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It’s not benign. It’s dangerous. I’ve been following Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s increasing influence on the American far right for some time as he hosted the likes of former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson and held CPAC meeting in Budapest. (They’re doing it again in April with Orban once again doing the hosting duties.)He was the darling of a certain faction of the conservative coalition even before Trump won and whose election in 2016 super-charged the “illiberal democracy” ideology here in the US which we now know as MAGA. He likewise hopes to consolidate the European far-right into a MAGA-style movement throughout the continent. Orban CPAC appearance got a thunderous ovation last year and just last week he came to meet with members of the Heritage Foundation which is busily putting together “Project 2025” for the second Trump term. One imagines he had quite a few tips for them. He wrote the book on how to turn a modern country into a repressive autocracy without becoming a full-fledged police state.

“It’s voter fatigue,” my therapist, Dr. Tuttle, explained to me. Some people just get voted out.”

It all made sense. I was simply too tired of the constant voting.

I began my hibernation in the winter of 2023, when the articles started. I swallowed one New York Times Op-Ed About Biden’s Age and one Gen Z Is the Most Politically Disengaged Generation Yet, and was out for three days.

My year of Voter Fatigue would not be an act of self-centeredness; it would be an act of self-preservation. If I did not not vote now, I might never not vote again.

I came to crave the comfort of the election coverage, which assured me that millions of other people were equally disengaged. Not Reva, my only friend, who had no qualms with voting for someone who was currently courting full-out war in multiple countries. Reva had not grown out of the “Grandpa Joe UwU” stage of praxis that the rest of us had dallied with in 2012. I hated her.

A lot of people won’t believe this post was actually Trump, but it was. The punchline isn’t so funny.

Franco Modigliani famously quipped that he did not think that unemployment during the Great Depression should be described, in an economic model, as a “sudden bout of contagious laziness”. Quite. For the past thirty years we have been debating whether to use classical real business cycle models (RBC), or their close cousins, modern New Keynesian […]

When underdogs fight back “When people feel uncertain, they’d rather have someone strong and wrong than weak and right,” President Bill Clinton advised Democratic leaders in 2002. Enter Donald John Trump, the seven deadly sins on two legs. No way would Americans vote for that walking atrocity, I thought in 2016. Hoo-boy, did I call that wrong. So did Bill’s wife Hillary. Americans chose strong and wrong. The pivot point in the Hero’s Journey comes when, after refusing the call to adventure, she/he crosses a threshold out of the ordinary world into one of challenge and quest. Young Luke Skywalker crosses that threshold early in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. Did President Joe Biden reach one of those pivot points last week? Some think maybe. Reflecting on the 2008 HBO film, Recount, about the 2000 presidential election, Joe Klein writes in The New York Times: Democrats litigate; Republicans fight. Democrats float toward an almost helium-infused state of high-mindedness; Republicans see politics as a no-holds-barred cage match. President Biden’s pugilistic State of the Union address last week may represent a new direction.

A new tool lets migrants in the UK know when and how they can vote - navigating the confusing patchwork of rules

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A source close to the families of two deceased US Special Forces soldiers claims that the Department of Defense intentionally mischaracterized their deaths.

The post Source Claims DoD Covered-up Deaths of US Special Forces Soldiers in 2020 Iranian Strike on US Airbase appeared first on MintPress News.

The place: Washington. The date: April 14, 1954. The question before the Security Board of the Atomic Energy Commission: whether Dr Robert Oppenheimer may safely be allowed continued access to secret information. Oppenheimer is testifying for the third day running. He is under cross-examination (the official record uses this term) by Roger Robb, counsel for […]

A revitalised Europe wide white supremacist movement is growing in the UK, gaining recruits through social media and online gaming

Refugees from Chinese oppression in Britain also believe the Government's crackdown on face masks at demonstrations opens them up to reprisals

A 2023 Column Contest grand-prize winner, Laurence Pevsner’s Sorry Not Sorry investigates why we’re sick of everyone apologizing all the time—and how the collapse of the public apology leaves little room for forgiveness and grace in our politics and culture.

When Shane Gillis performed his monologue on Saturday Night Live last month, he opened with a joke about why he was previously fired from the show. “Don’t look that up, please,” he says with a smile. “It’s fine, don’t even worry about it.”

If you do look it up, you’ll come across Seth Simons’s reporting for the Los Angeles Times, which details Shane’s long history of using slurs against Jewish, Chinese, and Black people. In one podcast episode, Shane shares his enthusiastic support for Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist militant organization that promotes political violence. In another, Shane says, “If the blood rushes to my head, all my blood’s racist. I do have racist blood.”

And still great at doing stuff Watching Ryan Gosling and the Barbie cast perform “I’m Just Ken” at the Oscars last night was the highlight of the wekend. Enjoy. Digby has a viral moment from late in the show in the queue. Come back soon. ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

AIPAC has become the key force against progressives in Democratic primaries, but a new coalition is seeking to protect the party’s left flank.

The post The Left Is Finally Building a Response to AIPAC appeared first on The Intercept.

Fady Joudah’s poems are exquisite yet ungovernable, rebelliously innovative yet attuned to a broad range of traditions. They spoke to me long before I had the…

Karam Bales delves into a conference with ties to a Russian backed anti-gender network