Here’s the video clip:
My Hat is off to him.
Hey, that’s the guy who was lecturing the ‘yankees’ about the correct pronunciation of DeKalb and Houston a few weeks ago. Someone likes the spotlight. (He’s not wrong, of course.)
The alternative is to accept that the “libtards” were right all along and that voting for a guy who was literally in court for fraud during the last election campaign may not have been the best idea. And they will never do that.
That is awesome! Pathetic and hilarious.
“Mr Parker. He said he got tired waiting to get into watch the votes being counted and left. He thinks because of this they should pass a law to redo the entire election“
Here’s why Trumpism is more dangerous than McCarthyism: McCarthyism came out of a fear of losing something - the loss of freedom, the fear of losing power to an evil force. That’s similar to the fear that we felt after 9/11. The fear that we could lose paradise, or what’s left of it anyway.
Trumpism is more like the South’s “lost cause,” or Germany’s “back stab” myth after World War I. It’s the idea that something has already been lost, and that the score must be somehow evened, or they might lose even more than they have already. It’s a sense of living with the humiliation of defeat.
You might ask, well what did Trump supporters lose other than tax cuts and an entertaining twitter feed? I go back to what Trump campaigned on, which is the idea of an America - even the entire world itself - that was great when white people were calling the shots. That hope has been, for the moment, snuffed out like a candle flame. What remains is darkness and the smell of smoke. And worse, the result is perceived as illegitimate. The idea didn’t lose - how could a candidacy that earned 74 million votes - more than any other presidential candidate (other than Biden) in American history - lose anything?
This isn’t going away anytime soon.
Excellent point.
Thanks, JK.
I guess to expand on that idea a little, as bad as McCarthyism and the “You’re either with us or against us” era were, there was nevertheless an underlying theme of unity inasmuch as both sides had a common enemy: communists in the 1950s and 60s and terrorists in the 2000s. There were divisions about how to approach this enemy, which led to the kinds of tensions we eventually saw during these times, but there was still a sense that there’s one America.
Trumpism is the opposite of that. Trumpism is that there is a legitimate question about the true identity of the country. There’s not a common enemy; the enemy is “the other,” the side that doesn’t agree with me or us. Not every single Trump voter necessarily falls into this category, but even those who still leave room to negotiate are still probably somewhat sympathetic to the grievances of the more deeply committed Trump voters.
As we’ve mentioned before, we are fortunate in that Trump and the GOP didn’t invest more time, effort, and money into sabotaging the outcome - probably because they still assumed for a little longer than they should have that they could win the election legitimately. But Trump leaves a lot behind. When the Tea Party-leaning GOP lost in 2012, they lost the election but they also made it clear to someone like Trump that there was an opportunity to capitalize on the politics of rage. I think there are opportunities out there for someone who wants to undo the system. It’s imperative that Biden succeed in restoring a sense of calm and that the politics of truth, cooperation, and pragmatism are a more palatable alternative to what we’ve seen these last few years. If not, we’re asking for some serious trouble.
I agree.
I don’t think they assumed they could win it “legitimately”. I think they assumed that they could throw the result into sufficient doubt that it would go to the courts that they have been stuffing for years with friendly judges. What happened was simply that, despite the GOP’s best (or worst) efforts, Biden got so many votes that it overwhelmed their margin for skulduggery. Which hasn’t stopped them from continuing to try.
I don’t know that Biden can, tbh. The people who have bought into this worldview of rage and fear will not listen to Biden any more than they listened to Obama, who was in reality a calm, rational figure who spoke in unifying rhetoric. They will instead listen to those who seek to continue to “capitalize on the politics of rage” - the OANNs, Hannitys and Carlsons, and whomever steps into Trump’s shoes on the political front (and there are plenty of such folk out there). And they will continue to believe, because the alternative would be to accept that they’ve been chumps taken in by conmen the whole time.
