What's Going on at the FBI?
lawfaremedia.org
lawfaremedia.org
The comparison to the Wordpress drama works surprisingly well for me, complete with vendettas and an overzealous leader, just on an even larger scale and affecting more people.
when putting US foreign policy into perspective over the past 30 (or more depending where you are) years, then aligning with China suddenly looks a lot less awful all of a sudden.
An example; look at what they’ve been doing in the South China Sea, Hong Kong or Xinjiang.
Some instability in the U.S. is definitely uncomfortable but the alternative is not better.
I'm not well informed on the subject and now you've got me really curious.
(Not that trump’s accountability is particularly high… but there’s some hope he’ll be gone in 4 years, whereas the situation is different in china)
And everyone in the US should try to remember, every day, that this is NOT normal, and it should not become the new normal.
I was being provocative a bit, to help remember it CAN get worse and we shouldn’t just ride it out.
- Hong Kong was ceded to the UK after the opium wars in 1842
- The British returned it in 1997, under an agreement that its economic and political systems wouldn't change for 50 years
- starting in the 2010s (less than 20 years later), the PRC has been pressuring the Hong Kong government to drop colonial-era democratic reforms, extradite critics of China, and in general curtail civil liberties.
Presumably OP is referring to the PRCs actions to integrate Hong Kong before 50 years have elapsed. I'm not an expert here, this is just my layman understanding from reading American news
I live in Europe, I am European: we've outsourced our own defense for far too long. It is absurd that a country presenting an existential threat to us has been met with more supplied resistance from a country across the earth than Europe.
It's long past time for Europe to wake up.
1. You have to allocate that budget towards buying from the US defence industry. You are not going to be allowed to spend that internally. Which arguments aside of if that actually makes sense is at least a conflict of interest.
2. We are also threatening to annex territory and rip up the only meaningful alliance that keeps you safe in practice at the same time.
This is all to say nothing about trade wars also happening in the background or that literally the only time Article 5 of the same NATO treaty was invoked it was done by the US and paid for with European lives.
I’m generally pro US alliance but it’s also entirely incompatible with a fascist takeover of their government and they absolutely cannot be trusted again until there is serious reform that honestly doesn’t look particularly realistic any time soon.
I'm hopeful that it will create a more robust governance systems on the local level in the long run, but not without more short term pain (after all, there were a lot of non-stateside mouths being fed who will have to figure out realistic alternatives and face once unpalatable choices that will need to be made out of necessity).
I don’t think a lot of Americans have any concept of exactly how much the rest of the world hates them right now but I promise you that you’re living in a very different world moving forward as is everyone else.
You can’t spend generations telling everyone to depend on you precisely because you are selling stability and predictability and then change your mind overnight. That is going to have large multi generational consequences.
My advice is to get on top of your oligarchy problem sooner rather than later and you had best figure out a way that the fate of the world and your country doesn’t rely on what a bunch of people from Iowa think about “wokeness” every 4 years. That’s not sustainable
If the rest of the world doesn't send munitions on target stateside, Americans wont care. Just like they didn't care for the past 20+ years when DoD was tasked with bombing millions others in far away lands without explicit declaration by congress.
Perhaps those who build their relationships on negotiated reciprocity rather than blind trust will fair better in the coming era.
People are motivated to make sure you feel the pain of this situation moving forward.
Right now, its just a clown show in regards to that.
I genuinely don’t mean to imply this as any kind of threat whatsoever just as a friendly pointer but I don’t think yelling “what are you going to do about it?” In a public forum under an alias attached to your real name is a particularly sensible move at the moment.
Lots of things that might have not been a big deal a week ago I would feel a lot less sure about now personally.
People will have hard choices to be made, doubly so for those who have avoided making them. It's great that you seem to now be questioning things you have thought unquestionable; things unfolding now are no surprise to me, and i expect things to get worse, even beyond the current administration or the next until I see people make hard decisions globally.
"If you can't trust America, who can you trust?"
It is worse. Many don't care. They believe in American exceptionalism.
I just watched a stadium full of Canadian hockey fans boo a black woman in a wheelchair singing the national anthem. I’d politely suggest that while that might look like a funny story on the surface is actually very dangerous.
Edit: updated language to not imply poster is American, I didn’t mean anything personal by it at all but better to clarify all the same.
Who thought Canadians booing the US anthem was funny? I saw anger from jingoistic Americans. Sorrow from others.
When the EU tried to set up a small standing armed force in the 90s to serve as an umbrella org in the event of war, the US put pressure on Germany and France not to support it, and it failed.
