#Trumpism

[mostlysignssomeportents]

"Now we will, at least for a time, replace justice with power as our guiding light."

-Bill McKibben on the Trump era

[alexa-santi-author]

For all the people who think Trump isn’t going to act quickly on all of his crazy plans:

- ICE raids have already started in multiple cities, and actually started in California before the inauguration.

- During the last Muslim ban, people were stopped at customs and immediately sent back as soon as the EO went into effect. Squads of lawyers had to descend on airports to try and prevent it.

DO NOT DEPEND ON PRIOR NORMS FROM OTHER ADMINISTRATIONS TO GUESS WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN. THOSE ARE ALL OUT THE WINDOW NOW.

For those American voters who refused to vote for Harris: I fucking told you so, and now we all have to suffer thanks to you.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Aslı Aydıntaşbaş for Politico Magazine:

American democracy is about to undergo a serious stress test. I know how it feels, in part because I lived through the slow and steady march of state capture as a journalist working in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey. Over a decade as a high-profile journalist, I covered Turkey’s descent into illiberalism, having to engage in the daily push and pull with the government. I know how self-censorship starts in small ways but then creeps into operations on a daily basis. I am familiar with the rhythms of the battle to reshape the media, state institutions and the judiciary. Having lived through it, and having gathered some lessons in hindsight, I believe that there are strategies that can help Democrats and Trump critics not only survive the coming four years, but come out stronger. Here are six of them.

1. Don’t Panic — Autocracy Takes Time

President-elect Donald Trump’s return to power is unnerving but, as I have argued previously, America will not turn into a dictatorship overnight — or in four years. Even the most determined strongmen face internal hurdles, from the bureaucracy to the media and the courts. It took Erdoğan well over a decade to fully consolidate his power. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Poland’s Law and Justice Party needed years to erode democratic norms and fortify their grip on state institutions.

I am not suggesting that the United States is immune to these patterns, but it’s important to remember that its decentralized system of governance — the network of state and local governments — offers enormous resilience. Federal judges serve lifetime appointments, states and governors have specific powers separate from those granted federally, there are local legislatures, and the media has the First Amendment as a shield, reinforced by over a century of legal precedents. Sure, there are dangers, including by a Supreme Court that might grant great deference to the president. But in the end, Donald Trump really only has two years to try to execute state capture. Legal battles, congressional pushback, market forces, midterm elections in 2026 and internal Republican dissent will slow him down and restrain him. The bottom line is that the U.S. is too decentralized in its governance system for a complete takeover. The Orbánization of America is not an imminent threat.

2. Don’t Disengage — Stay Connected

[...]

Nothing is more meaningful than being part of a struggle for democracy. That’s why millions of Turks turned out to the polls and gave the opposition a historic victory in local governments across Turkey earlier this year. That’s how the Poles organized a winning coalition to vote out the conservative Law and Justice Party last year. It can happen here, too. The answer to political defeat is not to disconnect, but to organize. You can take a couple of days or weeks off, commiserate with friends and mute Elon Musk on X — or erase the app altogether. But in the end, the best way to develop emotional resilience is greater engagement.

[...]

4. Charismatic Leadership Is a Non-Negotiable

One lesson from Turkey and Hungary is clear: You will lose if you don’t find a captivating leader, as was the case in 2023 general elections in Turkey and in 2022 in Hungary. Coalition-building or economic messaging is necessary and good. But it is not enough. You need charisma to mobilize social dissent. [...]

Last year’s elections in Poland and Turkey showcased how populist incumbents can be defeated (or not defeated, as in general elections in Turkey in 2023) depending on the opposition’s ability to unite around compelling candidates who resonate with voters. Voters seek authenticity and a connection — give it to them.

5. Skip the Protests and Identity Politics

Soon, Trump opponents will shake off the doldrums and start organizing an opposition campaign. But how they do it matters. For the longest time in Turkey, the opposition made the mistake of relying too much on holding street demonstrations and promoting secularism, Turkey’s version of identity politics, which speaks to the urban professional and middle class but not beyond. [...]

6. Have Hope

Nothing lasts forever and the U.S. is not the only part of the world that faces threats to democracy — and Americans are no different than the French, the Turks or Hungarians when it comes to the appeal of the far right. But in a country with a strong, decentralized system of government and with a long-standing tradition of free speech, the rule of law should be far more resilient than anywhere in the world. Trump’s return to power certainly poses challenges to U.S. democracy. But he will make mistakes and overplay his hand — at home and abroad. America will survive the next four years if Democrats pick themselves up and start learning from the successes of opponents of autocracy across the globe.

Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, who had first-hand experience with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s authoritarianism in her native Turkey as a journalist, wrote in Politico Magazine on how to effectively fight Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulses.

[alwaysbewoke]

x

[shutinthenutouse]

[jonostroveart]

Fuming. You bet he was.

[darknessdrops]

“When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving the cross." (Attributed, erroneously?, to Sinclair Lewis)

Jeff Clark (photographer)

why the fuck are so many young men voting for Trump??

[warrioreowynofrohan]

This is one of the best articles I’ve seen yet on Trump, Trumpism, and the upcoming election. It’s directed at the right and centre-right (whereas most tumblr posts on this are directed at the left), but it’s saying – with detailed analysis and evidence – exactly what needs to be said, to everyone. This is not a normal election. How you vote this November determines whether you ever get the chance to vote in a democratic election again. This is not a game. Fascism is not a buzzword or a rhetorical device to hurl at anyone and everyone you disagree with. It is real, it is dangerous, and Trump is openly running on a fascist platform.

There are only two sides in this election: those who want the United States to be a fascist dictatorship and those who do not.

I live in Canada. I do not want to live next to a fascist state (especially since the Comservatives here are way ahead in the polls and their leader gives every sign of wanting to cozy up to Trump).

Please, stop this while you still have a chance.

Today we’re going to look at definitions of fascism and ask the question – you may have guessed – if Donald Trump is running for President as a fascist. Worry not, this isn’t me shifting to full-time political pundit, nor is this the formal end of the hiatus (which will happen on Nov 1, when I hope to have a post answering some history questions from the ACOUP Senate to start off on), but this was an essay I had in me that I had to get out, and working on the book I haven’t the time to get it out in any other forum but this one. And I’ll be frank, some of Donald Trump’s recent statements and promises have raised the urgency of writing this; the political science suggests that politicians do, broadly, attempt to do the things they promise to do – and the things Trump is promising are dark indeed.

Now I want to be clear what we’re doing here. I am not asking if the Republican Party is fascist (I think, broadly speaking, it isn’t) and certainly not if you are fascist (I certainly hope not). But I want to employ the concept of fascism as an ideology with more precision than its normal use (‘thing I don’t like’) and in that context ask if Donald Trump fits the definition of a fascist based on his own statements and if so, what does that mean. And I want to do it in a long-form context where we can get beyond slogans or tweet-length arguments and into some detail.

Now the response from some folks is going to be anger that I am even asking this question and demands for me to ‘stay in my lane.’ To which I must remind them that the purpose of history and historians is, as Thucydides put it, is to offer “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human affairs must resemble if it does not reflect it” (Thuc. 1.22.4). This is my lane. Goodness knows, I’d much rather be discussing the historical implications of tax policy or long-term interstate strategy, but that isn’t the election we’re having. And if hearing about these things that happened is unpleasant, well, Polybius offers the solution: “men have no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past” (Plb. 1.1.1). We must correct our conduct.

The author, Bret Devereaux, lays out the history of the rise to power of Hitler and Mussolini and draws out the lessons

What I want to note here are two key commonalities: First, fascists were only able to take power because of the gullibility of those who thought they could ‘use’ the fascists against some other enemy (usually communists). Traditional conservative politicians (your Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham types) and conservative business leaders (your Elon Musks) fooled themselves into believing that, because the would-be tyrant seemed foolish, buffoonish, and uneducated that such an individual could be controlled to their ends, shaped in more productive, more ‘moderate,’ more ‘business friendly’ directions. They were wrong; many of them paid for their foolish error with their lives (Victor Emmanuel III paid for it with his crown). Mussolini and Hitler would not be ‘shaped,’ – they would be exactly the violent, tyrannical dictators they had promised to be – to the total and utter ruin of their countries.

Note that these men were not exactly subtle about what they wanted to do. Mein Kampf is not a subtle book. But they both knew how to promise violence to their followers while prevaricating to their temporary allies; be wary of the fascist who promises violence in his rally speeches but assures you that, if you just give him power, he won’t hurt anyone (except the people you don’t like) – because it is a lie, of course.

