1mo ago

Is Elon Musk Staging a Coup? Billionaire Seizes Control at Treasury Dept.

www.democracynow.org Is Elon Musk Staging a Coup? Billionaire Seizes Control at Treasury Dept.

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and unelected adviser to President Donald Trump, is asserting control over much of the federal bureaucracy and sensitive government computer systems despite lacking clear authority. The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department was pushed out after re...

There is a coup occurring now

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geneva_convenience @lemmy.ml

1mo ago

Is Elon Musk Staging a Coup? Billionaire Seizes Control at Treasury Dept.

www.democracynow.org /2025/2/3/elon_musk_gov

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- In case anyone was still wondering how people just stood by when Hitler took over Germany
  
  That isn’t just standing by, that advocates for opposition to leave as the right answer to their concerns.
  To emigrate from a country that openly hates immigrants.
  To grow the majority.
  
  I am not advocating for the "opposition" to leave. I am advocating for anyone who thinks America is a failed Democracy who thinks we're about to be genocided to leave. Just because it's a smart thing to do. Which is exactly what my original comment said.
  I don't assume everyone who disagrees with even a single word someone who is anti-trump says is pro-trump, because I'm not suffering from delusional internet political brainrot.
  
  Way ahead of you. And yet I still care about the lives of the millions of people we left behind who didn't have the luck of that option.
  You do know that you can't just leave and hope someone will let you live in their country instead, right?
  
  !remindme in 4 years when a genocide does not take place.
  I wish you had the capacity to understand how juvenile these types of comments are.
  
  There's literally an internment camp planned at gitmo.
  The hyperbole has been going on so long that maybe it's easy to miss that it's getting progressively more accurate.
  
  My main issue is the hyperbole
  
  So are they going to start murdering people there? Like in the holocaust?
  
  I'm sad to tell you this, but there were camps there in the 90s, and people died of lack of health care.
  As I said to my last suicide counselor- you don't really need a plan to kill someone. You can just stop doing all the things they need in order to keep living. It's pretty easy.
  
  Ok so if you arrest people that are illegally in your country and put them in jail, when does it become a genocide?
  
  I'm not enjoying your weird little word game.
  
  I don't enjoy flippantly using words like fascist and nazi and genocide and coup. It's all word games.
  
  I also don't enjoy using words like fascist and Nazi and genocide and coup, and will happily stop using them when they stop being relevant and accurate
  Unfortunately, they are accurate and relevant, so I guess I'm stuck using those words
  
  Your comment history is very telling about what you actually think. Despite your occasional comment about how you don't like Trump.
  
  When you're targeting them not because of their legal status, but because of their ethnicity.
  
  Yes. Trump's administration called for "a genocide of trans people" (direct quotation) once the election was over, before he was even in office.
  Trans people are having their government IDs and identifying documents seized when they try to renew their passports. Any info on gender is being scrubbed from medical and scientific research papers as we speak. An executive order was passed saying that there are only 2 genders in the US, and passports no longer accept an X gender marker.
  Then there's the immigrants being deported. They need camps to house all of them in.
  All of this is very much in line with Nazi Germany, from the burning of research from the Institute of Sexual Wellness (remember the famous picture of Nazis burning books? All research and medical records from the Institute relating to gay and trans people) to the camps for immigrants, gays, socialists, and, later on, Jews which began being built 53 days after Hitler took office.
  
  Content Warning for Ya'll, Transphobia-
  Hey I went digging and I found that one of the speakers at CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) in 2023, a prick named Michael Knowles, said “For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”
  And then he got all mad and demanded a bunch of retractions because he claims that saying you want to eradicate transgenderism is somehow different than saying you want to eradicate transgender people and went on to say some extremely upsettingly stupid things about how it can't be calling for genocide because “It’s not a legitimate category of being.”. Out of the two links, that one at Human Rights Campaign has a lot of other instances of assholery, so it's a good link for this conversation.
  So it seems (unsurprisingly) like chuds are trying to move the goalposts on, "it can't be genocide if they're not really people," which is actually way, way more disgusting than anything else I've read. Glad I went looking for supporting documentation, sad I found so much of it so quickly.
  And for any chuds who want to argue these points as if this is distinct from the Trump administration, please actually read that second link. There are exact quotes from Trump, from Reps, from former advisors. They did a great job collating info for us.
  
  Would be helpful to have a link to the quote - searching for it I'm having trouble finding it. I think I have seen language about "removing transgenderism from public life" or something like that. They seem to be bringing back rhetoric used against gay folks in the 1980s, e.g. emphasizing how the "homosexuals" groom children, how they just need to not flaunt their (sexualized / perverted) lifestyle in front of the children, how it's fine if they're gay in private - just not in public, etc.
  
  The quote has been buried in all the anti-trans executive orders that have been passed in the past week. I tried looking for it as well, since I saw at least a couple of articles that had quoted it directly from somebody in his administration, but all you can find now are the executive orders banning trans people from the military, etc.
  
  Are you sure the word "genocide" was used? I think they have generally kept to more round-about language like "eradicating gender ideology", etc. - I don't think they would want to characterize what they're doing as a genocide so directly.
  
  Yes, it was 100% used in those words. "A genocide of trans people" was what somebody in his administration said.
  Once they had the election, what little of the mask was left started to come off immediately. They have no reason to hide it any longer.
  
  huh, I'm definitely not finding that anywhere ...
  
  Where is the quote?
  
