Especially when they are eliminating internal oversights left and right:

https://www.propublica.org/article/homeland-security-crcl-civil-rights-immigration-border-patrol-trump-kristi-noem

That decision on 14 was a complete dereliction of duty on the part of SCOTUS, a stain of reasoning and cowardice (or collusion).

I really feel the underemphasized part of this is how much he, his associates, and collaborating media lied to voters.

People who pointed to Project 2025 during the campaign were ridiculed as conspiracy theorists, and here we are. It's a constant pattern with him and his allies: obscure things or outright lie about things they're planning or doing, because they know they're wrong, and then act entitled to their predation afterwards when the truth is known and they're in a position of control.

Different people voted for him for different reasons and some of them I think were abandoned by one political community, and then taken advantage of by him. It's hard for me to be too angry with some people who were crying out for help and their need for help was taken advantage of by a criminal.

People have been discussing this dynamic of autocratic economies. Put up tariffs and then negotiate exemptions or bailouts for people who give preferential treat to the autocrat.

This is just a variant of that.

So, not trying to be antagonistic but are there numbers on this kind of thing? Like the number of cases where they grant stays in similar circumstances?

Understanding it as a cult is probably the most useful way of approaching it. Either that or sabotage, or some combination.

What's sad to me is seeing how fast people who claim moral superiority sink to stereotypes and bigotry.

I understand that people are angry and I feel awful about what's happening, but it's not the way out.

It sounds ludicrous, but it's so weirdly pro-Russian in its attitude that I can't help but wonder how many of them are Russian disinformation posts, or are completely ignorant at how much they're playing into their game. But such are the times we live in.

Honestly, I'm disturbed at how little attention Russia's role in this/Trump is getting, both within the US and outside of it.

The last 10 years or so though, the misinformation and propaganda are unlike anything I remember before that point.

When people started talking about a "post truth era" I don't think the significance of it sunk in as much as it should have.

I'm very supportive of free speech but it's frightening how different and fractured the basic perspective of reality has become in different places in the US. It's not just the opinion on what happens, it's the basic understanding of what actually happened.

The trend you are mentioning is something that's been visible for a long time, but it's been accelerated in the last decade or so in a qualitatively different way, in my opinion.

Well... yes but what's your point?

That the Night of the Long Knives has no relevance to understanding Hitler's ascendance to power? That Germany and all the people in Germany who opposed Hitler should have burned in hell for eternity?

Sometimes these threads feel that way.

OP's point is that it's not just that only 30% of people voted for him, it's that in many regions it's less, and more importantly, they voted for him in lower numbers than his opponent. They literally could not do any more than what they did to prevent Trump from being in office.

It's like saying "sorry, you're responsible for the behavior of people who live in an entirely different area of the country 1000s of km away, so fuck you".

I'm sorry, I have to push back on this, that I see all the time. I hate Trump, I think he's a vile incompetent monster.

But there are multiple rallies involving thousands or tens of thousands of people all over the US on any given day. They're just spread out over an enormous distance. They don't get covered because people dismiss them constantly as being too small, or they're glossed over because they're just a blue state or whatever.

People come in here comparing the US to Serbian protests, but it's absurd to me comparing protests in the size of a small US state to protests in the US. Yes, if that's all it amounted to, sure. But you're talking about people spread out over almost 10000000 square km. Turkey is less than 1/10 the size of the United States; Serbia is less than 1/100 the size of the US. Those regimes have also been going on for much longer than the ... what? Couple of months of this administration?

It's not just the population, it's the access of protesters over larger over smaller distances. If you're angry about something, it's one thing to go travel even 100s of km; it's another thing to drive over multiple days or take flights to protest.

I just don't think people comprehend the geographic limitations involved in protesting in Washington DC.

Yes, there's lots of people who voted for Trump, and I wish people were doing more in the US, but if I'm being honest, some of the comments here from foreign countries strike me as naive or ignorant about any number of things, including geography and the scope of misinformation that's been going on over such a long time period.

I don't even know why I'm typing this because yes, I'd love to see massive marches in the street. People need to do more, much more. I don't disagree. But I think people everywhere would be better off if they had a better grasp of what, exactly, the nature of the beast is. It's much more complex, insidious, and, frankly, dangerous than the stereotype that gets promulgated here on Reddit regularly.

