I also “fear backlash” if he runs and loses the election. He won’t hesitate to get his followers to commit acts of violence. According to the logic of the “for fear of backlash we should allow him to run” people, we should just annoint Trump President for Life. After all, we can’t do anything that might cause MAGA to become violent, right? /s
Reminder that, in Ohio, Republicans pushed a bill that would have required doctors to reimplant ectopic pregnancies in the uterus. A medical technique that doesn’t exist. So doctors who didn’t do this non-existent technique would be “guilty of murder” and doctors who tried it and failed (because it’s not a thing we can do) would also be guilty. And either way, the woman would likely die.
“Look, I’ve beaten your half to death, but I could have beaten your FULLY to death! Vote for me!”
people tend to get more conservative as they age.
My father has been telling me this for decades. When I was 18, he said that I’d become a conservative at 21. In my 20’s, he said I’d become a conservative in my 30’s. In my 30’s, it was in my 40’s. Now that I’m 48, he says that I’ll become a conservative “when I get older.” (I guess he got tired of updating the date.)
Meanwhile, if anything, I’m getting more liberal. If you asked me in 2010 about gay marriage/marriage equality, I probably would have answered “marriage is for men and women, gay people should be allowed to have civil unions, though.” Obviously, that’s not my current position. Now, I think any two consenting adults should be allowed to marry (with very few exceptions - e.g. cases of incest). I didn’t get more conservative as I aged, I got more liberal.
Furthermore, if people get more conservative as they age, how does one explain Bernie Sanders?
Yes, some people get stuck in the past and can’t keep up, but there isn’t a hard and fast rule that says people move to the right as they age.
Look, sure the Republicans lied about wanting to ban abortions in the case of rape, incest, and the life of the mother. Sure, they lied about not wanting a national ban. And sure they lied about not wanting to prosecute women. But you can totally trust that they aren’t lying this time! Ignore the hand behind their back. They aren’t crossing their fingers. They promise!!!
Vaccines also faced a problem in that they are too good. I’m 48. I don’t remember any of my classmates getting measles or mumps. We did get chicken pox, though, because this was before the vaccine. My kids, meanwhile, haven’t gotten chicken pox because they got the vaccine.
Given that I haven’t experienced measles, mumps, whooping cough, etc first hand, it would be easy to dismiss their severity. “Measles are just some bumps on your body for a week. Whooping cough means you cough for a bit.” Completely untrue, but the Internet can spread these reduced severity descriptions far and wide.
If people experienced actual measles or whooping cough regularly, they would be racing to get the vaccines. By removing these diseases from everyday life, vaccines actually hurt themselves by making it easier for people to dismiss the diseases.
His supporters are very good at holding two contradictory positions at the same time. Like how they think Joe Biden is “Sleepy Joe” - a dementia riddled old man unable to string two sentences together - yet also a criminal mastermind who hides all the evidence proving his guilt. Or how illegal immigrants are both extremely lazy, but also taking everyone’s jobs.
So they’ll just say that Trump isn’t really in any legal jeopardy but they still need to donate their life savings to his legal defense fund to stop those “evil liberals who are just jealous of how wonderful Trump smells.”
That’s okay. They can still sing “Born in the USA” because that song is super-patriotic and not critical of America at all.
Oh, wait…
And he’s always been this way. I still remember, during the height of the pandemic, when he was asked what he would say to Americans scared about the deadly pandemic.
It was an easy, softball question. “I’d tell them that America is strong and together we’ll get through this.” There, I just made something up on the spot that the “America First” crowd would like.
But Trump didn’t say that. Instead, he attacked the reporter for asking such a horrible question and called him names. People are scared about a deadly disease? That must be a personal attack against me!!!
It’s so ridiculous that it would be unbelievable in fiction. You’d close the book or turn off the TV saying that this character was way too over the top. But that’s Trump!
Also, somewhere around 20-30% of the country still hangs on his every word. If they are saying “we need to attack X,” it’s important to know what X is.
(Here, X is a variable, not the idiotic renaming of a certain social media network.)
