United States | News & Politics

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/25541208

Press Release
January 29, 2025

"Benjamin Kersten, a Jewish student at UCLA who joined the student encampment against the Israeli military’s genocide last spring:

“This Executive Order has the potential to rip apart our communities, destroy my fellow classmates’ lives, and set a precedent that allows for authoritarian attacks on any group that opposes the MAGA agenda. As a Jewish student I refuse to allow my identity to be fuel for fascist crackdown on my fellow students.”"

With Republicans running the White House and Congress, the person who wins the DNC chair race will take on a critical role in U.S. politics. They will serve as a national spokesperson for the Democratic Party while simultaneously leading a fundraising and campaign organization that received and disbursed over $450 million in campaign funds over the last two years.

In writing this piece, I reached out to 427 of the DNC’s 448 voting members and interviewed 19 of them. Those who spoke with me came from ideologically, geographically, and racially diverse backgrounds. They included Democrats from rural and urban communities, grassroots party members, elected officials, and party insiders and critics alike. Most agreed to speak on the condition their names wouldn’t be used.

What emerged from these conversations is a picture of a DNC that is built to be an undemocratic, top-down institution, unable to truly leverage the wisdom and guidance of the DNC members who hail from local and state networks across the country. This is especially true when those local and state members disagree with the DNC’s posture or strategic choices.

The 2024 elections were a case in point. President Joe Biden may have wanted to run for reelection, but America would have been better served if DNC members were empowered to publicly challenge that decision and force a national debate to happen much sooner. But Biden controlled the DNC through Harrison, his hand-picked chair, and the culture of the DNC is not one that rewards dissent.

https://archive.ph/T7vZ6

best sublemmy i could find lol lmk

There's no ads, JavaScript, or tracking analytics, just a straight up html page. My hope is to simply have a place that shares facts.

It's by no means complete. I'd happily welcome anyone who has references to help me complete this page. I just found out the site I was using for his executive orders gets them after about 10 days, and the Whitehouse website has all the up to date one (almost 80 when I checked last night). I'll try to parse through them and update the list as I have time.

If you have any suggested edits or additional items I should add, I'm happy to do so given a reference.

I hope to keep it up to date as much as I can, but their whole plan right now is to flood the area with nonstop shit so that we can't really dial in on any one thing.

I've created an account and repo to outsource the work a little bit. Please feel free to interact and help out:

https://github.com/2025realitycheck/project-2025-reality-check

~~For some reason this is throwing a 404 when you go to it. Hopefully this goes away soon, likely because I only just created the account.~~

Problem has been resolved

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to “expand” a migrant detention center located within the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. Prior to the release of the executive order, the administration announced that 30,000 migrants would be detained at Guantánamo.

But according to Department of Homeland Security and Navy documents from 2021 and 2022 reviewed by Drop Site News, the Trump administration may not be able to detain that high of a number of migrants at the facility — at least not immediately. Documents show the Guantánamo migrant detention center only has the capacity to expand to hold 400 people, far below the announced tens of thousands.

In the fall, Drop Site News published previously unreported details of the treatment of migrants at the MOC, the bureaucratic process of how migrants are detained, and the private prison companies profiting from the detention center. In August 2024, the Biden administration granted a private prison company a $163.4 million contract to run the facility.

"For decades, the Guantanamo migrant detention center has been the hallmark of the most inhumane, racist, and brutal U.S. policies against people seeking refuge," said Jesse Franzblau, senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center. "The Biden administration could have shut down the facility but tragically renewed and entered into new contracts to keep it up and running."

“The idea that the Trump administration is going to send 30,000 migrants to Guantánamo is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve heard all week. It’s utterly absurd,” said J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents detainees at the Guantánamo military prison and frequently visits the base. “It’s purely performative. President Trump is trying to use the image of Guantánamo to project toughness towards refugees and asylum seekers.”