Tag: resistance

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After July 3rd, 2025 — Comes the independence movement

After July 3rd, 2025

Comes the independence movement

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 4th, 2025

Between the infiltration of fascists on the Supreme Court (name the traitors: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney-Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh) and in Congress (too many to name, but almost unanimously Republicans, and willingness to either commit or bow to treason almost unanimous amongst those Republicans), there was only one result possible. The United States of America never stood a chance.

The passage of the hideous, ironically named “One Big Beautiful Bill” is the capstone to the collapse of America. Yes, it is cruel, vicious, and designed to punish the poor and weaken the middle class into insolvency. It increases the already hideously disproportionate disparity of wealth and power of the top 1% to levels that far exceed those of pre-revolutionary France or Russia. That comes at the cost of a trillion for health care for the people, hundreds of billions more to feed the poor, and education. It will make the US a scientific, intellectual and educational backwater. It will, in time, eliminate accessible health care for most of the population, and weaken and degrade public, secular schools into irrelevance.

But the very worst part is that it erects the most efficient and oppressive police state in the history of the world. It provides more funding for the hated and vicious ICE secret police force than the US Marines get. Coupled with Elon Musk’s vast, comprehensive data theft of virtually every government record on everyone in America, it makes for a vast and omnipresent police state that would make Josef Stalin groan with envy.

Even now, I see people, mostly Democrats, chirping that the Republicans have really fucked up this time, and how we’ll make them pay in the off-terms next year. These people are fools: the Republicans have absolutely no intention of holding free and fair elections. None.

Some people take hope that the bill just signed into law delays some of the worst, most rapacious elements of the shredding of the social safety net until after November 2026, and point to that as a sign the Republicans are nervous about those elections.

Nonsense. They just want to hold what will be utterly fraudulent and meaningless elections to make sure their apparatus of control is rock solid and that they need never worry about any election going forward.

Oh, there will be an election. It will even look fairly convincing, in that Republicans will at least lackadaisically campaign, and if the people controlling the vote count are even half-way competent, the results will all fall into a convincing 10 point range for most of the Republicans. There may come a time when they can run unopposed and win 99% of the vote, like in the Soviet Union, but for now they have to pretend there’s still a United States and it is still a democracy of the people. As long as people can PRETEND the country is still theirs, they are less likely to rise up, you see. To that end, Republicans will wave many flags and pound a few Bibles in order to keep their believers glassy-eyed.

But they don’t intend to allow the people to have a meaningful voice. The bill Trump just signed had an approval rating of just 29% during the final hours of debate. No bill still pending before Congress was ever more unpopular. Ever. And when you have people like Joni Ernst sneering “We all have to die sometime” to people complaining that their children can’t get necessary medical care, or the psychotically racist Laura Loomer talking about deporting all 65 million native Latinos with a grin from the president, you know they have stopped pretending. Trump spent yesterday complaining about how farmers were at the mercy of “Shylock” bankers and crowing that he was going to throw a trashy UFC bloodfest on the White House lawn. They’ve quit pretending. They can’t be arsed giving a shit. They’ve won, and they know it.

But they still fear us. They know that if the people withdraw consent, and simply and peacefully refuse to cooperate, they cannot maintain power. The Soviet Union, the most efficiently oppressive regime in history, fell with hardly a shot being fired simply because the citizenry of the USSR withheld their support and peacefully resisted.

I’ve said before that once-a-month demonstrations aren’t going to cut it. People are going to have to go out every day and protest, and there’s certainly no shortage of things people can protest. The worthless corporate media will largely ignore it, but the internet is building its own fourth estate. Corporate news is rapidly falling into the same niche as Pravda and Izvestiya did in the Soviet Union and RT does today.

The government will make it harder and harder to defy. They may make demonstrating illegal, and even defiance of any sort. Who’s gonna stop them? Clarence Thomas? Mike Johnson? The law will be what they say it is, and it won’t be there to protect you.

But there are hundreds of ways to resist. They still need you, and even though they’ll never admit it, they need the support of the people in general.

Make Trump supporters feel unloved. Don’t miss an opportunity to discuss the failings and deceptions of the Trump regime. Make Trump supporters doubters, and eventually adversaries. When dealing with officials, drag your feet in every way possible. Do it legally, do it peacefully, but do it. And if they try to outlaw resistance, find less obvious ways of resisting, but never stop resisting. The apparatchiks of the Trump regime are human, and will slowly succumb to social pressure. Make them feel unloved.

Trump is a dying man. He isn’t plausible as the face of the fascist revolution now, and it’s only going to get more and more strained as his mind, never much to begin with, erodes. While we don’t know who will replace him, he won’t have whatever cult following Trump still retains at that point, so keep the pressure on, and make it unceasing. Most of Trump’s closest clique are weak and amazingly stupid opportunists, and they will make a lot of mistakes. Make them pay.

