I've found it helpful to view the current US admin through the lens of organized crime: if you pretend the prez is a mob boss, everything becomes much more congruent and coherent. The incentives align, the not-so-clear motivations make sense, and most definitely the methods.
kenjackson · 2h ago
It’s amazing that on HN this is not universally condemned. The big learning out of this administration is that the US people aren’t stewards of democracy. But rather fanatics of their “side”.
Lord-Jobo · 47m ago
HN has a whole lot of people trying to make it really big financially, for a huge variety of reasons. One of the things that excludes someone from that group is an understanding that our culture is dominated by the idea that wealth is the first, biggest, best priority.
We collectively give the wealthy extra protection, status, and influence. Basically every definition or subcategory of power.
When you do this, it creates a disgusting race to the bottom from those trying to reach the top. We are seeing the ultimate result of that: a mafia kingdom. A feudal clown show.
You will see a weirdly large amount of people supporting that here because a large number of people have conditioned morality out of their ideology. Or reduced it to a very superficial level, completely subservient to the almighty dollar. "Greed is good", "the ECONOMY", "my peers do it so it's okay". And in and on and on.
In short, many would be doing the same thing in the same position and they can't see just how amoral that is. And how it reflects the utter rot that is our culture.
calibas · 1h ago
Careful, making this kind of statement publicly might hurt your loyalty rating.
SpicyLemonZest · 2h ago
I'm familiar with at least one company where the execs are downright excited about the new way of doing business. No longer do you have to carefully study laws and regulations, you just have to make sure one guy likes you! It's a nice deal if you can get it, which is why I'm so aggressive about saying that the people who are getting it need to go to prison when constitutional governance is restored.
Aunche · 7m ago
> No longer do you have to carefully study laws and regulations, you just have to make sure one guy likes you!
American civic understanding has gone through the floor. People already think that corporate quid pro quo is the default, so for some, this is actually an improvement because it's more transparent now. It can't be that corporations achieve wins through research and coalition building because that would imply that they aren't not doing enough. The irony has made lobbying stigmatized in grass-roots organizations [1], which only gives corporate lobbyists more power.
Why? Tech has plenty of win at all costs people. Some of the most prominent people who openly don't believe in democracy are tech people.
mathiaspoint · 2h ago
Democratic leaders haven't been good stewards of our country so we're finding other ideas now.
happytoexplain · 1h ago
Sure, but there's a difference between voting for somebody more extreme because the existing options are ineffective, and supporting people with these attributes (pettiness, hatred, fascist-y behavior, incompetence, disrespect of laws/rights/citizens, disrespect of traditional US standards for leadership, etc).
AlecSchueler · 1h ago
We? You aren't doing anything, you just happen to like what this guy is telling you to do more than the other guys.
mathiaspoint · 1h ago
GP claimed Americans (that is "we") are "not good stewards of democracy." I agreed and offered an explanation as to why.
AlecSchueler · 1h ago
I'm confused how you can say it's Americans doing it while recognising in the same sentence that it's happening outside of the realm of democracy.
mathiaspoint · 1h ago
We have democratically rejected democracy. That's what most people mean when they say "<x> electorate are not good stewards of democracy."
causal · 1h ago
Democracy makes problems much more visible. The "other ideas" will just hide problems much better
Lord-Jobo · 45m ago
Hides them under a mountain of corpses with duct tape over their mouths. That's the only way these autocratic nightmares end.
beej71 · 1h ago
Maybe they haven't, but your other ideas are clearly worse.
Wonder if there are any groups out there tracking a "Democracy Loyalty Rating" (i.e. the opposition)...
bilbo0s · 2h ago
Just Devil's Advocate, but this being the US, the opposition doesn't necessarily support pure democratic ideals either.
It's just that the conservatives are so much further along the authoritarianism scale that the liberals appear to be freedom loving democracy activists by comparison. But I guarantee you, if you were to drop the average US Democratic party politician into Germany, Australia, or Canada, they'd be considered to be so far right of center that people would question whether or not that politician even believes in democracy.
ratelimitsteve · 2h ago
The ratchet effect is real. American liberals have comfortably positioned themselves as the counter to authoritarianism but you'll notice that they never actually make things less authoritarian. They're thrilled to keep the direct power seized by the right, and to expand their own soft power where possible.
Aunche · 18m ago
> you'll notice that they never actually make things less authoritarian
that's a wild misreading of the idea that the powerful like to keep and expand their power
ot · 2h ago
> Trump works transactionally
Why can't we just call this corruption? Is there any other, more charitable, interpretation of "transactional"?
tempodox · 44m ago
It has become so normal, nobody is even calling it corruption any more. See also: “regulatory capture”.
actionfromafar · 2h ago
Transactional at best. Not sly mob-leader transactional, but toddler transactional.
Edit: to his own detriment. Why bother with "deals" when you know it can change at any moment. Just put on a golden dog and pony show for the King and hope for the best.
pavlov · 2h ago
I suppose the charitable interpretation is that Trump favors transactions that offer short-term benefits to the country, rather than America’s traditional investments into long-term goals that tend to be more nebulous (“soft power” etc.)
Of course, one look at Trump’s actual transactions in office should dissuade of that notion. After he made the preliminary trade deal with the EU, he bragged on TV that Europeans are investing $600 billion and Trump himself gets to decide where the money goes. It’s baffling that anyone would assume that’s how any of this works, but he clearly thinks the point of these transactions is to get more power and wealth for himself.
balamatom · 2h ago
>It’s baffling that anyone would assume that’s how any of this works.
