I'm honestly surprised anyone had to ask this question. Suppression Of Dissent is actually a term. Why do hotels sue guests who post negative reviews on Yelp? Why did the Stasi Police exist? Why is a clown poster of Putin illegal in Russia?

We are being converted into an oligarchy. The administration is backed by a demographic that either doesn't realize this, or doesn't care. They unabashedly silence their opposition on the floors of Congress and the Senate all the time. Can't get your legislation through? Change the rules.

The GOP has no constituents. Nobody with a net worth under $10,000,000 matters to the GOP.

> We are being converted into an oligarchy. The administration is backed by a demographic that either doesn't realize this, or doesn't care

A portion doesn't realize, and another portion is likely actively in favor of this outcome, as oligarchies are pretty good for the oligarchs (at least for a while). Unfortunately the first portion has the votes, and the second has the money; that's just the way things are at the moment.

The issues the GOP are getting those low income votes on are total fabrications (yeah, sure, coal will come back, even though no one's investing in it; it was the environmentalists that cost those mining jobs, not the robots that replaced the miners; "We're Pro Life", unless you've already exited the womb), but it works, apparently.

I'm really not sure what steps we can take to increase the level of rational, critical thought in this discussion. People read a headline, get the endorphin rush of reading something that confirms their own biases, retweet and then stop thinking! I've noticed this bias in my own behavior and have taken steps to correct it - if an article just feels good to read, I must double check that its sources are well cited and its points are correct, otherwise it gets a mark of questionable credibility in my brain.

I don't really know how to convince others to do the same...

Request for refinement. Oligarchy is just rule by a few, perhaps you mean rule by the wealthy, plutocracy, which seems to be more compatible with your argument.

But then the GOP do have constituents, via a continued enhancement of the Southern strategy, to get people to vote against their economic interests. Of course there simply aren't enough plutocrats to win elections, so they have to rile up some masses with various promises, rhetoric, and occasionally throwing them red meat.

> The GOP has no constituents. Nobody with a net worth under $10,000,000 matters to the GOP.

You might re-examine that belief in light of the last election...

I think the disagreement might be in the distinction between constituents and supporters.

I think there are a lot of people who support the GOP (evidenced by the last election) but very few the GOP actually look out for.

Well, if that's the distinction we're talking about, then I would say that the Democratic Party also has far fewer people that it looks out for than that vote for it. They no longer seem to have the working class as a constituency, for example.

Trump was perceived as the lesser of the two evils. Looking at Hillary's donation list, it was even more pronounced that she was a Corporation puppet. Trump was the wild "fuck you" card who was perceived as the only candidate that would not sell out.

Except Trump is a corporation[1], which now gets federal money funneled into its pockets every time the president golfs at Mar-a-lago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trump_Organization

According to the news article in the other post, it seems the account author identifies him/herself as a gov employee:

"In the suit, Twitter writes that @ALT_uscis has purported to be a dissenting member of US Citizenship and Immigration Services"

So what? I could claim to be a government official on Twitter; that wouldn't give the government the right to my identity.

Of course it doesn't, I was just talking about why the government may have taken interest in this person, and not on countless other accounts with similar views.

My best guess would be that he (or she!) posted something that required information that they do not believe the general public would have.

The lawsuit was probably part of an effort to identify a leak.

Under what authority could the executive branch require third parties to identify leakers?

Or, if you prefer a normative argument: Do you think Bob Woodward should have been forced to identify Mark Felt?

What do you mean by "leakers"? Unless this account is tweeting classified information (which is unlikely, seeing how almost all of the tweets are just links to news articles with some commentary), the account owner has not committed a crime.

They offered their own theory as to why all of a sudden: https://twitter.com/ALT_uscis/status/850186120776306688

From my understanding its because the account claims to be an employee of USCIS.

Perhaps because they already have the identities of most of the others.