This guy is a douche. He called them a band of incels. This is why I don’t listen to these freaking idiotic vidcasters. Uggg he’s worse than Dan Bongino.
Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order Is Blocked Indefinitely
The nationwide injunction issued by a federal judge in Maryland is more permanent than the 14-day temporary restraining order issued last month by a federal judge in Seattle. This is the kind of legal action required to slow down Trump’s flow of shit.
This isn’t oversight, it’s literal midnight raids of public agencies by unelected and unaccountable private citizens, most of whom they refuse to even identify.
Oversight is the courts enforcing the Constitution, striking down laws that exceed the scope of congressional power. It’s transparency laws, that require deliberate, public decision-making. It’s a Congress that is a damn sight more representative than Musk, who represents ???, and Trump who got the votes of well less than half the population.
If you can’t see why the way this administration is acting is a problem, imagine Biden (who got 4 million more votes in 2020 than Trump did in 2024) flagrantly ignoring those restrictions to enact his favored policies. You would have been puking with rage and you know it. And it would have been just as illegal as what Trump is doing now.
The Constitution is intended to restrain the power of the government. It enumerates specific powers of each branch of government, and reserves the rest for the states and the people. It’s not perfect, but changing it is hard because it rests on multiple precarious compromises that keep us from going to war with ourselves. Just ignoring doesn’t fix it, it destroys it, it breaks those compromises in ways that will be hard or impossible to fix. It took blood to build, and if it is damaged beyond repair it will take blood to rebuild.
And the thing that gets rebuilt will have its own set of problems, because that’s how grand compromises work. That’s how democratic governments work. At its best, that’s how society works.
I… I don’t understand… Trump campaigned against all forms of student loan forgiveness, and Project 2025 (whose authors are drafting the memos ordering agencies to be gutted) explicitly called for the elimination of PSLF. They are going after the Department of Education as we speak.
I’m not sure how to convey the degree of pleading incredulity behind my words, but what in the world makes you think the new administration is going to make that program better?
I sincerely hope yours gets processed before Musk gets his hands on the loan system. Here is an article from Forbes recommending that people in the PSLF program take screenshots of their student loan forgiveness tracker before the DOE website goes down.
Godspeed.
Elon Musk is in violation of: 18 U.S.C. § 208 a federal law that prohibits government employees from participating in official matters that could affect their financial interests. This law is intended to prevent conflicts of interest and ensure the integrity of government decisions.
Transparency? The Kash Patel video was an object lesson in the art of prevarication. If you need a man to cover up any future (or past) indiscretions, Kash appears to be fully equipped to be your man.
‘‘I want my people to do the same.’’
It doesn’t matter either way. I’ve been throwing my money at it as much as I can, but, others may need it more than I do. For their sakes, I hope you’re wrong.
The word for what Elon Musk is doing: State capture is a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state’s decision-making processes to their own advantage.
The term was first used by the World Bank in 2000 to describe certain Central Asian countries making the transition from Soviet communism, where small corrupt groups used their influence over government officials to appropriate government decision-making in order to strengthen their own economic positions.[1]
Allegations of state capture have led to protests against the government in Bulgaria in 2013–2014 and in 2020–2021 and Romania in 2017,[2] and have caused an ongoing controversy in South Africa beginning in 2016.Turkey is considered as a recent example of state capture post-2002 period.[3]
A movement to protest the early actions of President Donald Trump’s administration took off Wednesday which I participated in.
Large crowds of demonstrators gathered at state capitols nationwide.
Protesters waved signs decrying Trump; billionaire Elon Musk, the leader of Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency; and Project 2025.
State capture is what happens when people who claim their conclusions are evidence-based try to erase the actual evidence surgically … using state resources.
Me too. There’s an almost glee on parts of the left right now for all the damage Trump’s doing: schadenfreude at seeing people who voted for Trump face immediate negative consequences; bragging rights for things going roughly the way they were warning they would go.
It’s an understandable and tempting, but it’s sick and important to reject it. Trump voters’ suffering is bad; the comeuppance isn’t worth the damage.
I hope I’m wrong about where I think this is going, because where I think this is going is very, very bad.
By late Wednesday, more than 40,000 employees, or roughly 2% of the federal workers eligible for the Trump/Musk offer/threat, had agreed to resign, according to an administration official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. The administration expects the number to surge in the final hours before the deadline.
Meanwhile, confusion over whether the deal is legal and enforceable persists, and many federal employees remain wary. If you think that government was inefficient in providing services before, don’t be surprised if services are significantly worse due to this disruption by Trump and his minions.
Where do you think it is going?
To add to my last, since this came up on Facebook….
He actually is intersex, not just identifying as intersex. If he denied being intersex and chose to identify as definitely male or definitely female, that would not be evidence-based. Imagine a male getting healthcare that is only for women, or a woman getting healthcare that is only for men. That doesn’t make any sense. Healthcare that is for intersex people is geared towards the medical conditions that result from such disorders. He is likely infertile because there are two biologically functional (for reproduction) sexes. However, that is obviously not all there is to being a person, and it’s totally OK to be single and (even if married) bear no children your entire life. It’s also okay to be intersex, still able to reproduce, and have a healthy relationship that recognizes a disorder does not negate actual biological function (but relies on it, as all privation relies on wholeness). But to be clearly male or clearly female in an evidence-based way, but to identify as intersex and demand the sort of healthcare only required for folks with intersex conditions, would border on the ridiculous.
