It’s not illegal for the rich to pay to skip the line. (For the uninitiated, at first glance it would appear Elon was in violation of his J-1 student visa as he didn’t attend classes at Stanford, but he was swiftly employed by way of an H1-B visa and had the paperwork fast tracked through his VC-DC connections. His brother did refer to himself and Elon as illegal immigrants tho, I would say no more illegal than our First Lady.)
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread
He was never enrolled at Stanford and was working while on a J-1. That is visa fraud. It's likely, because he never even enrolled in classes, that he intentionally applied to Stanford with the intention to never go to school there but to instead use it as a front to start working in Silicon Valley. And it's possible he even overstayed his J-1 visa while waiting on an H1-B.
It’s a sketchy story, he was technically in violation of his J1 visa since he was skipping classes and picked up an H1B work visa for his own startup which J1 strictly requires prior authorization for. It would seem he had some strings pulled and got post-hoc pre-authorization, or otherwise took advantage of some grace period and applied for the new visa with a fib. It’s all water under the bridge now, from a brief googling Denaturalization is rare except for cases of concealing crimes committed during naturalization or sham marriages. Lying on your application should revoke it from you but if it’s merely an omission, I don’t know, comes down to political will to prosecute, maybe if he pisses trump off enough somebody will “look into it”
please avoid weasel words like "technically" - he immigrated illegally, and it was not prosecuted because he is white and wealthy. This is important, since he is now part of a very harsh crackdown against people who are much more vulnerable than he ever has been, and who committed less serious and more understandable infractions.
It would be unfair to retroactively remove someone's citizenship for illegally overstaying their own visa... But if you're punishing the child for their parents doing it, then it's just common-sense justice! /S
Right. Because that's how presidential elections work - the president must do everything personally for the next 4 years and is not allowed to use other people to act on his behalf. That's what Biden did all 4 years for example.
Trump was elected, and he was born in the US, though he does have German ancestry. As an immigrant myself, I personally find it very worrying though that it becomes normal to use foreign descent as a slur in the American political debate. I thought at least the left is supportive of immigrants, but looks like it's conditional on political views and no person of foreign descent can feel safe from attack because of their origin.
This is my big struggle with all of this. His first term I felt America was duped by a con man so protested and made a fuss on social media. Americans saw the first four years and astonishingly decided they wanted more of it, by a decent margin.
So while I absolutely hate what is going on right now this seems to be what the people wanted. I question each day whether that needs to be respected or we should resist.
I also wonder if his supporters have any idea of what is going on. I am sure fox news isn't covering any of this and if they are it's probably being spun in some horrific way.
> I also wonder if his supporters have any idea of what is going on.
They do not. Most of his supporters are either rich or uneducated normal people who lack the mental capacity to realize what's going on. They just repeat the talking points. Respond to anyone of them with a non-talking point, compassion, and honesty and they just shut down. They haven't a clue about what's really going on. I bet none of his supporters even know who Robert Mercer is, the person that got him elected in the first place.
I feel like you're interacting with the same people I'm interacting with because your assessment of them is spot on. They love the talking points. Whenever you shut down one talking point with facts they pole vault over that into the next talking point. They want to be 20 ft up in the air away from the truth and never question why they've been lied to. They believe and even make up wild conspiracy theories on the spot when confronted with information that conflicts with what Trump and his supporters have said and done. Their brains leap over every possible barrier I put up, never letting it stop them. Maybe I'm not a good debater but facts are facts and they don't seem to appreciate or respect or even value them. I need to find a new, less depressing group of people to be around which will unfortunately mean quitting my job but I just can't do it anymore.
+1 I spend a lot of time engaging with these folks in good faith as well, and exact same pattern.
Repeat statement from Trump -> demonstrate that it's untrue -> repeat statement from Trump on new topic -> demonstrate that it's untrue -> repeat statement from Trump on new topic -> demonstrate that it's untrue
Don't live in the US, but I got the impression that a lot of people actually saw positive change in their lives in the first round, which is a pretty good reason to want more.
Do you honestly believe your news is being spun any less?
Yes I read high quality news sources- the WSJ, NYTimes, foreign affairs and a few others like the national review and mother Jones from time to time. I hear this argument a lot and my issues with Trump were from the primary source- his own words and tweets.
The economy was already humming when Trump first entered office and despite his best efforts it continued to do so through his term.
I feel like his first term benefitted from his administration being wholly unprepared to govern, as witnessed by the numerous stories of there effectively being no transition plan for a vast majority of departments.
The only real policy victory his first term was the TCJA. Otherwise, it was a lot of bark, no bite.
But now with four years to prepare, they came in barking and biting like hell.
Ironically, losing in 2020 gave MAGA time to create a game plan which we’re seeing in action now. A second Trump term right after the first would have been more effectual than the first, but not to the degree we’re seeing now.
You are free to believe what you want to believe and to seek out media that will tell you what you want hear.
Those of use living in the real world don't have the luxury of believing what ever makes us feel good; we seek out and even pay for journalism that describes the world as it is and not just how we want it to be.
Or election were hacked, but not the way you think.
Social media was weaponized and turned into a tool that manipulates people's view of the reality. Each person gets a personalized feed that presses their buttons to think certain way.
For example with war in gaza.
If for example you were pro Israeli, you will see content that Harris was siding with Hamas, and trump actually was the most Israel friendly candidate.
If you were supporting Palestine you would get that there's no difference between Harris and trump, and it is best to do protest vote.
Same with leaning too much to the left, or not enough to the left etc.
Pretty much every issue was handled this way. People who got their news from social media had no idea what her stance were on any topic, because that was filtered.
Few years ago we had huge scandal about Cambridge Analytica, there was a bit loud about it and then died out, meanwhile it all continued and was perfected.
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook manipulated older generation. While TikTok managed to capture younger, left leaning generation and make it more apathetic.
I don't think it is a coincidence that pretty much all social media (except the Chinese TikTok) was present on his inauguration.
I also don't think it is a coincidence that all social media companies have involvement with AI. With it, they no longer need humans to generate content, so the whole manipulation is much easier to do.
This isn't just isolated to US and it is being used in Europe too. Look at elections in Moldova, Romania, what's happening in Germany etc.
Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century" book is a must read so we can prevent this.
> Social media was weaponized and turned into a tool that manipulates people's view of the reality
I really dislike this argument. It shifts responsibility from the voters to evil nebulous puppet-masters. I reject that. At some point, you have to accept that people can think and make decisions for themselves.
Yeah. Everyone is convinced ads don't work on them, yet somehow it is a trillion dollar industry.
Perhaps you are lucky and don't have anyone in your family affected by disinformation.
I have family members that no longer watch TV, listen radio, read news papers. All "news" they are getting is from sources that also tell them that all other sources lie.
They live in complete different reality that it is a distorted mirror of actual reality.
Is it reasonable that social media influencers may be assigned some degree of credit? After all they are generally effective at selling products.
I also agree that people have responsibility for their actions. For example, it has been personally sobering to observe some friends and colleagues agree that defunding PEPFAR and putting 20 million lives at risk was morally the right thing to do.
He’s an elected president, not an elected dictator. It’s totally reasonable in our democracy to say that you don’t get to do anything everything you want just because you got 51% of the vote.
We have a constitution and separation of powers which many seem to have forgotten about this week
What is "the people" at this point, even? Is there really such a thing as "American people" that can be meaningfully defined? What would be its ideals?
I'm sorry, but how many non-voters were physically unable to vote? My heart goes out to them. But everyone else, who chose to stay home, chose to let others speak for them.
Everyone who decided not to vote literally relinquished their voice in the matter. They simply don't count. They were "OK" with whatever others decided. Their opinion has as much weight as my dog's (and I don't even have a dog!).
Not a contradiction at all. And this isn't about "sanewashing" Trump.
There is a set of people eligible to vote. There is a set of people who do vote. Anyone in the first set who chooses not be in the second set, is no longer included in statements about What The People Want. You snooze, you lose.
