This is part of a broader rolling catastrophe. Musk is evidently seizing control of the Office of Personnel Management
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-01-31/exclus...
Nasa took down their applied sciences page and is evidently scrubbing the data
https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/1icqchv/why_is_the_nas...
(https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov/)
Lots of other data sets are disappearing too:
https://mashable.com/article/government-datasets-disappear-s...
There is active discussion of this at https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
as well as at https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/
I would just like to point out that Musk is the richest man in the world and is now directing critical areas of the U.S. government. Surely he doesn't have ulterior motives and is looking out for the average person?
If you look back at Germany in the 19th century, nations like Prussia and Austria had this sort of power struggle between the merchant class and the nobility at the advent of steam power.
in this case the de-facto US nobility (rank-and-file career politicians) are being usurped by the bourgeouise (billionaires like Musk) at the advent of AI and tech by promising the working class a combination of culture war policy and relief from the very capitalist excess they themselves endorse. by reducing congress and senate to a simple debate team (conversely similar to the German National Asssembly) the tech-elite are able to seize power once reserved for the crown.
the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?
>the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?
You honestly think that's a question?
Power corrupts. You saw Trump, who in 2016 said he'd get everything done so he'd see no need to run again, he'd have Made America Great Again. He then tried to rig the 2020 election so he could stay in power, despite saying "if I lose the election you'll never hear from me again", and 4 years later, here we are.
These people are here to entrench themselves permanently.
I know that Trump was something of a bad loser when Biden was elected, and that he encouraged the riots on Capitol Hill, but I had not heard (from the media media here in Britain) that he attempted to rig the election. Could you provide a source for this please?
Possibly a reference to the fake electors plot [0], although there was also the phone call to the Georgia secretary of state asking him to find 11,780 more votes [1], the pressure he applied to his VP to reject the election results [2], the subsequent Jan 6 riot that disrupted the certification...
At least some of these were covered by BBC [3, 4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Raffensperger_ph...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Pence#Vote_counting_and_s...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55524838
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55559172
Thank you, vitus!
He also tried to get the DoJ to label the election as suspicious. Don’t have an immediate reference for that but it was surfaced by the Jan 6 committee.
> the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?
Why would they? Once they come for the judges and replace them with “real Americans”, there’s no bottom.
The Federalist Society has been a 40/50 year project to install a judiciary loyal to this coup project. This mix of Christian nationalist theocracy and unitary executive has been their aim all along.
Yea, these guys don't seem like the kind to do any abdicating, voluntarily.
A lot can happen in 4 years though. Maybe self-inflicted catastrophic wounds will drive down support for Trump enough where it becomes possible for R pols and oligarchs to abandon him. Or maybe they'll choose the dark path, and go farther into repressive authoritarianism to stay in power.
The problem for Musk et al is that they are concentrating power directly to Trump, not themselves. They're shackling themselves to the leopard and betting it will never eat their face.
> Maybe self-inflicted catastrophic wounds will drive down support for Trump enough
They will blame women, minorites and especially trans people for all of that.
And when dust settles, those who supported Trump and Musk will see themselves as primary victims - and will blame minorites, women, democracts and trans people for consequences of their own actions.
"Why didn't you stop me from putting my hand in the pain hole?"
> will they abdicate their power
Yeah, no. This is a coup and they are all in. They would not be this blatant about taking control illegally and fast if they expected to leave any institutions to still enforce the law against them.
I laughed when those people self-identified as accelerationists... but holly shit! they knew what it means and were honest.
Historically, they are just a bunch of rich morons that got lucky, got power, and decided to stage a coup. This is not some enlightened movement trying to replace the social norms. It's just your run of the mill personal power switch, and the only notable things about it are it's on a country that has been extremely stable before, and those people are stupid enough to willfully destroy it.
> it's on a country that has been extremely stable before
The US is a known bad design, nation builders working for the United States stopped trying to use this design for new countries in the 20th century, it doesn't work. It's inherently unstable and you previously got very lucky, although you have had a civil war and numerous close calls.
It's like oh, why don't we make coal-powered cars. Well because it's a known bad idea. We actually did try that, it's a bad idea, don't do it again.
And the bad design has severely limited our ability to self-correct.
[Citation Needed]
I'd love to read about the new designs.
The core is the President is kept from becoming a dictator by nothing more than norms. If Trump staffs the military with loyalists, there isn’t much anyone can do to make him do anything. Most other countries have power over the military, particularly in domestic contexts, much more shattered.
