Summary
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged countering the Trump administration’s policies by resisting at every turn, arguing that its incompetence makes it vulnerable.
Her remarks followed chaos caused by a rescinded executive order that temporarily shut down Medicaid portals nationwide.
She encouraged activists to take offline action, citing ongoing mobilization efforts.
Her strategy focuses on making governance difficult for Trump, calling his administration “dangerous and cruel” but also “shockingly dim.”
I’ve said it before, the Democrats need to take pieces out of the Republican playbook and stonewall the GOP at every opportunity. The problem is that they Democratic party is really a coalition, whereas the modern Republicans are a hierarchy, so getting everyone to lock shields and advance is damn near impossible. Especially since establishment “centrist” Dems are just Republicans from the 80s and unfortunately they’re the ones calling the shots. None of the progressives are stupid enough to tip the boat over while rocking it, so we’ve ended up here. Again.
“It’s important to know that a lot of productive activity is happening in person and offline, too,” she said. “Not all of it can be broadcast online, but we’ve had hundreds of people showing up to our trainings, mobilizations, and more. Keep going. Tyranny is eroded by a sea of small acts. Everything matters.”
So the guy went out and stated what he wanted to do, we held an election that he won, and the plan is to stand against everything he tries to do. How are we defending democracy exactly?
Easy, let’s scream and ramble against the voters, blaming them for our horrendous campaign, while at the same time , keep focusing on policy that the 99.9% of voters don’t care about.
I mean, who is not gonna love to have their hard earned money taken away in taxes for a multi million dollars program that will only benefit 0.018% of the population!
Affordable housing? The fuck is that? No man, we need to focus on pronouns! That’s easier!
A bloated federal government? Didn’t you read before? People LOVE to have their hard earned money taken away in taxes! If anything, we should be giving away people’s money! And while at that, make the state bigger and all powerful!
That way, on the next election, they will feel more likely to vote for us!
It’s genius!
Easy. Defending democracy means defending the Constitution. Most of what he wants to do is unconstitutional.
I didn’t vote for him. Why should he get to say what I do?
That is what it means to be part of a democracy. In 2028, whomever wins, I hope them success in improving America and would not act as an obstruction to everything they attempt to do. Like it or not American democracy chose him to lead.
I used to work for social services in Colorado. There was a Lady there that was fired without cause. She fought it, won in court, got her job back, and I’m pretty sure back pay. Beth, talking bout you, she said always fight, she has and it has always paid off.
I’d fight for the back pay, but if someone fired me without cause I wouldn’t want to work for them anymore.
In that position you’re far more protected from retaliation than a “regular person” – it’s easier to prove with an established history and courts really don’t like have their judgments undermined. You’ve also shown your employer trying to screw with you is expensive.
Go back and do your job to the letter. They’re either going to be very wary of pissing you off, or they’re going to do something stupid and you’ll get another payout.
Basically, resist. Do not comply in advance. Make them fire you. Challenge that firing in court.
I also think we ought to stop being consumers at a broad level. It’s clear the rich don’t actually trickle anything down and instead hoard it to invest. So, they won’t spend to prop up the economy.
For one, stop using Amazon. Cancel Prime. Use other search engines than Google. Don’t use WhatsApp. Cancel and delete your Instagram, Facebook and Twitter if you haven’t already. Don’t buy Apple products.
For each of those services and products above, there is at least one alternative.
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First president with gage earrings.
Does smashing your head against the podium give you gauges? Cause he clearly doesn’t have anything missing (except for intelligence, compassion, and empathy) and they wouldn’t release the medical record, so the likelihood he was hit or grazed by the bullet is IMO is slim to none.
He got rid of DEI to make more room for cronyism.
Any kind of on the ground movement or mobilization needs political support in the halls of power. It’s what made the resistance demonstrated against Trump the first term possible, and the dynamic goes both ways. On the ground resistance gives political actors the space to be resilient. Resilient politicians give in the ground movement space to work.
Basically all other Democrats other than Bernie and AOC shrivelling up and hiding in their shells will have a chilling effect on our ability to organize on the ground.
Heinrich from NM has made it clear that he will pushback. Let’s see what that looks like. I suggest folks that can contact your reps, now and frequently.
