In a post last week, we discussed a recent Anne Applebaum column on revolutionary logic. In her piece in The Atlantic, Applebaum observes that sputtering revolutionary regimes tend to escalate violence to consolidate power. She cites the depredations of the faltering Bolshevik and Maoist regimes as historical precedents, linking them to the flailing Trump regime’s violent assault on Los Angeles.
Now Trump faces the same choice as his revolutionary predecessors: Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence. Like his revolutionary predecessors, Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization, and he is openly seeking to provoke violence.
The regime seeks to appease its base by carrying out Trump’s mass deportation threats, but it’s coming up against the hard fact that the economy depends on immigrant labor. Last week, Trump announced policy “changes” at DHS: (WSJ)
The Trump administration said it has directed immigration officers to pause arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels, stressing that sweeps should focus on people in the U.S. illegally who have criminal backgrounds.
The new guidance by the Department of Homeland Security comes after raids in Los Angeles sparked protests in the city that have spread across the country and led to the Trump administration sending in the National Guard and Marines.
“We will follow the President’s direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets,” said DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin.
At first, I figured this announcement of a partial walk-back was a lie to placate worried business interests, and immigration raids at worksites would continue. Immigrants commit fewer crimes than U.S. citizens, so if the regime truly focused on “the worst of the worst,” deportations would drop to Obama and Biden-era levels, and that would constitute a de-escalation.
But last night, after marinating in the humiliation of his flop of a birthday parade contrasted with the millions of Americans who turned out Saturday to oppose his authoritarian power grab, Trump issued a preview of coming horrors in a truly insane and spittle-flecked Truth Social post.
Our Nation’s ICE Officers have shown incredible strength, determination, and courage as they facilitate a very important mission, the largest Mass Deportation Operation of Illegal Aliens in History. Every day, the Brave Men and Women of ICE are subjected to violence, harassment, and even threats from Radical Democrat Politicians, but nothing will stop us from executing our mission, and fulfilling our Mandate to the American People. ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.
In order to achieve this, we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens. These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them. That is why they believe in Open Borders, Transgender for Everybody, and Men playing in Women’s Sports — And that is why I want ICE, Border Patrol, and our Great and Patriotic Law Enforcement Officers, to FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!
I want our Brave ICE Officers to know that REAL Americans are cheering you on every day. The American People want our Cities, Schools, and Communities to be SAFE and FREE from Illegal Alien Crime, Conflict, and Chaos. That’s why I have directed my entire Administration to put every resource possible behind this effort, and reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia. Our Federal Government will continue to be focused on the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came, and preventing the admission of ANYONE who undermines the domestic tranquility of the United States.
To ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, the Patriots at Pentagon and the State Department, you have my unwavering support. Now go, GET THE JOB DONE! DJT
This is, of course, fucking nuts. All of it. And keep in mind the context in which Trump issued this authoritarian decree: One of his supporters was then still at large after assassinating Democrats in the state governed by the Democrat who was the VP nominee last year.
So, it appears this is the form the escalation will take: an all-out assault on our cities carried out by federal law enforcement and probably the U.S. military. It’s going to be a long, hot summer.
Open thread.
On The Road – Albatrossity – May, she will stay
Baud
He has no choice but to radicalize. His and the Republicans’ power center is their white rural base. That’s why he can’t send ICE to farms and why he has to ramp up the war on cities to 11. He needs the white rural base to stay engaged.
Baud
That post is truly deranged. I wonder if he’s suffering from foot Parkinson’s.
lowtechcyclist
I wish the national media would cover his posts on his social medium. Because they’re pretty much all the rants of a person you wouldn’t want running a convenience store, let alone the government of a major nation with nuclear weapons.
And while I’m at it, I might as well wish for a pet unicorn. Because there’s no way the media could possibly normalize these rantings, so they have to pretty much ignore them. Or boil them down to “last night, in a Truth Social post, Trump ordered ICE to concentrate its efforts on America’s cities.”
Grrr. Argh.
ColoradoGuy
If anyone truly Hates America, it’s Trump. He despises this country, the actual, existing country and its people. What he and his cult followers love is a Reality TV version of the Confederate States of America.
Baud
@ColoradoGuy:
For half the country, the feeling is mutual.
Scout211
Not that opinion polls seem to matter anymore, but I was a little surprised by a poll released last night by NBC News.
The judicial branch is what most of us are hoping can stop the horrors right now and even though Stephen Miller, et al. are working to undermine the judicial branch, I was encouraged that most Americans still believe in the rule of law.
Baud
@Scout211:
As a general rule, courts constrain liberals more than conservatives.
I also expect those numbers to change if Trump defies a court order blatantly.
Gvg
This is also what happens when lies get repeated so often they are accepted as truth. The facts are to start with that there aren’t as many illegals as they claimed. The truth wasn’t dramatic enough so they have been exaggerating for decades. The lies even became boring so they had to escalate.
Now we know the extreme racists saw all immigrants as illegal, in fact all non white as illegal, but there aren’t even as many immigrants as their exaggerated claims of illegals. They CAN’T live up to the claim and promise. But they believe their own lies, to a degree. I don’t know where they go from the box canyon they put themselves in, but I do think truth tellers have an opportunity to point this out loudly and clearly right now.
Part of the reason there aren’t their claimed numbers of immigrants is that they have been winning the battle to restrict legal immigration over an substained assault of decades. They have used all kinds of ways including just budget restrictions that effectively make it impossible to process the ones that should just go through rubber stamp.
We should also be highlighting this. Bring up the budgets too small make for inefficient government and in this case that was the intent. Then go into the really stupid restrictions of laws now. Such as citizens spouses not getting citizenship pretty easily. It’s not the governments business who we marry.
Then not granting citizenship to those who serve in the armed forces.
children of citizens.
Not granting asylum leading to citizenship for those who aid us in difficult situations such as Afghanistan or Iraq, when their situation turned dangerous. That is a stupid policy for the US interests.
I am sure I haven’t heard of all the problems. Immigration needs reform to make it easier. And you don’t stop illegal immigration by making all immigration illegal, that just increases it. Like prohibition, it ‘s a bad idea.
Quantum man
This all reminds me of the summers like 1968 during the Vietnam war and the civil rights demonstrations. Scary times.
Gvg
@Baud: yeah. So far most courts EXCEPT the supreme court have been pretty good.
Ii have been worrying though, because I think the Supreme Court is rotten and bought. They have made rulings I think are really not within the constitution. If Trump weren’t so bad, I think we would be having a judicial crisis instead.
We ought to be impeaching some of the court for corruption and bribery.
Of course it’s not a coincidence that these are happening at the same time. But maybe it’s different billionaires controlling them and they can fight. Trump did attack the federalist society and what’s his name recently.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud:
He’s already done that repeatedly. All that has to happen is that the media buries the story.
Betty Cracker
@Gvg: Great points.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
Not really. He’s delayed and stalled and the like, but it hasn’t yet come to an outright refusal to abide by a decision.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
mappy!
@Baud:
Taco-Two-Weeks (aka Taco-ninety-days) didn’t write this. He didn’t dictate it. This is pablum for the prurient hater faithful (food that doesn’t need chewing). Gotta keep the bigotry flowing otherwise the magots loose interest…
Problem is, if they go after LA or NYC and such, they’re going after hotel, restaurant and construction workers. If they go after the trades they’re done…
rikyrah
The blue cities are like…
Oh, really, what a shock 😒😒😒
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
He hasn’t. He’s used his DOJ lawyers to obfuscate and delay with often frivolous arguments and appeals and excuses. But he hasn’t given up on the legal process to get him out of a jam and engaged in self-help.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Baud
@mappy!:
Yeah, who knows what they’ll actually do? You can’t trust anything he says.
Suzanne
Maybe Chicago isn’t in the “heartland”. Maybe words don’t mean anything anymore.
rikyrah
They haven’t been interested in going after criminals
You don’t hang out in immigration court, where people are doing the LEGAL PROCESS, IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR CRIMINALS.
eclare
Huh?
I just put my stuff in the toaster oven.
Eta>Blue city of Memphis surround by red here.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud:
But the white rural base isn’t enough for them to carry the country. It has constitutional advantages. But they still have to retain the suburban swing vote, and when they do scary-crazy shit they lose it.
Or, they can abrogate democracy and try to rule by force alone. It’s a bold move, let’s see how it works out for them.
One of the things going on right now that makes me the maddest is the behavior of CBP toward foreigners entering the country–if you’re so much as a tourist, they will make it absolutely clear right now that no expression of political opposition to Trump is allowed. If you ever said anything against Trump on social media, if you tell them you don’t like Trump when they ask you (and they may well ask you), they will PUT YOU IN JAIL, for at least a little while, and then ban you from entering the country.
And they are absolutely gleeful about how they are fucking the First Amendment and getting away with it. They’re doing it with the bully smirk.
If I were a non-citizen, typing what I am typing right now would make it a jailing offense for me to cross the border of the United States.
For now, they’re not doing this to US citizens as far as I can tell. Whether they try it at some point depends on how much pushback they get. They may do it to a citizen by accident as they get bolder. I’m nervous about traveling outside the US because of it. But I also think I probably shouldn’t avoid it for that reason, because fuck those guys.
It’s a thing to keep watching, but really, the unconstitutional abuse is already happening. I don’t believe the First Amendment only applies to citizens. I don’t think anyone should believe that. But they keep pushing the boundaries on purpose.
Professor Bigfoot
Ultimately, Black people are ALWAYS their targets. Everyone else they hate is just a distraction.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
100%
They’re always trying to push the envelope because they know voters aren’t going to hold them accountable for trying.
The Thin Black Duke
@rikyrah: Real criminals shoot back.
WereBear
@Baud: Of course. Liberals are the SCARY ones.
Another Scott
@Baud: Yup.
Real people, subject to real rules about evidence and testimony and with real consequences for breaking them, have to present the government’s case. Only a few of them are willing to be fined or go to jail or lose their licenses. Many more, of course, are willing to dance on the line and dare the judges to do anything about it.
We’re fortunate, in a way, that “AI” is still so bad and immature. Fortunate that courts don’t accept that yet, and don’t accept “infallible” computer garbage as filings or evidence or testimony.
Yet.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
The suburbs are increasingly diverse. Much moreso than they were 25 years ago. Of course, FFOTUS doesn’t know anything about suburbs. He probably hasn’t gotten out of the car in a suburb in at least a decade.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That post of Trump reads like Miller wrote it and reads like it’s pleading with the MAGA base not to abandon Trump.
In what fantasy world do they think Urban American isn’t the nations economy?
Like the guy who shot up the pizza joint when he saw with his own eyes there was no basement like the conspiracy claimed, they get violent rather than accept realty. Except, this current group are such lazy assholes they demanding law enforcement do their violence for them while they hide from the world in their pillow forts.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Well, they THINK they won’t be held accountable. One of the things the rallies over the weekend were designed to convey is that millions of people actually are sufficiently pissed off about this to take to the streets. I was worried that the opposition was getting exhausted but it doesn’t look like it.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
From my perspective, correct. That’s what they think. From their perspective, they know. Because that’s what history tells them.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Note that post doesn’t say they will be doing the violence themselves. Just that ICE and Military “must do what must be done” Going by the Marines in LA, the Marines perfectly well know they will be held accountable.
JoyceH
If he means this latest escalation then it is time for a general strike. It’s the only way to keep things from becoming extremely bloody and if that happens, he could win. But a general strike or a localized general strike in the targeted cities will turn his rich backers against him. Those cities are where they make their money.
Trivia Man
@lowtechcyclist: I am still agog at his use of social media as the official publication of presidential policy announcements. “By notice of this TRUTH…”
tobie
The post is insane, and I don’t want to minimize the threat in it. But the post also had the feel of a re-run of tired lines from the campaign and the only people I can imagine responding to it are the most committed MAGAts. Unfortunately that group is so stoked up on rage that they pose a danger to all of us
ETA: @Enhanced Voting Techniques: said this better than me at #30.
Trivia Man
@Suzanne: “Not a true ‘heartland’”
JPL
@Baud: Is that caused by bone spurs? Just wondering!
Baud
It’s no accident that Trump posts this right after being embarrassed on a national and world stage yesterday.
Hey, at least he didn’t bomb Iran.