The time to say whether you want or don't want a President is in November. You stay quiet then, you don't get to complain in January "This isn't what I wanted!" To stay home by choice is be OK with whatever outcome others decide.
And those others spoke clearly that this is the outcome they wanted.
Honestly, my head hurts at the apologism over non-voters. If you don't vote, you don't count!
You're saying that 7 people could vote with the rest of the nations staying home, and then when Bob wins with 3/7 votes, I can say: "Look, the people spoke very clearly that they wanted Bob!"
No, that'd be frickin' insane, since:
1. Basically none of the "the people" ever "spoke" at all.
2. Even when non-voters somehow aren't "the people", there's nothing remotely "clear" Bob winning with a minority.
The moral fiber of nonvoters is irrelevant, this is about how you exaggerated a weak signal to the point of outright falsehood.
Can we then openly call republican voters guilty then? Instead of pretending that people voting for that party are good people? I do agree that many wanted the harm and that is why they voted for Trump.
I don't know. For years and years, center acted on the assumption it is unwise to be anything but accommodating and nice. Center enabled raise of extremism by tacitly suporting them.
Trump won by being not nice. Democrats lost by being nice.
Yeah, I’m obviously sympathetic to this view. I think things have changed in the last few days. This hostile takeover is going to be very bad for a lot of GOP and MAGA folks too and we need to ensure they’re ire is pointed in the right direction.
Americans are desperate. May not be felt among the HN crowd, but standards of living in the US have been declining consistently for a long time [1]. Remember that Trump was not re-elected to a second term initially specifically because he failed to deliver on his promise of "MAGA". He instead did a Jeb Bush presidency, complete with Wall Street (Mnuchin) and the CIA (Pompeo) running the country exactly as would have occurred had Bush won. So Americans tried Biden, in the hopes of a return to Obama era America. This obviously didn't happen, as standard of living continued to decline. So they tried Trump again, in sheer desperation.
I don't see a positive future for the US, as it is so clearly a declining empire, exhibiting every textbook symptom. The startup/tech crowd loves talking about cheap phones and "services", but the reality is bleak outside of this narrow tech bubble.
Nah. You cant explain fascism just by them being desperate economically. That is not how it works. They did not had to have Trump to be representant of the republican party again. If they were bothered by economics, they would pick someone else even if they wanted to change parties.
They wanted to cause harm for reasons unrelated to economics.
It rings a bit hollow when the single most popular president in recent history was Obama. If the US can cope with him what is the problem with women supposed to be? Harris was an unusually weak candidate; the primary system is supposed to shake people like that out and the Democrats were left in a disadvantageous place after bypassing it.
One of the reasons Trump is getting all these historic wins is because the US Democrats refuse point blank to do some introspection and ask if their policy positions are effective. Name-calling and shaming tactics turned out to not be good enough to stop Trump, so there is an interesting question of who they could stop and under what circumstances they could be politically successful.
Indeed. If the DNC had allowed Bernie Sanders to run against Trump, Sanders would very likely have beaten him and Trump would have remained a reality TV star. Instead, they pushed Clinton on Democrats just like they pushed Harris this cycle. The corruption within the DNC is very much to blame for Trump.
I refuse to accept the childish assertion that the majority of American voters are card carrying members of a radical political system that was defeated last century. This is just an emotional response to a reality that one does not want to accept.
> It rings a bit hollow when the single most popular president in recent history was Obama
Does it? It was when Obama got elected that Republicans started freaking out. Take a look at the 2008 Republican party platform [1]. On energy they talk about wanting an energy supply that is diverse, reliable, and cleaner.
They say "In the long run, American production should move to zero-emission sources, and our nation's fossil fuel resources are the bridge to that emissions-free future". They wanted more domestic oil to reduce foreign dependance, more nuclear (specifically calling out that it is zero-carbon. They also said
> Alternate power sources must enter the mainstream. The technology behind solar energy has improved significantly in recent years, and the commercial development of wind power promises major benefits both in costs and in environmental protection. Republicans support these and other alternative energy sources, including geothermal and hydropower, and anticipate technological developments that will increase their economic viability. We therefore advocate a long-term energy tax credit equally applicable to all renewable power sources.
> Republicans support measures to modernize the nation's electricity grid to provide American consumers and businesses with more affordable, reliable power. We will work to unleash innovation so entrepreneurs can develop technologies for a more advanced and robust United States transmission system that meets our growing energy demands
Read that to a Republican today without telling them where it is from and they will probably guess it was from Biden.
They also pushed conservation:
> Conservation does not mean deprivation; it means efficiency and achieving more with less. Most Americans today endeavor to conserve fossil fuels, whether in their cars or in their home heating, but we can do better. We can construct better and smarter buildings, use smarter thermostats and transmission grids, increase recycling, and make energy-efficient consumer purchases. Wireless communications, for example, can increase telecommuting options and cut back on business travel. The Republican goal is to ensure that Americans have more conservation options that will enable them to make the best choices for their families.
Here's what they said about cars:
> We must continue to develop alternative fuels, such as biofuels, especially cellulosic ethanol, and hasten their technological advances to next-generation production. As America develops energy technology for the 21st century, policy makers must consider the burden that rising food prices and energy costs create for the poor and developing nations around the world. Because alternative fuels are useless if vehicles cannot use them, we must move quickly to flexible fuel vehicles; we cannot expect necessary investments in alternative fuels if this flexibility does not become standard. We must also produce more vehicles that operate on electricity and natural gas, both to reduce demand for oil and to cut CO2 emissions.
> Given that fully 97 percent of our current transportation vehicles rely on oil, we will aggressively support technological advances to reduce our petroleum dependence. For example, lightweight composites could halve the weight and double the gas mileage of cars and trucks, and together with flex-fuel and electric vehicles, could usher in a renaissance in the American auto industry.
They had a big section on environmental protection which leads of with saying how the aforementioned energy policies will put the US in a good position to address climate change. They go on to spend 7 paragraphs explain a market and technology approach to addressing this.
Compare to the 2012 platform [2] and the 2016 platform [3].
Obama was black man president that broke republican minds. They really got more extreme, refused to cooperate in any way so center "work across the aisle" politics became impossible.
And then they voted for Trump. Ta-Nehisi comment with name "trum is first white president" makes the point better then I would do.
Who is "they"? And yes, you can absolutely explain it with desperation, and arrogance and in-fighting on behalf of the non-fascists.
The issues on the minds of American issues were mostly things like housing, healthcare; economics. Trump at least pretended to be also angry and willing to do something about it, while saying the Democrats were lukewarm would be flattering them.
What is the point of saying "people wanted this"? To legitimize not fighting it? I don't even care what I wanted yesterday, what do I care what someone else wanted last November?
No they weren't. There was huge focus on trans and immigration and vaccinationa. Economic is distant third.
They have continuing quest to make abortions as illegal as possible, the quest for male supremacy, the climate denial ... This was not hold your nose for economics. This was I don't care about economics, I hate others too much.
> What is the point of saying "people wanted this"? To legitimize not fighting it?
I am sick of excessive benefits of the doubt constantly given to the conservatives and their voters. Of sympathetic portraits of poor then while people they harm never get that. Of them lying, knowingly throwing false accusations and then centrists or left being blamed for not being nice to then.
Yes it should be fought. But it is not true that republican voters were victims of something when eventually Musks actions harm some of them. They wanted to cause harm and will cause more harm to people not like them.
Not a mention of 'COVID' anywhere on this page (thank you Ctrl+F). Surely, it had a role in how we got here, at least inflation-wise?
Has it slipped so easily from the face of History? Let's just hope its not a new pandemic that provides that final false-flag style push into fascism, as an excuse for suspending democracy. Those Republicans who will say one final time that we aren't a democracy ("we're a republic!") will be sorry for the seeds they have sown.
