News: How to Topple an Authoritarian Regime

I’m trying to think of a more dickish thing to do than to run away from the fight and then tell the people who are in the fight that they suck.

And right now I can’t.

 

When a 100% Trump supporter like LaMalfa dies, don’t make a statement about how good of a representative he was. Instead, call him out for supporting fascism, and express hope that his replacement, no matter from which party, is a supporter of democracy.

Otherwise, all the talk from Chuck Jeffsom about how MAGA=fascism comes across to normies as over the top political rhetoric.

A month or so back I rewatched the first Fargo TV series. Evil villain Lorne Malvo explains to good guy cop Colin Hanks how he does all his evil shit. Malvo says, the thing you need to learn is that there are no rules.

Our leadership for the most part is acting like Hanks was in that episode. They need to become

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

The Colin Hanks who executes Malvo.

 

Make no sense whatsoever, and not to be taken seriously, obviously.

 

It rather reminds me of Ezra Klein who said that Charlie Kirk 'did politics the right way'.

Either talk sense or STFU.

Instead you got this...

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eTeolgi-rGA
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/j2va_LUihfQ

 

Smells like teen rationalization.

 

Speaking with the guy who was installing my blinds today here in Ireland, he was telling me about two American couples he recently did work for who left because of Trump. Both couples were gay. That brings the total of Americans moving to Ireland that I either personally met or am one step removed from to 11, including myself. Of those 11, 8 are LGBT+ and the other 3 are POC. Seems to be a pattern regarding the people who got out while the getting was good.

 

Asked and answered.

AB, it would be one thing if we were sitting out protests. But there’s no leadership for what you want now. And since this is the real world and not a Disney movie, none of us here are going to start a nationwide movement of general strikes.

You really are being a privileged dick. Like, a genuinely distasteful, abhorrent human being.

 

I strongly advice those Americans, who want to flee the USA, to take the easiest and cheapest possibility, while it still exists...the DAFT route.
No need for a plea about unsafety, no need for cumbersome visa actions. The only things is it's called the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, and thus the question is for how long are we still going to treat the USA as a friend.

 

I hear the ayatollas encourage the Americans to take to the streets and warns the tanman not to kill them or there will be consequences.

 

I think that the "regime" isn't as strong as you might think it is... I said this in another thread but this feels more like Tsarist Russia than it does Nazi Germany.

Are they taking things out of the Nazi playbook? Sure. But the Nazis started with 43% of the vote with 2/3 of the population voting amongst six! different options. This after ten years of being a political party and only really building power after the Great Depression decimated Germany's economy. Trump? 49.8 percent of the vote with let's be generous and say 45 percent of the population voting amongst only two options. Most polls place his hardcore support at around 25-30 percent. I've seen some higher and I've seen some lower. Trump's movement has taken place in retaliation to the Obama presidency and this latter ICE agenda in Minnesota clearly a response to the George Floyd protests. It's about them feeling like it's their country again. It's not and it won't be... The demographics are already too mixed up for them to be successful. This really is just an extinction burst of white supremacy.

The Nazi's did a Reichstag fire immediately to consolidate a base and then built on it. They were operating in a society that only knew Democracy to be a failure. The Night of the Long Knives followed a year later, with Hitler becoming the Fuhrer and mixing the roles after Hindenburg's death. A year later, we see the Nuremberg Laws enacted in 1935, and then eventually in 1936 we see German troops occupying the Rhineland. It's only in 1938, five years after consolidating power and having the population behind him fully that Hitler is able to do things like annex Austria and the Kristallnacht.

This current administration? They are doing everything in a much more compressed time frame because they know it all ends with Trump dying. There will be a power vacuum and it's done after that. They know it because unlike Hitler, they haven't really made their supporters lives better. They haven't garnered more support amongst the population. They only know grievance politics and don't have any plan on delivering tangible results to the population. This is because their goals are different than the Nazis. This administration uses Nazi style politics in order to create a base, but their goals aren't to do right by their base. Their goals are to do right by the oligarchy and manipulating MAGA is their mechanism to do so. They hope to set us back a generation by changing things so much the same way things happened under Reagan.

Which leads me to why this is more like Tsarist Russia. Contrary to what people on this board realize, we are witnessing the death of Capitalism. In the 1970s as other countries got better at manufacturing after their own industrial revolutions, the West decided to do globalization and began the process of ending their manufacturing. It's gotten so bad that we are now dependent on other areas of the world to produce a good portion of not only our consumer goods, but our industrial ones as well. The impending end of the petrodollar creates a situation where we can no longer economically bully countries into submission. So whatever comes next (even if we retain a position of power over the rest of the world) will look substantially different. Obviously everyone has their own theories as to what's going to happen, but what we are witnessing is fundamentally different and yet the same. We are witnessing the end of the Old World and the beginning of a New one. I think the difference between MAGA and say Nazi Germany is that MAGA is the end of the Old World, whereas Nazi Germany was an attempt at creating a New World that failed.

