Trump Thread

[a completely inoffensive name]

Violence is always avoidable. The political violence isn't only because these mentally compromised people are having their fears and destructive thoughts escalated and amplified by an accommodating conservative media bubble.

[Montmorency]

Violence is always avoidable. The political violence isn't only because these mentally compromised people are having their fears and destructive thoughts escalated and amplified by an accommodating conservative media bubble.

There's something important I failed to include above: political violence is never really spontaneous. It is almost always fomented from above. (Every genocide, indeed, is organized. Even one-off pogroms against Jews and Negroes were organized from above.) Donald Trump benefits from political violence, indeed may not be able to survive without recourse to it, and has consciously agitated for violent retribution by his base against his enemies since the beginning. He does it more nakedly and shrilly as time passes. More importantly, Republican politicians and media icons around the country and on both state and federal levels have adopted and amplified this rhetoric.

One reason that extremist terrorist groups in post-war Europe or pre-war United States achieved no significant or lasting results, despite being unimaginably prolific by today's standards, was the unity of the political mainstream against them. And the European groups killed a lot of people during the Cold War, including major politicians and American figures. Today, apocalyptic confrontation is half the mainstream.

Things can only get much worse, and they will, unless you imagine a divine intervention to soften Pharaoh's heart. Time and pressure continue to grind away the layers of impossible > unthinkable > unfeasible > improbable > normal.

Have I mentioned that the only oath in all the depth of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family strong enough to capture the Trump phenomenon is nithing?

[Strike For The South]

This is directly on this administrations hands. The last thing this man posted was how Jews were funding the "caravan". We are slipping towards a tipping point. These are dark times.

[Beskar]

This is directly on this administrations hands. The last thing this man posted was how Jews were funding the "caravan". We are slipping towards a tipping point. These are dark times.

and the President suggested the democrats did it as a false-flag in a tweet..

Because someone who has their van decorated like this is clearly of a rational mind.

[Montmorency]

This is directly on this administrations hands. The last thing this man posted was how Jews were funding the "caravan". We are slipping towards a tipping point. These are dark times.

The escalation of agents of violence moves inward from the fringe of the, uh, mentally-defective and deranged toward the sane who are ideologically and physically committed to violence.

The next step down was illustrated already today by the Neo-Nazi terrorist who lethally shot up a synagogue because Trump was not sufficiently nationalist and was not moving to exterminate the Jews.

There are some steps to go, but a transformative milestone will be reached once there is a symbiotic connection made between Republican political leaders and gangs like Patriot Prayer or the Proud Boys. If Republican figures realize that they can advance their aims by co-opting and deploying the "militias" for the purpose of political suppression and terror in localities where the police forces are congenial, the GOP at large will come to partake out of institutional gravity (just as they did with Trumpism); those who refuse will be the next round to exit the party. At that point, the proto-brownshirts will become the genuine article...

EDIT: Oh, and lookit that, potentially an anti-black terrorist in the mold of Dylann Roof just the other day.

[Beskar]

Montmorency;*two more hate crimes by the right*

In the minds of those people, the Purge is simply the next step, not a horror series...

[a completely inoffensive name]

This is directly on this administrations hands. The last thing this man posted was how Jews were funding the "caravan". We are slipping towards a tipping point. These are dark times.

And yet, his approval has been increasing recently.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com...roval-ratings/

[Montmorency]

And yet, his approval has been increasing recently.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com...roval-ratings/

I find it remarkable how stable his approval ratings have been over the full term (perhaps only Obama is comparable in this regard out of the records of all Presidents as shown on 538). But his base will respond, thus slightly bumping his approval, every time he engages in his bailiwick, which is cultural-symbolic warfare and antagonism. Economics is literally meaningless in registering Trump's base support (as opposed to interest group or financial support).

You must understand - as so many have noted, but as this twitter thread does relatively succinctly - is that Trump's only option to build support is to divide the country (read the whole thing):

Starting from the proposal that Trump’s failure to even try to “unite” the country after the bombs doesn’t only stem from his character but his business model.

Or to put it otherwise, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his continued political success depends upon his not understanding it. Trump’s prospects for political survival don’t depend on uniting country, but on continuing to divide it in ways that are reinforced by the political geography of Senate, the rural-urban divide in House seats etc. Even if (implausibly) he wanted to build unity, he couldn’t stick to it without undermining his only viable political strategy (the people who hate him are going to go on hating him). This seems obvious.

What is maybe less immediately obvious is that the Democratic party faces very similar strictures. The broad aspirational claim that the country could be ‘united’ by a president depended on a very different ecosystem, where TV etc had a highly pronounced centrist bias.

As the historical work of @pastpunditry and the ecosystem mapping of @YBenkler et al. demonstrate, this has been radically transformed. We now have a bifurcated media ecosystem, with Fox News and its satellites radically at odds with the old consensus, which persuades viewers into a version of @normative epistemic closure (see also @drvox passsim). This means that Democratic presidents aren’t ever going to be able to unite the country either – a substantial minority will always believe they are part of a madrassa/benghazi/communist/globalist plot.

It’s notable that the last moment of purported ‘unity’ was GWB and the Iraq war – when the traditional media flocked to Fox’s view of the world, rather than vice versa. But there is a substantial minority that will never, ever be united beneath a president that has the (D).