Second: once these fascist leaders were in power it was already too late to stop them. Precisely because fascists had no respect for democratic processes and the rule of law – things they had declared openly in seeking power – once in power, they were unconstrained by them and swiftly set about converting all of the powers of the government into a machine to keep them in power. And the conversion from democracy to dictatorship was remarkably swift, in Italy, Mussolini marched in October of ’22, rewrote the election rules in November of ’23 and by December of ’24 had effectively dropped even the pretense of democracy; just two years. Hitler was faster: appointed chancellor in January 1933, by March of that year he had suspended constitutional protections and ruled by fiat; just three months.

The time to stop an authoritarian takeover of a democratic system is before the authoritarian is in office, because once they are in power, they will use that power, to stay in power and it becomes almost impossible to remove them without considerable violence (and difficult to do even with considerable violence).

That, however, creates a tricky situation. With most political ideologies, voters can adopt a strategy of judging by outputs: “if you don’t like the current government’s policies, let these other fellows here have a go at it and see if they do better. If not, you can always vote them out next time.” But with fascists and other authoritarians there may not be a next time and this strategy fails: by the time the actions of the fascists make it clear they are dangerous, it is too late to vote them out.

This is why it is important to listen carefully to what fascists say and what they promise and most importantly to take their threats of political violence and authoritarianism seriously.

Which is not to say that everything on the right is fascism (just as not everything on the left is its own authoritarian variant, communism). Ronald Reagan was not a fascist, nor was George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush or John McCain or Mitt Romney. They were conservatives within the liberal tradition (again, ‘liberal’ here in the old Jefferson-Locke-and-Washington sense). Most Republicans today are not fascists, although a distressing number appear ready to repeat Franz von Papen’s mistake of assuming they can achieve their goals through an alliance with fascists. Only the devil wins such a devil’s bargain.

How is one to tell the difference? Listen to the things they promise to do and understand that they make speak out of both sides of their mouth: promising violence to one audience and then toning down their rhetoric to another. But politicians speaking from within the tradition of liberty don’t need to speak that way because they don’t promise violence in the first place.

Listen for the promises of violence, the promises to suspend press freedoms, the promises to persecute political adversaries and when you hear them believe them.

I strongly recommend reading the whole article, as the author goes on to lay out two of the more common definitions of fascism and analyze, point-by-point, how Trumpism fits them.

There is a reason why some Republicans, even some of the people who were in Trump’s inner circle in 2016-2020, have jumped ship now. The Republicans who are willing to vote for Kamala aren’t doing it because she’s conservative – they’re doing it because they’re anti-fascist. It would be deeply ironic if people on the left who have been calling themselves anti-fascists for the last eight years proved to be less so than those Republicans. This may be one of the most crucial moments in American history. Take it seriously.

[politically-incorrect-penguin]

The more I see stuff about voter regret, the more I think that Trump voters were really just projecting their hopes and dreams and values into the orange man without considering IF he actually represents those things. They've had such a massive tunnel vision that they haven't seen all the stuff surrounding him. They didn't see Trump for who he is, they just saw a messianic figure who is going to magic all bad things away.

Like let's think about it: Trump Voters are surprised by his appointments of Robert F. Kennedy or Matt Gaetz, they are complaining about Elon Musk's influence on the government now, they are dropping their jaws when learning how Trumps Tarifs will actually affect them, muslim voters are dissatisfied with Trumps pro-Itsahell picks for the office (this one baffles me, how could you even imagine Trump is anything but a zionist? Don't you remember when he endorsed Jerusalem as the capital of Itsahell?). Latino trump voters are scared and saddened because the mass deportations might affect their families as well. None of this comes as a surprise for us who have been warning about Trump, but somehow the people who should've paid the closest attention to what he is actually trying to say in his incomprehensible mumbling didn't listen at all.

People were so concerned about the economy that they refused to see what consiquences voting a convicted felon might have. And now all americans will pay huge prize for that.

[davidaugust]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Canada’s ground-breaking, hamstrung repair and interop laws

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

When the GOP trifecta assumes power in just a few months, they will pass laws, and those laws will be terrible, and they will cast long, long shadows.

This is the story of how another far-right conservative government used its bulletproof majority to pass a wildly unpopular law that continues to stymie progress to this day. It's the story of Canada's Harper Conservative government, and two of its key ministers: Tony Clement and James Moore.

