For example:
They think that allowing people with penises to to change in women's locker rooms just because they identify as women is wicked, so they aren't being silent about it.
> the locker room situation with Thomas, who although she has transitioned to being female hormonally and identified as a woman, still has male body parts https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/lia-thomas-teamma...
The pendulum eventually swings to the other side.
(I'm somewhere in the middle with I suspect a majority of people - it's the extremists that are the loudest.)
Look I think we should disagree on fiscal and social policy, and be able to deliberate over these issues.
And have a system of government that allows for that kind of debate and representative vote.
But "one side" is dismantling everything that was still democratic about the United States and turning into a massively one-sided (even one-manned) system of control. So whatever your opinion or mine on social policy no longer matter, because it's all up to the whims of a single person, with no recourse for the rest of us.
Trump is the loudest and he represents his supporters
1. Administration makes demands of Harvard to change the way it's operating to fall in line.
2. Harvard stands up against these demands.
3. Administration is using every means possible to punish Harvard for daring taking a stand against it.
This is what dictatorships look like.
It's pretty clear these guys are morons. They're all impulse and no follow-up. It's the panic of the hour with them. No longer term than past lunch.
Reading other comments on here it almost seems like people feel it would be bad if American universities like Harvard had more Americans. Like there is something morally wrong with that. So that's probably a factor also.
Yes, they generally pay more. However, there are so many highly qualified Chinese applicants that universities generally hold them to a much higher standard, in order to avoid admitting "too many" Chinese students.
This is all a function of China producing many more highly qualified students (at the high-school and undergraduate level) than the United States does. If everything were done purely according to academic merit, there would be several times as many Chinese students as American students at American universities.
This is just so weird. How do people support this stuff only to then go on and complain about "free speech" the second you tell them something they said was kind of a little bit mean?
Chris Krebs, director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was forced to resign from SentinelOne Inc - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-17/ex-cyber-...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/head-of-greenland-base-van...
https://www.newsweek.com/air-force-special-ops-fired-militar...
The purge is progressing faster than anyone expected
Separately, sometimes the moderation team disables these filters on certain posts, but it's not often.
Surely the administration have a substantial degree of discretion with respect to student visas, but can they precipitate a blanket revocal on something as nakedly coercive (and speech-involved) as this?
(Edit: at a casual, non-expert glance it seems that a student can apply for a student visa at any SEVP-certified school, and the regulations governing SEVP certification seem to be at [0]. They list a lot of potential reasons to withdraw approval once it’s issued, but they all seem pretty specific: falsifying records, lying on your application, failing to keep proper records in relation to the students’ enrollment, and so on. Does it feel like maybe the mechanic here is claiming that tracking students’ speech is part of that essential record-keeping task?)
The Supreme Court has also held that the government can revoke tax exempt status of a private organization where it furthers a compelling government policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Jones_University_v._United...
Control over federal funding is also the hook for Title VI’s application of non-discrimination laws to private universities.
The government also has the trump card up its sleeve that Harvard is almost certainly violating Title VI through extensive programs of race consciousness. It’s well established that the civil rights laws apply equally to whites as to non-whites. Harvard has many programs for non-whites where, if those programs were for whites instead, that would be a Title VI violation that would jeopardize Harvard’s federal funding. E.g. Harvard had various racially segregated graduation parties last year: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/harvard-university-to-of.... If you can’t have a “White Celebration” then you can’t have a “Black Celebration” either. If Harvard doesn’t settle they’ll get hit with a Title VI lawsuit and they’re going to lose it.
Your second link involves a change in IRS policy. But there was no such change, instead again we have an executive diktat, despite the fact that the law explicitly forbids the President or his office from targeting specific institutions for audits or investigations: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/7217
> (2) any individual (other than the Attorney General of the United States) serving in a position specified in section 5312 of title 5, United States Code.
The affinity celebrations were open to all graduates according to the article's sources. The segregation claim originated seemingly from 1 student they interviewed whose comments about other aspects seemed speculative.
The celebrations were organized by students and hosted by alumni and community groups according to the university. The article did not contest this. Is there evidence students applied for and were denied recognition of a white celebration?
Programs which were largely created by both academics employed in educational institutions and by the paying students who wanted to learn about more than Western history and culture.
Where's the outrage when history classes center almost entirely on Western, white narratives? Or when English classes focus overwhelmingly on white authors? Why does concern about "race consciousness" only seem to surface in the face of efforts to include perspectives outside of white culture?
