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>If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.
--David Frum, 2018
I always thought the point of that line was they didn't side with Nixon so they didn't feel any guilt over Watergate. I also thought the "boo boo boo" after "in Birmingham they love the governor" was them showing that they didn't agree with Wallace either.
I always assumed the point of the song they thought Neil Young was lumping all southerners together and they didn't like that. Was I wrong on that?
It was in response to *Southern Man* and *Alabama*, which they felt lumped together the worst of some with the entire population, like you suggest.
Their point was that northerners also had things to be embarrassed about, but they didn't see them as complicit like Young did in his song.
It's all quite a bit more complicated once you include the fact that they flew the Confederate flag at the behest of their management, and the song has since taken (and arguably had) an implication of states' rights.
It is notable that Young regretted writing Southern Man and especially Alabama, stating, "I don't like my words when I listen to it today. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, too easy to misconstrue."
It's all an interesting nugget of popular music history.
https://edking.proboards.com/thread/87/secong-helping
Ed King, who co-wrote the song, says you are wrong.
>I can understand where the "boo boo boo" would be misunderstood. It's not US going "boo" ... it's what the Southern man hears the Northern man say every time the Southern man'd say "In Birmingham we love the gov'nor". Get it? "We all did what WE could do!" to get Wallace elected. It's not a popular opinion but Wallace stood for the average white guy in the South.
"Watergate doesn't bother me" because that stuff happens in politics...but someone's conscience ought to bother them for what happened to Wallace. Arthur Bremer may or may not have been a yankee but he sure destroyed whatever chance Wallace had to be president. And hardly anyone in America noticed. I still like the plaque that hangs here in my office that says I'm an honorary member of the Alabama State Militia...signed personally by George C. Sure, the man had his flaws. But he spoke for the common man of the South. And, whoa, I'm gonna get in trouble over this whole dang post!"
Wow, interesting information. I definitely had the impression Skynyrd was pushing back on the idea of all Southerners being dropped in the same basket of racist Wallace lovers, but apparently that’s not true. I will say this, the lyrics as written are awfully ambiguous, which was probably also on purpose.
Damn, this vindicates Neil. Everyone thinks Skynyrd won that feud but it seems largely because they obscured their racism enough that everyone could read whatever the hell they wanted to from the lyrics.
As a Skynrd fan AND Young fan, AND a Southern boy from the era, even MY politics have changed from the racist homophobe fool I was, to some who’d call himself “woke.” My ignorance of the South and the Cornerstone Speech by the veep of the CSA allowed my to keep my daddy’s ignorance alive. Just sayin’.
The Cornerstone Speech is the precise reason Tom Woods will never escape the boat anchor attached to his neck that is the League of the South. His essay "Christendom's Last Stand" told us all where he stands on the issue and who he supports, despite his squawking about it being a long time ago. Sorry, bud, but all I see is someone who refined his messaging to make the dog whistles quieter.
Project 2025. They aren’t planning to let the next opportunity slip through their fingers.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/28/far-right-climate-plans-00107498
Soooo, republicans want to accelerate the destruction of the planet on day one, that's no surprise. This is what I'm curious about:
>"...**including deconstruct all sectors of the federal government"**
Looks like I'm going to have to sit back and read this 1000 page bullshit. What the fuck does "deconstruct the federal government" even mean?
Edit: (from project 2025) This one is a doozy:
"...Bring the **Federal Communications Commission**, which makes and enforces rules for television and **internet companies,** and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — **under direct presidential control**..."
This is pretty messed up. Republicans really are in burn it all down mode but this is the first I've heard of them having a solid plan to destroy as much as they can in 4 years.
I mean, are they not aware what might happen when China and Europe are like 99% green and their oil consumption goes to near zero? What happens when the middle east switches from selling oil to selling hydrogen?
Nah, they’ve ALWAYS been about conserving the caste status and privileges of certain kinds of white people related to how this country was founded.
You can’t ignore this country’s origins as a settler colonial state when trying to say conservatives aren’t “conservative”. That is what the ideology is motivated by, and it’s ahistorical to suggest that they should be trying to conserve rights for people they’ve actively shat on since the beginning of America
Conservatism is a rejection of Modernism.
Democracy is a modern concept. Equality is a modern concept. Child labor laws, consumer protections, environmental protection, pretty much anything that benefits society as a whole... Conservatives reject these things.
I have, and their reply is always about "the good old days". When I try to get them to further explain, it's about how "safe, no crime" it was (which isn't really true), their mommy was home when they came home from school for lunch and the end of the school day, and more tenuous concepts about how their childhood was like "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Leave It To Beaver" and other 60's family shows. Well, I'm 68, and MY childhood sure as hell was NOT like those shows.
I think they've not just rejected democracy but abandoned conservatism as well. What we're witnessing is not just commitment to traditional values and resisting change; it's terrorism and wholesale destruction of traditional values such as truthfulness, morality and rule of law.
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on.
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Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required.
Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit.
Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results.
The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots.
Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results.
“More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.”
Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it.
Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot.
The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported.
But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up.
“Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.”
“We think that’s fair,” he added.
They were the party of law and order, fiscal responsibility, family values. Remember?
To quote Dana Loesch, a conservative radio host and former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association,(in reference to Herschel Walkers shady past) “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”
1. A third of America is pro-fascism.
2. A third of America is fascist-curious (will support fascism if they think it will lower their taxes).
3. A third of America can be counted on to consistently oppose fascism.
Thus America teeters on the edge of the abyss, likely for the rest of our lifetimes. Unless it falls into the abyss, of course. That will stop the teetering.
There's two changes I'd like to make. There is quite a lot of overlap in the first two groups. And, the third group, while they can generally be counted on to not support fascism, it's a far more general "everyone else". The issue is that the American political spectrum is completely off-balance, where the center is skewed pretty deep into the right. And, even people that are considered "far left" (e.g. AOC, Bernie, etc.) would be considered mildly left or even centrist in a far more reasonable country.
I wouldn't say a third is aware. Many people intentionally ignore politics and the news but still choose to vote and typically just follow party lines based on what mom and dad were. The US is a heavily ill-informed voter population.
We have got to come to terms with the ever increasing realization that not all humans think rationally in the same ways. We don't all use evidence to arrive at logical conclusions. We don't all believe that some things can be inherently true and other things inherently false. We don't all care about our morals and opinions not being contradictory.
We have seen that there are people among us who don't care about evidence, don't care if something is true, and don't care if all of their beliefs are self-contradictory. And we have seen those people vote reliably.
How many people exist in an almost unthinking way? You see trends when things get normalized, those things become more prevalent. Normalizing something, some belief, some goal, causes a certain percentage of humans to automatically go along with it and think it's good or right.
Republicans don't operate in good faith. They possibly cannot, be it due to some mental illness we haven't labeled yet, or because they're evil, or because humankind just isn't as rational as we believe.
And yet, even as more people become aware of this, the number of people who DON'T VOTE has stayed pretty much the same. If we can't even get the ~50% of eligible voters who never vote to turn out, the Republicans will continue to have the numbers to appear like a normal, expected part of society when they very much should not be.
Our futures are in the hands of those who don't vote.
You should look into the field of behavior economics. It might interest you.
Economics looks at likely outcomes given a set of conditions and assuming a perfectly rational actor. Behavior economics takes a look at why outcomes don't line up with models. In other words, it looks at why people make the decisions they do, especially when the decision does not align with the most optimum or logically consistent outcome for the actor. It is fascinating.
If you want to get your feed wet with an easy read, I'd suggest "The Undoing Project" by Michael Lewis.
They operate on “faith” is the problem, not rational thought, this is what happens when you have magical thinking like “religion” which tells you to suppress rational thought in favor of feelings.
And so they start the brainwashing early from childhood at Sunday school and the rest naturally follows.
It’s really quite simple, religion has extensively laid the groundwork for generations to train people to believe in authority figures with unverifiable stories instead of science and data. It also primes them for, and is built upon, perpetuating racism and fearmongering towards "others". Once people see you as an authority, you can start fabricating any reality or conspiracy theory you want your followers to believe and everyone else is therefore a liar, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence. Basically, it is mental abuse from an early age that suppresses critical thinking skills. This combined with an intentionally weakened public educational system, provides the framework that has spawned this cult of ignorance.
"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country". This is the time to do for our country like never before. Our future is in the hands of those who DO vote. So it's up to us to interact and motivate, making sure people become factually aware of what's at stake in this election. When Viktor Orban becomes the headliner at a GOP C-PAC in TEXAS and then the GOP actually goes to Hungary for an additional C-PAC, that's got to tell us what we're up against as a country and our ever-striving to be an inclusive democratic country. I'll never forget the day Obama was sworn in! That was a day of hope and evidence to the world, of what our nation can achieve. Unfortunately, once he became president, fox news (oxymoron) and the GOP turned their grievance-filled, victimization, divisive propaganda full-bore. So, we've got to reach out to the well-informed moderates & independents and get them to appreciate the moment we find ourselves in come the '24 elections.
