I don’t know if it adds to the picture but I don’t think people realize the scale on which laws are being broken in this country. I’m a federal grants manager and I have to deal with Trump’s bullshit lawlessness every day. I’ve read the entire OMB uniform guidance and he’s breaking laws left and right, just within the very narrow scope of my own job, the level of open hostility toward the law is pervasive. Plus we’ve been informed that all of our communications with federal granting agencies, email and phone correspondence, are being monitored for trigger words (“women’“, “lived experience”, “justice”, you name it, it could trigger a federal investigation.) Not only that but current grant opportunities indicate that we are supposed to break other laws to comply with federal immigration law.
This shit is fucking Orwellian! And I don’t use that comparison lightly. It’s like being in a malevolent funhouse.
No, we’re not doing fine and dandy. Trump and the Republicans are doing really terrible things. They are actively trying to end democracy and the rule of law in this country.
So I think we should be putting all of our efforts into stopping them and preserving democracy and the rule of law.
Efforts that are being used to oppose imaginary problems are not being used to oppose real problems.
Can you give an actual example of what you’re talking about? I can’t think of a single person saying they think Trump plans to reinstate slavery in the US. Is this something you’ve seen on this board?
I meant what I said. Trump responds to poll numbers and economic numbers. The point I’m trying to make is that so far his base has shrugged off everything he’s done, and so has the market, because they don’t think he’ll go as far as he suggests.
This shrugging-off is making things worse and worse. He takes it as evidence that his policies are working, or at least harmless, so he’ll keep going until he does something that can’t be shrugged off or papered over.
Even then I’m not sure there well be a reckoning. My point is that everyone shrugging off things like (for example) tariffs will result in him getting even more reckless and dangerous.
Let’s take Der_Trihs out of the equation, as they would probably be the worst offender, and that would be nutpicking.
What other examples of “anti-Trump hysteria” can you point to?
And frankly, while I’m no fan of slippery-slope arguments, when you’re facing an authoritarian who wants to bring about the closest thing to an American dictatorship we’ve ever seen simply to satisfy his own ego, you want to stop things before they get to the full Gestapo level - which is not to say we’re not already there, just that it’s mostly our brown-skinned population who are taking the brunt of it.
Otherwise, this is a very nice variant of the concern troll! 10/10 no notes.
I like that song (not how I’d characterize the lyrics, though.) I like a lot of country hits from the 1980s and 1990s. One of my very earliest memories was walking in circles in my grandparents’ living room singing along with a record of Randy Travis “Diggin’ Up Bones." I’m a huge fan of George Strait. It’s hard not to get a bad taste in my mouth though, knowing what that culture ultimately produced. But George, he seems so decent.
And love it or hate it, this is where I came from and who I was raised by and who my neighbors were. But I knew they were wrong even then. And there were, even then, plenty of songs that celebrated ignorance and glorified lynching and stuff that revealed the worst of what that culture had to offer. It’s always been there.
…it’s telling that this is your very first bullet point, when Trump (and Biden before him) have funded and give approval to the extermination of the Palestinians, a genocide that is being live-streamed on TikTok for all the world to see.
YOU are paying for it. It’s being done in your name. Yet you disavow it.
And that really sums up your OP. We are living in the worst timeline. The world is falling apart. We are in the dystopia. We are already 20 minutes into the future.
But for many of us, if we just pretend it isn’t happening, if we curate our news and social feeds so we don’t see any of the bad stuff, then we get to act like everything is just okay.
Yesterday Jim Acosta, former chief White House correspondent for CNN and a once respected journalist, interviewed the AI avatar for a student that was murdered in a mass shooting seven years ago.
That’s objectively batshit insane.
But that’s the world we live in right now. One where a reality-show host is the most powerful person on the planet. Where if you forget to tick the right box on an online form, your doorbell camera will report directly to the cops. Where sniper drones chase down kids and shoot them in the head. Where the internet, one of the last bastions of unbridled freedom, in the last month we’ve seen numerous governments around the world start to restrict that access all in the name of “protecting the children.”
Your problem is that you are viewing current events through the lens of history.
But the history hasn’t been written yet. We are in the middle of it all.
The “bad guys” have a plan. They’ve told us exactly what they are planning on doing. They’ve published entire manifestos on what they are going to do. And they are proceeding to do those things.
If anything: we aren’t being loud enough. Not that it matters, because people like you aren’t going to be listening anyway.
But again: the genocide in Gaza is illustrative here. Because South Africa had submitted a case accusing Israel of genocide to the International Court of Justice in December 2023. Yet it’s only been the last couple of months though that many people have started to accept this.
But the evidence hasn’t changed. We knew enough in December 2023 that if Israel weren’t stopped, Palestinians living in Gaza faced extermination. We had a chance to stop it. But we didn’t take it.
