stabby_cicada @ stabby_cicada @slrpnk.net

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Immigration law is based on the idea that deportation is not a punishment. So people in immigration court don't get the same protections people in criminal court do - lower standards for evidence, no right to an attorney, guilty until proven innocent instead of the reverse, etc.

Because technically (coughbullshitcough) we're not convicting or sentencing them, we're just sending them back to their home country.

Which has always been offensive and cruel, but with the goal of this administration being to hurt as many immigrants as possible as badly as possible, the cruelty is turned up to 11.

It is weird. Except, thinking about it, it's not.

All sides of American politics have been encouraged to hate and fear other Americans who disagree with them politically.

So when liberals have a choice between blaming their own political leaders for fucking up, or blaming the conservative Americans they hate anyway, a lot of them will make the wrong choice. Just like conservatives do when their leaders fuck up.

The plan was Project 2025. Trump didn't write it but he certainly followed it.

The economic failures of the Biden administration consisted of what, failing to have a populous who votes for a good legislative branch?

"The people" are not an unchanging monolith. A Republican-led House and Senate were not a foregone conclusion.

If Joe Biden and his staff actually cared about getting stuff through Congress they would have been out stumping for local and state candidates every day in 2022, pushing a very simple message: here's our big ambitious plan, here's what we want to do, here's how it will make your life better, these senators and representatives are stopping us, give us the House and Senate and we will transform America for the better.

And if they failed to get the Congressional support they needed in 2022, Biden and Harris needed to come back in 2024 with that big ambitious plan, and tell Americans what they tried to do, and what they would do in their second term, and what they need from the American people to make that transformation, and go back out and stump in every single state in every single election in the United States to earn the people's support.

But to do that they needed an ambitious plan - a Green New Deal - that would genuinely help Americans. And they needed to admit the economy was failing and people were hurting.

Biden didn't have an ambitious plan. Biden didn't have any plan. Biden sat on his hands and pretended the biggest wealth transfer in history was actually good for American consumers and the economy was going great, and then Harris ran on that record in 2024 and refused to suggest anything she would have done different than Biden.

And of course she lost, because Trump did have an ambitious plan to transform America, and he convinced Americans his plan would leave them better off, and Americans looked at how they were better off under Trump's first term than they were under Biden and made the obvious choice.

We still live in a democracy. And blaming voters for making the wrong choice is a great way to permanent minority status. It was Biden's job - it was the job of the Democratic Party as a whole - to recognize the problems facing the American people, offer genuine solutions, and convince the American people to support their plan.

Don't blame the American people for Biden's failure to lead.

It's a horrible thing Trump won.

But it was pretty much inevitable.

The Biden administration was weak, cowardly, and incompetent. It didn't understand - or refused to admit - how bad the US economy really was and how many people were struggling and suffering.

The student loan debacle exemplified the Biden administration's "strategy" on the economy, the environment, everything - make a half-ass attempt to slightly improve things, give up at the first challenge, and pat yourself on the back for trying.

The economic failures of the Weimar Republic pushed Germany into the arms of a fascist who promised security and prosperity.

The economic failures of the Biden administration did the same for America.

This administration sent out millions of emails giving immigrants from certain black and brown countries seven days to leave the U.S. voluntarily before being deported.

Seven days. A fucking eviction notice comes with thirty days. Seven days to pack up their entire lives, quit their jobs, buy plane tickets, find somewhere to live and work in a whole different country - fuck, if you had to buy plane tickets for your family at $250 per, could you even afford it? Most American families would have to go into debt for that, never mind immigrants from desperately poor countries who sold everything they had to get here in the first place...

The cruelty is the point, is my point.

Just like immigrants, college educated Americans from lower castes - people smart enough to go to college but too poor to pay for it out of pocket - are enemies of the Trump Administration.

And they want to make their enemies suffer.

They don't want it to "work". They want it to hurt people.

The Trump family made at least $500 million pumping and dumping cryptocurrency. I guess they're tired of playing in the crypto sandbox and going for the big money now.

Trump thinks he can trade a few weeks of bad headlines and market hit, for some magically reappearing domestic manufacturing. It doesnt work that way. Even if it were possible, it wouldn't create positive economic conditions on any kind of timeline sufficient to offset the negative effects real consumers are already experiencing.

A few weeks? Try a few months. Or years. I think Trump is fine with bad headlines for months on end.

The positive interpretation is: Trump's confident that he's right. He's confident America will be better off under his tariff plan. OR he's confident he can use tariffs to force trade deals that benefit America and exploit the rest of the world. And he knows voters have short memories. As long as the economy is strong in fall 2026 he can take credit for it and give Republicans overwhelming electoral victories at the federal and state level.

The negative interpretation is: Trump doesn't care about public opinion because he doesn't think elections are going to matter anymore.

Either way, what the media and the voters think about tariffs now doesn't matter to Trump. Trump does what Trump wants and the rest of the world submits to him. It's everything he's always wanted.