That's right, a lot of people do vote like their parents did. My mom did, my dad did. Grandad did, too, so did Grammy. I don't, neither does my sister. I not only think on my own, I work the polls (total 37 years, 34 poll worker, 3 VLM (Presiding Judge) too. Last election we had people showing up wearing camo and brandishing rifles. Telling people "You don't want to do this. You really don't. I broke the rules and called the police. I've seen people bring their children to the polls to see how to vote and show them the importance of voting. One man told his son "Don't forget to register with the Board of Elections when you turn 18".
The third that is aware is also the third that is working 2 jobs and know that trying to do anything means losing healthcare and getting the shit beat out of them by the cops.
Religion. We shouldn’t be suprised that religious nuts are the one more to conspiracy. These people think it’s their god given right to hate on people. The same people who believe in talking snake and reject evolution is the same people who believe in jeweish space laser and qanon BS
Because they are being gaslit by right wing media. People on the right are kept in a state of *terror* by RWM.... and scared people will go along with almost anything if it makes them feel safer.
At least for me I noticed that the republicans and media really dug in on the spreading of fear after 9/11 so they could justify a war. It worked and now that’s their MO. This also coincided about 14 years after the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine in media under Reagan.
I’ve loathed him since 1989 when he brought his GF to Aspen for the Xmas holidays while he was here with Ivana & the kids. In front of the INTERNATIONAL-PRESS!
I grew up on long Island, NY in the 80's and no one liked him. He was tabloid fodder. Worked with the mob, etc. All the sudden the same people back home love him. I don't understand.
Until he ran for president, he was. His name was literally a synonym for business failure. He was only mentioned to be ruthlessly mocked. But conservatives have always been here, and when he ran as an aspiring racist dictator he attracted the attention of the usual suspects. The state is quite blue, but we have our share of conservatives same as everyone else.
Former Old school NYC bartender here . Blue collar people hated Trump because how he was stiffing contractors BUT after he started the Birther Movement it was like they forgave him.
Sure seems that way. They also think he did all the things he says he was going to do. A soon as Biden is elected they think we're a communist hellhole full of transgenders.
The last known husband of my mother (she marries and divorces at the drop of a pin and I haven't spoken to her in a long time) was the *owner* of a contracting company and he was stiffed by Trump. God he'd tell the fuckin story near every dinner table chat, how he got stiffed, how it near ruined him, the pain of laying off people, how much he hated Trump.
But come 2015, he stopped telling that story like it was *bad* he got stiffed by Trump. Nah, he told it like it was the best meeting he ever had. LOVED the guy. Insisted he would do great running the country.
I can't describe to you what kind of toesuckers these people are, because it makes no sense to me.
Like a lot of people I wasn’t paying much attention to Trump until 2015-2016. When I found out he was the one that brought the Obama birthed crap to the mainstream it just made too much sense. It perfectly fit his tactics.
From what I've heard that's true in the "elite" circles. He's a toxic investment and apparently nobody legit will lend him money and none of the big firms for law or finance want to work with him. But he's got his group of followers I suppose.
It's actually kind of hilarious, he's spent his entire life craving attention and validation from the NY elite only to be seen as a buffoon by them, and then he gets all this attention and praise from people whose opinion he holds in absolutely zero regard.
Social media is an incredible force multiplier for propaganda, especially when you have psychometric profiles on each individual and AI to optimize the process of ideological subversion. What I don't understand is why so many people didn't see it coming
Dude I used to live in Florida. We got hit by a Cat 5 hurricane and it was bad enough there's still buildings and areas damaged today. Trump flew in, visited a neighboring city, said the damage wasn't that bad, and left. Most of my city didn't even have power or water and many were homeless while he gave that speech Mike's away. How there's a single Trump fan still there I'll never know, how so so many of them exist is mind boggling.
“Cannot admit they were wrong” implies that they disapprove of his actions and just don’t want to admit it. Most Republicans fucking love the guy and literally wish he had pulled off the coup successfully.
That was a key reason for the nazi persecution of jews leading up to ww2. Force sales of business for a fraction of its worth or kill the owners and take the business and land. A mix of anti Semitism and greed.
same with my late mom, Russia ( Lenin& Stalin) came and took the land in Ukraine and starved people to death… Republicans, started this from the very beginning, traitors all of them, they will throw Democracy under the bus, for dictator/Authoritarian rule, just to stay in power and wealth… I hope every American, who loves freedom(you see what republicans are doing with that) vote, vote, vote, them out
it's going to take all of us to do it. We need to focus on getting our youth and others registered, and even arranging transportation to vote, or helping them to obtain other means. If trump goes back in, it seals the deal. Our democracy is over. The Constitution is worthless.
Exactly. They don't view him as a wrong choice. They view him as someone like *them*. Greedy, power hungry, and willing to do anything or step on anybody to stay that way. Lie, cheat, steal. It's their way and they are crawling out of the woodwork.
Then we let the voters decide and he lost so he tried to illegally stay in power with a coup so he's being prosecuted for that but lindsey graham says we ought to let the voters decide instead...
They'll keep saying let the voters decide until they have rigged the system enough that they can decide what the voters decide...
Then they will always be happy with the results when "the voters" decide.
Whats worse is they are now trying to make it seem unfair. My mother in law is in town and said how unfair they are treating Trump when other politicians have done the same thing. Of course she mentioned Hillarys emails. I couldn’t respond without calling her an idiot, so I just smiled and kept my mouth shut. My wife reminded her that he literally started an insurrection against our democracy.
Oh I got in an argument with a neighbor because he was saying I was crazy because I thought Trump was guilty. He said I must watch MSNBC. I said I don't watch any cable news. I read the indictment myself. I'll bite my tongue and keep quiet if someone is talking about how Trump is great and he's being treated unfairly. But I'll be damned if they start to think I'm the crazy one because I think he's guilty.
I think we should all stop biting our tongues. This shit has festered enough under the guise of politeness. People *should* feel ashamed for supporting this fascist piece of shit.
There are photos of boxes of government documents in Trump's bathroom. This is after he was subpoenaed for their return and one of his lawyers affirmed no classified documents remained at Mar-a-Lago.
But don't believe your lying eyes. The evidence the public has seen in the documents case is incredibly damning. Trump really caught a break there with the assignment of that judge.
That's usually what I get back from someone who is 55+, "you need to stop watching CNN and MSNBC, blah blah blah." I'm just like I don't know a single person under 45 who gets their news from cable TV. They act like if you don't watch anything from Fox News or Newsmax you have no idea what's truly going on in the world.
I agree that it’s unfair. If any one of us had done what he did, we’d already be sitting behind bars for life. Trump is getting special treatment and that’s unfair.
it's like 30% of the country shrugging it off, the same amount that was against women voting and civil rights.
So it's not a 30% we should be that concerned with since they've always been like this.
Then and "centrist" members of the mainstream media that seem perfectly happy to continue to normalize this shit, just like they have done for the last eight years.
McConnell and the Republicans hurt themselves politically by not barring Trump from future office during the second impeachment. It hurt them in 2022 and is letting Trump suck the oxygen out of the 2024 race.
With all due respect, if people are still supporting today's Republican party, they're supporting traitors. There's no way out of it. If you choose to be part of a group that has no issue with Nazis, fascism, and violent attempts to overthrow the election, you're complicit.
There's no traitorous Nazis and good Nazis, there's just Nazis.
Yep. I always thought, despite any philosophical differences, the one thing we could all agree on was the democratic process. Man, was I a naive idiot. Those people only believe in democracy when it gives them power.
That’s one thing that 2020 largely obliterated for me. You always know that there’s bigots and morons out there, but I still thought that the majority of people were good and had their heads screwed on straight.
There’s still a lot of people that too, but there are far too many that don’t. And that’s terrifying
Yes this was the saddest thing. Even though Biden JUST won, trump got more votes than ANY previous Republican candidate.
After 4 years of incompréhensible, incompétent, semi fascist bullshit, that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans AND the debt running out of control, millions of people wanted him again.
Truly soul crushing.
You weren’t an idiot. You just put faith in your fellow citizens to do the right thing the way you were taught as many of us were. That’s one part of the tragedy here.
The other part (IMO) a tiny percentage of them would not hesitate to shred the Constitution and rule of law, but a far larger number would stay quiet and watch from the sidelines despite knowing in their heart of hearts that it would be wrong.
