I’m starting to really consider the whole “reality is a simulation” angle, and whoever is running the game has put in a cheat code. (not really really, but more than I ever have before)
It’s like a shitty unrealistic movie plot has unfolded over the past decade. And every time it looks like maybe things are heading back on track, BOOM, we get another event that just turns us right back on the track to crazytown.
I’m having a hard time coming up with anything I can cling to in the hopes that Project 2025 isn’t going to go exactly as planned down to the last detail.
How are we not going to become real-world Gilead (but with more racism)?
You are still on the acid trip, just ride it until it’s over. It’ll be more fun if you just let it do its thing.
I’m starting to really consider the whole “reality is a simulation” angle, and whoever is running the game has put in a cheat code. (not really really, but more than I ever have before)
🙄
I have some reeeeeeal bad news for you: the American voters handed Trump and the Republicans not just 1, not 2, but ALL 3 fucking branches of government, on top of a media in which at least 33% is in his fucking pocket and at least another 33% is too stupid to see through his bullshit.
I’m not sure what kind of push back you’re expecting or who you’re expecting it from exactly, but to whatever extent there IS push back it’s gonna be 90% performative gesturing and hand-wringing until at least 2026. And that’s the best case where people are smart enough to vote in their best interest, which knowing how fucking stupid you all are, I’m not gonna hold my breath.
GLHF.
Most of the safeguards were removed in trump’s previous term, and now the way’s open.
Good luck.
I dunno, man, it just feels like the ol’ fascist/totalitarian tactic of flooding the zone with shit until people get exhausted from fighting it has worked, people are exhausted, and there’s this energy of elated resignation, like, we can’t swim upstream anymore, so fuck it, riding the current is kind of fun (and the inevitable waterfall is out of sight and out of mind for the moment).
Thats all fine and well until youre shot on the front lines or happen to be one of the minorities being drowned
Who just knocked?All I’ll say is you’re not taking the “reality is a simulation” angle far enough, because you still believe that there is some sort of outcome that is both objectively good AND long term stable. But the only such outcome is that the simulation goes on, with or without you.
The Inspectors General that Trump is trying to fire basically told him to fuck off.
Under a law passed in 2022 (you know, when the Dems were doing nothing 🙄) the president has to give Congress 1) 30 days notice of firing an IG and 2) enumerate the reasons why that IG was being fired. The second any reason is given to Congress these people are going to sue for wrongful termination since it’s blatantly obvious to everyone Trump is trying to rid the government of anyone who could hold him accountable.
What is the consequence of not following these rules?
If the only consequence is a lawsuit he doesn’t have to pay personally, then I don’t think he cares.
I suppose if the firings are regarded as “official acts,” the courts will support POTUS on this one.
Currently the consequence is they aren’t accepting the termination of their enjoyment and aren’t leaving.
If the consequence of not following the rules means it doesn’t get enforced then he cares very much.
Why does trump care if someone he tried to fire refuses to accept that they’re fired. He can still hire a replacement and pretend the person he “fired” doesn’t exist, and as long as the rest of the bureaucracy plays along with him (which it always seems to) then trump faces no consequences for breaking the rules.
This happened time and time again last term where he broke norms and rules that had no codified repercussions. Dems would say “you can’t do that, it’s not allowed” but he’d do it anyways and succeed.
The checks placed on the POTUS need to have actual teeth and not just be a gentlemen’s agreement
Oh yeah I saw that headline when I got up this morning and it made me happy to see. But talk me down the tree a little further if you can.
In the current state I don’t see how it matters. I’m glad they did it. I appreciate the gesture, and I think it was an important one. But I feel like we’re all still pretending that laws and norms matter when clearly they no longer do for Trump and anyone under him.
What exactly stops him from having these people forcibly removed and/or their access to government resources cut, their paychecks held, their clearances revoked, etc? Who is in charge of those things that can stand up to that?
What exactly stops him from having these people forcibly removed and/or their access to government resources cut, their paychecks held, their clearances revoked, etc? Who is in charge of those things that can stand up to that?
What stops him is people willing to ignore obviously illegal demands, and the more people that stand up to him the more people will be encouraged to do the same. Now, if Trump openly defies court orders and the executive branch has enough sycophants in it that they’re willing to help him, then it becomes up to us to solve that problem.
Solid summary, the best way to deal with authority in general is to ignore them. Mind you someone can always use violence but often times thats a sign of weakness from someone who is trying to claim they have power.
What exactly stops him from having these people forcibly removed and/or their access to government resources cut, their paychecks held, their clearances revoked, etc? Who is in charge of those things that can stand up to that?