Starting in 1998, the US Trade Rep embarked on a long campaign to force every country in the world to enact a new kind of IP law: an "anticircumvention" law that would criminalize the production and use of tools that allowed people to use their own property in ways that the manufacturer disliked.

This first entered the US statute books with the 1998 passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose Section 1201 established a new felony for circumventing an "access control." Crucially, DMCA 1201's prohibition on circumvention did not confine itself to protecting copyright.

Circumventing an access control is a felony, even if you never violate copyright law. For example, if you circumvent the access control on your own printer to disable the processes that check to make sure you're using an official HP cartridge, HP can come after you.

You haven't violated any copyright, but the ink-checking code is a copyrighted work, and you had to circumvent a block in order to reach it. Thus, if I provide you a tool to escape HP's ink racket, I commit a felony with penalties of five years in prison and a $500k fine, for a first offense. So it is that HP ink costs more per ounce than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

This was clearly a bad idea in 1998, though it wasn't clear how bad an idea it was at the time. In 1998, chips were expensive and underpowered. By 2010, a chip that cost less than a dollar could easily implement a DMCA-triggering access control, and manufacturers of all kinds were adding superfluous chips to everything from engine parts to smart lightbulbs whose sole purpose was to transform modification into felonies. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business-model."

So when the Harper government set out to import US-style anticircumvention law to Canada, Canadians were furious. A consultation on the proposal received 6,138 responses opposing the law, and 54 in support:

https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/04/copycon-final-numbers/

And yet, James Moore and Tony Clement pressed on. When asked how they could advance such an unpopular bill, opposed by experts and the general public alike, Moore told the International Chamber of Commerce that every objector who responded to his consultation was a "radical extremist" with a "babyish" approach to copyright:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/copyright-debate-turns-ugly-1.898216

As is so often the case, history vindicated the babyish radical extremists. The DMCA actually has an official way to keep score on this one. Every three years, the US Copyright Office invites public submissions for exemptions to DMCA 1201, creating a detailed, evidence-backed record of all the legitimate activities that anticircumvention law interferes with.

Unfortunately, "a record" is all we get out of this proceeding. Even though the Copyright Office is allowed to grant "exemptions," these don't mean what you think they mean. The statute is very clear on this: the US Copyright Office is required to grant exemptions for the act of circumvention, but is forbidden from granting exemptions for tools needed to carry out these acts.

This is headspinningly and deliberately obscure, but there's one anecdote from my long crusade against this stupid law that lays it bare. As I mentioned, the US Trade Rep has made the passage of DMCA-like laws in other countries a top priority since the Clinton years. In 2001, the EU adopted the EU Copyright Directive, whose Article 6 copy-pastes the provisions of DMCA 1201.

In 2003, I found myself in Oslo, debating the minister who'd just completed Norway's EUCD implementation. The minister was very proud of his law, boasting that he'd researched the flaws in other countries' anticircumvention laws and addressed them in Norway's law. For example, Norway's law explicitly allowed blind people to bypass access controls on ebooks in order to feed them into text-to-speech engines, Braille printers and other accessibility tools.

I knew where this was going. I asked the minister how this would work in practice. Could someone sell a blind person a tool to break the DRM on their ebooks? Of course not, that's totally illegal. Could a nonprofit blind rights group make such a tool and give it away to blind people? No, that's illegal too. What about hobbyists, could they make the tool for their blind friends? No, not that either.

OK, so how do blind people exercise their right to bypass access controls on ebooks they own so they can actually read them?

Here's how. Each blind person, all by themself, is expected to decompile and reverse-engineer Adobe Reader, locate a vulnerability in the code and write a new program that exploits that vulnerability to extract their ebooks. While blind people are individually empowered to undertake this otherwise prohibited activity, they must do so on their own: they can't share notes with one another on the process. They certainly can't give each other the circumvention program they write in this way:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

That's what a use-only exemption is: the right to individually put a locked down device up on your own workbench, and, laboring in perfect secrecy, figure out how it works and then defeat the locks that stop you from changing those workings so they benefit you instead of the manufacturer. Without a "tools" exemption, a use exemption is basically a decorative ornament.

