Of Protests, Pitchforks and Plutocrats
Are We There Yet?
Representative Sara Jacobs hosted a virtual town hall on Saturday and, like in person and digital events nationwide, the crowd was larger than expected and eager for answers.
She answered pre-submitted questions and addressed real time input from an audience that at times reached a high of 1,200 viewers. Jacobs acknowledged that the prospects for a majority of legislative remedies were “bleak” for those opposed to Trump’s policies and proposals.
She held out the promise, based on what Republicans on the Hill were telling her, that open defiance of court orders was a red line that would enable bipartisan measures to counter Trump administration actions.
Good for her. Good for her for being willing to speak frankly with constituents, many of whom are fearful that US democracy is coming to end. (She’s having a live event in April)
But-but-but… there are plenty of reasons to think Republicans wouldn’t or couldn’t come to rescue. The willingness of billionaire Elon Musk to use his wealth as a whip in even the smallest of matters serves as a real life red line that Republicans are actually afraid to cross.
Having spent $13 million on a PAC campaign in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court contest, along with a boast that he’d pay individual voters a $100 each for signing a petition in opposition to Democrat’s Susan Crawford’s candidacy has put an exclamation mark on Musk’s determination to see a MAGA/Project 2025 agenda in place.
As Hamilton Nolan writes, Musk’s money and not his ideas are fueling the present-day chaos:
The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars. If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience.
The question foremost in the minds of non-elected activists is whether or not the Trump juggernaut has already passed the point of no return.
I would say yes… but that doesn’t mean we have to accept MAGA’s desired results.
The foundation for systemic change needed in a post–Trump world is broad acceptance of the class war in progress. Nobody is doing a better job of driving this point home than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders thru The Fighting Oligarchy Tour.
Appearances by the two are drawing the kinds of crowd sizes not seen since former President Obama’s campaign in 2008. Over the past weekend, over 86,000 people came out to rally with Sanders and AOC in Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada. Millions more were watching at home.
Be aware that the milque-toast media campaign to divert attention from their anti-billionaire agenda is underway. The New York Times and other outlets are profiling the two legislators, sprinkling their accounts with polls and anecdotes about imagined future runs for office. Next up will be the red-scare smear and critiques of odd-ball characters attending events.
Remember, we’ve seen this show before. To hell with those people. Any coverage that doesn't put the damage that obscene wealth is perpetrating in this country front and center doesn’t deserve your attention.
The neo-liberal adjacent types in politics are advancing something they’re calling the “abundance agenda,” the gist of which is that we “ought” to have a better life thanks to technological advancements. Somehow in this world, the fierce greed and myopic vision of people who simply have too much money will not matter if we can all agree on the need for more, more, more.
Read closely, this is actually a gussied up version of one of the most delusional documents ever written, Marc Andreessen’s (Trump supporting billionaire) “Techno Optimist Manifesto.” It’s just a game plan for autocracy sans the open sadism of what the White House is currently undertaking.
Just as DOGE hasn’t slowed down their campaign of chaos and destruction in government, so, too, is the momentum of the Tesla Takedown movement. This weekend there were protests at over 90 Tesla dealerships nationwide, and the numbers of participants are growing.
Given the panic Elon Musk and the Trump administration have sought to induce by calling vandals terrorists, the intensity of takedowns nationwide is a good thing. Next Saturday, TeslaTakedown has called for protests at all 277 dealerships. Expect more blather from the usual suspects. Protest anyway. More info: https://www.teslatakedown.com/
Oh Canada! There were other demonstrations of opposition to the Trump agenda around the country, often in locations adjacent to federal agencies Musk’s DOGE crew have gutted. The one that “got to me” was the cross national event on both sides of the Windsor-Detroit border.
From CTV News:
In Windsor, hundreds lined the riverfront beneath the Canadian flag at the foot of Ouellette Avenue. Across the Detroit River, their American counterparts rallied at Hart Plaza. Together, they chanted messages of unity — and frustration.
“Trump is not making America great. He’s making America hate,” said Windsor resident Nicole Dube. “We love Americans. Dump Trump!”
Many at the Windsor rally emphasized their respect for Americans while directing their frustration at Trump himself.
“It’s not the American people that we have a problem with. It’s Mr. Trump,” said Windsor resident Alan McLaughlin, adding his purpose of being at Saturday’s protest was to “show the Americans that Canadians are just as patriotic as them. “We love you as much as you love us. Let’s get this nonsense over with.”
As the Canadians are headed for elections in April, they are being subjected to an onslaught of misinformation and outright fear mongering. The Russians are barely concealing their role in generating content and fomenting division. Our northern neighbors seemed to have learned from our 2016/2024 experiences, so keep an eye on that.
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I’ve not mentioned all the bad news coming out of the MAGA/DOGE fire house of shit in recent days, and it’s not because I’m dialed out. At this point I think it’s better to pick and choose our battles while we demonstrate unity across the board.
Speaking of unity across the board, a coalition of organizations have called for protests on April 5 in Washington DC and in cities all over the country. Rather than risk dilution of the message and turnout, San Diego groups have called for one focused demonstration at City Hall, starting at noon.
