Kat Gale > Recent Status Updates

Republican senators had sacrificed democracy for power. The Republican Party was now the Trump Party.

[House Rep. Schiff said] You can’t trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. He has betrayed our national security, & he will do so again. He has compromised our elections, & he will do so again. You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less. And decency not at all.

Republican lawmakers stayed behind Trump so long as he was delivering their wish list. In addition to the 2017 tax cut, which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, Trump enabled Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to decimate the judiciary. During Trump’s term, McConnell churned through judicial nominees, putting in place more than 1 out of every 4 federal judges and, crucially, 3 Supreme Court justices.

[Trump] "assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden said, “and in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.” He committed to running for president to defeat the man he believed threatened our democracy. Trump was building a right-wing populist army. But Republicans still did not speak out.

[In 2017] the FBI, CIA, & NSA concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump...[his supporters wore] shirts that said “I’d Rather Be Russian Than a Democrat.” They also put slogans on FB & elsewhere that offered “free helicopter rides” to their opponents, a chilling reference to the Chilean dictator Nixon had helped empower whose goons murdered dissidents by tossing them from helicopters.

What no one outside the government knew was that Miller and his allies within the administration were already at work on separating children of refugees at the southern border from their parents. When career officials in the government protested that such an attack on American law and fundamental human rights was outrageous, the extremists in the administration simply excluded them from planning sessions.

It is always possible to stop looking away. None of this evil was ever necessary. Some carriages are gilded and others lacquered in blood, but the same engine pulls us all. We dismantle it now, build another thing entirely, or we hurtle toward the cliff, safe in the certainty that, when the time comes, we'll learn to lay tracks on air.

Trump’s authoritarianism became clear immediately when he insisted, contrary to all evidence, that his inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama’s...this stupid lie was not only a way to get media coverage but also a demonstration of dominance...constantly trying to defend what's real from what isn't destroys their ability to make sense of the world...authoritarians use this technique to destabilize a population.

Republicans had been ramping up the rhetorical techniques of dividing the country and demonizing their opponents since the 1960s, but they did not want an apocalypse; they wanted an end to business regulation and social services and the taxes they required.\n\nTrump had risen to the presidency thanks to their machinations, but he went far beyond them, making the leap from oligarchy to authoritarianism.

Donald Trump Jr., Kushner, & Paul Manafort‐who had deep ties to Russia-met in Trump Tower with Russian operatives who offered damaging material on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. In exchange, the Russians wanted the U.S. to drop sanctions...& support a plan to create a Russian-allied republic out of the four eastern regions of Ukraine. The new leader would be Manafort’s former boss Viktor Yanukovych.

[The Supreme Court's decision on the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission] ruled that corporations could spend unlimited money in campaign advertising so long as they weren't formally working with a candidate or party. Corporations&billionaires promptly formed super PACs, political action committees that were allowed to take funds from “dark money” groups—nonprofits that don't have to disclose their donors.

[The Affordable Care Act] went into effect in 2014, and by 2016 the number of uninsured Americans had been cut in half, with twenty million newly covered.

When the computers at the Office of Management and Budget projected that rather than balancing the budget, Reagan’s proposed cuts would create budget deficits of up to $116 billion by 1984, Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, simply reprogrammed the computers. “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” he told a reporter.

Under Nixon, the US launched a successful operation in Chile that would be a laboratory for overturning a democratically elected leader without leaving obvious fingerprints. When Chile elected Allende, Nixon promoted a nationwide truckers’ strike that started a labor crisis...dictator Pinochet seized power...The US supported his reign of terror, including his infamous practice of throwing opponents out of helicopters

[President Lyndon B. Johnson said] “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” The stage was set, with rhetoric and policy, for the rise of authoritarianism.

Strom Thurmond—by now a senator from South Carolina—took advantage of the fact that the Senate had never developed a rule to make people quit talking. He launched the longest filibuster in American history in an attempt to stop the measure [the Civil Rights Act].

A strongman warps history to galvanize his base into an authoritarian movement. He insists that his policies—which opponents loathe—simply follow established natural or religious rules his enemies have abandoned. Those rules portray society as based in hierarchies, rather than equality, and make the strongman’s followers better than their opponents...Failing to follow them will lead to terrible consequences.

It is not so hard to believe, even during the worst of things, that courage is the more potent contagion. That there are more invested in solidarity than annihilation.

It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people: those who had felt pain, and those who had yet to.

What procellous awesomeness does not in you abound?

One day there will be no more looking away. Looking away from climate disaster, from the last rabid takings of extractive capitalism, from the killing...and yes soon enough it will come to our doorstep...but until then, until that very last moment, it's important to understand that this really is the best way of doing things.

As a strongman becomes more and more destructive, followers’ loyalty only increases. Having begun to treat their perceived enemies badly, they need to believe their victims deserve it. Turning against the leader who inspired such behavior would mean admitting they had been wrong and that they, not their enemies, are evil. This, they cannot do.

[Authoritarian] leaders don’t try to persuade people to support real solutions, but instead reinforce their followers’ fantasy self-image and organize them into a mass movement. Once people internalize their leader’s propaganda, it doesn’t matter when pieces of it are proven to be lies, because it has become central to their identity.

Authoritarians rise when economic, social, political, or religious change makes members of a formerly powerful group feel as if they've been left behind. Their frustration makes them vulnerable to leaders who promise to make them dominant again. A strongman downplays the real conditions that have created their problems and tells them the only reason they've been dispossessed is that enemies have cheated them of power

It was a shock to be around so many people again, having spent the last three months holed up in a house in the woods.
–Can confirm! I relish long periods of time in the wilderness as well as social activities, but the transitions are jarring.

The liberal class that acquiesced so begrudgingly to the least of measures will find that a sizable contingent who might have previously aligned with its ideals can no longer bring themselves to do so. Not after what has been done, what has been see, what cannot be forgotten.

Epstein’s housekeeper, Debra Gale, alleged Andrew’s interest in young women: ‘One night he took a Swedish girl to his bedroom. They spent the entire night together and most of the next day.’ Pressed further, Gale added: ‘When the girls would leave Andrew’s bedroom I’d give them an envelope Mr Epstein left with anywhere from one to 25 thousand dollars in it

With better imaging, they discovered my mother did not have pancreatic cancer but a rare form of stage 4 squamous-cell carcinoma that had likely originated in the bile duct.The doctors told them if they had moved forward with the surgery the first doctor suggested, she would have bled out on the operating table.
–Always get a second opinion!

Ivan Novikov, Jeffrey Epstein’s personal driver, remembered: ‘Whenever Andrew was in town I’d be picking up young girls who were essentially prostitutes.’ He continued: ‘One time I drove Prince Andrew and two young girls around age eighteen to the Gansevoort Hotel in the Meatpacking District. Both girls were doing lines of cocaine. Prince Andrew was making out with one of them.’

Andrew claims to have only met Epstein earlier that year [1999]...but Andrew and his ex-wife had known the financier for almost a decade by then. According to Andrew’s private secretary, Alastair Watson, the two men had met in ‘the early 1990s’. The flight logs of Epstein’s plane alone, known as the Lolita Express because it flew so many young girls, reveal the duchess travelled on it with Epstein the previous April.