In those "newer designs" there is no electoral college. Also various alternative electoral systems have been tried. The winner-takes-all system of the US is known pathological and inevitably results in a two party system. Democracies in Europe most often result in many parties and a necessity to form coalitions. Ireland even goes as far as using IRV and STV.
The issue isn't even in how votes are counted, it's in parliamentary versus presidential republics.
The latter inevitably slide towards autocracy. Too much power is concentrated in one person, who is almost impossible to legally remove before their term is up, and who will happily punish dissenters within the party.
In parliamentary republics, every PM is one internal party vote away from being deposed. You tend to see less of the tail wagging the dog in them.
Literally every other existing democracy is newer. Dig in.
While I absolutely do not like what is happening right now, I cannot agree with your general statement. Could you elaborate?
The US has proper separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. The legislative has a per-state and popular representation. Which part of this is "inherently unstable"?
The only part lacking a proper proportional representation (as in a parliament).
The US Executive is way more powerful than the other powers. It can act as it wishes, and consequences only come years later, if ever.
Also, the per-state representation doesn't seem to lead to good results at all. As you said, the popular representation isn't proportional, what is a more relevant flaw than anything before this point on this comment.
And that is before you get into the details that are actually bad. It's incredible that they managed to stay stable with that electoral system, for example.
That said, looks like they will have an almost perfect opportunity to fix some of those in a few years...
Looking at the human nature while interacts with Capitalism, looks like they will try to concentrate it.
I found it shameful that we hold so much a power hungry war while however as Memento Mori teach us, the only certainty is death, and that power is simply gone.
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives.
They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
> the question will be, after four years, will they abdicate their power or concentrate it?
Musk, Thiel, and their friends clearly intend to consolidate power, and the people they associate with openly advocate for the creation of independent corporate fiefdoms with authoritarian control over society. There is no doubt at this point. These are not good people. They are oligarchs. They are the bitter nerds that just want power for themselves so they can be the bullies.
There are far more nerds (bitter or not) who were not so successful yet are far more clever than these "leaders" are, and they aren't the type to tolerate intolerance...
As far as things like ending EV tax credits musk noted it would hurt his competitors more than him.
It’s all obvious corruption.
EV tax credits under the previous administration applied to almost every EV that wasn't a Tesla. They got Tesla its start, though, so the ladder must be pulled up.
Of course, carbon offsets are still a huge cash cow for Tesla, so Musk won't be eager to touch those.
> applied to almost every EV that wasn't a Tesla
And Tesla?
https://www.tesla.com/IRA
The tax credits were eventually reapplied to Tesla with the changes starting in 2023, but for a while, Tesla had crossed the sales limit so that the credit wasn't available.
It's worth mentioning that situation wasn't unique to Tesla, as GM also crossed the sales limit and had no credit available before 2023.
The phaseout based on units sold was in place as far back as 2018 since Tesla reached it in July 2018 and GM in November 2018. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (effective August 2022, not 2023) reinstated Tesla's eligibility and disqualified a number of other EVs.
Although the Inflation Reduction Act became effective in August 2022, no EV tax credit was available for new Tesla or GM EVs purchased in 2022, regardless of month. The units-sold threshold phaseout was only lifted for purchases made after 2022.
Source: personal experience, as well as https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/manufacturers-and-mod...
You're right, thank you for the fix. My apologies.
> EV tax credits under the previous administration applied to almost every EV that wasn't a Tesla.
Your statement might give somebody the impression that somebody in the previous administration singled out Tesla. This is obviously not correct. EV credits were available to all car makers. But there was a limit and Tesla reached their limit first. And later GM did as well.
I really hope you're being sarcastic.
Sort of obvious sarcasm, no?
In this era? Not so.
Musk is not the richest man in the world. Those lists exclude royalty and other individuals who do not want the extra publicity. The Rothschilds are far richer.
> Those lists exclude royalty and other individuals who do not want the extra publicity
What individual(s)? You just mentioned a family and not an individual. Forbes lists Elon's net worth at $419 billion.
David de Rothschild. The family has lent money to governments and royalty for centuries. You’re not going to find his accurate net worth on Forbes.
Also, any king or dictator effectively owns their nation’s entire treasury, including all real estate. Maduro, for example, is wealthier than Musk.
Elon seems to have bought control over the US treasury, so he's in those leagues.
Our king has to moonlight as a airline pilot.
