Mamdami is absolutely a template for how progressives can win nation wide. But the key is to treat it is as a toolkit, not something to be copy-and-pasted exactly. Mamdami wouldn’t win in, say, Idaho, but there are people who can. They just have to keep hammering on the shit that matters to the average voter.

Biden and Kamala sank because they promised to keep doing exactly the same shit they’d been doing for the last four years, while refusing to acknowledge how much worse the average person’s quality of life had gotten over the last four years. Mamdami won because he focused, hard on cost of living issues. Make that your core message and people will flock to you. Healthcare and groceries. That’s what it’s all about right now.

organize, vote,

A lot of people are going to get upset at you for including “vote” here, but you’re absolutely correct, and those people really need to understand that these are not mutually exclusive imperatives.

Wasn’t the height of Nazi popularity (at least vote wise) something like 30%?

Keep in mind we’re talking about a political system where coalition governments are far more common. It’s not the two party system the US is used to, so votes aren’t a measure of “popularity” per se. What I mean by that is you can have plenty of people who don’t vote for a party, simply because there’s another choice they like better out of the fairly wide array of options, but that doesn’t mean they actively dislike every option they didn’t vote for just that it wasn’t their first choice. On top of that, the Nazis were very smart about putting in place policies that improved the lives of average working Germans (you know, the ones they liked), and they made sure to start out by targeting the minority groups that people least liked, or cared about, before taking their crackdowns wider.

This has been one of Trump’s major misplays. They went in with their immigration crackdown, which should have slotted neatly into that same zone of “Going after the minority groups people least liked” but in order to hit Trump’s outlandish target numbers they had to start rounding up the immigrants that everyone actually likes. Turns out for the most part Americans actually really like Abdul who runs the corner shop and gives them extra meat on their delhi sandwich, and they really like Eduardo who does their landscaping and is always on time and super polite, and the immigrants they hate are mostly just fictions made up by Fox News. Whereas Jewish people in Nazi Germany really were pretty actively disliked by a very broad swathe of the populace (the roots of European antisemitism go back millennia), so there was a lot less resistance to the concept as a whole.

It was very cumbersome to take a picture in the 1930s.

Yes, but you’re also not travelling as far from your home neighbourhood to do your job as any kind of cop or government agent. So a lot of the people around you are going to recognise you that evening at the bar or grocery store. People generally moved in smaller circles.

OK, but in all seriousness…

This is, genuinely, the difference between what’s happening in America today, and what happened in Nazi Germany.

There is, absolutely and without question, a fascist takeover of the US government in progress. But unlike what happened in Germany, that takeover is not popular. The fact that ICE have to hide their faces - the fact that they’re ashamed or afraid to be known for what they’re doing - is huge.

While there were obviously many Germans who did resist the Nazis, on the whole the party was immensely popular. They were tapping into feelings that were borne - or at least accepted - by most of the populace.

There’s a great recent video by American historian Heather Cox Richardson where she and Joanne Freeman talk about how this is basically the last chance for Trump’s admin to truly seize power. That’s terrifying - because they really might do it - but it also reflects a very real opportunity. They can be stopped, and the tide is very rapidly turning against them. Renee Good’s murder, in particular, has galvanized the country against ICE, and by extension Trump. It sucks that it took the murder of a white woman for Americans to give a shit, but they are giving a shit and that’s what matters for now.

Trump’s goons are scared. That should tell every decent American that now is truly the time to push back harder than you ever have before.

Hate to break it you bud, but those haven’t existed for about about two decades now.

The article is making some very broad assumptions by treating any of these moves as being directly connected to the proposed tax. Wealthy people do shit like this all the time.

Larry Page (with a net worth of $276 billion), one of Google’s founders, had his holding company move its headquarters to the tax-friendly East Coast state of Delaware, relocate three of its companies to Florida and purchased two homes in Miami, for $173 million. Larry Ellison (net worth $245 billion), cofounder of Oracle, sold his $45 million home in the hills above San Francisco, though he had already moved his tax residence to Hawaii in 2020, just like Elon Musk (head of the social media platform X and Tesla), who relocated to Texas. Meanwhile, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, who is worth $26 billion, has increased his presence in Florida.

So your headline is a lie?

One billionaire did some paperwork. He didn’t even leave, he literally just moved some assets around on paper.

“I’m not showing up to your party.”

“Well fuck you, I’m not inviting you then!”

OK?

Seriously, Americans, how the fuck did this guy win two elections? Please make it make sense.

