DocWatts

A vibes check from the point of view of a pro-democracy activist (so do take that into consideration - I won't pretend that this is an unbiased account). I also wrote a short Substack article on the current political situation in the United States a handful of weeks back. https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/a-dictatorial-coup-is-taking-place In short - it's bad. Not 1939 Nazi Germany bad, but people are scared. I would avoid recreational travel to the United States for the time being. Our Constitutional system of checks and balances is falling apart right now, and Trump is testing the waters to see what he can get away with. Canada, Britain, Germany, and Denmark have issued travel advisories to take extra precautions if visiting the US. Tourists trying to enter the country from countries like Germany and Canada are being detained by the US government for arbitrary reasons, to meet detention quotas set by the Trump administration. This recently happened to a Canadian citizen trying to enter the US: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-detained-us-immigration-jasmine-mooney Trump has begun using ICE as his personal gestapo to abduct and detain enemies of the regime. Hundreds of people have been abducted and sent to a forced labor camp in El Salvador with no oversight or due process, in direct defiance of court orders. So far this has been directed towards the most vulnerable people in the country : immigrants, naturalized US citizens, and trans people. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/president-trump-illegally-invokes-alien-enemies-act-brennan-center-reacts There's credible speculation that Trump is planning to invoke the Insurrection Act to declare Martial Law on April 20th, using a manufactured crisis on the Southern border to crack down on dissent against the regime. This was explicitly outlined in Project 2025, that the Department of Defense prepare a recommendation as to whether or not to declare a national military emergency within 90 days of Trump taking office. Trump has been systematically purging the military of people who place their Oath to the Constitution above their personal loyalty to Donald Trump, and replacing them with sycophants whose main qualification is that they're willing to help Trump violate our laws and our Constitution. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/trumps-insurrection-act-threat Protests are breaking out in almost all major cities across the country - thankfully these have been pretty much %100 peaceful, but that could change if Trump's regime does invoke wartime powers to outlaw public political gatherings (as to whether or not he'd actually be able to enforce such an insane order in a country of 330 million people is another thing entirely). That said, if you're a normie who's not part of a marginalized group and isn't actively participating in politics, you might not notice a difference from six months ago before Trump took office. Just be aware there's some dark shit going on here, and you don't have to go far to find it. If you're planning on spending time in the United States just be aware that you are taking a risk - probably not a huge risk for most people, but something that should be taken into account.

(Friendly suggestion, but this thread may be more at home in the Intellectual Stuff or Spirituality sections). As an outsider to both of these perspectives, I might have a somewhat novel take here. From my vantage point, Materialism and God-Consciousness Mysticism are more similar than you might think. While on the surface these two perspectives may seem like inverses of one another, the shared thread is that both are metaphysical ontologies - linked by their shared intuition that Reality has an absolute ground - or a fundamental basis for what’s ‘really real’. Of course, each one argues that their favored substrate - matter and energy, god-consciousness - is the 'correct' ground. (Note: ontology is a subset of philosophy that concerns itself with how we categorize things, what those things ultimately are, and more generally what counts as ‘real’). Moreover, both Materialism and God-Consciousness Mysticism are Transcendental Perspectives - meaning that there's a shared assumption that entities and phenomena need to have an existence which transcends our everyday, human perspective within Reality to be ‘truly real’. For materialism, entities and phenomena are 'real' because matter and physical laws persist whether or not anyone is there to observe them. For God-Consciousness Mysticism, entities and phenomena are 'real' because our god-consciousness expands beyond our everyday experience and creates all of Reality. I'd contend that both of these are 'outside-in' ontologies because they begin with a metaphysical intuition about what's ultimately 'real', and work their way backwards to the sublime mundanity of everyday experience. In contrast, another way of doing ontology is an 'inside-out' or 'phenomenological' approach, which brackets the question of what's 'ultimately real', and instead uses our everyday, embodied interactions with the world as a starting point for understanding our unavoidably anthropocentric viewpoint within Reality. In short, you could think of this 'third' approach as a pragmatic perspective that's less interested in what Reality ultimately is, more interested in understanding how human beings actually navigate the messy complexity of our embodied situation within Reality.

