DocWatts

As someone who's involved in the broad-tent pro-democracy movement, believe me we're well aware that this is the intent. Maintaining nonviolent discipline and cultivating positive optics with the American public are at the top of the priorities list. If you look at these demonstrations you'll see the American flag, and that's very much intentional - the intent is to make these demonstrations impossible to dismiss as a fringe-Left movement. You'll also see lots of white faces and grandmas with American flags at these events - there's a reason these don't look like the BLM protests, since there's an understanding that the mere presence of large numbers of young black and brown men will itself be used as an excuse for bad actors to instigate violence. As much as I dislike it, it would be foolish to ignore that being white gives you FAR more protection against violence from law enforcement. 5.2 million people took to the streets for the Hands Off protests across 1400 events nationwide, and not a single violent incident took place. And believe me, if there was anything that Fox News could be using against us we'd be hearing about it nonstop. The best the propaganda machine has been able to come up with so far is that that we're supposedly 'paid protestors'.

Greenland's citizens aren't treating Trump's annexation threats as a joke - they're treating it as a threat to their national sovereignty. Same goes for Canada - within just 100 days he's managed to torch a two century old military, economic, and cultural alliance between our two countries. And he's almost singlehandedly tipped Canada's national elections from being a slam dunk for the Conservatives to a likely Liberal victory. Do you know how much you have to f*ck up to get Canadian hockey fans to boo America's national anthem? What you have to understand this isn't the Trump of 2017. All of the adults who reigned him in during his first administration are GONE. The institutional guardrails that could have prevented him from doing something crazy have been eroded down to symbolic speedbumps with no real enforcement mechanisms behind them. In short, there's no one left to tell the Mad King 'NO'. Millions of Americans taking to the streets and withholding their cooperation with the regime, while demanding that our elected officials do their damned jobs and uphold the US Constitution, is one of the last checks on Trump's power that we have left.

Thank you, Leo.

It was never 'just' rhetoric - Trump's intentions were never hidden, they were stated openly and proudly. Just as Hitler's contempt for the Jews was never an 'open secret' but loudly declared from the very beginning, Trump is doing exactly what he campaigned on. Even after a decade of creeping fascism, it seems that people still have trouble believing bad actors when they're straightforwardly telling us what their plans are.

Robert Evans certainly has the chops to know what he's talking about. He's a journalist who's written extensively about online extremism and global conflict, and knows how to present these topics in an approachable way.

The atrocities that Trump's regime wants to commit requires the complicity or indifference of ordinary people. If sending American citizens to literal concentration camps isn't worth having difficult conversations with friends and family who are tuned out of politics, then nothing is. Call a spade a spade - MAGA is our version of the Nazis, and Trump is intentionally destroying our country from within for the benefit of billionaire oligarchs and Vladimir Putin. But fortunately, America isn't 1939 Germany - Trump's regime is weak and unpopular, and if you have any amount of social privilege the costs of resisting are quite low compared to what it could become if we throw in the towel just a few months in out of apathy and exhaustion 'Not being interested in politics' isn't an excuse anymore - if you ever wondered what you might have done in 1930s Germany or the Civil Rights Movement, you're doing it now. Fortunately, there are plenty of different avenues to join the pro-democracy movement. Attend a protest or a town hall. Call your reps using the 5calls app. Find your local Indivisible group and attend a meeting. In short - less souls searching, more instrumental engagement. Find a way to be integrate civic engagement into your life. Find a group to work with, and make good trouble. Behind The Bastards - How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible

It's important to be direct when we're discussing this. If there was ever a time to ditch sanitized language, it's now. Plain and simple, this is state repression - dictator shit that's meant to get us to obey in advance. (Not saying that you're doing this OP, but some are going to try and sanitize this - don't let them). Trump isn't deporting these people - they aren't being sent back to their country of origin. They're being abducted by ICE and sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador. This isn't immigration policy, it's state repression meant to terrify dissenters into silence. ICE isn't protecting our borders, they're being used as Trump's gestapo to disappear people.

If you live in the States, call your Senators and demand that they vote NO on the SAVE Act and the No Rogue Rulings Act. Both passed the House by razor thin margins and will be signed into law if they're not killed in the Senate, where they're due for a vote soon. The former is a expansive voter suppression bill that would disenfranchise tens of millions of voters by requiring rarely-used and expensive citizenship documents in order to vote, under the guise of the the GOP's Big Lie that millions of undocumented immigrants are supposedly voting in US elections. The latter is a blatant attempt to strip courts of their independence, so that Trump can rule by decree like a King, by stripping the courts of their ability to order national injunctions against Trump's unconstitutional behavior. The Courts are one of the few Constitutional checks on Trump's power that's largely working as intended, which is why MAGA is so fixated on destroying their independence.

