It’s a sketchy story, he was technically in violation of his J1 visa since he was skipping classes and picked up an H1B work visa for his own startup which J1 strictly requires prior authorization for. It would seem he had some strings pulled and got post-hoc pre-authorization, or otherwise took advantage of some grace period and applied for the new visa with a fib. It’s all water under the bridge now, from a brief googling Denaturalization is rare except for cases of concealing crimes committed during naturalization or sham marriages. Lying on your application should revoke it from you but if it’s merely an omission, I don’t know, comes down to political will to prosecute, maybe if he pisses trump off enough somebody will “look into it”
It’s not illegal for the rich to pay to skip the line. (For the uninitiated, at first glance it would appear Elon was in violation of his J-1 student visa as he didn’t attend classes at Stanford, but he was swiftly employed by way of an H1-B visa and had the paperwork fast tracked through his VC-DC connections. His brother did refer to himself and Elon as illegal immigrants tho, I would say no more illegal than our First Lady.)
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread
Trump was elected, and he was born in the US, though he does have German ancestry. As an immigrant myself, I personally find it very worrying though that it becomes normal to use foreign descent as a slur in the American political debate. I thought at least the left is supportive of immigrants, but looks like it's conditional on political views and no person of foreign descent can feel safe from attack because of their origin.
This is my big struggle with all of this. His first term I felt America was duped by a con man so protested and made a fuss on social media. Americans saw the first four years and astonishingly decided they wanted more of it, by a decent margin.
So while I absolutely hate what is going on right now this seems to be what the people wanted. I question each day whether that needs to be respected or we should resist.
I also wonder if his supporters have any idea of what is going on. I am sure fox news isn't covering any of this and if they are it's probably being spun in some horrific way.
Social media made them think that some problems were huge and these elected people would solve them, while at the same time demonizing all other media so all signals that these people are not right were effectively muted.
Can we then openly call republican voters guilty then? Instead of pretending that people voting for that party are good people? I do agree that many wanted the harm and that is why they voted for Trump.
Americans are desperate. May not be felt among the HN crowd, but standards of living in the US have been declining consistently for a long time [1]. Remember that Trump was not re-elected to a second term initially specifically because he failed to deliver on his promise of "MAGA". He instead did a Jeb Bush presidency, complete with Wall Street (Mnuchin) and the CIA (Pompeo) running the country exactly as would have occurred had Bush won. So Americans tried Biden, in the hopes of a return to Obama era America. This obviously didn't happen, as standard of living continued to decline. So they tried Trump again, in sheer desperation.
I don't see a positive future for the US, as it is so clearly a declining empire, exhibiting every textbook symptom. The startup/tech crowd loves talking about cheap phones and "services", but the reality is bleak outside of this narrow tech bubble.
Where did Trump promise to remove Phyllis Fong? Or something less specific that would translate to this? He promised to lower egg prices, and "the majority of the few people voted for Trump, so any random thing he now does is what THE AMERICAN PEOPLE wanted" is just not true.
And even if it was, to me the question isn't "did someone else want this at some point in the past, probably based on false or even no information" anyway, but how to judge it now. Sometimes people want wrong things for shitty reasons and a minority has to stand up to them standing on their principles.
Where do you get that from? Huge numbers didn’t vote. Of those who did Trump squeaked by with a small lead but significantly less than 50% of the populace voted for him.
Not everyone's standing by I've been working on hardened long range communications for cheap so the people that need it can have it. But thats just me, there's tons of people fighting back but those stories don't tend to make the news because it spits in the face of the prevailing narrative that people want this.
One thing you can do is shun employees of associated companies (Amazon, Tesla, Facebook) and refuse to give them a job. That requires some sacrifice though.
So a false flag and then martial law, maybe after taking over most law enforcement? The project 2025 leader did say that the next revolution remain bloodless if the left allows it to be. Maybe this is what the 2nd amendment was for.
The purpose of firing Inspectors General en masse is so that there are no independent overseers to investigate illegal or corrupt actions within the executive branch during your term in office.
The specific law that Trump is very obviously breaking is the Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022, which says Congress must be notified 30 days in advance and given "substantive" rationale for dismissing inspectors general.
This law was passed specifically in response to Trump breaking the antecedent law, Inspector General Reform Act of 2008, during his first term.
Will the "party of law and order" do anything? Nope.
