Gonna go make me some food, pack me a vase full of happy trees, and then Ahsokatime 😂

I’ve seen a few people asking why Thrawn would attack the New Republic – shouldn’t he join them and fix the system from the inside, or just go back to the Ascendancy? Why would he destabilize the galaxy further?

But if you think about it

Really, the only reason Thrawn needs is to believe that the New Republic is a threat to the galaxy. Which, well...

Thrawn joined the Empire to oppose the Grysk, because Thrawn believes in a strong military. Thrawn’s not good at politics, and deals with everything in military terms – remember the Lioaoin's economic issues? That’s why he got along with the Empire, and why he put up with all their crap. In Thrawn’s head, big military = big victory = stop bad guys = good.

Enter the New Republic.

What are they doing? Disarming. While there are still pirates, the Hutts, Imperial Remnants, and, of course, the Grysk nipping at their heels. In the midst of a tumultuous time, they are deliberately weakening their ability to meet the challenges ahead, and opening the galaxy to invasion. Says Thrawn.

It doesn’t even matter if they’re Grysk influenced or just stupid – it’s the same result. The galaxy loses. His people lose. Says Thrawn.

What do you expect him to do? Join them? Of course not – he at least knows he’s terrible at politics. And the New Republic is all politics – it would put him at a disadvantage, in a fight he cannot afford to lose. And it would open him to attacks on fronts where he has no power: trials for war crimes, possibly leading to execution – or worse. The Mind Flayer.

You think Thrawn would risk his mind?

Besides, better to ask forgiveness than permission, as they say.

And if you want something done right, do it yourself.

Conquering the New Republic would be better for everyone, Thrawn says. It would save the galaxy from annihilation, allow him to turn the resources of the Empire against evil, bring peace and order to the galaxy and beyond. He would keep all the good of the Empire, Thrawn says, while getting rid of all of the bad, Thrawn says – whatever that means to him.

For the greater good, Thrawn says.

Everything he’s done has always been for the greater good, Thrawn says.

The tragedy is that he believes it.

New details have emerged of plans by Trump allies to dismantle democracy under a second Trump administration by packing the Department of Justice with Trump loyalists and shrinking the independent scope of the FBI. The plans, as detailed by Reuters, seek to craft a DOJ to advance conservative agendas, heavily curtail civil liberties, and impede investigations into corruption by Trump and his allies.

The plans laid out by Trump allies to convert the FBI into a politically charged conservative attack dog come from the authoritarian aspirations of Project 2025, a sprawling network led by conservative think tanks that comb through existing law to find loopholes and precedent for Trump—or any conservative president—to enact extreme right-wing policies and consolidate power at a moment’s notice.

Trump allies plan to nuke consent decrees, a sort of contractual oversight agreement between the Department of Justice and local police departments, to curb civil rights abuses. They also want to downgrade the FBI’s access to the attorney general, instead making the FBI head report to two politically installed assistant attorneys general.

Steve Bradbury, who served as transportation secretary under Trump and who spoke with Reuters about these plans, claimed in backward fashion that the DOJ acting independently from the president’s wishes poses a “recipe for abuse of power.”

“Whenever you have power centers ... that have enormous resources, coercive power and investigative tools at their disposal, and they are presumed to be independent of any control down the chain of command from the president, that is a recipe for abuse of power,” Bradbury told Reuters.

Conservatives have long called to dismantle the FBI following investigations into Russian collusion with Trump’s 2016 campaign and indictments by the DOJ of participants in the January 6 Capitol riot. Trump allies want to reduce the scope of the FBI’s investigative authority, leaving the department to focus solely on “large-scale crimes and threats to national security,” from which insurrection and sedition by conservatives are, naturally, excluded. A January report by the National Institute of Justice found far-right extremism has continued to outpace all other forms of domestic terrorism since 1990.

