“If a law is enacted in the woods and no one is around to enforce it then did it really make a difference?”
9 Likes
Perhaps getting our Trump-loving neighbors and relatives to open up their eyes, but you would have to be subtle, don’t say “SEE, SEE??!! Trump is plotting a coup!” (they will just throw up their blinders at that point), instead pose the hypothetical “if there had been a huge terrorist attack under Obama’s first term, something in the scale of 9/11, and Obama declared martial law, would that have been OK, or would you assume it was all part of a plot?” Then follow that up with “OK, what about if Trump did it, would you be OK with that, and if so, why is that better? Does the Constitution matter or not?”
If you can get their ears after that, then cautiously list things Trump is doing (that Obama never did) that smack of totalitarianism: saying everything in the press is a lie, firing huge masses of government employees and installing loyalists, enriching his own businesses, trying to bypass the legislative process, ignoring the courts, etc.
[edit: This is really all about spreading awareness, particularly among people who may have once claimed to be members of the Tea Party, and their supposed love of the Constitution/democracy. If you can sow the seed of awareness then they might start seeing new Trumpian events as part of the larger picture of growing dictatorship and corruption.]
23 Likes
I am calling my Democratic rep in the House as often as I can, telling him that he needs to immediately and publicly call for the impeachment of Donald Trump under Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution of the United States, which he is in CLEAR violation of. Also telling that to my Senators, although obviously Impeachment needs to come from the House. The Dems have no power to impeach in the House, but I think publicly repeating again and again and again that Trump’s very presidency is blatantly unconstitutional is important. I am telling my Dem reps that unless they do absolutely everything int heir power to stop Trump, I will NOT be voting for them again when they are next up.
21 Likes
Create alliances and therefore influence with people in positions that can wield executive authority: police, aremed forces, border, etc.
Then at least they can be caused to question executive orders.
6 Likes
Seriousness and sarcasm aren’t mutually exclusive; sometimes shit is too dire to be conveyed without irony.
10 Likes
Except that they don’t!
4 Likes
This all makes Hoover and the Teapot dome scandal seem like small baby hands holding tiny little teacups or something.
5 Likes
This is a very important article for people to think about. What also happened this weekend? Bannon is now in the inner inner circle of military decisions, and the JOINT CHIEFS are out? What is starting to become VERY clear is that these guys aren’t “proto” fascists, they aren’t “kind sorta” fascists… These guys are the REAL DEAL, and Bannon may be at the center of it. He is a very chilling guy, and the fact that he projects as a raging alcoholic doesn’t ease my comfort levels at all. Pay very very close attention to the machinations of power, and what roles that are traditionally elevated, get demoted. And vice versa. This IS a coup, these ARE fascists, and it IS as horribly bad as you think it is. How does that motivate you to act? History will be watching this one, people. There is only one real certainty in life, and that life is not permanent. But what you did with your life will be permanently etched into the very fabric of the cosmos. At the very least, bang out some calls, go to rallies (while they’re still legal), and begin to organize! And ideally start organizing not so much electronically, as ALL of the internet is going to be a tool for these guys. They can read ALL of it, and they WILL use that power. God help us, that there are sane people in the military and IC who are not going to just go along with all of this. But unfortunately, we have NO reason to expect that the FBI isn’t already on the take! The fact that Comey publicized the Weiner-laptop-emails a few days before the election, but for months kept secret that the FBI was investigating the Trump administration for tries to Russia? OK I’m not making myself feel better… 
35 Likes
One other thing: It is VERY VERY VERY important that we engage the Democrats in office, and MAKE ABSOLUTELY SURE they do EVERYTHING they can to block all of this, and that they block it publicly and daily. The Democratic party is probably too big a thing for Bannon and the Russians to take down, to make illegal. So it needs to have teeth, and not be delegitimized. If the Democrats cave to all of this, we are well and truly fucked. There will be such an immense power vacuum, and there is nothing ready to flow into it. At that point they will have won. The GOP is fine with all of this, for the most part, by the way – the GOP is HAPPY to sell out Democracy, for unchecked power. ALL of this is going on with the DIRECT participation of high high-level GOP operatives like Preibus and Spicer. This is a GOP coup, or better stated, it’s a Bannon coup wrapped inside a Matyoshka of a Russian coup and a GOP coup. They’ll use the GOP for as long as they need to, and right now, the GOP is happy to go along with it. If you live in a GOP congressional district, for god’s sakes WHY ARE YOU READING THIS WEBSITE, get your butt to your congressional offices and take a stand!
