidProQuo, to exchange money or gifts for official actions.
And that all this explicit agreement stuff must happen #before the official acts are taken.
If five for all of the six Republicans on the Court agree with Snyder, it will end almost all federal bribery prosecutions of #corrupt elected officials and we’ll see an explosion of politicians anxious to fall all over themselves to “earn a tip” after they bow to their “friends” wishes.
(Katya Schwenk has written a great summary of the case and its implications for The Lever.)
💢 Snyder: “For most of this century, democracy has been in decline, and this decline has been accompanied by a discourse of passivity and a lack of resolve. Russia's attack on Ukraine -- the rare event of an armed autocracy seeking to destroy a peaceful democracy by military force -- was a turning point in this history. Which way we will all turn remains to be seen."
Must read summary of the #Ukraine situation. Links to more recomendations bellow.
#Snyder speaks to Americans. We the Europeans have our own role in the drama. We must support 🇺🇦 regardless of the development in the #US . We must ensure that 🇺🇦 wins a defeats 🇷🇺 with whatever support is needed from us.
We must start urgently talking about the dangers of a second Trump presidency
Do Americans really want to live in a fascist or authoritarian nation?
Some may believe it will work out just fine – that the loss of freedom may hurt others, but not them – but most of us don’t want that. Or we wouldn’t if we were fully aware of the consequences.
I talked with Sharlet about the actions that the mainstream press and regular citizens can take now that we know what we know.
👉Newsrooms big and small, he believes, need to 🔹educate their staffs about the dangers of fascism.🔹
“There needs to be a pause,” he said, in coverage as as usual, and an internal reckoning.
Sharlet suggests that media leaders bring in scholars – for example, Yale’s Timothy #Snyder, who wrote 🔸On Tyranny 🔸– to lead newsroom discussions, based on clear historical precedent. #Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of 🔸Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, 🔸would be another excellent choice.
After the New York Times wrote that Trump’s New Hampshire win “raises questions” about Nikki Haley’s path forward, Sharlet scoffed, noting that such questions have been settled for some time “but a press built for the horse race keeps touting a path that never existed when it should be retooling itself to cover a rapidly mutating fascism”.
Is such a retooling really possible?
Of course it is.
The fact that many newsrooms now have democracy teams or democracy reporters suggests that they understand the problem to some extent. But they need to get much more urgent about it.
That kind of change takes clear leadership from the top.
The New York Times – now more influential than ever, as other news organizations shrink and fade by the day – should set an example. Its top editor, Joseph #Kahn, with his background as a foreign correspondent in China, is extremely well positioned to take the lead.
As NYU professor Jay #Rosen so memorably put it, coverage must refocus: “Not the odds but the stakes.”
We do see “stakes” stories, of course, including on the Times front page, but it’s inarguable that horserace coverage still dominates.
What, exactly, we are racing toward is a question worth asking in every day’s politics coverage.
What about regular citizens?
Perhaps most importantly, they need to stop tuning out. They shouldn’t throw up their hands and decide not to care about politics or the future of the country.
“People need to pay attention to the exhaustion they feel and know that it is a symptom of acquiescence and adaptation,” Sharlet told me.
As Ben-Ghiat told me on my American Crisis podcast, that exhaustion is part of the strongman’s playbook.
Trump creates chaos, and we grow tired of it. Weary of the relentless flow of bad news, the dire warnings, the anxiety, we retreat into our personal lives or our political bubbles.
More advice from Sharlet for citizens: form a “boring book club” and read – for example – 😱Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation, 😱the shocking (and nearly 1,000-page) rightwing plan to dismantle the federal government and install political allies after a Trump election.
As the Associated Press wrote: “Trump-era conservatives want to gut the ‘administrative state’ from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.”
Neither politics reporters nor regular citizens need to become full-blown scholars of authoritarianism over the next nine months.
But failing to understand and act upon what’s at stake – either out of ennui or because “we’ve always done it that way” – is dangerous.
Best Joker in DCEU?
Is it LETOs joker in the Snyder Cut?...