Hours after the U.S. invaded Venezuela to seize President Nicolás Maduro, President Trump sent a warning to the governments of Mexico, Cuba and Colombia that their countries could be next.
Why it matters: The stunning attack on Caracas follows Trump’s recent assertion of his own version of the Monroe Doctrine, and the president’s comments that the U.S is not afraid to put “boots on the ground” in the country suggest that the administration won’t hesitate to have an ongoing presence in the region.
What has to happen to get the most heavily armed civilian population on earth to get off its fat ass and so something about their piece of shit country?
We need a true 4th estate to start telling people the truth.
That would be a good start.
Really puts Germany in the 30’s into perspective. I always wondered as a kid “why didn’t anyone do anything”. Turns out, very very few people want to sacrifice anything for democracy and freedom. Luigi did something that could potentially have started a chain reaction of dissent, but no one rose up and followed.
I’m prepared to die in a hail of gunfire before ICE takes my wife. Not a macho thing, I’ve thought on this more than any man in a rational society should have to, but that’s where I’ve decided to draw the line. But ICE isn’t here yet. Shall I go to another state and hunt them?
Already picked a verbal fight with my MAGA neighbor. Pussy called the cops because I hurt his feelings. Should I go shoot him?
(Reading this over, good thing I didn’t ask ChatGPT. 😁)
I respect that. I’d die for my family, it’s a no-brainer.
Why would you go highlight yourself to a docuhebag though? What I would also do for my family is keep them safe.
Well since more than a third of them can’t be arsed to get out and vote even once every four years, much less for state and local elections or primaries… I’d say a whole hell of a lot to get to an armed insurrection. Which has much less a chance than a non-violent revolution, no matter how many people on lemmy harp on about armed conflict being the only possible solution.
I’m far more heavily armed than most. I could outfit my entire block, though they’re already armed; young, old, liberal, MAGA. Yes, even the little old black lady across the street.
What the fuck do you want me to do? I’m sick of these smartass posts. Give me fucking instructions and be clear or STFU.
Fuck me. Saw what looked like an ICE thing in Alabama today, put my Colt .45 under my leg while trying to get my immigrant wife the hell back to Florida. There’s a 12-gauge pump leaning on my desk 24x7 and the AR-15 leans on my nightstand. Being that there’s no ICE around here, want me to hunt some down a couple of states away? Be clear in your instructions.
I now lock my doors, have a gun in reach everywhere I go and live in fear. And you assholes, “LOL! Where my 2A boys at?”
The problem is that no one is offering any other vision of the future. No leader in the US is offering anything worth dying for.
Its hard to fight for the status quo. Its even harder to ask someone to die for the status quo.
Protect your family and friends. Be friends with your neighbors. Join peaceful protests.
I swear, the posts you’re responding to are all bots and plants. There has been an effort for the past decade to continually divide the American populace.
Fascism is the division. Fighting back about immigrants being black bagged and disappeared isn’t dividing the American populace. This is how you end up where we are. Keep inching to the right so you don’t “divide the populace”.
Retarded yankistani only knows when to shoot when ordered. Checks out.
Sit the fuck down, you aren’t fooling anyone with that drivel. And you won’t do fucking shit when they come for you or anyone know, so lay off the self-aggrandizing bullshit.
Yeah, fuck these whiners. We are a nation of laws, and we still have several legal paths to follow before the next step is revolution.
On the meantime, as those legal steps play out, we all have our Red Lines that will not be crossed. You have a wife you’re concerned about. I have certain people counting on me for support of multiple kinds, and some of those people are members of vulnerable groups, and if these psychopaths were to do ANYTHING to them, I would become a very dangerous person.
Likewise, cancellation of elections means the official end of America, the government becomes my enemy, and it’s Civil War.
We aren’t obligated to jump at the orders of outsiders who want us to act impetuously, for their own sick entertainment. This is our nation’s future, and we will take it one step at a time, and the next step is the 2026 Midterm Election. We need to pour everything into that, and ignore the noise from outsiders.
That’s the thing though, you’re not. Trump pardons anyone he gets paid to, breaks precedence and laws, ignores court orders, encourages extrajudicial murder, kidnapping, and disappearing of citizens, not to mention people.
Without checks or balances, you’re just hoping they’ll pick you last, meanwhile losing neighbours, friends and allies you could have banded together with.
We are still a nation of laws, and they extend to all of us, including Trump. He’s just choosing to break them openly, because he knows the Dems are too cowardly to stop him, and he is 100% right.
But make no mistake, the American people respect those laws, and have no trouble living by them, and we are APALLED at the cowardly behavior of our elected leaders for not enforcing them on these scummy hyenas.
That’s why the upcoming Midterms elections are going to be a bloodbath, certainly for MAGA, but also for Dems to a certain extent. Several elections ago, proto-MAGA candidates kicked out a bunch of entrenched Republicans in the primary, and went on to morph into MAGA, and conquer the government.
