I’m a presidential historian. What’s happening in Congress is terrifying

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/jfk-files-congress-conspiracy-theories-anna-paulina-luna-rcna210504

29 comments

  1. From the article:

    I testified at a congressional hearing on the JFK files. As a historian invited to speak before Congress, I expected to converse with serious people. That’s not what happened. Congress is dominated by deeply unserious people wielding serious power.

    I reminded them that history has consistently taken a dim view of enablers who shield demagogues from accountability, excuse their abuses and help consolidate their power.

    Everything I do, including testifying, is an expression of my patriotism. I’m still down for the American Experiment — but I’m convinced the 119th Congress will do nothing to protect it. Its performance will end soon enough, but the damage won’t.

  2. Um. This has been going on at least since republicans under Clinton. This is a historian, right? She should look into McCarthyism.

  4. Give the vote back to the people. We need to vote more than just once every 4 years. We need to approve the budgets, we need to decide who gets health care. The people need their voice and power back. The biggest mistake was thinking the rich were the only ones who had opinions that mattered.

  5. I’m a nobody and I find all of it a bit terrifying tbh

  7. Come back to me when you’re a congressional historian. No no, for real though, shit bad right now. Real bad

  9. There was a serious study done a few years ago looking at partisanship in Congressional speeches, and they traced its beginning to the creation of CSPAN.

    Before congressmen started being televised giving their speeches, it was apparently a more functional place.

  10. BTW The Kennedy assassination wasn’t intended to kill Kennedy. It was intended to kill the Texas governor riding in the front seat with Kennedy.

    Lee Harvey Oswald had a gripe against him and had even included him in a list of “FOUR PEOPLE I WANT TO KILL” in his address book. The reason? Before he was governor, he had been Secretary of the Navy, and had said no when Lee Harvey Oswald appealed his dishonorable discharge to him.

    Really, it’s all well-documented. No grand conspiracy. Just a personal grudge. Lee Harvey Oswald tried to kill Governor Connally and accidentally killed the president instead.

  12. no one cares cause everyone is too busy consuming ai generated content

  13. “After that, it was undeniable: Congress is dominated by deeply unserious people wielding serious power.”

    Seems on point to me.

  14. What’s the closest historical parallel you’d point to in times like this?

  15. I mean, the legalized bribery has only gotten more and more obvious and less and less transparant..

    You can’t hold anyone accountable for their breaches of their oaths of office.

    And let’s be really really clear.. It’s not that America is failing.. It’s that half the population isn’t participating in the process.

  18. I’m a nobody, a citizen with some familiarity with history from learning about it in public school and by reading books afterward.

    I find what Americans did in 2024, making a convicted criminal who attempted a coup into their president after he promised to rule as a dictator, terrifying. The lack of opposition within the electorate to fascism spells doom and I don’t see any effective efforts being made to get a solid majority of the people to oppose fascism.

  19. Shit , I run a food truck and what is happening in Congress is terrifying. Hell I got a goldfish that also thinks this is the scariest shit in his or her life

  20. I really don’t know what the GOP’s endgame is with this is. The supposed “masterminds” that they’re hell-bent on blaming (President Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover) have been dead for over fifty years. Should we exhume and arrest their corpses?

  21. What the hell are we to do? I’m voting, im calling out trumps everything, I’m discussing all of his false rhetoric to my family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. They still don’t care, or say well he’s better than her…. they have school-aged daughters and will still vote for him.

  22. why were you using that vocabulary? its complex at worst, at best it shows your vocabulary skill.

  23. My god these titles.

    “I’m a historian, this is horrifying, this is unprecedented!”

    You are a historian from the only 3 decades in the last 200 years where chaos WASN’T a fact of life. You’re a historian? I’m a zoomer. Early years, just old enough to remember 9/11. This isn’t unprecedented. This is standard. We’ve been falling apart at the seams my whole life and this is just step ten thousand- what would be unprecedented in my lifetime is anyone, anywhere going and doing a single damn thing to stop it, because we’ve had 4 generations of people who never paid the costs for the world they created and now that the debt is due they’d rather be morally bankrupt than pay up.

    We live in a world where “kill” has been replaced with “unalive”, where chatbots have replaced human thought, where being able to read a paragraph and tell someone what it said is a fucking skill most people no longer have. This is a symptom. Its as horrifying as a new set of bumps on a measles patient. .

  26. The soviet union was on par militarily until its collapse, now it can’t win a war against a much smaller neighbouring country. What will happen to the US military after the fall of the USA? They are still very much able to dominate the world militarily at the moment.. and they have lots of nukes. Will they flail around and destroy the world as they draw their last breath? A lot of them are religious nutters that believe in the end times and that after their death they’ll get to go to heaven so they don’t care about the earth (see: religious arguments against protecting the environment). Not that different from jihadists when you think about it.

  27. I am baffled by people complaining that a historian writes a well informed warning.
    Don’t read it if you like the head in the sand attitude, but stop criticizing a scholar for writing about something they understand better than your usual tv news/social media snippet.

  28. I can’t stand the term “American experiment.”  It’s a bit silly…

  29. Regan figured out the pressure points to end the Soviet Union and Putin is returning the favor. It’s fascinating to watch, I just wish I didn’t have to be affected by it.

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