Show me a Cesar and I will show you an “Et tu, Brutè?”
This is why I’ve really been trying to make the ‘Orange Julius’ nickname stick.
Much more Orange Nero.
Mango Mousolini, Papay Pinochet, I’m sure there are more that I’m forgetting
Tbh that didnt really work out well for the Roman Republic…
If it gets to this point we are far passed working out well.
Much like the Roman Republic, the average age of our Senate seems to indicate the near end of life for our civilization.
The age is an issue, but the main worries should be the similarities in income inbalance and the continual breaking of mos maiorum.
Just not with a knife.
these people want war with you, they mean to subjugate you, and if you do not bow they mean to kill you
Paradox of tolerance.
If we all sit around while people organize killing us, eventually they’ll try to kill us.
We can’t treat Republicans as just having a different opinion. This isn’t “bedroom walls green or blue”. This is “should gay people live?”
There’s a saying about the boxes of liberty. Unfortunately, the right seems poised to open the ammo box first.
We all need to believe them when they tell us what kind of America they want to live in and what they are willing to do to get there. Fascist militias are popping up all over the place, all the while blue states are restricting access to firearms while red states are busy expanding their own. I’m hopeful it will never come down to it, but at the end of the day Jon Stewart’s not going to come to your rescue when they have you on your knees in front of a trench. There may come a time where you’ll wish you had access to non-nerfed rifles and normal capacity magazines.
Additionally, you might wonder why hyper capitalists are strong proponents of gun control but always manage to carve out exceptions for themselves 🤔.
I am alarmed, but not for 2025. They’re not likely to win in 2024, but that doesn’t mean they’ll drop their machinations after being foiled. I’m more concerned about the next coup attempt and the 2028 election.
I can be alarmed for both. Just because they look like a circus right now doesn’t mean Trump can’t win again in 2024.
And that’s a sober and reasonable way to look at it.
you’re out of your mind if you think they’re unlikely to win in 2024, that’s exactly what everyone thought about 2016
Defeating an incumbent is no small feat, even with the insanity going on. Just look at Boebert as a prime example. Ted Cruz is despised, yet he keeps winning by the skin of his teeth.
I’m referring mainly to that phenomenon, not implying that it’s going to be a cakewalk or that people should get complacent.
Yet trump lost in 2020 despite being incumbent.
He also got 74M votes in that election. I too don’t want him to win, but assuming he will lose is sure way to help him in the election.
In 2016 he won, because everyone was certain that Hillary has the presidency in her pocket. A lot of people who normally would vote for her did not show up or voted 3rd party as a protest, because they were certain that it won’t affect the outcome.
Trump lost, sure, but that’s the exception, not the rule. And in a head-to-head with Biden, who is doing a fabulous job ingratiating himself to unions, coupled with the clown show that is the remainder of the Republican party, and it’s an obvious uphill battle for anyone trying to unseat Biden.
However, as I said, that is not a call to get complacent. We collectively unseated the incumbent in 2020, but make no mistake that the people that want him there this time have a lot of money and influence. We need to be as coordinated if not more so this time around, because it really is going to be a matter of, “Do you want fascism or democracy?”
The autocratic powers pulling the GOP strings don’t intend to repeat their same mistakes.
Yeah, assuming trump loses, I’m still really nervous of the various ratfucking the GOP has prepped for 2024. But it is, in fact, not a guarantee that trump won’t win outright. There’s been a number of factors that have made biden somewhat unpopular (higher interest rates, gas prices, inflation). I believe those are mostly out of his control, but does the average voter? Biden is far from a perfect president, he’s done some pretty good stuff but he’s also somewhat milktoast in areas that might cause voters to not turn out.
Until the rightwing shitbags ditch their autocracy ambitions we are in a super perilous position. They have the judiciary locked up likely for the next 30 years which is going to make progress really super hard (making progressives look bad).
Until dems are consistently winning the house, senate, and presidency nobody should feel comfortable when a presidential election comes around. The fact that dems lost the house in 2022 is something that should make every anti-fascist nervous.
The fact that dems lost the house in 2022 is something that should make every anti-fascist nervous.
I agree, though I will say that was predictable (even though it didn’t have to happen at all). By all accounts, Democrats should have lost more, but thanks to a lot of effective grassroots efforts on shoestring budgets (fuck you, DNC), they didn’t.
Either way, it’s going to be a lifelong battle for many of us. Thanks, “Me Generation.” /s
Hillary won the popular vote. The Republicans haven’t won the popular vote since 92, and it’s increasingly unlikely they ever will again. This sucks because that allows the DNC to throw whatever milquetoast fossile they want to into the seat, because they know they have the country held hostage by the FPTP bullshit.
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popular vote doesn’t matter
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it’s amazing how you people always find a way to blame Democrats for literally everything
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what year is it?
Lefties, it’s time to start asking yourself if you wanna be disarming yourselves.
Under an authoritarian government, there is neither left, nor right, nor civilian gun ownership.
