I'm giving you a mission for this Memorial Day holiday weekend. I want you to talk to two people—friends, neighbors, cookout attendees—about why Trump's proposed budget would be a disaster for American kids.
We owe the next generation every chance, and this isn't it.— Hillary Rodham Clinton (@hillaryclinton.bsky.social) May 23, 2025 at 10:50 AM
All while he is promising, explicitly most of the time, to harm them.
— Clean Observer (@hammbear2024.bsky.social) May 23, 2025 at 10:19 PM
If I have a problem with the current democratic establishment discourse vis-a-vis Trump and the issues right now, it's the complete whitewashing of history before Nixon, and really probably Raegan.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) May 23, 2025 at 10:36 AM
You are welcome to disagree with me here, but I fundamentally don't view Trumpism as attempting to bring about an autocratic fascist state. I view it as a reactionary movement designed to move us back to the Gilded Age.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) May 23, 2025 at 10:36 AM
But regardless of what you think about Trump, Trumpism, whether it's fascist or not, you really need to be aware that the movement itself is -incredibly- American, and grows out of all the messy history of the United States.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) May 23, 2025 at 10:36 AM
Make that the last 150.
Just as we remember the burning of the White House and the British don't, the Mexicans remember Pershing coming for Pancho Villa and we don't— rebeccalynn2025.bsky.social (@rebeccalynn2025.bsky.social) May 23, 2025 at 11:05 AM
Baud
The Gilded Age and Jim Crow, which overlapped in time.
sab
@Baud: Good point.
It wasn’t until college that I learned that the reason the British burned the White House is because we had burned Toronto the previous winter.
ETA Not just Totonto but villages all over the Ontario peninsula. In February, leaving people homeless in Canadian winter.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Move *back” into the Gilded Age?
We’ve moved *into* Gilded Age 2.0 and have been for much of this century.
Nukular Biskits
And, with that, good mornin’, y’all.
And to reprise what I had just posted in the previous thread right before y’all so rudely moved on to this one:
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
It can be (and is, imho) all three:
RevRick
@Baud: When Hitler took power, he sent a delegation to Arkansas to learn how to do fascism legally. Since all fascisms begin with some claim to racial/ethnic/religious superiority, Jim Crow was the first modern fascism.
Ten Bears
The day they laid poor Pancho low Lefty split for Ohio
Where he got the bread to go, well, ain’t no body knows …
comrade scotts agenda of rage
https://www.facingsouth.org/2021/04/university-arkansass-hidden-history-helping-nazis
Arkansas and Nazis! I wonder if their current sorry-ass governor knows this? Probably considers it a notable (in a good way) moment in that great state’s history.
Nukular Biskits
@sab:
There was book I read year ago titled something like “Lies My Teach Told Me” which exposed some of the historical white-washing (and that word is carrying a lot of implications there, intentionally).
A lot of what we were taught in elementary and high school were historical fibrications, with “The Lost Cause” here in the South being a prime example.
It’s no wonder white conservatives are desperate to punish higher ed for not taking a knee.
UncleEbeneezer
If Dems tried to connect Trumpism to Reagan, Nixon, The Confederacy etc., they would be bashed for being nerdy professors who are stuck in the past and this is why they fail with young/infrequent voters etc. People like us here might appreciate a wholistic history approach to our politics (I know I do) but I don’t think it appeals to normies nearly as much as that Bsky poster assumes.
Nukular Biskits
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
“WhY aRe YoU bEiNg So DiViSiVe?!?!?!?!”
/
Interesting. And I posted that on my Bluesky account.
Thanks for the history lesson!
Manyakitty
@Nukular Biskits: this is a good suggestion.
RevRick
This Big Bill of Abomination not only strips many children of their futures in the way the former Sec. Of State lists, but it also guts all the climate change legislation that would lessen the impact of CO2 on their world. On top of that this abomination puts on the chopping block ways to assist special needs children in their education. And the cherry on top is that the bottom 40% actually loses income.