It's because the president said it on TV.
pavlov · 1h ago
Is that a recursive loop? The president thinks that’s how it works because the president said so on TV.
I can believe that kind of reinforcement happens. Trump watches Fox News, sees himself saying X, and thinks “yes, it’s very good that {X}.”
jrs235 · 27m ago
*Trump favors transactions that offer short-term benefits to himself (via maintaining or expanding power or money).
FTFY.
tempodox · 47m ago
Just one tiny step away from China’s social credit score.
SpicyLemonZest · 2h ago
I've been beating this drum for a while and I'm going to keep doing it. If you run or make strategic decisions for a tech company in 2025, you need to understand that many if not most of your competitors are working hard to figure out how to wield the federal government in their favor. I wouldn't advise doing it yourself, unless you'd like to go to prison for bribery alongside Tim Cook in 2029, but any assumption that the current federal government will treat you fairly without taking their side in political battles is a grave strategic error.
RajT88 · 2h ago
> I wouldn't advise doing it yourself, unless you'd like to go to prison for bribery alongside Tim Cook in 2029
That's optimistic that you think anyone is going to prison in 2029.
yks · 2h ago
Well, early supporters of fascism do tend to end up in prison, because fascism needs purges. So in a monkey paw way, I wouldn't bet against the current crop of CEOs falling from graces very hard.
bilbo0s · 2h ago
That's not quite how facism works.
There are the purges. But it's normally not the corporate or moneyed puppetmasters getting purged, rather it's the political allies of the fascists that get purged. Military and law enforcement leaders who start off as allies have a particularly dismal survival record in these kinds of governments, since they don't have even the ephemeral protection of democratic legitimacy.
mcphage · 2h ago
It may take longer, but they will, eventually. Maybe not Tim Cook.
scarface_74 · 2h ago
The companies that you could accuse of outright bribery are Meta, Twitter, Paramount, and Disney who all gave money that benefited the President directly.
Cook kissing ass and giving the President a meaningless trinket, doesn’t quite arise to that level.
bilbo0s · 2h ago
This.
I mean billionaires don't even go to prison for engaging in pedophilia. Which is just about the worst crime you can commit. If anyone thinks liberals or conservatives will put them in prison for bribery, they're being a little naive.
This nation is owned by the billionaires. In all honesty, they don't even need to be in alignment with the government. There's next to nothing the government can do to rein in giant banks. If anything, the government has to be certain to make sure the banks are appeased.
RajT88 · 2h ago
You could say "moneyed interests". There is a distinction - there are both huge companies and billionaires, and a lot of the companies are owned in part or in whole by the billionaires. But together, they increasingly determine how our political system is run.
It all seems to entrenched and at the same time escalating, it feels like it's inevitable it'll all fall apart. I'm surprised we're not seeing more moneyed interests colluding to establish equilibrium which is sustainable.
Hilift · 2h ago
I doubt anyone will care about this in four years. Society grows accustomed to daily life, as with the Vichy. The job market will be in tatters, similar to what South Africa has now with 40% unemployment. Every time a homeless person steals copper wire from a street lamp in LA, they make $50 from illegal recyclers and it costs taxpayers $10k to fix. $20 million per year, $100 million since 2020. 2029 there will be crime drones swarming LA recording crimes and seeking overly tanned people in real time on YouTube. LA took out a $1 billion loan this year to keep the lights on, and now Denver wants to do the same with zero economic prospects, which is a weird sales pitch.
Wow, this stood out. "Only 791 executions were carried out."
spwa4 · 15m ago
Which means 90% of people who committed extremely serious crimes in service of the Nazis, serious enough to warrant the death penalty, were gradually let out of prison in the years after that. Of the people not convicted to death, 100% were "forgiven". Not really, but read on.
Most people convicted to death (AND Robert Schuman, who was convicted, but later founded the EU) were guilty of helping the Nazis deport and massacre people, and not one or two, hundreds at least. Tens of thousands, some.
And the reason for releasing most of them is even worse, if you disregard that half managed to escape. The reason is that the resistance (and remaining Nazis, by the way, who in some places killed literally everyone they could get their hands on in retreat) carried out their own executions in French towns, villages and cities. Without courts, or judgement. Needless to say, pretty much everyone in government was guilty and more and more were getting executed.
So a "clean slate" was declared, to prevent the country falling apart entirely, and these people were let go. Not just in France. Spain. Italy. Belgium. Luxembourg. The Netherlands. In countries that were Nazi-leaning (like the Netherlands, Austria or Italy) some government departments (think health, youth, justice and education departments) literally have archives of their own cooperation with the holocaust.
Please note that it is now known that quite a few victims of both the courts and the extrajudicial killings were convicted as Nazi collaborators ... BY Nazi collaborators who remained in government and wanted revenge.
Needless to say, there was a wave of murders around the time of every release, with suspiciously little effort going to finding the perpetrators.
Note how softly it is put on Wikipedia, what he did, today. He "was in charge of refugees", not even mentioning the tiny little detail that he was in charge of refugees during the Nazi takeover of France. What he did was help the Nazis detain and deport tens of thousands of French citizens, as well letting cripples and mentally ill people, including children, freeze and starve to death (and worse). Yes he betrayed the Nazis afterwards, before the end of the war, and was let in government ... because there were a lot of Nazi collaborators and actual Nazis left in the postwar French government who were needed to rebuild France and needed to be reassured they wouldn't be hunted down like they deserved.
He is also the closest thing we have to the founder of the EU.