Every day I have sent mine a note from the contact form on their pages. Angrily
Don’t use the contact form or send an email. Call them. Even better, show up in person if possible. The contact form can be filled out from anywhere by anything, same as sending an email. Calling at least lets them know an actual person, likely a local voter, holds the views expressed and is more memorable and harder to ignore. Showing up in person even more so.
It’s funny. sounds like you’re giving up already, and blaming the Dems.
You got Bernie and the Squad.
If you want to put some backbone in the Dems in office, go out and start a voter registration drive. Let them see that there are people who will support them.
sounds like you’re giving up already
What is it about the lemm.ee domain that produces accounts with the most cringe, awful takes?
Hey that’s our job!
I think they just assume that everyone is a weak kneed and terminally online as themselves.
Speaking only for myself, it’s because peepee poopoo.
But for a more serious and less cringe-attempt of a response, I know that when I joined the Reddit API exodus, I initially tried to make an account on .world. I sent a few applications without response over a couple of weeks, then tried signing up for beehaw (because I’m from Texas and I thought the name was cute). Finally, I found some article that said that lemm.ee was doing quick or immediate approvals and just went with it. When my friends mentioned similar difficulties, I told them about lemm.ee, too.
I find it so rare to see contributions from other .ee users, but I’ll take your word for it that we suck. I’m willing to believe that.
I think I’m the only one that never bothers to look at someone’s domain, and just approach all posters on equal footing instead of relying on some weird sectarian nonsense based on what website they found that has decent up time and open registration…
I definitely start out that way. Generally only checking when someone has an especially bad take. That said I haven’t noticed any more shit coming from lemm.ee than .world And certainly not as bad as any .ML.
Based
That’s far too reasonable and measured. Get off the internet, you… you… Poopie-head!
(╯︵╰,)
lemm.ee has one of if not the best admin, and was always running more smoothly in earlier versions. More than that, when other bugs were taking out .world and many others, lemm.ee was already immune and the admin helped the other instances sort theirs out too. lemm.ee has a lot of good users.
However, when hexbear was banned, users on that instance started moonlighting on other instances. There were very few instances that were still federated with hexbear but also with the others, where all the conversation was - many wanted one account that could browse both. Several went to lemmy.ml, the instance run by the formal lemmy developers, and there was a noticeable shift in user behaviour from the instance. But lemm.ee never really was targeted by the hexbear brigading that led to their defederation with everyone else, perhaps because lemm.ee doesn’t really have any massive communities itself, not as big as the others.
So yeah, lemm.ee can still browse hexbear, and with that you get a sizeable chunk of their userbase spilling over. So some lemm.ee users do indeed suck. It’s not as bad as .ml, though, and I think that’s in no small part thanks to the lemm.ee admin team keeping the more extremist users in check.
Thanks for that! I’ll have to mostly take your word for it.
Except for the .ml part. What on Earth is going on over there???
The two devs themselves are massive tankies. They also run lemmygrad.
Sorry, but this sounds like a completely unhinged attempt to blame hexbear for everything that goes wrong anywhere.
The post from Dagwood222 that UnderpantsWeevil was complaining about couldn’t have been more completely opposite to the usual hexbear take. When is the last time that any hexbear user defended democrats like Dagwood222 did?
The statement was
What is it about the lemm.ee domain that produces accounts with the most cringe, awful takes?
Now, I wouldn’t say that’s really appropriate here, Dagwood222’s comment above that wasn’t cringe nor awful. However, apparently UnderpantsWeevil already has this perception of lemm.ee users, and hexbear users making up a chunk of the userbase is my explanation for that.
No one ever really spoke bad of lemm.ee users before the hexbear defederations, and it was a clear echo of the complaints about lemmy.ml users that also started at the same time. It’s just a bandwagon/circlejerk, really; a cheap way of getting upvotes from other users not on those instances that only has a pinch of truth. But that pinch is what I was describing.
What part of registering voters is ‘cringe’ to you?
The lack of self awareness in this comment is truly sublime.
So enlighten me. Did you have a better plan in 2024? Somethings besides voting? What’s your sure-fire winning strategy that you didn’t use yet?
