Trump's firing of the U.S. government archivist is far worse than it might seem
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
Anyway, scary when seen from across the pond, but I really don't know what's real and what's not. In my defence; I have US friends who tell me it's every bit as real and scary as the news tells it. They are, of course, not trump voters nor extremist left/right.
Or maybe we'll just continue to ignore all the contradictions in our society and hope and plan for the best. Who knows. I'm optimistic this could snap us out of the fever dream thats caused complete political deadlock for decades. We are very addicted to a comfortable life and any actual muscle to fight back will have to grow from nothing.
Ideologically driven politics are dead when the basis of what made that ideology real rather than just sth inside people's heads is missing. The current centrist ideology that fueled past administration is based on something that existed up to the 90s at most, and disappearing since then. The reason Trump has so much power right now is because the main political opposition (meaning the majority of the democratic party) had/has no touch with reality.
But, I will personally enjoy watching americans discover what america has always been on some level. Institutions are not going to fight for us. Institutions haven't wanted to give us most or the rights we take for granted today. We need to do more than vote if we want democracy to mean more than voting. We need to (gasp) be honest with our neighbors, not avoid uncomfortable topics, and critical of the people we vote for. For a country that prides itself on being a democracy we aren't very good at the fundamentals.
I've got zero reason to think that this is going to snap anybody out of anything. I strongly suspect that they're busy coming up with rationalizations that this is OK and they should do the same thing next time.
The judicial branch is still active and is issuing ruling after ruling that what Trump & Musk are doing is illegal, but it remains to be seen what force that has.
At some point this has to come down to the people. When does it become clear that the looting of the state needs to be stopped at all costs? The fear is Americans are overall too wealthy and comfortable, and too compromised by propaganda, to risk anything to stop it.
It may be the best we can hope for that a Democratic wave election is still possible in 2026, at which point we can begin to undo the damage and try to prevent a reoccurrence. That's an optimistic outlook.
Not to mention that democracy (control by the people) itself is merely an empty label, like "control of the means of production", because people are also controlled (influenced to a great degree) by many things.
In this case, it seems, the neoreactionary movement convinced a critical mass of people.
Even though Trump's approval rating is the lowest of all presidents, and will likely continue to drop, but will that be enough to get an anti-Trump supermajority after the midterms? (Unlikely.)
I'm not going to claim what he's doing is all good (though I find it hard to be upset by an attempt to make the federal government smaller). There's certainly a chance this all goes poorly.
But when you say hostile, to whom do you mean? A majority approve of what he's doing according to this recent poll:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/02/09/cbs-...
Have you ever heard of lobbying? It's been around for a little while. At least the stuff this admin is doing is 1) visible and 2) has majority approval.
Your typical bigco buying a senator for laws is pretty well under the radar usually.
I'm not American, but FTA it sounds like having a politically biased NARA director could have some interesting consequences for the formal parts of all y'all future electoral matters.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hacker News Guidelines
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.But you can see other comments in this thread about how pro-Trump posts, while being rare, are not flagged.
> If the U.S. Constitution is the core operating system of the U.S. government, the Archivist of the United States and NARA are the maintainers of the system’s foundational codebase of legal and historical documents.
I would argue the article is very much hacker related. Even as a foreigner, the US deleting government records should worry you, as it affects more than just their egg prices.
The potential collapse of American democracy is not interesting?
If you're not interested, just move on to the next article. I skip over 90% of HN articles.
Also, like it or not, American politics have a wide impact worldwide, more so than any other country (by far).
I'm not sure why dang in particular is allowing this to happen to this site.
Well, if it turns out there is major corruption in the government, isn't it understandable that people don't?
It is also funny that when pressed on it dang insists that this practice of explicit unconditional endorsement of the current administration is both unavoidable and emergent, not something intentionally and methodically foisted upon the users here. The censorship is good and necessary, there are some things that folks that come to HN just should not read about or discuss.
This line of excuses falls completely apart, immediately, when you consider how trivial it would be for this site —made for and by software engineers— to simply have a subforum where this sort of “flagged” political content gets moved to rather than removed. The choice to memory hole anything that remotely stands the chance of being an interesting discussion that doesn’t cheerlead the current administration is very much intentional.
That would be quite a cause for celebration. The first-ever subforum here in 17 years!
But regardless, we also didn't have random Biden (pro- or anti-) posts the last 4 years, nor Trump before that, nor Obama.
