DocWatts

Totally understandable. Don't hesitate to take a break if you need to. Spend time with friends, read a book, meditate, touch grass - do whatever you need to do to fill yourself up. Don't let this regime rob you of joy - secure your own oxygen mask before you attend to others. The civil rights movement, women's suffrage, the struggle to end Apartheid - these things took years. None of us were expecting this regime to fall because of one protest - it's going to take a massive sustained effort from millions of us to restore democracy. As individuals we can't do much against a fascist regime. When we come together as networks of communities pursuing a broad strategy, we can accomplish a lot - but make no mistake, we're going to be spending years of our lives pushing back against this. What we're doing right now is holding the line and building a sustained civil resistance movement. Americans haven't had to fight for our democracy in a long time. How do you think individuals from previous generations who believed in democracy felt six months into the Civil War or World War 2? That's the sort of mindset we need to have - one of resiliency, solidarity, and mutual support.

The Republican controlled legislature is on the verge of passing one of the worst pieces of domestic legislation in American history. Trump's Big Horrific Bill is essentially Project 2025 in legislative form. Make no mistake, droves of Americans are going to die as a direct result of the MAGA Murder Bill. And the spineless worms who voted to kick 17 million people off from their healthcare know it. In addition to the needless death and suffering for countless Americans, this bill effectively turns ICE into a private military that's at the beck and call of the felon occupying the White House with a 10x budget increase. This essentially gives the dictator his Gestapo on a silver platter. Fuck anyone who voted for this, and who continues to support this criminal regime.

You know that this is the way to use the democratic process to resist authoritarianism because the most vile people in the country are having a collective meltdown over this clean-cut, well-spoken man who also happens to be a POC and Muslim. MAGA is terrified of Mamdani. If Democrats want to win elections -rather than being the controlled opposition - they need an inspiring vision for the country that speaks to people's everyday concerns. They need to speak boldy and unapologetically to the evils of our time - fascism needs to be loudly and boldly rejected, not compromised with. And just to state this clearly - yes, Mamdani is an American citizen. And no, there's zero legal pretext to deport him that doesn't rip the Constitution and Rule Of Law to shreds (not that the Nazis who are calling for this give a damn) https://newrepublic.com/post/197279/maga-depraved-new-plan-democratic-star-zohran-mamdani

THIS is the energy we need from our Democratic politicians - and it worked. There's a reason that current Democratic leadership has a lower approval rating than even Donald Trump, whose own approval ratings are in the toilet. What we want is a party that FIGHTS BACK against Trump's fascist takeover and FIGHTS FOR working people across this country.

This is genuinely a huge deal. The mayor of NYC is one of the most powerful mayor in the entire country, and has a sizeable amount of influence on the national stage. A young principled populist with fresh ideas and an unapologetic rejection of both Trump and the corrupt Democratic gerontocracy is exactly what's needed right now.

Thanks! Above all, we're in this together. That means not just the Left, or even the littl corner of the internet we've cultivated on these Forums, but everyone who doesn't want to live under a tyrannical white supremecist mafia state. The challenge over the upcoming years is to build a broad-tent pro-democracy movement that can close ranks against the American equivalent of the Nazis. The Hands Off and No Kings protests are a promising start - but we need to keep up the momentum and above all draw more people in to the pro-democracy movement.

I can't seem to upload images on either my phone or my laptop to my Forum posts. I've tried this on a few different devices, to no avail. When I attempt to attach an image I get the message. There was a problem processing the uploaded file. Please contact us for assistance.

Seems that the wanna-be dictator is having a narcissistic crash-out over the No Kings protests. Not only did the protests ruin his North-Korean style military parade, he was waiting with baited breath for mass violence in the streets, which the No Kings protests didn't deliver. Mango Mussolini is trying to incite a civil war, but we didn't take the bait. 12 million people came out in defense of the Constitution and the Rule of Law, in peaceful defiance of Trump's fascist regime. And this historic turnout was in spite of violent intimidation by Trump and his MAGA brownshirts. The only violence to speak of was from far-right domestic terrorists.