Plans to dramatically alter the DOJ to act as an extension of conservative ambitions rather than an independent agency follow a similar pattern to Trump’s overhaul of the Supreme Court and packing conservative judges throughout the federal circuit as president—changes that led to the overturning of Roe after Trump left office and a continuation of attacks on LGBTQ+ freedoms and civil rights today. If reelected, Trump’s allies would replicate that process at the Department of Justice.

While the media has been happy to parade around the notion that there's an "epidemic of shoplifting" plaguing retail stores, a premise that has been demonstrated to be factually incorrect and exaggerated, they have basically ignored widespread wage theft by those very same retail companies (take, for instance, Bob Nardelli, the former chief executive for Home Depot, screaming about "organized gangs" of shoplifters while on tv while Home Depot settles a class action lawsuit over wage theft to the tune of 72.5 million dollars and McDonalds pays out 26 million dollars for the same. These are just two notable examples, the latter from 2019.) How "crime" is framed and discussed matters for a host of reasons I'm not in the mood to expand on here at the moment but I will say that corporate theft is a topic that I rarely hear addressed in any detailed and sustained form by most media outlets. A quick addendum: back in 2018, a ruling from the Supreme Court in 'Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis', made class action lawsuits against employers harder by weakening workplace protections for employees. I'm being lazy here in my presentation so I suggest you do a more rigorous accounting of this subject on your own.

As The New Republic reports, “Alito is complaining that people who oppose homosexuality were being unfairly branded as bigots, despite that being a dictionary definition of bigotry.” On Tuesday, agreeing the Court should not take a case, Alito wrote he is “concerned” that a lower court’s reasoning “may spread.” He notes that the lower court “reasoned that a person who still holds traditional religious views on questions of sexual morality is presumptively unfit to serve on a jury in a case involving a party who is a lesbian.” In that case, several jurors who acknowledged they held anti-LGBTQ views were released from serving on the trial. “That holding exemplifies the danger that I anticipated in 'Obergefell v. Hodges' … namely, that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.'” Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern writes, “Alito suggests that a trial court violates the free exercise and equal protection clauses when it allows an attorney who represents a gay client to strike potential jurors because they express overt bigotry against gay people.” [...] Attorney Max Kennerly posits, “If we followed Alito’s reasoning that religious beliefs can never serve as a basis to strike a juror, we’d instantly run into a collision with jurors who believe, on religious grounds, the death penalty is wrong. Any guesses how Alito would rule on that? Yeah, exactly.”

Why the condemnation of homosexual behavior by some (NOT all) religious conservatives might legitimately raise questions of bigotry

It seems to me that Alito is acting as if "traditional religious views" about homosexuality are uniform.

Alito doesn't seem to acknowledge (or perhaps is not fully aware) that there are some interpretations of scripture that do not support the condemnation of homosexual behavior or even of same-sex unions. In fact there are some mainstream Christian denominations that allow for blessings of same-sex couples (including recently the very "traditional" Roman Catholic Church). Furthermore, Reconstructionist, Reform and Conservative Jewish sects also allow the blessing of same-sex unions.

Given all of the above, one might reasonably wonder why some (not all) conservative Christians or Jews seem to prefer to accept anti-LGBTQ+ translations/ interpretations of scripture, when other translations/ interpretations that are more sympathetic to homosexual behavior are available.

Of course the primary group of religious people in the U.S. that condemns homosexual behavior consists of some (not all) right-wing "Christians" from various denominations. But one also might wonder why these same right-wing "Christians" DON'T seem to want to pass laws banning divorce, adultery, usury, lying, etc., but they DO want to pass anti-LGBTQ+ legislation? After all, behaviors like divorce, adultery, usury, and lying are clearly condemned in various parts of the Bible.

One might also ask, why do some of these same right-wing "Christians" who think it is okay to condemn the LGBTQ+ community, not also condemn a prominent politician like Trump, who has been divorced multiple times, committed adultery multiple times, and who lies almost every time he opens his mouth?