It’s important to note - and this article does get into this further down - that right now US oil companies are showing very little interest in Trump’s plans in Venezuela. Basically the proposition here is that they spend billions of dollars on a bet that maybe a very pissed off Venezuelan government won’t kick them out in a few years, and maybe Donald Trump will still be alive and he or his cronies will still be in power in a few years, and maybe Trump won’t just give up on this whole scheme after five minutes have passed and maybe Columbian guerrillas and anti-US rebels in Venezuela won’t blow up their shit and… Yeah. It sucks. It’s a dumb, stupid deal. Business likes certainty and stability, and Trump offers none of that.

That depends what you’re trying to solve. For a lot of people, they’re still gonna need their phone. I don’t think “Just use a walkie talkie bro” would read as very helpful advice to the average person.

If, however, you are the sort of person organizing a protest or other similar activity, yes, absolutely, walkie tallies are great. A lot of people who do serious political activism talk about how radio is still the most resilient communication method. Not fool-proof, you definitely need to study up on the limitations, but an invaluable tool to be aware of.

If you are going to a protest as a group, and you have the resources to invest a few hundred bucks, getting a set of walkie-talkies for the group plus a dedicated burner one responsible person to carry (maybe someone who will be in radio range but clear of the actual happenings) is also a solid strategy, but we also shouldn’t be acting like “Going as a group” and “spending a few hundred dollars” are prerequisites for being politically active. There need to be solutions for everyone.

As a Canadian, obviously I would take an help offered, but I do strongly believe that Greenland is where we need to draw the line in the sand. Again, I don’t think Trump has the stomach for an actual war. I think he knows how much that would sink his popularity with the people who most strongly support him. A war with Canada would be an especially difficult sell.

I’m not remotely dismissing the possibility that it could happen. Trust me, my wife is in the CAF, she’d be on the front fucking line if it did. There’s shit I know that I can’t even fucking talk about when it comes to those kinds of conversations. But I think the key here is that he’s really looking for quick easy wins. That’s Trump’s whole mentality. It’s all about what you can steal before anyone notices you got away with it. He’s a conman and a thief by nature. Greenland is where NATO can show Trump the will to stand up to him, and deny him the easy, cheap wins that he wants. It won’t end the threat, but at this point I’m really not sure if anything NATO does can end the threat of the US without a world war. I think the only thing, realistically, that can be done is to buy time for the people in America to get their fucking shit together and end this nightmare.

Yeah, honestly, this is one of the few good things to happen lately. There’s a comment from Mark Blyth where he calls himself a climate optimist because (paraphrasing) between China, India and the US, it really only needs one of them to move and the rest of the world will have to follow. We’re using “optimist” pretty loosely here, obviously, yes we all know that we’ve kicked the can too far down the road for any solution to even be good, let alone perfect, but China is merrily dragging us into many of the better of the bad solutions simply because they’re just good business (and, y’know, they had that whole thing where you could cut Beijing’s air with a chainsaw on a good day). Without the US fucking shit up, we might actually start to get somewhere on some real solutions. I hate looking to China to lead the world on anything, but US voters decided they didn’t want to act like adults so here we are.

The rest of NATO need to put troops in Greenland, today, with clear orders to fire on any invading force, even if its the US.

If there’s one clear and obvious pattern with Trump’s use of military power, it’s that he likes quick, easy, low cost military operations. One day of airstrikes, one special forces raid, declare victory, go home. Either he or the people around him understand that America has no stomach for a war right now. The American right have been beating the anti-war drums hard for the last decade. But surgical military operations win public because they’re already over before anyone can react. Look, see, no Iraq style quagmire. Trump gets it done, no problems. Not like those other idiots.

All of which adds up to the conclusion that Trump will not want to spark a war with the entirety of NATO. But he’s extremely confident that if he steals Greenland fast enough, NATO won’t want a war to take it back.

This is why the defence of Greenland has to be pre-emptive. A clear commitment to a fight, before the US can put boots on the ground. Do that, and Trump will back down. The right wing politics of today are not the right wing politics of 2001. He doesn’t want a war, he wants an easy victory. We cannot offer him one.

Oh, yeah, I mean the prize committee have turned the thing into a fucking joke as it is. It was a farce when Obama got one for simply not being quite as openly pro war as Bush was, and I genuinely cannot even begin to fathom why Machado deserves one.

I assumed “for corporations and the wealthy” would be sufficiently implied.

Oops.

Machado will give him the plaque or whatever the fuck it is they hand out, and we’ll see it on his desk with the name taped over and “Donald J Trump” written in sharpie. He’s such a child that he’ll absolutely believe that’s the same thing as actually being selected to receive the prize.

And given the insane deficits Trump is already running, they really need that tariff money.

Well, yes, but also that wouldn’t have applied in this case anyway. Politicians manage the public purse, they’re not personally liable for it.

Oh, that’s wild. I knew about the refunds, but had no idea there was a speculative market for them.