Trump doesn’t directly do any of those things, he would have to order other people to do so, and the risk of doing so is that if he encounters more resistance people start to notice that the emperor has no clothes.
The more people resist the more it encourages others to do the same. The president is not a king that can dictate commands, and the more people stop obeying the more Trump runs into those protections that stop him being a tyrant.
My concern as well. Trump really doesn’t seem to give a damn this go-around. There were people in place that hit the brakes on him last time, but this time nobody’s doing shit.
Some reporting is saying impeachment is being floated, suing the president has been a matter of course since Obama took office and hasn’t stopped since, he’s already issuing orders that are blatantly illegal and clearly violate the constitution. There are a lot of openings to fight back right now. Is anyone? Idk.
Are you un-ironically suggesting that impeachment is actually a viable check on a US president?
I doubt this to the point I would bet money against it if I could.
Did you not see that a proposal to amend the constitution for 3 terms was ACTUALLY proposed by a Congressperson from TN?
The republicans do not have enough of a majority in either house to get that through.
I sincerely doubt they are going to convince a third of the Dems to support it either
Remember that you’d have to get at least 38 state legislatures to ratify it as well. Getting any amendments passed in the modern day is a whole circus in and of itself, and I highly doubt there’s enough political capital to get such an obviously targeted amendment (since the candidate in question would’ve had to have two nonconsecutive terms - meaning this applies to Grocer Cleveland and Donald Trump) passed.
I’m beginning to think this term is more about Vance more than Trump. At least, that’s the plan by those behind Trump.
Let Trump go mad and do everything evil at a hundred miles an hour, which is what’s underway. Create utter chaos and make it impossible for anyone to draw breath and structure a defence. Then when the country finally pushes back (Maybe after about year) and he’s impeached, slip in JD Vance as a more moderate leader and everyone will be so grateful the Republicans secure several terms by turning against and blaming everything on Trump.
I could be wrong. Anyone making predictions in this chaos is guessing.
You are experiencing what they want you to experience in this situation: A state of shock.
This is “Shock and Awe.” It’s a blitz to make the enemy feel like the task to fight back is insurmountable and to give up before trying.
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
This is not a military battle, but it is clear that Trump is practicing rapid dominance. He is using the Project 2025 pre-written Executive Orders to execute rapid dominance over the US government and make us feel shocked, confused, and desperate.
Naomi Klein wrote The Shock Doctrine in response to the Iraq War, and this is the Shock Doctrine being used on the US citizenry to whip them into submission.
We must resist this shock. The feeling you have, that it is hopeless, that no one is pushing back, is exactly how they want you to feel.
Get involved in Mutual Aid. Give back to your local community. Check out of national politics, we can’t affect it anymore. Focus on building parallel systems (food banks, community gardens, community mesh-networks, community first aid) for people to rely on since we can no longer rely on the systems that Trump is actively trying to dismantle or twist to harm the American populace.
Losing hope right now means losing the long-term battle against this. Losing hope is what they intend to force you into, broken, submissive, no hope. Do not go silent into that good night.
If you’re asking for someone to push back with effectiveness, you can be one of the first by giving your skills to your community.
In Klein’s own words:
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.
EDIT: This also seems relevant right now:
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
-Fred “Mister” Rogers
There is !keeptrack@lemmy.world to help keep track of all these things
I agree with all except the “Check out of national politics” part. You cant decide who is President anymore, but you should still keep an eye on what national laws they may pass or should be prevented from passing
Thanks, lots to think about there and just the sort of thing I needed.
You’re welcome. There’s lots of other real efforts, too. There’s been various successes at people preventing ICE from getting at people. I know a lot of people in /r/Seattle were doing the legwork of communications to help people avoid getting snared by ICE. The West coast will be a hold out. A school in Chicago also successfully repelled ICE agents from entering the school. Look for the helpers, they won’t be from the government anymore, they will be people like you and me.
Naomi is brilliant and you’re right, her book perfectly describes what is happening to us right now. Thanks for elevating it into the conversation!
Have to be honest, the shock is working on me.
Yes, OP’s asking where the alleged helpers are.
Putting a much finer point on it, we just got a 4 year long demonstration of how utterly disinterested Democrats are in helping.
Thank you! 🙏
Yeah grow a food coop for the first band of fascist thugs that show up with guns. We need to arm ourselves and train just as much as decentralize our food. If you think they’ll go away peacefully and leave our gardens alone you’re horribly naive.
A best of post right here, thank you for the run down
I want to add a running theme in GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire is that doing gross and inhumane things may horrify us in the moment and make us feel overwhelmed but tends to turn around on those who would resort to such methods despite Tyrion Lannister’s opinion that those methods are not to be taken off the table when considering options.
