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Part of the issue is that elites have already bought into the coup. You don't eviscerate the US government without making sure the rich are on side first.
That's why so many CEOs publicly made gestures of support for trump just before and after the election.
The only way to stop the fascists who already have control of the courts, the government and the rich would be mass mobilization of a significant % of the population, or a military counter-coup.
People voted for the coup. People were warned, they were told it would happen, it was all documented in writing, they had a fucking website with the "we are going to do a coup" plan. People had a beta version 4 years ago. People still voted for the coup. And if you look at the world outside of lemmy, people don't care about the coup.
Less than 35% of the country voted for republicans in an election where PACs alone spent 5.6 billion dollars to lie and buy votes, and that doesn't include the amount spent on election interference by us and foreign oligarchs.
The 30% who didn't vote made a conscious decision, so I don't buy the 35% argument. You could also say that less than 33% of the country expressed their disagreement when asked.
“Democracy…If you can keep it”
This is an emergency, and it demands emergency response from every American with power or influence. The window for effective resistance narrows with each passing day. History will judge harshly those who had the capacity to resist but chose instead to wait and see how things develop. The time to act is now, before the mechanisms that would allow effective resistance are completely dismantled.
The alarms are being sounded, and not just from this publication. If nobody that has even a shred of power does anything... well fuck.
Top comment from Mike Brock’s blog (where this diatribe came from):
Right now it feels we have a growing chorus of people raising alarm, but very few people proposing any specific actions that are commensurate with the scale of the crisis? I appreciate your work and I don’t mean this flippantly, but do you have any proposals more specific than “resist” or “do something”?
This comment is my thought exactly. Brock isn’t wrong, but he’s just blowing real hard and hoping the house falls down.
All this blog did was piss me of, but it didn’t point me in a direction.
(But thanks for posting, OP.)
Because there is still time for people in power to stop being cowed. That is what this is calling for: do something before it is too late to avoid it becoming an illegitimate government, with all that brings.
Supposedly we have mechanisms to counter what's going on. The people in DC need to be pulling those lenders yesterday. Every person in politics should be fighting back.
If you're looking for advice on what citizens should do, that's not who the people sounding the are talking to.
Yeah. The instant this bullshit started happening, last week or ideally earlier, go to a federal judge. Ask for an injunction to allow you to physically put a stop to it, using some specifically named authorized law enforcement or military assets. Have something prepared for why it justifies that level of response, lord knows it wouldn't be hard to come up with.
It might not work. They might not grant the order. All kinds of things could happen if they did. But fucking try. That's the level that is required at this point. You can show up, with a physical piece of paper signed by an authorized judge and with deadly force at the ready, and if one of these tech-bro goons in a suit and a slick haircut bars the door with his 2 security people and tries to say "No that's not how the constitution works anymore, Trump said so," you'll have however-many trained military personnel whose ear will perk back up to some things they heard in their training.
I don't know, man. All kinds of things could go wrong. But if it doesn't work, at least you can say you fucking tried before moving on to something more drastic, or else getting out of the country while the getting is good. Going on TV, or threatening to use your debating even debating-er, is clearly a waste of everyone's time right now.
People who stand in the way of this type of thing are be risking jail and death.
They are. And by not standing in the way of it, they are also risking jail or death.
I won't pretend to know what the right answer is for any person. I can't answer it for them. I'm just saying what should happen. Haven't you seen "The Iron Giant"?
Haven’t you seen “The Iron Giant”?
Great, now I’m crying!
The coup happened decades ago. They're now comfortable enough in their power that the mask can come off.
From Trump’s POV it’s actually a heist. He’s going to take everything that’s not bolted down.
I am not sure you know what a coup is. This guy was elected.
President Leon was not elected.
ETA: The guy who was elected was stupid and vain for most of his life. Now, he's stupid, and vain, with a mind that's failing to dementia. That's to say that if he wasn't easily manipulated by playing to his vanity before, he's not the one in charge now.
An unelected billionaire without Congressional authority is physically going to government agencies and shutting them down, stealing their data, and threatening the staff. If that's not a coup, it's something new that we haven't invented a word for yet. Coup will have to do for now.
So was Hitler, Chavez, Erdogan among others. This take is so blind to history it’s absurd. Facists are often elected democratically.
And they do stage coups. Hitler did, Marcos did in the Philippines, Fujimori in Peru, as well as Chavez and Erdoğan.
Okay, he's a fascist shitbag, no argument there, but its not a coup by definition. This isnt sudden and its not by a small group of people.