Meanwhile in MAGA-Land, the Red Hats are going to be very confused when their sweet treats from China - their clothing and electronics and toys - more than double in price.

Those of us with our heads on straight are certainly trying - 5.2 million people took to the streets over the weekend for the nationwide 'Hands Off' protests, which is about %1.5 of the entire population of the United States (the largest single day of protest in American history). These will only continue to snowball as the weather gets nicer and Americans are crushed beneath the Trump Tariffs. Bernie Sanders is drawing crowds of tens of thousands of people to town halls all across the country in a year that's NOT an election. You don't revitalize a democracy that's been rotting from within over a weekend, but I can tell you as someone who's lived here for 37 years I've seen much more civic participation in the past 2 months than I have in the past two decades.

The FBI is compromised - Trump is replacing career agents with loyalist cronies whose only qualifications are a willingness to help Trump break the law and weaponize federal agencies.

@Rafael Thundercat Believe me, those of us who are participating in these protests are well aware that Trump is looking to manufacture an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act - Project 2025 clearly lays this out (with the upcoming deadline on Hitler's birthday, no less). Declaring martial law is one thing, and actually enforcing it is another. The US contains 340 million people, while the US military has 1.3 million active service members across all branches. The national guard which would be tasked with actually carrying out these orders numbers around 400k. The US military, when it was led by far more competent people, was barely able to keep a lid on Afghanistan - enforcing martial law across the US would be 1000 times more difficult. Moreover, Trump and Hegseth would be banking on the assumption that US service members are going to be okay with turning their weapons on crowds of peaceful protestors that contain moms and grandmas waving American flags. The intent of invoking the Insurrection Act is much like that of ICE abducting people off the streets - it's to intimidate dissenters into obeying in advance. Of course, this all hinges on the protests remaining nonviolent and having positive optics with the American public. 5.2 million people poured into the streets on April 5, and I've yet to hear of a single instance of violence or property damage. Believe me, if there was anything that could be weaponized against us, Fox News be blasting it from a megaphone like they did with the BLM protests - the best they've been able to come up with so far is that we're supposedly 'paid protesters'. Trump's regime is resorting to threats and intimidation because it's unpopular and weak. Rule #1 of resisting authoritarianism is DO NOT OBEY IN ADVANCE. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. - Timothy Snyder, On Liberty

For the periphery of swing voters who pushed Trump over the finish line because they thought he was going to lower the price of groceries, I'd say so. Ultimately, these folks are going to end up blaming the economic miseries they're experiencing on whoever's currently in charge. And Trump's insane lies can't fully pave over people's day to day experience as their grocery bill is skyrocketing from what it was six months ago. I wouldn't hold out much hope for any type of mass exodus from the Cult though - the buyers remorse that they were being conned this entire time is too high. And a sizeable proportion of these voters genuinely want the US to become (or more accurately, return to being) a white, Christian ethnostate.

By that metric, are you going to lump in Abolitionists with the slaveowners just because they're within the same borders? Or the French resistance with the Vichy government? For the record, I do agree that we need to be doing much more to take ownership of collective problems. Civic participation has been declining for a long time in the US, and American democracy has been rotting from within as a result. Moreover, it's been generations since we've had to fight for our freedoms. But the flip side of this partial truth - that Trump himself is a particularly acute symptom of a larger sickness within America - is that countries are not monoliths, and the US isn't just one culture. Treating America as a monolith just reinforces Trump's Big Lie that he has a mandate from the American people. When in actuality %32 of the country voted for this - the rest voted for other candidates or stayed home. 5 million people, or about %1.5 of the entire US population, took to the streets to protest Trump over the weekend - the biggest nationwide day of protest in American history. This is in spite of the fact that dissenting could get you abducted and thrown into a gulag in El Salvador.

Yup - anyone trying to spin this as economic policy is either dangerously naive or intentionally dishonest.

