Week in Review: On fascism, X, Meta, drought, and “anticipatory obedience”
Hello from Washington, where we are enjoying some of the best weather of the year.
Many thanks to everyone who has subscribed to CivicTexts since the last issue! Alex Howard here, your host for the day.
For this issue, I’ve pulled together news, commentary, and analysis from the last week in a review, as opposed to the single-issue essay that has dominated the format of the newsletters to date.
I’m still experimenting with style, length, design, and frequency. Please keep letting me know what you like don't like at Alex@governing.digital.
There’s much more to come in the week ahead, from what the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told me about fighting disinformation to the future of online ad transparency.
For now, buckle up and settle in: this is the longest newsletter I’ve written.
On the weird weather and our shifting climate
As I noted up top, the current forecast suggests a gorgeous Halloween 🎃 👻 for families. But 80F on November 1 is not a normal temperature. We are in elevated fire danger conditions after a parched October. Please be careful with any open fires 🔥, if you get out the marshmallows.
When I checked national conditions, I confirmed how abnormal this is. Per Capital Weather Gang, “Cities that have seen no rain so far in October include Philadelphia, Atlanta, Nashville, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City and Dallas. If the rain stays minimal for another week, some locations that have never had a rainless month could experience not only their driest October, but also their driest month on record overall.”
Other areas of the continental United States are experiencing severe drought conditions. In addition to the lack of October rain, ongoing streaks without precipitation are likely to push toward all-time highs by the time the next measurable rain falls. With all the dry weather and sunshine, the country is poised to end up with one of the warmest Octobers on record.”
Given what the folks at the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) blog are saying, I expend the District to once again have historically low snowfall, containing the trend of recent years. Bad news for sledding, skiing, and tubing in DC, but at least Halloween won’t get get rained out.
On President Biden’s official apology for the Federal Indian Boarding Schools
On Friday, President Joe Biden formally apologized for the actions of the U.S. government in the early 1800s through 1970.
“Tens of thousands of Native children entered the system. Nearly 1,000 documented Native child deaths, though the real number is likely to be much, much higher; lost generations, culture, and language; lost trust. It’s horribly, horribly wrong. It’s a sin on our soul.
I’d like to ask, with your permission, for a moment of silence as we remember those lost and the generations living with that trauma.
After 150 years, the United States government eventually stopped the program, but the federal government has never — never — formally apologized for what happened until today.
I formally apologize, as president of the United States of America, for what we did. I formally apologize. And it’s long overdue.”
While many Americans were looking elsewhere, the President’s action was a singular moment in our history. Don’t look away.
As the President said:
“…for those who went through this period, it was too painful to speak of. For our nation, it was too shameful to acknowledge. But just because history is silent doesn’t mean it didn’t take place. It did take place. While darkness can hide much, it erases nothing. It erases nothing. Some injustices are heinous, horrific, and grievous. They can’t be buried, no matter how hard people try.
As I’ve said throughout my presidency, we must know the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation. That’s what great nations do. We’re a great nation. We’re the greatest of nations. We do not erase history; we make history. We learn from history, and we remember so we can heal as a nation. It takes remembering.”
Just so. The arc of our union’s history has been bent towards justice by its people, from slavery to suffrage to civil rights. The persistence of prejudice & injuries of injustice do not mean they failed, but that new generations have to confront fear & hate with love, laws, & restoration.
Efforts to forget centuries of chattel slavery, apartheid states, & genocidal policies towards indigenous peoples are misguided, & always will be.
Great nations know their history. Moving forward, together, will require first understanding & atoning for the many traumas of our past in acts of restorative justice, with truth proceeding reconciliation.
News on AI & national security you might have missed
Campaign in poetry, govern in prose?
Last week saw a notable new memorandum by President Joe Biden on harnessing artifical intelligence (AI) models & AI-enabled technologies in U.S. Government, “while protecting human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, & safety.”
Campaign in tweets, govern in PDFs? A new U.S. government “framework to advance AI governance and risk management in national security” from is out at AI.gov.
On the unprecedented melding of politics, tech policy, and money on X
This above screenshot what I saw “for me” when I logged into X/Twitter this weekend. I’m old enough to remember when partisans complained about social media companies showed any hint of favor or animus towards the politicians who used or abused their platforms.
Elon Musk’s support and promotion of Trump’s campaign on the social media platform he bought, at rallies, and with tens of millions of dollars has no parallel in modern times, though Murdoch, Fox News, and Trump on 2016 are a notable antecedent.
We need to look further into American history to find an apt precedent in William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper baron whose actions presage our present in notable ways. History doesn’t always repeat, but it surely rhymes.
While some people have left X because of what Musk has done to Twitter and how he’s behaving, public servants who hold public trust must keep trying to find and engage Americans “where we are” to prebunk & debunk lies, rumors, conspiracy theories. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is a patriot, as is Arizona officiall Stephen Richer.
“Misinformation like this is the biggest threat to election officials, election workers, and election security today because it creates baseless suspicion about the very people who are our most trusted sources of information about our elections,” Angela Benander, a spokesperson for the Michigan Secretary of State, told the Washington Post.
