Stand Up for the Democracy You Took For Granted.

From the Front Office: Our Hollowed Out Democracy

While you were busy in your life, members of the press lost the ability to hear the President and ask questions.

While you were at the dentist, we somehow opened up our government to an unelected billionaire who buys votes, and wants to privatize a hollowed out government, using AI and technology he controls.

While you were picking up the kids, departments of education, of fair housing and equal opportunity, NASA, OSHA, FDA, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and departments doing scientific research, collecting and storing data, monitoring the climate, protecting your air, water and lands, administering grants to help VETS, people below the poverty line, agencies to protect employees, fight discrimination and abuse, and reign in corporate crimes - - the people who do this work have been sent packing, and the offices closed.

While you were getting bids on the front fence work, the President was playing roulette with tariffs which made his allies some fast money, and which will make pretty much everything cost more than it did, if you can even buy those things anymore.

While you were at the wedding, the President was demanding that law firms and universities to support his own causes, or they would face retribution.

And he is making this seem like it's lawful. It's not.

As they say, this is a partial list.

There used to be white papers, and Congressional and agency hearings to make major changes in government organizations. These hearings would be preceded by analysis and predicted outcomes for policy trajectories. (At a minimum, congress and the American people need to demand accountability from the President: a list of intended actions, and an inquiry into their consequences, before any further erosion of services or shuttering of offices.)

But at a more fundamental level, he is stripping away our ability to learn. Our ability to have a say in our government. And he is deadening our belief that we can do anything. He wants sheep. Docile, uncaring sheep.

“I’m no one of note. No one is coming to save us; we have to save the republic." These words are from Lauren Koster in her letter to her law firm to stand up to the unlawful demands being made upon it. I believe these words. I believe in them. I believe in America and I am not ready to relinquish democracy.

Don't stop caring. Don't stop trying to figure out what to do. This really is a call to action.

A Ticking Clock on American Freedom

From the Editor's Desk: I am not sure how much longer the Daily Telegiraffe will be operational.
I'm having issues with access and editing and logging out, and I'm not sure why. If this site suddenly goes dark,
know that it's been my privilege and pleasure to remind you that you're not alone out there.
Take care of your family and friends, yes. But not to the exclusion of the larger world.
The decisions you make matter today, but they also impact tomorrow in ways we often forget.

Remember to love each other. Through it all. No matter what.

From the Front Office: I Didn't Just Get Fired From My Job, But They Did

Thousands of people, like you and me, have been fired from their government jobs, without cause, and without due process.
More than 24,000 people. With rents and mortgages to pay, and families to support. These actions are profoundly UN-American.

Stripping people of their livelihoods, their careers, without due process--without any recourse.
These wrongful acts should be challengeable as unconstitutional, as well as in violation of myriad state and statutory protections for employees.

These employees are not AI. They are not bots.
These are actual people who are being thrown on the scrap heap in the burning of democracy.

Illegal. Unconstitutional. Immoral. UN-American.

Dismantling the Government

Excerpt From The New Yorker, March 30, 2025

We Are Sleepwalking Into Autocracy

Interview by David Remnick with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who describes how free and fair elections might end in America as soon as 2026.

Senator, I wonder if we could try to define the crisis that we’re in. I’m of the opinion that the Trump Administration is intent on creating an American-style authoritarian situation. Do you agree with me?

I do. Long ago, the Republican Party decided that they cared more about power than they did democracy. That’s what January 6th was all about—regardless of who won the election, they wanted to make sure that their person was in charge. They believe, and have long believed, that the Democratic Party progressives are an existential threat to the country, and thus any means justifies the end—which is making sure that a Democrat never again wins a national election. So, this seems pretty purposeful and transparent—this decision to rig the rules of democracy so that you still hold elections, but the minority party, the opposition party, is rendered just weak enough, and the rules are tilted toward the majority party just enough, so that Donald Trump and Republicans and the Trump family rule forever. And, of course, this is not an unfamiliar system. This is Hungary, this is Turkey, this is Serbia. There are plenty of countries, all around the world, that hold elections—it’s just that one party continues to win. And that is, I think, the very concrete, very transparent plan that Trump and his White House are implementing right now.

Why do your Republican colleagues put up with this? Do they fess up to it when you talk to them in private?

They do not fess up to the plan behind closed doors. They are living in a self-created delusion. Most of them will tell you that it’s not as bad as you think. Yes, Donald Trump is acting in a way that previous Presidents have not, but we will still have a free and fair election; what he’s doing is not enough to topple essential democratic norms.