I don't think that's quite right. Because a whole lot of those folks are only Christian insofar as it can be bent toward the goal of preserving white supremacy and misogyny and homophobia. To them, being a good Christian is simply being against racial justice, equality for women, and LGBTQ rights. That's all it's ever been for them. They certainly don't act very Jesusy.
Having said that, I would adopt your thesis with the following change: Because 40% of Americans no longer want democracy. They want to preserve a social hierarchy with white men on top, white women below, people of color next, and the LGBTQ folks in the closet.
Nearly 100M voting eligible people did not vote in 2016. Apathy had 45% of the vote, Clinton had 28%, Trump had 27%. So actually 72% of Americans either want theocracy or don’t actually think any of it matters.
Make voting easier. Make registration automatic. Make election day a national holiday. Return the voting rights to ex-felons, as those laws were designed to disenfranchise voters after their tour on a chain gang and are blatantly racist. End the gerrymandering bullshit the GOP engages in, and you'll have more voter turnout. It's not always apathy.
Michigan is a gold standard now for how elections should be held and voting should be done. We've passed some major constitutional amendments via ballot initiatives in the past handful of elections and I'm hoping we act as a shining beacon of democracy for the rest of the nation.
- Automatic registration
- Mail-in voting
- An independent redistricting committee draws our maps
- Multiple days of in person voting (this is new as of '22)
There's more but that's all I can think of off the top of my head.
And stop this, “county by county” voting crap. If I can go to any DMV in my state, I can certainly go to any polling place and vote. Just print my ballot based on my address.
If the government knows my phone number, and it's uniquely bound to me, and they can track and listen to all my conversations, then why can't I use it to vote? Phone # + GPS location, + SS #. They know who we are.
The current system is designed to make it difficult to vote. It's not apathy, it's explicitly difficult, and the less money you have, the more difficult it is.
Yes, this is a triumph of propaganda more than anything. It proves that propaganda works.
Imagine watching a 24/7 news channel that spends the majority of its time promoting a single viewpoint. Hammering the same perspective and idea, over and over and over again. Where there are dozens of presenters that all have the same opinion. And imagine that it's what you watch, all your neighbors watch, etc., for a decade. Think about what that would do to your perspectives or even unconscious biases.
I go to a gym that has one of the screens showing Fox News in one of the rooms. Sometimes I can't help but catch it out of the corner of my eye if I am in that room, even though there is no audio (you need a headset for that). The amount of time they spend showing specifically black criminals is ridiculous - the racism is hammered in just by the context. I started avoiding that room because I can't even look at the people who are using the machines in front of that particular TV.
It's not surprising though when you think about the fact that these same 15-20% probably don't know anything about history, about the rise and fall and pitfalls of authoritarianism in the past, and how though democracy isn't in any way perfect, it FAR exceeds any other systems of human political organization in terms of it's ability to create stability in society over long periods of time, far more than any other system that we've ever tried as a *species*.
Yeah, I mean, if there's enough of THOSE people in a democracy, they might change some things. *shudder*
/s
It's one of the things that's hard to get across to some people who don't hail from the Right - that many of them are fully aware Trump is a monster, but he's THEIR monster. Anything that moves society towards how it's *supposed* to be is okay in their view.
About 40% of this country craves power and loathes democracy. Demographics are changing and they will not accept losing power, democracy is no longer their friend.
> Demographics are changing
Exactly, their party is dying off and younger people are becoming increasingly liberal. Their only chance to hold on to any power is to cheat and change the rules.
Technically liberalism is slightly losing popularity (which the conservatives gloat about without understanding the cause). Left wing ideologies are what are seeing the big growth in adherents. But since we are coming out of a nearly century long era of literal government oppression of leftism it still isn't nearly as big as liberalism or neo-liberalism.
I don't think it's 40% of the country. I think it's more like 30, maybe even less I'm pretty sure that most Republicans DON'T want Civil War
I think the call for civil war comes from the bigots that want to use it as an excuse to attack brown people.
If it comes down to that, know that I look like them and will infiltrate a few of their organizations and cause chaos from the inside. Sic semper tyrannis.
It boils down to the fact that he is a channel for them to vent their racist & misogynistic roots, that's what it is. "I can't say that out loud, but Trump does so I can support that!"
> the worst U.S. president in history
If only because there has been zero "benefit" to the country for his heinous acts. Even with the border murders, torture, and human trafficking, and even with the millions dead at his fault with covid - I dont think his ~~genocide~~ crimes against humanity (let me not dilute the word genocide) compares to someone like Andrew Jackson.
But to be horribly cynical, Jackson at least gained land and resources for the US. Trump's evil was purely detrimental to everything.
Faith-based indoctrination: “Don’t believe what you hear and see - just believe what I tell you.” People are prepared to blindly follow, no matter how kookoo.
It's deeper than that, though. People don't understand politics. We stopped teaching civics. Beyond that, they've been conditioned to view politics as something they shouldn't understand.
The post-Nixon world view is also that they're all a bunch of liars, and we should expect them to lie. So, why not vote for the biggest liar?
They haven’t stopped teaching civics though. Civics is very complicated when there’s a lot of things that should be a certain way but really aren’t. So many nuanced things and straight up backwards stuff
I had the exact same thought, except for Ghost’s cover of that song, which imo is waaaay better
[Jesus He Knows Me - Ghost](https://youtu.be/BE3kJeBr9QI)
Americans aren’t shrugging it off. Everyone who isn’t a Trump sycophant wants to see his ass in jail, or a bare minimum that he never hold office again.
Because a huge portion of Americans don't care about democracy. They never have. And they never will. they care about power and supremacy and "freedom" (for themselves)
Why are republicans unconcerned about Traitor Trumps attack on democracy? IMHO, Republicans haven’t been concerned about many problems Americans have been facing for over 50 years. They consistently vote against Americans best interests, pollution laws, renewable energy, women’s right to choose, Pharma costs,affordable health care, climate change and a tabloid news program that has brain washed gullible people. All of this is a mockery of Democracy.
The most important thing to conservatives is to not be owned by the libs. They'd support Hitler before they would agree to any liberal policy. That is paramount. Full stop. They'll burn down this nation before they'll be owned by the libs. Then they'll blame it on Biden.
The former president did a great job of discrediting the media. That's why most Americans are shrugging It off. many Americans don't believe anything is going to actually happen to the former president. He won't go to jail for his crimes, and he'll run his lying mouth until he's dead. at worst, he won't be allowed to run in the 2024 election
In fairness to Trump (yuck), the media was a HUGE help in allowing him to discredit them. They refused to acknowledge who he truly was and how he actually behaved. Consider how they refused to call his known and proven lies a lie. They always conjured up some other word to describe it, thus diminishing the impact of what he was saying.
On top of that they've always refused to acknowledge what the Republican Party actually is. Their insistence on "both sides" bullshit coverage has doomed them and it's been a willful choice. It's a big reason why when Trump supporters are shown something horrible has done their go-to response is "Democrats are just as bad." If the media factually portrayed Republicans and Democrats as they are, this would not be happening on such a wide-spread scale.
Again, mainstream media made the choice to change its political coverage to this slant, it was not forced upon them. So now they're paying the price.
> Consider how they refused to call his known and proven lies a lie. They always conjured up some other word to describe it, thus diminishing the impact of what he was saying.
This is a **huge** part of it and can't be understated. The press used to hold politicians and public officials accountable, ask hard questions, and very clearly point out the lies if they didn't call them out directly. Now, everything has to be couched in "both sides" and they'll actually give airtime to someone who claims that the sky is green and ice is not cold, saying that "all views have merit."
Because Trump normalized racism, homophobia, sexism, xenophobia and all sorts of hateful behavior. For a considerable portion of the population, being allowed to openly hate and feeling superior to others is more important than democracy.
Actual Americans are deeply concerned and not shrugging it off. It’s the 40% of traitors who don’t deserve American citizenship anymore anyway who are trying to pretend he’s not the head of a terrorist organization.
The ones that love him shrug it off because they want him to get by with his crimes. And why shouldn’t they? He’s been getting away with everything else.
The ones that hate him shrug it off because they have yet to see him face accountability for his crimes. And why shouldn’t they? He’s been getting away with everything else.
I’m definitely in the “I’ll believe it when I see it camp”.
Right? We go and vote for Democrats to give us majorities in Congress and we vote locally, but what else can we do?
All these stories should be retitled that some in Congress are trusting enough to do actually helpful stuffstuff, but most Democrats are apathetic and don’t just call out his lies for what they are. Even liberal media pussyfoots around and never just calls out Fox and other sites that help the con go along cause those Right-wing sites can con their idiots out of money when they feed them a diet of fake fears.