He won the popular vote by less than Hillary won it in 2016, _when she lost the election._ Every time he's been candidate or president, he's the least popular of either in the history we've polled popularity or approval. Many pluralities who constitute "America" (felons, especially when you consider how many people we imprison; and immigrants) who are subject to US law don't get to vote. And many institutions (DC not having senators, Puerto Rico, and the Senate generally) are barely representational and serving the function of democracy.
So I know it makes you feel intelligent and cool to say "ah, but you see: this is what they wanted," but in every other way you can measure it besides the very narrow way you're focused on, it's as untrue as it could be.
Where did Trump promise to remove Phyllis Fong? Or something less specific that would translate to this? He promised to lower egg prices, and "the majority of the few people voted for Trump, so any random thing he now does is what THE AMERICAN PEOPLE wanted" is just not true.
And even if it was, to me the question isn't "did someone else want this at some point in the past, probably based on false or even no information" anyway, but how to judge it now. Sometimes people want wrong things for shitty reasons and a minority has to stand up to them standing on their principles.
Social media made them think that some problems were huge and these elected people would solve them, while at the same time demonizing all other media so all signals that these people are not right were effectively muted.
Where do you get that from? Huge numbers didn’t vote. Of those who did Trump squeaked by with a small lead but significantly less than 50% of the populace voted for him.
So a false flag and then martial law, maybe after taking over most law enforcement? The project 2025 leader did say that the next revolution remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. Maybe this is what the 2nd amendment was for.
One thing you can do is shun employees of associated companies (Amazon, Tesla, Facebook) and refuse to give them a job. That requires some sacrifice though.
Not everyone's standing by I've been working on hardened long range communications for cheap so the people that need it can have it. But thats just me, there's tons of people fighting back but those stories don't tend to make the news because it spits in the face of the prevailing narrative that people want this.
https://piermesh.net/
But the basics are we're using Meshtastic as a base to run a decentralized lightweight alternative internet that's run by the people using it. I've managed to squeeze a lot of juice out of one of the compatible esp32 boards so that for $15+ (what the board costs from Lilygo) an sd card you can run a web server on the board as well.
The purpose of firing Inspectors General en masse is so that there are no independent overseers to investigate illegal or corrupt actions within the executive branch during your term in office.
The specific law that Trump is very obviously breaking is the Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022, which says Congress must be notified 30 days in advance and given "substantive" rationale for dismissing inspectors general.
This law was passed specifically in response to Trump breaking the antecedent law, Inspector General Reform Act of 2008, during his first term.
Will the "party of law and order" do anything? Nope.
The Trump people went extremely well prepared into this. They are spamming with a ton of things, often legally questionable. They know that Congress doesn't have a backbone and lawsuits will take a very long time. It's a brilliant strategy.
A number of (especially recent) administrations have performed a large number of legally questionable acts which were often structured in such a way as to be difficult to challenge (the CFPB comes to mind). Trump’s innovation seems to be taking this tactic to an extreme, remarkably early in this administration.
That’s one of the decisions; on the other hand, the director was made removable at will (by the courts, in response to a challenge, and contrary to the original statute), and there have been other proposed challenges. This change has proved consequential.
I'm tired of congressional Republicans being treated as unmentioned bystanders in this.
Reporters should be pushing microphones in their faces asking why they approve of the latest thing Trump did, or at least what they think of him breaking laws they passed.
Reporters are doing that. But politicians in general and Republicans in particular excel at using rhetorical fallacies and other tactics to avoid answering difficult questions. Here's an example from last year where a bunch of Republicans simply booed and abused a reporter whose question they disliked: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4274345-republican-tells-...
The media has many shortcomings, but how are reporters supposed to hold accountable people who simply do not care?
Title makes it sound like she was in an Neuralink office and physically shoved out the door. The non-clickbait version is that she is in the same agency that started a Neuralink investigation (due to perceive conflicts of interest in its board) and her dismissal has zero substantive connection to neuralink or elon.
Are there any good blogs that are chronicling the USA Federal gov's slow descent into facism and overt corruption, just collecting and archiving pieces like this with a classiciation/categorization etc.?
I think it's an unprecedented opportunity to record the history of a downfall using modern tools, and future generations might benefit enormously.
When I learned about the disruption of the Weimar Republic in highschool, a thing our teacher did was make copious use of newspaper clippings to explain the delta between ground truth and public sentiment, and how certain narratives increased in frequency, etc. He had personally spent quite some time in old archives and on microfilm readers to create his little library. Something like this, but with much more data.
A friend of mine did her master's in political science on crawling data in Islamic extremist social media cycles and trying to correlate activity there with a dataset on terrorist events, trying to find out if you could anticipate them somehow.
This is a loose collection of thoughts, but I think there's something there in the signal.
There's lots of them, but I respectfully submit that doing something about it in the present - whatever you determine that to be, given your skills and inclinations - is a far higher priority than the educational byproduct for future generations.
Using your Weimar example, I would not argue that Germany or humanity is/are better off for having gone through the cataclysm of WW2. In terms of building context, you might find it helpful to read this dry but very detailed examination of the nazi administrative state, and how it delivered economic resources to its political clients through a combination of reorganization, financial engineering, and striaght-up theft:
On a more abstract level, try 'The logic of political survival' by Smith & Bueno de Mesquita. both books will give you a useful framework within which to assess the contextual significance of ongoing news events.
I also think this is a good summary for those who had never heard of Weimar before: https://archive.is/xh2Ci
But like most summaries, it suffers a bit from focusing on the key events, and not capturing this sort of ... change in the ambient noise floor, and what relationship the average citizen had to what was going on, and what perception of events. I think it's the "Would you have been able to tell that it'd get this bad?" is kind of the more interesting part. A political weather forecasting model, if you will.
On the contrary, there used to be "the spoils system." I'm just a sideline listener but I think that's an appropriate lens to look at this through rather than some severe negative, or dangerously harmful trend.
I think trying to bar such a system simply would make the same things covert.
> When I learned about the disruption of the Weimar Republic in highschool, a thing our teacher did was make copious use of newspaper clippings to explain he delta between ground truth and public sentiment, and how certain narratives increased in frequency, etc. He had personally spent quite some time in old archives and on microfilm readeers to create his little library. Something like this, but with much more data.
That sounds interesting. Wish it had been converted into a blogpost or something for more permanence.
> I think it's an unprecedented opportunity to record the history of a downfall using modern tools, and future generations might benefit enormously.
Well, the German atrocities of the Third Reich are well-documented and we are probably just a few years behind the U.S.
The best documentary won't help to prevent backsliding into superstition and barbarism if people don't believe them.
On the other hand, the history of downfall is basically self-documenting itself in real-time and people still don't believe it because people simply don't care about things that don't fit into their ideological borders or their perception of reality.
Truth doesn't exist anymore and thus anything that relies on truth.
They explain the laws in question (often with historical context of their creation), answer common procedural questions, separate the facts of the case from political rhetoric & misinformation, and give an objective analysis of possible outcomes. They are certainly not unbiased, but in the "we are biased against criminal behavior" way.
enough with your puerile, shallow pop psychology, bro.
maybe you didn't get what I mean by "your term".
I meant this comment by NicoJuicy, the parent comment that I replied to:
>US is becoming a banana republic
and the term that I meant was, Banana republic.
possibly you have not read the details of what a Banana republic really means, and how horrible it is, of both parties involved in that injustice, or rather those injustices, because it happened many times, with many countries, south of the US, in Central and/or South America. here you go:
the US and some US business companies (in a nexus, of course) was usually involved in the creation of those Banana republics, to the financial advantage of both them and the concerned countries' rulers aka dictators, and to the huge detriment of the general public in these countries, including huge scheming, violence and looting against them, etc.
and guess just who coined the term Banana republic?