Suzanne
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Cities are bad because they have gays, Black people, and uppity godless women [raises hand].
Of course, they are also the present and future of every bit of our economic growth. But that reality doesn’t flatter the sensibility of uneducated white men.
Another Scott
@Trivia Man: It’s another element of them trying to break everything. Refusing to follow procedures for official government communications, refusing to follow the Presidential Records Act and all the rest, deciding who is worthy to be able to cover them, etc.
“Oh that was just 47 giving his personal opinion. Why are you trying to stifle his First Amendment Rights, you commie activist judge??!”
To ICE and other law enforcement: Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, oh hey you’ll be fired if you don’t meet your numbers and do what Miller says. Understood??
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
In a similar theme, I see Senator Mike Lee is outright trying to claim Vance Boelter is a Marxists and not a radical conservative.
JPL
@rikyrah: Yup!
They Call Me Noni
@Baud: And he does have all that free legal advice from law firms that bent the knee so he doesn’t have to rely on only DOJ lawyers.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Another Scott: Yes, well said.
They Call Me Noni
@Matt McIrvin: Judging from the rally I attended in small town red Indiana the opposition is getting fired up.
HeleninEire
I spoke with a Dublin friend yesterday and he said apropos of absolutely nothing “Los Angeles is in bits!” The propaganda is quickly making its way across the Atlantic. I was easily able to convince him of the truth. He even said to his boyfriend, who was also on the call, “It’s good that we have someone who can tell us the truth.” I then told him about the massive protests. Crickets across the Atlantic about that.
It’s exhausting. Especially since I am in NYC. If anything happens here (and it most likely will), my friends are going to be in a panic.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Suzanne: Bell of the Ranch was replying in a video to e-mail from woman who was talking about how her dumb ass, right wing media father insist that the entity of Los Angles is ablaze in a never ending riot.
WereBear
Cities are where EVERYONE makes their money, ultimately.
The negative economic performance of red states is because they stunt their cities, on purpose, to keep the population stuck in their small town fears.
They are already killing women. Too.
Betty Cracker
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I saw that Mike Lee tweet via a Bluesky post a while ago. Mike Lee is a sick fuck. I’ll be shocked if anyone in his caucus publicly denounces Lee’s grotesque propaganda play — people like Lee and Marjorie Taylor Greene are the GOP establishment these days. But I hope Dems will raise 10 shades of holy hell on the floor of the House and Senate. Some of them knew the people who were assassinated by a Trump-supporting right-wing nut. I hope they get in front of cameras and denounce Lee in the starkest personal terms.
Baud
@HeleninEire:
One of the big problems we face is that a lot of people want to believe the lies. And not just MAGA.
stinger
We are being governed by an insane person.
Maybe there’s a technical definition I’m unaware of, but doesn’t “sweeps” mean grabbing up all the guys waiting outside Walmart hoping for a day gig or all the manicurists in a salon? Without prior individual identification that each one has a criminal background? In other words, without due process?
Not a lawyer, but I do watch a lot of cops and lawyers shows. Mostly British.
stinger
@ColoradoGuy:
You nailed it.
tobie
@HeleninEire: I just checked the main newspapers in Germany and while I could find little about what’s happening in LA or the protests yesterday, I did find top articles on the apprehension of the MN suspect and Trump’s latest “Truth Social” post. (Thanks, BC, for posting the transcript.) All these things would be deeply alarming to a German public. The echoes of fascism are unmistakeable. I’ll ask friends what they’re hearing about LA.
They Call Me Noni
@Trivia Man: IIRC it was determined during Trump 1.0 that his proclamations on his flailing social media site are indeed official pronouncements. No red wax seal is required. So, as best I can tell, he can fart it in morse code and it counts.
Librettist
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Miller is pleading with the boss to stay the course and not fire his ass.
In Trumpworld, you can’t have your wife run off with a now hated ex-bestie and join his breeding program. That’s “weak”.
Another Scott
@stinger: +1
Plus, they’re begging the question. They’ll say – as do wannabe authoritarians everywhere – that anyone they arrest is a criminal because otherwise they wouldn’t have been arrested. And they’ll continue to merge civil and criminal law in their talk. And they’ll continue to try to convince everyone that what they say is the law (“protesters will be met with very big force!!1”) actually is the law.
47 said they’re breaking the law, so they’re by definition criminals and the worst of the worst. Why are you communist eggheads who hate America so stupid??
When words have no meaning, power is unchecked.
Grr…
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@HeleninEire:
Maybe it’s just that they’re the politically engaged who spent the first month or two of the second Trump admin saying “why are Americans not in the streets?”, but I keep seeing social-media posts from Europe in which the posters say they’re following these protests and are tremendously heartened by people in the US standing up.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: “They’re criminals because they’re here illegally. They’re here illegally because we just now declared that they’re here illegally.” And the circle is complete. But when you start the argument by claiming that they’re rapists and murderers who are turning the cities into violent hellholes, this is weak sauce.
stinger
@Trivia Man:
And not just social media, but HIS OWN, created for him. In his first term, it was Twitter. Now it’s “Truth Social”. That’s the most dictator thing he’s done. You have to use HIS media to receive official communications.
I can’t believe the MSM doesn’t call that out.
Matt McIrvin
@stinger: the name of it is literally English for “Pravda.”
Dorothy A. Winsor
Re Trump’s pathetic parade: Somewhere (maybe here) I saw the term “malicious compliance” used to describe the playing of Fortunate Son, but it’s possible it applies to the whole parade. Someone (again maybe here) said the military knows how to march if it wants to. Maybe the whole shambolic scene resulted from military resentment against being used for Trumpian self-aggrandizement.
Of course, maybe I’m assuming malice when it’s just incompetence.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Matt McIrvin: Hee. Good one
Librettist
I’m not sure TACO understood the why and what for on Saturday. Just reflexively saluting like when he was a kid kaydet.
Barry
@lowtechcyclist: “Not really. He’s delayed and stalled and the like, but it hasn’t yet come to an outright refusal to abide by a decision.”
In the end it is.
Trivia Man
@They Call Me Noni: so FOIA requests can be made, right? /s
HeleninEire
@tobie: My friends did know about the parade (or should I say “perade”) but they did not know it was sparsely attended.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: “Drive till you qualify” is real, and it… well, it didn’t reverse white flight but it changed the pattern of it.
stinger
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m LOLing. Bitterly.
RaflW
Speaking of assaults, there’s multiple reports of about 30 US airborne refueling tankers crossing the Atlantic now heading east.
Speculation, but could be to support a sustained air campaign in a region now at war?
O. Felix Culpa
@Barry: In the end, they brought Abrego Garcia and another person back from the gulag per court orders. Of course they also charged the former with probably puffed-up crimes, but this was at least in part to cover up the fact that they complied with court rulings.
Trivia Man
@Another Scott: Schrödinger’s announcement … it is official communication AND private communication until it goes to court under oath. And it is even MORE powerful because it can be BOTH on the same day in different courts. Or the same court on a different day, because magic or something.
Librettist
Wiles was sitting behind him, and looked even more out of it than Trump.
Matt
@Suzanne:
That’s also why the Trumpkins there are spitting-mad: they spent all that money and put up with 45-minute commutes to everything so they didn’t have to see brown people, and now the brown people are there too!
They’ll hurt anybody, including themselves, in the desperate hope that it’ll make this stop happening. See also Brexit.
stinger
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I haven’t marched in a military formation since 1980, and I could still do better than what I saw in those DC videos. I’d be sorry my Army didn’t take more pride in the 250th anniversary, but for the other circumstances of the day.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: White flight was an anomalous thing. The overall trend around the world, and in the U.S., is urbanization, since we are shifting from an agriculture-and-resource-extraction economy to a skilled-services-and-engineering economy.
In approximately 2009, for the first time in human history, more than half of all people on earth lived in cities. That figure will hit 75% by approximately 2060. Roughly 75-80% of Americans live in cities or metro areas. That’s where the jobs are and will continue to be.
And anyone who’s lived in a suburb in the last 25 years can attest that they are much more mixed than they used to be.
Suzanne
@Matt: The suburbs are also increasingly Dem-leaning, especially the bougie suburbs where everyone went to college.
Betty Cracker
@Librettist: I’m not sure where Miller is in all of this. Trump has seemed mostly checked out since January, an enfeebled figurehead. Wiles is probably running daily ops. Musk was given free rein to attack the parts of the government that might hold him to account, punish enemies and secure federal revenue to mitigate the damage to his tarnished brands.
Miller was running the deportations, and his tactic was to indiscriminately round up and deport brown people, full stop. He doesn’t give a shit about agriculture and the hospitality industry. Until last week, ICE raids were happening in red areas too and harming Republican donors, like the construction site raids in The Villages.
Does this latest insane rant by Trump signal a reassertion of his power and the sidelining of Miller, or did Trump and Santa Monica Goebbels jointly come up with a new tactic to maximize violence against political enemies while minimizing pain to Republican donors? I have no idea.
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker:
Or the childcare industry, or the construction industry.
Seriously, I don’t know how anyone expects society to function without immigrants, and it was ever thus. My Italian ancestors hopped various boats and came over and did construction and domestic work. And that was a hundred years ago.
Soprano2
@rikyrah: They’re interested in filling their quota. Of course, some MAGA’s believe all immigrants are criminals, so to them they are going after the “criminals”.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne:
Society doesn’t have to function. I think the plan is for it to not function.
Sally
@Baud: Ha!
Aziz, light!
Trump didn’t write that statement, Miller did, on Trump’s request. For one thing, it herewith orders instead of hereby orders and for another the phrasing is too polished for Trump. The point is to antagonize the people in Southern California so much that they ramp up the resistance to ICE and give Trump an excuse to invoke the insurrection act and start shooting to kill. Why should people respect him like they do his idol Kim Jong-Un if he can’t kill people who don’t?
Spanky
@Matt McIrvin: Plan? The plan is to get off on their hate. Hate is the only thing tying this group of narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths together.
Soprano2
I’d go so far as to say that’s how we got FFOTUS again. People badly wanted to believe he had the magic formula to make everything better, since he kept telling them he did. I sincerely believe a lot of people voted for him because they thought the economy was better under him (little inflation). They were dumb enough to believe he could bring that back all by himself. Not discounting all the other reasons people voted for him, but I truly believe this is what got a lot of the “normies” to vote for him.
lowtechcyclist
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I guess they’ve given up on convincing even their own people that Portland is still a smoldering ruin. So they’re trying it with L.A. this time.
All I can say is, if one of my wife’s RW cousins spews that shit at me, I’ll just offer to buy us both a pair of plane tickets to L.A. and pay all our expenses while we’re there. If he (almost certainly a ‘he’) can show me where the riot is, then the trip is free for him, and I’m out all that money. If he can’t, then he has to reimburse me.
I bet he refuses that deal.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Librettist: It’s really so amusing the though of Trump firing Miller it’s hard to reply.
Soprano2
You must know one of my friends on FB. He posted this truly horrible meme this weekend. It was of a pickup with a bloody front and said something about handling or controlling protesters. I told him I thought that was gross, and that I was sorry he had become a person who thought that was funny. It set off quite a debate, with one of his friends calling me names. I think if I post there again I’ll say that if they wonder why people think they’re awful people, believing things like that are funny is one reason why.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Dorothy A. Winsor: What I heard is the Army spent the last three years planning events across the country for their anniversary, and the Trump admin scrapped all that for Trump’s birthday parade.
Soprano2
@RaflW: If it is, he’ll still act like we’re not involved with that at all.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, they’re all fine with shit not working until the shit-not-working affects them. Whaddya mean, there’s a 45-minute wait at McDonald’s? Whaddya mean, there’s no one to stock the shelves or mop the floors or fix my leaky roof?
The contempt radiates out of me.
I will note that, if someone really wanted to pay their workers more and make sure they were legal to work…. E-Verify has been a thing for decades. They could always do so. But what they want is to simultaneously have a exploitable servant class, as long as they’re out of sight and mind the rest of the time.
