There is no crisis in the US that results in canceled elections
The same guy that told the government of Georgia to add 10,000 votes to his total so he'd win.
The same guy that received 0 punishment for either action.
Why wouldn't he try something for the mid-terms?
Volunteer doing what? Donate to what? Boycott what with what demands? What's the most successful boycott in your estimation? I can only really think of buses in Montgomery and the Swadeshi movement in India, but even that started in like the 1910s and they didn't get independence until 1947 and who knows how much it mattered. If there were a big crank somewhere and you could guarantee me that turning it gives better than 50% odds that the world gets better in the ways I consider better, I'd be turning the crank. We'd all be turning the crank! But what's the crank?
As for a recent successful boycott, see Disney Plus cancellations in response to Jimmy Kimmel being taken off the air.
here are some concrete things I can think of: - don't like that Sam Altman is aligned with the regime? boycott chatgpt, it fell from the top spot in the app store and Sam Altman felt forced to address the controversy to his employees, it wouldn't take much more to turn the tide and other companies take notice and be disinclined to do similar - don't like that your elected representative was mum on the Iran war? write them an email, call their office - think that a candidate is best chance at change? donate to their campaign - show up at the next No Kings protest, politicians take notice of the coverage and what people are mad about
If you are waiting for a guarantee your actions will affect change I can't help you, but I can guarantee doing nothing won't.
Trump is not all powerful, unless everybody gives up their power. Not everybody is as weak as the SV elite, and the failures of Big Law and others that bent the knee were very instructive to everybody else. Bowing down to the king makes you his servant, but it does not protect you in any way.
But there's not enough of them. Even for Minneapolis, a mid-size city. There might be a few targeted attacks, lots of voter intimidation, but the US is a very big place, and the ranks are too small, and their popularity is tiny compared to other authoritarian regimes.
It's going to be ugly, maybe really really ugly with violence and innocent voters hurt, but the forces of democracy will win out. Minneapolis shows that there's a strong backbone to this country still, even if some swing voters were tricked.
Now imagine you're a voter who shows any signal of potentially being Dem-aligned - for example a slightly darker complexion, or maybe dyed hair. On your way to the polling station, masked ICE goons "scan your face" with their AI apps, and the apps tell them you're illegal, so they put you into a van and drive you to a holding facility.
What recourse do you have? Even if they let you go the next day, you've lost your vote. And that's not a given, what if they hold you for weeks or months? How many people have others who depend on them, so they can't risk this?
I don't mean to sound dramatic, but if anything like this happens (and there's basically no way it won't) the fascist takeover is complete, and your only recourse left is civil war.
and
> but the federal government has no direct control over any of the voting processes
Coming soon, to polling booths near you, "random" ICE activity.
The corruption competence of this body of actors is as impressive as it is horrific.
Civil war? Elections. WWII? Elections. Covid? Elections.
If so, why do you think this is not relevant to this particular empire at this particular time?
That doesn't mean all extant empires are currently actively falling, and soon, will have fallen.
The US is less divided now than it was during the Civil War, which it survived. Why would it be more likely to fall now than then?
We have the highest concentration of weapons per capita in the world and a deeply ingrained expectation of voting. In a very dark humor sort of way it would be absolutely hilarious if someone was stupid enough to attempt to intervene in the process.
We might go down in flames but you can be absolutely certain we'll have collectively agreed to light them ourselves.
Sure, but there's mechanism in real life that allows cancelling elections like sending your newly funded ICE goons to polling places. Ideally everyone follows the constitution but in reality (even looking at past administrations) there's nothing stopping the executive from taking an action and saying "oops guess we'll let the courts figure it out!"
I could see Trump trying this, but I also can see dozens of other people or groups, some richer, more powerful, more competent, and more ruthless than Trump, just waiting in the wings for the guardrails to come off to make a play to rule the territory of the former United States. If he tries and succeeds at this it's open-season. It's not a Trump dictatorship, it's a civil war, akin to the Chinese Civil War after the emperor fell or the Syrian civil war after the Arab Spring.
Free elections, on the other hand...
> Why worry about how the midterms, if you can create a situation where elections cannot be held at all...
Lincoln says, "With malice toward none, with charity for all"
Trump is the exact opposite of Lincoln being "With malice towards all, with charity for none"
The irony of the situation is that they are from the same party.
He believed that the greatest danger to America came from within, warning that if the nation faltered, it would be due to self-destruction rather than external forces
Lincoln's famous speech: , "At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
Lincoln was ahead of his time and might as well have predicted something like Trump.
Start to worry of the Republicans start talking about expanding the Supreme Court to add their own to it
Can't? They already did.