Oh and if you think this is the only EU leader that could be criticized for past decisions, including for killing their own countrymen, guess again.
causal · 2h ago
Trying to give something more power because you think it likes power is generally considered risky
The exception, of course, is if you expect to co-benefit - Intel sent their CEO to kiss the ring and now they might be getting free investment money out of the deal. But it's definitely a risky strategy.
abullinan · 2h ago
It was literally less than 48 hours where the president went from fully negative to fully positive on the intel ceo. I don’t think the ring is all the ceo kissed. That’s the president’s plan for every ceo.
causal · 2h ago
That is not an exception, it's exactly what the Tweet is talking about
SpicyLemonZest · 2h ago
It's not. The Intel CEO wasn't obeying "in advance", he went to the White House after Trump announced (with absolutely no explanation) that Intel must fire him.
tempodox · 34m ago
> in 2029
Nope, King of America is a lifetime position.
perihelions · 2h ago
> "unless you'd like to go to prison for bribery alongside Tim Cook in 2029"
I don't understand how anyone could disagree with this assessment. This is the most transparent bribe ever,
>If you run or make strategic decisions for a tech company in 2025, you need to understand that many if not most of your competitors are working hard to figure out how to wield the federal government in their favor.
This has been true in every industry and every company for the last 100 years. It's not even illegal, unless you're out there offering quid pro quo bribes.
ratelimitsteve · 2h ago
When the reckoning finally arrives the aristocrats will forgive themselves in the spirit of reconciliation and moving on, just like they did after WWII. Plenty of American companies like IBM made tons of money helping the Nazis and then after Berlin fell it turned out they were actually always on the side of freedom and there is absolutely no need to expand the war crimes trials to include collaborators.
cryoshon · 2h ago
This is fascism. There is no longer separation between the government and private industry as a result of the criminal and out-of-control authoritarian Trump administration.
By and large, Silicon Valley and its kingmakers are fully in support of this, many vocally so.
frogperson · 2h ago
This is fascism. The merging of corporations and the government.
lclc · 2h ago
So in your definition that makes China fascists, considering all its big corporations are merged with the government?
I'd say it's the nature of power, politics and the existence of government. They start out small and then grow and attract corruption. You can only slow it down by having things like democracy (especially direct democracy) and separation of power.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 1h ago
Yes? I'm surprised that the idea the Chinese government is fascist is a controversial one. China is easily a totalitarian government.
robby_w_g · 2h ago
It's pathetic how many people just shrug their shoulders at it and let it happen. The president is a corrupt clown, and people delude themselves into accepting it so they can line their pockets as well.
turnsout · 2h ago
Yes—more broadly, this is totalitarianism. [0] Every CEO on this list should loudly denounce it and call it out for what it is.
I don’t like it but it’s not the first time. FDR’s National Recovery Administration crossed similar boundaries.
bananapub · 2h ago
it really is just continually amazing that the American elite is almost entirely fine with the executive ending the rule of law and the pretence that the President isn't meant to use the powers of office purely to enrich himself and reward favoured courtiers.
why has no CEO of any, even medium sized, company come out and just said "fuck this, fuck you, fuck 33% of voters, we'll continue to try to operate like a normal country in our little corner"? I'm sure some absolutely fucking vile sociopaths will buy one share and then launch a shareholder lawsuit demanding the CEO be as pathetic as the rest of them and that Not Bribing The President is a new form of securities fraud, but you need at least one person to loudly say no to this nightmare if you want any hope of it ending.
linguae · 2h ago
Unfortunately the executive branch has a lot of power, and many opposed to these wild moves are fearful that openly speaking out will lead to retaliation. Witness the revocation of grant money at targeted universities, for example. Also consider how tariffs are applied and un-applied at moment’s notice.
The only way out that I see is for the executive branch to eventually overplay its hand and anger enough MAGA voters to risk losing the House and perhaps the Senate, thus opening the door for the opposition to have the numbers to block legislation and even threaten impeachment over egregious violations of the Constitution.
tstrimple · 1h ago
How many is enough? Half of Republicans stated they would still support Trump even if proven he was a child rapist on the Epstein plane. I don't think there is a bar low enough for conservatives to drop support. At some point we have to accept that they weren't just duped. They actually want these things to be happening.
tombert · 2h ago
I have very strong (and cynical) opinions on why people run companies do this but I was told posting it has made me unemployable so I’ll keep the spicier ones to myself.
I think a lot of it comes down to motivations. The people running these companies have very little to gain from acting ethically and a lot to lose.
jurking_hoff · 2h ago
> why has no CEO of any, even medium sized, company come out and just said "fuck this, fuck you, fuck 33% of voters, we'll continue to try to operate like a normal country in our little corner"
Because they’re the puppetmasters
No comments yet
Cuuugi · 2h ago
I do not like the Trump administration, but they don't exist in a vacuum.
It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".
Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.
_verandaguy · 2h ago
> Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.
While I won't defend corruption, there are orders of magnitude of difference in the intensity and harm caused by the current US government's corruption vs the type most people have grown accustomed to. Both sidesing this is insane.
And all that aside -- in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11 on running the government as your combination personal slush fund, army, and all-encompassing bureaucratic warfare organization?
gryfft · 2h ago
> in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11
A world in the throes of absolute war against an entirely dehumanized opponent. If the enemy is definitionally maximally evil, then absolutely any action is permissible as long as it hurts the Other.
sokoloff · 2h ago
I find it interesting (in a dismaying sense) how many people are perfectly comfortable or even in favor of government oversteps by “their” team that are aligned with outcomes they like but act shocked and indignant when the “other” team does it.