How is MAGA like Tsarist Russia before the collapse? Replace the social effects of rapid industrialization with the social effects of rapid change from technology and you have your first comparison point. AI/technological advances have created an under-employed, underpaid workforce, and created unheard of social wealth inequity. America like Tsarist Russia had seen quite a bit of immigration into the country that caused social unrest. While the scope is different, I think you can compare the Vietnam and Iraqi Wars to the Russo-Japanese and WWI because the populations were still both mostly around who witnessed them, which makes it a salient issue. Both societies have this sense of fragility around their military strength whether conscious or not.

Like it or not there is this undercurrent floating in American politics right now. And it's not being fully talked about, but it's about how do we end the Empire. When politicians talk about universal healthcare, they are talking about ending the Empire. When politicians talk about no foreign wars, they are talking about ending the Empire. When politicians say America First, we are talking about ending the Empire. And it's happening on both sides. The question is how do we do it and who benefits. The right is trying to kick out all of the immigrants because the want to repel people who have come to the Imperial Core because of disruptions the Empire has made to their own societies. The right wants to wipe their hands clean of them and keep their consolidated power. The left seeks to remove this consolidated power and move forward with a new system of economic orientation with a government that is providing for its citizens. I talk a big game, but I'm really only asking for the type of society that my grandparents got to enjoy. Yes I would like us to go full throated socialism, but I'd take a big capitalistic band aid again.

I think that this administration is obviously a threat and going to be a net negative for a lot of people. It's has and it's going to continue to cause a great deal of harm. However, I think rather than starting WWIII even though he does have all of the tools available to him, I think it's going to be more like a social revolution with the pendulum swinging far back to the left. I'm also an optimist so there's that too.

 

Hey @American Brummie is this guy doing enough?

2013344910078878096 is not a valid tweet id

How about them

 

Good, now we just need to stop voting for assholes that want to limit 2nd amendment rights.

"Since President Trump's second inauguration, more liberals, people of color and LGBTQ folks say they are buying guns and getting training. This is the latest in a trend that researchers, gun clubs and trainers say they've been watching for years. No longer do firearm buyers fit the old stereo-type of being white, rural and Republican. Today on The Sunday Story, NPR's Frank Langfitt shares his reporting on the changing face of American gun ownership."

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/11/nx-s1-5611025/why-more-liberals-are-buying-guns

 

That response, in a nutshell, is everything that is wrong with the US and how the country got into this mess in the first place. It's an unhealthy mentality for living in a society that encourages people to selfishly take matters into their own hands rather than seeing themselves as a part of a functioning society. I have never understood the American obsession and fetish with guns - it's simply a mental illness that is inherently counter-productive to a healthy functioning society.

Give me the New Zealand or Australian attitude to gun control over this American idiocy any day. It is simply perverted.

 

Thank you! The idea that, as an American, I have to buy a gun to defend my rights, is a load of crap. I want to live in a first world nation where I don't need to own a gun to be a full citizen.

Families that own guns experience higher rates of accidental gun deaths and suicides than families that don't own guns. I don't want that for me and my family, and I don't want people of color to have to experience that in order to defend their rights. Why can't we just have rights instead of having to own guns in order to have rights?

 

Because America has glorified the fictional Wild West cowboy into its avatar. On one hand it's all gunfights at the OK Corral, defending one's self and family from "savages", protecting property from wild and dangerous animals, etc. On the other hand it is the isolated (and inherently selfish and self-centered) outlook of being a loner in the big sky of the American West. Nothing about living in urban environments where you have to balance individual and group rights and responsibilities, it's all about me, myself and I.

 

As @Sufjan Guzan mentioned, the Weymar Republic was 15 years of crap and it's no surprise that the population decided to default to the tried and true militaristic authoritarianism that they thrived on during the 1800s. It is not and never was a good comparison for the US.

Tradition trumps everything. The one time the US got to close to a regime, Roosevelt's four terms, there was the huge asterisk of WW2. Not a true government capture. Immediately after, the constitution was amended to limit presidents to two term. Before that, Washington declined to run for a third term and multiple presidents after followed suit. As a South American, that is fascinating to me.

In general, the US does civil war much better than it does authoritarian regimes. If US society starts to fracture it will fracture regionally and then we might see a true regime install itself in a separate state followed by continuous war. At some point a new US could be formed with a regime.

A second scenario is that the US divides itself in to two people groups. The US does segregation quite well. There would still be democracy but for only one people group. That seems currently unlikely. You usually need an organized, clearly distinguishable dominant group and this is less and less the case over the decades.

 

If you didn't (have this feeling that you need to) defend yourself against every other or third organism you encounter on your daily goings, how could the gun industry sell you stuff?

I have guns because others have them, and because those others would prefer that I not have guns.

 

I think it's because the American consumer can't differentiate between fiction and real life. Nothing wrong with the fictional Wild West cowboy --it made for the greatest cinema there ever was. But you can't BE those guys, much as you want to most days- there a- were laws that dealt with this kind of thing.