52
votes
Are we witnessing the takeover of a country right now?
Foreign money and tech billionaires have bought control of the US government, they're looting the system and weakening it, and then they're going to crash it so they can install a new system that they can better control.
Prove me wrong?
There's a teapot floating in space somewhere between earth and Neptune. Prove me wrong.
In short, doesn't work like that. With that in mind.
As opposed to before when they were just sitting at home not donating to everyone? Why is this different?
If this is your answer to the previous question, what makes you think they're that smart or that in control?
People have this super strange belief that their enemies, who they will constantly cite as the dumbest assholes on the planet, are super competent strategy masters playing the long con.
Even people who are TRYING to be that (project 2025 as a possible example) seldom meet with anywhere near the kind of success being ascribed to these machinations. Most takeovers are "right place right time" as much as they are "brilliant master plan".
So first off, are they trying to takeover the country?
Probably kinda sorta? Again I don't think they can plan that far ahead in some ways (for better and worse). It's a very much moment to moment "what can I get away with" game. IF they actually see the opportunity, yes I think they will, but for all the doom, gloom, and panic right now, I still think we're pretty far from a total takeover.
Second, are they doing it by the methods ascribed?
I doubt it. I'd more say "fuck shit up for short term gains" mixed with some level of "i actually think i'm right" (and again, broken clock is right twice a day thing, some of it they may accidentally be) mixed with "someone else told me to do this and they'll keep me in power and I don't fucking care".
The third one is, to me, the most dangerous. Trump's first term is basically littered with stories that boil down to "do this treasonous horrible thing" "uhh no" "fine i'll get someone else". Obviously he ran his second campaign on the idea he won't be putting up with that shit again, and this is the sort of stuff I am worried about.
Overall-
Honestly, I think it's kinda showing the 1st world problem biases of many that they think a full country takeover could occur without millions dead in the streets. I've spoken to people who've lived through government takeovers. If it's JUST the rich get richer and put their cronies in, that would be a pretty unusual state.
I think this is the driving principle of Musk's involvement with the financial systems. People on reddit are screaming about how he's going to steal a trillion dollars. I'm pretty sure it's just an arrogant man looking at the bureaucracy and thinking that if only a bold and smart man could get his hands in there and remove the BS it would all be better. The problems there are that this isn't how things are supposed to work and that he thinks some good things are BS. Once we just stop following the constitution to this degree I'm not sure if we'll really ever go back.
To be fair, after he fired a bunch of people from Twitter there were only a few external hiccups from what I could see. I'm sure on the inside it was - and probably continues to be - really unpleasant and stressful.
Right. It's hard to interact with ANY bureaucratic entity and come out feeling that your time wasn't hellishly wasted, especially for anyone older (things have gotten a lot better with agencies actually adopting tech and using it to cut out bullshit and update, sometimes...).
There's absolutely a lot of truth in that in trying to be perfectly fair and follow a bunch of feelgood laws from decades of grandstanding politicians, that you actually lose the ability to get shit done.
One of the often cited issues is the military budget, and ignoring any other arguments, I have met a person who's job it was to help facilitate military contracts and he made a ton of money doing it. HALF of that was just making sure that the companies involved met all sorts of obtuse standards, and absolutely led to conversations that boiled down to "uhh quick go out and find the most competent person of this race/lineage/whatever you can so we can check off another box."
This is just the well meaning side of things, not the literal absolutely 100% fraud and graft, and it's all over the place for both.
That said, yes, Musk is at best a well meaning idiot(giving a fuckload of credit here) who, somewhat understandably, has come to the conclusion that if you let people try to make things perfect they'll just never do it, so it's better to burn everything down and just make a decision and adapt to the consequences.
There is some legit merit in this. I've seen many times where someone just say "damn the consequences, chuck the whole thing out", and then a year or two later yes they're forced to rebuild, but this time it's built right or using more modern knowledge and practices rather than the decades of legacy debt.
There is, obviously, also some extreme danger in it. I have ALSO seen this same cavalier approach used on something essentially business critical, and the company essentially did not survive.
Yes it was at the same place, so the irony was fully on display, and also goes to show that people who get high up by doing this sort of thing just think it's a magic panacea and it's not.
Musk probably believes in this idea, and he may even be right that he could execute it (for a certain definition of "built right"). But there are several problems.
