Tressie McMillan Cottom’s latest is not easily summarized, but is well-worth a read: Look Past Elon Musk’s Chaos. There’s Something More Sinister at Work.

“You acknowledge that the chaos is smoke, but the heist is the fire. Don’t look away from the smoke. Look through it for what is being taken, redefined and reallocated. Stop pointing out the hypocrisy. The other side does not care. Its content makes the people there feel powerful but action is the only real power.

…

Opposition is action”

It’s a private equity takeover. They’re looting the government. Musk’s goons stole $80 million of FEMA funds out of New York City’s bank account. Every single thing Musk has done is illegal. It’s an anti constitutional crime spree.

[transcript: Cameron Klein, seated: I’m not going to launch those ships. Captain’s orders. Brock Rumlow, draws firearm: Move away from your station. Klein closes his eyes. Sharon Carter crosses the room, her weapon raised to aim at Rumlow: Like he said… Captain’s orders. Uniformed security teams (presumably Hydra) and jacket-and-button-up office workers all draw weapons in a stand-off. Rumlow: You picked the wrong side, Agent [Carter]. Carter: Depends on where you’re standing.

/end transcript]

I want to share this analysis of this scene from cakeisnotpie

Because we are seeing that right now with the world situation and the fight against the Orange Fucker and Muskrat. All kinds of people gumming up the works, including people within the government itself, saying “no, I’m not doing that.” and many of them will be fired or removed. But people are digging in their heels for the small moment of mercy it will grant us.

May everyone with the power to resist find the will and courage to do so. Be like Cameron.

Oh.

OH.

I’m crying @comicgeekscomicgeek because I needed to hear this right now. To see my own words, to know that someone read the thought I shouted into the void and remembered. Thank you for being my Sharon Carter and reminding me that I do have a choice.. there’s always a choice.

So, Cap’s orders, I’m not taking my pronouns out of my email signature or pulling Nimona from my class. I can’t change anything, but I can plant myself like a tree, let my students take shelter behind me, and say, “no, you move.”

And to add on to this, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are not unprecedented powerhouses of evil. They’re criminals. Nothing more or less. Don’t think they’re superpowered or unbeatable.

“There are always men like you.”

—

Trump fires Rohit Chopra, Consumer Financial Protection director

So Trump just destroyed the CFPB, and he did it by *illegally* firing the head of the agency, who was *legally* in their five-year term.

And the head of that agency, in the face of an *illegal* order, shrugged and resigned.

These fucking cowards. I swear to god.

Today, President Trump rescinded Executive Order 14087 signed by former President Biden in October 2022.

What did Executive Order 14087 do?

It lowered drug costs for Americans on Medicare and Medicaid—working class Americans.

This only benefits big pharma.

Homeland Security Admits It Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists for Trump

A new Homeland Security report details orders to connect protesters arrested in Portland to one another in service of the Trump's imaginary antifa plot.

The Department of Homeland Security launched a failed operation that ensnared hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. protesters in what new documents show was as a sweeping, power-hungry effort before the 2020 election to bolster President Donald Trump’s spurious claims about a “terrorist organization” he accused his Democratic rivals of supporting.

An internal investigative report, made public this month by Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, details the findings of DHS lawyers concerning a previously undisclosed effort by Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, to amass secret dossiers on Americans in Portland attending anti-racism protests in summer 2020 sparked by the police murder of Minneapolis father George Floyd.

@riotbard @socialistexan @ubernegro

I do love that our outgoing President with less than 2 months left to be President pardoning his fuck up son of a number of constitutionally questionable charges is getting 200% more coverage and 4 million times as much outrage as the incoming President picking his two daughters' Father-in-laws for major diplomatic posts they're in no way qualified for just because they're members of the family, because he's a fucking mobster.

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, to listen to doctors and get my flu vaccine and any shots i could because they remembered Before.

then they started fighting Covid precautions.

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, that the ozone was disappearing and the earth was dying and we needed to recycle and save the planet.

now my parents think climate change is a myth.

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, that racism was a plague, that we had to love and accept everyone, that we should never judge before walking a mile in their shoes.

then they told me that protesting for my Black siblings was wrong.

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, that we needed to give to the poor. working at soup kitchens. making quilts. collecting food and money and supplies. building houses. because it was the christian and just plain right thing to do.

now they look at me, on food stamps with their grandchildren, and lament the "welfare state".

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and that any rich man, especially an immoral one, should never run our country.

you can guess who they voted for.

i remember adults telling me, as a kid, so very much.

when did they forget?

Time to bring this back. Again.

Apparently this is evergreen. Dammit.

I remember adults telling me, as a kid that girls can be equal to boys in all fields including athletics. Now, they consider girls to be delicate flowers who could never hope to compete against boys.

When did they forget?

They forgot when they got scared.

Scared of the ever-encroaching poverty line, scared of rising cost of living expenses their minds may be too small to understand, scared that they might have been scammed into buying the American Dream for fifty years having received nothing in return. Most people are inherently good, this I choose to believe. But fascism doesn’t form in a vacuum; it takes root when too many people become too desperate, and from there it’s able to masquerade as a legitimate political ideology, as a simple solution to all of life’s problems and unfairness. More and more people since the late 70s have fallen closer to or into poverty, and there’s only one type of mainstream political ideology that actively makes a promise to the people to do anything about it. Neither American party, however, has any intention of keeping it.

And that’s why Fox News plays such an enormous role in the fall of American democracy; every minute of airtime is spent sowing fear and distrust – and scared citizens will always lean to the right.

Let’s drag this out four years from now!

