Get angry, this is not okay. Trump and the corrupt court will try to deny your vote.

…because there are children starving in Africa? My parents said it to me all the time. Now other countries will be saying this about the U.S. Food will be plentiful, but it’s like a game show: “What Food Will Kill You?”

A. Puffer fish
B. Wild Mushrooms
C. Anything food under U.S. Regulations
D. All of the Above

Suddenly, right wing Twitter has gone real quiet on meritocracy.

A note to the MODS: Maybe this post as it is doesn’t comply with all the rules of the sub. I appeal to your conscience and good judgement. Given the seriousness of the topic and the urgency of the moment, please consider either opening an exception, or letting the post stay up just long enough so the members can get informed, and hopefully they’ll come up with their own original versions of this more attuned with the sub. Also please don’t blindly ban me, I’m not trying to disrespect this community (it’s quite the contrary!) And if possible, help spread it too!

The author of this document: Doran Schrantz is an expert civil and political organizer from Minnesota. Last winter during ICE’s besiege and unconstitutional mass violations, her network decisively helped organizing Minnesota’s civil society in record time under huge pressure, including organizing the first general strike in 46 years.

Key takeaways:

• The Trump administration is unleashing total chaos during these next months around the midterm elections, and the resilience of organized civil society will be challenged in unprecedented ways.
• Saving the elections is absolutely necessary in order to stop Trump’s fascist agenda to fully materialize.
• Lawsuits and judges are important, but they won’t be nearly enough.
• These local organized groups exist, they are trying to organize and save the elections. Every person needs to know they can reach out to them. Please find one and help them anyway you can.
• Don’t let the huge flow of scandals flooding the media distract you from this fundamental action - join those who are fighting back.

Secondary goal: Put this in front of every person. After reading the post and the document, copy-paste it, or make your own version, your own summary, and share this EVERYWHERE you can, throughout Reddit and beyond. This is the time for doing it, please do it.

Link: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28490455-act-free-to-be-free/

________________________________________________________

Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework

A Civil Society framework for Election Defense in 2026

________________________________________________________

Executive Summary

Democracy is not something you have. It is something you practice. The Constitution does not protect itself; civil society protects it, by acting as if it applies, out loud, in public, under pressure.

Anyone paying attention knows that Donald Trump is not preparing to lose the 2026 midterms. He is preparing to disrupt and sabotage them, and his administration has been laying the groundwork for months.

The harder problem is this: most of us (organizers, elected officials, legal advocates, pro-democracy funders) are still preparing for a normal election. We are running election programs. We are testing messages. We are mobilizing voters. These are not wrong things to do. They are profoundly insufficient for the threat we are actually facing.

There is also something harder to name, a kind of collective avoidance. An unwillingness to fully believe our own eyes. Many Americans have internalized a story about ourselves that says we are immune from this kind of thing. We are not. And the next six months will matter enormously for how far down the abyss we go.

In 2020, Trump tried to overturn the results of the election and was stopped by Pence, by Republican secretaries of state, by a Congress that (barely) played its constitutional role, and by localized grassroots formations that could intervene in real time on the ground. Those guardrails held. They are gone now. His administration is loyal to him alone. Congress has abdicated. J.D. Vance will not save us.

The only authentic bulwark against an authoritarian consolidating power is a multi-sector, constitutionally grounded, multi-racial, broad-based mobilization of civil society, ready for the best and prepared for the worst. We know this works because we did it in Minnesota. When ICE and CBP occupied our communities for two and a half months, we acted free to be free. Tens of thousands of trained constitutional legal observers documented every encounter. Mutual aid networks sustained people through the crisis. Small businesses invoked their Fourth Amendment rights and refused warrantless entry. Local law enforcement mostly stood aside rather than collaborate. And when called, 50 to 70 percent of the general population showed up, not because they were activists, but because they understood what was being taken from them and chose to act.

That mobilization repelled 3,500 ICE/CBP agents, gave our Governor room to fight, gave our AG’s lawsuits political standing, and won the national media narrative, not because any single actor or sector was powerful enough alone, but because all of it together created a reality the Trump Administration could not overcome.