I'm older but my sense of Gen Z's rightward turn isn't pushback against millennials so much as youthful naivete combined with timed propaganda combined with ignorance of the past.

This isn't so much a knock against Gen Z, more so them being in the wrong time to be targeted by propaganda machinery, and lacking personal experience with social crises of the past that led to where US society was. 

A good example of this is the Access Hollywood tapes. It's a critical thing in the Trump history but many seemed to be oblivious to it, even though it wasn't that long ago really. You can extrapolate backwards in time even more.

But every generation has their issues, and I'm probably completely wrong because the data doesn't really support the "conservative gen z" stereotype?

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/age-generational-cohorts-and-party-identification/

Speaking from personal experience in academics, it's not just Canada. Pretty much every Western country is having problems. The only exceptions worldwide I know of are maybe China and some limited number of other places in Asia.

Not saying places like Canada, the EU and others won't step up and make a massive investment in recruiting Americans, but things are tight financially in academics everywhere.

So far the stories I've read about with these non-American institutions targeting Americans are for a very small amount of funds in very specific areas targeted by the Trump administration (climate, vaccines, sexual and gender minorities), or are things that were in process for a long time, and that might not actually be related to Trump at all.

My hunch is, unless the EU or Canada just takes on a large debt or other cost to fund a massive recruiting campaign for new positions, what's going to happen is just a significant increase in numbers of applications to foreign positions from Americans, making a fixed pool even more competitive. In some countries there's also preferences given to citizens, which can always be bypassed but by default is not.

I'm not sure what's going to happen with this all but I think so far I don't actually see a massive campaign the media makes it out to be.

Just like Nazi Germany and Norway in the late 1930s. We've seen this before.

It's a sad time but I can't agree with the "knew full well who he was" part. To many of us it was obvious and I'm perplexed as hell how he was voted in a second time. However, at the same time the misinformation in the US over the last several years has been absurd.

Everything he's doing now he vehemently denied during the campaign and major media outlets here constantly spun him as a victim.

Not everyone feels this way and conversely there are also many states who are horrified by what's happening. But there's a certain percent of people who feel betrayed by him.

News coverage of him in the US has not been the same as in foreign outlets.

It's all made clear in this text:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

Finland, the Baltics, Poland, and generally former Soviet bloc countries are on the invasion radar. Germany and France are not.

Never have I felt like so much has been out in the open and yet it's treated like it doesn't exist, and then comes as a surprise over and over again. 

Between Foundations of Geopolitics, Project 2025, people mysteriously zipping themselves into plastic bags after committing suicide in the UK, Trump hiring the same campaign manager as that of an ousted Russian puppet president in the Ukraine... why is the press so damn ignorant or naive about this?

Hmm... Just the other day 11000 people showed up in a GOP district for a Dem event and 34000 people showed up later in another city in the same state.

You don't see these in the press because of the dilution of geography and the dismissal because it's in an overall blue state .

I feel sometimes like people don't understand the geography of the US. 

I think reasonable people can disagree about whether the DNC did enough about Project 2025, but my memory is that it was brought up a lot during the campaign, and the GOP and Trump essentially lied about him having anything to do with it.

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/22/g-s1-19202/trump-project-2025-border-immigration

"They've been told officially, legally, in every way, that we have nothing to do with Project 25,” Trump said. “They know it, but they bring it up anyway. They bring up every single thing that you can bring up. Every one of them was false.”

Now, of course, Trump can't be trusted about anything, but if you've conned enough of the population into thinking you're an innocent victim of a system out to get you, that part of the population is likely to believe you if you deny it vehemently enough.

Sometimes I think the effects of his lies in the election weren't taken seriously enough. Or rather, the dynamic of a con and his mark during the election, played out at a mass scale.

Should have more thought been put into it? Probably but really what you need is a de-brainwashing campaign, one that treats the victims as victims and not as inferior.

Elect a lying criminal, get more lying and crime.

A lot of this is about not being able to meet deportation quotas Trump set out for.

He wants to be able to be able to say he's deported more immigrants than in US history, and it's turned out to be really difficult to do that legally, just like the ACLU and other immigration law firms said.