The Progressives need to do that exact same thing in 2026 and 2028. MAGAs aren’t safe, but neither should weak Democratic bitches, like Schmuck Schumer, and the weakling in my district. I would vote for ANY Progressive, or even any other Democrat, before I’ll vote for this loser again.
This is not true according to the Supreme Court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States.
Once you accept that the highest court in the land is the one who decides which people are subject to the law, the path for accountability for Trump within the status quo of the system only has a single outlet: impeachment, conviction, and removal from office (followed by subsequent prosecution in the criminal system outside of Congress).
While impeachment has occurred (or been threatened) multiple times, nobody has ever convicted a president nor removed one from office in the country’s history. The “Dems” – who you are somewhat unjustly demonizing here given the current make-up of Congress – got the closest anyone has ever gotten to removing one in Trump’s second impeachment.
The status quo responded by saying “he’s close to out of office anyway, it doesn’t matter” and then allowed Trump’s propaganda machine to re-write history and turn the participants in the January 6th insurrection into pardoned, misunderstood heroes.
Inside the system (which you still think will save us), the “Dems” also attempted (though halfheartedly) to prosecute Trump after he was out of office, and this Supreme Court carve out for a sitting President was the reward for them trying to enforce the law under Biden.
The Democrats have plenty of blame to take here for the rise of Trump both generally speaking and in particular him being allowed to run for and win re-election. But they did much more than any single Republican has ever done to stop Trump.
I’d argue that Biden’s true mistake was not acting as Lula did and arresting Trump immediately upon entry to office.
I’ve said that from the moment Biden took office. He should have ordered all of them rounded up and sent to Gitmo for extended interrogation, then kept them locked up as national security threats. Any politician who amplified the Big Lie, should have been removed from office under 14A/S3. Those who helped organize and transport terrorist traitors to Jan 6, like Clarence Thomas’ bulldog wife, should have been prosecuted for sedition.
But Biden appointed the most ineffective Republican in history to go after MAGA, and he dithered and slow-walked it, and gave them a two year head start in running out the clock.
As for Trump’s supposed “immunity,” I think we’ll eventually discover that it isn’t as wide-reaching as many think, and especially as he thinks. SCOTUS said he has immunity for his official presidential duties, but that’s a serious limitation. His official presidential duties are defined in the Constitution, and subsequent case law, and he has immunity for THOSE actions. For instance, Obama can’t be prosecuted for murder for ordering drones strikes that were within his presidential duties, as many MAGAs have called for. That was an official presidential duty. But accepting airplanes for bribes, bombing foreign citizens in international waters, deporting innocent people to life sentences in torture prisons in third-party countries without due process, are not official presidential duties, outlined in the Constitution.
Most importantly, planning, promoting, and launching an Insurrection that violates the entire Constitution, and stealing hundreds of sensitive classified documents does NOT fall under anyone’s definition of “official presidential duties.”
Trump thinks it means he has full immunity for everything, because he mistakenly believes he is a King, but we have to disabuse him of that idea, harshly, ruthlessly, and mercilessly.
It’s not a big limitation for Republicans. They can simply make the argument to a sympathetic Supreme Court that the charged violation was part of his official presidential duties.
That’s the thing in general as well. “The law is the law” is a meaningless platitude. Humans interpret (and reinterpret) the law as they see fit. We also pick and choose which portions to enforce.
That all set aside:
(Emphasis mine)
“At least presumptive immunity” is another bit of legal worminess that makes whomever is president with a sympathetic make-up on the Supreme Court effectively a king with one exception reiterated throughout the opinion: impeachment, conviction, and removal.
Sure, there’s “unofficial acts”, but that is another bit of subjective non-sense that can be argued away before the trial even starts.
The idea that “the law applies to everyone” is not shared by our current Supreme Court. Despite Democrats being fairly useless and spineless, this part of the deconstruction of our country (along with the disastrous decision in Citizen’s United) belongs solely upon the shoulders of the gowned guys and gals of the Supreme Court. He acts with impunity because he can. He acts without fear of prosecution because his supplicants in Congress and the Supreme Court allow him to do so.
The majority are OK enough with their fascist regime because it doesn’t affect them personally (yet) or are as politically apathetic as the Russian people. Only way that things will change is when the majority of the population are starving it seems.
You could beat the entire armed population of the US with a small fraction of the US military. The power imbalance is crazy. One wiretap, one drone, and you don’t have to worry about anyone in that region fucking around again.
This doesn’t mean that the politicians can’t be killed, but it does mean that guns aren’t the way. We would need to get on board with letter bombs and ricin.
We would also be operating against the NSA and the militarized police state, so any action would have to be stochastic. Just like it takes time to boil water, it takes time to get an influential stochastic terrorism campaign going. Any truly organized rebellion would be stamped out almost immediately.
A hundred million people armed with rolling pins and bricks could topple any government on earth.
Personally feeling the pain.