White House gossip: Trump may be Putin’s quisling

There is a resistance twitter account called @RoguePOTUSStaff which appears to legitimately be from someone(s) inside the White House. Today the account tweeted the following about the call to Putin:

insistence to monitor Putin call was due to concern POTUS hasn’t told full story about Putin attempts at blackmail.

After call, do not seem to have had any fears allayed. POTUS behavior during call said to be suspicious.

urging POTUS that if Putin is compromising him to allow them to help. POTUS continues to deny, despite firm intelligence.

These “rogue twitter accounts” now extends all over the federal government, and reveal a profound disdain to Donald Trump. But what is sustaining him is the Authoritarian Party, in “alternative facts” known as the Republican Party, and they do so because he is too focused on food and TV to ay attention to what he is signing. He doesn’t give a rats ass about their pet issues. They have someone signing deeply unpopular executive orders, and he has pillars of support that sustain him in power. That is how dictatorships are established.

Hope Restored

With the 637-city, multimillion women’s march today, hope has been restored in the ability of the silent majority to stand up and defend Liberal Democracy against the intolerance and demagoguery that the fascists use as a wedge to take and hold power. Having said that, today was not a victory per se, it was just the rejoinder of the struggle. This was just the end of the beginning.

The women’s march in Washington D.C.

Where to go from here? Run for office! The crucial positions to take are all those relating to elections, on all levels from precinct to supervisor of elections. The fascist strategy is to deny minorities their right to vote, and to gerrymander. To be able to compete for the seats in the legislature and executive, the people must first safeguard the election process. No elected office is too insignificant to be worth fighting for.

Melania, I don’t care if you were an escort, but stop acting like one!

Melania the nude model who married Donald Trump, threatens to sue anyone calling her a hooker. I don’t care if she was a hooker or not, it is beside the point. Hookers are also people. What matters is how a person behaves. What matters is her standing up for her dignity – and she is not doing it by suing media, she would be doing it by telling her lying, cheating, sexually assaulting husband to behave like a man.

Melania: It is your husband who is disrespecting you. If you want to be taken  seriously, stand up and be a WOMAN in the relationship! Stop acting like a paid escort!

 

Will Americans wake up in time?

When a democracy turns into a dictatorship the rules change. If the democrats realize in time what is going on, they will act decisively and stop it. “Predict the end, prevent the beginning.” But if they refuse to take in what is happening, if they bury their heads in the sand, then the dictatorship will take root. Let me give you an example. Bill Palmer runs an anti-Trump group of 150k people on Facebook which used to be pro-Hillary (and he also writes the Palmer Report). As a democracy activist I have not just one but several Facebook accounts, everybody has that in dictatorships, so I joined that group with different accounts, and one after the other was blocked. At the same time I had Bill as a friend on Facebook, so I asked him why I was blocked. When time passed without a reply I started suspecting that someone was blocking people without his knowledge, and published the warning mentioned below. After about seven weeks he replied and the exchange below took place.

My advice to all Americans who are fighting against the authoritarian regime under Trump (it is already here) is to stay united, and to engage each other in open discussions. Name calling is what the Trumpistas are doing. Blocking someone who is trying to debate is the stuff of dictatorship, and is only helping Trump. The only legitimate reason to block someone is when that person is trying to destroy the debate. What we want is the debate! Not a monopoly of ideas, but a meeting of opinions.

Not once did Bill Palmer explain what “conspiracy theories” he has talking about, nor did he ever respond to any of my posts or comments. If you want democracy, act as a democrat, that is the first lesson. Second lesson is, don’t ever trust a person who doesn’t respect the norms of democracy – such as Donald Trump.

Unfortunately I don’t see the leadership abilities in the Democratic Party that it needs. There is a lack of spine, a lack of “full speed ahead damn the torpedoes” mentality. And that is the only thing that can save America now: Courage. Lots of civil courage.

Fascism came through the Internet

Social media are the new public space of the world. We cannot allow private corporations to be the masters of what we can or cannot say online, since that is tantamount to FASCISM. Take this example: This image was deleted by Facebook without any motivation or due process, just referring to what they euphemistically call “Community Standards.” For 7 days they blocked me, removing everything I had published on Facebook, much of it warning of the risk of fascism under Trump.  Did Facebook silence me to cover their behinds from retaliation from the president elect? How can we ever know that Facebook is NOT playing nice to Trump, helping him to silence free speech? How can we know that we are not in fascism already? Simple answer: We can’t.
The image that caused Facebook to suspend my account and remove all that I had published, most of which was warning of the risk of fascism under a president Trump.

My conclusion is that every democracy needs a social media ombudsman to prevent fascism, but in the United States it may be too late already. When public space moved from the street to social media, the free speech protections did not keep up. Whoever controls the online space controls what the People knows, believes, and thinks.

Authoritarians like Putin, Maduro, and Trump don’t write laws to control the Internet corporations; they just let them know what they expect and that if they don’t preemptively do what the Leader wants, there will be “consequences.” It’s a brave new world.