Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading.
- Francine Prose offers a reminder that everything else happening in the U.S. is secondary to the imminent threat of an authoritarian takeover. Ed Burmila highlights how Donald Trump can't afford the usual PR tactic of throwing somebody else under the bus for abusive behaviour due to his reliance on total impunity to keep his goons behind him. And Noah Berlatsky observes that the Trump regime's public statements can't be evaluated based on truth or falsity when they're aimed solely at laying the groundwork for perpetually increasing violence.
- But Luke O'Neil writes that the sense of solidarity on display in Minneapolis offers ample reason for hope that fascism won't ultimately win out. And Robert Worth discusses how plenty of people are finding homes for themselves in the resistance to Trump's occupation.
- Meanwhile, Kate Connolly reports that the international response to Trump's capriciousness includes Germany's examining the prospect of repatriating gold currently held on U.S. soil.
- And both Jason Markusoff and David Climenhaga note that the already-limited appeal of Alberta's separatist faction is declining all the more as the consequences of being more tightly tied to Trump become inescapable.
- Finally, Caitlin Johnstone rightly notes that the few people sitting on obscene levels of wealth and power can't have reached that position through anything resembling a healthy worldview. And Oxfam documents the continued concentration of wealth at the top of the income spectrum.
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