They are, of course, also deeply scared of him. They have worked very hard to become United States senators. You’ve sacrificed a lot to get to this point, and you don’t want to stop being a United States senator once you’ve gotten here. And for Republicans, the only thing that keeps you a United States senator is staying on Donald Trump’s good side.

I have to ask you why. Is the job so great—is being called “senator” by young staffers so great—if you have to give up and cede your principles?

Of course not. Of course not. And maybe this interacts with the third thing Republicans will tell you, which is, “Hey, listen, I’m trying to make this better.” Republicans in the mold of John Thune—and I’m not saying that he personally has said this to me, but people in his mold will say, “Well, if I cross Donald Trump, I’ll get replaced by somebody infinitely worse. And I can try to work behind the scenes to make this better.”

So, what’s the difference at this point?

Well, I’m telling you how they rationalize it. I’m not defending it. Of course, it is all treachery to lie down with Donald Trump, who is actively trying to destroy our democracy.

And then the majority of Republicans in Congress are fully on board with the idea that the rules should be rigged so that Democrats never rule again. There is just an exhaustion with democracy among a lot of Republicans.

This has only been going on for a couple of months—the Administration began January 20th, and it’s quite different from the first term. How bad is this, and where is it going, in your estimation?

I mean, it can be true that some of the orthodoxy of the left put us in the position of being unelectable. It is also true that the bureaucracy inside the federal government, the state governments, and local governments has become so big and cumbersome as to make it impossible to get things done in this country. But that is not mutually exclusive with the belief that we have months—not a year—before our democracy is rendered so damaged that it can’t be repaired.

I do think that over the last four years, those surrounding Donald Trump put together a pretty thoughtful plan to destroy democracy and the rule of law, and you are seeing it being implemented. Just in the last week—and you and others have covered this well—the assault has been trained on academia, institutions of higher education, and the legal community, the biggest law firms in this country. In democracy after democracy, those two institutions—higher education and the legal profession—are, in many ways, the foundation that undergirds the rule of law. Those are the places where people think about the rule of law, protect it, warn when it is being undermined. The legal profession is the place where people contest efforts to try to destroy the rule of law. And so it is not coincidental that Trump is trying to force both higher education and the legal profession to capitulate to him, and to commit, often through very explicit bilateral agreements—for the most important institutions—to essentially quelling protest.

And, of course, what the Administration is doing by taking on these very high-profile institutions is sending a warning to other law firms and to other colleges: if you take us on—if you file lawsuits against the Administration, if you support Democrats, if you allow for campus-wide protests against our priorities—you’ll be next. And so what will happen here—what inevitably happens in every democracy in which this tactic is tried—is that the Administration won’t have to go after every institution or every firm, because most of them will just decide in advance to stay out of the way. When students are filing a petition for a massive protest against a Trump Administration policy, they may just find it much harder to be able to exercise free speech on campus.

This is how democracy dies. Everybody just gets scared. You make a few examples, and everyone else just decides to comply.

That brings us to the real crux of our conversation today—the Democratic Party. What is the Democratic Party going to do about it? Every indicator that I see, in terms of public-opinion polls, shows widespread dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party. What are the Democrats going to do in a concerted way in the Senate and the House?

First, I do think there is a vast overestimation of the power that Democrats have. We are in the minority in the House and the Senate. We don’t have the Presidency. There are some people out there who think we should just be able to stop this. And the fact of the matter is that we don’t have an army, and thus we are relying on public mobilization and the courts.

Second, I do think that there’s an element out there that doesn’t actually want to have the really hard conversation about why we lost. I mean, people knew who this guy was. He said he was going to be a dictator on Day One. He told you he was going to pardon the January 6th protesters. He still won.

People thought he was fooling around.

Nah. I mean, that might be true, but I don’t know that that’s the whole story. I think we’re a pretty broken brand right now, and some of the people on the left don’t want to go through that hard rewrite of what the Democratic Party stands for.

What’s at the core of the brokenness, if we can be specific?

Well, we have become the status-quo party, and so we have reverted to defending democracy instead of explaining how we are going to break it down and reform it. We have not been a pugilistically populist party, where we name the people who have power and we build very easy-to-understand solutions about how to transfer power to people who don’t have it. And then we’re a pretty judgmental party, filled with a dozen litmus tests. We don’t let you in unless you agree with us on everything, kind of—from gender rights to reproductive rights to gun control to climate.

We’ve got to be a party that invites people in as long as they agree with us on the basic economic message, and build our party with a little bit more acceptance of people who have diverging views on social and cultural issues.

How would that conversation and that process come about, among the Democrats?