IMO, the solution is to demand constitutional and law-following behavior from both/all teams, but to be particularly careful to do that with your preferred side, as you might be prone to overlook those excesses.
yks · 2h ago
Russia perfected the ethics of "you don't need to be good, you just need everyone else to be bad", Americans are just bringing the state of the art home.
daveguy · 1h ago
Well, it helps that Russia has captured and helped pump propaganda over well more than 50% of US information channels.
sethops1 · 1h ago
This is what the system of checks-and-balances was supposed to enforce. Turns out that system is not effective if you vote the same party into power in each aspect of the government.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 2h ago
>the solution is to demand constitutional and law-following behavior from both/all teams
This is only a solution if you can reasonably anticipate the demands being obeyed. If instead you anticipate that they won't be obeyed (by one or both parties), then it only puts your team at a disadvantage. The other team knows this, so they tend to ignore or ridicule any such demands and to whip their team into ignoring and ridiculing those demands. At which point, your team suffers.
Cooperation strategies in an adversarial system only work in a limited set of highly unusual circumstances, and those circumstances aren't currently extant.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 2h ago
Yes, all political parties and organizations must be accountable to the Constitution and the law.
We also need to be honest with ourselves as a nation that Trumpism pushes far further into unconstitutional and law-disregarding behavior than what has come before. Pretending it is equivalent, as the starting comment does, is dangerous.
causal · 2h ago
Bad governance does not justify more bad governance. Even if it's true that previous admins have done all this before (it's not) it wouldn't justify a thing.
mexicocitinluez · 2h ago
Here's the hilarious part: When you say "previous admins" you're almost certainly talking about previous Republican admins.
I don’t know if it falls into the strict definition of “corruption”, but definitely falls into the broader category of “shitty”, but democrat politicians don’t seem to be above abusing their power to enrich themselves with the stock market.
I’m not a conservative, I’m pretty left-leaning by (American standards at least), but I am not going to act like my side is categorically better in this regard.
SpicyLemonZest · 2h ago
I'm sorry to break the news to you, but if you're using the phrase "democrat politicians", you're extremely conservative. This phrase does not exist and is never used outside of deeply partisan conservative circles. If this doesn't align with your understanding of who you are and what you believe, I'd urgently reevaluate your media consumption habits.
LPisGood · 1h ago
I’m on the left and I use that phrase. It took me forever to figure out what was “wrong” with it. They’re democrats, democrat politicians.
Like the other person said, this usage is extremely common and not just on extremist conservative spaces, unless your definition of “extremist” includes 80% of the USA’s overton window
tombert · 1h ago
Yeah, that’s the thing.
I think a lot of people spend all day on leftist YouTube and live in leftist Discord servers and hang out with self-proclaimed Marxist friends, and that’s all completely fine, but as a result of people not being tuned into their specific vernacular they act like this shit is a dog whistle instead of the fact that i just don’t know (or care much about) this specific vocabulary.
I suppose I could be a useful idiot for this, but I don’t feel like saying “democrat” is really that bad as far as these things go.
To be fair, republicans are far worse with regards to “pretending to be offended”. You cannot convince me that anyone is actually offended by the term “happy holidays”, but every year I get to hear about a “war on Christmas”
LPisGood · 52m ago
I have personally known people to be offended by the term and the broader war on Christmas they feel it represents.
tombert · 44m ago
I know a bunch of people who say they’re offended by it. I don’t believe them, they’re lying to me or themselves, but I think the former.
I could be wrong, it’s likely even, but it’s just not something I am going to be convinced of. I think they’re pretending to be offended, because if they act offended then it’s easier for them to “both-sides” stuff, or they think it shows how good of Christians they are.
tombert · 1h ago
It’s actually not conservative at all, they run under the democrat sticker, this is the self-prescribed label.
We can argue that the American democrats aren’t very left-leaning and I would probably agree with you, but I reject the idea that I cannot use their own labels to describe them without being described as conservative.
You're wrong on both the history and modern usage.
tombert · 1h ago
Fair enough. I meant to type Democratic but I guess I typed Democrat by mistake and didn’t realize it had baggage. I was typing on a phone.
It does seem like a pretty easy mistake to make regardless and I don’t think it’s reasonable to call me “extremely conservative” for making it. It’s still pretty common to call these politicians “democrats”, so someone who isn’t terminally tuned into semantic games might not realize it.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 1h ago
> It’s still pretty common to call these politicians “democrats”
Yes, this was the Republicans being successful in their efforts.
I appreciate you acknowledging the term has baggage.
tombert · 1h ago
Sure, but at this point it just kind of feels like splitting hairs and just a means of getting offended on purpose.
Calling people “extremely conservative” because I used a term that is very commonly used pretty much everywhere but leftist circles is needlessly pedantic and very annoying. I think it’s reasonable to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Also I’m not fucking conservative. I think Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder and Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk and pretty much anyone on the internet who has ever challenged anyone to a debate is a fucking moron.
SpicyLemonZest · 1h ago
The reason it seems like an easy mistake to make is that you've been consuming conservative media that uses it routinely. Presumably this is the same media that told you about this ETF whose ticker is a joke about Nancy Pelosi, and suggested that it proves some fact comparable to the current administration's misconduct. Again, I'm not saying you personally consider yourself to be conservative - but if you don't, you've been tricked, and you need to urgently reevaluate how much you listen to the people who tricked you.
tombert · 1h ago
Which “conservative media” are you referring to? I don’t watch Fox News, I don’t watch Newsmax, I don’t listen to Alex Jones, I don’t watch CNN, I don’t watch MSNBC, I don’t listen to any political commentators.
