A Finale 2000 Years in the Making

The hits keep coming…and this is only last week’s news & opinions, excerpted, copied & pasted by your humble correspondent:

Nature: “Sequoia is considered the largest living creature in the world and the longest-lived trees, as some of them exceed 88 meters in height, and some of them are estimated to be more than nine meters in diameter. The largest sequoia tree on Earth is located in the public park in California, Sequoia Park…its age is estimated to be ~2000 years.” Trump has ordered over 100 million hectares of US forest = 280 million acres to be chopped down.

Canadian Society: “Offline, @CaptiveDreamer7 is a low-brow Bartleby the Scrivener in a Canadian Christian university’s purchasing department. How does an intellectual millennial Canadian go all Nazi? …The parents & grandparents of Martin (AKA Dreamer) were members of the Worldwide Church of God, whose founder, Herbert Armstrong, was a mid-century radio preacher. Armstrong taught that white Anglo-Saxons are among the ten lost tribes of Israel and are the real Jews (maybe because the word ‘Brit’ in Hebrew means covenant).

“The notion that white humans are the true ‘chosen people’ of the Bible was/is also a tenet of the Ku Klux Klan...Dreamer has 71,000 Xitter followers in his radicalization pipeline, including major Trump admin figures and MAGA stars like JD Vance, Chris Rufo, Marc Andreesen, Curtis Yarvin, DOD deputy press secretary Kingley Wilson, and acting DC federal prosecutor Ed Martin. Elon Musk engages with and amplifies him..." https://www.americanfreakshow.news/p/magas-heart-of-darkness

US Society: "The parallels between the second Trump administration and Mao’s rule over China are stronger than the contrarians who loved loved LOVED to analogize wokeism to Maoism care to admit. Many Chinese people are finding they can relate to what many Americans are going through. They say it feels something like the Cultural Revolution, the period known as 'the decade of turmoil'. The young aides Elon Musk has sent to dismantle the US govt reminded some Chinese of the Red Guards whom Mao Zedong enlisted to destroy the bureaucracy at the peak of the Cultural Revolution…

"Millions of Chinese died during the Cultural Revolution, and tens of millions were persecuted. What’s happening in the US is far from that. 'It’s not exactly parallel', Ian Johnson, an American journalist who has been writing about China for decades, told me. 'But historical parallels are never exact because history doesn’t really repeat itself'. The American system is tearing itself apart with no outside pressure, he said, and this is similar to what the Communist Party did at the peak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966…." https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-real-american-maoists

US Govt: “The Trump administration took new steps to hollow out the Justice Department and bring it more firmly under White House control with a new round of purges of senior officials Friday…The White House confirms that Justice Department officials have used Trump political aide Stephen Miller as a ‘sounding board’…

“The Trump administration’s detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian green card holder who helped lead the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, marks a dangerous new turn in the president’s anti-immigrant crusade, suggesting that in addition to mass deportations there will be targeted removals based on political views.” https://morningmemo.talkingpointsmemo.com/p/senior-ranks-of-doj-hit-with-new

"There’s nothing novel in this realization that this is how a country descends into (hopefully momentary) madness—but we’re further down the pathway than we thought we were...and this madness is so terrifying, no one with any real power is willing to intervene…Once the event horizon is crossed, escape becomes improbable... when we go down, absolutely everyone is coming down the gravity well behind us."

"Outside American shores, guide with rationality & humanity. Remind us who we were and need to be. Tell us the stories we stopped telling ourselves... Be better. Be bigger. Show us what strength really is. Be a family we can easily rejoin when we decide the show is over. Be a framework where the pieces that will continue on the right path can still engage...” https://www.greatpower.us/p/america-needs-to-stop-cheering-for