Now you're seeing the stick. And NATO partners should absolutely up their spending on domestic defense industries. German tanks, Swedish anti-air, Ukrainian drones... you've got more than enough indigenous industry already to not feed the US with your defense dollars.
The impact on commercial, technical, cultural influence of the USA is incredible.
How could we have any insurance that these (personal and professional) US-based infra/tools companies (even AWS, Microsoft, Apple) could be even operating as expected, and in good faith, now that some petulant, inconsequential mixed-business-political leader is able to trigger that level of damage on a whim?
Just for the exercise, imagine Musk taking over Google or Apple: would you then still trust your computer/phone at the same extent as you do today?
Could it be, juuuust maybe, that you're believing what the US's other political side wants you to believe?
Are you so sure? In just a few days you come to that conclusion? What's certain is the damage that the US is self-inducing. The reaction from abroad, whatever form it may take, has not had the time to take shape yet.
> Culturally you will still be writing on this platform in 5 years (because, put simply...)
The more I read here, the more I realise how both part of the audience, and part of the hosting, is veeeeery skewed to some peculiar mindset I could not imagine in the past 10 years. Let's say that it is a good continuous learning experience.
> no critical mass is leaving twitter/x (because...)
[independant citation needed]. I found most of my active communities back on Bluesky and Mastodon, as they have gone almost extinct on X/Twitter. While I see a significant surge of bots (not hard to spot) both in comments, posts and follows. The mass may stay the same, to call it critical is a bit of a flex to me.
> and technically you very likely will be using an american made co-pilot (...).
I feel it's a bit early to say "likely". As it's a bit early to say that it may still be relevant to use it at all in a few years.
> Could it be, juuuust maybe, that you're believing what the US's other political side wants you to believe?
And that would be?
1/ it’s an open protocol, 2/ if anything it’s an excellent intermediary step towards something different, 3/ it feels like the caring Twitter from 2010 already, and that’s amazing a relief.
From America to Zimbabwe, have fun trying to find a country where X is not in the top three tier: https://appfigures.com/top-apps/ios-app-store/germany/iphone...
> Are you so sure? In just a few days you come to that conclusion?
So are you saying, that your currently unverifiable thing in the future (has not had the time to take shape yet) has to stand against the actual happenings of Canada and Mexico agreeing to Trump's terms within a day?
> Let's say that it is a good continuous learning experience
I don't know what you try to say here. Rest assure my standpoint is the minority here. Like another commentator said "Every single IT board" will be filled with the same arguments as are expressed in this threat here (ie. that we're basically witnessing Kristallnacht 2.0).
Because obviously, the numbers of 25Q1 matter? or the trend where alternative platforms are exploding and migration initiatives are organising? We might be settle this not before coming December, but even then, will this matter.
> has to stand against the actual happenings of Canada and Mexico agreeing to Trump's terms within a day?
You might want to dive a bit more in depth into what actually happened there: did they agree, or did they present what they are already doing as something new? The PR win is still for Trump because he looks like a strong boy, but...
Moreover, you know how governments really react. It takes weeks, if not months.
> Like another commentator said "Every single IT board" will be filled with the same arguments as are expressed in this threat here (ie. that we're basically witnessing Kristallnacht 2.0).
If you want to draw that sort of parallels, it ~looks more like January 1933, pre-Reichstag fire. But that's not really the parallel that makes things concerning. It's what's actually happening in 2025.
First, any attempt of geopolitical decoupling will be stymied by the likely outlook of an imminent 180 as soon as the beloved progressives are back in charge – as well as the ridiculousness of how that 180 would look.
Secondly, its not a coincidence that the American Empire (aka the West) consists of exactly one import based market surrounded by export based markets which need their trading surplusses to run their welfare programs. Unless the hegemon's subjects are suddenly switching to join BRICS all the grandstanding posture will be water under the bridge, eventually.
Thirdly, "Every single IT board" is exactly what made Trump and other populists elsewhere succeed in the first place.
The damage is done already. It's not because of the Republicans or the dummies they chose to follow that we would decouple, or because of the Democrats that we wouldn't. It's because of the whole, unpredictable thing that it's become.
Politically, business-wise, trade-wise, the trust is shattered. How could it be otherwise, if a handful of men have the power to disrupt so much the news, the administration, the businesses? How couldn't we expect much worse in the future?
There be a 180 or not, _the damage is done_. To reinstate trust will take decades. The best we can do now, it to handle you as an unreliable, dangerous hegemon, indeed. Was that what you wanted? You're losing at this game, because you might be big and strong, you're not the only boy in town.
