DocWatts

This hasn't been getting nearly as much coverage as Mamdani's victory, but democratic socialist Katie Wilson won a victory over the centrist establishment incumbent to become the new mayor of Seattle.

It's important to set expectations, Trump's not going to jail for his horrific crimes. 'Going down' means a fracturing of the coalition that Trump would need to consolidate his authoritarian power grab. While the core of the MAGA Cult is closer to defending pedophilia than they are to admitting they backed an irredeemable monster, this %15-25 of the country that's A-OK with backing the client of a child sex trafficking ring isn't a large enough plurality to succeed in his authoritarian ambitions. Autocrats who survive are ones that are popular, and just 10 months in and Trump's fascist experiment is imploding.

Most kinds of evil are banal - the result of selfishness, bias, and diffusion of responsibility. If you want a really good book on this subject, I'd highly recommend 'They Thought They Were Free' by Milton Mayer. Mayer was a Jewish American who traveled to Germany after the end of World War 2, and befriended and interviewed a number of ordinary Germans who were members of the Nazi Party, and wrote a book about it. The book is an excellent deep dive into the mental gymnastics that people will employ to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. It's also a chilling case study in how evil systems are almost always built and maintained by ordinary people. ___ "The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now [in 1946]. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it" "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D." "On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.” “The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn't know [about the Holocaust]. They didn't know because they didn't want to know; but they didn't know. They could have found out, at the time, only if they had wanted to very badly.”

For as livid as I am at Democratic leadership for being the Controlled Opposition, when I put on my Game Theory goggles I also recognize that there's a basic asymmetry here. For all of their glaring flaws, Democratic politicians care, to a degree that varies enormously between individual legislators, about the well being of their constituents. While Republicans do not give a flying fuck about the well-being of their own constituents, let alone the health and lives of Americans who didn't vote for them. Trump and his enablers would let millions of Americans starve rather that surrender some of their power.

Turns out that America isn't enjoying its fascist experiment - last night's 2025 elections were a blowout for Democrats, winning elections and ballot initiatives across the country. In my mind, this leaves little doubt that: 1) Barring something totally unprecedented that upends the political landscape over the next 12 months, the 2026 midterms are going to be a bloodbath for MAGA. If you have a Democratic Senator or Representative - call them every day and tell them to KEEP UP THE PRESSURE. Fear of the wanna-be dictator is contagious, but so is courage. Trump's regime is weak, unstable, and historically unpopular. 2) There's a 100% chance that Trump and his enablers are planning to steal the next election - nothing subtle about the fact that the Trump and Miller are trying to acclimatize us to seeing US troops deployed on American streets. That doesn't mean that the outcome of Trump's next coup attempt is a foregone conclusion, but it does mean that we need to be preparing for massive protests, civil disobedience, and economic disruptions should the worst come to pass.

To add to what's already been said, the metrics that have traditionally been used to gauge how well 'the economy' is doing - the stock market, unemployment, inflation - have become increasingly decoupled from the well-being of the bottom 80% of the country. While on paper the United States had a world-class economy under Biden, the numbers masked a cost of living crisis that has made owning a home or starting a family an impossible dream for at least half the country. 'Unemployment' may be something like 4%, but a huge portion of those jobs don't pay enough to meet a person's basic needs, let alone provide a firm foundation to build a prosperous life from. Trump cynically used this crisis to lie and con his way into power, having no intention whatsoever of addressing these kitchen table issues. On the contrary, the last 9 months have been a process of intentionally adding jet fuel to this dumpster fire. 40 million Americans are about to find themselves going hungry due to an abrupt disruption of nutritional subsidies, thanks to Trump's government shutdown. Add to that that the US economy is being artificially propped up by a speculative AI bubble, which is poised to pop in the coming years. No one yet knows what the fallout from this will look like, but a second version of the 2008 Financial Crisis and Great Recession isn't an unreasonable starting point.

$40 billion dollars to prop up Argentina's failing austerity economy for the benefit of billionaire investors while Americans go hungry.