Musk does not (or, pessimistically, should not) have the power to unilaterally close government departments and withhold funds. Those powers belong to Congress, not the Executive branch. (And that's not even mentioning the fact that Musk's status as a government employee is dubious to begin with.) Setting a precedent that the Executive branch can just roll over Congress is EXTREMELY dangerous. If that idea becomes normalized, that's basically the end of the Republic, even if that wasn't the original goal.
Aside from that foundational problem, Musk is simply the wrong person for the job.
Everything I know about Musk suggests that he is extremely self-centered, unprincipled, and reckless. (That's probably a large part of how he got to where he is.) Such a person should not have control of the government and access to sensitive information.
In conclusion, this is literally just the fall of the Roman Republic all over again. But this time, rather than plunder from conquered nations, it's the spoils of uncontrolled American industry that created individuals so wealthy and influential that they became unbound by the law. Even if Elon Musk has not decided to take it for himself outright (and I don't see why he wouldn't do that---as I said, he's incredibly reckless; he'll take whatever he can), it's only a matter of time before someone else does.
I've been saying we need to have a wealth cap in the US. Looks like it's too late for that, but maybe other countries will implement some kind of limit.
Realistically, higher taxes and increased IRS funding would fix this. It's easier to turn off the faucet than drain the pool. Even without explicit wealth taxes, there are plenty of ways to target billionaires and redistribute the wealth.
The wealth cap idea is not really likely to work. Taxes and other such instruments are a lot more elegant and will achieve the same goal without winding up going in circles about what qualifies as "wealth".
A flaw I see in "the bureaucracy gets in the way of getting shit done" argument is this: POSIWID.
The system exists , in part, to prevent exactly these sorts of radical changes. Making the system as malleable as it has become is due to two decades of presidents centralizing authority bit by bit. The more power that lies with the president, the more likely we find ourselves ruled by a tyrant instead of led by a president.
Part of the reason we have the laws and the bureaucracy we have is to create friction to sweeping changes such as what is being attempted now by the current administration. Part of the reason we have the legislative process that we have is for the same reason.
A country should not be completely remade every 2-4 years because a new set of officials is elected. Otherwise, said country is a pendulum swinging wildly with no predictability. This can't end well.
For anyone else like me, POSIWID: The purpose of a system is what it does
I explained in a separate post when I used it and got lazy here. Thanks.
Depends on what part of the system.
Should the executive be able to make radical changes out of no where? Absolutely not.
Should civil infrastructure projects be possible without 20+ years of arguing in court? Almost certainly.
It's in theory the second one most people run into, because it's those kinds of projects that have decades and decades of laws built up to try and protect one thing or another, but now hitting a critical mass of "fuck it it's just not worth it".
The first is arguably a response to that problem, and many others. Of course it mostly centers around everyone's frustration with congress essentially abdicating its purpose and just becoming a place for things to die.
Presidents have accumulated such power by Congress willfully abdicating its responsibilities. Some of the deference to executive agencies makes sense. There is no reason for air quality metrics to be tied to milk subsidies, as often happens in Congress-passed regulations. Most of it is Congressmen trying to have as little legislative record as possible so there's (literally) no votes to attack them for in the primaries.
Hitler was voted chancellor of Germany and then given emergency dictatorship powers without having to murder anyone.
In fact, the beerhall puscht a decade earlier, an attempted violent overthrow of the government, was a massive failure (remind you of anything?).
Only after Hitler was given absolute power did he start murdering people in droves to consolidate that power and ensure no one could threaten it.
Not saying that's what happening here (I'm also not NOT saying that), but there's definitely precident for dictators to come to power with minimal or no bloodshed. There's a significant portion of people who seem to like the idea of being ruled by someone with completely unchecked power for some reason.
Sure, it's not totally dissimilar no, but-
Post WWI Germany and current US are VASTLY different environments, especially economy wise. Things were already bad by the time of things like the beerhall puscht, and VASTLY worse by the time hitler took power. Hyperinflation was in full swing at the bare minimum and a ton of other horrible things were happening to the average german citizen.
I get why people compare Jan 6th to the puscht, but I really question how applicable it is. Hitler was personally IN THE BUILDING and declaring a revolution with a machine gun setup on site. Now granted you can absolutely argue that Trump is just not willing to put himself on the line mixed with the fact that people like Pence might have thwarted parts of the plan, but that's kinda the point.
