"But what if Trump’s behavior consistently warrants authoritarian interpretation? Then recognizing the pattern isn’t bias—it’s pattern recognition functioning correctly."
I had to laugh at the description of HCR subscribers. I'm a White male, gun owning, blue collar retiree who drinks bourbon and I start every morning by reading HCR.
There's no such animal as a scholar who never gets anything wrong. Nor do scholars demand such a degree of perfection of each other, else good scholarship would never be done. Richardson is one of the world's top scholars. The breadth and depth of the historical knowledge she brings to her posts is extraordinary.
Despite the scholarly debates involved in all scholarship, is there any established historian of fascism who doesn't easily recognize it in Trump? There are some who still quibble over the term, but none who deny it's close kin, whether or not a textbook illustration. Fascism (or close-kin-to-fascism) denial is as stupid as climate crisis denial at this point.
Is there a decent place that's attempted to track all of Thiel's ever-expanding gaggle of backed publications and demagogues? Whether playing a part reaching for Seven Mountains or not, I'm of Vonnegut's opinion: We are what we pretend to be. Apocalypse seems to be taking over his mind.
If your publication was such a paragon of journalistic integrity and commitment to truth, one might have taken note that Richardson walked back the Groyper affiliation the very next day. Yet, you sit here and have the audacity to lecture on the integrity of others.
If you mean that she didn’t mention it anymore, then you are correct lol. She did not “walk it back.” And she continued to assert that he was right-wing
She absolutely did. Listen to the first 5 minutes of her politics podcast the day afterwards. She acknowledged, explicitly, that she jumped the gun and trusted erroneous online reporting. Go check. I’ll wait.
It’s not in her written post. There’s no correction on the wrong post. And then it’s not brought up again after that. If you mess up in print, you correct in print
Fair enough. But this does little violence on the thrust of my critique. My critique of yours explicitly acknowledges that she’s made errors. And to help close the loop on the broader debate for readers, here’s a link to our other back-and-forth: https://substack.com/@mikebrock/note/c-166758982
It's insanity and gaslighting...and I so appreciate your calling it out. How does one function being aware of so much hatred and dishonesty? (I'm working on that). While it fuels those who would destroy our republic, for now, it cannot endure.
You can get to HCR's conclusion even without answering whether Trump is a dictator/tyrant. By even a cursory observation, and by almost every account, Donald Trump is a narcissist. Whether his narcissism is malignant or benign is irrelevant.
On the (correct) basis that Trump is a narcissist, he does not, cannot, have good and defensible reasons for the things he's doing. To reach that conclusion, one would need to assume there is some limit to a narcissist's narcissism. By definition, there is no such limit. Thus, benevolence cannot be Trump's wherefore.
Our piece asked a simple and narrow question: if you have an audience of 2.7 million people, are you sticking to the record — and correcting yourself when the record changes?
Richardson has a documented history of bending the facts to fit a clean morality tale. Unlike somebody like Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens, she is not a polemicist. She’s a “non-partisan historian.”
When you're talking about something as high stakes as the slide into authoritarianism, to one of the largest paying audiences in the country, that's not trivial. We don't have to assume Trump’s motives are pure. But we shouldn’t run ahead of the evidence, and we should fix mistakes when they happen. We’re saying the argument is more convincing when the details are solid.
And for the record, who you imagine is in our social circles doesn’t change what’s true. That’s not evidence, that's your own storytelling. If we’ve gotten anything wrong, point to it.
"... but we'll leave it up to readers to decide if paramilitary federal police jumping out of helicopters into a Chicago South Shore apartment building, kicking down doors, and putting children in zip-ties in the middle of the night (US and non-US citizens alike) without individualized warrants constitutes authoritarianism. Even though it violates one of the most fundamental tenets of the US Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment, and such detentions under generalized suspicion that were among the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, and the reason for the revolution. But we think, to be fair, we should allow ourselves to be open to the possibility that Trump has benevolent reasons for allowing such things to occur. Unlike Heather Cox Richardson, who immediately jumps to assuming malevolence. Is it authoritarianism? You decide!"
No one’s arguing that paramilitary raids are fine. The question is whether you want your outrage built on solid ground.
Authoritarians love sloppy opponents, the kind who, in the service of marketable infotainment, get everything from Bush’s response to 9/11 to Hoover’s position on taxes to the details of a murder that occupied multiple news cycles wrong.