I always liked René Girard’s take on it:
https://iep.utm.edu/girard/#H3
Whereas the philosophers of the 18th century would have agreed that communal violence comes to an end due to a social contract, Girard believes that, paradoxically, the problem of violence is frequently solved with a lesser dose of violence. When mimetic rivalries accumulate, tensions grow ever greater. But, that tension eventually reaches a paroxysm. When violence is at the point of threatening the existence of the community, very frequently a bizarre psychosocial mechanism arises: communal violence is all of the sudden projected upon a single individual. Thus, people that were formerly struggling, now unite efforts against someone chosen as a scapegoat. Former enemies now become friends, as they communally participate in the execution of violence against a specified enemy.
Girard calls this process ‘scapegoating’, an allusion to the ancient religious ritual where communal sins were metaphorically imposed upon a he-goat, and this beast was eventually abandoned in the desert, or sacrificed to the gods (in the Hebrew Bible, this is especially prescribed in Leviticus 16).The person that receives the communal violence is a ‘scapegoat’ in this sense: her death or expulsion is useful as a regeneration of communal peace and restoration of relationships.
However, Girard considers it crucial that this process be unconscious in order to work. The victim must never be recognized as an innocent scapegoat (indeed, Girard considers that, prior to the rise of Christianity, ‘innocent scapegoat’ was virtually an oxymoron; see section 4.b below); rather, the victim must be thought of as a monstrous creature that transgressed some prohibition and deserved to be punished. In such a manner, the community deceives itself into believing that the victim is the culprit of the communal crisis, and that the elimination of the victim will eventually restore peace.
Oh, but it is. What do you think “another member of the swamp” means?
“He’s not telling us what we want to hear, so he must be One Of Them.”
In terms of evolutionary social psychology, these “friends” that come together are more like tribes putting aside differences to redirect weakness and to in turn project strength in numbers on a perceived weaker tribe. Or in largely homogenous societies, it’s different castes or strata within a society gaining social status by trampling in unison on the other.
The last time someone told me about how Trump was going to “drain the swamp” I went into a mini-tirade about the importance of the swamp as an ecosystem.
I am not convinced he will be able to do this - mainly because of the current crop of Republican politicians who will not, will NEVER compromise, and would rather see the country further damaged rather than see Biden succeed.
To make an analogy; You’re in charge of repairing the upstairs of a house that has been damaged extensively by the former tenants. The former tenants have been told they must now live in the basement suite.
You are repairing holes in the drywall, repainting and getting in new carpets where they allowed the cats to pee in a corner.
Meanwhile, the downstairs tenants are sawing through the house support beams, because they are damned if you are going to live in a nice place upstairs. Thing is, they are convinced that if they destroy the beams, then somehow their downstairs suite will become a lovely place once the upstairs has been destroyed.
Apparently, Trump gave a speech today on the subject of election fraud. However it elicited no breaking news headlines, no TV coverage that I know of, and produced this extraordinary lede from The Associated Press:
Bret Brier talked about it on Fox. They showed a clip and he wondered why Trump just posted it on Facebook instead of making it available to news outlets since Fox would have covered it. He even said that this way it went directly into the veins, uh, I mean the social media, of his followers. And this was a puzzle to him. 
NYTimes has a story on it.
These are the last two paragraphs:
…
Some of the president’s key Republican allies on Capitol Hill and elsewhere have urged him to move on in recent days. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, who has been conspicuously silent about Mr. Trump’s claims, finally referred this week to the “new administration” that would be taking over next year, a clear signal to Mr. Trump that his time in office was coming to an end.
In case you missed it, Mitch referred to the “new administration.” 
Is that supposed to be his official acknowledgment that Joe won?
And then there’s this, which probably gave Donnie a teeny weeny woody:
But he retains the support of a core group of voters who quickly responded to his latest attack on the election. Within a few hours, his tweet had been “liked” by almost 134,000 Twitter users, and his Facebook video had been shared 93,000 times.
Holy hannah. The Lincoln Project is telling Mr. Trump to “shut the fuck up”:
I agree with the sentiment if not the wording.
Ouch! That’ll leave a mark. They are not the first one to tell him that:
