Latest comic: What does not belong?
#cartoon #comic #politics #democracy #firstamendment #monarchy #authoritarianism #uspol
uspol
You ever think to yourself “but I am just one person, what can I do to make a difference?”
It turns out that “wear an inflatable frog costume and go downtown” is actually a really reasonable answer.
Cruelty by #StephenMiller, #KristiNoem, #JDVance, & #DonaldTrump. This is what #MikeJohnson, alleged #Christian, & the cowards in Congress & the fascists on #SCOTUS are doing.
"Islas pulled out a brown teddy bear to ease the toddler’s nerves while she faced Judge Irene C. Feldman. Islas is not formally representing Lucy, but provided Feldman w/information regarding Lucy’s case due to her age & inability to understand #immigration proceedings."
https://coppercourier.com/2025/12/05/childrens-immigration-court/
I dislike framing #privilege in racial terms. It reaches those already aware & misses a huge growing reservoir of white privilege... brown people. That the American idea of white has shifted through time says that this is as much cultural as racial.
Being first generation, I know lots of immigrants. Brown people who weren't born with privilege and come into it later in life, can be the worst because we don't realize that we've joined the disenfranchisers.
I'm naturally introspective & may have figured it out eventually, but my wife accelerated the process. She's white, aware, & understood the implications and responsibilities of privilege. It's embarrassing, but at the start of our relationship, I was "whiter" than she was.
Also, the race conflict framing benefits the regime whose supporters are mostly not poor. The ones who are poor won't grasp the sociological implications of something they're not fully enjoying. Those people are potential allies & don't need to understand perfectly to join us.
Edited 1y ago
Don't be surprised if, in the coming days, the United States drops all charges against Maduro.
Trump can never say no to a good bribe, especially if it includes cash AND oil rights.
Trump got pissed at Ontario/Canada anti-tariff ads playing in US markets, so ending trade talks
Note to Carney, appeasement NEVER works with this asshole. Counter tariff the fuck out of the UIS, make a deal with China for EVs and our soy/wheat
And make it clear there will be NO ICE in Canadian territory
Edited 1y ago
Some leftists have criticized #NoKingsDay2 as useless. Though it was the largest protest in US history, it didn't change anything. I would go further to say that protests like these generally won't change anything. Dictators aren't forced to step down by 2% of the population coming out for one day. If they're forced to step down by protests, those protests are sustained. They are every single day. They are accompanied by general strikes.
We've been watching that happen all over the world. Portland in 2020 gave us a taste of that in the US. The George Floyd Rebellion was the type of resistance that actually brings down dictators like Trump. Occasional protests, no matter how large, can simply be ignored. That is precisely the reason the US developed a militarized police force in the first place. You need more, more than the largest protests in US history, more than Occupy, more than the resistance of the 60's and 70's, more than, and different from, anything we've seen in our lives.
And yet... Each protest has grown, and grown bolder. Some have grown more persistent. If you think of protest as the path to achieve change, you will lose. It is not. But it is a path to escalate. Some people, some otherwise comfortable white folks, came out for their first time. Some people got pepper sprayed for the first time. Some people questioned authority, stood up for the first time, and have had an experience that will radicalize them for the rest of their lives.
Protest is not useful in and of itself. It is training. It's making connections. Authoritarian regimes rely on the illusion of compliance, so visual resistance does actually undermine their power.
Liberals like to teach that non-violence is all about staying peaceful no matter what, that there's some way that morality simply overwhelms an enemy. I remember reading Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred in high school. I said it was a threat. My teacher said, "you're wrong, he was a pacifist." Pacifism is a threat. If you can spit at me, beat me, shoot me, and I will not move, if I have the strength to absorb violence without flinching, without even rising to violence, what will happen when you push me too far?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
For peaceful resistance to work, there must be ambiguity. It must not be clear if or when the resistance will stop being peaceful. Peaceful resistance with no possibility of escalation is just cowardice.
My critique then is not so harsh as some other anarchists. If you think that protest alone will work, you're probably going to lose. If you are prepared to escalate, if you are prepared to absorb violence without flinching, then it could be possible for protest alone to topple the dictator. The cracks are already beginning to show.
