#trump regime

[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.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Morgan Stephens at Daily Kos:

Behind the scenes, President Joe Biden’s team has been preparing for his big final weeks in office, regardless of who won the 2024 election. “The schedule will be robust and he plans to leave it all on the field,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt told NBC News in September.  During his speech to the nation last Wednesday, Biden addressed some of his administration’s final priorities, including a focus on infrastructure spending, which was a major legislative accomplishment of his presidency. "We're going to see over a trillion dollars' worth of infrastructure work done, changing people's lives in rural communities and communities that are in real difficulty," the president said.  In addition to getting infrastructure projects off the ground before Trump takes office, White House advisers said Biden will also work to safeguard freedoms the president believes are under threat, strengthen global alliances, and take steps to reduce costs for Americans.

[alwaysbewoke]

[trmpt]

Bullshit

[ot3]

there are no amount of domestic policy gains you can cite that will make people change their mind about voting for biden. it's not like the people refusing to vote for him are too uninformed to understand that biden has provided significantly more domestic protections for LGBT people than trump will, but some people are simply willing to risk their own political standing to avoid legitimizing genocidal regime. i dont think anyone in the world is operating the impression that trump would provide less funding and arms to israel but i also don't think it's a stretch to say that there are huge swathes of center-lib shitfucks who will suddenly change their mind about carpet bombing civilians when it's The Friggen Cheeto Man doing it instead of their favorite blue ghoul.

[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]

[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.

[rejectingrepublicans]

[tanadrin]

I appreciate your level-headed, anti-doomer advice. I'm afraid I can't really get it to work for me, but I appreciate it all the same. Do you think anything can be salvaged of the US if Trump wins again?

I think the framing of the question is backward; a Trump victory does not instantly reduce the whole country to ashes, out of which something must be rebuilt. A Trump victory starts a dangerous fire, which many millions of people must (and, based on evidence from his last term, likely will) organize to combat.

[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.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Radley Balko at The Watch:

Since the election, a number of readers have asked how worried we should be, and what we should be looking for in the weeks and months ahead. My general answer: pretty worried! At this point, I see little reason to think that Trump won’t at least attempt his most authoritarian and destructive campaign promises. Whether he succeeds will depend on how much resistance he gets from the courts, Congress, the federal bureaucracy, and the rest of us.

Trump’s nominations to cabinet positions so far are a clear indication that he’s dragging his party further into a nihilist cult of personality. It isn’t just that so many of them are unqualified, corrupt, or destructive (though it’s also all of those things). It’s that they’re uniquely unfit for the specific positions he has appointed them to hold. He’s daring someone to stop him, and learning from what follows.

The Matt Gaetz pick for attorney general was bad, but it wasn’t even his most dangerous. Appointing crank conspiracy theorist and Trump/Assad apologist Tulsi Gabbard to the most sensitive national security position in government is a direct threat to national security and a reflection of Trump’s own fondness for authoritarians. Department of Defense pick Pete Hegseth has never led more than a dozen or so people (the one small nonprofit he did lead, he ran into the ground). As a National Guardsman, he was barred from working security for Joe Biden’s inauguration because he has a tattoo common to white supremacists. He lobbied Trump to pardon war criminals who had been reported by their own platoons, and believes the U.S. military should ignore the Geneva Conventions.

Then there’s the fact that the leader of the QAnon party, a man himself found responsible for rape and credibly accused of sexual assault or misconduct by dozens of women, appointed four — four — cabinet level officials accused of engaging in or covering up sexual misconduct. There’s Gaetz, of course. RFK Jr. has also been accused of sexual assault (he didn’t exactly deny the accusation). The sexual assault allegation against DOD nominee Hegseth are particularly credible. And Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for Department of Education, was accused in a lawsuit of covering up a ringside announcer’s sex abuse of a boy while she and her husband ran World Wrestling Entertainment.

None of this is all that surprising, given that Trump’s party keeps nominating and electing sex creeps up and down the ballot. Nor does it seem to bother Trump’s congressional supporters. Instead, they’ve decided to single out and bully the first trans woman elected to Congress, barring her from using the women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill . . . because she’s a “threat” to women. (We’re still waiting to hear which bathrooms male Republicans neutered by Donald Trump will be permitted to use.) Trump is also refusing to subject his nominations to FBI background checks, and his campaign says he won’t release the names of donors to his transition. Both are clear signs that he has no intention of making himself accountable or transparent to anyone. Nearly everything he’s done since the election points to a president who not only intends to buck every norm, convention, and check, he won’t even pretend to try. It’s just open defiance.

In the coming days, I’ll look at the free press and the First Amendment, immigration, and crime and criminal justice. But today, I’ll focus on Trump’s openly-stated plans to weaponize the government against his critics and enemies. I fully expect to see Trump follow through on his promises to seek retribution against people like Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Alexander Vindman, Anthony Fauci, and countless others. Whether he’ll do it by ordering the DOJ to make sensationalist arrests and criminal charges or use subtler though still pernicious tools like IRS audits, subpoenas, or parading people before Congress for public ridicule, is hard to say. But investigations alone can ruin lives and careers.

Let’s start with the DOJ. I’m not sure that the Gaetz debacle provides much instruction on whether Senate Republicans have the backbone to provide any real oversight. (It did show us, however, that House Republicans were willing to remove their spines, gift-wrap them, and hand-deliver them to Trump.) I suspect Gaetz’s tendency to anger and insult members of his own party hurt his nomination more than his extremism, sex pestery, and utter lack of qualifications.