It's not 'the US', it's Trump. And they're not economic policy, they're extorsion. Trump wants to rule America like a mafia boss, not a president. The Liberation Day Tariffs are a political weapon intentionally designed to create economic hardship - to establish a patronage system where Trump can offer selective relief from the tariffs to companies and individuals who are willing to kiss the ring. Trump isn't playing twelve dimensional chess here - he's a grifter and a bully who's using tariffs to feel like a big man who can make people grovel at his feet. ________________________________________________ BlueSky post from Senator Chris Murphy on the Tariffs: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:y77n77kdqzhbg647blkfypyr/post/3lluxkmx7wc2m Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive. No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief. This week you will read many confused economists and political pundits who won’t understand how the tariffs make economic sense. That’s because they don’t. They aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool. You see, our founders created a President with limited and checked powers. They specifically put the power of spending and taxation in the hands of the legislature. Why? Because they watched how kings and despots used spending and taxes to control their subjects. British kings used taxation to reward loyalty and punish dissent. Our own revolution was spurred by the King’s use of heavy taxation of the colonies to punish our push for self governance. The King’s message was simple: stop protesting and I’ll stop taxing. Trump knows that he can weaken (and maybe destroy) democracy by using spending and taxation in the same way. He is using access to government funds to bully universities, law firms and state and local governments into loyalty pledges. Healthy democracies rely on an independent legal profession to maintain the rule of law, independent universities to guard objective truth and provide forums for dissent to authority, and independent state/local government to counterbalance a powerful federal government. But the private sector also plays a rule to protect democracy. Independent industry has power. The tariffs are Trump’s tool to erode that independence. Now, one by one, every industry or company will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief. What could Trump demand as part of a quiet loyalty pledge? Public shows of support from executives for all his economic policy. Contributions to his political efforts. Promises to police employees’ support for his political opposition. The tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship. Why? So that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears. And once Trump has the lawyers, colleges and industry under his thumb, it becomes very hard for the opposition to have any viable space to maneuver. Trump didn’t invent this strategy. It’s the playbook for democratically elected leaders who want to stay in power forever. The tariffs aren’t economic policy. They are political weapons. But as long as we see this clearly, we can stop him. Public mobilization is working. Today, a few Republicans joined Democrats to vote against one set of tariffs. The people still have the power.

Correction - a few such as CNN and APNews are, so due credit to the handful of legacy organizations that are covering it. I had to dig to find any mention of the the protests on the New York Times, Politico, and MSNBC.

Some encouraging news, for anyone who needs it. About 5 million people took to the streets in nationwide protests across 1400 cities for the April 5 'Hands Off' yesterday. The Detroit protest I attended had upwards of 6000 people, cities like Chicago and New York had 30,000-50,000 people. But this wasn't just in large cities - small towns with populations of just a few thousand people were having people show up as well (there were something like 20 -30 protests going on just in the state of Michigan). Tldr: the American resistance is alive and well, even if the legacy news media is compromised and not covering the protests https://www.reddit.com/r/50501/s/e0RCvGTDU4