I'm tired of congressional Republicans being treated as unmentioned bystanders in this.
Reporters should be pushing microphones in their faces asking why they approve of the latest thing Trump did, or at least what they think of him breaking laws they passed.
Reporters are doing that. But politicians in general and Republicans in particular excel at using rhetorical fallacies and other tactics to avoid answering difficult questions. Here's an example from last year where a bunch of Republicans simply booed and abused a reporter whose question they disliked: https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4274345-republican-tells-...
The media has many shortcomings, but how are reporters supposed to hold accountable people who simply do not care?
The Trump people went extremely well prepared into this. They are spamming with a ton of things, often legally questionable. They know that Congress doesn't have a backbone and lawsuits will take a very long time. It's a brilliant strategy.
A number of (especially recent) administrations have performed a large number of legally questionable acts which were often structured in such a way as to be difficult to challenge (the CFPB comes to mind). Trump’s innovation seems to be taking this tactic to an extreme, remarkably early in this administration.
Title makes it sound like she was in an Neuralink office and physically shoved out the door. The non-clickbait version is that she is in the same agency that started a Neuralink investigation (due to perceive conflicts of interest in its board) and her dismissal has zero substantive connection to neuralink or elon.
Are there any good blogs that are chronicling the USA Federal gov's slow descent into facism and overt corruption, just collecting and archiving pieces like this with a classiciation/categorization etc.?
I think it's an unprecedented opportunity to record the history of a downfall using modern tools, and future generations might benefit enormously.
When I learned about the disruption of the Weimar Republic in highschool, a thing our teacher did was make copious use of newspaper clippings to explain the delta between ground truth and public sentiment, and how certain narratives increased in frequency, etc. He had personally spent quite some time in old archives and on microfilm readers to create his little library. Something like this, but with much more data.
A friend of mine did her master's in political science on crawling data in Islamic extremist social media cycles and trying to correlate activity there with a dataset on terrorist events, trying to find out if you could anticipate them somehow.
This is a loose collection of thoughts, but I think there's something there in the signal.
There's lots of them, but I respectfully submit that doing something about it in the present - whatever you determine that to be, given your skills and inclinations - is a far higher priority than the educational byproduct for future generations.
Using your Weimar example, I would not argue that Germany or humanity is/are better off for having gone through the cataclysm of WW2. In terms of building context, you might find it helpful to read this dry but very detailed examination of the nazi administrative state, and how it delivered economic resources to its political clients through a combination of reorganization, financial engineering, and striaght-up theft:
On a more abstract level, try 'The logic of political survival' by Smith & Bueno de Mesquita. both books will give you a useful framework within which to assess the contextual significance of ongoing news events.
I also think this is a good summary for those who had never heard of Weimar before: https://archive.is/xh2Ci
But like most summaries, it suffers a bit from focusing on the key events, and not capturing this sort of ... change in the ambient noise floor, and what relationship the average citizen had to what was going on, and what perception of events. I think it's the "Would you have been able to tell that it'd get this bad?" is kind of the more interesting part. A political weather forecasting model, if you will.
> I think it's an unprecedented opportunity to record the history of a downfall using modern tools, and future generations might benefit enormously.
Well, the German atrocities of the Third Reich are well-documented and we are probably just a few years behind the U.S.
The best documentary won't help to prevent backsliding into superstition and barbarism if people don't believe them.
On the other hand, the history of downfall is basically self-documenting itself in real-time and people still don't believe it because people simply don't care about things that don't fit into their ideological borders or their perception of reality.
Truth doesn't exist anymore and thus anything that relies on truth.
On the contrary, there used to be "the spoils system." I'm just a sideline listener but I think that's an appropriate lens to look at this through rather than some severe negative, or dangerously harmful trend.
I think trying to bar such a system simply would make the same things covert.
> When I learned about the disruption of the Weimar Republic in highschool, a thing our teacher did was make copious use of newspaper clippings to explain he delta between ground truth and public sentiment, and how certain narratives increased in frequency, etc. He had personally spent quite some time in old archives and on microfilm readeers to create his little library. Something like this, but with much more data.
That sounds interesting. Wish it had been converted into a blogpost or something for more permanence.