The fact that the ETF is outperforming the regular market demonstrates that there’s some shiftiness going on. I am pretty sure that was the point.
I didn’t say it was comparable to the Trump admins misconduct, read my comment again. I said that democrats aren’t immune from shittiness.
Pretending to not understand what I was saying is extremely irritating.
ETA:
I reread my comment and I realize that I said “not categorically better”, which can easily be interpreted as an equivalence.
That wasn’t what I was trying to say. I was just trying to say like we shouldn’t act like there isn’t some level on shittiness on the democratic side.
SpicyLemonZest · 57m ago
Hard for me to know what you watch and listen to. Stereotypical "podcast bros" are one big thing I've seen - there's a lot of political content out there that gets cast as "apolitical" because the nominal topic is something else or the hosts are sympathetic to Bernie Sanders. (And this is something I'd absolutely is a both-sides thing, a lot of the content creators I follow do take broadly left-wing themes for granted.)
tombert · 48m ago
Well good news! I also don’t listen to podcasts! I think Joe Rogan is a big stupid idiot, and may have singularly caused more damage than nearly anyone currently alive. I used to listen to a lot of NPR podcasts but I haven’t in years.
I guess I do read The Onion so I am not divorced from politics, but I try to mostly avoid consuming much political shit.
Yeah yeah I know everything is political, I promise you that you don’t need to lecture me on that fact. I am just saying that most of the shit I consume now largely boils down to videos about how video games work or “documentaries” about lolcows on YouTube. I have tried to unplug from everything that gravitates around the political news sphere. The only place I get any “news” is HN nowadays, and I mostly try and read the tech shit.
Cuuugi · 2h ago
It's an explanation, not a justification.
You're letting past gov'ts away with a lot apparently but overall i agree.
The Overton window shifted too far and now an egomaniac is in charge of its reset.
gchamonlive · 2h ago
Such is dialectics, but if you are going to apply relativism to comparatively very different movements you are in for a really bad time.
mexicocitinluez · 2h ago
I need to the left's version of starting your own memecoin and openly taking bribes from officials and foreign countries.
I also would like the left's version of pardoning people who they directly do business with.
Those legitimately parrot the "both sides" stuff are terribly naive. No one who actually pays attention to what's happening thinks these parties are remotely similar right now.
bananapub · 2h ago
> Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.
it isn't possible for you to be so poorly informed that you think "Joe Biden's son told people who his dad was so they'd let him do a business deal" is in the same scale as:
- taking direct bribes from Qatar
- the president and his family launching multiple cryptocurrency firms to do infinite fraud and money laundering
- demanding and accepting direct bribes from universities and using taxpayer money as the cudgel
- directly taking cash from randoms for pardons
etc etc etc
marcusverus · 1h ago
100% of these assertions are lies. Bravo.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 2h ago
> It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left"
"Perceived" is a very important word in that sentence. The "misdeeds" don't actually exist, they are only "perceived" as part of right wing manufactured victimhood.
mcphage · 2h ago
> It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".
lolwhat? “I don’t like what I imagined the left is doing so I’m going to turn our cities into police states?” In what world is that a reasonable justification? Might as well say it’s a bitter reaction to the tooth fairy.
energy123 · 2h ago
It's an explanation not a justification.
mcphage · 49m ago
It's an excuse, not an explanation.
energy123 · 42m ago
It's an explanation, as much as you wish it isn't.
dralley · 2h ago
This is such utter BS. And also, btw, also doesn't exist in a vacuum.
The left isn't immune to feeling bitter disgust at titans of industry that openly pay bribes and tributes and lie on camera in service of political objectives in exchange for political and economic favors.
Cuuugi · 2h ago
The left does not equal the democrat party.
The right does not equate to the republican party.
My point is that there is open levels of collusion with the Biden admin (and Obama earlier) and media corps which have given the Trump admin cover to openly talk about their "favored companies"
Relax guy, politicians are not your friends.
LPisGood · 2h ago
> My point is that there is open levels of collusion with the Biden admin (and Obama earlier) and media corps
Foreign operatives were legitimately engaging in information warfare against the American people, so it makes sense for FBI and others to let American companies know when their platforms are being used for these things.
This is especially true when such content is already against the policy of those services.
Cuuugi · 52m ago
"Foreign operatives were legitimately engaging in information warfare against the American people" - says the government at the time, therein lies the concern.
No Government should regulate the internet.
LPisGood · 45m ago
That’s all well and good if you live in lala land where nothing bad is ever happening that isn’t the current government’s fault, but here in the Real World, the impacts of foreign governments engaging in an information war need to be dealt with. Part of that begins with acknowledging the objective fact that foreign state actors are engaged in such an information war.
lesuorac · 2h ago
It's probably a reference to the twitter files which showed coordinated efforts between Trump term1 and Twitter.
LPisGood · 1h ago
The “Twitter files” showed almost nothing of substance, to my knowledge. What are these coordinated efforts you’re talking about?
tstrimple · 1h ago
The Twitter Files, much like the Mueller Report is useful to determine who the disingenuous or ignorant are. The people most likely to bring them up make claims completely opposite to what is actually contained within the documents because that's what they were told was in them. They can't ever be bothered to actually read the things they are using as "evidence". They just have to point to them ominously.
To them the Twitter files proves that Democrats and Twitter collaborated to suppress conservative voices and boost liberals despite showing nothing to that effect.
To them the Mueller Report fully exonerates Trump and proves it was nothing but a Democratic smear campaign. Despite it showing the opposite.
Reality doesn't matter anymore. These are "facts" to roughly 1/3rd of the US population.
