I’m feeling so uneasy with everything I’ve been seeing. I keep thinking about what we will be this time next year, and if shit hits the fan, what is your plan? I’m queer and was politically active in 2020, so I would potentially be considered a political enemy.
The only blueprint I can think of is what you do in an active shooter situation; Flee, Hide, Fight.
I know there’s that romantic notion of “don’t be a coward, get out and protest”, but I remember the brutality of the 2020 protests firsthand, and even then I thought “thank god I’m going toe to toe with the CPD and not the CCP”. Next time is going to be different. The president now has authority to send drone strikes. Protests and riots don’t stand a chance agains missiles and live rounds.
Flee- I have an Uncle in Montreal who my family could potentially use as a way to at least temporarily escape the chaos. The hope I’d have is that Canada and other countries would accept American refugees, however that’s not a guarantee.
Hide- If borders are closed, lay low and move away from major cities if possible. If civil war breaks out, try to get away from the violence even if you think your side will win. Todays losers may be tomorrows victors.
Fight- If cellular data/ social media algorithms can keep track of you, and surveillance can make sure there’s no movement, this would be the last resort of desperation. I guess if possible try to either find a group for safety in numbers, or conversely go guerrilla as groups of resistance would make easy targets.
Sorry my mind is running and I’m getting scared.
We are pretty much screwed any way you slice it. Make sure you’ve got a trusted network of people, make sure you’ve got your passport renewed. Make sure you’ve got some coins stashed away.
But also, get into local government. Go to a city meeting. It sounds dumb but if you’re not involved then you’re not informed and have no power. A lot of cities have the power of ordinances that can make life less hellish.
Look up climate feedback loops cause we’re already over the edge on that crap. Ain’t nothing to be done except start living underground.
Look up climate feedback loops cause we’re already over the edge on that crap. Ain’t nothing to be done except start living underground.
We can still lessen the effect. Every .1 degree less average global temperature rise helps.
Yeah that .1 degree might stave off the extinction of several animal and insect species for a bit
Y he permafrost is melting in the tundra of Canada and Siberia, once we hit those methane pockets…it’s bad y’all and individuals can’t do nothing. It’s basically a greenhouse gas time bomb
A better question would be what are you going to do to make sure the orange Mussolini doesn’t win?
Make sure you, your friends, and your family are Registered to vote.
Make sure everyone you know gets to the polls on our before election day.
Become a poll worker.
We need to make sure we vote in numbers too big to steal. In 2000 the election was handed to Bush by the Supreme Court because of one state. Looking at the last term, the court would absolutely find a way to shift the election to the con in chief if it was just one swing state with irregularities.
Talk to people about project 2025 and what it will mean. This is how the guardrails from 2017 are removed. This is how we start a Christian theocracy. If we vote blue all the way down, the Dems may be able to put stronger rails in place. If it’s not Project 2025 it will be Project 2029. These conservative think tanks have been doing this since Reagan, but this is by far the scariest.
Talk to friends and family about the Biden administration wins. It’s not just Biden you’re voting for, it is a continuation of his administration.
- CHIPS and science act bringing an entire industry back home. This will make us competitive with China and boat domestic manufacturing.
- Inflation reduction act an investment in renewable and traditional energy.
- Biden has actually increased fossil fuel production which has kept energy prices low and curbed the post pandemic inflation. Record oil production SPR management
- What Has Biden Accomplished? Look at These 10 Metrics, Not the Polls
Bottom line, this is likely the most important election of many of our lives. All of us must participate.
- saving the economy,
- forgiving school loans,
- cutting insulin costs (THIS SAVED SO MANY LIVES IT’S BONKERS),
- stood up for unions & labor (FIRST PRESIDENT TO EVER WALK A PICKET LINE),
- increased overtime for millions,
- ended federally subsidized discriminatory mortgage lending,
- went after airlines, cable companies, phone companies, concert ticket sales and hotels for their fucking ridiculous hidden fees!,
- brought back net neutrality,
- he’s gonna try to tax billionaires!