And then what?
The problems that lead to the George Floyd uprising were never resolved. The problems that lead to Occupy where never resolve. The DAPL was built, protesters were maimed, it leaked multiple times (exactly as predicted). Segregation never went away, it only changed forms. The fact that immigrants have different courts and different rights means that anyone can be arbitrarily kidnaped and renditioned to an arbitrary country. We never did anything about the torture black site. FFS, people can still be stripped of their voting rights and slavery is still legal in the US. The people who control both parties in the US are killing our children and grand children with oil wars and climate change.
Toppling the dictator does nothing to resolve all of the problems that existed before him.
No, #NoKingsDay was absolutely not useless. #NoKings and related protests are extremely useful but they aren't sufficient. But, I think we still need to challenge the movement on two points:
How do you escalate after you're ignored or brutalized?
What do you demand after you win?
Edited 1y ago
After we broke the story of the #ICE lawyer with a white supremacist X account, no one seems to be able to tell us whether James Rodden still works with the agency. Even Congress can't get answers. https://www.texasobserver.org/ice-white-supremacist-x-account-veasey-answers/
#racism #fascism #genocide #law #Dallas #NorthTexas #Texas #Immigration #politics #USpol #news #Trump
"Trump announces that U.S. forces have carried out “a large scale strike against Venezuela” overnight and have captured (kidnapped) President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and flown them out of the country."
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01/03/world/trump-united-states-strikes-venezuela
#UsPol
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Edited 313d ago
Many #Trump allies had been secretly rooting for an #acquittal. The talking points wrote themselves: It would have been yet more evidence that the #UnitedStates #justice system was rigged in favor of #Bidens & against Trumps. Tues’s #guilty #verdict was inconvenient to that narrative.
Even more valuable would have been the #fundraising potential.
#gaslighting #ConspiracyTheories #USpol #law #HunterBiden
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/us/politics/donald-trump-hunter-biden.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
Nooooow c'mon! Let's go!
Reopen the house, pay your staff and swear in the Democrat to release the Trumpstein files
We'll go from there, I have some ideas
Marimar Martinez was shot by ICE and ended up with seven holes in her body.
A TikTok personality was shot today in South LA.
Tear gas, pepper bullets and chemical munitions are being used in suburban areas.
A 15 year old autistic boy is in federal custody while his Mom pleads for his return, and a 15 year old Chicago girl who had kidney surgery was detained so violently that she ended up back in hospital.
ICE enforcement is shaping up to be a mass disabling event.
My latest looks at how we can protect one another:
https://www.disabledginger.com/p/ice-enforcement-may-be-a-mass-disabling
#ice #uspol #abolishice #fascism #disabilty #ableism #eugenics
I fully support putting ICE agents on the web with their face 🤷
There should be a risk for those who wanna join the Gestapo
Edited 1y ago
Donald Trump has pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. Binance has been a major supporter of Trump's crypto projects, and Trump has already made millions after Binance accepted a $2 billion investment from an Emirati fund denominated in the Trump family's USD1 stablecoin.
One of the people CZ hired to lobby for the pardon is Teresa Goody Guillén, a lawyer who has simultaneously represented the Trump World Liberty Financial project. She's also lobbied on behalf of Binance on crypto-related topics.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-pardons-convicted-binance-founder-7509bd63
Edited 1y ago
New from José Luis Martínez: Last year, state investigators faced the highest number of paycheck complaints in nine years and a prior internal audit noted that it typically took months just for complaints to be assigned to an investigator. https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-workers-wage-theft-complaints-surge/
#labor #workers #poverty #Texas #politics #USpol #news #economy
No jobs report from BLS today (delayed until Dec. 16), but before the shutdown, the pre-Trump / post-Trump comparison in BLS data was very close to pre-Trump / post-Trump comparison in the ADP data.