1a527dd5 · 2h ago
I mean at first glance, this doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy. But ignoring my initial reaction; I don't think this is any different from lobby groups keeping tabs on what congressmen say vs do.
Just this time it's the government tracking which companies are pro-government currently.
It's not nice, but this government is transactional at best.
While I choose not to play games; it's hard not to play when the other side is the government.
This does explain all the random gifts the government is getting.
moelf · 2h ago
>I don't think this is any different from lobby groups
for starter, lobby groups cannot issue executive orders just start and stop tariffs and government grant willy nilly
gammarator · 2h ago
Lobby groups are private actors rating elected Congressional reps. This is government officials rating private actors (with an implied threat to punish those who don’t comply).
gchamonlive · 2h ago
> It's not nice, but this government is transactional at best.
Is it? Will it remain so? Things sometimes are until they aren't and the difference is sometimes impossible to distinguish. Better not to give fascism the benefit of the doubt it doesn't deserve.
SpicyLemonZest · 2h ago
I don't think "transactional" is the right word at all. There's no durable deal you can make with the government that will stop them from demanding more. The President's open, explicitly stated position is that the American economy belongs to him, and you have no right to conduct your business in a way he doesn't like.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 2h ago
You can't appease bullies. They always come back for your lunch money again on some future day. Any promises they make are worthless.
unclad5968 · 2h ago
Im uninvolved in politics. Can someone explain to me why it's facist that the government is recording who is cooperative and who isn't? That doesn't seem malicious to me, unless you assume it will be used for punishing poorly cooperative companies. Even then, lawmakers know who cooperates and who doesn't, they don't need a spreadsheet for it. I'm willing to be enlightened of my ignorance here.
dragonwriter · 1h ago
There is never any purpose for a government rating people/organizations on an axis except to act on that information in some way, and there is basically no way that the government acting on ratings of loyalty to the present leadership, is not, at a minimum, a dangerous promotion of private interest above public interest.
It is fascist, though, only in the context of other actions by the administration.
LPisGood · 42m ago
This government already has a track record of punishing poorly cooperative companies! Look into the illegal executive orders that targeted various law firms.
happytoexplain · 2h ago
The administration's vindictiveness and obsession with loyalty is extreme (for the US).
jaybrendansmith · 1h ago
John Adams: "I see a new nation ready to take its place in the world; not an empire, but a republic; and a republic of laws, not men."
throwawaysleep · 2h ago
> Can someone explain to me why it's facist that the government is recording who is cooperative and who isn't?
Because your experience with the government in a democracy shouldn't be dependent on whether the person in power decides you have shown sufficient fealty.
> unless you assume it will be used for punishing poorly cooperative companies.
Like they have so far?
delusional · 2h ago
> unless you assume it will be used for punishing poorly cooperative companies.
You don't have to assume that. The US government has already made that policy quite clear.
janderson215 · 2h ago
Does this also apply to Tesla with the previous administration, or is this new dynamic?
marcusverus · 55m ago
Sure, the Biden admin actively targeted a publicly traded company[0] because their CEO was critical of the administration, but that's not fascism. Fascism is when the bad guys make spreadsheets.
We collectively give the wealthy extra protection, status, and influence. Basically every definition or subcategory of power.
When you do this, it creates a disgusting race to the bottom from those trying to reach the top. We are seeing the ultimate result of that: a mafia kingdom. A feudal clown show.
You will see a weirdly large amount of people supporting that here because a large number of people have conditioned morality out of their ideology. Or reduced it to a very superficial level, completely subservient to the almighty dollar. "Greed is good", "the ECONOMY", "my peers do it so it's okay". And in and on and on.
In short, many would be doing the same thing in the same position and they can't see just how amoral that is. And how it reflects the utter rot that is our culture.
American civic understanding has gone through the floor. People already think that corporate quid pro quo is the default, so for some, this is actually an improvement because it's more transparent now. It can't be that corporations achieve wins through research and coalition building because that would imply that they aren't not doing enough. The irony has made lobbying stigmatized in grass-roots organizations [1], which only gives corporate lobbyists more power.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/nonprofits-lobbying-less-survey-1...
It's just that the conservatives are so much further along the authoritarianism scale that the liberals appear to be freedom loving democracy activists by comparison. But I guarantee you, if you were to drop the average US Democratic party politician into Germany, Australia, or Canada, they'd be considered to be so far right of center that people would question whether or not that politician even believes in democracy.
They tried, but it was blocked by Republicans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_People_Act
???
Why can't we just call this corruption? Is there any other, more charitable, interpretation of "transactional"?
Edit: to his own detriment. Why bother with "deals" when you know it can change at any moment. Just put on a golden dog and pony show for the King and hope for the best.
Of course, one look at Trump’s actual transactions in office should dissuade of that notion. After he made the preliminary trade deal with the EU, he bragged on TV that Europeans are investing $600 billion and Trump himself gets to decide where the money goes. It’s baffling that anyone would assume that’s how any of this works, but he clearly thinks the point of these transactions is to get more power and wealth for himself.
It's because the president said it on TV.
I can believe that kind of reinforcement happens. Trump watches Fox News, sees himself saying X, and thinks “yes, it’s very good that {X}.”
FTFY.
That's optimistic that you think anyone is going to prison in 2029.
There are the purges. But it's normally not the corporate or moneyed puppetmasters getting purged, rather it's the political allies of the fascists that get purged. Military and law enforcement leaders who start off as allies have a particularly dismal survival record in these kinds of governments, since they don't have even the ephemeral protection of democratic legitimacy.
Cook kissing ass and giving the President a meaningless trinket, doesn’t quite arise to that level.