An interesting tidbit from Wikipedia:
> Description of populations as "White" in reference to their skin color is occasionally found in Greco-Roman ethnography and other ancient or medieval sources, but these societies did not have any notion of a White race or pan-European identity. The term "White race" or "White people", defined by their light skin among other physical characteristics, entered the major European languages in the later seventeenth century, when the concept of a "unified White" achieved greater acceptance in Europe, in the context of racialized slavery and social status in the European colonies. Scholarship on race distinguishes the modern concept from pre-modern descriptions, which focused on physical complexion rather than the idea of race. Prior to the modern era, no European peoples regarded themselves as "White"; instead they defined their identity in terms of their religion, ancestry, ethnicity, or nationality. Contemporary anthropologists and other scientists, while recognizing the reality of biological variation between different human populations, regard the concept of a unified, distinguishable "White race" as a social construct with no scientific basis.
How can they prevent students from attending, it's not like they are going to specifically target and refuse or void the visa of anyone known to be an Harvard student ?!? (Or I guess, yeah, this kind of arbitrary rule is the exact thing that can happen under fascism...)
* The rule of law
* Moral integrity
* Respect for traditions and institutions
Today we have a president who openly defies the court orders, engages in blatant corruption, and undermines American institutions. The Trump administration's vehement rejection of all of these values highlights just how critical they really are.
It's time for American conservatives to vote Democrat.
I'm not sure how it was done legally, but when the Supreme Court ruled that Biden administration's student loan forgiveness was unconstitutional, Biden (or rather, his team) found another way to forgive loans.
I expect Trump's administration to similarly find legal workarounds.
> found another way to forgive loans
finding another _legal_ way to do something is not at all the same as ignoring a court order or breaking the law
Yes, and?
The supreme court ruled how the loans were canceled, not on Biden's desire to cancel loans
Each and every decision taken by the current administration is bringing the US closer to an age of darkness and idiocy.
I’m from Europe, I’m not saying the US was ever perfect but I don’t understand how it came to this.
My bet is a on a combination of extreme individualism due to a poor internalisation of the ideals of liberalism combined with a predatory capitalistic environment.
It’s sad to see what happens to a society that has the highest concentration of the brightest minds in world mostly working towards money related goals. So many great people that could work for the greater good and are dutifully tuning algorithms for the 0.01% capturing everyone’s attention and ideas.
Sad state of the world but I guess you can’t stop “progress”.
But from my point of view, it's more of a demonstration of the problem with governments that are designed to have a very strong executive. Eventually you get an executive that really sucks, and when that happens they can do a lot of damage.
One of the biggest influences on my thinking from listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History is a point he made about hereditary monarchy, that among its problems is that sometimes the next ruler in line is just a total dud, and you're just stuck with them.
Well, you can get a dud through voting as well. Ideally having fairly short terms mitigates this risk, but there is still a lot of damage that can be done in a short term, and there is a "who watches the watchmen" problem with the executive being required to fairly run the election to potentially replace them.
If we make it through this period with elections that remain fair and with successful transitions of power, I hope we'll find ways to weaken the presidency.
The system WASN'T design to have a very strong executive, quite literally the opposite. The other branches have simply bowed down and let him bulldoze them. And yes, this has been building up for decades, but these cases are and above any overreach of previous presidents.
The presidential system, widespread in Latin America, has an inherent tendency to produce caudillos. The US had the good fortune of escaping that fate for decade after decade, but maybe with Trump its luck has finally run out.
The parliamentary system, as used in the rest of the Anglosphere and most of Western Europe – it doesn't require a monarchy, see parliamentary republics such as Germany and Ireland – avoids this problem by putting greater limits on executive power – Prime Ministers derive their authority from the legislature and can be removed by it with a simple majority; while the US cabinet is essentially an advisory body to the President, Westminster cabinets are collegial bodies in which the Prime Minister is just one vote among many and can be outvoted by their colleagues.
> One of the biggest influences on my thinking from listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History is a point he made about hereditary monarchy, that among its problems is that sometimes the next ruler in line is just a total dud, and you're just stuck with them.
"Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king" (The Knoxville Journal, 9 February 1896)
The reason why you end up with a dud through election is that the rug can't cover all that anymore.
When a ridiculous, obtuse con man was elected President in 2016 and his party lost whatever little desire they had left for a functional government?
Of course, I would argue it was when "W" was elected for the second term.
Because 30+ different countries were able to wage information war on a population for 15+ years with unrestricted access and no recourse.
About six weeks ago.
