#Barbara Radice

[alessandro55]

Ettore Sottsass Métaphores

Sous la direction de Milco Carboni e Barbara Radice

Skira Seuil, Paris 2002, 125 pages, 24x34cm, ISBN 97888849132491

euro 140,00

email if you want to buy booksinprogressmilano@yahoo.it

Dans ce carnet intime, Ettore Sotsass, l'un des plus grands designers contemporains, laisse entrevoir ce qu'a été son expérience créatrice de la fin des années soixante au début des années soixante-dix. De cette période très féconde au plan artistique tant pour lui que pour bien d'autres artistes, Ettore Sotsass publie pour la première fois des projets et des photographies prises aux États-Unis, en Italie et en Espagne, entre 1968 et 1976. Soigneusement sélectionnées par ses soins, les pièces sont présentées dans le cadre d'une histoire par laquelle l'artiste convoque sa mémoire et dialogue avec son passé. Ce journal personnel en images permet d'accéder à l'univers culturel complexe de Sotsass et d'approcher son processus de création.

Progettato da Ettore Sottsass, il volume costituisce una sorta di diario intimo e di riflessione per immagini di uno dei più grandi designer del nostro tempo, con suggestive fotografie scattate dallo stesso autore. Interamente ideato e disegnato da Ettore Sottsass, il volume rappresenta le esperienze concettuali e artistiche compiute dal maestro milanese tra la fine degli anni ‘60 e i primi anni '70.

Considerato uno dei più acuti e provocatori designer del dopoguerra internazionale, fondatore di Memphis e icona della cultura postmoderna, Ettore Sottsass ha da sempre alternato l'attività di progettista a un uso continuo della fotografia come strumento per riflettere sulla realtà e sul ruolo della visione. Il volume raccoglie materiali fotografici e grafici realizzati negli Stati Uniti, in Italia e Spagna tra il 1968 e il 1976 fino ad oggi assolutamente inediti.

Le Metafore sono una sequenza di fotografie scattate da Ettore Sottsass Jr. durante i suoi viaggi nei deserti della Spagna (Barcellona, Madrid, Almeria, Grenada) e sui Pirenei. Le Metafore sono opere temporanee di land-art o pseudo-costruzioni architettoniche create nel paesaggio, fatte di oggetti poveri e fragili, pezzi di spago, legno, nastri, foglie, sassi, pezzi di abbigliamento, ecc.

In quel periodo Sottsass si interrogava sul ruolo e sulla responsabilità dell'architetto nella cultura industriale contemporanea e sentiva il bisogno di tornare alle origini dell'architettura: con questi edifici, sorta di "studio del linguaggio architettonico" (Barbara Radice), cercava di indagare il rapporto tra l'individuo e l'ambiente fisico. Case senza pareti e soffitti, porte che si affacciano sul vuoto, pavimenti senza fondo, letti dove non si può dormire e molti altri oggetti che pongono l'uomo come spettatore di fronte al vero significato della propria esistenza e del proprio destino.

18/06/24

[ceteradesunt]

Stage Fright (1987) dir. Michele Soavi

[garadinervi]

Ellen Shub (photograph), (left to right) Demita Frazier, Margo Okazawa-Rey, and Barbara Smith (with megaphone) protesting nine murders of women of color that took place in 1979, April 1979 [Black Women Radicals. © Ellen Shub]

[haggishlyhagging]

The extreme of the male culture has become a grotesque caricature of part of the potential inherent in every human being, whether female or male. Why are so many blind to the grotesqueness of the tough, hard, super-balls, insensitive, unemotional male image in John Wayne, James Bond, the Marines, etc.? Or so blind to the grotesqueness of the super-mind, intellect, reasoning, and abstraction removed from any connection with life in the "think tanks" of the Rand Corporation, the academy, the corporations, the Army Corps of Engineers, most scientific research, war games strategies, etc.?

