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Flag flown upside down as sign of distress outside of US State Department building today
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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I don't understand what it's going to take for someone to do something. Protests are not going to work when they're holding all our money, services, rights, data, etc hostage, and threatening all our public servants. We already had a hard time protesting before this, because health care is tied to employment. It's not a coincidence that they're going after Medicare and Medicaid. They want an entire nation of indentured servants. Unable to own anything, including our own freedom. When we can't work anymore we can just go die in the wilderness like animals I guess. Hmm where have we heard that before?
Everyone is terrified and exhausted. It seems pretty evident that the election was outright stolen, and I have a hard time believing nobody in power suspected something that many of us immediately called, not with the mountains of evidence that's been stacking up for months, years even. So why didn't they do anything? Why did they wait until Trump was sworn in to even talk about it?
I see Canadians online talking about Americans like we chose this. But we didn't, it was forced upon us, and we're begging for help! Who can we turn to if not our allies? What is going on???
Edit: To those claiming that I'm just as bad as the J6ers, that the election was not tampered with and Harris just ran a terrible campaign; whether unwittingly or not, you are part of the problem. You're falling for the suppression and misinformation tactics, or you're facilitating them. I'm editing my comment to compile some links, but let me be clear, I fully expect that you're going to deny these facts as well, and move the goalposts again. My refusal to engage is not a concession, it's me protecting what little emotional energy I have left.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2024_United_States_elections
Some great information about voter suppression from a trusted journalist: https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/
This guy's compilation is great
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eligible-voters-swept-up-conservative-activists-purge-voter-rolls/
https://www.youtube.com/live/284VFHrO8Nc
https://sos.ga.gov/news/georgias-2024-statewide-risk-limiting-audit-confirms-voting-system-accuracy ~ please note the date (November 20th) and how soon after the election this was, in business days. This link should be taken into consideration with a few more facts, including what we know about their flawed 2020 audit and Trump's famous phone call. Here is a good examination of the audit showing two very important oddities that should be further examined: https://goudanachos.github.io/pages/georgia-rla-discrepancy-analysis-2024/
https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-voting-machines-trump-investigation-2018890
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fake-bomb-threats-linked-russia-briefly-close-georgia-polling-locations-2024-11-05/
https://english.elpais.com/usa/2025-01-06/musk-and-putins-dual-interference-in-europe.html ~ an article about just some of the countries where there are suspected or substantiated instances of election interference.
Yes, this is what NATO is for. It is an alliance meant to prevent fascism from taking hold. Just because it's only ever been used in non member countries doesn't mean it can't be used on us, especially if Trump continues to threaten allies. Talking about this leading to WWIII is a strawman argument. You don't know that will happen and it is not a good reason to not be asking for help from our allies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO
To those who think comparisons to Hitler and Nazi Germany are hyperbole:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/hitler-germany-constitution-authoritarianism/681233/
I fully expect that some of the bad actors from reddit are here as well. For anyone else reading this: Question their motives. If they're trying to deny what we can see with our own eyes, their intentions are not good.
I will continue to add links as I'm able.
Watch this if you haven't already: https://youtu.be/CVgNJf6CsBA
People keep saying this, but WHO?
Who are you talking about?
Who is this "somebody" you keep talking about showing up to save us?
Look, nobody is coming to save us, and asking somebody else to risk harm on your behalf is selfish.
If we object, it isn't on somebody else to show up and save us, it's on us.
If you aren't willing to make the moves yourself, who the fuck are you to ask somebody else to.
Nobody is coming to save us, folks. It's either us, me and you, or it's nobody.
I don't trust anyone enough for something to actually be done. Buy guns, buy 3d Printers, learn to make clothing, prepate your homesteads, prepare for isolation and be ready to lean on and support your neighbors.
Be the best you can be, make good relationships with those around you, and brace yourselves . It's the only thing I can realistically think I alone can do for me, my family, and my community.
Is it a doomer view? I don't think so. I like to have hope that my vote can fix something. I like to think my protests are heard and considered. But at the end of the day I have to focus on doing what I actually can.
I have a similar, albeit slightly less doomer, view currently. Focus on the safety and good of your community and loved ones, and remember that nothing is guaranteed to us. Do the necessary good steps like voting and protesting, but don't be naïve enough to think that's the whole of necessary action or a magic bullet to solve the problems. Do the good, but focus on the real workable action in your direct sphere of influence. Cheers.