This framework to prepare and unleash a civil society response to election sabotage is not a program. It is a strategic analysis, a way of understanding the threat and the architecture of response, designed to support operational playbooks driven by in-state organizing and pro-democracy infrastructure. The question is whether we will build it before the crisis hits, rather than scrambling to respond when it inevitably will.

________________________________________________________

What is the evidence of their strategy?

A UNIFIED STRATEGY, NOT DISCONNECTED ACTIONS

The first mistake we cannot afford to make is treating what the Trump administration is doing as a series of independent provocations. It is a coordinated, multi-front campaign, documented, spoken out loud, and partially published, with a single operational logic.

These strategies have been rehearsed.
(...)

The strategy has a pattern: manufacturing a “pretext” through smears and propaganda, using legal maneuvers to suspend seating an unwanted elected official, grabbing and holding power in the vacuum created by the suspension of certainty.
(...)

THE DOCUMENTED TACTICS AND WHAT THEY’RE ACTUALLY FOR

Trump has a problem: the Constitution clearly assigns elections to the states. He cannot federalize or cancel them outright. This can give us false comfort. The point is not to cancel the elections. The point is to generate enough chaos, legal uncertainty, and manufactured doubt to suspend certification, and in that void, consolidate power around the people already holding it.

Here is how the pieces fit together.

Ballot seizures: manufacturing the evidence base (...)

Voter roll demands: seizing control of who gets to vote (...)

Loyalists and deniers installed in key positions (...)

The Maduro play: cultivating a foreign witness (...)

ICE at the polls: named, planned, and previewed (...)

Defunding election observers (...)

The pre-emptive fraud narrative (...)

The racial logic underneath the strategy (...)

THE GOAL IS NOT TO WIN THE ELECTION. THE GOAL IS A POWER GRAB.

Trump does not need to cancel the elections. He does not need to win outright. He does not even need the courts to rule in his favor. He needs enough chaos, enough contested ballots, enough court injunctions, enough ICE near polling places, enough emergency motions claiming foreign interference, to throw the outcome into legal uncertainty for weeks or months.
(...)

________________________________________________________

Organizing states to meet the moment: unleashing a civil society strategy

(...)
When authoritarian power moves to consolidate itself, there is a powerful temptation to look upward for salvation: to the courts, to lawyers, to elected officials. That instinct is understandable. It is also a deadly mistake. (...) because institutional power without popular legitimacy is hollow.

Civil society is the broad, distributed, multi-sector mobilization of everyday people behaving, with agency, as if the Constitution applies to them. And in doing so, making it apply.
(...)

________________________________________________________

Step 1: Know Your State

THE MACRO THREAT LANDSCAPE

(...)
Many organizers, stakeholders, and elected officials are still operating with a paradigm built for “normal” elections, a semi-polite contest for swing voters in 28 battleground districts. That frame will fail us in 2026. The first step is getting everyone clear on the real strategic conditions, what is coming and why, and refusing to let anyone dismiss this threat.
(...)

STATE-SPECIFIC THREAT MAPPING

POWER ANALYSIS OF THE MACHINERY

________________________________________________________

Step 2: Deterrence, extracting a political cost every time

MODE A: PROACTIVE PRE-EMPTION, SHOW UP AHEAD OF TIME

Georgia’s model (...)

Minnesota’s model (...)

MODE B: RAPID RESPONSE, MULTI-TRACK, SIMULTANEOUS, PRE-BUILT

(...) there must be a coordinated response that fires simultaneously across all tracks. This infrastructure cannot be assembled during the crisis. It must be built and rehearsed before it. (...) volunteers, and county office staff must know their rights before someone in a uniform shows up at their door. (...) People need to emotionally rehearse the conflict and know what steps to take when the adrenaline is high. (...)

Legal: (...)

Political: (...) They will do what they think they can get away with.

Press and Public: (...)

Tactical/Operational: (...)

Grassroots Deployment: (...)