Either way I think my point stands that the situation in Germany for the average German citizen was leagues worse than the average American citizen right now. Sure Musk and friends might be trying to push that over the edge to get to that point, but honestly if that was their goal there's much faster ways to accomplish that (just default the US debt for starters).
Trump wanted to be in the building and the secret service in the car stopped him from going to the capitol. He spent the afternoon watching live news of his followers storming the capitol.
The takeover of a country is significantly more plausible than a teapot floating in space between Earth and Neptune.
Doesn't prove me wrong
Russell's teapot is about unfalsifiable claims. It is not possible to falsify "Satan planted dino bones to test your faith."
The question of OP is not that. What do you think mens rea is? Oh, sure, the perpetrator had spent a year saying "I'm going to kill <victim", they researched extra-good stabby knives, and they followed the victim to an isolated alley... but we don't have the ability to read minds, therefore we can't say anything about whether it was premeditated.
You can find supporting evidence or contradictory evidence for whether the current administration wants to take over the country, and any individual can decide on what threshold of confidence they need. Criminal courts need more than civil courts, and even there the public is free to say OJ is guilty.
We hit the ridiculously high 5-sigma standard for anthropogenic global warming years back, but it made sense long before then to take action. If you're 90% sure you have cancer or 60% sure a coup is taking place maybe skip playing word games about literal definitions of "prove" when everyone understands we're using the colloquial one.
Obviously, I mostly disagree. I will agree OP's question is not as bad as the Satan dino bones example, but what kind of proof could one possibly offer to OP?
For quick reference:
So the claims are:
and the 4th, implied, claim, from the title
So...
I can guess that it's probably at the minimum the saudi's and Musk/Zuck, but who else? Microsoft? Oracle? Valve? Nvidia? Samsung? LG? OP seems to have a vague idea of what the problem is, but how the hell can anyone refute something without definitions?
Ditto for foreign money. There's plenty of other countries dumping money in the US, and some are much more popular allies. Are we only counting donations to super PAC's or do we include the trillons in business dealings that occurs?
The looting part seems to be something that could in theory actually be verified or disprove. I still maintain that, right now, it's basically an impossible claim to prove/disprove though. Even IF that's their goal in the most blatant of manner, I don't see any way for them to even have really accomplished this in such a short time frame.
Weakening it, well yes we see that. It's part of the very stated goals of multiple members of the groups in power. On the other hand though, what parts? Obviously they're strengthening the shit out of other parts, and while I can assume what OP meant to some extent, it's sure as hell hard to refute something so vague as "they're weakening the government", but that's partly because the "meat" of this claim is in part 3.
What does this even mean? What system are they replacing? Is OP implying that the goal is to straight up install a monarchy with Trump as King? I'm certain they're not.
However the range of viable options they're implying is quite large, and it changes the difficulty of trying to even offer intelligent discussion on the subject, let alone prove/disprove something. Why install a new system they have better control over if they already have enough control over this one to blow it up in the first place? Again I can think of several arguments for or against this stance, but I sure as hell can't guess what OP's view of this is.
Even this becomes nebulous fast. If we still have elections in 4 years and there's a legit transition of power, would that qualify as disproving the argument? I'm not so sure, both from a legit standpoint and from the kind of discussions I've had on this subject with those I suspect are like OP.
To be clear, one of the first sentiments I saw in leftist circles after the DC crash turned out to involve a black hawk helicopter was that the crash was planned by the administration and this was going to become the US equivalent of falling out of a window in russia.
This is a WILDLY absurd claim at the bare minimum if you know anything about planes, and yet was resoundingly supported by people who, I think most, would consider rational and well liked as a theory.
I have no idea where OP stands on the scale from "helicopter assassinations" to "the death of the spirit of the country even if the law stands", so yes, I think the teapot is invokable. This is much the same as "we have the ability to feed everyone and we aren't because we're evil". It's such a wide net as to be nearly impossible to even come to an agreement on what's being discussed.
and while time consuming, is possible to prove. NASA has a list of any human made objects ejected into space. You'd be stumbling into a much more interesting issue if we could identify a teapot in space.
All it takes is one clumsy english astronaut, too embarassed to report what he'd done.
