Trump's firing of the U.S. government archivist is far worse than it might seem

It's very bad. The constitutional rule of law has been suspended, and the state has been captured by hostile interests. The complete abdication of responsibility of the part of Republicans in Congress has made this possible.

The judicial branch is still active and is issuing ruling after ruling that what Trump & Musk are doing is illegal, but it remains to be seen what force that has.

At some point this has to come down to the people. When does it become clear that the looting of the state needs to be stopped at all costs? The fear is Americans are overall too wealthy and comfortable, and too compromised by propaganda, to risk anything to stop it.

It may be the best we can hope for that a Democratic wave election is still possible in 2026, at which point we can begin to undo the damage and try to prevent a reoccurrence. That's an optimistic outlook.

The centrists are definitely the most scared right now. If they can't trust their institutions what remains of the ideology? Their entire worldview is crumbling right now. Actually having to rummage around for values and some instinct of what power-building even looks like beyond "vote right" is going to involve a lot of the scary soul-searching and mirror-gazing that we normally chronically avoid as it's uncomfortable and unprofitable and we could be all at BRUNCH right now letting the technocrats bomb somewhere while we sip mimosas.

Or maybe we'll just continue to ignore all the contradictions in our society and hope and plan for the best. Who knows. I'm optimistic this could snap us out of the fever dream thats caused complete political deadlock for decades. We are very addicted to a comfortable life and any actual muscle to fight back will have to grow from nothing.

I'm foreign so I don't care much about american politics. I hope HN doesn't become reddit. So I flagged.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hacker News Guidelines

  What to Submit
  On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
  
  Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

There you go...

Is there a reliable way to see all the previous topics that have been flagged? If I remember the title there's always algolia but it would be nice to have the all in one location.

It is interesting that this site uses “avoiding drama” as an excuse to enforce a very strict and ideological political position of cheerleading whoever exercises the most political juice on any given day.

It is also funny that when pressed on it dang insists that this practice of explicit unconditional endorsement of the current administration is both unavoidable and emergent, not something intentionally and methodically foisted upon the users here. The censorship is good and necessary, there are some things that folks that come to HN just should not read about or discuss.

This line of excuses falls completely apart, immediately, when you consider how trivial it would be for this site —made for and by software engineers— to simply have a subforum where this sort of “flagged” political content gets moved to rather than removed. The choice to memory hole anything that remotely stands the chance of being an interesting discussion that doesn’t cheerlead the current administration is very much intentional.

And Dang will be here to say that the system is working exactly as expected and there’s zero reason at all to change any controls. It’s perfectly good and normal to have a system where a tiny handful of people can control what others see with zero reasoning or transparency, we should just assume that everyone is acting in good faith all the time.

Personally I'm happy to have at least one news outlet that's not just Trump Bad 24/7.

Aaaaand it's gone.

If there's gonna be Trump posts on HN, they should at least have some relevance to the usual HN topics.

Was this comment thread going to be anything more interesting than "he who controls the past, recycles pithy sayings", or "We got the administration we deserved" ?

[flagged]

We're a long way past that point.

It's too late for anyone but congressional Republicans to step up and impeach him and remove him from office.

I wouldn't hold my breath. Buckle up.

This is the will of the electorate. Even many of the people here on HN (probably more thoughtful than a typical cross section of the population) believe the administration is on the right track.

The best time to stop this was back in November.

At what point? During the election.

From the outside it looks like he's operating as a late-medieval King, theatrically issuing decrees whilst his courtiers are just going around picking fights.

I don't really understand what the point of the houses are now, a fig leaf I guess? I suppose that in 5 years time he'll just pass an executive order saying there's a clear and present danger to democracy by having elections and that will be that.

Everyone with the power and legitimacy to act is already involved in whatever the administration is doing. Apart from a violent coup or a revolution (which could easily lead to a civil war), nothing can really stop this before the next elections. This is what Americans voted for in elections that were generally fair and legitimate.

And eventually, when the dust settles, it might be a good idea to rewrite the Constitution. To have more effective checks and balances and a less centralized executive branch.

It's a little naive to think this is just Trump doing it, the people around him are all on board with what's going on, they're not "just doing their jobs".

Too late. There will be devastation in ways we haven't imagined.

In the delusion of GDP and wealth, Americans have completely forgotten their own capacity of destruction. This is the same country that used humans as legal property, went through many booms/busts, caused people and businesses to fail, destroyed wild ecosystems, destroyed industrial production, destroyed housing

and lastly, were completely ok with electing a convicted despicable human as their president.

America is 100% self deserving of an implosion. And Trump + spineless Congress + Republican supreme Court is enough to cause significant damage. It is too late.

> ..dyed in the wool..

Is consistent with

> .. don’t think he could reconcile my point.

I mean why would expect someone like that to consider a counter argument?

> neutrality and transparency from his own running of X, and while it may be better than it was before

Elon routinely (soft) bans people who say things he doesn't like and you think this is better than before? And that's just the obvious stuff that's happening.