Marjorie Feiner
I have questions. This is not meant to be snarky. I mean this seriously. How can ICE identify the criminals if they haven’t been charged with a crime or if charged, found guilty of a crime? Isn’t that the definition of a criminal? And if they have been identified as criminals, why are they still on the streets and not in prison? If Trump wanted to find the criminals, it seems to me, the obvious place to look would be in the prisons. I don’t think he would get much, if any, pushback if ICE cleaned out all the undocumented currently in prison. It would save the government from feeding and housing them, create space in our overcrowded prisons, and be good publicity. I’m not advocating for that, just wondering why it isn’t happening.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@RaflW: I would think they are anticipating Iranian proxies trying to shut down shipping in the Gulf and the Red Sea.
Shalimar
I have never looked up the numbers personally so this could be wrong, but what I have read repeatedly is that deportations are below Biden and especially Obama levels and this is what pisses Miller off so much.
Soprano2
@Marjorie Feiner: Because it’s not visible to people and doesn’t scare the shit out of people who are here legally. They need public raids to make the MAGA faithful happy.
WereBear
@Librettist: Loving every minute of it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Soprano2: What you describe is the theme from my coworkers who voted for Trump.
cmorenc
@ColoradoGuy:
You nailed it. Maybe more like a hybrid of Gilded-Age America + a hazily imagined version of Golden Age America from the 1950s as portrayed in Ozzie and Harrier that never actually was.
Jackie
@Baud:
I don’t believe FFOTUS wrote that. I got a strong smell of Miller’s spittle when I read that last night. FFOTUS doesn’t have the attention span to compose a lengthy screed.
Doug R
@Baud:
We need you over at LG&M
Betty
To add to the Trump madness, now another 36 countries are on a list for possible visa bans and travel restrictions, including many in the Caribbean. No idea what this could mean for the region’s tourism industry or for the many Americans, like me, who live in the region. And it seems they can be taken off the list if they agree to take deportees from other countries. What next?
Soprano2
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Oh, then it’s absolutely malicious compliance. Imagine having to scrap all of your carefully laid out plans because of that man baby. It might also be the short timeline involved. I think it’s impossible to put together the type of event FFOTUS wanted with such a short timeline. It’s sad for the Army, they should have had the event they planned.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Matt McIrvin:
Which happens how often? Oh yeah, any day ending in ‘y’.
They Call Me Noni
@Trivia Man: I believe so, but replies will be delivered via smoke signals or carrier pigeon.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: I think there’s a lot of nostalgia for the world of 2019, right before the COVID pandemic hit–ICE was being awful to immigrants much like they are now, if with lower intensity, and Trump was embarrassing America daily by saying ridiculous things, but the economy was still in good shape and Trump wasn’t doing anything that really hurt the median American.
And in some way, possibly subconscious, I think a lot of people somehow thought of voting for Trump in 2024 as a way of rolling everything back to that world.
Matt McIrvin
@Marjorie Feiner: A criminal is defined as somebody ICE arrests. ICE is arresting them because they’re criminals. It’s a loop, a perfect vacuum diagram.
Doug R
@Matt McIrvin:
Even better-they’ve been stopping cars LEAVING the country before they get to the border and searching causing hours long delays. And pulling staff from the entry booths, making those lines longer as well.
No wonder May crossings are down about 40% from the same month last year.
Doug R
@RaflW:
There’s one circling right now over Kananaskis, but I think that’s to keep an eye on the G7.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: I agree with you.
One thing that I think we’ve underestimated is how absolutely, completely, to the point of insanity freaked out many of them are by trans people in sports. Trans people in general, of course, but especially in sports.
Eyeroller
@stinger: I don’t know any of the details, though I’m sure I could find out, but my guess is that the “activities” described by the WaPo that were excerpted in an earlier thread were what the Army had planned for itself. Climb into a tank! Sit in an attack helicopter! Get your picture taken pretending to be a pilot! Watch demos, such as by a medic team! All things that the public might find fun and interesting and could help with image and recruitment.
We do know that the parade was not in their plans and they had to scramble (and spend a lot of money) and it would not be surprising that they might resent it and go for malicious compliance.
And putting “Fortunate Son” into the playlist was either gobsmacking ignorance or near-insubordination. Hard to tell since so many people pay no attention to lyrics, and as far as I could tell there was no singing.
brendancalling
I would not want to be ICE in Philly. We know they’re coming now—thanks for the heads-up, Donnie—and there will be resistance. Massive resistance. Philly doesn’t play, and I will leave it at that.
Doug R
@Matt McIrvin:
That was the talk around the start of this, remember? The Project 2025 True Believers™ muttered that there would be “some pain” during a “reset” and then we’d sail along with a smaller economy.
Suzanne
Saw this on Xhitter and it made me laugh:
Can confirm.
Belafon
This newest grift from the Trump’s is their new cell phone service. New phones on their service start at $499.
Doug R
@brendancalling:
So everyone’s at
Radio ShackBest Buy and Costco stocking up on D cells? (a Philly tradition)cmorenc
@O. Felix Culpa:
They nominally, albeit very tardily complied because someone influential around Trump got through to them that they would be better staying at least somewhat in the supportive favor of the RW justices to legally win much more substantively consequential support for their altered vision of the federal government than to attempt to impose it entirely roughshod over SCOTUS in contemptuous defiance and provoke the Justices to de facto revolt against Trump. Or at least that argument prevailed in this one instance, even though many of those in Trump’s Administration (including Trump himself) are only grudgingly, tenuously on-board with not openly defying the courts.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I’ve seen a little of that on Blue sky and reddit. It’s very weird. Like JD Vance weird.
Trivia Man
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: 49 years ago i read done dot thriller that contained a plot to sink something big in the strait of hormuz and cripple oil shipments. Is that possible? Likely? Still as disruptive as back then?
Trivia Man
@They Call Me Noni: or for a small “administrative copying expense” of $1 per word
Old Man Shadow
I see that the Executive branch of my government no longer sees me as a “real” American.
Trivia Man
@Doug R: Accelerationists are becoming more mainstream. Surprised they arent using Helter Skelter at trump events
Ohio Mom
@Doug R: Nope, Baud is ours. LGM can’t have him.
Belafon
@Matt McIrvin: Many of us – two of my son’s and I, for instance – did our first rally this weekend.
Trivia Man
@Doug R: on an unrelated note, yesterday i bought two 9 volt batteries. $13. First real sticker shock ive had cause i dont pay close attention to prices.
Soprano2
Oh absolutely. People thought Biden was going to fix everything that happened during Covid, including the higher prices. I think they started turning on him and Democrats in general when they realized that wasn’t going to happen, probably sometime in 2022. There was no going back to the world of 2019, and that made a lot of people angry. This thing they didn’t have any control over completely disrupted their lives, and what they wanted more than anything was to undo the results of that disruption.
Baud
@Ohio Mom:
Loomis would ban me in a heartbeat anyway.
jonas
Trump has always hated big, diverse cities like NYC, even though he’s from there. It’s because he has always deeply resented the fact that despite all his wealth and glitz, the city has always thought he was a putz. He was a joke. Sure he got lots of media attention and all that and got to slap his name all over some tacky high-rises, but he was never accepted by the *real* power brokers and elites — and still isn’t — and he’s never gotten over it. They still boo him at the Kennedy Center, which he’s trying to pretend he runs or something. So he’s now going to make the citadels of American wealth and culture pay.
Ohio Mom
@Eyeroller: What might have been for the Army’s 250th sounds like fun, actually.
It’s summer, parents are at a loss keeping their kids busy and occupied, that version of a party would have been well-attended.
Hoodie
@Doug R: A few days ago I drove by Warner Robins AFB, a big base for AF logistics. Usually there are C-17s and C-5s everywhere, but it seemed conspicuously empty.
Chief Oshkosh
@Soprano2: Point them to this conversation. There’s a bunch of old white guys here with a variety of backgrounds, including me. We probably all think he’s an asshole for thinking that’s funny.
That’s the thing about a lot of assholes. They simply cannot see what assholes they are. A few “get it” when their self-identified tribe (here, older white guys) dump shit on them. Most of them never get it. Those? Those we just have to say “fuck ’em, they’ll probably die before we do.
ETA: I’m assuming your nearly-former-friend is a white guy, because I’m prejudiced based on decades of direct experience…
Suzanne
@Baud: Lots of leftists, and some liberal men, TBH, have a hard time with the growing gender gap in the Dem Party. College-educated women are increasingly Democratic, and that gap is huge among the youngest voters. I see a fair amount of nostalgia for the Dems as “the party of the working class” and it always crashes up against the reality that being in the Party with the shitlib educated wine moms (who make more money) is a turnoff for men.
jonas
For most of the non-MAGA, low information voters who went for Trump this time, I think this is right on. They expected Biden to rewind everything to 2019 and were furious when that didn’t happen.
brendancalling
@Doug R: you joke. I’m serious. LOTS of radicals, black bloc, and anachists in Philly as well as regular folks who just like fighting.
Ohio Mom
@Suzanne: Hating on suburban moms sounds like unresolved adolescent issues to me. Especially since suburban dads aren’t mentioned.
I don’t disagree with most of the DSA’s vision, just their inability to be realistic. Again, adolescent.
Bupalos
@Baud: I don’t think that’s really it, I don’t think it’s that politically strategic. Nor that the white rurals generally would be upset if raids on farms and processing plants continued or escalated. I think it’s more about where the dystopian imagery he wants to produce can and cannot be produced. But above all, it’s just about today’s lunge for narcissistic supply. He’s had a series of injuries. He has to get back to the center of attention.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Ah, it’s 2016’s “just not that woman” integrated across the whole population.
Chief Oshkosh
@Suzanne: I don’t understand that tweet. Could you translate it for me. Not snark.
Eyeroller
@Ohio Mom: According to other commenters, they apparently were planning events like this all around the country, but must have had to scale it down just to DC because of the stupid parade. And something like this would have engaged the public and been a fitting 250th-anniversary tribute.
Matt McIrvin
@jonas: that’s why I say the Omicron variant reelected Trump. If COVID had somehow stayed what it was through the first three quarters of 2021, the pandemic ends triumphantly in a wave of mass vaccination and society gets back to normal. But Omicron made it so people like DeSantis could say the government lied about the vaccines, and be believed.
Suzanne
@Ohio Mom: Agree with you 100%. But I almost always do.
Hoodie
@Bupalos: It can be both. The weekend was a real hit for him emotionally, but the zealots around him like Miller would take advantage of that to further radicalization. I seriously doubt Trump wrote that post. It was probably penned by someone like Miller and put in front of him when Trump was particularly vulnerable to suggestion.
japa21
@Suzanne:
@Suzanne:
It’s a turn-on for me.
Baud
@japa21:
New pornhub category.
Jeffro
true and true and true, but big picture? it’s just that ‘he has always resented‘, PERIOD. Resentment is his brand.
This is all about him lashing out ’cause the whole country turned out to boo his sorry ass yesterday, and his parade sucked.
Suzanne
@Chief Oshkosh: So one of the “subdivisions” that’s happening on our side right now is that the Dems are changing. Dems are increasingly educated, relatively wealthier, more concentrated in urban areas, and more female. Republicans used to have the more college-educated electorate, the gender gap was smaller, and their voters used to make more money.
There’s a chunk of people on the left who are…. not thrilled with this. They would prefer to see a return to the Dems as the “party of the working class”, such as it was in mid-century, the FDR coalition. There seems to be a belief that blue-collar men, mostly white, used to be a Democratic cohort and that we should get them back.
I contend that there’s some misogyny and resentment at work here, because there’s frequent expressions toward those college-educated women, who are now pretty strong Democrats, as being “cringe” and driving away those blue-collar men.
jonas
That would make sense — a series of community events, parades, demos, in the towns/cities near big base installations like Ft. Drum or Ft. Knox or wherever. That stupid event in DC was such a fucking embarassment, for the soldiers forced to participate as well as the whole rest of the nation.
narya
@Suzanne: Part of that is that they refuse to actually see Black working-class folks. Somehow, “working-class” always and only means white men.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: We’ve seen occasional “leftist” troll comments here dipping all the way into eliminationist rhetoric on that score.
Suzanne
@japa21: Ali Wong has some great insight about this.
“The only kind of man that would leave a woman who makes more money is the kind of man that doesn’t like free money.”
Aziz, light!
@Hoodie: I assume that Wormtongue is always the last person to get his ear.
WereBear
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: There goes my fears of a military takeover.