And what we are seeing with some of the “over-the-top anti-Trump hysteria” is that people have tried getting through to you. But you haven’t been listening.
The world is in chaos. The stupidest people have all of the money and all of the power and are being guided by people who have a plan and an agenda and are going through with it.
Slavery in America still exist. The thirteenth has an exception. It doesn’t need to be “restored.” It never went away.
And Trump isn’t planning on starting a nuclear war. Because he isn’t that smart. He doesn’t plan to do anything. But we aren’t looking back at history. We are making history. And when the stupidest person on the planet has the keys to the launch codes, you can’t count anything out.
The world that we live in right now means everybody has a soapbox…but almost nobody is really listening. If people are saying stuff you don’t like, it’s now easier than ever to just tune that stuff out. Block 'em. Ignore 'em. Live in your bubble. You might be one of the lucky ones that get through this relatively okay.
But the only people giving Trump cover for the things he is actually doing are the people that gave him cover. I’m talking about the Republicans and MAGA. I’m talking about the Democrats who didn’t do enough to prosecute (in the figurative sense) him and didn’t treat this moment as the real threat that it was. I’m talking about the billionaires who are funding this. The pundits and think-tanks that are driving this. The media companies that are complicit with this.
But it isn’t the fault of Joe Bloggs who says something a tad over-the-top on an obscure message board that nobody even reads. Just get over it already. It isn’t their fault that Trump isn’t in jail.
I don’t know. It’s within sight of a reasonable point. Trump isn’t commiting genocide directly, but compare his relations with Netanyahu’s government to that of other American presidents. Biden came in for a lot of criticism on the issue (justifiably, in my opinion), but he nevertheless was a force for restraint on the worst of the state of Israel’s excesses. Trump is not a restraint, and it is certainly arguable that he is enabling a well-documented genocide in progress.
Add to that, of course, the hundreds of thousands who will die prematurely due to his mismanagement of America. It’s not genocide, but it’s certainly mass manslaughter.
The issue is if the people who run the republican party could do some of these things, they would.
I don’t think they’d bring back slavery. Maybe they’d push for indentured servitude for people they don’t like. But I don’t think they’d push for lifelong, intergenerational chattel slavery for black people IMO. But if they could, they would make it so anyone who wasn’t a conservative white person wasn’t allowed to vote. They’d make it so even if democrats won elections, they never got certified. They’d repeal a lot of laws saying the public and private sector are not allowed to discriminate against women, brown people, gays, muslims, etc while mandating their version of christianity on everyone.
They would deport all the hispanics and muslims, and they’d move all the Palestinians out of gaza and the west bank. They’d have widespread surveillance and disenfranchisement of anyone who wasn’t a conservative.
If Trump and the republicans could arrest everyone who disagrees with them (including politicians, judges, journalists, businessmen, etc) they would.
I feel like you’re saying ‘they’re not planning to do any of this’. But that isn’t the issue. The issue is that right now they ‘can’t’ do these things. But if they could they would, and right now they’re trying to roll back civil, political and human rights. Maybe we won’t get a situation where everyone who isn’t a conservative white person cannot vote, but we will get a rollback on voting rights.
It doesn’t have to be right or left. If someone said in 2002 ‘stop panicking, Hugo Chavez isn’t planning to turn Venezuela into a dictatorship’ that was untrue. He was planning. He just didn’t have the power in 2002 to do it. But now, Venezuela’s democracy has been shattered and its an oppressive dictatorship.
At the level of Clarence Thomas, when you have his wealth and power, the rules do not apply and he knows it. He doesn’t care if impoverished black people can’t marry, just so long as someone as rich and powerful as him still can.
Republicans do this with abortion too. They oppose abortion, knowing full well they can fly their mistresses, daughters, etc to a blue state or to Canada when they need an abortion. They fully support cutting medicaid, SNAP, public transit, pell grants, etc because they know they have enough wealth to never need it. They support extremely punitive criminal justice system against low level street criminals, knowing the crimes they commit will never be investigated or punished.
Laws are for the poor and powerless. Clarence Thomas is neither.
I tend to agree, but it’s worth pointing out that there’s a LOT of hyperbolic nonsense being thrown around on these boards and elsewhere, and it’s not actually helping. ‘
Case in point- saying repeatedly that democracy is already dead. First, that’s the kind of thing that’s pernicious and spreads between people. Second, if that’s indeed true, the time for protesting and bitching online is past, and we’re at the shoot people and blow shit up stage.
On the other hand, there are still a thundering herd of people insisting that ‘the courts’ will be the bulwark that protects democracy, or we just have to ‘hold out until the mod-terms’ when a ‘blue wave’ will sweep MAGA out of power, or Democrats can just gerrymander harder to even out imbalances, et cetera. At some point, refusing to acknowledge the clear and present danger is giving up on democracy.