I'm creating this thread as Public Service Announcement about political developments within the United States, for folks who either don't live here or have tuned out of politics in the weeks and months following the election. This thread wasn't created for argument or debate - any comments to that effect won't be responded to. I felt compelled to create this thread because we're in an incredibly dangerous moment right now, and traditional news media (CNN, The Associated Press, etc) is failing to convey the gravity of recent political developments. I'm also asking actualizers here who live in the States to pay attention to what's going on, and to take action. (Thanks to 50501 for this post on the night of the coup, some of which I’ll be quoting verbatim. I’m less interested in precise accreditation right now than I am with getting this information out there). _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ What's Going On In The United States Right Now? (Short Version) In short, the US is currently in a Constitutional Crisis. Since taking office, Donald Trump and his Project 2025 backers have been aggressively testing the waters to see what types of dictatorial actions they can get away with. Since taking office, Donald Trump has been abusing Executive Orders to consolidate unprecedented power under the Executive Branch. The unambiguous intent of these executive orders is to do away with the Constitutional checks and balances that prevents one person, such as a president, from amassing unchecked power. To that end, Trump has been using Executive Orders to appropriate the Constitutional Authority of Congress to draft laws and control spending. And he's been attempting to usurp the ability to the Courts to interpret the Constitutionality of laws. Executive Orders are NOT laws. They cannot be used to overturn Constitutional Amendments (such as birthright citizenship), or the shut down federal departments (such as the Department Of Education). Nor can they be used to override or 'veto' spending that's been approved by Congress. Trump has been using Executive Orders to do all three, in clear violation of the law and the US Constitution, out of a belief that no one is able or willing to stop him. Elon Musk, an unelected private citizen without any security clearances, broke into the highly sensitive US Treasury system, which controls $6 trillion of federal spending, and now likely has access to the Social Security Numbers and bank account information of every US taxpayer, in the biggest data breach in human history. What's Changed Within The Last 24 Hours? (As Of 2/19/2025). The White House just announced an unprecedented executive power grab, stripping independent governmental agencies of their autonomy. This order gives the President direct control over all regulatory bodies, allowing them to manipulate financial markets, elections, environmental policies, and legal interpretations. Agencies must now obey White House directives or face defunding. This Executive Order effectively ends independent oversight of the U.S. government. It cements total presidential control over regulatory agencies, giving Trump unchecked authority over financial markets, elections, environmental protections, and the legal system itself. WHAT THIS ORDER DOES: Eliminates Agency Independence: Agencies like the SEC, FCC, and FEC, which were designed to operate without direct political interference, are now forced to follow White House directives. This means the President can directly control stock market regulations, elections, and antitrust enforcement. Weaponizes the Budget: The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) can now block or redirect funding to agencies based on their political compliance. Agencies that resist will be defunded into submission. Mandates Legal Loyalty: All federal employees must now follow the President’s interpretation of the law, no independent legal assessments are allowed. The President’s word is now the law. Enforces Direct Oversight: A White House Liaison will be placed in every agency to ensure complete political obedience. No agency will be able to act without direct presidential approval. ( Source: WH Announces Massive Power Grab Through Executive Orders, Our Enabling Act Moment of Germany 1933 is HERE. ) The cumulative effect of this order is to give Trump and his Project 2025 backers dictatorial control over most US governmental agencies. You can read the Executive Order for yourself here - while the White House is pitching this as ‘restoring a government that responds the American people’, don’t be fooled. This is a naked power grab that has no basis in our laws or our Constitution. It would give Trump unchecked power to rule by decree like a King, gutting the Constitutional checks and balances that were designed to prevent exactly this outcome. Why This Is Incredibly Dangerous, And Why This Is A Coup In 1933, Hitler passed the Enabling Act, effectively dismantling Germany’s democracy and centralizing all government power under his rule. This executive order is a direct parallel, it removes the last barriers to total executive control and allows Trump to govern by decree. ( Source: WH Announces Massive Power Grab Through Executive Orders, Our Enabling Act Moment of Germany 1933 is HERE. ) If we do not resist immediately, this will be the final step in dismantling American democracy. The checks and balances that kept the presidency in check are GONE. The term for what is happening right now is an Auto-Coup (also called a Self-Coup) - where a leader or administration comes to power legally, and then uses illegal and unconstitutional actions to stay in power. What We Should Be Doing Right Now First and foremost, spread the word that this happening - legacy news media has largely NOT BEEN COVERING this. And when they have, it's not been with the urgency that's appropriate to what's happening. For the most part, they've been obeying in advance out of fear that they'll be penalized or shut down by a more repressive government. If you live in the United States, you need to be contacting your representatives. Flood their offices with calls, emails, and visits demanding immediate legislative action to block this power grab. Here's a simple script you can use to contact your representatives: SCRIPT: Hi, my name is [name] , and I’m a constituent from [city and zip code]. I’m calling to urge Senator [name] to take immediate action against the White House’s latest executive order, issued on Feb 18th, which strips federal agencies of their autonomy and centralizes unchecked power under the President. This order effectively ends independent oversight of the US government, giving Trump dictatorial control over markets, elections, environmental protections, and the legal system at his will. This is an unconstitutional power grab with no precedent in modern U.S. history. I urge the Senator to use every tool available — publicly denounce this, rally opposition, and block its implementation by any means necessary. The Democratic Party must act like a true opposition party before it's too late. Please do everything in your power to stop this. Thank you for your time. Back organizations such as the ACLU that are preparing legal battles to obstruct Trump's coup. If you're able to, consider joining in a protest. There's a reason that this latest executive order was signed late at night when most of the country was asleep. The more public pushback this gets, the longer and more difficult it will be for Trump to dismantle what remains of our democracy. Here are some organizations that organizing nationwide and state-level protests: #50501, RefuseFascism.org, Indivisible.org Follow organizations like 50501 on social media to stay informed, which are working to build a sustained non-violent resistance to fascism in the United States. I’d also highly recommend Parkrose Permaculture’s channel on YouTube. Call for and support organizations that are facilitating NON-VIOLENT resistance. Empirical studies have shown that nonviolence is much more effective at successfully challenging authoritarian regimes than violent resistance, and leads to more stable and democratic outcomes afterwards. To that end, I’d recommend Erica Chenoweth’s work, who has written about this at length.

