Look, I won't want to give people the impression that, by themselves, boycotts are going to end fascism. By that same measure if the rich nazis paying for all this fascism do have a soft underbelly, it's definitely their ties to the capitalism system and their need to keep accumulating profit. It's not going to be the knockout blow, but cutting the flow of capital to corporations and businesses that support the Trump regime's fascist agenda does hurt and hinder these nazis; which is easily demonstrated by observing the panicked reactions of both Elon Musk and the Trump administration to the ongoing Tesla protests and boycott actions. Furthermore, while many Americans have not yet realized the only way out of this is to "shut it down" so hard it's impossible to do fascism for profit anyway, data shows that an increasingly large number of people (particularly younger and nonwhite people) who don't like fascism, broadly support boycotting companies that collaborate or comply with Trump's fascist agenda.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/22/boycott-companies-tesla-trump-musk

Exclusive: 20% of Americans support boycott of firms aligning themselves with Trump agenda

"One in five Americans plan to turn their backs for good on companies that have shifted their policies to align with Donald Trump’s agenda, according to a new poll for the Guardian.

As high-profile brands including Amazon, Target and Tesla grapple with economic boycotts, research by the Harris Poll indicated the backlash could have a lasting impact.

“Companies and consumers are playing a high-stakes game of chicken – corporations betting on convenience winning out over conviction, while consumers wield their spending power like a weapon,” said Libby Rodney, chief strategy officer at the Harris Poll.

“The data suggests this is a miscalculation,” she said. “When 20% of Americans are permanently changing their consumption habits and nearly a third of boycotters say they’ll hold out indefinitely, convenience may no longer be the decisive factor companies think it is.”

When asked about the boycotts that have been making headlines over the last few weeks, 36% of Americans said they are or will be participating."

Again, I don't want to get too carried away because history tells me that when you actually do make these rich nazis suffer consequences for their actions, they're going to try and make you keep paying them by force; at which point all hell will break lose, just like it did during the formative years of the American labor struggle. Right now however, nobody is really doing enough to make it cost more to be a nazi than corporate CEOs and investors gain from supporting the new nazism, and that's a situation that isn't good for any of us who don't want fascism. Boycotts are obviously only a start in the fight back against fascism; but a start, is definitely better than doing nothing.

#Fascism #Trump #TeslaProtests #Boycott #ElonMusk #Tesla #Amazon #ResistEverywhere

I'm not gonna waste a lot of energy making an "if it bleeds, we can kill it" footnote on a bad pain day, but pursuant to the above post about boycotts, Elon Musk is upset enough about the movement to take down Tesla that he's still crying about it while trying to buy a state Supreme Court election in Wisconsin.

https://archive.ph/hp771

Elon Musk Says He Has No Clue Why People Hate His Guts

“In fact, it’s costing me a lot to be in this job,” Musk said. “You had Tim Walz dancing onstage showing a chart on Tesla stock, which is a really awful thing for him to do.”

On his tour of Republican districts, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz had trotted out Tesla’s tanking stock, saying that watching Musk’s value plummet gave him “a little boost” during the day.

Musk seems to have taken Walz’s jab as fighting words, and claimed that people were trying to put “massive pressure” on him and Tesla, in an attempt to get him to stop DOGE. The billionaire bureaucrat added that it was a “big deal” that his Tesla stock “went roughly in half.”

“So, not only is it—I’m not getting paid, I’m definitely not stealing money and would never get away with it, but the value of my Tesla stock is in half! So this is a very expensive job, is what I’m saying,” Musk said.

Musk had previously whined about Walz’s Tesla teasing Thursday night, during an exclusive interview on Fox News, calling the vice presidential former candidate “a big jerk.”

“He was overjoyed,” Musk said. “What an evil thing to do. What a creep, what a jerk. Who derives joy from that?”

The answer to Elon's question of course is that millions of people watching these fascist chucklefucks strip away their rights, loot the public coffers, and try to starve their grandparents with impunity, quite rationally seem to be deriving a lot of joy from seeing Musk finally suffer *some* consequences for his blatantly corrupt and authoritarian actions.

