Trump's attacks on universities get darker, with shadows reaching our shores | Hacker News Reader

Trump's attacks on universities get darker, with shadows reaching our shores

christinapagel.substack.com

235 pointsnickcotter160 comments

USA, the land of unlimited possibilities...of how to get detained without a process...for expressing opinions...by the government repating that we have finally free speach and the dark ages are gone...while revisiting history to avoid dangerous words such as a 'women'...

And I've thought our wana-be-authorian politicians are greates idiots of all, but there seems to be running some kind of global world competion to find them and let them ruin their countries.

The politicians aren't idiots, they don't actually believe anything they say.

The idiots are the people whose support they politicians are courting.

whether you pretend to be an idiot and do idiotic things or are an idiot and do idiotic things doesn’t matter, the outcome is the same.

Matter of fact pretending to be an idiot and doing idiotic things might be worse cause you know better, an idiot’s excuse would be that that’s all they know to do.

This was true 8 years ago. Now I wouldn't be so sure about it anymore. I wouldn't make a bet that there isn't a single Republican out there who truly believes in some of the crazy stuff they are saying.

But of course the survival of crazy policies hinges on people willing to elect politicians who will implement them. And that in turn hinges on how well you disinform them.

The recent signal leak shows that they really do believe this stuff. insert american flag and prayer emojis

The vice president writing they were going to pray makes me think the editor of the Atlantic was intentionally added to the chat.

I don’t see how it could be believable that Vance is actually religious and isn’t just using it as a way to get votes.

For what purpose? And if it was just for that, why did they also share classified information?

Maybe publicity? The group in charge knows they can do no wrong, and I would bet their voters liked the rhetoric in the chat. Maybe they use controversy as a tool to keep people distracted (or even lead them to check out).

Agreed, absolutely everything done needs to be viewed through the lens of what will the ratings/viewership be. Everything makes more sense. Just think of the public spectacle, interviewing world leaders in the pulpit at the Whitehouse for example. It's a live TV show.

The question is what consequences will it have. I have only seen good outcomes for the administration from the chat debacle. It is worrying, this could have led to a VP resigning.

The "balling out Europe" stuff again. Their goal is to ultimately normalise the idea that the EU is an enemy in advance of the Greenland invasion. The leaking of clarified information doesn't matter because A) US service personal are expendable and B) the involvement in Yemen is now only to keep up appearances of being allied to Saudi Arabia who will in the long term also get the same treatment as the EU because their fuel output competes with US/Russia.

I find it very believable that he became legitimately convinced of whatever odd sect Peter Thiel created that justifies extreme wealth hording, because it brought him into Peter Thiel's orbit which has clearly served him well.

People are really, really good at believing things that benefit themselves.

Well they have completely redefined what Christianity is, so in a way it doesn't surprise me that they need/use this redefined religion to provide "spiritual" comfort while performing these acts.

Yes the cynicism is there, but the "praying" is the means by which the subject performing the acts is able to feel authentic while performing them.

Also they're all performing for each other, too.

Some of them are. Have you ever heard anything said by the current US president? It's just incoherent rambling.

Then we also have the Signal chat, and even biographies and books by some of the others that makes it clear done of these people are genuinely dumb as fuck.

> Have you ever heard anything said by the current US president? It's just incoherent rambling.

Which is ironic considering all we heard from MAGA/Fox for the last 4 years is that Biden was incoherent and senile.

From the outside they both come across as incompetent and senile and it's hard to believe those are really the people at the top.

It doesn't really matter if Biden was a drooling vegetable, if his appointments were competent at doing their jobs.

These guys are, sadly competent at... Well, a few things, but none of them include 'good governance'.

It did matter in the election.

It’s hard for me to consider a successful propaganda campaign as ironic. The word you’re looking for is either hypocritical or malicious.

Most of what you said applies to the UK as well, for what it's worth.

It really doesn't, that's Fox news level of propaganda.

Does the UK have an issue with over-policing of twitter? Absolutely it does.

Are the tightening of protest laws concerning? Yes, very much so.

But it's nothing like the rhetoric and destruction of due process happening in the USA.

Does it now, dear whatabouter?

People are getting arrested and deported with no due process for expressing opinions? The UK government is rewriting history to remove women and gays?

