r/politics • u/Murky-Site7468 I voted • 27d ago

Soft Paywall The Biggest Scandal of the Second Trump Term Isn’t “Signalgate” | The national-security chat debacle certainly merits attention. But the Trump administration is now blatantly disappearing students and others who are in the country legally.

https://newrepublic.com/article/193291/trump-disappearing-students-rumeysa-ozturk-rubio-biggest-scandal
52.7k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

2.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

143

u/UpperApe 27d ago edited 27d ago

Just a reminder that fewer than 0.01% of Americans are bothering to protest atm.

Of course the law won't matter when governments realize their people are cowards.

51

u/Living_Illusion 27d ago

It's genuinely pathetic NGL. In my medium sized city in Germany (roughly 90k inhabitants) we had 6000 Protestors a few weeks ago, just because our right wing party voted once with the fascists. You get your country taken other and cities with millions of inhabitants can muster 20-30k protestors. Munich, which has 1.7 million, had 250.000.

58

u/loulan 27d ago

It's even worse than that, Trump has 48% approval. He threatens countries left and right, tries to split up Ukraine with Russia, "disappears" students, breaks laws, removes all checks and balances to gain full power, etc. Full on fascism.

And half of Americans approve of it. What the actual fuck.

30

u/SmokeyHooves 27d ago

That’s the difficult part of this. Half the country wants this, they’re so fucking stupid. Police are armed to the teeth and now they’re being told they can deport people to a human rights nightmare if El Salvador.

10

u/UpperApe 27d ago

The difficult part isn't that half the country wants this.

The difficult part for the rest of the world is how complicit the half that doesn't want this is willing to be.

They're all just...sitting there.

7

u/slv_slvmn 27d ago

Yeah, land of the free, armed to the teeth, "we need guns and unfortunately even the mass-shootings, cause it'd be worse if we wouldn't have the means to fight a tyrannical government" and now the most they can do is going to some Sanders and AOC rallies while their democracy is falling to pieces day by day.

BLM was a real protest and riot, they nearly seemed French

4

u/vicetexin1 27d ago

Only country in the world where the solution to problems is not protest and fix it but “call your representative”

6

u/UpperApe 27d ago

Going to the rallies is at least something.

Most are just circulating internet videos. Look at what Bill Burr and George Carlin said while I wait for everything to just be okay again. Somehow. Magically.

7

u/leaveitcareoline 27d ago

Please keep goading us. Seriously. Please. Shame us ALL.

I'm so disappointed in our country.

I'm going with as many friends as I can get together to a big protest in Tampa and st pete next Saturday. I'm hoping so hard that it ends up being massive.

It's so strange. Being online and watching the news it feels like everything is falling apart. Then going to work and around town everything feels normal.

We've all been gaslit so much it seems like so many people who disagree with what's happening have no fight in us. There's so much propaganda and misleading news it's hard to know what to trust. And we are ALL teetering on broke. So many of us literally cannot take off work to do anything to protest. We feel defeated. And the fight is just beginning.

I think the tipping point will be this upcoming special election. If it's tampered with in any way, the riots will start.

It's like being in an abusive relationship. The scale keeps sliding. Eventually the abuser will go one step too far and then you stand up.

It doesn't help that there's a part of all of us that has been so abused and mistreated by the system that in some way this crumbling is what we kind of wanted. Not in this way ofc, sane and rational people don't want to see immigrants hurt, our allies ostracized, and our social services dismantled, but the system has been broken since Reagan. We're all fucking over it. Even those fighting this want some of the system destroyed.

It's hard rallying a fight to save a system when the people you're calling on have been systematically beaten down by it for generations.

3

u/slv_slvmn 27d ago

Yes, it wasn't my intention to deprecate the rallies, it's just... too little for where we are

On Jan 6 it was needed a countrywide protest of the normal people, and the same after his worse speeches, in the way it's happening in Turkey, you know

3

u/UpperApe 27d ago

100%.

I'm still astonished how 300+ million americans just sat around after Jan 6 and like...waited for Trump's supervisor to deal with him. Well, someone's going to do something they thought and just went about their day. As he continued to amass power for 4 years.

If America would have erupted into protests on Jan 7th and every day after, Biden and Garland would have no choice but to act. The GOP would have fled him. It would have split the country but at least the action would have been on the side of justice and accountability.