Nukular Biskits
@RevRick:
You obviously don’t understand: Those are all features, not bugs.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
I wonder how many Never Trumpers, if you could get them to talk off-the-record, support much if not all of this bill?
Same thing for more prominent NTers like Liz Cheney.
RevRick
I wonder if some GOP Representatives willingly went on this suicide mission by supporting this bill, because they firmly believe that the Democrats won’t be able to assemble the 218-51-1 majorities necessary to undo their harm until 2040 at the earliest.
RevRick
@Nukular Biskits: Oh, I understand alright.
Betty Cracker
@Nukular Biskits: Glad you ported that into this thread. It’s a super important message!
Betty Cracker
@UncleEbeneezer: I think you’re right.
Omnes Omnibus
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: At the moment, I don’t really care. If they oppose it right now merely because they want Trump to lose, I will welcome their help. I will happily have vicious policy battles with down the road.
Princess
Canada remembers burning the White House. (But I only recently learned about the burning of Toronto)
The argument about the restoration of the Gilded Age is certainly true, as is the essential Americanness of what is happening. I do think though that if you were Black or an immigrant during the Gilded Age, it took on a certain resemblance to Fascism — I mean Nazi tace “science” comes straight from American race “science.” (As I now said RevRick noted above)
Dorothy A. Winsor
The future queen of Belgium is a grad student at Harvard. For now.
Nukular Biskits
@Betty Cracker:
I waver between “Why the fuck even bother?” to “Make the sociopathic cultists explain their position!”
Omnes Omnibus
@sab: Why had we burned Toronto? Because we were at war with Britain and an attempt to take and hold British territory in Canada was a reasonable military objective in that context. It didn’t work all that well, but it was a logical strategy during a war.
Betty Cracker
@Nukular Biskits: Same. I had a polite but pointed conversation this week with my shitty House rep’s intern about how his support of the Big Ugly Bill contradicts the constant PR crap his office pumps out about supporting seniors, veterans, etc. She sounded slightly put-upon, as if she’d had many conversations of a similar nature. GOOD.
lowtechcyclist
@Nukular Biskits:
This.
lowtechcyclist
@RevRick:
218-51-1-5 as David Anderson has frequently reminded us.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s not my point and it’s one I always come back to: ask a Never Trumper who they vote for down ballot. I know we’ve got a couple of prominent ones like Rubin, who actually do vote for down-ballot Dems but so many of the rest?
Sure, they’re basically Stalin in terms of defeating Hair Furor to use the usual WW2 analogy, but it doesn’t mean we blissfully look away on the rest, particularly if they’re voting for people who blatantly don’t uphold their duty to the Constitution as another branch of government.
And produce crap legislation like this.
japa21
Personally, I don’t think Trump is a fascist and most of his supporters have no idea what the word means . But the people behind the scenes like the engineers of Project 2025 are most definitely fascist and proud of it.
Peale
@UncleEbeneezer: yep.
“I know you’re mad as hell right now and want action, but let’s first start out with a lecture from a professor” is the liberal approach to solving all problems.
Nukular Biskits
@Betty Cracker:
Let’s face it: You’re never going to get a direct (or, most of the time, indirect) answer to any policy/position question you put to the poor staffer* in a US Representative’s or US Senator’s office. Their primary responsibility is to help constituents who are having problems with federal agencies (such as the VA or Social Security, etc) or simply “pass along your concerns”. And, WRT to the latter there, they mostly use that to help their boss determine which way the political winds are blowing.
Whenever I call, I’m polite (or at least I hope I am) but firm: I demand I want an answer (although I know I won’t get one), that I want someone to call me back with an answer (not a response), etc. And I almost always end the call by thanking them for doing what is probably a thankless job of not only dealing with angry constituents but outright cranks (which probably is sometimes me as well). But I also remind them their boss is outright lying, wrong, etc., and is refusing to answer to his/her constituents.
*Most of these are college-age kids who appear to be either intentionally kept in the dark or are smart enough to not try to explain/defend their boss’s rhetoric/statements/positions. On rare occasions, I will encounter a staffer who tries to “correct” me but I shut that shit down with quotes/facts … I usually don’t call unprepared.