Bold of you to assume that 2a will survive a coup for anyone not directly aligned with the new power structure, or for that matter, that any of the present US Constitution will survive a coup at all and not simply be replaced with martial law instantly and permanently: coups are slow until they’re not, and then they are lightning fast.
Someone’s clearly forgotten that every accusation is a confession, and has been tricked into looking at the wrong suspect. The ones who “are coming for your guns!” like the right wing propaganda machine so often screams these days, are not the “lefties” nor “liberals” nor even most of the right.
The ones who intend to take them are those who right now intend to be in power when democracy is gone, the Constitution is suspended, and they don’t want YOU pointing YOUR gun at the enforcers of the new order, whoever you are. If today you have a red Trump flag or a vote blue flag, tomorrow they will NOT give a shit: they are coming for EVERYONE’S guns.
“Lefties,” ha. Like there are going to be actual political parties under a dictatorship.
Trump supporters don’t care. They’re too stupid to realize anything you said. They think they’ll get special treatment under said dictatorship. It’s up to the “left” and whatever still sane centrists to turn out to vote regularly.
I’m clearly talking about who currently identifies more with the left side of the spectrum.
Do you believe gun ownership is as prevalent on that side as the right?
Do you believe gun ownership is as prevalent on that side as the right?
In rural areas, I’d say it’s even. In some parts of the country, even in non-rural areas it’s not a large divide. Many people have reasons for owning firearms, and the kinds of people that own them are as diverse as their reasons for wanting them in the first place. I myself am anything but right wing, and my first gun was purchased in and owned for many years in a large city. When I lived rurally, pretty much all my neighbors had guns, though I did not by that point (they assumed I did too, and I never indicated otherwise, so they spoke of it freely).
I gave it up for non-political reasons, but as an ex-gun owner who was a gun owner prior to all this craziness, I can tell you that NON-political gun owners are not shouting about their gun ownership and in general, don’t want anyone to know about it. I know I never did. Whose business is it but my own whether my home is armed or not? And if I do have a house full of guns, I also have a very attractive collection of theft targets I do not want to advertise. And even if I’m not armed, do I want anyone to know that for sure? No. Best to keep everyone guessing on all counts. Were I not writing anonymously, we would not now be having this conversation. But none of that will ever make the news, and never has, because it doesn’t rile anyone up in either direction.
Again, you’ve made the mistake of believing the media coverage you hear and assuming breadth of coverage equals breadth of real-life example. It does not. There are MANY more sane individual, non-political or liberal gun owners than you can imagine in the US. They’re just not talking about it or bringing media attention to it.
I should probably add, before you bring statistics into it, that gun ownership has only in the last couple of decades required real registration and tracking. When I bought and sold mine, I sold them through private sales, again decades ago. If some state thinks I still have a gun and wants me to produce it, all I have for them is a notarized bill of sale signed by both parties, and then they’re on their own, lol. There are a VAST number of untracked firearms in this country, owned by people who do not want to talk about them.
This is the kind of nuance that a mind attracted to authoritarianism just can’t understand.
I’ll be honest, I read about half of that. I’m just here to provide receipts.
According to the report by Statista, nearly half of Republicans (48%) reported that they own a gun, and 66% reported they live in a household with a gun. In comparison, only 20 percent of Democrats reported owning at least one gun, and 31 percent lived in a gun-owning household.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/who-owns-more-guns-democrats-or-republicans/ar-AA17ibLK
So, lefties, don’t give up your guns.
You’re not generally wrong here, but if trump were to become this dictator, in all likelihood he would call gun owners to kill the unarmed libs first. THEN take the guns from the righties. I’m not sure how that makes a huge difference from a self defense standpoint, but I thought it was an important step in the evolution of your described state
if trump were to become this dictator
Yeah, I don’t see that happening at all, for a number of reasons. Trump is the useful idiot real dictators would hold out in front to get the rubes to sign up and make way for themselves. As soon as martial law was declared and the Constitution set aside, Trump would be too, probably for his legal replacement (VP or Speaker of the House, etc), who would hold the reins until the transfer of power was secure, less than a year. And then that person would be set aside for the real power, the one(s) orchestrating the coup to begin with.
(Note how Pence only backed out of the January 6 plan at the VERY last minute he could, and not prior: Pence knew there was a coup in progress, that it was already underway, and refused to get into the Secret Service vehicle specifically for that reason, though he claimed ignorance as to the rest.)
You can believe Trump would be a dictator, but he was president for a single term, he is no longer incumbent, and most importantly, Trump literally cannot string together a coherent sentence or even keep from shitting his pants publicly. It takes much more than Trump has to engineer and successfully execute a coup over the span of several years. Agree to disagree, I guess.
So far, I’ve ever only seen pro 2A types side with the dictators.
How does one resist dictatorship without weapons?
Right now, with votes.
“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.” – Heather Cox Richardson
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/07/american-democracy-heather-cox-richardson-trump-biden
Sure, I do that too. I meant an active dictatorship.
