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Comment by TheAlchemist

3 days ago

Americans, where will you realize that the longer you wait, the worse it will get ? The whole country should be in the streets now. You guys are fast tracking your way into a dictatorship, and unfortunately you may drag the entire Western world with you.

The videos from this are numerous and very clear about what happened. And yet, all the officials are telling that a guy is a domestic terrorist and approached ICE officers with a gun, with intent to kill them. How crazy is that ? And if they do this in cases where everything is filmed, you can only imagine what's happening behind the scenes.

The unfortunate truth I think is that no matter how many people might be with this idea of just "rising up" and taking back the country, america is is fucking massive and many cities and towns there is no noticeable ice or border patrol presence. So even if you can get people out and protesting at some common meaningless locations its going to be symbolic at best.

If you want out-of-band change in the U.S. it will at minimum take some combination of three things:

- sustained weeks or months long protests in D.C.

- extreme social pressure on congress representatives no matter where they may be.

- state governments in rebellion or threatening it against the federal government.

I don't think we're particular close on any of these.

Otherwise tough luck, wait for the probably manipulated elections.

  • Street protests are useless because they don't actually hurt. They only work if they can shame the other side, but the other side isn't actually ashamed of what they are doing.

    The kind of protest that is needed is the kind that is actually disruptive. Nationwide strikes, for instance.

    • Economic protests, by contrast, are extremely effective, e.g., Jimmy Kimmel.

      Money is the most important thing the corrupt establishment and its masters care about. (Rich people hedged their bets, so both D and R have their shares of corruption.)

      1 reply →

    • A protest that is actually disruptive is called terrorism, and is off-topic on Hacker News.

  • In Minnesota they've striked recently and it sounds like they're being successful. If lots of people across the country striked maybe it would matter (fat chance in the USA I know but it's something)

  • All the towns where there's nothing happening don't need to be rising up though, surely, it only needs to happen in the major population centres.

  • More excuses.

    • I'm not sure you what you expect a single commenter on HN to do. They're not making excuses, they're stating a reality. The commenter could protest, but it won't make someone protest in a city that is insulated from all of this .

    • I have voted in every election and have not voted for any in this administration. The wife and I have been to the protests in Omaha. Every one. When there was a walk-out day, the wife and I stayed home, did not shop.

      Yeah, it feels to me that our actions have had zero effect but I am at a loss as to what else to do that is legal.

      Look at history when other fascist regimes moved in and ask yourself what a single, ordinary person at the time could have done to have prevented it.

      I suspect (like history has shown), it's going to take as long as it takes until enough of us can collectively shut the shit down. In the mean time my gestures will, sadly, have nearly zero impact.

Trouble is they elected this lot. Trump ran saying he'd deport millions. Maybe in subsequent elections that will change?

See this from 2024 "Trump explains his militaristic plan to deport 15-20 million people" https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/trump-immigratio...

  • There are voting anomalies in electronic voting records in key states. There's an org looking into this, filing lawsuits for more records from counties and states. The trend is, "the more voters that voted in a polling place, the more that polling place's machine-counted votes skewed towards Trump." These trends are not present in the hand counts.

    They have a YouTube channel too. If the charts in isolation don't make sense to you (they don't to me), watch any of their interviews on the channel to get a walk-through of the charts and their meanings.

    Their findings for Minnesota: https://electiontruthalliance.org/analysis/minnesota-hand-ve...

That's right. What you don't understand is that we must and can only move in resonance with our understanding and with the mass and momentum we are capable of. It's painfully slow, I know. Please be encouraging. We are being harassed by the "commander" of the (formerly) most powerful military in the world. He is a psychopath nobody can deny.

We MUST find our power and our power is NOT violence. But our power is MORE POWERFUL THAN VIOLENCE.

And when as you find it I hope you will see it in you and your people and realize that you too had it all along.