So, second, yes, not a surprise. But you would be aware that climate change is already shuffling the cards there for everyone, deep and strong. Whatever happens, the "American Empire" will have a hard time maintaining its might and reach in the coming 20/30 years without cooperation, because the resources each zone will need to devote to its own survival and order will massively surpass those required to maintain abroad influence.
Why claim to take over Groenland, Panama and Canada, if not to tighten control over water trade routes? That at least, is rational in some way, and also revealing.
It's not certain how federations and markets will organise themselves in those conditions. What is obvious is that Europe, among others, needs to decouple quite a bit from the USA, while keeping ties in the hope they come back to their senses. IT is the easy part, however hard it's going to be. The USA give us really no choice there.
Oh, by the way, look at the sales and prospects for Tesla in Europe.
You can argue that far more appalling things happen in places like Russia or China, sure. But this doesn't feel like a controlled assumption of power. It doesn't even feel like Trump is personally in control - let alone his "shadow president". It feels more like a chaotic romp through the federal government, disrupting operations and vital functions with little care or planning, then quickly dispatching a crowd of untrained, unqualified interns to put up scaffolding for something new and more aligned with whatever political goals may have inspired this.
Not just the FBI, not just the onslaught of EOs that seem to be more designed to test the limits of power by defying well-established constitutional and legal limits, not just the inconsistent threats of tariffs either. But also random acts like dumping water reserves ahead of summer for no clear benefit other than spite.
It's all very unpredictable - not Trump personally but the entire organism that surrounds him in this presidential term. I think this may be because of the many conflicting interests at play. You have Trump himself, the MAGA cult, the Evangelicals and hardline conservatives who supported him, the various interest groups within the GOP and so, so many billionaires trying to get a piece of the pie. I don't think he actually has much control over this. It's not just ideologically incoherent, it seemingly lacks direction.
I wonder what it will look like once the dust settles and the momentum has died down. As much as libertarians like to talk about running the government like a business, if the USG were a business right now I would expect it to be on its way to being shut down and sold for scrap like e.g. Toys'R'Us.
It was always strange to me when the far-right, and then mainstream republicans, started really leaning into this "Deep State" conspiracy theory--not liking the others politics is not reason to believe it was ever a thing on either side. Not in the way it was meant, there was no "shadow government".
At some point during Trumps first term something about that idea started to seem like they knew what they were talking about--and not talking about their projection of it onto the "other side". Now, if there was anything that has actually resembled this "deep state", it's what is being put on full display: our emperor got new clothes[0] and we're only at the stage of everyone frozen in cringe.
Like the whole USAID debacle, this is the kind of task and budget that is set by the legislative branch, and the president can and should be held to account if he refuses to execute on that task.
The situation looks unpredictable.
It may be worth rereading Mike Lofgren's essay from 11 years ago, before Trump's first campaign, in which he tries to apply the Turkish concept of the "derin devlet" to analyzing the workings of the US government, and why Obama's administration had accomplished so little of what it promised: https://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/
>That said, evidence is accumulating that Silicon Valley is losing billions in overseas business from companies, individuals and governments that want to maintain privacy. For high tech entrepreneurs, the cash nexus is ultimately more compelling than the Deep State’s demand for patriotic cooperation.
By Adam Goldman
Reporting from Washington Feb. 4, 2025
Brian Driscoll, the acting director of the F.B.I., has become an improbable symbol of quiet resistance toward the Justice Department’s campaign to single out F.B.I. employees who investigated the Jan. 6 riot.
To start, Mr. Driscoll’s appointment was an accident. Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, the White House identified the wrong agent as acting director on its website and never corrected the mistake.
Even if he was not meant to be leading the agency, he has defended the rank-and-file. His refusal at the time to furnish the names of employees, as top Justice Department officials desired, and his insistence that a formal review process be put in place, has spurred widespread support for Mr. Driscoll.
Former and current agents have traded memes and satirical clips celebrating him, offering a rare moment of levity as dismay and deep unease set in across the F.B.I. and as Mr. Driscoll navigates the political perils of Washington and a president who is deeply hostile to the agency.
Known as “Drizz” among his friends, Mr. Driscoll, 45, does not possess the typical G-man bearing of his predecessors, with a bushy mustache and his face framed by long curls. It is a demeanor that has become the focal point of artificially generated memes.
In one, he is depicted as a saint grasping the handbook for agents running investigations. In another, he glances upward, encircled by the words “What Would Drizz Do?” One video, a compilation of scenes from the movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” portrays Mr. Driscoll as Batman doing battle with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in Los Angeles.
