Elected representatives are going to be intransigent until a point in the very near future, when they realize they're about to be voted out en masse and their voters don't like them as much as they like another guy -- who isn't going to be on the ballot with them. So keep reminding them.
That happened - it was 2024. It's really seeming like Democrat politicians don't actually care about winning elections. They did terribly and they're still doing terribly and not acknowledging they're doing terribly, when they should have the easiest job in the world running against Trump.
The scale of the protests means the protests are already working. They’re as much about spreading awareness and mobilizing the voting public as they are about current events.
I don’t see a connection between their efficacy and what happened in Minnesota, which was an event that is arguably all the more reason to protest.
Good strategy if voting is still allowed in 2028, not super useful if political violence bubbles over into a coup or such.
The scale of the protests is encouraging, but I remember the mass protests under Bush were about as large, and the war continued and he stayed in power. Organization needs to do something with the mass of people who are out in the streets to direct them.
Voting is always allowed. No matter how corrupt the country, no matter if it's ruled by a dictator, even in a "Free Democratic Union of Independent People's Republics", there's always going to be an election sooner or later.
Whether the elections are fair and the opposition is even allowed to field a candidate... now that's a different story.
Like the Blue Wave I was promised in 2024? When we took the house or senate or presidency? Invigorated, of course, by the Presidential candidate threatening war on allies, the revocation of addition rights (following the death of RvW), etc?
Because Trump reliably makes at least one statement in support of ANY point in possibility space.
You can pull-quote Trump saying literally anything, from being pro-gun to anti-gun, pro-queer to radically anti-queer, literal child molester to saint.
His words literally don't matter, because he says them all.
I mean, I'm voting and I'll tell everyone to vote. Support my preferences publicly, of course.
But given the combined discrepancy between Harris vs the Attorney General in every single county of NC, the Elon contact for those voting machines, and Trump saying it out loud, I'm kind of at the point I'm not sure if the last election was legitimate. I don't have a lot of hope for 2026 or 228 since we're already past "the US military is deployed against its own citizens and make an extra-constitutonal arrest" stage with no consequences. Also the "disobey the Supreme Court" stage. But I guess we'll see and it'll be a great day to be proven wrong.
Though, I hardly even called America a democracy before that given the intense Gerrymandering, a lack of an established right/obligation to vote, and completely disproportionate representation in legislation. The whole system is a joke in it's design.
Some wisdom: There are and have always been problems with American democracy. Yet at the end of the day vote counts and protest counts are the things that change the country's trajectory.
Part of the toxicness of current news media is the "And this can never be changed" doomerism.
Bullshit. Everything can be changed. It just takes action and convincing others to take action.
Protests mostly make people feel good, but rarely invoke change. MLK did not accomplish his goals through life, it was the violence that followed that precipitated actual change. Did RvW protests stop the SC? Did Palestine protests stop our involvement with Israel? Did Occupy Wall Street work? Did the LEO system get reformed after the massive Floyd protests? No. Not a single one of those protests with tens of millions of total participants worked.
France didn't preserve their retirement age by walking around with signs. They had to get disobedient. Break shit, stop collecting trash or running services.
Shockingly, people who are going to fuck you for power or money could care less if you're upset about being fucked. And now that the majority of media in America is controlled by 7 billionaires and they've spent 30 years justifying shooting or run over protestors, they're calling the bluff and betting Americans will roll over and take it.
Rhetoric doesn't match. Marx literally said that the only for the working class to overthrow their oppressors (business owners) was to make them not a live.
I find Capital to be a fairly moderate look at the situation - a lot of it is essentially an economics textbook. Marx was almost an optimist compared to the power capital has today, if you look at his predictions.
I think largely they have not yet been effective at protecting immigrants.
> They’re as much about spreading awareness and mobilizing the voting public as they are about current events.
Right, so to some degree they "work" as tools for existing political groups in attracting attention, resources and possibly votes. But does it better enable those groups to actually help immigrants? Or does it just give political organizations a powerful talking point in the midterms?
The latter is probably the strongest route to actually doing something, because there's no accountability within the system until both Senate and House have flipped D.