It's easy to talk about the "decline" of the U.S. in abstract geopolitical terms, but let's be honest: the day the global tech community stops posting on Hacker News, stops building with U.S origin technologies, and stops looking to Silicon Valley as a benchmark, that's the day we can seriously start talking about America's fall from global leadership.
Until then, we're all still running our infrastructure on AWS, building apps with React, debating threads on HN, and watching YC Demo Day like it's the Super Bowl. The world may grumble, but it's still plugged in, literally and figuratively, to American innovation.
I guess that's the correct answer to the question as posed. But it does raise another question: if it happens, something undermined the foundations of America's prosperity long before the fall. What was it?
This post to HN describes what lead to the US becoming a science superpower: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692360 I found it convincing. The post also speculated if those conditions were removed, it America's superpowers will wither.
My take on the post is science has exponential return on investment over the very long term. But the return is random in that most scientific investigations fail to yield a return, and the time span so long that the usual capitalist incentives don't work. Or to put it another way, firms making investing in basic science get out-competed in the short term by others that don't make the investment. So you have to find a way to make societies at large pay for basic science, and give way what works to the capitalist engine. The USA found a way to do that. It's beginning to look like China has too. Now the USA is winding back the investment.
On the positive side, I suspect it will take a long time to kill the institutions that drive the USA's prosperity, I suspect many more than 4 years of madness. Putin pulled the same thing off, but it took him decades.
This is how politics looks like when the radical fringes from social networks take over national parties and squeeze out the so-much-mocked "enlightened centrists" from their seats. Missing them yet?
The same problem in Europe is somewhat tamed by proportional voting systems, but various edgelords have invaded our politics as well. Slovakia, right next to Czechia, is a horrible political circus. AfD in Germany mostly built its electorate online etc.
There's the assumption infused to a lot of these conversations that Trump is uniquely bad or uniquely extreme and so that "centrism" would still mean opposing him.
I also don't get what's particularly "grass roots" about support for the Democrats. During the Kamala campaign we had a string of celebrity endorsements including a cringey Avengers reunion zoom call. These are rich, privileged people from a specific social milieu - not grass roots by any means.
The last "grass roots" candidate was probably Bernie Sanders (someone Joe Rogan also supported, incidentally), but he was too dangerous to corporate profit margins for the DNC to let him win.
(Well, easy in retrospect, I guess it might be hard to realise that/when this is happening when you are in the middle of it ? Reading about the other times it happened might help ?)
Everyone has pet theories. Mine is that a section US society, urban coastal highly educated elites, coalesced around one set of ideas (I’m not exactly sure why, but probably in part because this group is less religious and very urban) and formed a very powerful ideological block that wasn’t in the US pre 1980s. This Trump thing is a reaction of the people who don’t fit into this political block (religious, less educated, rural, culturally not urban) against them.
It’s fundamentally identity politics, not some material conditions thing. People have a hard time believing this, because some people think the world is all about money, and ideas and identity mean nothing to people, but I really think the money-only view of human politics is flat wrong.
I say this because of my personal network of family, friends, and acquaintances from my hometown. When I try to gently get to the bottom of it, what I really find is a deep deep hatred for the coastal elites. They feel belittled and marginalized, not monetarily but culturally. They feel no one from those backgrounds has any right to tell them what to do. They feel that a coastal expert has no right to contradict their feelings on a topic, because that expert is not “one of them”, not because that expert is wealthy.
The network I have does not feel this way because they are economically struggling. Europeans often imply this is the case, but in my experience after 40 years in America, it is just not. Many of the people you see wearing maga hats and waving maga flags at rallies have mansions, 5 trucks, a vacation home in Hawaii, etc. my extended family and network has plenty of money. But they feel anyone who is an educated, coastal liberal is out to destroy them. They feel so completely culturally and identity wise different from the coastal elites, that they bristle under the thought that someone with an “education” could know more about something than them.
I think Republicans gained power in the last few years because of the economy, and Trump gained control of the republicans because of identity. This isn’t going away by “solving” the wealth gap.
> It’s fundamentally identity politics, not some material conditions thing.
> deep deep hatred for the coastal elites. They feel belittled and marginalized, not monetarily but culturally.
> Republicans gained power in the last few years because of the economy
> This isn’t going away by “solving” the wealth gap.
On a side note, funny that this group that supposedly defines themselves by their opposition to coastal elites rallied themselves behind... Trump, a prime representative of the east coast elite.