It’s telling that it’s not only the right who’s criticized HCR. It’s the left, fellow dems, her colleagues in academia…
Yes, of course. You're just trying to make sure the opposition's Is are dotted and Ts are crossed. This sort of button-downed, passionate commitment to meticulous accuracy is something that I immediately associate with Mike Solana and PirateWires.
Again with the guilt by association. You are not talking to Mike, who unlike heather doesn’t bill himself as an above it all non-partisan committed to perfect neutrality, but Katherine Dee. Don’t evaluate me by another person’s work.
Katherine, I have read and enjoyed some of your writing. But my critiques stand. The position and prose of this piece would leave any reader without further context thinking that anyone making the case that the Trump administration is engaging in authoritarian and extra-constitutional power consolidation should be considered hysterical. You hide behind the fact that this interpretation is contested by MAGA supporters.
It's reminiscent of young earth creationists arguing that Darwinian natural selection is controversial because it doesn't align with a literal reading of Genesis. The existence of controversy doesn't make the science unknowable—it means one side is denying evidence.
Except we're not talking about high school textbooks in Texas. We're talking about our constitutional republic and whether warrantless mass detentions violate the Fourth Amendment—which isn't a matter of interpretation, it's constitutional law that's existed since the Founding.
(I'm not just criticising conservatives there; I distinctly recall watching a Dan Rather livestream some years ago where he talked about democracy, voting and the ballot being "sacred", or used some other religiously charged language to the same effect, and when Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows issued her opinion preliminarily disqualifying Donald Trump from that state's primary ballot for violations of the 14th Amendment, she also used that term. To my ears it's creepy and cult-like and explains quite a lot about just how much visceral anger can get whipped up around the possibility of slight election errors whereas the errors made in an election such as in Châteauguay—Lacolle in 2021 do not whip up anywhere near the same sort of righteous anger.)
"But what if Trump’s behavior consistently warrants authoritarian interpretation? Then recognizing the pattern isn’t bias—it’s pattern recognition functioning correctly."
It's Bayesian analysis functioning correctly...
I had to laugh at the description of HCR subscribers. I'm a White male, gun owning, blue collar retiree who drinks bourbon and I start every morning by reading HCR.
💯%
There's no such animal as a scholar who never gets anything wrong. Nor do scholars demand such a degree of perfection of each other, else good scholarship would never be done. Richardson is one of the world's top scholars. The breadth and depth of the historical knowledge she brings to her posts is extraordinary.
Despite the scholarly debates involved in all scholarship, is there any established historian of fascism who doesn't easily recognize it in Trump? There are some who still quibble over the term, but none who deny it's close kin, whether or not a textbook illustration. Fascism (or close-kin-to-fascism) denial is as stupid as climate crisis denial at this point.
Is there a decent place that's attempted to track all of Thiel's ever-expanding gaggle of backed publications and demagogues? Whether playing a part reaching for Seven Mountains or not, I'm of Vonnegut's opinion: We are what we pretend to be. Apocalypse seems to be taking over his mind.
Trump's authoritarianism is so self-evident HCR has to constantly lie about it. Thank you Mike Brock!
If your publication was such a paragon of journalistic integrity and commitment to truth, one might have taken note that Richardson walked back the Groyper affiliation the very next day. Yet, you sit here and have the audacity to lecture on the integrity of others.
If you mean that she didn’t mention it anymore, then you are correct lol. She did not “walk it back.” And she continued to assert that he was right-wing
She absolutely did. Listen to the first 5 minutes of her politics podcast the day afterwards. She acknowledged, explicitly, that she jumped the gun and trusted erroneous online reporting. Go check. I’ll wait.
It’s not in her written post. There’s no correction on the wrong post. And then it’s not brought up again after that. If you mess up in print, you correct in print
Fair enough. But this does little violence on the thrust of my critique. My critique of yours explicitly acknowledges that she’s made errors. And to help close the loop on the broader debate for readers, here’s a link to our other back-and-forth: https://substack.com/@mikebrock/note/c-166758982
“Does little violence” lmao
It's insanity and gaslighting...and I so appreciate your calling it out. How does one function being aware of so much hatred and dishonesty? (I'm working on that). While it fuels those who would destroy our republic, for now, it cannot endure.