No, you're just confusing the existence of hate crimes in UK law, and maybe the dumb migrant detention in Rwanda scheme (which has since been cancelled), both of which have due process, are public, and ridiculous to compare.

You missed the first word of my comment.

Additionally, yeah there have been "social media offenses" in the recent years. Individuals have been arrested for comments made on social media platforms. Try it out. Communications Act 2003 come to mind.

Are people not entitled to lawyers in the US?

In any case, there is authority overreach in both countries (and more).

While there is legitimate debate over how authoritarian some policies in Australia or the UK might be in the past few years, these measures operate within established legal frameworks, with judicial oversight and public scrutiny. Even if you view them as overly restrictive, they don't stem from a single "contrarian" movement with a coordinated political agenda. Moreover, neither government is rewriting history to erase specific groups. The fact that hate-speech or migration laws exist doesn’t equate to people being arrested or deported without due process, nor does it imply some monolithic campaign to censor or remove entire populations from the record.

You are right, the UK adores mass migration, look around larger cities, such as London or Birmingham. :)

If the UK didn’t want immigrants, they shouldn’t have colonized half the world and took their stuff

It's complicated. Most traditional Brits don't want that but a lot of the asians are UK citizens and bring in brides / grooms from asia to marry so the numbers double roughly each generation.

Maybe as India gets richer and the UK economy flatlines they'll stop doing that.

Indians are definitely are issue, but so are the influx of people from Africa. It is worth looking at videos of these cities and how much they have changed over the course of years because of immigration. The city is trashed, quite literally. Trash everywhere you go.

> while revisiting history to avoid dangerous words such as a 'women'...

What happened? I missed that (I'm not ironic, I would really like to know what else they did).

I suspect this refers to the list of words that are used to filter out and likely cancel or block various grants. Those words are about what the current US government considers DEI, but they are ridiculously broad and include words like "woman".

I know people who have had to defend their grant-funded research using terms like “inclusion” (geology) or “diversity” (of samples).

Growing up at the end of the Cold War with basically every major political figure decrying the USSR’s political apparatchiks monitoring everything, I never expected that to happen here but having watched the right’s embrace of Orban it wasn’t a surprise by the time it happened. The guys who brought us “freedom fries” crowded everyone else out of the party.

Projects are being killed across the government for exactly this reason. If anything it's even dumber than it sounds. If any word in a project or department title string matches a list of common terms it can get killed with zero investigation or recourse. Billions of dollars worth of research and work have already been destroyed in this way and it's only getting worse.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...

I say without any hyperbole that what we're witnessing is the end of American empire.

So-called "accelerationists" are excited about this. But empires take a long time to die and go out with a bang rather than just fading peacefully into history.

What we're witnessing with universities and the illegal black-bagging of legal visitors and permanent residents is an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment. Only the McCarthy era probably comes close. We are very much in the era of thoughtcrime [1].

Fascism flames out because when loyalty is the only thing that matters, the administration turns into sycophantic morons. The courts won't save us. They've long since been subverted, a key pillar of the 50+ year Republican Project. There is no serious opposition to any of this.

There is no safe haven from this either. It's not Europe. Just look at the elections and political momentum in the UK, France, Germany and Hungary.

What's sad is the number of people who champion this as if it's going to make their lives any better. But cruelty, revenge and repression is the point. There are an awful lot of people who have legitimate grievances about the destruction of their standard of living, their material conditions. Yet nobody has done anything to address those concerns.

Things are going to get very, very bad.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime

The US is in a far worse state than those countries you listed sans Hungary. What doesn’t help of course is that the US seems determined to export American fascism back over the Atlantic.

Anyone who might dismiss this as being just a few isolated cases — or who think it is desirable to just remove political opponents from the equation — should think long and hard about what it will actually take to maintain this kind of “criminalisation of dissent” over the long term… escalation is inevitable.

There is clearly an intentional narrative being pushed that defines anyone who disagrees with the current administration’s ideology as an enemy who should be punished. Even if the risk to any one person is currently relatively small, just the threat itself will have profound effects on individual’s decisions.

A massive brain drain seems inevitable but such a war on free speech will also radicalise people, even if it starts only in whispers. That will likely necessitate further oppressive measures to “stamp it out” and so forth, creating a vicious cycle. With each iteration the stakes increase, justifying increasingly violent measures & countermeasures on both sides, further increasing the consequences of — and the need avoid — actually being held accountable for those actions…

What is a Culture War?

I'm concerned about this as well. If this keeps progressing, we could see a monoculture develop among elite institutions and media where the shots are being called by three letter agencies. We could get to a place where federal agencies are working directly with social media companies to coordinate censorship of dissent and set speech guidelines. If they don't oblige they'll be threatened with arbitrary enforcement and getting dragged out in front of Congress.

Eventually there could be an entire political capture of these social media companies, universities, journalists, NGOS etc where 90%+ of its employees subscribe to one political party .

But it gets even worse. If this continues we could see activist judges try to throw political rivals in jail. They would even change the law in order to try to get them to go to prison, combining misdemeanors into felonies.

And this says nothing about the rhetoric. By casting political opponents as villains, this invites assassination attempts and general lawlessness to intimidate people perceived as not falling in line. By this point the media will be complicit so there will be no investigation into these activities. Even a failed assassination attempt would be at most a few day story with no reporting on motive or coordination.

I too am very concerned about all of this.

So the final solution is a masked police force abducting people off the streets and rushing them onto a flight to a death camp in El Salvador?

I get you are being cute, but let's be real. Nothing "the left" did compares to this.

"Let's do all of this, but much worse, with more corruption, and more violently" is a weird response to perceived political grievances. Like how Leninist critiques of the Russian monarchy and subsequent revolution lead to a system at least as bad as that of the Tsar.

If you want to deconstruct the status quo, make sure that your outcomes will be actually be better for you. Even Stalin ended up as a victim of his regime at the end of days, his physician ending up arrested and being interrogated while his health declined.

I don’t quite recall Biden storming the Capitol, phoning politicians to “find votes,” and sending in a slate of fake electors to subvert the democratic process. But sure, the “activist judges” and their “lawfare” are the real problem here. Not, say, Judge Cannon punting and deferring rock-solid cases without precedent until it’s too late.

Fucking horseshit.

> where federal agencies are working directly with social media companies

When did this happen? If you're referring to the "Twitter files", then you're take on this is very misinformed and the government did not coerce Twitter to suppress the laptop story. It was even found that Republicans submitted so many similar requests that Twitter had to keep a special database to track those requests.

The right wing has a weird persecution complex while they have the biggest cable news network in the US (Fox News), just got control of all three branches of government, and had a billionaire buy Twitter for them to help their guy win.

Will you only be satisfied if everyone agrees with you and drinks the Trump kool-aid? Also note that the "other" political party you're referring to didn't deny the election results and try to overthrow the government.

There is an old documentary called "the Revolution will not be Televised" about the Chavez presidency in Venezuela. If you watch it you will come away feeling that Chavez was treated pretty unfairly by the rightist media and "deep state" who attempted to overthrow his Presidency.

But even if that is true, it is also true that Chavez took many actions to centralize power, erode democratic safeguards in the Constitution, control the media and destroy the opposition parties. Every step was justified by pointing to the horrible rightist conspiracy against Chavez. But the end result was a dictatorship and the absolute ruin of the Venezuelan state.

This is normal for dictators. Many cast themselves as victims. Stalin was pressed on all sides by Capitalists, Kulaks, and Trotskyists. Hitler, of course, by Jews and Communists. Whether the accusations are pure fantasy or rooted in some level of real persecution of the movement, it is very important not to allow them to be used to justify the establishment of tyranny.

All of this seems to borrow ideas from Putin's playbook. I never realized how strong of an appetite certain segment of US population has for authoritarianism.

There was a survey done recently and the GOP is about as rightwing and authoritarian in outlook as the Russians.

Miles beyond most other right wing parties. https://on.ft.com/4iqh3qA

US in general seems to be getting real dark real fast.

Definitely preferred the old somewhat comical "We're the only country with freedom" vibe they had going.

Right? What happened to "they hate us for our freedom"?

> What happened to "they hate us for our freedom"?

The hate is still there, but the "they" is now Trump/GOP and friends.

Lots of politically-right folks in the US have been a fan Hungary's Orban for a while now:

* https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-donald-tru...

* https://newrepublic.com/article/175368/why-republicans-love-...

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/10/hungary-vikt...

* https://time.com/6993483/budapest-playbook-orban-trump/

ACOUP was right it seems. Not only can Bret dissect siege warfare in popular culture, he was capable of seeing the obvious.

https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...

