Donald Trump poses a threat to civilization; The Guardian, January 6, 2025

  Robert Reich, The Guardian; Donald Trump poses a threat to civilization

"Trump’s domestic and foreign policies – ranging from his attempted coup against the United States five years ago, to his incursion into Venezuela last weekend, to his current threats against Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland – undermine domestic and international law. But that’s not all.

They threaten what we mean by civilization.

The moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.

This principle lies at the center of America’s founding documents – the Declaration of Independence, the constitution and the Bill of Rights. It’s also the core of the postwar international order championed by the United States, including the UN charter – emphasizing multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law...

A direct line connects Trump’s attempted coup five years ago to his capture of Nicolás Maduro last weekend. Both were lawless. Both were premised on the hubris of omnipotence.

That same line connects to Trump’s current threats against Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland.

You see much the same in Putin’s war on Ukraine. In Xi’s threats against Taiwan. In global depredation and monopolization by big tech and big oil. In Russian, Chinese, and American oligarchs who have fused public power with their personal wealth.

But unfettered might does not make right. It makes for instability, upheaval, and war.

History shows that laws and norms designed to constrain the powerful also protect them. Without such constraints, their insatiable demands for more power and wealth eventually bring them down – along with their corporations, nations, or empires. And threaten world war.

Trump’s blatant lawlessness will haunt America and the world – and civilization – for years to come."

The Idea That Once Held America Together Died in 2025; The New York Times, December 24, 2025

 John Fabian Witt , The New York Times; The Idea That Once Held America Together Died in 2025

"In a year when the United States seemed more split than ever, Americans united in one way: We demanded results, and we wanted them now. From ICE raids designed as a theater of terror and GLP-1 shortcuts for weight loss to A.I.-generated term papers, rampaging DOGE bros and summary Alien Enemies Act deportations, America raged against the journey and clamored for the destination, no matter what the lawyers and the chatbot therapists said. Outcomes seemed to be all that mattered. Winners win. Losers follow rules and talk it over.

The pattern was most conspicuous in a Washington that swept aside norms, starting with President Trump’s Inauguration Day assembly of billionaires and followed by a Project 2025-led smashing of the traditional rituals of administration. Regular order in Congress gave way to a federal shutdown, ad hoc continuing resolutions and forced votes on bills like the Epstein Files Transparency Act. With impoundments, the White House upended the Constitution’s carefully choreographed system for enacting spending bills. “Detain first, think later” became the angry spirit of immigration enforcement, even as the “Department of War” (renamed without the required congressional process) launched “kinetic strikes” that summarily executed dozens of people accused of being drug couriers."

Artificial Intelligence, Copyright, and the Fight for User Rights: 2025 in Review; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), December 25, 2025

 TORI NOBLE, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); Artificial Intelligence, Copyright, and the Fight for User Rights: 2025 in Review

"A tidal wave of copyright lawsuits against AI developers threatens beneficial uses of AI, like creative expression, legal research, and scientific advancement. How courts decide these cases will profoundly shape the future of this technology, including its capabilities, its costs, and whether its evolution will be shaped by the democratizing forces of the open market or the whims of an oligopoly. As these cases finished their trials and moved to appeals courts in 2025, EFF intervened to defend fair use, promote competition, and protect everyone’s rights to build and benefit from this technology.

At the same time, rightsholders stepped up their efforts to control fair uses through everything from state AI laws to technical standards that influence how the web functions. In 2025, EFF fought policies that threaten the open web in the California State Legislature, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and beyond."

ESSAY: Billionaire do-gooding is out. Naked oligarchy is in; The Ink, July 2, 2025

 ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, The Ink; ESSAY: Billionaire do-gooding is out. Naked oligarchy is in

 "No one was ever going to announce that the era of performative elite do-gooding had ceded to the era of naked oligarchy. But this week three events made that eclipse clear.

The first was the multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos’s wedding, in Venice, to Lauren Sánchez, who would surely float if she fell into a canal. As celebrities poured into a city already strained by tourism, and the happy couple was photographed frolicking in a literal foam party aboard a yacht, there was an almost refreshing, well, nakedness to the avarice, to the carelessness, to the not-giving of civic fucks. There was a reminder of the omnipotence and the utter loneliness at the commanding heights: you can get anyone you want to your wedding, and the people you want are the people you’d invite if you told your assistant to run to the dentist’s office, pick up People magazine, write down names in it, and invite them. These are people who have everything, and who don’t have the thing everybody else does.

The second was the inevitable announcement by multi-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable foundation, run with his wife, Priscilla Chan, that it is no longer focused on ending all the diseases, as it once promised. Rather, in the Trump era, it is focused on things that would not be any trouble to Trump. “Can we cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime?” read a screen behind the couple at a rehearsal in 2016. The answer turns out to be: No. The Washington Post, owned by the oligarch in the above item, nonetheless rightly warned, in the Zuckerberg-Chan case, of “the risks for communities reliant on wealthy private donors.”