So this creates a problem for the Democrats. They’re going to be asked to bring unity back to American politics, but they’re not going to be able to. When Clinton complained about the “deplorables” she was absolutely right. They may not be deplorable in the sense that they may be good to their neighbors, do not kick puppy dogs for fun etc, but they are going to be eager consumers of conspiracy theories, and they will be difficult to impossible to persuade given prevailing media structures.

What this means is that “uniting the country” is perhaps plausible as an organizing myth for a coalition that would like to think of itself as the unifying spirit of the country, but “uniting the country” should never be mistaken as a program for practical action. Indeed, that goal is likely to be a continuing problem, insofar as the coalition is likely to get cross pressure from a mainstream media that is still drinking its own home-brewed Kool-Aid, when that coalition takes politically divisive measures that are politically necessary under current circumstances. Justifying these measures in terms of broad political programs that are hard for media to assail because of their urgency – e.g. the need to restore American democracy a la Ezra, or the threat of global warming – is one possible way of responding that is obviously good on its own merits, albeit not always going to be effective in convincing media figures who still think they are in an earlier and very different America that operates according to different rules.

But if my barstool punditizing is right, then Trump’s immediate departure from uniting to dividing does not just represent his personal drive to spite and chaos. It also reflects the real state of a country that is so profoundly divided that Humpty Dumpty ain’t never going to be reassembled properly. While deploring the ways in which Trump uses this state of affairs, Democrats should be under no illusions it can be fixed.

Also, here is a useful article that elaborated on the recent topics of discussion here (re: compromise, extremism, partisanship), and explains why even alignment on economic policy between Democrats and Republicans will never allow for a meaningful coalition. (The TLDR is that the parties used to be similar enough that voters felt cross-pressured between identity groups associated with either party, but now they are more cleanly divided along lines like race, sex, and class)

Let me repeat my belief that this is our best option:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Montmorency]

There's been some pretty dire shit going on in the past week or two of these bad times, including the President of the United States claiming to have the power to revoke or abrogate Constitutional rights by executive fiat

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

not even with reference to some national emergency requiring the temporary derogation of protections, but with reference to the President's opinion on what the Constitution ought to say

so it's time for a

HUMOR BREAK


A young right-wing provocateur Jacob Wohl was just outed for attempting to frame the Special Counsel Mueller with discrediting sexual assault allegations. His plot was apparently as follows (in this summation where I'm missing something, it's probably a detail that makes the whole enterprise even dumber and you can delve and chuckle for yourselves):

1. Pose as a fake woman contacting reporters claiming that Republican operatives are paying her to lodge false accusations of sexual assault against Mueller.
2. Contact a real woman and offer her money to sign a sworn affidavit alleging that Mueller sexually assaulted her nearly 50 years ago.
3. Use a fake firm to put out a fake report containing anonymous allegations of sexual assault by Mueller through Gateway Pundit, a far-right fake news mill that, among other things, pushed the narrative in October 2016 that pro-Trump FBI agents were going to leak damaging information about Clinton as an October Surprise (FBI Director James Comey infamously got out ahead of this by effectively leaking himself)
4. Something something MeToo
5. ???
6. Glory to God-Emperor Trump!

Apparently the front site they setup to distribute the final product (the report and accusations) was filled with stock photos of actors and models, and included/was registered to Wohl's personal email and phone number - as well as a phone number registered to his mother.

Wohl stopped responding to NBC News after being told Surefire's official phone number redirects to his mother's voicemail.

<insert preferred gif>

Mueller quickly got wind of it and the FBI is investigating. Wohl will be lucky to escape a federal prison sentence for suborning perjury among other things.

@GilrandirThis is what politically-motivated accusations look like. Their hallmark is that they are very easy to debunk.

[Gilrandir]

There's been some pretty dire shit going on in the past week or two of these bad times, including the President of the United States claiming to have the power to revoke or abrogate Constitutional rights by executive fiat

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

not even with reference to some national emergency requiring the temporary derogation of protections, but with reference to the President's opinion on what the Constitution ought to say

so it's time for a

HUMOR BREAK


A young right-wing provocateur Jacob Wohl was just outed for attempting to frame the Special Counsel Mueller with discrediting sexual assault allegations. His plot was apparently as follows (in this summation where I'm missing something, it's probably a detail that makes the whole enterprise even dumber and you can delve and chuckle for yourselves):

1. Pose as a fake woman contacting reporters claiming that Republican operatives are paying her to lodge false accusations of sexual assault against Mueller.
2. Contact a real woman and offer her money to sign a sworn affidavit alleging that Mueller sexually assaulted her nearly 50 years ago.
3. Use a fake firm to put out a fake report containing anonymous allegations of sexual assault by Mueller through Gateway Pundit, a far-right fake news mill that, among other things, pushed the narrative in October 2016 that pro-Trump FBI agents were going to leak damaging information about Clinton as an October Surprise (FBI Director James Comey infamously got out ahead of this by effectively leaking himself)
4. Something something MeToo
5. ???
6. Glory to God-Emperor Trump!

Apparently the front site they setup to distribute the final product (the report and accusations) was filled with stock photos of actors and models, and included/was registered to Wohl's personal email and phone number - as well as a phone number registered to his mother.



<insert preferred gif>

Mueller quickly got wind of it and the FBI is investigating. Wohl will be lucky to escape a federal prison sentence for suborning perjury among other things.

@GilrandirThis is what politically-motivated accusations look like. Their hallmark is that they are very easy to debunk.

This accusation abounds in "fake" words, so its not really an accusation. Just old woman's tales. Real accusations are not like that. But, anyway, be it real or false, any accusations of a politician which are that old are politically motivated.