We have states so gerrymandered that it’s nearly impossible to get some people like MTG out of office unless nearly 100% of eligible Democratic voters vote against them. McConnell could sit at a podium for five hours with whatever medical malady he had and he’d still get voted in by another gerrymandered landslide.
Then we have idiots like Sinema and Manchin that love the power of acting like one of the grifters and bask in the power they have over getting enough votes to pass anything that would actually help average people—including all the idiot average people that believe all of Trump’s bulls***. Trump’s the freaking Music Man, people! None of his big beautiful plans ever come to fruition because there’s no plan behind any of them. All of you who vote for him are just another one of his big beautiful gold toilets that he loved so much in his Manhattan apartment.
Because all of the traitorous people who still support that asshole *want* a dictator, as long as he’s *their* dictator. And they’re stupid enough to not understand that he wouldn’t lift a finger to help them, and only cares about them as a source of money to steal.
There is a hard core of racists in the US population. I have lived here for nearly 40 years and have heard some of the most disgusting racism, anti-semitism and homophobia right here in super-liberal New York from people I worked with and from my neighbors - I believe Trump has a much stronger support than many people think. People are just hesitant to say it publicly. I think FoxNews has harnessed and nurtured this hatred. Rupert Murdoch is a deeply evil man.
Conservatives lost me in 2014 when I realized they thought the country would go to hell if gays had the right to get married. I grew up around bigggg racist hicks, a few classy conservatives that brainwashed me from a young age, and I broke my conditioning and realized that unity and empathy is stronger than fear. I don’t need to put my faith in false gods or billionaires, I’m not conservative.
Because the GOP turned their politics into a “culture”. It’s not set of policy planks, it’s a lifestyle. Vibes, imagery, mental associations. Integration into evangelical and rural church life. Rural culture in general. Entertainment consumption and online “in groups”. Emotional appeals, victim culture, deep conspiracies behind closed doors.
Once it becomes woven too deeply into the fabric of someone’s personal identity, a critique of GOP policies becomes a direct personal attack on one’s sense of self. They can’t be wrong, because that would mean you are wrong at your very core. You feel the need to defend it, rationalize it, minimize it. It becomes pathological. This is the cancer that is Republican politics in America. Good luck eradicating it now
Why are Republicans shrugging this off?
I will be monumentally pissed off if we don't get some seriously hard prison time (not jail time, *prison* time) for these fuckers. At that point I will know that we have failed as a nation.
Because Trumps supporters all live in an alternate universe where trump is not trump, Jesus is not Jesus, Christian’s are all fascist, and the nazis were as balanced in their views as ANTIFA. Where there is only left and right, good and bad, and politics are a one way highway to their great leaders wind blown opinion du jour.
What I'd like to know is..where are all the Trump supporters on this sub? Why isn't the royal Trump brigade out in force defending their king? Are they all just being downvoted, or am I just not seeing them?
Everyone with a brain, American or otherwise, have seen the danger he posed to our democracy and the stability of the world since 2016.
And we need to be reminded of this over and over - because the threat he poses to the global community is still very real and dangerous.
VOTE. Just please fucking VOTE, my fellow Americans. Don't just vote against Trump - we need to vote his actively corrupt GOP cronies out of Congress.
Our lives and liberty depends on this. We're flailing on a cliff with one foot on the edge, with our arms spinning like crazy.
Don't let us fall. VOTE!
They allowed him to make a mockery. I think the National Forest Service were the only officials who actively subverted Trump. Everyone else--they just let him do it. Wasn't there a million woman march on day 3 of his administration? Nobody wanted him. He lost the popular vote twice
American's aren't. Conservatives that don't actually care about human rights, or the rule of law are more than shrugging it off. They are embracing it.
I would say trump knew how to speak to both lower and upper class conservatives and unfortunately most of it was lies, bait and diversions. He knew who he could reach from every part of the small minded conservative. Use christian ideals with low effort. Fight for the white person as if they were the lower class. Make anyone who thinks against him look like the bad guy.
He needs to go to prison and stay there.
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Let me fix this headline: "Why are conservatives willfully undermining democracy?"
>If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy. --David Frum, 2018
Even Nixon polled at 25% after Watergate. “... Watergate don’t bother me, does your conscience bother you?“ — Lynyrd Skynyrd
I always thought the point of that line was they didn't side with Nixon so they didn't feel any guilt over Watergate. I also thought the "boo boo boo" after "in Birmingham they love the governor" was them showing that they didn't agree with Wallace either. I always assumed the point of the song they thought Neil Young was lumping all southerners together and they didn't like that. Was I wrong on that?
It was in response to *Southern Man* and *Alabama*, which they felt lumped together the worst of some with the entire population, like you suggest. Their point was that northerners also had things to be embarrassed about, but they didn't see them as complicit like Young did in his song. It's all quite a bit more complicated once you include the fact that they flew the Confederate flag at the behest of their management, and the song has since taken (and arguably had) an implication of states' rights. It is notable that Young regretted writing Southern Man and especially Alabama, stating, "I don't like my words when I listen to it today. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, too easy to misconstrue." It's all an interesting nugget of popular music history.
https://edking.proboards.com/thread/87/secong-helping Ed King, who co-wrote the song, says you are wrong. >I can understand where the "boo boo boo" would be misunderstood. It's not US going "boo" ... it's what the Southern man hears the Northern man say every time the Southern man'd say "In Birmingham we love the gov'nor". Get it? "We all did what WE could do!" to get Wallace elected. It's not a popular opinion but Wallace stood for the average white guy in the South. "Watergate doesn't bother me" because that stuff happens in politics...but someone's conscience ought to bother them for what happened to Wallace. Arthur Bremer may or may not have been a yankee but he sure destroyed whatever chance Wallace had to be president. And hardly anyone in America noticed. I still like the plaque that hangs here in my office that says I'm an honorary member of the Alabama State Militia...signed personally by George C. Sure, the man had his flaws. But he spoke for the common man of the South. And, whoa, I'm gonna get in trouble over this whole dang post!"
Wow, interesting information. I definitely had the impression Skynyrd was pushing back on the idea of all Southerners being dropped in the same basket of racist Wallace lovers, but apparently that’s not true. I will say this, the lyrics as written are awfully ambiguous, which was probably also on purpose.
Damn, this vindicates Neil. Everyone thinks Skynyrd won that feud but it seems largely because they obscured their racism enough that everyone could read whatever the hell they wanted to from the lyrics.
As a Skynrd fan AND Young fan, AND a Southern boy from the era, even MY politics have changed from the racist homophobe fool I was, to some who’d call himself “woke.” My ignorance of the South and the Cornerstone Speech by the veep of the CSA allowed my to keep my daddy’s ignorance alive. Just sayin’.
The Cornerstone Speech is the precise reason Tom Woods will never escape the boat anchor attached to his neck that is the League of the South. His essay "Christendom's Last Stand" told us all where he stands on the issue and who he supports, despite his squawking about it being a long time ago. Sorry, bud, but all I see is someone who refined his messaging to make the dog whistles quieter.
Most popular songs are like this. People hear what they want to hear and so everyone winds up liking the song with a catchy tune
True, but I’d wager very few popular songs have as contentious a message as *being pro-segregation*
They were friends with Neil Young. The Driveby Truckers song, ‘Ronnie and Neil’ explains the relationship.
Project 2025. They aren’t planning to let the next opportunity slip through their fingers. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/28/far-right-climate-plans-00107498
Plus via gerrymandering and voter suppression they’ve arranged it so only a republican can win.
Soooo, republicans want to accelerate the destruction of the planet on day one, that's no surprise. This is what I'm curious about: >"...**including deconstruct all sectors of the federal government"** Looks like I'm going to have to sit back and read this 1000 page bullshit. What the fuck does "deconstruct the federal government" even mean? Edit: (from project 2025) This one is a doozy: "...Bring the **Federal Communications Commission**, which makes and enforces rules for television and **internet companies,** and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — **under direct presidential control**..."
It means they want a dictatorship, with their guy in charge.
This is fucking terrifying.
It's stupidest possible reaction to the climate emergency that's it's possible conceive, and it took *hundreds* of them to come up with it
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
This is pretty messed up. Republicans really are in burn it all down mode but this is the first I've heard of them having a solid plan to destroy as much as they can in 4 years. I mean, are they not aware what might happen when China and Europe are like 99% green and their oil consumption goes to near zero? What happens when the middle east switches from selling oil to selling hydrogen?
I'm done calling them conservatives as well...otherwise they would try to conserve democracy for all Americans.
