Here is an interview with Ukranian-American Journalist Andrea Chalupa who has documented the battle against Oligarchy and corruption in Ukraine where the people rose up to depose a Russian-puppet President and took their nation back from corruption and fascism.
There’s a lot we could learn from Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity which led to the deposing of Putin puppet Viktor Yanakovich.
She has a ton of ideas, suggestions and plans for how we — even at this low point with the Oligarch’s in charge of the White House, Congress and Supreme Court — can still fight back and still make a difference in this country and world.
First, we have to remember who and what the enemy is: Corporate Greed.
Feeding the corporate machine as workers and consumers is exactly what the Oligarchs want. More consumerism, more profit, less regulations, less safety and health concerns, greater negative consequences — people poisoned and killed — and again, more profit. They want the government out of their way, they don’t want to be held accountable or responsible.
All the little culture-war fights are just window dressing to keep us distracted while they raid the US Treasury. They’ve paid $billions through SuperPacs and lobbyists to get into exactly the position they are in now. We can't let them get away with it.
Her first argument is — surprisingly — election security. As much as Trump and the GOP were hopping mad about this issue after 2020, we should now point out that yes, there are problems in our elections.
For starters, the Voting Rights Act has been kneecapped for the last decade. We need to restore this signature legislation from the Martin Luther King Jr. era to full strength. We need to talk to Republicans and point out that the John Louis Voting Rights Act should be passed. If you want to feel secure in your elections, if you truly want to have election integrity, we should start there.
We need to do election audits and recounts because even in this year — there still was hacking by foreign nations, including from Russia.
The Justice Department and Microsoft on Thursday announced the seizure of more than 100 web domains that a Russian intelligence agency allegedly used to try to hack current and former US officials, civil-society groups and Russians living in the US.
The sweeping hacking campaign sought to gather intelligence on US and allied efforts to support Ukraine, and to infiltrate and undermine pro-democracy and human rights organizations in the US, United Kingdom and Eastern Europe, according to US officials and private experts.
It’s the latest in a series of moves from the Justice Department to expose alleged covert Russian operations targeting US democracy in the runup to the 2024 presidential election. In this case, the hackers did not directly target political campaigns or election infrastructure; rather they aimed to degrade the civil-society groups that support functioning democracies, according to Microsoft.
From January 2023 to August 2024, the hackers targeted 30 organizations such as media outlets, think tanks and non-government organizations, stealing their sensitive internal data and trying to undermine their activities, according to Steven Masada, an assistant general counsel at Microsoft.
If it weren’t for years of Voter Suppression laws, illegal racial gerrymandering and Citizens United this election wouldn't have been close. We weren't wrong to complain about all these problems, and we need to double our efforts now.
Quoting Andrea from the video.
What Fascists want is for us to collapse into a heap of despair and frustration. They want us off the playing field. Once the horror show of Inaugural Oligarch Balls is over, they're going to try and Shock-and-Awe us. They want to show brute force.
Donald Trump doesn’t have any ideology. He’s not a Reagan Republican, he’s not a Bush Republican. His one consistent theme has been brute force, just showing strength. So in the early weeks, months of his administration they’re going to try to terrorize us into submission.
They will be leaning on this immigration dystopian plan of rounding up people. That’s probably how they’re going to start. And they’re pretty amped about that, that’s what drove out their base. That’s what Nazis do.
We have to refuse to accept that. We have to refuse to normalize that. We can not lull ourselves into the lie that they’re just going to round up “criminals” that shouldn't be here. We can not make false justifications in our minds to say” That’s ok” when it’s not.
Whatever lawfare they unleash, there is international law when it comes to human rights and that is what they must abide by. And it is what we must internally abide by in those critical first weeks and months.
Why? Because they’re going to be testing us to see how much we let them get away with. So, we need to react. We need to raise our voices, We need to raise hell.
Yes, we need to march.
I know people are feeling so demoralized to want to march. But understand, the marching we did in 2016 and all those years when Trump was in power, the phone calls we made, the postcards we sent, all the work we did during his first term — that created a sea change in American political life which historians are going to be writing about for generations.
We changed this country.