The reverse of this was the prevailing attitude among many democrats. The approach of lots of people was "we won the culture war, everyone who doesn't agree with us will get cancelled and suffer, deal with it". When you hung out in online circles, and more importantly in offices of famous American companies, the general vibe was "if your friend doesn't have left political views, you shouldn't be friends with them". So it's not like the idea was born in republican circles, the only new thing is democrats finding themselves on the losing side of the culture war.
No matter if you think the European or the American mindset is better, there was an enormous split of nations with the mass migration of Europeans to America. And it was a certain kind of person who would stay and a certain kind of person who would go. It's still that way.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/us/politics/trump-irs-har...
This is exactly what dictatorships do: comply with our demands or we will bring you down. Harvard might be able to stand up to them, but many other less wealthy universities will fold immediately.
But if the universities don't bind together and take a stand now, it will be too difficult and too late to do so later. Poor Columbia--now that Trump knows they will cower, he can make whatever demands he wants.
Don Corleone would be proud.
Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43684536 - April 2025 (1399 comments)
Avoiding too much repetition is a core principle of this place [1]. To get a sense of how repetitive these discussions are, just look at the comments in the current thread—they could just as easily have been posted to the previous thread.
The way HN operates with respect to political stories is clear and stable, and has been for many years: some stories with political overlap are ok [2], but there isn't room on the frontpage for all of them (not even 5% of them, really). Frontpage space is the scarcest resource that exists here [3], and HN is not a current affairs site [4].
If you, or anyone, will familiarize yourselves with the explanations in these links, and then still have a question that I haven't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This principle is applied very selectively though: The homepage has been full of insignificant iterations of overly hyped tech products for years now.
It is very hard to imagine all these submissions of announcements of products with monthly release cycles gratifying anyone's intellectual curiosity. Yet it apparently does because they can stay in the homepage for 24 hours.
But for some reason, something as unprecedented as the United States government threatening Harvard with a xenophobic ban is deemed "repetitive"?
It's not possible for moderation to be consistent because we don't read, or even see, most of what gets posted here. There's far too much.
There are other, less obvious factors affecting this too. Here's a post where I went into this a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306.
Btw, regarding this:
> insignificant iterations of overly hyped tech products for years now
HN's moderation system downweights those even more regularly than we downweight (some) political posts. Here's an explanation from a few years ago, which caused quite a stir if I remember correctly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428 (May 2020).
In both cases—incremental product releases on the one hand, and political news on the other—some posts still make it through through to the front page, and in both cases the users who want more of that category feel like it's unduly suppressed, while users who want less of that category feel like HN is overrun with it.
The previous discussion was about an April 11, 2025 joint letter to Harvard President Alan Garber from the Commissioner of the Federal Aquisition Service, General Services Administration, the Acting General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Acting General Counsel of the Department of Education.
https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/...
Discussion of the April 11th letter occurred in stories submitted at 2025-04-14T18:40:22 and 2025-04-14T18:13:07
This discussion is about an April 16, 2025 letter to Maureen Martin at Harvard's International Office from the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/60233385...
This story was submitted 2025-04-17T10:42:01. Discussion of this letter on April 14th would have been impossible. It was not sent until April 16th.
As one might guess, the letters make different requests. The threatened consequences for not complying are also different. Different letters, different senders, different recipients, different sets of requests, different types of potential consequences for noncompliance, e.g., cancelling funding versus refusing to grant student visas. Are these truly the same topic. Let the reader decide.
Is it possible the reason for these stories getting flagged is because HN users with flagging privileges do not want to them discussed. Not because of repetition but because the discussions are often low quality or offensive to them in some way.
One could argue HN routinely keeps having the same discussions about the same topics, even going so far as to allow HN users to resubmit stories for discussion. Hence, comments frequently note "past discussion".
For example, an HN Poll last year showed most HN readers who vote in polls thought "AI" was mostly hype. Comments have also suggested readers are tired of the hype. Yet they are still being forced to see/hide stories about "AI" every day on HN. Sometimes it feels like HN commenters are literally being forcefed the same tired, old topics and coaxed to repeat their same old opinions, or worse, their favourite memes, over and over again.
I am not suggesting there is anything HN can do about this problem. But I am inclined to agree with the GP comment; the current flagging behaviour mirrors the worst of HN commenting behaviour. It is a low quality, cowardly attempt at moderation that does not even seem to work. We are now consistently seeing flagged stories remain on page 1.
There is no "the" reader. There's a statistical cloud of readers with highly variant preferences.
You guys need to understand that the community is divided about these questions. I don't mean divided politically on partisan lines (though that as well), I mean divided around what sorts of topics are the best fit for the site.
