Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lays out battle plan against 'shockingly dim' Trump White House

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.
  
  It's all been downhill since JFK...
- 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
- 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?
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  sounds like you're giving up already, and blaming the Dems
  We all have dog in this fight. Apparently so do the people who voted third party and refuse to see the leopards.

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.
- 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.
  
  Not much since you're on .world. .ml is much more strict.
  
  Wait until you try the in-game chat in Rocket League. You can't even type "Discord". It's a banned word. 🤡
  
  Go removed ahead you removed.
  
  It's clbuttic bowdlerization.
  
  Would it not be kink? not …
- 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.
  
  lemmy.ml removes certain words, other instances don't.
- 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.
  
  I just signed up with the first one that worked, and it still took a while to actually get it created.
- 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.
  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chink
- 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!
- Wtf was removed
  
  chink in their armor.
  
  Similar to chips in the armor
- What was removed ? I don't understand
  
  A small imperfection in armor sometimes used to refer derogatorally towards people of east Asian decent
  
  Chinamen is not the preferred nomenclature, Dude.

"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.
- 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".
  
  Neighbor, you're who they're speaking to...
  
  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.
- Republican strategists are masters of the long con. Trump has been coming since Nixon.
  
  Trump has been coming since Nixon.
  I understand what you're saying, i really do, but i did NOT need the mental image you just gave me...
- This Lemmy user has the right idea.
- It's letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
- Well, they focused on one issue and ignored the convicted rapist insurrectionist in the room.
- 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.
  
  So it's better to do nothing while they sell you 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.
  
  This is like not believing in macro evolution.
  Actually, I think a lack of incrementalism got us here. We incremented in the wrong direction.
- I strongly disagree. As in all things, you need to pick your battles.
  It's absolutely possible to take a counter productive action with the best of intentions.

If all Dems had her tenacity and honest interest in helping the middle class, we wouldn't be where we are.
- ~~Dems~~ Politicians 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.
- 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.
- I thought this was obvious to everyone. Heck, Futurama had this as a joke 20 years ago when Zapp Brannigan stuffed his crew with nothing but loyalists who fall apart immediately.
  
  That was much more "chain of command is incompetent but we have no choice but to obey" rather than "blind loyalty". Did you forget the episode where he was dishonorably discharged by the DOOP for blowing up the space station with the ribbon cutting laser? His second in command, Kiff, is literally constantly pointing out how stupid and incompetent Zapp is. Hell, even "I sent wave after wave of my own men against the killbots until their counter overflowed", arguably the worst case of being a loyalist to Zapp, ended in a win for Earth. They didn't fall apart and collapse - they defeated the unstoppable killbot army and got a medal(show them the medal Kiff).
- Philosophical inbreeding is also not good.

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.

She encouraged activists to take offline action
Based

Basically, resist. Do not comply in advance. Make them fire you. Challenge that firing in court.

She is possibly our best hope.

finally, a person with a STRATEGY. so sick of the whining.
she needs volunteers for personal escort and safety. i think she is going to be targeted.
- She has employees
  Donate to her
- If she's gonna be persecuted, the DNC and the Clintons might be also involved in that
  
  That "might" is doing so much heavy lifting, it's getting a hernia.
- This isn't strategy. A strategy is a long-term plan. This is just a tactic.

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 used to work for social services in Colorado. There was a Lady there that was fired without cause. She fought it, won in court, got her job back, and I'm pretty sure back pay. Beth, talking bout you, she said always fight, she has and it has always paid off.
- I'd fight for the back pay, but if someone fired me without cause I wouldn't want to work for them anymore.
  
  In that position you're far more protected from retaliation than a "regular person" -- it's easier to prove with an established history and courts really don't like have their judgments undermined. You've also shown your employer trying to screw with you is expensive.
  Go back and do your job to the letter. They're either going to be very wary of pissing you off, or they're going to do something stupid and you'll get another payout.
  
  If you get your job back you may be entitled to severance and potentially pension
  
  A lot of times, the manager that caused all that trouble by firing you doesn't get to be a manager anymore.

Good luck to her.
- Her point is that everyone has to pitch in and do their little bit to make things harder for this administration. This resistance has to be built from the bottom up.
  
  I already wasted 20 years of my life in sacrifice to politics. I want to be done and other than venting about how we're doomed I more or less am done, thank you.
  I hope I'm wrong, and I earnestly wish her luck but I do not owe a population of people who chose Trump a single solitary fucking thing. I'm bitter, exhausted, and my patience is gone.
- Have the balls to just say you want her to fail.
  People help her and do it together, or it doesn't work. Band together against nazis.
  