  Here you go. Now it's time for you to claim the quote isn't real or that they weren't saying what we think they were or that it doesn't count.
  https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/cpac-speaker-transgender-people-eradicated-1234690924/
  And not only will I be nice enough to give you a paywall bypass link...
  https://archive.is/DPY2P
  I will even be nice enough to take a screenshot for you:
  Can't wait to hear what excuses you'll make...
  
  You're right, I'm absolutely going to say it doesn't count.
  Doesn't it say it right in the article itself? "Knowles subsequently claimed that it...is not a call for eradicating transgender people."
  So you are conflating getting rid of the concept of transgenderism with murdering transgender people? You guys love doing this.
  Let's go back to your original quote:
  Trump's administration called for "a genocide of trans people" (direct quotation)
  It was not said. Michael Knowles is a speaker at CPAC, and a Daily Wire host. Not a member of the Trump admin.
  My original comment was removed for misinformation, but I won't be surprised that yours won't.
  I was downvoted 11 times just for asking you for a quote that doesn't exist.
  
  I knew you'd find all sorts of reasons why one of them saying the quiet part out loud doesn't count, including believing him when he said he wasn't calling for genocide despite the article very clearly explaining why he was.
  And when trans people are loaded onto boxcars, you'll still be there denying it.
  I'd hate to know what you would have been like in the 1940s.
  
  And when trans people are loaded onto boxcars
  Well maybe if Trans people are using Ubers to go protest and you say that it means they're being put in boxcars to get sent to concentration camps to be exterminated by modern nazis I'll disagree with you then as well.
  
  I think you need to open a history book since you don't seem to know how many years it took from Hitler becoming chancellor to the Final Solution.
  Or do you think putting everyone from certain ethnic groups or with certain sexual preferences or with certain political views or just with disabilities in concentration camps wasn't genocide enough to count?
  And Trump is heading to concentration camps exponentially faster than Hitler did.
  
  They just pulled all medicare and are publically looking to store tens of thousands of people they consider subhumans in a hot climate without supplies or medical aid. Ran by people who managed to bankrupt a fucking casino. Three times. In a row.
  Its literally a death camp in the making. And you have a good chance of ending up in there as well.
  
  publically looking to store tens of thousands of people
  More like 10 million
  
  Also now usa is going to be responsible for ethnically cleanaing the gaza strip as well.
  
  Now they did with gaza strip. Congratulations.
- News organizations and politicians should think really carefully about publishing stories that make it seem like the United States is failed democracy.
  Yes
  Do you really believe that all it takes is one president and an aligned congress to completely destroy the country?
  Yes
  If so, the smart move would be applying for citizenship in a country that isn’t a failed democracy, and getting the fuck out.
  I'm not giving up without a fight first.
  
  How are you fighting?
  
  Why would anyone post that info online where it can be easily traced by government officials?
  Whether it's protesting or anything else, you'd just be incriminating yourself.
  
  Not fighting yet, just training.
- If so, the smart move would be applying for citizenship in a country that isn’t a failed democracy, and getting the fuck out. Not posting sensationalist news articles and claiming fascist nazis are one step from putting us up against the wall. It kind of betrays your point.
  What an absurd take!
  "Clearly you don't ACTUALLY believe something bad is happening, because you're spreading the word about it instead of quietly preparing your escape"
  
  Shouldn't the fascist Nazis be knocking on your door, OP's door, and the publishers of Democracy Now! door and putting them in a political torture camp?
  Or are we just being hyperbolic when we say it's a nazi coup?
  
  Even Hitler did not manage to get the Gestapo set up until 4 months after he was appointed as chancellor. It has only been 3 weeks. Auschwitz was not set up until 7 years after his rise to power. Though the first concentration camp, which I imagine was more mild, was set up after a few months.
  It feels like you are arguing in bad faith.
  If I am getting ready to go hiking in an area where there may be bears, I don't say to myself, "I am not currently being attacked by a bear, so I will probably not need bear mace." In this analogy I like hiking (living in the democracy that I was born in and served to defend) therefore I will not choose to just not go hiking (leaving).
  
  I don't know whether they're just ignorant of history or are trolling, but this person's whole argument seems to rely on the idea that Nazis aren't Nazis until they start actively killing people in concentration camps and until then, it's not fair to call them Nazis.
  So I guess the Nazis weren't Nazis for the first seven years Hitler was in power (or any of the years before that).
- You mean one executive branch, one legislative branch and one judicative branch (supreme court, which you forgot)?
  So like all the branches, that are supposed to check and balance each other? Good one mate
  
  Do you think if Trump told the military to jail democrats that they would do it?
  
  Why don't you go read some books on Hitler's rise to power, and after you've educated yourself, re-read these insipid posts you've made in this thread. Or maybe you already know how it happens and are cheering it on, pretending to be ignorant in how fascism works. Either way, get bent.
  
  After he replaced some Generals, created some New units completely loyal to him, yes.
  Maybe integrate the proud boys, who he already pardoned.
  As a German, this all looks very familiar. The SS didn't start in the military.
  Interesting to watch it all happen on twitter instead of a history book tho XD
- applying for citizenship in a country that isn't a failed democracy
  Which country is that, exactly? What are their immigration requirements?
- If so, the smart move would be applying for citizenship in a country that isn't a failed democracy, and getting the fuck out
  Me setting up a bug out bag while I arrange moving to another country
- We are an empire that, when looking at history, is in it's twilight years
- Lol wut. When was the US ever a democracy?

236 comments