I'd say that violent incursion into blue states with the help of federal forces and local brownshirt provocateurs is almost a goal of Project 2025 and MAGA more broadly so I wouldn't count on it not happening wherever you are. We've seen plenty of that kind of thing on the West Coast particularly. Local police unfortunately have a large membership overlap with said brownshirts.
There is also the issue of massive-scale gerrymandering, party politics preventing candidates we want from being given a chance to run in general elections, the electoral college, and widespread voter suppression and disenfranchisement as well-documented by Greg Palast and others. If they actually counted our votes we might get a more representative democracy, but what we have now is not that.
What about canceling a specific day of work every week? That would spread out the pain on both sides, but in a way that makes it less painful for workers because some may have sick days they can use. If literally nobody shows up on every Friday it sucks pretty bad for the bosses, even if they show up all the other days.
The problem with this is that Trump acting on his own, or in pure MAGA mode, is even worse than him acting under Musk's influence. I mean I absolutely hate Musk and the bad name he's given EV's, but his influence on Trump is literally my only glimmer of hope that the American vehicle fleet will electrify enough--and quickly enough--to stave off the very worst version of climate catastrophe. Sadly Musk either doesn't seem to give a shit about his own company, or is too busy making the cynical play that in a subsidy-free market Tesla wins due to sheer scale, as long as tariffs keep out cheap import EVs... it wouldn't be the first time he had screwed the EV market at large in order to be the top dog in a smaller luxury niche.
But again, with immigration, Musk and Vivek are the only dissenting voices in a sea of xenophobia, even though, again, I hate the cynical anti-labor motivations behind their advocacy for H1B visas. Still, the alternative is Stephen Miller and full-on white supremacy with no exceptions for smart hard-working brown people.
It absolutely sucks that our glimmer of hope is that the billionaires who used to sound more liberal will feel some weird compulsion to act consistent with their past statements, and it's a very slim chance that this will happen anyways. But given the state of affairs, it's what we've got.
Since I used to run GPT-2 bots on Reddit (openly declared as such, in a bot-friendly sub, using LLMs so stupid/deranged nobody would mistake them for real accounts) I've been thinking about this problem for a long time. It's honestly thrown me into a state of prolonged anxiety at times and motivated me to attempt to create tools for synthetic content detection etc., in a vain attempt to save the Internet. And I've concluded that we're well past that point, and approaching the point at which we need to reconsider what, exactly, the internet really is, and that is to say that it should not be considered a source of any sort of authentic experience. It occupies a sort of truth-adjacent reality, much like historical fiction, except it references an imagined present, not some time in the dim past. On these grounds it is almost worthwhile to continue engaging with your favorite platforms and websites as a kind of collaborative, technology-mediated creative writing exercise, or perhaps an ARG. It doesn't feel quite so pointless, viewed through that lens.
His political power is premised in large part on the supposition that his following on X is authentic. Given his interests in AI, self-professed belief that Twitter, as it used to be called, is overrun by bots, and ownership and control of X, is there any reason to believe that this is true? How do we know that his human following hasn't declined precipitously since his hard-right turn and been steadily replaced by bot accounts?
I know, you'll say "but--richest man--can buy politicians" and I say yes, but only on credit which could get yanked away at any time, should his following be revealed as inauthentic. His net worth is premised mostly on stock shares in a company with serious problems (which he is doing nothing to solve) facing stiff competition in a troubled niche industry (the electric car market). He had to borrow huge amounts of money in order to buy Twitter because he does not have the cash and if he were to sell that much money in Tesla shares it would cause an investor panic and precipitous decline in his net worth.
And so now we can see why he likely had to buy Twitter; he probably had no choice: the company was likely about to expose or tamp down on his fraudulent and bot-driven following, which would create loss of investor confidence in his brands, which is the only thing propping them up given their weak fundamentals. The Emperor has no clothes, folks.
This caused me to delete Google Maps, but their removal of Black History month from Google Calendar is what's making me contemplate migrating everything else away from them...