Nukular Biskits
@lowtechcyclist @RevRick:
This. And I see this at the state level as well here in MS, the perfect example being the phase out of the state income tax. All those who were cheerleading it, including “heritage, not hate” poster boy Gov. Tate Reeves, will be long gone, in comfortable, lucrative, well-connected lobbying or similar jobs and will never be held accountable when the piper is to be paid for their political malpractice.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Nukular Biskits:
So, you’re saying don’t call and start the call by saying:
“You’re boss is a lying sack of shit.”
I also have no sympathy whatsoever for college-age kids working for a GOP house member. It simply means they’re young true believers so making them regret, even if it’s a little frictional way of a phone call, that life choice is a plus.
Hoodie
@RevRick: That might play a role but I would suspect that most of this is giving Trump a win (and this avoiding being primaried) and extending the tax cuts, which is a gain they and their social peers can realize immediately. The Medicaid and other cuts were to get the sadist and racist loons on board and, importantly, are pushed down the road to delay consequences. The blue state GOPers were bought off with the raise in the SALT deduction, they tend to come from more affluent districts and maybe they think that will be enough to save them.
oldgold
It is the Navy’s 250th anniversary October 13 and the Marine’s on November 10.
Unfortunately for them, their big day is not on the Short-Fingered Vulgarian’s birthday – so, no big DC parade. Well, on second thought, they are probably better off having their own celebration and not allowing the Mango Mussolini to steal their valor.
RevRick
@lowtechcyclist: The 5 only comes into play when there are policy-Constitutional issues. A Reconciliation Bill should only deal with $, though this particular one has snuck some nasty policy stuff into it. The Senate might strip those out, because Byrd rules, but who knows?
jimmiraybob
“You are welcome to disagree with me here, but I fundamentally don’t view Trumpism as attempting to bring about an autocratic fascist state. I view it as a reactionary movement designed to move us back to the Gilded Age.”
Oh Schnorkles … sigh …..
That is what fascism does. It’s all about a mythical past when everything was golden and the mother/father country was free of invading subhuman vermin and the state & Party are one and the same. Let’s just call it a planned fascist Golden Era.
Betty Cracker
@Nukular Biskits: Sounds like we have a similar approach to registering disapproval with our reps — and a similar level of wholly justified cynicism about the corrupt GOP pricks who run our respective states. Florida has no income tax, so now Gov. Pudd’n Boots is trying to eliminate property taxes.
Where are public schools and local governments supposed to get revenue if that happens? Not his problem! He and his grifty wife will have moved on to right-wing media sinecures by the time that shit hits the fan.
(Or at least he thinks so. He’s so personally repellent that he may find his options are more limited than he thinks. Even fellow Repubs can’t stand that peevish fuckface!)
Nukular Biskits
lowtechcyclist posted this in the previous thread:
So … what if a lot of Americans register for their 2 free tickets () but never show up, a la this:
Trump ‘played’ by K-pop fans and TikTok users who disrupted Tulsa rally?
Matt McIrvin
Concerning Schnorkles’ argument (which is similar to things Erik Loomis has been saying), I think it’s both–Hitler was inspired by Gilded Age America.
Nukular Biskits
@oldgold:
I’d really like to see a parade of ships and submarines down Constitution Avenue …
Nukular Biskits
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I agree that probably the majority of them are “true believers” … but not all. Some are just kids who really wanted to be in public service, in the DC area (lots of stuff to do there, culturally & etc) with an eye towards public office.
Having said that, though, I honestly don’t know how that latter group could sleep at night, knowing they work for, at best, someone who doesn’t have the courage to stand up to Trump/MAGA or, at worst, a sociopath MAGA cult member.
Nukular Biskits
@Betty Cracker:
My problem is that these assholes always seem to fail upwards. A prime example of that is former MS governor Haley Barbour.
Again, there is never any accountability for the things they set in motion, sometimes years prior. And that ranks right at the top of my list of things that piss me off.