The guy who hung these ornaments was one of the January 6th insurrectionists. He’s shown that he’s willing to engage in violence and so it’s not “just a Christmas tree.”
He’s since deleted his post and posted that it wasn’t a call for violence. Given that he included President Biden and VP Harris in his “noose ornaments,” he probably got a visit from the Secret Service. They don’t tend to view these things as “just harmless pranks” or “just some odd Christmas ornaments.” Especially when there are clearly people (this person included) willing to take the speech and try to make it a reality.
It’s protected speech up to a point. Then it becomes an actual threat. The gallows in front of Congress as the insurrectionists violently broke into the Capitol chanting “hang Mike Pence” wasn’t protected speech.
Calling for the execution of your political foes crosses a line, especially when you know that there’s a large element of your base willing to take your “protected speech” and turn it into action. That and the repeated calls from the right for violence (see Nick Fuentes calling for the execution of all Jews and enemies of Trump) elevate this beyond protected speech IMO.
No. Any Democrat who said “we should execute all Republicans” would be shunned/called out by the rest of the party.
To give an example, look at the Bernie Sanders supporter who opened fire at a Congressional baseball game. Bernie quickly denounced this act of violence as did all other Democrats. Meanwhile, a large number of Republicans - including their likely Presidential candidate - call the January 6th insurrectionists “heroes” and “political prisoners” for violently invading the Capitol and wanting to kill Democrats (and Mike Pence).
And has any Republican denounced Nick Fuentes for calling for the execution of Jews? Stefanik was so “concerned” about anti-semitism on college campuses. Has she mentioned this once given that Fuentes has met with Trump?
Nope. Nothing. The best they can do is silence. Any other response they give is praise for the violent imagery or actions.
And we’ve also got to still accept that all these “hanging” imagery is just pretend, right? They don’t really want to execute all of us, right?
Biden has called this out. A lot of companies are still raising prices or aren’t letting prices fall. They’re still saying “oh, this is inflation causing this” while their costs fall and their profits rise.
Biden can’t stop them singlehandedly. (He’s a President, not a Supreme Dictator.) But he can call them out on it and use what powers he has to bear down on them somewhat if they don’t stop.
It might not get all of them to stop (some might risk fines because the profits would be greater), but hopefully it will direct the anger towards the actual culprits - big companies taking advantage of past inflation to raise prices.
Alternatively, “The Economy Is Booming And Everyone Is Doing Better, Here’s Why This Is Bad News For Biden!”
Well, Trump was adversarial to certain media outlets. Others, like FOX News, were All-But-State TV. They’d parrot whatever he said as the god given truth and he’d parrot whatever they said as truth. If Trump said that the election was stolen and COVID was no big deal, that’s how FOX reported it. If they said that vaccines were dangerous and that immigrants were replacing “real Americans” (read: white people), he’d parrot that right back.
Also, adversarial relationships are good to a point. Biden is asking the media to cover things honestly. Trump was calling the media “The Enemy Of The People” and threatening to go after them (or encouraged his supporters to go after them) unless they fell in line. There’s a huge difference between those two adversarial relationships.
My best case scenario for the parties (assuming we keep the two party system and don’t get something like Ranked Choice or Approval Voting in place) is that the Republican party vanishes. Then, the Democrats can split into Progressives and Centrists.
Same here. He could have retired after 9/11 and would have been seen as a hero and “America’s Mayor.” Granted, the accolades wouldn’t have been earned, but few weeks have looked deep underneath the glowing reputation.
Instead, he hitched his wagon to a narcissistic wannabe dictator. He tried to overthrow the election results. He repeatedly defamed two election workers. He destroyed every shred of his good reputation multiple times over and he has nobody to blame but himself. No, not even Trump. Rudy could have cut away from Trump at any point but chose not to. This is all on Rudy.
It’s a habit I formed back when I frequented Reddit. You sometimes couldn’t tell if someone was being serious or not and since I didn’t want anyone to mistake my sarcasm for MAGA-ism, I used /s liberally.