There are those who feel like each letter to each government agency is a major new story that obviously deserves frontpage time; and there are those who feel like HN is overrun with this sort of thing already. Ditto for every major topic including, as you say, AI: some feel like there's too much, some feel like there's not enough.
There's no HN user, including me, who's satisfied with the balance of stories on the front page. The more passionate you (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) are about a particular topic, the more it feels like the topic is being unfairly and outrageously suppressed, whether by user flags or the mods or both.
This is ultimately all coming from the fundamentals of how HN works—from its initial conditions, if you like—and those aren't likely to change. Feelings about it do uptick during times of political intensity, such as now, but the underlying phenomenon is consistent and has been for many years.
Edit: here's me making a similar point from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22644521, in case anyone was thinking this is a new phenomenon...
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2025-05-01
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43856795
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43852145
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43859814
None flagged for "repitition"
Whether some HN practice has always been the case or whether it will remain so for all time is irrelevant. What's relevant is that aggressive flagging is happening now. Commenters share their thoughts about it. Some disagree. Some agree. Discussion continues.
HN is designed to hide political discussions. If it weren't, the front page would be nothing but political discussions.
unless they're PG political posts, ahem
Why it's being flagged? People hiding behind the non-political rule are suppressing information and discussion.
This site is owned by ycombinator, who have a motivation to "not rock the boat", so such suppression is ignored.
I guess in time we'll see whether that's a good decision for them or not.
Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43684536 - April 2025 (1399 comments)
You guys should familiarize yourselves with how this site is operated, because it has been explained endlessly (to the limit of my patience, in fact) over many years, and the assumptions you're making do not match reality. If you want to do that, you'll find entrypoints into thousands of past explanations in my comment upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724590.
I’d argue that leadership of ycombinator is glad where this boat is sailing. Just look who are they inviting to advertised AI startup school at the bottom of this site.
translation: "we have a vested stake in the status quo."
active silencing on political issues is in and of itself a political stance.
That is only flagged kind of article. Other political articles are fine.
Decision to be non political would lead to different selection of articles to be banned.
If your neighbours are being taken away by state police there is no non-political move you can make. Helping the police is political, ducking away and pretending it is not helping is political and hiding them is political as well.
While I understand that this site tries to not drown in the flaming garbage site that online political discourse can be, if I — the exact demographic who startups would like to have working for them would list precisely this as my main concern stopping me from moving into the US it is a bit odd that it is verboten to discuss it.
Hackers historically were (and are) extremely critical of authority and for the freedom of knowledge, and now we can't discuss an direct attack at those very values on a site that calls itself Hackernews? Come on.
If you want the political stuff & the controversial stuff, you can add /active after the URL to HN main page.
The fact that there is an /active tab and flagged submissions can still be voted & commented on, tells me that while dang don't want it to be the face of HN, he's fine that people discuss it (as long as you comment with civility). If there was some tinfoil conspiracy, the tab would've been deleted.
I'm guilty that l now usually check /active and main page.
You know, some of the high-horse, HN readers are quick to say "social media, bad" and anything bashing social media (including blogs) sky rocket up to main page. "reddit sucks" is another common one. I mean I usually agree to that sentiment, but if you check /active posts, the comments, where things go, it resembles any other social media slop more than HN.
I spend more time on /active, sadly. Maybe those navel-gazing orangutans are actually the ones making sure this is not reddit or Facebook for techies rather than boomers
Where on earth could you live that American politics are irrelevant to you? Boring sure, but irrelevant? Unless you live, well, on Jupiter these days, there's not an inch of the globe that's untouched by the effects of American politics.
come on, probably 75% of all the posts on HN are boring and irrelevant to me; that doesn't mean I go downvoting them all
I look for the stuff I'm interested in, and ignore the rest.
If it's a choice between say Princeton in the US and Harvard outside the US, Princeton will be the choice for many.
So let's not pretend these institutions are noble
Most successful franchises try to expand abroad. Why not build a Harvard branch in London, Dubai, Sydney, Mumbai or Tokio?
Each of those would likely be subject to some pressures over time, but those times and pressures would vary.
Nowadays it is a "all eggs in one basket" situation.
Edit: In addition, some people only attend Harvard and co. for the networking opportunities.
I naturally expected that this would be the case. At the very least, record the lectures in 8K and stream them to other campuses (there would be major timezone differences).
That's what federal funding for universities looks like.
I remember that people advocated quite hard a few years ago to make that last part mandatory, because at the time it wasn't. Universities can claim ownership and patent the discovery. The research was also usually locked behind for-profit publications, thus limiting the research to only those that can afford to pay.
