Can’t help noticing the DOGE wants to defund the FBI

Why not just make him the ambassador at this point?

Swalwell is a shameless corporate shill and happy to play the “oops not enough votes” fall guy for a failed vote.

Rights have to be enforced. Enforcement is routinely selective and arbitrary, based on who is in power and who is enjoying a popular moment.

Police clocking fifty hours of overtime at $75/hr playing candy crush while they claim they’re investing a bike theft is something in willing to believe.

If you can remove the rights of people you don’t like, others can do the same to you

Except we remove these rights all the time, in large part because of the insidious bigotry that fanatics propagate. Defending the bigots does nothing to expand civil rights for the minorities they are marching to oppress.

FFS, the ACLU defended the Charleston tiki torch rioters. Whose interests did that serve?

If it’s not universal it cannot be a right.

Selective enforcement of civil rights is routine in the US. Hell, the same people crying about Campus Free Speech in 2022 ago were the ones calling for the heads of Palestine Solidarity protesters a year later.

It’s so horrifying to considering “having parents with a home to go back to” an idea we’re going to call a privilege.

Really has “society owes you nothing, you’re lucky we didn’t strangle you in the cradle” vibes.

Protecting the rights of bad people equally with good ones is what they stand for.

It isn’t. When you’re describing is a revisionist mission adopted by the New York branch in the 60s and 70s.

The original mission of the ACLU was the defense of labor agitators, picketers, and organizers - common targets for right wing hate groups.

This article from Jacobin goes into the transformation of the radical labor rights organizer to centrist Free Speech absolutist.

The mission has shifted from defending working people to bad people as the ACLU grew divorced from its labor roots.

Oof. Well, the first season was good at least

The ACLU is a broken organization for this very reason. They invest a great deal of their time and energy in trying to look nonpartisan by backing some of the most vile and irredeemable people in the country.

On the flip side, Democrats steer wide of the organization whenever it comes time to run candidates or appoint cabinet positions.

You’ll never see the head of the ACLU appointed to the DOJ or granted a federal judgeship. No more than a regional leader of Planned Parenthood gets to run for Senate in a bright blue state. They aren’t feeders to high office like the Federalist Society or the Heritage Foundation. All they are good for is fundraising from unhappy liberals.

They can make it illegal to acknowledge it, even. Label any recognition a form of antisemitism. Accuse any reporter or activist of siding with The Terrorists.

Easy to forget that Tlaib has already been censured for saying exactly this a year ago.

H.Res.845 - Censuring Representative Rashida Tlaib for promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and for calling for the destruction of the state of Israel.

brazenly violate rule #1 “We do not tolerate threats of and calls for violence in any form against any living creature”.

I’ve seen so many caveats and exemptions to this rule, its a complete joke.

There is no left in the US.

There is. The jails are full of them. The ghettos are full of them. The service sector wouldn’t exist if you tried to get by without anyone expressing leftist political views.

But they have very little capital, no open lines of communication, and no legal means of political organizing. America does not lack for Marxists. What it lacks is a vanguard party that can operate in full view of the public.

Any time you see a hint of party formation - from the WTO protests to OWS to BLM - it’s smothered to death by hostile police, mass media, and private grifters preying on any ambient social good will.

They’ve built an entire suite of technologies that are designed to quash dissent. Now with AI, you can’t even get your rhetoric out there because they can correlate your writing style and find out who you are

More insidiously, find you and echo your message from a hundred different knock off organizations that exist exclusively to spread FUD.

Bernie Sanders memes blasting from every corner, drowning out any actual organizing message while signaling nothing.

he raised taxes on oil companies, he doesn’t overpay for weapons, and stopped diesel exports for consumer benefit.

He had to do all this to fight the war. It wasn’t out of some ideological commitment, but the simple material necessities of running an economy during wartime when you don’t have the infinite money check of a global reserve currency.

Now imagine Texas is the entirety of US

Over half of Trump’s cabinet is from Florida

Forgot to mention that out electoral system is more straightforward, so it doesn’t allow for gerrymandering

That’s absolutely false

Yet you still see either party win the elections. In Russia, however? 80% goes to Putin and United Russia. Every. Single. Time.

Russia uses the same tricks to constrain participatory democracy as Florida or Texas. Even when a Democrat can win at the local level, the gerrymandered legislature steps in to gut the local government of authority (as Abbott did when he seized HISD).

Yes, you get to do the thing we call voting. But no, you don’t get to participate in government.

It’s no comparison to how blatantly corrupt a person can be when he knows he’ll be in power on practically every election cycle

Tell Ken Paxton. Tell Rick Scott. Tell Tim Moore or Chris Kapenga. These are people in office who literally cannot lose, as the state election system operates.

If Republicans manage to move us to “EC votes by House seats” system, they’ll have effectively gerrymandered the Presidency. Then there’s no way for a Dem to ever win, shy of some absurd lopsided 70/30 election.

Whether its a power struggle between autocrats or a ruthless police slaying of some grassroots organizers or the butchering of migrant workers along the border or the bombs flung around the world to kill some AI designated insurgent goat herder, American politics is drenched in blood.

I just think it’s fanciful to believe Evil Foreigners Don’t Value Human Life while we’ve got no shortage of trigger pullers in the States. The American Exceptionalist mentality is delusional. We simply refuse to see the violence in our own system.

the sentence still doesn’t mean he’s literally the same as hitler

For one, Trump doesn’t like dogs. For another, Hitler never had access to a nuclear arsenal.

Just like Trump, Jeffrey dahmer and Hitler.

One of these things is not like the other. Can you tell which one?

I mean, its funny to hear “they don’t kill the opposition in the US” while blinking past everyone from the Kennedy brothers, MLK, Fred Hampton, and Harvey Milk straight up to Clementa C. Pinckney (killed in the Dylan Roof mass shooting), Gabby Giffords, the plot against Gretchen Whitmire, or the repeated failed attempted on Donald Trump.

That’s before you start counting the string of modern civil rights activists who were shot and burned in their cars (Darren Seal most notably) or protesters like Manuel Esteban Paez Terán who were killed by the police.