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Donald Trump vs. the Blob Part 2 : Electric Boogaloo
Ladies and gentlemen, it's been 4 years since our last bout. In one corner, we have the undisputed champ, the greatest of all time, the BADDEST man on planet Earth, the king, the DC blllooob! And in the other corner, the challenger, the next Hitler, the orange man, the Donald himself, Donaaallld Trump.
Let's.. get... ready.. to... rumble!
Holy shit it's been a crazy week for the current members of the Federal bureaucracy. Let's review:
Trump issued an Executive Order that almost all federal workers will have to return to office five days a week
All federal workers also received an offer to resign immediately. If they accept, they will get their current salary and benefits until September (an incredibly generous 8 month severance package). All they have to do is reply with the word "resign".
But also, workers will have to prove that they haven't been working a second or third job (in Reddit parlance, a J2, J3, etc..) It turns out this is actually a crime punishable by prison.
On the other hand side, we have the Reddit hivemind.
There is a Reddit for federal workers called /r/fednews. It's a revealing glimpse into an entitled and mentally ill slice of our federal workforce. Much like every other website, and especially themotte.org, they post almost exclusively during working hours.
These "workers" also may be violating federal law by explicitly campaigning on the behalf of one political party over another. Even posting on Reddit may be illegal.
So who wins?
It's a tough call. On one hand, in theory, Trump controls the executive branch. On the other hand, he doesn't control the judiciary who will ultimately decide the outcome. Already, many lawsuits have been filed on behalf of aggrieved federal employees.
Furthermore, not counting the military, there are 2 million federal employees. This is a massive army of people who, though already 95% anti-Trump, are now galvanized into action to prevent the erasure of their generous pay and benefits.
Has Trump bitten off more than he can chew? Will the champion remain undefeated? Or will the challenger land enough blows to sway the judges. You decide! Respond in the comments below.
The word stochastic terrorism is rightfully derided, but what do you call this kind of speech, which received 42k votes?
Edited for brevity. If you convince a person that they are at war with Hitler, and in fact the last line of defense against Hitler, what do you think the end result is?
/r/somethingiswrong2024 posters keep wondering when the military and 3 letter agencies will take out Trump. Also more confusingly wondering how NATO can assist. Of course they use "saving democracy" type rhetoric.
They never use the word "coup" when describing this. And I don't think they get that democracy would not be restored post-coup. As though a cabal of CIA and military leaders would overthrow the elected government and then decide to appoint Kamala as President. They explicitly talk about Kamala being made President.
I'm reminded of so much of the rhetoric, often out of Europe, about Hungary and its "democratic backsliding," its "hybrid regime of electoral autocracy," how it maintains a "quasi-dictatorship" by winning elections (by giving the majority what they vote for); and the invocation of various "democracy indices" whose inner workings reveal a definition of "democracy" in which elections and the will of the voters play a relatively tiny part, and it becomes "undemocratic" to respect the outcomes of elections when the electorate 'votes wrong.'
Sure it will, given — per my previous paragraph — the way they define "democracy." After all, as I once saw some wag online put it (in a snowclone) "'Democracy' is when Democrats are in charge; the more Democrats are in charge, the more democratic it is."
I mean, I've exposed to a lot of melting-down lefties over on Tumblr, and there's quite a few coalescing around the position that if "democracy" means giving the voters a say, but a majority of American voters are either so stupid or so evil to support racist rapist Fascist felon Trump and his pure evil Nazi Party 2.0 over Kamala Harris's "flawless campaign" of "joy, hope and unity" and a Democratic Party that stands for all that is good and right in the world, then "democracy" has got to go — proposed solutions start with massively rolling back the franchise (such as requiring a bachelor's degree to vote), through "reeducation camps," to "kill all Trump supporters."
Well, who do you think "a cabal of CIA and military leaders," deathly opposed to Trump, Vance et al, and seeking to save the Left's hold on the permanent bureaucracy, would choose to install as their puppet in the White House? Newsom? Hillary? Liz Cheney?
To steelman this perspective, my lefty sister explained to me that, on a trivial level, democracy doesn't just mean tyranny of the majority: a necessary precondition of a functional democracy is ensuring that everyone who ought to be entitled to the franchise has it and is able to exercise their voting right. If every other Republican was diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia by a malicious Dem-voting psychiatrist and carted off by the men in butterfly nets (hence unable to go to the polls), everyone would recognise that this wasn't a fair election in any real sense. Likewise if gangs of Antifa goons were bussed in to red states to stand outside polling stations and level AR-15s at anyone in a MAGA hat.
From the perspective of these Dems, if you take them at their word, they believe that Trump will do something like this to American democracy. Either he'll abolish it entirely and crown himself Dictator-for-Life (the less outlandish version of this talks about him abolishing presidential term limits); or he'll use various procedural tricks to manipulate election outcomes - taking away the franchise from assorted reliably Dem-voting demographics, straight-up shipping them off to concentration camps, or simply instructing police officers to look the other way when members of these groups are assaulted or mudered. Thus, in order to ensure the long-term survival of American democracy, actions which are surely undemocratic in the short-term must be undertaken, as a "pre-emptive strike" to prevent the destruction of democracy in the long-term.
Needless to say, I don't agree with any of this. No concentration camps will be constructed during Trump's second term, the rate at which black Americans are stripped of their voting rights (e.g. because of felony disenfranchisement) will be no different than under Biden, the murder clearance rate will be largely unchanged (i.e. there will no massive spike in unsolved murders of black Americans, LGBT people etc.).
But if you were one of these people who sincerely believed that the long-term destruction of American democracy was imminent, I could certainly imagine thinking that, therefore, short-term undemocratic actions might be justified to protect. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.
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