Those of us who were here for the first San Diego Women's March remember the incredible visual impact of thousands of people in the space outside the Civic Center.
Something special is happening, folks. Now is the time to organize in every dimension possible and get to work. Here’s the local sign up link for April 5.
This mass mobilization day is our message to the world that we do not consent to the destruction of our government and our economy for the benefit of Trump and his billionaire allies. Alongside Americans across the country, we are marching, rallying, and protesting to demand a stop the chaos and build an opposition movement against the looting of our country.
A core principle behind all Hands Off! events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values.
Check out handsoff2025.com for more information.
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At this point I want once again to reference Harvard researcher Erica Chenoweth whose studies on non-violent protest indicate that when 3.5% of the public gets involved in regular public actions authoritarianism dissipates. In the US, this means 11.5 million people turning out on a daily to weekly basis.
Can this be done? Yes it can, as long as self identified activists get serious about building an informal and secular infrastructure that will enable otherwise overburdened people to participate. This isn’t inferring organization building; as a defensive strategy it’s better to have many groups singing in harmony than a soloist who can be brought down by unsavory (and untrue) inferences, personality flaws, and the relentless distraction of the press.
Mass non-cooperation going beyond marching and rallying needs to be on the agenda. At the Lawfare site, Ben Wittes has come up with a good list of actions that should find its way into activist agendas and social media influencers’ presentations. So has Mark Jacobs. We can use a sense of humor and symbolism, like something to do with eggs, due to high prices and the White House selling sponsorships for the Easter Egg Roll.
My point here is that a few town halls and consumer boycotts alone won’t get our opposition to MAGA/Project2025/DOGE over the finish line. In fact, Project 2025 can serve as a guidebook to point out the widespread stress points in the authoritarian agenda. And, above all, the class nature of our society needs to dictate a common theme.
How the Black Death reshaped English by Colin Gorre at Dead Language Society
…these weren't just any immigrants. Many were socially ambitious craftspeople and merchants, eager to improve their standing in the complex urban hierarchy of medieval London. And this social climbing may be our key to understanding the Great Vowel Shift.
When people try to move up the social ladder, they often modify their speech to match what they perceive as prestigious. But without perfect models to follow, they sometimes overshoot the mark.
In late medieval London, this dynamic was supercharged. The city had become a melting pot of regional dialects, just as English was transitioning from a low-status language (at least, compared to French) to one with growing national prestige. Socially mobile immigrants, eager to sound like prestigious Londoners rather than provincial newcomers, began exaggerating certain speech features they associated with the upper classes.
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We need to stop lying about what makes lost boys such easy marks for cons by Séamas O’Reilly at The Irish Times (h/t Lyz)
It seems clear to me that a large part of the attraction of the manosphere fits a similar brief. They, too, pitch one of the oldest offers in the world — blame your problems on people who aren’t like you — and utilise a vast ecosystem of wealth and influence to target young men in their millions, buttressed by the tacit support of broader right wing orthodoxy in mainstream news media and governments the world over.
The distinctions between the two are muddied further when one considers that the manosphere, itself, overwhelmingly offers ‘money for nothing’ too, since it’s entirely in-hoc to advertising from gambling companies, and speculative investments like ForEx trading, dropshipping, and crypto which perform the same function: promising quick cash in the form of ‘hustle’ to impressionable young men. When their victims inevitably crash out from this casino economy, these grifters are on hand to tell them to keep going, while laundering any shame and anger about their failures into the very same ‘blame everyone else’ rubric that leads, invariably, to the racism and misogyny that is their calling card.
At a certain point, the sympathy we have toward those whose personal circumstances lead to self-destructive addictions must be greater than our sympathy for those who agitate for the denigration, abuse, and assaulting of women and minorities. But if we want to reach these lost boys and turn them round, we need to stop lying about what makes them such easy marks for a very old, and very transparent set of cons. Pretending it’s down to anything else is not just stupid, it’s gambling with all our futures.
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Monopoly Round-Up: The Democrats' Corporate Lawyers Get the Humiliation They Deserve (Subscriber only, alas. It’s about the firm that caved in the face of Trumps’ sanctions) by Matt Stoller at BIG
But what should be crystal clear to everyone in politics is these lawyers aren’t just unethical, but are in many ways the reason that the Democratic Party is as enfeebled and pathetic as it seems to be. Big law is the brains of the Democrats, with the actual elected officials, often meek pleasers with little experience wielding real power, as ornaments who serve up slop on centrist and leftism and other meaningless terms. The alchemy of big law was always they way in which you seamlessly revolve in and out of government - the allure of making a lot of money and governing. That is what is shattering.
Relatedly, for the first time in my lifetime, Democratic voters are turning against their own leaders. 40% of Democratic voters approve of Congressional Democrats, and 49% disapprove. Last year, 75% approved and just 21% disapproved. At town halls, Democratic members of Congress are encountering not support, but rage. As Axios reported, a “senior House Democrat told Axios that a colleague called them after a town hall crying and said: "They hate us. They hate us.”’
Democratic voters haven’t fingered biglaw as the culprit, so the question right now is whether corporate America and big law will remain homeless, or whether firms like Paul Weiss can recapture what they had. But there is deep rage in the Democratic base, and on the right, at oligarchy.