Well, I think first is making the decision that economics is the tentpole. And populist economics. That means that you are going to have a party that, frankly, sounds a little bit more like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. You are talking about billionaires and corporate power. You are proposing really easy-to-understand ideas on how to shift that power—whether it be a cap on rent increases, or a massive increase in the minimum wage, or the regulation of every single drug price, not just the ten highest-priced drugs. And then it is just making that decision to go out and ask people to come into the coalition who might not be with us on issues that I care about, like guns, and to nominate candidates that signal that the Party is a big tent—people who are populist economically, but may not line up with us on all the social and cultural stuff.

Can you explain the split we’re seeing between Democratic senior leadership and more junior members of the Party?

I don’t know that it really breaks down along generational lines, but I can explain what the basic argument is right now. Is this a normal moment, where you can just keep on punching Donald Trump, and pushing down his approval ratings, and eventually win the 2026 election, and set up a potential win in 2028? Or is there a pretty good chance that we’re not going to have a free election in 2026?

You believe that’s a possibility?

A hundred per cent. Every single day, I think the chances are growing that we will not have a free and fair election in 2026.

What does that look like?

It may not even be that the mechanics of the election are rigged. I’m not suggesting that there will be election officials out there stuffing ballots. What I’m talking about is that the opposition—the infrastructure necessary for an opposition to win—will have been destroyed. No lawyers will represent us. They will take down ActBlue, which is our primary means of raising small-dollar contributions. They will threaten activists with violence, so no one will show up to our rallies and to our door-knock events. This is what happens in lots of democracies around the world; the opposition is just kept so weak that they can’t win. That’s what I worry about being the landscape as we approach 2026. And, if you believe that, then everything you do right now has to be in service of stopping that kind of weakening or destruction of democracy.

So, to me, the essential difference in the Party right now is that some people think that that has a very low likelihood, and so we should just engage in normal politics—try to become more popular than Republicans. And people like me believe that it won’t matter if we’re more popular than them, because the rules won’t allow us to run a fair election; and so everything we are doing right now, both inside the Capitol and outside the Capitol, should be geared toward trying to make Republicans stop this assault on the rule of law and democratic norms.

Do you think it’s possible that Donald Trump wants to stay in office past 2028? How would he do it?

I think it’s absolutely possible. People very close to him are saying that it’s already a foregone conclusion. If he breaks the Supreme Court and breaks the Constitution and pays no consequence for it, we could ultimately be living in a situation in which the President just declares that he will stay in office. He could also hand power to a relative—maybe Donald Trump doesn’t run, but a Trump family member runs and the Trump family just stays in power. I think all of those things are possible.

The Democrats ran, in no small measure, on the preservation of democracy, and that failed. Why do you have any confidence that the public would mobilize for democracy in the future, if not now?

The public was not convinced by our argument, in 2024, because we were shilling for the existing version of democracy—which is deeply corrupt, which does not work. When I got into politics twenty-five years ago, something like campaign-finance reform, government reform, democracy reform, was a top-three issue for Democrats. It was something we talked about every single day. Somewhere along the line that stopped; somewhere along the line we stopped talking about reforming democracy. So it became easy for voters to just believe that we were all corrupt, and that neither Republicans nor Democrats were actually sincere in fixing what was wrong with democracy.

Trump is giving us this opportunity—because this is the most corrupt White House in the history of the country—to run on an anti-corruption message. But we will only win if we actually run an anti-corruption platform. And so, for me, the two things that matter most are populist economics and government reform. If Democrats run on cleaning up Washington with real, actual plans—to, for instance, get private money completely out of politics; to pass the stock Act, to make sure that not a single person inside government can use insider information to trade to benefit them financially—and we run on populist economics, I think that’s a winner, and it’s a way for people to stand up and support democracy, but only a reformed version of democracy.

You mentioned corruption, and we now have a situation where members of the Trump family earn tremendous fees from foreign governments. Seems to me that that’s a colossal form of corruption, and it’s not something we don’t know about. It’s published all the time, and then it falls into a black hole. Why?

Trump has been so public about his corruption that it ends up being normalized. If it were so corrupt, why would you do it in public? It must not be corrupt if you’re doing it in public. We’re used to corruption being done in secret. We’re used to there being a sort of shamefulness about it. And so it is interesting that his boasting of his corruption ends in people believing that he might not be corrupt.

I’m just shocked that the Trump meme coin isn’t, like, the only thing that we’re talking about. It’s probably the most massive corruption scandal in the history of the country. You literally have an—I guess—legal, open channel for private donations to the President and his family in exchange for favors. And we just think that it’s part of Trump’s right to do business in the White House. It’s gross. It’s disgusting. It’s deeply immoral. And the fact that we didn’t talk about that every hour of every day, once he released that coin, was kind of a signal to the country that we weren’t going to take the corruption seriously.

