Two January quotes

 

Yes, I know, I know, I am not caught up.  I am, in fact, quite far behind my optimum schedule. But I'm going to reverse that a bit in the next couple of days.

So, today, some quotes from two articles in the New York Times from January. And it's gotten considerably worse since then.

One Year of Trump. The Time to Act is Now, While We Still Can.

"We have become a country whose government is attacking its universities, defunding research, reversing scientific advances, assaulting museums and hollowing out cultural institutions. Few of these attacks — carried out in broad daylight, announced in executive orders, extolled in speeches and put on display in giant metal letters — meet meaningful resistance. We are making ourselves stupider.

We are a country ruled by a megalomaniac whose views are openly hateful and proudly ignorant, whose avarice knows no bounds and whose claim to power is absolute. Foreign leaders try to appease him with flattery and curry his favor with gifts. It rarely works to temper his appetite or even catch his attention, but it’s seemingly all they can do.

We still have elections. But how free and fair will the 2026 elections be? Trump doesn’t just carry a grudge against the election authorities of many states; he made that grudge a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign. Since he returned to office, his administration has taken a series of executive actions and filed a series of lawsuits aimed at restricting access to the polls, purging voter rolls, limiting the independence of local election authorities, and generally laying the groundwork for the systematic intimidation of both voters and election officials. States have joined this effort. Florida is cracking down on voter registration drives. Ohio and other states have introduced restrictive voter ID laws. Georgia has limited poll hours and banned providing food or water to people standing in line to vote. Texas has gerrymandered a map that threatens to disenfranchise Black and Latino voters and may wipe five Democratic congressional seats out of existence, and the Supreme Court has allowed this controversial new map to be used in the 2026 midterms."

The Resistance Libs Were Right

"Both ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis and Trump’s threatened seizure of Greenland are part of the same story: An increasingly unpopular regime is rapidly radicalizing and testing how far it can go down the road toward autocracy. If people had predicted back in 2024 precisely what Trump’s return to the White House was going to look like, I suspect they’d have been accused of suffering from Trump derangement syndrome. But the shrillest of Resistance libs have always understood Trump better than those who make a show of their dispassion. As the heterodox writer Leighton Woodhouse put it on X, “The hysterical pussy hats were right.”

Yes, I know, it is not good.  Not good at all.