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Her remarks followed chaos caused by a rescinded executive order that temporarily shut down Medicaid portals nationwide.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.”
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.
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
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?
Speaking only for myself, it’s because peepee poopoo.
But for a more serious and less cringe-attempt of a response, I know that when I joined the Reddit API exodus, I initially tried to make an account on .world. I sent a few applications without response over a couple of weeks, then tried signing up for beehaw (because I’m from Texas and I thought the name was cute). Finally, I found some article that said that lemm.ee was doing quick or immediate approvals and just went with it. When my friends mentioned similar difficulties, I told them about lemm.ee, too.
I find it so rare to see contributions from other .ee users, but I’ll take your word for it that we suck. I’m willing to believe that.
lemm.ee has one of if not the best admin, and was always running more smoothly in earlier versions. More than that, when other bugs were taking out .world and many others, lemm.ee was already immune and the admin helped the other instances sort theirs out too. lemm.ee has a lot of good users.
However, when hexbear was banned, users on that instance started moonlighting on other instances. There were very few instances that were still federated with hexbear but also with the others, where all the conversation was - many wanted one account that could browse both. Several went to lemmy.ml, the instance run by the formal lemmy developers, and there was a noticeable shift in user behaviour from the instance. But lemm.ee never really was targeted by the hexbear brigading that led to their defederation with everyone else, perhaps because lemm.ee doesn’t really have any massive communities itself, not as big as the others.
So yeah, lemm.ee can still browse hexbear, and with that you get a sizeable chunk of their userbase spilling over. So some lemm.ee users do indeed suck. It’s not as bad as .ml, though, and I think that’s in no small part thanks to the lemm.ee admin team keeping the more extremist users in check.
Thanks for that! I’ll have to mostly take your word for it.
Except for the .ml part. What on Earth is going on over there???
The two devs themselves are massive tankies. They also run lemmygrad.
I think they just assume that everyone is a weak kneed and terminally online as themselves.
Hey that’s our job!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree with everything you said 100%, except the bit about how if voting worked it’d be illegal. Republicans are literally trying to make it that way. One of their main goals is to disenfranchise as many poor people and minorities as possible, bc if everyone voted, republicans would lose every election by a landslide. That’s why they love things like manually registering to vote, randomly deregistering people, the electoral college, and hand counting ballots, while opposing mail-in and absentee ballots, automatic voter registration, RCV, basically anything that gives Americans more voting power. Voting is very much the least you can do to affect change in America, but it is still a thing you can and should do regularly before republicans abolish it
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.
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.
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.
One of the reasons Hitler took power in Germany is that the other political parties couldn’t put aside their grudges and unite around a leader who would promise to keep the system running. If Harris had won last year we’d be sure of having elections in 2026. Now it’s up in the air.
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.
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!
Making hard eye contact while slowly donning burger king crown
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.
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.
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.
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 😂
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.
What was removed ? I don’t understand
A small imperfection in armor sometimes used to refer derogatorally towards people of east Asian decent
Thanks !!
Wtf was removed
chink in their armor.
Omg…what an idiotic auto moderation
What do you expect from marxist leninists?
I really need someone to explain all the random marxist leninists bogey-man bigotry that happens on this site at some point. Like this is a completely weird-o comment, about a political ideology that’s effecting a word filter for possible rascism? and on .world people still label it marxist?!
I’m aware there is deep historical connotations which I haven’t spent years researching so I try not to defend or participate but it feels like since people push back against “instance hating”, we’ve gotta pour on any political hatred we could possibly see in the shadows. I’m just gonna assume this is another bad faith comment striking up fear and hatred till I learn otherwise.
My dude, what do you think the .ml in your instance stands for?
.ml is Mali and marxist-leninists tend to use .ml as their hosting domain of choice the way that a lot of Generative AI domains are hosted in Anguilla because of the .ai domain.
Am I still missing something? This is posted on the instance of .world, wtf are we talking about .ml and politics for? If your instance filters your comments on other instances than that’s concerning and something I didn’t know.
edit: removed the sarcasm in the hopes someone actually responds to what the problem is.
