Summary
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged countering the Trump administration’s policies by resisting at every turn, arguing that its incompetence makes it vulnerable.
Her remarks followed chaos caused by a rescinded executive order that temporarily shut down Medicaid portals nationwide.
She encouraged activists to take offline action, citing ongoing mobilization efforts.
Her strategy focuses on making governance difficult for Trump, calling his administration “dangerous and cruel” but also “shockingly dim.”
“Tyranny is eroded by a sea of small acts. Everything matters.”
A lot of Lemmy users really need to understand this. Far too often I see people deride want action that doesn’t immediately fix all problems in the world as worthless or meaningless, simply because they lack the imagination needed to see how small actions can add up to big changes.
That’s true, but it can also be used in reverse as a pacifying mechanism. For example, contributing to making the US the most incarcerated population in the world with ridiculously strict “tough on crime” legislation and then pardoning a small fraction of prisoners. Another example is forcing student loan debt to stick around through bankruptcy, but then forgiving a tiny fraction of loans. It’s a move to pretend change is in motion, but it’s so small and so slow that it’s never going to actually solve the problem. This is especially bad when the other party makes such huge moves in the negative direction while we’re supposed to be content with tiny steps toward “progress”.
This Lemmy user has the right idea.
It isn’t chump and his taintsuckers you gotta worry about.
It’s the army of Federalist Society lawyers and policy experts around him. They’ve spent decades figuring out the removed in the armor of our governmental system. Figuring out how to dismantle it piece by piece.
Edit - wtf is that removed about? Wait…oh. bot thinks I did a racism.
Fucken hell, that’s the correct fucking way to define a gap in armor. Bullshit. I really want to try a bunch of slurs out and see what sets it off.
Not much since you’re on .world. .ml is much more strict.
Jebus. I still haven’t figured out if .ml is government funded or true believers. Very strange to me.
There are better Lemmy hosts out there, just waiting for you to join.
finally, a person with a STRATEGY. so sick of the whining.
she needs volunteers for personal escort and safety. i think she is going to be targeted.
That would be a great plan if the Dems were not spineless at best and complicit at worse
People see comments like this and get discouraged to vote or do anything meaningful. Life is choosing the lesser of two evils. By not choosing you have chosen the greater evil thus making you complicit.
That lesser evil still don’t want Medicare for all, raise the federal minimum wage, and building more affordable housing-- all of which are actually what suffocate many Americans in the ever worsening wealth inequality. That’s why people took the chance to vote Trump who promised tax cut, even though most Americans know they it doesn’t actually benefit them but the 1%.
Look outside of the American mainstream news bubble and discourse that want you to pick the two lesser evils, instead of thinking outside the box. The only way for ordinary Americans to win basic rights is to organise and mobilise by advocating both ranked choice voting and promoting third parties. It won’t happen in federal level so start on the local and state levels, and the changes will go up the chain to federal level. It’s not like Americans haven’t gone and out mobilised before for a better change. The people simply need to rediscover that they have the power.
Look at the “secret service detail” he picked.
He picked loyalty over skill, actually DEI
Just a few inches to the right
Few More Inches
He got rid of DEI to make more room for cronyism.
Any kind of on the ground movement or mobilization needs political support in the halls of power. It’s what made the resistance demonstrated against Trump the first term possible, and the dynamic goes both ways. On the ground resistance gives political actors the space to be resilient. Resilient politicians give in the ground movement space to work.
Basically all other Democrats other than Bernie and AOC shrivelling up and hiding in their shells will have a chilling effect on our ability to organize on the ground.
I’ve been bitching about the lack of leadership from the Democrats for a while now - I’m glad to see that others are seeing it too.
They need to dump Wasserman-Schulz. She’s a big part of the reason we’re in this mess.
It’s all been downhill since JFK…
LBJ at least pushed for laws, he helped convince white senators to vote for the Civil Rights Act. I think if we had a second LBJ, we’d have something done.
…I’d rather not have a new VIetnam war if that was the case, however.