Our queen emerita is a part-time painter.
I agree with your point but in this parent discussion doesn't make sense just throw "they are way richer than Z person"
Tho in the Maduro sense, which is a dictator that just make sense while he is in power, it's not actually own by him.
As someone living in a monarchy, I can assure you that our regent very much does not own my nation’s treasury.
There is no evidence — reliable, speculative, or otherwise — that suggests Nicolás Maduro's net worth exceeds even $100 billion. It's more likely in the hundreds of millions, not hundreds of billions.
Even the most aggressive speculative estimates from opposition figures, investigative journalists, or geopolitical analysts do not approach that figure.
No credible leaks (like the Panama Papers or Pandora Papers) have hinted at such vast assets tied to Maduro.
No intelligence reports or financial investigations from entities like the U.S. Treasury, the EU, or independent watchdogs have ever approached figures remotely close to hundreds of billions.
OP's point is that Maduro's authority over the whole country effectively grants him control over the resources and the corresponding net worth. It's a stretch but I can see where they are coming from.
The tech oligarchs want to dismantle democracy, receive a gift of 0.5% of Federal land from Trump and establish their own democracy-free fiefdoms. [1]
The social support system in the US is being dismantled and when people can no longer afford to eat, the ensuing riots will provide the necessary trigger to declare martial law and suspend democracy completely.
[1] DARK GOTHIC MAGA: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no
At this point, being a Musk supporter is nothing to be proud of.
I cancelled a Model 3 order and went with a different EV a few years ago. I was starting to soften my stance, and considering a Tesla for my next, but at this point, I have a hard time accepting the idea that buying one wouldn't send a message of implicit support.
Not just that, but I don't want my reputation tarnished.
And they look like shit anyway.
Indeed it is, but maybe is time that we detach a person from their proposals. I wonder how that would be achieved.
So you are suggesting that all posts on news.ycombinator be anonymous?
Ohhhg I think I expressed myself wrongly, I meant for example, the Musk person and his proposals as a public man in politics, should I edit my comment to be more clear?
Still now following.
Are you saying something like, "You know I hate everything Musk stands for, everything he does publicly — but he might be an okay guy as a person"?
I think Musk was a bad example, I mean for example, people wants better health care, and some public person and/or politician proposes better prices in prescriptions drugs at a mid term, then that person who was elect does not only holds the power but also is obligated to follow that project.
It's literally to detach the person from the projects, of course times changes and the elected project can not be achieved by an X factor, tho we should have checks and balances in that too.
Today we follow X or Y politician/party but in this polarization we lost the focus that in the end a politician is elected to execute goal/project and not to hold power and then maybe do it.
(I did the, slightly snarky, original sibling comment, but this comment was better to reply to.)
My understanding of your original comment was similar to how 'JkCalhoun understood it, but this comment reads more like "the country show follow through on decided changes" regardless of who is in power. That I agree more with, with exceptions of course. (One example is maybe Obamas connection with "Obamacare" that is still a thing even though he is not in power.) Perhaps another way to put it is to detach the project from the person, but the person will still be linked (in some way) to the project.
Especially when it comes to international policies. For one, international relations and agreements are (normally) much slower moving and longer lasting than internal ones, and if countries can't depend on agreements lasting longer than the current leadership then such countries will see themselves not taken very seriously.
Kind of like if a president signs a trade deal with his country's closest neighbors and then a few years later instigate a trade war against the same countries.
Pretty much what you said, Obamacare is a great example. Your snarky comment was pretty after I thought about.
First step would be to apologize to a trans woman for unleashing campaign of harassment for making a small ad for a beer and campaign to boycott that beer. You know, for making them first example of what you will do to those who do not sign to your gender idealogy.
What?
Because why would you want to judge someone by the quality of their ideas?
I beg your pardon? I mean more in that we stop following a personification of an idea and start vote in a project itself.
It's more a way for people to start see politics in the medium long term.
This is the downside of the web.
Fortunately we have depository libraries, so some key stuff won’t be destroyed by these barbarians. https://www.gpo.gov/how-to-work-with-us/agency/services-for-...
> Musk is evidently seizing control of the Office of Personnel Management
Suddenly I feel out of the loop when it comes to US politics, how come Musk is suddenly seemingly seizing control of parts of the US government? I don't recall him being on any ballots or anything?
As it so happens he did not appear on any ballots. But Musk (his aides more specifically) have locked federal employees out of their own systems
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-aides-lock-government-...