P.s. I didn’t vote for Trump. I wrote in self=other. This is one part of what I voted for. Love the skin you’re in.
Currently it looks like Russia-style oligarchy, i.e. the law doesn’t apply to the powerful and well-connected, the state works for them, and your rights end where their interests begin.
To an extent, that’s been the case for a while, but I think it matters a lot that it’s now being done openly. That system is enacted through the rank and file, middle-class workers who do their jobs in part because they believe in the norms of ‘equal rights’ and ‘rule of law’ and ‘a society of laws and not of men’. So in practice, those norms limit just how much the powerful and well-connected can get away with, because the rank and file will just refuse to enact blatant violations of them.
With the death of those norms, you get less accountability at all levels, petty tyrants at all levels doing what serves them and only caring to not upset the next rung in the chain. There’s no common set of values to appeal to other than self-interest, so people with no power increasingly have no rights, and people with lots of power increasingly have no laws.
Consider Epstein, who despite being powerful and well-connected, died in prison. His prosecution was by no means the ideal of a ‘society of laws’, but do we really think that the incoming DOJ will prosecute Trump’s friends at all? He pardoned thousands of violent criminals, many of who pled guilty, because they did their violence on his behalf. That kind of open disregard for the rule of law will get worse.
On the other side, Trump is using the power of the government as a cudgel to punish his enemies. He’s withheld disaster relief funds from blue states that voted against him. His FCC is threatening radio stations reporting on ICE raids. He will continue to abuse his authority to force people and institutions into line with his whims, he’ll remove anyone who doesn’t comply, and replace them with people who will do as he says.
And the media is increasingly captured, making the freedom of speech and of the press less effective as tools against it. Many major publications have already signaled their acquiescence, and Trump has taken steps to punish and make examples of them (e.g. by revoking access to government information from disfavored sources). This election, and in particular the surprise expressed by Trump voters at some of his actions since taking office, revealed how poorly informed much of the country is. That problem will get worse.
So yeah: corporate oligarchy, death of any semblance of a society of laws, and as a direct consequence the effective death of democracy.
As I said, I hope I’m wrong.
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…access to ‘Federal Payments’ databases that they first denied even existed.
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”Over $100 Billion Of Stolen Funds & Fraud After Auditing Just 1% Of The Federal Government”!
The [fake] Democrat meltdown/demonstrations is real… people be going to jail yo!
Reading the New York Times we see resistance against President Trump’s initiatives arising on many fronts. A federal judge said he would freeze a Trump administration effort to put thousands of U.S.A.I.D. workers on leave and withdraw employees abroad. Trump overstepped his constitutional presidential authority.
President Trump offered praise today for Elon Musk and his team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, who have led the administration’s effort to purge federal workers. He said he had directed them to search across the government for costs to eliminate. He mentioned in particular that Musk would scrutinize spending at the Pentagon, from which Musk has received at least $3.6 billion in contracts over the past decade. This constitutes a clear illegal conflict of interest. In the three weeks since President Trump took office and gave Elon Musk free rein inside the federal government, millions of calls have poured in to members of Congress, jamming the system.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada on Friday made his first comments in response to President Trump’s repeated statements that he wants to annex Canada and make it the 51st state.
Mr. Trudeau made clear that he did not regard Mr. Trump’s statements as having been made in jest and believes annexation is something Canada needs to treat as a serious threat. How will Canadian patriots resist the threat?
Seven transgender American citizens sued President Trump and the State Department in federal court on Friday, arguing that a new policy that prevents people from changing gender markers on passports violates their constitutional rights. Sruti Swaminathan, who represents the plaintiffs, said the new policy exposes transgender people to the potential for harassment, suspicion by the authorities about fraudulent documents and even violence when they travel abroad. Trump’s claim that transgender freedom to travel threatens women is ludicrous and unsubstantiated.
A federal judge early Saturday temporarily restricted access by Elon Musk’s government efficiency program to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems, saying there was a risk of “irreparable harm.”
The Trump administration’s new policy of allowing political appointees and “special government employees” access to these systems, which contain highly sensitive information such as bank details, heightens the risk of leaks and of the systems becoming more vulnerable than before to hacking, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said in an emergency order.
Judge Engelmayer ordered any such official who was granted access to the systems since Jan. 20 to “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.” He also restricted the Trump administration from granting access to these categories of officials. Trump’s strategy of acting without legal authority is being challenged on many fronts. Will it slow him down? Or will he test the judges’ ability to enforce their rulings?
Yeah you are right about Trump being corrupt, or at least acting like a thug much of the time. But to hear you, a liberal democrat, talk about the media being captured is honestly pretty hilarious.