So the many use exemptions that the US Copyright Office has granted since 1998 really amount to nothing more than a list of defects in the DMCA that the Copyright Office has painstaking verified but is powerless to fix. We could probably save everyone a lot of time by scrapping the triennial exemptions process and replacing it with an permanent sign over the doors of the Library of Congress reading "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

All of this was well understood by 2010, when Moore and Clement were working on the Canadian version of the DMCA. All of this was explained in eye-watering detail to Moore and Clement, but was roundly ignored. I even had a go at it, publicly picking a fight with Moore on Twitter:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130407101911if_/http://eaves.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/Conversations%20between%20@doctorow%20and%20@mpjamesmoore.jpg

Moore and Clement rammed their proposal through in the next session of Parliament, passing it as Bill C-11 in 2012:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Modernization_Act

This was something of a grand finale for the pair. Today, Moore is a faceless corporate lawyer, while Clement was last seen grifting covid PPE (Clement's political career ended abruptly when he sent dick pics to a young woman who turned out to be a pair of sextortionists from Cote D'Ivoire, and was revealed as a serial sex-pest in the ensuing scandal:)

https://globalnews.ca/news/4646287/tony-clement-instagram-women/

Even though Moore and Clement are long gone from public life, their signature achievement remains a Canadian disgrace, an anchor chain tied around the Canadian economy's throat, and an impediment to Canadian progress.

This week, two excellent new Canadian laws received royal assent: Bill C-244 is a broad, national Right to Repair law; and Bill C-294 is a broad, national interoperability law. Both laws establish the right to circumvent access controls for the purpose of fixing and improving things, something Canadians deserve and need.

But neither law contains a tools exemption. Like the blind people of Norway, a Canadian farmer who wants to attach a made-in-Canada Honeybee tool to their John Deere tractor is required to personally, individually reverse-engineer the John Deere tractor and modify it to talk to the Honeybee accessory, laboring in total secrecy:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/12/canada_right_to_repair/

Likewise the Canadian repair tech who fixes a smart speaker or a busted smartphone – they are legally permitted to circumvent in order to torture the device's repair codes out of it or force it to recognize a replacement part, but each technician must personally figure out how to get the device firmware to do this, without discussing it with anyone else.

Thus do Moore and Clement stand athwart Canadian self-reliance and economic development, shouting "STOP!" though both men have been out of politics for years.

There has never been a better time to hit Clement and Moore's political legacy over the head with a shovel and bury it in a shallow grave. Canadian technologists could be making a fortune creating circumvention devices that repair and improve devices marketed by foreign companies.

They could make circumvention tools to allow owners of consoles to play games by Canadian studios that are directly sold to Canadian gamers, bypassing the stores operated by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo and the 30% commissions they charge. Canadian technologists could be making diagnostic tools that allow every auto-mechanic in Canada to fix any car manufactured anywhere in the world.

Canadian cloud servers could power devices long after their US-based manufacturers discontinue support for them, providing income to Canadian cloud companies and continued enjoyment for Canadian owners of these otherwise bricked gadgets.

Canada's gigantic auto-parts sector could clone the security chips that foreign auto manufacturers use to block the use of third party parts, and every Canadian could enjoy a steep discount every time they fix their cars. Every farmer could avail themselves of third party parts for their tractors, which they could install themselves, bypassing the $200 service call from a John Deere technician who does nothing more than look over the farmer's own repair and then types an unlock code into the tractor's console.

Every Canadian who prints out a shopping list or their kid's homework could use third party ink that sells for pennies per liter, rather than HP's official colored water that cost more than vintage Veuve Cliquot.

A Canadian e-waste dump generates five low-paid jobs per ton of waste, and that waste itself will poison the land and water for centuries to come. A circumvention-enabled Canadian repair sector could generate 150 skilled, high-paid community jobs that saves gadgets and the Earth, all while saving Canadians millions.

Canadians could enjoy the resliency that comes of having a domestic tech and repair sector, and could count on it through pandemics and Trumpian trade-war.

All of that and more could be ours, except for the cowardice and greed of Tony Clement and James Moore and the Harper Tories who voted C-11 into law in 2012.

Everything the "radical extremists" warned them of has come true. It's long past time Canadians tore up anticircumvention law and put the interests of the Canadian public and Canadian tech businesses ahead of the rent-seeking enshittification of American Big Tech.

Until we do that, we can keep on passing all the repair and interop laws we want, but each one will be hamstrung by Moore and Clement's "felony contempt of business model" law, and the contempt it showed for the Canadian people.

