[peachchoker]

what's a hiatus anyway?

18+✨ late 20s ✨ bisexual ✨she/they

Hard No: minors, bigots, weight related anything, adding comments to my posts, stolen content, ageless blogs

tips: cashapp/venmo

have I interacted with your content in a way you don't like? let me know so I can delete it!

[yesornopolls]

Opinion | Don’t Believe Him

Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see.

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

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What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

[lightlybow]

“That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.”

This article gave me some hope

[heliotropist]

Really smart take.

These are people that believe perception and PR are everything, so they're trying to create the perception that they can destroy and remake government without consequences or constraints. And for a while people were stunned and overwhelmed by the ugliness of it all.

But now people are moving. Many, many lawsuits have been filed and the people are starting to claim their power.

Don't despair and don't give up. We're not done yet.

[angelbabymikaa]

“what radicalized you?” bitch what made you a stupid asshole?

[genderkoolaid]

posted on Kate Bornstein's substack

[nudityandnerdery]

I want you to remember:

The fascists hate you too and they just will pretend otherwise until after they've killed the rest of us, before they turn on you.

[nudityandnerdery]

Thanks to whoever tried, but I knew they'd never allow it.

[library-graffiti]

Let's do it the old fashioned way. Spread it far and wide.

[victusinveritas]

Reminder: you can't be the whole wall against stopping fascism by yourself. Nobody can. But you damn sure can be a brick.

[nudityandnerdery]

There's a lot of good comments and tags in the notes, but this one is very important, I feel like it deserves some emphasis.

Part of how authoritarianism works is telling you that you can't stop it. And you can't stop it by yourself. But it wants to stop the train of thought there and let you fall into despair.

You need to remember the next part: you don't have to stop it by yourself.

You're not alone. Take care of your community and let your community take care of you. Supporting each other is so vital.

[ayeforscotland]

As we see a barrage of evil executive orders come in, they are not immediately enforceable and will takes months or years to implement.

That’s still not great, but don’t let these pile up to the point of hopelessness. Take a breath, and look community leaders who will fight it every step of the way.

[everentropy]

Reminder that when Trump was in office before a LOT of his orders got overturned or held up in lower courts for long enough that they became irrelevant. It also does not mean they WILL be enforced. Stand with your community where you can. The fight is not over. Do not obey in advance.

[ayeforscotland]

Last sentence above is the most important. Tyranny requires people to shut up and fall in line. Do not obey in advance.

[riding-with-the-wild-hunt]

a whole bunch of gazan mutual aid projects and nonprofits. if the decision of which individual fundraiser to give to feels too daunting, or if you just want to help as many people as possible in one go, these are great initiatives to support.

care for gaza - focuses on providing food and essential supplies. donate here or here.

connecting humanity - securing internet access via donations of virtual sim cards (esims). if you can't afford a whole plan yourself, crips for esims is a communal pool that will use your donation to purchase and maintain esims

gaza soup kitchen - provides food, medical care, and classes for children. also has a gofundme

glia gaza medical support initiative - provides medical care through field clinics and tents at hospitals. donations can also be sent through their website.

ele elna elak - provides clean water, food, clothing, and shelter. they also have a gofundme

life for gaza - raising money for the gaza municipality to repair water and waste management infrastructure

taawon - partners with local civil organizations to provide food, water, medical care, shelter, and basic supplies

the sameer project - running various initiatives providing tents, medical care, and necessities. they have their own encampment project focused on sheltering families with children, sick and disabled members, or members in need of perinatal care

islamic relief worldwide's gaza emergency appeal - provides food, water, hygiene kits, medical supplies, and psychological support

baitulmaal - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, shelter, and medical supplies

gaza mutual aid fund - distributes food, hygiene products, water, and other essential supplies, including financial support. run by @/el-shab-hussein's amazing friend Mona. updates can be found on her instagram.

hygiene kits for gaza - provides hygiene supplies including menstrual products, wipes, and toothbrushes/toothpaste

anera - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, hygiene supplies, medicine, blankets and mattresses, and psychological care

palestine children's relief fund - provides supplies and support with a focus on children. also has an initiative for lebanon

dahnoun mutual aid - provides water, food, tents, baby supplies, financial support, and other necessities. updates can be found through their instagram

certainly this is not an exhaustive list, so please feel free to add on other projects or organizations that i didn't include. and as always, please take the time to donate if you can and share. it truly makes all the difference.

