this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

I appreciate the gusto, but I find rally posts like this to be extremely irritating.

Do you really think the people who are saying he'll just get away with it all don't think all of these things? Do you think people dropped their morals on the issue and now think "this is fine" because it's the status quo?

Pray tell -- what can I do, today, as a drop in the fucking ocean, to ensure this specific white collar criminal gets summarily apprehended, convicted, and meaningfully punished for his crimes on a reasonable timescale? What reasonable, concrete action am I supposed to take that will do a damn thing about it that I'm not already doing by dutifully casting my ballots and boycotting support for people and causes I don't believe in at every opportunity?

I am convinced there is no such action. The dominos that matter in this specific case were already set long ago. All we can do at this point is make logical predictions about how they will fall. And from my point of view, "Donald Trump will not be meaningfully punished" is looking inevitable. I have no faith in the current stacking of the judicial system to declare an outcome I'd be content with. I and others like me are not happy about it. But we aren't deluding ourselves either. The train for proles like us doing anything about this now is long gone.

Now, I don't think it's hopeless on the grand scale. We can and should work to claw progress on the general form of this issue over time. There's lots we can still do about that. Activism, protesting, dragging people to polls, etc. But that will likely be a "plant a tree whose shade you will never sit in" kind of thing.

Regarding this specific man today, I think we are powerless to meaningfully affect the trajectories of these cases. Anything short of rioting in the streets, casting aside legal process, and marching on the courthouse demanding his head on a pike (in other words, stooping to the level of Jan 6th insurrectionists) is too slow and/or only theoretical. And I am very tired of cheerleaders trying to tell me otherwise when they offer no substantive plan of action.