I bet this will surprise you. it was an American author, with pen name O. Henry:
it may be even manipulative by him, to make money, by tugging at heart strings, but I found it good nonetheless. we had it in English literature class in High School, IIRC.
wrong use of caps not by me, but by voice typing errors, can't be bothered to correct them.
also, wherever you are from, maybe you should read the following articles before pronouncing judgement on things you seem to know very little about:
Smedlet butler was one of the things that helped with this. Then he stopped the business plot by exposing it. Seems like something very much like it is going to happen now.
The US is starting to look like Berlusconi's Italy 30 years ago in this regard...
The only difference is that Berlusconi was Italian and could be elected, when politicians were not obeying as he expected.
I guess one minor distinction is the piece of legislation Congress passed that outlines the specific process for firing Fong, which was not followed, whereas I assume you have no such protection on your job?
This mistaken belief that government works like a corporation is the essence of fascism. Corporations are inherently authoritarian, government should not be. The entire point of bureaucracy is that supreme power should not vest into one person, but rather be divided amongst many people and mediated by a system of rules.
You can have entirely seperate governing entities complete with their own taxes and elections. The most interesting part imho is that people not even bother voting if the entity does its job properly.
If you were at a private company there would probably not be a rule that the board (qua Congress) had to be given 30 days notice of your termination, with documentation of cause.
echo "Phyllis Fong, who was investigating Elon Musk's brain implant startup Neuralink, "forcefully removed from office" after refusing termination order" | sed -E "s/Phyllis Fong, who was investigating (.*) startup Neuralink,(.*) from office(.*) refusing/\1\2\3/"
I have to laugh at the trump administration idiocy with saying they are removing "these rogue, partisan bureaucrats", when, clearly, she's been there through 6 administrations... SMH.
Propaganda. Propaganda is the term you're looking for. Nothing idiotic about it, except the hordes of people willingly buying into it (including "smart" people on this very forum!)
I gather that I'm further right than much of the HN crowd, having been on the edge of the Tea Party movement &c.
The presence of the Citrus Caesar and the billionaire boys is due to substantial, ongoing problems. The U.S. Government, like any code base, has accrued much cruft over the last century. Whether or not DJT has any lasting positive effect isn't knowable yet.
The risk of this current course being a cure worse than the disease is substantial. The two things to keep in mind in any case are:
- trust, but verify
- look for the substantive reform, not lipstick on the pig
That's an excellent going-in position. Given sufficient complexity and overlap, frictions arise. Hence all of the allegations and lawsuits and appeals and so forth.
The voters are the ultimate judge, and typically end up with a government that reflects them, warts and all.
It’s interesting how these “both sides are bad” convos degrade into one side saying: “he clearly broke the law literally written specifically for him” and the other side trying to invoke some incredibly vague “whatever you call the last 8 years” imagery.
It's interesting that when one tries to encourage a stepping back from the problem to consider larger patterns, that effort at abstraction gets carpet-bombed in the (im)moderation.
The larger pattern is actually that reactionary politics have no coherent model of the world, and that’s why it’s showing up by your continued inability to state your position.
For any readers interested in an extreme version of the intellectual emptiness that dominates this sphere (apparently Andreessen finds compelling!), the NYTimes profile of Curtis Yarvin was pretty hilarious for exactly this reason.
Sure, fine, whatever. However, when you fire all the inspectors general, without any evidence that they're being bribed, you're basically saying that you're planning corruption. The whole purpose of the position is to make sure the government is doing its job and firing them sends a signal that you are putting the watchdog role in a political light.
Except that nothing is illegal now, Biden showed that with blanket pardons. So for all intents and purposes they will do what they like and Trump can just wipe it clean at the end.
They are looking to kill the pig, eat the meat, blame women, trans and minorities for no one else being able to benefit from the pig anymore. And then their supporters will consider themselves primary victims and blame everyone except themselves and people they voted for for harm caused to them too.
Except that the rules about firing public officials and inspector generals in particular are different, by law. Accusing the headline writers of omitting context while ignoring that key difference makes your comment reek of hypocrisy.
Less annoying web page here, same story:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/29/usda-inspect...
Nothing to see here. Just a massive conflict of interest from an unelected foreigner exacting power over your government.
An illegal immigrant at that.
It’s not illegal for the rich to pay to skip the line. (For the uninitiated, at first glance it would appear Elon was in violation of his J-1 student visa as he didn’t attend classes at Stanford, but he was swiftly employed by way of an H1-B visa and had the paperwork fast tracked through his VC-DC connections. His brother did refer to himself and Elon as illegal immigrants tho, I would say no more illegal than our First Lady.)
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread
He was never enrolled at Stanford and was working while on a J-1. That is visa fraud. It's likely, because he never even enrolled in classes, that he intentionally applied to Stanford with the intention to never go to school there but to instead use it as a front to start working in Silicon Valley. And it's possible he even overstayed his J-1 visa while waiting on an H1-B.
i actually have no clue - but isnt musk a u.s. citizen? it would actually surprise me if he were not.
It’s a sketchy story, he was technically in violation of his J1 visa since he was skipping classes and picked up an H1B work visa for his own startup which J1 strictly requires prior authorization for. It would seem he had some strings pulled and got post-hoc pre-authorization, or otherwise took advantage of some grace period and applied for the new visa with a fib. It’s all water under the bridge now, from a brief googling Denaturalization is rare except for cases of concealing crimes committed during naturalization or sham marriages. Lying on your application should revoke it from you but if it’s merely an omission, I don’t know, comes down to political will to prosecute, maybe if he pisses trump off enough somebody will “look into it”
please avoid weasel words like "technically" - he immigrated illegally, and it was not prosecuted because he is white and wealthy. This is important, since he is now part of a very harsh crackdown against people who are much more vulnerable than he ever has been, and who committed less serious and more understandable infractions.
She was born in Philadelphia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Fong
I think they mean Musk
He's naturalized an American for roughly 20 years.
After he broke US immigration law.
It would be unfair to retroactively remove someone's citizenship for illegally overstaying their own visa... But if you're punishing the child for their parents doing it, then it's just common-sense justice! /S
I'm really tired of all this Calvinball.
TIL the term Calvinball: so great and apropos.
A lot of people who broke US immigration law are now naturalized citizens.
And so?
Elon Musk, however, was not.
Right. Because that's how presidential elections work - the president must do everything personally for the next 4 years and is not allowed to use other people to act on his behalf. That's what Biden did all 4 years for example.
While Republicans cheer.
Lots of bros here who support this for some reason. Wait till they come for your 500K salary.
Trump was elected, and he was born in the US, though he does have German ancestry. As an immigrant myself, I personally find it very worrying though that it becomes normal to use foreign descent as a slur in the American political debate. I thought at least the left is supportive of immigrants, but looks like it's conditional on political views and no person of foreign descent can feel safe from attack because of their origin.
Our government is literally falling in a matter of weeks. It's being assaulted, and we're all just standing by.
The people spoke very clearly in November: they wanted this.
Thanks to California's incredibly slow counting system it was a lot closer in popular vote than it initially appeared.
This is my big struggle with all of this. His first term I felt America was duped by a con man so protested and made a fuss on social media. Americans saw the first four years and astonishingly decided they wanted more of it, by a decent margin.
So while I absolutely hate what is going on right now this seems to be what the people wanted. I question each day whether that needs to be respected or we should resist.
I also wonder if his supporters have any idea of what is going on. I am sure fox news isn't covering any of this and if they are it's probably being spun in some horrific way.
> I also wonder if his supporters have any idea of what is going on.
They do not. Most of his supporters are either rich or uneducated normal people who lack the mental capacity to realize what's going on. They just repeat the talking points. Respond to anyone of them with a non-talking point, compassion, and honesty and they just shut down. They haven't a clue about what's really going on. I bet none of his supporters even know who Robert Mercer is, the person that got him elected in the first place.
