This is the guy who started the Silk Road dark website which was used the facilitate major global drug trafficking. Was serving life in prison. But when Trump wanted the Libertarian Party endorsement he promised them this. He never heard of Ulbricht. Even spelled his name wrong.
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) January 21, 2025 at 7:06 PM
The only thing Trump loves almost as much as money is hanging around with monsters & sociopaths. Feeling that he’s one of the Made Men is probably as close to pure excitement as the old felon is capable of reaching.
"The scum that worked to convict him," as President Trump puts it, were the FBI, federal prosecutors and the GOP-controlled Supreme Court (which denied his ultimate appeal.)
— Dan Murphy (@bungdan.bsky.social) January 21, 2025 at 7:24 PM
annnnnnnd there's the Ross Ulbricht pardon.
Even if you've got mixed feelings about Silk Road, his sentencing was based, in part, on evidence that he ordered the murder of an witness, an informant, and three others.
www.wired.com/2017/05/silk…— Justin Ling (@justinling.ca) January 21, 2025 at 7:34 PM
Just a cherry on the sh*t sundae of his Jan6 insurrectionist releases…
All these women who turned in January 6 terrorists are in danger tonight
— Brandon Friedman (@brandonfriedman.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 11:55 PM
Sergeant Gonell @sergeantaqgo.bsky.social sent me this picture. This is his call log. Each call is an automated Dept of "Justice" notification saying "The defendant you testified against is being released from the dept of corrections."
Each defendant assaulted him.— Harry Dunn (@libradunn1.bsky.social) January 21, 2025 at 10:15 AM
This is the kid I was talking about. And if I'm in his shoes I probably don't feel great about the prospect of the Justice Department keeping me safe under Trumphttps://t.co/sWRoWt3bkf
— The okayest poster there is (@ok_post_guy) January 21, 2025
Sympathy for the devils!
REPORTER: You would agree it's never acceptable to assault police officers?
TRUMP: Sure
REPORTER: Among those you pardoned is a guy who used a stun gun on a police officer. Why does he deserve a pardon?
TRUMP: Well, I don't know— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 21, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Jake Chansley, the Arizona actor who called himself the QAnon Shaman and who became one of the most recognized J6 figures, said tonight in a post on X that he received a pardon from Trump. He added: "NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!!"
— Nick Martin (@nick-martin.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 9:32 PM
KatKapCC
Well, birds of a feather and all that…
Professor Bigfoot
Sturmabteilung.
Old School
Well, we can’t hold Trump responsible for any future violence.
After all, how could he have known?
Old Man Shadow
Pure, irredeemable evil and wickedness.
Suzanne
I forgot about the QAnon shaman. Is QAnon still a thing? Feels like it’s like winged eyeliner and low-rise jeans.
different-church-lady
Welcome to day two of just-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.
different-church-lady
@Old School: It’s an official act.
Raoul Paste
Imagine if a Democrat had done this
different-church-lady
Wait, you’re saying a reporter actually put Trump on the spot?
BellyCat
FTFY
Kay
Went to the county Dem meeting tonight. Right leaning, older Dems (primarily). Not at all online.
They mentioned 1. Trump.supporters booing the Clintons and Obama at such a serious ceremony and 2. Trump pardoning violent offenders.
Horrified by both.
different-church-lady
@Kay: Horrified enough to vote?
(bitter /s)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Suzanne:
I wish I could’ve not remembering him.
Apparently, low-rise jeans made a bit of a comeback in the past few years, along with baggier clothing. I’ve gotten more jeans/pants in straight leg regular fit and I like them a lot better than the slim fits I used to wear
Jay
Welcome to the Gilded Rage.
BellyCat
@Kay: The meeting was in an Ohio diner, I hope.
HeleninEire
Having a moment. I feel trapped. I want to leave and I can’t.
Kay
@different-church-lady:
Oh, God if we’re doing this again I have to leave. We cannot drag every loss along with us, forever. I’ll check back when you-all stop feeling sorry for yourselves.
Of course they voted.
Quinerly
LOD on his second night hitting the double standard re the WH press corps. Biden vs Trump.
I highly recommend last night and tonight. First segments of his show.
Another Scott
@different-church-lady: bsky.app/profile/factpostnews.bsky.social
Lists several pointed questions from reporters to Donnie. It’s a good one to watch.
(Run by one/some of the rapid response people from Harris-Walz.)