No guarantee that 2028 (or 2026 for that matter) will be a free and fair election without a sustained public pressure campaign to slow down Trump's dismantling of our democracy. We need to move forward with the reasonable assumption that voter suppression tactics will be on overdrive, and that Trump and his Project 2025 backers will be attempting to subvert upcoming elections. This isn't a call to abstain from voting - just the opposite. It's a call for ordinary people to participate in politics between elections. Both ordinary people and our legislators need to loudly and boldly combat the firehouse of lies that MAGA will be using to justify these attempts. Which is to say, elections still matter! 2026 will be our best chance at obstructing Trump's regime in a procedurally meaningful way, but we can't sit back on our haunches and wait for midterms to save us. We need to be proactive in defending institutions over the next year and a half. And for what it's worth, a useful parallel here is the 1933 German elections - the first and only multiparty election after Hitler was appointed to Chancellor. Despite widespread voter intimidation and threats of physical violence, the Nazis won only %44 of the vote - well short of a majority. Unlike America in 2025, 1933 Germany didn't have a vibrant pro-democracy movement or functional courts - so keep fighting! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_election

It's completely deserved - and it's going to keep cratering as long as Democratic leadership is content to treat a fascist coup as 'business as usual'. Meanwhile Bernie and AOC are drawing crowds of tens of thousands of people on their Stop Oligarchy Tour. The pro-democracy resistance is alive and well within the United States, and it needs to extend into the Democratic Party. 'Adapt or become irrelevant'. We need to be demanding much more from our elected representatives. No one is coming to save us, and waiting for midterm elections is dangerously naive (no guarantee at all that we'll even still have free and fair elections by 2026). Ordinary people need to be taking to the streets in protest, calling their elected representatives, attending town halls, participating in boycotts, combatting MAGA propaganda, having uncomfortable conversations with people in our lives who've tuned out of politics since the election.

Here's Legal Eagle's take on Mahmoud Khalil (plus a second vid on Trump's defying the courts to send American citizens off to gulags in El Salvador with no due process) Seems to me that this is a pretty open and shut case of Lawfare - the weaponization of the law, by maliciously using it a highly selective way to punish dissent and oppress political opponents. This is standard stuff of authoritarian regimes such as Putin's Russia, which Trump and his sycophants are working to to import into America. The use of literacy tests and poll taxes in the Jim Crow South is another example of laws that were technically 'neutral' on paper, but were selectively enforced to deny black Americans their political rights. The context in which this is happening matters - the aim here is to terrify protesters, clamp down on dissent, and intimidate the American public into obeying in advance. How anyone can claim that any of this is 'above board' when Trump is simultaneously using of ICE as his personal Gestapo to send American citizens to for-profit gulags in El Salvador is beyond me. Keep in mind that this is coming just weeks after Trump gave a blanket pardon to all of the January 6th insurrectionists. In short - you can't just look at Laws are written on paper, you have to factor in the broader context in which they're being applied and enforced.

Give 'em credit, they're better at psychological projection than anyone else on the planet. Trump Derangement Syndrome, indeed. https://www.fox9.com/news/minnesota-senator-justin-eichorn-arrest

Thanks, my district is on that list. This is an encouraging sign - at least some Dems are realizing that they need to be campaigning their asses off over the next four years, while activists like myself are out on the streets building a civil resistance campaign against Trump's regime. One or the other on their own aren't going to cut it.

Also, since Blue Dog Dems were brought up, Blue Dogs don't have to be spineless and unimaginative - the current mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan, is great example of how they can have have both convictions and be a creative and empathic force for change that inspires people. (Detroiters such as myself generally agree that Dugan is the best mayor we've had in decades).

100%. Some of the best messaging I've seen has been from the Lincoln Project, and from Christians who are disgusted by Trump. The project then is to build a popular front between the Left the Center (including both the Center-Left and the Center-Right) against fascism. 'No Oligarchs. No Kings. Restore the Rule Of Law.' is one way of doing that.