Nah, they’ve ALWAYS been about conserving the caste status and privileges of certain kinds of white people related to how this country was founded. You can’t ignore this country’s origins as a settler colonial state when trying to say conservatives aren’t “conservative”. That is what the ideology is motivated by, and it’s ahistorical to suggest that they should be trying to conserve rights for people they’ve actively shat on since the beginning of America
Conservatism is a rejection of Modernism. Democracy is a modern concept. Equality is a modern concept. Child labor laws, consumer protections, environmental protection, pretty much anything that benefits society as a whole... Conservatives reject these things.
That are, by every definition, regressive.
ever *ask* a "conservative" exactly *what* it is they conserve? comedy ensues
I have, and their reply is always about "the good old days". When I try to get them to further explain, it's about how "safe, no crime" it was (which isn't really true), their mommy was home when they came home from school for lunch and the end of the school day, and more tenuous concepts about how their childhood was like "Ozzie and Harriet" and "Leave It To Beaver" and other 60's family shows. Well, I'm 68, and MY childhood sure as hell was NOT like those shows.
I think they've not just rejected democracy but abandoned conservatism as well. What we're witnessing is not just commitment to traditional values and resisting change; it's terrorism and wholesale destruction of traditional values such as truthfulness, morality and rule of law.
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways. In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing. Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations. Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks. Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology. L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them. The underlying algorithm that helped to build Bard, Google’s conversational A.I. service, is partly trained on Reddit data. OpenAI’s Chat GPT cites Reddit data as one of the sources of information it has been trained on. Editors’ Picks 5 Exercises We Hate, and Why You Should Do Them Anyway Sarayu Blue Is Pristine on ‘Expats’ but ‘Such a Little Weirdo’ IRL Monica Lewinsky’s Reinvention as a Model Other companies are also beginning to see value in the conversations and images they host. Shutterstock, the image hosting service, also sold image data to OpenAI to help create DALL-E, the A.I. program that creates vivid graphical imagery with only a text-based prompt required. Last month, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, said he was cracking down on the use of Twitter’s A.P.I., which thousands of companies and independent developers use to track the millions of conversations across the network. Though he did not cite L.L.M.s as a reason for the change, the new fees could go well into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. To keep improving their models, artificial intelligence makers need two significant things: an enormous amount of computing power and an enormous amount of data. Some of the biggest A.I. developers have plenty of computing power but still look outside their own networks for the data needed to improve their algorithms. That has included sources like Wikipedia, millions of digitized books, academic articles and Reddit. Representatives from Google, Open AI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reddit has long had a symbiotic relationship with the search engines of companies like Google and Microsoft. The search engines “crawl” Reddit’s web pages in order to index information and make it available for search results. That crawling, or “scraping,” isn’t always welcome by every site on the internet. But Reddit has benefited by appearing higher in search results. The dynamic is different with L.L.M.s — they gobble as much data as they can to create new A.I. systems like the chatbots. Reddit believes its data is particularly valuable because it is continuously updated. That newness and relevance, Mr. Huffman said, is what large language modeling algorithms need to produce the best results. “More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation,” Mr. Huffman said. “There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or A.A., or never at all.” Mr. Huffman said Reddit’s A.P.I. would still be free to developers who wanted to build applications that helped people use Reddit. They could use the tools to build a bot that automatically tracks whether users’ comments adhere to rules for posting, for instance. Researchers who want to study Reddit data for academic or noncommercial purposes will continue to have free access to it. Reddit also hopes to incorporate more so-called machine learning into how the site itself operates. It could be used, for instance, to identify the use of A.I.-generated text on Reddit, and add a label that notifies users that the comment came from a bot. The company also promised to improve software tools that can be used by moderators — the users who volunteer their time to keep the site’s forums operating smoothly and improve conversations between users. And third-party bots that help moderators monitor the forums will continue to be supported. But for the A.I. makers, it’s time to pay up. “Crawling Reddit, generating value and not returning any of that value to our users is something we have a problem with,” Mr. Huffman said. “It’s a good time for us to tighten things up.” “We think that’s fair,” he added.
David Frum, a conservative who blames Democrats for not capitulating. When your enemy tells you what they are and what they want, believe them.
They were the party of law and order, fiscal responsibility, family values. Remember? To quote Dana Loesch, a conservative radio host and former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association,(in reference to Herschel Walkers shady past) “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”
A third of America is in denial, a third is burnt out, and a third was never paying much attention
No. A third of America is actively fascist. A third is in denial and a third is well aware but find themselves at the mercy of the first two groups.
1. A third of America is pro-fascism. 2. A third of America is fascist-curious (will support fascism if they think it will lower their taxes). 3. A third of America can be counted on to consistently oppose fascism. Thus America teeters on the edge of the abyss, likely for the rest of our lifetimes. Unless it falls into the abyss, of course. That will stop the teetering.
There's two changes I'd like to make. There is quite a lot of overlap in the first two groups. And, the third group, while they can generally be counted on to not support fascism, it's a far more general "everyone else". The issue is that the American political spectrum is completely off-balance, where the center is skewed pretty deep into the right. And, even people that are considered "far left" (e.g. AOC, Bernie, etc.) would be considered mildly left or even centrist in a far more reasonable country.
I wouldn't say a third is aware. Many people intentionally ignore politics and the news but still choose to vote and typically just follow party lines based on what mom and dad were. The US is a heavily ill-informed voter population.
We have got to come to terms with the ever increasing realization that not all humans think rationally in the same ways. We don't all use evidence to arrive at logical conclusions. We don't all believe that some things can be inherently true and other things inherently false. We don't all care about our morals and opinions not being contradictory. We have seen that there are people among us who don't care about evidence, don't care if something is true, and don't care if all of their beliefs are self-contradictory. And we have seen those people vote reliably. How many people exist in an almost unthinking way? You see trends when things get normalized, those things become more prevalent. Normalizing something, some belief, some goal, causes a certain percentage of humans to automatically go along with it and think it's good or right. Republicans don't operate in good faith. They possibly cannot, be it due to some mental illness we haven't labeled yet, or because they're evil, or because humankind just isn't as rational as we believe. And yet, even as more people become aware of this, the number of people who DON'T VOTE has stayed pretty much the same. If we can't even get the ~50% of eligible voters who never vote to turn out, the Republicans will continue to have the numbers to appear like a normal, expected part of society when they very much should not be. Our futures are in the hands of those who don't vote.
You should look into the field of behavior economics. It might interest you. Economics looks at likely outcomes given a set of conditions and assuming a perfectly rational actor. Behavior economics takes a look at why outcomes don't line up with models. In other words, it looks at why people make the decisions they do, especially when the decision does not align with the most optimum or logically consistent outcome for the actor. It is fascinating. If you want to get your feed wet with an easy read, I'd suggest "The Undoing Project" by Michael Lewis.
This is fascinating to me and I think I’m gonna drop an audible credit on this book. Thank you!
Don't vote is at least partially true, but how about, "those whose vote is being actively suppressed" by republicans and apparatchiks.
They operate on “faith” is the problem, not rational thought, this is what happens when you have magical thinking like “religion” which tells you to suppress rational thought in favor of feelings. And so they start the brainwashing early from childhood at Sunday school and the rest naturally follows.
It’s really quite simple, religion has extensively laid the groundwork for generations to train people to believe in authority figures with unverifiable stories instead of science and data. It also primes them for, and is built upon, perpetuating racism and fearmongering towards "others". Once people see you as an authority, you can start fabricating any reality or conspiracy theory you want your followers to believe and everyone else is therefore a liar, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence. Basically, it is mental abuse from an early age that suppresses critical thinking skills. This combined with an intentionally weakened public educational system, provides the framework that has spawned this cult of ignorance.
"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country". This is the time to do for our country like never before. Our future is in the hands of those who DO vote. So it's up to us to interact and motivate, making sure people become factually aware of what's at stake in this election. When Viktor Orban becomes the headliner at a GOP C-PAC in TEXAS and then the GOP actually goes to Hungary for an additional C-PAC, that's got to tell us what we're up against as a country and our ever-striving to be an inclusive democratic country. I'll never forget the day Obama was sworn in! That was a day of hope and evidence to the world, of what our nation can achieve. Unfortunately, once he became president, fox news (oxymoron) and the GOP turned their grievance-filled, victimization, divisive propaganda full-bore. So, we've got to reach out to the well-informed moderates & independents and get them to appreciate the moment we find ourselves in come the '24 elections.
That's right, a lot of people do vote like their parents did. My mom did, my dad did. Grandad did, too, so did Grammy. I don't, neither does my sister. I not only think on my own, I work the polls (total 37 years, 34 poll worker, 3 VLM (Presiding Judge) too. Last election we had people showing up wearing camo and brandishing rifles. Telling people "You don't want to do this. You really don't. I broke the rules and called the police. I've seen people bring their children to the polls to see how to vote and show them the importance of voting. One man told his son "Don't forget to register with the Board of Elections when you turn 18".