Jeffro
@jonas:
@Matt McIrvin:
you’re both right
the RWNJs’ effort to kneecap the mass vaccinations (and therefore, our country’s recovery, and therefore credit to Biden/Harris) worked
we didn’t get the reset needed there, and people blamed Biden/Harris for things dragging on, including inflation
AND
we never got the comprehensive investigations/trials/convictions needed of DJT to cement in our blessed “independents” minds that we couldn’t go back to him and MAGA…he and they remained a viable choice for 2024
Suzanne
@narya: Agree.
I will also note that those college-educated shitlib wine moms are also often more than willing to vote for those blue-collar men’s interests. The inverse, however, doesn’t seem to be true. I wonder why that is.
(I don’t wonder why that is.)
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: Always the people who think the sequel won’t suck.
Miss Bianca
@Soprano2: And so they voted for…more disruption. Not just disruption – chaos and ruin. Nice job, normies!
jonas
I think that’s true of *white* Democrats nationally. Dems still get a majority of POC voters (in most places, exceptions being Cubans in FL, e.g.), many of whom, it should be pointed out, are technically “working class.” There’s not a conflict, in my mind, between focusing on bread-and-butter, working class issues, like boosting wages, lowering housing costs, protecting Social Security, etc., and also supporting minority communities in our coalition. The trick is getting more white guys to see that.
Jackie
This is happening NOW:
Bolding is mine.
Bupalos
@Hoodie: It could be both, but I don’t think it is here. I don’t think there is really any strategy related to retaining meaningful popularity among a coalitional partner here. Likely miller manipulated his dispositional state amidst narcissistic injury. This happens regularly, now it’s musk, now it’s Vance, now it’s Bessent, now it’s miller….it’s endless and ultimately pointless. They can’t make him follow through when the dispositional states changes. Trump can’t be successfully manipulated in a way that actually realizes his various courtiers’ goals because he has no actual ability to hold beliefs in the same sense other humans do. The difference between Trump’s short term suggestability is the key to how all the would-be Svengalis around him end up frustrated and often ruined. Everyone, even the worst of the worst, have a hard time grasping that Trump is truly both truly empty and incapable of being filled.
schrodingers_cat
@Soprano2: What is your theory about why Nancy Pelosi and her favorite legislators like Raskin and Schiff turned against Biden?
Liminal Owl
@Gvg: So well said. Thank you. Would it be OK to quote you else-Net? With or without attribution? I will certainly be referring to your points in conversation.
Liminal Owl
@rikyrah: Also very important. Thank you.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@jonas:
This.
And the centrist Dems along the lines of Ezra Broder Klein/MattY/Smith/Atlantic/Vox/Abundance crap., simply double down on basically white-focused, racially tone deaf policies that alienate voter segments that should be voting for Dems but don’t. It’s the Dems ‘Gentrification Problem’ that they, at best ignore, or more usually, embrace.
It’s a lazy approach that’s always disingenuously reframed by the same white people pushing policies that ignore the minority poor and marginalizes diverse working class coalitions and opens us up to attacks from the populist right from which we have no effective answer.
They blame electoral failures on anything but themselves and their policies. Pro tip: if your electoral strategy for 270 votes was defeated by a Cletus in Scranton sharing an obviously photoshopped picture from a Russian source with 50 gullible voters while large numbers of people who voted for you the last time decided they had enough with the lack of delivery of tangible benefits for voting Dem, you were already cooked.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: You’re right about Omicron. I watched in real time as DeSantis, who had himself shut down schools and business in 2020, retcon the history of the pandemic response for political advantage in 2022. It’s unforgiveable. He and Trump and that whole fucking party have ensured we’ll never be able to take collective action to stave off a communicable disease again, at least not in our lifetimes.
rikyrah
@Baud:
But, here’s the thing. The cities aren’t going to cooperate, and we’re not going to buckle. The marines in LA has been a flop.
schrodingers_cat
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Agreed. I detest these former blog bros and now MSM bros. But the DSA and tankies also have the same problem of centering white people, especially white men.
Suzanne
@jonas: I agree with you about there being no conflict in those issues. In fact, I think that’s a solid Party platform.
But these demographic changes are not just amongst white people. The gender gap is growing amongst all races. Which leads me to wonder…. if women are moving to the left, why aren’t the men following?
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: He will send them to college towns. We are not that big. Many are blue dots in red seas. Chairman Mao’s Pumpkin incarnation hates us as do the robber barrons of the Silicon Age.
Matt
@Matt McIrvin:
Every Republican president since (& including) Nixon has been a walking fountain of criminality, and not one has received any meaningful consequences either at the ballot box or the jury box.
WereBear
@Suzanne: They now have competition from more than their fellow mediocres.
Scoring above George W’s Gentleman’s C? Easy.
Competing with a smart minority woman, who usually got there with her brains? Not.
rikyrah
@Professor Bigfoot:
They have been trying to bait Black people since the beginning. But, we’ve stayed at home.
Once again…sending the Military to Los Angeles…has flopped.
There’s a reason when they mention this, it’s Memphis – a Black city in a Red State. There’s no Governor in a Blue State that wouldn’t sue against this shyt.
Baud
@Suzanne:
What’s in it for them?
A lot of our political strength depends on altruism from privileged people who don’t need us to be in power.
Belafon
@jonas:
Which is why Republicans focus on trans, gays, minorities buying lobsters with SNAP, and dangerous immigrants with drugs crossing the borders.
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffro: It wasn’t just RWNJ kneecapping things. The Biden administration was presented in spring 2021 with the spectacle of a vaccine that seemed almost miraculously more effective at stopping infection than the scientists had promised in the first place, and decided to bet everything on a vaccination-first political/rhetorical strategy. Get the vaccine, get your life back. And they deemphasized the things people really didn’t like, the masks and isolation.
But COVID itself took away their political lifeline. The vaccines still worked, but only as what they’d originally been designed to be, protection against severe disease. And long COVID presented some danger even to the vaccinated.
I’d say it was a strategic error on Biden’s part, but I’m not sure that is even true because the virus was so contagious that even Chinese-level lockdown protocols that would have had the US in violent open revolt were hard pressed to keep it down forever. It’s hard to imagine anything feasible in the US working… except just letting it roll and denying that anything was wrong, which a Republican administration might get away with but not a Democratic one.
WereBear
@Belafon: And the War on Christmas!
Kirk
@Suzanne:
Because as I’ve stated before, while racism may be the nation’s original sin misogyny is the world’s original sin.
If it’s perceived as helping women at the expense of men, or only helping women, or (gasp) putting women in charge of men, too many men will give up the proverbial curtain rod to prevent it.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
He might want to, but, they don’t have the demographic he needs.
No. He’s going to go for the Black towns in Red States, whose Governors will not remotely come to bat for them.
narya
@Suzanne: I have a Theory about this. Women have only been able to make their own way in the world for maaaaybe 50 years (think getting a mortgage, a credit card, a job that pays enough). On top of that, divorce became easier, all of which means that women don’t have to put up with as much shit to survive. (It also means that men can more easily dump their wives for a younger model, but that, too, can radicalize women.) Many women still (consciously or unconsciously) expect to be partnered with a man, but they’ve also had the experience of living their own lives. Men, OTOH, have had the experience of having two-income households while still ignoring a lot of the “home” work (managing the kids’ doctors’ appointments; managing the cleaning and cooking)–bonus! more household income, but not a lot more work for them! And I think a lot of women just get tired of it, even if it’s not entirely conscious on their part. So, no world-historical massive changes, just little nudges around the edges, plus things like Dobbs–and their daughters are even more insistent on a partner, not a man-baby. Obviously these are huge strokes and there are a million exceptions and nuances, but essentially women have tried to figure out what “freedom” and a “partnership” contain, while men. . . . have not. And all of the repressive measures in, e.g., Project 2025 attack exactly those changes.
rikyrah
@Jackie:
Absolutely OUTRAGEOUS
Steve LaBonne
@schrodingers_cat: The Great MAGAtarian Cultural Revolution.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I would argue that the class privilege many middle class Americans have will evaporate if the full T2.0 agenda is put into practice.
It will be like the Great Depression on steroids.
Suzanne
@WereBear:
Yeah no kidding.
And misogyny and patriarchy have interracial appeal. Lots of men want women in subservient roles and under their financial control.
The gender gap is pretty narrow for the oldest voters, and has been widening for each generational cohort. (The youngest cohort is the least white, BTW). So I continue to wonder….. as the women have been moving to the Dems….. why haven’t the men followed? I bet I know why!
Steve LaBonne
@rikyrah: If 5 Supreme Court justices will allow something so blatantly unconstitutional, the rule of law will be officially dead.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Trivia Man: Pretty easy for the Iranians to start sinking tankers going through the straits, if they want to go there.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: Biden was obviously losing, and losing big time. Ditching him at least offered an outside shot. It’s not more complicated than that.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: I think he will do both. And the college towns do have one demographic he hates, international students.In many universities with good research programs the percentage of international students and thus the towns in the vicinity, is about one third the population.
Suzanne
@Baud: Why are women better at putting their own interests aside for the sake of the whole? Why can’t men return the favor?
Steve LaBonne
@schrodingers_cat: All construction in the targeted cities will grind to a halt. That alone will be enough to tip the economy into recession. Then add the effect of the tariffs on top of that…
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Jeffro:
I mention historical echoes of 1930s Germany a lot this year but what you describe is a stark reminder of another time in US history where we did the same thing: post-Civil War.
Nobody was prosecuted, nobody was hung. Nothing. And as gets stated frequently, the North won the military part of the Civil War but lost the aftermath.
We made the same mistake earlier in the decade. Sure, we can argue all day about whether or not it could have been done, timelines, yada, yada, yada but the bottom line is that it wasn’t done enough and Here. We. Are.
Jackie
Another attack:
This is getting scarier by the day.
schrodingers_cat
A majority of white women have voted for Trump every single time he has been the ballot. So they clear the low bar of being more altruistic than white men. But they are far less altruistic as group compared to women of other demographics. If we define altruism as voting for Ds. Which is a skewed definition at best.
Belafon
@Matt McIrvin:
You must have had a nice bubble. In my part of the world, i.e. Texas, my division was rebelling against the parent company over Covid requirements. People here were asking when the company was going to stop requiring masks, and the company flat out said in the replies “When the Texas division gets their infection numbers down.”
Soprano2
@Suzanne: Yes there is. Some people think those people should be completely driven out of the Democratic Party because they are destroying it. They believe it is perverting what the Democratic Party should be. I agree with you that there is a lot of resentment against these people because they are women. It’s the James Carville argument that the Democratic Party is “too feminine”.
schrodingers_cat
@rikyrah: International students make up one third the student population in many college towns near major research universities.
Jackie
@Steve LaBonne:
Unfortunately this discrimination against certain Americans is CURRENTLY happening at some VA hospitals. How many will be denied medical treatment BEFORE it’s in the SC’s hands?
jimmiraybob
@ColoradoGuy: “…a Reality TV version of the Confederate States of America.”
The white supremacists and anti government militias for some have been calling for American Civil War 2.0. It sure seems like we are in the end stages of Antebellum 2.0 and LA might be the Fort Sumter turning point. Instead of the Union (north) and Confederacy (south) we have Blue States (counties & cities) lining up to defend the Constitutional order and Red States (counties and cities) lining up to defeat the Constitutional order and instill a lawless MAGA order.
Soprano2
@Jackie: Wow, I saw a headline about this but didn’t realize how far reaching it was. This sounds blatantly unconstitutional to me.
lowtechcyclist
@Barry:
:looks around:
Nope, not the end yet.
scav
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Your analysis nevertheless assumes they are get-at-able. Prosecutions may just fuel their sense they’ve been hard done by. History is littered with examples of grudges held for centuries. Sapiens is a bit of a stretch for a self-name and sapiens sapiens is pure fantasy.
Bupalos
@Belafon: I think those actually are attempts to politicize people around the very real and deep economic and social erosion they feel around them. They are ugly and false explanations and mobilizations, but politically it’s been very successful. And I think largely because Democrats since Clinton and Obama largely limited themselves to meliorist denials of the challenges we faced and basically swept decay under the rug. Biden actually had a different thrust and program but no politics or ability to communicate to go with it. All three basically conveyed “just wait, things are getting better” to an electorate where this was, in terms of the median voter, either not true or not sufficient to the moment in terms of scale or urgency.