They explain the laws in question (often with historical context of their creation), answer common procedural questions, separate the facts of the case from political rhetoric & misinformation, and give an objective analysis of possible outcomes. They are certainly not unbiased, but in the "we are biased against criminal behavior" way.
Readit News
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/29/usda-inspect...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Fong
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The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread
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So while I absolutely hate what is going on right now this seems to be what the people wanted. I question each day whether that needs to be respected or we should resist.
I also wonder if his supporters have any idea of what is going on. I am sure fox news isn't covering any of this and if they are it's probably being spun in some horrific way.
Unfortunately they either didn't read the fine print, or concluded that it was a price they were willing to pay. I suspect it is more the former.
As Obama said, elections have consequences.
I don't see a positive future for the US, as it is so clearly a declining empire, exhibiting every textbook symptom. The startup/tech crowd loves talking about cheap phones and "services", but the reality is bleak outside of this narrow tech bubble.
1. https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjun24/negativity6-24.html
And even if it was, to me the question isn't "did someone else want this at some point in the past, probably based on false or even no information" anyway, but how to judge it now. Sometimes people want wrong things for shitty reasons and a minority has to stand up to them standing on their principles.
He has no mandate.
49.8% of the people who voted wanted this.
50.2% wanted someone else to be president (but did not pass the threshold for someone other than Trump).
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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/hitler-ger...
Maybe Musk and Trump can beat his record.
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Reversing it four years later is just too late.
This law was passed specifically in response to Trump breaking the antecedent law, Inspector General Reform Act of 2008, during his first term.
Will the "party of law and order" do anything? Nope.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11546
Good on Ms Fong for refusing to leave.
Reporters should be pushing microphones in their faces asking why they approve of the latest thing Trump did, or at least what they think of him breaking laws they passed.
The media has many shortcomings, but how are reporters supposed to hold accountable people who simply do not care?
In all seriousness, the situation is very dire. The future does not, currently, bode well for the common man.
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I think it's an unprecedented opportunity to record the history of a downfall using modern tools, and future generations might benefit enormously.
When I learned about the disruption of the Weimar Republic in highschool, a thing our teacher did was make copious use of newspaper clippings to explain the delta between ground truth and public sentiment, and how certain narratives increased in frequency, etc. He had personally spent quite some time in old archives and on microfilm readers to create his little library. Something like this, but with much more data.
A friend of mine did her master's in political science on crawling data in Islamic extremist social media cycles and trying to correlate activity there with a dataset on terrorist events, trying to find out if you could anticipate them somehow.
This is a loose collection of thoughts, but I think there's something there in the signal.
Using your Weimar example, I would not argue that Germany or humanity is/are better off for having gone through the cataclysm of WW2. In terms of building context, you might find it helpful to read this dry but very detailed examination of the nazi administrative state, and how it delivered economic resources to its political clients through a combination of reorganization, financial engineering, and striaght-up theft:
https://archive.org/details/hitlersbeneficia00alyg
On a more abstract level, try 'The logic of political survival' by Smith & Bueno de Mesquita. both books will give you a useful framework within which to assess the contextual significance of ongoing news events.
I also think this is a good summary for those who had never heard of Weimar before: https://archive.is/xh2Ci
But like most summaries, it suffers a bit from focusing on the key events, and not capturing this sort of ... change in the ambient noise floor, and what relationship the average citizen had to what was going on, and what perception of events. I think it's the "Would you have been able to tell that it'd get this bad?" is kind of the more interesting part. A political weather forecasting model, if you will.
Well, the German atrocities of the Third Reich are well-documented and we are probably just a few years behind the U.S.
The best documentary won't help to prevent backsliding into superstition and barbarism if people don't believe them.
On the other hand, the history of downfall is basically self-documenting itself in real-time and people still don't believe it because people simply don't care about things that don't fit into their ideological borders or their perception of reality.
Truth doesn't exist anymore and thus anything that relies on truth.
I think trying to bar such a system simply would make the same things covert.
That sounds interesting. Wish it had been converted into a blogpost or something for more permanence.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Keep_Track/
Also has a Patreon
https://youtube.com/@legaleagle
They explain the laws in question (often with historical context of their creation), answer common procedural questions, separate the facts of the case from political rhetoric & misinformation, and give an objective analysis of possible outcomes. They are certainly not unbiased, but in the "we are biased against criminal behavior" way.
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(CONMEBOL being South America's soccer/football association)