> Phyllis Fong was heading up an investigation into Elon Musk's Neuralink.
> Last Friday, President Donald Trump purged several agencies of their inspectors general, demanding that at least 17 people in the role immediately turn in their work laptops and ID badges. One of those IGs, Phyllis Fong at the US Department of Agriculture, decided not to leave, believing the order to be illegal. According to a report from Reuters, she was escorted from the building today by security.
Never mind a long four years, it’s been a long two weeks. Unfortunately, the law is too slow dealing with things like this. And even if it was ruled illegal, who’s going to enforce it. The White House?
This is the real danger of where we’re at right now. We are currently at a point where the President has a stacked Supreme Court that had already showed they’re willing to take his side almost no matter what. There is now effectively no check against the executive branch because of that. Papers are already running stories about how Congress is just letting him loose, with these Inspectors General firings as a prime example of how Congress has just thrown their hands up without even a fight.
"The removal procedure for presidentially appointed IGs is
found in Title 5, Section 403(b), which reads in part
An Inspector General may be removed from office
by the President. If an Inspector General is removed
from office or is transferred to another position or
location within an establishment, the President shall
communicate in writing the substantive rationale,
including detailed and case-specific reasons for any
such removal or transfer to both Houses of
Congress (including the appropriate congressional
committees), not later than 30 days before the
removal or transfer. Nothing in this subsection shall
prohibit a personnel action otherwise authorized by
law, other than transfer or removal."
> the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer
So worst case, they’re legally fired a month from a few days ago and are owed back pay. This seems much ado about nothing.
Well, there's the whole Presidential obligation from the Constitution that the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". No big deal. I'm sure it's fine he can pick and choose.
Well people are also upset about the whole "President not respecting obligations to Congress" thing.
Any normal president wouldn't conduct the removal without being able to provide the substantive rationale. Which is then evidence Congress has about how the president is conducting his duties. Like "is this rationale consistent with the stated goals of increased efficiency".
Trump doesn't even care enough to make something up.
"...the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer."
It's a bit more than "detailed". And he didn't even try to meet any of the elements above. It's essentially a loyalty purge.
"Detailed and case-specific." The case-specific reason can be appointed by my predecessor on such and such date. The law doesn't place any limits on what those reasons can be.
It’s not. It’s a gutting of a norm. That’s an important difference. The law provides for independent agencies where the President can’t just fire them. It didn’t provide this cover to the IGs.
> Which of course isn't likely to happen in this case
No. But that's in the hands of the American people. A simple majority in the house to impeach and 67 votes in the Senate to convict. 34 seats are up for election in 2026 [1]. Dems only have 47 seats, and a 20-seat pick-up is almost impossible. But if Indiana, Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, South Carolina and Florida [2] swung, that could convince moderate Republicans to convict.
Of course, we'd then have the practical matter of getting him out of the White House...
Please let’s not go back to the 2016-2020 impeachment and removal fantasies. The man was impeached twice, once even after his presidency was over and still the American people put him back into office.
Also, of note, every time he has run for president he received more votes than prior runs—even in 2020. There is literally only one person who has ever received more votes than Trump and that’s Biden in 2020 and frankly there will forever be an asterisk after that election due to the pandemic and Trump’s subsequent win in 2024.
If you want him out of office before his term ends, you will need to have 67 democrats as senators with probably at least a quarter of those senators being willing to lose their own elections for that vote. Bottom line, he is in for the next four.
I think impeachment is a long shot. We agree in that Trump’s popularity is what gives him power. If he lost it, one woudln’t need 67 Democratic Senators on Capitol Hill, the GOP would save itself. It’s just difficult to imagine what Trump could do to fuck up that badly.