Isolation really is an American mentality but it's not particularly great for actually striking out. If you want to atop things from getting worse Collectivist activities and thinking is your best chance.
Reach out to the people who are already doing stuff. If you have a union or a political action group, go to it and start organizing. If someone has already started organizing then join them and be subordinate. Find people who understand democratic systems and collective action and offer your time. In fighting is the luxury of peacetime so learn to do that which is not your own exact process. Set aside differences and petty disagreement and work to mutual benefit.
Learn the Roberts rules of order or how your local and state governments function and utilize channels that exist. If you have a gardening or farmers market society reach out and looking at replacing your lawn for gardens and pool with like minded neighbours. Learn first aid and stock a kit. Train your body to be fit and learn self defense. Prepare yourself to be disobedient on someone else's behalf.
Your votes at a federal level are no longer being considered but will your protest be toothless? If you are feeling doom, reach out and find hope in solidarity.
The cavalry's not coming. It's just us.
In 2016, people thought that Trump was the problem. That if Trump left, we could have civility restored to the electoral process. Defeating Trump won't solve the problem because he isn't it - it is the electorate. The voters need to SEE what will happen when this or that occur.
Deport all the immigrants, see the damage that brings, then bring them back with legal protections this time.
Cancel all the science, see how far behind we get, then bring it back with all the funding to make the next moonshot.
Get rid of all fogien aid, watch as our global power dimishes, the vote to bring it back with a clear and true purpose other than empire building.
The people don't know WHY these things are important, and are unwilling to listen or learn. Thus, the only teacher is to experience. But to quote Trump: "There will be some pain" when doing it.
I don't disagree with you and I would love it if people had to experience the consequences of their poor decisions and learn hard lessons that they've been evading for years. The problem is that millions of innocents are and will be caught in the crosshairs. This is a matter of life or death for many people who did not vote for him and it is unconscionable to allow all those people to die just so a bunch of loud racist hillbillies with lead poisoning can learn a lesson.
Fair, I just see no other way of swaying minds without consequences. We tried 4 years of shielding people from Trump's baser urges, and we ended with thousands of people dying each day to COVID. Then 4 year later THEY VOTED HIM BACK IN.
They don't even know what DEI means until oh hey, they're out on disability for months+ for surgery in their physically demanding job and need help because their arm or whatever doesn't work and/or they'll be out for surgery for months and/or SSDI rejects their claim. The willful ignorance and just plain ignorance is really sad.
100%. Even after he leaves office, is anyone confident that the country will collectively go "well that was embarrassing, anyway, back to normality now!"
How, at this point, could anyone assume that in 4 years Trump will just "leave the office"?
Dead on. This is a snowballing shit storm building since Reagan. Probably earlier. Trump is only a foothold, a useful idiot. He's popular with the Boomers and knows how to work them and use the language. They even refer to him as "their boy." Meanwhile he's "making deals" e.g. pumping the dicks of other corpos like Xi and Putin and pretending to get them on board even when he fails with the smarter leaders while his little weasels dismantle shit in the background.
The nonvoters might learn, but not the brainwashed consuming Fox News - they'll blame the left once again.
It wasn't stolen and it wasn't forced on you. Depressingly enough, turkeys, it seems, do sometimes vote for Christmas. I totally agree with you about the awfulness of the situation but - he told you how he was going to govern, he told you what he was going to do and then he won the election that enables him to do it. You did, as a nation, choose this.
I don't know how any nation state can really intervene on that basis. Its not like Hitler steam rolling Poland or Putin annexing the Crimea - this isn't an invasion or a hostile takeover, it's an elected President carrying out the will of the people that voted for him.
I'm not going to argue with you, I get enough of that on reddit. But there is a literal mountain of evidence, including their own statements and sketchy behavior, hard data, unsecured voting machines, various voter suppression tactics, ballots that were tossed, code that was published online months (possibly more than a year) before the election, and one of the twerps currently taking over the treasury wrote code that can falsify ballots while he was an intern for Musk.
Also, it is like Hitler, they're using the same exact playbook, and while there are some key differences there is no arguing that this is the exact reason NATO exists. Justin Trudeau could invoke article 4 for threats of invasion. Someone from our government should still be able to invoke article 5. These international agreements exist because when the highest power in the nation is compromised, we need outside help.