Best wishes,
Scott.
Princess
@different-church-lady: You think there are people who care enough to attend a Democratic Party meeting but not enough to vote?
BellyCat
Anybody catch the Pod Save guy’s latest? Some good points on how the Tik-Tok ban without reasoning provided was a bigger mistake than most realize as The Yoot, whom we need to win in 2 years, feel like Dems just banned their lifeline.
different-church-lady
@Kay: Yes, sorry, just bitter humor.
different-church-lady
@Princess: I’m more mocking the idiots who kept saying “Democrats didn’t turn out”. Without seeming to realize that not everyone who voted for Biden was a Democrat.
Quinerly
This needs to be thrown into this thread….
Boebert inviting the pardoned J6ers to tour the Capitol with her.
yahoo.com/news/lauren-boebert-tells-pardoned-jan-215703506.html
John S.
@BellyCat:
I mentioned the same thing the other day, but most here just kind of shrugged it off as no big deal. We shall see.
different-church-lady
More Tik Tok = more problems. It will eventually be a youth Nazi ballfield next to the Nazi bars.
Wag
My only hope is that with all of this bullshit, even the GOP will turn on him.
Then I remember that he tried to overthrow the government, and they still elected him President.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@BellyCat:
@John S.:
It’s possible in a few years it will be forgotten about, like so much else has. People have short-term collective memories
BellyCat
@John S.: So many possible lessons to reflect on, it’s easier to reject them all than try and separate signal from noise, right?
BellyCat
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I kind of doubt it. Especially when Trump either finds a buyer or simple rejects the ban.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@BellyCat:
Why do you have reason to doubt it? People memory-holed the pandemic, January 6th, and recently egg prices apparently
I guess we’ll see
tobie
I worry about the safety of the people who testified against the insurrectionists. The Jan6ers are not people with impulse control. Will their friends in law enforcement help them track down the family members who turned them in? I feel like the police are brown shirts.
Quinerly
FINALLY a police union says SOMETHING. Fraternal Order of the Police endorsed Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
axios.com/2025/01/22/police-union-trump-jan-6-pardons
sentient ai from the future
rule of what now?
J. Arthur Crank
@Quinerly: Good news indeed. So it is theoretically possible for T***m to go too far with some of his supporters.
As an aside, Axios drives me bananas with its writing style (“zooming in”, “between the lines”, etc.). I don’t know if their being like that has made their readers dumber or Axios is like that because their readers are dumber. Either way it annoys me.
tobie
@Quinerly: Of course, the police union had to both-sides their criticism of Trump and claim Biden’s pardons and commutations were just as disturbing. What a gross union.
sentient ai from the future
putting down a marker:
it may never be investigated. who knows. but this ulbricht pardon has to do with cryptocurrency drug/crime networks and voting. (f)elon is part of it. i’d be willing to put money down (ha!) that illicit gambling networks like polymarket are also involved.
networks like that dont just evaporate because you’ve taken out a key organizer.
this is him paying back his cryptocurrency bros for winning the election for him. he only commuted the sentences of his brownshirt leadership.
catclub
@BellyCat: reasonable, since he is one.
wolf parade
@Suzanne: low rise jeans are back and so are these guys.
J. Arthur Crank
@sentient ai from the future: Can’t you just tell us how it all goes, or is there some kind of “temporal prime directive” at play here?
sab
@Quinerly: But they both sided it. FOP is disappointed in both Trump and Biden for their pardons.
Aussie Sheila
@Kay:
I don’t know how you keep doing it.
Christ almighty.
Well done you. I can tell from here people who actually ‘do’ political work, from those who think moral outrage does the trick, especially when you think getting up in the grill of people who are partisans but who don’t share all the particular ideological positions considered ‘correct’ is the way to go.
May the wind be at your back and the road ahead smooth.
Aussie Sheila
@different-church-lady:
You know what? Partisan political identification everywhere in the democratic world has dropped to around 30-35% of any electorate.
And that is especially true for the traditionally centre left parties, even parties that have a stronger partisan id than US Dems.
Unless the centre left finds a way to mobilise anti fascist sentiment, you are done, and in the end, everyone is done.
Fucking get a grip.
gene108
We are heading to a reversal of the last 70 years of civil rights gains, or 127 years if you want include birthright citizenship, and I’m not sure enough attention will be paid to it.
I doubt the news media will constantly cover the human suffering Trump and Republicans are causing. They’ve largely ignored the damage abortion bans have done.