Hard disagree on 'forever be an asterisk', if you're referring to the 2020 election itself. You really think a 7 million vote margin leaves room to question this election yet another time after all the audits and Krakens, etc.? Negative sentiment on Trump was strong going into the election, especially considering the economic conditions brought on by COVID. This, being the COVID that he was seen to have mishandled, largely with his own concern at heart, wanting testing curtailed so that ever-higher cases wouldn't hurt his election chances. I guess he loved America so much that he just didn't know how to express it.
Why Trump lost in 2020 and then won in 2024 is clear. Biden's election win was no fluke. The 2024 election was about going with the devil-that-you-know, hoping that kitchen table concerns could be alleviated, and still delivered no landslide (unless you're Stephen Miller).
Just wait until all these Trump voters have to swallow the totality of merely the last 2 weeks of changes (and recissions, in some cases), and they'll find that wanting a bull in a China shop has severe consequences. After 100 days, when actual results will be expected, all the fun Trump & Musk had as they had their way uprooting bureaucrats will be over. As recriminations flow, whether Trump can hold together the crew he started with will be a major question. Interesting times.
I am saying that the pandemic caused an statistical outlier election shift that year and Trump’s election in 2024 where the stats sort of reset to baseline makes it seem pretty likely that without the pandemic and with his ability to increase votes in every election, the 2020 election would have been much closer. Frankly with the weak dem field in 2020 and without the pandemic, I would have bet on Trump winning.
I am not sure what the first 100 days of his second term will bring and I will make no dire predictions (literally all of the dire predictions people made in 2016 were wrong). I have never voted for Trump, but I am not tribal enough to automatically assume that everything he does or is doing is bad either. Short of the last 9 months of his first presidency, his first time in office had zero negative impact on me.
Truthfully, my bet is this second term will likely be as equally uneventful…at least for me and my family.
Yes. The statute literally leads with "The president may remove the Inspectors General" (quoting/closely paraphrasing from memory). The notification requirement is in addition to this but there's no language which says that the removal power is conditioned on obeying the notification requirement. So Trump legally removed the IGs, and then as a side-effect broke the law by failing to notify Congress.
There's a problem with how the law is written though... It supposedly required Trump to notify Congress before he was even President, but its requirements also only apply to the President. Arguably the law was impossible to follow as written, and I gather that's not even the strongest constitutional problem with the law as written. What we have here is a failure of Congress, and Trump exploiting it.
He didn’t step away willingly the first time, I have zero reason to believe he would step away willingly the second time, especially after he’s spent so much time undoing all the checks and balances that pushed him out that first time.
> even if it was ruled illegal, who’s going to enforce it
The court that ruled it such. She would not only be entitled to back pay, anything her replacement does wouldn’t have legal force. That means anything they do can be challenged by anyone who doesn’t like it.
We’re seeing the limits of Congressional checks on the executive. But we still have an independent judiciary. (If that collapses it will be a good time to be a billionaire in America.) The judiciary’s advantage is its patient; it can exact consequences after 2028 in a way the executive and even the Congress cannot.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the courts essentially powerless to enforce? If memory serves, the judicial branch merely interprets the law and Constitution, but they lack an enforcement mechanism - it is up to the Executive Branch (the president) to administer and enforce the law. If they decide they don't feel like listening to the courts, it's unclear anybody could actually do anything. (Other than impeachment perhaps? But of course that isn't going to happen anytime soon.)
Besides, even if they did have the power to enforce the law, I can't say I exactly trust the Supreme Court to even try reining in Trump (except in minor ways) based on their recent track record. But who knows.
Sure, if we get down to mechanics like that, the courts require someone else to enforce. But at that mechanistic level, so does the President. He isn’t personally escorting her out of the office.
> But at that mechanistic level, so does the President. He isn’t personally escorting her out of the office.
Fair enough, I strongly hope a good number of folks within the government show a backbone and resist unlawful or abusive orders however they can. Unfortunately those same people can easily be fired and replaced with somebody appropriately loyal (as is already happening). So, unfortunately, I'm not terribly optimistic.