I’ve been saving for a down payment for a house for two years. It would appear my money is not wanted in the USA. I also have dual EU citizenship. My plan is to improve my spoken German and take my family overseas.
As an atheist married to a Salvadoran woman with whom I have two hispanic children, I feel like after they run out of illegal immigrants we’ll not be far down the “committing suicide with two bullets to the back of the head” list. Or maybe we’ll just get sent to a camp that treats ADHD if you catch my drift.
I visited Germany in 2022 and was very impressed with the walkable/bikeable infrastructure and ICE trains even if they were late on occasion. The food wasn’t my favorite but the culture and people were kind and they still seem to value rule of law and societal decorum to a certain degree. The idea that making a nazi salute in public is jailable/fineable is really how it should be everywhere but “free speech” yadda yadda…
I have wanted to leave the US since 2003. Just didn’t have skills or money until now. I’m still going to struggle with a language barrier and finding a job with A2 level German. That’s my biggest issue right now I think.
My mom moved to the US not knowing English. How the turntables have turned.
you have to admit, moving to germany to avoid deathcamps has some hiarlous irony
As a German: You’ll be welcomed and appreciated, just know that we too are fighting a political right shift and that the neonazi AfD might emerge as one of, if not the strongest party next election cycle. Especially if Trump wins this will float nationalist and fascists in Europe on the rising brown tide. It’s extremely unlikely they’ll end up in government though.
Generally immigrants from the US are quite happy over here and report high satisfaction with their move if they have a) children or b) health issues that cost an arm and a leg in the US and also bring a patience for German bureaucracy and good language skills.
Since you have German citizenship you are free to also consider the Netherlands (easier finding a job with only English, way higher cost of housing) or other EU countries, since you can settle in any one thanks to freedom of movement (Spain might be easier on your wife, since she’ll speak the language).
So because I’m in a first past the post system over here, how does that work? You will still have other parties that can form a coalition against the right at that point? Assuming they don’t get 50+% of the vote, correct? The courts here are already fascist and preparing for the takeover due to Trump’s judge appointments during his term. Congress is deadlocked and useless as usual, and Biden is circling the drain figuratively and literally. There is no run off here. No coalitions to be had. Trump gets 47%, Biden 46%, and Kennedy 7%? Trump becomes president even though over half the country doesn’t want him. What’s worse is that he only needs percentages of the electoral college and not actual votes.
Germany, at least from my outsider perspective, seems to understand its history enough to be minimizing the right wing to its true proportions. But yeah, I’m well aware the developed world is going to shit. I’m not really sure what to do about it or where to go. The USA feels like ground zero for this shit due to Trump being in Russia’s pocket. That propaganda op worked better than anything they’ve ever done in the past. Even they probably can’t believe how successful they’ve been.
We looked at Spain, but ultimately the salaries are so low that we wouldn’t be able to afford to fly home to visit relatives and friends assuming we can still do that post Trump. I guess I’m not writing off the US entirely just yet but it’s not looking too great.
Thanks for your advice and well wishes. I hope to vote against AfD if/when I get there.
Whether you’re left, right, or center, focus on becoming ungovernable.
If you build up your local community and supporting institutions, and commit to ignoring unjust laws, you can greatly minimize the degree to which anything at the federal level impacts you.
This involves a lot of self sufficiency and privacy efforts that many are resistent to because of the loss of convenience, but it is well worth it.
As a non American living outside of the US; I’m much more concerned about a second Trump term.
The first one was mostly just annoying, funny and embarrassing for you guys.
This time he’ll be taking over with war in Europe and the whole Israel/Gaza thing. There is quite a lot of damage he can do…
Don’t underestimate the US military, as an ally. They are primarily younger, and the upper echelons are educated and all take their oath very seriously, to defend the Constitution, from enemies foreign and domestic. Of course there will be factions that will stick to Trump, like certain national guards, but that will fracture command and weaken our ability to react internationally. The military understand those implications, the potential literal end of the world. In the end, they push the button, not the president. The lower ranks have no desire to fight American civilians either, it’s antithetical to everything they are taught, and the age range is generally people in their 20’s and 30’s.I trust a Marine, a soldier, an airman, a seaman heheh, coast guard too, oh and the spacemen, way more than a cop, to do the right thing.