Former agents jokingly called his appointment a providential mistake.
A heated confrontation on Friday with top Justice Department officials left many wondering at the time whether Mr. Driscoll had been fired. Scrutinizing agents and others involved in the sprawling investigation into the Capitol riot would touch a startling number of people: The F.B.I. opened about 2,400 cases that involved about 6,000 intelligence analysts, agents and other employees.
In a defiant email Friday night, James Dennehy, the top agent in the New York field office, warned his staff that the F.B.I. was “in the middle of a battle of our own.” Praising Mr. Driscoll and his deputy, Robert C. Kissane, as “warriors,” Mr. Dennehy asserted they were “fighting for this organization.”
In fact, Mr. Kissane, the top counterterrorism agent in New York, had been widely believed to be in line to be acting director, several current and former agents said, with Mr. Driscoll as the No. 2 official. But when the White House unveiled its website to reflect its staff under the Trump administration, Mr. Driscoll was identified as the bureau’s chief.
Rather than correct the error, the administration left it.
Mr. Driscoll had been in charge of the Newark office for only about a week before he moved to the director’s suite on the seventh floor of F.B.I. headquarters in Washington, thrust into the middle of a political firestorm. Rumors of his dismissal continued to swirl on Friday until the bureau released a statement a day later to confirm that he was still in charge.
Friends and colleagues describe Mr. Driscoll as unflappable. He was a special agent with the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service in San Diego before joining the F.B.I. in 2007. His first assignment was in the New York office, the largest outpost in the bureau, where agents form powerful alliances and deep connections.
In 2011, he passed rigorous tryouts and was selected to the F.B.I.’s Hostage Rescue Team, a highly trained unit formed in the years after the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Many operators were once in the U.S. military and served in the Joint Special Operations Command.
Rescue team operators, including Mr. Driscoll, have repeatedly deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq during the wars there, embedding with Navy SEAL and Delta Force commandos.
Former members of the rescue team said that Mr. Driscoll was dispatched in 2013 to Alabama, where they successfully rescued a 5-year-old boy who had been taken hostage in a bunker. He was a gunfighter on the blue squadron.
He also took part in a dangerous raid with U.S. commandos in May 2015 in Syria in the hopes of finding clues about Kayla Mueller, a young woman from Phoenix who was kidnapped by the Islamic State. (Ms. Mueller died in captivity.)
During the operation, Delta Force commandos killed a top militant leader and captured his wife. Mr. Driscoll later testified in a criminal trial in Northern Virginia about the evidence he collected at the scene, including a red laptop that the Islamic State had used to force Ms. Mueller to watch jihadist videos.
In 2020, Mr. Driscoll returned to New York, where he supervised terrorism cases in Africa, Western Europe and Canada. He then took over the Hostage Rescue Team in 2022, which handles the most dangerous missions inside the United States, like disabling a nuclear weapon or rescuing a hostage held by a terrorist.
Chris O’Leary, a former top counterterrorism agent in New York who worked with Mr. Driscoll, pointed to his experience.
“What the F.B.I. needs most is a principled leader, and we have one right now in Brian Driscoll,” Mr. O’Leary said.
He added that Mr. Kissane, a West Point graduate, is of the same mold as Mr. Driscoll.
On Friday, Mr. Driscoll notified staff about the Justice Department’s efforts to collect the names of all F.B.I. personnel who worked on the Jan. 6 cases.
“I am one of those employees,” he wrote.
Indeed, Mr. Driscoll took part in the arrest of Samuel Fisher, an adherent of the QAnon conspiracy theory, in Manhattan two weeks after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.
F.B.I. agents found over a thousand rounds of ammunition and several weapons, including an illegally modified AR-15 rifle and machetes, in Mr. Fisher’s Upper East Side apartment and car. Among them was a “ghost gun,” which is unregistered and thus untraceable.
In 2022, Mr. Fisher was sentenced to three and a half years in prison after he pleaded guilty to a gun possession charge in Manhattan Supreme Court. He also pleaded guilty in federal court to illegally entering the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Mr. Fisher was pardoned by Mr. Trump.
All feels incredibly illiberal. I hope for the best that the oaths of office specific to these institutions hold.
Isn't the very reason that the puppets "need replacing" (according to the president) tell you that they are of the wrong (previous president's) political flavor?
Honest question, I'm not from US, but on the surface it just looks like more of the same thing that has always been happening? Except with way more media attention?
Then why did Fauci lie to Congress and got the Biden's pre-emptive pardon?
NB: I really disliked the preemptively pardoning. Like really really disliked it and wish it were not legal.