The third event was the passage today of Donald Trump’s and the Republicans’ budget, a document of searing meanness that former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls the “Worst Bill in History” — a “giant budget-busting, Medicaid-shattering, shafting-the-poor-and-working-class, making-the-rich-even richer bill.” Like the Bezos wedding and the Zuckerberg-Chan pivot, the bill had one refreshing quality, though. It made zero effort to mask its ugliness. It said the cruel part out loud.

There is a nakedness to our oligarchy now, and it is pruny as hell. But at least there is this: As far as I can tell, the era of highly performative elite do-gooding is passing."

Post owner Bezos announces shift in opinions section; Shipley to leave; The Washington Post, February 26, 2025

 Washington Post staff , The Washington Post; Post owner Bezos announces shift in opinions section; Shipley to leave

"What readers are saying

The comments express strong disapproval of The Washington Post's new focus on "personal liberties and free markets" in its opinion section. Many readers perceive this shift as a move towards right-wing ideology and a departure from the paper's tradition of diverse and critical opinion pieces. There is a widespread sentiment that this change undermines journalistic integrity and stifles free speech, leading numerous subscribers to cancel their subscriptions in protest. Show less

This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments."

Timothy Snyder; The Logic of Destruction: And how to resist it, February 2, 2025

TIMOTHY SNYDER; The Logic of Destruction: And how to resist it

"What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.

The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate. 

For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.

The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.

All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow...

The best people in American federal law enforcement, national security, and national intelligence are being fired. The reasons given for this are DEI and trumpwashing the past. Of course, if you fire everyone who was concerned in some way with the investigations of January 6th or of Russia, that will be much or even most of the FBI. Those are bad reasons, but the reality is worse: the aim is lawlessness: to get the police and the patriots out of the way.

In the logic of destruction, there is no need to rebuild afterwards. In this chaos, the oligarchs will tell us that there is no choice but to have a strong man in charge. It can be a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras, or a conniving Vance who, unlike Trump, has always known the plot. Or someone else...

Almost everything that has happened during this attempted takeover is illegal. Lawsuits can be filed and courts can order that executive orders be halted. This is crucial work.

Much of what is happening, though, involves private individuals whose names are not even known, and who have no legal authority, wandering through government offices and issuing orders beyond even the questionable authority of executive orders. Their idea is that they will be immunized by their boldness. This must be proven wrong.

Some of this will reach the Supreme Court quickly. I am under no illusion that the majority of justices care about the rule of law. They know, however, that our belief in it makes their office something other than the undignified handmaiden of oligarchy. If they legalize the coup, they are irrelevant forever.

Individual Democrats in the Senate and House have legal and institutional tools to slow down the attempted oligarchical takeover. There should also be legislation. It might take a moment, but even Republican leaders might recognize that the Senate and House will no longer matter in a post-American oligarchy without citizens."

Biden bids farewell with dark warning for America: the oligarchs are coming; The Guardian, January 15, 2025

 David Smith in Washington , The Guardian; Biden bids farewell with dark warning for America: the oligarchs are coming

"The primetime speech did not mention Donald Trump by name. Instead it will be remembered for its dark, ominous warning about something wider and deeper of which Trump is a symptom.

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said.

The word “oligarchy” comes from the Greek words meaning rule (arche) by the few (oligos). Some have argued that the dominant political divide in America is no longer between left and right, but between democracy and oligarchy, as power becomes concentrated in the hands of a few. The wealthiest 1% of Americans now has more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.

The trend did not start with Trump but he is set to accelerate it. The self-styled working-class hero has picked the richest cabinet in history, including 13 billionaires, surrounding himself with the very elite he claims to oppose. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has become a key adviser. Tech titans Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – collectively worth a trillion dollars – will be sitting at his inauguration on Monday.

Invoking former president Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address in January 1961 that warned against the rise of a military-industrial complex, Biden said: “Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech industrial complex. It could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power.”

In an acknowledgement of news deserts and layoffs at venerable institutions such as the Washington Post, Biden added starkly: “The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking. Truth is smothered by lies, told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable, to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”

Zuckerberg’s recent decision to abandon factcheckers on Facebook, and Musk’s weaponisation of X in favour of far-right movements including Maga, was surely uppermost in Biden’s mind. Trust in the old media is breaking down as people turn to a fragmented new ecosystem. It has all happened with disorienting speed."

Jeff Bezos to marry fiancée Lauren Sanchez in lavish $600M Aspen wedding next weekend: report; New York Post, December 21, 2024

Anna Young, New York Post; Jeff Bezos to marry fiancée Lauren Sanchez in lavish $600M Aspen wedding next weekend: report

[Kip Currier: Think about how spiritually and ethically bankrupt -- how intellectually vacuous -- a person is who would choose to spend more than half a billion dollars on a wedding, amidst rampant suffering and vital needs in this world.

Imagine what even a fraction of that money could do to help people and this planet.] 

[Excerpt]

"A new report says billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will marry his fiancée Lauren Sanchez next  Saturday in an extravagant $600 million wedding in Aspen, Colorado."