Of course not.

It’s not as if Trump is difficult to figure out or predict.

All you have to do really is keep in mind the fact that he has the emotional development of a spoiled toddler.

So all you have to do is ask yourself, for instance, “Would a spoiled toddler share power with Congress?”

And the answer is “No.”

This isn’t even a political issue really.

Trump’s ENTIRE motivation is the prospect of his family making a fortune in Gaza waterfront real estate.

You’re evil as demonstrated by the fact that you take pleasure in the suffering of others. You’re “having the time of your life” watching Trump and his billionaire cronies destroy the United States and bring harm to millions. You actually, by your own oft-repeated admission, want to see them harmed - you want to see them suffer.

That is evil, pure and simple.

And if there is a hell, you will burn in it.

It’s a given that one of Trump’s prerequisites for the position was that his FBI director be unprincipled and corrupt, and the only possible variable is the exact nature of that corruption.

I’m having the time of my life, actually! :)

You’re evil and you’re going to burn in hell.

That’s backwards.

Every American should be suffering grief, depression and very real fear. Those are entirely natural reactions to the fact that Trump and Musk and the rest of their co-conspirators are in the middle of systematically destroying democracy, liberty and the rule of law and dismantling the US government in order to institute a plutocratic autocracy.

The problem isn’t that there are people who are suffering those things, but that there are people who aren’t - people like you who are so blinded by their hatred for their fellow Americans and deluded by the propaganda they’ve been fed that they’re actually cheering on the systematic destruction of everything of any value in the US and its replacement with a system designed explicitly to further enrich the wealhy and politically powerful few at the expense of everyone and everything else.

If it weren’t for those people - if they weren’t so blinded by hatred and so eager to see other people suffer - we the people might be able to come together to do something to save our country from the people who are in the process of destroying it.

But because those people exist, the US is almost certainly doomed. And they’re not only so toxic and so deluded that they make it possible - they’re so toxic and so deluded that they’re cheering it on and laughing - actually thrilled and happy to see people suffer, and looking forward to more.

It IS a hostile takeover. Musk and Trump are currently in the process of overthrowing the US government and installing a pluocratic autocracy in its place.

Are we really in a timeline in which a fat, smelly sociopath wirh the attention span of a gnat proposes taking over a sovereign territory on the other side of the planet and actual professional politicians go on record saying that they think that’s a good idea?

It’s as if we’re being governed by insane stupid children.

Surfaces?

It’s been there all along - it’s just been routinely ignored by the legacy media.

That said - there is a sort of interesting meta-topic here.

It’s arguably likely that there’s a relatively powerful and serious opposition to Trump coming together, simply because the NYT is so craven and cowardly and ethically bankrupt that there’s basically no way that they’d publish something like this unless there was somebody other than Trump that they could suck up to by doing it.

For whatever that’s worth.

Yes, but all too many Americans have been blinded by decades of deliberate indoctrination, so all they heard were the parts where Trump said it was all the fault of the out groups they were conditioned into hating. The rest was just irrelevant details to them.

Which is exactly why I stipulated “when the reality of what’s being done to us finally filters out to enough people to trigger widespread opposition.”

If the American people by and large were actually aware and rational, that point would’ve already been passed. They aren’t, so it hasn’t been, and it likely won’t be for quite some time to come, and it’ll be too late when it finally is.

By design.

It’s not a coincidence that Trump and Musk and their mercenaries are actively working to overthrow the US government and replace it with a plutocratic autocracy.

It’s primarily so that when the reality of what’s being done to us finally filters out to enough people to trigger widespread opposition, the only options left will be to submit, to go to prison or to die.

That’s a great essay and I agree wholeheartedly.

However, it neglects to mention the one fatal flaw in the whole idea - a strong, pro-people, leftist economic platform would be opposed by corporate America and most wealthy individuals, they’re the main source of soft money donations to the DNC, and the DNC values that money more than anything, including winning elections.

So it is a sound observarion and a worksble strategy, but can only succeed if those in the position to affect Democratic platforms would be willing to engage in it, and all indications are that they simply are not.

Still though…

I think that if humanity can manage to survive long enough, anarchism is inevitable.

It’s essentially the adult stage of human society - the point at which humans collectively and consistently, rather than just individually and situationally, can be trusted to generally do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing and therefore the most reasonable thing to do.

