Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn arenât in earshot theyâll never know right?
Then about a week into their journey like
Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying
Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah weâre the worst
i mean, honestly itâs amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.
english would probably have changed less since Chaucerâs time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.
theyâve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodoâs books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isnât likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragornâs foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolasâ father was born.
so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we canât really tell because there werenât years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.
plus a lot of Bilboâs materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didnât establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isnât the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.
so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron heâs probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but heâs not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.
to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolasâ grandfather was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.
so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when heâs being casual. or both!
considering legolasâ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.
âŚitâs also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didnât learn as a kid.
which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and theyâre just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.
this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. thereâs a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!
Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now
Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?
Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?
Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbitsâ weird dialect this whole time: Thatâs what it sounds like to me.
Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.
Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y'all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.
#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there werenât any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature itâs pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.
Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because heâs black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period thereâs very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isnât like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that weâre all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.
Iâm really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the âand we do condemn! wholeheartedly!â discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between âmorals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongsâ to âmorals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by todayâs standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveableâ so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance
please try this on for size:
there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present
My mind just boggles at the âThereâs Racism In That Bookâ argument. Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM. The message is that it is BAD.Â
My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.
Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary. And in that respect, itâs a heroic tale, because Huckâwith absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary thatâs full of hate speechâhe turns around and says, âIâm not going to do it. Iâm not going to participate in this system. If that means I go to Hell, so be it. Going to Hell now.â
(I used to read a blogger who insisted that âAll right, Iâll go to Hell,â from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature. Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a âGet thee behind me,â and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too. Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because âthey can change their name, Iâm not changing mine.â Interesting guy. Sorry for the long parenthetical.)
Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.
And when you put it like that, itâs no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblrâpeople who prioritize words over every other form of social justiceâfind it threatening and hard to comprehend.
I somehow donât remember ever reading Huckleberry Finn in school as a kid, so I read it more recently (although still a couple years ago) after already having seen a lot of the racism discourse around it.
The surprising thing, to me, was that no one was talking about the child abuse and neglect that was affecting Huck himself, and all of the commentary was about slavery and racism. The commentary I saw on Huckleberry Finn seemed to insinuate â if not directly state â that it was the story of a privileged white boy who generously condescended to empathize with Jim, the poor slave who wasnât born with the innumerable advantages Huckâs white skin blessed him with.
Then I read the book, and I was reading a story about a boy with a physically abusive, neglectful, alcoholic father who reappears in his sonâs life only to attempt to seize his windfall wealth in a brazen act of parental theft that would have shamed James Spears, and an aunt a guardian whose self-righteous controlling behavior and spiritual abuse make Huck wonder whether he isnât better off with the aforementioned dad.
So I think the adverse circumstances that both Jim and Huck face â although in many ways different from each other â have parallels that allow them to empathize with each other in a manner thatâs closer to parity than âHuck gazes down at the pathetic Jim from the peaks of Mt. Privilege and feels pity.â
(There are times when Huck acts kind of patronizing toward Jim, but correspondingly there are times when Jim does the same thing toward Huck. In both cases, they tend to be confidently wrong, with Huck citing half-learned, misremembered, garbled lessons from school, and Jim citing various superstitions.)
Crucially, it is personal empathy, and not any kind of principled abolitionist morality that is at play here. Huck and Jim are thieves and vagabonds. Rejection of slavery comes in the context of a broader rejection of social norms and morality â and not some kind of consistent high-minded anarchism, either, but stuff like âweâve gotta steal to survive, but persimmons arenât that great this time of year, so we wonât steal those, and weâll count the fact that we donât steal persimmons as points in our favor morally.â
A cynical part of me wonders whether thatâs the really offensive part of Huckleberry Finn â the suggestion that maybe the ability to transcend and see past societyâs arbitrariness and injustices isnât the exclusive preserve of the respectable classes using all of the right Diversity Equity & Inclusion-workshop approved language, or the YA authors obsessed with imparting the Correct Moral Lessons to the Youth (hmmm⌠which Huckleberry Finn character do they remind me of?), but might lay with outcasts and runaways who use some offensive language and do desperate things to survive, but who experience society from an outsiderâs perspective and form bonds of necessity â and, ultimately, empathy â with members of other widely despised segments of society.