[your-gay-grandma]

i need everyone to know that community is what will save us all in every single way imaginable. you forming a bond with your neighbour or coworker might help them move house or feel less alone or have the courage to leave an unhealthy living environment. you helping a stranger might provide them with hope. in turn, being able to lean on your community in times of need will save you. your broader bonds with your community are the revolution we need. our society seeks to divide and separate us in so many ways but we are all so much more united in our struggles and joys than you are made to believe. we need to hold onto each other very tightly.

[a-method-in-it]

You know that Chris Fleming line that goes "Call yourself a community organizer even though you're not on speaking terms with your roommates"?

I honestly think every leftist who talks about the "revolution" like Christians talk about the rapture needs to spend a year trying to organize their workplace. Anyone who sincerely talks about building a movement so vast and all-encompassing that it overwhelms all existing power structures needs the dose of humility that comes with realizing they can't even build a movement to get people paid better at a badly run AMC Theaters where everyone already hates the manager.

[ghostofbriggiesmalls]

the real takeaway here is that organizing movements is *not* what most people think it is. This is where ideological purity on the front end destroys movements. This is why the left loses. If you want change, you need power. If you want power, you need people. If you want people, you need a collective goal or objective.

You pick a target, something the left is garbage at. NOT EVERYONE NEEDS THE SAME TARGET AND YOU CANT DO EVERYTHING AS A SINGLE GROUP. You pick a target that is immediate, specific, and salient. This usually involves actually working with fucking people. You have to understand what they want and need to unite them around a common goal. You can’t just come in and say “I care about a walkable city and so should you, dumbass.” You have to come in and listen and learn about what people actually would unite around. Maybe they’re sick of having to pay so much time and money to commute because they can’t afford to live near their work.

Then you work together to develop a solution. With specifics. And goals. And tangible milestones. The “things should be better!”rallying cry is true, salient, and fully fucking useless. You find out what solution is most acceptable. What’s going to make an impact that people are going to feel and care about and fight for. The bigger the fix, the longer and harder the fight. Maybe it’s better public transit. Maybe it’s higher wages. Maybe it’s rent caps. Maybe it’s renters unions. You build a coalition of people around a common goal. They might not be from the same background, political ideology, etc. AND THATS OK. IN FACT, *THATS GOOD AND NORMAL AND HOW IT SHOULD BE.* (more on this later)

Then starts the hard, frustrating, boring slog of work. It takes WORK. It takes lots of people lots of time to attend meetings, develop talking points, work to get more people on board, develop plans and suggestions.

All the while people are still STRUGGLING. This is where so many orgs fall flat on their fucking faces. YOU NEED MUTUAL AID. Provide for people. Help them tangibly. Get them bought in. So many orgs either want to provide services but have no endgame, or want to fight for change but have no way to keep people in the fight. This is exactly how the Black Panther Party built power and truly threatened the status quo. MAKE PEOPLE LESS RELIANT ON CURRENT POWER STRUCTURES THAT ARE KILLING YOU.

Ok, but you’re not all ideologically pure. But you know what? This is where you build solidarity. Maybe your pro life coworker sees a single mom of 3 get pregnant and wrestle with what to do. She sees the humanity of people who are in these situations and how the world is shades of grey. Maybe the guy who isn’t homophobic but isn’t super comfortable with trans folks has car trouble and someone in the community helps out. That person has a trans sister and talks about how scared she is right now. This helps humanize the problem and help people see why they should care. Maybe this guy isn’t gonna fistfight a nazi, but maybe the next politician who starts trans bashing isn’t going to get his vote.