RevRick
@japa21: When it was claimed (Ivana?) in his first campaign that Trump kept a copy of Mein Kampf by his bedside, I was skeptical. Now, I believe it.
Fascisms don’t have to look like Nazi Germany. We have had iterations of it in Italy, Japan, Spain, Portugal, and now Russia, Hungary, and India.
But one thing Umberto Eco said was that some fascisms want to destroy education, because fascism is about action, not critical thinking. He noted that debate is viewed as treason. And doesn’t this sound exactly like what Trump is doing?
oldgold
@Nukular Biskits:
So would I!
In NYC the Navy is going to have a parade of ships.
Hey, the Marines could make a celebratory amphibious landing on the shores of the Potomac.
So would I.
Matt McIrvin
@jimmiraybob: Lest we forget, immigration was incredibly lax in that era with one huge exception (no Chinese allowed). Their model for *that* is the extremely xenophobic policy of mid-20th-century America between the late 1920s and 1965.
Another Scott
@japa21: ??
47 clearly models himself after Benito in his public presentation. [ insert driftglass picture of Benito with 47’s face ]
PBS.org (from October 2024):
Ultimately, of course, it’s his actions that matter, not whatever “thinking” goes on in that damaged brain of his.
Grr…
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: There’s all the stuff Mattis said about his interactions with Trump. Something like “Why aren’t the generals loyal to me like Hitler’s generals? They did anything he wanted.” “What? Hitler’s generals repeatedly tried to murder him because he was a dumbass.” “No they didn’t! I want Hitler’s generals!”
Edit: I guess it was Kelly, not Mattis
Melancholy Jaques
@UncleEbeneezer:
Agree completely. Academic historical analysis isn’t going to help us win the midterms. And we most definitely need to win the midterms.
Matt McIrvin
@Hoodie:
The delays do imply that they either think they won’t be in power forever, or that for some reason it won’t matter when the consequences happen.
At some point, and I admit it could be any time from tomorrow to 20 years from now, Trumpism will be denied Trump. I think the Never-Trumper types are trying to maneuver to be the post-Trump conservatism. But nobody in the MAGA blob seems to think that far ahead.
gene108
I don’t get what Shnorkle’s O’Bork is getting at.
There less than perfect eras in U.S. history, like the Gilded Age or Jim Crow. There is a consensus that those eras were bad. The country fixed problems from those eras.
It’s not like people looked at the problems of the Gilded Age, and decided things were always bad, so why bother with the progressive movement to force change.
I don’t get what this person’s point is. Bad eras happen. People work to fix things so the bad era ends, and a better era begins.
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, was executed for his tangential participation in the failed 1944 plot. The plotters wanted to kill Hitler, because they saw he was leading Germany to a moral and physical catastrophe.
Nukular Biskits
@Nukular Biskits:
WRT my post above about people signing up for their 2 free tickets to attend Trump’s B’day Bash parade on 14JUNE … and not showing up, I actually went to the website to request my tickets.
However … there is a check box for an “Opt In” with absolutely no explanation as to what I’d be opting in/out for.
250th Anniversary of the U.S. Army Grand Military Parade and Celebration
Anyone have any clues?
Melancholy Jaques
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Never Trumpers are a tiny, powerless portion of the media universe. From time to time, they produce internet content that amuses many of us.
Do you think they are surprised that they have zero impact on politics? Certainly they all once thought they mattered.
laura
@Matt McIrvin: Downfall video clips has entered the chat: https://youtu.be/b6rTu-pJFnw?
Baud
@Another Scott:
He should choose Franco. Franco lasted the longest.
Harrison Wesley
@Nukular Biskits: Sounds like it involves money.
TONYG
Just my opinion … My problem with the idea of saying that Trump/Musk and the GOP are bringing back the Gilded Age is: 1) The average American knows nothing about history and has never heard of the Gilded Age. 2) The average American has lived his or her entire life in a “culture” in which wealthy celebrities are emulated and worshipped as gods. That “culture” has also taught the average American that other people do not matter. That’s how Trump was elected in the first place in 2016. Therefore a “Gilded Age” would sound good to the average American. 3) The average American has (maybe) at least heard of Hitler and (maybe) at least thinks that Hitler was a bad guy. I’m sorry, but the average American is about as dumb as a pile of shit. He or she has to be approached at his or her level.
