Summary
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged countering the Trump administration’s policies by resisting at every turn, arguing that its incompetence makes it vulnerable.
Her remarks followed chaos caused by a rescinded executive order that temporarily shut down Medicaid portals nationwide.
She encouraged activists to take offline action, citing ongoing mobilization efforts.
Her strategy focuses on making governance difficult for Trump, calling his administration “dangerous and cruel” but also “shockingly dim.”
Basically, resist. Do not comply in advance. Make them fire you. Challenge that firing in court.
“It’s important to know that a lot of productive activity is happening in person and offline, too,” she said. “Not all of it can be broadcast online, but we’ve had hundreds of people showing up to our trainings, mobilizations, and more. Keep going. Tyranny is eroded by a sea of small acts. Everything matters.”
I just hope she comes out of this unscathed. It only takes one loon with a shiv… and now there’s millions of 'em.
I would love to start something in my city, and I’ve already been trying, but it’s hard to get people to mobilize. It’s disheartening at the very least. Any ideas on how I can be helpful to my country aside from voting?
I’d highly recommend this handy guide on how to find local groups that are building the foundations to fight back.
Get involved in mutual aid groups if possible. Those folks will be able to guide you best on how to be effective in your community.
I’ve joined a few groups but I feel I’m not doing enough.
Do what you can now and keep your mind open to new opportunities. This isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. Don’t burn yourself out looking to do everything you possibly can. The important thing is to build that muscle of direct action instead of letting it atrophy through complacency or learned helplessness. That way, when you’re really needed you’ll be able to mobilize.
This is such a good answer and it’s exactly what I needed to read. Thank you kind internet strangler.
He is definitely confused, weak and incompetent, backed by confused, weak and incompetent Republicans.
Let’s just hope they are so incompetent that they can’t do as much harm as they would like to. Fingers crossed.
The problem is decades ago Democrats did not make changes to help the poor and lower middle classes fast enough and extreme enough to show that they were the party of the common worker and get a dominant position for multiple election cycles, allowing them to put in policies to stop inflation.
Do you want Jesus/religion and extreme poverty for the lower classes?
or Do you want abortion and mild poverty for the lower classes?
Moral wedge issues resulted in a lot of lost votes because for decades Democrats offered only minimal or marginal economic benefits for the lower classes. Their platform was so conservative they lost power completely over moral wedge issues and now can’t get it back. Also, now the US is in so much debt that something like DOGE (which is covert austerity measures camouflaged as conservatism) is actually prudent and necessary.
DOGE is not prudent or nessessary, its “we have tried nothing and were all out of ideas”. There has not been a proper budget in decades, we do not give the IRS the resources to go after wealthy tax evaders and we keep giving tax breaks to those least in need of them…
Both parties have failed at gaining the political will to fix anything and now that the scales are tipped in the GOPs favor, they alone opt to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Even if you are right, and you may be, other forms of austerity measures or balanced budgets etc simply haven’t been politically feasible to implement, otherwise they would have been done. My point is that Democrats could have prevented this whole mess by offering the poor a more more lucrative platform, so lucrative that perhaps they cared less about religion and moral wedge issues, but they clung to a more moderate platform, allowing wedge issues to become a large factor in how people voted, leading to the present situation.
The Senate: "We can’t hear you over conforming Trump’s Secretary of State nomination unanimously!“
Said Secretary, Marco Rubio: immediately bans accurate passports for trans, nongender, and intersex people 🤦🤬
Any kind of on the ground movement or mobilization needs political support in the halls of power. It’s what made the resistance demonstrated against Trump the first term possible, and the dynamic goes both ways. On the ground resistance gives political actors the space to be resilient. Resilient politicians give in the ground movement space to work.
Basically all other Democrats other than Bernie and AOC shrivelling up and hiding in their shells will have a chilling effect on our ability to organize on the ground.
I’ve been bitching about the lack of leadership from the Democrats for a while now - I’m glad to see that others are seeing it too.
They need to dump Wasserman-Schulz. She’s a big part of the reason we’re in this mess.