  But I don't want her to fail. I want to be wrong, desperately. I legitimately want to feel fucking stupid about being doomer in 4 years.
  I'll probably try to help in non-risky ways at best but I think I might be pretty useless anyway. Being an atheist and terrified of death/non-existence yet also resenting having been born doesn't tend to make one particularly productive in meaningfully resisting death cult nazi's.
- Since people outside the south tend to not know that the phrase is generally uttered as a sincere one after someone has emotionally moved you, whose bite exists only in that context (ie, you have moved them to pity) I choose to interpret it in the former way, the same way my Democratic southern grandmother would have. Bless her heart, she is doing the Lord’s work.

shockingly dim
When you hire yes men, you get some pretty dumb people.

I also think we ought to stop being consumers at a broad level. It's clear the rich don't actually trickle anything down and instead hoard it to invest. So, they won't spend to prop up the economy.
- For one, stop using Amazon. Cancel Prime. Use other search engines than Google. Don't use WhatsApp. Cancel and delete your Instagram, Facebook and Twitter if you haven't already. Don't buy Apple products.
  For each of those services and products above, there is at least one alternative.
  
  Unfortunately I can't upvote this more than once. Also, if only I could force people to follow this advice.
  
  I would also delete reddit and TikTok if you haven't already! I don't know if there's a good replacement for short form videos but TikTok is censoring like crazy, plus all the other bad shit they do.
  
  Is there a reliable resource for good alternatives to these services? I've prepared my own, which I can share. But I know I'm missing a lot of options.
  Edit: I found this page, which has some good ones. But it's far from complete from a social network perspective.

"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 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.

That would be a great plan if the Dems were not spineless at best and complicit at worse
- People see comments like this and get discouraged to vote or do anything meaningful. Life is choosing the lesser of two evils. By not choosing you have chosen the greater evil thus making you complicit.
  
  Bullshit. Electoral reform in the blue states must happen. Red states as well but we all know republicans stance on more democracy.
  Democrats have lost their "we are the only people resisting the republicans" privilege. They should have lost it long ago but we sure gave em every chance we could. No more chances, no more safe states/seats.
  This shouldn't be hard to pass. Alaska already has a Ranked choice voting system. Plus Democrats are huge democracy supporters... right?
  
  That lesser evil still don't want Medicare for all, raise the federal minimum wage, and building more affordable housing-- all of which are actually what suffocate many Americans in the ever worsening wealth inequality. That's why people took the chance to vote Trump who promised tax cut, even though most Americans know they it doesn't actually benefit them but the 1%.
  Look outside of the American mainstream news bubble and discourse that want you to pick the two lesser evils, instead of thinking outside the box. The only way for ordinary Americans to win basic rights is to organise and mobilise by advocating both ranked choice voting and promoting third parties. It won't happen in federal level so start on the local and state levels, and the changes will go up the chain to federal level. It's not like Americans haven't gone and out mobilised before for a better change. The people simply need to rediscover that they have the power.
  
  *Life in MURICA...
  
  People see comments like this and get discouraged to vote or do anything meaningful.
  So shut up and be happy.

I've said it before, the Democrats need to take pieces out of the Republican playbook and stonewall the GOP at every opportunity. The problem is that they Democratic party is really a coalition, whereas the modern Republicans are a hierarchy, so getting everyone to lock shields and advance is damn near impossible. Especially since establishment "centrist" Dems are just Republicans from the 80s and unfortunately they're the ones calling the shots. None of the progressives are stupid enough to tip the boat over while rocking it, so we've ended up here. Again.
- For a long time, I thought the Democrats were fighting valiantly but just overwhelmed by the oligarchy and the Republicans. Then I saw that the Democrats keep losing fights they should win, and figured they must be weak and ineffectual. Then I kept seeing them backing off without putting up a fight at all, and decided they were gutless cowards. Finally I noticed that enough of them keep voting with Republicans to always make sure the Republicans more of less win almost every fight, and that they keep starting from a center position and bargaining to the right, and eventually it became impossible to ignore the only conclusion that fits the facts: The Democrats are not overmatched, they aren't weak, they aren't cowards... They are complicit.
- I've said it over and over, the Dems need to be more Machiavelli and less Mr. Rogers.

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.

Simple Sabotage Manual

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 🤦🤬

Alright, she was eligible to run this time. Can we get her in the white house before she turns 80?

Bit late. I appreciate her efforts to resist, and we all need to do that, but it honestly is too late now. The time to resist this was last year. Now we’re in disaster recovery, which requires a whole different kind of resistance, and it feels like even people like her don’t quite understand where we are now.
Because of all the people who haven’t fucking listened to the warnings, we’ve entered actual fascism, and regular resistance won’t work anymore. Thinking it will only makes more of us believe small actions or Strong Words will save us. This isn’t 1930 Germany like we were warning last year, it’s 1939 Germany now, and der führer is beginning to build the camps.
Are you going to keep ignoring us when you’re ruffling the ashes of your compatriots from your hair? I honestly believe you will.
- You've convinced me. I was planning to start attending my local town meetings and lend my support to the few outnumbered progressives there, but instead I think I'll just hoard canned goods and hunker down.
  