I meant an active dictatorship.
That makes it a much more interesting – and impossible to predict – question, most of which depends on at what point during the transfer of power an individual gun owner finally has enough personal, immediate cause to raise that gun against an individual enforcement of the new order.
Not all coups involve armies; not all coups involve immediate martial law or enforcement against non-government individuals, though all that comes in time. Compare Malaysia to pre-WWII Germany and you’ll see exactly what I mean: both countries had the same essential events involved in moving to an authoritarian government against the will of the majority, but differences in both size and culture made those same events look extremely different, and take place at different points in the transition of power.
So your guess is as good as mine. I will tell you this, though: if the US loses democracy, absolutely none of the players are unaware of how much firepower citizens now hold, and will not want any citizen owning a gun. Every imaginable resource and effort at drawing them out and seizing them will be made, at every level of government.
And all this will happen to the vast shock and surprise of those who are unfamiliar with just how much of a surveilled life we now lead and think this new government is there for them because they helped overturn the old one. Anyone having “wild West” fantasies about exercising their own 2a rights against an unwanted new government may find the reality very different: there has never been a coup in history enforced by a militia that was unwilling to kill to cement its place in power, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries. Once the military is on board, blood will run.
For example, Chile loaded civilians into stadiums for the killing, and Argentina loaded them into planes to dump them over the sea. These were civilized democratic countries, not backwaters or banana republics. And that’s just two examples of many from the 20th century; I haven’t even mentioned Cambodia or Brazil, or cartel-related coups like the one in Colombia.
So the question stands: if/when a new US authoritarian government arrives by coup in the 21st century, how will an 18th century right to bear arms stand against it? I honestly don’t know. I don’t think anyone else does either. But in the age of precisely-targeted drone warfare and mass surveillance, and speaking solely for myself, I think the odds of individual arms’ success after a coup have dropped significantly, and certainly well past the point their proponents now believe.
How does one resist a dictatorship in control of tanks, bombers, drones, and the largest surveillance state in history, with little rifles? How do other countries with strong gun control resist dictatorship? How many existing dictatorships can you name, where guns aren’t readily available?
You already forgot about our 20 yr boondoggle in the Middle East?
What resources did those guys have?
Local cooperation. When it’s a foreign force it’s relatively easy to get cooperation from local civilians. When it’s your own government who has been installed by your own fascist faction I think it’s harder to resist without getting dobbed in.
First of all, you’ve responded apparently to the first of my sentences, and pretended the other two don’t exist, so I’m not feeling too optimistic about your good faith in this conversation. But ok.
There is a vast difference between a local authoritarian government intending to control the local populace, and a neoliberal government from far away that just wants to destabilize your region, increase oil profits for transnational corporations, and funnel a fortune into arms dealers. Our boondoggle in the Middle East was only a boondoggle if the goal was the one stated, which, I suspect you are smart enough to know, it wasn’t. The actual goals were very much accomplished, and the local resistance was a key part of that - how else could they justify all that spending?
That’s why WE need to be pro 2A
Btw now you’ve met one
Vote against this monster
Caesar wasn’t voted across the Rubicon.
I had the hypothesis that, with the proximity to the election, the invasion of Ukraine was also Putin setting the stage for Trump to have grounds to justify declaring national Martial Law followed by the summary dissolution of Congress and the suspension of the Constitution. All it would have taken would be for us to “aid” Ukraine and have Putin “retaliate” against somewhere in the Pacific NW. I’m guessing Portland since it is a liberal stronghold. Putin could have invaded Portland, Trump would have send in the boys in green to “drive them back”, but not before declaring martial law and somehow not before all of the liberal officials in the city were rounded up and executed. He could have then just installed cronies of his to take over the city and the rest of the plan would have already been taking place.
Yes. You’re getting downvoted by the Trumpies and tankies, but the planned declaration of martial law was a known part of the January 6 conspiracy, and a number of scholars and political analysts have also opined the same as you are now. Seeing how far Russia is involved in the subversion of American government, I don’t think an attack to help everything along is an imagination run wild, either.
Lol, that actually makes me feel pretty good considering I was calling it the day they invaded.
They bring out the res Caesar and I’ll show them the blue beaver, damn it.
Ask Julius how that turned out… oh, wait…
Five years of dictatorship and a permanent end to the republic, with his grand-nephew becoming the next dictator.
Well, this is happy horseshit…
Not too anybody who’s been paying attention to the politics of the last few years. Whether it’s Trump or someone else, the republican party has embraced fascism, and they’ve basically tried to throw out all the rules slowly. They’ve even captured the Supreme Court and a large amount of federal judge appointments to make sure it can happen.
Want to know why one person is stopping all the military appointments right now? The hope is that they can install lackies in those positions in 2024 if they win.
Lackeys
But yes, and it should get called out more. Republicans are blatantly subverting democracy.
Now THIS is some high quality political analysis.