A vet.
I had a similar conversation about this with a Marine yesterday, and I definitely trust the lower ranks and their commitment to the American people, but it is after all an authoritarian hierarchy. I’ve heard of privates coerced into taking vaccines under the threat of disappearing, and if soldiers can fire on their own civilians in other countries, I have every reason to believe they can here. And I know some of them readily would.
I’ve heard of privates coerced into taking vaccines under the threat of disappearing, and if soldiers can fire on their own civilians in other countries, I have every reason to believe they can here.
you know you’re deranged right? either you’re dumber than dogshit for believing this when you read it below the BATBOY headline, or you’re sick in the head for making it up.
I’ve heard of privates coerced into taking vaccines under the threat of disappearing,
LOL this is ridiculous. threat of disappearing is bullshit. During the GWOT many units were mandated to get Anthrax and a host of other vaccines, and you know what? Most people just took it.
A few didn’t. They got their discharges.
No one fucking disappeared. Jesus Handy Christ, that’s so fucking dumb it’s astounding
The US military’s entire existence is so they can attack other countries to keep rich americans rich. I dont think they will now suddenly change and care about the life of anyone not rich.
Be really mad amd then do nothing
you guys have cried about your guns for two hundred years in case of this exact situation
i think the gun people might be voting for trump
Never underestimate dem/liberal gun ownership. We are just quiet about it and don’t make it our entire personality.
I can’t be the only one to roll my eyes at comments like this. Like in one respect I get it, we want to say we will fuck up the fascists. But on the flipside, what the fuck are you guys actually suggesting here?
Bear in mind per Propublica reporting that the right-wing extremist groups want to incite a race/Civil War. They hate the fact that there is such a stark contrast in violence between the left and right and it’s making them look TERRIBLE.
Bear in mind firearm manufacturers are actively trying to break into the leftist market to sell more guns. Pretty obvious.
Forgetting the evidence that guns for all intents don’t make you safer. We need to use our brains before bullets, lest we’ve all already lost.
Civilians with guns against an actual military would never work, it’s just some fantasy those on the far right have.
It doesn’t seem like you’ve read much about insurgencies and rebel groups. It doesn’t actually take much firepower to inject enough chaos into the system that you cause issues with traditional militaries. One person with a rifle could keep a FOB alert and wasting resources for a couple of hours in Afghanistan. IEDs placed by individuals or small groups caused absolute terror in Iraq.
These types of things are unlikely to “win” a war. But if you make it costly enough, the other side will decide it’s not worth fighting. The point is not to engage in head-on combat, that’s suicide.
Or hell, look to the tactics of some of the rebels in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War.
I sure haven’t. That’s a deluded conservative thing… they say they need guns to defend from an overbearing government, then they’re the idiots who vote for freedom-infringing authoritarians. It also hasn’t made sense in decades at best, given that they’d be gravy seals fighting army or police with their handguns while the government has helicopters, grenades, night vision, comm systems (like, they think they’d have cell service in a civil war?) and so on. Maybe some organized group could pull off an Iraq or Afghanistan style resistance, but it seems unlikely.
I’ve dabbled in ham radio a bit, comms is something that at least some of the right are thinking about with these kinds of things, there’s more than a handful of right wing doomsday pepper lunatics in the ham radio circle, if you ever decide to listen in on CB radio chatter, there’s a good chance you’re gonna hear some lunatic ranting about conspiracy bullshit, I’m pretty sure I saw some pictures of guys at 1/6 with some baofengs (cheap Chinese ham radios, pretty much every ham has one or two kicking around)
I remember when I first started looking into ham radio, I was googling some stuff, clicking into a whole bunch of different results not paying too much attention to where I was, and I found one forum thread that was actually pretty informative until halfway down the thread someone said something really unhinged about race wars or something, and no one called him out about it and some even agreed with him, so I took a look at what site I was on and it was the stormfront forums. Nope I out of there really quick.
