Here’s a list of suggestions for effectively opposing Trump’s power grab. I don’t claim to do all these things well; some of them could be notes to myself. Feel free to quote from here, but consider linking back to this post.
Promote principles, not factions.
Focus. A few well-made points are better than a laundry list.
Anger weakens your case, and cursing rarely persuades.
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A few days ago, I started to write something complaining about people who use “white supremacy” when they mean “white supremacism.” Supremacy, I was going to say, is the state of being supreme. Usually they mean the unfounded assertion of being supreme. People who make that claim are supremacists, so the claim should be called supremacism, right? Like “racist” and “racism.”
But my spelling checker complained about the word “supremacism,” so I checked to make sure. Neither Merriam-Webster nor dictionary.com recognizes it as a word, though both recognize “supremacist.” The OED recognizes the word, though, so it’s OK to use it east of the Atlantic.
If one word exists, shouldn’t the other? I’d start a campaign to get it listed in dictionaries, except that “campaigning for supremacism” doesn’t sound so good.
In the past few days, I’ve been working on accompaniment for the 1928 public domain silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc. I uploaded it to YouTube, but you won’t be able to see it. When the upload finished, YouTube informed me:
Copyrighted content has been detected in your video “The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) with new accompaniment”. As a result, your video can no longer be monetized and has been blocked in 243 territories. The copyright owner may be either monetizing it, or receiving analytics about it in other territories. This is not a copyright strike and does not affect your channel.
Here are some pictures from the April 5 rally on Boston Common against Trump’s power grab.
Yes, I went. Will it make any difference? Probably not. Trump isn’t going to stop his quest for tyrannical power just because a lot of people object, nor will Homan stop inflicting Hell on Boston with his Gestapo-like abductions. But it’s nice to see that people do object, and some of them even have the right reasons.
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In the roughly three weeks since my post on “Why America is dying,” things have continued on the same course. Trump is defying court orders, trying to annul pardons (Biden’s preemptively pardoning his inner circle was disgusting but legal), and in general playing the role of someone with absolute power. This should have been a golden opportunity for the Democrats, but their response has been inept, and their popularity has tanked. Charles Schumer declares that the Republicans’ “whole goal is to reduce taxes” as Trump imposes destructive taxes by executive decree. That’s insane both tactically and factually.
It’s an “I told you so” moment for libertarians. Give the government, and the president in particular, unlimited power, and it will eventually be turned to evil ends. But libertarians are in disarray too, and too many who call themselves by that name support Trump. The United States is in for a long stretch of bad years, even if the Democrats recapture Congress in 2026. It may fall to pieces. Parts may secede, but someone who wants to annex Canada and Greenland isn’t likely to let any territory go peacefully.
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