You mentioned the possibility of public involvement, public demonstrations, people out on the street. What would bring them there?

Well, there aren’t daily political rallies happening in the country. But anytime you set one up now, you’re seeing not thousands of people, but tens of thousands of people attending.

People are ready to mobilize. We just haven’t been organized enough to give them those opportunities. And this speaks to the actual need of the Democratic Party right now. We have to be better when it comes to our tactics inside Washington, but we actually have to build a political infrastructure that can plug people in. And that’s what we’ve been really terrible at doing over the years. The Republicans have a permanent political infrastructure—mobilizing, legal, messaging, intellectual. The Democrats have a very thin permanent infrastructure.

We need to be engaged in risk-tolerant behavior right now. Because ultimately, the only way to save the democracy is for there to be a national public mobilization—of not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of people—when the five-alarm fire happens. If the public doesn’t see us [in Congress] taking risks, then they are not going to take what will be a risk on their part, standing up to a repressive regime where it’s clear that the government is willing to make you pay a personal price if you exercise your voice.

[We should be united behind] a message that is anchored in fighting concentrated economic power, and fighting the billionaire class that is taking over our government.

I actually believe that there is a good chance that we are not going to have an election in which people can make an actual choice in 2026. My hair is on fire about it. So to the extent that people are picking up what I’m putting down, I think it’s because they see that I am motivated—first, second, and third—by my fear that we are going to sleepwalk through the transition of our country from a democracy to an autocracy.

And you believe that’s what we’re doing right now?

I think we are at risk of sleepwalking through this transition. We desperately want to believe that we can play politics as normal because it’s uncomfortable—really uncomfortable—to play politics as not normal. It involves taking really big risks. And, of course, you just want to wake up and believe that you live in a country where people wouldn’t make a conscious choice to move away from democratic norms. But while some people are being hoodwinked into being along for that ride, others are making the conscious choice because our democracy has been so broken for so long.

So, yes, I believe that there is a chance that we miss this moment. We just wake up one day and we are no longer in a democracy, which is why I think we have to start acting more urgently right now.

No one in Washington is taking my call.

The trashing of American democracy before our very eyes.

The illegitimate unchecked Government of T/usk continues to lock itself into power.

Excerpt from the NYT: The White House shields the work of Musk’s team, letting it skirt open records laws.

In October, Elon Musk preached the message of government transparency during a presidential campaign rally he held in Pennsylvania in support of Donald J. Trump, suggesting that nearly all government records should be made public. But Mr. Musk's cost-cutting initiative, better known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, appears to be heading in the opposite direction.

The White House has designated Mr. Musk’s office, United States DOGE Service, as an entity insulated from public records requests or most judicial intervention until at least 2034, by declaring the documents it produces and receives "presidential records".

Katie Miller, an employee for the efficiency initiative, said on X that Mr. Musk’s office "was reorganized under the Executive Office of the President” and was now “subject to Presidential Records."

That designation has a special legal meaning under a law called the Presidential Records Act. The law shields from the public all documents, communication trails and records from the president, his advisers and staff until five years after that president leaves office.

That law still requires presidents to keep a broad set of written materials created or received by them while executing their duties. Nonetheless, presidents can also dispose of their records after getting a written approval from the archivist at the National Archives, whom a president can remove from office.

On Friday, Mr. Trump fired the nation’s archivist, Colleen Shogan. No cause or reason was cited, Ms. Shogan said in her LinkedIn page post announcing her dismissal.

Long live these words. Words are not who we should fear.

accessible activism activists advocacy advocate advocates affirming care all-inclusive allyship anti-racism antiracist assigned at birth assigned female at birth assigned male at birth at risk barrier barriers belong bias biased biased toward biases biases towards biologically female biologically male BIPOC Black breastfeed + people breastfeed + person chestfeed + people chestfeed + person clean energy climate crisis climate science commercial sex worker community diversity community equity confirmation bias cultural competence cultural differences cultural heritage cultural sensitivity culturally appropriate culturally responsive DEI DEIA DEIAB DEIJ disabilities disability discriminated discrimination discriminatory disparity diverse diverse backgrounds diverse communities diverse community diverse group diverse groups diversified diversify diversifying diversity enhance the diversity enhancing diversity environmental quality equal opportunity equality equitable equitableness equity ethnicity excluded exclusion expression female females feminism fostering inclusivity GBV gender gender based gender based violence gender diversity gender identity gender ideology gender-affirming care genders Gulf of Mexico hate speech health disparity health equity hispanic minority historically identity immigrants implicit bias implicit biases inclusion inclusive inclusive leadership inclusiveness inclusivity increase diversity increase the diversity indigenous community inequalities inequality inequitable inequities inequity injustice institutional intersectional intersectionality key groups key people key populations Latinx LGBT LGBTQ marginalize marginalized men who have sex with men mental health minorities minority most risk MSM multicultural Mx Native American non-binary nonbinary oppression oppressive orientation people + uterus people-centered care person-centered person-centered care polarization political pollution pregnant people pregnant person pregnant persons prejudice privilege privileges promote diversity promoting diversity pronoun pronouns prostitute race race and ethnicity racial racial diversity racial identity racial inequality racial justice racially racism segregation sense of belonging sex sexual preferences sexuality social justice sociocultural socioeconomic status stereotype stereotypes systemic systemically they/them trans transgender transsexual trauma traumatic tribal unconscious bias underappreciated underprivileged underrepresentation underrepresented underserved undervalued victim victims vulnerable populations women women and underrepresented