Now he's upset and just coming up with ways to meet his numbers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/01/26/ice-arrests-raids-trump-quota/

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-angry-deportation-numbers-not-004822082.html

https://san.com/cc/trump-reassigns-ice-director-due-to-frustration-with-low-deportations/

https://newrepublic.com/article/192318/trump-immigrant-deportations-low-rage-unnerving

Trump argued against minority quotas during the campaign, but it turns out he's in favor of them, just in a different way.

I think the "rescue" is more hype and misinformation on the part of Trump and Musk?

https://www.factcheck.org/2025/03/the-facts-behind-the-delayed-return-of-u-s-astronauts/

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/19/biden-left-astronauts-space-political-gain/

The *real* question about SpaceX in this case is whether or not a different avenue would have been open from the beginning if SpaceX had not ever existed (that is, how would have this mission been developed, if SpaceX had never been around? Where would have that *government* money gone to otherwise? Would the government *never* have paid *anyone* to develop alternatives prior to June 2024, when the crew went up to the ISS?). I think it's a stretch to assume that no other aerospace company or option would have available to facilitate the mission, or that such a venture would have needed Musk in particular. I guess I would dispute the "no other feasible option" in this or any other relevant possible world assumption.

It's also important to keep in mind that for years and years (decades?), from the beginning there have been criticisms of the ISS as a waste of money (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201030-should-astronauts-abandon-the-space-station), and that money would have been better spent on uncrewed space missions or other types of crewed missions. This is just another thing in a long line of problematic things with the ISS.

I'm not saying Musk's companies have done *nothing*. What I'm saying is that on balance, overall, his companies and the world in general would have been better off without him at their helms.

Why BC? I can understand the Quebec part but BC I'd have to look up (which I might do but I have a feeling someone might explain it more easily than I could figure it out).

I'm trying to decide if tariffs within the US would be a good thing at the moment or not. My hunch is that they would be but it is at odds with my general antitariff attitude.

For a not too insignificant amount of time, prior to Tesla, the Nissan Leaf was the biggest selling EV in the US (maybe in the world?).

If Chinese EVs were allowed to compete fairly in the US, my guess is Tesla would be losing ground even faster.

Impartial rating organizations like CR have often rated brands like Hyundai better EV purchases than Teslas.

All of these sorts of things make me skeptical of attempts to attribute EV sale increases to Musk. Electric appliances and equipment have been gaining in market share in other domains as well; a lot of this is due to improvements in battery technology more than anything else.

Just the other day, *all* of the Cybertrucks were recalled due to significant safety problems, and three young adults were recently killed by a Cybertruck they couldn't escape from when it caught on fire (the relatively high rate of fires with Cybertrucks per unit has been controversial, but the numbers are there). People have recently been pointing to public accounting anomalies at Tesla, and Reuters has uncovered company attempts to cover-up serious problems with their cars.

Together with what I've heard about DOGE, what's happened at Twitter, and his history pre-Tesla, I get the sense that Musk is a kind of hype magnet that mismanages his companies, where the rot is slowed by competent staff who are either terrified of losing their jobs or approval, by government subsidies (somewhere just this morning I read that 40ish percent of Tesla profits are from carbon credits? not sure if that's true but it fits), by network effects, or corruption.

There's a pattern now with him that's pretty undeniable, imho.

I think there's been a bit of concept creep then. Terrorism originally meant "scare by threatening physical safety".

It's kind of offensive to me to compare suicide bombers and so forth to people burning cars in a parking lot. The cars might be burned just to damage Tesla's inventory.

"Intimidating potential buyers" also can be a slippery slope. What if a bunch of people picketing in front of a dealership is intimidating? Is that "terrorism"?

I don't like this poll for what it's worth because it's vague and blends a bunch of things together. Burning a car at a dealership after hours to me is really different to me from damaging a personal vehicle, and that's really different to me from leaking personal information of owners.

I've been calling our legislators and governor to ask them to address this specific issue, of sovereignty comments in particular. Nothing yet but sometimes it takes a bit of delay.

It seems our state isn't the only one who has constituents bringing this up:

https://bsky.app/profile/islandpunk.bsky.social/post/3lkoyexuejs2t