The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

A reminder: kakistocracy means “a state or society governed by its least suitable or competent citizens.”

Peter Zeihan: “For the first time since I started doing this…I’m worried for the United States.”

In his latest YouTube video, geopolitical analyst and consultant Peter Zeihan (author of a very interesting and informative book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning) describes the current situation under Trump as such:

This isn’t an abdication of American power. This isn’t mismanagement. This is a deliberate disassembly of the building blocks of American power, and security, and safety.

This isn’t anything that I would think any American would ever want, much less orchestrate, which has pushed me into the realm of some conspiracy theories.

I think we now need to consider that the Russians really have penetrated the White House.

And while I think it’s a stretch to say that this is like a Manchurian Candidate sort of situation, there are too many things happening that seem too tailored to hobble American capacity long run, and everything that was on this list is something that the Russians have tried before:

• NATO is something they’ve been trying to destroy since the fifties, and now we have the possibility of the U.S. just walking away.
• The military has been the bulwark of global security, and so gutting it from the inside is something they would love to see.
• Our intel system has been the canary in the coal mine and it appears that Trump is either not receiving or not reading the daily brief that the agency produces for him every day.
• The food supply situation in the United States has long been the world’s safest, and now we’re not even testing to maintain it?
• The demographics of Russia is one of the main reasons why the Russians are facing such a bleak long-term future, but if you interfere with the vaccine schedule in the United States, you can start increasing the death rate in Americans — not just under 20, but under 5 — and start to equalize that situation.

Watch the video, which is the first in a series on events from the Russian perspective — how they see the world, influence world events, and “given the chance, how they would redirect American policy to serve their interests.”

Lesson 3 from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: “Beware the one-party state.”

In the past couple of Notes for the kakistocracy, I posted the first two lessons from historian Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Here’s lesson 3: Beware the one-party state.

Timothy Snyder’s message here is loud and clear: If you don’t want to live under a dictatorship, don’t let one party take over everything. Simple, right? But history says we tend to miss the warning signs until it’s too late.

Look at Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or any number of regimes that started out with elections and political competition — until they didn’t. One party (or one leader) rigs the system, crushes opposition, and suddenly, democracy is just a decorative word they slap on sham elections. At that point, voting becomes about as meaningful as clicking “Accept All Cookies” on a website — you don’t really have a choice.

So what can you do? Give a damn. Vote. Pay attention when politicians start talking about “reforms” that make it harder to vote or easier to sideline opponents. Call out power grabs when you see them. Democracy doesn’t clean up after its often messy self — it only works if enough people actively keep it from rusting over.

TL;DR: If you don’t want to end up in a country where elections are just a formality, make sure the system stays fair while you still have a say. Because once a one-party state is locked in, good luck getting it unstuck.

The better Vance: JD Vance’s cousin Nate was a volunteer soldier in a Ukrainian battalion

JD Vance’s cousin, Nate Vance, fought on the front lines in Ukraine, and was pretty good at it too. When he heard that cousin JD was telling falsehoods about Ukraine and Zelenskyy, he tried contacting him several times — unsurprisingly but disappointingly, to be met with silence.

The (formerly conservative-by-French-standards, now centrist-by-French-standards) French newspaper Le Figaro, which has been around since the early 1800s, has an exclusive interview with Nate Vance.

Since the original article was in French and in a paper that many Americans might not have heard of, I’ve posted an English translation of the article. Check it out!

Canadian quote of the moment: “Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.”

Because I am a Canadian, I’m familiar with this aphorism attributed to Canadian clergyman-turned-author Basil King:

Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.

This is actually a shortening of what he wrote:

Go at it boldly, and you’ll find unexpected forces closing round you and coming to your aid.

Not only is it a time for boldness, but also for forming mighty forces. If you see someone being bold, be part of those forces that come to their aid.

Maybe the real fraud was the fraud that DOGE made up along the way

The Legal Eagle YouTube channel’s latest video is a great summary of the fraud that Elon Musk and his DOGE minions have found — and it’s nowhere near as much as they claim.

Among some of the points made in the video:

• Much of the spending that DOGE have tried to cancel was already approved by the Congress — that is, the legislature. In other words, that spending was law. If there are problems with such spending, there’s a process for reviewing and changing it, and DOGE ain’t part of it.
• DOGE made a lot of false claims, such as “Condoms for Gaza.” The truth:
  • Reuters: Fact Check: No evidence US spent $50 million on condoms for Gaza
  • AP News: FACT FOCUS: No evidence that $50 million was designated by the US to buy condoms for Hamas
  • CNN: ‘Some of the things that I say will be incorrect’: Musk backs away from false claim of $50 million for Gaza condoms
• The math just isn’t mathing. The half-trillion, or trillion, or multiple trillion is savings. Consider:
  • This New York Times article, DOGE Claimed It Saved $8 Billion in One Contract. It Was Actually $8 Million. For those of you who are bad at math, 8 million is one thousand times smaller than 8 billion. After this article came out, DOGE removed the screenshot they used as “proof” of their claim.
  • 60% of the federal workforce work at the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs, and Trump promised not to touch them (although 1,000 people in Veterans Affairs have already been let go). The remaining 40% account for $108 billion, and even if you managed to fire 1 in every 3 of them, you’d have a $72 billion in savings. That’s paltry compared to what you’d save if you cut what the government pays in subsidies to the very profitable oil industry: $757 billion.

I’m fine with auditing government spending, but by actual auditors, and not Dollar General Lex Luthor.

David Brooks (ugh) on Friday’s moral injury

I would usually have issues with quoting David Brooks — generally because he’s a bit of a fuddy-duddy “Man Karen,” but specifically because he dumped his long-time wife, suspiciously around the time he and his much younger (23 years) writing assistant while they were working on his book, The Road to Character.

So it’s with some distaste that I quote him here, but what he said in his summary of the mobster-style shakedown that Trump give Volodymyr Zelenskyy last Friday, but damn it, the philandering milquetoast has a point…

Brooks:

I was nauseated, just nauseated. All my life, I have had a certain idea of about America, that we’re a flawed country, but we’re fundamentally a force for good in the world, that we defeated Soviet Union, we defeated fascism, we did the Marshall Plan, we did PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) to help people live in Africa. And we make mistakes, Iraq, Vietnam, but they’re usually mistakes out of stupidity, naivete and arrogance.

 

They’re not because we’re ill-intentioned. What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen.

 

Donald Trump believes in one thing. He believes that might makes right. And, in that, he agrees with Vladimir Putin that they are birds of a feather. And he and Vladimir Putin together are trying to create a world that’s safe for gangsters, where ruthless people can thrive. And we saw the product of that effort today in the Oval Office.

 

And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.

Presidential counselor Alina Habba on veterans fired by DOGE: “Perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment.”

She said:

You know, we care about veterans tremendously. But at the same time, we have taxpayer dollars, we have a fiscal responsibility to use taxpayer dollars to pay people that actually work.

 

That doesn’t mean that we forget our veterans by any means, we are going to care for them in the right way, but perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment or not willing to come to work.

 

And we can’t, you know, I wouldn’t take money from you and pay somebody and say sorry, you know, they’re not going to come to work. It’s just not acceptable.

Veterans account for about a third of federal workers, and so far, this administration has fired 6,000 of them.

Lesson 2 from On Tyranny: Defend institutions!

In the previous Notes for the Kakistocracy, I posted the first lesson from historian Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny, which was “Do not obey in advance.” Here’s the second: Defend institutions.

“Elbows up!”

Kudos to fellow Canadian and Torontonian Mike Myers — not just for his performance as Elon Musk in Saturday Night Live’s cold open last Saturday, but for his T-shirt at the closing…

…and this gesture, which any good Canadian will recognize:

That’s “elbows up!”, a hockey (and also boxing) expression that means “protect yourself and fight back,” and it’s become a popular catchphrase in light of the Trump tariffs, which are completely unjustified and whose purpose is to weaken Canada to make it easier to take over.

Kakis-what?

Kakistocracy, meaning a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. Its root is the Greek work kakistos, meaning “worst.”

This is a regular series of posts on The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century on surviving, thriving in, and countering the kakistocracy in the U.S. and around the world.

Last Week Tonight on  Facebook and Content Moderation

If you haven’t yet watched this Last Week Tonight piece, watch it now. Note that at the end of the segment, John Oliver shows you how to make yourself less valuable (and less profitable) for Facebook.

The National Lawyers Guild of Detroit and Michigan remind you: “Shut the fuck up!”

There’s a reason why the first line of Miranda is “You have the right to remain silent.”

Lesson 1 from Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: “Do not obey in advance”

History professor Timothy Snyder has been studying European tyrants throughout history and has derived 20 lessons that are applicable in the U.S. under Trump. Here’s the first one, and it’s key: Do not obey in advance.

Adam Conover: No one is coming to save us (so we’d better do it ourselves)

Adam Conover reminds us that if you want to see change in this country from its current state of ass-clownery (and remember, it hasn’t even been two months since the inauguration — image the damage MAGA can do over a year), it requires organizing and taking action, and there are plenty of historical precedents.