This week, we got the latest jobs data comparison from ADP, through November:
Squeaker of the House, Mike Johnson is making up all kinds of bs reasons not to swear in Democrats newest congresswoman to prevent her from signing the release of the Trumpstein files
Now the Squeaker is getting sued over it
Ha!
we may not have them this november, but we will definitely need UN and international elections observers for the 2028 general (presidential and federal)
» US appeals court rejects Trump bid to implement new vote-by-mail rules https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/10/us-appeals-court-rejects-trump-bid-to-implement-new-vote-by-mail-rules
"The S is for surveillance": fighting KOSA and bad internet bills in the ATmosphere and the fediverses
https://thenexusofprivacy.net/the-s-in-kosa-is-for-surveillance/
The first post in this series was at a fairly high level. Now, let's shift from theory to practice.
Thanks to Anthony Moser for the framing help!
UPDATE: Activism makes a difference: the SCREEN Act unexpectedly fails in committee!
Edited 97d ago
In August, the #Trump admin sent #UCLA a 27-page list of demands and settlement proposal, which UCLA wanted to keep confidential during the negotiations. The UCLA Faculty Association sued to compel its disclosure, and the California Supreme Court just decided in favor of the faculty.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-24/uc-publicly-release-trump-ucla-1-2-billion-settlement-offer
Here's the list of demands.
https://ucop.edu/communications/_files/confidential-rule-408-communication-ucla-08-08-25.pdf
#Academia #AcademicMastodon #DefendResearch #Trump #TrumpVResearch #Universities #USPol #USPolitics
Edited 1y ago
the #FBI is now officially visiting the homes of people spotted at protests like #NoKings, #ICE, etc.
it boggles the mind that there are people at #protests in the US who, upon finding #FBI agents at their door asking “do you have a few minutes to talk about the protests?” answer with anything other than “do you have a warrant?” followed by a polite request that they leave your property.
this isn’t complicated. you need to shut the fuck up. the #5thAmendment exists for a reason. shutting the fuck up cannot be used against you, for any reason, ever. not shutting the fuck up will never help you. it can only hurt you.
any false statement to the FBI can be charged as a crime. even if you just forgot. even if you mix up the order of events. even if you tell the truth but the agents find another person whose story contradicts yours. even if you tell the truth but the agents misrember what you said (!!!)
talking to the FBI is much more legally perilous than talking to the police (and you shouldn’t do that either) and talking to Kash Patel's FBI is far worse than talking to the old FBI.
i know it’s hard. you want to be helpful. you want to explain yourself. it’s a very natural human thing and that’s exactly what they’re going to use against you. so here’s a helpful script you can follow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqo5RYOp4nQ
literally every single lawyer in the united states will tell you exactly what i’m telling you now. tell a friend. tell all your friends. tell random people you see on the street.
and shut. the. fuck. up.
don't be like this guy, who helpfully stepped out of his house to chat with the FBI outside the range of audio recording for most of an hour: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/video-fbi-agents-visit-anti-ice-protester
#STFU #shutTheFuckUp #PSA #uspol #uspolitics #KashPatel #law #lawfedi
Edited 1y ago
"The Treasury Dept instructed employees not to share photos of the demolition of parts of the White House’s East Wing after images of construction equipment dismantling the facade of the building went viral online.
Treasury’s HQ is located next door to the East Wing, giving employees there a front-row seat to the construction of Trump’s $250 million ballroom. The new project is set to replace parts of the East Wing."
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/treasury-tells-employees-not-to-share-photos-of-white-house-ballroom-construction-1d4f2c49?st=woEQcR
More pics at https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/10/21/white-house-east-wing-demolition-trump-ballroom-photos/
#UsPol
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Edited 1y ago
RE: https://flipboard.social/@newsguyusa/116409413448725052
there goes the theory that US military commanders would refuse illegal orders.
the gringo war machine is so huge, they could lose two-thirds and still be the largest in the world ―and with enough sociopaths to willingly do anything for war-mongering.
all because white supremacists couldn't respect a great treaty ―by international law standards― that a Black man negotiated.
getting rid of white supremacist is the new (and should have been the old) bash a fash.
Out today: Feeding #Texas estimates that its 20 member banks have lost a total of $57.6 million in federal funding cuts, and that’s only in immediate canceled funding. But this could actually be on the low end of the potential impact range. https://www.texasobserver.org/trump-cuts-texas-food-banks/