All the money in the world, the courts, most of the media, etc. seem hell bent on undoing progress for non-white men.
Aussie Sheila
@gene108:
Yes they will try to do all that. But without the assent of the people, they won’t succeed. That is the point. Who speaks with and on behalf of the people? And ‘to speak’ means who listens the most intelligently. Not who moralises the loudest.
Intelligent listening is the best political skill. Talking, let alone moralising is useless.
sab
@Aussie Sheila: I am 71 now. My dad just died at age 99 last spring.
I remember getting into a political argument with him in the 1960s. I was very young. We were in the midst of the best progress of the Civil Rights movement, but also in the Vietnam war.
I was very leftish in my politics (I still am) and my dad was outraged. Not about where I was on the political spectrum, but that I thought that spectrum had anything to do with American politics. “We aren’t like Europe here. Each party is a big tent.”
I think he was correct then, but then Nixon got in riding on his racist Southern strategy. My dad was Lincoln Republican. Pro-business but also pro- Civil Rights.
Makes no sense to me now but made perfect sense to him then and for the rest of his life.
He admitted late in his life that unions were really necessary.
ColoradoGuy
Trump is a gangster trained from the cradle by Roy Cohn. He’s always been a gangster, and that’s what the GOP loves about him. No thin veneer of elder statesmanship like Reagan, and certainly not the integrity and down-to-earth leadership qualities of Eisenhower. No, they want an ugly, physically crude gangster who aspires to be the American Hitler.
And that yearning for an outright gangster has been a part of the GOP since Nixon’s early days in the Fifties. Nixon was seen as a devious crook back when he was first elected in 1948, and grew in power as he used the House Un-American Activities Committee to destroy people’s lives, sitting alongside Roy Cohn.
Nixon -> Roy Cohn -> Trump
sab
@ColoradoGuy: Agreed.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@sentient ai from the future: tfg pardoned the brownshirts. That’s what I read. A couple said they were going to go out and get some guns. I don’t think that would have been possible if they had been commuted. Peltier got commuted by Biden.
Geminid
@Aussie Sheila: You got that right. This cheap cynicism people people wallow in is corrosive and debilitating.
If people are too demoralized to function, they can at least not snipe and snark at the ones who can. That’s crab bucket crap.
sab
@Mai Naem mobile ¹: Yes indeed. Both sides.
Biden let a very old and unhealthy man go home under house arrest to die with his family.
Trump let a bunch of angry nut jobs out loose to arm themselves and go kill their former families. Domestic abusers gone rampant with presidential blessing.
TBone
@Professor Bigfoot: when little bro and I were in Munich as very young teens, we ate a meal at the Munich Hofbrauhaus. My stepdad wanted my brother and I to exist in places like that in Germany and Austria. He spit right in the Nazis’ eyes through us just being there and being happy. I had stuffed brook trout and I bought a beer stein. Same with Kehlsteinhaus – he was so chuffed to see us kids alive and happy and enjoying ourselves, like we were dancing on Hitler’s grave. I miss my dad so much these days.
TBone
@Jay: you said it! You won the thread.
TBone
@Quinerly: the c word is relevant.
Aussie Sheila
@sab:
Yes, this. My family were solidly middle class ‘conservatives’ but not in the US sense of that. They were against Australian participation in the war against Vietnamese liberation, and were sympathetic to the Chinese revolution in 1949, understanding anti imperialistic movements to their bone. Those sentiments were not ‘outre’ for the Australian middle class of the ‘50s and ‘60s.
Those sentiments drive the anti AUKUS sentiment now and will continue to do so. It isn’t ‘leftisim’ as understood in the US. It is solid middle class resistance to the demands of a gangster state.
The Australian left wouldn’t be recognised in the US. It is calm, well organised, and doesn’t mistake being ‘anti establishment’ for being left wing, and above all, doesn’t mistake being pro Ukraine for being anti imperialism.
There are of course, fuckwits here. No polity is without them. Anti semites have attended the anti Israel demos re Gaza. But they have mostly been shoved out, with the assistance of Muslim communities
Aussie Sheila
@ColoradoGuy:
I think this is the essence of trump and his following. He is a gangster and so are his fervent followers. This is also the essence of fascism and its leaders. It is vital that the base of the centre left be weaned off this chimera stat. That means tough, no nonsense leadership from top to bottom and the other way around. No nonsense, no thumb sucking, and no bipartisanship when it comes to fascists.