I made a comment recently going through the list of the campaign advisors for Harris which included;
mostly C-suite executives, advisors for the richest peoples trust funds and literally a representative from New Orleans who had to step down after it was discovered he was the top recipient for bribes from the oil industry but is still apparently a great choice for directly advising the DNC.It’s not just one person it’s the whole of the DNC that’s like this. They bow to decorum while underhandedly stuffing their pockets with cash just like the Republicans. They just want it to look professional while they do it.
They need to give a shit about others and the average citizen not just see this as their rightful place to make money because they deserve it for being better connected. That’s why we are in this mess.
It’s all been downhill since JFK…
LBJ at least pushed for laws, he helped convince white senators to vote for the Civil Rights Act. I think if we had a second LBJ, we’d have something done.
…I’d rather not have a new VIetnam war if that was the case, however.
Heinrich from NM has made it clear that he will pushback. Let’s see what that looks like. I suggest folks that can contact your reps, now and frequently.
Every day I have sent mine a note from the contact form on their pages. Angrily
Don’t use the contact form or send an email. Call them. Even better, show up in person if possible. The contact form can be filled out from anywhere by anything, same as sending an email. Calling at least lets them know an actual person, likely a local voter, holds the views expressed and is more memorable and harder to ignore. Showing up in person even more so.
You make a good point, especially in these times.
It’s funny. sounds like you’re giving up already, and blaming the Dems.
You got Bernie and the Squad.
If you want to put some backbone in the Dems in office, go out and start a voter registration drive. Let them see that there are people who will support them.
sounds like you’re giving up already
What is it about the lemm.ee domain that produces accounts with the most cringe, awful takes?
I think they just assume that everyone is a weak kneed and terminally online as themselves.
What part of registering voters is ‘cringe’ to you?
The lack of self awareness in this comment is truly sublime.
So enlighten me. Did you have a better plan in 2024? Somethings besides voting? What’s your sure-fire winning strategy that you didn’t use yet?
Who’s talking about voting as resistance, besides you? There’s a conversation to be had about it sure, but it’s not the conversation being had now, here. You trying to shift the focus to a subject you’re comfortably confident about discussing is why you’re being criticized, not for the merit of what you’re saying on its own.
Hey that’s our job!
start a voter registration drive
What? The time for a voter registration drive was a year ago. We’re well past that now. You can’t vote out a dictator.
It’s time for more direct action. We need protests. We need strikes. We need people in the streets fighting for their rights because they’re being taken away by the day.
Understanding and recognizing how the world functions isn’t equivalent to giving up. Nor is “hope” for the sake of hope any kind of a strategy. And yes. The Dem’s are the fucking problem and always have been. Nothing about this fascist takeover would have ever been possible with out the complicity and milquetoast politics of Democrats. They are a worthless and abhorrent party with no integrity and barely worth supporting, beyond the weakest possible argument of them being the “lessor” evil. The rise of fascism would be impossible with out the previous 30 years of normalization politics out of Democrats. Start a voter registration drive? Give me a fucking break with the navel gazing. Voting isn’t going to save the Union.
We may need the squad to break away from a Democratic party that has shown its self incapable of wielding power in such a way as to prevent the rise of fascism. What we’ll need for on the ground movements to be successful is support in some way from the halls of power. That doesn’t necessarily mean working with Democrats.
I dunno, seems like the fascists are the problem, actually.
The moderates that tolerate fascists and thus enable them are always the problem, actually. The fascists fail without them but succeed with them, every time.
So the fascists… aren’t the problem?
My comment didn’t even slightly say anything even remotely resembling that, and you fucking know it. Quit commenting in bad faith.
It did, though. Or at least the message you’re presenting seems to indicate that.
The moderates that tolerate fascists and thus enable them are always the problem, actually.
I’m fairly sure you phrased it like this as a retort to the first commenter’s comment, but you gotta see how insisting the blame ‘actually’ lies with the moderates and the people enabling the fascists is pretty clearly interpretable as shifting the responsibility. Both parties are to blame, but you’re implying that the bulk of the criticism lies with the people being passive about allowing the fascist takeover instead of with the people exploiting the resource they’ve found in moderates by doing the fascism.
Dems didn’t get their shit together and exploit the moderates first to prevent this, but while that does make them culpable for the current fascist power grab, it does not make them equally culpable, and that is the position you seem to be presenting.
Maybe learn like, even a tiny bit about the history of fascism and how it comes into being and how it takes power.
Who is this ‘we’ you speak of?