FAQ:
> What to Submit
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This is extremely detrimental to a democracy.
I was like you can’t just knock down a constitutional amendment with an executive order, even if you do agree with it.
He was incredulous. The president has that authority and the courts can’t stop him.
I was like ok, by that logic, a Dem president could sign away free speech and the second amendment the same way.
Still don’t think he could reconcile my point.
Is consistent with
> .. don’t think he could reconcile my point.
I mean why would expect someone like that to consider a counter argument?
Anyway, I know deep down he got it. But it’s always that moment of realization that I find satisfying.
I did it to eff with his head. It’s that moment when the cognitive dissonance pulls apart and the lucid thought makes a connection, but before the dissonance sets back in. It’s like watching someone melt for a split second.
Yes, I’m an ass.
I wouldn't hold my breath. Buckle up.
Nothing I said relies on magical thinking. I personally don't think there's any help coming. This administration has a will to power and are going to exercise it. They want to dismantle the government and so they're going to do it. Obviously someone can always take illegal or unprecedented action to deal with the situation, but not mentioning that fact doesn't mean someone is engaging in magical thinking.
If people wanted to rise up and actually deal with the establishment like so many want, that involves dealing with career politicians (through term limits and getting money out of politics) and especially dealing with big businesses and the ultra wealthy. (By getting much stronger personal rights, from consumer protection to labor rights to privacy rights to health rights.) Many of these should be non-controversial to the average person, if we had some level of class consciousness that helped people realize that our real problems are not cultural divides.
The main point, though, is that many Americans are pretty comfortable, and mostly not interested in direct, confrontational action. That only comes when things get very personal.
Since big companies like FAANG/OpenAI/Twitter etc. can control the information that 99% of people see (and seem to support the current leadership), it's almost impossible to get objective information if they don't want it out there.
In the delusion of GDP and wealth, Americans have completely forgotten their own capacity of destruction. This is the same country that used humans as legal property, went through many booms/busts, caused people and businesses to fail, destroyed wild ecosystems, destroyed industrial production, destroyed housing
and lastly, were completely ok with electing a convicted despicable human as their president.
America is 100% self deserving of an implosion. And Trump + spineless Congress + Republican supreme Court is enough to cause significant damage. It is too late.
The best time to stop this was back in November.
What makes you think that?
Perhaps I'm too optimistic.
And eventually, when the dust settles, it might be a good idea to rewrite the Constitution. To have more effective checks and balances and a less centralized executive branch.
I don't really understand what the point of the houses are now, a fig leaf I guess? I suppose that in 5 years time he'll just pass an executive order saying there's a clear and present danger to democracy by having elections and that will be that.
I just hope that if they leave anything in their wake, it's a system of transparency and neutrality, but firing an archivist doesn't sound like the place to start. We unfortunately have a window into Musk's commitment to neutrality and transparency from his own running of X, and while it may be better than it was before on those fronts, he has demonstrated time and again that he's not particularly strong on either.
Elon routinely (soft) bans people who say things he doesn't like and you think this is better than before? And that's just the obvious stuff that's happening.
You arrive at thoughtful, transparent solutions by talking to everyone in the room, sharing your learnings, being transparent with data and metrics, taking your time to understand the context you’re working in, and avoiding bulldozing everyone in the process.
Musk, with his conflicts of interests, stands to make astounding amounts of money off of better EV & driverless car incentives, government contracts via SpaceX, he gets to be in the room when big tech & social medial policy is discussed regarding Twitter, and don’t forget about his AI plays. It’s one thing to get advice from that kind of businessman. But you would NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS put them in charge of making the government more transparent and accountable, especially since he somehow has power to change agencies to do what he wants!
It’s like the most obvious recent example of corruption in American politics I’ve seen, because there’s nothing hidden about it. The conflict of interest is a plain, obvious fact, and we’re just going with the “trust me bro,” he’s not gonna do anything that might make him money.
Why the hell did he get involved with Trump and conservatives in the first place? Because he stands to get a lot of power and money out of it; a lot more than pretending to be liberal.
Just imprison the president and his loyal stuff inside White House with all electronics removed, no comms outside and just a guy bringing some food ever so often.
Better just wait 4 years than get everything dismantled even further. In the end only Musk wins and he might "flee" to another country when shit hits the fan.