I also really hate it, but it's becoming more obvious with time that they to some degree were necessary in this case. Ideally they wouldn't be needed or possible, but Trump and his administration seem to have multiple axes to grind with anyone in the government not directly subserviant to him.
I think the hard part of enforcing the law is enforcing it equally, even towards those we love the most.
We're way past lofty ideals like equal application of the law. It's going to take a reconsideration of our social contract in order to live in a society where we once again protect the innocent and punish the guilty.
I agree with restorative justice, but the people using a law as a weapon do not so I hope they see the same mercy they show their victims.
"Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is part of the NIH, told Congress in May that the NIH "has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.""
which we know is a blatant lie - see NIH EcoHealth Alliance Wuhan grants (which even had the "Human Subjects Included" checkbox checked. As a bonus read on how they made there the coronavirus which was successfully infecting and killing mice engineered to have human cells).
See also https://oversight.house.gov/release/hearing-wrap-up-dr-fauci... and https://oversight.house.gov/release/hearing-wrap-up-dr-fauci...
You seem to think that any manipulation of a virus is "gain-of-function." The technical term that regulators use of "gain of function of concern." There's a specific definition of that term that was drawn up in the 2010s, and that's what NIH applies.
And btw https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285579/
" “gain of function research of concern,” includes the generation of viruses with properties that do not exist in nature."
So, even NIH defintion does cover Wuhan. So, Fauci lied. Blatantly. Even by NIH defintion.
And this
https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/documents/gain-of-function.pd...
"Gain-of-function studies, or research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease,"
The last link is exactly that 2014 document based on which the gain of function research was moved from US to in particular Wuhan. And Fauci was instrumental in that move.
Edit: to the commenters below who cares so much about the definition that Fauci uses - please do tell what is that magical definition which doesn't match even the NIH documents (see the links above).
> It was his professional duty to add to his answer that the gain of function they funded in Wuhan that the Congress was asking him about isn't fitting whatever narrow technical definition NIH uses.
No, it isn't. You would think a Senator in charge of regulating the NIH would ask one of his aides to explain to him before the session what "gain of function" means.
> yes, that old "i didn't have s-x with that woman".
Since you are alluding to Clinton impeachment, I would say people who voted for Trump or defend him lost any benefit of doubt they ever cared about respectability, morality or ethics of that situation. Or lying for that matter.
Why did Fauci raise the possibility of a lab leak on Feb 1, 2020, if he was trying to cover that possibility up?
Time and time again we see conspiratorial claims with nothing to back them up.
it is actually in the report of the subcommittee:
"Members questioned Dr. Fauci about his facilitation and promotion of a singular COVID-19 narrative, his clearly misleading statements before Congress and the public, ..."
and Biden pre-empively pardoned Fauci. So, what else do you need?
>Why did Fauci raise the possibility of a lab leak on Feb 1, 2020
He didn't. He was told in that meeting that it may be a lab leak, and he suppressed it then and after.
>Time and time again we see conspiratorial claims with nothing to back them up.
Interesting, the people arguing against me, like you for example, haven't provided any links/documents so far, where is i provided references and links to the government docs, reports, grants backing up my statements.
To me, at least.
But ye it usually happens to some extent: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-trump-burrowin...
To note, the president was only an active participant insofar as he asked people to remain calm and peaceful.
So this is in fact very different from how things normally work.
The challenge is that people are more loyal to their political parties than their political branches, and the Constitution is built to check and balance branches, not parties.
If they want to go through with a coup like this, let them do it in the courtrooms.
They're simply relying on a blitzkrieg of (often illegal) firing/purges, assuming that no-one will challenge them, or that any challenge will take so long that they're ineffective.
Purely anecdotally from seeing a small part of military-adjacent tech, while most definitely voted for Trump and some of them will be MAGA-converts, most of them actually belived in that mission and won't be aligned with a proper dictatorship. They'll have to play it very carefully, keep elections but rig them just enough to make the outcome inevitable, to keep these people able to convince themselves it's still a democracy, boiling the frog very slowly. It might be preferable for them to actually accelerate things and go full Putin, there'll be a lot more active resistance that way.
All the Europeans who have died revolting against totalitarian governments are rolling in their graves.
The US Constitution grants Congress, not the executive branch, the power to determine how the federal government’s money is spent.
Elon Musk’s team within the Executive Office of the President have reportedly gained full admin access to the payment system of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service at the Department of the Treasury, which is responsible for the majority of the federal government’s payments, and are using that access to prevent certain payments from being made. Among other things, they are also attempting to close down the US Agency for International Development, which was established and funded as an independent agency by an act of Congress.