I really wanted Bernie in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Somehow ‘we’ managed not to get out and get him nominated.
But now, somehow, ‘we’ are going to get organized.
Until ‘we’ shows me that they can organize a weinie roast, I’ll stick with the people who are actually on the ballot.
I also notice that you had nothing to say about registering voters as an actual tool.
Until ‘we’ shows me that they can organize a weinie roast, I’ll stick with the people who are actually on the ballot.
I guess you missed the part where we were manning barricades and taking tear gas canisters to the face in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022… directly confronting fascism on the streets and taking it to them. Your obtuseness has no external meaning.
I also notice that you had nothing to say about registering voters as an actual tool.
If voting changed anything about this system, they’d make it illegal. Voting as a strategy to stop fascism was attempted in 2020. The result was a 4 year hiatus, but with no real ability or intention to take action against fascism. Biden could have had Trump arrested on day fucking one of taking power. He chose not to. Democrats chose to only make a show of any kind of consequences for a literal attempted coup, because to them, it simply wasn’t a priority. Voting as a strategy to change the system doesn’t work when the people you are obligated to vote for as the “opposition party” are not, and will not, and have no interest in changing the system: ie, Democrats.
So, in other words, bOTh SidES arE tHe SAMe. Don’t vote, because it doesn’t work.
At a certain point its obvious that you are just intentionally missing the point.
If voting changed anything about this system, they’d make it illegal. Voting as a strategy to stop fascism was attempted in 2020.
It’s like you just type away and don’t even bother reading what you wrote.
bOTh SidES arE tHe SAMe
Everyone who says this with mixed case sarcasm does so out of bitter disappointment at the remaining differences.
The parties agree on more shit than they should.
Humans and apes share of 98% of genetic material.
What’s the alternative? Register as Republicans and do a hostile takeover of that party?
State level electoral reform
Honestly, it would be a lot easier to do a hostile takeover of the Green Party. If Democrats are so damned worried about splitting the vote, they don’t have to field a candidate. It’s not like they are interested in fielding one that can win anyway.
The Dems have given up. Because it’s time for them to take a vacation after playing the part for their rich donors for the last 4 years.
Another NPC saying “The Left who didn’t vote are to blame” as a concern troll for the Right… Sowing the seeds of doubt basically. Shame on you but you have no shame.
Bruh don’t use the term “NPC”
Cool! Don’t “Bruh” me either then. You guys sound like you’re about to vomit on me, mid-syllable.
Bruh why? It’s not race/sex/gender/able-ist, stop letting right wing propagandists dictate what words you can use.
It isn’t chump and his taintsuckers you gotta worry about.
It’s the army of Federalist Society lawyers and policy experts around him. They’ve spent decades figuring out the removed in the armor of our governmental system. Figuring out how to dismantle it piece by piece.
Edit - wtf is that removed about? Wait…oh. bot thinks I did a racism.
Ha. Reminds me of an Asian standup comedian who had this routine about how he grew up in the inner city where the basketball nets were made of chains and so the chains didn’t go ‘swish,’ they went ‘chіnk.’ So when guys wanted to play basketball, they said, “let’s go shoot us up some chіnk.”
Thank you, Cyrillic letter і, for letting me bypass the bot to tell that joke. Because I’ve remembered that joke for years.
To attack the c h eye nk in someone’s armor shouldn’t be censored. Its a word that has meaning other than rascist. Bot should be smarter.
I don’t mind removed, but the group of people I don’t care for is the removed. They’re almost as bad as removed!
What was removed ? I don’t understand
A small imperfection in armor sometimes used to refer derogatorally towards people of east Asian decent
Thanks !!
Chinamen is not the preferred nomenclature, Dude.
Look, this isn’t a guy who built the… I mean what’s your point, man ? what’s the word ?? I’m out of my element
Fucken hell, that’s the correct fucking way to define a gap in armor. Bullshit. I really want to try a bunch of slurs out and see what sets it off.
I really want to try a bunch of slurs out
This is surely the most rational reaction to being slightly inconvenienced by a word filter.