It also means strong Party leadership.
Raflw
@gene108: One need not have all that sharp a DEI lense to see that many reporters and most editors at all our big papers are white men.
OK, they might have ridden along on the me too stuff while it generated clicks, but they’re not particularly interested in ceding their own power. Look at how they lapped up the defenestration of two powerful non-white women university presidents. And have their noses so far up Chris Rufo’s ass they can tickle his prostate by exhaling.
Aussie Sheila
@Raflw:
Agree. Which is why that recognition must accompany a determined ‘popular front’ strategy against the gangsterism of the trump administration. No apologies, no stepping back, no throat clearing, no bipartisanship. Absolute and clear opposition. From as many fronts as can be organised.
Loud and proud, all day every day.
satby
@Aussie Sheila:> Talking, let alone moralising is useless.
And yet, you consistently show up here to do just that.
matt
@BellyCat: that’s dumb handwringing.
MomSense
@Suzanne:
Oh yeah. You see some of them commenting about LA fires. Deep State is getting rid of the Diddy tunnels.
sab
@satby: I think Aussie Shiela misunderstood about 95 percent of my comnent, but that is what transnational comments are about. At least ours are in sort of English ( since neither of us speak actual Received Pronunciation English) Thank God. for that.
Chris Johnson
@Quinerly: …again?
Or was it a different congresscritter who helped them case the joint, and Boebert who placed bombs? Or was that MTG who placed bombs?
Because I’ll note that one of the things happening is the Musk side of things being ascendant and showing how much they want to be fully Nazis.
Boebert, MTG, Gaetz and a pack of Trump’s nominees are not that faction. They’re the Russia faction. Fully, 100%, run by Putin. As is Trump… SORT of. Because he’s kinda ungovernable and too stupid to be of much use, and guys who are a lot smarter (Carlson) don’t get a look in no matter how hard they fluff Putin and Russia because they are a lot smarter.
And Musk, in particular, is dangerous to Putin because Musk controls tech things and is too wacked out on ketamine to know fear. Musk is a real danger to Putin, probably entertaining ideas of seizing power in the US AND in Russia as the big satellite savior and Dr Evil supreme.
In this light, the J6ers are wrecking balls and terrorists, yeah, but all that crowd are really not FIRST dangerous to us or our loved ones. (their loved ones, yeah: they will act like they can just run around killing anyone they want, cops emphatically included)
That crowd are primarily dangerous to the techbro faction, to the Ramaswamys, to the Musks, to the oligarchs. They’re out to accomplish an incoherent mess because it’ll wreck America, many of them show total fealty to Putin over even Trump, and Boebert is showing them the layout of the Capitol.
For sure they’re a danger to Democrats: that’s a given. But they’re arguably more of a danger to anyone in the Trump tent who are not Russia-aligned. And that tent is a coalition of villains, not unified. And villains don’t play nice with each other.
In particular, MAGA can be weaponized against the techbros. The techbros are fools, but insist on becoming even wealthier. That’s… not the plan for them.
Chris Johnson
@Quinerly: And so they should. This police union correctly identifies those right-wing militias as rivals. ‘Proud Boys’, ‘Oath Keepers’ will be in training to be death squads for their preferred leaders (here or indeed from elsewhere) and will make a particular point of training to kill police and replace them, because police are at best ‘plausible deniability death squads’ and will have too much loyalty to their own, to commit completely to being death squads for the leader.
That’s not necessarily because they’re any morally better, but they’ve got generations upon generations of self-interest and they’ve got a degree of kayfabe where they are expected to serve justice. You could say the public-facing part of their job is to represent justice. The militia guys have no problem abandoning that and just being death squads… those that align with Trump or his Russian enabler.
None of this means there can’t be militia death squads aligning AGAINST Trump. Those ones wouldn’t be buddy-buddy with Boebert and the Russians. They’ll exist. In a sense that’s what the Boebert faction are trying to guard against, though the Boebert faction are often too addled to be all that effective.
Ksmiami
@ColoradoGuy: which is why we need to feel nothing but hatred for them as we fight back. No mercy.
lowtechcyclist
I said earlier that the party line about the J6 pardons needs to be that Trump set hundreds of dangerous criminals loose. Even more so now that we know about some of the specific people who are in danger on account of this horror.
