A conspiracy theory literally made Trump president: It was his relentless advocacy of the “birther” lie about Barack Obama that turned him from a reality show clown into a political figure. He didn’t deliver the goods then, either: He claimed he had sent investigators to Hawaii “and they cannot believe what they’re finding,” but for some reason the revelations from these phantom investigators were never released.

But that didn’t slow him down. As a 2016 candidate and then president, there was no conspiracy theory too ridiculous for Trump to spread, even if he was usually careful not to come out and say definitively that he believed them. Was Ted Cruz’s dad in cahoots with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill JFK? It sure seems like it. Was Antonin Scalia murdered? “They say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow,” so gosh, who knows? Do vaccines cause autism? Probably. QAnon? “I heard that these are people that love our country.” Did you read a report that made Trump look bad? Fake news, don’t believe it. That’s not to mention voter fraud conspiracies and the “Great Replacement” theory.

Ce type d’intervention politique sur les archives n’a rien d’anodin. L’histoire regorge d’exemples où la manipulation ou la destruction d’archives a servi des régimes autoritaires. De l’Allemagne nazie à l’Union soviétique, en passant par la Révolution culturelle chinoise et le régime des Khmers rouges, les archives ont toujours représenté un enjeu de pouvoir majeur. L’accès à une information libre, fiable et contextualisée est une menace pour ceux qui cherchent à réécrire l’histoire à leur avantage.

It seems that the more people learn about Musk, the less they like him—at least, according to a new Hart Research survey published Wednesday by Groundwork Collective and Public Citizen. The poll asked respondents about how much influence they felt Musk should have in government, explaining aspects of his role in DOGE, his lack of oversight, and his far-reaching access.

By the end of the survey, 63 percent of voters reported having an unfavorable opinion of Musk, an increase of nine points from the beginning of the survey. Meanwhile, only 32 percent of respondents had a favorable opinion, which was down 7 percent from the start, and showed a major negative swing among non-MAGA Republicans.

Likewise, it takes willful blindness to Trump’s own history of explicit racism to treat his crusade against diversity and integration as an embrace of meritocracy (please ignore the people he has chosen to lead the government) rather than a function of the same bigotries that drove him to attack Barack Obama as illegitimate and unfit to be president.

There is no evidence that Trump is a figure of deep thought or serious insight. There is no evidence that Trump is anything other than what he’s been for his entire time in the public eye: an ego-driven creature of boundless envy and vicious, overlapping resentments. Those resentments have led him on a grand tour of retribution against the public.

The newspapers this morning all contain analysis pieces trying to explain why Trump is imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico. You can see the writers struggling, because this is a profoundly self-destructive move — it will impose huge, possibly devastating costs on U.S. manufacturing, while significantly raising the cost of living — without any visible justification. Yet the conventions of mainstream journalism make it hard to say directly that the president’s actions are just vindictive and senseless.

Comment les différentes facettes de la "gun culture" américaine (qui n'est pas du tout uniforme) prennent racine dans les différentes cultures qui ont colonisé les différents territoires US il y a plusieurs siècles. Et comment ces différences culturelles, qu'on pourrait croire gommées par des siècles de coexistence au sein d'une seule nation, subsistent et colorent encore fortement la vie politique actuelle.

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

This is all being spun by the Trump administration as an effort to save money and reduce government "waste," but no one should be fooled. The sadism of these efforts belies the psychological damage motivating people like Musk and Russ Vought, the Project 2025 author Trump nominated to run the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). MAGA is certainly a racist and sexist movement, but it's crucially also a movement of bullies lashing out at people whose skills and talents remind MAGA folks of their own insecurities. Nowhere is this more evident than in the unhinged MAGA hatred of federal workers, a group largely known for being humble and hard-working, reminding MAGA leaders of their own lack of basic virtues. 

Musk, the world's richest person, spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars helping Trump get elected president in November. Removing the crash-disclosure provision would particularly benefit Tesla, which has reported most of the crashes – more than 1,500 – to federal safety regulators under the program. Tesla has been targeted in National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigations, including three stemming from the data.

When the world’s on fire, reporting “some say it’s not that warm” isn’t brave — it’s complicit. If journalists can’t bring themselves to point at a full-blown authoritarian and say “this is some bad shit,” then maybe they should switch to weather forecasting, where at least the stakes are lower.

The time for milquetoast coverage is over. Either tell the truth, naked and ugly, or don’t act surprised when your freedom to write anything at all goes up in smoke.