#trump regime

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Nick Visser at HuffPost:

Many career diplomats at the State Department will resign at noon on Monday after being asked to leave by the incoming Trump administration, The Washington Post reports. President-elect Donald Trump’s aides have told a number of veterans of the U.S. Foreign Service, including those working as undersecretaries and in other high-level positions, that they will no longer be needed from the moment of his inauguration. That list includes John Bass, the State Department’s acting undersecretary for political affairs. Asking top officials to leave is standard in the changing of the guard for near presidencies, although some presidents will keep longtime diplomats in their posts until they are replaced with other appointees. [...] Trump also plans to suspend the security clearances for 51 intelligence officials who said damaging news stories about President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, were linked to a Russian influence campaign in 2020.

The State Department purges have begun. Lots of expertise gone, as national security is being jeopardized.

[reading-writing-revolution]

More pushback... keep it going, but don't leave it to politicians and public personalities. Get involved locally and huddle up to get your voice out there.

[alwaysbewoke]

[ottopilot-sfw]

TikTok is offline - voluntarily! - while mentioning Trump by name in the pop-up message.

Don't be shocked when President Dear Leader *miraculously* brings it back online next week by making a "deal" with ByteDance.

This is the type of dumbass banana republic psy-op America deserves at this point.

[miltaart]

American Democracy Jul. 4. 1776 - † Nov. 5. 2024

Voting a ignorant idiot with no regards for human life, decency or freedom is something my homeland Germany knows all-too well.

Making this mistake once is bad enough. Making it twice shows the true character of a nation.

Whatever consequences the United States brought upon themselves by re-electing the annoying orange now, this time its deserved.

[trmpt]

Bullshit

[overcookingmytoast]

hey, don't donate or support the ADL, who are out here literally giving excuses to elon musk doing the nazi salute on a national stage bc elon is pro-israel

[queersatanic]

Biden’s Justice Department put out a press release about it

Jeffrey had previously been sentenced, while the other four were sentenced Thursday. In addition to the prison sentences, all defendants received terms of supervised release: Lung’aho 36 months; Nowlin, Espinosa-Villegas, and Goddard 24 months; and Jeffrey 18 months. There is no parole in the federal system.

Clear through lines between the summer 2020 uprisings and COINTELPRO in Little Rock, Ark.

There's a lot here that's worth taking stock of from the way that racial justice protesters are treated in contrast to Jan. 6 white supremacist insurrectionists, or how they are treated in contrast to fascist thugs in their own areas, or how Black protesters are treated in contrast to white and other people of color.

Also critical is how the modern surveillance state works, and how digital OpSec is critically important. They will use the weakest link to take down a whole network.

The heavy surveillance of the protesters ultimately caught up with Jeffrey—thanks in part to a T-shirt. One of her closest friends, Mujera Benjamin Lung’aho, was also at the July protest at the Capitol. The two first met in high school, where they played soccer together, and reconnected years later as the racial justice uprising in Ferguson, Mo., reverberated across the country. They eventually grew close enough that Jeffrey spoke at Lung’aho’s father’s funeral. At the Capitol clash, Lung’aho had worn a distinctive shirt. According to a warrant later filed to search his phone, a detective claimed to have recognized Lung’aho’s shirt and other specific features from surveillance video taken a few days earlier during a vandalism spree at a local Confederate cemetery, where several people were caught on camera destroying monuments. Officers showed up at Lung’aho’s residence and arrested him after a foot chase. “Under the current climate, I just was compelled to flee,” Lung’aho recalled in a conversation with us. When the police searched his phone, they found encrypted group chats and social media messages that they claim tied him to high-profile demonstrations in Little Rock throughout 2020. This turned out to be a key moment for law enforcement—and a big payoff after months of tracking Black activists.

COINTELPRO never stopped, and people acting for racial justice in the South are routinely targeted and crushed for their resistance, often in silence.

Please share this story with your networks, especially in and around Arkansas.

These are the people still being targeted by the state and awaiting sentencing.

Brittany Dawn Jeffrey

Mujera Benjamin Lung'aho

Renea Goddard

Loba Espinosa-Villegas

Emily Nowlin

[godisarepublican]

[tanadrin]

I am sorry for the anon but I feel too vulnerable to come off due to the nature of my question.

I am slowly losing friends due to my refusal to engage in negative/nihilistic/doomer views of the future. My friends are 1000% convinced Trump and Republicans are going to crash the economy on purpose, leading to a depression, and carry out a Gilead situation. I told one of my friends the other day how, despite everything and the political situation, I am trying to be as positive as possible - or at least neutral. Her response to me was, "Why? I don't understand your optimism. You know they're going to enslave us all like in The Handmaid's Tale, right?" and it has become so dreadful now to interact with them. Anytime I disagree, they try to intellectually dominate me or put me under them in a way where I have no choice but to just leave the conversation.