Hard agree. This is a pic from Bernie's 'Fighting Oligarchy' tour from my home town with close to 10,000 people in attendance. (I'm in that crowd!). And below that is some of the messaging I've been creating for the protests I've been attending - 'No Oligarchs. No Kings. Restore The Rule Of Law.'

I %100 agree on the need for national unity and strategic compromise. It's not about being as far Left as possible, it's about having convictions that you're willing to fight for, and a vision of the country that inspires people. In theory you can do that from both the Center and the Left, but at the present moment the progressive wing of the party are almost the only ones doing so - and that needs to change. (Notice that I didn't say 'progressives' in my previous post - I said 'fighting Dems'). What current Democratic leadership is doing isn't strategic compromise - it's foolishly ceding ground to fascism with nothing to show for it, out of mistaken belief that fascist criminals will meet you halfway. It's like thinking that if you're nice to the guy claiming to be the 'wallet inspector', you'll get your wallet back sooner. Part of the reason that MAGA won was that they had a vision of the country that inspired their base - a fascist vision sure, but 'Make American Great Again' worked because Trump voters could project whatever it was they thought that made America 'great'. What the current Democratic leadership is projecting to the country is that they're too feckless and weak to stand up to fascism. 'We can't fight for you because we're in the minority' is objectively terrible messaging that borders on Vichy style complicity. There's a reason that in my hometown of Warren, MI over 10,000 crammed into a High School to a Bernie Sanders rally when it's not an election year. Bernie is speaking to people's actual concerns and desire for real change - progressive economic policies are popular with the American people, and Bernie is an expert at marketing them in a way that makes them seem pragmatic and reasonable. Restoring the rule of law, No Oligarchs No Kings, and protecting popular social programs like Social Security and Medicaid that are a life and death issue for tens of millions of Americans that Dems can leverage to produce a 'rally around the flag' effect when %60 of the country is living paycheck to paycheck and can't afford a $400 emergency without going into debt. "Trump is a puppet for billionaire oligarchs that are waging economic warfare against you and your family" is not only truthful, it's more unifying than running on abstract, vacuous ideals like an 'opportunity economy '. Kamala ran on 'protecting democracy', and it didn't work (keep in mind I'm writing this as someone who canvassed for her, and desperately tried to help her win). The idea that national unity comes from the Democratic Party becoming Republicans-lite is a losing strategy. Future Dems need to run on 'here's how we're going to make your lives better.' Own the fact that they're the party of FDR. Be proud of it, damnit. Offer Americans a second New Deal that will be transformative for the %60 of the country that's living paycheck to paycheck. Messaging needs to shift from "we can't get any legislation passed" to "we're not going to get everything we want due to Trump and his corrupt cronies blocking aid for you and your family, but we're going to fight like hell for it."

Every single Democrat who capitulated on this spending bill needs to be tossed out of Congress, and replaced by fighting Dems who are willing to stand up to fascism. Jeffries and Schumer are content to be the controlled opposition - leadership of the House and Senate needs to be wrenched away from them. We need to begin building a coalition around a viable alternative for both chambers - whether that's AOC, Chris Murphy,or someone else. No more Vichy Democrats in Congress - the stakes are too high to cede any more ground to the criminals who are doing a hostile takeover of our country. 'The Treacherous Ten' :

Representative Al Green, who was tossed out of the State Of The Union for disrupting Trump's hideous lies about Medicaid, showing more courage and humanity than anyone else in the chamber that day. We need to be demanding much more of our legislatures - this shouldn't be the exception. https://youtu.be/Xn1Mtn0RiLY?si=8En71Um-QeVg1qmD

Update: 9000 people (!!!) showed up to the event in my hometown of Warren, MI. (While I was there my guess was maybe two or three thousand in attendance). Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and UAW president Shawn Fain spoke before Bernie. The entire event was highly energetic and incredibly well organized. Would highly recommend attending one of these events if you have the opportunity. Great opportunity for face-to-face solidarity with people from your community.