I can fully understand the sentiment behind “told you so” and calling out Trump/Republican voters for wanting to throw others under the bus. Still, you’re going to have to build as powerful a coalition against the Republican administration as you can, and for many districts this will eventually require a good number of former MAGA people. It may feel shitty, but the most strategic thing (including for the purpose of helping the most oppressed) is to find a way so that potential supporters who voted red in 2024 won’t be quiet 2026 and 2028 because of shame.

If you don’t come around to this, two years down the road I would have grounds for saying “told you so” to you – and I’d hate me for it, because it would mean that I haven’t communicated this crucial point effectively enough. Much love from Germany.

One can of course always argue over what percentile makes you which class (and to to what degree percentiles are useful for this question in the first place).

As for the question of influence, Piketty for example, while calling the top 10% the “upper class”, calls the top 1% the “ruling class”, which seems like a decent way to undercore this point.

Thank you, that’s very insightful and useful.

There are still several good outlets, and since they’re badly needed right now, let’s not, well, shit on them.

Come the margin call I’ma feast on a dozen fried eggs and maybe, just maybe a tiny smidge of K

Also, just to indicate the orders of magnitude: The German electiricty grid roughly operates at a power of 200 000 MW on average.

Source (the colorful graph in the middle of the page). (Be mindful that the absolute numbers in the graph are given in “MWh per 15 minutes” (power*time/time), so to get the Watt number (power) at any given time, one has to multiply the number by 4.)

Please let us recall the Capitol attack. It was much, much worse, targeting not cars, but people and democracy itself.

(As for Elon, it is important to recall that back then, neither he nor any other liberal magnate had free access to the oval office and his own-or-technically-maybe-not-his-own government agency. His status is wholly unprecedented.)

I would even go so far as to say let’s hope that China steps in, too.

(Disclaimer: I’m not American.)

Not to argue for vandalism, but with the US government illegally detaining and deporting people for saying things that right wingers don’t like, I don’t think the MAGA crowd retains significant reservations about engaging in vandalism themselves – it’s just that so far they haven’t spotted a target where it would serve their cause to do so, and because, with the federal government in their hands, Republicans have much more effective and ostensibly legal methods at their disposal. (Should Republicans be voted out of power eventually, there will most certainly be vandalism from the right, conceivably even widespread violence against people, but this will probably be the case irrespective of whether Teslas keep exploding due to vandalism or only due to bad engineering.)

At this point, a perspective might be that it’s no longer about “a political goal”, but about preventing permanent loss of the ability of the people to achieve anything at all through democratic means.

Still, though: Even with this in mind, it’s utterly true that one should be careful about cheering for any such actions.