With regards to the constitution specifically the power of the purse seems a little vague. In 1974 the Impoundment Control Act was passed as a response to, and to prevent, presidents from unilaterally impounding.
https://protectdemocracy.org/work/impoundment-threat-explain...
This is a very interesting way of saying "following the law."
I would encourage you to learn more about that day. Most people that were charged did not go into the building. And the few that did were literally waved in by police, including many being escorted around inside by police.
And no, being elected to a public office is no blank cheque to dismantle checks on that office by other branches of government.
Does that mean that the real coup happened when Trump picked the supreme court justices? Perhaps, but again it was very legal, and not particularly out of step from previous norms.
If you compare that to germany in the 1930s, a common example of a self-coup, you'll see some similarities but also large differences...
> The Reichstag building... caught fire... Hitler immediately accused the Communists of being the perpetrators... Using this justification, Hitler persuaded Hindenburg to enact the Reichstag Fire Decree. The decree abolished most civil liberties, including the right to speak, assemble, protest, and due process... the Nazis declared a state of emergency and began a violent crackdown against their political enemies... Hitler submitted a proposal to the Reichstag that if passed would immediately grant all legislative powers to the cabinet... allow Hitler's government to act without regard to the constitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933 (Edited for brevity)
As well as a stress test against half the voting population that thinks an authoritarian president is peachy and somehow patriotic.
It’s just that most of them have not read history and none of them have lived through war or fascism to understand what they are signing up for.
They will all learn their lesson.
So far so good…
so far so good…
How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land!"
People don't "learn their lesson". Accelerationism always fails. Suffering, fear and looming threats are what enable the rise of authoritarianism and autocracy, not what helps overcome them. Fascism is rarely overthrown by a popular revolt that establishes direct democracy and egalitarianism. It's usually overthrown by a military junta or gradually coalesces into an oligarchy that reintroduces the trappings of liberal democracy to placate the masses.
As much as the American right loves to call the Democrats "radical leftists" or "socialists", the Democrats have nothing to offer in response to the people's suffering. The Republicans can at least lie through populism: claiming to be opposed to "the swamp" while installing their own loyalists and family members in positions of government, claiming to fight the "coastal elites" while implementing the whims of billionaires, claiming to defend "freedom of speech" while prohibiting government agencies from using progressive terminology, etc etc. But the Democrats can't even do this because at best they can offer half-measures or compromises. They couldn't even pass the Green New Deal and now the Trump government keeps referring to it as if it had actually been implemented.
This isn't a uniquely American problem. The social democrats in Germany have recently come out in opposition to voting on initiating the process to investigate the far-right AfD party (which Elon Musk has been actively supporting btw, which is an unprecedent level of foreign influence) for qualifying for a trial to be banned as unconstitutional (i.e. roughly equivalent to proposing a grand jury with the outcome being a constitutional court trial being launched or not). Why? Because if they would participate in such a vote and support it, "all democratic parties" should support it but there's a good chance the conservative party would vote against or abstain and this would "hurt the democratic parties" by making them no longer unified in their opposition to the AfD - or that if the conservatives were to vote in favor, this might radicalise some of its supporters to vote for the AfD instead. Mind you, the conservative party has already repeatedly cooperated with the AfD and they have supported each others' proposals, although the conservative party is officially ruling out any potential coalition with them while incrementally adopting their rhetoric. The socdems are too concerned with protecting the optics of the system itself and maintaining decorum to directly attack a party that is fundamentally opposed to the principles underlying that system.
What an incredibly sharp phrasing there!
Your analysis overall seems really astute too, but what you just articulated there is too good. I almost want to try to compressing it even further -- what is needed most of all is short, concise rallying cries that draw attention and raise consciousness, and that's gotta be a great example of one.
I wonder what else could be said to really draw people's attention to this sort of thing, to try to achieve any sort of reform among liberals, to wake them up from centrism and complacency.
WTF? The Democrats are the ones with concrete offers to ease people's suffering. Literally. Stuff like Medicare for all.
For example, Clinton offered coal miners retraining and income support in order to ameliorate the inevitable. Trump offered empty impossible promises. People voted for the empty promises rather than the concrete reality. Coal miners lost their jobs without the support Clinton would have provided.
99% of economists were predicting recession during the multiple crises of the Biden term. 99% of economists were wrong because we had skilled leadership at the helm. How much suffering did that prevent?
No. Democrats have concrete offers. The Democrats don't. The Democrats had several opportunities to pass far-reaching reforms like Medicare For All but didn't.