In the rearview mirror.

How We Resist an Authoritarian Takeover

"What Is Authoritarianism and Autocratic Rule?
An authoritarian system of governance, which Project 2025 threatens to impose, includes:"

• Highly concentrated centralized power.
• Severely limited individual rights and freedoms.
• Repressive state control and violence targeted at specific population groups.
• Purging of dissent and ending political pluralism.
• Weakened separation of powers.
• Full central control and manipulation of administrative institutions, staffed with partisans and weaponized for political purposes.

An authoritarian system is autocratic when unrestrained power is held by a single individual, such as the president, elevated by a cult of personality. An autocratic president:

• Personally controls the administrative branch and neutralizes or removes congressional and judicial oversight.
• Uses the federal bureaucracy as an instrument of personal will.
• Acts free from any checks and balances.

Modern autocratic rulers come to power through elections. Autocrats consolidate their power by:

• Claiming they embody the will of a unified people.
• Maintaining the shell of democratic institutions, but hollowing them out from within.
• Using existing laws to gradually dismantle the foundations of democratic structures.
• Undermining future elections to remain in office indefinitely.

Without democratic, accountable institutions to implement our policies and enforce our rights, we cannot build the just society we envision.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"My name’s Donovan. Irish. Both sides, mother and father. I’m Irish, you’re German.
But what makes us both Americans? Just one thing. One, one, one. The rule book.
We call it the Constitution and we agree to the rules. And that’s what makes us Americans.
It’s all that makes us Americans, so don’t tell me there’s no rule book and don’t nod at me like that, you son of a bitch.”

---- Tom Hanks, “Bridge of Spies” (2015)

__________________________________________________________________________

NEW YORK - "Hamlet" was chosen as the greatest poem of the millenium in the New York Times Magazine millenium review!

LONDON (Reuters) - William Shakespeare was picked as Britain's "Man of the Millennium" by a poll of BBC radio listeners!

ENJOY . . . Chosen as the greatest poem of the millenium, Hamlet endures.

ENJOY . . . Who is the "Greatest Fictional Character in World Literature and Legend" - - one guess.
With the Austen lover's link.

ENJOY . . . Back issues of our features, indexed by subject on the front page, and on current feature pages.

ENJOY . . . Programme notes from the NFT's Branagh Retrospective, now added off of the Hamlet page.

ENJOY . . . Gertrude and Claudius, a book by John Updike, explores the new King and Queen.

ENJOY . . . Shakespeare in Less Than 10 Minutes Review of a video of restorations of the earliest surviving silent Shakespeare films
from 1899-1911.

ENJOY . . . Director Michael Almereyda's film "collage" of a knit-hatted Ethan Hawke as a Gen-X slacker. Our review of his Hamlet is here.

Almereyda does Denmark as a corporate prison.
From the New York Times: Two Fortinbrases and the Ghosts of Hamlets Past. Added: The New York Post museson performing Hamlet.

ENJOY . . . Glimpses of genius. In praise of HAMLET: Kenneth Branagh's film version captures the soul of Hamlet.

Also find on the Hamlet Page an interview with Kenneth Branagh
and an account of the London benefit screening of Hamlet, at which Branagh appeared.

ENJOY . . . The New York Times review of "Discovering Hamlet" a short film which documents Branagh's early take
on the stage role under the direction of Sir Derek Jacobi.

ENJOY . . . Kenneth Branagh's interview at his NFT Retrospective, as conducted by the Guardian newspaper.
Complete text, and complete Questions and Answers now available.

ENJOY . . . The films " Onegin" and "The End of the Affair" open with reviews, interviews, and photographs.
Fiennes has been searching for Pushkin's anti-hero Eugene Oneginfor some time.

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