At the beginning of March, Johnson advised his Republican colleagues not to hold town hall meetings, claiming they were giving a “forum” to “professional protesters.”
These idiots are going to find out why peaceful protest exists. The alternative is not very friendly to say the least.
Its looking more and more like thats the GOP plan. Incite an uprising, then they declare martial law where they are free from any check on their power by the courts.
Whats going to be the lynchpin is the GOP will have an army willing to put down Americans en masse.
Or the military command structure fractures and now they have several warring regional or state fractions/civil war, or the military leadership enacts a coup when given illegal orders and either holds executive under military threat or hands control back to the legislature or judicial to hold a special election.
They are unable to see any of these unintended possible consequences of their actions, the same way they are unable to identify irony, or have empathy, or entertain hypotheticals.
There’s a conflict of interest between EU and USA that is becoming a real problem.
Preamble: European States and companies widely use cloud services run by US companies. In the EU data protection is considered a human right, whereas in the US it’s a citizen’s right.
That means, if an intelligence service in the eu want to look at my data, they need a warrant. If an intelligence service in the US want to look at a US citizen’s data, they need a warrant. Ø
But if a US intelligence service want to look at my data, a US company will just have to hand it over. I have no protection, not being a US citizen.
A few legal exercises has been made to deal with this. After all, the amounts earned by Azure, Google Cloud and AWS are noteworthy. Twice the EU court of Law has deemed these exercises wanting, and the problem has been huge enough that Biden and EU Commission head van der Layen made a joint pressemøde conference to annonce that it had been solved - latest in october 2022 by executive order 14086.
End of preamble.
So. The US has this peaceful group of nations across the atlantic that very much just want to pump billions into the US digital economy. As long as the US at least pretends that they respect EU data privacy laws more or less on the level that US citizens are protected. Because building our own similar services is one hell of a pain.
It’s a pipeline of free money. And even though we complain at every price hike, we can’t seem to move towards the exit.
Project 2025 language on this? It’s all an evil plot by scheming europeans in Brussels to nerf US intelligence, and EO14086 is another weak decision by weak biden. It should be cancelled and Brussels should told to piss off.
Billions. Literally billions of dollars every year flowing from companies and taxpayers all over EU towards US Big Tech bank accounts. And the p2025 nutcases want to fuck it up, because setting a tiny privacy footnote on billions of tech dollars make america look weak.
Sorry. We can’t trust you Guys.
holds executive under military threat or hands control back to the legislature or judicial to hold a special election.
With the actual past insurrection supporters currently in control of the legislature and the judiciary, I wonder if this would be the final thing that triggers action on their part to preserve the country, or would they simply hand the reigns of power back to copycats of the ones that fomented the first insurrection.
This is one of the reasons why Lincoln was emphatic that the south had to draw first blood. That allowed him to set the war in motion.
The problem this time is that the fascists are in power and they have their hands on the levers. They are drawing first blood through their laws and executive orders.
At some point, liberals will have to fight back. I fear that more people will die before that happens
And every single person is likely armed.
If you have to advise all of your colleagues to hide from protesters instead of holding a dialogue with the people you represent… maybe you’re the baddies?
Be peaceful until it’s no longer an option to be peaceful.
Peace was never an option, this country has been fighting a class war on itself since it was founded.
We need to start hosting our own town halls. Invite the fuckers and the media.
I like this idea. What does it look like?
One or two skilled people identify a venue (public high school gym? Public park? Local, non-corporate movie theater? A stadium?) and schedule a date and time?
Come up with a draft agenda to discuss at the meeting, publish it somewhere accessible online, and request comments to consider additions/revisions?
Do the same thing for a meeting ruleset to ensure it remains productive and not just an excuse to suck up oxygen by venting/ranting? Use something like a ‘talking stick’?
Have petitions ready for signature so attendees can formally record their views and desires upon conclusion of the meeting?
Identify 3 or so topics to rally behind and ask for volunteers to lead or serve on committees to act on them?
I want this stuff to be actionable, not just a “someone should do this!” complaint.
I’m not an organizer… I’m naive on how this kind of thing works…but I’d like to be part of an organized movement to make things trend toward better before it gets worse.
You cant just organise a gathering of many people without permits. If you lack the permits for say, fire safety, your gathering will be broken up by police and you get a fun day in court. And guess what happens if you apply for permits in your town and you say you want to organise your own town hall because you disagree with the ones in power? Do you think they will get approved?
Exactly. This is why peaceful protest doesn’t work.
K, so what’s the alternative to an organized town hall look like? Like I said, I’m naive. I’ve largely been insulated from activism and have allowed myself to go with the flow for too long.
Now why did you lose your individual first aid kit pal?
Team was ambushed by uglies.
So, let’s get this straight.
Protestors make noise and cause a ruckus to draw attention to any number of social issues they feel need addressed. If they’re successful, laws/perceptions change to more closely reflect their ideal.
Professional protestors are those that get paid to do that.
Ergo, politicians are the “paid protestors”, and the people you are avoiding are just garden-variety protestors.
My question to Republicans is how the fuck are paid protesters any different than paid lobbyists?!