Also not the only experience I had like that, few of my hobbies and interests have significant overlap with the right wing lunatics fringe since I’m into some outdoors camping and survivalist type stuff, the algorithms try really hard to suck me into crazytown sometimes.
Honestly. I wish we had more leftest prepped stuff. The darknet hacker scene (privacy is a mixed bag) is decent IMHO, but as soon as you want to prepare for disasters (canning, homesteading, HAM radio, reloading, guns, etc) ALOT of the content and social media is a mix of ethno or Christian nationalism bunk.
We, the left, really should be interested in this stuff. This is how you provide mutual aid in disasters. How you help the marginalized avoid oppression and how you raise the cost of faciest take over.
Yeah that would involve actual work so no
Hey. We got through the last trump presidency. If it happens, we’ll fight like hell to protect the ones who are most vulnerable, and we’ll figure it out. Personally I am still hopeful that it won’t happen. We all need to vote and not get complacent, but this panic is good, electorally speaking. One reason Clinton lost in 2016 was that a lot of people didnt take trump’s chances of winning seriously. Biden’s polling low right now because leftists are mad at him (and rightly so). But as the election starts to ratchet up more and more, we’ll hopefully see people fall in line on at least keeping Trump out of office.
I hate it, personally. I hate that we get government-induced anxiety every election year, just to get people to vote the way they should. All this attention on Trump and Project 2025 is meant to force the undecideds to choose where they stand. If you’ve already decided how you’ll be voting in November, take a break for your own mental health. Last election cycle I made myself crazy listening to political podcasts, checking 538, analysing polling data. I can’t do it this year, so I’m trying not to get too deep into it.
Germany got through Hitler and the beer hall putsch, go read about what happened next time when he regrouped and tried again.
This would NOT be the same thing and you (and folks like you) really need to accept that.
I will note that not everyone got through the last Trump presidency. Clinton would have had an actual response to Covid because she wouldn’t have disbanded the NSC unit that would have saved most of the 1.1 million Americans who died of Covid-19.
That’s absolutely true. But we can do more about the future than we can the past.
Only thing I can do is hope I don’t get genocided. But when Proud Boys show up, I’m not going without a fight.
Get up, send my kids to school and go to work.
Buy a gun or two. Nothing in this country has more rights than a gun.
Stay and vote. The way I see it, Canada is fucked if PP wins anyways, and will be hurt by Trump regardless. Europe is fucked if the alt right wins in France and hobbles Germany in the next couple elections. Nigel Farage is going to parasitically eat the conservatives from the inside out in the UK. Trump will pull put of NATO, which means war on Europe’s doorstep and probably all of south east Asia if China decides they don’t mind war.
Running isn’t going to work. Voting and protesting and political action is what will keep us all at peace and ever vigilant against populism and later, fascism. All hope isn’t lost. We still can undo the damage and categorically reject hate and corruption that is threatening democracies worldwide (and already dooming authoritarian countries with massive population gaps and economic damage)
I did not need to change my plans when he was president a first time, why would I this time?
He was no less a fascist in 2016, but there were enough checks on his power that he mostly managed to simply be incompetent and chaotic. He bungled Covid response and gave free handouts to billionaires, sold who knows how many state secrets to foreign entities, but there are a lot of positions in government held by actually qualified and competent people who waylaid his whims. Conservatives have been carefully putting the pieces into place to prevent this from happening again, for instance reclassifying higher ranking government employees so that the president would be able to fire/dismiss them without cause. If the leader of the FBI attempts to investigate him again, they could just hire a new one who won’t. The supreme court being full of right wing extremists is another purposeful and deliberate step to undermine the checks and balances system. Conservatives want kings, and they weren’t prepared the last time Trump was in power. They will be able to do much more damage this time.
