The Soviet-ification of America

Mother Jones illustration; Sunira Moses/Unsplash; Paul Christian Gordon/ZUMA

When I traveled in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, I was struck by how many Russians blithely accepted that they were living in a truthless society in which propaganda was oxygen. But after decades of Five-Year Plans and a never-ending stream of glorious-revolution bullshit, it was hard to blame them. A saying that’s been attributed to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—which he likely never uttered or wrote—captured this attitude:

We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.

I wonder if the United States is slipping into such a fog.

The Donald Trump regime, of course, is predicated on lies. His 2024 campaign was a crusade of disinformation. Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs; criminal immigrant gangs have taken over entire cities; public schools were performing gender affirmation procedures; Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were purposefully allowing fentanyl to be smuggled into the United States. And Trump, as you might recall, was clocked by the Washington Post during his first term as spewing more than 30,000 falsehoods and lies.

It’s no news flash that he’s prevaricating non-stop. But what’s most worrisome is how brazen he and the fellow fibbers in his gang are—as if there were absolutely no concern about being caught or found out. And not just regarding lying. They’re also brazen when it comes to racism, abuse of power, and corruption. In the quaint days before Trump, lying presidents and lying elected officials tried to make it seem they were not lying. Corrupt presidents and corrupt elected officials tried to make it seem they were not corrupt. With Trump and his banditos, there are no such games of pretend.

It leads to a disturbing dynamic, in which Trump and his lieutenants display their atrociousness to such an extent that it can lead to inurement. We know their actions are outrageous, they know their actions are outrageous, we know they know, they know we know they know—and this circle swallows itself. Nothing changes.

Trump denies he’s vengefully weaponizing the Justice Department to take down his enemies. Yet we see this clearly happening in multiple instances, with the prosecutions of James Comey, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff and the criminal investigations of others, including former special counsel Jack Smith and former CIA director John Brennan. These cases have been mounted over the objections of professional prosecutors and handled by political hacks—a true sign they are flagrant abuses of power. Yet Trump and his lackeys insist this is merely the Justice Department doing its job by the book. There has never been a more obvious perversion of the DOJ. They know we know.

Trump denies he’s a racist. Yet he has a long history of racist statements and acts. I don’t need to run though all that again. But a few days ago, when he was on Dan Bongino’s podcast—to which the former FBI deputy director has returned to resume his conspiracy-mongering career—Trump said, “Minnesota is a mess. There's something in the water up there…I won the three times but I got no credit for it…It's a rigged state. Really rigged badly with the Somalians, and the Somalians and the theft…These are people that don’t work…We gotta get 'em out, most of them. And it’s most of them. Ninety-two percent don't work…Many of them drive Mercedes-Benzes.” In December, he exclaimed, Somalis “are garbage” and “contribute nothing. I don’t want 'em in our country…We don’t want ’em in our country...Let ’em go back to where they came from.” Pure, unadulterated racism. On Thursday night, Trump put up on his money-losing social media site a meme depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes—which was later removed, though the White House defended it. And the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Labor have been routinely posting memes and messages that promote images and slogans used by white supremacists. In modern times there has never been such undisguised and explicit racism purposefully propagated by an administration. They know we know.

Trump engages in the most overt corruption. His wife accepted a $40 million payment from billionaire Jeff Bezos and Amazon for a mediocre (at best) film—a way-above-market-value licensing fee—while Bezos and Amazon have multiple interests before the government that Trump controls. (Amazon Web Services depend on billions of dollars in contract with the NSA, the CIA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon.) It was recently revealed that an investment firm tied to the government of the United Arab Emirates invested $500 million in Trump’s crypto company and pocketed a 49 percent stake in the firm. This is just one sleazy deal of many within Trump’s wonderful world of graft and grift. (To get a fuller picture of Trump’s supersize swamp, check out this graphic.) Out in the open, Trump has turned the presidency into a cash-generating business for him, his family, and his cronies, creating a mess of conflicts of interests that previously would never have been tolerated. They know we know.

And back to the lies—just the recent ones. Acquiring Greenland is a “national emergency.” The economic numbers are “spectacular” and “inflation has stopped.” Vladimir Putin wants a peace deal. Housing costs “are way down.” ICE is mainly rounding up criminals. Trump has ended eight wars. The 2020 election was “rigged.” The January 6 rioters were “patriotic” Americans entrapped by the FBI. Renée Good was a domestic terrorist. Alex Pretti was an “assassin.” (See Dumbass Comment of the Week below.) All bullshit. They know we know.