Heinrich from NM has made it clear that he will pushback. Let’s see what that looks like. I suggest folks that can contact your reps, now and frequently.
Every day I have sent mine a note from the contact form on their pages. Angrily
It’s funny. sounds like you’re giving up already, and blaming the Dems.
You got Bernie and the Squad.
If you want to put some backbone in the Dems in office, go out and start a voter registration drive. Let them see that there are people who will support them.
start a voter registration drive
What? The time for a voter registration drive was a year ago. We’re well past that now. You can’t vote out a dictator.
It’s time for more direct action. We need protests. We need strikes. We need people in the streets fighting for their rights because they’re being taken away by the day.
sounds like you’re giving up already
What is it about the lemm.ee domain that produces accounts with the most cringe, awful takes?
Speaking only for myself, it’s because peepee poopoo.
But for a more serious and less cringe-attempt of a response, I know that when I joined the Reddit API exodus, I initially tried to make an account on .world. I sent a few applications without response over a couple of weeks, then tried signing up for beehaw (because I’m from Texas and I thought the name was cute). Finally, I found some article that said that lemm.ee was doing quick or immediate approvals and just went with it. When my friends mentioned similar difficulties, I told them about lemm.ee, too.
I find it so rare to see contributions from other .ee users, but I’ll take your word for it that we suck. I’m willing to believe that.
lemm.ee has one of if not the best admin, and was always running more smoothly in earlier versions. More than that, when other bugs were taking out .world and many others, lemm.ee was already immune and the admin helped the other instances sort theirs out too. lemm.ee has a lot of good users.
However, when hexbear was banned, users on that instance started moonlighting on other instances. There were very few instances that were still federated with hexbear but also with the others, where all the conversation was - many wanted one account that could browse both. Several went to lemmy.ml, the instance run by the formal lemmy developers, and there was a noticeable shift in user behaviour from the instance. But lemm.ee never really was targeted by the hexbear brigading that led to their defederation with everyone else, perhaps because lemm.ee doesn’t really have any massive communities itself, not as big as the others.
So yeah, lemm.ee can still browse hexbear, and with that you get a sizeable chunk of their userbase spilling over. So some lemm.ee users do indeed suck. It’s not as bad as .ml, though, and I think that’s in no small part thanks to the lemm.ee admin team keeping the more extremist users in check.
Sorry, but this sounds like a completely unhinged attempt to blame hexbear for everything that goes wrong anywhere.
The post from Dagwood222 that UnderpantsWeevil was complaining about couldn’t have been more completely opposite to the usual hexbear take. When is the last time that any hexbear user defended democrats like Dagwood222 did?
Thanks for that! I’ll have to mostly take your word for it.
Except for the .ml part. What on Earth is going on over there???
The two devs themselves are massive tankies. They also run lemmygrad.
I think I’m the only one that never bothers to look at someone’s domain, and just approach all posters on equal footing instead of relying on some weird sectarian nonsense based on what website they found that has decent up time and open registration…
I definitely start out that way. Generally only checking when someone has an especially bad take. That said I haven’t noticed any more shit coming from lemm.ee than .world And certainly not as bad as any .ML.
That’s far too reasonable and measured. Get off the internet, you… you… Poopie-head!
(╯︵╰,)
I think they just assume that everyone is a weak kneed and terminally online as themselves.
What part of registering voters is ‘cringe’ to you?
The lack of self awareness in this comment is truly sublime.
So enlighten me. Did you have a better plan in 2024? Somethings besides voting? What’s your sure-fire winning strategy that you didn’t use yet?
Who’s talking about voting as resistance, besides you? There’s a conversation to be had about it sure, but it’s not the conversation being had now, here. You trying to shift the focus to a subject you’re comfortably confident about discussing is why you’re being criticized, not for the merit of what you’re saying on its own.
The Dems have given up. Because it’s time for them to take a vacation after playing the part for their rich donors for the last 4 years.