It’s a long term problem for the party now. In the most politically salient ways, we are branded as the party of satisfaction in an age of dissatisfaction.
Matt McIrvin
@Belafon: For me there was this strange IRL/online gap. In real life I was the bad guy, always ruining everyone’s fun– everyone else wanted less isolation. But I had online friends who voluntarily stayed in something close to home lockdown for 3 or 4 years, and were perpetually angry that everyone wasn’t doing it. I see people on social media who are still urging this today.
Mike in Pasadena
@Gvg: Excellent analysis. Thanks.
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: I know you don’t like this answer, but it’s my understanding that they saw poll numbers from after the debate that showed Democrats getting absolutely wiped out across the whole country, and they decided the only way to prevent that from happening was to convince Biden to drop out. I think few people actually know the truth of everything that was going on with Joe Biden in the last couple of years of his presidency; maybe someday one of them will write a book about it. I love Biden and everything he did for the country, and I was risk averse about changing candidates, but I’ve come to believe that it’s true that the voters didn’t want to vote for him, and that Democrats would have been much worse off down the ballot if he had stayed the candidate. I also think it’s true that the press played into the perception that Biden wasn’t up to the job anymore. I feel none of us really know the whole truth about the situation, and that includes Jake Tapper and that other guy he wrote that book with.
Betty Cracker
@scav:
So is this blog! ;-)
catclub
No love for the smoldering ruins of Seattle.
Harrison Wesley
So after Big Baby’s Birthday Bust we need another diversion. Why not war with Iran? Are you not entertained?
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne:
I don’t think they are. I think they’re just recognizing in greater numbers that Democrats do support their interests, and those are contrary to the interests of patriarchalist men.
It’s hard, except maybe in the most extreme sort of separatist/TERF fantasy, to imagine a literal war of elimination between men and women. But I do think some of the crazier elements of incel/manosphere culture are thinking that way, and this is a global phenomenon.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@schrodingers_cat:
Yup. Election results have been catching up to what many of us have been saying: the Dem party has left working-class people of all kinds behind. If there’s any demographic we should be able to get, it’s white, women working-class voters but nope, the usual white centrists would have us forget about them.
I’m trying to find some good reports on this since so many comments about “how people voted” get thrown out with little to no verification as to their accuracy.
One of the better ones:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2024/11/08/men-and-white-people-vote-differently-based-education
states that non-educated white women voted for the Orange Fart Cloud by 28 points over Harris. If misogyny were that much of an issue, one wouldn’t expect that. Racism, sure, that’ll factor into it but for white people who still try to boil this down to misogyny and racism as an attempt to divert attention from their own white-centric view of the Dem Party going forward, it ignores that potentially reachable demographic that shares a lot of day-to-day concerns with the non-white component of that demographic in terms of class.
The classism on display in these discussions is stark.
Bupalos
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Oil shocking the world economy would probably be a really bad idea for the Iranian regime, but I suppose they have been presented with nothing but bad options, so who knows.
Nothing but bad options for a brittle regime constructed out of bad decisions and theocratic lunacy. Sounds like fun.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: You can call it a grudge but it is data point as to how the Dem leadership will behave when bullied by the MSM. If they can push out their President and nominee, they can certainly do it to inconvenient/unpopular minority groups.
cain
@Betty Cracker:
The businesses that hire illegal immigrants are also likely Trump supporters so attacking blue states is also attacking their base too
schrodingers_cat
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I would add white fragility to the classism.
cain
@Soprano2:
Did the tanks fuck up the streets ? Looks like it didn’t.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Disagree here. There’s absolutely no logical reason for a working-class person to vote for the GOP. None. The only reason would be sparrows-and-curtain-rods, which is not logical but is more real because of it.
Jeffro
@Matt McIrvin: thanks but I’m disinclined to do a deep dive on Biden/Harris’ faults re: trying to save lives, get everyone vaccinated, etc. The administration was quite clear from the get-go that it wasn’t a cure-all.
It’s the RWNJs’ fault that the numbers of anti-vaxxers in this country grew – they exploited it to keep the party together and to deny Biden/Harris a huge win. All of those deaths are on MAGA’s collective hands (and especially, MAGA leaders)
Jackie
@Betty Cracker:
Thanks for the coffee shooting out of my nose! Excuse me while I clean off my phone screen and blow my nose free of coffee residue!
gene108
@Gvg:
Framing legal immigrants as illegal, and stopping legal immigration is a mainstream Republican position. It’s not an extreme position.
They routinely conflate refugees as being here illegally, whether they are waiting for an asylum hearing or here on TPS or other status.
jonas
A huge part of the problem right now is that the vast majority of native-born Americans have absolutely no clue what a bureaucratic nightmare legal immigration can be. “Why can’t these people just play by the rules?” is something you hear a lot. They haven’t a clue. Most undocumented immigrants are undocumented because, effectively, there was no legal path for them to come here and they were desperate.
The prohibition analogy is apt. If gas taxes were $20/gal and some poor people got caught smuggling black market gasoline, would we throw the book at them? Or would there be a lot of sympathy for why they were breaking that particular law and demands for the taxes to be lowered? Same with illegal immigration — it exists because we, in a sense, tax legal immigration too much.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Bupalos:
A former SEC chief of staff laid this out, from the House side, in stark detail recently:
https://x.com/amandalfischer/status/1929956399292821950
Basically, a corporate friendly Dem party that simply won’t deal with problems head on when they have the chance.
rikyrah
@Suzanne:
Imma sit here and eat my breakfast.
These men are lagging behind women, and are mad that just doing the bare minimum doesn’t entitle them to access to women.
I don’t know about other women my age, but, I do know that I tell young women all the time..
You should not be involved in build-a-bear projects with men.
You can do all the domestic labor in your household all by yourself.
GET YOUR OWN – this means education, career, life.
A man needs to make your life easier. I don’t even mean financial. I mean, no man SHOULD TAKE AWAY FROM YOUR PEACE OF MIND.
With all the bullshyt about the ‘male loneliness epidemic’, NONE of them actually tell the young men to WORK ON THEMSELVES so that that make appealing partners for young women.
zhena gogolia
@Mike in Pasadena: Yeah — when I saw they were going to use “quotas,” it reminded me of Stalin’s quotas for getting “enemies of the people.” There just weren’t that many enemies, so lots and lots and lots of innocent people died or spent years in the gulag.
Matt McIrvin
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
If this is the problem, why did Barack Obama (whose economic policies were objectively MORE educated-bougie-centrist, less attuned to the working class) not do worse than Joe Biden? Is there just a 12-year lag in the system?
Leftist radicals hate Obama but normie voters still love him, including a lot of the youth who were markedly unenthusiastic about Biden. But if you compared the two on working-class pocketbook issues I’d take Biden any day. So what gives?
rikyrah
@gene108:
I mean..yeah. this is it.
It was obvious that the entire ‘ go after the criminals’ was a bullshyt line from the get go.
No phucking way that MILLIONS OF ACTUAL CRIMINALS would go under the radar in the country WHO LOCKS UP MORE PEOPLE THAN ANYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD.
BY VIRTUE OF BEING UNDOCUMENTED, YOU WERE A CRIMINAL.
PERIOD.
AND THIS…
is what so many Black people understood without hesitation.
and, it honestly did confuse us as to why so many Latinos didn’t see this clear as day.
Chasing that White Adjancency, I guess.
Belafon
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
You keep trying and trying and trying to dance around the fact that white women are racists. Let me tell you, from what I see and hear here in Texas: White women are racist. You can explain until you are blue in the face that if they want to fix their economic problems, they need to recognize that the people you have in common are minorities, and they will not hear it, they are no more receptive than white men
Edited for clarity.
narya
@rikyrah: OMG, that build-a-bear line is everything! Thank you for that succinct description.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Biden made minorities (VP and nominee to the Supreme court among others) the face of his administration. A bridge to far for many even on our side
Barack Obama was cool and had an Ivy League pedigree. Something that Biden didn’t. That explains some of the PodBros type people and their animus against Biden.
schrodingers_cat
@Belafon: In fairness they are slightly more receptive than white men, if you look at the national percentages. It would be interesting to see the state by state break up. IIRC in the southern states even college graduate white women vote majority R.
Politics is a lot about group identity.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: Okay, since this has happened two days in a row (with WaterGirl yesterday), I think it’s worthy of note. When a front-pager makes a comment that’s clearly directed at a mere commenter, it carries more weight and has a feeling of policing. I have noticed that whenever anyone, but especially schrödinger’s cat, says anything about Biden, they get a front-pager coming in to suggest they shut up about it. I don’t see this happening when certain commenters propose exterminating everyone in red states, etc. I wonder why this is the only apparently forbidden topic.
Those of us who bring it up believe it is absolutely relevant to the disaster we are experiencing at this moment. Whether or not it looked as if Biden was going to lose, the swift abandonment by the elected officials in his own party was a disgusting spectacle that many of us have not forgotten and would not like to see repeated. It looked at times as if Trump was going to lose — many times — but his people never abandoned him. That’s why he’s in office destroying the country right now.
And Harris had the Gaza people screaming at her whenever she appeared. I do not think that helped our chances in a very close election. But maybe that’s another forbidden topic.
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
I never hold grudges.
Even against those whom I’ll never forgive.
;)
Mike in Pasadena
@Suzanne: Words have not meant anything to Republicans for many years now.
Suzanne
@rikyrah: Agree.
Younger women, of all races, are getting more educated, making more money, and moving more Democratic. These trends are clear and have been happening for multiple cycles. (A reminder that white women are disproportionately older and the gender and education gaps are smaller in the older age cohorts.)
Emily B.
It is just wrong, wrong, wrong for any leader to demonize and insult ordinary Americans who belong to an opposing political party. I’m referring to the part of the post that says “Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country….”
You go far enough down that road, you wind up in Rwanda.
JBWoodford
@narya: Samantha Hancox-Li wrote a really nice analysis of that, HERE
lowtechcyclist
@brendancalling:
“There are certain sections of New York, Major, that I would not advise you to try to invade.” – Bogart, Casablanca
Applies just as well to Philly, I’m sure.
NotMax
@Emily B.
Dixiecrats an exception to the rule?
Baud
@Suzanne:
Men are pigs?
narya
@JBWoodford: thanks!
Sister Golden Bear
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Who would’ve thought that forcing troops travel to DC, sleep on floors and eat MREs on what otherwise would’ve been a three-day weekend off coinciding with Father’s Day would spark malice compliance
It’s not hard to march in formation (ask any high band nerd), and while our military doesn’t do Kim Jong Un levels of precision marching, it was pretty clear none of the soldiers, nor their officers gave a shit about doing so.
trollhattan
How is this Minnesota assassin being charged with 2nd degree murder charges? If there were ever a premeditated crime, these seem to fit the bill.
Kayla Rudbek
@Matt McIrvin: like the short story The Screwfly Solution
Baud
@trollhattan:
First degree requires a grand jury.
NotMax
FYI I have it (second hand but originally from an unimpeachable source) that ICE’s initial forays in Westbury, NY (Nassau county on Long Island) have been thwarted by the local populace for now.
Belafon
@trollhattan: The charges can be upgraded.
Edit. just going to remove the speculation.
WereBear
@Soprano2: And against all medical ethics.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Belafon:
Not dancing around it, fully acknowledge it, just like I don’t dance around the fact that self-professed, progressive white women who indicate they vote Dem are some of the most racially tone-deaf people on the left side of the aisle. It’s a constant on both sides of the political spectrum.
The question in both cases is what are those numbers? Yunno, something along the lines of the Crazification Factor, at least in in concept.
Assuming the link I reference above is reasonably accurate, let’s look at the roughly 62% of non-college educated white women who voted for Trump. Of that 62%, how much of the Trump vote (or perhaps anti-Harris vote) can be attributed to out-and-out racism?
Not all of it and that’s where the classism that’s on exhibit gets in the way of appealing to that segment in a meaningful way.
I’ll repeat, the classism that’s on display in these discussions is stark and revealing.
frosty
@Betty Cracker: Ain’t that the truth! There are lots of comments where I just roll my eyes and move on. No sense in getting into a pissing match.