Evidently set up an on-prem email server at the OPM to send out their emails asking disloyal employees to resign
https://gizmodo.com/federal-employees-sue-agency-over-new-em...
And is attempting to do the same at the US Treasury (edit: I meant to gain access to/control of, not the email server thing)
https://www.finance.senate.gov/chairmans-news/wyden-demands-...
The twitzkrieg seems to be working.
The trouble is, to talk about WHY Musk is attempting to seize control of parts of the US government and why the Trump administration is attempting to censor mass quantities of data would be a political conversation.
Hacker News isn't designed for this. The point at which it becomes mass censorship that computer hackers (in their capacity as The Internet) might take an active role in routing around, is more or less this point: you're quite correct that this is worrying, but up to this point it's been a deeply political conversation and only as it becomes mass censorship and control by technological means, does it become really on-message for Hacker News.
Hacking includes systems, not just code, and what Musk is doing certainly counts as systems hacking I would say.
Hell, Captain Crunch didn't even use a computer.
Oh, I don't disagree. I'm getting downvotes as if I didn't think this was Hacker News business. I think it became Hacker News business when unelected guys seized offices and computer systems and started doing… what? We don't know, but there's a lot of data deleting, censoring, and grant-freezing going on.
I'm leaning very hard into an HN 'tone' with this because this is Hacker News. There's other places where I can be a lot more direct, but the HN tone is perfectly valid as a response: being able to think dispassionately is both tactically and strategically useful as long as it's not purely used to obfuscate.
I fear HN folks have been sheltered from a lot of the reality of what's happening and led down the garden path BY intentionally asserting that tone anytime things get too assertive, but the tone still has its uses.
edit: woof! Ok ok, this is fully HN business and always was. Right on. Sorry I even suggested it could ever be otherwise. I didn't give my fellow nerds enough credit :)
> to talk about WHY Musk is attempting to seize control of parts of the US government and why the Trump administration is attempting to censor mass quantities of data would be a political conversation.
In an attempt to keep it non-political: perhaps they (DOGE) are trying to put a "freeze" on the records while they consider who to fire. That would imply DOGE does not trust the people who have access to the records not to alter them in their favor. (Irony, since DOGE is demanding trust themselves.) You might not agree with that reason, but it is a reason.
Musk was appointed as the administrator of DOGE, itself a subordinate "temporary organization" under the United States DOGE Service (formerly the United States Digital Service).
All of this is happening within the Executive Office of the President, which is essentially fancyspeak to mean the government employees working the Executive Branch of the federal government. Those government employees serve at the pleasure of the President; Congress only has very limited influence (namely budgetary influences from the House and certain positions that require Senate confirmation).
So Musk, being appointed as a part of the Executive Branch, derives authority vested in the President of which Trump has delegated some to Musk for the purposes of implementing and enforcing DOGE policies.
Musk for his part also serves at the pleasure of the President, so whatever he does is ostensibly what Trump wants regardless of who actually does it.
Most federal workers do not serve at the pleasure of the President, ever since the Pendleton Act in 1883:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Refo...
So remember, when Trump talks about the "deep state," he means workers hired through a merit system.
> In January 1981, the Jimmy Carter administration settled the court case Luévano v. Campbell, which alleged the Professional and Administrative Careers Examination (PACE) was racially discriminatory as a result of the lower average scores and pass rates achieved by Black and Hispanic test takers. As a result of this settlement agreement, PACE, the main entry-level test for candidates seeking positions in the federal government’s executive branch, was scrapped.[36] It has not been replaced by a similar general exam, although attempts at replacement exams have been made. The system which replaced the general PACE exam has been criticized...
People couldn't agree what merit was, and sued over it. Now it's not only [still] unclear what merit is, but it's also unclear how aligned federal hiring practices are with any platonic ideal of "merit".
Trump and Elon taking a blowtorch to a lot of agencies isn't better, or even good. It looks to me like a different kind of bad that can't be quantified at the moment. Some of the worst of this will be temporary, since various resources are offline so that federal agencies can be compliant with Trump's EOs while they figure out how to change the resources and their databases, or wait for lawsuits to clarify before changing much or putting it back online.
Hiring through a merit system does not imply that the employees' work is meritful.