This regime can be brought down in ways in which the founders of the United States would approve. But be prepared to be stubborn and unyielding. Make them feel unloved.

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The Collapse of Trumpistan — The diminutizing of little people

November 11th 2020

Like most folk, I spent the past few weeks wondering a) If Trump was going to stage a coup, and b) if his followers were going to rise up and wage war against the United States in the name of Amurka. Yes, a lot of those clowns love America and hate the United States. It takes a special kind of stupid to be a Trumpkin.

We’re a full week after the polls closed (yeah, seems longer, I know) and four days since the election was called for Biden. Trump has responded about the way everyone expected (memorably likened by one commentator to a toddler who has just been informed it’s time to leave Chuck E. Cheese) with tantrums on twitter and otherwise holing up in the schlupfloch formerly known as the White House.

His lawyers filed a veritable snowstorm of suits, most of which amounted to little more than despairing wails. At last count, he was 0-14 in court, with the closest thing to a victory being one judge who agreed GOP observers could stand six feet from the tabulators instead of the agreed-upon 10 feet. Didn’t change the results any.

The closest thing to a viable suit was one in which a postal worker alleged widespread vote tampering in making postmarks match before the election date. It collapsed when the same worker, in a sworn affidavit, admitted he made the whole thing up. Since his initial allegation was ALSO a sworn affidavit, he is prima facie in jeopardy of a charge of perjury, and he can probably kiss his PO job goodbye. And if someone in the Trump organization offered him money for the false testimony, he can probably kiss that goodbye, as well. Maybe they’ll let him keep the MAGA hat.

A large majority of people have decided that Trump’s protests are without merit and he should concede and gracefully allow President-Elect Biden to proceed with the transition. That’s eighty percent of voters, including 55% of Republicans. As the courts reject suit after suit, and state after state formally certifies their results, that number will change in Joe Biden’s favor. By December 9th, the day after “safe harbor” reporting of final results, that same poll is likely to show 95% support for Biden, with 85% of Republicans agreeing. There’s only three states where Trump qualifies for an automatic recount, and he doesn’t have any realistic hope of winning any of them. An error rate of 0.1% would be considered extraordinarily high, and the narrowest difference he’s contesting is 0.5%.

Most of his antics are delaying tactics and red meat for his base, a base that is steadily shrinking as it becomes clear just how hypocritical and self-serving Trump’s arguments have become. Even Fox News has given up on Trump and are now urging him to just concede already and let the nation move forward. That leaves only the lunatics who faithfully follow OANN, Breitbart, Newsmax, Qanon, and the right wing cesspool known as Parler. That social media site looks like a kindergarten on psilocybin. I might just create a fake account and go over there and commit acts of Polemical Judo. Nothing drives right wingers into a bigger frenzy than a calm, reasoned recitation of provable, salient facts, and a suggestion that perhaps a friendly wager on some of them might be in order. Just drives them nuts. You’ll learn things about your manners, morals, ancestry and post-life destination that you would never have guessed in a million years.

There isn’t going to be a widespread, or even significant uprising on Trump’s behalf. Even amongst the most resolute of Trumpkins, there is unease that stems from the fact that Trump flat-out said he would attack the integrity of the election process if he lost, praise it if he won. Coupled with court loss after loss after loss, and growing public anger, his support is eroding. There’s an old saying, “If you can’t decide if the whole world is right or you are, it’s likely the world is right.” When Trumpkins are reduced to considering the entire United States to be just a conspiracy to suppress Donald Trump, there won’t be many of them left, because crazy can only take a movement so far.

The Trump movement will die a well-deserved death. Well, OK, cults never die entirely, and there will always be a few True Believers, but there will never be enough of them to matter. For the vast majority of people, Trump will find his historical level: a bad joke that nearly destroyed a country.

The militant right, which piggybanked on Trump as a way to advance their aims, are another matter. They are, for the most part, neo-Nazis and other vile extremists who don’t mind using terror and violence to get their way. They are, and will remain, a danger. My best guess is some McVeigh amongst them will commit an atrocity that will finally persuade the American public that they are a bigger problem than Islamic extremism (and in fact they already are) and far far worse than the imaginary threats posed by Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Under Biden, I expect intelligence agencies will be allowed to resume infiltrating and monitoring these outfits, and preventing another OKC.

Trump’s going to do a fair bit of damage between now and January 2021. He’s trying to steal everything he can and move as many levers as possible to soften his landing, although I doubt any decent person is in any mood to let him just walk away from his crimes. He’s panicked and anxious, and well he should be.

But don’t worry about the crap he’s pulling with the military. His appointments are all civilian, not in the chain of command, and the military has already made it clear it isn’t going to go to war with America in the name of Donald Trump.

So hang tight. We’ll get through this.