Trump’s new AG nominee, Pam Bondi, is less abrasive than Gaetz, but every bit the devout MAGA loyalist. As Florida Attorney General, Bondi was at one point set to join other states in suing Trump University (Florida has more “alumni” than any other state). Shen then mysteriously pulled out of the class action after Trump made a $25,000 donation to her PAC — a donation that came from Trump’s “charity,” by the way — and then held a fundraiser for her at Mar-a-Lago. (Bondi has a long history of that sort of pay-to-play.) Bondi quickly became a full-throated supporter. She’s not only a 2020 election denier, she was part of Trump’s legal team in his bid to overturn the election. She actually stood next to Rudy Giuliani at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Bondi has also already made clear that she fully supports Trump’s plan to weaponize the agency he has nominated her to lead.

[...] We’ll see an important test of Trump’s power shortly after he takes office. He plans to fire FBI director Christopher Wray and replace him with Kash Patel, a vengeful loyalist wholly unqualified for that position. The FBI director is supposed to serve outside the political influence of individual presidents. It’s why the position comes with a 10-year term, and why an FBI director can only be fired for cause. Remember that when Trump fired James Comey, Jeff Sessions considered it a serious enough abuse of power to appoint a special counsel. We’ve become so accustomed to Trump’s power grabs that it’s now just widely expected that he’ll fire Wray for pretextual reasons and install an unqualified lickspittle like Patel — a guy who has vowed to imprison journalists and critics. If the Senate allows that to happen, I fear dark days lie ahead. (Trump is also reportedly considering appointing Patel to a position that doesn’t require Senate approval, but which could still give him the power to act as Trump’s retributive hammer.)

[...] Trump is also already planning to devote DOJ resources to “uncovering” evidence that he won the 2020 election, and to prosecuting state officials who resisted his attempts to coerce them. Expect to see a full-throttle effort to rewrite history about that election, only this time Trump will have more power to force federal agencies to provide faux credibility to his bullshit fraud conspiracies. Watch to see which agencies fall in line.

[...] The Post and other outlets have since reported that one of the key architects of Trump’s plan to purge federal agencies of institutionalists is Russ Vought, Trump’s former head of the Office of Management and Budget — one of the most powerful under-the-radar positions in government. Vought was also a key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a Trump II administration so deeply unpopular that Trump repeatedly claimed during the campaign that he had nothing to do with it. That of course was a lie: last week, Trump nominated Vought back to his old position.

[...] Finally, one particularly pernicious pattern we’ve seen from Trump officials and MAGA pundits is the targeting of not just politicians and public officials, but everyday people they see as representative of their enemies — at which point the MAGA faithful swarm with threats and harassment. We saw Trump-loyal publications repeatedly try to dox whistleblowers who exposed corruption and abuse. We saw them upend the lives of people like Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, along with countless other 2020 election workers who signed up for the sort of nonpartisan positions necessary in a functional democracy.

They did it to doctors and nurses during COVID, healthcare workers who treat trans people, and of course to the Haitian immigrants in Springfield — along with any local residents who dared to defend them. The Libs of TikTok account on X run by Chaya Raichik basically exists solely for this purpose — to sic an army of online followers to heap hate and invective on people she has deemed to be on the wrong side of the culture war. Trump’s “co-president” Elon Musk has been particularly eager to weaponize the social media platform he bought for this sort of targeting. Shortly after purchasing Twitter, he selectively released emails, internal documents, and other private correspondence to a few hand-picked “journalists” to create a dubious narrative about public-private censorship. While there were certainly some examples of improper government pressure on Twitter, most of the claims were wildly overblown. More worrying, the whole project — along with the complicity of Republicans in Congress — led to harassment and death threats against former Twitter employees, whistleblowers, misinformation researchers, and others caught in the crossfire.

Radley Balko wrote a great piece on how the incoming Trump Misadministration seeks to weaponize government agencies to be sharp tools to help his authoritarian masturbatory revenge fantasies.

[relaxedstyles]

#Inflation #economy #NATO #europe #ukraine #syria

And absolutely banger of an interview.

[arctic-hands]

Not to be a downer and this isn't an indictment of people celebrating this, but I remember watching an as-it-happened documentary (my favorite type of documentary tbh) on the fiftieth anniversary of the Moon Landing and then halfway into it the spell it had over me snapped and I just started thinking "What did the people fighting in Vietnam, both sides, think of all this? Where was that 'moment of global unity' everyone has been talking about for the last fifty years that was allegedly during this moment? What about the people slaving away in factories or in fields or prison during this? What about the people who couldn't afford a TV because of rampant wealth inequality? There was so much vitriol in this moment just for people who wanted to be treated equal but I'm told the world as a whole and America in particular had come together."

I love as-it-happened documentaries because I love putting myself in moments that witness history in the making, good or bad, but I couldn't reconcile this idealized version of what I've been told my entire life and the historical truths I knew were going on as Americans landed on the moon

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

CNN Contributor Jonah Goldberg Retracts Statement After Misleading Voters with Erroneous 'Execution' Remark on Trump’s Cheney Comments

From Necon Jonah Goldberg: "This morning on CNN I referred to Trump’s “rifles” quote as him advocating a “firing squad” for Liz Cheney...After I said that, my co-panelist, Brad Todd made the case that I was wrong. Brad was right and, again, I was wrong. Trump was making – albeit in his customary fashion – a different argument about Cheney’s alleged foreign policy views and the use of force...I let my disgust at Trump’s comments get the better of me as this was the first time I’d heard them. In fact, at the end of the program, having thought about it, I said as much (though I could have been clearer). A fact that has been left out in a lot of the criticism of me since this morning...I regret the initial comment because it was inaccurate and contributed to the kind of overheated environment Trump thrives on."