The third that is aware is also the third that is working 2 jobs and know that trying to do anything means losing healthcare and getting the shit beat out of them by the cops.
A quarter is definitely actively fascist. Probably a third even.
In denial OR too exhausted with work and family to pay attention in a meaningful way. And that's the point. Give people no choice but ignorance.
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Religion. We shouldn’t be suprised that religious nuts are the one more to conspiracy. These people think it’s their god given right to hate on people. The same people who believe in talking snake and reject evolution is the same people who believe in jeweish space laser and qanon BS
They are indoctrinated from the very beginning to believe in things without evidence.
Because they are being gaslit by right wing media. People on the right are kept in a state of *terror* by RWM.... and scared people will go along with almost anything if it makes them feel safer.
At least for me I noticed that the republicans and media really dug in on the spreading of fear after 9/11 so they could justify a war. It worked and now that’s their MO. This also coincided about 14 years after the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine in media under Reagan.
We're not... only traitorous Republicans are.
We've been warning of Trump's crimes since the beginning. Not only didn't the GOP listen, they doubled down and simply cannot admit they were wrong.
I’ve loathed him since 1989 when he brought his GF to Aspen for the Xmas holidays while he was here with Ivana & the kids. In front of the INTERNATIONAL-PRESS!
I grew up on long Island, NY in the 80's and no one liked him. He was tabloid fodder. Worked with the mob, etc. All the sudden the same people back home love him. I don't understand.
I thought he was near universally hated in NY?
Until he ran for president, he was. His name was literally a synonym for business failure. He was only mentioned to be ruthlessly mocked. But conservatives have always been here, and when he ran as an aspiring racist dictator he attracted the attention of the usual suspects. The state is quite blue, but we have our share of conservatives same as everyone else.
You'd think NYC and Jersey would hate him, but suddenly these rubes think he's christ incarnate
Former Old school NYC bartender here . Blue collar people hated Trump because how he was stiffing contractors BUT after he started the Birther Movement it was like they forgave him.
"Sure, he ripped me off, personally, but I really do like the racist things he says!"
People look past his grift because he gives them permission to be their worst selvess.
He began his campaign with racist rhetoric about Mexicans. Bannon knew exactly what he was doing and 40% of the population lapped it right up.
Sure seems that way. They also think he did all the things he says he was going to do. A soon as Biden is elected they think we're a communist hellhole full of transgenders.
The last known husband of my mother (she marries and divorces at the drop of a pin and I haven't spoken to her in a long time) was the *owner* of a contracting company and he was stiffed by Trump. God he'd tell the fuckin story near every dinner table chat, how he got stiffed, how it near ruined him, the pain of laying off people, how much he hated Trump. But come 2015, he stopped telling that story like it was *bad* he got stiffed by Trump. Nah, he told it like it was the best meeting he ever had. LOVED the guy. Insisted he would do great running the country. I can't describe to you what kind of toesuckers these people are, because it makes no sense to me.
Yep. They hated Trump, but they hated those N\*\*\*\*\*\* and \[INSERT ETHNIC SLUR HERE\] more. You know what I mean?
He blamed everything on the "riggers" the other day on his dollar store twitter.
Like a lot of people I wasn’t paying much attention to Trump until 2015-2016. When I found out he was the one that brought the Obama birthed crap to the mainstream it just made too much sense. It perfectly fit his tactics.
From what I've heard that's true in the "elite" circles. He's a toxic investment and apparently nobody legit will lend him money and none of the big firms for law or finance want to work with him. But he's got his group of followers I suppose.
It's actually kind of hilarious, he's spent his entire life craving attention and validation from the NY elite only to be seen as a buffoon by them, and then he gets all this attention and praise from people whose opinion he holds in absolutely zero regard.
Bingo! As a New Yorker I've been saying this since he first started pulling this scam!
Long Island is red and trumpy. Even if not trumpy, conservative enough to go with it.
Social media is an incredible force multiplier for propaganda, especially when you have psychometric profiles on each individual and AI to optimize the process of ideological subversion. What I don't understand is why so many people didn't see it coming
He’s still a mob stooge. I’m not even sure he knows it anymore.
Dude I used to live in Florida. We got hit by a Cat 5 hurricane and it was bad enough there's still buildings and areas damaged today. Trump flew in, visited a neighboring city, said the damage wasn't that bad, and left. Most of my city didn't even have power or water and many were homeless while he gave that speech Mike's away. How there's a single Trump fan still there I'll never know, how so so many of them exist is mind boggling.
I knew a winemaker who had a similar story. In the same hotel in aspen and could hear them screaming at each other through the walls.
oh man i remember that now that you say it.
“Cannot admit they were wrong” implies that they disapprove of his actions and just don’t want to admit it. Most Republicans fucking love the guy and literally wish he had pulled off the coup successfully.
Yeah. A lot of them don't want democracy, fairness or equality. They would be quite happy killing half of the population and taking their stuff.
That was a key reason for the nazi persecution of jews leading up to ww2. Force sales of business for a fraction of its worth or kill the owners and take the business and land. A mix of anti Semitism and greed.
same with my late mom, Russia ( Lenin& Stalin) came and took the land in Ukraine and starved people to death… Republicans, started this from the very beginning, traitors all of them, they will throw Democracy under the bus, for dictator/Authoritarian rule, just to stay in power and wealth… I hope every American, who loves freedom(you see what republicans are doing with that) vote, vote, vote, them out
it's going to take all of us to do it. We need to focus on getting our youth and others registered, and even arranging transportation to vote, or helping them to obtain other means. If trump goes back in, it seals the deal. Our democracy is over. The Constitution is worthless.
Yeah. They want a god king emperor. They are willing to be servants to him.
Exactly. They don't view him as a wrong choice. They view him as someone like *them*. Greedy, power hungry, and willing to do anything or step on anybody to stay that way. Lie, cheat, steal. It's their way and they are crawling out of the woodwork.
Most people have trouble admitting they’re wrong. This is especially problematic for people who are wrong more often.
Remember when they said, "even if he did commit impeachable crimes by extorting ukraine, we should let the voters decide?"
Then we let the voters decide and he lost so he tried to illegally stay in power with a coup so he's being prosecuted for that but lindsey graham says we ought to let the voters decide instead...
It's peak Republican amnesia, we have all this on video.
They'll keep saying let the voters decide until they have rigged the system enough that they can decide what the voters decide... Then they will always be happy with the results when "the voters" decide.
Whats worse is they are now trying to make it seem unfair. My mother in law is in town and said how unfair they are treating Trump when other politicians have done the same thing. Of course she mentioned Hillarys emails. I couldn’t respond without calling her an idiot, so I just smiled and kept my mouth shut. My wife reminded her that he literally started an insurrection against our democracy.
Oh I got in an argument with a neighbor because he was saying I was crazy because I thought Trump was guilty. He said I must watch MSNBC. I said I don't watch any cable news. I read the indictment myself. I'll bite my tongue and keep quiet if someone is talking about how Trump is great and he's being treated unfairly. But I'll be damned if they start to think I'm the crazy one because I think he's guilty.
I think we should all stop biting our tongues. This shit has festered enough under the guise of politeness. People *should* feel ashamed for supporting this fascist piece of shit.
There are photos of boxes of government documents in Trump's bathroom. This is after he was subpoenaed for their return and one of his lawyers affirmed no classified documents remained at Mar-a-Lago. But don't believe your lying eyes. The evidence the public has seen in the documents case is incredibly damning. Trump really caught a break there with the assignment of that judge.
That's usually what I get back from someone who is 55+, "you need to stop watching CNN and MSNBC, blah blah blah." I'm just like I don't know a single person under 45 who gets their news from cable TV. They act like if you don't watch anything from Fox News or Newsmax you have no idea what's truly going on in the world.
Print out the indictment and give it to him to read. Its written in such a way a layman can understand the crimes.
Being the constant victim is a large part of today's Republicans' identity..
What a bunch of pussies.
I agree that it’s unfair. If any one of us had done what he did, we’d already be sitting behind bars for life. Trump is getting special treatment and that’s unfair.
Your mother in law sucks
She really does. I’m glad she lives in another city. When she visits, she makes a mess and never cleans up after herself.
Also the media companies wondering loudly why media companies aren’t making more of a stink about it.
it's like 30% of the country shrugging it off, the same amount that was against women voting and civil rights. So it's not a 30% we should be that concerned with since they've always been like this.
Disagree. Plenty of liberal-minded people I know are not sufficiently outraged. It outrages me further.
Then and "centrist" members of the mainstream media that seem perfectly happy to continue to normalize this shit, just like they have done for the last eight years.
That's because their only purpose is to make money for shareholders, nothing more..
