This one’s going in a day early because of an appointment I have tomorrow, all day. Don’t boo me. Boo Mike Pence.
A study from Cornell shows how to use facial recognition data to track “criminality,” which is totally not a terrifying power for law enforcement to have under the best of circumstances and utterly fine with the incoming administration.
Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine wrote a decent appraisal of the horror show that Trump is building for the executive branch.
The theme connecting Bannon’s ideology with Flynn and Sessions is an intensified and narrow nationalism. The Bannonites see a “real” America as under threat by demographic transformation, and the waves of immigrants eating away at its culture from below are in alliance with a global and disproportionately Jewish media and business elite from above. Their project is to preserve white Christian American identity, and wage a civilizational war against Islam in alliance with other white Christian powers, especially Russia.
Not bad from Chait but if the Bush administration was any indication he’ll be on board with whatever awful war Trump starts. Still, it’s nice to see some good writing in the meantime.
The New Yorker has a profile of Chapo Trap House, an irreverent podcast for the left that I enjoy — though it’s not for everyone.
The “Chapo” guys loathe the unctuous sanctimony that can descend on liberal politics — a tone they associate with Clinton and certain corners of the mainstream media. According to “Chapo,” liberals humiliated themselves when they urged Trump protesters in Chicago to behave. Liberals were fools for piously donating to the fire-bombed North Carolina G.O.P. office in October, putting their desire to project civility over the ongoing reality of voter suppression in the state. On the podcast and on Twitter, they have made the case, over and over, that the way the Democratic Party leans on celebrity and pop culture is misguided and embarrassing.
The latest episode has a lot of rage, anguish, and pain over the election of Trump. I’d highly recommend it.
Muftah has a good overview of the fact that the proposed Muslim registry from Trump is not the first of its kind, and that, indeed, the liberal cheering of “no fly, no buy” is part of the problem.
Just this week, news of president-elect Trump’s proposed Muslim registry made headlines again, after first being proposed a year ago — with pro-Trump Great America PAC spokesperson Carl Higbie citing Japanese internment as “precedent”. Some advocates have reminded us, however, about precedent that is far more recent.
Finally, Dan O’Sullivan drops an absolute firebomb on Trump, Clinton, the election, and the establishment in a piece at Jacobin. Every single paragraph of this essay could be quoted to get you interested — it’s that good. I’ll just quote one of my favorite passages here.
If you read nothing else this weekend, read this article.
It’s funny, isn’t it, who was right and who was wrong. The Samantha Bees and John Olivers and Trevor Noahs of the world had their fun little jokes about Trump, didn’t they — humorless, vapid Trump, resolutely unable to laugh at himself. He’s orange, with a two-digit IQ, and takes shits in a gold toilet bowl. And his followers, oh, what a gift for comedy — unhinged, unwell, violent — and best of all, loathsome, the perfect target of derision, because who would feel bad mocking the worst people in the world?
And yet. In the words of Trump’s slimey limey, the odious Nigel Farage, crowing to the European Parliament in the wake of the Brexit vote: “You’re not laughing now, are you?”
Enjoy your Saturday.
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