And, we can change it again.
It’s time to get off the mat, pick ourselves up off the floor and get back into the fight. We haven’t lost the war, we’ve just moved into a new phase of the battle.
On the one hand, I have a feeling that the MAGA crowd is not going to turn away from their madness until their own Leopard comes to eat their faces. They need to learn the lesson of their own idiocy on things like tariffs and mass deportation which will likely tank the economy and spur massive inflation. They have to learn that lesson. They have to come to realize that MAGA is built on top of a pack of lies and delusions. We probably shouldn’t stand in the way of that. We should let it happen.
But that doesn’t mean we should sit back and let MAGA’s destroy everything in this country to teach them a basic civics and economic lesson they should have already figured out.
The best-case scenario is that many of the MAGAs will realize how badly they’ve fucked themselves economically and come to their senses in time for the 2026 midterms - when we can put the brakes on everything.
But unless or until that happens we are gonna have to spend the next two years standing the fuck up and fighting back.
Next, we need to target Congress. We need to get on the phone to our representatives and start writing letters to them. The first issue will be tax cuts. Trump’s original cuts are going to expire in 2025 which means to extend or expand them Congress will have to pass a new tax cut bill.
This Bill Has. To. Be. Blocked.
We have to shut it down in the House if possible and definitely filibuster it in the Senate. It can’t be allowed to pass. Most of our current deficit is caused by Trump’s tax cuts, I strongly feel that the deficit would immediately begin to fall — and eventually come into balance and surplus as it did in 1998 — if those cuts are simply allowed to expire and die.
Secondly, there’s Ramaswamy and Musk’s ridiculous DOGE project. We know they’re coming for the Department of Education (Which provides funding for programs for Special Needs children), the Department of Energy (Which takes care of our country's Nukes), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (because why would these Oligarchs want to protect consumers?), the EPA (because oligarchs love to pollute) NOAA (yeah, I don't know why) as well as Medicare, Social Security and Obamacare (Affordable Care Act). We can't let this shit happen.
Technically, they’re going just be a pair of Unelected Billionaire Bureaucrats trying to fire and displace other unelected subject matter expert bureaucrats — only they won’t actually have any official position or governmental power. All they can do is make recommendations to Congress who actually hold the purse strings. Again, we need to push as many members of Congress as possible, particularly in the Senate, to hold the line and block as much of the DOGE bullshit as possible. If they suggest shutting down a department or a statute, they’re going to need to explain how they intend to replace or mitigate what will be lost without having the department around. Gaining efficiency is fine, but removing functionality is not.
As much as possible we need to protect the gains that Biden was able to implement such as the CHIPS Act, the Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act and it's green energy projects. As Biden heads out the door I'm sure he's trying to get the money spent on various specific projects so they can't be blocked or canceled. But that doesn't mean that Trump won't TRY to block or cancel the projects that are planned or already in progress. There’s a lot of damage, and jobs, he could destroy.
There isn't that much we can do to protect the people on Trump and Kash Patel's Deep State “enemies list" who they intend to sue and prosecute for so-called "Treason." Jim Jordan is trying to investigate Fani Willis and Jack Smith to see if they “colluded” or something. But even if they did - that's not a crime. Prosecutors do tend to work with each other, especially if they have similar or overlapping cases. The one protection that people like John Brennan, James Comey, Barack Obama, Anthony Fauci, Liz Cheney, Olivia Troye, Adam Schiff, Hillary Clinton, Cassidy Hutchinson and Hunter Biden have is the fact that their completely innocent of the stupid delusional bullshit the MAGAs are accusing them of.
QAnon conspiracies don’t work in court. Just like their election conspiracies, these cases are likely to be laughed out of court and the lawyers behind them will likely get sanctioned for their frivolous obnoxious crap. Watching this nonsense go down in flames might be kinda fun — like if Patel actually does try to sue Olivia Troye for Defamation the fact that he really is a “delusional liar" might just come out in an evidentiary hearing, all you have to do is listen to him — but it won't be much fun to pay lawyers for depositions or to pay security personnel to protect all these people from death threats and potential physical assaults and attacks inspired by hopped-up MAGA morons that they’ll put into the DOJ.