They clearly aren't competent. that's the dangerous part. He has the backing power of a president, and his plan is to walk in and just randomly lock people out while he puts a strange server in. and try to walk into secure buildings on a weekend. He brings his own interns (not even senior employees, boys in college) to help with this stuff. It sounds like something out of a Mr. Bean movie, not a Bond movie.
They are a crazy person swinging around a sledgehammer and seeing what they hit. Doesn't matter how many of their crazy plans succeed, there will be destruction and maybe blood on their hands.
I'm not sure.
But it doesn't look good.
One thing for sure is that the United States has a crisis of ethics. Specifically, the practice of basic ethics in government at the highest level is completely dead.
Elon Musk is an extremely unethical person. He bought twitter specifically to use it to influence global politics with lies and disinformation. It's an absolute crisis that this unelected person with ties to foreign enemies has almost unlimited access to critical infrastructure and secrets.
The president of the country is a convicted felon who committed multiple high crimes during his first term, mismanaged a pandemic in a way that caused hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, committed sedition and probably treason, and was somehow not held accountable and was reelected. This directly reflects on a lack of character, and lack of interest in justice, and dereliction of civic duty in the majority of the voting populace.
I'm also concerned by the open corruption in other parts of government. The blatant acceptance of bribes by multiple members of the supreme court. Insider trading by multiple (most of the?) members of congress. The open acceptance of dark money and lobbying. The blatant lying that mostly goes unchallenged by the press.
This blatant corruption and lack of accountability permeates everything and I believe that it is contagious. Supporters of Musk and Trump often revel in cruelty and harming others, just like their heroes.
Ethics is not only important in what you do. It is also what you seem to do, especially when you are in power. Lawlessness and abuse of power erode basic trust in government and in each other.
There has always been corruption. But as an old timer may say, we've really gone to hell in a handbasket.
Yet funnily enough, they generally don't beat the market. We should ban Congressional stock trading because the incentives are bad, but the evidence of insider trading is mixed at best.
It doesn’t even matter if they beat the market or not. It’s abuse of power. If they abuse their power for insider trading, they’re likely to do it in other places too.
I agree. The possibility of trying to beat the market by trading companies related to the committees they run is a very bad look. It's an easy source of corruption that should be banned.
They didn't "take over", we handed the country to them on a silver platter.
None of these plans were a secret. A critical mass of people just didn't give a shit.
Exactly. And, from what I’ve gathered from wading through the conservative side of things, this is what those who voted for Trump wanted.
Everyone who failed to take an entire political party at their word when they literally spelled out in humongous, bright white letters — “WE ARE ALL DOMESTIC TERRORISTS” — across the stage of the August 2022 CPAC, and is now upset, but did not vote is part of what brought us here. And by here, I mean ‘the precipice’ — of what, I do not know, but it won’t be easy and I doubt it will be good.
I think we’re a new toy-box, and we’re super interesting right now, but eventually the ultra-rich will become bored, or dissatisfied, and then we’ll be smashed to pieces for parts and thrown away. I don’t actually believe we are capable of comprehending just how out of touch these billionaires truly are.
But — if we do somehow miraculously step back from the edge and seize control once more, the punishments must be harsh; after all, the Reconstruction failed for a reason.
r/fednews found a website that is doxing federal employees and calling them targets.
Yea, I saw earlier. The nonprofit that runs that site is a dark money black hole.
They’re responsible for running a slew of successful, high profile interference campaigns against various candidates favored by the Democrats, and they have very high connections within the Republican Party. These guys are the real deal, not some weird fringe group. That their focus is on riling up tensions against select individuals is extremely concerning.
Kind of thing that the FBI would care about if it was free to intervene. Now, who knows
This is just a continuation of the policies we've seen for the past 40+ years. We've starved the beast long enough, now it's just time to go in for the kill.
Quite simply, yes. In the sense that you mean it, at least. But in a less simple sense, we've been witnessing this takeover since....the 1700s? But, in a slightly-more-but-still-less-simple-than-you-mean sense, since the...40s? The...20s? Yes. Yes. Yes.
The sense it seems you mean
The structures and ideals of liberal democracy of the US government are actively being subverted by a small cohort of politically incoherent business owners. They are using tactics from the same bag drawn from by countless coups, from the Nazi takeover of the Weimar Republic, to Stalin's accretion of control in the early Soviet Union, to the numerous state-sponsored coups that happened in Guatemala, Chile, Vietnam, Korea, throughout the 20th century.