Image: JeffJ (modified) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tony_Clement_-_2007-06-30_in_Kearney,_Ontario.JPG

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

--

Jorge Franganillo (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duga_radar_system-_wreckage_of_electronic_devices_(37885984654).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[ejlyt]

DO YOU SPEAK CHINESE?

RB TO GET THIS TO SOMEONE WHO DOES!!!

I recently watched the below video, and found it was explained really well. I would like to get this information to my grandparents, who struggle with English.

Could someone translate this for me please? (In a RB, YT removed community captions. I can edit it onto the video to send to them) traditional is preferred, but I can convert it from simplified so that works too.

EVEN IF YOU CAN’T TRANSLATE IT, PLEASE RB TO GET THIS POST TO SOMEONE WHO CAN

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jay Kuo for Think Big Picture:

We’re all still grieving the electoral loss and feeling queasy about the prospect of Trump returning to the White House in January. But in response to the giddy pronouncements from the GOP and the Trump campaign, some have already begun to think about an effective political resistance to Trump and Trumpism. 

Democrats need to make these plans knowing full well that Trump will be backed by a sycophantic GOP Congress and blank check-writing SCOTUS. And this time around, there won’t be any adults in the room, including White House counsel who during his first term would quietly shelve Trump’s most outrageous requests, or chiefs of staff like John Kelly who would struggle to moderate, educate and soften his most extreme positions. No, this time around Trump will be surrounded by people even further to the right of him. They will seek to implement the most dangerous and destructive of policies, many drawn from the Project 2025 blueprint. And they will encourage Trump to issue Executive Orders that could reshape American democracy, insert our armed forces deeply into civil affairs, hurtle our economy into an abyss, and upend the lives of millions of minorities.

This is a thought piece, an early stab (and work in progress) about how Democrats (and the lawyers who are aligned with them) can ready themselves to resist Trump. We’re in very new territory here, but the ideas are based on what we’ve learned about Trump from both his first term and the four years he’s been more or less idle when he wasn’t sitting in courtrooms or stumping on the campaign trail. They play into both his ego and the worst aspects of his character and leadership style. I hope you find this early exploration a good starting point for how the next four years could go if Democrats play their cards smartly, even if the strategy seems highly unorthodox. Note that I won’t be discussing what average citizens might consider doing. This, for now, is the beginning of a political and legal strategy. Others involved in grassroots organizing may have ideas for direct resistance by citizens, but that is for another discussion.

[...]

Hit ‘em with lawfare

One of the most effective weapons against Trump’s policies during his first term was the slew of lawsuits that his executive orders met when they were first announced. Remember the Muslim ban? That bounced up and down the courts for years before it could finally go into effect in a watered-down form. 

Lawyers from every non-profit walk of life should be readying civil complaints today, just as people like Russ Vought are already preparing horrific executive orders for Trump to sign. The minute Trump announces his Day One policy to deport millions of undocumented migrants, for example, lawyers everywhere should file suit. It shouldn’t just be one suit; it should be several. Tie up the White House lawyers and the Trump Justice Department with as many cognizable claims as they can think of. More than the sheer number, they should file these cases before judges in jurisdictions where the appellate courts will be more friendly, such as in the Ninth Circuit. This is the inverse of what MAGA and Christian Nationalist legal counsel have been doing now for years by picking a single court near Amarillo, Texas to ensure their cases are heard before radical judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.

Once those cases are filed, judges (and their clerks) should slow-walk them. Act like the nun in The Sound Of Music, opening the gate as slowly as she can so the Nazis are delayed. Then, after issuing temporary restraining orders, set the hearings out as far as possible. Have the lawyers demand extensions. File motions that could receive interlocutory appeals, to further gum things up. In short, drag things out as long as possible to prevent his policies from going into effect. Governors in blue border states could also get involved. California and Arizona both have Democratic governors, after all. And they also have Democratic state attorneys general. These states could move to intervene in suits or file them on their own, just as the red states have done to block Biden’s policies like student debt relief. Sure, this will eventually get up to the Supreme Court and get overturned, but the point is delay. Run out the clock, run out the clock, run out the clock. Trump only gets four years, two before the midterms. [...]

