Welcome to Litsy!

Hearing this in audio read by the author brought a real sense of sincerity to the narrative of institutional decay. I found Kendzior‘s dry wit to be a nice balance to the heaviness of the topic being covered. Being a long time listener of Gaslit Nation a lot of this was information already covered but I found it helpful to have it all laid out in one place.

Doing some #audiocrafting today while I race to finish the tagged before my loan is up. I got this project from my library‘s makerspace take home program.

#BookReport
Well I feel accomplished because I finished to books this week. Albeit one was fast and short but the other was Sanderson so it had a little heft to it and was not quite a chunkster. I also really enjoyed both.

#WeeklyForecast
My goal this week is to finish the tagged in audio before the library due date as there is someone on the holds list and I can't renew. Then I want to make a big dent in the chonky boi.

This is a very haunting book. Page after page, you get chills, you find yourself whispering, ‘my god...‘
Don‘t let it happen. It is happening. But we can stop it. Every day is a new nightmare, but it is also a chance to fight back. Please. Please, fight with me.

There is a difference between expecting an American autocracy and excepting it, and I refuse to accept it. Every loss we endure is a reminder of the gifts we still hold, and of our obligation to fight for a better future for the next generation. I will never settle. I want to settle the score.

There is a fragility to life now that nearly breaks me, one I could handle as a child and as an adult but not as a mother. Children force you to envision the future, and doing that today is an act of mental violence. But children also force you to fight for the future—to insist that there will be one, to bend the ark of the moral universe toward justice through sheer force of will, because it sure as hell doesn‘t bend that way on its own.

To paraphrase George Orwell, those who control the past control the future. I want my children to see the American past before it is gone.

Our country was always vulnerable, always flawed but people fought back. In the past, we survived because good Americans answered the question “Why does nobody stop people from doing bad things?” with laws and actions that prevented people from doing them. If we survive the current era, it will not be due to a savior from above, but to the refusal of ordinary people to accept elite criminal impunity as normal.

RESIST

People keep looking for the smoking gun that will end Trump‘s corrupt reign; it has been there the whole time. It is in his hand, still smoking. Because he is shooting our country to death. Because no one will take away the gun. Because the very people tasked with protecting you reload it for him again, again. They will keep firing until all constraints are removed and there is no one left to gaze at the carnage and ask why nothing is being done.

You you know damn well I was a snake before you let me in. —Trump, 2016

Women comprised the grassroots efforts of the 2018 Democratic wins, organizing while dealing with the endless agonizing revelations of the #MeToo. In the years after Trump‘s election, more women ran for and won office than ever before. This flurry of female activism should surprise no one, given that the policies of the Trump administration, whether economic or social, disproportionately hurt women. In Trump‘s America, women run for their lives.

Canada was now the new America, taking in our huddled masses yearning to breathe free while the Trump administration condemned the Statue of Liberty. White supremacist movements are moving into mainstream Canadian politics. When people ask me if they should leave the United States, my answer is always, “And where, exactly, is it safe to go?”

⬆️This should terrify you.

The dutch audience asked whether a Trump phenomenon could happen there, and I said, “Yes, it can happen anywhere.” This is the same answer I give everywhere I go, because the surest route to a kleptocratic takeover is to deny it‘s happening, and the surest way to solve it is to sever it before it blooms.

The Trump administration whistleblowers have all been women whose findings are marginalized by officials and the press. This is not surprising. To take the evidence seriously means to challenge the fundamental legitimacy of Trump‘s election, and all of the decisions—appointments, laws, arrests—that came after. Trump has spent his life silencing inconvenient women, and as president he does the same.

Caller: I‘d like to know how you handle your stress. Trump: I try and tell myself it doesn‘t matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn‘t matter—like you do shows, you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn‘t matter.

•Malignant narcissism combines narcissism with psychopathy— someone incapable of feeling sadness, empathy, remorse, or guilt.

You wish you lived in a time when people were more haunted by the past than by the future. The television tells you not to stress so much, *there‘s a plan,* take it easy, *there‘s a plan,* of course officials would never just let this happen.

(But they ARE). Every day is a nightmare. We can end it, together.

You know what‘s coming but you don‘t know how to stop it. There‘s no logic to this orchestration, there‘s just raw power, and you, with your stripped-down city and low-down life, seem to have the exact wrong amount: enough to make the wrong people angry, not enough to make the right people act.

You can be prepared for something but that does not make the pain of it any less: the pain you feel for others, or the pain you feel inside, the pain you push away daily because if you gave into it you would never get out.

Birtherism was never about where Barack Obama came from. It was about where he was allowed to go. Power, for Trump, a wealthy real estate scion, was rooted in birthright, and birthright was inseparable from race.

Saw someone post about this one and it piqued my curiosity.

I had spent my professional life studying authoritarian regimes with the luxury of being able to leave them. My studies have been voluntary; I could stop at any time. When I went abroad to authoritarian states, I faced certain risks, but I took them knowing I could always return to the relative security of American life. Now the horror had come home.

In recent years, both the Trump campaign and the mainstream media has portrayed Trump as a political neophyte or outsider, but nothing could be further from the truth. Trump sought elected office for 30 years. He ran for president in 2000, 2012, and 2016, and he nearly ran in 1988 and 1996.

•This narcissistic fuck has wanted to be king for a long time.

When 1983 was about to turn into 1984, my mother decided to tell me about fascism. I was five years old. “A long time ago, a guy named George Orwell wrote a book called 1984 that was about a society where everyone lied, where people would tell you that 2+2 = 5 and you had to believe it, and no one had freedom except for the people in charge, called Big Brother, and Big Brother was always spying on you to make sure you didn‘t think for yourself.”

“We do not have a government; we have a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.” Weaving threads from Roy Cohn, Jeffrey Epstein, Trump, 2008 crash, her own economic struggles, Kendzior has a history of writing on dictatorships and kleptocracies in former Soviet Central Asia, provides troubling perspective. Reviews the many years the media, government, and public failed to hold Trump accountable. 2019

This is 320 pgs. of hard truths, and may or may not feel like healthy quarantine reading. Especially considering how much scarier everything has gotten since Kendzior finished writing. She posits that the factors leading to the election of Donald Trump started years and years ago. But this is so much more than just one man. 4.5/5 stars

Full review http://www.TheBibliophage.com #thebibliophage2020 #nonfictionchallenge2020 #aboutacandidate

Devastating and crucial. Please read this book. It will (I hope) make you mad. It should. But it will also make you smarter. So very important, and so very good.

#Bookmail no. 1 - a serious book about the current political moment

“Missouri is not a red state, but it is becoming a one-party state - a party ruled by mysterious mega donors, a party that openly disregards the will of the electorate. In the most damning of ways, we are the bellwether for the United States. We are losing not only our freedom but our sovereignty to forces we do not fully understand, but which understand our own vulnerabilities all too well." Coming in April. Essential reading - especially now.