Understanding and recognizing how the world functions isn’t equivalent to giving up. Nor is “hope” for the sake of hope any kind of a strategy. And yes. The Dem’s are the fucking problem and always have been. Nothing about this fascist takeover would have ever been possible with out the complicity and milquetoast politics of Democrats. They are a worthless and abhorrent party with no integrity and barely worth supporting, beyond the weakest possible argument of them being the “lessor” evil. The rise of fascism would be impossible with out the previous 30 years of normalization politics out of Democrats. Start a voter registration drive? Give me a fucking break with the navel gazing. Voting isn’t going to save the Union.
We may need the squad to break away from a Democratic party that has shown its self incapable of wielding power in such a way as to prevent the rise of fascism. What we’ll need for on the ground movements to be successful is support in some way from the halls of power. That doesn’t necessarily mean working with Democrats.
What’s the alternative? Register as Republicans and do a hostile takeover of that party?
I dunno, seems like the fascists are the problem, actually.
The moderates that tolerate fascists and thus enable them are always the problem, actually. The fascists fail without them but succeed with them, every time.
So the fascists… aren’t the problem?
My comment didn’t even slightly say anything even remotely resembling that, and you fucking know it. Quit commenting in bad faith.
It did, though. Or at least the message you’re presenting seems to indicate that.
The moderates that tolerate fascists and thus enable them are always the problem, actually.
I’m fairly sure you phrased it like this as a retort to the first commenter’s comment, but you gotta see how insisting the blame ‘actually’ lies with the moderates and the people enabling the fascists is pretty clearly interpretable as shifting the responsibility. Both parties are to blame, but you’re implying that the bulk of the criticism lies with the people being passive about allowing the fascist takeover instead of with the people exploiting the resource they’ve found in moderates by doing the fascism.
Dems didn’t get their shit together and exploit the moderates first to prevent this, but while that does make them culpable for the current fascist power grab, it does not make them equally culpable, and that is the position you seem to be presenting.
Maybe learn like, even a tiny bit about the history of fascism and how it comes into being and how it takes power.
Who is this ‘we’ you speak of?
I really wanted Bernie in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Somehow ‘we’ managed not to get out and get him nominated.
But now, somehow, ‘we’ are going to get organized.
Until ‘we’ shows me that they can organize a weinie roast, I’ll stick with the people who are actually on the ballot.
I also notice that you had nothing to say about registering voters as an actual tool.
Until ‘we’ shows me that they can organize a weinie roast, I’ll stick with the people who are actually on the ballot.
I guess you missed the part where we were manning barricades and taking tear gas canisters to the face in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022… directly confronting fascism on the streets and taking it to them. Your obtuseness has no external meaning.
I also notice that you had nothing to say about registering voters as an actual tool.
If voting changed anything about this system, they’d make it illegal. Voting as a strategy to stop fascism was attempted in 2020. The result was a 4 year hiatus, but with no real ability or intention to take action against fascism. Biden could have had Trump arrested on day fucking one of taking power. He chose not to. Democrats chose to only make a show of any kind of consequences for a literal attempted coup, because to them, it simply wasn’t a priority. Voting as a strategy to change the system doesn’t work when the people you are obligated to vote for as the “opposition party” are not, and will not, and have no interest in changing the system: ie, Democrats.
I agree with everything you said 100%, except the bit about how if voting worked it’d be illegal. Republicans are literally trying to make it that way. One of their main goals is to disenfranchise as many poor people and minorities as possible, bc if everyone voted, republicans would lose every election by a landslide. That’s why they love things like manually registering to vote, randomly deregistering people, the electoral college, and hand counting ballots, while opposing mail-in and absentee ballots, automatic voter registration, RCV, basically anything that gives Americans more voting power. Voting is very much the least you can do to affect change in America, but it is still a thing you can and should do regularly before republicans abolish it
So, in other words, bOTh SidES arE tHe SAMe. Don’t vote, because it doesn’t work.
At a certain point its obvious that you are just intentionally missing the point.
If voting changed anything about this system, they’d make it illegal. Voting as a strategy to stop fascism was attempted in 2020.