There isn’t exactly a single candidate in the past ten years I would’ve called competent. In 2016, every last person running was out of touch, the only thing that enormously benefitted were the memes. Which is why I often mention my biggest qualm with Democrats, that in 2016 they wanted votes so badly they shunned third party voting as “throwing away your vote”. Uhm, no, throwing away your vote is what we’re doing right now. If the system wasn’t simply a monarchy with two choices and if people voted honestly, this is a situation we wouldn’t even be thinking about. I feel sorry for nobody.
there were enough checks on his power that he mostly managed to simply be incompetent and chaotic
There were no real checks. He had way too many Republicans in Congress for there to be. Most of what protects America is gentleman’s agreements that we all assume a normal president wouldn’t defy.
If the leader of the FBI attempts to investigate him again, they could just hire a new one who won’t.
That is literally what happened last time. The house (where Republicans are a majority) wouldn’t pass a bill that makes firing the FBI director illegal so there’s no real difference.
I’d like to try to assuage your fears regarding a protest meeting missiles or drone strikes. Yes, the President can order drone strikes with impunity. It’s been that way since the first use of drones, early as the Obama era (maybe earlier, but I was a bit young then).
However, this does not apply to US soil. One of the benefits of state sovereignty is that federal armed forces can’t operate on US soil. National guard gets involved, at the governor’s request, but they don’t have missiles or drones. Police are barbaric, but they also don’t have missiles or drones.
So I don’t think we’d see much of an escalation in terms of weapons of violence with regards to protests when compared to 2020.
If he declares it an official act, then it’s not illegal. Drone strikes are pretty official.
SCOTUS fucked up super-sized
He can order it all he wants, but that doesn’t mean any branch of the military has to actually carry out an obviously illegal order. All it means is that he theoretically “can’t” get prosecuted for trying.
Soldiers swear an oath to the Constitution to not commit illegal orders, regardless of who orders them.
The issue is that the president cant issue illegal orders anymore. Since hes the commander in chief of the military, his orders are an “official act,” i.e constitutional.
The supreme court has said that the president can order military executions of anyone at all and the military can no longer legally refuse. The above is constitutional, because the people who decide what is constitutional said it is.
A huge portion of the military supports him.
And a huge proportion doesn’t.
Dont underestimate how many people join the military at 18 for financial/career reasons and often end up living overseas and meeting people from different backgrounds. It’s not as conservative as people might imagine.
I know that many do not, but I have no idea what the actual proportions would be. Polls are iffy.
However, this does not apply to US soil. One of the benefits of state sovereignty is that federal armed forces can’t operate on US soil
From the Project 2025 wiki page:
In November 2023, The Washington Post reported that deploying the military for domestic law enforcement under the Insurrection Act of 1807 would be an “immediate priority” upon a second Trump inauguration in 2025. That aspect of the plan was being led by Jeffrey Clark, a contributor to the project and a former official in the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ). Clark is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a Project 2025 partner. The plan reportedly includes directing the DOJ to pursue those considered by Trump as disloyal or a political adversary
I was unaware of “Project 2025”, interesting read! While that does contain multiple concerning ideas, this is far from a reliable manifesto. Additionally, ties have been drawn to the Trump campaign, but these are loose ties and appear primarily to be op-eds. Trump has also disavowed ties to this “publication”. Lastly, that “Washington Post report” is another one of those vague articles featuring “according to sources familiar”.
Why is this fucker still alive?
Clearly “the system” isn’t capable of handling the threat of right-wing extremism and something needs to be done, but anybody murking Trump would probably make things worse, not better. He’d become a conservative martyr, and they could point to his death and say “see, we told you they’re violent” and use it to deepen hatred and oppression. This is what happened after the failed assassination attempt on Robert Fico
Haven’t been following the news, have we? What you said was mostly true a week ago. Now, NO ONE has legal protection under U.S. law against crime committed by an American president.
While this may be true, and a drone strike may be ordered on US soil, the President will not be the one controlling the drone, not directly in command of that person. The UCMJ supercedes in the case.
Any “official order” of the president is lawful now. As commander in chief of the military, he can indeed “officially order” drone strikes on US soil. The soldier following that will be following a lawful order. The UCMJ will not apply.
Pretty crazy that all it took was one ruling from 6 people to undo our entire system of checks and balances, and 247 years of accountability.
