I am looking into the Portuguese Golden Visa. Unfortunately, we can't actually do it now, because DH would lose his security clearance and job.
I am not worried about jack-booted thugs at my door. (Yet) I am rich and white and straight, and therefore likely personally safe.
What I am worried about is the destruction of the rule of law and of institutions that we all rely on more than we realize in order to keep our basic rights secure. And I don't just mean personal rights, but things like property rights, free commerce, and all of those other traditional rights that make the country go and keep us stable. Unelected private citizens are being given unrestricted access to vast amounts of sensitive information, and they are not handling it with any appropriate degree of information security. And the agencies designed to protect our bank accounts and tax returns and, you know, nuclear arsenal are entirely decimated and have been intentionally placed in a situation where they are literally unable to respond to any crisis. We have a lot of enemies in the world. I cannot believe that some of them are not already taking advantage of the giant holes in our information security systems to find ways to hurt us, be it physically or financially.
I cannot believe that we ran a whole election based on #ButHerEmails!, and all the people who were completely up in arms over that are celebrating in the streets now that it's their guy doing that times 1,000,000. And the courts -- the supposed check against overreaching executive AND congressional power -- are doing absolutely nothing to stop what is clearly illegal activity. By the time anyone actually declares this is illegal, the harm will have already been done.
The fundamental problem is that destabilization is the point, not just an unintended consequence. Since the '90s, there has been a sliver of the Republican party that believes the federal government is the root of all evil, and that its powers must be dramatically restrained, by any means necessary. They followed the "starve the beast" concept for a while, forcing tax cuts that we couldn't pay for in an effort to compel budget cuts elsewhere (this is when the party lost its concept of fiscal conservatism, btw -- again, doing stuff we can't pay for was the point, so that deep cuts would be required elsewhere. But that theory overlooked the reality that Congress can just choose to spend more, which it did). Now we have a direct slashing of the federal workforce that will cripple the agencies' ability to do their jobs. Which, again, is the point. Imagine you don't get your tax refund this year because the IRS can't process it in time. Who are people going to blame? Trump? Nah -- it'll just be another example of the incompetence of the federal government, thus underscoring why all of these cuts were needed in the first place. The less competent the goverment becomes, the more evidence we get of why the government is terrible and should be cut further.
Don't think that's going to happen? I was reading about the fiasco at the Nuclear Security Administration -- firing key folks, then realizing they needed to rehire them, and not being able to contact some of the folks to come back. You know what the most common reaction was? Not: how the fuck can you just indiscriminately whack at the people who hold the keys to our nuclear arsenal? No. It was: how incompetent must you be not to be able to contact your own people. And some of these comments are from middle-of-the-road, not-particularly-Trump-ites. [The answer, btw, is that the firings happened on Friday, and Monday was a holiday, and people who've just been summarily fired may not be rushing to pick up the phone when their former employer calls on a holiday weekend]