The extreme of the female culture has also become a grotesque caricature of the potential inherent in every human being. Why are so many blind to the grotesqueness of the super-sex goddesses, the sex-object removed from mind and emotion, the motherhood myth, the pettily personal existence which is not allowed to transcend itself into the individual autonomous existence, the enforced delicacy without full feeling and intensity, the sentiment turned into bathos because removed from direct sexual or creative expression, etc.?

The abstractions of male and female are extreme and many people are not molded wholly into either category—there is a great deal of overlap. But no one in the society is allowed to be a whole human being as long as the tyranny of the male and female culture or sex role split exists.

Recently there has been an unfortunate reaction among some women's liberationists and feminists. Some women have begun to call anything which they do not like "male." They seem to think that anything that has been defined as a "male quality" is inherently bad. A woman who is strong or takes initiative is told that she is "acting like a man" or "talking like a man." The crushing of initiative and strength and self-expression in women is now being done by other women in the movement under the guise of "anti-elitism," "anti-male-identification," and "collective self-suppression." It would be a tragedy if women were to make our oppressed state into a virtue and a model of humanity and the new society. We need to sift out what is good in our imposed definition as females and to honestly examine what is stupid and self-destructive. We need also to sift out what is good in what has been defined as male and therefore denied expression in us. We need no more glorification of the oppressed and their "super-soul" and "superior" culture, for that will blind us to our weaknesses and only lead us back into the same mire from which we have been trying to free ourselves.

-Barbara Burris, ‘The Fourth World Manifesto’ in Radical Feminism, Koedt et al (eds.)

[brick-van-dyke]

My dad, jokingly: "I'm badman"

Me: "haha sure" (not thinking he's anything like batman)

My dad: *left/ separated from my mum when I was a teen, started a GTA gang that helps bullied kids, ended up emotionally adopting like 8 kids and helped them through bullying, suicide, abuse, etc.*

Me: *was hurt by an abuser and had to deal with said abuser being forgiven by family around me*

Me: *gets into Batman lore*

Me: ...

"Wait a second..."

[alter-petrus]

If I had a nickel for every couple of Disney comic book authors who left Disney to find success thanks to a graphic novel series centered around p̶r̶o̶s̶t̶i̶t̶u̶t̶i̶o̶n̶, I would have 2 nickels. Which isn't much, but it's weird it happened twice.

And they ended up eventually under the same publisher too.

[banji-effect]

This Valentine's Day, let's watch Superdyke (1975) by Barbara Hammer!

[harrowcoded]

Leiam autorAs!

Vão tentar te dizer que isso é injusto, mas a realidade vai continuar a mesma não importa a quem ofenda: homens raramente merecem admiração de verdade. Pode ser qualquer um deles. Eles não merecem sua confiança, atenção ou perdão.

[darkeraven22]

Hanna Barbara SWAT KATS Season 1 Episode Five Review

In This Universe, They Robocop The Criminals!I’m sure there’s some important life moral about not letting idealistic old cats build advanced robotics. He might stick the minds of a married crime couple into his robots… For starters. This is the premiere of the so called Metallikats. Aka Max and Molly Mange. A married mob couple with all the love of… The Honeymooners. And all the sardonic wit as…

[thechanelmuse]

Jackie Ormes, the first Black American woman cartoonist

When the 14-year-old Black American boy Emmett Till was lynched in 1955, one cartoonist responded in a single-panel comic. It showed one Black girl telling another: "I don't want to seem touchy on the subject... but that new little white tea-kettle just whistled at me!"

It may not seem radical today, but penning such a political cartoon was a bold and brave statement for its time — especially for the artist who was behind it. This cartoon was drawn by Jackie Ormes, the first syndicated Black American woman cartoonist to be published in a newspaper. Ormes, who grew up in Pittsburgh, got her first break as cartoonist as a teenager. She started working for the Pittsburgh Courier as a sports reporter, then editor, then cartoonist who penned her first comic, Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem, in 1937. It followed a Mississippi teen who becomes a famous singer at the famed Harlem jazz club, The Cotton Club.

In 1942, Ormes moved to Chicago, where she drew her most popular cartoon, Patty-Jo 'n' Ginger, which followed two sisters who made sharp political commentary on Black American life. 