It’s like you just type away and don’t even bother reading what you wrote.
Another NPC saying “The Left who didn’t vote are to blame” as a concern troll for the Right… Sowing the seeds of doubt basically. Shame on you but you have no shame.
Bruh don’t use the term “NPC”
sounds like you’re giving up already, and blaming the Dems
We all have dog in this fight. Apparently so do the people who voted third party and refuse to see the leopards.
One of the reasons Hitler took power in Germany is that the other political parties couldn’t put aside their grudges and unite around a leader who would promise to keep the system running. If Harris had won last year we’d be sure of having elections in 2026. Now it’s up in the air.
Oh we’ll have elections.
Just like in Turkey
😉
To put that another way, though, a leader who only promises to keep the system running and not to actually fix it is part of how fascists win. Delaying the problem to 2028 isn’t the same as actually fixing the problem, and it seems the Democrats never had any intention of doing the latter.
If all Dems had her tenacity and honest interest in helping the middle class, we wouldn’t be where we are.
DemsPoliticians FTFY sorry sometimes we forget because republicans/right are so pro rich class.It’s not that people don’t mention Republicans in statements like that because they’re letting them off the hook; it’s that they don’t bother mentioning them because they’re a lost cause.
She encouraged activists to take offline action
Based
She is possibly our best hope.
shockingly dim
When you hire yes men, you get some pretty dumb people.
Good luck to her.
Have the balls to just say you want her to fail.
People help her and do it together, or it doesn’t work. Band together against nazis.
Her point is that everyone has to pitch in and do their little bit to make things harder for this administration. This resistance has to be built from the bottom up.
I already wasted 20 years of my life in sacrifice to politics. I want to be done and other than venting about how we’re doomed I more or less am done, thank you.
I hope I’m wrong, and I earnestly wish her luck but I do not owe a population of people who chose Trump a single solitary fucking thing. I’m bitter, exhausted, and my patience is gone.
Apparently not exhausted enough to just sit silently instead of actively depressing the discourse and actions of others.
If you’re done with politics, then just stop. This isn’t an airport, you don’t need to loudly announce your departure.
How about I loudly announce whatever the fuck I want.
So childish. “I didn’t get what I want! I quit!” “You can’t tell me what to do!”. Get over yourself.
Yeah this is definitely a white heterosexual man. The privilege is wafting off those sentences.
Cool…
But if you’re done, why are you here trying to convince others to give up?
If it’s too much for you, that happens.
Go check out from politics, dont hang out and tell people it’s pointless to try. Literally no one is happy in that scenario except trump.
I’m not, I’m just angry and bitter and venting. Its not rational its seeking catharsis from lashing out.
It’s understandable why you feel this way, but ultimately unproductive:
”The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
— Plato
I’ve spent the last 20+ years of my life fighting for my right to simply exist in this country, and the reward is a government that vilifies me for being brown, neurodivergent, trans, and gay. I’m done, I’m taking the next opportunity out of here.
Understandable.
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“Walking away” isn’t a thing in this case. You are not entitled to choose not to fulfill your obligations as a citizen.
Even if you want to emigrate, that’s not your choice: you have to convince some other country to let you in. Until that happens, you’re fucking stuck here and you have to suck it up, buttercup, and deal with it!
Just a bunch of cowards who don’t want to recognize the impotence of their unwillingness to get involved directly.
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Since people outside the south tend to not know that the phrase is generally uttered as a sincere one after someone has emotionally moved you, whose bite exists only in that context (ie, you have moved them to pity) I choose to interpret it in the former way, the same way my Democratic southern grandmother would have. Bless her heart, she is doing the Lord’s work.
Thanks
It is one of my pet peeves. My grandma was the sweetest woman on earth, one of her go to phrases doesn’t deserve this one dimensional understanding! You can only have it as an insanely effective burn if it’s usually sincere! I will get up on a soapbox and bang pots and pans about this all day if I’m allowed, haha.
Simple Sabotage Manual