The methods:
a) labels a huge portion of the population as suspect-by-default and blames for all the administration's failures
b) inspires those without vested interests to simply tune out, thanks to exhaustion
But, wait, doesn't that apply to... George W Bush? Reagan? Nixon?
The sense you kind of mean
Yes, it does. Since the rise of the USSR, the federal government of the USA has allowed regulatory capture and coerced journalists in order to placate the corporations who facilitate the economy. It has engaged in disinformation campaigns, from Reefer Madness, to the Red Scare, to rumours of Weapons of Mass Destruction so as to coerce the populace into acceptance of
Fascism is not an ideology, not outside of Rome. Fascism is a long-term procedural decay and disenfranchisement of the populace in the interests of corporations and reactionary political parties.
But, wait, what about pre-1900? Wasn't the Spanish-American War kinda-sorta orchestrated by the publishing industry? Weren't there a number of huge classes of American citizens already disenfranchised before...the 1960s? Women couldn't vote before the 20s, racism?
The way you don't mean
Yeah, it wasn't like the Founding Fathers were angels sent to throw tea off a ship and fight a Righteous War to Usher in Liberty and Justice for All. They were, broadly, a bunch of business owners and polymaths who wanted to take advantage of the distance between the Colonies and the King to avoid taxation and the sure-to-come abolition of slavery in Brittania.
So, they huddled up, drunk and overcaffeinated, possibly stoned on cannabis or opium, and brainstormed a means of achieving local popularity for their private interests. They mined Locke and Rousseau's writings for positive justification of sovereignty, they borrowed from Adam Smith's early explorations of macroeconomics to chart a course to support their newly-cast-off dinghy, and blended these ideas with a fetish for ancient Athens and the Roman Republic they developed thanks to Enlightenment Education.
Basically, by accident, they designed the first modern state: one where every Man was King, where capitalism would nurture the children, where government was agreed upon by The People. Of course, they conveniently ignored the rights of their slaves, treated women as incapable of higher thought (and therefore participation in government), and only allowed the indigenous population such dignities if they stayed in their place (either in the Frontier, keeping to themselves, or as converts to the Modern State).
This was the model of the soon-to-follow French Revolution. As global literacy rose, as colonialism became gauche, as the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches lost political power, and the Protestants fell into countless schisms themselves, as the world became more Enlightened, it turned out that the only system that people could really get behind, when facing these cultural and logical contradictions, was a system entirely devoid of self-seriousness. Liberal Democracy became the name of the game, and soon enough, even the warring kingdoms of Italy and Germany threw away their monarchies, even the British had to put their sovereign in a closet, to maintain Order.
Liberal Democracy, however, is a fragile ceasefire. It is a serviceable method of preventing social collapse, of curtailing the tendency of merchants to own private armies to guard their mansions, of keeping the huddled masses from killing the feudal lords, of preserving the human need for the illusions of Truth and Justice despite the death of gods and kings. Should the huddled masses become too huddled and too educated, they may revolt. Should the priests convert enough to once again fill the churches, they may dictate Righteousness again. Should the factory owners confuse the workers, they may convince them to surrender their political will. Should the government bureaucracy become convinced of its own righteousness, it may institute its own God.
So, yeah. We're watching the Holy Constitution burn. We're watching the miseducated masses conspire to conspire. We're watching a wealthy narcissist with dementia take advantage of the largest camp of conspirators, those who learned right and wrong from televangelists, oil barons, and weapon dealers.
HOPIUM
Some Things Are Happening. But it isn't new, and the bureaucracy of government will attempt to preserve itself, because it must. The tech billionaires don't agree on much except that the world should be modeled on a circuitboard, the military industry wants moar gun, the press want moar news, the petrochemical complex wants...well, whatever gets regulation out of the way, and the social regressives want to be kids again. With continual efforts to subvert alignment between these diverse power-holders, and luck, We will avoid a Brave New World and a Big Brother. If We give up, We'll have Orwellian totalitarianism. If We give in to our inner demons, We'll have a Huxleyan world state. If We build something, We will have it.
But liberal democracy is probably dead. It was born with Washington and Lincoln, it drowned in Coca-Cola Death Squads. If We resurrect it, We'll need to reckon with some Big Problems, or Fascism will come back out of the hinterlands.
What do you expect is replacing liberal democracy?