There's a massive difference between the ideals of a few activist politicians running for office and the actual policy decisions of a government led by that party.
Also, I already acknowledged that the US handled the recession remarkably well. But that still doesn't change that generally things are pretty rough and "doing largely the same for 4 more years" isn't a very attractive position to the masses when the other guy is appealing to the base instincts of "strong man will fix problem" - especially in a cultural environment where "hard problems require hard solutions" (i.e. that morally repugnant actions are often necessary to help people in the long run) is often accepted without questions.
But better than everywhere else in the world. Virtually every other country did worse over the last 4 years than the US did.
> The Democrats had several opportunities to pass far-reaching reforms like Medicare For All but didn't.
They had 2 opportunities to bypass the Senate filibuster and pass far-reaching reforms. They chose to use those two opportunities to fight inflation and stabilize the economy.
It literally doesn't matter how much the Democrats have prevented things from being worse in the past because their messaging is what ultimately allowed Trump to win. Twice. This isn't the 1990s anymore. People don't want stable. People are sick of stable because what has been stabilized had already not been working for them before. There's been a massive, crippling redistribution of wealth and political power in all Western economies (and the former Eastern bloc but they were less subtle about it) from the people to the billionaire class. You can no longer pretend that's not happening. At least the Republicans had the good sense to actively lie and misdirect and continue to do so while said billionaires are desparately trying to dismantle the system before it can be turned against them.
Because:
A) It was all based on "vibes" and beliefs, not their own actual reality (the gap between "how well off are you personally" and "how do you think others are well off" was wild)
B) Voters lie and the economy was, like in 2016, the fig leaf for the true driver: egoism and cruelty. If Trump's tarriffs destroy their wellbeing, there will be no outcry, because "the cruelty is the point", to the point of self-harm as long as "the others" are harmed even more.
When you have billions to communicate, and people like Musk have a full global network to brain wash his ideas, obviously a lot of people might be wrongly convinced that they elected the president that defend freedom and efficiency of the institutions to improve their life.
Not realizing that Trump, Musk, are just selfish bastards defending these ideas but only for themselves.
Organizations are ongoing processes, constantly in flux, not structures erected in the past. Like a river, you can never step in the same organization twice. Like ghosts and money, they only exist in people's minds; they consist of belief in them, hyperstitiously.
The democracy the FBI is sworn to protect has turned on it. What is left for it to protect? The laws handed down from an older, wiser time? Perhaps the time of Senator McCarthy? Or Jim Crow? What if today's president pardons common criminals and today's Congress legalizes their crimes—will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws?
You can count on the FBI to protect itself, but never believe that what it is protecting is democracy.
Except the only thing that what makes them different from organized crime is also the shared belief in laws that form and direct them.
> will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws?
If they don't, i.e. if they start to openly pick and choose which laws are valid and which are not, the whole thing will unravel. Laws won't mean anything anymore, and then suddenly the president is just a random dude, the FBI is just a bunch of thugs with guns and suits, and USA is just words on a map.
You don't want to go there.
ah yes, the same way every major police department in the US has been functioning for most of living memory
They already did that under Biden.
> The democracy the FBI is sworn to protect has turned on it. What is left for it to protect? The laws handed down from an older, wiser time? Perhaps the time of Senator McCarthy? Or Jim Crow?
specifically mentions of McCarthy and Jim Crow, made me misunderstand this bit:
> What if today's president pardons common criminals and today's Congress legalizes their crimes—will the FBI continue to enforce yesterday's laws?
That is, the first part made me think of Bad Laws created by Bad People, and this made me parse the final question as: "What if today's president and Congress turn into Bad People and make Bad Laws, should the FBI enforce such Bad Laws, even when they're obviously just like Bad Laws from Bad People of the dark chapter of our past?".
The point I'm making is, yes, the FBI has to enforce law, good or bad, because that's the reason it exists. If it starts getting picky, it invalidates its own mandate.
Also, FBI as an organization is not an independent entity that sworn fealty to the government - it is a construct of the government. Therefore, if "The democracy the FBI is sworn to protect has turned on it", what the FBI should do, as an organization, is to lie down and take the beating, and allow itself to be disbanded. The FBI was created to protect democracy (in specific ways), has sworn to do it, so if the democracy decides it no longer needs the FBI, then the sworn duty of the FBI is to stop existing. For the FBI to do otherwise is to break the oath and invalidate its own existence.
(Now this applies to the organization. As for the people in it, they're also citizens with conscience, and they're free to work within the process to right what they see as morally wrong, and/or quit.)