The point of the protests wasn't to change the hearts and minds of MAGA - most of them are beyond saving. It was to make the pro-democracy movement visible, as part of a sustained public pressure campaign on politicians and institutions that are obeying Trump's criminal regime in advance. Beyond this, the target is ordinary people who have tuned out of politics since the election, and folks who are disturbed by what's going on but don't know what to do about it. Trump wants nothing more than to project an image of strong man. He wants us to think that his reign is inevitable. In actuality, his regime is weak and historically unpopular. No Kings Day was a humiliating optics defeat for a fragile narcissist. While Trump was being the world's saddest birthday boy with his farcical military parade, 12 million people - or 3.5% of the entire population of the United States - was out in the streets saying NO to his authoritarian regime. Time and time again, this regime has shown us that it can't be compromised with. Trump is above all an abusive narcissist and a bully - attempts to appease the wanna-be dictator is only received as an invitation to take more. All of the 'reasonable' MAGAs left after his violent coup attempt - those still with him after close to a decade of escalating authoritarianism are the American version of the Nazis. They need to be boldly and loudly rejected, not compromised with. A large part of how we got to where we are was by normalizing creeping Trump's authoritarianism, criminality, and political violence.

Detroit - and Michigan - showed up!

I had no idea we had an attachment quota! Thanks, you've solved my difficulties

Alt National Parks is estimating that over 11 million people showed up - that's more than twice as many as the Hands Off protests, and over %3 of the entire US population! 🇺🇸

Meanwhile, 11 million people - or over %3 of the entire population of the United States - was out in the streets protesting this disgraceful regime.

The author is me, btw And you're right - what I'm suggesting in that article is a long term strategy, and on its own it's not enough. The epistemic work needs to be done in parallel with civic participation. In addition to the approach of epistemic attunement I outline in that article, we need to be building a broad-based civil resistance movement to hold the line against fascism - which is why I've been encouraging folks to join pro-democracy groups like Indivisible and attend the No Kings protests. We also need to be building the infrastructure for the 2026 midterms right now. Neither assuming that Trump is going to cancel the election (ie obeying in advance), nor assuming that an election that's a year and a half away will save us. Taking the House and Senate will be vital in obstructing Trump's authoritarian takeover, but we need to be acting as citizens right now. That means attending protests, participating in boycotts, calling your elected officials, knocking on doors, raising money for pro-democracy organizations. Even if midterms are a blowout for the Dems, we need to put in the work right now to make sure that happens and some form of democracy survives until then.

Short of getting married or having major surgery, whatever you're doing today is less important than showing up to defend your country from fascism. This is an all hands on deck situation, even if you can only attend briefly it will have an impact. Stay safe, remain peaceful, give 'em hell. (No shade towards folks who genuinely can't make it for one reason or another, but I'm encouraging everyone to make an effort. This is not a drill - fascism IS HERE, and we need to come together to stand against it.)

I'd also recommend 'Nexus' by Yuval Noah Harari, which is a deep dive into human information networks. In it, he goes into why the so-called 'marketplace of ideas' - the notion that the best ideas supposedly win in the end - is dangerously naive.

If you're interested, I wrote an entire Substack article on how 21st century authoritarianism isn't just a political crisis - it's also an epistemic one, rooted in how we respond to uncertainty in a complex world. Substack: How Broken Ways Of Knowing Feed Modern Tyrants The authoritarian bargain - from Nazism to Maoism to MAGA - is the emotional comfort of certainty without the burden of truth-seeking. It’s the epistemic version of having your cake and eating it too. Emotional validation without introspection, certainty without responsibility, belonging without accountability - what’s not to like? Too bad, then, that the cake is poisoned and the person selling it knows it. Even worse, most of the people eating it know it too, but have convinced themselves that the poison is an acceptable trade-off for the intoxicating feelings it provides.