The initiative that I remember asked that government funded research must be published in open access, and that no patents (or other IP) may be created in direct relation to such research.
Did such initiative win and become law?
It's investment, not charity.
For example:
| Sarah Fortune, a professor and chair of the department of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, woke up Tuesday to a stop-work order for a large contract focused on unraveling how the immune system fights tuberculosis, with the goal of creating better detection and vaccines.
Who said they aren't profitable
I had thought the leftwing reaction to accuse this of authoritarianism, overblown. Many of the actions that had been taken were taken by previous leftwing administrations, just with less publicity (, and so on).
However I think the rubicon has been crossed. The president now believes he has impunity to engage in extrajudicial rendition to enslave people, including citizens, in foreign prisons. He attacks the centres of civil power: universities, law firms, (likekly soon, ) the mass media. And rival state power: ignoring the supreme court, congress (ie., reorganising federal gov beyond his power), and the institional professional class in the executive.
All the while, increasingly I see people on the centre-right in the mass media credulously believing the president's account of his actions. Identifying with the president as an expression of their power, and believing likewise, that the whole of civil society is legitimately brought under state ideological control. That the presidency is the state, that state is society, and that society must "for democratic reasons" be brought to the state's heel.
The next phase of this will be very dangerous for the american people. I think civil resistance will be target for at best, imprisonment -- perhaps even rendition to a foreign prison. All one needs to say is that the resistance protestors are domestic terroists, and trump has a wide base of people credulously willing to believe it -- no doubt looting and other things will occur. It is very easy to imagine state elections being brought under "federal control" and a process of election rigging soon following.
As far as I can see there are two forces acting against the possibility of an american tyranny: trump's own desire to perform what's he's doing completely destabilises his plans (eg., on the economy especially). Secondly, the federalism of the american system.
It seems now plausible to me to imagine a future in which a democractic state violently expels federal forces, esp., eg., if ICE are used to rendition american citizens. It will be almost an obligation of states to suspend federal police presense. This, in the end, may make totalisation of federal state power difficult.
I am not from the US, and I watch with mild amusement its slide into full blown banana republic dictatorship with a sprinkle of last century European fascism - I mean, at this point ICE is basically a secret police that disappears people, not unlike Stasi or Gestapo from years past.
But you thought that Trump was an answer to "wealth over income" or "capital over labor"? Even without knowing that much about the intricacies of US politics this sounds pretty naive.
Whether his solution works or not isnt relevant to whether Trump's real preferences aren't, "by default", the american corporate owner.
It's very unhelpful to reduce trump down to basic evil motivations, and to call any ascription of a non-evil one, "naive". It has been this manner which has made the left entirely unable to communicate beyond its self.
Do you have an example of ICE "disappearing" a US citizen or murdering someone? If not, they're nothing like the Stasi or the Gestapo.
It's a bad idea to cry wolf this much, because the wolf might actually come.
Write down on a sticky note "if the government sends a US citizen to CECOT I will..." and fill in the rest of this sentence. Put it somewhere you see it everyday.
I'm personally absolutely sick of the "oh it is not a problem until..." lines moving basically daily. Everybody defending this administration needs to commit to a line otherwise I fully expect to see posts saying what you are saying here with ever more brutal and violent outcomes from the state for the rest of time.
The issue with these extrajudicial renditions to foreign prisions is the extrajudicial part. The rest of it is just immoral -- the former part, a catastrophe.
I mean, once they start disappearing people that are completely legal in the country, disappearing citizens is just a minor step forward.
By all means, I am not in the US, I'll keep enjoying my popcorn from afar. I wonder if when the ovens are turned on in some Central American death camp you will move the goalposts to "but, but we don't even have gas showers yet".
> cry wolf
The wolf has been here for a while buddy, we are just discussing what color and size it is.
This could lead to National Guard versus federal forces stand-offs as was seen in the 1960s over Civil Rights disagreements between state and federal governments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine#National_Guar...
Another factor that differentiates the United States in conflicts of the people against their government is how heavily armed and resourceful the US populace is. In the War on Terror, US Armed Forces faced insurgency militias in Iraq and Afghanistan. If similar insurgency militias were to arise in the United States in response to illegal federal government actions, it would probably have similar results.
Is not optimistic reading
However, this entire line of thought presupposes that those people (whether in NG or SDF) would align themselves with the state and against the feds, and that's not given at all. I know from personal experience of close interaction with my local right-wing militias in WA state that quite a few members are in NG or WSG.
