call your senators and keep calling every day. Tell them to vote no and tell them to do everything they can, including procedural actions and filibusters to stop it. Call over and over again with this message, whether your senator is red or blue. And get the word out to as many people as possible that they’ve gotta start calling too.
Actually do it. You have to call, write, email, whatever you can do. Don’t just reblog this post.
I was wondering when the enabling act would come, and this seems like a test to see whether there would be too much internal pushback and people ready to properly oppose them. Trump has already done the classical “declare state of emergency” and “abuse emergency powers relentlessly” thing and an enabling act would be the logical next step since the United States doesn’t have a convenient martial law for him to declare like South Korea’s President recently tried.
I expect the democrats will only apply mild pressure and not actually take any kind of principled stance, after all Hitler’s enabling act passed with the Nazis only holding 43.9% of the votes in the election just before it.
I do think it’s funny that American retailers are caught between a rock and a hard place: swallow the cost of tariffs themselves, which may mean selling some items at a loss (???) or raise prices to cover the tariffs, and face the wrath of the man who levied them.
I mean realistically they will probably dig around for other plausibly deniable justifications to raise prices or juggle product categories to hide the change, but it’s still funny what he’s doing to them.
Or possibly a secret third thing where the retailer (Costco, Winco) doesn’t raise prices but posts what the prices WOULD be if they passed the tariffs onto the consumer. It’d be a double fuck-you to Trump, which would be in character for those specific retailers.
Btw, it’s pretty funny watching the president yell at companies. Like, doesn’t Jeff Bezos realize what a power move it’d be to tell Trump to fuck off into the sun? I hate Amazon but I hate Trump more, so it’d be an instant way to rehabilitate his image for 200+ million americans.
What a colossal idiot.
yeah although as we see with Harvard, the president has levers and he’s not afraid to pull them to fuck with people he doesn’t like 😬
man I wish it was possible to get enough major businesses to coordinate to simply refuse to pay the tariff that enforcing the punishment would cause more problems than not getting the tariff money. I just wanna see what would happen. What is the punishment anyways? a fine?
I also wonder if that level of coordination would trigger anti-trust action, like would that get shot down as a cartel even before they had a chance to make an agreement or take action? (of course I recognize that there are more fundamental logistical issues that would likely prevent them from even getting to that point, though)
trouble is I don’t think you can get your goods out of the port, right?
Look, always remember. Any sort of porn ban will be used to:
ban a variety of queer content (both trans and just other queer stuff)
ban certain health education content (especially on women’s health)
create a precedent to charge minorities for any sort of content that will be argued to be then “pornographic”
will also very certainly create precedent to go against platforms like tumblr and AO3 and whereever you consume your favorite fanwork
will definitely also charge any depiction of “female presenting nipples”
Even if you think all porn is bad (you are wrong by the way), this stuff is never just about porn. Heck, chances are they would use such a law to in some roundabout way also prevent simple sex ed!
Here’s a simple script for if you feel more comfortable emailing them.
Subject: Interstate Obscenity Definition Act
I am messaging to make a comment to Senator [THEIR NAME] about S.1671 aka the “Interstate Obscenity Definition Act”.
My name is [YOUR NAME], and I live at (YOUR ADDRESS AND CITY]. I’m messaging to urge Senator [THEIR NAME] to vote “NO” on S.1671, aka the “Interstate Obscenity Definition Act.” I care about this because:
-The wording is vague and do not do anything to effectively protect children
-The bill would infringe upon constitutional, legal expression made by consenting adults
-This bill would be used to censor speech and criminalize people under the guise of “obscenity”, especially by the current Trump Administration
-It would push people and communities underground, making them more vulnerable to abuse
You know the thing about having basic human empathy, respect for other cultures, and caring about the environment as an American it makes you fucking hate your government as you listen and realize the damage your country has done to everyone. “You American hating leftist.” Dawg we are like factually the greatest evil on earth right now. If you wrote an evil empire with America’s current foreign and domestic policy in fiction it’d be called grimdark and ridiculous.
Also? A memo from the Department of Justice doesn’t mean shit. That’s not a law. That’s not a legal precedent. It’s just telling you how they’re going to ignore your rights without any legal standing to do so. It’s gonna get someone killed when ICE decides they’re going to force their way into a house one day and the person inside decides to use their legal rights to defend themselves. And then the fascists will want to use that to further escalate.
“No Person holding any Office [in the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present… of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” — US Constitution, Article I, Section 9, Clause 8
You know the thing about having basic human empathy, respect for other cultures, and caring about the environment as an American it makes you fucking hate your government as you listen and realize the damage your country has done to everyone. “You American hating leftist.” Dawg we are like factually the greatest evil on earth right now. If you wrote an evil empire with America’s current foreign and domestic policy in fiction it’d be called grimdark and ridiculous.
Also? A memo from the Department of Justice doesn’t mean shit. That’s not a law. That’s not a legal precedent. It’s just telling you how they’re going to ignore your rights without any legal standing to do so. It’s gonna get someone killed when ICE decides they’re going to force their way into a house one day and the person inside decides to use their legal rights to defend themselves. And then the fascists will want to use that to further escalate.
Documenting the Damage: 100 Harmful Policies from the First 100 Days of Trump’s Second Term
The second Trump administration has had the busiest first 100 days of any US presidency in nearly a century. Since January, I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet documenting 900+ policy changes and political developments. I then bundled many of the most important changes into 100 topics areas and wrote a summary of each of them, providing a semi-comprehensive account of the tremendous changes to US politics which have occurred.
Folks, this is an incredible piece of journalism reflecting a tremendous amount of research, effort, and thought.
It’s completely free, brilliantly made, and I am incredulous that it had been so narrowly shared on Tumblr.
I am in awe of what Brett has done here. Please click through and read at least some of this because I think people are really missing out on what an incredible tool this is.
It’s a quick reference, it’s an archive (it’s SO rich in sources and references), it’s an explainer, and it is a point-by-point means of de-normalizing the trump administration to anyone in your life who thinks things aren’t that bad.