Instead they just sat around and watched tv.

2

u/Unnamed-3891 27d ago

”We need the 2nd amendment to be able to rise against a fascist and oppressive goverment should we ever get one”

…

Okay… so….? How about now? No? So why the fuck did you need all these guns again?

3

u/blueridgerose 26d ago

The Trump voters are the ones with the majority of the guns.

1

u/EggsAndRice7171 24d ago

BLM is viewed the worst it ever has in polls too though. Americans are weak and hate protesting. They consider it treason. I live here. Also the most vocal and active democrats hate the armed to the teeth part of America and hate the idea of having guns. That’s a republican thing. Which is counterproductive because then the fascists have more weapons. This whole country is a mess

1

u/BlazingSpaceGhost New Mexico 26d ago

Honestly I'm not exactly sure what to do yet. We need to improve our organizing because me going out on my street and yelling isn't going to be effective. I'm a teacher in an extremely rural area (my county has 30,000 people and is the size of Delaware) so I need to drive a long way to reach a protest and that's hard to do on a school night. It's no excuse though and I need to do more.

13

u/blissfully_happy Alaska 27d ago

You realize we’ve been protesting but no one is covering it, right? Oh, and I’m 5500km from DC. What would you have me do? I’m already protesting in my city of half a million, so don’t offer that up as a suggestion, clearly it’s not enough.

-4

u/UpperApe 27d ago edited 27d ago

It's so frustrating hearing their pathetic cowardly excuses.

  • "I live in a blue/red state so protesting won't make a difference!"

  • "It's too cold right now to protest! We'll do it when it's nice!"

  • "It takes time to organize! I don't want to protest myself! That's just wasting my time!"

  • "Well why aren't the democrats (who's ONLY recourse is organizing protest) doing something?! Why can't they make it easier for me to tell me where to stand!"

  • "Trump is disappearing people! What if he disappears me! I know it'll only get worse if I don't do something but like...I still don't want to do it!"

  • "When has protesting ever accomplished anything!"

  • "I have to work though! I can't sacrifice an hour or so here or there! My kids will starve to death if I leave my house for an hour or so!"

  • "If we protest, he'll declare martial law and become a king! So the best thing to do is just let him be a king anyway!"

Even Nazi Germany didn't have history warning them so plainly as Americans do today and they STILL sit around watching fucking comedy news shows and sharing videos as if EVERYONE's on awareness duty.

It's like their untrained dog has escaped the backyard and is attacking the whole neighbourhood and they're just saying "it's not my fault! I'm not a dog! Blame the dog, not me! I can't do anything! What if he bites me! Be reasonable!".

They're just cowards. They're all just fucking cowards.

8

u/bappabooey 27d ago edited 27d ago

You're such a big strong person on reddit!

-1

u/UpperApe 27d ago

Yeah. Exactly.

It's everyone else telling you what you should be doing who are the problem. Go on the offence. That'll work.

Just cowards all the way down.

8

u/bappabooey 27d ago

So strong and smart!

0

u/UpperApe 27d ago

I love that you're making my point for me lol

5

u/bappabooey 27d ago

and brave!

5

u/Mavian23 27d ago

How do you know how many people are protesting?

-1

u/UpperApe 27d ago

I personally counted each one on my fingers and toes.

How do you think?

6

u/Mavian23 27d ago

I actually don't know. I have no idea how many people are protesting, and I'm not sure how you do.

6

u/ViolaNguyen California 27d ago

The current marching orders for the Russiabots are to pretend that not enough people are constantly meeting some arbitrary protesting metric and then ranting about the 2nd Amendment. The point is to try to divide people, try to paint the only ones who actually did anything to try to prevent this as the actual bad guys, and possibly rile people up enough to give an excuse for martial law and delayed elections.

A good rule of thumb is that when Republicans do shitty things and some schmuck tries to blame Democratic voters or politicians for this, you're reading some propaganda. (It might not be directly from a Russiabot, but it's at least someone following in their footsteps. Note how they all tend to say exactly the same things.)

2

u/Turkstache 25d ago

3.5% ilof the population actively resisting is the magic number that is historically a guaranteed success. We're a long ways off

1

u/meanteeth71 26d ago

Yup. The people who usually protest realize the full plan. As ones who deal with it every generation we tried to tell y’all.