Knowing where we are is much easier than where we'll be in a century, of course.
In the local context of the USA for the next decade, Musk (the only one at the table with any real plan) wants to institute a techno-feudalist structure, and the larger industries would have no problems there. The military itself, and the parts of society who think they support the current administration, really don't want that. Trump himself might grow tired of being played by his most recent partner in crime. I expect war, or a fragmented totalitarianism that gets chewed up by outside forces and civil unrest.
In the paradigmatic sense, it seems like there are two or three global competitors for liberal democracy's inheritance. One is exemplified by Russia, and can be seen happening in the US as the CIA is seeming to back the current administration: kleptocratic info-tyranny, where violence is entirely decentralized and power is accrued by the most craven and most-able to control communications. Another is whatever you call China's current paradigm: a centralized power structure is maintained which cannily suppresses any competing organization of value, holds economic efficiency as the sole virtue, and seems to aim toward a "utopia" that resembles the World State of Brave New World. Order as God, and hedonism as the sole humanity. The third is much less clear, and its gravity is more diffuse, but somewhere between the Nordic European rational humanist socialism project, the recurrent progressive tides in South America, and the ideals of Indian democracy seems to be a third pole of sorts. This one seems vulnerable to subversion by the others, as it's an order that's thrived under the canopy of the cold war and outside powers predominating. Europe appears on the precipice of fascism as well, as India has built its own military industry it's followed that same path, and those idealists in South America seem bent toward failure unless the Catholic Church takes up a unifying mantle in that mold (which seems not unlikely).
My ignorance of African politics beyond the broadest strokes leaves a massive set of undefined variables in the equation, and these things are really too complex to forecast for anyone. My gut says that the three structures I listed above are all likely to converge on a rigid hierarchy built on cryptoeugenics and industrial economy. My heart dreams that humanity can forgo its demand for false certainty and supremacy without some sort of apocalypse (or theocratic vanguard state) delivering us into a solarpunk/Star Trek utopia.
I wonder what kind of plan Vance has in the event that Trump gets impeached and removed.
I'm very far from Washington DC but this is hard to watch. I have emotional investment in the old order for a variety of reasons.
I'm equally curious about Vance. He strikes me as closer to a mark than a conman, and in a lot of ways that's heartening. His ideology may be racist, and himself is clearly misogynistic and classist, but he might be grounded and principled enough to disregard the more totalitarian and destructive elements in the Republican party. I'm hardly expecting him to fix anything, but he probably won't burn the house down trying to turn on the TV.
I'm sufficiently young and alienated not to have those investments, but the old order sure was comfortable, and I can't begrudge anyone their nostalgia.
I think Vance has genuine principles. I think no one will ever know what those principles are because Vance will always do what he thinks will get people to like him/give him power. That's in opposition to someone like Mitch McConnell, who we have always known to have principles, often known what they are, and then watched him completely ignore them, which (very charitably) may possibly be due to following other principles (doing what's best—under a strict definition of the term—for his party). I think very few politicians act in a principled manner, but at least we know what some of them actually believe underneath the game they're playing. Unfortunately, they're not principled enough to follow their principles.
Absolutely! But that's the difference between Trump and politicians as a group: I'm not sure he's ever had any. I don't think Vance is some secret antifascist, just that he's reasonable enough to convince of something that doesn't privilege his own wealth.
Correct. I think McConnell can, in the proper situations, act against his own interests if he believes strongly enough in something. I think Vance will do something that he believes is worse for everyone else—even if it goes against his beliefs—if it will materially benefit him. I do not think that Trump believes in anything.
To be fair to Vance, I think most politicians are like him. I do think that most politicians at the top will take principled stands, if only because they think so highly of themselves. That is, i think most politicians at the very top act more principled than most a step below them (these are the ones Vance is similar to). I don't think they're always doing what their principles dictate, but I think the ability to know when to not toe the party line is part of what gives them their high profiles (know when to pick your battles and all that).
But Trump has upset that balance, and that's why a typical low-profile nobody (relatively speaking) became his Vice President.
I guess I see Vance as someone like LBJ: a horrible presidential possibility, but probably better than the guy without an intact frontal cortex.
Vance subscribes to Peter Thiel’s beliefs. Personally, I think Thiel distancing himself from this round of politics has to do more with optics than anything else.
