Doesn’t matter now. He’s rapidly destroying the regulatory infrastructure and sending his brown shirts out to sow fear and confusion. He is a fascist, the rest of the Republican party are his enablers, and things are going to get super mega shitty before they get better.
If they get better.
He’s rapidly destroying the regulatory infrastructure and sending his brown shirts out to sow fear and confusion.
It’s literally the playbook from Bush’s “Shock and Awe” campaign turned on US citizens (minus the indiscriminate bombing). It amounts to the same thing, though. It’s a blitz, do so much so fast it sets everybody off balance and puts them in a state of shock.
Shock and awe (technically known as rapid dominance) is a military strategy based on the use of overwhelming power and spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy’s perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight.
Project 2025 wants to shock people into obedience. The flurry of Executive Orders are part of this shock treatment, as are the deportations, and roadblocks suddenly thrown up in front of government agencies. They intend to shock us and cripple our ability to respond via governance.
EDIT: Turns out, Klein agrees.
Trump is a rolling shock machine, which a recipe for keeping us scattered and reactive to the latest shocking news. There will be moments when we need to react forcefully and meaningfully to protect one another.
Oh yeah, the violence will come. After they’ve sufficiently shocked everyone into submission. The violence is to perpetuate the submission since shock wears off.
He is a fascist, the rest of the Republican party are his enablers
The rest of the Republican party are his sycophants and subordinates. It’s the “moderate” Democrats who are his enablers, through inaction.
Honest question: What should they have done, given the makeup of the House and Senate?
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Biden should’ve appointed an AG four years ago who would’ve actually been motivated to prosecute Trump with a sense of urgency, rather than sitting on his ass for two years before finally appointing a special prosecutor precisely and deliberately after the last moment. (Remember, Merrick Garland was only nominated for SCOTUS in the first place because Obama thought he was so conservative that not even Mitch McConnell could find an excuse to object. That should’ve made it obvious that he was exactly the wrong choice for AG.)
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Also four years ago (or two years ago, or six years ago, or any even-numbered years ago going back to at least before Bill Clinton’s “third way” nonsense, if not the end of LBJ’s “Great Society” programs or even the New Deal), the Democrats should’ve been running more economically-progressive candidates (e.g. Elizabeth Warran, AOC, etc.) instead of neoliberal pro-corporate toadies, so that they could have actually moved the needle on helping the working class instead of leaving them vulnerable to empty promises by fascist demagogues.
To be very clear, I’m not saying that being socially-progressive was a mistake. In fact I will directly refute that: mainstream Democrats trying to scapegoat being too “woke” as the reason they lost are not only wrong, but lying. What I am saying is that the economic aspects of progressivism, not the social ones, are what would’ve actually made the difference.
As for what they should do now as opposed to in the past, other than “obstruct” I don’t have a fucking clue because they’ve already comprehensively failed and it might very well be too late.
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It’s not gonna get better until the people start to stir shit. Remember that.
Actually, that’s part of what he is aiming for. He wants mass protests so he can enact Martial Law. That was literally part of the plan on January 6th, 2020, to enact a State of Emergency. He’s just looking for excuses to put the hammer down on American citizens.
Not to say that’s a reason to not stir shit. They’re looking for excuses to ramp up the violence anyway, even if you try to keep your head down. Keeping our heads down won’t save us from it, so stir away.
That’s weird, seeing as the playing field would be leveled a bit in that situation, and his rule would be threatened
I don’t think he’s clever enough to understand that. He didn’t understand that Hitler’s own Generals had plotted against him. He’s genuinely a dumb fucking prick. He just thinks “I’m a strongman and this is what strongmen do, MARTIAL LAW!” He’s like Captain fucking Murphy declaring “Martian Law.” He only barely understands these concepts.
According to Goldberg’s account of Baker and Glasser’s reporting, Kelly responded by explaining to Trump that the German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off,” but Trump reportedly was not swayed by the correction.
“No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” Trump said, according to Goldberg’s telling of Baker and Glasser’s reporting.
He was pretty keen on using violence against his opponents last time, and BLM still stressed resources to the point where enforcement had to have pretty limited objectives. I think people overestimate just how actually powerful the police (and by extension the military trying to support the police) are in the face of popular uprisings. Every state, even the US with its giant military and police state, relies on individual fear to prevent uprisings.