Who’s talking about voting as resistance, besides you? There’s a conversation to be had about it sure, but it’s not the conversation being had now, here. You trying to shift the focus to a subject you’re comfortably confident about discussing is why you’re being criticized, not for the merit of what you’re saying on its own.
sounds like you’re giving up already, and blaming the Dems
We all have dog in this fight. Apparently so do the people who voted third party and refuse to see the leopards.
One of the reasons Hitler took power in Germany is that the other political parties couldn’t put aside their grudges and unite around a leader who would promise to keep the system running. If Harris had won last year we’d be sure of having elections in 2026. Now it’s up in the air.
To put that another way, though, a leader who only promises to keep the system running and not to actually fix it is part of how fascists win. Delaying the problem to 2028 isn’t the same as actually fixing the problem, and it seems the Democrats never had any intention of doing the latter.
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Understanding and recognizing how the world functions isn’t equivalent to giving up. Nor is “hope” for the sake of hope any kind of a strategy. And yes. The Dem’s are the fucking problem and always have been. Nothing about this fascist takeover would have ever been possible with out the complicity and milquetoast politics of Democrats. They are a worthless and abhorrent party with no integrity and barely worth supporting, beyond the weakest possible argument of them being the “lessor” evil. The rise of fascism would be impossible with out the previous 30 years of normalization politics out of Democrats. Start a voter registration drive? Give me a fucking break with the navel gazing. Voting isn’t going to save the Union.
We may need the squad to break away from a Democratic party that has shown its self incapable of wielding power in such a way as to prevent the rise of fascism. What we’ll need for on the ground movements to be successful is support in some way from the halls of power. That doesn’t necessarily mean working with Democrats.
Who is this ‘we’ you speak of?
I really wanted Bernie in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Somehow ‘we’ managed not to get out and get him nominated.
But now, somehow, ‘we’ are going to get organized.
Until ‘we’ shows me that they can organize a weinie roast, I’ll stick with the people who are actually on the ballot.
I also notice that you had nothing to say about registering voters as an actual tool.
Until ‘we’ shows me that they can organize a weinie roast, I’ll stick with the people who are actually on the ballot.
I guess you missed the part where we were manning barricades and taking tear gas canisters to the face in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022… directly confronting fascism on the streets and taking it to them. Your obtuseness has no external meaning.
I also notice that you had nothing to say about registering voters as an actual tool.
If voting changed anything about this system, they’d make it illegal. Voting as a strategy to stop fascism was attempted in 2020. The result was a 4 year hiatus, but with no real ability or intention to take action against fascism. Biden could have had Trump arrested on day fucking one of taking power. He chose not to. Democrats chose to only make a show of any kind of consequences for a literal attempted coup, because to them, it simply wasn’t a priority. Voting as a strategy to change the system doesn’t work when the people you are obligated to vote for as the “opposition party” are not, and will not, and have no interest in changing the system: ie, Democrats.
I agree with everything you said 100%, except the bit about how if voting worked it’d be illegal. Republicans are literally trying to make it that way. One of their main goals is to disenfranchise as many poor people and minorities as possible, bc if everyone voted, republicans would lose every election by a landslide. That’s why they love things like manually registering to vote, randomly deregistering people, the electoral college, and hand counting ballots, while opposing mail-in and absentee ballots, automatic voter registration, RCV, basically anything that gives Americans more voting power. Voting is very much the least you can do to affect change in America, but it is still a thing you can and should do regularly before republicans abolish it
So, in other words, bOTh SidES arE tHe SAMe. Don’t vote, because it doesn’t work.
At a certain point its obvious that you are just intentionally missing the point.
If voting changed anything about this system, they’d make it illegal. Voting as a strategy to stop fascism was attempted in 2020.
It’s like you just type away and don’t even bother reading what you wrote.
bOTh SidES arE tHe SAMe
Everyone who says this with mixed case sarcasm does so out of bitter disappointment at the remaining differences.
The parties agree on more shit than they should.
Humans and apes share of 98% of genetic material.
I dunno, seems like the fascists are the problem, actually.
Maybe learn like, even a tiny bit about the history of fascism and how it comes into being and how it takes power.
The moderates that tolerate fascists and thus enable them are always the problem, actually. The fascists fail without them but succeed with them, every time.
