Attention USA

Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto.

Attention USA: U.S. agriculture isn't nearing a trade war tariff crisis, it's in a 'full-blown crisis already,' farmers say in late April 2025. We The People need to assert goodness on the world stage, ask for global cult deprogramming assistance

Attention USA: “When Are More Americans Going to Speak Up?” - Mocking MAGA all day every day is not "Speaking Up" about the mockery, it is being a part of the total mockery. People are unable to be serious.

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/cory-booker-america-needs-moral-leadership-and-not-political-leadership

"This is a time when America needs moral leadership, and not political leadership."

“And so as much as we want to point a finger at people who are elected to positions, which is justified, I also want to ask a lot of other powerful people in this country who are remaining silent. We’ve seen what many corporate leaders are doing right now—instead of speaking up and speaking truth, they’re kowtowing for their own private deals.”

Attention USA: Hundreds of scholars say U.S. is swiftly heading toward authoritarianism. "That's a precipitous drop," says John Carey, a professor of government at Dartmouth and co-director of Bright Line Watch. "There's certainly consensus: We're moving in the wrong direction."

Dear USA:
Attention USA:

“It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, year 1985

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See also: !BackTo1985@lemm.ee community.

The first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.

You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.

The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.

And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped.

America was a country of bubbles. I loved it as one loves anything that is both real and fantastical.

Donald Trump has blown himself into a bubble of gilded ceilings, ersatz Roman murals, sycophants on tap and midnight rants of imperial conquest on personally owned social media networks. He is only one story. America was millions of bubbles. For some reason, I find myself remembering Tom Waits in a junkyard making Bone Machine, turning rusted fenders and tossed-out dry cleaners and cracked sheet metal into a scrap marimba of his own invention. Even its dumps could give birth to magic.

Golf course palaces and wrecking-lot percussion: twin American truths.

MORE AT: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/20/american-dream-trump-canada