I'm sorry, I'm Canadian, and what exactly do you think all of NATO could do, allied and organized against the American armed forces? Do you seriously believe we could stage an effective military campaign against America? That would he suicide.
It's just so fucked up, all of it. They've been pumping shitloads of money into their military for so long, it's a behemoth larger than the military of the next, what, 9 countries combined? All that money should have been spent on things that are actually good for U.S. citizens. A better educational system, a healthcare system, more worker protections, a better social security net, trying to fix homelessness, etc.
But now, their humongous military is going to be used against their own people and their allies. And all the while I'm here thinking that a well-educated, healthy, happy populace would have been much less inclined to vote a fascist into office. But hey, they didn't need all that, they were already the best country in the world, right?
The worst part is that we're rich enough as a country to have our obscene military spending and civilized healthcare and education, we just choose not to.
yeah but if you give out civilized healthcare, how will you bully your people into working hard so they don't end up in the trench abandoned?
Using NATO to stop Trump, you want WW3? Because that's how you get WW3. You're not going to get any help until you help yourselfs. It's your house, you have to clean it up. If you need an idea of a place to start, I'd start with the Democrats.
If you have democratic senators you should be a thorn in their side about why aren't they grinding the Senate to a halt. Why they aren't using every tool available to resist senate Republicans. The Republicans did when Obama was president and he wasn't a fascist. Now seems like a good time to start using all those republican cheats to blanket obstruct the Senate and Congress.
If you have republican senators you should be getting involved with the democratic party, first screaming and dragging everyone you know with you. Then demanding over and over that the old game is dead and they need you and the people to get out of this.
Regardless, no one is coming to save you. You need to first believe that you can actually work with your neighbors, then saves yourselves. Tons of Americans have been begging for your help to stop Trump for over a decade now and you thought it was just their job to take care of it. Well guess what, it was yours too and you failed to answer the call.
I will agree that there was targeted voter suppression, targeted registration purges, and Russian propaganda. But all of this has been around for many elections. It's wrong that we have to live with this in the US, but it's already been challenged in court, largely unsuccessfully. So we do have to live with it, until it can be fixed by a legislature that actually works for the people.
Even if you could prove voting machine tampering sufficient to change the election, there's still the problem that 77 million voters chose catastrophe. You can't possibly prove that this was off by an order of magnitude. We have to face the reality that there is an excess of bad voters, and a shortage of good candidates.
Every suppressed vote is as fraudulent as any fake vote.
In a democracy, however flawed it may be, politics are still the result of a large part of the population's will. Which is strongly influenced by propaganda of course, and without much thought of all the consequences that it may have, but still. Protest against these politics can come in many forms, depending on how strongly people are affected by it, never mind how exhausted people think they might be.
Then there's also the military, does anybody here have any insight how they feel about the recent political changes that have been carried through?
You did choose this through decades of inaction, apathy, laziness, fecklessness. The world kept telling you that something was wrong in your "democracy" and the canned response was, "Haha, not in America - land of the free, home of the brave!" Then one day, with your rights stripped away you all finally say, "Not my fault!" It was, it is, and it will be solely Americans fault. And the longer it takes you to own it and fix-your-shit the more costly it's going to be. As always. Imagine how much easier it would have been had you just mass protested after Citizen's United, for example.
No one is coming to save you. The people who have been standing up to fix it couldn't motivate the rest of you to get off the couch. My suggestion is to stop parroting excuses like, "We are too exhausted to do it", and do it. Look to history for examples on how, and for what real exhaustion looks like. The first steps are usually meeting with organizations already doing something and ask what you need to do.
"But I'll lose my job!" If 50% of the country loses there job then there will be a lot of job opportunities. "But my family!" Ok, then sit there and let your fear keep you from action. Keep waiting for someone to save you. Watch how bad it gets as Americas military falls under the control of a facist regime. Watch as your educational system becomes even more of an indoctrination engine. I wonder which, if any, heinous act by your government finally motivates you enough. The kids-in-cages wasn't enough, I wonder what could be? Possibly nothing.
"Home of the brave". Fucking ha ha ha. "Land of the free". Sure. I have no sympathy for people just waking up now. Where the fuck have you been?