The most well known example in the series was the Red Wedding, the marriage of Edmure Tully, Roslin Frey, which was followed by the massacre of Rob and Catelyn Stark and many others, while under the protection of the tradition of hospitality. If we ignore the GoT Season 8 revenge by Arya Stark (which isn’t canon but is based off an implied plot by Lord Manderly), reputation of fell deed figured in House Frey losing allies and trade, and Frey casualties numbered to exceed all its gains and those inflicted on Stark and its allies.
IRL, Trump’s heavy-handed response to the George Floyd protests in 2020 only doubled the protest sizes in the following days. Notoriously after Putin-style LGMs (unmarked uniformed men in military gear abducting citizens without due process) and brutal police action at the Portland ICE building resulted in the moms joining the protests and then the dads (who brought their wireless leaf blowers, handy against CS gas).
An example that will be applicable to the US is the rise of the French Résistance during the German occupation of France. Despite efforts by German administrators to advice soldiers to stay polite, they couldn’t help themselves and were brutal to the French civilians. The people started engaging in light direct action, tearing down or defacing German propaganda, slashing tires, cutting phone lines, until they found each other and organized. Within two years, they were a formidable fighting force.
Yes, the find out portion of the upcoming era is going to be harsh. People who need services and supplies will not get them. Police will be cruel to folks at the border, and may even hunt down migrants and Trans folks like the SS after Jews. It will be fucking scary, but it will turn bystanders into resistance sympathists, sympathists into activists and activists into militants. And yes, it appears police just can’t help themselves but be brutal, and the resistance will not only feel justified in cutting them down, but will eventually hunt them to the ends of the earth to assure they see tribunal, even when the last guard and bureaucrat is ninety.
Plenty of despots around the world stayed in power for decades and died peacefully in their beds. Tyranny as a means of maintaining power is a “solved problem” and Americans are no smarter or more sophisticated than the citizens of North Korea, Cameroon, Congo or Uganda. Or Spain or Portugal for that matter.
Yes. And if we go down that path, not only will millions perish in the purges, but then China will take us economically, and may be the Allies to our Axis.
And much like Germany, the brain drain and infighting at the top ranks will slow them down and become an exploitable weakness.
If we’re not careful, we’ll organize a rebellion and overthrow the Trump regime only to have it replaced with another despot, and then (as the pattern goes) another and another and another until everyone knows someone who’s perished in the fighting. And that’s no guarantee of a democracy.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve advocated we do something that (AFAIK) we’ve never tried before, and create a constitution before we try to overthrow the government. Make it public; get legal experts to pick at it for loopholes and exploits to close until it’s ironclad. And then, unlike the constitutional framers of the US, don’t let the fighting leaders take place as administrative officials.
But I’m a novice at history and sociopolitical studies. Maybe we are doomed to a century of tyranny and all we have wrought will burn in fire. But I know instances have occurred in which something different happened, via non-violent resistance, even.
At this point get involved with your mutual aid orgs and community orgs. The more of us that organize to resist, the more likely it will actually succeed.
PS: To borrow some phrasing from Donald Rumsfeld, You build a society with the people you have, not the people you wish you had or might have at a later time. But we do still have access to the internet, and not just Facebook and Twitter, even if a lot of people barely move beyond social media. We have the resources to train people to think critically, to develop class consciousness and civic and political literacy.
ETA: PSS: Feel free to use that phrase and accredit as Rumsfeld’s law. I’ll enjoy the schadenfreude of the guy who tried to justify state-sanctioned torture programs being grossly annoyed that he is attributed with a left-wing adage.
Having an idea of the government we want to have before shit goes down is a great idea. I’ve thought about writing down my thoughts for what a better government would look like and maybe I should do that. I’m sure none of us randos on Lemmy would be the people in the room where it’s happening, but if we talk about it maybe we can influence it.
If you’re near a university, get your butt to the law school department and ask professors how feasible this is. (Buy them lunch if possible / necessary) And if it’s as brilliant as it sounds, they might be able to hook us up with the legal experts necessary to follow through.
We are in very interesting times, which may give the notion more traction than a far off whimsy.
We have colleges here in Sacramento. I’ll see what I can do here.
One BIG thing to consider is that in other countries citizens weren’t nearly as well armed as the U.S.
An even BIGGER thing to consider is that in other countries the armies under the control of the leader weren’t nearly as well armed as the US
I AM the one who knocks out your nazi face to the pavement
There’s the Reagan-appointed federal judge who near instantaneously ruled that trump’s birthright citizenship EO was unconstitutional and expressed disbelief that anyone recognized by the Bar Association would argue for such a position.