Anyone else remember Neopets? They had a filter that was extreme and multilingual. I can’t count how many times I’d write a friendly message, the filter would block it, and I would end up editing chunks of text trying to avoid whatever word or series of letters the filter thought was inappropriate. Sometimes it’d be a few letters embedded in another word (like “associate” being banned for the letters a s s.) But sometimes, I was truly stumped. The only explanation I can think of is that some letters in English words matched up to swears in other languages.
Anyway, fun fact - I met my first boyfriend through that site. We decided to see how dirty we could talk while still getting messages past the filter. We used innuendos, slang, and other turns of phrase with each other just to see what we could get away with.
In the end, all that filter did was make us more creative at communicating forbidden topics. Whoops ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Nintendo still does this. There are pokemon names you can’t use as nicknames because it gets filtered. Most recently: Moltres EX gets caught by the filter on TCG Pocket and you can’t label your deck after it. “Violet” was blocked on an older game because “viol” is French for “rape”. Lazy, overcorrecting filter.
deleted by creator
Would a younger kid have understood what was being talked about or would it have gone over their head like the dirty jokes in kids cartoons? If the latter, the filters did their job. Neopets was probably one of the rare instances where parents actually signed the permission slips for their under 13 year old kids to use the social aspects. I know my parents did and it was the only site they ever did that for.
SEE WHAT YOU’RE MAKING ME DO? NOW I HAVE TO SAY THE N WORD… I DON’T WANT TO BUT YOU GAVE ME NO CHOICE!
“What if I come up with an entirely fictitious, nigh-impossible combination of circumstances to try and corner you into accepting my racial prejudice?”
also the answer is yes. Just because it’s a last wish doesn’t make it okay. it’s not like you can wish to do crimes for example.
I’d be slightly curious about why a child would make that particular dying wish, why they think anyone really has the power to either grant (if the wish is to say it without anyone thinking badly of them) or prevent that wish (if they just want to be able to say it, they already can), but mostly just lose any sympathy I might have had for the kid because I wouldn’t expect any good answer to that first question.
Making hard eye contact while slowly donning burger king crown
Not much since you’re on .world. .ml is much more strict.
Jebus. I still haven’t figured out if .ml is government funded or true believers. Very strange to me.
It’s the home instance of the founders of Lemmy, who are communists. I don’t know their views on authoritarian communism like Stalin or Mao, but people who thought these were good leaders are the “tankies” you may have heard of. There are a lot of them on .ml.
I’ve basically only ran into 90% left wing, sporadic sprinklings of conservative, tankie, liberal, other. “A lot of them” is pulling extra weight here.
Fair enough. They are more visible than most commenters, stand out to me at least, so maybe it seems like a lot.
Confirmation Bias is a hell of a drug.
Can’t upset the Chinese on .ml 😂
Wait until you try the in-game chat in Rocket League. You can’t even type “Discord”. It’s a banned word. 🤡
They’re probably trying to prevent people spamming discord invite links in game. I don’t necessarily have an issue with that. If someone got invited to a scam discord server from RL chat, blowback would definitely hit RL for allowing that on-ramp. If you vibe with someone and want to invite them to a discord server to enable teaming up easier, you can always send them the code after the discord.gg/ part of the link.
That’s gotta be it, yeah. You’re absolutely right.
Although typing in another language is absolutely impossible, at least for us in Sweden. So many basic words get bleeped, even if the banned word is only part of a larger word. An example: “I have to stop playing now” -> “Jag måste sluta spela nu”. “slut” is banned, sentence looks like this: “Jag måste ***** spela nu”
And it’s like that for like a substantial amount of sentences. So we’ll just go on Discord to talk. But we can’t say “hop on discord” or similar, so we just immediately say “disc” 😆
Go removed ahead you removed.
It’s clbuttic bowdlerization.
Would it not be kink? not …
Are you saying your comment was edited?
.ml replaces certain words with “removed”
In this case it seems to have been this term.
The “r” word will be removed too.
I haven’t noticed what the others are. I swear fairly often and those haven’t been removed. I would guess only things that are slurs etc.
Edit: It was removed from my link as well. LOL. Look up “gap in suit of armor” if you haven’t figured it out already. Kinda ironically, when it’s used as a slur it’s against chinese people.
There are better Lemmy hosts out there, just waiting for you to join.
Gimme a list.
There was as guy running around with a list of smaller, worthwhile instances.
