All posts tagged: moral authority

Wargaming for Democracy – The Atlantic

Wargaming for Democracy – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

It’s January 21, 2025, the first full day of the second Trump administration. Members of a right-wing paramilitary group, deputized by the president to patrol the border, have killed a migrant family. Video of the incident sparks outrage, sending local protesters swarming to ICE detention centers. Left-wing pro-immigrant groups begin arriving in border states to reinforce the protests, setting off clashes. In response, the Democratic governors of New Mexico and Arizona mobilize National Guard units, ordering them to disperse the paramilitaries. But these groups, having been deputized by the president, are recognized under Articles I and II of the Constitution as legal militias. The commander of the New Mexico National Guard refuses orders from the governor, saying that migrants pose the true threat, not patriotic Americans defending their homes. The governor summarily relieves him of command. On his way out the door, the general pledges to “continue to follow the lawful commands of POTUS.” Last month, at one site in Washington, D.C., and another in Palo Alto, California, the advocacy group Veterans for Responsible Leadership …

War-Gaming for Democracy – The Atlantic

War-Gaming for Democracy – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

It’s January 21, 2025, the first full day of the second Trump administration. Members of a right-wing paramilitary group, deputized by the president to patrol the border, have killed a migrant family. Video of the incident sparks outrage, sending local protesters swarming to ICE detention centers. Left-wing pro-immigrant groups begin arriving in border states to reinforce the protests, setting off clashes. In response, the Democratic governors of New Mexico and Arizona mobilize National Guard units, ordering them to disperse the paramilitaries. But these groups, having been deputized by the president, are recognized under Articles I and II of the Constitution as legal militias. The commander of the New Mexico National Guard refuses orders from the governor, saying that migrants pose the true threat, not patriotic Americans defending their homes. The governor summarily relieves him of command. On his way out the door, the general pledges to “continue to follow the lawful commands of POTUS.” Last month, at one site in Washington, D.C., and another in Palo Alto, California, the advocacy group Veterans for Responsible Leadership …

Tana French Doesn’t Think She Needs Detectives Anymore

Tana French Doesn’t Think She Needs Detectives Anymore

Published by skeptic

Two detectives walk into a hospital room. That line isn’t a joke, but they are. The detectives are called Martin and Gannon, and they’ve been sent to investigate the burglary and beating of Toby Hennessy, an up-and-coming gallerist in Dublin. But Toby’s cottoned brain can’t quite make out what they’d like from him, and they don’t inspire much confidence; he wants them and their prying questions gone. To his delight and ours, once they walk out, they’re barely heard from again, leaving Tana French’s The Witch Elm all the better for their absence. This was French’s first novel outside the Dublin Murder Squad series, the popular and critically acclaimed crime novels that made her name. Each book in the series featured a different member of the squad, all of whom brought a new kind of intensity to the case at hand; to open a new Dublin Murder Squad novel was to consider the ways that the very different human frailties of detectives would influence how they worked their cases, and who was damaged or redeemed …

How Chile Won Back Its Democracy

How Chile Won Back Its Democracy

Published by skeptic

“There is a graveyard smell to Chile, the fumes of democracy in decomposition,” wrote Edward Korry, the U.S. ambassador to Chile, soon after the 1970 election of the Socialist President Salvador Allende. The United States government, the Brazilian military, and Chilean elites spent the next three years working to destabilize Chile’s left-wing government. Their efforts culminated in a military coup on September 11, 1973—50 years ago today—that deposed Allende and his democratically elected government, and plunged the country into dictatorship. That history made Chile a textbook case of Cold War anti-Communist machinations, but this perspective has tended to overshadow the ways in which Chile is also a study in resistance to autocracy. In 1988, after 17 years under the iron rule of General Augusto Pinochet, the country rose to shrug off the dictatorship through nonviolent mass protests and civil-society mobilization. After a major effort to register voters and restore electoral procedures, Chile achieved a peaceful return to democracy. In standing up to the regime, Chileans took on not only a military that had used torture …

They Are Still With Him

They Are Still With Him

Published by skeptic

Come November of next year, Donald Trump might be elected president of the nation whose democracy he attempted to overthrow. Although it’s early, Trump is polling strongly against his successor, President Joe Biden, despite having been indicted for state and federal crimes, including a conspiracy to keep himself in power after his 2020 election loss. The indictment, filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith yesterday, offers a detailed recounting of Trump’s effort to “overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election and retain power,” using as pretext claims of voter fraud that Trump knew were false—in the words of one of his advisers, “conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.” In addition to simply making unfounded allegations of electoral fraud, which is irresponsible but protected as free speech, Trump and his advisers hatched one bizarre plan after another to illegitimately seize power by overturning the election. If you’re trying to understand how, despite all of this, Trump could still be president again, you need look no further than the reactions of his primary rivals and …