This take is lazy and offensive to everyone who truly didn’t have a choice. I’ve been in school this entire time because growing up everyone told me I could be whatever I wanted if I worked hard. Now that I’ve done that and I’m almost graduated, I’m looking around at a world that is completely unrecognizable from before and hope for everyone my age is at an all-time low. Please enlighten me, as someone who has only been a member of the civic process for less than half a decade, how the fuck is this my fault?
The decades of inaction should be largely heaped at the feet of Baby Boomers, who have sucked up and hollowed out the vast majority of American prosperity.
Everyone else has been carried along in the wake of their outsized cohort's rampage.
I know it probably feels comforting to claim the moral high ground and say "I told you so" but you're just letting your own weakness infect the people on your side. Everyone has moral turning points in all of their lives and it's a futile and stupid gesture to say your entry point is better than someone elses. Let's focus our hatred on the people who deserve it: billionaires.
I haven't made any moral claim. I haven't said anything about right or wrong. Is this a case of you getting your platitudes mixed up? So many for Americans to choose from, hard to keep them straight I imagine. Words are hard.
The original post was some FREEDOM loving American asking where their saviour was. I responded by saying (essentially) look in a mirror. The Americans then all jumped on me to assuage the guilt they feel because my point is an obvious one. Then they all did that thing where they point to someone else to blame rather than doing the relatively simple step of getting involved themselves.
So,it's billionaires now is it? Wow. The level of delusion is remarkable. for liberals it's billionaires, foreign governments, and rogue news stations. For conservatives it's immigrants, liberals, and the Clintons. Its remarkable to see the manufacturing of consent demonstrated so clearly. See Noam Chomosky's book of that title for context - though I don;t expect anyone reading this will. low effort posts are easier.
No, dems just did a piss-poor job of motivating people. I voted for her, but she wasn't offering much other than an alternative to him. Same as ever.
Repubs motivate their people with lies and slander, but it's still motivational for hate-mongers. Don't sound like they did when Biden won. It wasn't stolen. Dems failed us.
It can be both. Pissweak corpodems don't inspire enough people for a landslide, and landslides are much harder to rig.
Who is someone? Who is something? Organize and mobilize. I know all Americans didn’t choose this, but you’ll need a lot of support/like minded folks (which it sounds like you have). Trump’s shock doctrine has clearly worked. Try and focus on tangible steps to take whether it’s annoying the heck out of your elected officials, joining a grassroots org, or attending a public rally on an off day.
What are you asking outside forces to do? Invade America and install a foreign government because americans are unable to maintain their freedom?
Perhaps we can ask the Taliban for help
Thanks for this. Anytime I talk about these things to folks outside the US, it's always some reply about "your country chose this!" And how, regardless of how I voted, I still somehow let this happen. It's super frustrating and disheartening. Now, it is the cool thing to be super anti-American. This country has a huge population of people who are terrified and strictly opposed to what is happening. Once you decide: "Fuck the US," you're turning your back on millions of Americans that did not want this to happen and did what they could do stop it. We need help in our resistance. Please don't abandon us.
I hear you. Americans in general aren't our (Canada's) enemy, but your President is, along with those who voted for him (and to a lesser extent, those who did not vote), and I have much less sympathy for the "leopards ate my face" crowd during Trump's second term than his first, since he made it very well known what kind of charlatan he was.
I hear you, friend. Just remember, they don't live here. They haven't experienced the calculated dismantling of our education system. They haven't seen the meteoric rise of Christian nationalism. They don't know how sick and tired the general population is. Social safety nets are more robust in their countries, so they don't have nearly the same number of racist, angry, lead addled boomers managing to gain a chokehold on every aspect of our daily lives.
But we do live here, we have experienced it, and you are not alone.
Non Americans don't understand and assume we have the same liberties as them.
"Just do die in the street and achieve nothing" Isn't the compelling moral argument many Canadians seem to think it is.
Either go protest and get shot or you clearly asked for your rights to be stripped away feels like a slap in the face for anyone who is directly affected by the things that is happening and is extremely demotivating. It feels like someone saying that somehow it was your individual fault that states that you are not in did not vote the way you would have liked them too.
The Canadians I talk to are either furiously pissed off and lashing out at me like I'm about to annex them myself or dead ass silent. This is a weird fucking timeline to say the least.