Popular backlash seems to be fairly effective so far at least, so there is some hope. (For example the federal funding freeze which ended almost immediately after a flurry of confusion and outrage. Allegedly ended, anyway - it's not exactly clear in reality.)
Inspectors General have a special provision in the law regarding removal or relocation:
> The removal procedure for presidentially appointed IGs is found in Title 5, Section 403(b), which reads in part An Inspector General may be removed from office by the President. If an Inspector General is removed from office or is transferred to another position or location within an establishment, the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer. Nothing in this subsection shall prohibit a personnel action otherwise authorized by law, other than transfer or removal.
So it's illegal because he didn't notify Congress in advance. That statute was enacted in 2022 specifically to prevent abuses of power such as this.
> it's illegal because he didn't notify Congress in advance
I can't see any judge agreeing with this. The notice requirement is separate from the removal. "If an Inspector General is remove from office..." the President has to do X 30 days in advance. It's a bit convoluted to argue that if the second part isn't done, the first part is invalid. The breach is in failure to notice. That can be cured by noticing.
This is boy who cried wolf crap. The firings are unprecedented but totally legal. The breach was in forgetting to tweet some Congressmen. If we go Defcon 1 over paperwork fuckups, there's nowhere left to go when he does something that's substantively illegal.
Good point! It's always fascinating when the sergeant at arms is actually employed since it's so seldom used. I'm sure Congress wouldn't go down that path with Trump for many many reasons, but perhaps it could be used against lower-level minions in extreme situations. Probably not, but fascinating to consider :)
People should be very careful with words and comparisons. Stalin's purges resulted in assassinations numbering in the millions. Comparing Trump to Stalin is an exaggeration, even considering Trump’s policies that warrant criticism.
I’m not on the left but I know what fascism is, and this is both the same strategy and same ideology. The only reason I can think of to say it’s not is if you genuinely want fascism- but are worried the negative connotations of the label might prevent it from succeeding.
They’re openly using the publicly disclosed strategies of fascist blogger and author Curtis Yarvin for example- he was invited to the inauguration as a guest of honor.
If you know what fascism is then you are nearly alone in the world. Read over the Wikipedia definition of fascism and you'll find it starts with a comparison to "nailing jelly to the wall".
Trump isn't literally Mussolini, and he isn't even personally a fascist, just a political opportunist with no principles- but the movement he is part of literally fits the entire first paragraph of the Wikipedia article to a T.
"Dark Gothic Maga" is a phrase Elon made up to describe himself, and the video covers Peter Thiel directly saying he wants to destroy America. Watch the damn video.
It doesn't seem like you do. I think if you're to make a claim, you should substantiate it. Simply calling "Curtis Yarvin", someone with only the most tangential relation to the Trump campaign - and I'm being generous because that's the directive here - a fascist is actually precisely the name-calling I outlined.
The next steps are
A. You define fascism and your understanding of it specifically.
B. You substantiate how Trump is "fascist" in a way that isn't simple name-calling. You'll have to be careful here because comparing Trump to actual murderous regimes is going to be highly tenuous inherently.
A note: simply providing outrageous things that Curtis Yarvin has said to guffaw at also won't suffice. Fascism has a very specific meaning. It is a philosophy very contemporaneous to the 30s and 40s with very specific influences, thinkers, and an intellectual tradition that most people aren't actually familiar with and authors you've likely never read because they simply haven't been translated to English or aren't very popular in Western philosophical tradition for obvious reasons.
Also, it bears mentioning that Curtis Yarvin is a Jew and calling him a fascist has another layer of incredulity attached.
I don't think Trump is personally a fascist, just an opportunist that is suffering from NPD, and found traction to get attention and power with a particular political movement.
I don't see the value in arguing this point- if you are smart enough to understand any argument I made, and I strongly suspect you are, you can see exactly what Trump and his movement are doing and why with a lot more nuance than any single word label would provide- and you already either think it's a good idea or isn't.