 

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America Burns — Trump makes it his own personal fire sale

America Burns

Trump makes it his own personal fire sale

April 16th 2020

We’re at the point where there are some faint glimmers of hope that the first round of the coronavirus pandemic might be cresting. New cases as a percentage of existing cases have dropped from 15% three weeks ago to just 5% now. New York crested, and Cuomo sent 150 ventilators to states that haven’t been overwhelmed yet. Social distancing has had an effect: back in early March, I estimated we would have 1.2 million cases by April 12 (it was just under 600,000) and between 10 and 20 thousand dead. Unfortunately, I was wrong in the bad way on that one: the death toll was actually 21,500.

However, America has been hit harder than any other country, due in part to the utter lack of a safety net, and partly because the Republican party expects every good American worker to risk his life so that no billionaire should ever have to chance the horror of becoming a mere millionaire. As a result, even as places like New York and California can see a light at the end of the epidemiological tunnel, colonies of infection are erupting across the red and mostly rural states. South Dakota, lightly affected until this past week, had 650 new cases erupt at just one meat processing plant which was under no orders to close down and felt little pressure to protect its workers.

Despite that, there’s a growing resistance from people who are tired of being locked down, which is reasonable, and believe that the disease is a hoax, or want to show the Chinese they can’t infect good Americans, or just want to stick it to the libs, none of which is reasonable.

Incoherence plays a major role in this. In Florida, pro wrestling was declared an “essential business” and allowed to continue business as usual. Pro wrestling. Yes, you read that right. But in Florida, and in most of the country, beaches are closed, even though usage of same is light this time of year. The resistance is also pretty incoherent, as you might imagine. Some of them just want to lock up any politicians they find annoying. Some just want to be able to go to the hairdresser again. I saw a video made by a well-coiffed sorority brat type who sobbed through a glittery blonde frenzy about how without decent nails and lots of good make up, she would have to compete with unkempt and possibly smelly farm girls for the attentions of the boyz. Now, good chance she was just taking the piss, but I took no chances; I suggested we help her out by sending her old “L’il Abner” comic strips as a fashion guide.

I suspect the resistance to shelter-in-place will grow, and as a result, so will the contagion. It’s hard to be sympathetic to these people because while they will find out that you can’t gaslight mother nature, the fact is they’ll also infect relatives, co-workers and friends through their foolishness.

But as all this is going on, we have Trump and his cabal of thieves who are exploiting this. They are encouraging people, and the dimmer state governors, to defy social distancing and get back to work. Avery Bundy and his gang of land-thief nuts declared that no phony government was going to stop him from his self-declared right to steal other people’s property. Various churches rebelled, declaring that Jesus would protect them from the virus. About once a week, I see an amusing article about how one of the pastors or leaders of these little cults up and died from—you guessed it—coronavirus. In Wisconsin, republican judges ruled that voters must cast votes and not delay the primary. Both the state Supreme Court and the federal Supreme Court disgraced themselves in this bald-faced ploy to protect a Republican incumbent judge, and in the hundreds of thousands, Wisconsins turned out to kick that fascist strutter off the court. It was perhaps THE bright spot in all of these. Americans are still willing to fight fascism, and to risk their lives to do so.

The worst part is the people who are defying the lockdowns out of simple desperation. The government response has been mostly pure shit, and many people are out of food, facing eviction, and utterly desperate.

It’s in the interest of the federal government to make this even worse. Trump is staging a coup against America. He reluctantly signed the stimulus bill, adding the signing statement that he felt free to disregard the language that forbade him or his pestilential family from profiting from the crisis, or other language that the government must account for where and how that money is spent. To that end, he fired the inspectors-general, administrative cops that oversee disbursements of funding for fraud or waste. He wants lots of fraud and waste, and he wants it kept secret.

He also is demanding that in the next stimulus bill, funding for the Post Office be cut and the Post Office closed. Never mind that the Post Office is vital; Republicans have wanted it shut down for years so profiteers can take over, and Trump wants it eliminated because without the Post Office, there is no mail-in voting, and Trump has openly admitted that if everyone could vote by mail, no Republican would ever win office again. It’s nice to know that even he acknowledges that most Americans hate fascism.

Now he’s threatening to close Congress if they don’t immediately approve all his appointees. He hasn’t read the Constitution; not only does he not have that power, but neither House can adjourn for more than three days without the consent of the other House. If Pelosi digs in her heels—and she will—Trump will have to force another Constitutional crisis to get his way.

If he does that, America is only weeks away from widespread revolt and possible civil war.

Between the pandemic and his own lust for power, Trump is hoping, if he can’t simply prevent voting in November, to at least make it so hard and so dangerous to vote that he can get reelected by the surviving members of his cult—the ones out protesting that Americans should bow to no sissy virus whut weighs less than one tenth what a good Amurrkin does.

So even though many other countries have peaked and are containing the virus, America has the wrong government, run by the wrong people, at the wrong time.

It won’t end well.

 

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