Three professors from Yale who study fascism are leaving to go to the University of Toronto (Canada):

* https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/03/27/three-prominent-ya...

Another related article, three Yale professors are leaving for Canada: https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/28/us/yale-university-scholars-t...

Brain drain is happening in real time.

Related: "as part of the Brains for Brussels initiative, VUB aims to actively attract American professors looking to relocate"

https://www.brusselstimes.com/1490737/brussels-university-vu...

The three professors:

https://history.yale.edu/people/timothy-snyder

https://history.yale.edu/people/marci-shore

https://philosophy.yale.edu/profile/jason-stanley

Surely a brain drain of liberal arts professors is part of the plan though? Will be interesting to see engineers/pharma/mathematicians also leave. US doesn’t look like a nice place to be in the next few years so perhaps they will.

Those are history professors though. I don't want to disparage other lib arts, but the historians are at least looking at what has happened when countries become fascist states. Could they have recognised all the warning signs?

Snyder was regularly posted on HN on his subject matter. HN used to consider him someone worth reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10210327 ("Understanding Hitler’s Anti-Semitism (theatlantic.com)" (2015), 59 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41583725 ("Timothy Snyder on How the Collapse of the Soviet Union Took America by Surprise (lithub.com)" (2024), 87 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33104723 ("How does the Russo-Ukrainian War end? (snyder.substack.com)" (2022), 88 comments)

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=timothy%20snyder

And a few more here (Algolia search censors things that were flagged),

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=snyder.substack.com

Yep, it’s an interesting social experiment. USA is becoming like Russia, with fake democracy and robber baron oligarchy that does whatever it wants. Many people are going to be OK with it, as long as they think it benefits them personally. But I’m not sure many in academia will be among those.

I bet China, India and EU will soon overtake America in sciences. Made in America may yet become the new made in Bangladesh.

If Trump and his intellectual descendants stay in power, it is very likely they take Canada eventually, probably starting with Alberta.

Fun fact, the leader of Alberta is hanging around Trump and others in his orbit a ton and having a generally great time. That isn't a coincidence:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/article/danielle-smith-has-g...

Are you following events and making highly speculative judgements or can you see evidence this is the direction Trump is headed?

Its just crazy. Are they seriously going to bully current allies and start wars with them?

> Are you following events and making highly speculative judgements or can you see evidence this is the direction Trump is headed?

Here is a recent New York Times major article titled: "How Trump’s ‘51st State’ Canada Talk Came to Be Seen as Deadly Serious"

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/world/canada/trump-trudea...

Here is NBC News headline:

"Trump's quest to conquer Canada is confusing everyone: President Donald Trump increasingly links a trade war to his push to annex America's northern neighbor."

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-quest-co...

The underlying issue is that it makes sense from a long-term economic standpoint if you ignore everything else. Canada has tons of resources and even more land which will get more valuable as the world warms. Argicultural regions may shift northward if there is significant warming and that could hurt the US and benefit Canada. So strategically there is logic.

The main complicating factor is that Trump can be quite erratic in his views, so it may just shift off of his plate and he focuses on something else if we are lucky.

Come to Europe and join your local army reserve! Hard for non citizens though.

There's always the French foreign legion. Ukraine has one too.

I do not really understand this line of thought of USA invading Canada. What’s in it for them? Canada isn’t some helpless third world with oil that they can exploit, Canada can and will retaliate.

> Canada isn’t some helpless third world with oil that they can exploit, Canada can and will retaliate

Canada can retaliate in a trade war, but if it is real annexation/invasion, Canada cannot effectively fight back. It would be a walk in the park for the US. We do not have the military resources, our popular is 1/10 the US, and our weapons are mostly supplied by the US, so they may not even work in a real war. And unlike with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, no one is coming to our aid.

Also the US would likely do it incrementally and start with a friendly province like Alberta, where a significant minority may even welcome it.

I don't understand why we haven't yet created an alliance of civilized Western countries? Like NATO, just without the US?

US will withdraw from NATO, Trump has wanted this since '87

Third world countries unironically have bigger militaries than Canada.

Certainly Iraq pre-invasion made them look like a pushover!

That's not to say that invading would be painless, but let's not pretend that Canada would have a chance.

Contiguity on the map. (Yes, really.) Empire-building.

I wouldn't worry about that. Alberta had a pretty close election, and if their current premier Danielle Smith even hinted at the proposition of joining the US she would never win another election again. Not to mention that the federal government of Canada would also have to be on board for a province to seperate.

And yet, Carrie Lam did sell out Hong Kong to Chinese annexation, and was silent as student protest leaders were black-bagged and dragged off to the mainland for torturing. Her approval rating at that point bottomed out in the single digits; but that is what she did.

Not every politician is motivated solely by winning one more election.

If US annexation of Canada started to look like a fait accompli, and Trump was threatening terrible retributions for anyone who resisted him—which politicians would resist, and which would become Carrie Lams, or Pétains?

> Not to mention that the federal government of Canada would also have to be on board for a province to seperate.

You may be right about the other aspects, but "annexation", which Trump has proposed, isn't a negotiated thing, it is something that is forced.

Economic force wouldn't be enough, so I'm guessing you mean military.

The idea of the US going to war with Canada is seriously stupid. Canada has fought beside the US military. There are deep ties between the countries that go much deeper than trade, many close friendships, and family connections across the border.

The US will not start a war with Canada, despite what Trump may make you think.

Next up: Trump signing an executive order forbidding top level academics to leave US soil ? Or maybe Russian style: we'll see an increase of mysterious accidents and suicides amongst high profile dissidents?

If they are doing this to non-citizens, it is a matter of time until they start doing it to citizens as well. Soon it will be stripping naturalized citizenship (which they have floated already). After that, they will just lock up native born citizens for frivolous reasons.

Exactly. Once due process is removed from non-citizens, they can arrest whoever they want, claim they are non-citizens, then prevent them the due process to prove otherwise.

Or really, there is very little difference between trampling the constitutional rights of naturalized citizens vs. natural born citizens.

If the judicial branch chooses not to check that power for partisan reasons, they will continue not to check that power as they exercise it more.

Sounds like they are testing an argument about jurisdiction now. US citizens are likely next.

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/an-admi...

> which they have floated already

I would say it's well past 'floating'.

He's already signed the EO to end it, and now it's up to SCOTUS. This is like saying someone is floating the idea of getting a pizza, when they're in the store, pie in hand, waiting for the payment to clear.

And if you're on a foreign student on visa, you better not write anything critical of federal policy, as otherwise you might be arrested on the street; surveillance video:

* https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/federal-immigration-aut...

We are in an extremely shameful state.

No, this is winning and completely fine if you go down a path of mental and legal gymnastics. The argument now is that non-citizens (even permanent residents) are a different class of people that the bill of rights doesn't apply to.

Meanwhile frauds like Trevor Milton get pardoned. Milton donated 1.5 million to the Trump campaign and his lawyer is the brother of the Attorney General, which I'm sure was not a coincidence. Milton was on Team Trump. I don't care that much about Milton -- he's just one of many fraudsters who got away with it -- but it's the contrast here that's so shocking: if you support Trump he will bail you out even if you're a criminal but if you're critical of Trump he will try to destroy you.

In earlier biographies Trump bragged about his vengeful nature. How he would gladly bear a grudge for a decade if that would allow him to finally get even. To Trump winning is justice. He fantasizes about destroying any FBI agent that had the audacity to investigate him. And any judge that found him guilty. Or any politician that voted for his impeachment. Canada and Europe have mocked Trump for decades, but who's laughing now?

Vengeance seem so old-fashioned. Most of us don't seek vengeance or bear grudges. But to Trump getting even -- winning -- is everything.

> Even a 1% chance of being denied entry or shipped to a detention centre is too high.

Yes. As someone else remarked online, there is a world of difference between an effectively zero chance of this terrible outcome, and a non-zero chance.

It's a change in kind not in degree, and people will react to that.

The first amendment is worth fighting for.

The constitution is worth fighting for. All of it.

Protests need to be taking place. This isn't a bi partisan issue but a constitutional crisis that will destroy our country if we do not overturn these illegal EOs.

April 5th come support the national protest.

And he was already president once. It's not like he was a champion of free speech the first time around...

And he was convicted of 34 felonies...

... in a kangaroo court in New York that is under appeal where Trump is certain to win.