Again folks, I don't want to go too overboard here; boycotts and targeted protests hurt the fascist regime, but it's not going to make Trump surrender. By that same measure however, Musk wouldn't be crying about what a small innocent bean he is and why people are so cruel to him when he only wanted to transform America into Apartheid South Africa and a subsidiary of his companies, if this wasn't hurting him; after all, this is the same guy who spent his first two months as co-president sneering at you and waving around a chainsaw - something changed Musk's tone, and based on his squealing, that something is clearly the Tesla protests and boycott. I'm less interested in what Tim Walz has to say about it, but if Democrat politicians want to encourage people to boycott companies facilitating Trump's fascist regime, that would at least be making themselves useful for a change. The important point here is "if it bleeds, we can kill it" and Tesla is bleeding hard enough to make Musk moan in public about it for weeks now.

Just remember, if you can do it to the world's richest man and a company like Tesla, you can do it to any of these rich nazis and the corporations they control.

#Fascism #Trump #Musk #Resist #Boycott #Tesla #TeslaProtests

So, I'm mostly sharing this because reporting has been very spotty and if I didn't know better, I'd suggest a media class more afraid of people power than fascists are not particularly interested in sharing the news that millions (with an m) of Americans were out protesting the Trump Regime yesterday.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/hands-off-protests-april-5

Millions March Against Trump-Musk in Nationwide 'Hands Off' Protests

"Indivisible, one of the key organizing groups behind the day's protests, said millions participated in more than 1,300 individual rallies as they demanded "an end to Trump's authoritarian power grab" and condemning all those aiding and abetting it.

"We expected hundreds of thousands. But at virtually every single event, the crowds eclipsed our estimates," the group said in a statement Saturday evening.

"This is the largest day of protest since Trump retook office," the group added. "And in many small towns and cities, activists are reporting the biggest protests their communities have ever seen as everyday people send a clear, unmistakable message to Trump and Musk: Hands off our healthcare, hands off our civil rights, hands off our schools, our freedoms, and our democracy."

Look, are millions of people politely marching with witty protest signs going to topple the fascist Trump regime? No, probably not. Is it a problem that a lot of the people who marched yesterday are still wedded to capitalism and a free market fundamentalist worldview that's precisely how we ended up in a place where we're staring down a fascist dictatorship in progress? Yes, it probably is. Some of these people definitely aren't good at protesting, and don't have particularly good politics; some of them are even diehard Democratic Party partisans who intend to direct all this energy into elections in 2026 and 2028 that I've already said I don't think we have time to wait for, and I don't think are guaranteed to be real, unrigged elections anyway. It's not all gumdrops and lollipops; we're a very long way away from "shutting it down" or "becoming ungovernable" and I think realistically we're not going to see the end of fascism, let alone the capitalist order that's boiling our children like soup so rich nazis can keep extracting profit from our shared planet, until we see a lot more "be ungovernable" and "shut it down."

By that same measure however, putting millions of people in the streets to oppose the fascist regime and the billionaire white Afrikaner nazi who bought it, is certainly better than not doing that. Clearly some portions of the (upper class) media are spooked enough to minimize what happened here, and you know the regime is scared because their propagandists are already out here saying the (again, millions) of protestors were a paid psy-op and also working for Hamas, somehow. There is exploitable and extendable political capital here, and it would in my opinion be a bad idea for antifascists and anticapitalists to help the machine tamp down enthusiasm for taking the streets back from nazis. If this is just one day of protest, with the very narrow objectives of protecting social security and ending Musk's DOGE project to install what some call a "technofeudalist" order, then it's just a collection of nice memories. If however this is a beginning of something larger, just as the initial George Floyd protests against police violence were the beginning of something larger back in 2020, then there's a lot of work to be done here and an opportunity to help people getting ground up by the fuck barrel find solutions that actually work; both to remove the fascist regime, and change the fuck barrel world that birthed it. I can't predict the future of course, but I'd prefer to have the opportunity to see where this goes, than to sit quietly in my house waiting for the nazis to come and kill us one by one.

"It can't rain all the time, Eric...'

#Fascism #Trump #HandsOff #Protest #Antifascism #ElonMusk #GlobalProtests

I mean it wouldn't be an anti-Musk/Trump protests without fascist propagandists claiming *checks notes* millions of protestors were a paid psy-op (and also, Hamas, apparently.)

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/elon-musk-says-saturdays-protesters-were-paid-puppets-thats-not-what-i-saw/

Elon Musk Says Saturday’s Protesters Were Paid “Puppets.” That’s Not What I Saw.