I know this was a lot. But is there any advice you might have for someone like me? Because I sometimes feel like I am being painted as crazy. I know things will be hard but they genuinely want me to believe I have no future and I can't stand that.

Also, would it be too much to ask if you maybe mind sharing some of the other people/blogs you follow?

I once heard advice on dealing with Qanon family members who had fallen down the rabbit hole and only ever wanted to talk about conspiracy theories or the outrage bait they'd seen on Fox News or OANN or whatever, about not challenging them on their views but basically saying "I don't want to talk about this; let's talk about our plans for the weekend, or what movie we wanna go see later, or what interesting books you've read lately." The idea being, arguing with someone can only further entrench their beliefs, and if you really want to shake someone out of their dismal universe of conspiracism, it helps to remind them of all the things that aren't the fear-and-anger-activating content they're stuffing their brains with for hours every day.

Maybe something like this could help? I have a hard time imagining that someone really believes The Handmaid's Tale really is just around the corner--if you really believed that, surely you would be trying to flee to Canada or doing some political volunteer work or something--and sometimes doomer stuff can be kind of reflexive or phatic, like making a crack about how your retirement plan is to die in the water wars or something. But even if it isn't, I don't think there's any point in trying to argue about this stuff in the moment. Instead try to build on the things you still find fulfilling in that friendship, the conversations and interests and activities with those friends that caused you to become friends in the first place.

If you can't do that--if hanging out with them is always a constant grind of full-throttle doomerism, and they express no interest in actually trying to do something with their feelings of anger and frustration--you are perfectly within your rights to spend less time around them. You could, if you wanted to and you felt that you owed them at least that, give them a heads up as to why. If a close friend of mine or a family member was doing this, I would certainly talk to them about it. But your obligation to subject yourself to someone else's self-destructive idee fixe is not bottomless. Even with a partner you are within your rights to eventually say "I'm not going to talk about this with you anymore."

(And that's not only true of politics or conspiracy theories, by the way! If you have a close friend or family member or partner who--for example--has severe depression but refuses to seek treatment for it, you are not obligated to be the sponge for their misery forever every time they need someone to talk to. If someone in your life is in a relationship or a job that is making them miserable, and won't do anything to leave that relationship or find a new job, and just wants a friend to complain to, you are within your rights to eventually shut that down. Lots of people fall into a holding pattern in their life where they are unhappy but unable to do anything about it, and they will make this their friends' or loved ones' problem. That doesn't make them bad people: lord knows I have found myself doing this before. It's a very human thing to do. But sometimes the Good Friend Thing is to say "I love you, and will support you if you want to actually *do something* about your situation, but otherwise, oh my god shut the fuck up." But, you know, nicely.)

But if your friends want to make themselves miserable because hanging on to an endless stream of toxicity and doomerism from social media (and I will bet this is primarily coming from social media) is more important to them than your friendship, and they can't handle you not agreeing with them, you may lose them as friends. If you do, I'm sorry. That sucks. It's hard to lose friends, and it's even harder later in life when making new friends is more difficult, and I don't want to pretend like that's not a big deal.

[usercelestial]

all of you were like "ill vote if it's not for Joe Biden!!" but now that you're voting for Person Who Is Not Joe Biden, you're all still like "yeah but she sucks too!!" im gonna hold your hand so gently and tell you that it's wonderful that you want better but you won't be able to get to the utopia you want by speed running it and skipping all the steps. you want a rebellion, you have to plan it, you have to be strategic, you have to vote for people who are closest to the future you want so that progress can happen. that's how change is made. not by letting the far right win.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box (01.20.2025):

Today is a day so many of us have dreaded for so long. By lunchtime, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States of America. By dinner, he will undoubtedly have signed a series of scary executive orders targeting immigrants and others. Trump will then head off to be feted at a series of inaugural balls (including one paid for by Mark Zuckerberg). Eventually (after too many Diet Cokes and watching all the Fox shows on his DVR), Trump will go to bed and wake up to do it all over again. After today, the Trump presidency will last another 1,460 days. Somehow, as a country and as individuals, we must figure out how to survive all of them. It won’t be easy. Everything seems daunting, and the path back looks long and treacherous. I know many of you want to throw your phone into the nearest body of water.