Suzanne
@Baud: I think that lots of men — and women who grew up framing their lives around patriarchal values — hate women’s autonomy and the changes to the social order that it implicates.
lowtechcyclist
@Chief Oshkosh:
“How come jerks don’t know they’re jerks?” – Kim Stockwood, “Jerk“
Baud
@Suzanne:
Yeah, most people don’t like losing their status in society. That’s why I said up thread that our coalition depends on altruism.
rikyrah
@zhena gogolia:
Which is why they were so willing to push that bullshyt book of Jake Tappers.
Who do you think were the sources for Tapper back then.
Trying to absolve themselves, because people like me…
I was taking names then, and I promised that, WIN OR LOSE..
Those traitor muthaphuckas needed to be dealt with in 2026.
I have not changed my mind. I will spend my election funds on donating to primary challengers for those muthaphuckas.
rikyrah
@trollhattan:
Whatever will get STATE CONVICTIONS.
STATE CONVICTIONS
STATE CONVICTIONS.
Now, if the Feds want to do charges, fine.
But, this killer needs to be convicted under STATE charges.
no possible room for a Federal Pardon.
Baud
Sister Golden Bear
@Suzanne:
Another general reminder for my fellow jackals, that there’s less than 10 trans athletes at the collegiate levels, out of 510,000 athletes, in and California (population 40 million) the number is in the single digits. A number of states that passed bans on trans athletes didn’t even have any.
WereBear
@Suzanne: Yes, they are more required to be a contributing adult.
The horror.
Wapiti
@stinger: You were marching to march music. I haven’t turned up the sound on the video, but if they’re playing some old pop tunes instead of the old military standards, it might be hell to stay in step without the heavy drum beat when your left (or is it right?) foot hits the ground.
jimmiraybob
Speaking of Fox News inside and outside of the White House studios, I am reminded of the movie Wag the Dog.
NotMax
@Baud
That the alleged perpetrator is named Vance is icing on the cake.
Suzanne
@Baud: But, to get back to where this discussion started….. the only reason to hate on “shitlib wine moms” in the Dem Party is because a fair amount of liberal and left men have a big problem with women. The prototypical West Virginia coal miner is increasingly not getabble as a Dem voter because of it.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: What the actual fuck? My comment was an attempt at humor in response to a commenter who, as far as I know, has never alleged oppression by WG or me. It had nothing to do with Biden. It had fuck-all to do with schrodingers cat. Seriously, this is bizarre.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@zhena gogolia:
Thank you so much for bringing this up; I’m not the only one to have seen it.
The dehumanizing language that’s been used here, consistently in some quarters, and that’s gone completely unremarked upon not just by front pagers but in general, is telling. And a sad reflection that such language is not only tolerated but allowed whereas something that’s far more benign is singled out from the top town for criticism.
Sure Lurkalot
@Kirk:
Ah yes, from Ancient Greece, the cradle of democracy, here’s Hesiod on the gift Zeus gave MANkind to punish them for receiving stolen fire from Prometheus:
I note the emphasis on women stealing men’s livelihood, very pertinent to a discussion about the right’s message to men. There’s a zero sum amount of dollars to be made in the world and women are stealing YOURS.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Yeah, it’s frustrating how many people cling to the idea that the group that they want to get is gettable. The centrists do it too, which is why they’re often so wishy washy.
Chasing groups based on one’s heart takes energy away from figuring out how to create a real winning coalition.
NotMax
@Wapiti
U.S. Navy band does Thriller. Yes, including zombies in dress whites.
;)
WereBear
@jimmiraybob: I preferred Canadian Bacon.
Sister Golden Bear
@trollhattan: First-degree murder requires a grand jury indictment in MN.
Plus, it’s really common for police to arrest people on “easy” charges initially—e.g. felon in possession of a gun or possession of drugs etc.—so that the suspects can be held in jail while the investigation continues, and then more serious charges are added later.
Belafon
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: The rest correlates to transphobia, and that, funnily enough, conservative women are highly misogynistic.
But I will circle back to it, that “working class” whites that we have lost we lost when the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts were past, it just took some places a little while longer than others. Here in Texas, for instance, we had a 15-20 year window between when Democrats became the more progressive party and voters finally realized that the change had occurred, roughly a generation. The reason Democrats will have trouble winning statewide office here is that R now means conservative, and that’s entirely the criteria that too many use to vote.
Democrats have tried providing solutions to help many “working class” people, including large investments in infrastructure for rural people. What they haven’t done is buy media in rural markets. Which rich Democrat is going to start buying newspapers, radio, and television to broadcast messages in rural areas?
So, as you can tell, I don’t buy the Democrats abandoned the white working class. There is no getting through to them as long as we also support minorities and other groups that their minister and news channels tell them to hate.
Ohio Mom
@cain: We will never know but I could imagine the tanks shortening the life span of the streets — more potholes, more cracks, sooner than expected by whatever kind of engineers that do roads and paving. But it will far off enough in the future that it won’t be traceable to the parade.
BellyCat
It’s already time for a general strike. Repeatedly. Regularly scheduled. Increasing in frequency and duration.
The protests are good in that they build support for general strikes. But they will not be enough. Until general strikes take place, all else is window dressing at best and, at worst, opportunities for violence and imposition of martial law.
Mike in Pasadena
@Suzanne: Yes, less than 1/2 of 1 percent of the population scares red staters more than anything else.
schrodingers_cat
Is this directed at me? If it is, please point out when I have done so. Thanks
Shalimar
LGM would be a place I donate when I make more money and I would have pointed that out during their recent fundraiser except Loomis banned me from their house a long time ago and all I can do is read silently. I have to believe a lot of their problem reaching fundraising goals has to do with the thousands of people they have banned permanently for very temporary reasons.
rikyrah
@Sister Golden Bear:
I also want a thorough investigation. Everyone who helped this muthaphucka needs to catch charges TOO.
Ohio Mom
I understood the vaccinations and what passed for lockdowns as ways to save hospitals, so they wouldn’t collapse under the weight of too many too sick people.
Better you should be in bed at home, relatively only slightly sick as a result of a somewhat effective vaccine than in hospital, waiting for your turn to be treated. Suzanne can speak to this better than I can, but hospitals do not have unlimited capacity.
But that idea is too abstract for mass compsumption, and the media is too wired against Democrats.
brantl
“sick of mind…“, where did this clown learn English? Latveria?
Suzanne
@Sister Golden Bear: The trans athlete freakout is so out of proportion to…. well, everything real, that it’s really made me reconsider the role that sports plays in some people’s lives.
rikyrah
Variety
@Variety
The Trump Organization has announced Trump Mobile, which will offer 5G service with an unlimited plan priced at $47.45 per month via AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. Trump Mobile plans to release the “T1 Phone” in August — described as “a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States for customers who expect the best from their mobile carrier.” https://variety.com/2025/biz/news/trump-mobile-wireless-phone-service-launch-1236431690/
brantl
@ColoradoGuy: Douche Dynasty.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Obviously not. Looking forward to the consumer fraud lawsuits.
Baud
Scout211
I’m not making a comment about today, but did you read the thread from last night? The commenter started by making wild accusations directly toward WaterGirl about her intentions. It was not WaterGirl singling her out, she was responding to the accusations. Then the commenter continue to accuse her and her intentions.
After some time, the commenter apologized profusely when she went back over her own comments and could see she that she was initially on the attack and wrongly accused WaterGirl. The commenter felt badly that she misconstrued WaterGirl’s intentions and continued to apologize again, several times. Then it was over.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: JFC. No, it’s in reference to the commenter I originally replied to, who is not you, and who had made a comment that has nothing to do with you or Biden AFAIK. I didn’t reply to you or reference you anywhere in this thread except in response to an accusation from ZG that some commenters, allegedly “especially” you, are being unfairly policed.
I don’t read every thread, but I think that’s horseshit. Also, nobody should take any comment I make as authoritative. Cole is the blog boss, not me.
Baud
brantl
@lowtechcyclist:
Kumar Abrego Garcia.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Belafon:
Nice discussion. We agree on the messaging part, heh heh, I think just about everybody here would agree on that general subject. I’m always praising Biden’s work and how people would benefit. But local low-info/low-motivation voters, who aren’t necessarily driven by some non-stop racist view of the world, simply didn’t see it that way, particularly in metro areas or cities run by Dems and doing things on a daily basis to screw them.
My “abandonment” statements aren’t limited to white working class (it’s always disingenuously reframed as that by the same classist outlook on display) , it’s a broader indictment stemming from the decision Dems made starting with Clinton to hitch their wagon to the tech community, big donors, etc., and has lead to a basic inability to see beyond their urban, cosmopolitan business ‘liberalism’, monied core. We’ve now seen the fragility of that coalition in 16 and 24 at the federal level when confronting a challenge from the populist right.
And doubling down on that, as espoused by the racially tone deaf New Liberalism types (Klein, MattY, etc) while at the same time attempting to further weaken the bonds between organized labor, public education and what I call “NextGen” civil rights (gay, trans, etc) isn’t exactly a compelling and unifying approach.
Sometime in the last 6-8 months, commenter RaflW said it best:
Key there is “mean”. And the divergence in how we should proceed is always on stark display here.
Baud
Matt McIrvin
@Belafon: I think the Democrats SHOULD be more redistributionist, more pro-labor and less pro-corporate than they are, as a moral issue. I am also deeply skeptical that this will get us votes in an election like 2024. Because I think that people mostly vote irrationally based on vibes and cultural affinities until there is a relevant emergency that directly affects them. So our side’s wins come from the other side making emergencies. (And a lot of the losses come from either our side failing to completely fix the real emergencies in 2 years, or from them ginning up fake emergencies.)
Now, emergency response *is* one area where I could see a more redistributionist/social-democratic focus helping politically. (E.g. in the Great Recession crash, bailing out homeowners instead of banks). But it’s also hard to do because of Republican obstructionism.
Steve LaBonne
@Suzanne: I don’t think it’s about the role sports play in people’s lives, because almost nobody fuming over the microscopic phenomenon of trans women in women’s sports actually has ever given a rat’s ass about women’s sports. It’s a popular attack simply because it’s the kind of thing that sounds reasonable to stupid people.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Shalimar:
Another reason could be that the Three Stooges (Lemieux, Loomis and Campos) shouldn’t be given a dime of money to that helps give them any kind of platform.
Baud
rikyrah
@Sister Golden Bear:
10
10
10
10
10
RaflW
Yeah we went through gyrations on this question the past several weeks, as a trip by plane abroad approached. We went, but we got a recommendation of an immigration atty practicing in our state and put down their name & phone to carry on paper on our persons, I temp. deactivated Bsky, removed it from my phone, and entered the country with the phone powered down and in my carry on.
All went quickly and felt as normal as the past several arrivals, thankfully. We have a Sept trip to finalize, I’ve pre-paid* for a lunch event with 20 (!) of my cousins in Sweden but if we bail at the last minute, I’ll just ask them to take lots of pictures and send us stories of how the day goes.
*Not too late to get a refund for a good bit of time, but eventually, it’ll lock in.
I guess what I’m saying is, plan to still take joy where you can, keep connected to friends and fam, and be adaptable if needs must that things change.
scav
@schrodingers_cat: As the mere original commenter Betty C replied to, I’m now prostrate on the floor giggling because your comment can be read as your objecting to the implication that you’ve never complained of oppression by WG & BC. This is utterly baroque.
Suzanne
@Steve LaBonne: What I mean by “the role of sports in people’s lives” is not actually sports that they play. It’s that sports — especially pro and college sports that the vast majority of people don’t play and only watch on television — seem to serve as far more than escapist entertainment. More like a religious experience.
Gvg
@Suzanne: the difference between suburbs and “cities” eludes me. Maybe it’s different up north or in older places but in Florida every place I have lived there was effectively no difference. The downtown sections are minuscule with few people living in them and I include the “urban poor”. They are business places not residential. With some attempts at downtown revitalization there are some small trendy condo type things built for…I don’t know well off with no children who like a night life? But they just aren’t numerous. Maybe it has to do with we never got much in the way of industry. Most cities function to supply the city. They have businesses and people work. The businesses that make things or ship things need room too and aren’t downtown they are kind of spread out just like the suburbs which is just another word for neighborhood. What I am getting at is there is not a big group of voters in the center that votes differently than the suburbs. It’s all the same or maybe split by class and some racial interests, but the minorities are suburbs too. They may be in different suburbs based on money and comfort, but it’s all suburbs.
schrodingers_cat
@scav: Standing up for myself, is alleging oppression? That’s a strange definition.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: Thanks for the clarification.