Kill more CEOs
AP has a new poll out which asked whether people think it’s a good or bad thing that the President “relies on billionaires for advice about government policy.” When I first saw the results of this poll as “good” coming in at “+12” I thought they meant ‘net’ 12% and I thought, ‘eeeesh, the honeymoon phase is more intense than I thought!’ But no, 12%: as in, 12% of the public think it’s a good thing. 60% think it’s not. That’s US adults. The only outliers are Republicans, 20% of whom think this is a good thing. But even that is pretty feeble. To put it simply, these are terrible numbers.
In a strange way, this is reassuring. I’ve said a lot of times the most frustrating thing about all of this isn’t that the conservatives are too stupid to see the forest for the trees. No, they see a lot of the same shit we do, but their dedication to hierarchy is what undoes them every time. They could technically agree with me about an issue, but I’m not a person they consider an Authority Figure, and the only people they do respect as Authority Figures are, to put it fucking mildly, abusive bullies.
It’s also that misinformation has succeeded. What I assume is due to primarily a lack of quality education, but they seem incapable of understanding nuance. So they see that, say, the New York Times may not be trustworthy when discussing certain issues, just like I do. However, unlike myself, instead of reading it anyway with a skeptical eye while also digesting other sources about the same issue, they instead write off all mainstream media sources and then believe crazy shit online. They don’t know who to trust anymore, so they trust the most wild charlatans that exist. That’s not their fault, to be fair, our mainstream media has been failing us for decades. I worked in local news during the Iraq War and I remember how much the media juiced the war for the Bush Administration while asking few questions and the NYT even sat on the NSA wiretapping story for over a year to help Bush.
They’re not wrong to not entirely trust legacy media, but they end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In the end, they also see how letting the most obscenely wealthy run the show isn’t such a hot idea. Which is strangely reassuring, as I said. They know something stinks, but they lack the education and tools to properly identify it, as well as their inability to break out from hierarchical thinking.
Very well put, great insight.
Don’t eat shit.
Mulch the rich.
The democrats know all these things and don’t care. they’re just as much in service to the billionaires as the republicans.
I generally avoid painting them all with a single brush like that.
Some absolutely are bought off like you describe. But an awful lot are not — the big problem we’ve had is that the contingent of the bought off Democrats plus the Republicans has been enough to block meaningful action, even when the Democrats have had a nominal majority.
I’m tired of the excuse making for them. It’s like sitting at a table of 10 Nazis. Guess what? It’s 11 Nazis.
Problem with that view is that minority of the Democrats were bought off, like about 4%. And they had a hard time winning reelection as a result
Try 99% of them.
Definitely the party leaders who consistently outperform the S and P
If so, it doesn’t show up in voting records or rhetoric.
I dislike this comparison because it invokes a circular reasoning / begging the question fallacy:
What we are debating is whether all billionaires are bad. Then you raise a comparison trying to prove they’re all bad by associating them with nazis.
But we haven’t yet established if thr10 billionaires around a table are all inherently evil or to the same degree to begin with.
Bill Gates or Warren Buffett is not as bad as Musk or the Waltons. At least the former believe they shouldn’t exist in the first place. So when fighting fascism we kind of need all the resources we can get.
Gee who’s funding the Nazis right now (and back then)? The billionaires.
I was using the saying because it’s appropriate, but the Nazi comparison is double appropriate.
The last 3 elections have shown there are only two groups: Republicans and Republicans that get paid less.
I feel like they get paid just as much only put on a fucking costume and pretend to be something they aren’t.
But thank you for your sane comment in a world of complete fucking insanity and denial about what’s really going on.
True. Maybe “Republicans and JV Republicans” is more accurate?
Oooo good one.
Taking bets if there is a 2028 election (there won’t be) the democrats will run Liz Cheney.
Until enough maga cultist become casualties of Trump’s fascist state nothing will change.
It takes more than that — people just resort to conspiracy theories. What the mind-changing process actually looks like:
- distancing from ideological community
- desire to seek out new information
- and solidifying experiences of gradual or epiphanic realization
It’s so sad that cult deprogramming works so much like cult programming, just in reverse. The cult isolates you inside the cult community, and the only way to break it is to isolate a person from the cult community. It’s not really the same thing, because once they’re separated from the cult they should otherwise be allowed to freely associate with anyone, but it operates on the same principles.
I’m sure the feckless controlled opposition party will jump right on this, just you wait
