Author: Jon Ponder

In Shock Doctrine, her seminal work on the rise of authoritarnism in the contemporary world, Naomi Klein shows how fascists undermine democracies in order to replace them with authoritarian states by creating and exploiting economic chaos. In the disruptions that ensue, they seize power.

In advance of his inauguration next month, Trump is saying plainly that he is very intentionally bringing economic chaos on day one. As Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do.”

Salon.com: Donald Trump, who won in part due to inflation that peaked two years ago, campaigned on a policy of making everything from vegetables to televisions more expensive, suggesting a plurality of voters either did not understand tariffs — and the rippling economic impact of raising taxes on imported goods — or simply did not believe the Republican candidate would follow through.

In a Monday evening post on Truth Social, the president-elect reaffirmed that yeah, he’s serious.

[…]

After months, even years, of sane-washing Donald Trump, the New York Times reported on Saturday that Donald Trump has been delivering “rambling” and “fantastical” speeches at campaign rallies this year. But with just a month to go before the 2024 general election when many Americans are voting early, it is may be too little and too late to make a difference.

New York Times: New York Times (Paywall): “He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own ‘beautiful’ body. He relishes ‘a great day in Louisiana’ after spending the day in Georgia.”

“He expresses fear that North Korea is ‘trying to kill me’ when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.”

In a follow-up to her disastrous response to Pres. Biden’s barnburner 2024 State of the Union speech, Sen. Katie Britt (MAGA-AL) has introduced a bill that would use federal resources both to discourage abortion and to create a database of pregnant people.

The More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed Act (MOMS Act) provides online pregnancy resources through a new website, pregnancy.gov, but it also funds anti-abortion organizations and offers no resources on abortion.

Users of pregnancy.com can opt to have their contact information compiled into a federal pregnancy database. The government may use the data to “conduct outreach via phone or email” to share “additional resources that would be helpful.”

But critics fear that the government database may be used to discouraged abortion. Troy Matthews at Meidas Touch News suggested that, “It’s very likely the government staffer that follows up with the website users will also be tasked with pressuring them out of seeking proper healthcare if it involves an abortion.”

Britt was famously caught lying during her MAGA State of the Union rebuttal. She claimed she met with a woman who was sex trafficked in the United States as a result of Biden administration policies. In fact, the woman was trafficked in Mexico City decades before Biden became president.

The tabloid-ready headlines about the worm that ate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain have overshadowed it, but revelations about Kennedy’s medical history also revealed several other potentially debilitating health issues. The revelations were published by the New York Times this week in an article that was reprinted by Yahoo.com.

Testifying in a deposition in 2012, Kennedy, then 58, said he was experiencing symptoms of a brain tumor, especially memory loss and severe mental fogginess. The symptoms were especially concerning because his uncle, Sen. Edward Kennedy, died from brain cancer in 2009.

Scans showed a small mass in the Kennedy Jr.’s brain, and he was scheduled for surgery. A last-minute second opinion revised the diagnosis as a parasitic infection, likely from a pork tapeworm larva. As Kennedy put it back then, he was infected by “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”

Other health concerns
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Polls consistently find that around 15 to 20 percent of voters say they’ll vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president. Today, five months out from Election Day, Kennedy’s support remains a proverbial jump ball in the campaign. At first, Kennedy attracted support from Democrats. But now there is evidence that he is pulling support from both parties, with some polls showing his support coming increasingly from Donald Trump.

Writing in the Washington Post, Aaron Blake says that a recent Monmouth University poll “gets at why the Kennedy effect might shift in Biden’s favor.”

Blake writes that when voters are informed about Kennedy’s crackpot theories on vaccination and public health, “Republicans say they become more open to supporting Kennedy, while Democrats sour on him.”

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From Jon Favreau’s series, “Offline,” Rachel Maddow talks about her new podcast series “Ultra” and describes how she learned about the serious, nationwide campaign by pro-Nazi Christian Nationalists to overthrow the U.S. government in the run-up to World War II.

Listen to “Ultra”: https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-presents-ultra