@hopfgeist @seachanger I also really hope the German electorate take the hint.

I am an outsider still stunned at how fast things are moving in a very wrong directionThey've been building up to this for a long time through both legal, grey, and illegal methods: blocking judge nominations & pushing nominations through to capture the supreme court, large scale buyouts of media to control information flow, bribes in the form of sweet sweet contracts to companies to structure things just so, etc. So it's moving fast because they've got all the dominoes setup, so to speak, and with the transfer of power they've started kicking them. We're seeing that process play out now. They learned a lot about what things in the federal government were law and what were simply "gentlemen's agreements" the last time and they're putting it to use more heavily now. Especially now that they're at least partially, if not fully, insulted against consequences by the supreme court. This does not mean that the courts can't be used to slow it down or stop it, though, even though no one may ever be punished for it.

And it is definitely illegal. It is unclear, to me at least, who is "responsible" (in terms of the constitution) for blocking this and whether that would lie in the hands of a captured supreme court or a captured senate and what actions would normally be available to instantly block this shit.But that's just me, maybe I don't understand how the system works.It's not clear to me either, in terms of what maneuvers are available to legislators and federal employees. But the idea that there's nothing that can be done, legally, is probably false. The president does not have the authority to make laws, and there are many laws that block what he's doing here. I think that getting people to accept that "this is legal" is actively very harmful, hence my argument about the legality of the moves and pushing back on the "congress can do nothing" because ​:doubt:​.Because if people who are not "accountable public officials" are doing stuff in public offices, they have no business being there, let alone revoking access to IT systems, sending people on leave or dismantling infrastructure.They definitely should not be. I am starting to hear rumblings from congress people about this that might result in some news tomorrow, which, good, they should do something, even if it's literally just sand in the gears. People not involved with the federal government should also be doing things about this illegal power grab and distribution of classified material buuut I'll leave that part blank...