I feel like you're interacting with the same people I'm interacting with because your assessment of them is spot on. They love the talking points. Whenever you shut down one talking point with facts they pole vault over that into the next talking point. They want to be 20 ft up in the air away from the truth and never question why they've been lied to. They believe and even make up wild conspiracy theories on the spot when confronted with information that conflicts with what Trump and his supporters have said and done. Their brains leap over every possible barrier I put up, never letting it stop them. Maybe I'm not a good debater but facts are facts and they don't seem to appreciate or respect or even value them. I need to find a new, less depressing group of people to be around which will unfortunately mean quitting my job but I just can't do it anymore.
+1 I spend a lot of time engaging with these folks in good faith as well, and exact same pattern.
Repeat statement from Trump -> demonstrate that it's untrue -> repeat statement from Trump on new topic -> demonstrate that it's untrue -> repeat statement from Trump on new topic -> demonstrate that it's untrue
They're in a cult.
No, you don't need to respect it for the same reason we needn't respect the decision-making of suicide cults.
Don't live in the US, but I got the impression that a lot of people actually saw positive change in their lives in the first round, which is a pretty good reason to want more.
Do you honestly believe your news is being spun any less?
Yes I read high quality news sources- the WSJ, NYTimes, foreign affairs and a few others like the national review and mother Jones from time to time. I hear this argument a lot and my issues with Trump were from the primary source- his own words and tweets.
The economy was already humming when Trump first entered office and despite his best efforts it continued to do so through his term.
I feel like his first term benefitted from his administration being wholly unprepared to govern, as witnessed by the numerous stories of there effectively being no transition plan for a vast majority of departments.
The only real policy victory his first term was the TCJA. Otherwise, it was a lot of bark, no bite.
But now with four years to prepare, they came in barking and biting like hell.
Ironically, losing in 2020 gave MAGA time to create a game plan which we’re seeing in action now. A second Trump term right after the first would have been more effectual than the first, but not to the degree we’re seeing now.
And you honestly believe these "special" news sources are not spun to at least the same degree.
I think you have a few nasty surprises coming up.
They aren't. You are showing your true colors. Fox news literally says in it's tos that it's a source of entertainment and not real news.
There is no false equivalence here. Fox news is absolute trash. Don't even attempt to put it in the same conversation as othe news sources.
Good luck with that!
You are free to believe what you want to believe and to seek out media that will tell you what you want hear.
Those of use living in the real world don't have the luxury of believing what ever makes us feel good; we seek out and even pay for journalism that describes the world as it is and not just how we want it to be.
Where on Earth did you hear that? His approval rating was dismal.
Or election were hacked, but not the way you think.
Social media was weaponized and turned into a tool that manipulates people's view of the reality. Each person gets a personalized feed that presses their buttons to think certain way.
For example with war in gaza. If for example you were pro Israeli, you will see content that Harris was siding with Hamas, and trump actually was the most Israel friendly candidate.
If you were supporting Palestine you would get that there's no difference between Harris and trump, and it is best to do protest vote.
Same with leaning too much to the left, or not enough to the left etc.
Pretty much every issue was handled this way. People who got their news from social media had no idea what her stance were on any topic, because that was filtered.
Few years ago we had huge scandal about Cambridge Analytica, there was a bit loud about it and then died out, meanwhile it all continued and was perfected.
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook manipulated older generation. While TikTok managed to capture younger, left leaning generation and make it more apathetic.
I don't think it is a coincidence that pretty much all social media (except the Chinese TikTok) was present on his inauguration.
I also don't think it is a coincidence that all social media companies have involvement with AI. With it, they no longer need humans to generate content, so the whole manipulation is much easier to do.
This isn't just isolated to US and it is being used in Europe too. Look at elections in Moldova, Romania, what's happening in Germany etc.
Timothy Snyder's "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century" book is a must read so we can prevent this.
Here's summary of the lessons: https://substack.com/@snyder/p-155209838
The book is quite short and he also reads and discussed them on his YouTube channel.
> Social media was weaponized and turned into a tool that manipulates people's view of the reality
I really dislike this argument. It shifts responsibility from the voters to evil nebulous puppet-masters. I reject that. At some point, you have to accept that people can think and make decisions for themselves.
Yeah. Everyone is convinced ads don't work on them, yet somehow it is a trillion dollar industry.
Perhaps you are lucky and don't have anyone in your family affected by disinformation.
I have family members that no longer watch TV, listen radio, read news papers. All "news" they are getting is from sources that also tell them that all other sources lie.
They live in complete different reality that it is a distorted mirror of actual reality.
> At some point, you have to accept that people can think and make decisions for themselves.
And then we have to accept that this world is what we want and deserve, and this dicussion goes in cycles.
Is it reasonable that social media influencers may be assigned some degree of credit? After all they are generally effective at selling products.
I also agree that people have responsibility for their actions. For example, it has been personally sobering to observe some friends and colleagues agree that defunding PEPFAR and putting 20 million lives at risk was morally the right thing to do.
He’s an elected president, not an elected dictator. It’s totally reasonable in our democracy to say that you don’t get to do anything everything you want just because you got 51% of the vote.
We have a constitution and separation of powers which many seem to have forgotten about this week
*49.8%
What is "the people" at this point, even? Is there really such a thing as "American people" that can be meaningfully defined? What would be its ideals?
A minority spoke clearly. Many of "the people" didn't vote, and Trump got less than 50% of those that did.
The ones that didn’t vote are ok with what the voters choose, otherwise they would’ve voted
They're okay the way a patient in a coma is okay with whatever the doctor does.
I'm sorry, but how many non-voters were physically unable to vote? My heart goes out to them. But everyone else, who chose to stay home, chose to let others speak for them.
"Spoke clearly that they wanted $X" != "Didn't take the opportunity to express any opinion."
Those are fundamentally different.
By deciding not to vote, you’re actively saying that either option is fine. So you’re ok with the outcome.
Everyone who decided not to vote literally relinquished their voice in the matter. They simply don't count. They were "OK" with whatever others decided. Their opinion has as much weight as my dog's (and I don't even have a dog!).
> The people spoke very clearly [that] they wanted this.
> [Nonvoters] were "OK" with whatever others decided.
Those are not the same thing! Stop contradicting yourself in order to sanewash Trump.
Not a contradiction at all. And this isn't about "sanewashing" Trump.
There is a set of people eligible to vote. There is a set of people who do vote. Anyone in the first set who chooses not be in the second set, is no longer included in statements about What The People Want. You snooze, you lose.
The time to say whether you want or don't want a President is in November. You stay quiet then, you don't get to complain in January "This isn't what I wanted!" To stay home by choice is be OK with whatever outcome others decide.
And those others spoke clearly that this is the outcome they wanted.
Honestly, my head hurts at the apologism over non-voters. If you don't vote, you don't count!
You're saying that 7 people could vote with the rest of the nations staying home, and then when Bob wins with 3/7 votes, I can say: "Look, the people spoke very clearly that they wanted Bob!"
No, that'd be frickin' insane, since:
1. Basically none of the "the people" ever "spoke" at all.
2. Even when non-voters somehow aren't "the people", there's nothing remotely "clear" Bob winning with a minority.
The moral fiber of nonvoters is irrelevant, this is about how you exaggerated a weak signal to the point of outright falsehood.
Can we then openly call republican voters guilty then? Instead of pretending that people voting for that party are good people? I do agree that many wanted the harm and that is why they voted for Trump.
IMO they're morally (and practically) responsible but it is politically unwise to do this.
I don't know. For years and years, center acted on the assumption it is unwise to be anything but accommodating and nice. Center enabled raise of extremism by tacitly suporting them.
Trump won by being not nice. Democrats lost by being nice.
Yeah, I’m obviously sympathetic to this view. I think things have changed in the last few days. This hostile takeover is going to be very bad for a lot of GOP and MAGA folks too and we need to ensure they’re ire is pointed in the right direction.
I also spoke when I voted for my Senators and Congressmen/women. I voted for Congress to do their jobs.