Nukular Biskits
@Harrison Wesley:
Given the history of grift by Trump, I wouldn’t be surprised.
laura
@RevRick: i just finished reading a book All the frequent Troubles of our days about an American woman who married a relative of Bonhoffer’s; Arvid Harnack; and created an underground resistance network in Berlin, they too were revealed, tried and executed. Fun fact, the American government began an investigation, but closed it and welcomed their nazi prosecutor to the USA immediately after the war. And so it goes.
Matt McIrvin
@gene108: Democrats have an interest in calling Trump a Nazi because that emphasizes the grave danger of his movement and frames it as un-American. Leftists who criticize Democrats a lot as part of a critique of America in general, contrariwise, have an interest in emphasizing the continuity between Trumpism and American political history. So things people say have to be interpreted in that light.
The extreme case is the idiotic pro-Trump radical left of 2016, which felt Trump was preferable to the tyranny of Democrats, but at least this isn’t going that far. I *have* seen some “Biden and Democrats were just fascism lite and only civil war will save us” chatter going around.
Another Scott
@Nukular Biskits: “Guest Entry begins at 2:00 PM. Parade starts at 6:30 PM”
I haven’t seen anything about what the public can actually see and do that day if they decide to ask for tickets, and I’m not going to sign up to try to find out.
So, assuming masses of people actually want to attend, they’ll be standing around in the DC summer heat for 4.5 hours before anything even starts??
It looks like America 250 was (sensibly) started under Biden, since it takes years to plan this stuff if you want to do it right. Adding a giant military parade at the (relative) last minute isn’t what one normally does if one wants things to go smoothly.
I assume they will try to stage-manage everything, with lots of shots of a couple of full temporary bleachers with cult members, and lots of stretches of the route with few or any people that somehow don’t end up on TV.
Anyway.
:-/
Best wishes,
Scott.
Anyway
yeah I think Maggots hate the 1965 immigration act and all the changes it brought. So back to the Jim Crow era with white guys on top.
Nukular Biskits
@Another Scott:
DC is very humid in the summertime … and I’m the guy from MS saying that.
I have no plans on attending but I do think it would be awesome if a bazillion Americans requested tickets (and, as asked originally by lowtechcyclists, WTF do these tickets actually get you?) and didn’t show.
I suspect, as a minimum, the # of tickets will be used to plan (?) accordingly for law enforcement, etc. One could make a very good argument that people intentionally requesting no-cost tickets and not attending (thus suppressing attendance numbers) results in higher costs to the taxpayers … and it would be hard to argue against that point.
Nevertheless, protest is not free and having a dismal showing for Trump’s folly would be priceless.
RevRick
I read Krugman’s blog the other day and he wonders what will happen if foreign capital ceases to flow into our country. All the economic uncertainty created by Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs coupled with the massively inflationary increase in our debt due to Big Ugly Abomination will cause foreign investors to pull back. And when they do, interest rates will soar, the housing market will crash, and we will be caught in a stagflation cycle of high unemployment and high inflation.
It will take us a long time to repair the damage.
Matt McIrvin
@TONYG: Trump *openly* says he’s trying to bring back that era and talks about how wonderful it was. Popular history of the type intended for kids often describes it as an era of great dynamism, technological innovation, growth and enterprise. It’s far back enough to not be in living memory at all.
NotMax
FYI. Out of curiosity, went digging for stats.
5% of undergraduate students at Harvartd-threatening former governor Noem’s University of South Dakota are non-citizen foreigners (Source).
jimmiraybob
@Matt McIrvin:
Keeping with the theme, while the Felon is framing a lot of what he is doing as a war against antisemitism, he is simultaneously branding Jews as “good Jews” (those that support him) and “bad Jews” (those that do not support him).
This has been a common factor in oppressing and cleansing European Jews and eventually it gets around to they are all bad. A Jew can convert to Christianity but still he/she is a Jew.