Now you’re building power. You’re getting momentum. You’re building community and you’re getting somewhere. But maybe you’re only still just dozens or hundreds in a sea of millions. Well boy howdy welcome to mutualism. Look across and see your fellow communities who are fighting their fights. See where there are bridges and common goals. Maybe the next city council meeting to discuss the budget for public transit gets your group AND the folks fighting for rent caps. And then you attend their city council meeting to shut out the bitching landlords complaining about new regulations.

NOW YOURE BUILDING REAL POWER. And not just in your movement. In your mutual aid too. Now people have more help. More folks who they can uplift and be uplifted by. And the power of the city council seems pretty small by comparison. In fact, the next election may see many of your group win seats.

But this is not easy. This takes time. This takes flexing communal muscles many have all but lost (definitely the case for us in the US). And it takes patience. And the willingness to put community over self. Yeah there are people who you don’t agree with now. But life isn’t about surrounding yourself on a bed of pillows to never struggle. I get it. It’s already hard. And getting harder by the day. So that bed looks really appealing. But we’re only digging the hole deeper. And the first rule of holes is to stop digging.

[spaceintruderdetector]

https://archive.org/details/Black_Flags_and_Windmills/page/n3/mode/2up

When both levees and governments failed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the anarchist-inspired Common Ground Collective was created to fill the void. With the motto of “Solidarity Not Charity,” they worked to create power from below—building autonomous projects, programs, and spaces of self-sufficiency like health clinics and neighborhood assemblies, while also supporting communities defending themselves from white militias and police brutality, illegal home demolitions, and evictions.

Black Flags and Windmills—equal parts memoir, history, and organizing philosophy—vividly intertwines Common Ground cofounder scott crow’s experiences and ideas with Katrina’s reality, illustrating how people can build local grassroots power for collective liberation. It is a story of resisting indifference, rebuilding hope amid collapse, and struggling against the grain to create better worlds.

[baggebythesea]

Grieve AND organize.

Good article by David Hunter on how to survive the Trump presidency, both on the personal and on the political plane.

There is hope — 10 ways to be prepared and grounded for another Trump presidency

The key to taking effective action if Trump wins is to avoid perpetuating his goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion and disorientation.

[the-moon-loves-the-sea]

This is an excellent article. It talks about the psychology of tyranny, the history of resistance and the paths we have to take to rescue each other and recover.

[embodiedfutures]

just wanted to remind everyone again not only of the 3,000+ resources offered through our Liberation Library but also of the study guides for beginners offered under each of our social justice topics!

resources can be organized by type (article, novel, podcast, video, etc.) as well as filtered and searched through. we’ve tried to make our system much more accessible than our former platform on google docs so this is such an exciting development to share with everyone.

please share to promote equitable access education!

[liarsblade]

Do the right thing Baron

[liarsblade]

[geeses]

reblog to diminish the horrors from the person you reblogged from

[u-u-h]

I am begging all of my American followers who have not voted yet; Please go out and vote!!!

If you haven't voted and are wondering if you're still able, please visit these sites to check your ability to vote, and to research your ballot:

Voting rights and registration:

Register to vote in your state | Vote.gov

Find the information you need to make registration and voting easy. Official voter registration website of the United States government.

Voting Resources (who and what is on your ballot specifically):

VOTE411

Election information you need. Brought to you by The League of Women Voters Education Fund.

Ballotpedia

Ballotpedia is the digital encyclopedia of American politics and elections. Our goal is to inform people about politics by providing accurat

If you have already voted, I am extremely grateful!!!

These sites are going to get heavy traffic, so it would be good to research your ballot ahead of time and make a note on your phone or a piece of paper about how and for whom you want to vote. This is extra important for non-partisan votes as well as amendments and measures.

Every person and measure on the ballot is important!

Every vote matters! Your vote matters!

Your vote could save your life, or mine, or the life of someone you care about. Please vote. 💗

[outofcontextkingofthehill]

[littlewickedthings]

Alejandra Oviedo