The lobbyists pay the politicians. Paid protesters don’t.
No. No, they are not. America is full of a bunch of pussy, shit talkers. They won’t do a damn thing. If they were going to do anything but whine, they would have done it by now.
I definitely get this sentiment, but I do feel like it should be pointed out that there’s been at least two assassination attempts against Trump.
What we really need is just better aim.
That means .00000005% of American’s chose violence.
Dude Americans can’t even be fucked to do anything when their kids are smashed to pieces by bullets in their own schools, except of course a “thoughts and prayers” on a social media is about the most of it, the rest go “Oh that’s terrible” and go back to eating their dinners.
Look at you sitting in Michigan talking to a mirror. We’re waiting for you to lead the charge.
Was I wrong?
Yes.
Tell that to Thomas Crooks and Luigi Mangione.
It would seem not that pussy. Trump has already survived one assassination attempt.
Republicans are the Nazi party in America.
This is just factual, and it never fails to blow my mind.
It doesn’t help they seem to have a few Vichy-type collaborators on the “opposing” team.
Good use of air bunnies!
I saw an ad for a trump youth podcast. Nothing alarming about that.
MAGA youth parades. Time to get these kids reporting on their parents and reporting to our glorious leader.
They’d have to go outside
They will give them a cow, instead of a dog, and they have to kill the cow to turn it into a hamberder
And what’s the only good kind of Nazi? 🤔
A dead’ne?
The thing is that the Nazi Party had a talented speaker who knew how to talk to the common man and a right hand man who was an expert at propaganda.
I don’t think you understand how idiotic Americans have become. All it takes is an Orange Turd to convince them.
Trump has a cult of personality which makes it hard to gauge how some folks see him. I see him as a sniveling, gormless, weakling who’s is undeserving of even basic human respect. My grandmother somehow is seeing the savior of America who will start a new golden age, I blame 40 years of propaganda and lead poisoning.
The point is that it’s not necessarily a matter of intelligence but moreso a matter of influence, I’ve met a couple folks who are dumber than shit but are separate from propaganda and are anti trump for the simple fact that he talks worse than them. Destroy the propaganda networks and you destroy Trump.
This needs to be the mission going forward. Rush Limbaugh started it and now the people of America need to end it. Right wing media has brought us to Nazism in America.
The real problem is who do you go after first? It ain’t just Limbaugh now, ya got everything from mega churchs to podcasts to YouTubers to local talk radio. Personally I think going after churches would be best since it’d have an outsized impact and work on multiple levels.
I think social media plays a far bigger influential role nowadays in terms of raw numbers. A lot of younger conservative boomers and Gen Xers really consume the shit out of platforms like Facebook. If you regulated Facebook as an actual Media Outlet, they’d suddenly be liable for outright libel and other grossly false ads they permit and promote.
Not disagreeing moreso gonna elaborate on my point, when I say attack churches I specifically mean the big ones like the Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, and Southern Baptists. They are all directly associated with the conservative movement on some level, damaging their attendence numbers will do an outsized good since it may strip them of some cash flow. Also it’s a lot easier to damage their influence than a large amorphous corporation like Facebook, far easier to make a church unlivable by pouring liquid ass or cat piss concentrate into the HVAC system.
Precisely.
He speaks to Americans.
He is their figurehead, icon, leader, exemplar.
What a sad and absurd irony of history.
My favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, was a Republican. I think a secular federal republic is a pretty decent form of democratic governance. The “Radical Republican” wing of the antebellum Republican Party were the most ardent and vocal supporters of abolition in Congress.
Now the very word is tainted by association by these scumbags.
And Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive Republican that opposed trusts and the imbalanced influence of money in politics (but the changes began to happen during his time, which is why he left the party altogether). There was a time when “Republican” just referred to the kind of governmental structure one supported (just like “democrat”), with a range of economic and social views. That’s actually what the “grand” in Grand Old Party (GOP) referred to iirc—it was a party big enough handle a range views and ideas. AND, again iirc, the whole push for republican governmental ideas by said party was to find a way around the stranglehold of slavery in American economics. Representative government could make decisions that the populace might not support because it was the morally correct thing to do (which is also why the concept of electors was advanced by Hamilton, incidentally: as a safe-guard against tyranny—electors could look at an elected candidate and say “nah” because that person was actually likely to work against the interests of the United States).
How the mighty have fallen.
This chant brought to you by the people who voted explicitly to tax the poor in order to give money to the rich. Just two brain cells in the entire goddamn party.
How do people not realize that they are the poor people that rich people hate
They see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
At this stage, we could the rich/poor on the $1M/yr income line and it would still be good.
Don’t you know? If it wasn’t for all those damn liberals giving away all the money to those illegal-ish immigrants I would be a millionaire too! I have worked hard so obviously it is their fault I am not wealthy yet! /s
How do you know it was republicans chanting?
Fair point, but I suppose that’s the majority of the population in Columbus Nebraska
I do tend to be suspicious about that these days …… I live in a very blue area but over the last get years we’ve had town halls disrupted by chants to stop protecting our kids from diseases. From people out of our town, including out of state
Wow, that’s infuriating.