The public will need a “sensible” leader to look to after this whole fiasco, and Vance is pretty much being positioned to be the one to take up those reins. He’s literally perfect for it, from a conservative point of view.
But, and this is just speculation from my very layperson self — I’m not convinced he believes in the sovereignty of US law — or the sovereignty of any national government, for that matter — any more than anyone else within Thiel’s sphere. And while that’s great for some people, it certainly isn’t great for me, lol.
Don't take the label of "mark" versus "conman" as implicit support—he is more or less a technomonarchist, he'd not be a good president for almost anybody but his pals. The difference there is in the malleability of his intentions, and his relative lack of charisma.
Nor is his groundedness or principle-driven personality (by contrast to the current president) an indication of virtue. By any real measure of character, he's a craven and self-serving viper with enough guile to wear a mask.
However. Trump is Hitler-in-the-bunker, Qaddafi in the 2000s level of deranged. He seems to have lost everything except the ability to puff out his chest and string words along. This allows people who aren't reckoned with the intentions of those who are facilitating his administration to dismiss concerns, because "he's all talk". It allows people who voted for him as a proxy for "None of the above" to hear what they want to hear. It allows more cognizant conmen to manipulate him. He wants one thing: to feel good about himself, and to believe he's either feared or loved by everyone else. He seems to be perpetually one bad week away from deploying nukes to secure Greenland as "his". He's off-the-cuff threatened to take control of Gaza. He might dream that his dad told him off for letting eggs be expensive, and invade Canada to secure their chicken farms.
I'm really not saying that "Vance is better", I'm saying he's sane and capable of comprehending consequences beyond "if I throw a fit, I get what I want!", and that means a lot in terms of rallying opposition and strategizing against him.
Vance certainly talks like a reasonable person.
He says unreasonable things, but he says them in a very reasonable manner!
Can you expand on this a bit? I just tried Googling and came up with nothing satisfactory.
Basically, I suspect that any society which holds economic efficiency as an ultimate virtue will eventually convince itself that certain forms of life are intrinsically more valuable than others, and be able to institute subtle incentives which don't scan as eugenicist to those who see such paradigms as unethical. Think designer babies, or systematic marginalization of certain traits which, over time, leads to castes. I'm not one to privilege DNA itself as a core factor in human experience, but also don't trust society not to recapitulate bigotry based on its expression.
They said fascism is.
We'll see.
Musk and minions are at the VA now. They seem to be experimenting with cutting benefits without warning.
There are lots of veterans in federal service.
Yep. And yet so many veterans voted for this ‘soft coup’ to happen.
E: link fixed
I'd like to clarify that I more said that fascism is what we have now, and it's the subjective appraisal of liberal democracy in decay.
Just chiming in here to say I love your writing style!
Thanks. It's the result of much consideration, and I'm glad to hear it's appreciated.
As far as I can tell, that's one good theory regarding what is happening. There may be a slightly different reality but we can't tell from the outside.
They haven't succeeded yet either in crashing it or in replacing the current system.
Are there any realistic alternative theories right now? Not being facetious, I genuinely can’t think of anything plausible that would explain the number of clearly illegal executive actions and the random college kids being sent to fuck with government computer systems over the weekend.
I think most political thinkers have been interpreting this with the assumption that this is an attempt to redefine and control the Republic like a Goldwater/ grover norquist Republican or to morph it into an empire like Rome or the third reich, not destroy it like a libertarian anarchist.
But your question has me nearly vomiting in the corner with dread.
Congress and the judges will respond but Trump and Musk have surprise and the initiative.
What the military decides is going to be important if this is as bad as I think it is.
@Eiji1700 described my line of logic in that this is more of a smash and grab operation to steal off the top rather than a calculated attempt to subvert US Hegemony for fun and profit. It's hard to prove intent, malice or incompetence in situations like these, but this is early days, and we might not know what exactly is going on or how deep the damage is until the books are already written.
We should keep in mind that they haven't succeeded at any of their theoretical goals yet. As @snake_case implied, Trump and co fail way more often than they succeed.
Whatever the ultimate goals are, if there are any besides enriching themselves and grabbing power, this timeline is crazy.
Normally Id say if you have to ask, but with the amount of shit these guys throw at the wall that ends up not sticking (build a wall???) I dont even know any more.
I don't know about crash it. But it seems like they're remaking the system into whatever they want. More of a formalized oligarchy.