So, from my perspective, the normative questions you're bringing up are sort of a distraction. I don't want to waste my emotional energy on praising or condemning FBI agents, which seems like the only possible outcome of the normative debate.
(My examples may not have been well chosen to avoid that debate, but I discarded many even worse ones.)
Of course each individual person in the organization can do anything they choose, within their physical and mental capabilities, and what they think they should do will probably influence what they will do; but what the organization as a whole can do is constrained by those individuals' ability to coordinate. (And what you think or I think they should do doesn't enter into it at all.)
And, from that coordination point of view, at least from an outside perspective, it's not obvious that it's capable of meaningful resistance beyond simple self-preservation.
It is the US institutions who have happily engaged in endless foreign wars over past several decades. They have also enacted low corporate taxation resulting in high stock prices but even larger wealth gap where few winners take all the profits.
- complete radicalisation of an entire congressional party against functional democracy
- complete politicisation of the entire federal government
- normalisation of just straight up lying to the Senate in confirmation hearings (RFK on everything, Patel on q anon)
- normalisation of just straight up lying during campaigns (no idea what Project 2025 is!)
- making it clear to every single ally of the US that the US cannot be trusted to not be a complete cock
- normalisation of pardoning thousands of criminals who did crimes on TV in your favour
- normalisation of Congress and the top level courts being completely and utterly unwilling to lift a finger to stop autocratic exercise of powers by the president
maybe the next president won't be a sociopath, but the above will still be true and maybe the one after will be.
To give an example of what the process felt like with another case I made the mistake of talking about (makes a better story than just the pure lies of the rfk conversation, where said family member just lied constantly and started making things up about bernie sanders):
- elon musk probably didn't do a nazi salute multiple times - and if he did it was misinterpreted - no i don't want to see the videos - and i don't care anyway
For context btw, this family member literally had their grandparents suffer under nazi occupation in ww2.
It's also wild that this family member has already actively been harmed by trump's policies including the forced RTO, and literally just ignores it. They just ignore painful examples when they're brought up, or claim it's all part of trump's plan and the only way it could possible have been done. Yes, as if it was just an inevitable occurrence like a natural disaster and thus not trump's fault.
Basically the analysis of anyone who already hated Trump and didn't vote for him. I see a lot of psuedo intellectual exercises in this thread that basically amount to trying to relitigate the election or sour grapes for having lost.
The acting head of the FBI is strongly against this and is resisting.[2]
So labor and management are both against this. It's the first real challenge to Trump's authoritarianism. Plus, most FBI agents have civil service appeals rights. They can fight back against arbitrary dismissal.
Misc. item: the tariff deal between the US and Mexico has something that the Trump administration hasn't mentioned - the US agreed to help clamp down on shipments of guns to Mexico. Mexico does not have easy access to guns in the way that the US does.[3]
[1] https://www.fbiaa.org/joint-letter-to-congress-on-the-fbi/
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/senior-fb...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_Mexico
However, isn't it a bit naive to presume the current administration would relinquish power and allow for a peaceful transfer of government in the end?
I hope I'm wrong but all the evidence and data is pointing to a decline of America and the American-led world order. What's more concerning is, as the economy and social climate continues to decline, people will be far less tolerant and accepting of each other. I'm concerned a lot of the horrible historical trends of the past will repeat.
A lot of things are happening that you just can't recover from, like at all. And some things, like relations with Canada and the EU may not recover for like a generation.
I suspect, history will look at the past few months as the time when the cold war was really won. I mean, even on HN, the majority were against the tiktok ban, if that isn't defeat, what is? Imagine not banning propaganda radio from Russia and china during the cold war. The most crucial victory America's enemies achieved is convincing American voters they're no longer their enemies. American voters mostly think it's a fight between governments or politicians, they don't get that the hostility includes the day to day people of the nations involved.
The question really (to me at least) is, is the war already lost and we just need time to process the loss? or can it still be fought? I don't know how, it will be decades of trying to avoid an actual civil war, can America really withstand being torn apart, when even something like banning tiktok is impossible?
I can understand how looking at the greatness of this nation and its might it can be difficult to imagine it's fall and decimation. can congress and the supreme court put aside their own short-term gains to save their country? Will states continue to want to be part of the union, despite disaster aids being withheld and American citizens being deported (yes, this is happening)?
And who would come after trump, now that trump has paved the way? it will take him his entire term fully gutting the government and lining up the military. I suspect his replacement won't need votes.
And to say that everyone who voted for him "wanted him" is a stretch.
These are famous problems with most voting systems, especially the USA's.
I.e. the parent is correct.