People I care deeply about are being targeted, and systematically dehumanized for who they are or where they are from, and all of the checks and balances that would have protected them in the past have been systematically eliminated. At this point we're past the point of discussing these issues productively, unfortunately.
It doesn't really seem like you're interested in having a serious discussion about the points outlined, which is unfortunate, because I suspect it'd have seriously challenged some of your worldview that you appear to passively hold.
Anyways, just in terms of "vibe", I regret to inform you that your response, which I understand and empathize that it resonates heavily and even implicitly with you, is something you literally need to already agree with to engage with meaningfully.
Already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42902355
> Phyllis Fong was heading up an investigation into Elon Musk's Neuralink.
> Last Friday, President Donald Trump purged several agencies of their inspectors general, demanding that at least 17 people in the role immediately turn in their work laptops and ID badges. One of those IGs, Phyllis Fong at the US Department of Agriculture, decided not to leave, believing the order to be illegal. According to a report from Reuters, she was escorted from the building today by security.
Never mind a long four years, it’s been a long two weeks. Unfortunately, the law is too slow dealing with things like this. And even if it was ruled illegal, who’s going to enforce it. The White House?
> who’s going to enforce it?
This is the real danger of where we’re at right now. We are currently at a point where the President has a stacked Supreme Court that had already showed they’re willing to take his side almost no matter what. There is now effectively no check against the executive branch because of that. Papers are already running stories about how Congress is just letting him loose, with these Inspectors General firings as a prime example of how Congress has just thrown their hands up without even a fight.
We are on the brink of a fascist dictatorship and hardly anyone is noticing or taking it seriously.
Really? It seemed to me that people were shouting it from the rooftops prior to the election.
And then the Democrats were accused of only taking about the threat to Democracy instead of the price of eggs.
[dead]
It is extremely difficult to take seriously.
> with these Inspectors General firings as a prime example of how Congress has just thrown their hands up without even a fight
From what I can tell, the IGs do serve at the pleasure of the President. The only thing he didn’t do is notify the Congress. Is that true?
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11546
"The removal procedure for presidentially appointed IGs is found in Title 5, Section 403(b), which reads in part An Inspector General may be removed from office by the President. If an Inspector General is removed from office or is transferred to another position or location within an establishment, the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer. Nothing in this subsection shall prohibit a personnel action otherwise authorized by law, other than transfer or removal."
> the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer
So worst case, they’re legally fired a month from a few days ago and are owed back pay. This seems much ado about nothing.
Well, there's the whole Presidential obligation from the Constitution that the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed". No big deal. I'm sure it's fine he can pick and choose.
> I'm sure it's fine he can pick and choose
Pretty much every president has done this…so it probably is fine.
Well people are also upset about the whole "President not respecting obligations to Congress" thing.
Any normal president wouldn't conduct the removal without being able to provide the substantive rationale. Which is then evidence Congress has about how the president is conducting his duties. Like "is this rationale consistent with the stated goals of increased efficiency".
Trump doesn't even care enough to make something up.
The law says that he has to notify Congress with a good reason for the dismissal.
> he has to notify Congress with a good reason
He just has to notify. The law doesn’t give the Congress nor judges discretion over whether the reasons are good. Just detailed.
"...the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer."
It's a bit more than "detailed". And he didn't even try to meet any of the elements above. It's essentially a loyalty purge.
> a bit more than "detailed"
"Detailed and case-specific." The case-specific reason can be appointed by my predecessor on such and such date. The law doesn't place any limits on what those reasons can be.
Sure. And it can also be "I don't like how his name was pronounced". What you suppose is a gutting of the law.
> What you suppose is a gutting of the law
It’s not. It’s a gutting of a norm. That’s an important difference. The law provides for independent agencies where the President can’t just fire them. It didn’t provide this cover to the IGs.
Well, until they are used as evidence in an impeachment trial.
Which of course isn't likely to happen in this case...