I ended up on lemmy.zip more recently after starting on kbin, then moving to .world.
lemm.ee seems to be gaining popularity.
sh.itjust.works is also pretty well represented, its users seem normal enough afaik.
lemmy.dbzer0 is an anarchist instance, their admin is super knowledgeable and seems like a cool guy.
lemmy.blåhaj.zone is a radically inclusive, safe instance. They’re virulently anti-bigotry and anything perceived as “anti-marginalized” groups will likely be removed/banned.
There are hundreds of instances, 569 as of writing this. Some are niche and focused on specific hobbies or uses and a bunch of others are general purpose. It’s worth clicking around and sorting a few different ways to find a server you like. Remember you can export your settings and import them into an account on another instances so moving is relatively painless.
sh.itjust.works is also pretty well represented, its users seem normal enough afaik.
I resent the implication that I am normal!
Seriously though it’s a p chill instance
Thank you very much.
Bookmarked. Thank you for this insight.
I chose this one because it had the piracy community
I just signed up with the first one that worked, and it still took a while to actually get it created.
“Tyranny is eroded by a sea of small acts. Everything matters.”
A lot of Lemmy users really need to understand this. Far too often I see people deride any action that doesn’t immediately fix all problems in the world as worthless or meaningless, simply because they lack the imagination needed to see how small actions can add up to big changes.
It’s letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
That’s true, but it can also be used in reverse as a pacifying mechanism. For example, contributing to making the US the most incarcerated population in the world with ridiculously strict “tough on crime” legislation and then pardoning a small fraction of prisoners. Another example is forcing student loan debt to stick around through bankruptcy, but then forgiving a tiny fraction of loans. It’s a move to pretend change is in motion, but it’s so small and so slow that it’s never going to actually solve the problem. This is especially bad when the other party makes such huge moves in the negative direction while we’re supposed to be content with tiny steps toward “progress”.
What is this pacifying people from, do you imagine?
Like, let’s say Trump gives the order to disband all DEI committees everywhere, and a lot of people who like theirs resist the order to do so at every turn. Malicious compliance, straight-up refusal, sleight of hand. This pacifying resistance means they won’t…?
Even if the actions really do nothing, they get people active and organized, so that they can take more effective actions later on.
I honestly think a lot of this criticism is people’s internalized rationalization for why they themselves don’t take action.
This Lemmy user has the right idea.
Incrementalism got us here. At some point, you have to realize that you can’t stop a flash flood by bailing with a solo cup and shouting “I’m helping!”
It’s a stalling tactic to placate chumps while they sell us all out.
The difference being that the incrementalism was outsourced to elected officials. What I understand that sentence to mean to say is that it needs every one of you who is able to do anything of any magnitude. It adds up. And like kattfisk says, you get active and organized. You have more power than you think and democracy is more than just drawing a few crosses in a box every few years.
I mean, who is going to do it if not you? What have the heroes from the Democratic party been up to since the peaceful transition of power? Some of the Dem senators voted for many of Trumps catastrophic picks. In a time where the White House is flooding the zone (as Steve Bannon put it some time ago), Shumer is giving speeches on the senate floor, that no one is listening to and Dem leadership is scheduling emergency meetings for after the reason for the meeting goes into effect. Finally AOC shows some kind of leadership and calls upon all of you to mobilize and resist fascism and you react with “it’s a stalling tactic”? Please realize that you want the same thing. But if you want a mass movement, you will need to be organized on a smaller scale first or else it will fizzle out quickly.
Finally AOC shows some kind of leadership and calls upon all of you to mobilize and resist fascism and you react with “it’s a stalling tactic”?
AOC is not calling for incrementalism.
AOC is not calling for incrementalism.
That’s what I’m saying. Because neither did the user you replied to. They didn’t call for politicians to take small steps over time, but for everyone to take action so it adds up. Big difference.
Because neither did the user you replied to. They didn’t call for politicians to take small steps over time, but for everyone to take action so it adds up.
No, they just misrepresented the position of people who are sick if incrementalism for the sake of sliding right:
Far too often I see people deride any action that doesn’t immediately fix all problems in the world as worthless or meaningless
So it’s better to do nothing while they sell you all out?
Note how they bitch without bringing any actionable suggestions, but instead try to denigrate those that are taking action, all done with a sense of superiority.
That’s not what I said.