Update: Crossed out âaunt,â because I misremembered and Miss Watson is not Huck Finnâs aunt.
#public libraries are good because they let people access books they might never otherwise read#private book ownership is good because it's Yours#physical books are good because they last a long time and again it's Yours#ebooks are good because you can fit a whole library into the physical space of a single book and they're cheaper to produce#audiobooks are good because they're accessible to people with eyesight or visual reading issues and leave your hands free#in conclusion: all books are good and people should enjoy them however and whenever they can#(lest it be misunderstood I agree with you completely OP I just also really like books in general and it got away from me)
So the government just defunded PBS and NPR which is fucked. That being said, the public can cover the damage if we orginize and donate.
Only about $1.60 of tax dollars per US citizen per year are spent on the public broadcasting budget. NPR and PBS offer beong able to make small monthly donations, some being 7$ per month or lower if you want.
If you want to donate 1.60$ per month to your local station, you can multiply how much funding they get from you by 12. If you do their monthly donation of $7 per month, your donation can equal the tax dollars of 54 people spent on public broadcasting per year.
If you want to donate to your local station, look them up by your town here to make sure your local stations get helped specifically:
Here's a remade masterpost of free and full shakespeare adaptations! Thanks @william-shakespeare-official for this excellent post. Unfortunately, a lot of the links in it are broken, so I thought I'd make an updated version (also I just wanted to organize things a bit more)
Anthony and Cleopatra:
~ Josette Simon, Antony Byrne & Ben Allen - 2017
As You Like It:
~ At Wolfe Park - 2013
~ Kenneth Brannagh's - 2006
Coriolanus:
~ NYET Alumni - 2016
~ Tom Hiddleston - 2014
~ Ralph Fiennes - 2011
Cymbelline:
~ Michael Almereyda's - 2014
Hamlet:
~ David Tennant - 2009
~ Ethan Hawke & Diane Venora - 2000
~ Kenneth Branagh's - 1989
~ BCC's Part One & Two - 1990
~ Broadway - 1964
~ Christopher Plummer - 1964
~ Laurence Olivier's - 1948
Henry IV:
~ BBC's Part One & Two - 1989
~ The Brussel's Shakespeare Society's - 2017
Henry V:
~ The BBC's - 1990
~ Laurence Olivier's - 1944
Julius Caesar:
~ Phyllida Lloyd's - 2019
~ The BBC's - 1979
~ John Gielgud - 1970
King Lear:
~ The RSC's - 2008
~ Laurence Olivier - 1983
~ The BBC's - 1975
~ James Earl Jones - 1974
~ Orson Wells - 1953
Love's Labour's Lost:
~ Calvin University - 2016
Macbeth:
~ Antoni Cimolino & Shelagh O'Brien's - 2017
~ Ian McKellen & Judi Dench - 1969
~ Sean Connery - 1961
Measure for Measure:
~ Hugo Weaving - 2019
~ The BBC's - 1990
The Merchant of Venice:
~ Al Pacino - 2004
~ Trevor Nunn & Chris Hunt - 2001
~ The BBC's - 1980
~ Lawrence Olivier - 1973
The Merry Wives of Windsor:
~ The Royal Shakespeare Company's - 1982
A Midsummer Night's Dream:
~ Oliver Chris & Gwendoline Christie - 2019
~ City of Columbus's - 2018
~ Julie Taymor's - 2014
~ The Globe's - 2013
~ The BBC's - 1988
~ Lindsay Duncan & Alex Jennings - 1986
Much Ado About Nothing:
~ Shakespeare in the Park - 2019
~ Kenneth Branagh - 1993
~ The BBC's - 1984
Othello:
~ The BBC's Part One & Two - 1990
Richard II:
~ David Tennant - 2013
~ Deborah Warner's - 1997
~ The BBC's - 1978
Richard III:
~ Ian McKellen - 1995
~ Laurence Olivier - 1955
Romeo and Juliet:
~ Simon Godwin's - 2021
~ The BBC's - 1988
~ Laurence Harvey & Susan Shentall - 1954
The Taming of the Shrew:
~ Ontario production?
