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The Science of Defeating an Authoritarian, Part 3 [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-11

This is the third diary in a series about how we can use social science to save our democracy.

Today's installment is called, "It's the Corruption, Stupid." It's about how to help people organize the barrage of news stories coming at us into one big story about Trump & Musk's corruption.

Scaffolding and Master Frames

Ben Rhodes wrote in After the Fall that Alexei Navalny built an effective resistance against Putin by focusing on corruption. In education, we call the strategy I am about to outline scaffolding. The goal is to help your students create a larger structure in their head that they can plug the smaller details into. That helps them understand and remember what they learned more easily.

As an example, in her book on Tea Party Republicans, Arlie Hochschild wrote the liberals see the world as the "1% vs. the 99%" whereas conservatives see the world as divided between "makers and takers" (the lazy poor who receive government aid instead of working and everyone else who works and pays their taxes). That's scaffolding. It's a shorthand way to understand American politics that you can plug other ideas into, like Republicans attempting to kill Medicaid in the near future.

As AOC said in her recent Instagram Live video, don't think of what is happening as a million different little stories. Think of them as all part of one or two big stories. Then they make sense. The big story is corruption.

In social science, we would call this a master frame. Framing is how you help people understand the messy reality of the world. A master frame is a big overarching frame that encompasses other smaller frames. If I'm an environmentalist with a master frame that humans disrupt nature's balance, then it's really easy for you to communicate to me why I should oppose drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When you describe it to me as pristine nature about to be polluted, it will resonate because it fits my master frame.

What fits into the corruption master frame? Buckle up. What follows looks like many stories but within the corruption master frame, they are all, in fact, one big story:

Straight Up Grift

Thousands of investors in Trump’s memecoin lost $2 billion in just weeks while the family and its partners racked up $100 million in trading fees. Last time somebody looking to bribe Trump could stay at his hotel. Now they can buy his memecoin.

Trump meme coin price: Ex-aid blasts 'corruption' as market cap surges

Here's everything wrong with Trump's crypto meme coins

Screwing Regular Americans to Fund Tax Cuts for Billionaires and Corporations

To pay for Trump tax cuts, House GOP floats plan to slash benefits for the poor and working class.

I've started to see things from progressive sources saying my taxes will go up while millionaires' and billionaires' go down. AOC said in her Instagram Live she thinks Elon's passion for cost cutting is related to his desire for a tax cut for himself.

Trump Letting Off Corrupt Officials

Trump pardons disgraced former Illinois Gov Rod Blagojevich - Bagojevich is a Democrat who got busted in 2008 for trying to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat. Trump commuted his sentence last time he was in office. Now he pardoned him. Apparently Trump can be bipartisan but only for corruption.

Removing Government Oversight

Trump uses mass firing to remove independent inspectors general at a series of agencies. Their job was rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. But don't worry, Elon Musk put a child who goes by the internet handle Big Balls on the "waste, fraud, and abuse" job.

Trump halted the work of the CFPB, which makes sure financial companies don't rip consumers off: The Trump administration has stopped work at CFPB. Here's what the agency does.

He hobbled the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and National Labor Relations Board: Trump fires EEOC and labor board officials, setting up legal fight

Trump interfered with election oversight: Democratic FEC chair Ellen Weintraub says Trump fired her. She says it's not legal.

Trump pauses enforcement of law banning foreign bribery

After getting confirmed as Attorney General based on her qualifications of not being Matt Gaetz, Pam Bondi got to work doing the president's bidding: Attorney General Bondi cuts back on programs that ran afoul of Trump

"The Foreign Agents Registration Act is a decades-old law that has ensnared Trump associates in recent years, from Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, and Gen. Mike Flynn, the first national security adviser in Trump’s first term, to Russian operatives who allegedly funded pro-Trump media figures during the recent presidential election. The Foreign Influence Task Force is an outgrowth of the response by the FBI and US intelligence agencies to 2016 election interference by Russia, which worked to boost Trump’s first election victory."

Elon Musk Takes a Chainsaw to Anybody Who Ever Tried to Regulate Him

One agency [FAA] tried to regulate SpaceX. Now its fate could be in Elon Musk's hands. (He already got the head of the FAA fired.)

Alleged USAID probe into Starlink raises Elon Mask conflict concerns

The CFPB took aim at Big Tech. Then Elon Musk moved to dismantle it.

Musk Profits From the Government He Now Controls

Musk has serious conflicts of interest. His corporations receive billions in government subsidies and contracts. Is he cutting them? No.

As Musk works to slash federal spending, his own firms have received billions in federal contracts

Elon Musk's Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shakeup

All of the above stories tell one big story: corruption. And I am sure there are more. Help people understand the big story - the master frame - of corruption so they can understand how the little stories fit in: Trump is allowing corporate criminals and corrupt public officials to go unpunished while they screw us. The rich are trying to give themselves a tax cut at our expense. Musk is profiting handsomely from a government while cutting funds to others so he can get a tax break. He's firing people and even dismantling an entire agency- illegally - just because they had the chutzpah to investigate him.

These were just the corruption stories I could think of off the top of my head. Let me know what I missing in the comments.

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