It is the picking and choosing of what to condemn, and the hyperfocus on using the law to allow those with certain "religious views" to deny the rights of the LGBTQ+ community (while not choosing to deny the rights of other kinds of so-called "sinners"--NOT that I support that either) that suggests it might be legitimate to question whether some on the religious right use religion as an excuse to hold bigoted beliefs about and/or to discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community.

[edited]

Shattered Glass (2003) dir. Billy Ray

Ruth Ben-Ghiat at The New Republic:

“Does fascism intend to restore state authority or subvert it? Is it order or disorder? Can you be conservatives and subversives at the same time?” Six months before the March on Rome in October 1922, when Benito Mussolini was the head of the Fascist Party and its decentralized militia movement, he isolated the contradictions at the heart of fascism that remain fundamental to authoritarianism today. During his 21 years in power, 18 of them as dictator, Il Duce framed fascism as a revolution of reaction against the left, against liberal democracy, and against any group that threatened the survival of white Christian civilization. Carrying out a violent destabilization of society in the name of a return to social order and national tradition, fascism pioneered the autocratic formula in use today of disenfranchising and repressing the many to allow the few to exploit the workforce, women’s bodies, the environment, and the economy.

Trumpism is in this tradition. It started in 2015 as a movement fueled by conservative alarm and white rural rage at a multiracial and progressive America. It continued as an authoritarian presidency envisioned as “a shock to the system” that unleashed waves of hate crimes against nonwhites and non-Christians. It culminated in the January 6 assault on the Capitol, which was a counterrevolutionary operation in the spirit of fascism. Its goal in deploying violence was not just to keep Donald Trump in office, but to prevent the representatives of social and racial progress from taking power.

PROJECT 2025 AS COUNTERREVOLUTION

The fascists believed that you have to destroy to create, and this is what a second Trump administration would do. Project 2025 is a plan for an authoritarian takeover of the United States that goes by a deceptively neutral name. It preserves Trumpism’s original radical intent in its goals to “[d]ismantle the administrative state” and “decentralize and privatize as much as possible,” allowing the American people to “live freely.” “[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,” Heritage Foundation head Kevin Roberts told The New York Times in January. “And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.” The solution to this “slow start”—code for the restraints imposed by operating in a democracy—is counterrevolution.

The plan promises the abolition of the Department of Education and other federal agencies. The intent here is to destroy the legal and governance cultures of liberal democracy and create new bureaucratic structures, staffed by new politically vetted cadres, to support autocratic rule. So new agencies could appear to manage parents’ and family rights, Christian affairs, and other pillars of the new order. The Department of Health and Human Services is poised to have a central role in governance, given the priorities Trumpism places on policing sexuality, weaponizing motherhood, persecuting transgender people and LGBTQ communities, and criminalizing abortion.

During Trump’s presidency, far-right Roman Catholic attorney Roger Severino headed the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services, transforming it into an office that prioritized the protection of the rights of white Christians and the “natural family.” During his tenure, the department banned the use of the words “fetus” and “transgender” in government communications and made other moves long embraced by evangelical Christians and their far-right allies in politics. In the future, this office could be elevated into an autonomous entity. Appropriating civil rights for white Christians furthers the Trumpist goal of delegitimizing the cause of racial equality while also making Christian nationalism a core value of domestic policy. Doing away with the separation of church and state is the goal of many architects of Trumpism, from Project 2025 contributor Russ Vought to far-right proselytizer Michael Flynn, who uses the idea of “spiritual war” as counterrevolutionary fuel.

Even if the Department of Education is abolished, some other entity would appear to take its place, since it is unlikely that the task of undoing liberal democratic models of pedagogy would be left entirely to individual states. Not everyone will be able to homeschool their children—the preferred extremist option, since it removes children from exposure to the multifaith and multiracial environments of public schools. It is not so far-fetched to imagine the special Bible Trump has been hawking, which includes the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance, as a required text in a Christian nationalist curriculum.