I mean billionaires don't even go to prison for engaging in pedophilia. Which is just about the worst crime you can commit. If anyone thinks liberals or conservatives will put them in prison for bribery, they're being a little naive.
This nation is owned by the billionaires. In all honesty, they don't even need to be in alignment with the government. There's next to nothing the government can do to rein in giant banks. If anything, the government has to be certain to make sure the banks are appeased.
It all seems to entrenched and at the same time escalating, it feels like it's inevitable it'll all fall apart. I'm surprised we're not seeing more moneyed interests colluding to establish equilibrium which is sustainable.
Well, Vichy collaboraters certainly got executed afterwards
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89puration_l%C3%A9gale
Most people convicted to death (AND Robert Schuman, who was convicted, but later founded the EU) were guilty of helping the Nazis deport and massacre people, and not one or two, hundreds at least. Tens of thousands, some.
And the reason for releasing most of them is even worse, if you disregard that half managed to escape. The reason is that the resistance (and remaining Nazis, by the way, who in some places killed literally everyone they could get their hands on in retreat) carried out their own executions in French towns, villages and cities. Without courts, or judgement. Needless to say, pretty much everyone in government was guilty and more and more were getting executed.
So a "clean slate" was declared, to prevent the country falling apart entirely, and these people were let go. Not just in France. Spain. Italy. Belgium. Luxembourg. The Netherlands. In countries that were Nazi-leaning (like the Netherlands, Austria or Italy) some government departments (think health, youth, justice and education departments) literally have archives of their own cooperation with the holocaust.
Please note that it is now known that quite a few victims of both the courts and the extrajudicial killings were convicted as Nazi collaborators ... BY Nazi collaborators who remained in government and wanted revenge.
Needless to say, there was a wave of murders around the time of every release, with suspiciously little effort going to finding the perpetrators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Schuman#World_War_II
Note how softly it is put on Wikipedia, what he did, today. He "was in charge of refugees", not even mentioning the tiny little detail that he was in charge of refugees during the Nazi takeover of France. What he did was help the Nazis detain and deport tens of thousands of French citizens, as well letting cripples and mentally ill people, including children, freeze and starve to death (and worse). Yes he betrayed the Nazis afterwards, before the end of the war, and was let in government ... because there were a lot of Nazi collaborators and actual Nazis left in the postwar French government who were needed to rebuild France and needed to be reassured they wouldn't be hunted down like they deserved.
He is also the closest thing we have to the founder of the EU.
Oh and if you think this is the only EU leader that could be criticized for past decisions, including for killing their own countrymen, guess again.
https://x.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1849951974944313590?lang...
Nope, King of America is a lifetime position.
I don't understand how anyone could disagree with this assessment. This is the most transparent bribe ever,
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Getty... ("Donald Trump speaks behind an engraved glass disc gifted to him by Apple CEO Tim Cook during an event in the Oval Office of the White House")
This has been true in every industry and every company for the last 100 years. It's not even illegal, unless you're out there offering quid pro quo bribes.
By and large, Silicon Valley and its kingmakers are fully in support of this, many vocally so.
I'd say it's the nature of power, politics and the existence of government. They start out small and then grow and attract corruption. You can only slow it down by having things like democracy (especially direct democracy) and separation of power.
why has no CEO of any, even medium sized, company come out and just said "fuck this, fuck you, fuck 33% of voters, we'll continue to try to operate like a normal country in our little corner"? I'm sure some absolutely fucking vile sociopaths will buy one share and then launch a shareholder lawsuit demanding the CEO be as pathetic as the rest of them and that Not Bribing The President is a new form of securities fraud, but you need at least one person to loudly say no to this nightmare if you want any hope of it ending.
The only way out that I see is for the executive branch to eventually overplay its hand and anger enough MAGA voters to risk losing the House and perhaps the Senate, thus opening the door for the opposition to have the numbers to block legislation and even threaten impeachment over egregious violations of the Constitution.
I think a lot of it comes down to motivations. The people running these companies have very little to gain from acting ethically and a lot to lose.
Because they’re the puppetmasters
No comments yet
It seems the most of their policies are bitter reactions to perceived misdeeds from "the left".
Corruption definitely crosses the aisle.
And all that aside -- in what world is the appropriate response to perceived misdeeds by a political opponent to crank the dial up to 11 on running the government as your combination personal slush fund, army, and all-encompassing bureaucratic warfare organization?
A world in the throes of absolute war against an entirely dehumanized opponent. If the enemy is definitionally maximally evil, then absolutely any action is permissible as long as it hurts the Other.
IMO, the solution is to demand constitutional and law-following behavior from both/all teams, but to be particularly careful to do that with your preferred side, as you might be prone to overlook those excesses.
This is only a solution if you can reasonably anticipate the demands being obeyed. If instead you anticipate that they won't be obeyed (by one or both parties), then it only puts your team at a disadvantage. The other team knows this, so they tend to ignore or ridicule any such demands and to whip their team into ignoring and ridiculing those demands. At which point, your team suffers.
Cooperation strategies in an adversarial system only work in a limited set of highly unusual circumstances, and those circumstances aren't currently extant.
We also need to be honest with ourselves as a nation that Trumpism pushes far further into unconstitutional and law-disregarding behavior than what has come before. Pretending it is equivalent, as the starting comment does, is dangerous.
https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/have-there-been-significant...
There’s an entire (successful) ETF exploiting it. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NANC/
I’m not a conservative, I’m pretty left-leaning by (American standards at least), but I am not going to act like my side is categorically better in this regard.