You can get to HCR's conclusion even without answering whether Trump is a dictator/tyrant. By even a cursory observation, and by almost every account, Donald Trump is a narcissist. Whether his narcissism is malignant or benign is irrelevant.
On the (correct) basis that Trump is a narcissist, he does not, cannot, have good and defensible reasons for the things he's doing. To reach that conclusion, one would need to assume there is some limit to a narcissist's narcissism. By definition, there is no such limit. Thus, benevolence cannot be Trump's wherefore.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
So we're going to recycle a tired phrase because if you have Peter Thiel's balls in your mouth, you deserve it:
Never. Stop. Punching. Nazi. Techno. Fascist. Oligarchs. Fucking. Period.
Our piece asked a simple and narrow question: if you have an audience of 2.7 million people, are you sticking to the record — and correcting yourself when the record changes?
Richardson has a documented history of bending the facts to fit a clean morality tale. Unlike somebody like Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens, she is not a polemicist. She’s a “non-partisan historian.”
When you're talking about something as high stakes as the slide into authoritarianism, to one of the largest paying audiences in the country, that's not trivial. We don't have to assume Trump’s motives are pure. But we shouldn’t run ahead of the evidence, and we should fix mistakes when they happen. We’re saying the argument is more convincing when the details are solid.
And for the record, who you imagine is in our social circles doesn’t change what’s true. That’s not evidence, that's your own storytelling. If we’ve gotten anything wrong, point to it.
"... but we'll leave it up to readers to decide if paramilitary federal police jumping out of helicopters into a Chicago South Shore apartment building, kicking down doors, and putting children in zip-ties in the middle of the night (US and non-US citizens alike) without individualized warrants constitutes authoritarianism. Even though it violates one of the most fundamental tenets of the US Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment, and such detentions under generalized suspicion that were among the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, and the reason for the revolution. But we think, to be fair, we should allow ourselves to be open to the possibility that Trump has benevolent reasons for allowing such things to occur. Unlike Heather Cox Richardson, who immediately jumps to assuming malevolence. Is it authoritarianism? You decide!"
No one’s arguing that paramilitary raids are fine. The question is whether you want your outrage built on solid ground.
Authoritarians love sloppy opponents, the kind who, in the service of marketable infotainment, get everything from Bush’s response to 9/11 to Hoover’s position on taxes to the details of a murder that occupied multiple news cycles wrong.
It’s telling that it’s not only the right who’s criticized HCR. It’s the left, fellow dems, her colleagues in academia…
Yes, of course. You're just trying to make sure the opposition's Is are dotted and Ts are crossed. This sort of button-downed, passionate commitment to meticulous accuracy is something that I immediately associate with Mike Solana and PirateWires.
Again with the guilt by association. You are not talking to Mike, who unlike heather doesn’t bill himself as an above it all non-partisan committed to perfect neutrality, but Katherine Dee. Don’t evaluate me by another person’s work.
Katherine, I have read and enjoyed some of your writing. But my critiques stand. The position and prose of this piece would leave any reader without further context thinking that anyone making the case that the Trump administration is engaging in authoritarian and extra-constitutional power consolidation should be considered hysterical. You hide behind the fact that this interpretation is contested by MAGA supporters.
It's reminiscent of young earth creationists arguing that Darwinian natural selection is controversial because it doesn't align with a literal reading of Genesis. The existence of controversy doesn't make the science unknowable—it means one side is denying evidence.
Except we're not talking about high school textbooks in Texas. We're talking about our constitutional republic and whether warrantless mass detentions violate the Fourth Amendment—which isn't a matter of interpretation, it's constitutional law that's existed since the Founding.
So well said, Mike.
Have restacked several tims with excerpts.
Politics in the US has, for some segment of its population (of all ideological stripes) long since ceased to be a sober civic exercise and is instead effectively a religion: https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3loqsfhswjk2r
(I'm not just criticising conservatives there; I distinctly recall watching a Dan Rather livestream some years ago where he talked about democracy, voting and the ballot being "sacred", or used some other religiously charged language to the same effect, and when Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows issued her opinion preliminarily disqualifying Donald Trump from that state's primary ballot for violations of the 14th Amendment, she also used that term. To my ears it's creepy and cult-like and explains quite a lot about just how much visceral anger can get whipped up around the possibility of slight election errors whereas the errors made in an election such as in Châteauguay—Lacolle in 2021 do not whip up anywhere near the same sort of righteous anger.)