> in a kangaroo court

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

The first time he was president his administration was staffed mostly with legacy GOP leadership. He also hadn't yet stuffed the federal courts with goons. This meant that he got pushback for some of his worst authoritarian impulses (certainly not all of them, but some).

Now the administration is staffed entirely with maga loyalists and Trump has appointed a substantial portion of the entire federal judiciary, up to creating a supermajority in the supreme court. The barriers are gone.

So now we get the white house deliberately messaging the suffering of others. Kristi Noem in front of prisoners in El Salvador. Tweets of people in shackles or AI images of people weeping while being arrested, presented to the glee of adoring fans. "We love hurting these people" is the message.

It’s a sad time to be American.

Not for everyone.

Some were tired of the media ignoring stories like the Biden laptop story.

Others wanted more details on Hunters $500k no show Ukrainian job. Or disliked that Trump was tried on novel charges.

Personally, I think the way Hollywood has been weaponized is worth overthrowing. That’s a giant propaganda machine.

Institutions like NPR, which had 87 directors that are Democrats and no Republicans. Doesn’t seem right, does it?

So not everybody is alarmed. It’s only dark if you’re on one side of the political spectrum.

> Some were tired of the media ignoring stories like the Biden laptop story.

The endless litigation in the laptop case against Hunter Biden wasn't enough? Every media company must also cover it if MAGA says so?

> Others wanted more details on Hunters $500k no show Ukrainian job

Hunter Biden does not and has not held any position in public office, but regardless a House Republican investigation into the Biden family found no wrongdoing[0].

I'm sorry that you feel persecuted when your side just got control of all three branches of government, had the richest man in the world buy Twitter to help you win, and also controls the largest cable news network in the country.

[0]: https://archive.is/SAkcs

> The endless litigation in the laptop case against Hunter Biden wasn't enough? Every media company must also cover it if MAGA says so?

The story was suppressed at the FBI's insistence until after the election. They were spreading that it was Russian disinformation to ensure it wouldn't harm the Democrats, including getting social media sites to remove posts about it.

What do you mean the story was suppressed by the FBI? Are you referring to the Twitter files which didn't find that the government coerced any social media companies and that Republicans were submitting the same requests?

Here: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/in-the-news/facebook-execs...

Ah okay, so they wrote a strongly worded letter that said they couldn't confirm it was disinformation but that it had the signs of a disinformation campaign? So, they didn't threaten punishment or coerce these companies into doing it? Is that correct? You also didn't address the part where Republicans submitted many similar "censorship" requests that they had to keep a special database.

> "We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not, and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement—just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case," the letter said.[0]

> called up Twitter in the early morning hours of September 9, 2019, officials had what they believed was a serious issue to report: Famous model Chrissy Teigen had just called President Donald Trump “a pussy ass bitch” on Twitter — and the White House wanted the tweet to come down.[1]

> That exchange — revealed during Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee hearing on Twitter by Rep. Gerry Connolly — and others like it are nowhere to be found in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” releases, which have focused almost exclusively on requests from Democrats and the feds to the social media company. The newly empowered Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now devoting significant resources and time to investigating this supposed “collusion” between liberal politicians and Twitter.[1]

[0]: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9...

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/115286/documents/...

Come now - the Biden laptop story wasn't all that old that you have conveniently forgotten the 51 senior intelligence officers coordinated with the Biden campaign and explicitly stated that the nypost story "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation" ? Some of them were active CIA contractors. Your great Adam Schiff even went on CNN saying that this smear campaign comes from the Kremlin and that Kremlin is assisting Trump.

Taxpayer funded Politico also went live with headlines "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say".

The reveal was shut down fast by the Biden white-house.

https://intelligence.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Docu...

"Furthermore, officials within the CIA recognized at the time that the Hunter Biden statement was political and would hurt the Agency. The signatories’ decision to leverage their former intelligence community titles to promote a narrative about foreign election interference improperly embroiled the Agency in domestic politics. This report underscores the potential dangers of a politicized intelligence community."

The point is that the government didn't force these companies to take down the content. That, coupled with the endless legal witch hunts against Hunter Biden should be sufficient enough for Republicans but I guess it isn't. This story never dies for some reason.

You'll never see me defending our intelligence apparatus and I agree that it's bad they involved themselves. But, government agents can submit strongly worded letters all they want. It doesn't mean anything.