Pappenheimer
@stinger: someone put those troops in route march, it looked like. For that president, l’d have done the same
scav
@schrodingers_cat: Did I say that? I merely pointed out your comment was phrased in such a way as it could be read in two fashions. Which is amusing, especially in that particular string of comments.
Jay
@They Call Me Noni:
ETTD (Everything Trump Touches, Dies).
If you scan daily r/Leopards, you will note that all the White shoe Law Firms that took part in “bending the knee” have lost most of their Partners, (Senior Lawyers), most of their Legal Teams, many of their “bottomless pit of money” Customers*, and are struggling to hire and keep the lights on.
I don’t think that they will be keen or competent when DJTdiot demands pro-bono legal work.
*from the Customers view, if the Law Firm won’t fight for the rights of the Law Firm, why would they fight for us?
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Gvg:
Um, white colonizer/gentrifiers going to “hot” cities looking for their Urban Living, Theme Park Experience (until children, then it’s back to someplace with “better”, read, white, schools because Gentrification Stops At The School House Door) is a massive thing and has resulted in some cities, like Denver, with a massive landscape and demographic change from the resulting displacement. It’s the thing that hit me full in the face when moving back to Denver after all these years.
It’s certainly not a universal thing in all metro areas but it’s been a massive trend coming out of the Great Recesssion. Heh heh, come to Denver and I can give you a tour showing exactly what this is about.
Back in the 90s, cartoonist Tom Toles published something that was prescient in describing what’s happened:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/cartoon-the-secret-gentrification-plan–194499277629623106/
How does this then explain voting patterns? There’s a shitload on this but much starts from a basic red state/blue state perspective in that you see less distinction between city core areas and 1st ring burbs voting wise than you do when you start hitting 2nd/3rd ring burbs or exurbs in blue states. The differences are more pronounced in red states.
For example, if you look at voting patterns in the Denver metro area (CO blue state) vs someplace like St Louis (MO red state), it’s a different pattern and you get more red the further out you get. White flight from the 60s explains the core being for this but over the last 15 years, it’s become more nuanced than that and I’d need to track down some of the pieces I’ve read on that.
It’s why I don’t refer to “cities” much and more “metro areas” because they have more meaning when it comes to looking at voting trends, movement trends, etc.
jimmiraybob
@WereBear:
Yes, like that one too!
They Call Me Noni
@JBWoodford: Fascinating. Thank you for posting.
Suzanne
@Gvg: The city/suburb distinction is really about the economic center of the region. Suburbs typically don’t have a manufacturing or industry or large commercial tax base, and their economy is built primarily around residential areas (many of which serve the city) and services to support the people who live there. The term “metropolitan area” is meant to encompass the whole economic unit of city and surrounding suburbs.
In the Sun Belt, where cities developed around car infrastructure, there is often no difference in density. Tempe is denser than Phoenix, for example, but Tempe is a suburb of Phoenix. What you’ve seen in Florida is similar.
Citizen Alan
In my experience, leftists who complain that Dems are “corporate friendly” are just trying to be polite when, in truth, they hate the Dems for not being aggressively Socialist (if not outright Marxist) to the point of nationalizing a significant portion of American corporations and imposing punitively large tax rates on the wealthy.
Matt McIrvin
@Shalimar: Someone here recently called LGM the abusive boyfriend of the left blogosphere, and it hit home. There have been times when I was more active there than here. I still like Shakezula and Cheryl’s posts there, even some of Lemieux’s. But I’m not sure Loomis or Campos’s attitudes toward the current national clusterfuck actually help.
If there’s one thing I love about this blog it’s its activist focus. I think there’s an interesting paradox (or is it?) in the more “normie”-toned blog of the two having the greater lean toward personal political action, while the bloggers with more radical sensibilities grouse about how it’s all a waste of time.
Citizen Alan
Yeah, but honestly and objectively looking at yourself in the mirror, engaging in a serious self-critique, and resolving to change the things about you that other people find off-putting is HAAARRRDD! It’s so much easier to just destroy all opportunities for advancement and self-actualization for women so that it’s easier to find one who will put up with your shit just to survive.
These are the men who made “negging” a lifestyle choice, after all.
ETtheLibrarian
As someone pointed out, this won’t ultimately just be limited to blue states or blue cities in red states because Justice Dpt. lawyers all over are going to want to prove their bona fides (esp if they desire political office). It will reach into red or purple suburbs/exurbs. Red state farmers, construction firms, etc. are going to to see because this is already happening.
They Call Me Noni
@Belafon:
Same here.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Citizen Alan:
Can I fall somewhere along that spectrum? No fan of nationalizing but a big fan of significant tax increases on the wealthy.
My normie (and for less left than my shrill leftist self) wife would help lead the pitchork and torches crowd when it comes to significant tax increases on the wealthy and all the nuances that surround revising a tax policy that doesn’t consolidate wealth.
Timill
@Suzanne: I don’t know that it’s sports per se: I think the underlying phobia is “Naked men around My Daughters (in the locker rooms)”.
Guess what: your daughters aren’t any more innocent than your girlfriends used to be back in the day.
They Call Me Noni
@rikyrah: For the MAGA who doesn’t care for the red hat but would absolutely love a gold phone!
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: I’m sorry if I misinterpreted your reference to grudges as being a criticism of sc’s comment about Biden.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: I think it’s directed at me.
zhena gogolia
@Scout211: We’re talking about two different threads.
Spanky
From a WaPo article that I was somehow given access to:
Scout211
@zhena gogolia: Okay. Got it.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: Part of my contempt for “Leftist radicals” lies in their refusal to acknowledge that Joe Biden was not only the most Progressive president of my lifetime, he is probably as far to the Left as we will ever see. But they cling to this belief that some other out-and-proud Marxist will become President and usher in the Socialist Utopia that exists only in their fantasies.
It’s always been telling to me that the most obnoxiously leftist person in my personal friend group (no longer a close friend as we only communicated through Facebook which I’m no longer on) was, at the time he told me he was a communist, working as VP for Intellectual Property at the company he worked for.
They Call Me Noni
@Jay: All the better! But perhaps that was the plan all along? Don’t know if he’s that smart, but maybe his handlers are.
Suzanne
@They Call Me Noni: I could have bought into the idea that Dems could have done better for the working class….. but that crashed into the shoal of voting for Republicans. Which…. IMO, reveals that line of attack to be utter bullshit.
Our tech overlords are firmly in the GOP camp these days, so the white working class, who voted overwhelmingly with the GOP, is voting to step on their own dicks. Please proceed.
Citizen Alan
@schrodingers_cat: People forget that a lot of Obama’s “corporatist” tendencies came from his recognition of the fact that the GOP and the entire media apparatus was salivating at the prospect of him saying or doing anything that could be used to paint him as a Marxist. Sarah Palin basically called him a terrorist because he served on a charitable board (or something like that) with Bill Ayers, which is why I continue to despise Sarah Palin even though she’s been largely out of the public eye for so many years. Hell, Obama merely choked up for a few seconds when discussing Trayvon Martin and the Teabaggers screamed that it was proof of how much he hated white people.
zhena gogolia
I should be clear, I love all the front-pagers.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: There’s a segment of them who *mostly* care about foreign policy, and there, mostly opposing anything the US does or advocates rather than supporting leftist ideology per se (so you have the strange spectacle of “leftists” carrying water for Putin as if he were heading the old USSR).
The strange phenomenon of pro-Trump leftists in 2016 were mostly these sorts of people in the extreme. They saw Trump as the living bomb who would take down the Empire from within. And maybe they were right.
snoey
@Suzanne: People see sports as one area where fairness still matters even if they feel that most things are rigged – usually against them. If the runner’s foot is on the bag, if the last second shot is still on the fingertips etc. Trans athletes are misunderstood as cheaters.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Speaking about how the top elected Ds betrayed Biden does seem to be forbidden topic on this blog. And bring it up gets a reprimand or a lecture. Its happened way too many times for that to be a coincidence.
Citizen Alan
@Suzanne: Two things:
First, a lot of transphobia comes from the same source as homophobia, hostility to abortion rights, and, in general, equality for women: fundamentalist Christianity. For them, it’s all driven by an obsession on the part of certain straight white Christian men with reinforcing the gender roles outlined in the Bible. Gender roles which, by happy coincidence, hold up straight white Christian men as the perfected human at the top of the pyramid, straight white Christian women who are obedient to their whims just below them, and everyone else at their feet. Trans women, by existing, are an assault on the idea that every sensible person obviously would want to be a man and there’s something wrong with being a woman instead.
Suzanne
@snoey: I think a lot of the appeal of sports for people is just that it was a thing they were good at, at some level, and that provided them some status amongst their peers.
schrodingers_cat
Deleted.
rikyrah
DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) posted at 9:26 AM on Sun, Jun 15, 2025:
You aren’t going to like this post, but it needs to be said about Vance Bolter.
At first, I assumed Vance Boelter was just another grifter in the NGO/activist space. He built a fake resume, floated around volunteer gigs, and set up shell organizations for clout. His “Red Lion Group” has no real paper trail. His side business in “security services” looks like a cash grab.
But the more I dug, the more different it looks.
Boelter was a 7/11 manager, but constantly promoted himself as a corporate executive. He claims the title “Dr.” based on a Ed.D. in Leadership. He chased every opportunity to get in front of an audience: volunteering for Governor Walz’s “Workforce Development” initiatives, speaking at conferences, anything to be seen as a leader.
And in videos of him in African churches, you see him light up. He’s performing. He’s preaching vague, positive platitudes to foreign audiences. He wanted to be somebody. He wanted to be followed.
There’s good reason to believe that @JamesHartline is right… he was remodeling that building below into a church. Not to serve Jesus, but as a stage for an audience that would never come.
I think he is a man addicted to attention and status, who tried to get it through a lot of means. And when that attention dried up (possibly whoever cut him off his funding in Congo), he snapped.
I believe Vance Boelter committed violence as a last, desperate attempt to be glorified: under the delusion that killing abortion rights activists would make him a martyr or hero.
This is not Christianity. I watched his sermons. They were designed to provoke emotional applause, not spiritual conviction.
His actions contradict the standard Jesus gave us to recognize false prophets:
“By their fruits you will know them.” – Matthew 7:15–20
Boelter bore no good fruit. Just narcissism, manipulation, and ultimately violence. He wasn’t an evangelical or MAGA. He was a man who couldn’t stand being ordinary.
https://t.co/EbphTJRM4c
(https://x.com/DataRepublican/status/1934256121394712998?t=VuCpTAKIPfgBEYGKQhibgg&s=03)
snoey
@Suzanne: Not wrong, but sports is also a value system for a lot of people.
Soprano2
I think this is one of the things that turns me off the “we have a crisis among boys” stuff. There is never ANY discussion of what is happening that boys can take responsibility for. They never talk about how boys are CHOOSING to listen to and idolize men with gross attitudes toward women, and thus start adopting that attitude. No one ever addresses the male attitude of entitlement to being first in line, always ahead of women, and how women succeeding might be part of why they aren’t going to college anymore. No, it’s all wringing hands about how society can adapt to make these boys and young men feel better.
Citizen Alan
@Citizen Alan: And I hit enter before my second point, which was that another facet of transphobia is that, for some people, trans individuals and especially trans women merely by existing in their personal space trigger a lizard brain response. Ultimately, we all nothing but chimpanzees that have been strategically shaved and taught to dress ourselves. And there is a part of us that is always doing threat assessment during every waking moment. And when you encounter someone you don’t know and suddenly realize that you cannot immediately categorize them according to something as basic as gender, it triggers an internal alarm and raises stress levels. I mean, I am fully supportive of trans rights, but I still feel anxiety when I meet someone whose gender presentation is unclear because I’m constantly worrying about accidentally misgendering them, which is socially embarrassing if not insulting whether the person is cis or trans.
Soprano2
This describes a lot of my mother’s attitude.