Congress had over 140 years (1883 to 2024) to carefully balance the rights of civil service workers against the need for top-down executive authority to ensure agencies are effective, in a way that would survive judicial review. Unfortunately, Congress is inept at almost everything. The Pendleton Act, followed by the CSRA, don't seem to have very well addressed the original patronage-based exec-branch staffing issue; as the article describes it, they've only ensured that replacing high-level staff is delayed by a term. Have they also made it too difficult to dismiss lower-level staff if agencies are ever in need of scaling back?
I'd be very surprised to find Musk went through the trouble of becoming an actual employee with a Salary. Are cabinet members very often volunteers?
The US is undergoing a fascist takeover basically.
You’re being downvoted but looking from the outside in, Gitmo being scaled up to house 30k people that the administration expects never to be able to repatriate, an unelected billionaire running around destroying institutions and a president actively starting trade wars and threatening occupation with allies looks an awful lot like it.
People aren't downvoting because they disagree about what's happening. They are downvoting because they agree with fascism, but don't like it when people say the truth out loud. It's a fundamental reality of fascism that those who support it will also deflect all valid criticism of their movement.
A majority of U.S. voters chose this. After all that was already known about this admin, they aren't backing down, he's doing what he promised he would do.
It is going to be more catastrophic than I think anyone knows.
Nitpick - fewer than fifty percent of votes went to trump
I was sure this was wrong, but it's true: according to official state counts, Donald Trump won 49.80% of the popular vote to Kamala Harris's 48.32%. The top 5 was rounded out by Jill Stein (0.56%), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (0.49%), and Chase Oliver (0.42%) [1].
[1] https://www.fec.gov/resources/cms-content/documents/2024pres...
(yes, I'm aware of the irony of linking to federal agency data in this thread)
archive it, quick! Can't have that data around contradicting the landslide and all :)
Why would it be surprising enough to need verification? There was more than 2 candidates and the US presidential election is always very close.
While technically true the difference between 49.8 and 50.01 is quite small and not very interesting. I think the major point was probably that a lot of US citizens don't vote.
He also has the assurance from SCOTUS that he can do no wrong as POTUS. That's a very disconcerting thought about the supposed checks and balances. Now that his party controls both houses, he'll never be impeached for anything he does either. And that was the one limit that Trump was stipulating existed--the only way POTUS could get in trouble was to be convicted in the Senate after the House impeaches. So he essentially is untouchable.
If fascism means secure borders, an end to the kinetic conflict in Ukraine, an end to social media censorship, and a booming economy, more than half the country will vote for fascism. Promises fulfilled or not aside.
Trump tariffs are definitely not going to make the economy boom...
This is literally a Trump press release. Are you aware there were new tariffs announced today?
And how does this make the economy boom, exactly?
"Some things are more important than GDP".
Ah, so it won't help the economy. Funny how you've moved the goalpost so far that you're now arguing against your own claim.
The article we're discussing talks about removal of publicly accessible data. Huge amounts of it. How is that better than "social media censorship"?
At some point you're going to have to stop spouting the bullshit talking points and accept that this administration are actively worse on most metrics that they campaigned on improving.
Lmao. Nope. US is reclaiming the common sense
I won't argue about immigration here because I don't want to get mired in that shit, but what is common sense about denying the existence of climate change and attempting to destroy/reverse our progress as a nation against it, and further engaging in activities to make it worse rather than alleviate it?
What is common sense about sewing chaos in the federal government, inhibiting it's ability to function? In removing datasets that help us keep track of how effective our actions are?
Not every person in the government is elected. Some positions are appointed. Not one judge from SCOTUS is elected. None of the members of the president's cabinet are elected. They are all Senate confirmed though, which is what's going on now with the current clown show. Somehow, Musk has created a role for himself where he even gets to bypass the Senate confirmation stage. That's the most disconcerting thing to me. Not that I think he wouldn't get confirmed, but the fact that he has this much power totally unchecked.
> the fact that he has this much power totally unchecked.
I think this is just a symptom of the amount of power the office of the president has accumulated over the years. Musk has no authority on his own; he's acting on the authority of the president.
Due to the number of things Congress has delegated to the executive branch over the years, that's quite a lot of unchecked power indeed. But it's not Musk's power, it's the president's.
President add unelected civilians to their cabinet every election.
Did anyone elect Anthony Blinken? Janet Yellen? Lloyd Austin?
None of these people were elected yet have substantial power delegated through the President.
And while these people were approved by Senate vote, plenty of people in the Biden circle weren’t - Chief of Staff, members of the National Security Council, etc.