Americans are desperate. May not be felt among the HN crowd, but standards of living in the US have been declining consistently for a long time [1]. Remember that Trump was not re-elected to a second term initially specifically because he failed to deliver on his promise of "MAGA". He instead did a Jeb Bush presidency, complete with Wall Street (Mnuchin) and the CIA (Pompeo) running the country exactly as would have occurred had Bush won. So Americans tried Biden, in the hopes of a return to Obama era America. This obviously didn't happen, as standard of living continued to decline. So they tried Trump again, in sheer desperation.
I don't see a positive future for the US, as it is so clearly a declining empire, exhibiting every textbook symptom. The startup/tech crowd loves talking about cheap phones and "services", but the reality is bleak outside of this narrow tech bubble.
1. https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjun24/negativity6-24.html
Nah. You cant explain fascism just by them being desperate economically. That is not how it works. They did not had to have Trump to be representant of the republican party again. If they were bothered by economics, they would pick someone else even if they wanted to change parties.
They wanted to cause harm for reasons unrelated to economics.
You see an electorate that wanted to cause harm. I see an electorate that thought anything is better than a black woman in charge. :-\
Whats race got to do with it? Trumps 2-0 against women regardless of race.
It rings a bit hollow when the single most popular president in recent history was Obama. If the US can cope with him what is the problem with women supposed to be? Harris was an unusually weak candidate; the primary system is supposed to shake people like that out and the Democrats were left in a disadvantageous place after bypassing it.
One of the reasons Trump is getting all these historic wins is because the US Democrats refuse point blank to do some introspection and ask if their policy positions are effective. Name-calling and shaming tactics turned out to not be good enough to stop Trump, so there is an interesting question of who they could stop and under what circumstances they could be politically successful.
Indeed. If the DNC had allowed Bernie Sanders to run against Trump, Sanders would very likely have beaten him and Trump would have remained a reality TV star. Instead, they pushed Clinton on Democrats just like they pushed Harris this cycle. The corruption within the DNC is very much to blame for Trump.
I refuse to accept the childish assertion that the majority of American voters are card carrying members of a radical political system that was defeated last century. This is just an emotional response to a reality that one does not want to accept.
> It rings a bit hollow when the single most popular president in recent history was Obama
Does it? It was when Obama got elected that Republicans started freaking out. Take a look at the 2008 Republican party platform [1]. On energy they talk about wanting an energy supply that is diverse, reliable, and cleaner.
They say "In the long run, American production should move to zero-emission sources, and our nation's fossil fuel resources are the bridge to that emissions-free future". They wanted more domestic oil to reduce foreign dependance, more nuclear (specifically calling out that it is zero-carbon. They also said
> Alternate power sources must enter the mainstream. The technology behind solar energy has improved significantly in recent years, and the commercial development of wind power promises major benefits both in costs and in environmental protection. Republicans support these and other alternative energy sources, including geothermal and hydropower, and anticipate technological developments that will increase their economic viability. We therefore advocate a long-term energy tax credit equally applicable to all renewable power sources.
> Republicans support measures to modernize the nation's electricity grid to provide American consumers and businesses with more affordable, reliable power. We will work to unleash innovation so entrepreneurs can develop technologies for a more advanced and robust United States transmission system that meets our growing energy demands
Read that to a Republican today without telling them where it is from and they will probably guess it was from Biden.
They also pushed conservation:
> Conservation does not mean deprivation; it means efficiency and achieving more with less. Most Americans today endeavor to conserve fossil fuels, whether in their cars or in their home heating, but we can do better. We can construct better and smarter buildings, use smarter thermostats and transmission grids, increase recycling, and make energy-efficient consumer purchases. Wireless communications, for example, can increase telecommuting options and cut back on business travel. The Republican goal is to ensure that Americans have more conservation options that will enable them to make the best choices for their families.
Here's what they said about cars:
> We must continue to develop alternative fuels, such as biofuels, especially cellulosic ethanol, and hasten their technological advances to next-generation production. As America develops energy technology for the 21st century, policy makers must consider the burden that rising food prices and energy costs create for the poor and developing nations around the world. Because alternative fuels are useless if vehicles cannot use them, we must move quickly to flexible fuel vehicles; we cannot expect necessary investments in alternative fuels if this flexibility does not become standard. We must also produce more vehicles that operate on electricity and natural gas, both to reduce demand for oil and to cut CO2 emissions.
> Given that fully 97 percent of our current transportation vehicles rely on oil, we will aggressively support technological advances to reduce our petroleum dependence. For example, lightweight composites could halve the weight and double the gas mileage of cars and trucks, and together with flex-fuel and electric vehicles, could usher in a renaissance in the American auto industry.
They had a big section on environmental protection which leads of with saying how the aforementioned energy policies will put the US in a good position to address climate change. They go on to spend 7 paragraphs explain a market and technology approach to addressing this.
Compare to the 2012 platform [2] and the 2016 platform [3].
[1] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2008-republican-pa...
[2] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2012-republican-pa...
[3] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2016-republican-pa...
Obama was black man president that broke republican minds. They really got more extreme, refused to cooperate in any way so center "work across the aisle" politics became impossible.
And then they voted for Trump. Ta-Nehisi comment with name "trum is first white president" makes the point better then I would do.
Who is "they"? And yes, you can absolutely explain it with desperation, and arrogance and in-fighting on behalf of the non-fascists.
The issues on the minds of American issues were mostly things like housing, healthcare; economics. Trump at least pretended to be also angry and willing to do something about it, while saying the Democrats were lukewarm would be flattering them.
What is the point of saying "people wanted this"? To legitimize not fighting it? I don't even care what I wanted yesterday, what do I care what someone else wanted last November?
No they weren't. There was huge focus on trans and immigration and vaccinationa. Economic is distant third.
They have continuing quest to make abortions as illegal as possible, the quest for male supremacy, the climate denial ... This was not hold your nose for economics. This was I don't care about economics, I hate others too much.
> What is the point of saying "people wanted this"? To legitimize not fighting it?
I am sick of excessive benefits of the doubt constantly given to the conservatives and their voters. Of sympathetic portraits of poor then while people they harm never get that. Of them lying, knowingly throwing false accusations and then centrists or left being blamed for not being nice to then.
Yes it should be fought. But it is not true that republican voters were victims of something when eventually Musks actions harm some of them. They wanted to cause harm and will cause more harm to people not like them.
> There was huge focus on trans and immigration and vaccinationa. Economic is distant third.
I'm just not seeing that, e.g.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-...
Not a mention of 'COVID' anywhere on this page (thank you Ctrl+F). Surely, it had a role in how we got here, at least inflation-wise?
Has it slipped so easily from the face of History? Let's just hope its not a new pandemic that provides that final false-flag style push into fascism, as an excuse for suspending democracy. Those Republicans who will say one final time that we aren't a democracy ("we're a republic!") will be sorry for the seeds they have sown.
If you look at everyone eligible to vote, the people spoke clearly in November with the same message they have for decades, "none of the above".
Those people spoke loud and clear: "We're OK with whatever everyone else decides!"
So again: the people have spoken. America is getting exactly what America wants.
He won the popular vote by less than Hillary won it in 2016, _when she lost the election._ Every time he's been candidate or president, he's the least popular of either in the history we've polled popularity or approval. Many pluralities who constitute "America" (felons, especially when you consider how many people we imprison; and immigrants) who are subject to US law don't get to vote. And many institutions (DC not having senators, Puerto Rico, and the Senate generally) are barely representational and serving the function of democracy.
So I know it makes you feel intelligent and cool to say "ah, but you see: this is what they wanted," but in every other way you can measure it besides the very narrow way you're focused on, it's as untrue as it could be.
Where did Trump promise to remove Phyllis Fong? Or something less specific that would translate to this? He promised to lower egg prices, and "the majority of the few people voted for Trump, so any random thing he now does is what THE AMERICAN PEOPLE wanted" is just not true.