Barney
As someone pointed out to me, it seems highly like that Ulbricht, or his family, still have tons of hidden crypto to pay a bribe to Trump with. That seems a far more likely transaction for Trump to do than “the support of the Libertarian Party” (which he got, and doesn’t need now, so he’d normally stiff a bill like that).
MomSense
Trump needs terrorists at the ready to threaten and worse anyone who disagrees with him, especially elected officials at all levels. School board member doesn’t agree with a book ban or firing of a teacher? He won’t even have to ask them.
I ran afoul of some local gun nuts after Sandy Hook and that was bad enough. This will be much, much worse.
Kay
Ulbricht hosted a seller of adulterated drugs on his platform. A 17 year old Australian high school student ordered the drugs. He had a psychotic episode and jumped off a balcony to his death. His parents were at Ulbricht’s sentencing.
The sentence was so harsh because of that – he killed a 17 year old.
MomSense
@BellyCat:
Banning TikTok was so fucking stupid. Oh well. It hurt Dems and TikTok is back but 100% more Nazi. The algorithms on all the big platforms have been tweaked. The broligarchy has been activated. Information has always been powerful.
Kay
Ulbricht and Trump actually have a lot in common. Both privileged assholes who play tough guy.
Ulbricht – who was too fucking cowardly to do his own killing – hired what he thought were outlaw motorcycle gang members to kill his business associates. He paid them millions in Bitcoin. But they burned him – they staged a murder and sent Ulbricht a photo of his supposedly beaten and drowned enemy. Instead of murdering Ulbricht’s enemies, however, they worked with his enemies to stage the murder and take Ulbricht’s money. The contract killers he hired robbed him.
Ulbricht is a clown.
Geminid
@Barney: Trump needed Libertarian support because he needed every last vote he could scrape up. He got it too; last year’s vote for the Libertarian candidate was a little over a third of what Jo Jorgenson received in 2020.
Kay
Trump talks a lot about extrajudicial killing of Mexican drug dealers because of overdose deaths in the US.
Did his handlers tell him Ulbricht killed a 17 year old and expressed no remorse and those were factors in his sentencing? He was a drug dealer who sold all over the world and killed people. Exactly like the Mexican drug lords.
Kay
@MomSense:
I got off TikTok. Its all MAGA now. But I find the clarity of this realignment energizing. All the billionaires are on their side now.
Zuckerberg and Bezos were never our friends. My middle son built an Amazon data center. He said the Amazon workers were treated like shit. He told them to go over to Samsung SDS. The Koreans treat US workers better than US billionaires do.
satby
@sab: she’s a troll
Kay
@different-church-lady:
I’m sorry I snapped at you. I had just left a meeting where everyone was in full bore panic mode, I spent 90 minutes trying to buck them up, and I unfairly took all that out on you for really no reason. I know you were joking.
Ruckus
@sab:
A lot of things were different in the way back. Politics was one of them. Stated differently, taken differently, and not seen as often or heard as loudly. How long has what we are doing now been around?
You and I are not all that much different in age, I’m 75. We have seen some very different information on, well most everything over the last 20-25 years. Like what we are doing right here, right now. And yes I’ve made this comment here before. We only had anywhere near what we are doing here and now over back yard fences 25-30 yrs ago. We see and hear far more than we did back then. News was different because it was controlled by the networks and those were/are owned by the wealthy. Money has always been a controlling factor till as I’m saying 20-25 yrs ago. What we are doing right here, right now, is the common citizen (and not citizens) communicating, openly, across the street, nation, the world. We are not controlled by the news networks or only face to face communications. My point is that information delivery has changed significantly, and not all that long ago. Now we may need to do better to avoid things like electing someone totally incapable of doing the job of actually being anything but a self absorbed, all unknowing sack of whatever. But then this is humanity……
Ruckus
@Kay:
When some have lots of money, they become scared that they will lose it. Any of it. It’s like a drug to a lot of humans, not a way to live far more than comfortably. It’s like being the most dangerous member in a gang. And it’s not everyone with a lot of money but it is a not insignificant percentage of them. It allows them to effectively purchase humans – or at least their attention. To some it’s similar to a drug addiction. Except overdosing doesn’t kill you. Though it can make one a complete and utter asshole.
Matt
My advice to anybody who testified against one of these chuds: make sure you have a loaded firearm and are prepared to Stand Your Ground. That’s the only language they speak, and the only cure for their insanity.