If you can afford to, consider making a donation to a food bank in your community. Because the fascist regime that controls all three branches of our government - Does. Not. Give. A. Shit. if Americans are going hungry. If anything, Trump and Stephen Miller see millions of hungry desperate people as a benefit, since the regime has been going out of their way to provoke riots as a pretext for a military crackdown. They've failed to do so with the terror tactics that ICE is employing, children and families going hungry gives them another opportunity. The US House is currently shut down because speaker of the House MAGA Mike Johnson does not want a vote to release the Epstein files - is in fact refusing to inaugurate a newly elected Democratic representative for that very purpose, because it would give the House enough votes to release the files. Senate Republicans meanwhile are lockstep with their Cult leader who refuse to negotiate with Senate Democrats, who are demanding rollbacks to healthcare cuts and enforceable guardrails to illegal impoundments and rescissions of Congressionally approved spending. Meanwhile, Trump has earmarked $40 billion to prop up Argentina's failing economic experiment, while refusing to allocate the tiny fraction of that amount that it would take to fund SNAP until the end of the year.

In short, it's because we tend to use ideologies to meet our identity, belonging, and survival needs - with the truthfulness of the ideology being a distant, secondary concern. We like to flatter ourselves that we're rational actors who 'choose' our ideologies like how we choose between boxes of cereal at the grocery store - but this is putting the cart before the horse. In actuality, our sociopolitical views are of outgrowth of the lives we've lived. Tldr: the ideologies we adopt aren't a dispassionate 'choice' based on the merits of the evidence - we instead gravitate towards ideologies that accommodate our lived reality. 'Extreme' ideologies, then, are often linked to trauma or difficult survival circumstances. No one chooses to become an incel, for example - they slip into it out of despair due to negative experiences they've had with women, and a lack of self worth.

Yeah, that checks out, since we're living in a timeline where a vindictive man-child became the wanna-be king of America.

More like: First they came for the immigrants And I spoke out immediately because I read the rest of the damned poem.

Amazing how 7 million Americans had very little difficulty protesting against a fascist regime on No Kings Day without commiting any crimes. Yet if you put 2500 MAGAs at the steps of the Capitol Building, they can't resist the urge to bludgeon police officers with flag poles, trample people to death, and attempt to murder their political opponents. "Law and order for thee, not for me". The intent was always to let white bigots with red hats do whatever the fuck they want with zero consequences, while using a lawless state to persecute minorities. There are ways to remove people who are here illegally while respecting due process - so let's not pretend that the terror tactics we've seen over the last 9 months are anything more than racism for racism's sake and a ploy to consolidate naked, unaccountable power.

To be clear you made two claims. Stating that he got 78 million votes: true statement. Going on to claim that a majority of the country supports him: not even remotely true. The best propaganda is based on a kernel of truth that's been contorted to serve a deceitful narrative. The Big Lie here is that Trump's authoritarian power grab is somehow justified because a majority of the country supports his actions - this is, and always has been, utter horseshit.

That's not even remotely true. Less than a third of American adults voted for the wanna-be dictator. More Americans stayed home than voted for Trump. If 'didn't vote' was a candidate, it would have won the election handily. It would be more true to say that apathy won the election. Even among people who did bother to vote, Trump won a plurality rather than a majority. 9 months into his presidency, less than 40% of the country approves of the job he's doing - this is historically low when you consider the first year is typically the honeymoon period where presidents enjoy the highest approval ratings of their entire term. A larger percentage of Americans support having him impeached (52%) than approve of Trump 2.0 (< %40). He's underwater on every single issue, including the economy and immigration. An overwhelming majority of the country, including a majority of MAGA Republicans, want the Epstein files released. Stop spreading propaganda.

What got the country where it today is anticipatory obedience - institutions and individuals obeying in advance out of cowardice and political expediency. Or to quote Timothy Snyder: "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." I suspect that folks pooh-poohing what's likely to be the largest single day of protest in American history have spent very little time researching how authoritarian governments are actually toppled. Speaking from my experience as an actual activist - one who's involvement in the pro-democracy movement is far more extensive than attending a single protest - I can say with confidence that we don't need everyone to be doing everything, we just need a majority of people doing something. Civil resistance movements succeed when they're able to separate an authoritarian regime from its pillars of political, economic, military, and cultural support. In practice, this is achieved by building a demographically and ideologically diverse pro-democracy coalition while simultaneously fracturing the autocrats coalition. Demonstration like No Kings are important because they draw people into more active forms of resistance, push back against the atmosphere of fear and inevitability that the autocrat is trying to instill in the public, and make it abundantly clear that the regime is weak and unpopular.