So the fascists… aren’t the problem?
My comment didn’t even slightly say anything even remotely resembling that, and you fucking know it. Quit commenting in bad faith.
It did, though. Or at least the message you’re presenting seems to indicate that.
The moderates that tolerate fascists and thus enable them are always the problem, actually.
I’m fairly sure you phrased it like this as a retort to the first commenter’s comment, but you gotta see how insisting the blame ‘actually’ lies with the moderates and the people enabling the fascists is pretty clearly interpretable as shifting the responsibility. Both parties are to blame, but you’re implying that the bulk of the criticism lies with the people being passive about allowing the fascist takeover instead of with the people exploiting the resource they’ve found in moderates by doing the fascism.
Dems didn’t get their shit together and exploit the moderates first to prevent this, but while that does make them culpable for the current fascist power grab, it does not make them equally culpable, and that is the position you seem to be presenting.
What’s the alternative? Register as Republicans and do a hostile takeover of that party?
Honestly, it would be a lot easier to do a hostile takeover of the Green Party. If Democrats are so damned worried about splitting the vote, they don’t have to field a candidate. It’s not like they are interested in fielding one that can win anyway.
State level electoral reform
start a voter registration drive
What? The time for a voter registration drive was a year ago. We’re well past that now. You can’t vote out a dictator.
It’s time for more direct action. We need protests. We need strikes. We need people in the streets fighting for their rights because they’re being taken away by the day.
The Dems have given up. Because it’s time for them to take a vacation after playing the part for their rich donors for the last 4 years.
I’ve been bitching about the lack of leadership from the Democrats for a while now - I’m glad to see that others are seeing it too.
It’s all been downhill since JFK…
LBJ at least pushed for laws, he helped convince white senators to vote for the Civil Rights Act. I think if we had a second LBJ, we’d have something done.
…I’d rather not have a new VIetnam war if that was the case, however.
They need to dump Wasserman-Schulz. She’s a big part of the reason we’re in this mess.
finally, a person with a STRATEGY. so sick of the whining.
she needs volunteers for personal escort and safety. i think she is going to be targeted.
She has employees
Donate to her
If she’s gonna be persecuted, the DNC and the Clintons might be also involved in that
If only AOC didn’t whip up a battle plan to prevent the union strike when she voted to protect the rail corporation.
She deserves criticism for that, and she should apologize. Your downvoters either support strikebreaking or support AOC even when she does the wrong thing.
She deserves criticism for that but she still does a lot of good and should not be discounted. Saying “if only” kinda sounds like “I would like this good thing she’s suggesting (the subject of the article where they are responding “if only “), if only she didn’t do something I disagreed with once”. A more productive tact would be “I still don’t like that she didn’t support the striking rail workers but the plan she describes here is …”
She deserves criticism for that but she still does a lot of good and should not be discounted.
Agreed. I like AOC and I want her to succeed, despite the efforts of her own party. Liking a candidate doesn’t mean you shirk your responsibility to hold them accountable when they do the wrong thing, though. Quite the opposite. You don’t want them to go all Fetterman on you.
Simple Sabotage Manual
She encouraged activists to take offline action
Based
“Tyranny is eroded by a sea of small acts. Everything matters.”
A lot of Lemmy users really need to understand this. Far too often I see people deride want action that doesn’t immediately fix all problems in the world as worthless or meaningless, simply because they lack the imagination needed to see how small actions can add up to big changes.
Incrementalism got us here. At some point, you have to realize that you can’t stop a flash flood by bailing with a solo cup and shouting “I’m helping!”
It’s a stalling tactic to placate chumps while they sell us all out.
So it’s better to do nothing while they sell you all out?
That’s not what I said.
Don’t be so easily placated. They’re selling you out.
That’s true, but it can also be used in reverse as a pacifying mechanism. For example, contributing to making the US the most incarcerated population in the world with ridiculously strict “tough on crime” legislation and then pardoning a small fraction of prisoners. Another example is forcing student loan debt to stick around through bankruptcy, but then forgiving a tiny fraction of loans. It’s a move to pretend change is in motion, but it’s so small and so slow that it’s never going to actually solve the problem. This is especially bad when the other party makes such huge moves in the negative direction while we’re supposed to be content with tiny steps toward “progress”.
