Doom Report (Week 7: Human Progress: Neither Automatic nor Inevitable)

Many moons ago, I worked for ThinkGeek.  And, as I touched on briefly a few years back, I left because the downward spiral seemed inevitable.  I distinctly remember sitting down with Willie, the company’s co-founder and chief visionary ... but not its CEO.  CEOs were supplied by the corporate overlords, which was the source of the downward spiral, in my opinion.  Willie disagreed, of course: his unfailing optimism was what I admired most about him as well as his most infuriating trait.  From his perspective, there were plenty more years for ThinkGeek to continue being awesome.  I clarified: I too thought that ThinkGeek would continue being awesome for years to come.  I just felt that, when we were old and looking back on it, we would point to this time and say “that’s where it all started to go wrong.”

This week, Jon Stewart interviewed Maria Ressa on the Weekly Show.  If you don’t know Ressa, she’s a Filipino-American journalist who reported extensively on the autocratic takeover of the Philippines by Duterte.  She was arrested, detained briefly, and charged with enough crimes to put her in prison for a century, some of which are still pending despite the fact that Duterte lost power in 2022.  In addition to her real-life experience, Ressa has taught politics at the college level and has written 3 books on the topic, including How to Stand Up To a Dictator.  She’s been interviewed by Stewart several times and is an amazing resource on recognizing patterns in aspiring autocrats.

I encourage you to watch the whole interview, but the part that most caught my ear was this snippet from Jon:

Right now, it’s it’s getting a little dark, but we’ll talk about some of the institutional, structural, geographical things that are positive and optimistic for the United States moving forward—and there are some.  You know, I don’t want to make it seem as though this is inexorable and we’re just sliding towards that ...

And I couldn’t help but think, is it inexorable?  Maybe Jon is being like my friend Willie; maybe, in retrospect, we’ll look back on this moment and say, “no, it was inexorable ... we just didn’t realize it yet.”  Man, I hope not.  For that matter, I bet Willie would still disagree with me on the whole ThinkGeek thing ... but also it is a fact that all the founders were pushed out and the company was eventually sold again and now it no longer exists.  So I would say that any argument along the lines of “well, sure: it eventually happened, but it wasn’t inevitable” is applying a layer of rose-colored glass to the facts.

Ressa has plenty of chilling comparisons between our current situation and that of the Philippines during Duterte’s rise to power in the mid-2010s: the use of social media to spread misinformation, the recruiting of Internet trolls to do some of the dirty work, calling Ressa’s news organization “fake news” when she wrote about his crimes and dictator-curious policies.  At one point she puts it this way:

So the question here is: the longer these institutions do not act, and you have a compliant head that is selected based on loyalty—and I’ll talk about the Philippines so I don’t get myself in trouble in the United States—you know, ignorance and arrogance plus loyalty: this is how it collapses.

“Ignorance and arrogance plus loyalty” is also a good description of Trump’s “state of the union” speech this week.  I don’t want to rehash the hot takes you’ve probably already heard, but I’ll draw your attention to a few of the less repeated ones.  Colbert highlighted the irony of Trump claiming he had ended government censorship and “brought back” free speech shortly after ejecting Texas rep Al Green for ... well, speaking.  (And don’t even get me started on the 10 moronic Democrats who voted with the Republicans on the resulting censure vote.)  On The Daily Show, Michael Kosta specifically showed the moment where a random Democrat silently holds a sign behind Trump’s back saying “This is NOT Normal” only to have it snatched out of her hand and tossed away by a random Republican.  Kosta posits that this is emblematic of the Democrats’ ineffectualness and the Republicans’ glee in bullying them.  I’m not sure I agree ... but then I’m not sure I can really disagree either.

Over on LegalEagle, Devin has two really good videos this week.  The first is on the court battles over Trump trying to fire civil service workers, which he is (ostensibly) losing, because that’s illegal.  (As is rapidly becoming the LegalEagle mantra: let’s hope he follows the court order.)  Devin covers the basic history of those Civil Service protections, but I’ll add even more context:  After the Civil War, there were two factions in the new(ish) Republican Party, typically referred to as “Stalwarts” and “Half-Breeds” (each vaguely insulting epithet being coined by the other side).  Stalwarts believed that government employees should be chosen the way they’d always been: the President just picks all the cronies and bootlickers they can find, and that’s who runs the government.  Meanwhile, the Half-Breeds were on about some dumb “merit-based” system.  And then President Garfield—a Half-Breed—comes along, and Charles Guiteau, one of the people who advocates for him during his campaign—a Stalwart—demands to be made consul of France.  (The fact that this man spoke no French seemed to be not an obstacle to him.  Is any of this sounding familiar at all?)  But Garfield refused.  So Guiteau shot him.  And then, after that, we decided to make the majority of civil service employees not be appointed by the whims of the President and their advisors, but rather by passing a test.  Which we did, nearly a hundred and fifty years ago.  It’s truly stunning to me how often we have to learn the same lessons over and over.

The more chilling aspect of this video is when Devin points out that a lot of the stuff Trump did illegally, he could have done legally if he’d just been a bit more patient.  After all, he completely controls Congress: if he had just waited the requisite amount of time and demanded his toadies do as he asked, he could have fired thousands of federal employees without raising any legal issues whatsoever.  Which leads me to wonder: if President Musk and the Project 2025 crowd just been more patient, would we even have noticed?

Speaking of President Musk, Devin’s other great video was on the crazy DOGE emails that keep flying around to government employees.  Again, watch the whole thing, but my favorite bit was almost a throwaway line toward the beginning:

When musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, he sent a similar email to Twitter employees demanding that they send him screenshots of their most salient lines of code.  Musk then fired thousands of them, leading to dozens of lawsuits, all of which he’s lost so far, and a diminished user experience in Twitter, to put it lightly.  And now that Elon Musk has purchased the US government for a much lower price, he got to work making America more miserable for everyone, but especially government employees.

Note Devin’s bon mot about how it cost Musk significantly less to buy our government than he paid for Twitter.  Get it?  It’s funny because it’s true.  And also horrifying.

Still, our primary hope continues to lie in their incompetence.  This week’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me contains another throwaway line about a CIA black site being outed when DOGE put the building up for sale.  Of course, the part that Colbert found the most amusing was that the agency responsible for selling the buildings, the GSA, managed to put their own building on the list of ones to sell.  Maybe that one will get sold before the others have a chance to.  We can only hope.

One final nugget of maybe-hope: BTC has a great video on the resurgence of that greatest of soap operas: the Real Housewives of MAGA.  Bannon going after Musk, Musk and Rubio at each other’s throats ... great popcorn viewing.  You may recall from our last installment that I predicted that this falling out was inevitable, and it’s actually taken a bit longer than I expected for the cracks to start showing.  Well, they started showing before Trump even took office—my link there is to Week -4, after all—but it kind of seemed like Susie Wiles had it locked down for a bit.  But now the cracks are widening, and we haven’t heard anything from Susie for a while ... I wonder if she’s given up, or just been sucked into the undertow.  But it continues to be amusing to watch them at each other’s throats.  If you want a less serious take on the whole thing, SNL’s cold open this week was, once again, pretty funny.