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.
How can I keep up with all the bad news? by Heather Schieder
Part of living in a kakistocracy is dealing with all the bad news, especially when the kakistocrats’ strategy is “flood the zone,” a strategy provided to them by none other than permanently disheveled former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who recently pleaded guilty for his role in a “give me money, and I’ll build the wall” grift, where he collected the money without any intent of delivering on that wall.
The idea behind the “flood the zone” strategy is to have so many outrageous things going on that people become confused and numbed by the spectacle and misinformation that it’s hard to tell truth from half-truth from outright falsehoods and people just give up on the idea that truth is knowable. It’s basically manufactured nihilism.
Surviving Trump: A guide for Trans and LGBTQ youth
For my LGBTQ friends out there — here’s a guide on surviving the kakistocracy, courtesy of Angry Gay Grandpa. You don’t have to be any of the letters L, G, B, T, or Q to benefit from Angry Gay Grandpa’s advice, but you should be ready to step up for them in these times.
This is NOT Conservatism. This is a CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS! by Rick Wilson
Project 2025 Private Training Video: Appointee Survival Guide
ProPublica and Documented got their hands on over 14 hours videos from Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy, whose purpose was to train the next conservative administration’s political appointees “to be ready on day one.” This video is about an hour’s worth of the material, and it’s worth watching to see what they’re being taught.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s noticed the similarities between The Office’s Dwight K. Schrute and the United States’ very own Assistant to the Regional Manager…
Call to action for creative Canadians
Here’s a LinkedIn post from Kevin Newman, Canadian and former anchor/journalist for ABC, CBC, CTV and Global National. He’s putting a call out to social media-savvy Canadians to build a rapid-response anti-mis/disinformation team. Interested? Read on for more.
Does this describe you?
A proud Canadian.
Friend of America.
Someone who has worked in or is retired from television journalism.
Someone with proven creative juice and a laptop loaded with GFX/edit tools.
Ready to act, but not sure how?
Do you believe the best defence is a moral offense?
Do you have half a day here and there to volunteer for the next 6 months?
If we still have your attention, here’s what we’re thinking.
As we’re seeing around the world, the most potent non-combat weapon is increasingly InfoWar.
Our adversaries are using it to soften resistance and make people question truth and facts. We are seeing they can win, even in the United States, yet no one seems to have come up with a defence plan.
Our leaders are not protecting the hearts and minds of Canadians, and winning over more Americans. We are becoming a bigger target for misinformation campaigns against our sovereignty.
So we’d like to propose kickstarting a defence.
We are looking for motivated creative Canadians capable of building rapid-response fact-checking on all the bogus information out there. A social-media-only campaign built for the platforms where misinformation thrives. This is not a partisan endeavor — we only seek to promote truth and verified facts.
So if you’re looking to engage, here is the first step.
Former journalist and historian Jonathan Jackson will be managing our interest and building a database of volunteers. He will need your contacts, any specific skills and areas of interest you can research and write about, your resume and a sense of your time availability.
We need:
Reporters
Graphic artists
Fact-checkers
Video editors
We will not share this information with any outside entity. We aim to eventually pay for the skills you bring. We are already hunting for donors across Canada. If you think you can be a partner in this effort, please DM Kevin directly on LinkedIn.
Thank you for considering this appeal. We hope you feel as we do that its time to fight for Canada in the creative/information space and will share this online to friends in our industry. We’ll keep you updated on our progress here.
To me, Ezra Klein’s pieces are hit and miss, but I think he hit it with this recent podcast piece about The Manchurian Cantaloupe, Don’t Believe Him.
Some key bits:
Why he’s pushing laws through executive orders instead of through Congress
There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress.
A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way.
Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government.
You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.
Why such a breakneck pace?
The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them.
The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already.
We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post.
For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.
Be thankful for the speed
I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive.
I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.
But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.
Three-Ring Government
If you’re too young to have watched Schoolhouse Rock during Saturday morning cartoons, or didn’t live within the broadcast radius of ABC during the 1970s and 1980s, you’ve probably never seen Three-Ring Government, a cartoon musical short explaining the three branches of the U.S. Government.
It’s Sunday, which means it’s time for another “picdump!” Here are 100+ memes, pictures, and cartoons floating around the internet that I found interesting or relevant this week. Share and enjoy!
It’s Sunday, which means it’s time for another “picdump!” Here are 136 memes, pictures, and cartoons floating around the internet that I found interesting or relevant this week. Share and enjoy!
I originally wrote that the best translation of “pas grave” (pronounced “pah grav”) in this context is “nothing to concern yourself about,” but my friend AKMA said a better one would be “Nothing to worry your little head about” — and he’s right!
Gaddis, pictured above, was the employee at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection who leaked the state’s rushed-under-cover-of-secrecy plans to build golf courses, hotels, pickleball courts, and more land developer-friendly conversions of Florida’s state parks, which are natural protected lands. His leaking of that information and the Florida government’s rushed timeline led to the outcry that led to the postponement of those plans.
Here’s what Gaddis told the Tampa Bay Times:
“It was the absolute flagrant disregard for the critical, globally imperiled habitat in these parks,” Gaddis said in an interview Monday morning. Gaddis said he was tasked with making the proposed conceptual land use maps that depicted the golf courses and other developments. Two proposals were especially egregious in his eyes: The Jonathan Dickinson State Park golf course, and the 350-room hotel at Anastasia State Park.
“This was going to be a complete bulldozing of all of that habitat,” Gaddis said. He recalls his hand, hovering over a computer mouse, shaking with anger and frustration as he was told to rush his maps from senior leadership. “The secrecy was totally confusing and very frustrating. No state agency should be behaving like this.”
Unfortunately, doing the right thing sometimes means doing the career-limiting thing. For his heroic actions, he was fired. Here’s his dismissal notice:
While he was technically fired for “conduct unbecoming a public employee,” it’s the rest of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection who are truly guilty of unbecoming conduct, for doing the exact opposite of what the Department is supposed to do.
With much secrecy, little notice, and almost no time slated for public feedback, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis announced a plan to put golf courses and pickleball courts in Florida’s state parks.
Art by V. Steiner. Click to see the source.
The state’s original plan was to hold public meetings on one day only — tomorrow, Tuesday, August 27th — where members of the public would have three minutes each to voice their opinions.
Eric Draper, who served as the director of Florida’s state parks between 2017 and 2021, said it appears the state’s environmental agency is skirting the legal process and the parks system’s own internal operations manual for updating park management plans.
“This appears to be something that has been planned in secret, and it doesn’t appear to have involved the hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are volunteers in the parks, the citizen support organizations, or the many people who have been involved in helping to create and develop Florida’s award-winning park system,” Draper said in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times.
Before the environmental agency formally introduced its proposed changes, staff should have convened a citizens advisory committee made up of other state agencies and people who are working at state parks, Draper said. That advisory committee should have then met and held a public hearing.
Public golf courses and other facilities, including the removal of the Hobe Mountain Observation Tower, an existing park entrance, staff residences and more.