  If that’s what you took from my comment, I’m sorry. Obviously those are things we should do.
  My point is we’ve been pushing people to do exactly those things for decades (eta and have been doing them ourselves) and it hasn’t worked. We need to do much more than that now.
- I think both you and her are wrong. Dems lost big in this last election. So it's time to take a fucking step back and ask why. What needs changing? The party is in trouble. And they are in trouble because they are listening to big business and political consultants and not voters and people like AOC and Bernie. Kamala was supposed to be easy 'safe' candidate to defeat Trump. How'd that work? Hillary was supposed to be the 'safe' candidate to beat him the first time. Safer than Bernie and his 'crazy radical platform' of actually making the country work for the fucking people who live in it. How'd that work out?
  Maybe having candidates that manipulate the primary process and count on superdelegates doesn't work. Maybe putting someone forward who polled at 2% among Democrats before election season doesn't work. Maybe 'I'm not Trump' isn't fucking good enough to win the White House.
  Unfortunately I don't see many Democrats talking about this lesson, let alone taking it to heart. So I am looking forward to four more years of complaining and hopelessly attempting damage control while putting forward no new ideas whatsoever.
  
  I think both you and her are wrong. Dems lost big in this last election. So it’s time to take a fucking step back and ask why.
  We can ask all we want. The party's about to appoint Pelosi's choice for chair. Again. They're never going to change.
  
  So it's time to take a fucking step back and ask why.
  Obviously we should ask why. But any answers we come up with in response to whatever strategy we’ve been using will be horribly outdated already because we’re no longer operating under even a veiled democracy.
  That was the biggest answer to ‘why’ this last time. Because this is outright, honest to dog fascism. That’s why nothing worked. Because you cannot fight fascism with normal discourse. Because Dems, the media, and everyone still tried to pretend we were working under the status quo when we absolutely were not, and anyone trying to call that out was treated as some kind of alarmist. And the fascists know this, and take advantage of it in their propaganda. Most of us don’t want to believe there’s a true, real, legitimate fascist movement, and fascists use that against us.
  It doesn’t actually matter how good Dem candidates are – Dems could run Jesus himself, seen by all as descending from on high and streamed simultaneously on TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch, and it wouldn’t have mattered. They would easily reject Jesus and get all the centrists to oppose him. We’re in an unprecedented age of propaganda owned exclusively by a handful of sociopaths who know they can buy sentiment, views, and votes. They did, and there’s little we can do about it.
  It doesn’t matter what democrats say or do at this point. We’re past that.
- You must be fun at resistance parties. I guess it's time to annihilate ourselves through labor then (งツ)ว
  
  I’m just saying we need different, more modern strategies. What we’ve been doing doesn’t work.
  We can do better. I don’t know the answer, but we can’t keep doing the same things.

If only AOC didn't whip up a battle plan to prevent the union strike when she voted to protect the rail corporation.
- Oh no, this option isn't perfect in every way for all people, and thus indistinguishable from being worthless?
  
  Yup, get used to it, electoralism is an enemy of all but the strongest class
  
  Can you imagine if Republicans approached Trump this way?
- She deserves criticism for that, and she should apologize. Your downvoters either support strikebreaking or support AOC even when she does the wrong thing.
  
  She deserves criticism for that but she still does a lot of good and should not be discounted. Saying “if only” kinda sounds like “I would like this good thing she’s suggesting (the subject of the article where they are responding “if only “), if only she didn’t do something I disagreed with once”. A more productive tact would be “I still don’t like that she didn’t support the striking rail workers but the plan she describes here is …”

So the guy went out and stated what he wanted to do, we held an election that he won, and the plan is to stand against everything he tries to do. How are we defending democracy exactly?
- Easy. Defending democracy means defending the Constitution. Most of what he wants to do is unconstitutional.
- I didn't vote for him. Why should he get to say what I do?
  
  That is what it means to be part of a democracy. In 2028, whomever wins, I hope them success in improving America and would not act as an obstruction to everything they attempt to do. Like it or not American democracy chose him to lead.
- Easy, let's scream and ramble against the voters, blaming them for our horrendous campaign, while at the same time , keep focusing on policy that the 99.9% of voters don't care about.
  I mean, who is not gonna love to have their hard earned money taken away in taxes for a multi million dollars program that will only benefit 0.018% of the population!
  Affordable housing? The fuck is that? No man, we need to focus on pronouns! That's easier!
  A bloated federal government? Didn't you read before? People LOVE to have their hard earned money taken away in taxes! If anything, we should be giving away people's money! And while at that, make the state bigger and all powerful!
  That way, on the next election, they will feel more likely to vote for us!
  It's genius!