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/

Ancora una volta sul prezzo del gas e sugli aumenti in bolletta le cose non stanno come vengono raccontate. A dicembre 2024 il gas è aumentato del 31,84% circa rispetto al dicembre dell’anno precedente, come le bollette, quindi, la crescita sarebbe dovuta al prezzo del gas causato da variabili geopolitiche. Peccato che non sia così.

Le bollette sono aumentate perché il Governo Meloni ha bisogno di far cassa.

https://altreconomia.it/di-quanto-e-aumentata-la-bolletta-del-gas-e-perche-centra-il-governo/

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is not, of course, an example of the imperial gothic but instead a still relevant anti-Enlightenment fable. If a novel ever illustrated how the sleep of reason begets monsters, it is Shelley’s story of how a scientist’s urge to create artificial life leads to utter destruction. However, in Universal Studios’s 1931 Frankenstein, the many pertinent philosophical issues that the original gothic novel explores reshape into thinly veiled imperial gothic through the introduction of a eugenic and highly racialised discourse that changes the monster from a rightfully vengeful and eminently intelligent being into an atavistic criminal. In its Hollywood guise, the monster is not a tragic, lonesome and then understandably vengeful product of unethical science but instead a reincarnation of the degenerate criminal whose brain the monster is provided with in the film. This takes on a peculiarly American dynamics in the movie. As Elizabeth Young suggests in Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (2008), a connection between the monster and the supposedly primitive black American was made as early as during the immediate post-Civil War period when ‘the “hideous progeny” of Shelley’s novel was symbolically reborn in racist parody as the symbol of the miscegenated nation’.

An important reference to American Reconstruction history is also the ending of the movie. Instead of escaping to the North Pole, as is the case in Shelley’s novel, the monster is exorcised by what amounts to a lynch mob. In Frankenstein the movie, as in the American South, justice is done by the people on the spot; by ‘lynch law’. The violation of the sanctified space and body of Frankenstein’s fiancée, Elizabeth, as much as the accidental drowning of the little girl, justifies this public rage in the eyes of the movie audience. This is the end that comes to those who dare violate the purity of white women, or oppose the progress of modernity in any form, be they black Americans in the South, Native Americans on the reservations or unruly natives in the Philippines. Like so many lynching victims, Frankenstein dies in flames.

In this way, the discursive conditions that informed the British colonial enterprise as well as the racism that structured black and white relations in the US permeate Frankenstein. The childlike and aggressive monster is an example of the kind of human category that can never ‘possess the intelligence to make a rational choice of political allegiance’, as Lansing put it. In addition to this, the audience is also free to imagine an alternative narrative in which Fritz never drops the jar with the ‘normal’ brain to the floor. It is not science or faith in modernity that Frankenstein fears, it is atavism. The resolution to the crisis that atavism constitutes is the sad but necessary violence of the lynch mob. When the monster has been burned, the movie can end with the happy union of the film’s central white couple

Johan Anders Höglund, The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence