DocWatts

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; some of the victims are US citizens. 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

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! 😆