In 1947, Ormes created the Patty-Jo doll, the first Black doll that wasn't a mammy doll or a Topsy-Turvy doll. In production for a decade, it was a role model for young black girls. "The doll was a fashionable, beautiful character," says Daniel Schulman, who curated one of the dolls into a recent Chicago exhibition. "It had an extraordinary presence and power — they're collected today and have important place in American doll-making in the U.S."

In 1950, Ormes drew her final strip, Torchy in Heartbeats, which followed an independent, stylish black woman on the quest for love — who commented on racism in the South. "Torchy was adventurous, we never saw that with an Black American female figure," says Beauchamp-Byrd. "And remember, this is the 1950s." Ormes was the first to portray black women as intellectual and socially-aware in a time when they were depicted in a derogatory way.

One common mistake that erased Ormes from history is mis-crediting Barbara Brandon-Croft as the first nationally syndicated Black American female cartoonist. "I'm just the first mainstream cartoonist, I'm not the first at all," says Brandon-Croft, who published her cartoons in the Detroit Free Press in the 1990s. "So much of Black history has been ignored, it's a reminder that Black history shouldn't just be celebrated in February."

Source

[gatheringbones]

they were her property: white women as slave owners in the american south, by stephanie e. jones-rogers

the trouble with white women: a counterhistory of feminism, by kyla schuller

gender heretics: evangelicals, feminists, and the alliance against trans liberation, by rebecca jane morgan

memoir of a race traitor: fighting racism in the american south by mab segrest

yours in struggle: three feminist perspectives on anti-semitism and racism, by elly bulkin, barbara smith, and minnie bruce pratt

this has always been a war: the radicalization of a working class queer, by lori fox

[themotherofrevelation]

In women’s brains there are unique neural links between the forebrain and the cerebellum, which allow sensations of physical pleasure to be directly integrated into the neocortex, or high brain center. This explains why some women experience orgasm so intense that they enter ‘religious’ trance, or altered states of consciousness. And this ecstatic female orgasmic experience, in which the physical and the spiritual are fused and realized as one, is at the core of all mystical experience. This is why, in the original religion of the Great Mother, body and mind and spirit are always integrated. Because human male brains do not seem to have these neurological connections (just as human male sexuality has not evolved radically beyond primate sexuality, while human females, through the shift from estrus to menstrual cycles, have evolved a nonreproductive sexual capacity that functions primarily for affectional bonding), the researchers conclude that it is women who must take the lead in further human evolution—‘toward the integration of the conscious and the unconscious mind and to a more profound understanding of the spiritual nature of the species.’

Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth

[milksockets]

'barbara mott astride her harley davidson' in radical rags: fashions of the sixties - joel lobenthal (1990)

[reasonsforhope]

"On a blustery day in early March, the who’s who of methane research gathered at Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara, California. Dozens of people crammed into a NASA mission control center. Others watched from cars pulled alongside roads just outside the sprawling facility. Many more followed a livestream. They came from across the country to witness the launch of an oven-sized satellite capable of detecting the potent planet-warming gas from space. 

The amount of methane, the primary component in natural gas, in the atmosphere has been rising steadily over the last few decades, reaching nearly three times as much as preindustrial times. About a third of methane emissions in the United States occur during the extraction of fossil fuels as the gas seeps from wellheads, pipelines, and other equipment. The rest come from agricultural operations, landfills, coal mining, and other sources. Some of these leaks are large enough to be seen from orbit. Others are miniscule, yet contribute to a growing problem.

Identifying and repairing them is a relatively straightforward climate solution. Methane has a warming potential about 80 times higher than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, so reducing its levels in the atmosphere can help curb global temperature rise. And unlike other industries where the technology to decarbonize is still relatively new, oil and gas companies have long had the tools and know-how to fix these leaks.

MethaneSAT, the gas-detecting device launched in March, is the latest in a growing armada of satellites designed to detect methane. Led by the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, or EDF, and more than six years in the making, the satellite has the ability to circle the globe 15 times a day and monitor regions where 80 percent of the world’s oil and gas is produced. Along with other satellites in orbit, it is expected to dramatically change how regulators and watchdogs police the oil and gas industry...