The FBI even explicitly went to facebook and said you need to be aware of Russian misinformation and this story "fit the pattern". Did you really need the govt intelligence apparatus to hold a gun to media heads ? Things don't work that way as you well know - they all need plausible denial.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532

Something that will likely hopefully change your position:

Chat logs, published just this Tuesday by the House Judiciary Committee on X, show that the gag order extended to an FBI analyst who attempted to alert social media companies that the laptop was authentic—before these companies moved to censor the story’s spread.

Plese read the thread at: https://x.com/intent/like?tweet_id=1907098412652052870

Nutshell: So, the FBI under Biden stated that the laptop story had all the signs of a Russian misinformation op. When an agent wanted to correct the record and mention that the laptop was genuine, he was made to shut up. If this isn't explicit partisan interference during an election period, the there is no standard of evidence that will convince you.

flagged. hackernews continues to submit to censorship

I look at Trump's popularity and it is still quite high. So while it may seem dark to some, generally it isn't bothering most Americans that much. Thus it is likely to continue and progress.

What is next?

- Maybe punish citizens for their views that do not align with the state sanctioned perspective, rather than just Green Card and immigrants. In this case, I expect some type of black list that deals economic damage to those on it. I can imagine some type of wide ranging social media bans for those on the list.

- Further erode the rule of law and empower the president as a unity power. Or alternatively marketed, deal with corrupt judges who want to upend the will of a democratically elected leader.

This play book has happened so many times recently, Putin in Russia, Netanyahu is doing it in Israel right now, Erdoğan in Turkey.

It seems this is where the US is headed and I do not see any off ramps in the need term.

> Thus it is likely to continue and progress.

Legitimately people are asking for a King. Right wing, supposed to be ultra-Americans are asking for a king.

As long as he promises to make their bank accounts grow, and make their perceived enemies suffer, they want a king.

I am absolutely astounded by what's going on around me right now

Is there a chance of a civil war, or are the royalists in the majority and will win anyway, so no one will dare?

There is zero chance of a civil war. That would require entire states, not just citizens.

Republican state governors and legislators have drank the Trump Kool aid, Democrats need trump to run against to stay in office.

The people are fat and lazy and either comfortable or uncomfortable enough not to have spare time.

It's a fucking train wreck. Nothing means anything and everything is bullshit.

They are asking for violence against their enemies. Some of the poorest people I know are huge Trump supporters.

So long as he hurts the right people, they love him.

It's because they blame their current status on "the other". Why can't they get a job? Because a foreigner "stole" it. Why is government aid failing to keep up? Because the bad people that don't deserve it are draining their deserved benefit.

But further, their religious texts say times will get tough before their Messiah comes back, so if Trump makes them personally suffer "well, hopefully Jesus will be back soon".

> As long as he promises to make their bank accounts grow, and make their perceived enemies suffer, they want a king.

They have given up on the "make their bank accounts grow" thing. The tariff tax and stock market sliding down doesn't appear to bother them. Neither does the fact that he promised to make their groceries cheaper in one day. And the opposite is happening.

Making the perceived enemies suffer is the big thing. "I may not have enough to feed my family, but if you make marginalized people I don't like suffer, you have my support."

I’m in a solidly red state. Nobody is asking for that.

What they want is mostly fair representation in media, entertainment, and politics. Look no further than Saturday Night Live to understand how conservatives are misrepresented and liberals are given a free pass. Fix that and people will generally be more satisfied.

Reddit and Hackernews tend to think this crowd (liberal latte-drinking Macbook developer) represents the general population.

I see a lot more 'Reddit/Hackernews people think' generalization than the reverse. The folks you're describing mostly just share their opinions—they're not usually claiming to speak for or define everyone else, like you un-ironically seem to be doing here.

> I look at Trump's popularity and it is still quite high.

Yes, but it is shifting. The recent special elections are good data points, though special elections draw very motivated voters.

To your point, I think media bans will be next (Trump has floated many times). If they can ban all media except Fox and X, MAGAs will be able to lie with impunity continuing to control the narrative.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/27/demo...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/gop-anxiety-persi...

It’s also true that the Democratic Party is at record levels of unpopularity. Only 7% are very happy with the party.

Good point. The Democratic Party has a ton of issues with platform and messaging. But, I would vote for them over any MAGA person at this point and I think the polls/special elections are starting to show that shift at scale.

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