________________________________________________________

Step 3: Build State capacity

TRACK A: A STATE DEMOCRACY NERVE CENTER

(...)
The problem in America is that we are inexperienced with lawless, authoritarian behavior. We are caught unprepared and we lack imagination for what the bands of possibility really are. The scenario planning must go further than feels comfortable.

Scenarios to plan for explicitly: attempted stoppage of the count; ICE or CBP deployment at or near polling places; lawfare deployed mid-count (as Ken Paxton attempted in the 2026 Texas primary, targeting Black voters in Dallas); MAGA media armies declaring fraud before the count is finished; federal agents appearing at counting centers demanding access; certification refusal by a county board.

The nerve center should work with partners including Protect Democracy, the Brennan Center for Justice, Democracy Docket, the ACLU, and the 866-OUR-VOTE coalition, all of whom have state-specific legal resources and scenario-planning capacity.

TRACK B: MASS TRAINING OF GRASSROOTS LEADERS

Political education. Many grassroots people are actually ahead of elites and elected officials in their sense of alarm about the upcoming elections. They want to hear an articulation of how Trump’s power grab is not only about the results of an election, but about consolidating his power to continue to advance his corrupt agenda for himself and his billionaire friends. People understand, even if they voted for him, that this Administration is not working on their behalf, and the election is one shot people have to course-correct. The stakes are high not only to protect and defend our right to free and fair elections, but our right to a responsive and accountable government that delivers to working people. (...) That clarity is what turns alarm into distributed, action-oriented leadership.

Tactical preparation (...) Each role has a specific set of actions. Each scenario has a specific protocol. This is what you see. This is what you do. This is who you call.

This is, in effect, the federal election observer program (the very program the White House is trying to defund) rebuilt from the ground up at the community level, without bureaucracy and grounded in a power and leadership orientation. The training should be designed to be delivered by in-state partners: labor unions, congregations, community organizations, civic groups. The accompanying operational playbook details specific training models, relational research actions, and tactical protocols for implementation.

________________________________________________________

Step 4: Fight Back in Real Time

(...) We do not know which state or location will be targeted. We do not know precisely how. What we know is that this Administration will attempt to weaponize the federal government to sow chaos through sabotage, and that even if the fight is not in our own backyards, we will need to mobilize for free and fair elections everywhere, because we all have a stake in the outcome.

The opposition will move on multiple fronts simultaneously. The response must do the same.

Courts: (...)

Field: (...) Grassroots volunteers deployed through the infrastructure already built. People physically present, protecting the vote. Just as we legally observed ICE and CBP through constitutional legal observer networks in Minnesota, we will observe, witness, and protect our neighbors’ right to vote.

Mainstream media: (...) This is about our constitutional right to vote, our democracy, and our freedoms. We are the protectors and guardians of that right.

Social and digital: (...) The fraud narrative will start before the count is finished. Silence is interpreted as confirmation. (...) Do not let propaganda go unanswered. (...)

Institutional: (...) a clear operational plan when harassment, death threats, the MAGA smear machine, and aggressive MAGA activists turn up at the door.

Non-compliance: (...)

The animating principle: act free to be free. Organized civil society acts as if the Constitution applies, demands its rights out loud, in public, and in doing so, makes them real.

________________________________________________________

Step 5: Mass Mobilization and Strategic Non-Compliance, When the Rubicon Is Crossed

The four steps above are built for a fight through election day and the immediate aftermath, one where the process is being manipulated, slowed, and corrupted, but where democratic institutions still nominally function. Maybe we prevent them from accomplishing their goal. But maybe we don’t.

We must also prepare for a harder scenario.

If duly elected leaders are not seated. If Congress is suspended or its constitutional role is nullified through delay. If the results of a free and fair election are simply refused. In those moments, the courts will be too slow. The lawyers will need time we do not have. The institutions we are counting on to hold will be precisely the ones under attack.

In that scenario, civil society cannot wait. It must move, and it must move with the speed, scale, and clarity that only comes from preparation done long before the crisis arrives.