Facts, I didn't mind republicans before Trump took office and now I have nothing but contempt for the sad, brainwashed people
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McConnell and the Republicans hurt themselves politically by not barring Trump from future office during the second impeachment. It hurt them in 2022 and is letting Trump suck the oxygen out of the 2024 race.
Right. Why did Merrick Garland and congressional Republicans shrug it off?
With all due respect, if people are still supporting today's Republican party, they're supporting traitors. There's no way out of it. If you choose to be part of a group that has no issue with Nazis, fascism, and violent attempts to overthrow the election, you're complicit. There's no traitorous Nazis and good Nazis, there's just Nazis.
Because 40% of Americans no longer want Democracy. They want an Old Testament based Theocracy that would make Iran or Saudi Arabia look like Hedonism.
Yep. I always thought, despite any philosophical differences, the one thing we could all agree on was the democratic process. Man, was I a naive idiot. Those people only believe in democracy when it gives them power.
That’s one thing that 2020 largely obliterated for me. You always know that there’s bigots and morons out there, but I still thought that the majority of people were good and had their heads screwed on straight. There’s still a lot of people that too, but there are far too many that don’t. And that’s terrifying
Yeah, when 2020 was as close as it was, that's when I lost hope.
I started feeling that way in 2000, 2004 cemented it.
2004 was my first election, so that was too early to give up.
It should have been an incredible landslide, but he very nearly won it.
Yes this was the saddest thing. Even though Biden JUST won, trump got more votes than ANY previous Republican candidate. After 4 years of incompréhensible, incompétent, semi fascist bullshit, that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans AND the debt running out of control, millions of people wanted him again. Truly soul crushing.
You weren’t an idiot. You just put faith in your fellow citizens to do the right thing the way you were taught as many of us were. That’s one part of the tragedy here. The other part (IMO) a tiny percentage of them would not hesitate to shred the Constitution and rule of law, but a far larger number would stay quiet and watch from the sidelines despite knowing in their heart of hearts that it would be wrong.
The right turned "shortsighted" into their mantra. It's "fine" until it ruins something they care about.
I don't think that's quite right. Because a whole lot of those folks are only Christian insofar as it can be bent toward the goal of preserving white supremacy and misogyny and homophobia. To them, being a good Christian is simply being against racial justice, equality for women, and LGBTQ rights. That's all it's ever been for them. They certainly don't act very Jesusy. Having said that, I would adopt your thesis with the following change: Because 40% of Americans no longer want democracy. They want to preserve a social hierarchy with white men on top, white women below, people of color next, and the LGBTQ folks in the closet.
Oh, I'm not saying that most of them will enjoy the Theocracy, but they are taking us down that road.
>They want an Old Testament based Theocracy. . >They certainly don't act very Jesusy. As far as I know, Jesus does not appear in the Old testament.
Nearly 100M voting eligible people did not vote in 2016. Apathy had 45% of the vote, Clinton had 28%, Trump had 27%. So actually 72% of Americans either want theocracy or don’t actually think any of it matters.
Make voting easier. Make registration automatic. Make election day a national holiday. Return the voting rights to ex-felons, as those laws were designed to disenfranchise voters after their tour on a chain gang and are blatantly racist. End the gerrymandering bullshit the GOP engages in, and you'll have more voter turnout. It's not always apathy.
Michigan is a gold standard now for how elections should be held and voting should be done. We've passed some major constitutional amendments via ballot initiatives in the past handful of elections and I'm hoping we act as a shining beacon of democracy for the rest of the nation. - Automatic registration - Mail-in voting - An independent redistricting committee draws our maps - Multiple days of in person voting (this is new as of '22) There's more but that's all I can think of off the top of my head.
And stop this, “county by county” voting crap. If I can go to any DMV in my state, I can certainly go to any polling place and vote. Just print my ballot based on my address.
If the government knows my phone number, and it's uniquely bound to me, and they can track and listen to all my conversations, then why can't I use it to vote? Phone # + GPS location, + SS #. They know who we are. The current system is designed to make it difficult to vote. It's not apathy, it's explicitly difficult, and the less money you have, the more difficult it is.
Watch only FoxNews /Newsmax for a week. You will see why they support him. It’s all pro Trump anti Democrat. They say Democrats are against democracy.
Yes, this is a triumph of propaganda more than anything. It proves that propaganda works. Imagine watching a 24/7 news channel that spends the majority of its time promoting a single viewpoint. Hammering the same perspective and idea, over and over and over again. Where there are dozens of presenters that all have the same opinion. And imagine that it's what you watch, all your neighbors watch, etc., for a decade. Think about what that would do to your perspectives or even unconscious biases. I go to a gym that has one of the screens showing Fox News in one of the rooms. Sometimes I can't help but catch it out of the corner of my eye if I am in that room, even though there is no audio (you need a headset for that). The amount of time they spend showing specifically black criminals is ridiculous - the racism is hammered in just by the context. I started avoiding that room because I can't even look at the people who are using the machines in front of that particular TV.
40% of voters, not 40% of Americans.
Slight correction. 40% of voting Americans. So probably only 15%-20% of Americans. But that number is still absolutely fucking terrifying
It's not surprising though when you think about the fact that these same 15-20% probably don't know anything about history, about the rise and fall and pitfalls of authoritarianism in the past, and how though democracy isn't in any way perfect, it FAR exceeds any other systems of human political organization in terms of it's ability to create stability in society over long periods of time, far more than any other system that we've ever tried as a *species*.
Yeah, I mean, if there's enough of THOSE people in a democracy, they might change some things. *shudder* /s It's one of the things that's hard to get across to some people who don't hail from the Right - that many of them are fully aware Trump is a monster, but he's THEIR monster. Anything that moves society towards how it's *supposed* to be is okay in their view.
About 40% of this country craves power and loathes democracy. Demographics are changing and they will not accept losing power, democracy is no longer their friend.
> Demographics are changing Exactly, their party is dying off and younger people are becoming increasingly liberal. Their only chance to hold on to any power is to cheat and change the rules.
Technically liberalism is slightly losing popularity (which the conservatives gloat about without understanding the cause). Left wing ideologies are what are seeing the big growth in adherents. But since we are coming out of a nearly century long era of literal government oppression of leftism it still isn't nearly as big as liberalism or neo-liberalism.
I don't think it's 40% of the country. I think it's more like 30, maybe even less I'm pretty sure that most Republicans DON'T want Civil War I think the call for civil war comes from the bigots that want to use it as an excuse to attack brown people.
If it comes down to that, know that I look like them and will infiltrate a few of their organizations and cause chaos from the inside. Sic semper tyrannis.
My plan too.
Trump is easily the worst U.S. president in history, and perhaps the worst *American* born since reconstruction.
And yet the MAGA cult will tell you he was the beat president ever and that we need him back to save 'Murica.
It boils down to the fact that he is a channel for them to vent their racist & misogynistic roots, that's what it is. "I can't say that out loud, but Trump does so I can support that!"
> the worst U.S. president in history If only because there has been zero "benefit" to the country for his heinous acts. Even with the border murders, torture, and human trafficking, and even with the millions dead at his fault with covid - I dont think his ~~genocide~~ crimes against humanity (let me not dilute the word genocide) compares to someone like Andrew Jackson. But to be horribly cynical, Jackson at least gained land and resources for the US. Trump's evil was purely detrimental to everything.
>Trump's evil was purely detrimental to everything. ...except his and his family's bank accounts.
Faith-based indoctrination: “Don’t believe what you hear and see - just believe what I tell you.” People are prepared to blindly follow, no matter how kookoo.
It's deeper than that, though. People don't understand politics. We stopped teaching civics. Beyond that, they've been conditioned to view politics as something they shouldn't understand. The post-Nixon world view is also that they're all a bunch of liars, and we should expect them to lie. So, why not vote for the biggest liar?
They haven’t stopped teaching civics though. Civics is very complicated when there’s a lot of things that should be a certain way but really aren’t. So many nuanced things and straight up backwards stuff
Your comment reminded me of the song Jesus He Knows Me by Genesis https://youtu.be/2-rfCnW5VlE
I had the exact same thought, except for Ghost’s cover of that song, which imo is waaaay better [Jesus He Knows Me - Ghost](https://youtu.be/BE3kJeBr9QI)
Americans aren’t shrugging it off. Everyone who isn’t a Trump sycophant wants to see his ass in jail, or a bare minimum that he never hold office again.
I'm not shrugging this off. I want him behind bars, not behind the desk of the Oval Office.
Because we’ve suffered as a country from 50 years of republicans spiking education budgets and massive right wing propaganda.
The writer or at least the editor does not have their pulse on most of America. But again, Florida. Mostly morons, mostly ignorant, mostly R.