The "defender of free speech" is censoring data? Who ever thought about it?
A lot of "woke" people warned it but several ignored as being "political speech" now we pay the consequences.
Only paranoid SJWs called Musk a right wing person and here we are, watching Musk fund extreme right clearly proving them wrong. Those SJW were doing this thing whole my life, seems to me. There was always outrage about them accusing an innocent person of bad stuff ... only to turn out they were actually right.
How is this not all illegal? How are cease and resists not being put into place? An illegal immigrant, narcissist, billionaire, and many other things is taking over federal agencies and actively purging them for his own ideologies.
It's only illegal if someone enforces the law
Anything the president does is legal so says the supreme court
I'm surprised that this was not given more attention, despite how much it was given, it should have gotten orders of magnitudes more.
In the US, you can fly multiple planes into skyscrapers, rape three whole kindergartens, and lynch an entire race to extermination. As long as you then win the next election before you get convicted, you're in the clear.
This is the United States of America.
Vulgar examples? The bare minimum necessary to make people remotely feel the severity in their bones. Problem is that no one dares to say them out loud in fear of their reputation, despite it being a good thing to do.
Absolutely. That begs the question though, if Trump has ordered federal employees to make the government efficient and eliminate the weaponization of government, are those employees not obligated to remove Trump and Musk from their current roles?
Laws are just words
I see these kinds of comments regularly and am curious: what is your thought process? What makes you think that it's not illegal? What makes you think that legality matters here?
what makes me think it is illegal. I dont think there is a congressional law that X data must be hosted at a given URL.
Can you just state what you would like to?
I did
You made no statements.
Correct, I asked a question, which is what I wanted to do :)
They are saying it's likely illegal but it doesn't matter because the law does not apply to certain people. No consequences for illegal activity will ever touch Trump or Musk.
Well that is my opinion of the situation, but other people had already covered that well enough so I didn't feel the need to. I was curious about what thought process results in the assumption that what they're doing is legal, so I asked.
"I see these kinds of comments regularly and am curious"
This clearly states the person's feelings (curiosity) about some observations (seeing comments of a particular sort).
I hate to sound like a conventional cis-man, but this is exactly the sort of situation where conventional cis-man energy is needed:
Where are the CDC people growing a spine to stand up to this? This is obviously bad.
The reason why bullies only understand 1 language (force) is exactly why counter-bullies who also speak that language are needed. And these are (usually) men (and some smaller percentage of women). (I'm seriously not trying to genderize this. I'm speaking of "fighting/disobeying/confronting energy" instead of "nurturing/complying/keeping-copacetic energy". Anyone who's good at that, should exercise it.)
If you have to take good science to the darknet, then fucking do so. That's what it's there for.
"The [Dark]Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore.
Alternately, move the data hosting to Switzerland, Iceland, or the Netherlands as a data-haven. Hetzner might be OK too, since very-left-wing Germany (while it has an agreement to comply with legal MLAT requests) might savor the opportunity to snub Trumpian requests or stall them indefinitely due to lack of obvious national-security importance.
Sorry, I couldn't get through your third paragraph without hearing the "Team America: World Police" pussies/dicks speech in the background.
But your argument is inherently flawed. Part of the point of government is to regulate and direct the use of force. We have mechanisms that are supposed to apply force to "bullies". The problem is that the "bullies" have co-opted that system to use it for their own ends. This happened gradually so it didn't become obvious until the most recent "bully" decided he didn't even want to pretend that he wasn't in control.
Individuals who directly stand up to this administration will be hammered down with the full force of the government. The best we can hope for is a passive resistance and malicious compliance. That combined with grassroots efforts to fill the media with protests of objectionable policies is probably the best we can do for now.
The only other option is to apply force outside of the system to correct it, but things are not nearly to the point where revolution is the better option.
> The problem is that the "bullies" have co-opted that system to use it for their own ends. This happened gradually so it didn't become obvious until the most recent "bully" decided he didn't even want to pretend that he wasn't in control.
The funny thing is that people have always said this exact thing except paraphrased in various ways (perhaps the term was less "bully" and something more conventionally a universal term of disparagement like "fascist"). I definitely didn't want Obama going after whistleblowers, increasing domestic surveillance and not closing Guantanamo when I voted him in... and I liked his healthcare plan, until it died...
I suspect that everyone says this when the person they didn't want in charge, now is, and starts doing things that their biased media always depicts only the negative side of.