PJH Studios

Tag: trump

  • The scale of Minnesota resistance

    An aggregated Bluesky thread from Margaret Killjoy details the scale and scope of resistance in Minnesota.

    Half the street corners around here have people–from every walk of life, including republicans–standing guard to watch for suspicious vehicles, which are reported to a robust and entirely decentralized network that tracks ICE vehicles and mobilizes responders.

    I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years. I have never seen anything approaching this scale. Minneapolis is not accepting what’s happening here. ICE fucking murdered a woman for participating in this, and all that did is bring out more people, from more walks of life.

  • The Cassandras predicted our current political reality

    Back in 2015, 2016, there was a minority group of people who saw what Trump really was, Modern-day Cassandras who had a vision but were not listened to.

    Why were they afraid of this? Or, put better, how did they correctly see all this coming? Virtually all the Cassandras would make the same points. They used different examples and discussed them in different ways, but the bones of the argument were the same. The experience for me, as interviewer, was like hearing the same song played by different musicians—once by a folk guitarist, then sung by an opera singer, then played by a heavy metal band, then a string quartet, and so on. Very different styles, but clearly working from the same sheet music. 

    I started to think of this as “The Cassandra Song.” It plays as follows:

    1. Trump (or senior people in the movement) said (insert bad outcome or values).
    2. We had good reasons to think he/they meant it.
    3. We had good reasons to think his base wanted it.

    I still remember how the arguments with family members were that this was not going to go well. While they may not concede that I was right, they can definitely see that a lot of things did come true.

  • Trump Action Tracker

    Informative and depressing: the Trump Action Tracker. Tracks all the actions and orders taken and what they affect.

  • The use of Fortunate Son

    Like Born on the Fourth of July, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son is up there with most misunderstood songs of all time. Why or how Fortunate Son, about a draft dodger, ended up on Trump’s parade playlist is a new height for irony.

  • FAFAnomics

    Recent economic policy has turned into FAFAnomics – Fuck Around and Find Out Economics,

    F*ck Around and Find Out Economics, something that feels like the policy equivalent of a TikTok influencer doing increasingly dangerous stunts off the side of a building for views. The goal isn’t good governance; it’s capturing attention at any cost. And it’s working! While we debate whether each new crisis is legal, ethical, or even real1(as we should) the broader transformation of American fiscal policy continues.

  • White House social media strategy

    Washington Post explores the new White House social media machine

    After years of working to undermine mainstream outlets and neutralize critical reporting, Trump’s allies are now pushing a parallel information universe of social media feeds and right-wing firebrands to sell the country on his expansionist approach to presidential power.

    For the Trump team, that has involved aggressively confronting critics like Gomez, not just to “reframe the narrative” but to drown them out, said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team.

    Ghoulish behavior through propaganda.