Timothy Snyder - one of the leading experts on fascism who wrote On Tyranny - is sounding the alarm bells that Trump is trying to incite a second Civil War. Below are some quotes from the writeup, but I'd recommend reading the Substack article in full - it's chilling. When people whose job it is to study fascism are telling us that the moment we're living through is a flash point, we should take them seriously. If you've ever wondered what you would have done in Nazi Germany or the US Civil Rights struggle, you're doing it right now. A second civil war and the reforging of the United States into a white supremacist police state isn't a foregone conclusion, but preventing it requires that we be brave and step up to the moment. That means no more equivocating, no more burying our heads in the sand, no more compromising with extremes that need to be rejected. And no more saying that 'this doesn't effect me'. If you're on a conscious politics forum, you should be more willing than the average person to take responsibility for the current moment, and not watch from the sidelines as a petty, inhumane dictator tries to plunge your country into violence and chaos. RESOURCES - How YOU can get involved in the pro-democracy movement: No Kings Day: https://www.nokings.org/ Indivisible: https://indivisible.org/ 50501: https://www.fiftyfifty.one/ _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Trump's Civil War - Timothy Snyder https://substack.com/home/post/p-165796793?source=queue "Earlier this week Donald Trump called for a second civil war at a US military base. This scenario can be resisted and prevented, if we have the courage to listen, interpret, and act. And this Saturday we will have the occasion to act. In general, we imagine that the US Army is here to defend us, not to attack us. But summoning soldiers to heckle their fellow Americans is a sign of something quite different. Trump seized the occasion to summon soldiers to join him in mocking the press. Reporters, of course, as the Founders understood, are a critical check on tyranny. They, like protestors, are protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Trump was teaching soldiers that society does not matter, and that law does not matter. He "loves" soldiers. He is personally responsible for the pay raises: "I gave you so much money for four years it was crazy." "We're giving you an across-the-board raise" This is the way a dictator speaks to a palace guard, or a fascist to a paramilitary. We are witnessing an attempt at regime change, rife in perversities. It has a historical component: we are to celebrate the oathbreakers and the traitors. It has a fascist component: we are to embrace the present moment as an exception, in which all things are permitted to the Leader. And of course it has an institutional component: soldiers are meant to be the avant-garde of the end of democracy. Instead of treating the army as defenders or freedom, Trump presented soldiers as his personal armed servants, whose job it was to oppress his chosen enemies -- inside the United States. Trump was trying to instruct soldiers that their mission was to crush fellow Americans who dared to exercise their rights, such as the right to protest."

If there was ever a time to to be crystal clear in our messaging - and to do so in bold and uncompromising language - it's right now. This isn't all that complicated: Trump is intentionally manufacturing a crisis so that he can invoke martial law. ICE is kidnapping people off the streets in violation of our laws and the US Constitution. Trump is a traitor, and MAGA is the American equivalent of the Nazis. The regime needs to be resisted. The most effective way to do so is through mass nonviolent protest and civil disobedience. Standing up to tyrants is a reflection of core American values. The US flag doesn't belong to insurrectionist traitors, which is why we'll be flying it at the protests.

Hitler's brown shirts - armed street gangs - would deliberately force their way into areas where they were not welcome in order to provoke street fights, then claim that they were 'attacked' when the groups they were terrorizing defended themselves. Nazis - and their American equivalents - are nothing if not uncreative in their tactics. Masked men who are refusing to identify themselves as law enforcement are kidnapping people off the streets. Without proper identification and due process we don't know who these people are or if the people they are trafficking are even in this country illegally. They could be Proud Boys in tactical gear bought off from Amazon for all we know. If Trump wanted to enforce existing immigration laws more strictly, there are legal ways to do that which follow due process. Hell, Biden deported more people than Trump at this point in his presidency, and he didn't have any problem following the law. These raids aren't about enforcing immigration policy - they're state sponsored terror designed to clamp down on dissent, and create a manufactured pretext for invoking martial law. Don't let anyone gaslight you that these tactics aren't strait out of the Nazi playbook.