And even if it was, to me the question isn't "did someone else want this at some point in the past, probably based on false or even no information" anyway, but how to judge it now. Sometimes people want wrong things for shitty reasons and a minority has to stand up to them standing on their principles.
The majority just wanted lower grocery / gas / rent.
Unfortunately they either didn't read the fine print, or concluded that it was a price they were willing to pay. I suspect it is more the former.
As Obama said, elections have consequences.
If 49.8% of the vote is the people speaking clearly, then what do you call the 50.2% of the vote that did not vote for this?
Social media made them think that some problems were huge and these elected people would solve them, while at the same time demonizing all other media so all signals that these people are not right were effectively muted.
> The people spoke very clearly in November: they wanted this.
49.8% of the people who voted wanted this.
50.2% wanted someone else to be president (but did not pass the threshold for someone other than Trump).
Where do you get that from? Huge numbers didn’t vote. Of those who did Trump squeaked by with a small lead but significantly less than 50% of the populace voted for him.
He has no mandate.
Hitler got rid of Germany's democracy in 53 days:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/hitler-ger...
Maybe Musk and Trump can beat his record.
So a false flag and then martial law, maybe after taking over most law enforcement? The project 2025 leader did say that the next revolution remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. Maybe this is what the 2nd amendment was for.
One thing you can do is shun employees of associated companies (Amazon, Tesla, Facebook) and refuse to give them a job. That requires some sacrifice though.
Not everyone's standing by I've been working on hardened long range communications for cheap so the people that need it can have it. But thats just me, there's tons of people fighting back but those stories don't tend to make the news because it spits in the face of the prevailing narrative that people want this.
Have any more details on this?
https://piermesh.net/ But the basics are we're using Meshtastic as a base to run a decentralized lightweight alternative internet that's run by the people using it. I've managed to squeeze a lot of juice out of one of the compatible esp32 boards so that for $15+ (what the board costs from Lilygo) an sd card you can run a web server on the board as well.
I wonder about the purpose of many of these actions. Since they’re done via EOs they can easily be reversed.
If this continues, it won’t be easy to track and revert 4 years of EOs. And it will be impossible to undo all the consequences
They’re literally all on the White House site in order.
You think they're just text on a website?
They might not be there for too long though
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910099
Maybe it will be an opportunity to “build back better”, like in 2021. However, that’s assuming he actually leaves office which is not a given.
The purpose of firing Inspectors General en masse is so that there are no independent overseers to investigate illegal or corrupt actions within the executive branch during your term in office.
Reversing it four years later is just too late.
The specific law that Trump is very obviously breaking is the Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022, which says Congress must be notified 30 days in advance and given "substantive" rationale for dismissing inspectors general.
This law was passed specifically in response to Trump breaking the antecedent law, Inspector General Reform Act of 2008, during his first term.
Will the "party of law and order" do anything? Nope.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11546
Good on Ms Fong for refusing to leave.
Ah yes, the little known legal loophole of "nobody is going to stop me".
In all seriousness, the situation is very dire. The future does not, currently, bode well for the common man.
The Trump people went extremely well prepared into this. They are spamming with a ton of things, often legally questionable. They know that Congress doesn't have a backbone and lawsuits will take a very long time. It's a brilliant strategy.
Lawsuits take a very long time, but a court injunction can control which way that time is spent.
A number of (especially recent) administrations have performed a large number of legally questionable acts which were often structured in such a way as to be difficult to challenge (the CFPB comes to mind). Trump’s innovation seems to be taking this tactic to an extreme, remarkably early in this administration.
Say more about how the CFPB was illegal? It was created by an act of Congress.
There are/were a number of issues with its structure, some of which are described in the lawsuits mentioned on its Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protectio...
Its constitutionality was literally upheld in SCOTUS
So no, not really. You have a list of complaints from the regulated parties.
That’s one of the decisions; on the other hand, the director was made removable at will (by the courts, in response to a challenge, and contrary to the original statute), and there have been other proposed challenges. This change has proved consequential.
I'm tired of congressional Republicans being treated as unmentioned bystanders in this.
Reporters should be pushing microphones in their faces asking why they approve of the latest thing Trump did, or at least what they think of him breaking laws they passed.
Absolutely agreed.
Reporters are doing that. But politicians in general and Republicans in particular excel at using rhetorical fallacies and other tactics to avoid answering difficult questions. Here's an example from last year where a bunch of Republicans simply booed and abused a reporter whose question they disliked: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4274345-republican-tells-...
The media has many shortcomings, but how are reporters supposed to hold accountable people who simply do not care?
Title makes it sound like she was in an Neuralink office and physically shoved out the door. The non-clickbait version is that she is in the same agency that started a Neuralink investigation (due to perceive conflicts of interest in its board) and her dismissal has zero substantive connection to neuralink or elon.
Are there any good blogs that are chronicling the USA Federal gov's slow descent into facism and overt corruption, just collecting and archiving pieces like this with a classiciation/categorization etc.?
I think it's an unprecedented opportunity to record the history of a downfall using modern tools, and future generations might benefit enormously.
When I learned about the disruption of the Weimar Republic in highschool, a thing our teacher did was make copious use of newspaper clippings to explain the delta between ground truth and public sentiment, and how certain narratives increased in frequency, etc. He had personally spent quite some time in old archives and on microfilm readers to create his little library. Something like this, but with much more data.
A friend of mine did her master's in political science on crawling data in Islamic extremist social media cycles and trying to correlate activity there with a dataset on terrorist events, trying to find out if you could anticipate them somehow.
This is a loose collection of thoughts, but I think there's something there in the signal.
There's lots of them, but I respectfully submit that doing something about it in the present - whatever you determine that to be, given your skills and inclinations - is a far higher priority than the educational byproduct for future generations.
Using your Weimar example, I would not argue that Germany or humanity is/are better off for having gone through the cataclysm of WW2. In terms of building context, you might find it helpful to read this dry but very detailed examination of the nazi administrative state, and how it delivered economic resources to its political clients through a combination of reorganization, financial engineering, and striaght-up theft:
https://archive.org/details/hitlersbeneficia00alyg
On a more abstract level, try 'The logic of political survival' by Smith & Bueno de Mesquita. both books will give you a useful framework within which to assess the contextual significance of ongoing news events.
Thanks!
I also think this is a good summary for those who had never heard of Weimar before: https://archive.is/xh2Ci
But like most summaries, it suffers a bit from focusing on the key events, and not capturing this sort of ... change in the ambient noise floor, and what relationship the average citizen had to what was going on, and what perception of events. I think it's the "Would you have been able to tell that it'd get this bad?" is kind of the more interesting part. A political weather forecasting model, if you will.
On the contrary, there used to be "the spoils system." I'm just a sideline listener but I think that's an appropriate lens to look at this through rather than some severe negative, or dangerously harmful trend.
I think trying to bar such a system simply would make the same things covert.
slow?
> When I learned about the disruption of the Weimar Republic in highschool, a thing our teacher did was make copious use of newspaper clippings to explain he delta between ground truth and public sentiment, and how certain narratives increased in frequency, etc. He had personally spent quite some time in old archives and on microfilm readeers to create his little library. Something like this, but with much more data.
That sounds interesting. Wish it had been converted into a blogpost or something for more permanence.
Check out KeepTrack
https://www.reddit.com/r/Keep_Track/
Also has a Patreon
Thanks!
> I think it's an unprecedented opportunity to record the history of a downfall using modern tools, and future generations might benefit enormously.
Well, the German atrocities of the Third Reich are well-documented and we are probably just a few years behind the U.S.
The best documentary won't help to prevent backsliding into superstition and barbarism if people don't believe them.
On the other hand, the history of downfall is basically self-documenting itself in real-time and people still don't believe it because people simply don't care about things that don't fit into their ideological borders or their perception of reality.
Truth doesn't exist anymore and thus anything that relies on truth.