A couple hours after the rocket blasted off, Wofsy, Hamburg, and his colleagues watched on a television at a hotel about two miles away as their creation was ejected into orbit. It was a jubilant moment for members of the team, many of whom had traveled to Vandenberg with their partners, parents, and children. “Everybody spontaneously broke into a cheer,” Wofsy said. “You [would’ve] thought that your team scored a touchdown during overtime.”

The data the satellite generates in the coming months will be publicly accessible — available for environmental advocates, oil and gas companies, and regulators alike. Each has an interest in the information MethaneSAT will beam home. Climate advocates hope to use it to push for more stringent regulations governing methane emissions and to hold negligent operators accountable. Fossil fuel companies, many of which do their own monitoring, could use the information to pinpoint and repair leaks, avoiding penalties and recouping a resource they can sell. Regulators could use the data to identify hotspots, develop targeted policies, and catch polluters. For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency is taking steps to be able to use third-party data to enforce its air quality regulations, developing guidelines for using the intelligence satellites like MethaneSAT will provide. The satellite is so important to the agency’s efforts that EPA Administrator Michael Regan was in Santa Barbara for the launch as was a congressional lawmaker. Activists hailed the satellite as a much-needed tool to address climate change. 

“This is going to radically change the amount of empirically observed data that we have and vastly increase our understanding of the amount of methane emissions that are currently happening and what needs to be done to reduce them,” said Dakota Raynes, a research and policy manager at the environmental nonprofit Earthworks. “I’m hopeful that gaining that understanding is going to help continue to shift the narrative towards [the] phase down of fossil fuels.”

With the satellite safely orbiting 370 miles above the Earth’s surface, the mission enters a critical second phase. In the coming months, EDF researchers will calibrate equipment and ensure the satellite works as planned. By next year [2025], it is expected to transmit reams of information from around the world."

-via Grist, April 7, 2024

[justvora]

It hurts me in a horrible way what they did to Barbara Gordon. Because it is not only an insult to the character, but to a symbol that can mean too much to people with mobility difficulties: A healthy representation. But she wasn't just that: she was the expression of love of a writer who knew she had a limited time on this earth, but decided to face it with radical joy, writing a character to reflect her own journey towards self-acceptance and joy before she died.

⎯⎯ paraphrased from a post by wassilastalia on twt.

The Oracle mantle was a way of resignifying Barbara's very sexist character assassination, something that devastated her and reduced her to the “woman in the refrigerator” trope - and yet, from a misogynistic act by which they reduced women's pain, they managed to rebirth her from the ashes to give her a new mantle, a legacy that granted her greater freedom to help people in a global way. There she ceased to be a helper, or someone else composing the writings of someone else's book. That's when Barbara Gordon went on to write her own book, the book of her life.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Barbara Rogan

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 1, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 02, 2025

Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it.

The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality.

Last night, officials in the Trump administration purged the Federal Bureau of Investigation of all six of its top executives and, according to NBC’s Ken Dilanian, more than 20 heads of FBI field offices, including those in Washington, D.C., and Miami, where officials pursued cases against now-president Trump. Acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, who represented Trump in a number of his criminal cases, asked acting FBI director Brian J. Driscoll Jr. for a list of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases to “determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”

Clarissa-Jan Lim of MSNBC reported that Trump denied knowing about the dismissals but said the firings were “a good thing” because “[t]hey were very corrupt people, very corrupt, and they hurt our country very badly with the weaponization.”

Officials also fired 25 to 30 federal prosecutors who had worked on cases involving the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and reassigned others. Bove ordered the firings. Career civil servants can’t be fired without cause, and these purges come on top of the apparently illegal firing of 18 inspectors general across federal agencies and a purge of the Department of Justice of those who had worked on cases involving Trump.