"Musk chimed in on the same video: “The problem is the puppetmasters, not the puppets, as the latter have no idea why they are even there,” he wrote. “He had to read the paper he was given to understand the sign he was holding,” Musk wrote over a video of a protester explaining what his sign—which said “End the kakistocracy”—meant. Musk also shared several posts from the Wall Street Apes account on X, which has more than 929,000 followers, and right-wing influencer Mario Nawfal, who has more than two million followers, alleging—without evidence—that the protesters were paid.

Conspiracy theorist and journalist cosplayer Laura Loomer also alleged that “the radical left is BUSSING IN PROTESTERS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY TO CAUSE CHAOS IN WASHINGTON DC” who she claimed were “pro-Hamas,”an apparent reference to the fact that some were holding Palestinian flags and wearing keffiyehs."

Folks, I don't know who needs to hear that it is feasibly impossible for a "puppet master" (man, he even talks like Goebbels) to pay MILLIONS of protestors, but it is. Please keep in mind that when it comes to Musk, who is literally a fucking nazi, this is the same guy who was accusing George Soros of paying hecklers at his Wisconsin Volkish Revival rally while he was dishing out million dollar checks to voters for "signing a petition" in an effort to buy a judicial election. As for Loomer, I'm pretty sure she also thinks her Uber driver and any particularly "swarthy" person she encounters in public spaces is also "Hamas" if her past social media transgressions are any indication.

The bigger picture here is pretty simple; for whatever the Hands Off protests did, didn't, will, or won't accomplish, if these nazi maggots are scared enough to lie about it with poorly-coordinated conspiracy theories to try and explain it away for the cult of Trump, that means *they* certainly noticed millions of people giving up their Saturday to tell Trump and Musk to get in the fucking sea.

#Fascism #Trump #ElonMusk #HandsOff #Nazis #Antisemitism #ConspiracyTheories #LauraLoomer #Propaganda #Cult

Well folks, if we weren't through the looking glass into a full on fascist takeover before now, we are as of this afternoon after Trump more or less said there is no law but his word and he intends to send you, even you "natural born" Americans, to a slave labor prison in El Salvador if you don't like it. What we do, collectively, from here, is going to decide what kind of future there is for this society; if there's any future at all. All this time antifascists, and historians of fascism have been telling you that this moment was coming, but I understand that this is a horrifying shock and moment of despair for folks who didn't, or didn't want to, believe it.

If you're confused, alienated, and scared right now, I want you to take ten minutes and read this article by Vicky Osterweil, because everything in here is correct and it'll make you feel better. The truth is that Trump and his regime are not operating from the position of strength they would have you believe they are. That absolute muppet has given away his endgame, to the point that it can't be denied anymore, long before the regime is in position to crush all dissent. There is a window now, that will not last forever, to strangle this dictatorship in its crib. It won't be easy, and it won't be safe, but there is still far too much opposition to fascism for these nazis to crush us all - if we act now, in unison, and with purpose.

https://www.cawshinythings.com/on-rubicons-crossed/

On Rubicons Crossed

"Trump did not show up with an army today. His forces are no better organized or more ready to carry out his plans than they were on Friday. In stating his absolute unwillingness to follow the law, Trump is forcing the confrontation with the judiciary. But it does not make the regime any more (or less) logistically capable of mass arrests and crackdowns on the population.

This is the prelude to the fight, not the fight itself. And while hindsight, metaphor and mythology make it seem inevitable, Caesar's victory in the Civil War was far from assured the moment his legion placed sandaled foot on Roman soil. He gambled, correctly as it turns out, on his prowess as a military commander, his popularity with the troops and the citizens of Rome, and the political divisions within the Senate camp.

When South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol made a similar gamble in December of last year, his attempt lasted less than 24 hours. Members of parliament jumped over fences and physically fought police officers, driving Yoon right back over the river: the sorry attempt ended with him disgraced, impeached and thrown from power within a few months."

Just because Trump says its a dictatorship now, doesn't make it true; especially if the populace at large will not comply. There's a limit to how much any of us can put into writing, particularly in a fascist police state, but the examples of what fighting back, refusing to obey, and shutting it down looks like are all around you in the world and its recent history. We need to put enough bodies in the streets that fascism cannot be conducted, profit cannot be made, and it's impossible to shoot us all - and the clock is ticking. But if we can do that, the American people can absolutely take advantage of the fact that Trump has showed his cards too soon. It's just a question of whether you, and your neighbors, are willing to risk something to end this nightmare, or we'd all rather hide in our dwellings and hope the nazis take someone else the next time, and the next time, and the next time, until our luck runs out.

Choose wisely.