~ American Conservatory Theater - 1976
~ Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor - 1967
~ Mary Pickford & Samuel Taylor - 1929
The Tempest:
~ Gregory Doran's - 2017
~ The BBC's - 1988
Timon of Athens:
~ Barry Avrich's - 2024
Troilus and Cressida:
~ Audio Production
~ This one I found on youtube? - 2016
Titus Andronicus:
~ Anthony Hopkins - 1999
Twelfth night:
~ Texas Shakespeare Festival's - 2015
~ Alec Guinness, Joan Plowright & Ralph Richardson - 1970
Two Gentlemen of Verona:
~ Katherine Steweart's - 2018
~ The BBC's
The Winter's Tale:
~ Antony Sher - 1999 (Warning: they don't have a bear...)
Bonuses:
Time Loop Hamlet! (A personal fav of mine)
Rock Opera Hamlet???
Shakespeare animated tales
The Complete Works Of Shakespeare Abridged comedy
From the original post:
A Midwinter's Tale, about a man trying to make Hamlet.
Russian Hamlet here
Here's Scotland, PA, the 2001 modern Macbeth retelling.
Rave Macbeth for anyone interested is here.
This one is the Taming of the Shrew modern retelling.
The french Romeo & Juliet musical with English subtitles is here!
Here's the 1948 one,
the Orson Wells Othello movie with Portuguese subtitles there
Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trumpâs second term and youâll see something very different than what he wants you to see.
The article is under the cut because paywalls suck
This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on âThe Ezra Klein Show.â You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBSâs âFrontlineâ in 2019:
Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because theyâre dumb and theyâre lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. âŚ
All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. Theyâll bite on one, and weâll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never â will never be able to recover. But weâve got to start with muzzle velocity. So itâs got to start, and itâs got to hammer, and itâs got to â
Michael Kirk:Â What was the word?
Bannon:Â Muzzle velocity.
Muzzle velocity. Bannonâs insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media â be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media â if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next â no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.
Donald Trumpâs first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannonâs strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasnât in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trumpâs country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, itâs over.
Or so he wants you to think. In Trumpâs first term, we were told: Donât normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Donât believe him.
Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.
Donât believe him. Trump has real powers â but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trumpâs transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassinâs bullet â as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trumpâs soul â but it was an act that was within his power.
But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge â a Reagan appointee â who told Trumpâs lawyers, âI have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.â A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.
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What Bannon wanted â what the Trump administration wants â is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If youâre always consumed by the next outrage, you canât look closely at the last one. The impression of Trumpâs power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Donât believe him.
You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.
But Trumpâs odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the courtâs ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budgetâs order to freeze spending suggests they donât. Bravado aside, Trumpâs political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trumpâs approval rating at 47 percent â about 10 points beneath Joe Bidenâs in January 2021.
There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trumpâs aim is to bring the civil service to heel â to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends â he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.
But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.
That is the tension at the heart of Trumpâs whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.
The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that theyâre ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. Weâve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials â âit didnât go through the proper approval process,â an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a presidentâs second term is embarrassing.
But itâs not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the âdeep stateâ it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: âFork in the Road.â Musk wants you to know it was him.
The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: âTake the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.â The Washington Post reported that the email âblindsidedâ many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.
I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?
The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Muskâs takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.
What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself â that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Donât believe them.
I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.
But he didnât. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.
There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: âThis non âbuyoutâ really seems to have backfired. Iâll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.â As I write this, itâs been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.
In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isnât building support; heâs losing it. Trump isnât fracturing his opposition; heâs uniting it.
This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And thereâs only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.
Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part â a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.
The first two weeks of Trumpâs presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isnât true. Donât believe him.
You can listen to this conversation by following âThe Ezra Klein Showâ on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
âThat is the tension at the heart of Trumpâs whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.â
These are people that believe perception and PR are everything, so they're trying to create the perception that they can destroy and remake government without consequences or constraints. And for a while people were stunned and overwhelmed by the ugliness of it all.
But now people are moving. Many, many lawsuits have been filed and the people are starting to claim their power.
Don't despair and don't give up. We're not done yet.
itâs really easy to become obsessed with a shakespeare play you just have to watch one version of it and then read the play and then go mad trying to watch every possible version of it you can find and then study several centuries worth of performance history and controversy
There will be millions of actions like this over the coming years. An important thing to remember is that for them to work (anywhere, not just libraries) is people absolutely canât announce that this is what they are doing.
Not seeing constant acts of resistance doesnât mean it isnât happening all around you all the time. Some very effective methods require silence and secrecy.