> Which of course isn't likely to happen in this case
No. But that's in the hands of the American people. A simple majority in the house to impeach and 67 votes in the Senate to convict. 34 seats are up for election in 2026 [1]. Dems only have 47 seats, and a 20-seat pick-up is almost impossible. But if Indiana, Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Kentucky, South Carolina and Florida [2] swung, that could convince moderate Republicans to convict.
Of course, we'd then have the practical matter of getting him out of the White House...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_elec...
[2] https://www.270towin.com/2026-senate-election/
Please let’s not go back to the 2016-2020 impeachment and removal fantasies. The man was impeached twice, once even after his presidency was over and still the American people put him back into office.
Also, of note, every time he has run for president he received more votes than prior runs—even in 2020. There is literally only one person who has ever received more votes than Trump and that’s Biden in 2020 and frankly there will forever be an asterisk after that election due to the pandemic and Trump’s subsequent win in 2024.
If you want him out of office before his term ends, you will need to have 67 democrats as senators with probably at least a quarter of those senators being willing to lose their own elections for that vote. Bottom line, he is in for the next four.
> you will need to have 67 democrats as senators
I think impeachment is a long shot. We agree in that Trump’s popularity is what gives him power. If he lost it, one woudln’t need 67 Democratic Senators on Capitol Hill, the GOP would save itself. It’s just difficult to imagine what Trump could do to fuck up that badly.
Hard disagree on 'forever be an asterisk', if you're referring to the 2020 election itself. You really think a 7 million vote margin leaves room to question this election yet another time after all the audits and Krakens, etc.? Negative sentiment on Trump was strong going into the election, especially considering the economic conditions brought on by COVID. This, being the COVID that he was seen to have mishandled, largely with his own concern at heart, wanting testing curtailed so that ever-higher cases wouldn't hurt his election chances. I guess he loved America so much that he just didn't know how to express it.
Why Trump lost in 2020 and then won in 2024 is clear. Biden's election win was no fluke. The 2024 election was about going with the devil-that-you-know, hoping that kitchen table concerns could be alleviated, and still delivered no landslide (unless you're Stephen Miller).
Just wait until all these Trump voters have to swallow the totality of merely the last 2 weeks of changes (and recissions, in some cases), and they'll find that wanting a bull in a China shop has severe consequences. After 100 days, when actual results will be expected, all the fun Trump & Musk had as they had their way uprooting bureaucrats will be over. As recriminations flow, whether Trump can hold together the crew he started with will be a major question. Interesting times.
I am saying that the pandemic caused an statistical outlier election shift that year and Trump’s election in 2024 where the stats sort of reset to baseline makes it seem pretty likely that without the pandemic and with his ability to increase votes in every election, the 2020 election would have been much closer. Frankly with the weak dem field in 2020 and without the pandemic, I would have bet on Trump winning.
I am not sure what the first 100 days of his second term will bring and I will make no dire predictions (literally all of the dire predictions people made in 2016 were wrong). I have never voted for Trump, but I am not tribal enough to automatically assume that everything he does or is doing is bad either. Short of the last 9 months of his first presidency, his first time in office had zero negative impact on me.
Truthfully, my bet is this second term will likely be as equally uneventful…at least for me and my family.
Yes. The statute literally leads with "The president may remove the Inspectors General" (quoting/closely paraphrasing from memory). The notification requirement is in addition to this but there's no language which says that the removal power is conditioned on obeying the notification requirement. So Trump legally removed the IGs, and then as a side-effect broke the law by failing to notify Congress.
There's a problem with how the law is written though... It supposedly required Trump to notify Congress before he was even President, but its requirements also only apply to the President. Arguably the law was impossible to follow as written, and I gather that's not even the strongest constitutional problem with the law as written. What we have here is a failure of Congress, and Trump exploiting it.
Here's a better question:
Why with this kind of setup, absolutely no-one to stop them, would they step aside in 1450 days if voters have their say?
Past 10 days have been an absolute railroad of undoing past 100 years.