Don’t be so easily placated. They’re selling you out.
That’s not what I said.
So far you haven’t said what you think people should be doing. You’ve just said “this type of resistance is a waste of time.”
Without an alternative proposal that really sounds like “do nothing.”
You’ve just said “this type of resistance is a waste of time.”
Cool. Where?
You lied about what I said then. Thanks.
Who? Who is selling you out? Ocasio Cortez? Really?
Incrementalist democrats. Pay a tiny bit of attention.
This is like not believing in macro evolution.
Actually, I think a lack of incrementalism got us here. We incremented in the wrong direction.
This is like not believing in macro evolution.
Ever hear of punctuated equilibrium?
Actually, I think a lack of incrementalism got us here. We incremented in the wrong direction.
Sure is neat how Republicans get to do what they want all at once but we need decades of baby steps and half measures.
The Republicans only get to push things this far after decades of baby steps and half measures to get there. Things like getting fox news going, getting to draw congressional districts, slowly getting courts set up to let their movements work, working smaller representative races to get a foothold, facing a rejection as they tried to go all out with the tea party. Finally their preparation has a house, Senate, supreme Court, that was ready and willing to enable this effort.
So, what were Democrats doing while all this was going on? What was their celebrated incrementalism setting up?
Because it looks to me like they spent all this time moving to the right, incrementally of course.
The whole “If the Democrats don’t immediately and completely do everything I want I’m not going to participate at all” is a self-fulfilling philosophy.
On the republican side, when the larger party was “too far to the left”, they didn’t just throw up their hands, they worked at it, slogging away at the relatively less glamorous task of mucking about within the framework of their party, getting small victories and parlaying them to broader victories and preparation to have their time when the ground was ready. But the entire time supporting the party closest to what they wanted while they worked things even as the party failed to move as far as they wanted. All the time learning lessons on how to advance even the parts of their agenda that kept getting rejected even by their own party. They were clowns, mocked, too ridiculous to really be feared, but they were ultimately pragmatic and as a result, here they are…
The whole “If the Democrats don’t immediately and completely do everything I want I’m not going to participate at all” is a self-fulfilling philosophy.
It’s also belittling to anyone who isn’t 100% satisfied with everything Democrats do.
But the entire time supporting the party closest to what they wanted while they worked things even as the party failed to move as far as they wanted.
Progressives have a choice of two parties that are moving away from what they want. Republicans have two parties that listen to them.
Well, they focused on one issue and ignored the convicted rapist insurrectionist in the room.
If all Dems had her tenacity and honest interest in helping the middle class, we wouldn’t be where we are.
DemsPoliticians FTFY sorry sometimes we forget because republicans/right are so pro rich class.It’s not that people don’t mention Republicans in statements like that because they’re letting them off the hook; it’s that they don’t bother mentioning them because they’re a lost cause.
“Why aren’t you mad at the Republicans we keep acting like?!”
Eh, I wouldn’t go that far. They aren’t acting like Republicans; they are acting normal despite the abnormal situation.
In fact, that’s the problem: they should’ve acted more like the Republicans, in the sense of forcefully pushing through changes and daring the opposition to stop them (except good things instead of cartoonishly evil ones). But that would go against their nature, representing the neoliberal status quo.
Eh, I wouldn’t go that far. They aren’t acting like Republicans; they are acting normal despite the abnormal situation.
They adopted republican border policy and ran republican anti-trans talking points in their own ads. They supported strikebreaking and genocide. I said they acted like republicans because they did.
If Democrats could say “poor” we might not be where we are.
Thankfully Republicans will do it.
Turns out when all you want are loyalists, all you get are dumb assess.
Philosophical inbreeding is also not good.
She encouraged activists to take offline action
Based
Look at the “secret service detail” he picked.
He picked loyalty over skill, actually DEI
Just a few inches to the right
Few More Inches
He got rid of DEI to make more room for cronyism.
First president with gage earrings.
Does smashing your head against the podium give you gauges? Cause he clearly doesn’t have anything missing (except for intelligence, compassion, and empathy) and they wouldn’t release the medical record, so the likelihood he was hit or grazed by the bullet is IMO is slim to none.
He was bleeding… like, you can see the blood.
“Gauges” is just funny.
She is possibly our best hope.
