Bad and Dangerous

When President Trump blames a “so-called judge” for blocking his immigration ban, and then claims that “many very bad and dangerous people may be pouring into our country,” he is not just attacking the constitutional order and our system of checks and balances. He is also setting up the pretext for a crackdown on the independent court system should there be an attack on the country.

National Security Council staffer Sebastian Gorka tells Fox News that Judge James Robart, who issued the ruling blocking Trump’s order nationally, “doesn’t have the daily presidential intelligence brief. He has no idea what the threats to America are.”

Republican Congressman Justin Amash (R-MI) tweets, “@POTUS’s constant fear mongering to undermine support for our constitutional system of checks and balances is irresponsible and dangerous.”

Search interest in the term “Reichstag fire” is at an all-time high in Google trends.

Some good news: Reddit has banned three subreddits tied to white nationalists because of repeated violations of the site’s rules against doxing (posting of personal confidential information) and harassment, Aja Romano reports for Vox.

Ninety-seven major tech companies have filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit court of appeals defending the role of immigrants in American society, Elizabeth Dwoskin reports for the Washington Post.

Late on Friday, the new FCC chairman Ajit Pai nixed his predecessor’s decision to use the Lifeline program to provide low-cost internet access to poor Americans, Brian Fung reports for The Washington Post. Pai says he wants to reduce the digital divide, but as Gene Kimmelman of Public Knowledge comments, “limiting the Lifeline program, at this moment in time, exacerbates the digital divide.”

Opposition news: Tony Romm of Politico reports that LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga founder Mark Pincus “are teaming up with former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach” to launch a new organization tentatively called Win the Future to support progressive candidates and causes. He writes, “Their early efforts will include building a platform to connect activists and, potentially, a website similar to the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to fund progressive initiatives.”

While these folks surely have good intentions, there is ZERO NEED for a platform to connect activists (which will take months if not longer to build) or yet another crowd-funding platform. Instead, here’s one simple suggestion for today’s suddenly woke tech moguls: Give your money to the groups already doing the frontline work resisting Trumpism. Here’s a good starting place for that, MovementVote.org.

Tech Forward also has a list of organizations and tools “working for social progress.”

Speaking of building a platform to connect activists, Meetup.com, which is a platform that connects like-minded people on any interest, has just launched Resist.Meetup.com. As of this morning there were 988 groups with more than 14,000 members. The goal is to catalyze new groups – especially in places that aren’t already seeing lots of activity.

And Indivisible has just launched a tool for posting group meetings and local events to a searchable calendar.

Our good friend Catherine Bracy has launched TechResistance.org, to help support efforts by techies to resist Trump policies. Unlike Hoffman and Pincus, she says TechResistance it will focus on “developing opportunities for technologists to lend their skills to push resistance efforts forward and curating resources to support the growth of grassroots technology resistance efforts across the country.”

For that kind of matchmaking, nothing can beat the growing value of the Progressive Coders Network, which now has more than 700 participants and more than two dozen projects in development.

Speaking of which, check out RUN DNC, a site built by a Progressive Coders Network team led by Mike Bloomberg (a Democratic activist in Pittsfield, MA who is no relation to the ex-Mayor). The idea is to make the race for Democratic National Committee chair, which will be decided February 26 by just 447 national committee members, into a more participatory exercise. Visitors to the site can learn more about each candidate and endorse the one they prefer.

Longtime politics analyst Adele Stan writes in The American Prospect that what progressives need if they really want to change the balance of power in America is “physical spaces designed to encourage cross-pollination between the constituencies of the left.” She adds, “If donors would fund strategically placed facilities for use by progressive groups—facilities that included meeting and event spaces, and were each staffed with a full-time manager and scheduler, you might greatly increase collaborative work among various groups. With collaboration, creativity is catalyzed. And right now, we need all the creativity we can muster.”

Gee, what place does that sound like?

Long-reads for dark times: This is probably the best single distillation of White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s thinking that I have yet seen, by Gwynn Guilford and Nikhil Sonnad for Quartz.

Writing in Zeit Online, Volker Ullrich reminds us that most of Germany’s leading politicians, journalists, writers and diplomats thought Adolf Hitler would be tamed in office and never imagined that within months they’d be living in a dictatorship.

Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ron Rosenbaum—the author of Explaining Hitler—finds a compelling comparison between the German dictator and our new president in their coming hatred of the media.

In other news: The Trump Administration appears to be shutting down most of the channels used for the public to find out what it is doing, reports Anita Kumar of McClatchyDC. She writes: “The White House comment line is shut down. New signatures aren’t being counted on petitions posted on the White House’s website. Federal agencies are not allowed to respond to requests. Americans aren’t just failing to get their voices heard. The administration, too, is failing to provide information to them. Transcripts, executive orders and news releases aren’t being posted online. Social media accounts, including Flickr, Pinterest and Tumblr, are no longer in use. Sending information to the Federal Register, the daily journal of the U.S. government, is delayed.”

New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission has approved regulations requiring transportation networking companies like Uber to report detailed data on rides in the city, David Morris reports for Fortune.

Facebook and Google are partnering with several leading news organizations in France to counter fake news, Reuters reports.