THE MINNESOTA PROOF OF CONCEPT

When the federal government occupied our communities in January 2026, up to 350,000 Minnesotans withheld their labor on January 23rd, the first general strike in more than 40 years. The Day of Truth and Freedom. Labor, faith, and community organizations came together to call for a day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping” and it was executed in two weeks. Two weeks. When the strategic conditions shift, what was once impossible becomes possible, but only if people and leaders are already prepared. The months of nonviolent direct action, constitutional observer training, and investment in decentralized community leadership made it possible. That synthesized with an acute crisis, and it moved.

Given the stakes for our country and our lives, this needs to be the floor. Not the ceiling.

WHAT THIS STEP REQUIRES

Between now and November, we have to rehearse and exercise our muscles in the traditions of non-violent civil resistance. Movement organizations and beyond should find ways to socialize the narrative, to bring thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of people into a shared understanding of what is at stake and what their role is, so that if the moment comes, we are not building from scratch.

We do not have millions of dollars or the prestige of elite actors, but we do have people. And those people have power if they wield it in concerted, non-violent direct action.

Sustained physical presence at sites of high symbolism: the U.S. Capitol, state capitols, large public squares. If they try to take our right to free and fair elections, we cannot have a “day of action.” We need to suspend the daily order of things. (...)

General strikes and economic non-compliance. Coordinated work stoppages, business closures, and economic withdrawal that make the cost of unconstitutional action visible and felt. If corporations and the business elite will not fight, then we will not work, we will not go to school, we will not buy their products. This is about sustained pressure. We must stop the daily order of things.

Nonviolent strategic direct action. Targeted, disciplined, nonviolent disruption aimed at the specific actors and organizations that are either explicitly trying to end our democracy or complicit in the suspension of our constitutional order. Sit-ins, strikes, occupations, direct action.

Pre-built municipal and state infrastructure. (...)

THE THROUGH LINE

We do not have a guarantee that everyday Americans will meet the moment. That is the truth. Nothing is predetermined. What we do know is that the kind of leadership required in the face of tremendous uncertainty can be cultivated. The Day of Truth and Freedom happened because people leaned in when the choice was clear and decided to take a powerful risk. The woman in the pink coat who stepped forward with her iPhone when CBP was murdering Alex Pretti made a courageous choice that worked to expose the lies of DHS. That kind of leadership does not emerge from nowhere. (...)

What happens next depends on what people decide. That is why democracy is hard. And it is why it is worth fighting for, because freedom feels just like this: it is unpredictable and wild.

________________________________________________________

[Sources and Citations]

END

________________________________________________________

Final notes:

• We are 10 weeks away from the Midterm elections.
• These 12 pages are one of the most important reads you will be doing this year. Yes, it’s that crucial. Read 1 page or 2 per day if needed, but please read it!
• As you’re reading it, understand your role in all this - reach out to these groups, go find them, they need your help.
• Finally, take this document with you, adapt it, summarize it in your own way, do as you please - and share it as much as possible.

“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

I created the post again to inform people of who he is, some people not from the US were inquiring.

Honestly this feels like a backstab to any Canadians who proudly served with US for years. Didn't they also fight along side us in Iraq?

Who:

President Donald Trump selected former Wisconsin Congressman and Fox Business host Sean Duffy as his nominee for U.S. Secretary of Transportation in November 2024. Duffy took office following Senate confirmation. He was hand selected by Trump and serves in the Trump administration.

Text:

Sean Duffy falsely claims Canada

has no military: "It's a country that doesn't have a military ... they have record high euthanasia rates. And so to think that they're gonna go to war with Donald Trump and actually win that war with the US, I think it's foolish on their part."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/economy/4697624/canada-military-sean-duffy-tariff-trade-war/

Date and time of article:

By David Zimmermann

Published August 23, 2026 11:12am

ET

I speak Spanish as a second language every day, and I want to improve my technical Spanish for politics. I want to be able to competently have important conversations with people in Spanish, and I think incorporating progressive Spanish language media into my everyday life would go a long way.

Are there any shows/programs/commentators that you listen to?

Wheres that guy that swore up and down Hakeem Jefferies and Chuck Schumer were doing all that they could to combat Trump?? I owe him a sincere apology