According to reports, far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday that “the goal for 2025 is to demolish more than the Palestinians build in the West Bank.” This comes as the Israeli government is reportedly building almost 1,000 additional housing units in the Efrat settlement close to Jerusalem.

The additional units built for settlers in Efrat would increase the settlement’s size by 40% and block development in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. The roughly 100 existing settlements in the West Bank host around 500,000 Israeli settlers and are considered illegal under international law.

Sunday’s comments from Smotrich reflect his longstanding hopes for Israeli absorption of the West Bank and the nixing of a two-state solution. He published a lengthy plan in 2017 in this regard entitled “One Hope.”

“We need to and can go back to the post-1948 days, regarding both Israeli Arabs and the Arabs of Judea and Samaria,” he outlined in the plan, the first phase of which is called “Victory Through Settlement.” This, he explained, ”will be realized via a political-legal act of imposing sovereignty on all Judea and Samaria, and with concurrent acts of settlement: the establishment of cities and towns, the laying down of infrastructure as is customary in ‘little’ Israel and the encouragement of tens and hundreds of thousands of residents to come live in Judea and Samaria. In this way, we will be able to create a clear and irreversible reality on the ground.”

"The Arabs of Judea and Samaria will be able to conduct their daily life in freedom and peace, but not to vote for the Israeli Knesset at the first stage” as a way to “preserve the Jewish majority in decision-making in the state of Israel.” He vehemently denies that this system resembles apartheid.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/smotrich-calls-for-more-settlements/

Over the weekend, the Trump administration appeared to begin the process of rolling back enforcement of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the “Magna Carta” of federal environmental law. In a filing submitted February 16, administration officials announced an interim rule titled “Removal of National Environmental Policy Act Implementing Regulations.”

NEPA requires all federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of their work, including by submitting new contracts and permits to rigorous environmental assessments and public comment. Signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970 amid growing pollution concerns, NEPA was the nation’s first major environmental law, predating the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Project 2025 — the conservative policy agenda authored by Trump’s former aides — said that the government is “abusing” NEPA, and has called for severely limiting the law.

https://jacobin.com/2025/02/nepa-federal-environment-law-trump/

In historical terms, the event we are witnessing is an attempt at Gleichschaltung. The Nazi term is usually translated “coordination,” sometimes “consolidation” or “streamlining.” In this phase of totalitarianism, the Movement, now elected to power, uses its hold on the legitimate authority of the state to try, illegitimately, to align neutral, nonpartisan, or independent institutions with the extra-state Movement, forging an obligation to the Leader rather than to the constitutional state.

The task of coordination is to reshape, refound, purge, and, by all means foul and fair, shake the underlying basis of institutions and install new, arbitrary ones. Because institutions only subsist by their personnel, a Gleichschaltung should unnerve the committed participants in institutions, first within government and then in civil society, and mold minds toward constant doubt and adjustment. Personnel should feel that they require alignment with the leader, or acknowledgment of arbitrary or irrelevant Movement goals, simply to continue to work and to avoid baseless investigation or denunciation.

Next, history tells us, comes the effort to undermine the professional and non-political civil service. In 1933, the National Socialists undertook this part of Gleichschaltung with a “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.” Under its articles, the regime purged the civil service according to several different criteria. Some could be fired to reduce expenses and shrink the bureaucracy (Article 6), others because they could not be relied upon in their loyalty to the Nazi state (Article 4). And Jews were expelled from State employment because they were Jews (Article 3).

Odd as it may sound, the antidote to totalitarianism, recorded by those who lived through it, is associational life. De-atomization, and the creation of loyalties to other people that can’t be, or simply aren’t, coordinated with a regime. In a time of temptation to the bad, or to the worse, association is what lets people find the courage to refuse, and the practical standing to do so. If things get very bad, it is also associational life that helps people circulate information, hide, escape, and travel. Combinations of associations like churches, clubs, professional or activist societies, local government and local agencies, stretching from close-range to middle-range, are practically efficacious in kinds of details that can’t be seen from above, or aren’t seen until too late and are too banal to punish: accidentally failing to find or arrest someone, sponsoring and sheltering, and passing money

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-fork-in-the-road/

We are witnessing something new: the convergence of three strains of politics that have never simultaneously been this proximate to power. Those projects come from different but related places: the Wall Street–Silicon Valley nexus of distressed debt and startup culture; anti–New Deal conservative think tanks; and the extremely online world of anarchocapitalism and right-wing accelerationism. Within the new administration, each strain is striving to realize its desired outcome. The first wants a sleek state that narrowly seeks to maximize returns on investment; the second a shackled state unable to promote social justice; and the third, most dramatically, a shattered state that cedes governing authority to competing projects of decentralized private rule. We are watching how well they can collaborate to reinforce one another. The future condition of the government—and by extension the country—depends on how far the dynamo spins.

Data scientists are ringing alarm bells about potentially irreversible damage to federal databases. If the think tankers have their way, the state will no longer be able to collect information and allocate tax dollars to socially desirable goals.

What do they see? Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into what Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, calls a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.”v
https://archive.ph/0R22H

Trump’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education, apparently on hold for now, turns out to be opposed by majorities of voters in both parties — numbers that are likely to grow as the implications of funding cuts, which will fall hardest on Trump’s own red-state base, begin to sink in. And Trump’s threat to withhold federal funding from schools with vaccine mandates is even more of a political loser. According to a recent survey, just 15 percent of adults identified this as a top priority, while nearly half said that the cuts “should not be done.”

Even the calls for mass deportations, which so thrilled many of his supporters, run afoul of public opinion when it comes to schools. Just 18 percent of voters support arresting undocumented students at schools.

In Kentucky, voters from every single county rejected a change to the Constitution that would have allowed public dollars to fund private religious education, despite a marquee endorsement from Trump. “Kentuckians agree with Donald Trump,” proclaimed one ad, featuring Trump broadcasting his support for school choice. “If you do too, vote yes on [Amendment] 2.

The appeal landed with a thud. The same rural counties that supported Trump most emphatically also rejected the voucher amendment by outsize margins. Voters in Monroe County, which borders Tennessee, supported Trump by nearly 90 percent while rejecting the voucher amendment by 70.5 percent. And in the state’s tiniest county, eight out of ten voters went for Trump, nearly the same margin by which they opposed Amendment 2. In Nebraska, vouchers were defeated by an equally lopsided margin.”

https://jacobin.com/2025/01/trump-education-vouchers-privatization-democrats/

1. Obtain a phone. It doesn’t need to have an active phone number associated with it, and can be either an old phone you have around or a dedicated burner phone.
2. Locate a pay phone.
3. Find the pay phone’s phone number (call 1-800-444-4444 if it’s not written on the phone).
4. Make sure the pay phone can receive incoming calls.
5. Enter the pay phone number into Signal, and use the ‘Call me’ option to receive a verification call (this option shows up only after the SMS timer runs out).
6. Input the confirmation code, set up a PIN and enable Registration Lock in the Signal app.

https://theintercept.com/2024/07/16/signal-app-privacy-phone-number/