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The Shutdown Isn’t a Stalemate — It’s a Power Grab. And the Media Are Missing It.
(www.mediaite.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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It's all fucking bonkers. They are talking about loyalty pledges for universities, they are doing little pogrom dry runs on Chicago apartment blocks, they are building the concentration camps. And people are still out here wrangling about health care and tax benefits. I mean, it's not wrong, we should care about those things, but the whole framing of what is happening in the media, and treating this shutdown as all of a sudden as a big crisis overshadowing the other stuff, is just nuts.
This article to me got to the heart of it. Framing it as primarily a fight about health care plays into the Republicans getting away with more of the Hitler stuff, however it plays out.
People here are still saying "both sides are the same" as of yesterday, too.
I can tell it's a Democrat strategy consultant making that framing decision and it's just so... stupid. Yes, we're ok with a shutdown, just as we were in March when Schumer et al decided to cave in out of fear for this exact situation, and now they're getting a lose lose scenario because they can't just say "governments on hold until the fascist stop fascisting" to at least use this shutdown to galvanize the left.
We're so cooked, ugh.
I'm not sure it is even the strategy consultants who are framing it that way. I feel like the Chuck Schumer / consultant framing is "we hate doing this shutdown because it makes us look bad." Then there is the Bernie / AOC framing of "it's really critical that we don't kill 50,000 Americans a year by taking their health insurance away that is what we're refusing to compromise on." That's better, the consultants would have been fine with caving and killing 50,000 Americans a year, they've done it before. Even better than that would be "Well we should be shutting down the government, because what the government is doing is attacking American citizens and in some cases killing them directly and building camps to house them by the thousands. And the Supreme Court just said Trump is king and doesn't even have to honor any 'deal' that Congress works out about health care or anything else, so fuck it, government's closed." That framing is more where I'm at.
Most fucked part to me is it doesn't even stop them; ICE is considered essential and therefore it gets to keep operating during a shutdown.
Do they get paid? The military doesn't. ICE still getting paid would be a little surprising but not really.
Good question. This is a case of me reading a headline to a paywall so I don't know.
Double checking, seems like they don't but they do get back pay when it comes back just like everyone else. Would not be surprised if they're more full of people willing to work for free than other sectors, though, as racist hate is a strong motivator.
A strong motivator it may be, but it doesn’t pay the bills. I have a feeling a lot of the new recruits aren’t the most financially savvy bunch and won’t be able to sustain missing multiple paychecks. If the Democrats stick to their guns for a while we’ll probably see a lot of ICE agents going broke and quitting.
That honestly is huge to me. Why the fuck the Democrats are not saying that ICE is snatching random people off the streets of this country and they are planning on making sure they don't get paid another paycheck until they stop doing that, and that's the hill they want to die on, I have not a fucking clue in the world.
My guess is still internal polling suggests this is the most popular message with centrists and independent voters, or something to that effect. But I agree with you, it's nuts that they still don't get that messaging fails overall.
The recent polls on immigration suggest otherwise, Americans overall don’t like this.
And it seems very unlikely that any of the ones who do like what’s happening, are potential Democrat votes.
I feel like it is complacency poison, and habituation of what the important issues and messages are. It's like, it can't be that bad. They can't just be killing people. And they can't be planning what they are clearly planning.
ICE largely consists of bounty hunters. It is about $1,500 a head. Assuming you got rich asswipes like Elon funding the bounties, the ICE can keep doing their thing.
?
What?
No it isn't. Where did you get this idea?
It has been mentioned in various spots on Blue Sky and so forth. Remember, ICE doesn't have formalized uniforms nor training, nor do they offer ID, and their vehicles often lack registries. The odds of them being genuine officers of any kind is low.
Oh, well in THAT case lmao
What makes you believe that they aren't employing bounties? The Trump Regime hasn't demonstrated anything resembling ethics - for example, Elon has at least twice tried to buy votes for elections. It is only yesterday that the Hatch Act was violated, when assorted federal websites blamed Democrats for the government shutdown. Or those 500 children who almost got sent to Guatemala?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
I am not saying it is technically impossible, I am just saying it would be weird for such a fundamental fact as over 50% of ICE agents' income coming from personal payouts for bounties to just not be reported on anywhere. And of course "it has been mentioned in various spots on Blue Sky" is more or less the same as "my cousin told me."
(Actually, it is worse, because you know your cousin is a real person whereas on Bluesky there is no such guarantee. But, regardless, it basically means nothing at all in terms of whether or not that assertion is true. "Weird" is an understatement for how improbable this is to actually be true.)
lemmy.world comments section in action, I guess. Literally every time someone comes at me with some kind of bonkers take, I look up, and I see that I am in a lemmy.world community.
Oligarch-controlled opposition, doing what they've been paid by the oligarchs to do, and told by the oligarchs lobbyists to do, to benefit the oligarchs authoritarian takeover.
Every time I come to lemmy.world, I always regret it lol
If this were the explanation, they would surely be aware that they are talking themselves into potentially a concentration camp, or potentially "only" losing their job and career forever and becoming a bunch of Leon Trotskies. Your theory has a certain emotionally satisfying nihilism to it, but it doesn't actually make sense for understanding the nature of the failures in our government (and ideally being able to react to them constructively in some fashion, in the future.)
Why would you ever think there would be anything emotionally satisfying about any of this?
And people still think the files will end it lmao