19 Likes
Aw, man, I was so hoping all of this was just a display of gross incompetence. But all these points make sense. Ai ya.
8 Likes
I agree wholeheartedly.
My comment was a reference to another thread.
I’m going to write to the President of Mexico and the Prime Minister of Canada and ask for money to build a wall around Washington DC while Drumpf and his “people” are there. I’m pretty sure they’ll pay for that.
15 Likes
I have my doubts.
On the “pro coup” side of the argument is the theory that bannon is a super-competent evil genius. On the “con coup” side is the theory that bannon is a paranoid idealogue who is out of his depth.
I lean towards the later for things like the fact that the muslim ban EO was incompetently written. I see the tight “circle of power” around trump not as a consolidation of power, but as a reaction to being in a wholly new environment where they don’t really have a good handle on how things work, but are too paranoid to reach out to experts because they don’t trust the experts to agree with their goals — which may not even be true, but to an idealogue any resistance, even if it is just about procedure and not goals, looks like opposition.
I see the CBP’s inconsistent failures to obey the court orders as stemming from crappy lines of communication/command and general confusion.
As for the rosneft sale, the article gets part of it wrong - the Steele memo that contains that information is page 30 which is dated october 18th, not july - it just that the source in the memo said the discussion happened in july. A sale of that magnitude does not happen overnight or even in just a couple of months. It is not hard to imagine that rumors of a (legit) rosneft sale had trickled out during the planing and Steele’s source conflated them with Trump.
As for the whole “trial run” or “shock tactics” approach I disagree, the muslim ban had the effect of bringing people together, not splitting them apart. These protests don’t just happen in a vacuum with people standing around like robots. Connections are made, face-to-face connections that are stronger than pseudonymous twitter flocks. It is part of the process of organizing. Its also had the effect of waking up people on the fence, those who thought maybe he didn’t really mean all the shit he said during the campaign. It wipes away the kind of self-deception that let people vote for him thinking it was rhetoric that he wouldn’t actually try.
I do think the risk of “outrage fatigue” is high. I think that was part of how he got elected, there is just so much wrong with the guy that you can’t keep it all in your head. But I don’t think its a strategy, more like a dark serendipity.
13 Likes
It’s very simple.
You shouldn’t wield political power that you don’t want your worse political enemy using.
Instead you should abolish it.
Pure and simple.
12 Likes
There are two sides to a wall.
One to keep people out. They also work to keep people in.
2 Likes
Because getting rid of a corrupt government and unjust laws (both of which have been in place for decades upon decades) is just that easy; huh, comrade?
Come enlighten us, how this never happens in your homeland and that’s why your country is so superior to ours.
*waits
14 Likes
They are already doing that. But the federal government is a small minority compared against the populace at large.
This really is so disturbingly plausible.
See, I don’t see those two positions as being contradictory - the people involved are incompetent - they are out of their depth, they know nothing of how the government operates, and they also clearly don’t care. But that doesn’t mean they’re not plotting a coup here. Their ignorance of how the systems of governance work is part of their disdain for it - and Trump and Bannon have stated, publicly, that they’d like to totally destroy those systems (and replace them with their own systems). The question is whether they can blunder their way to their goals, and how much of the chaos they’re causing is accidental, part of a desire to simply create chaos, and how much is part of achieving this kind of goal.
People have been saying, “Expect a ‘Reichstag fire’ event,” and that’s seeming more and more likely. I just hope people will recognize it when it comes, otherwise it could really cause people to rally around Trump.
14 Likes
Um, you do know that hundreds of thousands of people, you know, live in DC. And Trump only got 4% of the votes there.
8 Likes
I had the same response when people would go off about how the minority of dumb assholes who run Texas should be allowed to secede.
2 Likes