The same goes for armed populace. It's true that there's a lot of weaponry in private hands, and we're not just talking your stereotypical AR-15, but stuff like say .50 BMG anti-materiel rifles, grenade launchers, and even privately owned tanks and artillery in some cases. However, they are disproportionally in hands of people who lean far right, so in event of open conflict I would expect them to work with the feds. There are some of us on the left who are heavily armed precisely so as to counterbalance that, but we are outnumbered by an order of magnitude. Then there's the issue of training - right-wing militias actually get together and train, and while it is derided as LARPing - often for good reasons - it's still better than nothing. More importantly, it's not just training but also networking - those people know each other and have plans to get together and coordinate "when it's time".
Indeed, a particularly nasty possibility is that Trump wouldn't even need to issue any kinds of explicit orders to federal troops, but rather just let the right wing paramilitaries loose by simply not doing anything to stop them (and making it widely known that there will be no consequences).
But now I see posts like this and it's like "how could we have known this was going to happen?". Well, you could have! At least maybe you can update your priors on how seriously to take warnings that a political movement is dangerous?
Now I read every comparison to the Nazis with a huge grain of salt and I'm "somewhat neutral" on Trump.
The extrajudicial enslavement of legal immigrants into foreign prisons, "crosses the rubicon". You cannot have presidential power operating in this way. It's not the immigrant part, it's the extrajudicial part. If trump has this power against anyone, he then has it against everyone.
Against that backdrop you have the targeting of law firms that have represented political opponents of the president; the attempt to totalise control of universities, and so on.
The whole thing is now tettering on the edge of what was previously just hysteria.
Perhaps the final nail in the coffin for me has been seeing online how credulous the right has been about the government's propaganda. This tells me that the conditions for totalitarianism are here in the people -- a mass of people identify with trump, uncritically believe the propaganda. The dismantling of rival power centres in all of american society and government is taking place whilst a large number of people applaud.
People havent yet seen the transition that has taken place within the Trump government. Before the Musk programme, the deportations, etc. were all on the extreme-side of constitutional presidental power.
We are actually now past that, and his supporters are operating as if we're not. They don't realise they're applauding what they will severely come to regret. They think they're applauding the end of DEI, of elite power, of the stock-owning class. When in fact, it's pretty clear now, these are just the grievances benig used to establish unlimited intrusion of the presidency into all aspects of civil and political life.
The next mass protest will precipitate a crisis of the legitimacy of the federal monopoly on violence in the US. Unless some means can be deployed soon to constrain the president, america is in a very dangerous position.
The second term rolls around, and now you can do whatever you like, because you're done at the end of that. At least in theory.
And what happened is like Y2K: People who recognized the risks successfully worked to mitigate the worst of them. It's not really surprising, but it is frustrating, that just like with Y2K, many people thus concluded that it was not necessary to mitigate the risks.
For many people, mitigating risks provides evidence that there were never any risks in the first place. (You can probably think of more examples of this.)
But unfortunately, people were correct when they identified that Trump's character combined with increasing control over one of the two political parties could pose a that to our system. And now it's harder to mitigate the problem, because the control over the party has advanced significantly further.
I grew up in Russia at the time when we had a brief stint with democracy. I remember how people elected Putin because he was supposed to fix everything that was wrong, and how they laughed at those of us who said that it would be a dictatorship before soon.
There was some political fuckery, but nothing out of the ordinary for a populist srong man type politician.
What happened then is definitely not what is happening now.
If trump had been in this straightjacket I had expected, I would not mind that "on this go around" the american right, with its grievances, has them heard by american society.
The problem of american politics, over the last decade or two, has been the complete cultural maginalisation of the right (from centres of civil power). Something had to give. The universities, the corporate culture, the internet mass media -- had all been monpolised by a "consensus moralism" which was replusive to a lot of people.
I didnt feel able to continue to deny those people their representation. However, I hadn't seen how easily the straighjackets of the constituion were this easy to disregard if you only have enough people at the top to do it.
I see this offered a lot as an example of a "missing middle", that conservative ideals are systematically underrepresented in e.g. universities or popular culture, and the explanation offered by conservative thinkers is that there's some shadowy force at play.
Could it not just be that these ideals are unpopular? The classic tale of a kid going off to college and coming back with more liberal politics is offered as an example of brainwashing or "consensus moralism," but maybe it's because they were genuinely convinced to shift their worldview.
Can you elaborate on this?
That said, I do deeply appreciate your willingness to change your mind, and to talk about it publicly. The reality is that a third of our society is in Trump's thrall. At my best, I don't want those people to disappear, or suffer in powerlessness for years. I want them to change their mind, and I know how hard that can be. So thank you!