Soprano2
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I try to fight the good fight about how not all FFOTUS supporters are total monsters, but I think if you live in a place where you rarely interact with them it’s hard to believe they’re normal people. What I hope is that I give them pause as an example of a liberal who doesn’t fit the crazy stereotype in their heads. Saturday was inspiring to see that there are lot more of us here than it appears.
Citizen Alan
The only reason that blue-collar men ever supported the Democratic Party is because they perpetuated systems that reserved good-paying blue-collar jobs for white men. In 1964, we lost, possibly forever, every white guy in the country who was offended that a black person could be promoted over him or move next door or become President.
Soprano2
@Baud: They desperately want the approval of the only group of voters who they think matters, white men. Not being able to win that group makes some parts of our coalition feel that they are “lesser”. That will persist unless and until we get people to understand that the white male voter is not the “normal, average” voter.
Suzanne
@Soprano2: Internalized misogyny is a thing. Lots of women are deeply invested in patriarchy and are dependent upon it. They’ve shaped their lives around it, and they’re unwilling or unable to change. Anyone who asserts that sexism isn’t a factor because they would expect women not to support it….. hasn’t really grokked what patriarchy has wrought on women’s lives.
Ironcity
@Spanky: It’s the grift too. Deep Throat was right.. follow the money.
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah: There is a lot of self-improvement rhetoric in the “manosphere”–I think that was originally a lot of Jordan Peterson’s appeal, the common-sense “make your bed, pull your pants up” stuff. Where it fails is that it’s mostly not geared to anything most women want. It’s about making yourself a stoic, hypermasculine warrior king. It’s stuff that impresses other men, which is why it makes sense to the target audience. And then they get really mad when they hear that women don’t want this
I think a lot of these guys are interested in women mostly as prizes to denote high status in the bro hierarchy. They don’t actually LIKE women, they’ve just been told that they are necessary as win conditions.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I think focusing on sports is a way to get people to turn against trans people on the basis of “fairness”. I think for a lot of the ones who are freaked out about trans girls and women their real objection is fear that their daughter might get a glimpse of a penis in the locker room. I also think they truly believe that cis boys would pretend to be girls to get into a girls locker room so they could see naked girls. It’s hard for me to imagine a guy doing this, but I think they truly believe it happens. They honestly don’t understand that a trans girl is a girl who is not interested in sexually assaulting their daughter.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Soprano2:
It’s no excuse. I lived in red, rurl, all-white, Central Misery for 22+ years and heard the *exact* kind of ignorant comments from the locals about “people like us” that are routinely used here, more so since around 2016.
I didn’t give them a pass for that and won’t do the same with people who are constantly proclaiming their in-effect “wokeness” in one sentence and then using phrasing that’s straight from the Nazi propaganda playbook in the next sentence to bash the right.
We can call them ‘lying sacks of shit’ or call them Nazis or say Stephen Miller most likely sleeps upside down but we don’t need to use the same dehumanizing language once used and once again out in the open on the right.
Bupalos
@Soprano2: I think this kind of “pull themselves up by the bootstraps stuff” is always fundamentally anti-intellectual and illiberal. It’s a testament to the political power of counter-paternalist narratives that otherwise liberal people online can bring themselves to be shitting on 12 year olds and basically blaming them for their own pathologies.
I’m pretty sure we’re going to figure out that for some reason the screens are worse for the developing male brain, maybe simply a matter of the different timing. But whatever, it’s just profoundly disappointing to me that we can’t see the very real and disturbing trends with boys as something that might exist beyond the realm of the historical injustices we already happened to be talking about. I mean, you can practically hear people saying “well fuck them, they had it great for 2000 years.” Like, you’re talking about a 12 year old, or teenagers committing suicide. It’s not historical comeuppance, it’s things going off the rails. It’s as important for girls as for boys that we get out of our own heads long enough to take it seriously as a critical common social issue.
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat:
I’ve said this before, but:
1) You seem to like to dump on white women, while when it comes to white men, you just kinda shrug as if to say, “white men, what can you do?”
2) You seem to expect the voting gap between white women and white men to be something like the gap between (for instance) whites and Blacks. It’s as if you forget that the vast majority of white women exist in the same social world with, and usually intimate relationships with, white men. While whites and Blacks still mostly exist in separate (though overlapping) social spheres.
That white women vote as differently as they do from the white men their lives are intertwined with says a lot about their character, but you will continue to pretend that that intertwining of lives, which typically carries with it a great deal of overlap in values, should mean little when it comes to voting, which is largely about values. I find that to be ridiculous.
lowtechcyclist
@Betty Cracker:
It just seems like we’ve been arguing for centuries here!
Citizen Alan
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Oh, I fully support raising the top marginal rate through the roof. Hell, I think some businesses should be nationalized. I’m just not dumb enough to think that because Dems don’t do The Thing because at the moment it’s politically impossible, I should turn on the Dems and publicly hate them and undermine them at every point.
And I still say that if Bernie Sanders had, in some bizarre chain of events, become President in 2016, he wouldn’t have made it to the Inauguration before the opinion leaders of the Prog-Left turned on him and called him a corporate sell-out. Hell, they might have turned on him after the Convention simply because he allowed Centrist Dems to speak.
Bupalos
I think you’re probably too averse to the topic to have actually engaged the sources you’re implicitly criticizing. Even among significantly toxic and conservative and essentialist commentators in this space (say Jordan Peterson) “you need to quit being a loser” is about half of the message. Probably not a very effective one, but you’re simply wrong that there isn’t a ton of Bill Cosby style preaching at these guys. And there are far, far better folks in this space.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Bupalos: [ I haven’t read this whole thread so forgive me if what I write isn’t fully on topic ]
Can anyone doubt that there are severe problems in our society? There are so many symptoms, not least being the fact that Trump won the election. Are screens and the associated decline in attention spans the worst issue? Or the onslaught of propaganda and deliberate misinformation?
What to do? Saturday at least is a hopeful sign.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: The “AOC is a sellout” rhetoric has existed for years.
Mike in Pasadena
@rikyrah: Your post here makes many valid points. Really clarified my thinking. Thanks
O. Felix Culpa
@Betty Cracker: Sorry, not bizarre. You may honestly not have intended that as a dig, however, the tone policing towards certain parties about a particular topic has been remarkable. As in frequent and repeated. Whilst other fairly egregious behaviors get ignored, as zg pointed out. Which leads to a higher level of sensitivity when it appears to be happening again, even–as in your case this time–when unintended.
tam1MI
@rikyrah:
I was taking names then, and I promised that, WIN OR LOSE..
Those traitor muthaphuckas needed to be dealt with in 2026.
I have not changed my mind. I will spend my election funds on donating to primary challengers for those muthaphuckas.
I did the same thing and I suspect a lot of us did also. I am willing to give a pass to fellow voters who supported the backstabbing because they believed politicians who kept bellowing about the Big Super Sekrit Polls That Showed We Were Losing Eleventy-Billion to One, but the politicians themselves… We Will Not Forget and We Will Not Forgive.
Citizen Alan
These are the idiots who think that elementary schools are performing penectomies.
While I agree with your larger point, a sizeable percentage of trans women also identify as lesbian or bisexual, something like 27% I believe. The trigger for some TERFS (Rowling, for one) seems to be a terror of being a woman confronted in a supposedly safe space where they are vulnerable (like a locker room) with someone who (a) still has a penis and (b) feels sexual attraction towards women.
There have been incidents of sexual assault perpetrated by trans females against cis females, including in locker rooms. As with all discussions of crime, I think these cases are overblown by demagogues in order to stir up public fear against trans people and trans allies as a demographic group. But saying that there is no possibility whatsoever of TF on CF sexual assault is simply not true. I suspect that someone who has the mentality to sexually assault others while living as a cis man is probably going to be just as likely to do so as a trans woman.
frosty
Well, all morning/afternoon, at least. I seem to have broken my own rule (well, a guideline) not to read any comments when they go past 200 or so. Oh well, at least this gives me an excuse to avoid something I don’t want to do.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: It’s okay. I’m not offended, but I am puzzled as to why you assumed my comment was an oblique reference to Biden (as a topic) and/or s_c since neither were mentioned in my comment, the comment to which I was responding nor in the comment to which THAT commenter was responding.
It doesn’t make sense to me. You don’t owe me an explanation; I’m just telling you why I felt blindsided by the reaction.
@O. Felix Culpa: Well, it is bizarre from my perspective as explained above. If the “particular topic” you’re referencing is complaints about Biden’s ouster, it seems like that gets discussed regularly here, so it’s hardly a forbidden subject. I also don’t buy the insinuation that people who are still pissed off about that are being bullied or silenced, at least not that I’ve seen.
As for the “fairly egregious behaviors” that allegedly get ignored, i.e., eliminationist rhetoric aimed at people in red states, as a person who lives in a red state, I’ve pushed back on that many times in comments and have seen other commenters also push back on such wanking nonsense, so I don’t think that charge really sticks either.
YMMV, which is fine. It’s okay to disagree, but I think it sucks to assume bad faith on the basis of literally nothing contained in a comment and then insist that’s okay too. It’s not. Ultimately, it creates a shitty atmosphere for everyone. (Just to clarify, that’s my opinion as a commenter, nothing more.)
O. Felix Culpa
@Betty Cracker: Fair points. And a FPer chided specific folks just yesterday for bringing up that topic (and not for the first time), so in context, the heightened sensitivity is understandable.
I also appreciate you and others speaking out against the eliminationist.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@O. Felix Culpa:
There needs to be an update in the Comment Policy that specifically addresses that and dehumanizing rhetoric/labeling, not just “maybe somebody kinda pushed back if they happened to see it and bothered to butt heads with somebody.”
Mr. Bemused Senior
[as it’s an open thread] Hey, BC, I noticed that invasive pythons are being removed from Florida.
“Help, help! I’m being removed!”
Mike in Pasadena
@Sure Lurkalot: Paul wrote that it is better to marry than to burn. Hardly a ringing endorsement of marriage to women. Christian religion has long been hostile to women. Nevermind that without women, religion would probably waste away from neglect. The Catholic church, which partly descends from Paul, is full of women-hating rules starting with the priesthood.
TEL
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I think you have this backwards. It isn’t that Democratic policy no longer serves the working class – dems generally do the best they can within our current shitty political system. Racism and misogyny aren’t just for white men, they also infect a large number of white women. I’ve come up against this hard truth more times than I can count now, but I remember the first time I really had to deal with it. I used to do a lot of domestic violence and sexual assault-related nonprofit work , including training for volunteers. Some of the most difficult people to get to understand that sexual assault wasn’t the survivor’s fault were white women.
lowtechcyclist
@brantl:
Dr. Doom was a much cooler villain than any of these bozos.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
I just want to say to these people that if one of their top ten or fifteen political concerns is the possibility that some girl might finish third instead of second in a track meet because they had to compete with a trans person, then American society must be damn near perfect just the way it is.
Lauryn11
@Suzanne: It’s part of the long-standing cultural view in both parties, more tacit among Dems but still manifest, that a vote is not authentically American unless it comes from a white male. Minority and women voters are the “identity politics” cabal that cause the party to be fractious, suspect, and “weak” even if increasingly, they can decide elections.
Lauryn11
@Lauryn11: Interestingly, though, if a white female vote swing helps Republicans it’s seen as a strength and the media can’t stop talking about it (see soccer moms, security moms after 9/11).
Lauryn11
@lowtechcyclist: It goes along with the usual surveys that say Americans believe the trans population is around 20% when it’s closer to 1%.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: Really stupid if they thought that.
Paul in KY
@Soprano2: Pres Biden and his team did a piss-poor (IMO) job of explaining why that wasn’t going to happen and who was responsible for the higher prices, etc.
Paul in KY
@Hoodie: Be interesting to see how many planes are at Dover AFB. That’s a huge MAC base.
Paul in KY
@Suzanne: ‘Blue Collar Males (and females)’ should certainly be Democrats!
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: Agree.
Paul in KY
@zhena gogolia: IMO, schrödinger’s cat is really anal about that and it tends to wear thin after the 437th iteration.
Paul in KY
@tam1MI: We should also be a bit mad at Pres. Biden and his family for not conceding to reality and bowing out when we could have had a primary, etc.
The bottom line was that he was physically not up to a POTUS campaign in 2024.