“It’s part of a strategy to convince voters that their voices don’t matter and suppress voter turnout. And it’s an attempt to lay the groundwork to challenge the results of the election if [Trump] doesn’t like the outcome.”
There is no evidence that inactive voter registrations are being used to fraudulently cast ballots in Michigan elections, Benander said. “Anyone with evidence that this or any other election crime has taken place should provide that evidence to local, state, or federal law enforcement agencies who will investigate,” she added.
On Trump’s fascism
U.S. Marine Corps General John Kelly (retired), 28th White House Archived Chief of Staff, 5th Department of Homeland Security Secretary, and former Commander of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) — told the New York Times that former President Trump is a fascist, would govern like a dictator, and has no understanding of the Constitution or the rule of law. (Gift link)
When asked, VP Kamala Harris said she agreed with Kelley, retired 20th Joint Chief of Staff Milley, & former U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) secretary Esper that Trump is a fascist.
When U.S. military leaders are warning Americans of a potential dictator, listen. 700+ former national security officials of both parties told us Trump would endanger our democracy.
Trump’s language and authoritarian intent are now undeniable: “In the nine years that he has been running for or serving as president, Mr. Trump has regularly evoked the language, history and motifs of fascism without hesitation or evident concern about how it would make him look, reported Peter Baker.
“While presidents have pushed the boundaries of power, and in some cases abused it outright, no American commander in chief over the past couple of centuries has so aggressively sought to discredit the institutions of democracy at home while so openly embracing and envying dictators abroad. Although plenty of presidents have been called dictators by their opponents, none has been publicly accused of fascism by his own handpicked top adviser who spent day after day with him in the Oval Office.”
Trump has no answer for his former White House chief of staff — former four star Marine General — telling The New York Times about his unfitness to lead or concluding that he is a fascist. (Gift link)
There is no defense for Trump praising Hitler. So Trump projects, protects, and attacks. He has no other play. It’s the “Roy Cohn Way.“
About that rally in New York City last night
Republicans were furious about Secretary Hillary Clinton comparing Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden to a Nazi rally in 1939.
But all Americans should know & remember who advocated for “America First” a century ago and who attacked our cathedral of democracy in DC almost four years ago, carrying the flags of insurrection.
How many of us know how many militia leaders have been convicted of seditious conspiracy?
The problem is not that Hillary Clinton comparing Trump’s rally to American fascists who supported Nazi Germany in 1939.
Watch “A Night At The Garden,” if you aren’t familiar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC1MNGFHR58
It’s that Trump is using dehumanizing speech for immigrants and his political opponents — animals, vermin, scum — and describing using federal police and the U.S. military to attack the “enemy within.”
All Americans should be denouncing THAT, not blaming the messenger.
The day after, the echoes of history are louder, not muted, as Phil Bump reported at the Washington Post:
“America,” Miller said at one point, “is for Americans — and Americans only.”
At the Madison Square Garden rally 85 years prior, Bund national secretary James Wheeler-Hill had insisted that the group’s mandate was “to restore America to the true Americans.”
In giving Trump an immunity for his use or abuse official powers that does not exist in the Constitution, the Supreme Court bent the arc of moral progress backwards, creating the conditions for unaccountable tyranny.
Patriotic generals warning Americans of this threat did not incite violence. Trump’s lies and corruption did.
His unprecedented presidency ended with him igniting seditious mob violence here in the National Mall, when his conspiracy to overturn the presidential election results culminated in a failed auto-coup and historic putsch attempt at the U.S. Capitol.
Trump has used the 21st century of weapons of mass distraction — cable news, smartphones, social media, targeted advertising, AI, and computational propaganda — to fuel division, despair, and doubt about a stolen election long before Election Day.
He kept sowing doubt and disinformation about the integrity of our elections long before he pre-emptively declared victory in the early morning, long before the race was called for his opponent.
He’s going to do it again, if Harris doesn’t sweep the East Coast states. He might do it anyway: any election he doesn’t win will be “rigged” or “stolen.”
All of us must now cast ballots, not bullets.
Raise our voices, not our fists.
Hold elected leaders accountable for lies, corruption, or unconstitutional abuses of power through due process & by exercising our right to vote.
On Trump’s autocratic attacks on the press and complicit oligarchs
I can’t let this go by unremarked, either: Former President Trump is escalating his authoritarian rhetoric towards news media in the USA, telling a rally 60 Minutes should be “taken off the air.”
His demands for unconstitutional acts that would violate the First Amendment of the Constitution merit universal condemnation.
So far, that hasn’t happened, nor will it. And that’s bad news for our democracy.
Speaking of which, as you may have heard, the Washington Post not endorsing a presidential candidate this year is anticipatory obedience by an oligarch with business before US government.
“…while proclaiming that they are simply being neutral or following business interests,” Jeff Bezos & Dr. Pat Soon Shiong are “doing what Trump wants in advance only makes it more likely that Trump will have power, and only teaches him that you are easy to intimidate,” observed historian Timothy D. Snyder.