Imagine 1000 days from now the chaos and nobody can change anything for any reason.
The word tyranny seems to fit and I wouldn't have used that with Bush/Cheney or even Reagan.
He didn’t step away willingly the first time, I have zero reason to believe he would step away willingly the second time, especially after he’s spent so much time undoing all the checks and balances that pushed him out that first time.
> even if it was ruled illegal, who’s going to enforce it
The court that ruled it such. She would not only be entitled to back pay, anything her replacement does wouldn’t have legal force. That means anything they do can be challenged by anyone who doesn’t like it.
We’re seeing the limits of Congressional checks on the executive. But we still have an independent judiciary. (If that collapses it will be a good time to be a billionaire in America.) The judiciary’s advantage is its patient; it can exact consequences after 2028 in a way the executive and even the Congress cannot.
We do not have an independent judiciary, they have already shown their allegiance to the President.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the courts essentially powerless to enforce? If memory serves, the judicial branch merely interprets the law and Constitution, but they lack an enforcement mechanism - it is up to the Executive Branch (the president) to administer and enforce the law. If they decide they don't feel like listening to the courts, it's unclear anybody could actually do anything. (Other than impeachment perhaps? But of course that isn't going to happen anytime soon.)
Besides, even if they did have the power to enforce the law, I can't say I exactly trust the Supreme Court to even try reining in Trump (except in minor ways) based on their recent track record. But who knows.
> it's unclear anybody could actually do anything
Sure, if we get down to mechanics like that, the courts require someone else to enforce. But at that mechanistic level, so does the President. He isn’t personally escorting her out of the office.
> But at that mechanistic level, so does the President. He isn’t personally escorting her out of the office.
Fair enough, I strongly hope a good number of folks within the government show a backbone and resist unlawful or abusive orders however they can. Unfortunately those same people can easily be fired and replaced with somebody appropriately loyal (as is already happening). So, unfortunately, I'm not terribly optimistic.
Popular backlash seems to be fairly effective so far at least, so there is some hope. (For example the federal funding freeze which ended almost immediately after a flurry of confusion and outrage. Allegedly ended, anyway - it's not exactly clear in reality.)
> resist unlawful or abusive orders
These firings don’t appear to be unlawful or abusive. They’re sloppy. But he has the power to fire them.
Inspectors General have a special provision in the law regarding removal or relocation:
> The removal procedure for presidentially appointed IGs is found in Title 5, Section 403(b), which reads in part An Inspector General may be removed from office by the President. If an Inspector General is removed from office or is transferred to another position or location within an establishment, the President shall communicate in writing the substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress (including the appropriate congressional committees), not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer. Nothing in this subsection shall prohibit a personnel action otherwise authorized by law, other than transfer or removal.
So it's illegal because he didn't notify Congress in advance. That statute was enacted in 2022 specifically to prevent abuses of power such as this.
> it's illegal because he didn't notify Congress in advance
I can't see any judge agreeing with this. The notice requirement is separate from the removal. "If an Inspector General is remove from office..." the President has to do X 30 days in advance. It's a bit convoluted to argue that if the second part isn't done, the first part is invalid. The breach is in failure to notice. That can be cured by noticing.
This is boy who cried wolf crap. The firings are unprecedented but totally legal. The breach was in forgetting to tweet some Congressmen. If we go Defcon 1 over paperwork fuckups, there's nowhere left to go when he does something that's substantively illegal.
Congress actually has it's own (small) police force, the sergeant at arms.
It's a power they basically never use, but they can technically arrest someone for not complying with a congressional order/subpoena.
But then if they did decide to arrest Trump or others for compliance that'd pit the Sargent at arms directly against the secret services.
Good point! It's always fascinating when the sergeant at arms is actually employed since it's so seldom used. I'm sure Congress wouldn't go down that path with Trump for many many reasons, but perhaps it could be used against lower-level minions in extreme situations. Probably not, but fascinating to consider :)
Eh... When was not a good time to be a billionaire in USA? You mean like now? Is it not a good time now?