Since I sympathised with the people who sympathised with him, I did not regard him as an inherently "evil" -- which seemed to be the left's take. And it's a pretty dangerous one. Because when people identify with trump, if you call him evil, so to them. And the left's habit of just opposing whatever he says renders their side seemingly at least as callous as him: which is why so many polls believe trump understands their problems better than the other side.
I think it's more accurate to say trump is a complex individual who could, with the right social environment, express quite different politics. What I hadn't anticipated is that his social environment has become so radicalised, professionalised, and totalitarian. (As someone else put it: the last trump was "Jared's" and this one is Don Jr's. Trump, I think, can be both. That's over now.)
In any case, I think it's a moot point. I was wrong. This latent rage of the right against their cultural marginalisation is now a smokescreen for the totalising of the presidency. It's a real problem.
Devil's advocate, I think it's easy if you don't directly feel impact from his policies. I've been losing my marbles about Trump at family dinners for a while, but for a chunk of my family he's a check against "radical" liberalism (read: gender ideology, spending money on things that don't serve everyday americans) and a path to lower tax bills.
Similarly, I think it's easy (from a conservative perspective) to dismiss all the seemingly emotional reactions to something Your Guy is saying because that's just politics; that's the expected behavior of politicians. It's not a problem if Your Guy is caught in a lie because they all do it.
I'm straw-manning a bit, but I'm just trying to sketch anecdotes of how I've seen otherwise rational, empathetic, intelligent people routinely offer (to me) unreasonably calm takes on Trump's activities and behavior.
As an aside, I faced casual racism plenty of times in the country; pretty sure no one ever gave a shit. Trump country would cheer for it, actually.
What's different this time?
In 2024 the entire Republican Party had evicted the non-MAGA people. Trump could staff everything with absolute sycophants. And there is no way that the Republicans in Congress will lift a finger to change anything.
Further, Trump had years of vindictive rage bottled up after losing in 2020. Every organization and institution he spent years raging about on Truth Social suddenly becomes his target. No actual governance. Just revenge.
There are no guard rails, there is no emergency stop this time.
-- JD Vance, Vice president of USA on Trump, President of USA.
(Before JD became VP)
> I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a*hole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?
2. We wouldn't even be talking about that industrial scale genocide this early on Hitler's term, which I don't say to suggest he's going to be Hitler 2 but rather to point out how it can be quite valid to be concerned before someone's getting into full swing with atrocities.
And yes, I believe that we are at substantial risk for mass death at a scale resembling the holocaust within the next decade.
not with 1939 Hitler, but with 1933 Hitler after the Nazi party won the elections? that's not farfetched
The power is bestowed upon them by Republican voters and they are to blame. Voting for one issue, lack of education, or desire to tune out politics isn't a reasonable excuse.
Edit
I have no issue with downvotes but offer up arguments why voters aren't responsible.
2. How am I demoralizing the opposition? I'm directing them to a more ideal target.
It has no purpose and you're not going after the source
The usual avenues to air grievances that modern Americans are used to, like writing your representative or even peaceful mass protests, only work in a political culture where they are universally perceived as detrimental to government's legitimacy and that matters. We are past this point now, and, arguably, have been for a while.
For an example of how well such tactics work in a different culture, look at e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011%E2%80%932013_Russian_prot...
To put it bluntly, Trump and people who elected him don't give a fuck about "whiny libs". If you want to convince them to change course, you need to cause them actual measurable harm. Starting with economic - mass strikes etc - but be prepared that government would escalate to physical and match in kind.
Clearly the way people vote matters. But I bristle at the sentiment that protesting against it is “pointless”. Such protests are as much a signal to those who voted as it is to those who didn’t and those who hold power. It’s an ecosystem reacting in the way it should react when threatened.
Non-voters is a good point but I'm not sure the affect with Trump. Are there people who weren't aware of how much people dislike him?
It is an ecosystem, like I get why it's happening but I disagree with the target.
its seen as something odd when someone decides not to.
Down vote all you want, wont make blocking students from class because they are Jewish and hiring people based on their race or sexual preferences any less moronic.
Breath of fresh air to see that idiocy burn.
What's 'burning' is the hospitals, military research, medical research and the vast array of technical R&D that congress has requested harvard to perform.
This is just an attack on americans. Harvard is secure regardless of what destruction the presidency does to the projects congress has asked of it.
About as close to personal as it gets, other than having zero respect for racist crayon munching idiots.