1. Remember, Trump’s Win Was Not as Resounding as it Seems

Everyone is treating Donald Trump as if he just won in a Reagan-esque 49 state landslide. The Republican Party is so fully in his thrall that Senate Republicans appear willing to rubberstamp the nomination of a weekend news anchor with a reported drinking problem to run the Pentagon. CEOs and billionaires, many of whom formerly opposed Trump, are bending over backward to kiss Trump’s ass in the most debasing way possible. Even the media, which is supposed to hold Trump to account, is adopting an accommodationist stance to avoid angering our incoming tinpot dictator. But Trump’s win was not as resounding as he would have you believe. Yes, he made huge gains across the country. Yes, he became the second Republican since 1988 to win the popular vote. Yes, he made huge inroads in core parts of the Democratic coalition. But it’s also true that Trump only won by 100,000 votes across three battleground states. No, I don’t say that to try to convince you that Democrats don’t have a ton of work to do or to suggest that we did everything right during the campaign. Far from it. The Democratic Party needs to reevaluate how we do everything — our message, our strategy, our policy agenda, and our leadership. What we are doing is not working. However, it’s important to keep in mind that victory is closer than everyone wants you to believe. We can win if we do the work — and make the necessary changes. All is not lost. [...]

3. Channel Your Anxiety into Action

Sitting around your house doom-scrolling and fretting about all of the terrible thing that Trump and his MAGA minions are doing to America is a terrible way to spend the next four years. Maybe, it seems exhausting after the campaign we just went through, but when you are ready, I highly recommend channeling your anger and anxiety into action. There is no easy or obvious way to beat back the ascendant MAGA movement. But we also don’t need all the answers right now. We can do it in stages. The most impactful way to stop Trump is to take back the House in 2026. If we do that, Trump will never pass another law without Democratic support again. Speaker Jefferies will control what comes to the floor. We will have enormous leverage in budget negotiations and, as importantly, Democrats will have subpoena power to investigate the rampant corruption and criminality that will almost certainly be pulsating throughout the Trump Administration. Retaking the House is very much within our reach. The GOP currently has one of thee narrowest margins in history. If a mere 7000 votes across three districts had gone the other way, Hakeem Jeffries would be Speaker of the House right now. Because of the nature of our Trump-era coalition, Democrats tend to overperform in midterm elections, which have significantly lower turnout. With the notable exception of 2022, the first midterm for a new President is usually very good for the opposition. If 2026 seems like a long way off, you don’t have to wait that long. There are several important elections in 2025. Virginia and New Jersey has key gubernatorial and legislative elections. These races will be even more closely watched than usual because while these are traditionally Democratic states, Trump significantly improved his performance in both states compared to 2020. These races will be a major test fo whether the MAGA movement is ascendant or a flash in the pan that succeeded because of inflation and an unpopular Democratic incumbent. If Republicans win, they will be emboldened to be even more aggressive in pushing their extreme agenda. If we win, it will give vulnerable Republicans permission structure to be even more terrible. If November seems like a long way off, you don’t have to wait that long. There is a critical State Supreme Court race in Wisconsin taking place in April. [...]

4. Don’t Give Up Hope

The most important piece of advice I can give you is not to give up hope. I know things seem especially dark right now. I was around back in 2004 when Democrats lost a winnable election to a woefully underqualified candidate with little regard for people’s civil rights. Like Trump, George W. Bush made gains with core Democratic constituencies. Like now, pundits were talking about an emerging Republican majority that could dominate politics for decades on end. And just like in this moment, the Democratic Party seemed to enfeebled to mount the necessary comeback. But two years after that devastating election, Democrats retook the House and Senate. Four years afterward, Barack Obama won a huge landslide victory. Such an outcome is not a foregone conclusion. It will take real work and hard decisions. But none it will be possible, if we give up hope.

Dan Pfeiffer has a handy guide for surviving the four years of tumult that has begun today.

[rejectingrepublicans]

[davidaugust]

“Being lawless does not make Trump omnipotent – and obscuring that distinction is an act of defeatism that only serves the regime.”

https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/navigating-the-nonsense-and-propaganda

[remembertheplunge]

Curious about your take and feelings on the election. Do you feel safe, or unsafe? Do you believe your community will be safe in 2025? Or will your community be protected? What are your feelings on the state of America? Did you vote? Not asking which party. Do your friends vote? Do they feel safe? Do you have a strong connection to your community, friends? Take care, and be safe.

11/20/2024

I don't feel safe after the election. I don't think my community will be safe in 2025. My slogan for life post election is "We're fucked." Daily this feeling grows stronger based on ongoing cabinet picks, which a KPFA radio guest today on Background Briefing said resembles "The Star Wars bar scene". Yes, I voted for Harris. I don't ask my friends if they voted because often I don't know which side they ar on. The Trump supporters feel safe. The rest of us don't feel safe. We are very concerned about what is transpiring. I do have a strong connection with my community, including the Tumblr community and with my friends. Thank you for your questions. You take care and be safe, aware and observant as well.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Andreína Chávez Alava

For over two decades, Venezuela has been the target of the “free elections” broken record alongside regime change operations and economic sanctions, leaving a long trail of destruction behind. How does the U.S. get away with this “free elections” scam? With the unconditional support of the remorseless corporate media.