Wow...crazy as hell

Trump’s unidentified secret police force was not prepared to meet this guy.

He said in an interview that he shouldn’t have been surprised that they would have no respect for vets when they are gassing moms

Honorary Antifa Supersolider

In case you, a U.S. voter, were feeling iffy about voting for Kamala Harris, here’s a reminder of the shit that went down under Trump…

Yeah, remember when his administration SENT UNMARKED PARAMILITARY FORCES into cities to quell BLM protests? Not “riot police” - tactical, militarized units with identifying tags and numbers deliberately removed or obscured.

Oh shit…. you probably forgot about that, didn’t you? There was so much going on in 2020, it’s natural to block out stuff, but if you have the power and the privilege of voting in this year’s elections don’t you DARE allow this man back in office, especially when he is CURRENTLY saying stuff like this:

[x]

[x]

[x]

[x]

[x]

[x]

ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION???

In case you were a kid in 2020 and protected from seeing what happened

You need to know what’s at stake here. This stuff? was a TEST RUN. Look up everything that happened those years. Everything you can find from 2016 and Standing Rock to 2020 and Black Lives Matter and the Riots and then look up Jan 6 and the attempted coup on our government.

THEN VOTE

I really think people have forgotten just how bad things were under the Trump Administration. Literally every day there was news about some service being cut or someone terrible appointed somewhere they shouldn't be or what have you. He constantly flirted with WW3 and military dictatorship. It was such a blur of badness that there aren't big standouts for people to point to to make him "the XYZ president." it was everything. all the time. Why do we not remember this.

Remember how everyone learned Zelenskyys name? he wasn't the presiden of Ukraine standing up against a longshot defense against a Russian invasion. He was that guy that Trump tried to extort in order to get blackmail against Joe Biden.

Can anyone name the current secretary of education? I can't. But I can list the shitty things Betsy DeVos did

He literally signed an executive order blocking people from six (primarily Muslim) countries from entering the United States a week after he took office. A week after he took office, we had people on airplanes back to the States getting turned away. We had people with legitimate visas getting turned away. Permanent residents were being detained at airports for days. People with dual citizenship didn't know what the fuck to do. There were lawyers camped out at airports. There were protests. We went from taking 1800 refugees a week to taking 2. 2 refugees. The entire time the executive order was in effect.

A week after he took office he did this. A fucking week.

Here is a list of what Joe Biden did on his first day in office

It's a lot of smaller, occasionally kind of policy wonk-ish stuff. He didn't save the world and create an eternal paradise in his first hundred days. But a lot of people could breathe a little easier, whether or not they knew the work that went into it.

And, you know, people weren't being held indefinitely at airports while Trump fought to revoke their visas for being the wrong kind of Muslim (aka the poor kind), so there's that.

#i was in elementary and middle school during trump so i don't remember what it was like but I'm sure it was awful

@writingraccoon it was! And it's going to be even more awful if he's elected again, because he's actually got a plan this time--it involves staffing every government office with loyalists, which would include things like the department of education, the EPA, the CDC, and so on--and now thanks to the Supreme Court he gets immunity on anything he does in office ever.

The fact that all this is going on and all the media seems to be concerned with is how old Biden is is making me fucking insane.

The idea that it's been long enough for there to be people who were too young to remember the difference is actually horrifying me. What do you mean it's been eight years and he's still a problem and his changes haven't all been undone yet. What the fuck. It only feels like 2016 was a "couple" years ago to me. But I'm almost a decade older. I lost so much time and health and lifespan since what I could swear was just yesterday.

People who think social security is sacred and Republicans wouldn't dare destroy it should ask women about Roe vs Wade.

This is such an important and genuinely terrifying post. I could completely go off on the rise of anti-science, but for now I’ll just add: it isn’t just boomers that get deceived. This is a warning to all of us.

Pay ATTENTION to what you are being told. If you think you cannot be deceived, you leave yourself open to deception. Question, doubt, research research research. Learn about your personal biases, dig up any subconscious cognitive dissonance. Keep an eye on your mind.

It needs to be stressed that biases, not a lack of intelligence, is very much the issue here. Being aware of the need to fact check yourself is key: Intelligence won’t protect you from bad or unhealthy mental states, or keep you safe from cults of any sort. Intelligence will just make it easier for you to rationalize and attempt to justify the malformed tools you’ve taken/been given to yourself and others. You need to be wise enough to challenge yourself.

As a cult survivor, this is lethally accurate.

As a librarian, I would also add that even more important than doing your research is understanding how to evaluate and check SOURCES. What terrifies me about the modern age is that many people consider watching YouTube or reading social media posts to be “research.” To them it is as good as reading peer-reviewed articles from trusted journals and publications. In reality, never trust someone who says they have done the research for you, especially if they are dodgy about listing sources by name. Fact-check everything, including the source of a fact. Never believe anything you hear on the internet unless it can be independently verified. Resources like Snopes and NewsGuard can help you check the veracity of reports and media sources. Other free options, like a library card, can give you access to hundreds of databases and trusted peer-reviewed journals if you ever want to fact-check something manually. Either way: there is no shortage of options out there for how to do your own homework. Laziness is no excuse for ignorance. 

I strongly suspect that Trump withdrew from the 60 minutes interview because CBS could not be trusted to let him lie without consequence.

Republicans do not always lie. It only happens when their mouths are moving.

True story: Trump once asked the Joint Chiefs if the Chinese had a secret “hurricane” gun they were firing at the US.

And yet they’ll have no problem pushing the narrative that “The climate is too vast and complex a system to suggest that human activity could possibly alter it” when it comes time to address climate change.