I don’t think they expect this one to hold water, but it does serve as an excellent distraction from all the other nefarious shit coming down the pipe. Don’t lose sight of that other stuff - especially attempts to liquidate the treasury into $doge, $trump, or any other shit coin. That is the monumental heist they’re gunning for, make no mistake.
It’ll be like Roe. Where they lose at every level because it’s obvious until they get to SCOTUS. Who will decide in the GOP’s favor based on the Papal Bull of 462.
He only issued a TRO, though. I am unfortunately confident they will find a way around this.
Thank you this is what I’m talking about! (Holding my breath to see if he’s somehow overridden or disbarred.)
You can’t push back against the person who doesn’t care. These “trump” things aren’t likely coming from trump. All he wants is attention. So as long as someone spins an idea to him that will get him attention, he will sign it. He hasn’t had an original idea in decades. So you won’t see push back in public much. It will happen between the people behind the scenes.
This is something people should point out more often. For me, in terms of policies, the real president are Vought and Peter Thiel. Two very dangerous men because unlike Trump, they are very smart and actual ideologues. The one foil they have is that their ideologies are only compatible so long as they have a common enemy in liberals. If they managed to beat the liberals they would inevitably have to fight one another for ultimate control over the ideological direction of the party (at this point in my hypothetical future perhaps the only party in America)
The next election will be very interesting.
If trump is still functional (in the goes to rallies for a successor sense), will there be someone he can or will transfer his popularity to. I kind of doubt it. Anyone able to take on that popularity is a threat to him. Maybe he would do it for one of his kids, because he might think he could control them, but I still doubt it. So he might submarine his own party.That would open the door for another boring centrist from the democrats that “plays ball” with the party elites.
If trump is too feeble to do any rallies and such. That would allow a trump like replacement to pick up the republican torch. This would push the dems toward needing a progressive trump like populist to try to win. The dem “party” (the people behind the scenes) would fight that. Just like they did when Bernie was up against Hillary. And could end up handing it to the new trump like person. This would be the path to your future one party system.
The third scenario would have trump die in office somehow. Vance would “play ball” with the rep party elite in a heartbeat. And he is more like a pre-trump politician. We saw that in the vp debate. But the party elite would probably back him. It could end up with the return of the pre trump days with boring poloticians who just do what the party elite say, with the party elite m9ving back into the shadows.
It’s the rich buying off both major political parties in the US. One is paid to implement a fascist oligarchy. The other is paid to pump the breaks on the fascist oligarchy when the population freaks out.
In both cases, political bribery has run amok and unchecked. Neither party is beholden to the will of the people. Low voter turnout means Republicans and oligarchy wins. High voter turnout means Democrats and the same oligarchy wins.
The world could really do with a few more Luigis.
Not a single soul in the government is going to help or save you. I’m sorry you’re only realizing this now, but the U.S. government has never been your friend or given a shit about you. It was captured by corporate forces at least 20 years ago, and set down this path to fascism over 40 years ago by Reagan. At this point, you will have to be one of the ones to resist, and you should reach out to local organizations to resist with them.
Can the US government just fire anybody they want for whatever reason? (I’ve seen lots of things implying they can, but I’ve never seen anything stating it clearly.)
Because if that’s the case, yeah, nobody there will help. You’ll just see a lot of people exiting it.
Can the US government just fire anybody they want for whatever reason?
Only when a Republican is in office. When a Democrat is in office, we have to keep DeJoy running the post office.
The first day of his inaguration, Trump put forth an executive order that will attempt to make all federal employees Schedule F, basically, the same protections as a political appointee instead of a civil servant. This will make them basically at will employees.
DunkinCoder is correct they are also making it really awful to work for the federal government with RTO and freezing of funding. And the hiring freeze. But it’s not the complete picture, its actually much worse.
There will be court cases with federal employees trying to keep their jobs. I suspect they will fail, due to how the courts are republican controlled right now. The firings haven’t started yet. Expect them soon. There will be loyalty tests. There’s an email floating around asking federal employees to rat on “DEI hires”, whatever that is. Are minorities that are actually entirely qualified for their federal position a “DEI hire”? Do you get fired if you don’t pretend that they are?
Edit - article: link
Not really. The goal aside from probationary employees is to make the workforce miserable so they quit and starve itself in the process. RTOs (especially for those hired remotely, say states away), is one example.
“Hey the government is even more inefficient, let’s fire all the low performers.” - To the employee left doing 5x usual workload at 50% efficiency.
Who’s going to stop them?
