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The change coincides with broader concerns about political interference at the Smithsonian and how the institution charged with preserving American history could be shaped by the Trump administration’s efforts to exert more control over its work.
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Let’s make sure actual history doesn’t make Dear Leader look bad.
Of all the things they’re doing, and this might seem odd, but this to me is the most disturbing. Literally rewriting history is about as sinister as it gets.
If it had been somehow possible to have the Senate trial on the night of 1/6/21, I think it would have been possible; a whole lot of GOP senators were scared and angry as hell. But, the time it took for the second impeachment to get to that point gave them time to calm down, and let themselves get talked down by Trump’s supporters.
Wapo is becoming so restrictive these days that even with a gift link, you still have to set up an account and sign in to see the article, so to hell with them.
I presume the three presidents they’re probably talking about are Andrew Johnson (impeached but not convicted), Clinton (impeached but not convicted), and Nixon (House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach but Nixon resigned before a formal impeachment was carried out). Trump should definitely be on the list because he was impeached not once but twice. The probability of conviction by spineless Republicans isn’t important; what’s important is that the reasons for both impeachments were not frivolous, but based on serious transgressions. It’s all part of history, which the orange man-child is now ordering to be rewritten.
I’ve had a Yahoo email account for years that I use for things like that. Really, any place that needs an email address to gain access to something. Any place that might generate junk mail. And I go to that account and delete everything in it (and empty the trash) every couple of days. I rarely give out my main email address.
I expect that soon every copy of 1984 will be disappeared. To be replaced by something of the same name that’s vaguely similar but which extols the true paradise they’re creating. And not in an ironic way; with all the sincerity an AI ghostwriter can muster.
Will voters realize we are in a recession if the statistics have been faked? We’ll probably find out. Or will it be truly impossible to know the overall economic situation?
Or will Trump eat a TACO? Oligarchs won’t like this.
P.S. Note that the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides the inflation rate as well as unemployment.
At this point I am picturing armies of workers (ok, maybe AI will do it), combing through Internet articles, amending figures retrospectively, 1984 style. You know it’s going to happen.
It’s possible that the Trump tariffs could be reversed by a court. Specifically, the Washington, D.C.-based Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has wondered how Trump is invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to enact tariffs, when the IEEPA doesn’t mention the word tariffs at all.
People figured out that the economy was bad in the USSR, despite them trying the same trick of not collecting economic data (even the Politburo had no way to get accurate economic data). While it takes an organization to gather and analyze precise numbers, the problem with trying to outright hide a bad economy is that people are living in it.