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It's frightening how a dictatorship is setting itself up in plain sight, at an accelerated pace, almost hour after hour, and nobody does a damn thing about it.
These are fascist purges. The way a military dictatorship would take over. This kind of thing is what you see in undeveloped poor countries, banana republics.
As it turns out, American exceptionalism is bullshit propaganda.
Well that tracks since the US is a poor, underdeveloped country that spent all its money on a Gucci belt.
We've had failing grades on infrastructure like bridges since the god damn Bush Jr. era. That's pushing 20 years and no maintenance has been done.
Didn't Biden pass an infrastructure act to fix these bridges? Granted, I expect it'll take more than a year or two.
Musk is literally hijacking the treasury right now so it's more likely it'll just have the funding cut out from under it.
Trump is literally enacting Project 2025 right now, purging people like crazy, and people are like "What about how things normally work, though?" If it's not clear they're not going to work normally from here on out I don't know what to tell you other than: wake up.
You just can't say "no maintenance has been done." It has, with more planned.
Had we elected Kamala, this was one of the things that would continue to get fixed. Just seems you don't want to give credit where credit is due. Not sure if you're going for a "both sides" angle or what. But if you are, you don't get to conflate that with the current bullshit.
Gonna be real with you: Too little too late coming between Trump's first term and Trump's second.
Accomplishments are only accomplishments if they are seen through to the end. If Trump and Musk gut the funding for half the government overnight to pocket the difference, how's any of that going to happen? And if it doesn't happen, what's there to crow about in terms of accomplishments? Great job, we got two years in on 20+ years of maintenance backlogs.
Keep pretending things are normal or it matters when the whole point is we didn't get shit like that soon enough to keep people's faith in the government. Instead they got mad and voted for a mad clown to tear it all down after we pissed away trillions on pointless wars in the middle east that even conservatives claim they never supported now.
Nobody's gonna care what Biden wanted to do if Trump tears it all down anyway.
Call me in 6 months to let me know how many of those are still on track vs how many suddenly had no money or all their workers stopped showing up.
He did. Our free press didn't talk about it and spent time on Trump's latest bullshit. 🤷♂️
You forgot that last part
Yeah it's honestly pretty fucked to use Banana Republic as an insult from the nation that did the military invasions.
There's so many parts and pieces that all failed to get to where we are today. Each time you reflect a moment and realize that we shouldn't be be here in the first place:
The list is not exhaustive and goes on and on...
And in the background there's all the systemic failures and problems that enabled this: terrible public education, ignoring a large chunk of the electorate for too long, citizens united, social media and outrage culture, rampant disinformation and propaganda disguised as news, the electoral college and de facto 2 party system, too few checks and balances being hard codified, obvious loop holes like presidential pardons, ...
Petty sure historians will analyze this for generations. If we will still live in a world where historians are allowed to about their work freely.
Historians have studied the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis in, out, up, down and sideways for 92 years and it amounted to a big fat nothing, as here we are again, dealing with the exact same shit today.
Don't get your hopes high.
The majority of Germans thought Hitler was an idiot. It was the idiots who followed him who brought him to power. Just like maga. The fact is that a few generations from now another idiot fascist will rise to power and another group of people will be equally astonished at the stupidity of their voters.
It'll go something like: "Oh my god WTF are you thinking!?! He's doing exactly the same thing as trump and Hitler!! He's a fucking fascist!! He just did a fucking maga salute FFS !!!"
The problem is that the people who really need to learn from history don't see any need to. It's the idiots who repeat history and we have to sit here watching them stick their dick in a beehive, knowing that everyone is about to get stung.
It’s at least helped those who seek that info be aware of the red flags and processes that took place to get them where they got.
You make Supreme Court judges political appointees, all of this was always going to happen at some point.
All you needed was the right guy to pull the levers.
The ultimate should have is, America should have got it's shit together somewhere in the last 20 years.
Well someone is going to do something, likely a lawsuit because these firings are pretty clearly illegal. Now if the Supreme Court (again) decides the law doesn't apply to Trump, then maybe it's time to freak out. But that'll take over a year and then it'll be midterms time. And as terrible as Democrats are at winning, they'll have to really suck to screw that up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung?wprov=sfla1 this is whats happening
First they came for the FBI, and I did nothing, just like those pigs did when they had the chance to do something.
Who is going to do something? This is what the country voted for. So far, everything done has been legal. It will take time to make worse things legal, probably, but that is coming, too.
Not everything done so far has been legal and there are multiple ongoing cases suing Trump's actions. Book bans, healthcare, and anti-trans legislation are the first that come to mind. People and organizations (e.g. ACLU) in positions of power are trying to stand up for the common person where they can. If I had more money I'd donate to them.
Fuck legality.
Slavery? Legal.
The Holocaust? Legal.
Legality is what fascists use to keep the population in line, because if it's legal, what can we do, right?
No, it's not all legal. But the courts don't act at the speed of this executive.
This is a breakdown of our government.
I'm curious as to who's doing the actual force of these things. I know federal employees at the Treasury aren't expected to be armed resistance, but who, exactly, is behind forcing the way for Musk's people? Is it police? Private security? His own goons?
The new head of the agency badged them in, set them up in executive positions, and told his employees to obey them. They don't even have security clearance or government credentials. One of them is 18 fucking years old. Assuming you're talking about the fiasco at the Office of Personnel Management.
Why? It's literally what half the country voted for
Half the country didn't vote. A quarter of the country voted for this.
Half the country didn't vote for fascism. Half the country voted for anyone who promised to lower the price of fucking groceries, danger and morals be damned.
Yes, half of the country is thick as pig shit. But they're not all fascist to the core.
I'm trying to remember what that phrase about people who aren't bothered about fascism is. Something like "If there are nine nazis sitting at a table and someone is okay with sitting with them then there are ten nazis sitting at the table".
Unless that tenth person is a bit of a thickie, uneducated or was deceived into thinking the Nazis just had a mild case of right-wingness but otherwise offered solutions to their problems by constant exposure to "fair and balanced" media. Then you have nine Nazis and one fool sitting at the table.
"I was duped" is just as bad as "I was following orders". You don't get to weasel your way out of responsibility for your acts.
So, 10 Nazis.
If you're not fighting against it and just going along, you're still a Nazi. Not every German was walking around in Hugo boss uniforms rounding up Jews. Plenty we're just keeping their heads down and trying to to get through the unpleasantness.
And that made them Nazis?
Those who were fooled into voting Hitler were idiots. Those who didn't weren't. And although I intensely despite those who voted Hitler out of idiocy, as much as I despise those who voted Trump for the same reason, at the end of the day, they were and will be all victims.
The true Nazis, then and now, are those who voted Hitler and Trump fully knowing, understanding and willing what was on the menu.
See my comment above.
Does that matter anymore?
It does because at some point, those people who voted Trump will need to realize what they did and feel the shame.
what have you been doing?
I'm not in a position to do anything. But others are, and they're sitting on their thumbs in the Capitol Building, or actively collaborating with the orange utan in the hope of keeping their miserable jobs.