Seems that way. Could be unsuccessful, but the damage incurred along the way could be bad enough. We shall see in time. I have extremely pessimistic views about what is happening that I've shared elsewhere. Either way, I think we should treat it as a coup. To me, this is not a drill. The intent is there and an attempt underway. Act accordingly. The is the Project 2025 playbook in action.
All of the news is dizzying, which I think is a component they want. Keep people's heads spinning. Keep the energy used in defiance dispersed and diffused. I'm personally exhausted. If that's what they want, it's working on me. But I haven't personally been in top form for a while.
I wish I had started compiling a list of everything as it unfolds and kept it as a living doc that I update daily. I can't otherwise keep up and recall just from memory. I may try to start one, but oh boy am I tired.
A user on project owl discord server has documented as much as possible so it might be worth checking it out.
The project owl is an open source investigation discord much like bellingcat so they are very good at what they do.
https://discord.gg/projectowl
I think that invite works. You would be looking for The regime in the server
The best time to plant a tree (start this document) is ten years ago (as events started unfolding) but the second-best time is right now.
Sure, it would be great if you had this document keeping everything together from the start, but next-week you will look back on this-week you who started from now, and be grateful that you at least have something.
This message is intended to help inspire you to do something you already wanted to do, but please don’t feel pressured by me if you decide it’s better to take an opportunity to chill rather than take on this extra task. Look after yourself!
Overall, so far, about a month in,
I would say yes
it is heading in the direction of Trump completely taking over the country forever.
Forever is a very long time
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-democracy-report-1.7486317
At this point, I would bet that the US will not hold another free election.
Until, years from now, there’s some sort of armed insurrection and US Emperor Barron Trump is overthrown.
At first it was shocking and I could only assume the worst, but after reading about it more I'm not too worried. While it doesn't look good and it is absolutely improper... but what they are doing is legal (at least from a 1000 ft view--the executive branch decides how to execute and the congress decides how to congress) though some of the details may be illegal.
The biggest problem that I see with this situation is that, compared to before, there seems to be even less oversight and they've thrown all processes and procedures out the window. They are likely using DeepSeek or OpenAI to write COBOL/JCL. I don't think their goal is to break it or accidentally delete everything. But I don't think there will be zero side effects from what is happening...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Efficiency_entry_into_US_federal_buildings
I'm sorry but this is plainly incorrect. What they are doing, even from a 100ft view, is completely illegal. The executive branch cannot unilaterally decide not to spend money that congress has appropriated, they cannot unilaterally cancel contracts, they cannot unilaterally dismantle executive departments that have been created by congress, DOGE is a commision with 0 legal authority — these things are not just details and they are illegal. Of course, that hasn't stopped them from doing them, but this whole thing is illegal. The executive branch does not just get to decide what laws to follow — what's the point of congress otherwise?
I agree. So far I haven't read that they have done actually done this. Have any payments stopped? Has enough evidence been created by now to charge? What specific laws have been broken? These?
I haven't seen anything truly damning... just a bunch of people saying "no" and then fired the next day and replaced with loyalists...
I do not like what they are doing either. It is beyond disturbing. But I think we'll need hard evidence first...
?? Yes!! Foreign aid has stopped! Payments are delayed! They have recalled all USAID employees, taken down the websites, and stopped funding! Those employees they have been firing who say no and are replaced? They have protection against firings like this. It's illegal. They cannot do any of those things — they are statutorily mandated by Congress. At its core the Executive branch cannot just decide to stop executing large swatches of laws.
And who is going to charge them? That is the problem here.
Much of what they are attempting or have already tried to do is patently illegal. The president cannot decide to withhold congressionally appropriated funds. This is written into the constitution. The president cannot unilaterally decide to close a federal agency, either, but they're sure as hell trying to right now.
And the Trump administration knows they can't close a federal department which is why they're instead doing everything they legally can to hamstring the Department of Education. Making a department intentionally terrible and outsourcing as much functionality as possible to another department is probably legal.
Most of the checks and balances in the US expected Congress to act as a check on the president, not roll over and give the executive ever increasing authority
Here’s a quote from a Russian speaking about Russian opinions on the Ukraine invasion, but one that seems to be equally relevant to certain trends of acquiescence in US political support:
Quote from this BBC News article.
Are we witnessing a takeover attempt of the whole planet?
Yes.
No.