Man, it’s just classic tribalism and confirmation bias. People assume the most obnoxious voices are representative of all Communist spaces and that’s poisoned a lot of perception here. Folks love having a villain to pick on and reddit.world here has decided “tankies are the bad guy”.
Similar to chips in the armor
“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.
Republican strategists are masters of the long con. Trump has been coming since Nixon.
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”.
It’s letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
This Lemmy user has the right idea.
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?
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.
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.
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).
Gir!
Hehe it is the best. Been using Gir as my avatar for things most of my life 😂
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Philosophical inbreeding is also not good.
She encouraged activists to take offline action
Based
She is possibly our best hope.
Basically, resist. Do not comply in advance. Make them fire you. Challenge that firing in court.
I just hope she comes out of this unscathed. It only takes one loon with a shiv… and now there’s millions of 'em.
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.
If she’s gonna be persecuted, the DNC and the Clintons might be also involved in that
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.
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.
Cool…
But if you’re done, why are you here trying to convince others to give up?
If it’s too much for you, that happens.
Go check out from politics, dont hang out and tell people it’s pointless to try. Literally no one is happy in that scenario except trump.
I’m not, I’m just angry and bitter and venting. Its not rational its seeking catharsis from lashing out.
Coulda fooled me, most people I know lashing out don’t recognize they’re lashing out and dont explicitly say they’re not being rational.
Real catch-22 moment here, if you know your being irrational, you’re not actually irrational.
Its probably something to do with being autistic but IDK.
I’m not being rational anymore since the election, I’m just giving in a lot to bad impulses because I don’t have much fight in me anymore because before I kind thought things were worth fighting for. Now I look around at the average stranger and think “7/10 times that person either voted for Trump or failed to vote meaning I probably hate them.” And then like, half of the remainder who voted Harris were probably libs that were anti-Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 so I don’t think I’d be happy to meet them either. Its not good for my mental health and there is no solution but suffering a now pointless fucking existence.
I know other thoughts floating in my head are new as well and I’m not super thrilled about them.
Sure shit sucks right now, doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting to fix. If you’re burnt out from being politically engaged for a decade, disconnect from it for a while, and actually disconnect from it until you get to a better head state, not just scream into the algorithm about how you think its all pointless. As cliche as it is, touch some grass, go outside, breathe some fresh air, find somewhere quiet and disconnect for a bit. Pick up a hobby that doesn’t result in being terminally online, disc golf is pretty affordable and surpringly more common than you think.
If you’re done with politics, then just stop. This isn’t an airport, you don’t need to loudly announce your departure.
How about I loudly announce whatever the fuck I want.
So childish. “I didn’t get what I want! I quit!” “You can’t tell me what to do!”. Get over yourself.
I owe you literally nothing. I owe the world literally nothing. I could just off myself out of spite and I’d be 100% in the right because I literally did not choose to be born, no individual chooses to be born.
That said, I earnestly wanted the world to be better. I used to have a small sliver of hope for that. My resentment toward politics comes from seemingly having to swim up a fucking waterfall while people who ought to have been my allies hold my ankles.
“Whine, whine, whine.” The world doesn’t owe you anything either, bud. And the only people that piss and moan about that are privileged children. Adults get to work making things happen, and understand it’ll be long, frustrating work to do so.
It’s understandable why you feel this way, but ultimately unproductive:
”The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
— Plato
I don’t know if I’m capable of being productive. I’m having a mental breakdown.
Stop watching the news and focus on things you can control in your own life. Grow plants. Read. Paint. Create something with your hands. Try a new recipe. Help a friend or family member out. Call your parents and have them talk about their lives. Hope things get better soon.
Apparently not exhausted enough to just sit silently instead of actively depressing the discourse and actions of others.
Staying silent is exhausting.
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.
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.
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.
Loops is coming soon, and it’s federated!
Yay! Thank you, this is a nice nugget of news.
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Unfortunately I can’t upvote this more than once. Also, if only I could force people to follow this advice.
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.
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?
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.