Neighbor, you’re who they’re speaking to…
This Lemmy user has the right idea.
Turns out when all you want are loyalists, all you get are dumb assess.
Philosophical inbreeding is also not good.
Bit late. I appreciate her efforts to resist, and we all need to do that, but it honestly is too late now. The time to resist this was last year. Now we’re in disaster recovery, which requires a whole different kind of resistance, and it feels like even people like her don’t quite understand where we are now.
Because of all the people who haven’t fucking listened to the warnings, we’ve entered actual fascism, and regular resistance won’t work anymore. Thinking it will only makes more of us believe small actions or Strong Words will save us. This isn’t 1930 Germany like we were warning last year, it’s 1939 Germany now, and der führer is beginning to build the camps.
Are you going to keep ignoring us when you’re ruffling the ashes of your compatriots from your hair? I honestly believe you will.
I think both you and her are wrong. Dems lost big in this last election. So it’s time to take a fucking step back and ask why. What needs changing? The party is in trouble. And they are in trouble because they are listening to big business and political consultants and not voters and people like AOC and Bernie. Kamala was supposed to be easy ‘safe’ candidate to defeat Trump. How’d that work? Hillary was supposed to be the ‘safe’ candidate to beat him the first time. Safer than Bernie and his ‘crazy radical platform’ of actually making the country work for the fucking people who live in it. How’d that work out?
Maybe having candidates that manipulate the primary process and count on superdelegates doesn’t work. Maybe putting someone forward who polled at 2% among Democrats before election season doesn’t work. Maybe ‘I’m not Trump’ isn’t fucking good enough to win the White House.
Unfortunately I don’t see many Democrats talking about this lesson, let alone taking it to heart. So I am looking forward to four more years of complaining and hopelessly attempting damage control while putting forward no new ideas whatsoever.
So it’s time to take a fucking step back and ask why.
Obviously we should ask why. But any answers we come up with in response to whatever strategy we’ve been using will be horribly outdated already because we’re no longer operating under even a veiled democracy.
That was the biggest answer to ‘why’ this last time. Because this is outright, honest to dog fascism. That’s why nothing worked. Because you cannot fight fascism with normal discourse. Because Dems, the media, and everyone still tried to pretend we were working under the status quo when we absolutely were not, and anyone trying to call that out was treated as some kind of alarmist. And the fascists know this, and take advantage of it in their propaganda. Most of us don’t want to believe there’s a true, real, legitimate fascist movement, and fascists use that against us.
It doesn’t actually matter how good Dem candidates are – Dems could run Jesus himself, seen by all as descending from on high and streamed simultaneously on TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch, and it wouldn’t have mattered. They would easily reject Jesus and get all the centrists to oppose him. We’re in an unprecedented age of propaganda owned exclusively by a handful of sociopaths who know they can buy sentiment, views, and votes. They did, and there’s little we can do about it.
It doesn’t matter what democrats say or do at this point. We’re past that.
You’ve convinced me. I was planning to start attending my local town meetings and lend my support to the few outnumbered progressives there, but instead I think I’ll just hoard canned goods and hunker down.
If that’s what you took from my comment, I’m sorry. Obviously those are things we should do.
My point is we’ve been pushing people to do exactly those things for decades (eta and have been doing them ourselves) and it hasn’t worked. We need to do much more than that now.
Fair enough. I agree that we all need to do more, but I think that’s going to look different for everyone. For someone like me, it means getting off the Internet and actually showing up - not blowing up a federal building or whatever “much more” implies.
Much more is relative.
For someone like me, it means getting off the Internet and actually showing up.
Yes, thank you for that. That’s much more for many people. If you actually do that, it will be awesome.
Might I ask you for even more, though? You’re already starting to do it, but will you speak out to people IRL like you’re doing with me? Challenge their views like you’re doing here? It really helps people to think critically.
You must be fun at resistance parties. I guess it’s time to annihilate ourselves through labor then (งツ)ว
I’m just saying we need different, more modern strategies. What we’ve been doing doesn’t work.
We can do better. I don’t know the answer, but we can’t keep doing the same things.