In fact, the Trump mob, so used to skating by, figured it could say whatever it wanted about Good and Pretti to vilify them and justify their murders by out-of-control federal agents. Yet, finally, there was a burst of blowback, with popular opposition to the smearing of American citizens killed by Trump’s secret police force.

The revulsion triggered by the efforts to demonize Pretti and Good showed that Trump’s factotums—Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, JD Vance—could not pull off over-the-top, Trump-style lying as well as the grandmaster, but it has not caused Trump and his crew to ratchet back on the prevaricating. And they’re sticking with the audacity of awfulness. The racism, abuses of power, corruption, and lies are not ebbing. Trump has learned the lesson that while one outrage may stand out and cause political trouble, a flood of outrages can be numbing.

Excess has always been the key to Trump’s success, and that includes excessive wrongdoing, from the petty (placing his name on the Kennedy Center) to the grand (pocketing billions in shady deals). The question is whether his tsunami of transgressions will continue to spur shrugs among many Americans or come to trigger more widespread disgust. Trump and his band of racists, profiteers, scoundrels, and flunkies seem high on their shamelessness. They defiantly flaunt their brazenness. They revel in their exploitation of power and their embrace of violence, dishonesty, intimidation, and brutality. Look what we can get away with. This has always been a favorite fix for Trump: conning the suckers.

In despotic and corrupt societies, rulers and their favored elites rely upon popular acquiescence and apathy—people becoming accustomed to all the lies and corruption. Trump and his stooges are counting on the same occurring in the United States so they can turn this nation into an authoritarian kleptocracy. They know that’s the plan. Do we?

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

There are many reasons to worry about AI. Chief among them are the people controlling the development and implementation of AI, including Elon Musk. This week, the Washington Post published an impressive report on Musk pushing his xAI company to sexualize its chatbot Grok and loosen controls on the sexual content it can generate. This has led to Grok being used to produce child sexual abuse material and sexual images of people without their consent. It’s Musk’s sophomoric strategy to attract users and scramble to the top of the AI heap.

But there was a particularly chilling passage in the middle of the article:

Within xAI, the company’s AI safety team, in charge of preventing major harms such as users building cyberweapons using the app, consisted of just two or three people for most of 2025, according to two of the people, a small fraction of the dozens of staffers on similar teams at OpenAI or other rivals.

A fear regarding AI is that it will be used to develop cyberweapons—or maybe decide on its own to develop cyberweapons. Yet in Musk’s shop, it’s party on, dude. Let’s see Angelie Jolie in nothing but Silly String. That’s how’ll we’ll make billions. It’s damn frightening that one of the greatest powers created by us humans—which could come to be a threat to humanity—is in the hands of a juvenile, egotistical, empathy-defying racist gazillionaire.

With the recent FBI raid on a Fulton County election center in Georgia, where federal agents searched for evidence to support Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, concern that Trump and the GOP might mess with the coming midterms ramped up. Could this be a test run for feds seizing ballots in key swing districts in November to prevent the Republicans from losing control of the House? It’s not so tough to imagine that when MAGA influencers like Steve Bannon are publicly calling for a federal takeover of the election…by force. Look at what he said:

We're gonna have ICE surround the polls come November...We will never again allow an election to be stolen.

We have been warned.

The judges were bemused but not surprised by the idiocy of a quote from Charles Murray, the conservative academic who co-wrote The Bell Curve, the 1994 book that tried to scientifically prove that there were genetically determined differences in IQ between racial and ethnic groups—a racist theory blown apart by mainstream science. Murray was annoyed that award-winning director Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer) has potentially cast Lupita Nyong’o, a Black woman, as Helen of Troy in his version of The Odyssey. (Elon Musk was very upset too, naturally.) This casting, Murray groused, “causes me to feel hostility. It is a deliberate assault on a treasure of Western Civilization.”

It’s hardly surprising that this guy three decades ago wrote a racist tract. But he did try to wiggle out of his racism by saying he was “old and grumpy.” The judges, though, know from firsthand experience that one can be “old and grumpy” without being a bigot. Wait until Murray finds out what Jesus really looked like. You think he’s going to bitch about all the depictions of him as a white dude?