Melancholy Jaques
@RevRick:
And me about to retire & go on a fixed income.
Harrison Wesley
@Another Scott: Crowds standing for hours in summer heat? I’m sure Trump concession stands will be offering warm soda for $5/can.
Matt McIrvin
@Anyway: They see post-1965 immigration as a dirty trick pulled on America by liberals, to juice the electorate with automatic Democratic voters so they would win forever. You can explain that these immigrants aren’t super liberal and aren’t even automatic Democratic voters until you’re blue in the face but they won’t care.
RevRick
@Melancholy Jaques: Make sure your assets are in bonds, because the last time— the 70s — this happened, stocks had a negative return.
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: For example, the Cubans.
kindness
I think the most powerful motivating messages Democrats can run with against the BBB is 1) Medicaid pays for elderly Ma & Pa (or Grandma/Grandpa) when they are in a SNF/assisted living facility, and 2) The $3.8 T budget deficit it creates (all to give billionaires another bag of gold) will require huge cuts in Medicare, which pays for all elderly over 65 (and many younger than that) healthcare. We all have or recently have had someone in our lives who spent time in a SNF or assisted living facility. God knows no one could afford to pay those bills without Medicaid. Medicare covers a big chunk of the voting public. And god damnit, those fucking billionaires don’t need another yacht (or mistress) on our dime which is what the BBB would give them.
NotMax
@Harrison Wesley
Also too hours with loudspeakers blasting YMCA on a loop.
//
kent
SERIOUSLY, how hard is it for Dems to just say “Huge, Horrible Bill” every time they refer to it?
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: A lot of immigrant communities that lean D only do so because the Republicans are grossly racist against them. Republican campaigns even successfully court their votes sometimes! But the Great Replacement idea persists anyway.
JML
Going to be interesting to see if there’s a public workers strike in MN this year; negotiations over healthcare are going exceptionally poorly, with management proposing massive increases in worker costs for the next biennium, with premium increases of 200% and co-pays going up by 2/3’s. When management’s almost certainly going to be proposing wage freezes, that’s going to be an absolute non-starter.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Black people are as American as apple pie and they don’t care either.
White South Africans on the other hand…
Baud
@Baud:
They = Republican base that Matt was referring to.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I am struck that in 2024 Trump was able to increase his voting margin among groups that he was simultaneously demonizing to other parts of his base. You had phenomena like Muslims for Trump. It’s something you can do in a fragmented media landscape.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Also helps to have (1) a media landscape that’s unified in demonizing Dems and (2) marks who are primed to accept lies and ignore reality to satiate their lizard brains.
New Deal democrat
@RevRick: The economic consequences will proceed in stops and starts, but mainly starts, and are already beginning to happen.
Remember when Bill Clinton said that if there was reincarnation, he wanted to come back as the Bond Market, because it was so powerful? Well, the bond and currency markets have already started to react negatively to both Tariff-palooza! and the Big Brutal Bustout Budget Bill:
“The lack of a rebound in container traffic after the China-US trade deal on May 12 is worrying” says Apollo Investements. And the response by Josh Chafetz is “It’s almost like when your tariff policy is best described as a random walk, no one wants to make medium-term plans around it.”
Port of LA inbound container shipping is down about -10% in the past 6 weeks. It appears to have now hit the railroads, where intermodal container shipping is now only up 0.3% YoY.
The US$ closed this week at a near 4 year low, with even places like the Central Bank of the Phillipines indicating they were looking at diversifying away from the dollar.
The 30 year US Treasury bond yield hit an 18 year high during the week, meaning investors were demanding higher interest to hold on to the bonds.
None of this will move in a straight line, but the necessary fundamental trend is obvious, and as noted above, the Bond Market is not stupid.