These are but a few broad-stroke ideas, but it’s time everyone who will be part of the resistance start thinking about how they can play a vital part in pushing back. Some of these tactics are admittedly unorthodox, others quite petty. Still others are variations on what has worked well before. Together, they could bog down or distract Trump and the White House just long enough for the midterms to give Democrats a chance to regain control of one or both chambers and really turn up the heat.

It may make many quite uncomfortable to consider deploying these kinds of strategies. They make Democrats into obstructionists, even political saboteurs, much as the GOP has been for the few cycles when Democrats have been in charge.  But here there is a difference, though it’s one MAGA Republicans will never acknowledge: When actual fascists have taken control of the government and are trying to destroy democracy, patriotic opponents must use every peaceful means at their disposal to prevent them. Indeed, it is a moral imperative, because millions of lives are on the line. We cannot act as if the world has not changed, and Democrats must grow far more accustomed to acting outside the box and getting creative in their approaches.

It’s time for Democrats to play rough by delaying and gumming up Donald Trump’s tyrannical proposals to run the clock down.

[deadpresidents]

Hypothetically what do you think would have happened if the january 6 rioters had gotten to pence or pelosi before they got safe?

At this point, I almost dread answering questions like this anymore because I know the kind of hate mail it will unleash for the next few days, but it's important to keep talking about what happened on January 6, 2021 since so many people are trying to normalize it. That includes many people whose lives were in danger that day, as well as the former President who tried to hold on to power by encouraging his supporters to launch a violent insurrection and is now referring to those who have been brought to justice for attempting a coup as "patriots" and "hostages".

I genuinely believe that there were people in that crowd who would have killed Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, and certain Congressional leaders if they had reached them on January 6th. I think there are people in that crowd who were ready to hold lawmakers hostage. Why else did they have handcuffs and zip ties? To help the Capitol Police maintain order? (Oh yeah...that's right, thanks for reminding me: they violently attacked the police -- some even beat police officers with the "Blue Lives Matter" flags that they brought with them.) Now, I do not think that everybody who was at the Capitol on January 6th -- or even the majority of those who took part in the insurrection -- were willing to go that far. I think a lot of them got swept up in what was happening and went with the flow. That doesn't excuse what they did. The flow that they got swept up in was still a fucking insurrection, and anyone who took part in that deserves to be held accountable. But I think there were certain elements embedded throughout that crowd that were much more organized and prepared to fully execute their plans for a coup after disrupting the certification of the Electoral College votes.

I actually think Vice President Pence was probably in more danger than even Speaker Pelosi or some of the Democratic leaders because Trump was so actively calling him out in the days and hours before the insurrection. I think that's why Pence is so adamant now about not supporting Trump. I mean, think about how disgustingly loyal and subservient Pence was to Trump throughout those four years until basically the first few days of January 2021. But even as other Republican leaders are crumbling and offering their allegiance to Trump again in 2024, Pence is standing by his decision not to endorse or support Trump, and I think that's because he realizes that Trump absolutely almost got him (and his family, who were with him in the Capitol on that day) killed on January 6th. Shit, even Mitch McConnell has folded and endorsed Trump again despite the fact that Trump has spent the last three years not only insulting him but also making racist attacks and questioning McConnell's wife's loyalty to the United States all because Elaine Chao had the audacity to resign from Trump's Cabinet in the wake of the insurrection. Yet Mike Pence -- who spent the better part of four years following Trump around like Paul Heyman follows Roman Reigns...

...THAT same Mike Pence is steadfastly refusing to endorse Trump because he has personal experience about how real of an existential threat Trump is. Some of those people at the Capitol were very serious about following through on their chants to "Hang Mike Pence", and not only does Pence realize that, but he also knows now that Trump -- who refused to take actions that would have helped clear the Capitol more quickly -- said "he deserves it" when hearing about those chants.

That's what is so scary about the insurrection, its aftermath, and the Trump Republican Party's redefinition of what happened that day. It almost worked. They stormed the United States Capitol and invaded both chambers of Congress. They carried Confederate flags into the United States Capitol -- even the fucking Confederate States of America didn't successfully invade Washington, D.C. and plant their flag in the Capitol. They were willing to hurt and probably kill some of America's elected leaders. And the people who helped plan and instigate the events of January 6th have spent the three-plus years since then learning from their mistakes and figuring out how to be successful next time. And guess what? "Next time" is only a few months away.

[jonostroveart]

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