Notices by William Lindsey :toad: (wdlindsy@toad.social), page 4

Michael Tomasky also warns us not to dismss Trump's Gaza talk as a distraction:

"[It's] a potential war crime. A plan to forcibly move a people out of a place where they have been living for decades (centuries, actually) amounts to a pretty clear violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1998 Rome Statutes, which established the International Criminal Court. It’s ethnic cleansing, plain and simple."

#Trump #Gaza #Palestinians #Netanyahu #EthnicCleansing
/9

https://newsletter.tnr.com/index.php?action=social&chash=b618c3210e934362ac261db280128c22.1351&s=cdd6377d8462caad2b4695418c877aea

"Musk is currently targeting mainstream Protestant churches involved in immigration resettlement."

~ Jeet Heer

#Musk #Trump #churches #ReligiousFreedom #immigrants #ICE #sanctuary
/1

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/elon-musk-spending-data-coup/

"Over the past few days, people working for the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Elon Musk’s shadowy quasi-governmental organization, have reportedly demanded access to the Department of the Treasury’s payment system. According to press reports, they have grabbed control of the Office of Personnel Management’s computer system, locking out regular employees."

#Trump #Musk #DOGE #Treasury
/2

~ Henry Farrell, Abraham L. Newman

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/elon-musk-weaponizes-the-government

"The National Institutes of Health have effectively been shut down. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stopped releasing crucial data. If you go to CDC’s website, there’s a banner across the top reading 'CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders,' which mainly means purging anything that hints at concern over social inequality."

~ Paul Krugman

#Trump #healthcare #CDC #NIH
/1

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/rfk-jr-and-the-maga-death-trip

"By tampering with crucial data they are depriving our institutions of the equivalent of oxygen. The US government is now on life support, gasping for constitutional air."

~ Kim Lane Scheppele

#Trump #Musk #DOGE #Treasury #Medicare #Medicaid #SocialSecurity #healthcare #CDC #NIH #USAID
/3

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/all-the-governments-data

Ruth Ben-Ghiat thinks that the game plan of Trump's fascist biopolitics is to weaken America. She notes that fascist strongmen typically engage in biopolitics, "social engineering and population management programs founded on the idea that some groups should thrive and multiply and others must be ejected from the nation, or decline or be eliminated."

#Trump #Musk #biopolitics #healthcare #CDC #NIH #vaccines #pandemic #fascism
/4

https://lucid.substack.com/p/the-trump-administrations-fascist

"Stopping research into cancer and other diseases, even for children, is the opposite of investing in the future of the American people: it is cruel and uncaring by design.

Harming American influence externally and weakening Americans internally will benefit our adversaries."

#Trump #Musk #RFKJr #biopolitics #healthcare #CDC #NIH #vaccines #cancer #children #pandemic #fascism
/6

"As signaled by the nomination of conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer RFK, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Trump administration may restrict access to vaccines and other proven methods of disease prevention, knowing this sets the stage for the U.S. population to be more susceptible to illness and in the long run less productive and prosperous."

#Trump #Musk #RFKJr #biopolitics #healthcare #CDC #NIH #vaccines #pandemic #fascism
/5

"A power-mad president possessed of radical theories of executive authority and convinced of his own royal prerogative has given de facto control of most of the federal government to one of the richest men on the planet, if not the richest, whose own interests are tangled up in those of rival governments and foreign autocracies as well as the United States."

~ Jamelle Bouie

#Trump #Musk #healthcare #Medicare #Medicaid #SocialSecurity #healthcare #CDC #NIH #USAID
/8

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/opinion/trump-musk-federal-government.html

ProPublica is, as always, doing a valuable service to all of us with its hard-hitting investigative journalism. As the group now announces, it's working hard to identify who is assisting Elon Musk now in running a buzz saw through the US federal government — a task made difficult because some people want their identities hidden, and the government is totally not forthcoming with information. ProPublica names names.

#Musk #DOGE

https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/

"A lot of people opt out of their humanity. I think we are seeing that pretty clearly right now."

~ Holly Berkley Fletcher

#Musk #Trump #fascism #cruelty #hate #humanity #mercy #resistance
/1

https://hollyberkleyfletcher.substack.com/p/survivors-guilt

"Tyranny is eroded by a sea of small acts. Everything matters.”

~ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

#Musk #Trump #fascism #cruelty #hate #humanity #mercy #resistance
/3

https://www.headsupnews.org/p/civil-society-is-coming-to-the-rescue

"An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive 'wokeism'. ... It is a communal and contagious celebration of cruelty."

~ Judith Butler

#Musk #Trump #fascism #cruelty #hate #humanity #mercy #resistance
/2

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/06/trump-sadism-judith-butler

What Jay Kuo says here, 100%:

"Folks, a gentle reminder.

When there are important court filings and victories, it does no one any good to chime in with, 'Yeah, but too late' or 'They won’t abide by the court order anyway.'”

As Jay says, this response capitulates in advance and it gratifies strongmen sorts who count on our cynicism so they can win.

#Musk #Trump #fascism #cruelty #hate #humanity #mercy #resistance
/4

https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/can-musk-be-stopped/comment/91310996

So "check yourself if you’re inclined to pee in the Cheerios in the comments. If you’re feeling that way, remind yourself that this is EXACTLY what Trump and Musk want you to feel, then resist it with all you have."

#Musk #Trump #fascism #cruelty #hate #humanity #mercy #resistance
/5

"Friends,

It’s a coup. …

The choice right now is democracy or dictatorship (or if you’d rather use the term fascism, go right ahead). And we are sliding faster than I ever thought possible into the latter."

~ Robert Reich

#Musk #Trump #coup #billionaires #EconomicElites #media
/18

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/this-is-what-dictatorship-looks-like

"Elon Musk is currently executing his own side coup that is distinct from both Project 2025 as well as the nativist crusade. If he is following a playbook, it might be similar to what he did when he took over Twitter in late 2022:"

~ Thomas Zimmer

#Musk #Trump #coup #billionaires #EconomicElites
/10

https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/maga-feeding-frenzy-has-caused-a

"Occupy the place, disrupt operations, get rid of everyone who knows what they are doing, bring your own lackeys, and tear everything down – starting with simply not paying for anything you, based on little more than grievance and a completely uninformed hunch, don’t think is cool."

#Musk #Trump #coup #billionaires #EconomicElites
/11

"At last count, Musk employees have control over sensitive student aid data, small business administration data, federal employee data (including data from job applicants), social security and tax refund data, and are seeking data from the Department of Labor (think the Bureau of Labor Statistics), and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Data (weather data)."

~ Don Moynihan

#Musk #Trump #coup #billionaires #EconomicElites
/13

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/meditations-in-an-emergency

"You say: they shutdown USAID.

You mean: they illegally broke in to a secure facility over a weekend, hijacked sensitive data on vulnerable people and US businesses, destroyed property Americans paid for, cut off resources for hungry families, and fired Americans."

~ Loren DeJonge Schulman quoted by Greg Dworkin

#Musk #Trump #coup #billionaires #EconomicElites #USAID
/12

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/5/2301527/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-The-State-of-the-Union-is-not-sound