Phil Williams of NewsChannel 5 in Nashville, Tennessee, reported on Friday that federal prosecutors were withdrawn from a criminal investigation of Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) for election fraud; Ogles recently filed a House resolution to enable Trump to run for a third term and another supporting Trump’s designs on Greenland. On Wednesday, federal prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss an election fraud case against former representative Jeffrey Fortenberry (R-NE). Trump called Fortenberry’s case an illustration of “the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats.”

That impulse to protect Trump showed yesterday in what a local water manager said was an “extremely unprecedented” release of water from two dams in California apparently to provide evidence of his social media post that the U.S. military had gone into California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” In fact, water was released from two reservoirs that hold water to supply farmland in the summer. They are about 500 miles (800 km) from Los Angeles, where the fires were earlier this year, and the water did not go to Southern California. “This is going to hurt farmers,” a water manager said, “This takes water out of the summer irrigation portfolio.” But Trump posted that if California officials had listened to him six years ago, there would have been no fires. Shashank Joshi of The Economist called it “real ‘mad king’ stuff.”

Trump’s loyalists overlap with the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025, a plan that mirrors the one used by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to overthrow democracy in Hungary. Operating from the position that modern democracy destroys a country by treating everyone equally before the law and welcoming immigrants, it calls for discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy.

Former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson has been a vocal proponent of Orbán’s ideology, and J.D. Vance this week hired Carlson’s son, 28-year-old Buckley, as his deputy press secretary. Although Trump claimed during the campaign he didn't know anything about Project 2025, Steve Contorno and Casey Tolan of CNN estimate that more than two thirds of Trump’s executive orders mirror Project 2025.

You can see the influence of this faction in the indiscriminate immigration sweeps the administration has launched, Trump’s announcement that he is opening a 30,000-bed migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and officials’ revocation of protection for more than 600,000 Venezuelans legally in the U.S. and possibly also for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. You can see it in the administration’s attempt to end the birthright citizenship written into the U.S. Constitution in 1868.

It shows in the new administration's persecution of transgender Americans, including Trump’s executive order purging trans service members from the military, another limiting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, and yet another ordering trans federal prisoners to be medically detransitioned and then moved to facilities that correspond to their sex at birth, an outcome that a trans woman suing the administration calls “humiliating, terrifying, and dangerous.”

The administration has ordered that federal employees must remove all pronouns from their email signatures and, as Jeremy Faust reported in Inside Medicine, that researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must scrub from their work any references to “[g]ender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.” Faust notes that the requirements are vague and that because “most manuscripts include demographic information about the populations or patients studied,” the order potentially affects “just about any major study…including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else.”

Those embracing this ideology are also isolationist. As soon as he took office, Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid except for military aid to Israel and Egypt, abruptly cutting off about $60 billion in funding—less than 1% of the U.S. budget—to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides humanitarian assistance to fight starvation and provide basic medical care for the globe’s most vulnerable and desperate populations. The outcry, both from those appalled that the U.S. would renege on its promises to provide food for children in war-torn countries and from those who recognize that the U.S. withdrawal from these popular programs would create a vacuum China is eager to fill, made Trump’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, say that “humanitarian programs” would be exempted from the freeze, but that appears either untrue or so complicated to negotiate that programs are shutting down anyway.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) appears to be beside himself over this destruction. “Let me explain why the total destruction of USAID…matters so much,” he posted on social media. “China—where Musk makes his money—wants USAID destroyed. So does Russia. Trump and Musk are doing the bidding of Beijing and Moscow. Why?” “The U.S. is in full retreat from the world,” he wrote, and there is “[n]o good reason for it. The immediate consequences of this are cataclysmic. Malnourished babies who depend on U.S. aid will die. Anti-terrorism programs will shut down and our most deadly enemies will get stronger. Diseases that threaten the U.S. will go unabated and reach our shores faster. And China will fill the void. As developing countries will now ONLY be able to rely on China for help, they will cut more deals with Beijing to give them control of ports, critical mineral deposits, etc. U.S. power will shrink. U.S. jobs will be lost.” Murphy speculated that “billionaires like Musk who make $ in China” or “someone buying all that secret Trump meme coin” would benefit from deliberately sabotaging eighty years of U.S. goodwill on the international stage.