Another rather dumb remark came from Daniel Neeleman, who with his wife runs what’s termed a “cooking and lifestyle brand” called Ballerina Farm, which is based in Utah. The couple was selling raw milk until health inspectors came knocking and discovered their supply contained high levels of coliform, a bacteria close to E. coli. Asked about this by People, Neeleman said, “Producing raw milk takes careful planning from a facility and infrastructure standpoint. Unfortunately, we learned this after the fact.”

Oops. Now they tell us.

House Speaker Mike Johnson often doesn’t respond to Trump’s most alarming remarks, pretending he’s just too busy legislating 24/7 to pay attention to what the president says. But apparently he did catch Trump’s recent call for Republicans to “nationalize” the midterm elections and seize control of contests in certain spots (which would be a violation of the Constitution). Defending Trump’s comment, Johnson said, "We had three Republicans who were ahead on election day in last cycle and every time a new tranche of ballots came in they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost…It looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove that? No"

It’s reprehensible for a House speaker to suggest electoral fraud when there is no evidence. It is routine in many districts with big city precincts for votes to come in late and shift a lead. The Republicans are working hard to construct a false narrative that can justify measures to screw with the midterm vote. As I said above, we have been warned.

Many on the right are still trying to diminish the horror and criminality of the execution at point-blank range of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis. Conservative commentator Erick Erickson blamed not only the victim but the Minneapolis police, city officials, and Joe Biden for his death:

Had Alex Pretti not gotten into the mix, he'd be alive. But also, he'd be alive if the police had arrested him over a week ago. And he'd be alive if Minneapolis cooperated with the feds. And he'd be alive if Biden hadn't let the border be overrun.

And if Trump hadn’t been elected president, Pretti would be alive—and so would Renée Good, as well as the hundreds of thousands of people overseas who have perished because of the destruction of USAID.

Despite the strong competition, Vice President JD Vance reached the winner’s circle for the immensely smug reply he offered when a reporter asked, “Do you plan to apologize to the family of Alex Pretti?” Missing not a beat, Vance shot back, “For what?”

He knew what for. Immediately after the shooting, he amplified a post on X from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller that called Pretti “an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.” That was a false and defamatory statement callously uttered for political gain. Vance cared not a whit for the truth. Now he shows he does not have an ounce of decency in his Trumpified soul—and that makes him this week’s victor.

A few days ago, Judge Ana Reyes of the federal court in Washington, DC, blocked Homeland Secretary Secretary Kristi Noem’s cruel decision to end temporary protected status for Haitian immigrants, which would have subjected 350,000 legal residents to immediate deportation. Reyes opened her decision with a reference to a guy who knew a thing or two about the original American dream: George Washington:

On December 2, 1783, then-Commander-in-Chief George Washington penned: “America is open to receive not only the Opulent & respected Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions.” More than two centuries later, Congress reaffirmed President Washington’s vision by establishing the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. It provides humanitarian relief to foreign nationals in the United States who come from disaster-stricken countries. It also brings in substantial revenue, with TPS holders generating $5.2 billion in taxes annually.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem has a different take.

Reyes then displayed a social media post from Noem:

I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leechers and entitlement junkies. Our forefathers ult this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invades to slaughter our heroes, suck our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICNS. WE DON”T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.

Quite a comparison. Reyes continued:

Plaintiffs are five Haitian TPS holders. They are not, it emerges, “killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies.” They are instead: Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease; Rudolph Civil, a software engineer at a national bank; Marlene Gail Noble, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department; Marica Merline Laguerre, a college economics major; and Vilbrun Dorsainvil, a full-time registered nurse.

Uh, in your face, Secretary. It’s heartening to see a federal judge blend fierce jurisprudence and trolling. Read her decision here.

Meanwhile…

This is probably one reason Trump decided not to attend the Super Bowl.

There was much consternation in the letters that came in replying to the recent issue on Donald Trump reviving his 2020 conspiracy theory and sending federal agents to raid that election center in Fulton County, Georgia.

Chris Powers’ note was typical:

David, I don't need to tell you that the FBI's seizure of Georgia 2020 election ballots, voter rolls, etc., is an ominous sign for this year's midterms. I believe that, combined with the normalization of militarized federal agents on our streets, this will become the story of the year if allowed to stand. God help us.

James Cregan emailed:

I agree this is a very dangerous situation—one that the mainstream media (whatever that is these days) should pay more attention to. The question: Is this really about the 2026 election with Trump & Company laying the foundation for a cancellation/postponement argument (perhaps with an Insurrection Act invocation), or is it about 2028, with Trump arguing that he should be allowed to run for third term because he was "cheated" out of a 2020 victory?

Trump is obsessed with the midterms. He knows that if the Democrats win the House, he may wind up facing a third impeachment, as well as an assortment of investigations. So that’s the battle at hand. I’m not sure how proving there was fraud in 2020—which there was not—would entitle him to run for a third term. But he might try that. I wouldn’t rule anything out.

John Ranta shared this:

I’m not sure Trump sincerely harbors delusions about the 2020 election. Pretending to be, and promoting those delusions, benefits him in many ways. So it is not surprising that he harps on it so much. My belief is that Trump plans to suspend or steal the midterms. He can’t allow elections to be controlled by the states, with the risk of a blue wave. Seizing all the voting materials in Fulton County is a logical next step in announcing that they’ve found “extensive vote fraud” (surprise!), and therefore state election organizations are corrupt and untrustworthy. From there who knows? He can put his own people in charge of the midterm elections (focusing on the “corrupt” blue states), or he can issue some form of emergency directive suspending the midterms indefinitely. His goal is to leave the House and Senate in Republican hands so that he won’t be impeached and imprisoned.

Trump is not genuinely paranoid about the 2020 election. But he is paranoid about the next one.

I go back and forth on whether Trump believes his delusions. But I do think John is right to worry about plans Trump has for the midterms. Since John wrote, Trump has publicly said that Republicans should take over elections in certain areas. The means to do that are not available—thanks to the Constitution. So it's not as easily done as said. But that doesn't mean he won't give it a shot. Now that he has tipped his hand, we can hope that Americans who care about democracy prepare in advance for any power grab. 

Bob Taylor emailed:

Today Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Epstein investigation is over. Nothing else to pursue. Yet this past weekend the FBI raided the Fulton County election storage center related to the 2020 elections, which was completely settled years ago.

Bob, are you suggesting there is hypocrisy at the highest levels of the Trump administration?

Tom O’Connor had some policy ideas on his mind:

I'm wondering why Dems don't try to improve the immigration system instead of the current zero-sum fight. For example: 1. Increase the number of immigration judges to eliminate the time spent in detention waiting on a hearing. 2. Increase the number of processing centers (that are off-limits to ICE) 3. Increase the number of translators, social workers, and housing specialists to move immigration applicants to safe spaces while awaiting immigration decisions. 4. Fund placement services to move qualified applicants to work (and tax paying) as soon as possible. I think the $10 billion in DHS funding under review could go a long way to making this happen.

Of course, the Democrats can't do any of this while they are in the minority. But promoting solid ideas about immigration—beyond decrying Trump's mass deportation crusade—might help their candidates in some districts and states.

An old friend from high school whom I haven’t spoken with for decades asked for advice:

I've mostly been supporting organization that help kids (food banks, foster care organizations) however feel like it's time to get more involved politically which I was prohibited from doing by the companies for which I worked. I am more interested in supporting strong organizations than I am individual candidates.  

I understand the inclination to support groups over individual candidates. But the most dramatic and consequential political action this year will be the outcome in the fight to control the House of Representatives. The Senate may be in play, but the House is truly up for grabs. Consequently, the biggest bang a buck can have is contributing to a congressional race that might determine the outcome in the House. There are about 18 toss-up seats at the moment, and an equal number that could swing one way or the other. The Cook Political Report is a good place to look up these contests. You can find one near you (or not) and donate directly.

I did suggest to my pal that he reconsider his no-candidates preference. Giving to a campaign is usually more effective than contributing to an outside group involved in such a race. But there are outside groups, such as Sierra Club, Emily’s List, and the League of Conservation Voters, that do a lot to support candidates. And, of course, both parties have their congressional committees—the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee—that raise money and then use these funds to aid the candidates they believe will best help their chances to control the House.

This newsletter is produced by a nonprofit organization that cannot endorse candidates. So my advice is not a sign of support for any contender or party. But if you agree with me that the House is the ballgame, that’s where resources should go.

“I need to go out.”
“But, Moxie, it’s so cold outside. And so nice by the fire.”
“I really need to go out. We haven’t been out all day.”
“You know, I read that you can train a dog to poop in a litter—”
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Okay, let’s go.”