You know things are getting bad when I'm seeing the tariffs being discussed on YouTube channels about Nintendo games that are normally apolitical. All of those folks in the States who "aren't interested in politics" are going to find out that "politics is interested in them" when they're suddenly paying $700 for a $450 video game console because of the tariffs.

Live your life in a way that a billion people won't be celebrating in the streets when you finally drop dead.

Yeah Trump is trying to intentionally collapse America's economy, but look how much cheaper GRO-CE-REI-S have gotten! 😆

US Senator Chris Murphy's refreshingly clear sighted take on Trump's insane tariffs. This isn't 'economic policy' so much as it's Trump's attempt to rule American like a mob boss - tariffs are his weapon to reward loyalty and punish dissent. USA : Senator Chris Murphy lays out why Trump's insane tariffs are "a tool to collapse our Democracy" https://bsky.app/profile/chrismurphyct.bsky.social/post/3lluxkmx7wc2m Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive. No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief. This week you will read many confused economists and political pundits who won’t understand how the tariffs make economic sense. That’s because they don’t. They aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool. You see, our founders created a President with limited and checked powers. They specifically put the power of spending and taxation in the hands of the legislature. Why? Because they watched how kings and despots used spending and taxes to control their subjects. British kings used taxation to reward loyalty and punish dissent. Our own revolution was spurred by the King’s use of heavy taxation of the colonies to punish our push for self governance. The King’s message was simple: stop protesting and I’ll stop taxing. Trump knows that he can weaken (and maybe destroy) democracy by using spending and taxation in the same way. He is using access to government funds to bully universities, law firms and state and local governments into loyalty pledges. Healthy democracies rely on an independent legal profession to maintain the rule of law, independent universities to guard objective truth and provide forums for dissent to authority, and independent state/local government to counterbalance a powerful federal government. But the private sector also plays a rule to protect democracy. Independent industry has power. The tariffs are Trump’s tool to erode that independence. Now, one by one, every industry or company will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief. What could Trump demand as part of a quiet loyalty pledge? Public shows of support from executives for all his economic policy. Contributions to his political efforts. Promises to police employees’ support for his political opposition. The tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship. Why? So that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears. And once Trump has the lawyers, colleges and industry under his thumb, it becomes very hard for the opposition to have any viable space to maneuver. Trump didn’t invent this strategy. It’s the playbook for democratically elected leaders who want to stay in power forever. The tariffs aren’t economic policy. They are political weapons. But as long as we see this clearly, we can stop him. Public mobilization is working. Today, a few Republicans joined Democrats to vote against one set of tariffs. The people still have the power.

That's assuming we still have free and fair elections in 2026 - it's a safe bet that Trump and his Project 2025 backers will be doing everything in their power to make sure that doesn't happen. Trump has already said 'Blue states will be wiped off the map', and that MAGA 'wont have to worry about voting anymore'. The Cheeto Man just signed an Executive Order trying to mandate proof of citizenship in order to register to vote (ie a passport or a certified birth certificate, which a large chunk of the country doesn't have). He's trying to dismantle the post office, which would effectively end voting by mail. He's been weaponizing fringe, bad-faith interpretations of the law to interfere with the Democratic Party's ability to fundraise. We may be less than 30 days away from Trump using a manufactured crisis at the Southern border as a flimsy excuse to declare martial law through an Executive Order, and has been purging the military of servants who place their oath to the Constitution above their personal loyalty to Donald Trump for just that purpose. Trump has been using ICE as his personal gestapo, abducting people off the streets in order to terrorize dissenters into anticipatory obedience - not a stretch to imagine that this will only increase going forward, since there's so far been zero consequences for this Nazi-like behavior. Hell, we could be in a shooting war with Canada or Mexico or Panama or Greenland by 2026, for all we know. In short - we're in uncharted territory here, don't assume anything about 2026 will resemble 'business as usual'.

The rest of the world should enact a coordinated boycott of American businesses and products, ala Apartheid South Africa. Despite puffing himself up as a strongman, Trump's regime is weak and unpopular - don't believe Trump's lies that he has a mandate, in actuality only 31.8% of the country actually voted for him (the rest of the country either voted for other candidates or stayed home). He's got historically low approval ratings for a new president, which are poised to drop further as his idiotic, chaotic policies continue to tank the US economy. A coordinated campaign to hit American companies in the pocket book could put serious pressure on the regime, and begin to separate Trump's regime from its pillars of support.