For the time being and the foreseeable future though, humanity is nowhere even close to that. Through the course of history, human society has managed to advance to about the equivalent of adolescence. There’s still a long way to go.

In spite of that, I do identify as an anarchist, but my advocacy is focused on the ideal and the steps humanity as a whole has to take to achieve it. I think it’s plainly obvious that it cannot be implemented, since any mechanism by which it might be inplemented would necessarily violate the very principles that define it. It can only be willingly adopted by each and all (or close enough as makes no meaningful difference), and that point will come whenever (if) it comes.

I’ve been deliberately avoiding addressing that whole aspect of it, since Trump and Musk are the obvious primary insurrectionists - the day-to-day leaders of this brazen attempt to overthrow the US government and install a plutocratic autocracy in its place.

But yes.

Of course they would be, which is why they’re not going to happen.

The deportations serve three main purposes:

1. They appeal to Trump’s racist base and further divisions between the people broadly.
2. They establish precedents for the detention of whoever the Trump administration declares to be rightfully detained (which will certainly not be limited to, or even primarily, undocumented immigrants).
3. They make the remaining undocumented immigrants just that much more desperate and willing to endure oppression.

To fulfill those purposes, there’s no need to deport all undocumented immigrants or even any really significant percentage of them. All that’s necessary is to make the deportations that will happen as merciless and vivid and well publicized as possible.

And once those purposes have been served, the program can be quietly moved out of the spotlight and American businesses can take advantage of the cheap labor provided by undocumented immigrants who are even more desperate than they were before Trump took office.

The Trump administration is systematically purging anyone who worked on the investigations into his criminal activities.

If that isn’t sufficient to trigger a significant response from the Senate all by itself, then they’re rather obviously part of the problem, and likely complicit in Trump’s current ongoing efforts to overthrow the US government and repace it with a plutocratic autocracy with himself as supreme ruler.

Pretend you know nothing at all about “AI”/LLMs, and someone comes to you and says, “I want to start a service that will scrape everything that anyone’s ever posted to the internet, let some corporate weasels decide which parts of it you’re allowed to see, then feed you bits and pieces of what’s left in some order or another.”

Does that sound appealing?

shifts that could help the GOP or moderate Democrats

So are there people who sincerely believe this bullshit spin? Is it an unrealistically widespread conspiracy of misinformation? Is it indoctrination and confirmation bias?

To anyone with a working brain and a speck of integrity, it’s blatantly obvious that the domination of the party (and most notably the DNC) by “moderates” (which is to say, neoliberal hacks) is the exact problem with the Democrats, and the exact reason that so many people hate both parties. That’s the whole basis for the durability of the claim that both parties are the same - the Democrats are so “moderate” that there isn’t enough difference to overcome that claim.

Trump’s ascension and the collapse of the already toxically moderate Democrats sure as fuck isn’t an opportunity for moderate Democrats - that’s just more of what’s already failed. It’s an opportunity for progressives. It’s an opportunity for the Democrats to reclaim the left, and much more to the point, their role as the party of the people - the party that stands for the people against the depradations of the ruling class.

I understand that the party hierarchy don’t want that - that they’re perfectly content to just gorge themselves at the soft money trough and let the people suffer - but honestly, fuck them. It’s long past time to get them out of the way.

So again, do people sincerely believe this “opportunity for moderates” bullshit? Is it some unrealistically widespread conspiracy? Is it just indoctrination and confirmation bias?

And more importantly, how do we overcome it, and not just sometime, but in time to save the American people from plutocratic autocracy?

Of course it has.

There are two qualities that are crucial to fulfilling Trump’s dictatorial ambitions - hatred and ignorance. He needs people to be hateful enough to support his overtly destructive and oppressive rule and ignorant enough to not figure out that they will suffer/are suffering right alongside the people they hate.

Step 1 was to gain control of the legacy media and social media and he’s mostly already done that (there are still some holdouts, but they’ll have to be destroyed if they won’t submit and that will come later). Step 2 is to solidify control of the governmental distribution of information and use that to suppress information that might undermine his dictatorial ambitions and promote and even manufacture information that will further them. That’s exactly what he and his co-conspirators and their mercenaries are doing right now.

Musk wants in on the cascade of bribes settlements that Trump has been collecting.