We also may not be able to stop Tariffs as that is a Presidential function that doesn’t require Congress. We also may have problems blocking Trump's mass deportation plans except for blocking it’s funding the same way we blocked funding for his border wall. As he did then, he’ll probably raid the defense budget for the funds, or simply have much of the physical work done by MAGA Sheriffs, the National Guard and the Active Duty troops (who are not fighting anyone else overseas right now) take care of the main labor-intensive functions such as rounding people up and staffing the detention camps.
Legally, unless the person has a criminal record it takes the determination of an immigration judge to finalize deportation proceedings so people will have to be held in these camps until they get their hearings. They might try to increase the number of judges, but Trump already shot down that bill and we need to make sure Congress remembers that fact. This will be family separation yet again as undocumented parents will be yanked away from their American-born children. In some cases, Tom Homan has suggested that the US born kids would be deported too, [who cares about the14th Amendment anyway?] just to keep their family together. What a humanitarian, eh?
Again, we should highlight this - this means they would be deporting U.S. Citizens!! And whose to say that they’ll be able to do even do that right? Many citizens could easily mistaken and caught up in these crazy Nazi-styled round ups.
Reportedly, Stephen Miller is going to try to denaturalize US citizens who may have made mistakes on their naturalization forms. So besides US Citizen children, they also going to try and throw formerly naturalized citizens out of the country as well. Charming. While all these people are piling up -- they'll all be held in detention just like the Internment camps that Japanese Citizens were held in during WWII. That’ll make a great sight.
Yes, all you Latinos who voted for Trump - your leopards will have arrived.
We’ll have to work double-time to bring focus to the cruelty, inhumanity and near War Crime that this situation will be. We’ll have to push for International condemnation and highlight how this program violates the UN Convention on the Refugee which the U.S. ratified in 1960.
The core principle of the 1951 Convention is non-refoulement, which asserts that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.
The document outlines the basic minimum standards for the treatment of refugees, including the right to housing, work and education while displaced so they can lead a dignified and independent life. It also defines a refugee’s obligations to host countries and specifies certain categories of people, such as war criminals, who do not qualify for refugee status.
In addition, it details the legal obligations of the States that are party to one or both of these instruments.
Deporting people to countries where their lives are in immediate jeopardy is a direct violation of this Convention, which means it's a violation of International and U.S. Law. I’m sure the MAGAs don't know this or care, but the International community knows and they do care. Lawsuits over the conventions will need to be filed.
Of course, there will be horrible visuals of this. People being yanked out of their homes pulled off the streets, and thrown into these camps -- which will certainly be Hellholes.
And of course, all the people thrown into this position certainly won't be students and visitors from Europe who overstayed their visas.
The report released Wednesday by the Center for Migration Studies of New York finds that from 2016-2017, people who overstayed their visas accounted for 62 percent of the newly undocumented, while 38 percent had crossed a border illegally.
"It is clear from our research that persons who overstay their visas add to the US undocumented population at a higher rate than border crossers. This is not a blip, but a trend which has become the norm," said Donald Kerwin, CMS' executive director, in a statement. "As these numbers indicate, construction of hundreds of more miles of border wall would not address the challenge of irregular migration into our country, far from it."
Yeah, so they’re not going to address the biggest part of the undocumented problem - at all. They're going to go after those people who are from countries they hate. And those people who are poor and vulnerable. No shocker there. It's going to be terrible, and we need to help show everyone just how terrible and racist it is.
We can’t let people turn away. We can't let them sweep this under the rug. We have to make the faces of the children left behind, and those also deported with their parents known and seen.
All the negative consequences of this administration have to be exposed. They have to be highlighted. All the grift, all the graft, all the money-grubbing and corruption has to be brought into the light.
We know that they're going to try and distract us. We know that they're going to try a flash a shiny light and tell us to "Look Away! Pay no attention to Human Rights disaster taking place right in front f you."
Well, we're going to see it. We're going to witness it. And we're to make sure no one ever forgets any of it.
Because, that's the primary way to ensure that fascist shit like this Never. Ever, Happens. Again.
