Trump doesn't have a sense of humor. He doesn't joke. He knows what he says is absolutely illegal. He's not good with money. He's not good at negotiating. He's not a business man. He has no skills that are valuable to any other person. But he is extremely good at getting away with fraud. One of the skills required to get away with lots of fraud is knowing that you can trust your accomplices. How do you do that? You can't just ask someone, "hey, wanna do some crimes with me?" They could be against those crimes. They could get your arrested. Even talking about some crimes is a crime itself. You also can't just ask someone straight out, "how do you feel about, say, tax fraud? You know, hypothetically... for a friend." You have to understand where they're at. You have to explore their boundaries and beliefs in a way that's actually plausibly deniable. Pretending to joke is invaluable to people like Trump. He follows mob rules when getting things done. Joke, test the waters, then imply directions but never explicitly give them. It should always be possible to pull back and claim you didn't say a thing or mean it "in that way." Ambiguity and plausible deniability are critical. This criminal skill translates perfectly to politics. The far right has used this tactic for years to pry open the Overton Window. Legacy media has been complicit in the right wing tactic by perennially platforming fascists. Trump starts by making a "joke." He'll keep making the "joke" until enough people around him think he can get away with it, then it stops being a joke and starts being a policy. Once you've become normalized to the "joke," the Overton window has opened enough to talk about the reality. When he "jokes" about deporting American citizens, he means he's planning to use ICE to kidnap protesters like he did in Portland at the end of his last term. But he will send them to a death camp in El Salvador instead of just intimidating them. He is telegraphing his next move. Get ready for it. #USPol

"Move fast and break things" is "haste makes waste" restated as an objective.

Just a worthwhile reminder for #TeslaTakedown folks: #Tesla was never a real car company under #Musk. It was always an unprofitable grift propped up by massive government subsidies. The bubble was always going to pop at some point. It's always been vulnerable. There will never be robot taxis, or robots, or any of the other bullshit he's always promised to pump up the hype. That was always a lie. The work you're doing is great and important, and you will win. Elon will find more ways to dump money into Tesla to prop up the stock, but, in the end, it will collapse. Tesla should have died a long time ago. You are attacking the only thing Tesla has: image. Keep going, you will win.

Some years back a friend of mine related a conversation about the game Prison Architect. Basically someone had figured out a way to maximize profits by creating an area with bad wiring so that prisoners would end up being elected. My friend pointed out, "uh, dude, you just built a death camp." It's actually surprisingly realistic that the most profitable prison would be a death camp. In fact, Monowitz was a concentration camp (an extension of Auschwitz) run by the conglomerate IG Farben. It was one of the most brutal Nazi camps that regularly worked people to death. It was also very profitable. After the end of the civil war, US slavery transitioned from chattel to prison slavery. The convict leasing system was similar to the arrangement between IG Farben and the Nazi government in that prisoners were leased for labor with no concern for safety. American prisoners were used for dangerous labor like coal mining. It's no coincidence that these slaves were explicitly used to break strikes by free miners. It won't surprise anyone that almost all of these slave prisoners were black, but not *all.* That was part of why it became less popular. Convict leasing *mostly* stopped after a white guy was whipped to death while being leased. But it never really went away and the private prison industry, who funded Trump and Republicans are heavily invested in, has been bringing back prison slavery bit by bit. It would be really profitable if they could have a really large supply of labor that they could make money off of and then dispose of, before they had to spend money on things like basic healthcare. It turns out that keeping people alive really eats into those profits, you can make way more money if you just work people to death. Turns out, that the most profitable prison is a death camp. Monowitz wasn't run by Nazis trying to kill as many "undesirables" as possible. It was run by business people trying to maximize profit. It doesn't take an evil or hateful ideology to drive people to commit atrocities. It just takes perverse incentives. Take some time to think about the fact that there is a tremendous financial incentive to build death camps in the US, that the people who would regulate them are all invested in the industry, and then take another look at what's happening in the US right now. What's going to happen next? Take some time to process this and think about this question. It's worth thinking through carefully. #USPol