Knowledge is an instrument of power. The relations of power within a society, not truthfulness, determines which interpretations of the past prevail.”
Michel Foucault
It will take a generation of journalists, grad students and writers to flesh out the full extent of the criminality of the Trump administration and of the damage done to our institutions.
The failed January 6, 2021 coup by MAGA mobs and the right-wing revisionism that has followed have substantiated the fact that the Republican Party has been, and continues to be, the biggest internal threat to American democracy since the Civil War.
In a 2018 essay ”The Constitution of Knowledge,” Jonathan Rauch describes the information ecosystem in democracies that winnows out nonsense. “We let alt-truth talk but we don’t let it write textbooks, receive tenure, bypass peer review…or dominate the front pages.”
That has changed.
Standard definitions and standards of proof have been scrapped. A growing segment of the public—driven by passion and immune to evidence and rational discourse—has created a post-Enlightenment wasteland in which anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection can distort the public record.
For the foreseeable future, Trumpism will remain a threat to “ourselves and our Posterity” because of its success in sidestepping those constraints.
An extensive body of fiction–a new national mythology–has been created by an unholy alliance between corporate media and a professional Republican political class that has elevated party over principle; their political futures over facts.
There is an inability on the part of many to see the dots that outline the disturbing shape of the future.
This blog is a digest, the goal of which is to connect those dots.
Paul Eaton Hamilton
June 17, 2021
2024
Maafa? The Nakba?
Maafa is a Kiswahili word for “great disaster,” a reference to the death and dislocation caused by the trans-Atlantic trade in Africans to the western hemisphere.
Al-Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.”
America is in need of a new word to describe the election of Donald Trump to a second term, a watershed moment in American history.
Despite a nascent bipartisan pro-democracy movement spearheaded by such anti-Trump organizations as the Lincoln Project, Republicans for Harris and White Dudes for Harris; despite the unprecedented public endorsement of Kamala Harris by former Republican vice president Dick Cheney and daughter Liz Cheney, former chair of the House Republican Conference; despite the public support of a Democratic presidential candidate by over 200 former Republican staffers from the Reagan and both Bush administrations; despite the public condemnation of the generals and national security professionals who served with Donald Trump (former chief of staff and retired Marine Corp general John Kelly; retired Army general and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley; retired Marine Corp General and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis; retired Army Lieutenant General and National Security adviser H.R. McMaster; plus former Secretary of the Army Mark Esper as well as over 700 lower-level national security professionals)…
Donald Trump skillfully managed to turn the shame of the January 6th insurrection into a badge of honor and ultimately into a litmus test for access to power in the right-wing political universe.
In another free and fair election he was elected as the 47th president of the United States, albeit by what seems at this point to be a margin of less than 2%.
As it turns out, the primary threat to the information ecosystem was not posed by AI, foreign actors or even the bonkers billionaire Elon Musk. Enough information was out there to enable any American with an honest interest in public affairs to evaluate the threat to the Republic posed by the Trumpist enemies within.
The corporate media, however, failed once again to connect the dots between discrete day-to-day activities and the larger outlines of a democracy on the ropes. Newspapers of record such as the Washington Post and New York Times consistently made errors and misjudgments in basic journalism which, taken together, obscured the threat to American democracy. Cable and on-line media followed the shiny red ball of daily distraction to rack up viewers and clicks; live reporters with access to public figures failed to ask questions designed to elicit useful and relevant information.
The First Amendment is first for a reason. The press failed us. The consequences are grim. They may be irreversible.
This blog remains a digest dedicated still to connecting the dots between daily events and a disquieting future.
Paul Eaton Hamilton
November 16, 2024
Connect the Dots 101 