Mussolini kicked off his counterrevolutionary police state in the 1920s with new “public security” laws that justified the arrest of anyone deemed a security threat—meaning anyone who opposed fascism from a liberal democratic or leftist point of view. Trump’s assertion a century later that “people within our country” pose “the greatest threat” to the United States, and his desire to “root [them] out,” could translate into counterterror and counterinsurgency operations. These would require a recasting or expansion of existing federal and state security agencies—for example, if the National Guard is federalized or the promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants come into being.

[...]

Personalist leaders organize government institutions around their self-preservation. Their private interests and needs shape party politics, legislative action, and national policy, just as their relationships with foreign autocrats influence foreign affairs. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who served as the translator of Vladimir Putin’s views and desires in Europe for a decade, was able to personalize Italy’s foreign policy. He excluded Italian diplomats from meetings with Putin, allowing only his private translator-envoy, Valentino Valentini, to be present. An Italian parliamentary investigation later revealed that Berlusconi would have received a kickback from the profits of a planned Italy-and-Russia-built South Stream pipeline. Trump holds a similarly proprietary vision of governance, which is why classified national security documents ended up in the bathroom of his private residence in Florida. Like most autocrats, Trump sees holding public office as a means of personal enrichment. 

Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote in The New Republic as part of their American Fascism series about the right-wing fascist counterrevolution that is brewing in America, and if Trump wins again, America will be headed down the same path as Hungary, Russia, El Salvador, and Turkey.

See Also:

The New Republic: What American Fascism Would Look Like

i wanna witness the utter renaissance that must've happened after the war ended on chorus. i wanna know what everyone did now that they had the chance to, what music and literature people wrote and what art people made and who went back to school for what and what pop culture developed and what kind of cultural marvels came out of this rinky-dink little planet on the edge of nowhere that almost didn't make it. i wanna see these people thrive after such a long time of just surviving, they have so much potential and i want to see the people of chorus flourish (not even to mention the kind of pop culture frankenstein that must've been created even just after the two armies unified, that clash must've really been something!)

The MVP that is holding it all together. A true Reble. 🧡

Recently unsealed court documents suggest that prosecutors in Donald Trump’s classified documents case have even more damning evidence that he tried to obstruct the government’s attempts to retrieve the documents.

According to supporting documentation for a motion filed by Trump’s legal team, the government subpoena for Mar-a-Lago’s security footage seemingly led Trump to try to cover up the relocation of the classified documents. Trump was notified of the subpoena in a June 2022 call with one of his attorneys, which probably prompted Trump to tell staffers to evade security cameras when moving boxes thereafter—or so concluded the district judge who oversaw the grand jury in the case.

“The government has provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the June 24, 2022 phone call may have furthered the former president’s efforts to obstruct the government’s investigation,” Judge Beryl Howell wrote in 2023.

The damning detail is just one of many revelations that have come out of hundreds of pages of court documents that were unsealed Tuesday. Howell’s opinion also described how four more documents with classified markings were discovered on Trump’s property, stashed away in his bedroom, even months after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

Howell also found that prosecutors provided sufficient evidence that Trump had “intentionally concealed the existence of additional documents” in order to mislead the government and impede the FBI’s investigation.

Trump faces 42 felony charges in the case related to illegally retaining national security documents and conspiracy to obstruct justice. But the judge overseeing the case has been dragging her feet for months. Judge Aileen Cannon indefinitely delayed the trial earlier this month, purportedly over issues about how to handle classified evidence. Legal analysts worry that these delays could be the Trump-appointed judge’s way of surreptitiously dismissing the trial altogether.

People getting their panties in a bunch about the practices of the new republic in the most recent episode of The Mandalorian. I'm sorry, did you thing the republic was pure clean goodness? It may not be totalitarian but it's still GOVERNMENT. Show me the happiest, most functional country in the world and I'll show you the dirty seedy underside of how they keep it working

I don't endorse it but it's not SHOCKING