I love the use of the word purge here, makes me think of Stalin.
[flagged]
People should be very careful with words and comparisons. Stalin's purges resulted in assassinations numbering in the millions. Comparing Trump to Stalin is an exaggeration, even considering Trump’s policies that warrant criticism.
It's a comical comparison.
Similar to the left using the word "fascism" with no real grasp on the actual meaning.
It's just name-calling.
I’m not on the left but I know what fascism is, and this is both the same strategy and same ideology. The only reason I can think of to say it’s not is if you genuinely want fascism- but are worried the negative connotations of the label might prevent it from succeeding.
They’re openly using the publicly disclosed strategies of fascist blogger and author Curtis Yarvin for example- he was invited to the inauguration as a guest of honor.
If you know what fascism is then you are nearly alone in the world. Read over the Wikipedia definition of fascism and you'll find it starts with a comparison to "nailing jelly to the wall".
The most solid explanation is in this part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Fascist_as_a_pejorativ...
Trump isn't literally Mussolini, and he isn't even personally a fascist, just a political opportunist with no principles- but the movement he is part of literally fits the entire first paragraph of the Wikipedia article to a T.
Fascism is when you enforce your country's immigration laws it seems for most people.
Just learned about that guy Curtis Yarvin and his "Butterfly Revolution" today
"DARK GOTHIC MAGA: How Tech Billionaires Plan to Destroy America" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no
That is a very polemical title. It makes me discard the opinion of the author because they present themselves as biased.
"Dark Gothic Maga" is a phrase Elon made up to describe himself, and the video covers Peter Thiel directly saying he wants to destroy America. Watch the damn video.
>I know what fascism is
It doesn't seem like you do. I think if you're to make a claim, you should substantiate it. Simply calling "Curtis Yarvin", someone with only the most tangential relation to the Trump campaign - and I'm being generous because that's the directive here - a fascist is actually precisely the name-calling I outlined.
The next steps are
A. You define fascism and your understanding of it specifically.
B. You substantiate how Trump is "fascist" in a way that isn't simple name-calling. You'll have to be careful here because comparing Trump to actual murderous regimes is going to be highly tenuous inherently.
A note: simply providing outrageous things that Curtis Yarvin has said to guffaw at also won't suffice. Fascism has a very specific meaning. It is a philosophy very contemporaneous to the 30s and 40s with very specific influences, thinkers, and an intellectual tradition that most people aren't actually familiar with and authors you've likely never read because they simply haven't been translated to English or aren't very popular in Western philosophical tradition for obvious reasons.
Also, it bears mentioning that Curtis Yarvin is a Jew and calling him a fascist has another layer of incredulity attached.
> Also, it bears mentioning that Curtis Yarvin is a Jew and calling him a fascist has another layer of incredulity attached.
Formally he is not a Jew since his mother is not a Jew but I don't understand what is the point of connecting his ancestors to his ideology.
I don't think Trump is personally a fascist, just an opportunist that is suffering from NPD, and found traction to get attention and power with a particular political movement.
I don't see the value in arguing this point- if you are smart enough to understand any argument I made, and I strongly suspect you are, you can see exactly what Trump and his movement are doing and why with a lot more nuance than any single word label would provide- and you already either think it's a good idea or isn't.
People I care deeply about are being targeted, and systematically dehumanized for who they are or where they are from, and all of the checks and balances that would have protected them in the past have been systematically eliminated. At this point we're past the point of discussing these issues productively, unfortunately.
It doesn't really seem like you're interested in having a serious discussion about the points outlined, which is unfortunate, because I suspect it'd have seriously challenged some of your worldview that you appear to passively hold.
Anyways, just in terms of "vibe", I regret to inform you that your response, which I understand and empathize that it resonates heavily and even implicitly with you, is something you literally need to already agree with to engage with meaningfully.