And that brings us to the third faction: that of the tech bros, led by billionaire Elon Musk, who according to year-end Federal Election Commission filings spent more than $290 million supporting Trump and the Republicans in 2024. Musk appears to consider colonizing space imperative for the survival of humanity, and part of that goal requires slashing government regulations, as well as receiving government contracts that help to fund his space program.

Before he took office, Trump named Musk and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, to an extra-governmental group called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but Musk has assumed full control of the group, whose mission is to cut the federal budget by as much as $2 trillion.

Musk is interested in the government for future contracts, although a report from January 30, when Musk’s Tesla company filed its annual financial report, showed that the company, which is valued at more than $1 trillion and which made $2.3 billion in 2024, paid $0 in federal income tax. Today, Musk’s X social media company became a form of state media when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it would no longer email updates about this week’s two plane crashes—one in Washington, D.C., and one in Philadelphia—and that reporters would have to get their information through X.

Musk’s goal might well be the crux of the drastic cuts to federal aid, as well as the attempt last week from the Office of Management and Budget to “pause” federal funding and grants to make sure funding reflected Trump’s goals. After a public outcry over the loss of payments to local law enforcement, Meals on Wheels for shut-ins, supplemental nutrition programs, and so on, the OMB rescinded its first memo, but then White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately contradicted the new memo, saying the cuts were still in effect.

The chaos surrounding the cuts could have been designed to make it difficult for opponents to sue over them. This method of changing government priorities through “impoundment” is illegal. Congress—which is the body that represents the American people—appropriates the money for programs, and the president takes an oath to execute the laws. After President Richard M. Nixon tried it, Congress passed a 1974 law making impoundment expressly illegal. But the on-again-off-again confusion appeared at first to stand a chance of stopping lawsuits. It didn’t work: a federal judge halted the funding freeze, suggesting it was a blatant violation of the Constitution.

But then, yesterday, Elon Musk forced the resignation of David A. Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department. Lebryk had been at Treasury since 1989 and had risen to become the person in charge of the U.S. government payment system that disburses about $6 trillion a year through Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, contracts, grants, salaries for federal government workers, tax refunds, and so on, essentially managing the nation’s checkbook.

According to Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post, Musk’s team wanted access to the payment system. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) demanded answers from Trump’s new Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, warning that “these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”

Now, though, with Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to.

Wyden continued by reminding Bessent that the press has reported that Musk has previously been “denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China—a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems—endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.”

This afternoon, Wyden posted that he has been told that Bessent has given the Department of Government Efficiency full access to the system. “Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk's own companies. All of it.”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted: “This is more or less like taking the gold from Fort Knox and putting it in Elons basement. Anyone who gets a check from soc sec or anything else[,] he can cut it off or see all y[ou]r personal and financial data.” Pundit Stuart Stevens called it “the most significant data leak in cyber history.”

All three of these factions are focused on destroying the federal government, which, after all, represents the American people through their elected representatives and spends their taxpayer money. Musk, who is an unelected adjunct to Trump, this evening gleefully referred to the civil servants in the government who work for the American people as “the opposing team.”

But something jumps out from the chaos of the past two weeks. Instructions are vague, circumstances are chaotic, and it’s unclear who is making decisions. That confusion makes it hard to enforce laws or sue, although observers note that what’s going on is “illegal and a breach of the constitutional order.”

Our federal government rests on the U.S. Constitution. The three different factions of Trump's MAGA Republicans agree that the government must be destroyed, and they are operating outside the constitutional order, not eager to win legal victories so much as determined to slash and burn down the government without them.

Today, senior Washington Post political reporter Aaron Blake noted that while it is traditional for cabinet nominees to pledge that they will refuse to honor illegal presidential orders, at least seven of Trump’s nominees have sidestepped that question. Attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, now-confirmed defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, small business administrator nominee Kelly Loeffler, Veterans Affairs secretary nominee Douglas A. Collins, and commerce secretary nominee Howard Lutnick all avoided the question by saying that Trump would never ask them to do anything illegal. FBI director nominee Kash Patel just said he would “always obey the law.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON