Posted by /u/Theory_of_Time
Our democracy is at immediate risk, and history is repeating itself. What Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing mirrors the actions of past authoritarian regimes. It took just 53 days for Hitler to dismantle Germany’s democracy. 53 days. He used executive orders, erased marginalized groups, and silenced opposition—while too many stood by and did nothing.
Trump’s executive order erases transgender and intersex people from legal recognition—just like Hitler erased Jewish and trans people from legal records before persecution began.
Elon Musk now has access to the U.S. Treasury’s financial system—just like Putin’s oligarchs seized control of Russia’s wealth to consolidate power.
Trump is erasing vital medical information from our government and silencing opposition—just like Hitler suppressed science and banned opposing views.
Trump is dismantling government agencies, firing oversight officials, and gutting institutions like USAID and the Department of Education—just like Hitler replaced government officials with loyalists to eliminate accountability.
We are on day 15, and we are running out of time. We have to make change, or our democracy will be gone.
All true, but I think we’re the choir here.
Well, it’s like pulling teeth to get anyone moving.
For one, there’s nobody on the inside to give access. Hard to work from the top down like that.
Most of the people in the middle of it all don’t have much they can do, and since they’re government workers to begin with, they don’t likely know that there’s people ready, if they can get in deep enough for direct action.
But, nobody seems to be able/willing to make moves at the bottom either. Most of that is the lack of any real organization preexisting. Even the folks that are relatively radical on the left don’t have a history of serious resistance preparation. They’re used to thinking in terms of protest and disruption rather than outright breaking established situations. And that’s a huge gap. Going from “I want the system to change, but without destruction” to “I’m going to do whatever it takes” is not easy.
Two weeks in, I’m actually amazed that anyone has managed to do anything useful, and that little bit isn’t online at all. Offline there’s people prepping, but you take a small local group and try to put them on a wartime footing, you discover that a lot of what was talked about was more hypothetical than willing to take risk. Now you’ve got half-assed people that are a security hole, but can’t entirely cut them off either. So anyone trying to make moves has to go slow or risk it being stopped entirely.
Seriously, how many people do you know are willing to die for this cause? That’s what is being asked of anyone that wants to try and halt things before it ends up as a prolonged resistance. And, out of those, how many can do something useful about it?
So, it ends up where the goals have to be about delay and blunting efforts rather than rising up in numbers because there aren’t enough numbers. And what numbers there are, don’t have the ability to walk into the places where the people doing the destruction are. They can’t use stealth because you ain’t walking casually into the Treasury apparatus (as an example) and cleaning house sneakily.
Our democracy was at risk at election time. It died on Jan 20th.
Yea. We’re fucked.