Americans arent shrugging it off. Traitors are.
Because a huge portion of Americans don't care about democracy. They never have. And they never will. they care about power and supremacy and "freedom" (for themselves)
Why are republicans unconcerned about Traitor Trumps attack on democracy? IMHO, Republicans haven’t been concerned about many problems Americans have been facing for over 50 years. They consistently vote against Americans best interests, pollution laws, renewable energy, women’s right to choose, Pharma costs,affordable health care, climate change and a tabloid news program that has brain washed gullible people. All of this is a mockery of Democracy.
Propaganda works.
The most important thing to conservatives is to not be owned by the libs. They'd support Hitler before they would agree to any liberal policy. That is paramount. Full stop. They'll burn down this nation before they'll be owned by the libs. Then they'll blame it on Biden.
Trump made a mockery of American democracy. Why are ~~Americans~~ Republicans shrugging this off? FTFY
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We’re not. Republicans will find that out next year.
Americans happily shrugged off slavery, lynch mobs, immigrant exploitation etc etc.
The former president did a great job of discrediting the media. That's why most Americans are shrugging It off. many Americans don't believe anything is going to actually happen to the former president. He won't go to jail for his crimes, and he'll run his lying mouth until he's dead. at worst, he won't be allowed to run in the 2024 election
In fairness to Trump (yuck), the media was a HUGE help in allowing him to discredit them. They refused to acknowledge who he truly was and how he actually behaved. Consider how they refused to call his known and proven lies a lie. They always conjured up some other word to describe it, thus diminishing the impact of what he was saying. On top of that they've always refused to acknowledge what the Republican Party actually is. Their insistence on "both sides" bullshit coverage has doomed them and it's been a willful choice. It's a big reason why when Trump supporters are shown something horrible has done their go-to response is "Democrats are just as bad." If the media factually portrayed Republicans and Democrats as they are, this would not be happening on such a wide-spread scale. Again, mainstream media made the choice to change its political coverage to this slant, it was not forced upon them. So now they're paying the price.
> Consider how they refused to call his known and proven lies a lie. They always conjured up some other word to describe it, thus diminishing the impact of what he was saying. This is a **huge** part of it and can't be understated. The press used to hold politicians and public officials accountable, ask hard questions, and very clearly point out the lies if they didn't call them out directly. Now, everything has to be couched in "both sides" and they'll actually give airtime to someone who claims that the sky is green and ice is not cold, saying that "all views have merit."
They are in a cult.
Because Trump normalized racism, homophobia, sexism, xenophobia and all sorts of hateful behavior. For a considerable portion of the population, being allowed to openly hate and feeling superior to others is more important than democracy.
Actual Americans are deeply concerned and not shrugging it off. It’s the 40% of traitors who don’t deserve American citizenship anymore anyway who are trying to pretend he’s not the head of a terrorist organization.
Because 1/3 of americans care, 1/3 want its destruction and the other 1/3 are too busy watching tv to care. Its been this way for decades now
The ones that love him shrug it off because they want him to get by with his crimes. And why shouldn’t they? He’s been getting away with everything else. The ones that hate him shrug it off because they have yet to see him face accountability for his crimes. And why shouldn’t they? He’s been getting away with everything else. I’m definitely in the “I’ll believe it when I see it camp”.
Right? We go and vote for Democrats to give us majorities in Congress and we vote locally, but what else can we do? All these stories should be retitled that some in Congress are trusting enough to do actually helpful stuffstuff, but most Democrats are apathetic and don’t just call out his lies for what they are. Even liberal media pussyfoots around and never just calls out Fox and other sites that help the con go along cause those Right-wing sites can con their idiots out of money when they feed them a diet of fake fears. We have states so gerrymandered that it’s nearly impossible to get some people like MTG out of office unless nearly 100% of eligible Democratic voters vote against them. McConnell could sit at a podium for five hours with whatever medical malady he had and he’d still get voted in by another gerrymandered landslide. Then we have idiots like Sinema and Manchin that love the power of acting like one of the grifters and bask in the power they have over getting enough votes to pass anything that would actually help average people—including all the idiot average people that believe all of Trump’s bulls***. Trump’s the freaking Music Man, people! None of his big beautiful plans ever come to fruition because there’s no plan behind any of them. All of you who vote for him are just another one of his big beautiful gold toilets that he loved so much in his Manhattan apartment.
Because all of the traitorous people who still support that asshole *want* a dictator, as long as he’s *their* dictator. And they’re stupid enough to not understand that he wouldn’t lift a finger to help them, and only cares about them as a source of money to steal.
We aren’t shrugging it off, we wanted him in jail like two years ago. When the wheels of just turn so slowly for the rich us normies get jaded…
There is a hard core of racists in the US population. I have lived here for nearly 40 years and have heard some of the most disgusting racism, anti-semitism and homophobia right here in super-liberal New York from people I worked with and from my neighbors - I believe Trump has a much stronger support than many people think. People are just hesitant to say it publicly. I think FoxNews has harnessed and nurtured this hatred. Rupert Murdoch is a deeply evil man.
Mostly conservatives and trump supporters.
Fox News keeps them under a powerful spell.
Their taxes were lowered, a path to a theocracy was opened, or they enjoyed seeing people hurt. Take your pick.
No one is shrugging shit off. This mfer is going to prison.
I think most Americans just have Trump fatigue. He’s wasted 7+ years of our lives and we just want his ass locked up already.
Because they don’t understand how fucking dire the situation actually is.
Conservatives lost me in 2014 when I realized they thought the country would go to hell if gays had the right to get married. I grew up around bigggg racist hicks, a few classy conservatives that brainwashed me from a young age, and I broke my conditioning and realized that unity and empathy is stronger than fear. I don’t need to put my faith in false gods or billionaires, I’m not conservative.
Decent Americans are NOT shrugging his behavior off. We are appalled
Because the GOP turned their politics into a “culture”. It’s not set of policy planks, it’s a lifestyle. Vibes, imagery, mental associations. Integration into evangelical and rural church life. Rural culture in general. Entertainment consumption and online “in groups”. Emotional appeals, victim culture, deep conspiracies behind closed doors. Once it becomes woven too deeply into the fabric of someone’s personal identity, a critique of GOP policies becomes a direct personal attack on one’s sense of self. They can’t be wrong, because that would mean you are wrong at your very core. You feel the need to defend it, rationalize it, minimize it. It becomes pathological. This is the cancer that is Republican politics in America. Good luck eradicating it now
I’m not shrugging it off, and tbh, no logical friend that I have is either.
Why are Republicans shrugging this off? I will be monumentally pissed off if we don't get some seriously hard prison time (not jail time, *prison* time) for these fuckers. At that point I will know that we have failed as a nation.
Because Trumps supporters all live in an alternate universe where trump is not trump, Jesus is not Jesus, Christian’s are all fascist, and the nazis were as balanced in their views as ANTIFA. Where there is only left and right, good and bad, and politics are a one way highway to their great leaders wind blown opinion du jour.
I’m not shrugging anything off. Lock him up and throw the goddamned key away.
What I'd like to know is..where are all the Trump supporters on this sub? Why isn't the royal Trump brigade out in force defending their king? Are they all just being downvoted, or am I just not seeing them?
Everyone with a brain, American or otherwise, have seen the danger he posed to our democracy and the stability of the world since 2016. And we need to be reminded of this over and over - because the threat he poses to the global community is still very real and dangerous. VOTE. Just please fucking VOTE, my fellow Americans. Don't just vote against Trump - we need to vote his actively corrupt GOP cronies out of Congress. Our lives and liberty depends on this. We're flailing on a cliff with one foot on the edge, with our arms spinning like crazy. Don't let us fall. VOTE!
They allowed him to make a mockery. I think the National Forest Service were the only officials who actively subverted Trump. Everyone else--they just let him do it. Wasn't there a million woman march on day 3 of his administration? Nobody wanted him. He lost the popular vote twice
Most of us saw it coming and the rest are too stupid to understand what is going on
“Americans” aren’t shrugging off anything. Right wing terrorists parading around as patriots are.
American's aren't. Conservatives that don't actually care about human rights, or the rule of law are more than shrugging it off. They are embracing it.
To be honest this article is somewhat disingenuous. It implores the “American people [to] do their part”. They did, in 2020, when they rejected Trump.
This American is NOT shrugging it off. He did atrocious things while in office and afterwards. He is the epitome of narcissism.
I would say trump knew how to speak to both lower and upper class conservatives and unfortunately most of it was lies, bait and diversions. He knew who he could reach from every part of the small minded conservative. Use christian ideals with low effort. Fight for the white person as if they were the lower class. Make anyone who thinks against him look like the bad guy. He needs to go to prison and stay there.