“You are giving the authoritarian power he would not otherwise have. The irony is that the rest of us will have to save the billionaires from their own cowardice.”
As with Los Angeles Times not endorsing this year, the late timing left no question of why. Bezos has made a tragic mockery of “Democracy dies in darkness.”
It was a rough end to the week.
As Professors Ziblatt and Levitksy observe, “democracy’s last bastion of defense is civil society.“
“When the constitutional order is under threat, influential groups and societal leaders — chief executives, religious leaders, labor leaders and prominent retired public officials — must speak out, reminding citizens of the red lines that democratic societies must never cross. And when politicians cross those red lines, society’s most prominent voices must publicly and forcefully repudiate them.“ (Gift Link)
On the most important campaign proposal you haven’t heard about
VP Kamala Harris’ proposal to expand Medicare is a tangible step to making “it possible for people with disabilities to participate in the everyday commercial, economic, & social activities of American life,” as the Americans with Disabilities Act envisioned, writes professor Pamela Herd, in a must-read piece on “rationing rights.“
Please read, & share. Rationing support on opaque waitlists should be unacceptable in the wealthiest nation ever to exist.
This is about collectively helping all of us with a 21st century safety net by upholding the civil rights and human dignity of our neighbors, not leaving any Americans behind to drown in debt or despair.
How Meta is damping freedom of expression before an election
It’s not just your imagination: Meta is removing posts with “political content” on Threads a week before a historic election, in error.
If you’re a prominent journalist & report it, you may hear that “it shouldn’t have been removed” & the spin that “the error was quickly realized & the content was automatically restored after it was mistakenly taken down.”
How much of the expression posted by millions of other Americans this week was censored? How many “mistakes” have been “restored”? We don’t know!
As Geoffrey Fowler reports, Mark Zuckerberg does have a First Amendment right to make decisions about what to promote on his platforms,” but his fellow Americans “deserve transparency about what topics are limited — and how Instagram determines what’s over the line.”
Meta declined to comment to the Washington Post and claimed “fluctuations in engagement are common and can ebb & flow for reasons that have nothing to do with its policy changes.”
“Mistakes” and “errors.”
Fowler sent Meta questions “about how it determines what to reduce. It wouldn’t detail what it means by ‘political & social issues’ beyond content potentially related to “things like laws, elections, or social topics.”
The world’s biggest social media company seems to be over-moderating the political expression of Americans during an election, but you won’t hear a peep out of the House this week because they don’t think it’s their partisans being silenced.
They’re wrong: it’s all of us.
How Meta is getting Americans to register to vote and go to the polls
On the positive side of the ledger, I got an outstanding nudge from Facebook today. The link went right to early voting in DC!
I wish Google & Meta had a “democracy dashboard” that estimated how many people clicked through links encouraging us to register to vote or find a polling place, with an incentive to confirm that they’d acted.
That’s the kind of pro-democracy feature worth celebrating.
On the White House’s new Open Goverment Page
For the first time since January 2017, The White House has an Open Government page again: whitehouse.gov/open/
It’s symbolic & is missing the pillars of government accountability & collaboration, along with a ton of other relevant programs, policies, and personnel — but it still matters. It’s also table stakes for what’s to come.
The White House’s new WH.gov/open isn’t linked to its own disclosures or the USA page on Open Government Partnership yet, just USGSA’s Open Government Secretariat.
There is no Open Government Memorandum or Directive, nor dashboard of updated agency Open Government plans, like US National Archives or U.S. Department of Commerce. It’s not what it should be. But it’s a start.
How governments can use humor on social media for good
We focus a lot of negative uses and abuses of social media, but there’s more going on. There is no U.S. government account that uses memes and wonderfully weird content to engage Americans about public safety better than U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
I wish this White House understood how important humor & satire are to countering propaganda & lies that put safety & health at risk.
A civic text for kids
I hope The New York Times creates an interactive online version of this wonderful election issue for kids and partners with schools and libraries to print it out. This was part of a $6 Sunday paper; the election issue is $5 on its own.
I’m furious about Bezos’s decision, but I love just about everything about this interactive act of journalism from the Washington Post, from the quiz to the design to the helpful tips that follow. I’m also relieved that I correctly identified all of the misinformation.
Try it yourself & please share these tips with friends, family, & colleagues.
A civic test for adults
One un/funny thing: 💩 art on the Mall
This desk and home monument on third Street is one of the most entertaining installations of public art I’ve seen in the District since I moved here over 15 years ago.
It recalls a day that will live in infamy throughout American history, history, when partisan with lies about a stolen election assaulted federal police, and broke into the US capital, urinating and defecating in one of the sacred spaces of our democracy.
The false depiction of the people who have been convicted of assaulting police or seditious conspiracy as “patriots” or “hostages” dishonors the bravery of the patriots who defended the US government against Americans engaging in insurrection. This art lampoons that absurd distortion of history and the facts, to comic effect.
