[Barenaked Ladies voice] It's been...

...one of the most overwhelmingly dark, mind-numbingly stupid weeks in recent American history. And we're supposed be paralyzed by it.

Hello dear readers. I am acutely aware of my silence here this week. I kept sitting down to write a post about the inauguration and then feeling absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of horrible things unfolding that I felt like I needed to address—which I’ve since realized is exactly the point of the new administration rolling out Project 2025 at such an insanely fast clip.

The week started with the tragic death of Cecile Richards, one of the most prominent abortion rights activists of the past several decades, from aggressive brain cancer on the morning of Trump’s inauguration. The timing of the announcement from her family felt ominous, as Trump stood on stage next to the richest men in the world—whom he pointedly placed in front of his own cabinet nominees on the platform—and laid out his unimaginably bleak, fascist vision for the next four years.

That explicit introduction of our new (br)oligarchy, which I wrote about in a column for The Cut that evening, was followed by shadow president Elon Musk throwing out two straight-up Nazi salutes on stage, which Republicans quickly wrote off as “an autistic man throwing his heart to the crowd” with a straight-arm gesture that just coincidentally resembled a sieg heil. Days later, Musk addressed the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party and said that it’s time for the country to “move on” from its “past guilt” about the Holocaust and embrace nationalism again. Musk is a Nazi, period, and it’s time for everyone to stop making excuses for him and reckon with the outsized power this man now has over our government.

Meanwhile, Trump spent his first few days issuing dozens of bizarre executive orders—many of them blatantly unconstitutional—as well as pardons for Jan. 6 insurrectionists, police officers who killed innocent young Black men, and anti-abortion extremists who blocked women from getting into medical clinics. He said the government no longer recognizes trans people as people, froze cancer research at the NIH, tried to end birthright citizenship (blocked by judge), and gave ICE the green light to raid to churches and elementary schools. The new administration suggested that Native Americans should be stripped of birthright citizenship, which is nonsensical and unhinged. And then Trump came out and said yesterday that he wants to help Israel “clean out” Gaza of the Muslim people who live there and move them to Jordan and Egypt—an unequivocal, explicit acknowledgement and endorsement of ethnic cleansing.

As the media scrambled to cover all of this, the Senate jammed through Pete Hegseth, our new Secretary of Defense, despite even more alarming information continuing to drip out about his domestic abuse, $50K hush payment to his rape accuser, perpetual drunkenness, financial mismanagement, and complete lack of qualification for any kind of management job, much less a job running the largest government department with an $850 billion budget and the entire U.S. military. It was not possible to give the Hegseth confirmation the attention it deserved with all of the other bleak shit going on in the news, and that was all, of course, by design.

“Monday you hit, you flood the zone. Second week you’ll flood the zone,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, said on his online talk show of the new administration’s strategy. “It’s working. It’s just stunning to me what they’re doing, and it’s not getting covered because it’s too much. They’re overwhelming the system.”

It’s true: They want us stunned and overwhelmed. They want our outrage spread out over a thousand different developments, so we can’t focus on any particular one enough to resist it. As my friend Jill Filipovic wrote in her newsletter this week, “When we are overwhelmed we miss a lot. When we are overwhelmed we struggle to distinguish between what’s important and what’s a distraction, or what’s important and what can wait, or what’s doable and what’s out of our control. When we are overwhelmed we not only feel powerless, we begin to behave as if we are powerless.”

I have felt powerless this week even to write a single newsletter, like my head is permanently on a swivel. It’s much easier to go numb, to wave my hands in despair over just “everything,” unspecifically, and dissociate to protect my peace. But readers, Steve Bannon’s comments have lit a new fire under my ass. RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearing is coming up, and he is an absolutely terrifying man who threatens to bring back the measles and give us all bird flu while dismantling the Food and Drug Administration. I’ll be covering it here thoroughly. Fuck you, Bannon.