Like the other person said, this usage is extremely common and not just on extremist conservative spaces, unless your definition of “extremist” includes 80% of the USA’s overton window
I think a lot of people spend all day on leftist YouTube and live in leftist Discord servers and hang out with self-proclaimed Marxist friends, and that’s all completely fine, but as a result of people not being tuned into their specific vernacular they act like this shit is a dog whistle instead of the fact that i just don’t know (or care much about) this specific vocabulary.
I suppose I could be a useful idiot for this, but I don’t feel like saying “democrat” is really that bad as far as these things go.
To be fair, republicans are far worse with regards to “pretending to be offended”. You cannot convince me that anyone is actually offended by the term “happy holidays”, but every year I get to hear about a “war on Christmas”
I could be wrong, it’s likely even, but it’s just not something I am going to be convinced of. I think they’re pretending to be offended, because if they act offended then it’s easier for them to “both-sides” stuff, or they think it shows how good of Christians they are.
We can argue that the American democrats aren’t very left-leaning and I would probably agree with you, but I reject the idea that I cannot use their own labels to describe them without being described as conservative.
You're wrong on both the history and modern usage.
It does seem like a pretty easy mistake to make regardless and I don’t think it’s reasonable to call me “extremely conservative” for making it. It’s still pretty common to call these politicians “democrats”, so someone who isn’t terminally tuned into semantic games might not realize it.
Yes, this was the Republicans being successful in their efforts.
I appreciate you acknowledging the term has baggage.
Calling people “extremely conservative” because I used a term that is very commonly used pretty much everywhere but leftist circles is needlessly pedantic and very annoying. I think it’s reasonable to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Also I’m not fucking conservative. I think Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder and Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk and pretty much anyone on the internet who has ever challenged anyone to a debate is a fucking moron.
The fact that the ETF is outperforming the regular market demonstrates that there’s some shiftiness going on. I am pretty sure that was the point.
I didn’t say it was comparable to the Trump admins misconduct, read my comment again. I said that democrats aren’t immune from shittiness.
Pretending to not understand what I was saying is extremely irritating.
ETA:
I reread my comment and I realize that I said “not categorically better”, which can easily be interpreted as an equivalence.
That wasn’t what I was trying to say. I was just trying to say like we shouldn’t act like there isn’t some level on shittiness on the democratic side.
I guess I do read The Onion so I am not divorced from politics, but I try to mostly avoid consuming much political shit.
Yeah yeah I know everything is political, I promise you that you don’t need to lecture me on that fact. I am just saying that most of the shit I consume now largely boils down to videos about how video games work or “documentaries” about lolcows on YouTube. I have tried to unplug from everything that gravitates around the political news sphere. The only place I get any “news” is HN nowadays, and I mostly try and read the tech shit.
You're letting past gov'ts away with a lot apparently but overall i agree.
The Overton window shifted too far and now an egomaniac is in charge of its reset.
I also would like the left's version of pardoning people who they directly do business with.
Those legitimately parrot the "both sides" stuff are terribly naive. No one who actually pays attention to what's happening thinks these parties are remotely similar right now.
it isn't possible for you to be so poorly informed that you think "Joe Biden's son told people who his dad was so they'd let him do a business deal" is in the same scale as:
- taking direct bribes from Qatar - the president and his family launching multiple cryptocurrency firms to do infinite fraud and money laundering - demanding and accepting direct bribes from universities and using taxpayer money as the cudgel - directly taking cash from randoms for pardons
etc etc etc
"Perceived" is a very important word in that sentence. The "misdeeds" don't actually exist, they are only "perceived" as part of right wing manufactured victimhood.
lolwhat? “I don’t like what I imagined the left is doing so I’m going to turn our cities into police states?” In what world is that a reasonable justification? Might as well say it’s a bitter reaction to the tooth fairy.
The left isn't immune to feeling bitter disgust at titans of industry that openly pay bribes and tributes and lie on camera in service of political objectives in exchange for political and economic favors.
My point is that there is open levels of collusion with the Biden admin (and Obama earlier) and media corps which have given the Trump admin cover to openly talk about their "favored companies"
Relax guy, politicians are not your friends.
What do you mean?
This case just doesnt sit right with me.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/26/biden-admin-cant-be...
This is especially true when such content is already against the policy of those services.
No Government should regulate the internet.
To them the Twitter files proves that Democrats and Twitter collaborated to suppress conservative voices and boost liberals despite showing nothing to that effect.
To them the Mueller Report fully exonerates Trump and proves it was nothing but a Democratic smear campaign. Despite it showing the opposite.
Reality doesn't matter anymore. These are "facts" to roughly 1/3rd of the US population.
Just this time it's the government tracking which companies are pro-government currently.
It's not nice, but this government is transactional at best.
While I choose not to play games; it's hard not to play when the other side is the government.
This does explain all the random gifts the government is getting.
for starter, lobby groups cannot issue executive orders just start and stop tariffs and government grant willy nilly
Is it? Will it remain so? Things sometimes are until they aren't and the difference is sometimes impossible to distinguish. Better not to give fascism the benefit of the doubt it doesn't deserve.
It is fascist, though, only in the context of other actions by the administration.
Because your experience with the government in a democracy shouldn't be dependent on whether the person in power decides you have shown sufficient fealty.
> unless you assume it will be used for punishing poorly cooperative companies.
Like they have so far?
You don't have to assume that. The US government has already made that policy quite clear.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/ev-tax-credit-2024-tesla-model-3-ex...
Also, comparing the actions of Trump to anything any previous President (including Trump 1!) almost feels like you’re being disingenuous.