TONYG
@Matt McIrvin: Yes, that’s true. And Trump’s talk of the Gilded Age resonates because … 1) People like gold and are dumb enough to think that they can get some for themselves! … and … 2) There is almost nobody alive today who remembers that era. My father (morning in Italy in 1914) remembered the tail end of the Gilded age, as well as the Great Depression, and a good way to get him angry was to talk about “The Good Old Days”. He remembered that era as a time of poverty and misery, but he’s been gone now for almost 40 years. It would be good if the average American had a little bit of interest in learning about the history of his or her own country, but “learning” and “thinking” seem to be forbidden words in our “culture”. The current war against all forms of education is a way to make sure that most people are dumb.
TONYG
@Matt McIrvin: Divide and conquer; a very old tactic. My understanding of the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century is that the various “white” immigrant groups (Italian, Irish, Poles, Jews, etc.) were primed to hate and fear each other — and all of them were primed to despise the blacks. A old tradition.
TONYG
@TONYG: “born in Italy in 1914”. I blame “DEI” for my bad typing!
Matt McIrvin
@TONYG: Well, Trump says Golden, not Gilded. Twain used the word very deliberately– the shine, he was saying, was all surface.
Hoodie
Just describing Trump as analogous to the Gilded Age won’t move voters, as they won’t know what that means or might even think it’s a good thing. Trump even uses “golden age” rhetoric. The analogy is only useful to the extent it gives insight into what did in the Gilded Age, including massive corruption and a series of financial disasters. Nazi-themed rhetoric isn’t any more useful, as a lot of people will view that as hyperbole. Better to stick to the basics, e.g., Trump is a crook who takes bribes from plutocrats and Arab princes, a liar who hasn’t done what he promised for everyday Americans, and a demented loon who put a bunch of loons in charge of the government and makes us look stupid.
Matt McIrvin
@kent: I’ve heard “MAGA Murder Budget”.
lowtechcyclist
@japa21:
OK, Stephen Miller and Russell Vought and the rest of the P2025 gang are fascists, and Trump is happily using the power of the Presidency to enable them.
Whether Trump actually IS a fascist in his heart of hearts (assuming facts not in evidence, I know) really doesn’t matter one whit. To all intents and purposes, he is a fascist: in terms of what he is doing and enabling, the difference between Cheetolini and a fascist is < ε for all ε > 0.
lowtechcyclist
@RevRick:
They certainly intervene in areas that one wouldn’t think had any Constitutional issues. As Josh Marshall says, this Court has a “make it up as you go” Constitution.
Professor Bigfoot
I was exactly today years old when I learned this.
Throw the stone and hide the hands, that’s a lot of American history in a nutshell.
Professor Bigfoot
This country has been a police state for Black people since before the Founding.
The Enslavement, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration have all be manifestations of that police state.
Anyway
Thank you! I hate that the lamestream media employs the fifth-grader names he rolls out in his cheapo social media utterances. How did they become the official statement of the US government? So many annoyances … so little time
Sure Lurkalot
@TONYG:
All true but there is some broad appeal for “tax the rich” (if not ”eat the rich”)…I think a lot of people worship and envy the wealthy and resent them at the same time.
So if history has no appeal, another approach is to compare the wealthy to hoarders or gluttons (“And if all this world’s a cake – then you took too big a slice” h/t Public Image Ltd).
different-church-lady
It’s a two-fer. Stop trying to cram it into one box. It’s about smashing and grabbing. Let the historians figure out what to call it.
Elizabelle
@different-church-lady: Agreed. Can definitely be both. And entrenching White Supremacy. Confederates gonna win this time, y’all. Officially.
Planetjanet
@kindness: Medicaid does NOT pay for assisted living, only nursing facilities.
kindness
@Planetjanet: Medicare helps pay for assisted living facilities.
Planetjanet
@kindness: No, assisted living facilities are private pay.
rikyrah
@Baud:
Truth
The Lodger
@lowtechcyclist: Honestly, man, I was promised there would be no math.
Kayla Rudbek
@Professor Bigfoot: same here, although I had heard that the US Patent Office was the one building in DC that the British spared during the War of 1812 (only to have it burn down in 1838 and lose the patent records anyway – some have been recovered, but that’s why the US utility patent numbers started in 1838, the recovered ones are the X-series)