To my knowledge none of this behavior is connected to the planned protests organized by #50501, Indivisible, or any other pro-democracy groups. I've attended more than half a dozen of these planned events where exactly zero acts of violence or property damage occurred. What's happening in LA has the feel of people reacting in a viscerally emotional and unplanned way to having their communities terrorized by ICE. Trump - or to be more accurate, the people behind the curtain like Stephen Miller - are intentionally trying to provoke violence, and escalate the situation to justify the invocation of the Insurrection Act. The governor of California, the mayor of LA, and even the chief of the LAPD have all said as much. The regime is hamfistedly manufacturing a crisis in order to build the groundwork for quasi-Martial Law. I say 'quasi' because there's no constitutional or legal framework to invoke marital law, 'declaring' it is akin to ripping up the US Constitution and throwing it in the garbage. But to your point - yes, optics matter, and we want the protests to be nonviolent. On April 5, 5.2 million people took to the streets in defiance of the Trump regime, without a single instance of property damage or violence that I've heard of. We can marshal how people behave at planned and organized events, but people also behave in somewhat predictable ways to being brutalized that no movement can fully control when we're speaking of a nation of 330 million people. So we need to be doing two things: 1) Emphasize like a broken record that protests are more effective when they are peaceful. Note that 'peaceful' doesn't mean non-confrontational or non-disruptive - just look to the civil rights movement to see how effective civil disobedience can be to a nonviolent resistance. Protest movements need two things to be successful - attention and positive optics in the eyes of the public. Violence grabs attention but it's counter productive to maintaining positive optics in the eyes of the public. This is hugely important because positive optics is a large part of what keeps participants safe -- it makes crack downs much riskier for the regime because of the horrible optics of using disproportionate force against a peaceful movement. 2) Don't cede any ground whatsoever to the regime or its apologists on this issue. The regime is clearly in the wrong for intentionally provoking these communities with its Gestapo-like tactics. ICE agents are Trump's brown shirts - brutalizing thugs that have absolutely no legal basis for the cruelty they're inflicting. There are ways to remove people who are in this country unlawfully that follow due process and the rule of law. That's not what these ICE raids are - they're about inflicting terror. (Not so fun fact - Biden deported more people than Trump did at this point in their presidency, and didn't have to break the law to do so). Nazi apologists are going to try to equivocate a handful of people vandalizing cop cars with ICE agents literally disappearing people to concentration camps. The idea that everyone in the country loses their Constitutional Rights to free speech and free assembly because a tiny handful of people engaged in property damage in response to provocation is a narrative that we need to be pushing back against hard. Make no mistake - the regime is crossing a huge red line here by deploying the Marines against US citizens. This is hugely, unprecedentedly illegal. The Posse Comitatus Act is quite explicit about this.

From Senator Chris Murphy, who's got a good head on his shoulders for his understanding of the Trump regime: "Here’s what you need to know about what’s going on in Los Angeles. The state and city have the means to control the protests. Donald Trump is getting involved to intentionally make the situation more violent. And potentially to create a pretext for some sort of martial law."

That line of tanks in the video? Those will be tearing up the streets of Washington DC, all so the insecure tyrant can throw himself a lavish North Korean style military for his birthday. $45 million taxpayer dollars are being spent on this disgusting farce at a time when Trump is firing tens of thousands of veterans from our federal workforce along with devastating budget cuts to the Department Of Veterans Affairs.

Also keep in mind that these crack downs are taking place on the eve of Trump of spending $45-90 million taxpayer dollars to throw himself a lavish North Korean style military parade for his birthday. That endless line of tanks in the video? Those will be tearing up the streets of downtown Washington DC this Saturday. If you haven't signed up, consider joining us for the No Kings protests on June 14 - which will be taking place everywhere else in the country other than Washington DC.