People power - that was an excellent display of it this last weekend. BLM, Civil Rights Movement, and Vietnam are the only ones comparable. All of those built up - Vietnam was bc it was the first time people could see war like that, and we were sending lottery drafted 18 year olds - those very big deals.
This is solely in response to what has happened since January 21st of this year.
That's incredible actually. Concerning for sure if you planned on people being sheep.
When someone attempted to assassinate Trump would you have lumped all of those against Trump into "they"?
I don't support what the current administration is doing; not by a long shot. But to say, "they did just shoot two elected representatives," is disingenuous at best.
I have lumped every people with roughly the same ideology as the Trump shooter in a 'they'.
I don't remember the exact sentence but it was something like that: "That's the issue with pandering to violent conspiracy theorists, if they feel betrayed they will aim that violence at you".
Publicly they'll wring their hands and tell us a bunch of BS about how violence outside of the state is bad and whatnot but behind the scenes they'll go back to their research people and their focus groups and try and get to the bottom of whether it was just one crazy or an outlier who's of an existing trend in opinion they ought to care about. Same as they did when that CEO got shot.
Only one person shot two elected representatives, and AFAIK, his pronouns are not "they". There is zero evidence that he is part of some larger plan, and I have seen zero evidence of anyone cheering on his heinous acts (unlike with a recent left-wing murderer, who was lauded as upstanding and handsome).
I watched large portions of the right wing immediately denounce the killings as a left-wing assassination. I don't think any of these people truly believed that left-wing assassins conducted a targeted execution of two Democrats in a tightly-divided R/D state legislature: I think it was a very deliberate effort to confuse the news reporting and minimize the damage of their divisive rhetoric, until something else (a war) pushed it out of the spotlight.
TBH, I want such reps to be loud about that. We need to stop pretending that the right is not leveraging stochastic terrorism. The problem doesn't go away by ignoring it.
Yes, that's risky. Some people might get hurt. A lot of people are being hurt, and will continue to be hurt, by the current situation. We all have to make our own choices about when principles and long-term outcomes outweigh our instinct for self preservation.
It seems like it would be possible for state and local forces (police) to arrest and imprison ICE agents that are acting illegally. Specifically, arrest them for kidnapping when the nab people off the streets. Sure, they'll get out because they can lie and pretend they have cause; but they could be locked up for a while at least. And do it enough, and maybe they'll start thinking twice before acting stupid.
I have bad news about the police. They are exactly the same as ICE. If they fight it would be more like gang warfare over turf and money, since that is all they really are.
Your outrage is not that ICE is acting illegally but that they are enforcing US law. Having local law enforcement launch some kind of insurrection is the kind of myopic nonsense you would have condemned a few years ago, even months. Heck, for the last 50 years the Imperial Presidency also was a bipartisan consensus.
It looks different when it's your ox getting gored, but the solution is actually temperance, restraint and dialog.
I hear story after story about ICE kidnapping folks, wearing masks, not showing ID (in fact, being told _not_ to wear id). And story after story of those folks being held without the ability to consult a lawyer, or see their families, etc. And story after story of people being deported without due process. And story after story of judges saying very clearly that this is illegal. And ordering it to stop. And yet it continues.
So no, I'm not outraged that they are enforcing US law. I am outraged that they are breaking US law in the name of enforcing it. And I think they should be forced to stop it. And clearly, the judicial branch telling them it's illegal isn't getting them to stop.
Mostly because they're acting as agents of the president's agenda, and as such, even if one were to prosecute them for their crimes, the president would just blanket-pardon them all and executive-order that they're immune to any legal enforcement against them, and the toadies in D.C. would roll over and allow it all to happen.
But none of that has to do with a president's own qualified immunity.
ICE isn't inheriting the president's qualified immunity; they have it because they're government employees. It doesn't matter if they're acting in the presidents interests or not and for state employees if they're acting in the governors interests or not.
Pardon is a very clearly enumerated power of the president so any usage of it is very clearly legal (although typically undesirable).
The problem with the presidential pardon is that it enables the president or his accomplices to carry out any amount of federal crimes. See Iran-Contra.
We do not have to sit back and let this happen.