Nebraska is actually more blue than you might think. Also, it’s pretty assured that Democrats are showing up to town halls and making their voices heard. They’re EVERYONE’S rep no matter their party affiliation.
Spineless cowards. There are amateur stand up comedians living in their cars and working for beer money who handle hecklers better than these professional public speakers with lifetime Healthcare.
Meanwhile we have people like AOC volunteering to do town halls in Republican districts, just so Republican voters can actually talk to a member of congress.
What a pathetic state of affairs.
Meanwhile we have people like AOC volunteering to do town halls in Republican districts, just so Republican voters can actually talk to a member of congress.
I love this as it’s such a power move.
It really is. Her and a few others need to form a coalition and take over the party. Give Pelosi and Schumer the boot and pivot hard to the Left for the working class.
It may already be happening, she polls better than anyone else in her party
Yeah I’ve been hoping for it for a while now, but it’s crazy how much power people like Pelosi have over the party as a whole. Maybe with the absolute madness of the second Trump administration, that’ll weaken as people realize how useless the Democratic Old Guard is.
GOP voters actually advocating for something that would be good for them? I feel like I woke up in a different timeline.
They advocate for all kinds of reasonable things, but they never actually vote for them.
And this is the curse of the two party system in action. In reality, we have more in common with one another than we think, save for those solely driven by bigotry and fear(and there’s a lot of those)
It seems like when given the choice to lose all Medicare and social security or to tax billionaires a little bit, they are finally understanding the right decision …
It’s just too bad like always, it doesn’t seem to bother them until it directly affects them.
Oh honey… They’ll just vote Republican anyway. Maybe if the Democratic party disbanded and a new party with a new name came out of it… otherwise, they will never vote D.
As a nebraskan I am finally proud of one thing in this corn packed hellhole. At least the people in this district are finally fucking realizing who to blame for their poverty
Doubt
tax the rich! tax the rich!
Tax or trebuchet. I’m okay with either.
“Tax or trebuchet, I’m ok with either way”
It says the same thing but has good meter and rhymes. Great for chanting.
Tax everyone, balance the budget.
The thing is even more ridiculous because the Republicans warned him not to have the town hall and have told their members to only have online town halls or “moderated” chats. So they can keep any dissenting voices out and project an image of everyone loving what they are doing.
Now they are just relegated to calling things like this “democratic operatives” trying to disrupt civil Republican discourse. This isn’t gonna work as well as they think because people know who is hurting them since the Republicans own all the branches right now.
They owned all the branches during trump’s first term too. Republican voters won’t learn, they’re too stupid to understand
They also had all branches during W’s term when he crashed the economy and started two never ending wars.
The Republican voter is dumber than a bag of rocks. Hell, even a bag of rocks would learn faster than a Republican voter.
He was still getting his feet wet in that term and he only had them all for half his term. And they at least pretended to give a shit about the less wealthy constituents, that tax break they gave to “everybody” expired for the middle and lower class after a year or two but was there for the wealthy well into Biden’s term.
This time they’re not even pretending to care. They’re relying completely on their propaganda to convince their idiotic fans that tariffs are going to be a tax on other countries and their bills will go lower as a result of it. Meanwhile they’re going to gut Medicaid and other social services in order to give money to the wealthiest people in the country.
So in answer to your comment, they will hopefully notice this time because they’re going to be hurting as a direct result of what Trump is doing as opposed to something he could deflect as being “because liberals”.
It’s as if the more a population is restricted, the harder it will resist. It’s taking a while for the american people to be roused, but I have hope that it gathers speed and power, not unlike a boulder hurdling down a hill towards a village.
lol and watch them vote for these cowards over and over again. 🤦🏽♀️
Video cut out before he no doubt retorted with some facile, bullshit strawman argument. But you just know that happened.
Yes. Basically his argument was that Biden proposed a millionaire tax, but even that tax (which didn’t pass) would not have solved the problem. So might as well not try or something like that. The question begins at around the 23 minute mark. https://www.youtube.com/live/GW2hRMYVhjQ
Let’s see if the Americans actually have teeth to bare. My guess is no.
Satisfied keyboard warriors everywhere agree.
You love to see it.
attendees voted Republican? a little cognitive dissonant if so
The district as a whole voted republican, but the attendees are just whoever showed up to the town hall to air grievances, which sounds like it was not republicans.
At least not only Republicans. Republicans may have very well been annoyed at their party, but “tax the rich” is a very Democrat chant.
It’s a very working class ideology.
Last August, I was at a bar, and got into a convo about general politics. I avoided using leftist words, but just started talking about their paychecks, and how their boss always tries to screw them, which led to their boss having undue influence and money in politics…
Withing an hour and a half or so, everyone one in the bar was talking about the same thing: the ruling class screwing the workers.
Only two people were quite unhappy… one I know was a Reich Winger, because I helped compile a dossier on him for local activists.
Fuck around… find out 🤷
The next funding dinner should help them forget about all of that
James Franco in a top hat: “Boo hoo, are the people still deciding?”