IMO the LegalEagle YouTube channel has done a fantastic job:
https://youtube.com/@legaleagle
They explain the laws in question (often with historical context of their creation), answer common procedural questions, separate the facts of the case from political rhetoric & misinformation, and give an objective analysis of possible outcomes. They are certainly not unbiased, but in the "we are biased against criminal behavior" way.
US is becoming a banana republic
becoming? past tense is more like it. also Google your own term in Wikipedia to see the history of it.
This extreme cynicism is part of what got us here. People have made this cynicism manifest. They're making the government of their imaginations real.
cynicism?
enough with your puerile, shallow pop psychology, bro.
maybe you didn't get what I mean by "your term".
I meant this comment by NicoJuicy, the parent comment that I replied to:
>US is becoming a banana republic
and the term that I meant was, Banana republic.
possibly you have not read the details of what a Banana republic really means, and how horrible it is, of both parties involved in that injustice, or rather those injustices, because it happened many times, with many countries, south of the US, in Central and/or South America. here you go:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic
short partial summary:
the US and some US business companies (in a nexus, of course) was usually involved in the creation of those Banana republics, to the financial advantage of both them and the concerned countries' rulers aka dictators, and to the huge detriment of the general public in these countries, including huge scheming, violence and looting against them, etc.
and guess just who coined the term Banana republic?
I bet this will surprise you. it was an American author, with pen name O. Henry:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._Henry
he was not innocent himself, he embezzled money from a bank, and fled south.
I have read a short story by him:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Leaf
it may be even manipulative by him, to make money, by tugging at heart strings, but I found it good nonetheless. we had it in English literature class in High School, IIRC.
wrong use of caps not by me, but by voice typing errors, can't be bothered to correct them.
also, wherever you are from, maybe you should read the following articles before pronouncing judgement on things you seem to know very little about:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Indigenous_Peoples%27_His...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bury_My_Heart_at_Wounded_Kne...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dee_Brown_(writer)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_United_States
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_the_Unit...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism
and maybe most of all, because it is kind of a summary and an indictment:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
Smedlet butler was one of the things that helped with this. Then he stopped the business plot by exposing it. Seems like something very much like it is going to happen now.
Smedley, not Smedlet.
But yes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
I had read about him earlier, in connection with the Banana republics.
let people form their own opinion on these issues.
speaking of The Last Leaf short story:
I searched for and found a version of it:
https://americanenglish.state.gov/files/ae/resource_files/th...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904706
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42913081
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42913081
I thought this was to be the American century, now I'm just fascinated and wonder what it will be instead.
The Chinese century, if I had to bet.
Brazilians were joking "welcome to CONMEBOL, South Korea" when their president tried that coup. I guess the US wants to join in as well
(CONMEBOL being South America's soccer/football association)
Oh, Banana Co...
The US is starting to look like Berlusconi's Italy 30 years ago in this regard... The only difference is that Berlusconi was Italian and could be elected, when politicians were not obeying as he expected.
Uh what? If I got fired from a private company security would also remove me
I guess one minor distinction is the piece of legislation Congress passed that outlines the specific process for firing Fong, which was not followed, whereas I assume you have no such protection on your job?
Just a minor distinction though!
I guess it must have been an official act
This mistaken belief that government works like a corporation is the essence of fascism. Corporations are inherently authoritarian, government should not be. The entire point of bureaucracy is that supreme power should not vest into one person, but rather be divided amongst many people and mediated by a system of rules.
You can have entirely seperate governing entities complete with their own taxes and elections. The most interesting part imho is that people not even bother voting if the entity does its job properly.
If you were at a private company there would probably not be a rule that the board (qua Congress) had to be given 30 days notice of your termination, with documentation of cause.
> US is starting to look like Berlusconi's Italy 30 years ago
Call a spade a spade. It’s looking like South Africa. Our government has been coöpted by South African patronage politics.
> The US is starting to look like Berlusconi's Italy 30 years ago in this regard...
Ever since 2016, I've been offering these small apologies to the people of Italy when the subject comes up online.
Before, I wondered what was wrong with them for such a blatant crook stay in power, confident that It Couldn't Happen Here.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/phy...
hmmm. let's see ...
$ echo "Phyllis Fong, who was investigating Elon Musk's brain implant startup Neuralink, "forcefully removed from office" after refusing termination order" | ...
oh, never mind.
I'm too lazy to write the regex for getting this output from the above input:
Elon Musk's brain implant forcefully removed after termination order
there may be a bug in your sed
It works on my Mac and Linux box!
I have to laugh at the trump administration idiocy with saying they are removing "these rogue, partisan bureaucrats", when, clearly, she's been there through 6 administrations... SMH.
Propaganda. Propaganda is the term you're looking for. Nothing idiotic about it, except the hordes of people willingly buying into it (including "smart" people on this very forum!)
I gather that I'm further right than much of the HN crowd, having been on the edge of the Tea Party movement &c.
The presence of the Citrus Caesar and the billionaire boys is due to substantial, ongoing problems. The U.S. Government, like any code base, has accrued much cruft over the last century. Whether or not DJT has any lasting positive effect isn't knowable yet.
The risk of this current course being a cure worse than the disease is substantial. The two things to keep in mind in any case are:
- trust, but verify
- look for the substantive reform, not lipstick on the pig
A third thing to keep in mind: law is law and must be followed.
That's an excellent going-in position. Given sufficient complexity and overlap, frictions arise. Hence all of the allegations and lawsuits and appeals and so forth.
The voters are the ultimate judge, and typically end up with a government that reflects them, warts and all.
There’s nothing complex about “IGs cannot be dismissed without 30 days notice to Congress.”
And no, judges are judges. That’s why they’re called that.
I guess that I'd be closer to your position if the last eight years of...however you characterize it...hadn't gone down.
?
!
It’s interesting how these “both sides are bad” convos degrade into one side saying: “he clearly broke the law literally written specifically for him” and the other side trying to invoke some incredibly vague “whatever you call the last 8 years” imagery.
It's interesting that when one tries to encourage a stepping back from the problem to consider larger patterns, that effort at abstraction gets carpet-bombed in the (im)moderation.
More saying-nothing going on here.
The larger pattern is actually that reactionary politics have no coherent model of the world, and that’s why it’s showing up by your continued inability to state your position.
For any readers interested in an extreme version of the intellectual emptiness that dominates this sphere (apparently Andreessen finds compelling!), the NYTimes profile of Curtis Yarvin was pretty hilarious for exactly this reason.
It is indeed a larger pattern!
> More saying-nothing going on here.
The Tower of Babel: who can understand it?
Let us go ahead and assign you the "W". Best wishes, and the last word is yours.
> The Tower of Babel: who can understand it?
Great commit to the bit
Sure, fine, whatever. However, when you fire all the inspectors general, without any evidence that they're being bribed, you're basically saying that you're planning corruption. The whole purpose of the position is to make sure the government is doing its job and firing them sends a signal that you are putting the watchdog role in a political light.
What part of the cure is illegally firing someone who was investigating you for a valid, non political reason?
There's no cure in that, just corruption.
Except that nothing is illegal now, Biden showed that with blanket pardons. So for all intents and purposes they will do what they like and Trump can just wipe it clean at the end.
Do you mean “SCOTUS ruled that the president has ultimate immunity”?
They are looking to kill the pig, eat the meat, blame women, trans and minorities for no one else being able to benefit from the pig anymore. And then their supporters will consider themselves primary victims and blame everyone except themselves and people they voted for for harm caused to them too.
>- look for the substantive reform, not lipstick on the pig
Mitch McConnell made it his personal mission to prevent "substantive reform" of any kind from being passed through the Senate.
Nice truncating the title and removing context.
If you got fired from literally any private sector company and refused to leave your office, security would escort you out immediately.
Except that the rules about firing public officials and inspector generals in particular are different, by law. Accusing the headline writers of omitting context while ignoring that key difference makes your comment reek of hypocrisy.
Title was trimmed to fit into the character limits imposed by HN. I did my best to preserve meaning.